Andrei Makine - Once Upon The River Love

Ever since our childhood, however, the pendulum seemed to have stuck. It was as if its immense weight had become entangled in the innumerable lines of barbed-wire fencing stretched across its path. Indeed, there was a camp about a dozen miles from our village. There was a place on the road leading to the town where the taiga opened up and in the cold glitter of the fog you could see the silhouettes of the watchtowers. How many of these snares strewn across the empire did the pendulum encounter as it swung? God alone knows.

The village, depopulated, did not amount to more than a score of izbas. There, close by that pent-up mass of human lives, it seemed to be asleep. The camp, a black speck amid the endless snows…

A child needs very little in order to construct its personal universe: a few natural landmarks whose harmony it can readily uncover and which it arranges into a coherent world. It was thus that the microcosm of our young years organized itself. We knew the place in a deep thicket in the taiga where a stream arose, emerging from the dark mirror of an underground wellspring. This stream – the Brook as everyone called it – circled the village and flowed into the river near the abandoned bathhouse: a river that wound its way between two dark walls of the taiga, wide and deep. It had a proper name, Olyei, and figured in a broader geographical role, since the direction in which it flowed marked the north-south line, and a long way from the village it met up with a mighty river: the river Amur. This was marked on the dusty globe that our old geography teacher occasionally showed to us. In our primitive microcosm, the human habitations were also arranged according to this hierarchy of three levels: our village, Svetlaya; then, six miles from the village, farther downstream on the Olyei, Kazhdai, a district center; and finally, on the great river itself, the only real city, Nerlug, which had a store where you could even buy lemonade in bottles…

The upheavals caused by the pendulum had made the population of the village very motley, despite the primitive simplicity of its existence. Among us there was a former "kulak," exiled here during the collectivization of the Ukraine in the thirties; a family of old believers, the Klestovs, who lived in fierce isolation, hardly talking to anyone else; and a ferryman, Verbin, who had only one arm and who always told the same story to his passengers. He was one of the first to have inscribed his name on the walls of the conquered Reichstag; and it was at that ecstatic moment of victory that a stray shell splinter had severed his right arm – when he was only halfway through his name!

The pendulum had also crushed families. There were hardly any complete ones apart from that of the old believers. My friend Utkin lived with his mother, alone. As long as he was a child and could not understand, she would tell him that his father had been a pilot in the war and that he had perished in a kamikaze attack, hurling his blazing plane at a column of German tanks. But one day Utkin had realized that since he was born twelve years after the war, it was physically impossible for him to have had such a father. Mortified, he said this to his mother. She explained, blushing, that it had been the Korean War… Fortunately, there was no shortage of wars.

As for myself, I had only my aunt… The pendulum in its flight must have scraped the frozen soil of our land and uncovered rivers with golden sand. Or perhaps some of the gilding on its heavy disk had rubbed off on the rough earth… My aunt had no need to invent aeronautical exploits. My father, a geologist, had followed the pendulum's gilded trail. He must secretly have hoped to discover some new gold-bearing terrain for the day of my birth. His body was never found. And my mother died in labor…

As for Samurai, who was fifteen at this time, neither Utkin nor I could ever properly understand who the hook-nosed old woman was in whose izba he lived. His mother? His grandmother? He always called her by her first name and cut short all our attempts to learn anything more about her.

The pendulum stopped swinging. And the life of the village was gradually reduced to three essential matters: timber, gold, and the chill shadow of the camp. It was beyond us to imagine our futures unfolding outside these three prime elements. One day, we thought, we would have to join the men who disappeared into the taiga with their toothed chain saws. Some of these loggers had come to our icy hell in pursuit of the "northern bonus," the premium that doubled their meager wages. Others – prisoners on parole on condition of good work and exemplary conduct – counted not rubles but days… Or perhaps we would be among those gold prospectors we sometimes saw coming into the workers' canteen: huge fox-fur shapkas; short fur coats, held in with broad belts; gigantic boots lined with smooth, glistening fur. It was said that among them were some who "stole gold from the state." Yes, they washed sand on unknown terrains and disposed of their nuggets on a mysterious "black market." As children, we were certainly much tempted by such a future.

There was one more choice open to us: to freeze there in the chill shadow, aiming an automatic rifle from the top of a watch-tower at the ranks of prisoners drawn up beside their huts. Or ourselves disappear into the seething humanity of those barrack huts…

All the latest news in Svetlaya revolved around those three elements: taiga, gold, shadow. We would learn that once again a gang of loggers had disturbed a bear in its lair and escaped by piling, all six of them, into the cabin of their tractor. There was talk of the record weight of a gold nugget "as big as your fist." And there were whispers of yet another escapee… Then came the season of violent snowstorms, and even this thin trickle of information was interrupted. Now the talk was of strictly local news: an electric cable that had snapped, traces of wolves found near the barn. Finally, one day, the village did not wake up…

The villagers got up, prepared breakfast. And suddenly they surprised a strange silence reigning around their izbas. No crunch of footsteps in the snow; no wind whistling around the roof edges, no dogs barking. Nothing. A cotton-wool silence, opaque, absolute. This deaf outside world filtered out all the household sounds that normally went unnoticed. You could hear the sighing of a kettle on the stove, the slight, regular hiss of a lightbulb. We listened, my aunt and I, to the unfathomable depth of this silence. We looked at the clock with its weights. Normally the day should have dawned by then. With our foreheads pressed against the windowpane, we peered into the darkness. The window was completely blocked by snow. Then we rushed to the entrance hall and, already anticipating the unimaginable, which recurred almost every winter, we opened the door…

A wall of snow rose on the threshold of our izba. The village was entirely buried.

With a yell of wild joy, I seized hold of a shovel. No school! No homework! A day of happy chaos awaited us.

I began by digging out a narrow section; then, by packing down the light and feathery snow, I fashioned steps. From time to time my aunt sprinkled the depths of my cavern with hot water from the kettle to ease my task. I was climbing up slowly, compelled at times to proceed almost horizontally. My aunt encouraged me from the threshold of the izba, begging me not to go too fast. I was beginning to be short of breath, I experienced a strange giddiness, my bare hands were burning, my pulse was throbbing heavily in my temples. The light of the dim bulb coming from the izba now scarcely reached the corner where I was hacking away.

Dripping with sweat, despite the snow that surrounded me, I felt as if I were within warm and protective entrails. My body seemed to have memories of prenatal darkness. My brain, dulled by the lack of air, feebly suggested to me that it might have been sensible to go back down into the izba to recover my breath…