Brief Loves That Live Forever (5 page)

In the street the sunlight’s dazzling whiteness reminds me of a brilliant late winter’s day in my native land. An unknown woman seated on that grandstand, profoundly calm, drowsing amid the snows. I have just rediscovered her face in the features of the young woman I passed in the cemetery. Her look of grief and serenity.

I realize this was a very fleeting moment, and yet a vital one in the life of a tortured being. All the pain is still there but love is already breaking free from it and is alive, briefly, in its absolute truth: the world, with its absurdities, its lies, and all its ugliness, no longer comes between the woman and the one she loves.

The world … I remember those steel cages where I flailed about as a child beneath the parade grandstand. And those drab hierarchs saluting the crowd. And the wars and revolutions, and the promises of global freedom and happiness that were proclaimed from the eastern frontier to the western. The thought plunges me into boundless amazement: nothing is left of it all!

At the end of the street I can still make out the young woman in black who has just walked away. An intense feeling of communion. Then her silhouette fades into the impetuous mistral’s blue and gold.

First they introduced this man to us. He was in his fifties and very officially exploiting the fact of being one of History’s elect. On Lenin’s birthday, April 22, he was invited into the city’s schools to talk to the pupils about his brief encounter with the Guide, the leader of the proletarian revolution. One morning, as part of his doubtless crowded touring schedule, he visited our orphanage.

Anticipating his coming was a source of great excitement for us. Without exaggeration, it was perhaps comparable to the sensation that might have been caused by the appearance in a late nineteenth-century French primary school of a veteran from Napoleon’s Old Guard, whose fierce mustache had once brushed the emperor’s chubby hand.

The man came in, smiled, spoke with amazing fluency, and indeed verve. He left pauses for us to give gasps of “Oh!” At suspense-filled moments in the narrative he spoke in a whisper. He was a professional. From the very start of his performance we were assailed by doubt.

In the first place he struck us as far too young. We had pictured a hoary, battle-scarred, bent old man. For, since he came from what, for us, was the dawn of time, the period of the 1917 revolution, he must necessarily have fought in the civil war and also the one against Hitler. Yes, we should have preferred a mustached grenadier, or at least the Russian version of this. But he had a smooth, pink baby’s face and looked like the official image of a good little Komsomol apparatchik.

Our history teacher, a very pretty woman in her thirties, was herself taken aback by the visitor’s youthful appearance.

“You don’t look your age at all!” she exclaimed, her cheeks flushing slightly.

The man threw her a frankly saucy wink and murmured, “Ah, that’s what comes of meeting so many beautiful teachers …”

Our doubts were only strengthened.

Could he have been a fraud? This possibility must be ruled out. Ideological education was a highly serious affair and the control exercised by the Party over public lectures of this type was too vigilant. Short of undergoing a lie detector test, the speaker would certainly have been the subject of detailed checks, biographical inquiries, personality tests. For the image of the founder of the State was no laughing matter. Every day in Lenin’s life had been accounted for by an army of historiographers and so there would be no question of allowing an impostor to worm his way into it.

No, the man was not lying; he must truly have met the theorist of communism.

His rather youthful appearance was surprising, but, after all, if he was in his late fifties, purely as regards chronology, he could have been alive for a relatively brief period at the same time as Lenin. We were at the end of the sixties, so the man would have been born around 1910 to 1913. Lenin was able to get about without too much difficulty until 1922, before his illness immobilized him completely. The lecturer was nine years old, he told us, at the time of their historic encounter. So it was believable.

“The meeting was brief,” he explained. “Vladimir Ilyich had come to our village to observe the implementation of the Party’s policy of introducing machinery into rural life. The members of the local soviet were most eager to show him a new tractor. And it was during this demonstration that an appalling catastrophe loomed. It looked inevitable …”

The man’s voice became muted, menacing. He frowned and his nostrils flared, as if he had detected a criminal lurking among us. We listened to him with bated breath, wondering what horrible mishap was about to befall Lenin. We already knew the Guide had suffered an assassination attempt and that in the old days the peasantry, the most ignorant and backward of the working masses, refused to accept the benefits of collectivization. In conspiratorial tones the lecturer whispered, “Although perfectly new, the tractor, the one the soviet was due to demonstrate to Lenin, broke down!”

A chill silence froze the class. At the age of twelve or thirteen we were old enough to be aware of what happened to engineers incapable of putting the Party’s policies into practice. Under Stalin these “saboteurs” were quickly sent to the camps. The pause, held by the lecturer for some time, was intended to bring home to us the possibility of such an outcome. If at this stage in his narrative, he had proclaimed, “So Lenin gave orders for them all to be shot!” I believe we would not have been enormously surprised. We might even have applauded such an action, harsh but contributing to the achievement of collectivization … Today such a reaction in the children we were then would seem unbelievably cruel. But in those days we lived in a world in which there were enemies everywhere to be unmasked. The indoctrination we underwent, often without our being aware of it, was based upon the hatred of a broad category of human beings hostile to the welfare of our country. Depending on the historical context, the Party decided which of our fellow men fell into this category. More realistically, after all, the consequences of the Nazi invasion were still present in everyone’s memories, and in the bodies of many war wounded …

The storyteller’s voice, somber until then, suddenly became animated and emotional: “So, by way of encouragement, Lenin asked the mechanic to explain what was not working. Moved to tears by Vladimir Ilyich’s friendly tones, he started to answer his questions. And that’s how, guided by the great Lenin’s constantly judicious probing, he identified the cause of the problem. Within fifteen minutes the engine was running. The plow, drawn by the tractor, was digging its first furrow. The first furrow of the new life!”

The man clapped his hands together to trigger our dutiful applause. His story was faultlessly constructed. The best juggler in a circus is not the one who immediately demonstrates perfection, but that rare ace who, as he sets ten objects dancing in the air, allows one or two of them to fall so that the public can sense how difficult a feat it is. To whet their curiosity and increase the tension. And at length, when the spectators are beginning to doubt his skill, hey presto! all his playthings pirouette rhythmically in the air together, without a hitch. Our lecturer had used the same device: a tractor goes on strike, all hope seems to be lost, and suddenly the Guide steps in and a miracle occurs. At least that is how we perceived it, because for our generation Lenin remained a cross between a mythical hero and a wonder worker. A benevolent spirit, a just and indulgent grandfather, very different from the ferocious Stalin, whose infamous crimes had recently been acknowledged by the Party and who, as the lecturer hinted, would doubtless have thrown the mechanic into prison.

We applauded, but our hearts were not in it. His performance had been “over the top,” as we would say nowadays. For this “man who had seen Lenin” was a fairground barker, a ham actor, a spin doctor for official History … He sailed out of the classroom with the lithe aplomb of a pop singer, a winning smile on his lips, and another wink at our beautiful history teacher.

We were a long way from that austere veteran of Napoleon’s Old Guard, tanned by the smoke of battle.

Disillusionment caused a group of pupils, of whom I was one, to linger in the classroom. We surrounded the teacher, upset, puzzled.

“He was a bit too … too neat and tidy,” one of my comrades ventured.

This description, at first sight out of place (in fact, somewhat untidily used), nevertheless expressed the truth: yes, a man too meticulous, too smooth, lacking the bitter stench of History.

Our teacher decoded the thought behind it and quickly came to the rescue lest we lose our faith.

“Listen,” she murmured, as if sharing a confidence. “There’s something you have to understand. When he met Lenin he was a child, so, naturally, when he recalls this today it rejuvenates him … But look, I know, well, not exactly personally, an elderly lady … who was very close to Lenin and used to see him when he lived in Switzerland and France … She lives in a village about twenty miles from the city. I’ll try to do some research and discover her precise address …”

The old lady’s home was not easy to locate. It was not until halfway through June that our teacher gave us the name of the village, Perevoz, which could be reached by taking a little train that served a string of suburbs, hamlets, and simple stops giving access to forestry sites. She even showed us a black-and-white photograph in a big book, where we saw a woman of mature years with powerfully molded features and great, dark eyes. Her posture, both imposing and voluptuous, was evocative of the physical suppleness of Oriental women. Many years later I would realize that she resembled the famous portrait of the aging George Sand …

Since the lecturer’s visit most of the pupils had had time to forget about such ghosts from the revolutionary era, and on the day of the expedition there were only six of us to go. To cap it all, as no other boy wanted to come, I found myself in the company of five girls.

For them this outing represented a significant social event, we had never before set out to visit someone who did not belong to the closed world of the orphanage. I noticed they had got hold of some lipstick and had blackened their lashes and eyelids. It is well known that girls of their age mature quickly. I felt like a page boy at a wedding with five brides to escort. On the outward journey, fortunately, the train was almost empty.

More knowing than I, they must have sensed that there was something intriguing about this sudden appearance of a woman at Lenin’s side. The Guide, that completely asexual being, was all at once acquiring disturbing psychological depths that brought him mysteriously to life, much more substantially than the mummy on display in his mausoleum in Red Square, although that was real. It was like picturing a statue of Lenin starting to stir, making eyes, ready to reveal his intimate secrets to us.

At the address we were given in the village of Perevoz, we found a long single-story building lined with flower beds where mainly weeds were growing. The walls were painted a very pale blue, the shade of cornflowers on the brink of fading, losing their color.

There was clearly some mistake, it was impossible for “the woman who had known Lenin” to be living in such a dump. We rang the bell and, after a wait, pricking up our ears at the slightest rustle, pushed open the door …

The interior presented an even more wretched appearance: a long, dark corridor with little windows along one side, doors on the other, it looked like a barracks or a home for single women. Even our orphanage seemed to us more welcoming than this impersonal lodging. The shadowy depths were lit by a feeble bare bulb and a voice both weary and aggressive shouted out: “She’s not here. Gone to the city. Don’t know when she’ll be back …”

A housekeeper or caretaker appeared. We repeated the name of the lady we were looking for, certain we would now be given the correct address.

“Yes, that’s her,” the caretaker replied, “room nine. But she’s not here, I tell you. She’s at her son’s, in Moscow. Come back in a month …”

She stepped forward, ushering us gently toward the exit.

Disconcerted, we made a tour of the building, which might have seemed uninhabited had we not noticed ancient, wrinkled faces at two or three windows, peering out at us between a couple of pots of geraniums. It was a painful discovery: “the woman who had seen Lenin” was ending her days among these faded ghosts! It was rather like a den of witches …

Not really downhearted, the girls decided to look on the bright side: “Well, at least we can have a smoke here, without the supervisors getting on our backs.”

They lit up their cigarettes and strutted along the village street like film stars who had just arrived in the back of beyond. A single street, wooden houses with collapsed roofs, a feeling of great neglect, of life on the verge of extinction. It was a gray day; occasionally a gust of wind ran through the dense foliage with a hasty, plaintive whisper …

Only one inhabitant deigned to view the five young beauties: a man, obviously drunk, sitting in the open window of his izba. He wore a faded undershirt over a body all blue with tattoos. As the divas walked past, his unevenly bearded cheeks creased into a somewhat unnerving grin. And all at once, in an astonishingly fine voice, he recited: