All that remains now is the March light, the heady exhalation from the snows beneath the sun’s dazzling rays, the wood of an old landing stage, its timbers warmed by a long day of sunshine. What remains is the pale patch of a dress on the front steps of a little wooden house. The gesture of a hand waving me good-bye. I walk on, drawing farther away, turning back after every five paces, and the hand is still visible in the mauve, luminous springtime dusk.
What remains is a fleeting paradise that lives on for all time, having no need of doctrines.
FIVE. Lovers on a Stormy Night
The moths flung themselves at every light source, collided with things, got scorched, fell, exhausted, regained their strength, hurtled back once more toward the white heat. In the face of this absurd obstinacy, one had to imagine a sublime sexual passion whose intensity made the risk of dying seem trifling.
Every evening during August that year we saw clouds of kamikaze insects bombarding the little lamps in the restaurants and the street-lights. And hordes of vacationers, seeking the heat of an embrace, the blindness of an affair, with a similar determination.
The awareness of being a part of this gave rise to ambiguous feelings in us: the joy of belonging to a bronzed, carefree tribe, hungry for love, and at the same time the disappointment of being just one more couple, a holiday romance, ephemeral and feverish, among so many others in that beach resort on the Black Sea …
This disagreeable feeling that we were imitating all the others was added to by our dependence on pleasure, like that induced by drugs. We had to increase the dosage, step up the frequency of our bouts of lovemaking. And our bodies would give way, exhausted, like those of the moths intoxicated with light. And every night we would be pained by this growing realization of a trite and bitter truth: pleasure only aims at itself, being a marvelous end in itself. A repetitive loop, heady, exhausting, delicious, perfumed with the scent of tanned and salty skin, molded by muscles made firm in lengthy daily swims, spiced with hot dishes and thick wine that tastes of walnuts, a panting flight toward the climax and a spiraling down into the abyss of bed linen saturated with sea spray, beneath a star hanging low among the branches of a pomegranate tree. An intoxicating cul-de-sac.
My companion during that August proved to be more aware than I of this circular dead end. Every night she watched the moths struggling against the suicidal impulse of their aerobatics … She was an Abkhazian, studying in Moscow and hoping, during her holidays, to experience an adventure essential to the life of a young woman of her origins: to free herself from the moral constraints of her Caucasian homeland, to love without falling in love. Yes, to be a moth fluttering amid a stream of light particles but without burning her wings. She had a name to match the best romantic scenario: Leonora …
Within a few days this project was accomplished: we met, free, passionate, each eager to offer the other the most attractive image of a physical relationship, to act out a fine drama of love. Our bodies performed superbly, the decor of mountains sloping down to the sea added a cinematic luster to every word, every kiss. We clasped one another with the energy of athletes, with a fierce yearning for perfection, just as if our every move were being projected onto an ever-changing screen of beautiful sunsets.
At that age one is loath to accept the brevity of pleasure. Still less, the blunting, the anodyne routine of it, ever more unsurprising, insipid. At the end of two weeks, our original thirst quenched, we had forebodings of a suffocating and vaguely matrimonial coziness.
All young lovers travel this road and all, in their alarm, have only one solution: to put pressure on the limits our poor human bodies impose on us. We doubled the violence of our embraces, seeking now the complicity of the sea at night, now the solitude of waterfalls in the forest. Following the consummation of our ecstasy, the waves would nonchalantly hurl back our entwined bodies onto the chill pebbles, turning us into gasping shipwreck victims. After lovemaking buoyed up by the sea, our walk over the stony beach to retrieve our clothes became torture. We hobbled blindly along in the darkness, groaning and limping, exiled from a paradise we believed in less and less. Or we would sally forth on a cool, misty morning for an amorous expedition upon a wooded hillside, only for it to conclude with a return in full sunlight, under the blaze of a pitiless sky, down a road where the molten asphalt was frankly reminiscent of hell.
One evening, as we emerged from the sea, we surprised another couple making love in the water. They located their clothes easily: the boy had a diver’s electric flashlight fastened to his waist … We had the strength to find this amusing.
At the end of the third week there was a day of rain, a dark sea, yes, black, to match its name, with the laughing sob of the seagulls, a prelude to the end of the vacation. We wandered in a park, went down to the beach, picturing our nocturnal swims with a shiver, then returned to the center of town. Everything we had lived through since we met was brimming with happiness and the scenario we had written with our bodies was a palpable success. Yet we could not manage to conceal from one another a feeling of frustration. Our affair was like one of those concertinas of holiday postcards displayed under the noses of tourists. It led to nothing beyond sun-soaked clichés.
In short, it did not lead to love. That day, without admitting it, we sensed what we lacked.
Not having the courage to recognize this, we started looking for someone to blame. And the villain was very quickly unmasked!
The obstacle to our love was right there in front of us, depicted on a vast billboard that ornamented the train station’s facade. An imposing face, an authoritarian gaze beneath bushy eyebrows. A fine man, in short, with a slightly receding hairline and a solid chin, sporting four gold stars on his black jacket …
Today his name could serve as a marker for the generations: those who have grown up since the fall of the Berlin Wall will not even remember a certain Brezhnev, images of whom once decorated one-sixth of the globe. And even in this seaside town he was everywhere to be seen: alongside roads, on the walls of holiday homes, at the central point in the big park where all the pathways met … Forgotten nowadays, this old potentate then presided over the destinies of a vast empire, governing the lives of hundreds of millions of people, unleashing wars at all four corners of the earth. A man whose slightest frown would cause barrels of ink to flow in newspapers across the planet …
Lifting our umbrella a little, we met his gaze and sighed, recognizing with resignation: yes, he was the guilty one. And, beyond him, the regime that held sway in our country and of which he was the deified incarnation.
What did those lovers pacing up and down in the driving rain need? Not much, in the end. The chance to rent a hotel room and create a little summer vacation love nest where they could feel at home. But in that era hotels were few in number and imposed identity checks more rigorously than the police. If an unmarried couple had dared to present themselves at the reception desk, they would have been suspected of madness.