Brief Loves That Live Forever (6 page)

“Well, she can go fuck herself beneath her tree!” he concluded abruptly, giving my brides a sneering look.

All at once he disappeared, as if he had fallen backward onto the floor, the way figures somersault out of sight in a puppet show.

Hurriedly the girls retreated toward me, their only defender.

“The train’s at four twenty. We’re going back,” they said, reconciled to the failure of their fashion parade. “We’ll wait in the station café. It’ll be more fun there than in this hole. There’s no point in hanging around here. That friend of Lenin’s won’t come now, that’s for sure.”

“I’m going to stay. I know she’ll come.”

“Well, watch out. The four twenty’s the last train. Don’t miss it or those old witches’ll bite off your … ears, ha, ha, ha!”

They set off toward the station; the street became empty, a cigarette stub lay smoking in the dust. I hesitated, then walked back to the blue building. This time no faces appeared at the row of windows half covered by weeds. The inmates had probably just gathered in the dining room. Or did each one eat lunch in her own room?

Hesitating over what tactics to employ, I pushed open the front door and found myself face-to-face with the caretaker at a table. She had opened her little lodge and was having a meal there. I particularly noticed a bottle of wine placed on the floor, behind one of the table legs, which would make it possible to conceal this solitary libation in the case of an unexpected visit from a superior. I knew the label on the bottle: a poor-quality wine, a rotgut people referred to as “ink” because it was so dark, the color of walnut stain.

The caretaker recognized me easily (a boy among five girls!), and instead of the rebuff I was expecting, her greeting was almost affectionate: “No, she’s still not come back, our poor lady … Oh yes, that’s the truth: she’s a poor lady …” Her gaze clouded over with a veil of melancholy. I believe she had just reached the stage of intoxication that, for a while, makes us soft, forgiving, understanding.

“Come on then, have a bite to eat!” she invited me, noticing how hungrily I was swallowing my saliva. She offered me bread; cut me a slice of sausage. Then, with a hefty movement of her foot, pushed a little stool toward me and watched me eating with a sympathetic air.

“Oh yes, she’s poor, all right!” she exclaimed after a moment, as if I had expressed reservations about the truth of her remarks. “Not because she’s been dumped here in this shack. When you’re old you don’t need a palace. No, it’s that … she’s got nobody who loves her …”

The caretaker sniffed, wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her blouse, spoke in a broken voice: “Oh, she did have a husband … But he ratted on her, the bastard. It was after the war. Before you were born. She was arrested and her husband disowned her to save his own skin. He even denounced her. Said she was an enemy of the people and a … What do they call it? … A cosmo … a conso … Anyway he said she wasn’t patriotic, you know. And he divorced her. They had a daughter and a son. When Stalin died they let her out, but no one in the family wanted to have anything to do with her anymore. Her husband had married another woman long ago. And her children were in good jobs in Moscow. They were ashamed of their mother, her being fresh out of prison. And what’s more, she hadn’t a penny and nowhere to live … Look what she gave me as a present …”

The caretaker thrust her hand into a drawer, took out a pretty round comb, and slipped it into her hair with a young girl’s coquetry. Then, catching a look of amazement in my gaze, she quickly removed the comb and gabbled on in haste, to conclude her story: “She gets a pauper’s pension but she’s ready to part with her last kopeck. Even to Sashka, who’s our singer here and tattooed worse than a savage … Right, that’s it. On your way now! That’s enough talk. I’ve told you already, she’s not here and I don’t know when she’ll be back. In any case, she never talks about Lenin. Go on. Away with you!”

Suddenly in a bad temper, she stood up, giving me little thumps on my back to direct me toward the door. I guessed she needed another draft of alcohol to restore her to the level of intoxication that fills our hearts with floods of benevolence.

I left both better informed and less certain of what I knew. “The woman who had seen Lenin” thrown into prison! Forgotten by her nearest and dearest. Sharing her meager funds with a tattooed drunkard … All this was a long way from our history textbooks and the yarn that fresh-faced mountebank of a lecturer had spun us.

Disconcerted, I loitered for a moment in the village’s empty street, walked past the drunkard Sashka’s house, went as far as the edge of a wood that extended down into a broad valley covered in meadowland that had not been threatened with scything for a long time. A combine harvester, brown with rust, all its tires flat, lay idle there, surrounded by a profusion of grasses and flowers. There was a silence now, as if settled by the imminence of rain. Even the birds had stopped singing. My own presence was painful to me; I felt I had strayed into a time well before my own life. I decided to go back to the station, rejoin my five brides.

As I walked past the blue building I had an idea that whetted my curiosity. “The woman who had seen Lenin” lived in room nine. Room one was located just next door to the caretaker’s lodge. And, as there was only one window per room, it would be easy to locate room nine. Proud of my deduction, I slipped along beside the wall like a thief, crouching low and glancing rapidly into each room: numbers one, two, three, four …

I was certain that in room nine, the very last in the row, I should see a portrait of Lenin, possibly even photographs of him in the company of the lady we were looking for.

Slowly, with a pounding heart, I peered in at the window opening. First I saw a narrow worktable, or rather a desk, on which a few books, a pen, and a stack of paper were arranged in perfect order. One of the volumes lay open, pencil marks on the page showed signs of an interrupted reading … then there was a bed, a blanket drawn tight, military fashion … A very simple lamp of an antiquated type. And finally a portrait. It was not Lenin. A young man, dressed in the uniform of a cavalryman in the Red Army, a long cape and this cap, with its design based on a medieval helmet, the famous
budyonovka
…

The woman was not there, the caretaker had not lied. No longer hiding, I became glued to the window, feeling as if I were looking into a display cabinet in a museum showing the reconstruction of a way of life in a remote past. All the little space was filled with books and the remainder of the walls covered in photographs. Views of places where the architecture was very unlike that of our Russian towns. Group portraits, a color verging on ocher, static poses that gave away just how old the snapshots were …

And then this photograph: a young woman with long, dark hair, a mother holding a child in her arms whose gaze was curiously directed to one side.

“Does that interest you?”

I gave a start, backing away abruptly from the window and colliding with the person who had just called out to me. I turned around, openmouthed, trying to find excuses, explanations. An adolescent girl, scarcely older than myself, was staring at me fearlessly, but also without hostility, which gave me courage and left me time to study her: a mass of raven hair tied back with a scarlet ribbon, big, dark eyes, and a rather grown-up air that, mysteriously, seemed familiar to me … I hastened to give high-sounding reasons for my espionage. “It’s for our history lessons. I’d like to meet the woman who’d seen Lenin …”

“So would I,” the girl cut in. “And it’s not the first time I’ve come here. But she’s never at home … My name’s Maya.”

I introduced myself, a little awkwardly, sensing that she belonged to a world where dealings between men and women, children and adults, were more relaxed thanks to codes of politeness my comrades either knew nothing of or regarded as signs of weakness.

We moved away from the blue building, walking slowly, following the village’s only street. I felt quite ill at ease, nervous lest I let slip one of those coarse expressions that made up our daily language at the orphanage, grasping, too, that an invisible bond had just been created between this girl and me and that I must be worthy of such a gift from fate. This Maya had a radiant beauty that, from minute to minute, became more magical, almost heartbreakingly so, still hinting at a hidden resemblance to a face I could not identify in my memory. On top of all this the time for the train was close and I was already picturing myself appearing with this new companion in front of my five brides. Their mockery, the teasing glances the passengers would give me in the midst of my harem …

Maya’s voice gradually calmed my fears. Hers was a more serious voice than the tones one might expect from a girl of thirteen or fourteen. More melancholy, too.

“This woman who’d seen Lenin is called Alexandra Guerdt. Her brother was killed in the First World War. After that she had only one dream: to rid the earth of rulers who send young men to their deaths, starve their peoples, and rob the weak. It was a dream of worldwide brotherhood, shared happiness. During the tsarist era she remained abroad, in Europe. That was where she met Lenin. He admired her greatly. He even entrusted her with a number of secret missions. They wrote special letters to one another, with an ordinary text, but, between the lines, words written in milk. Yes, milk! You had to hold the paper over a flame and then the words appeared … After the revolution she worked on his staff. She lived with a man who’d been a major in the Red Army cavalry. At the end of the thirties he was accused of treason and shot. As they weren’t married she only spent two years in prison. She was released because the war against Hitler had just started. She spoke several languages, German in particular. Stalin decided she could be useful … But then, after the war, she got another sentence, at the time of the struggle against cosmopolitanism …”

“Eh? Com-so-politism? What’s that? Political Komsomols?”

“No, it’s … well, there were people who were suspected of not loving their country enough. And that was when her husband (she’d met him during the war) disowned her. And worst of all, he brought up his children to despise their mother. She was too shaken by her life in the camps to put up a fight. She lived alone now. Many years later her innocence was recognized. They even returned her Party card and historians wrote about her. Then her family wanted to get back in touch. But she always refused …”

We reached the spot where the old combine lay dormant. The sky on that June day had become even more gray, and the wind was sweeping through the trees with a sad, autumnal sound. It was time to go back to the station. Maya was silent, her gaze lost in the distant mist over the fields, and from time to time she shook her head gently, as if expressing some refusal in a reverie where I no longer had any place. Yet I so much wanted to exist for her! I must attempt a subterfuge, which is why, in genial and flattering tones, and with a click of my tongue, I exclaimed, “Hey! You’re a real ace at history. I bet you’ve read a lot of books …”

She roused herself, gave me a vague smile, and murmured, “Not all that many. And in the books, you know, the woman who’d seen Lenin is given the name she assumed as a young revolutionary. The name I told you, her real name, Alexandra Guerdt … not many people know that.”

She fell silent again and I sensed a cord within her stretched to breaking point. Her voice resonated with a musical quality, close to tears: “I know the name, you see, because Alexandra Guerdt, she’s … my grandmother.”

She did not burst out sobbing but her breath came in gasps as she tried to speak: “I’ve got cousins who live in your city. But my family lives in Moscow. I lied to my parents. I told them I wanted to spend a week with my uncle and aunt. This was all so as to be able to come here, to Perevoz. Today’s my last day. Tomorrow I go back to Moscow. I’ve never been able to meet my grandmother. My father says she’s an old madwoman. And this village, you’ve seen it. What a wilderness! I’ve asked the caretaker a hundred times. She sent me packing. And she’s lying, in any case. I don’t know where my grandmother could be. She’s too old for long journeys and besides … She’s really very poor.”

We were walking back up the street toward the station. The drunkard’s window was wide open. I quickened the pace to protect Maya from defilement by oaths or smutty rhymes. But it was from behind a row of raspberry canes that Sashka called out to us, and this time his powerful voice was tinged with a strange lassitude.

“Get along home now. You’ll never see her, our good Alexandra. She’s not for the likes of two-faced bastards like you. As soon as any meddlers poke their noses in, she locks the door and goes off quick down the valley. She knows the timetables. They come on the midday train, all the stupid pricks who want to see her, and go back on the four twenty. I know the timetables, too. That’s all I do know. So piss off now and leave us in peace.”

He disappeared as abruptly as the first time.

Dumbfounded, we stood there face-to-face for a moment, then, with unspoken accord, we started to run toward the valley.

Just beyond the wreck of the combine harvester the meadow sloped more steeply. From above, beyond the thickets, the banks of a stream could be seen and, amid the willows, a footpath swamped with wild plants. A dark figure, still very far away, was walking slowly along the bank, coming toward the village. Despite the distance I could make out the ample chignon of white hair, an imposing, upright stature. In a fraction of a second the whole tale I had just heard, this tragic life story that had spanned the century, was condensed into a human presence.

“Go down, Maya! You must go down to her. Don’t wait for her here. Run!”

My whisper was on fire with emotion.

“No, I’m scared,” she muttered. “I can’t. She’ll never want to see me. She’ll drive me away. I can’t!”

I saw tears welling in her eyes.