Andrei Makine: Once Upon The River Love

"How do you mean, they don't know how to live?" I asked, lifting my head up from the bench.

"They settle for mediocrity."

"What?"

"Yes, they all want to be average. She's got it right. They all imitate one another. An average job. An average wife. They're average in bed. Mediocrities, you see…"

"And you?"

"I smoke cigars."

"It costs more, is that it?"

"Not just that. Smoking a cigar is a – um – a… it's an aesthetic act."

"What?"

"How can I explain it? Olga knows how to say it…"

"Aesthet… What's that?"

"Well, it's the way. Everything depends on the way you do things and not what you do."

"Well, that's obvious. Or we'd have been flogging each other with nettles…"

"Hm… Only you see, Juan, Olga says beauty begins when the way becomes everything. When only the way matters. We weren't flogging each other so as to get clean. Do you understand?"

"No, not really…"

Samurai was silent. The aromatic cloud from his cigar drifted above his tub. I sensed that he was trying to find words to express what Olga had explained to him.

"Look," he murmured finally, inhaling a puff, with his eyes half closed. "For example, she says that when you are with a woman, you don't need to have a prick as big as that!" Samurai grabbed the ax and brandished its long, slightly curved handle. "That's not what counts…"

"She talked to you about that?"

"Sure… Well, not in those words."

I raised myself on my bench to get a better look at Samurai. I hoped that he was going to reveal a great mystery.

"So. What does count when you 'have' a woman?" I asked in a falsely neutral voice, so as not to disturb his confidences.

Samurai remained silent, then, as if he was disappointed in advance by my incomprehension, he replied a little curtly: "Harmony."

"Huh? Harmony…How?"

"Everything being in harmony – lights, smells, colors…" He stirred in his tub. Turning toward me, he warmed to his theme: "Olga says a woman's body makes time stand still. By its beauty. Everyone else is running and jumping around… and you, you live in that beauty…"

He went on talking, at first hesitantly, then in an increasingly assured voice. He probably had not understood what Olga had confided to him until he began to explain it to me.

I listened absentmindedly. I thought I caught the main drift. What I was seeing again now was the face of the blond stranger on the riverbank. Yes, there was a harmony: the rippling of the Olyei, its coldness, the aromatic breath of the wood fire, the pregnant silence of the taiga. And that feminine presence intensely concentrated in the soft curve of the blond stranger's neck as I stared at her over the dance of the flames.

"Otherwise, Juan, you know, love would be like it is with the animals. Do you remember last summer at the farm?"

Yes, I remembered. It was one of the first warm days of spring. On the way back from school we were crossing the neighboring kolkhoz. Suddenly the furious bellowing of a cow exploded within a long building made of logs, a barn rising up out of thick mud composed of a mixture of snow and dung.

"They must be slaughtering it, the bastards," exclaimed Utkin indignandy, his face distorted with dismay.

Samurai uttered a brief guffaw and beckoned us to follow him. We drew close to the half-open door, lifting our boots with difficulty out of the clinging mud.

Inside, in a section separated from the rest of the barn by a solid barrier of thick planks, we saw a russet cow with fine white patches on its belly. Its legs were shackled. Its head – the horns were cut – was tied to the planks of the barrier. The cow was moving heavily within its enclosure. And an enormous bull was heaving itself up onto the cow's rump with ponderous and ferocious clumsiness. Three men, with the aid of thick ropes, were guiding this relentless assault. The bull had a ring through its nostrils, with a chain attached to it that was being held by one of the men. The bull was uttering ferocious roars as it trampled the muddy ground with its hind feet while with the other two it held the cow's back. That animal's body was supported by a kind of prop, so that its legs should not be broken under this monstrous weight.

The erect thing beneath the bull's belly held our gaze mesmerized on account of the mightiness of its gnarled, purplish shaft. This shaft, glistening with dark blood, was beating heavily against the cow's white rump. A man gave a shout to the one standing closest to the bull. Amid the agitation and trampling, the man addressed seemed not to hear him.

It was at this moment that the bull uttered a deafening groan. We saw the enormous shaft beneath its belly quiver and propel a powerful jet against the white rump. The men began shouting. Then the kolkhoznik who was closest very deftly grasped the shaft and planted it in the right place. The other two men went on yelling and appeared to be bawling him out because he had been slow.

The whole mass of the bull shuddered with ponderous tremors. The props supporting the cow's body shook and gave out repeated creaks. We saw rapid shivers running across the bull's skin. Its bellowing became duller, as if it was out of breath.

The coupling machine slowed down, and as they watched its functioning, the men were already uttering sighs of relief and mopping their sweaty brows.

Outside, in brilliant sunlight, we headed toward Svetlaya. And we felt a painful numbness in all our limbs… as one feels after a superhuman effort or a long illness. Utkin looked at the two of us, his face contracted, and exclaimed in a cracked voice: "My uncle's right when he says man is the cruelest animal on earth!"

"Your uncle is a poet." Samurai sighed, smiling. "Like you, Utkin. And poets are always afraid of life…"

"Life?" echoed Utkin in a very sharp tone.

And he walked on faster, pointing his right shoulder toward the sky. His exclamation echoed in my head for a long time…

Samurai was looking at me from his tub. He was clearly waiting for me to reply to a question I had not heard, engrossed as I was in my recollections of that carnal machine at the farm.

"So Olga, who is she?" I asked, to conceal my inattention.

"He who learns much grows old soon," replied Samurai with a vague smile.

He got up slowly, stepping over the edge of the tub. "Let's go; it's late already," he added, throwing my linen towel to me.

On the way back we walked quickly. The bodies we now had beneath our short sheepskin coats were once more susceptible to the cold, as our eyes were to the terrifying beauty of the frozen sky. The sky was no longer drawing us up but bearing down on us with its hard nocturnal clarity. The biting wind lashed our faces.

Olga's izba was at the other end of the village. Before leaving me, Samurai stopped and said in a somewhat strained voice, because his lips were frozen: "She thinks the most important thing is to make a success of your death. That the man who dreams of a fine death will have an extraordinary life. But that's something I don't quite understand yet…"

"Who can make a success of his death?" I asked, parting my lips with difficulty.

Samurai had already turned and taken several paces away from me. He called out into the icy wind: "A warrior!"

It was A phantom train, a dream, an extraterrestrial. The peaceful flow of time in the switch operator's house took its rhythm from the thundering passage of it. Every evening.

The little izba, where my aunt spent twenty-four hours at a time on duty, nestled between the taiga, which overhung its roof, and the tracks. It took you a good three hours to get there on foot. But my aunt fixed it with the carriers of wood who passed through the village early in the morning. They gave her a lift as far as the Devil's Bend, where there was a fork in the road. This gave her a good start. She now had only an hour's walk.