Andrei Makine: Once Upon The River Love

So it must have been at the start of summer. An evening filled with a blue wind from the steppes. On an island in the middle of the river in spate – a narrow grassy strip with a ruined izba and the remnants of an orchard, several apple trees foaming with white blossom.

In the distance, in the golden haze of the sunset, rose the taiga, its feet in the river, reflected in the somber mirrors of the water that now reached into its shady recesses.

The little island floated in the glow of the evening. The noisy rippling of the current mingled with the rustle of the wind in the blossoming branches. The cool little waves lapped insistently, breaking against the sides of the old boat I had moored to the rail of the flooded izba steps. The day was slowly fading, the light was turning mauve, lilac, then violet. The darkness seemed to refine the living harmony of the sounds. "We could hear the slight scraping of the boat against the wood of the steps now, the serene cry of a bird, the silky whispering of the grass.

We were stretched out at the feet of the apple trees, lying against each other, our eyes wandering amid the first stars. Naked, she and I, the warm wind enveloping our bodies with its breeze steeped in the aromas of the steppe. And above our heads, fastened to the great stunted branches, a hammock swung gently in the wind. Yes, we had remained true to Belmondo, down to the smallest details of the setting for our love scene. We had climbed into that unstable craft and tried to stand up, embracing each other and quickly losing our heads… But either our desire was too violent or the erotic savoir faire of the West still escaped us…

We found ourselves in the grass, scattered with white petals: we hardly noticed our fall. We felt we were still falling, still flying, still loving each other in flight…

Her supple body slipped away, escaping in our fall through the air. I did not succeed in holding onto it. With my frenzied heaving I was pushing it along on the smooth grass toward our island's ephemeral frontier at the water's edge. I had to wrap the cascade of her hair around my fist. As the cossacks used to do in the old days, lying on bearskins in their yurts. My desire had a memory of that gesture…

She was Nivkh, a native of the forest of the Far East where we had once seen a tiger, blazing in the snow… Her face was framed with long, glossy black hair; she had slanting eyes, the enigmatic smile of a Buddha. Her body had skin that seemed to be covered with a golden varnish and the reflexes of a liana. When she sensed that I would not let her go, her body twined around me, molded me, absorbed me through all its trembling vessels. She permeated me with her scent, her breath, her blood… And I could no longer make out where her body merged into the grass filled with the wind from the steppes; where the savor of her round, firm breasts mingled with that of the apple blossom; where the sky of her dazzled eyes ended and the somber depths glistening with stars began.

Her blood flowed in my veins. Her breathing filled my lungs. Her body writhed into me. When I kissed her breast I was drinking the foam from the snowy clusters in the orchard. I thrust myself into that nocturnal space through which the wind had traveled, perfuming itself with a thousand aromas, carrying away with it the pollen of coundess flowers. She cried out as she sensed the peak approaching, her nails tore at my shoulders. A crazy liana intoxicated with the sap of the trunk it held entwined. I flooded her, I filled her with myself. In her I touched the giddy depths of the sky, the cool of the dark waves. Her heart was already beating somewhere beyond the nocturnal taiga…

The wind scattered white petals over our bodies as we lay there in the blissful exhaustion of love. The wood fire we had lit on arrival flared up at intervals into a tall red plume, then quieted down, stretched out on the ground in the silent glowing of its embers. The boat fastened to the steps of the izba, washed occasionally by a wave, gave out a whisper, followed by sleepy lapping. And the hammock, the hammock of our crazy fantasies, swung about our heads amid the bubbling foam of the blossom. It looked like a fantastic net hurled into the dark heavens by a demented fisherman so as to make a catch of quivering stars…

On a gray, calm day in July that same summer I was walking in the streets of Nerlug, a bag of provisions in my hand. The gardens were spilling their abundant foliage over the fences. In the courtyards you could hear the lazy clucking of hens. The sparrows bathed in the warm dust at the sides of the little streets. Everything was so familiar, so ordinary! There was just me, carrying within me, through this tranquil day, the trembling immensity of my first love.

I was waiting in Une with several women in front of the ticket window in the little building at the bus station. Filled with my secret fever, I did not at first pay any attention to their talk. Suddenly the name of the Redhead broke in on my blissful oblivion.

"But what could he do? They fished her out a good three miles below the bridge. Doctor or not, what do you expect him to do?"

"I don't know… Artificial respiration, maybe. They say that helps."

"Well, she was completely rotten already, that one, I tell you. And if it wasn't that, it would have been syphilis or some such…"

"She had it coming to her. When I think of the number of folk she passed on her filth to…"

That last observation seemed to the women too harsh. They fell silent, lowering their eyes and turning away, but internally they must have approved of the remark. It was then that an old woman with fine, pale lips, who had so far said nothing, began to talk, giving little chuckles as if to relax the atmosphere: "I've seen her. , hee, hee! I've often seen her at the train station, that one! She was real crafty, I can tell you. More than most. All the time she pretended she was waiting for a train. She went this way, she went that way. She looked at the clock. As if she was a passenger. , hee, hee!"

"Some passenger! A filthy cow!" cut in one woman, adjusting the straps on her knapsack. "May God forgive me, but I tell you she had it coming to her!"

I left my place in the waiting Une and pushed open the door. As I came away, the sound of that little laugh grated in my head like ground glass… I went to Kazhdai.

I did not have the courage to go right up to her izba. I saw the door barricaded with two long crossed planks, the window with its panes broken. The branches of the birch tree held hidden within their foliage the light, tuneful lives of several invisible birds. A pure and delicate song in this silent garden…

I left, taking the same route as in winter. But at this season the plain that led down to the Olyei was all covered with flowers.

The death of the red-haired woman – or rather the conversation about her suicide – decided me: I must go away. Leave the village, escape from Nerlug, never again set eyes on that country where ultimately the saga of the old Chinese would triumph over the elegance of the Western World and its adventures. Where in some dark corner of a bus station you would hear the grating of ground glass. And once Belmondo had gone again, this grating and grinding would crop up all over the place. It would be the sound of the heavy boots of prisoners taken out in serried ranks to do hard labor; the strident screaming of the saws biting into the tender flesh of the cedar trees; and the clatter of the coupling between the coaches on the Transsiberian – which no one would wait for in Kazhdai anymore. This grinding would once more become the very stuff of the harsh life of all who lived here. Of those, in fact, who did not know how to escape it by fleeing west of Lake Baikal, west of the Urals, beyond that frontier, invisible but so substantial, with Europe.