The sky turned silver and black at the same time. Sudden downpours, sporadic for the moment, drove the passengers into the little station building as though with great sweeps of a broom. We followed them, but remaining inside was torture: the stifling sultriness was loud with the yelling of children, the curses of harassed parents, and the yapping of several dogs … Then one lady remarked to her husband, “We’ve had no lunch. What we need now is some good hot borshch!” This remark was the last straw. Moving as one, we rushed outside …
The sky was in turmoil, laying bare the blue rifts of lightning flashes. The thunder responded, ever closer and more deafening. Our clothes were quickly wringing wet and in a movement of disarray we turned to one another, as if seeking advice. Our solitude on this empty platform in the driving rain epitomized the status of all lovers with nowhere to stay. Coming to life amid the outpourings from the heavens, the loudspeaker hissed in strangely confidential tones, as if its message only concerned this couple alone in the middle of a deluge: “All trains will be subject to a delay of two to three hours …” As he saw us, a railroad worker, galloping the length of the platform in great jagged leaps, shouted out, “At least!” At a loss, we took several steps, not really knowing where to go …
And suddenly we saw another Brezhnev.
This one was mounted on a vast billboard at right angles to the tracks, so that passengers on departing trains took the benediction of his paternal gaze with them on their journey. His face, incidentally, had suffered a serious assault: the features were streaked with two stains from overripe fruit, one beneath his left eye, the other on his chin. The infamous projectiles had doubtless been hurled from a moving train, so as to ensure an easy impunity for the terrorist. A narrow canopy above the billboard kept the rain off his face, which thus delayed the washing away of the trickles of brownish juice, probably from rotten peaches. Curiously enough, this besmirching took away the portrait’s flat and foolish expression, even conferring on it an aura of profundity. This was no longer a fat apparatchik rejuvenated by a servile painter, but an older man, as Brezhnev was in reality, yes, someone who seemed to be looking down with an all-encompassing bitterness at this young couple lashed by torrential rain …
We took a step forward, noticing all at once that the billboard was constructed just like a sloping roof deposited on the ground. The other side, identical to the first, also bore a political message, visible to passengers departing southward: “The USSR is the bulwark of peace, democracy, and friendship between peoples!”
A thunderclap exploded so violently that we stooped instinctively and dived in beneath the roof formed by these plywood panels. We had to cross a hedge of thornbushes, stepping over lengths of wood piled there for the struts … This double billboard was doubtless under construction and the storm must have interrupted work on it that day. On the inside the wood still retained the dry and resinous smell from the scorching heat before the rain.
We settled down on a heap of planks, relieved to be under cover … Gradually this feeling gave way to an idea both ironic and sad: yes, we finally had our little corner to ourselves, the refuge we had so much missed during our vacation. And what a refuge! On the other side of each plywood expanse we could picture Brezhnev’s stained face and the slogan celebrating democracy and friendship between peoples … Our very own hotel room.
The silence we maintained did not weigh upon us, the scenario we had acted out for three weeks no longer held sway, everything was becoming simple and natural. Instead of a passionate embrace there was this unmoving caress of a hand upon a shoulder, a cheek pressed against fingers that smelled of the chill of the rain. The storm was moving off toward the sea, the rumbling was becoming more muted and the rain more regular, heavier.
Flashes of lightning still lit up our refuge and it was against a greenish glow that we observed the arrival of two shadowy figures in the entrance to this makeshift den. The matching crash of thunder now caught up with the lightning, and the smaller of the silhouettes shuddered while the other leaned over in a protective gesture. Our eyes, accustomed to the darkness, managed to see them fairly clearly.
They were a very elderly couple, both certainly in their eighties. More than their faces or their movements, it was their way of speaking and their demeanor that gave them away as beings who belonged to quite a different era from the one we lived in … They seemed not to have noticed our presence.
The man, tall and lean, wearing a broad, light-colored hat, ministered to his wife with the care one has for a child. He made her sit down on a plank covered with a sweater that he took out of his bag. Then, shaking a big umbrella, he placed it open in the entrance to the shelter, evidently to keep out drafts. His voice was tinged with firm, genial confidence.
“There you are, all’s well that ends well … No, I feel much better now. I got a bit hot in that waiting room, that’s all … No, it wasn’t my heart, I promise you. I was just a bit breathless … No, those people weren’t being unpleasant. Just a bit on edge, that’s all. This storm, and the wind. They were frightened, you know. Otherwise, I’m sure they’d have offered us a seat … And it shows they think we’re young. Which is encouraging. And, as for all that pushing and shoving, well, we’ve seen far worse, as you know …”
More lightning erupted, and the thunderclap drowned out his words. The blazing sky enabled us to see the old man gently clasping his wife, as if to protect her from the debris following an explosion. He began speaking again and we did not know if we should show ourselves and greet them, or simply leave them in their extreme remoteness. The more they spoke the more the distance separating them from us increased, so that our eavesdropping seemed to matter less and less.
“Remember those stations after the revolution? Now that really was some pushing and shoving! … What? … But we were. Well, we were still disguised as peasants. And then there was that day, with Red Guards all around us, when you began to speak in French … Now that time I really was afraid … Yes, I know. You were exhausted … And the Crimea was no beach resort in those days. Far from it …”
The crashing thunder interrupted their conversation again and gave us time to gather our wits: in the darkness of our den, almost within touching distance, were two survivors of tsarist Russia, two White Russians, as they used to be called, people born before the revolution, at the end of the nineteenth century, no doubt, and who, for mysterious reasons, had not emigrated to Europe, had grown old in this country, which they could not love, and at the age of more than eighty on a stormy night had wound up beneath a plywood billboard that was being shaken furiously by the squalls.
The tale continued, always in tones seeking more to reassure the old lady than to revive shared memories. The husband’s voice managed it, his wife, less distressed, was joining in from time to time, to pinpoint some detail of their past. Two or three times we even heard the thin tinkle of her laughter.
The story they told could be summed up in a few sentences: the Crimea, the ultimate bastion of the White Army, the waves of exiles who thronged there, hoping to catch a ship, cross the Black Sea, and seek refuge in Europe. This man, a young officer, fights to the end, but at the moment of defeat he does not set sail with his companions in arms because his wife is due to arrive from one day to the next. In fact, she is waiting for him at a neighboring port, convinced her husband’s regiment is due to leave from there. Each of them sees one last ship preparing to depart; the people embarking on it thrust them back, or else try to drag them on board … They remain on the quay, they wait, see the Reds occupying the Crimea. And two months later manage to be reunited in what is already a different Russia. They change their identities, censor their conversations, try to survive, and in the end discover the remedy: in the bloody night that descends on Russia they recall luminous moments that go back to their youth. They perceive that people everywhere carry such bright glimpses of the past within themselves, but are afraid to believe in them, to share them with strangers … Twenty years after their wanderings in the Crimea there is another separation: the man goes off to war against Hitler, now fighting to save this new Russia he had resisted with fury in his youth … Over four years they meet only once, at a railroad station. The wife has become a nurse and is escorting a trainload of wounded due for evacuation toward the rear. He is in command of a regiment preparing to defend the city … After the victory it is once again in the middle of a vast gathering in Moscow that she comes looking for him, on his return from the front in ‘45. “This crowd’s just like the one in the Crimea, do you remember?” he murmurs in her ear, as he clears a way for them through the demobilized troops … The years go by and still they have the sense that the beautiful clarity of their young days is miraculously preserved within them. It even feels as if this radiance grows more limpid, sharper, with increasing age. For the sixtieth anniversary of their marriage they travel to the Black Sea, first a week in the Crimea, then a brief stay on the coast near the Caucasus … On the evening of their departure a storm breaks, they escape from the general melee at the station and find themselves sheltering beneath enormous propaganda billboards. So remote from the world, so present in their own world, which they have never really left …