Brief Loves That Live Forever (15 page)

I wake up, realizing I have dreamed those words, utterly true and equally impossible to share with her. Lying beside the water, her head resting on one arm, Kira is drowsing, too, and the expression on her face betrays a childish disarray. In a murmur I now address this sleeping beauty, this little girl of long ago, who shows through as she sleeps. “You’re right, Kira, these apple trees will never bear fruit. It’s a failed project, like my hope for an ideal city lived in by fraternal men, cured of hatred and greed … But just wait and see. Here, in the realm of this barren apple orchard, beside this half-finished fountain, a single apple is going to ripen, just one, an exception to nature’s logic, a fruit that’ll be here for us, with a flavor no one on earth has ever tasted. We’ll have to return in September …”

Kira stirs, opens her eyes, shakes her head, gives me a rather defiant look.

A droning noise fills the air, I recognize a helicopter flying low. It was doubtless this thundering clatter, a sound imprinted in every cell of my scalded body, that woke me just now. A little veil of clouds dulls the sun. A swift breeze passes through the tops of the apple trees, causes some petals to flutter down. Kira shivers, I see the reflection of her face shimmering in the mirror of the water, a strangely wan image, that of a bitter woman, weary of believing and being mistaken … She dresses and we leave.

At the moment when the central circle is about to be lost to view behind the avenue’s massed branches, I turn: a ray of sunlight picks out the imprint of our bodies on the sand.

A few years after our expedition to the model apple orchard, the project cherished by Kira’s friends came to fruition. Communism collapsed in a great tragicomic hurly-burly of palace revolutions, liberal promises, putsches, appalling economic pillage, edifying credos, and contempt for the old and weak.

In fact, History overtook this tardy generation of rebels, and the most exalted of their dreams soon appeared timid beside the savage violence with which Russia was reformed. The nice, cozy bourgeois society whose advent they hoped for found itself submerged under the muddy torrent of a capitalism of predators and mafiosi. By then most of the dissidents had already emigrated to America, where they could meditate on the unpredictable character of their country, quoting this old adage: “Russians never achieve their goals, because they always overshoot.”

Kira never knew that cataclysmic time. She died in the winter of the year following our brief encounter. As a rebellious militant, she would doubtless have preferred to perish in a camp or on the scaffold. But it was an ill-tended pneumonia. I would learn, much later, that she had contracted it when she went to visit her companion in his exile thirty miles from Moscow. This version, which I have always tried to believe in, had the advantage of allowing my childhood friend a heroic life, sacrificed on the altar of a great cause.

The man Kira was so in love with has been living in Berlin for several years now. I find his surname, Svistunov (“whistler”), with its comic hint of frivolity, hard to forget, an uncommon name. His profession, on the other hand, is not at all rare among the dissident intellectuals of his generation: he is a journalist, or more precisely a reporter who runs, as it were, an import-export business in ideas. Sometimes in Moscow, sometimes in Europe, he feeds the Western press with terrifying stories about the rebirth of dictatorship in Russia and the Russian press with reports on the perfidious designs of the Europeans and Americans …

We met recently and he was the one who told me, amid laughter, about this double game. He struck me as a lighthearted, jovial man, barely affected by his former exile. After Kira’s account I had pictured a pale martyr with a feverish look, his lips on fire with the truth. As I stared at him I was trying to work out the incredible physical resemblance he had to someone I was familiar with. Suddenly it came to me: Svistunov’s smooth, pink visage was not very different from the baby face of “the man who had known Lenin.” Yes, that sprightly and youthful apparatchik whose story we had listened to. Only a woman’s blind love could have endowed Svistunov’s humdrum face with an insurgent’s tragic nobility.

I talked to him about Kira. With an emotion that took me by surprise—I had not expected that day spent in the apple orchard to remain such a vivid memory.

“Kira … who? Wait, was she a blonde or a brunette? More auburn haired? … No. I’m sorry. I don’t remember her. Are you sure she was one of my … admirers? No. Not even the KGB will make me confess to it, ha, ha, ha!”

He seemed perfectly sincere and it was the one moment when his face took on an air of frankness, being otherwise overlaid with expressions that were always somewhat elusive and ambiguous, as required by his professional duplicity. No, he was not lying; he really did not remember the young woman who had idolized him.

“And your novel, that book you were writing in exile,
Captives in Absurdia,
was it?”

“Oh, that. That was just juvenile rubbish. Besides, after Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, what is there to tell? They’ve said it all … And, as for girls, well, I was a superstud at the time. And another thing, you know what women are like. They take a great fancy to outlaws, persecuted people, exiles … So many came to see me, hordes of them, in that dump in the sticks where they made me live …”

He began to tell me about his extremely active and dissolute love life, in total contradiction to the grim picture his generation used to paint of the country crushed beneath the ideology’s puritanism. His voice shook with positively nostalgic vibrato. Yes, he missed that youth made up of clandestine meetings, dissident daydreams, and fleeting multiple love affairs, spiced with danger. I saw his eyes cloud over … Quickly he pulled himself together.

“So, shall we do it, our little interview? I should tell you straight away, this is for a Russian paper, so …”

The fact that Kira was totally forgotten by him upset me at first, as if this ideas merchant’s boorishness were directed at me personally. Then I discovered a silver lining in it: for that stroll we took long ago in the middle of the apple orchard’s silent paradise had thus remained permanently apart from the lives of other people. My only fear now was of learning that a new freeway had drawn a line forever through that useless orchard’s beautiful madness. A motorway, a Coca-Cola bottling plant, or some kind of sports center with swimming pools and casinos, celebratory symbols of the recent upheavals.

One day in a plane flying from Paris to Japan I passed over the region of that giant plantation from the Soviet era. The spring sky was exceptionally clear and on the ground one could see the tiniest dots of houses, the tracery of rivers, the mirrors of lakes. And the line of a road, probably the one linking Moscow and Kiev, which in the old days ran beside innumerable apple trees. At one moment I thought I could see them: a sea of snow-white foam, the vast size of which was surprising, even observed from that altitude. Or was it a long drift of clouds lit up by the sunset?

My fears of seeing that white dream replaced by a superstore were dispelled then. For now I knew that very distant day when I wandered in Kira’s company was no longer of this world and therefore ran no risk of being destroyed.

“That apple orchard is still in flower,” I told myself. “Time has passed it by, leaving it behind in a moment that does not pass. An idea that seems as insane as the beauty of those flowering trees that will never bear fruit. But to believe in it gives a supreme meaning to our lives, our encounters, our loves.”

Then I caught myself mentally addressing Kira, as on so many occasions during these last twenty years.

The truth is, I have never stopped walking beside her along an endless avenue lined with snow-clad boughs.

At first I cannot understand what it is about this scene that intrigues me so …

The luminous violence of the mistral in these towns, white with sunlight, that look as if they had been drawn on the sails of ships, has left me still dazed. An old friend has arranged to meet me in Nice. Starting the previous day, I have been taking my time, stepping off the train on three or four occasions in places I did not know, as if to get myself used to the idea of meeting someone again after so many years of forgetting. This return to the past was making me somewhat apprehensive …

In one of these towns, stunned by this winter wind’s sun-drenched ferocity, I had been stumbling as I walked before finding shelter behind the walls of a cemetery. And seeing that haunting female figure beside a grave. The past, whose summons I was trying to hold at bay, suddenly became very present, close enough to touch at the slightest rekindling of memory …

My eyes still blinded, I am now watching a strange performance. A heavy, stout woman of about sixty, with a dour expression, emerges from a private room in the restaurant in Nice where I sit at a table with my friend of thirty years ago. Supported under her elbows by a woman and man who could be her children, she begins making her way up a staircase. It is painful to see her contorted legs on high heels, scarcely practical in view of her corpulence. She has a sullen air and mutters observations between her teeth, no doubt railing against the stupid idea of installing lavatories on the second floor. Her escorts concur with comical obsequiousness.

But it is particularly my friend’s attitude that strikes me: I sense that he is uneasy, his gaze travels around the room, settles on a man just coming in and another, an athletic type with dark hair, suddenly standing up …

The stout woman mounts the last few steps of the staircase and, panting heavily, broadcasts a critique in more ringing tones: in her view the quality of the cuisine does not match the establishment’s reputation. Suddenly I realize she is speaking in Russian …

I turn to my friend.

“Do you know that woman?”

He seems embarrassed, rubs his brow, then comes out with: “Yes … I know her. She’s a woman who … a woman who, without being aware of it … was loved … in a way one cannot be loved … other than far away from this earth.”

This friend, Pyotr Glebov, is the former regimental comrade with whom I once endured the circumstance, both dangerous and funny, of our helicopter crashing and catching fire, our tumbling out, Pyotr’s ribs being smashed by my landing on top of him, my back being struck by a jet of blazing fuel, thus saving him from burns on the face … We laugh now as we recall these events, as if it were an ancient schoolboy escapade.

What strikes us is the short time it takes to catch up on the more than two dozen years during which the crucial part of our adult lives has passed. Sharing the fate of all our generation, bruised by the collapse of the USSR, Pyotr has tried a thousand trades since then, traveled a lot, forever seeking to convince himself he was coming to grips with this modern life, not feeling behind the times.

He describes his current occupation somewhat vaguely: an agent for a firm that arranges for VIPs to travel abroad. His experience of travel must be useful to him and he speaks several languages … I do not press him too hard to tell me what precisely his duties are: I can see talking about it embarrasses him.

This reticence was visible from the first moments of our encounter. He did not want to sit down for dinner, preferring just to have a drink. I thought it was a worry over money. “But this is my treat!” He refused again, complained that he had eaten too much at lunchtime …

The stout woman, surrounded by her entourage, returns down the stairs. I can study her face better now. The disdainful dourness of an important person’s wife, the spoiled manner of one who must be obeyed in all things because she is rich. A heavily powdered mask, features doubtless reshaped by a surgeon, with taut grimaces that lag behind the sentiments expressed. Her corpulent figure is reminiscent of bulges in the bark on tree trunks. And her clothes proclaim their costliness, bombarding the eye with a spangle of jewels. Her whole outfit, excessive and gleaming, is just like … Yes, like that luxury car I saw parked opposite the restaurant. I was astonished to see a Russian license plate. I glance out the window: the limousine is still there.

Pyotr has intercepted my look.

“They had it brought from Moscow … Instead of hiring a vehicle locally.”

“But why?”

“Why are people idiots? Rich, powerful, and idiots …?”

The stout woman has gone back into the private room and Pyotr relaxes. The connection between him and the Russian dinner guests is still a mystery to me. But I am loath to press him for revelations.

“Now, you said that stuck-up old cow had been loved the way no one has the luck to be loved these days, here in this world of ours. A bit like Beatrice by her Dante … Looking at her, it’s hard to imagine. Maybe at sixteen, young and fresh …”

“Even in her forties she was a very attractive woman, I promise you. And that was her age when the man who loved her died. The romantic novelists’ traditional formula would not be wrong in his case. He surely died with her name on his lips. He had never ceased loving her.”