Andrei Makine: Once Upon The River Love

The day after the storm, hardly had the snowplows cleared the principal thoroughfares of the city than she went to the cinema. Armored in her carapace of thick wool, she noted with satisfaction that she was practically alone in the auditorium…

The captain arrived only after the newsreel. A disciplined man, he found his row and his seat and sat down beside her. He wore the expression he had on bad days – days when he needed to leave the ship and plunge into the bustle of everyday life, become a man like other men. He was on his way to Novosibirsk: his train had been blocked at Nerlug by winter's rearguard action; its departure was not forecast for another twenty-four hours. Exasperated by the futile wait, badly shaved, peevish, the captain ended up in the cold auditorium of the Red October cinema, next to a woman of whom he thought, with disgust: So this is a woman of Nerlug… Heavens above! How can a woman get herself up like this? My sailors could do better. A pretty face, but that expression! She looks like a nun in the middle of Lent…

The lights went out. Colors filled the screen. A legendary city arose from the azure sea. With its palaces, and its towers reflected in the water… And the captain immediately forgot Nerlug and his train and the Red October; and as he recognized the silhouette from the air, he murmured: "Venetsia. "

The headmistress's long lashes trembled…

Belmondo arose, concentrating within his gaze all the magnificence of the sky, the sea, and the city, and sped off along the canals in his crazy boat.

"I have reserved the royal suite for tonight," he declared, crash-landing in the hotel lobby at the wheel of his launch.

A gentle echo vibrated in the hearts of the two solitary spectators: "The royal suite… For tonight…"

And in the suite in question a kind of bacchante, on stiletto heels and wearing very little else, snatched off the tablecloth and invited the hero to a wild orgy: "You're going to have me on this table right now."

The headmistress stiffened, feeling the hairs on her temples grow tense. The captain coughed.

"And why not standing up in a hammock? Or on skis?" retorted Belmondo.

It was too silly for words! Wonderfully silly! Astounding! The captain began to laugh heartily. The headmistress, no longer able to resist the laughter welling up, did the same, pressing a lace-edged handkerchief to her lips…

And once again the city could be seen rising out of the waters of the lagoon, but this time arrayed in its nocturnal beauty. Belmondo appeared, caught in that fleeting moment of a tremor of the soul between two adventures. He was sitting on a granite parapet, with a muted look and a melancholy air. We had always taken these moments to be a necessary pause between the action sequences. But two solitary spectators read quite a different meaning into this silent parenthesis… It was then that the captain, turning his head slightly toward his neighbor, repeated dreamily: "Venetsia. "

As for the rest of us, gawking onlookers fascinated by the Western machine on that day in May, the extent of the upheaval provoked in our lives by Belmondo was clearly borne in on us. If a car newly emerged from one of his films could rip up the frozen perspective of Lenin Avenue and transform our headmistress into a creature of fantasy, something had changed forever. The gray uniforms, we knew, would invade the streets again; the Communard barbed-wire factory would increase its productivity and exceed the plan; winter would return… But nothing would be as it was before. From now on our lives would open out into an infinite elsewhere. The sun, trapped among the watchtowers of the camp, would gradually resume its majestic pendulum swing back and forth.

Nothing would ever be as it had been before. Oh, how we longed to believe this!

When did it finally happen?

That young female body taking me, shaping me, inhaling me, absorbing me into its scents, into the ephemeral suppleness of its skin, into the dark smoke of its hair spread out upon the grass. With the strong, warm wind of early summer blowing, the wind from the steppe – such a contrast with the ice-cold torrent of the Olyei, whose crystalline waters in spate surrounded us on all sides. And the hammock swaying in the wind… Yes, a hammock! We had forgotten nothing, Belmondo! That wind. The sky overturned in her slanting eyes, blinded with pleasure, her breathless moaning… When was it?

Belmondo s arrival had interrupted the regular passage of time.

Winter no longer implied endless sleep. Nor the evenings – because of the films – quietude at the end of the day. The hour of six-thirty had imposed itself on everyone with apparent universality. We lived subject to these new rhythms, finding ourselves in Mexico one day, in Venice the next. Any other concept of time was obsolete…

It is impossible for me to remember now whether it was Year One or Year Two of our new chronology. Impossible to say whether I was fifteen, as in that spring when we absconded to the Far East; or sixteen – that is, a year after Belmondo's arrival. I simply do not know. In all probability, however, it was the second spring. For I could not have lived through all that I did in a single year. My heart would have exploded!

Fifteen, sixteen… These methods of reckoning are in any case so relative, given the vibrant intensity of our passions. Here is what I lived through: the age of the night in the red-haired woman's izba; the age of my first mouthful of cognac; the age of the salt taste of the Pacific. The age when I discovered that the fragile beauty of a woman's knee could cause devastating pain, could be blissful torture. The age when the soft white flesh of an aging prostitute haunted me with its insurmountable physicality. The age of the unveiled mystery of the Transsiberian. The age when a woman's body taught me its language, word by word, gesture by gesture. The age when childhood had become no more than a faint echo – like the memory of that great frozen tear in the eye of the wolf stretched out full length on the blue-tinted snow of the evening.

Fifteen, sixteen… Here is what I was. A strange alloy of the winds, silences, and sounds of the taiga, of places visited or imagined. Someone who already knew, thanks to Olga's library, that feudal chatelaines had long bodices, like the bodice of the unhappy Emma Bovary. That the shoulders of a bathing odalisque were tinged with amber… And that only a real boor, like that country squire in Maupassant, would ask a hotel manager to prepare the bed at midday, thus revealing his intentions with regard to his crimson-faced young wife… Having studied Musset, I knew that romantic lovers always choose a cold, sunny morning in December to part forever – the clarity of past passions now spent, the vivid bitterness of feelings now subdued. I was somebody who observed the monstrous decomposition of the flesh of Zola's Nana, shaking my head in violent denial: No, no, beyond this human clay doomed to disintegration, there is something else! There is that song that arose from the depths of the snow and poured out into the dark-purple April sky… And in that hotel bedroom at the Golden Lion I was to perceive something that many readers in the West had not even noticed: on the mantelpiece, glimpsed in a brief phrase, there were two big seashells. You had only to hold them to your ear – had Emma done it? I often wondered – and you could hear the faint roar of the sea. With our mad dreams of the Pacific, how close we felt at such moments to that adulterous woman!

Belmondo gave to the alloy that I was a structure, a movement, a personified outline. With all his joyful strength he brought our present and our dreams closer together. I was at an age when this fusion still seemed possible…