The status of free lovers was on a par with that of vagabonds, thieves, dissidents. Which was not mistaken: love is in essence subversive. Totalitarianism, even in the mild form our generation knew, dreaded the spectacle of two beings embracing and escaping its control. It was less the prudishness of a moral order than the nervous tic of a secret police, refusing to admit that a tiny part of existence can lay claim to its personal mystery. A hotel room became a dangerous place: the laws of the totalitarian world were flouted there by the pleasure two people gave one another, with scant regard for the decisions of the latest Party Congress.
In these circumstances there was only one means of finding accommodation: the “private sector,” as this relic of bourgeois life was then called. Little houses into which the owners struggled to cram an extravagant number of vacationers. Every room, every nook and cranny, the tiniest shed, was packed with beds in which families and couples, as well as people on their own who had come to the seaside to relieve their loneliness, all slept in a tribal lack of privacy. Inviting a person into such a wigwam was not, in principle, impossible. But to avoid the righteous anger of respectable mothers, the carnal act had to proceed at the slow tempo of those silent gyrations cosmonauts perform in orbit. At the first creak of the bed, the lovers would freeze, waiting for the neighboring snores to resume their rhythm. To put it mildly, the ponderous nature of this Kama Sutra did not go hand in hand with the full flowering of sexuality. We had dared to try it once, Leonora and I. We never repeated the experience. Hence our choices of the sea and the forest and a return every night to our respective vacation accommodations.
Hence, too, this wandering on a rainy day and our gloomy sarcasm at the sight of the portrait decorating the station front. And this joke I told my companion to cheer her up: “Have you heard? Brezhnev’s just had an operation!” “Really? What’s wrong with him?” “They’re trying to enlarge his rib cage so they can hang another gold star on his chest …” With mirthless laughter we repeated what all the youth of our country used to boldly proclaim, sotto voce. The old men in the Kremlin are sabotaging our love lives. They won’t let us travel freely, or read what young people in the West read, or listen to the music they listen to. (“Or drink double whiskeys in a bar on Sunset Boulevard,” some wits would add, “before driving off in our convertibles.”)
The days when I used to dream of that ideal city in a fraternal society were now very remote …
We would never have admitted that these recriminations allowed us to forget the brevity of our pleasure, the routine sameness waiting to ambush our amorous passion, and also, quite simply, the tedium of the carnal habit, a bitter reality for which not even the most democratic regime had so far found a remedy.
This dismal day would by now be quite forgotten if, as the evening approached, we had not decided to take refuge in a cinema. We felt it would have been too infuriating simply to part in the rain, going off to sleep in our respective “private sectors.” We saw a poster, and the title of the film seemed to contain a comic hyperbole in response to our anti-Soviet sulks and pro-Western lamentations: A Thousand Billion Dollars. Yes, double whiskeys, convertibles, the lot. We hurried to the box office.
We were completely mistaken. Not as regards the quality of the film, a good action picture with talented actors, but the subject. Our fantasy Western world did not emerge unscathed: assaults on its famous freedom of expression, the press under the yoke of big capital, journalists of integrity under pressure … That was why this French film had achieved clearance from the Soviet censorship! Better than any kind of propaganda coming from the Kremlin, the plot exposed the hypocrisy of bourgeois society.
Despite the ideological implications the cinema was full. Partly because the spectators, mostly young couples, had nowhere else to go on a wet night. Besides, it was a good story. A young journalist played by Patrick Dewaere confronts a terrifying multinational, having discovered its certainly ancient but still criminal links to the Nazis. The intrepid investigator is threatened, hunted down, escapes a hired killer, and then, when he is almost ready to drop, goes into hiding in a small provincial town, where a local newspaper is bold enough to publish his revelations …
The audience responded adequately. Everyone sympathized with the journalist’s plight, on the run from the baddies, waxed indignant at the machinations of the multinational, willed good to triumph over evil. These noble aspirations went hand in hand with quite a few fond hugs and kisses in the dark …
Suddenly I had a physical sense that the room was growing tense, gripped by a violent muscular spasm. I was aware of creaking seats and the space created by people holding their breath. Leonora, who was squeezing my hand, dug her nails into my wrist …
The cheer that arose was more volcanic than at any rock concert. I saw spectators leaping up, waving their arms in a feverish salute, embracing their companions in a demented frenzy. The applause drowned all the sounds coming from the screen. People were laughing, yelling, and, in the half-light, I caught several pairs of eyes glistening with tears. The rest of the film, which had almost finished, no longer mattered.
For the sequence that was being applauded had no dramatic significance and could well have been cut in the editing, so trivial was its place in the story. One evening the young journalist, in flight from his pursuers, walks into a little hotel in provincial France and asks for a room. The receptionist hands him a key, saying, “Here you are, monsieur, room fourteen” (or fifteen, or sixteen, I no longer remember). Nothing more. But it was this brief, completely anodyne exchange that threw the audience into a state of collective hysteria. For suddenly the spectators were witnessing a miracle, which apparently, somewhere in the West, was a perfectly ordinary feature of life. A man walked into a hotel and, without presenting any kind of identification, was given a room key!
The film continued, but the only image that caught anyone’s eye was simply this: a pair of lovers, following hard upon the journalist’s heels, also asked for a room and the sleepy night clerk handed them a key without any inquisitorial checks.
At the exit to the cinema the spectators scattered into the darkness with a strangely buoyant tread, that of children taking off from a trampoline and capering about in the air.
That evening, more effectively than all the dissidents put together, Patrick Dewaere contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
During the days that followed the sun returned and up until our departure the vacation happiness unfurled its concertina of colored cards. There was joy, newfound, along with the azure of the sea’s expanse; the ripening of bunches of grapes above the terraces, the vigor of our suntanned bodies. A joy too radiant not to be a little wistful. And the worst of it was that now we were familiar with that simple action; walking into a hotel and climbing up an ancient wooden staircase to a room that might have been waiting for us. A lot of the visitors to that beach resort spent the last week of August with the name of a certain French village on their minds, as well as that of the hotel there, with its sleepy night clerk taking down a key from a board bristling with little hooks.
Leonora was due to catch the evening train to Moscow, my plane was the following day. That day, from the morning onward, the weather was unbearably hot, the sky clouded over, low, suffocating. In the afternoon a dull light hung over the beaches, a storm was on the prowl, hesitant to strike. The streets were plunged into tropical darkness, like a flood of scalding ink.
The first rumbles of thunder surprised us on the road to the station. They rolled out majestically, drowning the noises of the town, the chatter of the crowd gathering alongside the platforms. Peering down from his vast portrait on the station front, Brezhnev arched an eyebrow, as if to say, “A storm? Has it been authorized by the Politburo?”