Andrei Makine - A Hero's Daughter

Sometimes, waking in the small hours, the favorite time for suicides, she was almost physically aware of the echoing void entering her eyes. She would prop herself up on one elbow, contemplating with alarmed amazement a head, a somewhat prominent ear, a half-open mouth from which a quiet little whistling sound emerged. Then her glance would turn toward the pile of crumpled clothes on the chair and meet the languid eye of a saxophone player with dark slicked back hair, smiling at her from the wall. "Gianni Caporale," she read on the poster. Sometimes in this darkness her stare would encounter that of a voluptuous half-naked beauty, or else that of Lenin, stuck above the bed by a facetious Westerner. "Gianni Caporale," she read silently and took fright at her own internal voice. "What am I doing here?" The question echoed in her head. And each time this "I" reminded her of their apartment in Borissov, the particular smell and light of their rooms. Also of a winter's day with sparkling sunshine, and a gleaming slope, with skiers and children on toboggans racing down it. That day – it must have been a Sunday – her parents were out for a walk with her. When she became tired of her toboggan Ivan thought it would be fun to invite her mother to have a ride. And, elated by the sun and the sharp, icy air, she laughingly agreed. They plunged down, so huge and so comic on the little toboggan! At the bottom they had turned over and climbed back up the slope hand in hand, reappearing at the summit with rosy cheeks and shining eyes.

Olya looked again at the person sleeping beside her. She called him silently by his name, remembering what she knew of him in an effort to bring him to life, to bring him closer to herself, but it all remained empty of meaning.

"I'm nothing but a whore," she said to herself. But she knew very well this was not true. "What do I get out of all this?" Tights from the Beriozka store. That filthy makeup you can buy from any black market dealer… I should really stop this at once. Vitaly Ivanovich? Well, so what? I could go and see him and tell him point blank: 'I've had enough of this. It's finished. I'm getting married.' They wouldn't put me in prison for that…"

These nocturnal reflections calmed her somewhat. "I'm complicating my life," she thought. "I'm filling my head with all this nonsense. As Mayakovsky said, 'What is good? What is evil?' And after all, where's the harm in it? The girls at the Institute hang around in restaurants for months before landing themselves some grubby little Yugoslav. While here there's something to suit all tastes… Take Milka Vorontsova, a beautiful girl with real class, a princess. She found herself a husband, an African, without batting an eye!"

Olya remembered that after the three days of wedding celebrations Milka had gone back to the Institute. In the intervals between classes her fellow students had clustered around her and, with many a mischievous wink, had begun to ask her questions about the initial delights of conjugal life. Without any embarrassment and indeed welcoming this curiosity, Milka instructed them thus: "Listen to me, you future 'heroic mothers.' The golden rule with an African husband is never to dream of him at night."

"Why not?" the voices asked in amazement.

"Because he's so ugly that if you see him in your dreams there's a good chance you'll never wake again!"

There were peals of laughter. When the tinny sound of the bell rang out the students hastily stubbed out their cigarettes and made their way back to the lecture room. Olya asked Milka: "Listen, Milka, are you really going to become African and live in Tamba-Dabatu?" Milka looked at her with her clear blue eyes and said softly: "Olyechka, any town in the world can be a staging post to somewhere else!" Outside the window the day was beginning to break. The head on the pillow murmured something in French and turned over on the other cheek. Olya stretched out as well, unfolding her weary elbow with relief. The suicides' hour receded, as did the dark shadow of night.

In her new life at the Center Olya's first "client" was the representative of an English electronics firm. She made contact with him by telephone and introduced herself, saying that she was going to be his interpreter. The voice on the telephone, was calm, self-confident, even a little authoritarian. She imagined a face in the manner of James Bond, with graying temples and a suit as dark as if it had been carved out of a block of granite glinting with mica. "He's an old hand," Sergei Alexeievich, the KGB officer who worked with her at the Center had remarked of this Englishman. "He knows the USSR very well and speaks Russian. But he pretends not to…"

But the imposing tones of the voice on the telephone had misled her. They were simply the tones formed by his profession. When a dumpy bald man clad in a checked jacket detached himself from the wall and came toward her in the lobby with a somewhat embarrassed smile, Olya was dumbfounded. He was already nodding his head and holding out his hand as he introduced himself while she continued to stare at him. At that very moment a metal rooster began leaping up and down on its perch in the middle of the lobby, announcing twelve noon by flapping its wings. "What an odd representative," thought Olya in the elevator.

When taking his shower that morning, the Englishman had lost a contact lens. Feeling around in the shower tray for it, he had lost the other one. Once dressed, he had extracted his glasses case from the bottom of his suitcase, taken out his glasses nervously, and dropped them on a marble ashtray. "How can one present oneself in such a state?" thought Olya in amazement. He cast rather confused glances at her: the right lens of his spectacles was missing and his eye peered through the empty circle in a blurred and timid manner.

"I can understand almost everything in Russian," he had said in the elevator, "but I'm out of practice and I speak it very badly." He would say: "I telephone to you," and, something that particularly amused Olya, "Would you like to close me the door?" He was staying at the Intourist Hotel. On the third evening they had dinner together at the restaurant and she stayed with him.

And once more she experienced that hollow wakefulness early in the morning at the suicides' hour. But also on this occasion a calm, desperate serenity. She realized that what tormented her was not futile remorse but the inevitable disappointment of an absurd hope. It was something she had already experienced when she was at the Institute and was now encountering again at the Center.

She used to meet a new "subject" and, in spite of herself, without being conscious of it, would begin looking forward to some miraculous change, a completely new life that would be quite unlike the old one.

But nothing would change. Sometimes she would go with her acquaintances to the airport. Sluggishly, as if in an underwater kingdom, the announcements at Sheremetevo would make themselves heard. And already on the far side of customs, her "subject" would be waving good-bye to her and disappearing amid the colorful crowd of passengers. She would walk away slowly toward the bus stop.

Nothing did change.

And now, waking up beside this Englishman, fast asleep with his face in the pillow, she finally understood that she should expect nothing. That all this was futile. Futile, this hoping for something. And sometimes there was this feeling of pity for the "subject," a sentient human being, after all. And a vague sense of shame.

She had to press on, knowing her place in the long, invisible chain that disappeared into the labyrinth of political games and technological theft and ended up somewhere in the capitals of Europe and the Americas. It was not her business to think about all these machinations. Her business was to assess her "subject" in a swift exchange of words and looks and, within a given time, to act out all the scenes of the stipulated love drama. Her business, when she encountered a representative like this in a checked jacket, was to make him forget that his damp reddish hair barely covered his bald head and that his right eye was peering out hazily and timidly, and that, in unbuttoning his crumpled shirt beneath his belt, he had laid bare his white belly and tried to cover it up and then, having caught her look, been horribly embarrassed.