Brief Loves That Live Forever (10 page)

Hence, too, this wandering on a rainy day and our gloomy sarcasm at the sight of the portrait decorating the station front. And this joke I told my companion to cheer her up: “Have you heard? Brezhnev’s just had an operation!” “Really? What’s wrong with him?” “They’re trying to enlarge his rib cage so they can hang another gold star on his chest …” With mirthless laughter we repeated what all the youth of our country used to boldly proclaim, sotto voce. The old men in the Kremlin are sabotaging our love lives. They won’t let us travel freely, or read what young people in the West read, or listen to the music they listen to. (“Or drink double whiskeys in a bar on Sunset Boulevard,” some wits would add, “before driving off in our convertibles.”)

The days when I used to dream of that ideal city in a fraternal society were now very remote …

We would never have admitted that these recriminations allowed us to forget the brevity of our pleasure, the routine sameness waiting to ambush our amorous passion, and also, quite simply, the tedium of the carnal habit, a bitter reality for which not even the most democratic regime had so far found a remedy.

This dismal day would by now be quite forgotten if, as the evening approached, we had not decided to take refuge in a cinema. We felt it would have been too infuriating simply to part in the rain, going off to sleep in our respective “private sectors.” We saw a poster, and the title of the film seemed to contain a comic hyperbole in response to our anti-Soviet sulks and pro-Western lamentations:
A Thousand Billion Dollars.
Yes, double whiskeys, convertibles, the lot. We hurried to the box office.

We were completely mistaken. Not as regards the quality of the film, a good action picture with talented actors, but the subject. Our fantasy Western world did not emerge unscathed: assaults on its famous freedom of expression, the press under the yoke of big capital, journalists of integrity under pressure … That was why this French film had achieved clearance from the Soviet censorship! Better than any kind of propaganda coming from the Kremlin, the plot exposed the hypocrisy of bourgeois society.

Despite the ideological implications the cinema was full. Partly because the spectators, mostly young couples, had nowhere else to go on a wet night. Besides, it was a good story. A young journalist played by Patrick Dewaere confronts a terrifying multinational, having discovered its certainly ancient but still criminal links to the Nazis. The intrepid investigator is threatened, hunted down, escapes a hired killer, and then, when he is almost ready to drop, goes into hiding in a small provincial town, where a local newspaper is bold enough to publish his revelations …

The audience responded adequately. Everyone sympathized with the journalist’s plight, on the run from the baddies, waxed indignant at the machinations of the multinational, willed good to triumph over evil. These noble aspirations went hand in hand with quite a few fond hugs and kisses in the dark …

Suddenly I had a physical sense that the room was growing tense, gripped by a violent muscular spasm. I was aware of creaking seats and the space created by people holding their breath. Leonora, who was squeezing my hand, dug her nails into my wrist …

The cheer that arose was more volcanic than at any rock concert. I saw spectators leaping up, waving their arms in a feverish salute, embracing their companions in a demented frenzy. The applause drowned all the sounds coming from the screen. People were laughing, yelling, and, in the half-light, I caught several pairs of eyes glistening with tears. The rest of the film, which had almost finished, no longer mattered.

For the sequence that was being applauded had no dramatic significance and could well have been cut in the editing, so trivial was its place in the story. One evening the young journalist, in flight from his pursuers, walks into a little hotel in provincial France and asks for a room. The receptionist hands him a key, saying, “Here you are, monsieur, room fourteen” (or fifteen, or sixteen, I no longer remember). Nothing more. But it was this brief, completely anodyne exchange that threw the audience into a state of collective hysteria. For suddenly the spectators were witnessing a miracle, which apparently, somewhere in the West, was a perfectly ordinary feature of life. A man walked into a hotel and, without presenting any kind of identification, was given a room key!

The film continued, but the only image that caught anyone’s eye was simply this: a pair of lovers, following hard upon the journalist’s heels, also asked for a room and the sleepy night clerk handed them a key without any inquisitorial checks.

At the exit to the cinema the spectators scattered into the darkness with a strangely buoyant tread, that of children taking off from a trampoline and capering about in the air.

That evening, more effectively than all the dissidents put together, Patrick Dewaere contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

During the days that followed the sun returned and up until our departure the vacation happiness unfurled its concertina of colored cards. There was joy, newfound, along with the azure of the sea’s expanse; the ripening of bunches of grapes above the terraces, the vigor of our suntanned bodies. A joy too radiant not to be a little wistful. And the worst of it was that now we were familiar with that simple action; walking into a hotel and climbing up an ancient wooden staircase to a room that might have been waiting for us. A lot of the visitors to that beach resort spent the last week of August with the name of a certain French village on their minds, as well as that of the hotel there, with its sleepy night clerk taking down a key from a board bristling with little hooks.

Leonora was due to catch the evening train to Moscow, my plane was the following day. That day, from the morning onward, the weather was unbearably hot, the sky clouded over, low, suffocating. In the afternoon a dull light hung over the beaches, a storm was on the prowl, hesitant to strike. The streets were plunged into tropical darkness, like a flood of scalding ink.

The first rumbles of thunder surprised us on the road to the station. They rolled out majestically, drowning the noises of the town, the chatter of the crowd gathering alongside the platforms. Peering down from his vast portrait on the station front, Brezhnev arched an eyebrow, as if to say, “A storm? Has it been authorized by the Politburo?”

The sky turned silver and black at the same time. Sudden downpours, sporadic for the moment, drove the passengers into the little station building as though with great sweeps of a broom. We followed them, but remaining inside was torture: the stifling sultriness was loud with the yelling of children, the curses of harassed parents, and the yapping of several dogs … Then one lady remarked to her husband, “We’ve had no lunch. What we need now is some good hot borshch!” This remark was the last straw. Moving as one, we rushed outside …

The sky was in turmoil, laying bare the blue rifts of lightning flashes. The thunder responded, ever closer and more deafening. Our clothes were quickly wringing wet and in a movement of disarray we turned to one another, as if seeking advice. Our solitude on this empty platform in the driving rain epitomized the status of all lovers with nowhere to stay. Coming to life amid the outpourings from the heavens, the loudspeaker hissed in strangely confidential tones, as if its message only concerned this couple alone in the middle of a deluge: “All trains will be subject to a delay of two to three hours …” As he saw us, a railroad worker, galloping the length of the platform in great jagged leaps, shouted out, “At least!” At a loss, we took several steps, not really knowing where to go …

And suddenly we saw another Brezhnev.

This one was mounted on a vast billboard at right angles to the tracks, so that passengers on departing trains took the benediction of his paternal gaze with them on their journey. His face, incidentally, had suffered a serious assault: the features were streaked with two stains from overripe fruit, one beneath his left eye, the other on his chin. The infamous projectiles had doubtless been hurled from a moving train, so as to ensure an easy impunity for the terrorist. A narrow canopy above the billboard kept the rain off his face, which thus delayed the washing away of the trickles of brownish juice, probably from rotten peaches. Curiously enough, this besmirching took away the portrait’s flat and foolish expression, even conferring on it an aura of profundity. This was no longer a fat apparatchik rejuvenated by a servile painter, but an older man, as Brezhnev was in reality, yes, someone who seemed to be looking down with an all-encompassing bitterness at this young couple lashed by torrential rain …

We took a step forward, noticing all at once that the billboard was constructed just like a sloping roof deposited on the ground. The other side, identical to the first, also bore a political message, visible to passengers departing southward: “The USSR is the bulwark of peace, democracy, and friendship between peoples!”

A thunderclap exploded so violently that we stooped instinctively and dived in beneath the roof formed by these plywood panels. We had to cross a hedge of thornbushes, stepping over lengths of wood piled there for the struts … This double billboard was doubtless under construction and the storm must have interrupted work on it that day. On the inside the wood still retained the dry and resinous smell from the scorching heat before the rain.

We settled down on a heap of planks, relieved to be under cover … Gradually this feeling gave way to an idea both ironic and sad: yes, we finally had our little corner to ourselves, the refuge we had so much missed during our vacation. And what a refuge! On the other side of each plywood expanse we could picture Brezhnev’s stained face and the slogan celebrating democracy and friendship between peoples … Our very own hotel room.

The silence we maintained did not weigh upon us, the scenario we had acted out for three weeks no longer held sway, everything was becoming simple and natural. Instead of a passionate embrace there was this unmoving caress of a hand upon a shoulder, a cheek pressed against fingers that smelled of the chill of the rain. The storm was moving off toward the sea, the rumbling was becoming more muted and the rain more regular, heavier.

Flashes of lightning still lit up our refuge and it was against a greenish glow that we observed the arrival of two shadowy figures in the entrance to this makeshift den. The matching crash of thunder now caught up with the lightning, and the smaller of the silhouettes shuddered while the other leaned over in a protective gesture. Our eyes, accustomed to the darkness, managed to see them fairly clearly.

They were a very elderly couple, both certainly in their eighties. More than their faces or their movements, it was their way of speaking and their demeanor that gave them away as beings who belonged to quite a different era from the one we lived in … They seemed not to have noticed our presence.

The man, tall and lean, wearing a broad, light-colored hat, ministered to his wife with the care one has for a child. He made her sit down on a plank covered with a sweater that he took out of his bag. Then, shaking a big umbrella, he placed it open in the entrance to the shelter, evidently to keep out drafts. His voice was tinged with firm, genial confidence.

“There you are, all’s well that ends well … No, I feel much better now. I got a bit hot in that waiting room, that’s all … No, it wasn’t my heart, I promise you. I was just a bit breathless … No, those people weren’t being unpleasant. Just a bit on edge, that’s all. This storm, and the wind. They were frightened, you know. Otherwise, I’m sure they’d have offered us a seat … And it shows they think we’re young. Which is encouraging. And, as for all that pushing and shoving, well, we’ve seen far worse, as you know …”

More lightning erupted, and the thunderclap drowned out his words. The blazing sky enabled us to see the old man gently clasping his wife, as if to protect her from the debris following an explosion. He began speaking again and we did not know if we should show ourselves and greet them, or simply leave them in their extreme remoteness. The more they spoke the more the distance separating them from us increased, so that our eavesdropping seemed to matter less and less.

“Remember those stations after the revolution? Now that really was some pushing and shoving! … What? … But we were. Well, we were still disguised as peasants. And then there was that day, with Red Guards all around us, when you began to speak in French … Now that time I really was afraid … Yes, I know. You were exhausted … And the Crimea was no beach resort in those days. Far from it …”

The crashing thunder interrupted their conversation again and gave us time to gather our wits: in the darkness of our den, almost within touching distance, were two survivors of tsarist Russia, two White Russians, as they used to be called, people born before the revolution, at the end of the nineteenth century, no doubt, and who, for mysterious reasons, had not emigrated to Europe, had grown old in this country, which they could not love, and at the age of more than eighty on a stormy night had wound up beneath a plywood billboard that was being shaken furiously by the squalls.

The tale continued, always in tones seeking more to reassure the old lady than to revive shared memories. The husband’s voice managed it, his wife, less distressed, was joining in from time to time, to pinpoint some detail of their past. Two or three times we even heard the thin tinkle of her laughter.

The story they told could be summed up in a few sentences: the Crimea, the ultimate bastion of the White Army, the waves of exiles who thronged there, hoping to catch a ship, cross the Black Sea, and seek refuge in Europe. This man, a young officer, fights to the end, but at the moment of defeat he does not set sail with his companions in arms because his wife is due to arrive from one day to the next. In fact, she is waiting for him at a neighboring port, convinced her husband’s regiment is due to leave from there. Each of them sees one last ship preparing to depart; the people embarking on it thrust them back, or else try to drag them on board … They remain on the quay, they wait, see the Reds occupying the Crimea. And two months later manage to be reunited in what is already a different Russia. They change their identities, censor their conversations, try to survive, and in the end discover the remedy: in the bloody night that descends on Russia they recall luminous moments that go back to their youth. They perceive that people everywhere carry such bright glimpses of the past within themselves, but are afraid to believe in them, to share them with strangers … Twenty years after their wanderings in the Crimea there is another separation: the man goes off to war against Hitler, now fighting to save this new Russia he had resisted with fury in his youth … Over four years they meet only once, at a railroad station. The wife has become a nurse and is escorting a trainload of wounded due for evacuation toward the rear. He is in command of a regiment preparing to defend the city … After the victory it is once again in the middle of a vast gathering in Moscow that she comes looking for him, on his return from the front in ‘45. “This crowd’s just like the one in the Crimea, do you remember?” he murmurs in her ear, as he clears a way for them through the demobilized troops … The years go by and still they have the sense that the beautiful clarity of their young days is miraculously preserved within them. It even feels as if this radiance grows more limpid, sharper, with increasing age. For the sixtieth anniversary of their marriage they travel to the Black Sea, first a week in the Crimea, then a brief stay on the coast near the Caucasus … On the evening of their departure a storm breaks, they escape from the general melee at the station and find themselves sheltering beneath enormous propaganda billboards. So remote from the world, so present in their own world, which they have never really left …