Brief Loves That Live Forever (2 page)

Instead of making him compliant, the camp made him stubborn. As soon as he was released, he offended again. Drawings and pamphlets that now fell into a more grievous category: anti-soviet propaganda. In short, he made matters worse for himself. Which caused a judge, exasperated by so much inflexibility, to resort to a Russian expression that means, more or less, “Never crawl into the neck of a bottle.”

If only he had followed the logic of those dissidents who sounded off against the Kremlin and idolized the West. But no, he stuck to his guns: his graphic and literary output targeted the whole of humanity and his native land was merely one instance among others. He took a five-year sentence in his stride. Another, the last, in a camp “with a strict regime,” broke him physically but confirmed the flinty solidity of his convictions. What is more, he looked like a long shard of flint and on occasion his eyes flashed with glints of fire, flying sparks from an unconquered mind in a broken body.

All I learned about that bruised life was limited to this tally of three convictions and a few rare details of his daily life as prisoner … And also the nickname “Poet,” which his fellow prisoners had given him, though I did not know if its implication was disparaging or approving. That was all. Ress made it a point of honor not to talk about his sufferings.

The only long conversation we had took place in a city in northern Russia six hundred miles from Moscow, the place of residence assigned to him during the last six months of his life.

It was May Day. I was walking home with him and we had to wait for a while at the entrance to a bridge, closed off on account of the parade taking place on the main square. Leaning on the rail, we could see the procession advancing past an immense building, the local Party headquarters. On the grandstand’s terraces stood rows of black overcoats and felt hats.

The day was sunny but icy and windy. Bursts of military marches were borne on the breeze, snatches of slogans flung out by the loudspeakers, the dull roar from the columns of participants as they repeated these official watchwords at the tops of their voices.

“Just picture it! The very same spectacle all the way from the Far East to the Polish frontier,” Ress murmured, in the dreamy tones one adopts when conjuring up a fabled land. “And from the Arctic Ocean to the deserts of central Asia. The same grandstands, the same pigs in felt hats, the same crowd stupefied by this charade. The same parade stretching for thousands and thousands of miles …”

The notion was striking, I had never thought about this human tide, sweeping in relays from one time zone to the next (eleven in all!) across the vast territory of the country. Yes, in every town, in every latitude, the same collectivist religious celebration.

Sensing my perplexity, he hastened to add, “And, believe me, it’s the same in the camps! The top-ranking camp guards lined up on a platform, a band made up of musical ex-convicts, red banners: ‘Glory,’ ‘Long Live,’ ‘Forward!’ Everywhere, I tell you. One day they’ll fly those grandstands up to the moon …”

Echoing his words, a gust of wind spat out, “Long live the heroic vanguard of the working class! …” Ress gave a tight-lipped smile over a toothless mouth.

“Oh those grandstands! … In the West they’ve written critical commentaries by the ton to explain this society of ours, the hierarchy, the mental enslavement undergone by the populace … And they still don’t get it! While if you’re here, all you have to do is open your eyes. You can see the chief apparatchik from here, at the center of the platform, a black hat and that face, flat as a pancake. Around him, with meticulous concern for the ranking order, his henchmen. The farther they are from him, the less important they are. Logical. The supreme example is the official platform in Red Square. A few soldiers, so the people know what power upholds the Party’s authority. And most interesting of all: the enclosures that divide the platform into sectors. In the one on the right are the heads of state enterprises, the river port administration, a few high-ranking trade unionists, and, lest the proletarians be forgotten, three or four shock workers. In a nutshell, the cream of the forces of production. And as for the less productive forces, but ones still useful to the regime, they put them on the left. Heads of universities, editors of local newspapers, bigwigs from the world of medicine, a couple of scribblers, in a word, the intelligentsia. And immediately beneath the central podium, the family enclosure where the wives and children are deposited …”

He was overcome by a fit of coughing, leaned forward, and a thick blue vein swelled on his temple, very prominent beneath the transparent skin of his cranium. I sought to steer the conversation in another direction.

“Fine. But, you know, the people don’t really care about those grandstands …”

He stood up straight and his eyes burned into me.

“Wrong! The people do care about them. They need them! This pyramid of pigs’ heads is essential to them as the coherent expression of the world’s architecture. The way the enclosures are arranged reassures them. It’s their lay religion. And that idiot bellowing slogans into the loudspeaker is the precise equivalent of a priest preaching his sermon …”

He managed to hold in check another coughing fit, his neck trembled, his face turned purple. His voice came out in bursts, wary of the spasms clutching at his throat.

“We shouldn’t generalize … They’re not all the same … these demonstrators. You could say there are … three groups. The first, the overwhelming majority, are a docile mass who like the comfort of the herd. The second category is made up of cynics, mainly from the intelligentsia: they chorus the slogans, but when they chant it’s all a game, it’s a joke. They wave their flags in ironic frenzy. They brandish the leaders’ portraits on their poles as if they were heads held aloft on pikes. The third and last category is that of the rebels, naive enough to hope they can disrupt this grotesque parade. They write pamphlets, make posters, and … and …”

He began coughing again, one hand covering his mouth, the other seizing the parapet of the bridge. His thin body’s bent shape, clad in an old raincoat, was reminiscent of a broken branch … The path had just been reopened, the parade was coming to an end, the crowd could be seen dispersing into the neighboring streets.

We continued our walk, but instead of going toward his home, Ress led me into a residential quarter of the Stalin era: a park surrounded by a rectangle of apartment buildings where lived the notables we had just seen on the grandstand. He stopped beside the cast-iron fence to catch his breath, watching the demonstrators on their way home, glad to be finished with the chore of compulsory participation. A young man carrying the portrait of a member of the Politburo over his shoulder. Three adolescent girls, each with a rolled-up banner tucked under her arm. A group of schoolboys …

And suddenly, stepping out of a black official car, an attractive woman in her forties, dressed in a pale coat, holding a little boy’s hand. The child stared at us in astonishment, the presence of these two men, so unalike, must have appeared strange to him. The mother tugged at his hand, and they passed within a few yards of us before going into one of the “Stalinesque” apartment buildings. I caught a trace of perfume, subtly bitter, in harmony with that cool, luminous day. Ress turned away, coughing again, but without choking. For a moment it even seemed as if he were trying to spare the child the spectacle of his discomfort …

We set off again without my understanding why he had wanted to go via the park. Perhaps, simply, so as to emerge onto the main square, now almost empty … He nodded his head slightly in the direction of the grandstand. His voice now had a joyful ring.

“A science fiction scenario. Tomorrow this rotten regime falls apart. We find ourselves in the capitalist paradise and the people who step up onto this grandstand are millionaires, film stars, suntanned politicians … And in the intellectuals’ enclosure, let’s say, Jean-Paul Sartre … No, he’s just died. Well, they’ll find someone. And do you know what the funniest part of it is? The crowd will parade past just the same. You see, they don’t care who fills the grandstand. What matters is for it to be filled. That’s what gives meaning to the lives of our human ant heap. Yes, instead of the statue of Lenin, you’d have to picture a playboy in a tuxedo. It’ll happen one day. And once again there’ll be those three categories in the parade: placid sleepwalkers, very much in the majority, some cynics, and a few marginal rebels …”

He was already coughing a little as he spoke, but the real onslaught came as we began walking again. Barking and choking, which gave him the pitiful appearance of an old dog emptying its lungs of the last of its rages. I stood there helplessly, not knowing how to come to his aid, nor what to say, embarrassed and ashamed, as one always is when confronted by a person taken ill out in the street.

We had stopped on a badly paved slope, flanked by old wooden houses. At the bottom of the incline, beyond the luminous tracery of willow groves, the river could be seen glittering. Slabs of ice still clung to the banks. From time to time a cloud hid the sun and then the landscape was reminiscent of the start of winter …

For a moment Ress managed to control his coughing, raised his head, and, with what looked to me like a blind stare, took in the slope, the riverbank, the willows. His words came in feverish gasps.

“Yes, they’ll always … be there … those three categories … dozing swine … cynics … and sourpusses with ruined lungs … like me …”

The cough started again and suddenly the hand he pressed to his lips was filled with red. With clumsy urgency he took out a handkerchief and I saw the fabric was already spotted with blood. A fresh spasm in his chest caused a dark clot to erupt from his mouth, then another. I hastened to offer him my handkerchief …

A telling detail: that silk square had been given to me by a girlfriend. Such a gift would seem incongruous today, but was evidently not unusual in the Russia of those years, and this brings home to me the almost cosmic gap that separates us from that period. But that day, as I watched Ress wiping his lips, it was the man’s own past that I was speculating on: “He’s not had many chances to be loved …” Long spells of hard labor, the painful slowness with which a prisoner’s life is then rebuilt, and already another arrest, and very soon health too ravaged for any hope of a new lease on life, born of some fresh encounter, a new dream, a love affair.

He was still bent double, overcome by the lashing of the cough, the handkerchief crushed against his mouth. With the ugly stance of a drunkard overcome by nausea. Disconcerted, I would from time to time stammer a useless reassurance: “It’ll calm down soon … You just need a glass of cold water …” With an intensity I had never before experienced, I sensed the atrocious injustice of life, or History, or perhaps God, at all events the cruelty of this world’s indifference toward a man spitting out his blood into a silk handkerchief. A man who had never had the time to be in love.

Half the sky was already laden with clouds. A scattering of snow-flakes began to float over the rooftops, weaving a swirl of white at the end of the street. In the far distance beyond the river, the light remained dazzling, springlike, as if that morning’s motley parade were continuing over there, leaving us all alone in this little sloping street. The snow, this last snow of the year, brought with it alleviation, a fresh, deeper perspective, the silent harmony of all we could see. This silence also came from Ress getting his breath back at last, a rhythm of short, ever calmer exhalations.

His voice, freed now from the urge to argue or convince, sounded like an echo coming from a time when all he was saying would seem obvious.

“Three categories … The conciliators, the cynics, the rebels … But there are … There are also those who have the wisdom to pause in an alleyway like this and watch the snow falling. Notice a lamp being lit in a window. Inhale the scent of burning wood. This wisdom, only a tiny minority among us know how to live by it. In my case, I’ve found it too late. I’m only just getting to know it. Often, out of habit, I go back to playing the old roles. I did it just now, when I was making fun of those poor wretches on their platform. They’re blind. They’ll die having never seen this beauty.”

What we could see was humble, gray, very poor. Houses from the previous century, their roofs bristling with dead stalks here and there. The dull air was reminiscent of dusk in November, on the brink of winter. We were in May, the whole city was busy with preparations for the festive meal, and the sun’s brutal gaiety would return. But the beauty was there in this moment adrift between seasons. All it took was these pale colors, the untimely chill of the snow, the poignant memory of so many past winters suddenly awakened. This beauty merged into our breathing, all we had to do was to forget who we thought we were.

I do not know the precise circumstances of Ress’s death, whether there was any friendly, or at least solicitous, presence with him at the end. I have my own excuses, which are the best I can come up with: travel, work, and the difficulty of remaining in contact with someone who, like him, did not even have a telephone. Besides, we had never really been close; he was “a friend of a friend of a friend.”

Today, more than a quarter of a century later, as I try to remember Ress and try, as we all do from time to time in addressing people now departed or dead, to embark on a conversation where his voice might join me, what returns to me is a scattered sequence of days, from long before he and I ever met, days going back to my childhood, to my youth. They come to life again in my memory, thanks to Ress’s words spoken then, his lips still stained with blood. Strangely enough, it is these glimpses of the past that offer the best response to his tortured tones. Perhaps because they were moments of tenderness lived through long, long ago, moments of love such as he himself had no time for in his life.

In these words, now silently addressed to Ress, what matters to me is letting him know he was right. We are all capable of stepping aside from the sheep-like procession of parades, with their fanatical chanting, their crushing emblems, their lies.