Andrei Makine - Once Upon The River Love

The red-haired woman provided the substance for these fantasies, the human clay, the bodily lava that I wanted to keep anonymous. All I needed was her physical weight, the heaviness of her breasts, the bulk of her thighs, the warm mass of her hips. This was the material that I sculpted endlessly, impressing onto it the shape of my dreams of the West. It was the amorphous matter waiting to be shaped by the chisel of the Western mind. The breathless chaos of that night of the snowstorm was refashioned as an amorous intrigue; the Redhead's great body was clothed in fine garments and her legs were covered with the transparent patina of stockings. And all that survived of our uneasy coupling beneath a blinding light-bulb was the sensation of an embrace; and this was refined as it segued, via the discreet lighting of a luxury compartment, toward a salon where, sitting in front of the fire, a woman was imperceptibly revealing her delicate nakedness…

Western clarity banished all the untidy elements of that night. The photos spread out on the blanket, her tears, her drunken woman's clumsiness: these now seemed to me like minor blemishes, scraps of clay to be eliminated by the deft and precise chisel.

All this time the red-haired woman was still there in my mind's eye, as it was invaded by female bodies in gestation. And yet she was no longer there: transformed by my cunning craftsmanship, unrecognizable in her new guises. As for her face, I had forgotten her expression since that night. Snow, fatigue, and drunkenness had left it like a washed-out watercolor. This greatly assisted my erotic modeling.

Oddly enough, however, the more the body of the red-haired prostitute became blurred, the more I felt the need to go back to see her, to undergo that first experience again but with quite a new attitude. To obtain a new supply of carnal lava for my fantasies. To possess that great faded body and draw from its primal matter sensations that I would later refine. To make use of its easy abundance, while waiting for the West.

Seeing her again now had a symbolic importance for me as well. I could no longer tolerate the destiny of "neither one thing nor the other." I must make a choice. I could no longer live alternating between that half-mad Chinese, caught up in his interminable saga, and the universe of Belmondo. Between the Orient and the Western World. And the choice made must be final. A visit to the prostitute should draw a Une through the saga of Asia. A farewell with no going back.

It took me a long time to resolve to go to Kazhdai. The days passed, and I was never alone. The six-thirty performance; tea at Olga's: we spent all our free time together.

It was an April evening, mild and silent, that made this farewell encounter possible…

By the afternoon we had all sensed it in the air: winter was about to fight its last rearguard action. The sky misted over, softened, became pregnant with cloudy anticipation. The great flakes began to swirl around in an increasingly powerful, increasingly giddy breeze. It was the start of the final snowstorm. This last gasp, this indolent gale, was winter's "way of showing off its power to the victorious spring that was close at hand. Like a great bird, wearied by its seven-month journey, it would flap its great white wings frantically and then would fly away at last, leaving our izbas beneath the soft covering of its snowy quilt…

The next day the village woke up entombed. But this time we sensed that it really was the end of the winter. The layer of snow that I dug into with a wooden shovel had a luminous lightness and caved in on itself, collapsing listlessly. And the sun, up on the surface, was already quite springlike. It shone with warm brilliance on a number of chimneys that rose up out of the snow and on the darkened rooftops. A heavy exhalation emanated from the taiga, the disturbing scent of the mighty reawakening of countless plant lives. And a jackdaw, disproportionately large on a poplar tree that was now quite stunted, called out with mad, abandoned glee. Seeing me emerge from my tunnel, it swung up into the sky, filling the air with its heady cries. Then, in the sun-drenched silence, I heard the murmur of drops forming along the rooftop as it grew warm in the solar rays. The secret birth of the first stream…

That evening I headed for Kazhdai. I approached it not from our village but coming from Nerlug. There in the city was where I had just bought something I had never held in my hands before: a bottle of cognac. It was flat and easy to slip into the pocket of my sheepskin coat. I took it out at intervals, turned the cork, which yielded with a pleasant creaking sound, and swallowed a small stinging draft.

All I could see now was the body of the red-haired woman. After each draft I manipulated it more and more deftly, I squeezed it unsparingly. I delved into this flesh to take from it what my dreams would later shape. And I took an increasing pride in my arrogant virility. I saw it as marking the final break with my past. Yes, I must scorn this great amorphous body, humiliate it, impose on it my disdainful strength. And as I slipped across the plain, bathed in coppery light, I thrilled to picture that human clay. My hands were filled with the mass of its breasts, as I pulled and kneaded them. massaging and tormenting their grainy pulp. My hand no longer clung stupidly to her shoulder, as on the first occasion, but plunged into the deep softness of her heavy thighs. I felt I was a sculptor, an artist seeking his raw material in the abundance of a nature that lacked a sense of form. And also a Westerner – a being who focused the proud lucidity of his intellect on his desire, his love, and the female body.

Thanks to Olga's readings, I was daily becoming more familiar with this clarity. I was certain that this marvelous illumination could give an account of our darkest emotions. Even of my visit to the woman I had never loved and whose body frightened me with its weary enormity. My desire to see her again gradually became associated in my mind with the perverse elegance of that woman confidante slowly revealing the soft pink of her thigh. While her eyes retained a light of almost maternal compassion…

Yes, at a certain moment I felt I was perverse. And therefore heroic. Liberated from that whole jumble of sentimental trivia my mind had been dragging along in a confused spate. I was perverse, as I understood it, therefore I was a Westerner! And liberated because I was going to have my way with that body – which was all ready and waiting for me – without the least compunction. And I would walk away from it without the red-haired woman knowing that we should never meet again…

Happy to have reached total comprehension at last, I stopped at the summit of a great snow dune that overhung the valley of the Olyei. Screwing up my eyes at the brilliance of the sunset, I turned the cork and drank a long draft of the brownish liquid whose foreign name had such a fine ring to it. And in my head there reverberated these few sentences that in all their Western limpidity expressed perfectly what I was preparing to experience:

I know not what desperate impulse drove me to it, but I had, as it were, a subdued desire to possess her one more time, to drink all those bitter tears from her magnificent body and then to kill both of us. Ultimately, I both abhorred and worshiped her…

At the station I walked into the main hall with a resolute tread, with the nonchalance of a conqueror. After the Pacific port, everything in this building seemed to me tiny, provincial. The train timetables on the dusty notice board; the dim row of lamps behind their opaque glass bowls; a few travelers with their rustic luggage. I went into the little waiting room. I thought I could already see the glow of her red hair above the rows of chairs… But the woman was not there. Dumbfounded, I made a tour of the main hall: the display case on the newsstand with the faded smiles of the cosmonauts; the buffet with the sleepy attendant; the hoarfrost on the windows… It had not even occurred to me that the red-haired woman might not be there. Especially not on the day of the snowstorm… The day of so important and final a choice!