Andrei Makine - Once Upon The River Love

The last time I went to Paris was in June 1914… My father thought I was big enough to go up the Eiffel Tower. I was eleven…"

That was how on an April evening, in an izba buried amid snowdrifts, Olga began her story.

Once we were back from our trip to the Western World – in other words, the Far East – Samurai had decided that we were ripe for initiation into Olga s secret life. He had revealed its significance to us in brief but solemn tones: "Olga is a noblewoman. And she has seen Paris…"

Taken aback, neither Utkin nor I managed to find words for the tiniest question, despite the crowd of queries buzzing in our heads. The reality of a being who had seen Paris was too much for us…

We listened to Olga. The samovar emitted its light hissing and its soft melodious sighs. The snow tinkled on the windowpane. Olga had swept up her gray hair into a becoming wave, held in place by a little silver comb. She was wearing a long dress edged with black lace, which we had never seen before. Her words were tinged with a dreamy indulgence that seemed to be saying: "I know you regard me as an old madwoman. Well… my madness consists in having lived through an era whose richness and beauty you cannot even imagine. My madness is to have seen Paris…"

Listening to her, we learned, with incredulity, of a time when the Western World was practically next door. People went there on vacation! Better still: just to climb up a tower!… We could not get over it. So the Western World had not always been a forbidden planet, accessible only obliquely, via the magic of the cinema?

No, in Olga's memories this planet was a kind of picturesque suburb of Saint Petersburg. And from that suburb there had one day come into her family a certain Mademoiselle Verrière, who taught the little Olga a language with strange r's, vibrant and sensual…

"I already understood enough French," Olga confided in us, "to be able to make out the novels my elder sister used to read and which she hid in her bedside cabinet… It was on the train taking us to Paris that I first succeeded in getting my hands on one of these forbidden volumes. One day, when she went out of the compartment, my sister left her book on the berth. I peeped into the corridor: she was busy chatting with Mademoiselle Verrière. I opened the book and immediately came upon a scene that made me forget everyone else's existence as well as my own…"

Olga pours us another cup of tea, then opens a volume with yellowed pages and begins to read softly…

Did she read it in French and give us a translation, a summary? Or was it a text in Russian? I no longer recall. That evening we retained neither the title of the novel nor the author's name. We simply lived amid the dazzling intensity of the images that had abruptly flooded the room in that snowbound izba.

It was a society dinner in a legendary, romantic Paris. A grand supper party after a masked ball… The splendor of the decor, the shimmering gold of the candles, the elegant and richly costumed guests at a refined banquet. Sparkling women. Exquisite dishes, decanters, chandeliers, flowers. A young dandy, sitting opposite his mistress, is exchanging passionate glances with her. Suddenly, distracted and clumsy, he drops a fork. He bends down, lifts the tablecloth slightly… and the whole world crumbles! His mistress's dainty foot is resting on that of his best friend and gently caressing it. Yes, their legs are entwined, and from time to time they squeeze them together… And when the dandy sits up again, he is greeted by the same loving smile in the eyes of the woman… He flees. He takes flight across the ruins of his love…

Faced with this little feminine foot caressing the perfidious friend's shoe, we were speechless. With those legs intertwined beneath the tablecloth… With that fork… Nothing in our universe corresponded to the voluptuous subtlety of the scene. We cudgeled our brains to think what foot among our acquaintance could be capable of such a caress and such a betrayal. The images that came to mind were of great felt boots and chapped red hands.

Olga continued reading. The despairing dandy counted on finding some solace with his mistress's best friend. She, at least, should understand and share his pain. And the friend showed herself to be very understanding and compassionate. A sisterly soul seemed to be winging its way toward the unhappy man… But in the midst of his tale of woe the hero noticed that this woman's dress, as she sat before the fire, had slipped – inadvertently, of course – so as to reveal her knee and even the delicate flesh of her thigh. The young man was discreet, thinking that this disarray was due to the emotion his story had inspired. He looked away, hoping that his confidante would finally notice this blemish in her dress. A few moments later he takes another furtive look: the knee and the thigh are exposed to his eyes with what seems an even more flagrant nonchalance. An impossible thought crosses his mind: enticing him with her body, this sisterly soul is inviting him to lose himself between her thighs! The dandy meets her gaze: the woman's eyes are misted over with lust.

So what was there that we could compare with the unimaginable emotional complexity of the Western World that had been revealed to us that evening? In what terms could we express the nuanced eroticism of that seduction scene? The woman sitting in her armchair knowingly baring her leg. A woman continuing to listen to the sorrowful confidences of the young betrayed lover, and showing all the signs of compassion, while at the same time imperceptibly raising the hem of her dress… No, we men of the taiga had nothing in our vocabulary to match this sensual dialectic!

Of the three of us, I was the only one who could picture the confidante turned seductress revealing the delicate pink of her thigh. For I had seen her! She was the nocturnal traveler on the evening of our return from the Pacific. It was she. She was also the faithless mistress whose foot caressed that of the perfidious guest beneath the table. I recognized the paleness of her flesh and the elegance of her ankle boot resting on the ledge. "And who knows," I said to myself on the evening of that reading. "If I had not fled like an idiot, maybe the traveler, who turned back the lapel of her cape, might have begun slowly raising the hem of her dress while continuing to stare with exaggerated attention at the dark window!"

So the smile Belmondo was giving us from the end of Lenin Avenue was not so simple. Behind the Western World, seen as a bathing beach for golden antelopes, and the heroic and adventurous West, with its headlong action sequences, lay hidden another one – a voluptuous West, a realm of unimaginable sensual perversions, of refined erotic flourishes, of capricious emotional entanglements…

"We paused on the brink of this unknown continent. As our guide we had a little girl from the start of the century, who had one day opened a novel on the Saint Petersburg – Paris train and hit upon these lines that had bewitched her:

My mistress had made an assignation with me for that night; gazing at her, I raised my glass slowly to my lips. As I turned to take a plate, my fork fell to the ground…

All through those days I never stopped thinking about the red-haired woman in her izba buried under the snow. My memory had become even more vivid. Our discovery of the Western World had removed all the tragic sense from that night of the snowstorm: the red-haired prostitute had been transformed, quite logically, into my first amorous adventure, my first conquest. Ardently I awaited the sequel. I could already picture them arriving, my future lovers: sometimes as glamorous spies with robust tanned bodies that promised torrid grappling on the warm ocean beach; sometimes as languorous vamps with decadent and perverse charm…