Andrei Makine - Once Upon The River Love

It sounded very plausible. A typical career for a young fellow in our part of the world. But I was experiencing a strange emptiness beneath my heart, as I looked at the village, hidden behind a curtain of rain. I did not yet know that it was for the last time…

Suddenly a female silhouette appeared in the hazy distance. A woman dressed in a long waterproof coat was walking on the beach at the edge of the water.

Verbin sighed. We exchanged looks.

"She still waits for him," he said softly, as if afraid that the woman on the opposite bank might hear him. "I saw him last winter, her husband. At Nerlug… Everyone knows he's alive. And she still hopes I'm going to bring him back to her one day on my ferry…"

The ferryman was silent, his eyes fixed on the fragile silhouette, blurred by the rain. Then he gave me a look filled with a somewhat desperate jauntiness and spoke louder, in almost cheerful tones: "But you know, Dmitri, I sometimes tell myself that maybe she's happier than lots of others… I've seen him, her man: fat, pompous. He looks like a Japanese oil magnate; he can't open his eyes, he's so bulging with fat… But she's waiting for someone else, her young, lean soldier boy, with a shaven head and a faded tunic. That's what we were all like in the spring of '45… Your aunt speaks the truth. It's why Vera doesn't grow old. Her hair's quite gray; you've seen her. But she's still got the face of a young girl. And she's still waiting for him, her soldier…"

The few, rare passengers began to gather around the ferry. I shook Verbin's hand and set off along the rain-drenched road… At the corner, when I had to leave the valley of the Olyei and enter the taiga, I glanced behind me. The ferry, a little square on the gray expanse of the waters, was already in the middle of the river.

I arrived in Leningrad after sixteen long days of traveling. Always in third class. Often without a ticket. Sleeping on luggage racks, dodging ticket inspectors, eating the free bread at station buffets. I crossed the empire from one end to the other – twelve thousand leagues. I crossed its giant rivers, the Lena, the Yenisey, the Ob, the Kama, the Volga… I traveled through the Urals. I saw Novosibirsk, which seemed to me like Nerlug, only much bigger. I discovered Moscow, crushing, cyclopean, endless. But overall an Oriental city, and thus very close to my profoundly Asiatic nature.

Finally there was Leningrad, the only truly Western city in the empire… I emerged onto the great square by the station. My eyes were heavy with sleep, but they opened wide. The apartment buildings had quite a different style here: packed close together, svelte and arrogant, overloaded with cornices, moldings, and pilasters, they formed long rows. This European rectitude, but above all the smell – a little acid, fresh, stimulating – fascinated me. I walked with a sleepwalker's tread across the square and suddenly uttered an "Oh!" which made all the passersby turn their heads…

The Nevsky Prospekt in all its morning brilliance, veiled with a light-bluish mist, spread out before my astonished gaze. And at the very end of this luminous perspective, lined with sumptuous facades, shone the gilded spire of the Admiralty. I remained in ecstasy for several moments before the glitter of this golden sword pointing up into a sky that was slowly suffused with a pale Nordic sun. Through the mists that hovered over the Neva, the West was making its appearance.

In a blinding flash my gaze took in everything: the nostalgic charm of Olga's childhood as she walked, long ago, along the elegant streets of this city, to take the Saint Petersburg-Paris train with her parents; the noble soul of this ancient capital that would never become accustomed to the nickname its new masters had bestowed on it; and the shade of Raskolnikov, wandering somewhere in the depths of the foggy streets.

But most of all, I realized that in the midst of this scene tinged with autumn light, I would not have been excessively surprised to have run into Belmondo. In person. The one and only. His presence was becoming seriously conceivable… I readjusted my knapsack and, with a resolute tread, made my way toward a streetcar stop. I did not know if this was the best means for traveling to my college. But the sound of their bells in the morning air was just too lovely…

During my three years of studies, I had little news from Svetlaya. A few letters from my aunt, at first anxious and reproving, then calmer and filled with the details of a daily life that meant less and less to me. Absentmindedly, or quite simply so as to have something to say, she spoke in all her letters about the Olyei and the ferry: I was always watching Verbin repair the timbers or replace the cable… "The saga of the old Chinese still continues," I said to myself, as I walked through the city of our Western dreams…

There was also a card from Samurai. But it did not come from the village. It was, in fact, an amateur snapshot with a few sentences written on the back in a slightly distant tone. Evidently he could not forgive me for my flight, which he and Utkin considered to be a betrayal of our friendship… Samurai reported Olga's death and told me that she had continued her evening readings right up to the last moment and regretted that "Don Juan" was no longer participating… In the photo I was not at all surprised to see Samurai in the uniform of the marines on the deck of a ship. And hardly more so to see the white slabs of apartment buildings and the shadows of palm trees. The inscription in blue ink read: "The Port of Havana." I guessed that the deck of this ship represented a decisive step toward his boyhood project, his crazy dream that he had once told me about at Svetlaya, of joining the guerrilleros of Central America and rekindling the embers of the campaign of Che Guevara…

As for Utkin, he never wrote to me from Svetlaya. But two years after my flight I saw a silhouette I instantly recognized in the dark corridor of our student residence hall. Limping, he came to meet me and offered me his hand… We talked all night in the corridor, so as not to disturb the other three occupants of my room. Perched on the windowsill in front of the frost-covered glass, we talked as we drank cold tea…

I learned that Utkin, too, had fled from Svetlaya. He had even succeeded in traveling farther than me, to the West, to Kiev. He was studying at the faculty of journalism and hoping one day to get down to writing "real literature," as he called it in a grave tone, lowering his eyes.

And it was in the course of that night that I learned in what circumstances Belmondo had finally left the Red October cinema and disappeared, maybe forever, from the corner of Lenin Avenue.

It was the winter following my flight. Samurai and Utkin were slipping along on their snowshoes through the taiga. It was engulfed in the half-light of the early hours of morning. They were going to Nerlug for the six-thirty performance. Without me. Another film they wanted to see again? Or perhaps so as to demonstrate – to whom? – that my betrayal did not affect their own relationship with Belmondo?

The cold was bitter, even for winter in our country. From time to time you could hear a long echoing sound like that of a gunshot. But this was tree trunks exploding, split open by frozen sap and resin. In weather like this, women in our village taking wash down from the clothesline would break it like glass. Truckdrivers would rage around tanks filled with white powder: frozen gasoline. And children would amuse themselves by spitting on the rock-hard road and hearing the tinkling of their spit as it turned into icicles…

It was by the first rays of the sun that they saw it. On the fork formed by two thick branches of a pine tree. Samurai saw it first and had a moment of hesitation: should he point it out to Utkin? He knew his friend was going to be shocked by it. Always very protective of Utkin, Samurai had become even more so after my departure. So at first he wanted to walk past, as if there were nothing there. But in the absolute calm of the taiga Utkin must have sensed his hesitation, Samurai's intake of breath. He stopped in turn, looked up, and let out a cry…