Andrei Makine - Once Upon The River Love

On the tree fork, hanging on to the rough trunk, his arms wrapped around it, was seated a man, his face white, covered in hoarfrost, his eyes wide open. His pose had the frightening fixity of death. His legs were not dangling but rigid in space, six feet above the ground. He seemed to be staring at them, directing a horrible rictus at them. The snow around the tree was churned up with the footprints of wolves.

Samurai studied the frozen face and was silent. Utkin, appalled by this encounter in the sleeping taiga, sought to cover up his dismay. He spoke quickly, volubly, trying to sound tough: "That must be an escaped political prisoner. Sure. I'll bet he's a dissident. Maybe he wrote anti-Soviet novels and they threw him into the Gulag, and then somebody helped him escape. Maybe he has manuscripts hidden on him… Maybe he wanted – "

"Shut your trap, Duck," Samurai suddenly barked.

And with malevolent fury, speaking as he had never spoken to Utkin before, he went on: "Political prisoner! Gulag! Who are you kidding? The camp you can see from Svetlaya is a normal camp, Duck. You hear me? Normal! And there are normal men there. Normal guys who have simply stolen something or smashed someone's face in. And these normal guys play cards after work, in a normal way, write letters, or nap. And then these normal men choose their victim, generally a young guy who's lost at cards. You lost – now you have to pay. It's quite normal. And these normal men fuck him in the mouth and up the ass, the whole hut, each one in turn. So that instead of a mouth it's only beef hash, and between his legs it's mincemeat. And after that the poor guy becomes untouchable; he has to sleep next to the shit bucket; he can't drink from the tap the others use. But anyone can fuck him whenever he likes. And to escape that there's only one way: to throw himself on the barbed wire. Then the guard fires a few rounds into his head. Straight to heaven… That one must have got away when they were doing hard labor…"

Utkin uttered a strange sound, between a groan and a protest.

"Shut your trap, I tell you," Samurai rebuked him again. "Shut your trap with your stupid fucker's romanticism! That's what normal life is, do you understand? Yes or no? Guys who come out after ten years of that life and live among us… And we're all like that, more or less. This normal life is how we live. No animal would live like that…"

"But Olga, but Bel… Bel…" Utkin suddenly gasped in a tortured voice, without being able to continue.

Samurai said nothing. He looked around to mark the place well. Then he picked up his pike and motioned to Utkin to follow him… They did not go to Nerlug that day They missed their six-thirty rendezvous.

Later, sitting in the smoke-filled premises of the militia at Kazhdai, they spent a long time waiting for an official to be free to go with them to the site. Samurai was silent, shaking his head at intervals. His eyes were focused on invisible images of past days. Utkin watched these fleeting ghosts obliquely. He sensed that soon Samurai's voice would lighten, and in an embarrassed tone he would ask his forgiveness…

Seated on the windowsill, that was how Utkin told me about the end of Belmondo's era in the land of our youth… It was so strange to hear the sound of his voice in the corridor of our residence hall! His face was that of a young man with his first mustache, but through it shone the features of the injured child of the old days. The child who used to long so passionately for the start of adult life, hoping that he would experience love – like other people – in spite of everything. There was I, already cheerfully enjoying the love life of a carefree young male, and suddenly I perceived the infinite despair my friend carried within him. It was as if his face had been eroded by the indifference in women's eyes. By their blindness, so natural, so pitiless…

Utkin noticed the intensity of my stare. The shadow of a disillusioned smile flickered on his lips. He turned his head away toward the windowpane, outside which the chilly Leningrad night was turning pale.

"And when we came back to the place with the guys from the militia," he went on, "when we looked again at the escaped prisoner attached to his branch, I felt no more fear. No sadness or pain either. I'm ashamed to say it, but I experienced… a strange kind of happiness. You know… I said to myself- in that language deep inside you that articulates things without using words – I said to myself that if the world's so horrible, it can't be real. And certainly not unique. That's it, I told myself. You can't take it seriously"

Watching the militiamen, assisted by Samurai, trying to haul the dead man out of the tree, Utkin experienced a mysterious revelation. This young prisoner, whose frozen fingers were now being wrenched open by the men, panting with their exertion, marked a certain limit. As did his own mutilated body? A limit of cruelty, of pain. A frontier…

The corpse finally yielded. The three militiamen and Samurai carried it toward the four-wheel-drive parked at the edge of the taiga. The prisoner's shapka fell from his head. It was Utkin who picked it up. He followed the others, at every step pointing his right shoulder up into the sky, as if he were trying to take a look beyond that frontier…

We spent a whole day traipsing around the wet streets of Leningrad. We went into museums, crossed the Neva. I was proud to be showing Utkin the only Western city in the empire. But neither he nor I was really in the mood for tourism. Even at the Hermitage we talked of other things. The previous night, Utkin had handed me three dozen typewritten pages – a fragment of his future novel. "In the tradition of The Gulag Archipelago," he had explained. I was carrying them inside my jacket now; I felt like a real dissident.

Yes, even in the middle of the Imperial Palace we were speaking in low tones about the horrors of the regime. We criticized everything. We rejected the whole system. The Belmondo of our adolescence and his mythical Western World were transformed into an ideal of liberty, a plan of campaign. We still had a vision of the sun trapped in the barbed wire, impaled on the watchtowers. The gigantic pendulum must be activated! Time, our time, the dictatorship's unhappy victim, must be set free!

Our angry whispering threatened at any moment to erupt into a shout. Thanks to Utkin, it did.

"I've got nothing to lose! I shall fight, even in the camp!"

I started coughing, to cover up the echo of his words beneath the magnificent ceilings. The attendant gave us a suspicious look. We abandoned our regicidal planning session. There in front of us, beneath a red canopy, stood the imperial throne of the Romanovs…

It is snowing on New York this evening. Or perhaps only on Brighton Beach, a Russian archipelago, where the white turbulence revives so many memories and inspires melancholy in the eyes of all those children of the defunct empire who end up here after arriving in the promised land.

We remain silent for a long moment as we walk along the boardwalk, beside the ocean. The smell of the wind – now a salt gust from the waves, now the piquant chill of the snowflakes – easily replaces words. The bitter cold of the night air evokes a whole sequence of past days that speak to us in profound, serious tones.

"I'm so sorry, but I just couldn't have come any earlier!" I finally say, in an effort to justify myself.

"It's all right. I understand!" Utkin hastens to reassure me. "When I saw him he was already breathing with difficulty; he could no longer speak. And yet when I looked into his eyes I had the feeling that he recognized me… No, no. I don't think they could have done anything, even here. His body was riddled with steel… Yes, I think Samurai recognized me."