Andrei Makine - Once Upon The River Love

Young savage that I was, I sensed the intimate mystery of this face, this body. In my mind I could never have conceived of it. Nor even have described whom I had encountered. But the savor of her long cigarette and the gleam of her knee were enough for my intuition. As I looked at her, I sensed that her protective aura was slowly dissipating. And it seemed to me less and less impossible that I might hurl myself at this knee, kiss it, bite it, tear the stocking, thrust my unseeing face ever higher…

The nocturnal traveler must have suspected my agony. The ghost of a smile played over her face. She knew her aura was inviolable. To see this young barbarian a couple of steps from her, a savage dressed in a sheepskin and a shapka that smelled of wood smoke and cedar resin, amused her. But where has he come from, this young bear? she must have wondered, smiling. He looks as if he'd like to eat me…

The torture of my contemplation was becoming unbearable. The blood throbbed in my temples, and the words that echoed it were meaningless and yet said it all: "Western Woman! She's a Western Woman!… I have seen a real live Western Woman!"

It was then that the train slowed down and began to cross an interminable bridge. It was moving heavily along a track that had become more resonant. Huge steel crosspieces began to march past the window. I rushed to the exit door, I grasped the handle and pushed it violently. The force of the draft and the depth of the black abyss beneath my feet flung me backward.

We were crossing the river Amur.

The breakup that was taking place in its dark immensity was quite different from that symbolic procession of ice blocks that always accompanied the "raising of the revolutionary consciousness of the people" in propaganda films. Symbols like that disgusted us with their tawdry sterility: some aimlessly drifting intellectual contemplating the gutted ice on the river Neva and deciding to commit himself to the Revolution on the spot…

No, the Amur had no interest in contemplative intellectuals. It seemed to be motionless, so slow was its nocturnal gestation. What you saw was an expanse of snow opening up like gigantic eyelids. The black pupil – the water – appeared, expanded, became another sky, a sky upside down. It was a legendary dragon awakening, slowly shedding its old skin, its scales of ice, tearing them from its body. This worn skin, porous, with greenish fissures, formed into folds, broke, hurled fragments against the pillars of the bridge. You could hear the noise of the powerful impact as the current made the walls of the coach vibrate. The dragon uttered a long dull hiss, scraping up against the granite of the pillars, tearing away the smooth snow from the banks with its claws. And the wind carried in the mists of the Pacific – toward which the dragon's head was flowing – and the breath of the icy steppes, where its tail was still lost…

Gradually coming to myself again, I looked at the Western Woman. Her face impressed me with its complete calm. The spectacle, it seemed, amused her. Nothing more. As I observed her, I sensed, almost physically, that her transparent aura was much more impenetrable than I had believed. "It's the breakup on the river Amur," one could read on her lips. Yes, that night was labeled, understood, ready to be recounted.

Whereas I understood nothing! I did not understand where the titanic breathing of the river ended and my own respiration, my own life, began. I did not understand why the light on the knee of an unknown woman was such torture to me and why it tasted the same in my mouth as the mist saturated with marine smells. I did not understand how, knowing nothing about this woman, I could feel so intensely the velvety suppleness of her thighs, imagine their golden softness under my fingers, under my cheek, under my lips. Or why to possess this body hardly mattered once the secret of its golden warmth had been divined. And why spreading this warmth into the wild breath of the night already seemed to me to be an infinitely more vital prize…

I understood nothing. But unconsciously, I took delight in it…

The last pillars of the bridge marched by. The Amur vanished into the night. The Transsiberian entered the dense silence of the taiga.

I saw the nocturnal traveler stub out the rest of her cigarette in the ashtray fixed to the wall… Without closing the door, I began to hurry back through the coaches. I knew that I was returning to the East, Asia and the interminable tale of the ageless Chinese. A life where everything was both fortuitous and fated. Where death and pain were accepted with the resignation and the indifference of the grass on the steppes. Where a she-wolf brought food every night to her six little ones whose paws were bound with wire and watched them eat and sometimes uttered a long plaintive howl, as if she guessed that they would be killed and that their absurd deaths would shortly be followed by the death of their assassin, a cruel and absurd one as well. And no one could say why it happened like that, and only the monotonous saga in the depths of a crowded compartment could take account of this absurdity…

I walked along empty corridors and corridors where bare feet or feet in woolen socks stuck out; coaches filled with the heavy breathing and the groans of sleepers; and coaches buzzing with interminable stories of the war, of the camps, of the taiga – all those coaches that separated us from the Western World.

As I climbed onto the narrow plank of the luggage rack, I began to whisper in the darkness for the benefit of Samurai, who was stretched out opposite: "Asia, Samurai, Asia…"

A single word says it all. There's nothing we can do about it. Asia holds us with its infinite spaces; with the endlessness of its winters; and with this interminable saga that a Chinese, both Russified and mad – which comes to the same thing – continues to recount in his dark corner. This jam-packed coach is Asia. But I have seen a woman – a woman, Samurai! – at the other end of the train. Beyond the piles of dirty luggage and shopping bags dripping with melting fish; beyond the hundreds of bodies chewing over their wars and their camps. This woman, Samurai, was the Western World that Belmondo revealed to us. But you know, he forgot to tell us that you have to choose that coach once and for all: you cannot be here and there at the same time. The train is long, Samurai. And the Western Woman's coach had already crossed the Amur while we were still getting drunk from its wild winds…

I was tossing these random remarks into the darkness without even knowing if Samurai could hear me. I spoke of the Western Woman, the light on her knee beneath the transparent patina of a stocking, such as we had never seen on the legs of a woman. But the more I spoke of it, the more I sensed the shimmering singularity of my encounter with her slipping away… In the end I fell silent. And it was not Samurai but Utkin (we were lying head-to-foot on our luggage racks) who asked in a nervous whisper: "And us, where are we?"

Samurai's voice answered him, as if emerging from a long nocturnal meditation: "We are the pendulum… between the two. Russia is a pendulum."

"In other words, nowhere at all," muttered Utkin. "Neither one thing nor the other…"

Samurai sighed in the darkness, as he turned over onto his back, then he murmured: "You know, Duckling, to be neither one thing nor the other is also a destiny…"

I woke with a start. Utkin had nudged me with his foot in his sleep. Samurai was also asleep, with his long arm dangling in space. " Asia… the West…" So all that had been a dream. Utkin and Samurai knew nothing of my encounter. I derived a strange comfort from this: their Western World remained intact. And in his corner the Chinese was still mumbling: "… And this neighbor, when he came back from the war, married another one; he has three big children already; and his first wife, his fiancee, he forgot her long ago. But as for her, she waits for him every evening on the riverbank. She still hopes he will come back… Ever since the war she's been waiting for him… waiting for him… waiting for him…"