When I emerged from the hospital she invited me on this dissident expedition to the model apple orchard. Was she counting on having a little more time to get me to talk about my past as a soldier? Or did she simply prefer to have a man with her on this trip through remote countryside?
Now we advance in silence, through a soft, white, perfectly unmoving dream. No breath of air can penetrate the bloom-laden density of these innumerable trees, no sound: their branches awash with petals do not stir, nor do their shadows along the avenue. I know my friend is there to gather proof of the rank stupidity revealed by such an arboricultural project and yet I can feel she is increasingly disconcerted, her verdict had been reached before our excursion, but she had not foreseen this insane plantation’s magnificent lack of proportion. I glance at her furtively from time to time. She walks with an uncertain tread, looking to the right, to the left, with vaguely distressed incredulity. This white avalanche in which we are drowning is extraordinarily beautiful, it cannot be denied. Beautiful to the point of ecstasy, to the point of swooning, so unbelievably beautiful that, in admiring it, one gradually forgets who one is, even forgetting that at some time one will have to abandon this hazy reverie and return to one’s previous life.
What life? I read this question in my friend’s wide-open eyes. And the avenue unfolds in front of us, still with the same milky brilliance, an unchanging, hypnotic, endless pathway.
At length I myself experience a slight uneasiness: ten miles by fourteen? What if my friend were mistaken and it was not fourteen miles but forty? There are no limits to folie de grandeur. To rid myself of this incipient anxiety I try to find words for all this white spilling over us. Coiners of fine phrases might speak of “bridal” or “arctic” or even “virginal” white … I can only smile, such expressions are so far from what we are actually breathing, seeing, and perceiving with every part of our beings.
But how, above all, to evoke the presence of this friend at my side, a little girl from the past, Kira, known as “Red Riding Hood,” who has grown into a magnificent young woman with red hair, a finely chiseled face, a muscular body alive in every one of its curves? A woman who, when she came to the hospital, aroused in me hopes of bonding, affection. But who is passionately in love with another, a man involved, like her, in this business of dissidence and clandestine publications, which is all so alien to me. He is the hero of her life. I am merely an old childhood friend, she made this clear to me just as I was preparing to settle into the role of a wounded soldier with whom a woman falls in love …
I steal a glance at her, her eyes are open wide, her lips are moving slightly, and in her mind she must be anticipating giving an account of our expedition to the man she loves.
The glorious monotony of the avenue is suddenly interrupted; it broadens out and opens onto a circular space, the topographical center of the giant apple orchard, it seems. Another avenue forms a geometrically precise intersection with ours. We are thus at the heart of this dreamlike universe.
The middle of this round area is occupied by a ring of concrete, a very shallow basin whose edges are half covered with thick slabs of pink marble. It is a fountain under construction, or rather an abandoned one. Pipes eaten away by verdigris lie amid heaps of gravel and sand. And at the bottom of the basin a very fine trickle of water winds around. It must have been flowing there for years because its persistent current has filled a tiny pool, held in by the gravel barrier. The rains have dispersed the sand, creating a little strip of beach. Flecks of mica gleam in the crystal-clear water, along with a coin, certainly lost by a workman.
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 …