Страница 2 из 34
Now, in the warmth of this kitchen, there is nothing more for me to do but wait for the journey's pitching and tossing, still active in my body, to calm down. Several days on the train, then the aircraft, and finally the terrible tracked vehicle that brought me here across the icy wastes. And the last stage: the interminable hike along that cable swathed in frost, stumbling painfully to arrive at the Edge. At the edge of what? At the edge of everything. Of inhabited land, of the Arctic, of the polar night. The rope ended there, nailed to the timbers of the very last house.
I manage to move my feet in my boots. My hands, my finger joints, are coming back to life, obeying me. I can grip the cup without spilling it, as happened just now. "The goal has been reached," I think with a smile. I am here, in the terrain Jacques Dorme once flew over. Tomorrow I shall see the place where a life I have carried inside of me since childhood was ruptured. His life and that of the woman who had loved him. In the blissful drowsiness of my exhaustion, those lives of long ago come awake behind my eyelids, revive that tale of a day, a city, the imagined memory of a night. That night when the rain mimicked the staccato rattle of the amber beads…
"Tell me, my friend, have you heard the one about the young man from Moscow, a bit like you, who arrives in the taiga of Yakutia? Listen. I'll tell you…"
One of my hosts is speaking. There are three of them in the house on the Edge. Two are these geologists who shook hands with me, both, by a comic coincidence, proffering the same name: Lev. Two Leos, two lions, I said to myself, suppressing a smile. The first of them, tall, with broad shoulders, evidently read my mind and sought to clarify matters. "Now see here. I'm the real lion. He's only a cub…" The other, short and with a face marked by chilblains, exclaimed: "Shut your mouth, Trotsky!" By way of a welcome I had joined them in a glass of that inhuman brew, alcohol barely sweetened with cranberry syrup, and then, with almost magical ease, succeeded in getting myself accepted to join their next day's expedition. "But of course, my friend. All we have to do is say the word to the pilot and it's as good as done. While we're blowing the mountain to smithereens he'll take you wherever you like." I took a bottle of brandy I had brought from Paris out of my knapsack and we poured it into three good-sized thick glass tumblers. They drank, exchanged doubtful glances. Russian custom forbids the criticism of fare that is a gift. "It's… good," Big Lev concluded. "Yes, not bad," Little Lev agreed. "It's like the wine they give you in church. I expect women like it. Would you care for a drop, Valya?"
Valya, the cook, shook her head. Her arms white with flour up to the elbows, she was kneading dough on a big table at the other end of the room. An enormous woman: a heavy, rounded bosom thrusting out beneath her thick sweater, a broad backside that, when on a stool, covered the seat completely. Her eyes slanted like those of the Yakut, but her skin was very white. A carnal robustness reminiscent of the women of the Ukraine. "What man could take on such a giantess?" I thought with a mixture of fear and admiration.
Now I am listening to Little Lev telling the story on which he has embarked. "… So there you are. He lands in the middle of the taiga all the way from Moscow. He has no idea about anything, but he's a bit like all of you, full of energy. And, right away, the old Siberians say to him, 'If you want to be one of us there are three things you've got to do: first, down a bottle of vodka in one gulp; second, screw a Yakut woman; and third, go out into the taiga and shake a bear by the paw.' Well, your man jumps up, grabs a bottle, and presto, downs it in one gulp! Then he runs out into the taiga. An hour later he comes back, all covered in scratches, and yells at the top of his voice: 'Right. Now show me a Yakut woman and I'll shake her paw.' Ha-ha-ha…"
They choke with laughter, as do I, infected by their mirth, above all because of the comic pantomime Little Lev starts acting out – the young novice knocking back a pint of spirit, ru
That night the howling of the blizzard forms the single background to all the other noises: the snoring of the two Levs, the crackle of wood in the stove, and from time to time, the rustle of a page. In the other room, Valya is reading the thick book I noticed on a windowsill when I arrived. One of those novels of the sixties where love took its course against a background of vast electricity-generating stations under construction, the conquest of the taiga, the glorious exploits of the mother country. A fiction not too far removed, actually, from this woman's life or her dreams? Who knows? I do not notice the moment when she turns out the light.
Toward the middle of the night, the lashing of the squalls drowns out anything else the ear could still hear. I think about the tiny dot of my presence in this corner of the world. What point of reference can one find? The icy fringe of the Arctic Ocean? The Bering Strait? The Victory Peak, nine thousand feet high, to the west of this house?
I tell myself that, when it comes down to it, nothing better evokes this landscape for me than the memory of Jacques Dorme's life.
JACQUES DORME'S STORY HAD KEPT ME COMPANY all along my route. The intensity of it turned any given town I was passing through, any railroad station, into a blur; it isolated me in the midst of crowds. From Paris I traveled to Warsaw, reached the Ukraine (which had recently proclaimed its independence) without difficulty and was then held up for several hours at the brand-new border of Russia. When pronounced in front of a small hut darkly stained with damp snow, the words "border" and "visa" seemed to come out of one of Chekhov's satirical short stories. As did the uniforms of the border guards, which were of a strangely effeminate cut, and the eagles on their shapkas, cheap gold braid reminiscent of Christmas tree decorations. And, even more so, the document I offered them. This stateless person's passport, authorizing me to visit "any country except the USSR." The USSR no longer existed, and this prohibition had now taken on a disturbing, almost metaphysical meaning. Poorly covered in plastic by an old Algerian on the Boulevard Barbès, the document had suffered from the damp, and the thin, buckled cardboard, with its blurred stamps, was bound to provoke suspicion. Taking pity on my i
It was the first time I had gone back to Russia and I was returning in secret. However, the strangeness of my arrival was soon eclipsed by the bizarre nature, now comic, now painful, of the new state of things. The monument in a Ukrainian town… two figures shaking hands and the legend in letters of gold: "Long live the Union of the Ukraine with…" The rest of it ("… Russia ") had been torn off. My "visa," paid for with a bottle of brandy. Then one evening in Moscow, a gathering of men at the back of an ugly restaurant building. They were shuffling around in early March's muddy snow, gri