Brief Loves That Live Forever (16 page)

“So do you know who this Prince Charming was?”

“You know, too. I introduced him to you once. His name was Dmitri Ress.”

I had known Ress too little and too briefly. For a few months before his death … The man who had been given the nickname of “Poet” in one of the camps.

His life was turned upside down on account of one poster: the lineup of piglike figures on the grandstand for the parade celebrating the October Revolution, the spitting images of the Party leaders. “Long Live the Great October Pork Harvest!” proclaimed the caption.

Conviction, camp, release, fresh acts of “anti-Soviet propaganda,” another conviction, each time a longer sentence in a camp with an even harsher regime. And, two decades later, the outcome of this unequal struggle, a man of forty-four who looked like an eighty-year-old, a toothless grimace, lungs ravaged by cancer, a shaking body that the wind seemed to cut right through …

I recall our slow stroll through a big city in a festive mood. The conversation we had, held up on a bridge, as we watched the May Day parade in the distance, lines of people and red flags flooding the city’s main square. The devastating coughing fits that overcame Ress, the fiery gaze he directed at the world, the vigor of his words, incredible, given his extreme frailty. And then a brief pause beside a park, Ress turning away as a woman passed by with a child. An attractive woman emerging from an official car, walking beside the park fence, disappearing into an apartment building’s entrance. And leaving us with a fleeting trace of bitter perfume …

Pyotr Glebov’s story finally fills in the gaps in what I knew about Ress’s life. The woman who has just gone back into a private room in the restaurant is the boyhood sweetheart, the only love, of that indomitable man.

At the age of twenty-two, intoxicated with illicit literature and revolutionary plans, they launch their bill-posting campaign. Important details: it is the young woman who suggests the subject of the “Great Pork Harvest.” At first she is much more militant than he; he is a thoughtful student, immersed in the study of Marx. For, strictly speaking, he is not anti-Soviet. Very soon he senses that all societies produce creatures of the same type: ones that, with zoological predictability, can think only of feeding themselves, reproducing themselves, and yielding to the power of a state that shackles them into mind-destroying tasks, stuns them with substitutes for culture, has them kill one another in wars. Indeed, in his early days, he is more of a freethinker drawn to anarchism. But the poster itself is clearly an attack on the prevailing regime. They put it up at night: a libertarian ecstasy, followed by long hours of love, dreams, pledges. And the memory of those November days will never fade, the fluttering of the first snowflakes, the muted air that smells of wood fires, a heady chill announcing the start of a new life, the promise of a quite different world.

Identifying the culprits is child’s play for the police. Traces of paint, a vigilant neighbor …

During the interrogration, Ress takes everything on himself. His girlfriend suddenly sobers up, realizing that things are getting serious, bursts into tears, denies all responsibility, lies, sobs, is delirious, begs for pardon. She has highly placed parents, Ress only has his mother, a woman of doubtful reputation, having herself spent time in prison under Stalin … The young man gets three years, a merciful sentence intended to give him a chance to return to the straight and narrow. His ladylove settles down. After believing you could play hide-and-seek with the regime, she has just glimpsed the workings of the heavy mechanism of repression. From now on she has only one desire: to forget the errors of her youth, to go back to being a pretty student from a good family, carefree, unoriginal, and, very soon, a happy wife and mother.

In the camp Ress comes to realize how much his surmises as a rebellious youth were justified. He discovers a whole world of ruined lives. Men crushed day after day by the prison machinery as it turns them into wrecks beyond repair. And the man who managed to cross all the lines of barbed wire one night and was shot down at the last of them. Ress now knows his life will be dedicated to the fight against the bullets that make mincemeat of a prisoner caught in the last line of barbed wire.

The regime does not kill him, for we are no longer in the days of Stalin. With quiet, bureaucratic indolence, it inflicts a slow death on him: trial, conviction, release, fresh trial …

Throughout all these years the love Ress carries within him follows the paradoxical logic of those who worship calmly, without hope, free of any mind games. No connection between the former lovers is possible now. The woman is married, in the bosom of a family, she lives on another planet, inaccessible to a prisoner who has just been released and will be back in a camp before long. But dreaming of her is vital to him. If he lost this hope, his struggle would become the mere obstinacy of an embittered man, which is how the judges think of him.

His own existence is of little concern to him: released, he finds work, anything to keep body and soul together, and the rest of the time he reads and writes, accumulating, without a second thought, the incriminating elements for his next conviction. From time to time a woman gives him shelter, hoping to divert him from the course he has set himself. As soon as he senses the danger of such a diversion, he leaves, lives in train stations, in abandoned railroad cars. These “inconveniences,” as he calls them, with a smile, seem to him external to what matters. His only aim is to arouse his fellow beings from their numb, piglike composure, to share with them the certainty of a world freed of its flaws, the robust faith with which he is now filled.

He becomes increasingly convinced that his former girlfriend initiated him into this quest for truth. That even in her absence, she still gives him the strength to continue his fight. So they are ever united, as in their youth … One of his judges, less insensitive than the rest, refers to this dissident so eager to save humanity as having psychological problems, hoping thus to spare him another spell of hard labor. Ress demands that they name any work by Karl Marx, saying he is ready to summarize the contents in order to demonstrate his perfect sanity. The lawyers are embarrassed. He feels sorry for them: “They’re forcing you to declare that anyone who thinks mankind deserves better than a pig’s fate is mad.”

Tossed from one prison to another, from one haven to the next, Ress at last finds a place of anchorage on his tormented road. During his periods of liberty he comes to the city where his former girlfriend lives and where, twice a year, he is sure to be able to see her go by: on May Day and at the celebration of the October Revolution. He knows that, as the wife of one of the city’s leaders, she is present at the parades and immediately afterward goes home to prepare the celebratory meal.

He does not try to speak to her. What matters to him is to watch her go by, close to him, immersed in a life he could have led. What makes him happy, above all, is to feel no regret at the idea of having been exiled from this mild routine of human life.

As time passes, remaining unseen becomes difficult. The violence of his cough gives him away, his gaunt physique and his clothes render him suspect in this residential enclave where the city’s dignitaries live. One day, after the May Day parade, his beloved’s child notices the odd presence of a vagrant shaken by a coughing fit …

That day I was with him on his pilgrimage. Ress turned away, clapping a hand to his mouth. The woman moved on, suspecting nothing.

Six months later it was Pyotr Glebov who helped Ress to keep his rendezvous. It was the October Revolution celebrations … The parade had finished, a car set down an attractive woman dressed in a long, pale overcoat, who strolled beside the park railings with a dreamy air, passing two men stationed there in a bizarre vigil beneath a fine autumn drizzle. A tall fellow with broad shoulders and a comically thin old man, who was coughing, doubled up, with his eyes half closed. She moved on, leaving them with a momentary tremor of perfume: followed by her son, she went into the apartment building, where the caretaker eyed the two men reprovingly from the doorstep.

“He died a week later,” Pyotr tells me now.

“So that was his very last encounter,” I murmur, echoing his words, “with the woman he loved …”

Pyotr nods, but with a hesitant air, as if the chronology of this love affair were beyond the simple logic of men. Then he continues his story.

On that last occasion Ress had asked him to take him as far as the river. And on the bank he took off his shapka, drew himself up to his full height, exposing his face to the wind’s icy blast. He stood there, motionless, his gaze lost in what lay beyond the waters, with an expression Pyotr had never seen on him before. Hard, proud, victorious. Then a distant smile softened his face, he began breathing deeply …

Pyotr turns toward the private room. The stout woman is framed in the doorway, and it looks as if her entourage, which consists of several people, is carrying her, supported under her elbows.

“Oh, excuse me,” he stammers. “I have to get going now …”

“So soon? But, hold on. What’s going on? It’s not late, we can stay a bit longer …”

“The thing is … I work for those people. Guide, interpreter, bodyguard, chauffeur. In a word, I’m their servant. I’m very sorry … I’ll try to call you tomorrow …”

He moves away, slips ahead of the Russian dinner guests, holds the door for them … Through the window I can see him opening the limousine doors. In fact a whole convoy departs: this huge luxury car plus two other vehicles, one preceding it, the other bringing up the rear …

The room in the restaurant is almost empty, night has fallen, and Pyotr Glebov’s story comes back to me as vividly as an experience remembered.

Ress stands facing the cold expanse of the river. The wind sets a fine tuft of white hair on the top of his head dancing. The November squalls are powerful, icy; they strike him in the chest, making him teeter. But he stands his ground, stares at the horizon with his toothless mouth stretched in a painful smile.

For he has won! The regime that has ravaged his life is beginning to show signs of decrepitude, is on the brink of collapse.

Very quickly, however, his hard grimace fades into a detached, almost tender expression. He knows that in this duel with History there can be no victor. Regimes change. What remains unchanged is men’s desire to possess, to crush their fellow men, to lapse into the numb indifference of well-fed animals.

He smiles, breathes in deeply, and the breath he inhales is mingled with the river’s snowy chill, the smoke from a fire burning in one of the shacks that cling to the shore. And a bitter tang of perfume …

“A man who’s never been loved …” I used to say to myself when thinking about Ress. Even God was no help, for such were the laws of his Creation, based upon hatred, destruction, death. Above all, based upon time, which can transform an adored girl into a stout, heavy woman with a coarsely made-up face, like a pig. No, if God had to confront this world without love, he would be powerless.

And it is this human wraith, this Ress, teetering on the brink of nothingness, yes, he alone who has had the strength to cause the beauty of the woman he loved to live forever.

At the time of our meeting, almost thirty years ago, these were the solemn words I believed were needed to sum up Dmitri Ress’s life: a revolt against a world in which hatred is the rule and love a strange anomaly. And the failure of God, whose Creation man is called upon to set to rights …

I now remember that at the moment when we left the little street where we had paused, looking out over the river, Ress had confided to me with a rueful smile, “They used to call me ‘Poet,’ my comrades at the camp. If only it were true! I should know how to speak of the joy and light I find everywhere nowadays. Speak of a moment like this, yes, with the last of the snow falling, the scent of a wood fire, and the lamp that has just been lit in that little gray window over there, do you see it?”

I am convinced now that these words expressed, better than anything, what Ress’s life allowed us to perceive. Far beyond all doctrines.

For that day, perhaps without his knowing it, it was the poet in him who spoke.

ANDREÏ MAKINE was born in Siberia in 1957 and has lived in France since 1987. His fourth novel,
Dreams of My Russian Summers (Le testament français),
won both of France’s top literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. Makine’s most recent novels,
The Life of an Unknown Man, Brief Loves That Live Forever,
and
A Woman Loved
are all available from Graywolf Press.

GEOFFREY STRACHAN was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 1998 for his translation of
Le testament français.
He has translated all of Andreï Makine’s novels for publication in Britain and the United States.

The text of
Brief Loves That Live Forever
is set in Centaur, a typeface originally designed by Bruce Rogers for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1914 and modeled on letters cut by the fifteenth-century printer Nicolas Jenson. Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.