I was enthralled by this doctrine, which they taught us at school. It put into words what I had previously only been able to picture in a reverie: a white city bathed in sunlight, fraternal men freed at last of all hatred, united by an awe-inspiring plan that carried them toward a radiant future. And also the vision, rashly sketched by our history teacher, of stores bursting with plenty, from which the citizens of the future would take only what was strictly necessary … These childish dreams were now illuminated by the brilliance of texts studied in the classroom, among them The Communist Manifesto, which gave us a glimpse of a world not yet realized, from which brutish rivalry between men, the violence of exploitation, the carnivorous greed of property owners, all these congenital malformations of the tribes of humanity, would be banished. Each day torrents of words in the newspapers or on the radio sought to convince us that this promised future lay at the end of a new five-year plan. Each day reality belied these promises. At length people no longer noticed the letters ten feet high on the factory roof.
And while I so longed to believe in this fraternal world, I knew that when you passed through our city’s suburbs at night it was better to have a switchblade in your pocket.
Once I set foot on the street leading to the village I forgot about these contradictions. In the distance, on the doorstep of the house closest to the river, I could see my friend’s pale dress and time took on an altered significance, becoming estranged from the life I had just left behind. The street lined with blue snowdrifts detached itself from reality, slipped by me in a silent progress like those in cities in our dreams, which we recollect with incredulous joy as we leave them on waking. From the river came the echoing rustle of ice floes beginning to melt. The chilly, intoxicating scent of the waters breaking free, still invisible beneath the snows, hung on the air. The sun dazzled me and at first I could not manage to bring into focus the well-loved face that was smiling at me. I blinked, unconsciously sensing that the problem was not just with the sun but with human eyesight’s inability to see beyond the fine features to the elusive beauty being born and reborn at every instant …
We went in, my friend made some tea, words came or not, the silence of the house was enough for us. Sometimes we listened, but at an almost inaudible volume, to Tchaikovsky’s Seasons. It was always the same section, “June,” which my friend located with a conjurer’s deftness on a large, tired long-playing record. We never turned up the sound, the music was intended only as a faint murmur, it seemed more secret like that, beyond the reach of the life that carried on in the distance, with its din, its pointless speed, its deafness.
The light painted the passing hours, changing from gold to amber, then turning pale.
We used to talk about our first meeting, a source of inexhaustible amusement. A month earlier, before we knew one another, we had taken part in paramilitary training where several schools in the city formed two opposing armies. Assaults on fortresses built from ice blocks, hurling practice grenades, field exercises in a park. The bellicose tension was more than playfuclass="underline" we fought ferociously, seeking, for the duration of a war game, to emulate the pantheon of patriotic heroes. The army our orphanage belonged to wore green armbands, our enemies yellow armbands … The light was beginning to fade when I gave chase to a patch of yellow running away into the undergrowth. To capture a prisoner alive was held to be a far more glorious exploit than riddling him with imaginary bullets and shouting, “Lie down, you’re dead!” I caught up with the fugitive in a clearing, knocked him over by pushing him violently in the back, and thrust my plastic pistol against the nape of his neck. The enemy turned around. It was a girl. I hesitated, then helped her up. We paused for a moment, uncertain whether to resume our roles or instead …
The noise of the battle was now coming from a long way off, almost blotted out by the calm of the great trees asleep under the snow. The warlike passion that had animated us a moment earlier was dissipated in the fading air of a winter dusk, in the silence marked by the two of us panting breathlessly.
“They were supposed to come this way …,” the girl murmured, making it clear to me that the same notion had occurred to us both, the real possibility of calling a halt to this cruel and childish game, this training in brute force, and recognizing that quite a different mode of existence, quite a different world, lay close at hand …
My prisoner’s face had a simple beauty, somewhat austere, or at least avoiding any facile charm, one of those whose fine features, when first seen, impose an attitude, a tone of voice, a respect for the sovereign mystery of that person.
“My name’s Vika,” she said, while I, for my part, made nervous by the direction our encounter was taking, introduced myself in a highly military manner, starting with surname, then my first name, as we did at roll call in the orphanage.
“Reporting for duty, sir!” she replied with a smile and we moved off, without hurrying, in the direction of the shouts of delight announcing the victory of one or other of the camps.
Knowing which side had won that evening became a matter of indifference to us … Mentally I was pronouncing that name, Vika, like the first word of an unknown language.
Nowadays people would refer, with a sly grin, to the understanding we had as a “platonic relationship”. The description seems appropriate enough: no physical bonding arose between us during the very brief period of our friendship. Yet that term is also utterly misleading, since at no time during my presence in the little house near the old port did this “issue” concern us. For it was never an issue. We were far from being particularly prudish. At the orphanage, amid the crowding together of the two sexes and several age groups, there was not much I did not know about the joys and sorrows of the human body. My prisoner was probably as well acquainted with them as I was. Soviet society at that time, under cover of an official coyness, was relatively relaxed. But, without our imposing any kind of vow of chastity upon ourselves, we expressed our love in other ways.
For us the fact of being in love went without saying. But rather than provoking a state of feverish excitement, it made us almost impassive. We became slow, hypnotized by the novelty and power of what was happening to us. I could spend hours in perfect felicity, all it took was the occasional movement of the pale dress through the room bathed in the copper glow of the March sun. To see a lightly curled plait, every hair gleaming as a ray of light picked it out, was sufficient for me to feel happy. And when those eyes, tinged with green and blue, rested upon me, I felt I was starting to exist in an identity that was truly my own at last.
At that age, when our lives seem endless, I could easily have given away half of the span that was left for me to have the certainty, expressed in one sweet word, of being loved. Doubtless that word would have destroyed the very essence of the hypnotic bliss we were both immersed in. If our relationship had lasted longer, words would, in any case, have come … But in the absence of any such declaration I remained mutely adoring, noting the gestures traced by a hand in motion, the fluttering of eyelashes, the depth of an intake of breath, relishing the chill of the snows when, in the evening, my friend came out onto the house’s little front steps to say good-bye to me and follow me with her eyes as far as the corner. These were silent signs, but when we gaze at the stars, do we not, like Rimbaud, hear their “soft rustling sound” quite clearly?