But now came Belmondo with his pointless exploits, his achievements with no purpose, his gratuitous heroism. We saw a strength that took pride in itself with no thought for the result; the gleam of muscles that were not concerned to break productivity records. We discovered that the physical presence of a man could be beautiful in itself! Without any ulterior motive, be it messianic, ideological, or futurist. From now on we had a name for this marvelous "in itself": Western World.
And then there was also that encounter at the airport. The spy who was to meet our hero had to have about her person an agreed object, an identifying sign. And it was a… karavai, a loaf of black bread, Russian – you can't get more Russian than that – and called by its Russian name in a French film! A shout of delight and national pride ran through the rows at the Red October cinema… On the way back to Svetlaya this time we spoke of nothing else: so over there in the Western World they did have an inkling that we existed!
Why Belmondo?
Because he arrived at the right moment. He erupted in the midst of the snowbound taiga as if propelled there by a fantastic film stunt. Yes, it was one of his action sequences – a dazzling series of leaps, chases, pistol shots and fisticuffs, falls, spins of the steering wheel, takeoffs and touchdowns. That was how he had touched down in the midst of the taiga!
He arrived at the moment when the discontinuity between the promised future and our own present was on the brink of making us irremediably schizophrenic. When in the name of our messianic project the fishermen were preparing to leave not one single fish in the seas, and the loggers to transform the taiga into a desert of ice. While back in the Kremlin one old man was decorating another and anointing him "three times Hero of Socialist Labor" and "four times Hero of the Soviet Union," and there was no space left on the shrunken chest of the decorated person for all those gold stars…
When Belmondo took Siberia by storm, all that was part of it. The Kremlin; the hundred and fifty weaving looms; vodka as the sole means to combat the schizophrenic rupture between the future and the present. Not to mention the disk of the setting sun trapped in the barbed wire…
He leaped from a helicopter hooked onto the end of the Siberian sky, rolled in the snow, and erupted on the screen, inviting us to follow him… It was a stroll beside the warm sea. By constantly turning our backs on the distant silhouette of the radiant future, we advanced gingerly into that terra incognita: the Western World.
But more than anything else: it was love…
What did I know of it, what did any of the audience know of it, before his arrival? We knew there was I've-had-her love. The most common currency in the emotional life of our rough country. And eternally-waiting-by-the-ferry love… And there was another kind, the one we generally encountered on the screen at the Red October. I recall one very typical film about love…
Boy meets girl. On a path in the midst of the fields of rye, in the evening. They walk along silently, artistically shy, heaving eloquent sighs from time to time. The moment of decision approaches. The audience holds still, subsides, waiting for an appropriate embrace. The young kolkhoznik removes his cap, makes a broad circular gesture, and declares: "You know the rye this year, Masha: I bet it yields twelve quintals per hectare!"
A groan of frustration shook the darkened auditorium.
Especially because the heroine was very beautiful and her partner definitely virile. If her dress had been ripped into tatters, we would have been able to gaze at breasts just as well rounded as the one Belmondo's ravishing prisoner was in danger of losing. If she had lain down in the grass – which the whole auditorium was ardently longing for – then the shapeliness of her thighs would easily have rivaled the sensual curves of the spy…
But all the lovers could see, hovering over the fields in the evening, was the misty outline of the messianic project, the sunbathed peaks of the future. They stifled their natural urges and concentrated on talking about the harvest… The kiss came as a more or less optional extra. It made the screen go dark. And before it Ht up again we heard the first wails of the baby that had appeared in the arms of its happy mother. Clearly these moments of darkness were a filmic expression of the night of the gestation period…
The gulf between this official modesty and I've-had-her love was the same as that which lay between the prophetic future and Nerlug in the present. And at the bottom of this chasm was the house of the red-haired prostitute. A woman with a heavy, weary body. A woman who weeps as she lays out on a blanket photos with the edges carefully trimmed. Heaven knows why. Showing them to an adolescent who can only think of that dead bird within him – his dream of love. At the bottom of this chasm was that night of snowstorm and the Transsiberian backtracking. The washed-out face of the woman above the candle flame and her fingers caressing my hair…
Belmondo held out his hand to this adolescent with a dead bird nestling close to his heart. He drew him toward the southern sun. And the terrifying and unspeakable lava of love found words to speak its name with Western clarity: seduction, desire, conquest, sex, eroticism, passion. Like a true professional in love, he even included in his analysis the possible setbacks and disappointments that lie in wait for the young seducer in the early stages of his adventure. We saw him preparing a candlelit dinner to which he had invited his neighbor. He put on a dark suit, went on waiting and… fell asleep in the posture of a vanquished gladiator. She never came…
Yes, the leap into the abyss of love was also an element in his storming of Siberia. And so that there should be no doubt on this subject, he had come and sat down beside me, disguised as Gerassim Tugai, in the front row of the Red October cinema…
The thaw lasted only a few days. The winter took its revenge on this luminous interlude and brought a stinging polar wind, froze the stars in the black crystal of the sky.
But Belmondo fought back. On every free day or, as often as not, missing our classes at school, we woke up before sunrise and set off for the city. For the fourteenth time, the fifteenth, the sixteenth… We did not tire.
10
In the forest it was still night. The snow was sometimes gilded by the moon, sometimes intensely blue. Every young pine tree seemed like an animal lying in wait, every shadow was alive and watching us. We spoke little, not daring to break the solemn silence of this sleeping kingdom. From time to time a pine branch shook off a great white cap of snow. We heard the muffled rustling, then the stifled sound of it falling. And for a long time afterward crystals would flutter down beneath this awakened branch, iridescent green, blue, and mauve spangles. And everything became still again in the dreamy silver light of the moon… Sometimes we heard a light rustling, while all the branches remained motionless. We pricked up our ears: "Wolves?" And above the clearing we saw the shadow of an owl passing. The silence was so pure that we seemed to feel the density and the suppleness of the icy air as the great gray wings of the bird cut into it.
It was during those still-shadowy hours of night that I liked to return to my secret…
My companions were traveling through the forest to go and see a comedy, to learn some more dialogue by heart, to laugh. If I was on my way to the Red October, it was to participate in a miraculous transfiguration: soon I was going to have another body, another soul; and the bird in my breast was going to dance around my heart, fluffing out its feathers. But for the moment it did not stir. And with mournful relish I bore my adult grief within me – the house of the red-haired woman.