Brief Loves That Live Forever (14 page)

My friend does not conceal her delight. Unease at finding ourselves in an endless avenue is dissipated. This central space is a good indication that we have reached the halfway mark in our journey: another two hours’ walk and we will emerge at the other end of this sterile dream.

Kira proclaims this out loud with a laugh, referring again to the absurdity of the regime she and her friends are up in arms against.

“What’s really stupid is that this Soviet era won’t even leave beautiful ruins behind. Just the debris of abandoned construction sites, like this ridiculous fountain … I know, why don’t I take a dip? I’m boiling hot. And I’ve got my swimsuit. I was thinking of going to the pool when we get back. But I’m afraid this jaunt is going to take more time than I thought. Right, you can do what you like, but I’m getting in! I’m going to take the waters, Soviet-style …”

She goes in among the trees to change, reappears in a bathing suit. The arrogant contours of her body take my breath away, a body already suntanned and more bursting with femininity than I could have imagined. The water in the little pool barely reaches halfway up her calves, but this does not stop her stretching out full length in it, splashing herself with it, even, for my amusement, pretending to be really swimming …

The cool water renews her energy. She hoists herself up onto a pile of sand and embarks on an impassioned account of “their” struggle. Secret meetings in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev. Manuscripts they contrive to send to the West in diplomatic bags. Long hours at night spent making microfilms that will immortalize these texts upon which the fate of humanity depends. Especially a certain text, tragically unfinished—for it is touched with genius—the novel Kira’s friend has stopped writing. He is hindered by the stifling climate the regime imposes as well as the scale of his literary undertaking (“The seven decades of Soviet rule!” Kira explains to me. And in hushed tones she reveals the title,
Captives in Absurdia
) … The agonies of creativity are aggravated by the enforced remoteness imposed on this rebellious author.

In hushed tones, in turn, I ask sympathetically, “Is he in the gulag?”

I sense Kira’s slight embarrassment.

“No, not exactly. More in exile. Thirty miles from Moscow, maybe even farther. Just picture it. Sending an artist like him among peasants, to a kolkhoz full of drunken idiots, where he has to live in a hut with a leaking roof!”

She waxes indignant without even suspecting that her words might make me jealous. In fact, I hardly exist for her. I try not to give myself away, not to show that the life she describes seems to me full of contradictions.

“And this man, your friend, that is. Does he have … a profession? Does he work?”

Kira flashes a scorching look at me.

“Him, work? But he’s a creative artist! He’s fighting the regime that frustrates his talent. That’s a full-time occupation! I can see you really don’t get it at all …”

I stammer out a conciliatory protest: “I do, I do understand now …”

But what I understand, although I shall not say this to Kira, is the speed at which these dissident artists have come to form an elite caste. Compared with them, the rest of us, the noninitiates, are now becoming peasants, beneath contempt. And yet the author of this
Absurdia
always contrives to eat three square meals a day, while it is the peasants and scum of the earth who provide his sustenance … I watch Kira slipping languorously back into the water from her pile of sand, extending her glowing golden limbs full length. “A creative artist …” He may, after all, be a good man whose lot I envy. As well as his good fortune in being loved the way Kira loves him.

She lies there, stretched out in our little pool, her eyes closed, her lips on the move once more, framing unspoken words for the man of her life. Despite her beauty she suddenly strikes me as vulnerable. Furthermore, the vehemence with which she criticizes the regime is a sign of weakness: the Soviet society she detests is already moribund. Kira is wasting the best years of her life savaging a corpse. Or perhaps this ferocious stance is the price she has to pay for being accepted in the world of the capital’s dissident intelligentsia. She, a poor provincial with no connections, a former pupil at an orphanage. Red Riding Hood …

The memory of our childhood returns, the more than sibling solidarity that bonded us together, a redirection onto our schoolfellows of our longing for a close relative to love. The search indeed for an absent mother in the features of a female teacher, a fellow pupil … As a child, I must have stared at Kira’s face in that way.

I should like to reassure the little girl whose presence I sense deep inside this beautiful, self-confident young woman, in reality so defenseless.

“You’re right, Kira. Absolutely right. This society can’t last much longer. And your artist friends, I can understand them: censorship, the impossibility of traveling, empty shops. Except that … Look at the two of us, for instance. We were brought up in an orphanage, right? Did you ever go without food? No. The same for clothes. It was very simple, but we didn’t walk around in rags. And later on you and I were both able to go to college without rich parents paying for private tutors and lodging for us. But above all …”

I am interrupted by a mighty shout of laughter. Kira stands up in the pool and hurls great spurts of water at me, with both hands.

“You’re a hopeless Leninist! Yes, I remember now. You were the one who dragged us off, me and some other girls, trying to find an old madwoman who’d met Lenin, or so she said! Look, by the age of twelve you were already completely brainwashed … It’s unbelievable how people still hang on to that rotten concept of communism! You’d be a first-rate propagandist for the Soviet paradise. Free education, free health care. What are you going to give us next? Free rail travel to the gulag, I suppose?”

She weeps tears of laughter and for a short while I begin to have doubts about that vulnerability covered up by her self-assurance. She seems like a young woman completely comfortable in the life she has chosen.

“Go on. Take off your shirt and pants! Do a bit of sunbathing; it’ll drive away your gloom. If you haven’t got trunks it doesn’t matter. We all know Soviet industry only produces a single type of underpants, big enough to fit three fellows like you at once …”

Embarrassed and reverting to being a schoolboy confronted by a mocking girl, I take off my shirt, murmuring, “Actually the doctor told me to be careful of the sun. On account of my burns …”

My back, in particular, is still marked with red patches where the new skin is delicate and sensitive. Kira abandons her jeering manner.

“Go into the shade. But, you know, those wounds will form scar tissue better out in the air …”

Our generation has retained this pious respect for wounded soldiers. Very soon, however, my friend remembers she is dealing with a special kind of soldier, one of those who took part in a war waged by an abominable regime. So this is an army man not entitled to the customary consideration.

“And you still dare to find excuses for those geriatrics in the Kremlin who’ve turned you into a leopard! Have you seen your back in a mirror? It looks like squashed tomatoes. I hope they gave you a medal for your bravery!”

I hesitate for a moment, then tell myself that, in her eyes, I have nothing left to lose.

“It was even more stupid than you might think. Our helicopter crashed just before landing. When we jumped clear the chopper was already on fire. I was lucky enough to land on something like a mattress—a very big guy. I don’t know how many of his ribs I cracked. And this saved me from breaking anything myself. And thanks to me, he escaped burns on his face. In point of fact I took all the heat on my back. We used to tease one another at the hospital. He’d say, ‘You smashed my ribs, you bastard!’ and I’d say, ‘Feast your eyes on this, you swine. This is how your face would look if I hadn’t protected you!’ And I’d turn and show him my back. Yes, squashed tomatoes, as you say … So, you see there was no reason to stick a medal on me …”

Kira laughs again, this time with a hint of contempt. And I regret having told her about my regimental comrade. He and I, she thinks, belong in the same category: we are stupid enough not to have totally rejected the world we were born into and grew up in, which is now dying of a pitiful and often ridiculous old age. I ought to spit out this past, deride the people who had the misfortune to live through it, that way I could satisfy Kira and her friends. How can I explain to her that the past of this country, which is on the brink of disappearing forever, also contains our childhood? And this brief fragment of memory, too: high up on a grandstand, in the middle of a huge park covered in snow, I see the pupils from our class, far away, heading toward the orphanage after clearing the pathways, and there, apart from the others, already bridling at discipline, walks a little girl, whom I can recognize by her red hat … Must that memory also be rejected? And this apple orchard, too? And its intoxicating beauty? Must it be derided, seen as a failure on the part of a society that promised a dreamlike future and has lamentably run aground? But derided in the name of what other future?

Kira’s laughter calms down, she gives a pitying sigh.

“Your problem is that you can’t free yourself mentally. You can’t even imagine how people could live and think differently. How life could be radically different!”

“Wait, this radically different life interests me. So tomorrow communism’s rotten shanty will be razed to the ground. That’s clear. But what, in fact, do you and your friends propose to replace it? What kind of society? What way of life?”

“We propose freedom! And a
civilized
society, do you understand? A way of life where you don’t have to stand in line for three hours to get hold of a pair of boots. Where you can travel without a visa. Where you can publish your manuscripts freely. Yes, a material and social life to a modern standard. And where you can happily …”

“Drive your convertible along Sunset Boulevard …”

“You satirize everything. That’s another habit of the good little Soviet citizen you’ve never stopped being … Well, why not a convertible? Why despise people who like to own nice things and enjoy life to the full? After all, God created men the way they are …”

“Well, I think it was more a case of men creating that kind of god. But let it pass … OK, no more satire, I promise. So tomorrow, thanks to your friends, we’ll have freedom. Shoes bought without having to stand in line. Thirty television channels. In a word, a multiparty system plus material comfort for everyone, or almost everyone … And then what?”

“How do you mean: then what? Well, that’s how it’ll go on being.”

“And that’s all? Don’t you find the prospect a bit dispiriting?”

The thought that the society her friends long for might become a matter of routine, might lose its dazzle as a future dream, is an idea that puzzles Kira. I suspect she has never foreseen a sequel to the paradise of freedom and abundance that inspires her dissident activity. She stretches out on the sand again, somewhat sulkily, like a child not wanting to admit reality, and grumbles with a sigh, “OK, if you prefer to remain stuck in the communist lunatic asylum, stay right here in this orchard. You couldn’t have chosen a place more suited to your tastes. Only, as I warned you, these apple trees are barren. You’ll never get a bite to eat here. It’s just like the empty stores in this country …”

The voice she says it in allows a weary indifference to be heard, a refusal to argue. With a yawn she turns away, stretches out her hand, scoops up a little water, pats her forehead and her neck, then lies still.

I do not reply. I have a dawning perception it is not easy to put into words. I simply sense that in this pointless debate, something essential has eluded us. And this essential point is the red hat belonging to the little girl who wanted to be different at all costs. Her revolt arose out of a violent longing for identity in a world that did all it could to impose a collective, leveled-out life and what it called “social equality.” In adolescence she became aware that this equality meant mind-numbing work for starvation wages and cramming several families into one communal apartment. As a young woman, when she wanted to reach for the stratosphere on high heels and bombard the crowd with the staccato of her inimitable footsteps, what she found was dreary queues waiting at counters where cantankerous saleswomen offered ankle boots reminiscent of medieval instruments of torture. She came to loathe this regime, considering that it prohibited her from being unique. All the rest came later: dissidence, drink-fueled secret meetings in kitchens blue with tobacco smoke where, for whole nights at a time, banned artists would read aloud from their unfinished novels, excoriate the Soviet hell, and extol the paradise of the West. There she felt happy, finding in this agitation the opportunity for an incomparable way forward such as she had always dreamed of, yes, the chance to put on her red hat …

And then time had gone by and on the threshold of being thirty, a formidable milestone for any young woman, she had come across a former fellow pupil from the orphanage, a bit of an oaf, who could not understand how wonderfully exciting her life was and how mind-blowing the project was that she and her friends were developing for their sorry country. And now, to cap it all, this backward-looking comrade has been stupid enough to ask her a ridiculous question that has nevertheless made her thoughtful. “Imagine your dream has come true,” he has said. “The queues disappear, people live in material comfort and travel all over the world the way retired people in rich countries do. But would this collection of benefits totally change the course of your life, give you a happiness unlike any other, the Red Riding Hood hat you used to sport at the orphanage?”

I know what I should say to Kira is just this: “The unique existence you’ve always been looking for is right here. In this dreamlike apple orchard, like nowhere else on earth. In this fine day poised between spring and summer. In this moment so singular it’s not even a part of your life. It’s a blip in time, a meeting, a fruitless one for you, with a man you’ll never love, me, and the specter of a man you do love. This will never happen again in your life. It’s here, your destiny and yours alone. If I were you I’d utter a long shout of joy in salute to the incredible madness of the regime you hate. For it’s given you this breathtaking flight through the beauty of this mass of white trees, trees, as if laden with snow, just as they were at that moment when I saw you in childhood, walking apart from the others, with your red hat on your head …”