The Life of an Unknown Man (2 page)

He crouches down in the corner where Léa’s things are piled up. “You’re not a failure,” she told him one day. “No. You’re not even embittered. Not like one of those East Europeans, people like Cioran and the rest. You’re just unlucky. Like someone… like someone who…” (she was searching for the word and he was wild with gratitude: she’s understood me, I’m not a professional failure!)— “That’s it. You’re like an undetonated shell with its devastating power intact. You’re an explosion still waiting to be heard.”

In all his life no one had spoken to him like that. He had lived to the age of fifty, done a great deal of reading and study, experienced poverty and fleeting success, gone to war and come close to death, but it had taken a young Frenchwoman to explain to him what other people regarded as a wasted life. “An explosion still waiting to be heard…” Which, in fact, is the common fate of all true artists. Very intelligent, that girl. Dear, good Léa. “My Léa…”

Or else, maybe just a bitch who made use of this dovecote while she had nowhere else to stay and who’s going off now because she found herself a “guy” who’ll give her a roof over her head. A young “babe” setting out to conquer Paris, leaving Shutov to rot, an old madman obsessed with his search for an epithet to describe that lunar whiteness on the rooftops.

“I love you, Nadenka…” He pours himself another whiskey, downs it with the grimace of one who has seen through the universal grubbiness of human nature, but, at the same time, with a writer’s reflex, observes himself and finds his own posture false and exaggerated. No, there’s no point in doing a bitter little Cioran number of his own. For whose benefit, in any case? Freed of the mask of disgust, his face softens, his eyes mist over. “I love you, Nadenka…” If that story still works, Shutov tells himself, it’s because I once knew a love like that. And that was… yes, more than thirty years ago.

Except that it happened not in winter but beneath the translucent gold of autumn. The start of his studies in Leningrad, a feminine presence along pathways redolent of the acrid tang of dead leaves. A girl of whom the only trace now is a tenuous silhouette, the echo of a voice…

The telephone rings. Shutov struggles out of the sofa’s depths, stands—a drunken sailor on a ship’s deck. The hope of hearing Léa sobers him up. His racing thoughts imagine a combination of excuses and backpedaling, which might enable them to get together again. He lifts the receiver, hears a dial tone, and then, on the other side of the wall, a vibrant male voice: his neighbor, an Australian student whose antipodean friends often telephone during the night. Since Léa’s departure Shutov’s ear is constantly cocked (telephone, footsteps on the stairs) and there is little sound insulation in his attic. His neighbor laughs with frank, healthy candor. To be a young Australian with fine white teeth, living amid the rooftops of Paris. Bliss!

Before sinking back into the depths of the sofa he wanders around to the corner where Léa’s cardboard boxes are stacked. There is a bag of her clothes as well. The silk blouse he gave her… One day they bathed in the sea, near Cassis—she got dressed and when she tossed her hair back in a swift movement to tie it up, her wet locks made a pattern of arabesques on the silk… He has forgotten nothing, the fool. And these memories tear at his guts. No, at his eyelids, rather (make a note: the pain rips away your eyelids, making it impossible to banish the vision of the woman who has left you).

Damn those eyelids! Always his scribbler’s mania. The conclusion is simpler than that: a young woman who breaks up with an aging man should never leave him alive. That’s the truth! Léa should have knifed him, poisoned him, pushed him off that old stone bridge in the alpine village they visited one day. It would have been less inhuman than what she did. Less tormenting than the sleek softness of this silk. Yes, she should have killed him.

Which, in fact, is more or less what did happen.

Shutov remembers clearly the precise moment when the execution took place.

They often used to argue but with the theatrical violence of lovers, aware that the fiercest tirades will fade away at the first moans of pleasure. Shutov would rage against the poverty of contemporary literature. Léa would drum up a whole army of “living classics” to contradict him. He would thunder against writers castrated by political correctness. She would quote what she called a “brilliant” passage. (It was, among other things, about a son held on a leash mentally by his mother while he makes love to a woman.) They would loathe one another and, half an hour later, adore one another, and what was really important was the glow from the sunset coming in through the skylight, gilding Léa’s skin and heightening a long scar on Shutov’s shoulder.

For a long while he turned a blind eye. The tone of their arguments changed: Léa becoming less combative, he more virulent. He sensed a threat in this indifference and was now the only one still ranting and raving. Especially that evening when he had received one of his manuscripts back, rejected. That was when, picking her way between words, she had compared him to an explosion unable to make itself heard… After they had split up Shutov would come to perceive that this had been the last flush of tenderness within her.

Then the dismantling began (beneath the windows of his attic workmen were removing some scaffolding: yet another stupid parallel, the writer’s mania) and their union was taken apart as well, a story at a time. Léa came increasingly rarely to the dovecote, explaining her absences less and less, yawning and letting him shout himself hoarse.

“The awesome power of a woman no longer in love,” thought Shutov, peering at himself in the mirror, feeling the crow’s-feet around his eyes, promising to be more conciliatory, a little more devious about his own convictions, to come to terms with her “living classics”… Then took to shouting again, invoking the sacred fire of the poets. In a word, making himself unbearable. For he was in love.

The assassination took place in a café. For ten minutes or so, Shutov made an effort to be nice,
gentil,
as the French say, then, unable to hold back, erupted (“an explosion!” he thought later, mocking himself). Everything came under fire: the wheeling and dealing of the book world, the fawning wordsmiths who suck up to the hoi polloi as well as the cultural elite, Léa herself (“The truth is you’re just a groupie to that rotten little clique”), even the newspaper poking out of her bag. (“Go ahead! Lick the boots of your armchair socialists. Maybe they’ll take you on as a stringer for their
Paris Pravda
”)… He felt ridiculous, knowing there was only one thing he should be asking her: do you still love me or not? But he dreaded her reply and clung to the memory of their arguments in the old days, which used to founder, lovingly in an embrace.

At first Léa succeeded in passing off the scene to the customers in the café as a somewhat lively but amicable squabble. Then came the moment when the acrimonious tone was no longer fooling anyone: a middle-aged gentleman was “bawling out” his girlfriend, who was, incidentally, far too young for him. Léa felt trapped. Get up and walk away? But she still had quite a lot of stuff to collect from this madman’s attic and he was capable of throwing it all out into the street. Shutov would never know if such thoughts passed through her mind. Léa’s face hardened. And with a bored expression she aimed her blow where she knew him to be defenseless.

“By the way, I’ve learned what your surname means in Russian…,” she announced, taking advantage of the umpteenth coffee he was downing with a grimace.

Shutov pretended surprise but his face took on an evasive, almost guilty expression. He stammered, “Well, you know… There are several possible derivations…”

Léa emitted a peal of laughter, a tinkling cascade of breaking glass. “No. Your name has only one meaning…” She kept him waiting, then in a firm, disdainful voice, let fly: “
Shut
means ‘clown.’ You know. A buffoon.”

She got up and made her way to the exit without hurrying, so confident was she of the effect of her words. Stunned, Shutov watched her walking away, followed by amused glances from the other customers, then jumped up, ran to the door, and there, amid the passersby, yelled out in a voice whose pained tones astonished even himself: “
Shut
means a sad clown! Remember that! And this sad clown loved you…”

The end of the sentence faded away into a cough. “Like the whispering of the young lover in Chekhov’s story,” it occurred to him one evening, as he was staring at the last of Léa’s cardboard boxes, stacked there in the corner of the dovecote.

But that day, on his return from the café, for a long time he was incapable of thought, once more picturing a child in a row of other children, all dressed the same, a boy taking a step forward on hearing his name called and shouting, “Present,” then resuming his place. They are lined up in front of the gray orphanage building and after the roll call they climb into a truck and go off to work amid muddy fields under a fine hail of icy tears. For the first time in his life the child perceives that this name, Shutov, is his only possession here on this earth, the only thing that makes him “present” in other people’s eyes. A name he will always feel slightly ashamed of (that damned derivation!) but to which, however, he will be attached, for it is the name borne by that still-mute little being, who had seen the door closing on the person he loved most in all the world.

A
cross the street from the dovecote there is a narrow building with faded walls (“It’s been out in the sun too long, it’s peeling,” Léa used to say). The moon moves bit by bit across the little top-floor apartment. The workmen have not closed the windows and the room shines, like a sleepwalker’s dream. An old woman lived there once, then she disappeared, dead, no doubt, the dividing walls have been demolished to make an open-plan studio apartment, as fashion dictates, and now the moon keeps watch over this empty space and a drunkard with sad eyes marvels at it, as he whispers words intended for the woman who will never hear him.

After making love with her “guy,” she is asleep now in their new “place”… And everything hurts him, the way he imagines Léa’s friends talking and the idea of that young body, so close to him yet irretrievably lost. A body as supple as a frond of seaweed, which, in their intimacy, retained a touching, vulnerable awkwardness. To be dispossessed of those feminine arms, of those thighs, of Léa’s nighttime breathing: the mere thought of it is a blow to his solar plexus. A crude jealousy, a feeling of amputation. It will pass, Shutov knows this from experience. A body desired that now gives itself to another man can be forgotten quickly enough. More quickly, even, than one’s regret at never having spoken of the moon passing over the apartment across the street, of the woman who lived there, suffered, loved. And of the new life that will fill this white shell, bring in furniture, prepare meals, love, suffer, hope.

On occasion, after their literary quarrels, after making love, they would reflect on such unsettling aspects of human life. At these moments Shutov always felt that this was how he would have liked to be: passionate but detached, sensual, and at the same time conscious that, thanks to their measured conversations, Léa was rising with him to glorious heights…

A window lights up on the third floor of the building opposite. A young man, naked, opens a refrigerator, takes out a bottle of mineral water, drinks. A young woman, naked as well, goes up to him, embraces him, he moves away, his mouth clamped to the neck of the bottle, splutters, sprays his girlfriend, they laugh. The light goes out.

“That could be Léa with her boyfriend,” thinks Shutov, and, curiously enough, the scene eases the pangs of jealousy in the pit of his stomach. “They’re young. What do you expect…?”

He moves away from the window, collapses onto the sofa. Yes, his fatal error was to complicate everything. “She was rising with me to glorious heights…” What crap! A man unhappily close to the age of fifty suddenly has the luck to meet a pretty young woman who is no fool. And genuinely fond of him. He ought to take wing with joy, soaring aloft like a paraglider. Sing, bless heaven. And, above all, make the most of it. In the greediest sense of the phrase. Make the most of her clumsy, because genuine, tenderness, of their excursions (“We’re off to Paris,” they would say, traveling down from their patch in Ménilmontant), of the whispering of the rain on the roof at night. Of all those clichés of a love affair in Paris (oh, that singing of the rain!), intolerable in a book but so sweet in real life. Of this remake of a sixties romantic comedy…

For their love did last two and a half years, after all. Which is a good deal longer than an affair in one of today’s novels. He could very well have lived out one of those little stories that crowd the bookstore shelves: two characters meet, fall in love, laugh, weep, part, are reunited, and then she leaves or kills herself (according to taste) while he, with a tormented but handsome face, drives away into the night along an
autoroute,
heading for Paris, for oblivion. They were both of them in good health, as it happened, and with no suicidal tendencies. And, as for
autoroutes,
Shutov avoided them, not being a very confident driver. Yes, he could quite simply have been happy.

To achieve this, he should have risked being clear from the start: a young woman from the provinces leaves her parents, or rather her single-parent family, living in a region with a stricken economy to the north of the Ardennes, arrives in Paris where she runs into an “unusual” man who can give her a roof over her head. The young woman dreams of writing (“like all the French,” thinks Shutov) and although he is a writer with a limited readership, he will give her advice, possibly even help her to get published.

That, objectively, was their situation. All Shutov had to do was to accept it… But, like so many Russians, he believed that a happiness derived from petty practical arrangements was unworthy of people in love. At the age of fourteen he had read a story by Chekhov in which a couple’s material well-being counted for nothing beside the heady thrill of a moment on a snow-covered hill, on a toboggan run. At the age of eighteen, he had spent weeks strolling up and down in Leningrad’s parks beneath a golden canopy of foliage in the company of a girl: more than a quarter of a century later he would remember this as a vitally important time in his life. At twenty-two, as a young soldier sent to Afghanistan, he had seen an old woman lying dead in the courtyard of a house, clutching her dog in her arms, both of them killed by an exploding shell. Noticing his tears, his regimental comrades had called him a wimp (several years later this choking back of a sob would lead him on to political dissidence…). From his university studies he would retain the memory of a Latin text, words that had inspired Dante: “Amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.” He meditated long on a woman “loved as none will ever be loved.” Such a love called for a sacred language. Not necessarily Latin, but one that would elevate the beloved above the mundane.
Amata nobis…
I love you, Nadenka…