Seated on the windowsill, that was how Utkin told me about the end of Belmondo's era in the land of our youth… It was so strange to hear the sound of his voice in the corridor of our residence hall! His face was that of a young man with his first mustache, but through it shone the features of the injured child of the old days. The child who used to long so passionately for the start of adult life, hoping that he would experience love – like other people – in spite of everything. There was I, already cheerfully enjoying the love life of a carefree young male, and suddenly I perceived the infinite despair my friend carried within him. It was as if his face had been eroded by the indifference in women's eyes. By their blindness, so natural, so pitiless…
Utkin noticed the intensity of my stare. The shadow of a disillusioned smile flickered on his lips. He turned his head away toward the windowpane, outside which the chilly Leningrad night was turning pale.
"And when we came back to the place with the guys from the militia," he went on, "when we looked again at the escaped prisoner attached to his branch, I felt no more fear. No sadness or pain either. I'm ashamed to say it, but I experienced… a strange kind of happiness. You know… I said to myself- in that language deep inside you that articulates things without using words – I said to myself that if the world's so horrible, it can't be real. And certainly not unique. That's it, I told myself. You can't take it seriously"
Watching the militiamen, assisted by Samurai, trying to haul the dead man out of the tree, Utkin experienced a mysterious revelation. This young prisoner, whose frozen fingers were now being wrenched open by the men, panting with their exertion, marked a certain limit. As did his own mutilated body? A limit of cruelty, of pain. A frontier…
The corpse finally yielded. The three militiamen and Samurai carried it toward the four-wheel-drive parked at the edge of the taiga. The prisoner's shapka fell from his head. It was Utkin who picked it up. He followed the others, at every step pointing his right shoulder up into the sky, as if he were trying to take a look beyond that frontier…
We spent a whole day traipsing around the wet streets of Leningrad. We went into museums, crossed the Neva. I was proud to be showing Utkin the only Western city in the empire. But neither he nor I was really in the mood for tourism. Even at the Hermitage we talked of other things. The previous night, Utkin had handed me three dozen typewritten pages – a fragment of his future novel. "In the tradition of The Gulag Archipelago," he had explained. I was carrying them inside my jacket now; I felt like a real dissident.
Yes, even in the middle of the Imperial Palace we were speaking in low tones about the horrors of the regime. We criticized everything. We rejected the whole system. The Belmondo of our adolescence and his mythical Western World were transformed into an ideal of liberty, a plan of campaign. We still had a vision of the sun trapped in the barbed wire, impaled on the watchtowers. The gigantic pendulum must be activated! Time, our time, the dictatorship's unhappy victim, must be set free!
Our angry whispering threatened at any moment to erupt into a shout. Thanks to Utkin, it did.
"I've got nothing to lose! I shall fight, even in the camp!"
I started coughing, to cover up the echo of his words beneath the magnificent ceilings. The attendant gave us a suspicious look. We abandoned our regicidal planning session. There in front of us, beneath a red canopy, stood the imperial throne of the Romanovs…
4
19
It is snowing on New York this evening. Or perhaps only on Brighton Beach, a Russian archipelago, where the white turbulence revives so many memories and inspires melancholy in the eyes of all those children of the defunct empire who end up here after arriving in the promised land.
We remain silent for a long moment as we walk along the boardwalk, beside the ocean. The smell of the wind – now a salt gust from the waves, now the piquant chill of the snowflakes – easily replaces words. The bitter cold of the night air evokes a whole sequence of past days that speak to us in profound, serious tones.
"I'm so sorry, but I just couldn't have come any earlier!" I finally say, in an effort to justify myself.
"It's all right. I understand!" Utkin hastens to reassure me. "When I saw him he was already breathing with difficulty; he could no longer speak. And yet when I looked into his eyes I had the feeling that he recognized me… No, no. I don't think they could have done anything, even here. His body was riddled with steel… Yes, I think Samurai recognized me."
He shows me a photo, brightly colored like a holiday snapshot. In front of the long mound of the grave, Utkin has been captured, involuntarily standing at attention. This is the Utkin of "twenty years later" with a little Trotsky-style goatee and eyes invisible behind his glasses. Beside him a woman crouches, seen from behind, piling up the earth around a plant with big purple flowers. Her very practical gestures make her astonishingly distant from, foreign to, the tortured gravity of Utkin's expression…
So does everything come down to this little mound of fresh earth lost somewhere beneath the skies of Central America…?
The dining room of the Russian restaurant, generally half empty, is well filled this evening. The Orthodox Easter. One can see the grizzled manes and noble brows of the first emigration, and some thin faces and embittered expressions from the latest wave; and plenty of Westerners, who have come to sample Slavic charm by candlelight. The musicians and the singer are not there at the moment – the obligatory intermission between two courses. Their repertoire matches the degree of intoxication. After the break come songs more in accord with the quantities of vodka consumed. Conversations become heated, remarks overlap, slowly spreading a confused hubbub across all the tables. And our host, the famous Sasha, like the conductor of an experimental orchestra, directs this cacophony, now coming over to this group, now to that one.
"Oh yes, Your Royal Highness. The only shashlik of this kind to be made in New York now is ours. After the death of Count Sheremetyev's chef… Yes, my good friend, this wine will help you forget your Moscow fallen into the hands of neo-Bolsheviks… Yes, of course, madam, this follows a purely Russian tradition. And furthermore, you'll see that it will go perfectly with this slightly acid punch…"
He seats us at one of the last free tables. I sit with my back to the room. Utkin stretches out his leg in the narrow space between the tables and lets himself down, facing me. The big mirror behind his chair transmits back to me the multicolored depths of the room filled with the vivid lights of the candles. On the walls hung with red velvet are the "icons" – pages from illustrated magazines cut out and stuck onto rectangles of plywood and covered in varnish. In one corner, on a cabinet, is a full-bellied samovar.
After the first vodka Utkin rummages in his great leather bag and brings out a colored volume reminiscent of a children's book.
"Since it's a time for confessions and faded dreams tonight…"
I open the volume, putting my glass aside. It is a comic book for adults. Quite "hard," from the look of it.
"These are my novels, Juan! Yes, all the plots are mine. The situations, the dialogue, the captions, everything… Impressive, huh?"
I leaf through the colored pages. With some variations, the stories are all similar: the characters are clothed at the beginning, undressed at the end. The backdrop for their nakedness is sometimes a lush tropical wilderness, sometimes the luxurious interior of a villa, on occasion even the weightlessness of a spacecraft… As the pages flick past, a whole firework display surges out of them: curvaceous backsides being grasped by the hands of hairy men; pink or tanned buttocks; genitals being flourished; hungry lips; luminous thighs. Suddenly I understand everything.