She was not the first woman to have dazzled me with her beauty, with the patient strength of her love. She was, however, the first to reveal to me that a woman with love in her heart no longer belongs to our world but from it creates another one where she dwells, sovereign, untouched by the restless greed of everyday life. Yes, an extraterrestrial.
And to think that our encounter took place upon a stage set devised to represent a life devoid of love!
The symbols used by officialdom are designed to affect our mental state. When we take part in a mass spectacle, each modest self gains the strength of ten, our voices ring out, amplified by the anthems and the brass bands’ din, the long view of History helps our fear of death to fade. In the trompe l’oeil of propaganda each emblem conjures up a road to be followed, a meaning to life, a future. Yes, existential tranquilizers, metaphysical antidepressants.
As a child I was not remotely aware of this, and yet these addictive symbols were already having their effect on me. They camouflaged the deprivation we lived in, which would be hard to describe today, amid a plethora of convenient, disposable objects. The world I and my comrades saw was transparent with poverty: an iron bed in a dormitory, clothes that, as we grew out of them, were passed on to our juniors, a single pair of shoes, too hot in summer, too thin during the cold weather, which, in those regions of the middle Volga, persisted bitterly right into April. One pen (to be precise, a little rod with a nib holder at the tip of it), a few notebooks, no books other than those we borrowed from the library, no money, no personal possessions, no means of communicating with the outside world.
The exuberance that filled us seemed illogical, almost uncanny. But the only yardstick we measure happiness by is our own lives, whether rich or destitute. After the midday meal we were entitled to a cup of hot liquid in which a few slices of dried fruit were macerating. Having the good luck to come upon a fig would transform one of our number into a “chosen one”; he would relish it, closing his eyes and concentrating completely on the indescribable taste that opened up inside his mouth. We would watch him dumbly, transported to the distant lands where such fruits ripened … Much later, in a book by Solzhenitsyn, I would come across a character in a gulag who was thrilled to trawl a tiny scrap of fish out of his bowl of soup when the ladle chanced to scrape the bottom of a pot. One day, talking to one of the countless prisoners from the Stalin era, I would learn that happiness could be based on even less: a grain left unmilled in a slice of bread …
Alongside these poor people’s pleasures an infinitely richer happiness was available to us, that of things imagined. We possessed so little, and for such a short time, that the whole world was there for us to dream about. That dazzlingly white city, for instance. I can still see its streets bathed in sunlight, its tall, serene inhabitants walking along unhurriedly, entering a store crammed with an abundance of things to eat: one of them selects a bottle of lemonade, another a chocolate bar (just one and yet there are thousands!), and they go on their way without having to pay anything … In answer to our questions about the nature of communism our teacher gave us this explanation: “Money will no longer exist. Everyone will be able to take what is sufficient for his needs …”
An incredulous murmur ran around the class in response to the vision we had just glimpsed: jubilant hordes storming the shops and running off laden with masses of cakes, chocolates, and ice cream … The teacher must have guessed at the looting we had in mind and hastened to complete her interpretation of the future: “The people who live in communist society will have a different type of conscience from ours. The shops will be full and everything will be free, but people will take only what they need. If you can return next day, why hoard?”
That scene occurred at the start of the sixties. The Party had just proclaimed that communism would arrive within the marvelously brief span of twenty years.
The idea of a new type of conscience struck my child’s mind like a flash of inspiration. Yes, a shining city, smiling, fraternal people, who, amid an abundance of desirable goods and food, do not lose their heads, choose the minimum, enough to feed themselves and devote themselves to a mysterious activity referred to by our teacher as “the edification of the future.” Such a task made ridiculous the desire to stuff oneself, thrusting one’s neighbor aside to grab the choicest piece … Childhood images do not fade or vanish. That shining city has often seemed more real to me than those where I lived.
Official propaganda congealed these dream visions together into tangible, simplified language, common to the country’s whole population. The two great parades of the year, for May Day and the October Revolution, gave substance to the symbolic, ideas were embodied in columns of workers, on Red Square the word was made tanks and rockets, History spoke with the voice of an endless crowd, processing from Moscow to the humblest township, past grandstands on which the leaders stood, saluting this dress rehearsal for the messianic society.
At the time I was incapable of understanding it, as I marched beside my comrades in the ranks, carrying a flag or a portrait of one of the Party leaders. Now what remains is the memory of a mesmerized sense of belonging to this human mass, dazzlement at the sea of red banners, a state of euphoria, ecstasy even, yes, some kind of trance. But I was too young then to perceive it like that, I simply felt happy.
The May Day ceremonies have ended up merging in my memory into a single celebration, resonant with loudspeaker slogans and prolonged cheering, spattered with sprays of sunlight and scarlet flags flapping in the wind.
The autumn parades, on the other hand, have left me with quite a different recollection, an upsetting sensation for a child who truly believed in this spectacle and suddenly felt himself duped by it. That was it, the feeling of a lie guessed at behind the mise en scène.
And yet the mise en scène for that parade, politically more important than May Day, was always impeccable. The strict hierarchy governing the placing of the leaders on the grandstand, the banners proclaiming the imminence of the radiant future or lambasting American imperialism. The nimble tread of those in the parade, grouped according to their professional affiliations, the impressive steadiness of the soldiers in the honor guard, a living bulwark against the enemies of socialism. As for the symbolism, every detail was respected: the people were advancing toward that white city of the future of which I had always dreamed.
And perhaps it took no more than a fine shower of icy rain to transform the meaning of the procession that day. A purely physical discomfort, that was it, irritating to the occupants of the grandstand.
The pupils from our orphanage came right at the end of the parade, given the lack of ideological weight represented by our soberly attired ranks, our close-cropped heads, with the pale, bony faces of poorly nourished children. Just as we reached the foot of the grandstand the apparatchiks abandoned their parade ground immobility, bestirred themselves, and, in emulation of the first among them, began to move off the grandstand, exchanging discreet remarks out of the corners of their mouths. The cheering rumbled on, far too loud for us to be able to hear any of this chat, but the drift of it was clear: the dismal weather, the cold, and the delights of a copious lunch that awaited them.
Without realizing it, I had seen the wrong side of the scenery, a stage from which those sinister actors were making their exit. The grandstand was emptying, losing its symbolic significance. Heady euphoria gave way to worrying surmise, doubts I quickly stifled beneath my comrades’ vociferous chanting and the smell of the red paint on rain-soaked banners … And yet that momentary “What’s the point?” had left its mark on my naive faith.
Two days later a hallucinatory nocturnal vision reinforced my disillusionment … We were often sent to work in big factories on the outskirts of the city, to prepare us for manual labor, which was the lot our condition destined us for. We cleaned workshops, raked yards strewn with scrap metal, picked up waste steel or timber. That evening the truck due to take us back to the orphanage broke down and we waited until late into the night, gathered together in a warehouse … As we were driving back through the city a distressing spectacle confronted those who, like me, were sitting at the back of the van: there on the central square, beneath spotlight beams, workers were dismantling the grandstand! I just had time to see long sections of the terraces and a stack of portraits piled on top of one another, at random …
The shock was as great as if in the middle of the screening of a film I had caught sight of technicians rearranging the furniture or even tickling one of the actresses. The blatant nature of what I saw blinded me: this dismantling was done at night to conceal from the people the fact that it was all no more than scenery, a painted facade, behind which there was nothing. And yet there was something: the asphalt littered with cigarette ends, the sad sleepiness of windows in ugly houses, the bare, shivering trees. The workmen’s gestures spoke of ill-tempered abruptness, weary disgust … The following day the square resumed its ordinary appearance, merely leaving me with a nagging thought: “That whole grandstand, they must hide it in a secret place.”
An even more astounding discovery occurred at the end of the winter: the place was not secret at all!
One afternoon in February they sent us to clear the pathways in a huge park at the edge of the city, and it was there, in an area few people visited, that we came upon the parade grandstand. Nobody had thought of covering it up, except that it was blanketed in thick snow, intensely blue in the sunlight, marked by no human footprint …
The real mystery, however, lay not upon the snow-covered terraces but in the grandstand’s entrails, a dark space, pierced through with steel poles, into which I slithered, following three or four of my comrades. The others, their shovels on their shoulders, were already lining up in ranks to return to the orphanage, just as we embarked on a long exploration of this metallic maze.
For me the adventure had a rather sacrilegious appeal: crouched beneath the terraces that were generally occupied by the Party leaders, I had just gained access to the holy of holies of power, the ladder of fame, at the very heart of a symbol! From below, I identified the place where the chief apparatchik stood, then the enclosure for the intelligentsia …
My reverie was shattered by a shout from outside. My comrades were calling me and their voices were vibrant with baleful glee masquerading as friendly concern. “Hey, come on! Get out of there! It’s time to go back. The supervisor’s going to be fuming again …”
Wriggling between two steel poles, I had to climb over a waist-high barrier of beams, slip with more difficulty between the next poles, crouch to pass under a fresh crossbar.
And suddenly I realized that, although this maze was of open scaffolding, there was no way out of it!
My panic was met by wild guffaws. My comrades were helpless with laughter, pointing at me as if I were a caged animal. Perfidious reassurance was added to their mockery: “Don’t worry. You’ve got lots of time till tomorrow. Night night! Sleep well! We’ll tell the supervisor you decided to bed down under the grandstand, ha, ha, ha …”
And they were already moving off, almost forgetting me. I knew this mixture of hardness and indifference, it was the very stuff of our young lives.
Fear robbed me of all judgment. Like a puppet on strings, I bounded about, making the same moves over and over again amid countless metal poles—crouching, swiveling, sliding, skirting … Reaching the last line of poles, I realized they were closer together than the preceding ones and left me no chance of escape! I also became aware that I had instinctively chosen a route that led toward the sunlight and it was the wrong route.
But all routes were wrong in this labyrinth. I repeated the exercise in the opposite direction, already with a resigned foreboding of failure. The geometry of the steel did not change: crossbars, beams, clamps, heavy joists … Halfway along I was struck by an appalling certainty: I was simply moving from one cage into another …
In fact, the grandstand’s skeleton was nothing but a sequence of cages!
I nevertheless continued right to the end of this tough obstacle course, twisting this way and that, bending double, jumping, crawling flat on my face … At the other end of the grandstand—the same structure, the same trap, with spaces too narrow …
My panic caused the energy of a cornered wild beast to explode within me. I swung around, launched myself into a chaotic charge from one cage to the next, no longer noticing collisions with the flanges of beams, no longer headed in any particular direction … My forehead struck violently against the edge of a platform, my vision became blurred, I stopped and the pain brought me a wild calm, the gloomy acceptance of defeat.
Sunk in the torpor of a condemned man, I saw I was in a vast spiderweb, spun from iron. This three-dimensional trellis was everywhere. The sky, the frozen earth, the shadow of the trees and the sun, everything was seen through a grid of solid bars, indifferent to my fevered presence.
My terror was so profound that, within this prison-like captivity, I must have glimpsed a more immense reality concerning the country I lived in, whose political character I was just beginning to grasp, thanks to snatches of conversation intercepted here and there … Much later the memory of this metallic straitjacket would make me think of my compatriots’ despair in the face of ubiquitous censorship and police control and, above all, the impossibility of leaving the country, breaking through the armature of the Iron Curtain. All across that vast territory the same grandstands, the same slogans from loudspeakers, the same leaders’ portraits. And beneath all the terraces, identical steel traps with no way out. I was not yet familiar with the concept of a “totalitarian regime.” But the intimate sensation of what could be experienced in one took hold of me at that moment, in the chill bowels of that symbolic structure …
I resumed my journey with the numb movements of a sleepwalker, guided by the vague hope of slipping out beneath the lowest tier of the terraces, at the front of the grandstand. Now with each step I took I had to crouch a little lower. As I progressed toward this improbable way out, the cages became smaller. My calculation was not incorrect, the first tier, some fifteen inches from the ground, could have allowed me to slip through to the outside. But that took no account of the thickness of the ice, a black layer of which held the base of the skeleton in its grip. I lay full length upon the frozen surface, attempted to thrust my head under the bottom tier, which caused my shapka to fall off, with my cheek against the snow …
No, to escape, I would have had to grind away at that grainy crust or else cause it to melt. The idea of the thaw crossed my mind, but only to confirm the folly of such a notion: yes, remaining there until the fine weather in April …
I shook my head to rid myself of this vision and at that moment I saw a little spot of red encrusted in the ice. I touched it and recognized the remnant of a child’s balloon, one of those that brought color to the grandstands during the two parades. The notables’ children sometimes let them go, and, as we trod the asphalt in our enthusiastic ranks, we would watch these brightly colored bubbles vanishing into the depths of the sky … At that moment I was stretched out beneath the enclosure where they generally corralled such children and their mothers. The red balloon must have burst, fallen under the terraces, got caught on a beam …
I felt the gulf that separated me from the child who had lost it. I pictured a boy of my own age, living in a family, watching the parade, not in the middle of a crowd of strangers but on the grandstand, with his parents. I did not think, “a rich kid,” it was more that I sensed the texture of a life so different from my own, a maternal presence at his side, the solidity of a mode of existence this boy would share with some other children in the enclosure. The impossibility of imagining his way of life coincided in my mind with my inability to escape from these steel cages.
Less surprised than before, I noticed the remnants of another balloon above me, blue, this one, dangling, caught between two bars. I reached up with my hand and …
It was like a shaft of light in the darkness: just where the collapsed balloon had been caught, the grandstand’s metal supports formed crisscross patterns that, as the tiers rose higher, appeared to lead out into space!
It was a harsh challenge but hope gave me the strength of a daredevil. I had to lie flat on my stomach across the intersection of the bars, catch hold of the next crossover, haul myself up to its level, like a garment thrown over a fence, catch my breath, and, already feeling the pain of its sharp edges pressing into my diaphragm, resume this upward scramble.
Heave, balance a moment on a plank, wriggle like a lizard, grip again, thrust again …
The final lunge was performed with almost excessive vigor, with contempt for the vanquished monster. I gripped the highest bar, pivoted, grasped the topmost platform, straddled it, sat down upon the snow-covered timber.
I was free.
And blinded by light, my vision made iridescent by the effort. Deaf too, hearing only the drumming of the blood in my temples. After such a long incarceration everything seemed new to me, especially seen from this height. Tranquil sunlight, the whiteness of broad glades, the majestic calm of tall fir trees laden with snow.
On the pathway parallel to the river I was stunned to observe a little troop of children walking slowly away, all carrying shovels on their shoulders. I could see they were my comrades, including the girl we used to call “Red Riding Hood,” on account of her hat, a pupil always in revolt against discipline, who was now moving along, apart from the others, and looked as if she were dancing as she went … So my absence had not been noticed and my interminable captivity in those steel cages had, in fact, lasted only a few minutes!
I began to make my way down the terraces, confused by these two strands of time, which made me doubt my own reality. And, as if to confirm the novelty of such a state of affairs, suddenly there was this young woman.
She had walked over to the grandstand, doubtless following our footprints in the drifts, had cleared snow from the end of one of the terraces, and was now sitting there, with closed eyelids, bathed in sunlight. On her knees she held an open book.
I halted in my descent, froze, aware that this occurrence did not belong to the world I lived in.
It was the first time an awareness of femininity had struck me so openly. Before that, women used to have the physique of the workers we came across in factories and on construction sites, strong women, often marked by physical labor and alcohol, whom life had molded to be able to hold their own against men. At the orphanage femininity was even less in evidence, we all of us, boys and girls, had a neutralized identity: our heads cropped once a month, clothes of the same thick flannel, a way of talking whose male roughness passed unnoticed. Of course there were those women assembled in the family enclosures on the grandstand, the wives of notables and apparatchiks, but they were as unreal as the symbolic figures on propaganda posters.
So, for me, the young woman I now saw became the first real woman. The slightly arched posture of her body was feminine. As was the knee, clad in the fine wool of a black stocking, left uncovered, with innocent and alarming naturalness, by the hem of her overcoat. And this face, her eyes shut, as if offered for a caress.
Thanks to her, I suddenly knew what it was to be in love: to forget your past life and exist only to sense the breathing of the one you love, the quiver of her eyelashes, the softness of her neck beneath a gray scarf. But, above all, to experience how blissfully impossible it was to reduce this woman simply to herself. For she was also the abundance of snow surrounding us and the glittering haze floating among the trees, and this whole moment in which there was already a foretaste of the hesitant breath of spring. She was all of this and each detail of her figure’s mere outline echoed this far-reaching radiance.
The snow crunched under my foot, the woman opened her eyes, and I saw tears glistening upon her lashes. But her expression remained serene, almost glowing.
I climbed down, with sheepish caution, embarrassed to have disturbed her solitude. She lowered her head toward the book, an envelope had been slipped into it as a bookmark. In a hasty movement she closed the volume, as if I could have stolen the secret of her letter. At once she must have realized that a child, as taken aback by this unexpected encounter as herself, presented no threat. She looked at me for a long time, with a slight smile now. As I reached the lowest tier, I saw such a violently grief-stricken shadow pass across her gaze that I turned away and fled behind the grandstand.
There the mystery of the trap was resolved: one of the steel bars, simply held in place by a bolt, could be moved aside, and so gave access to the maze …
At the park’s exit I passed two elderly women, members of the gardening staff, who were scraping halfheartedly at the frozen earth around some great stone basins. One of them inclined her head in the direction of the grandstand and gave a sigh: “Well, what can you say? … He was a submariner, her man. And if they’re lost at sea they don’t get a grave, or a cross …”
The other one stopped scraping, leaned on the handle of her shovel, and sighed as well: “Well, as for a cross, you know … Maybe it’s better there’s no grave. She’ll get over it quicker …”
Catching these words in passing, I ran to rejoin my comrades. Unconsciously I was hoping to get back into our games, to forget the beauty and grief I had just experienced.
This forgetfulness never came. The young woman sitting on the snow-covered grandstand became much more than a memory. A way of seeing, of understanding, a tonality without which my life would not have been what it was to become. After my fleeting encounter with her I had a quite different perception of the weighty symbols celebrating my country’s messianic project. All those parades, ceremonies, congresses, monuments … Curiously enough, I now had less desire to make fun of them, to criticize the hypocrisy of the dignitaries up there on the grandstand, to denounce them as profiteers for whom the dream of a new society was nothing more than a convenient old lie.
I sensed that the truth was to be found neither among them nor in the opposing camp, with the dissidents. I perceived it as simple and luminous, like that February day beneath the trees burdened with snow. The humble beauty of the woman’s face with lowered eyelids showed up those platforms and their occupants and the pretentiousness of men prophesying in History’s name as ridiculous. What spoke the truth was this woman’s silence, her solitude, her love, so all-embracing that even this child, a stranger, scrambling down from tier to tier, remained forever dazzled by it.
This led me to the notion that this loving woman lived in a time that had no connection with the routine of our lives, so regularly punctuated by imposing mass spectacles. Or else, perhaps, that she lived in a world as it might have been without the overbearing aggressiveness of men, without grandstands, without the spiderwebs of their steel bars.
This hope revived in me my dream of the white city, of the men with new consciences, who, according to our teacher, would inhabit the future society. Yes, those fine, serene beings, who would not hoard and would work passionately for “the edification of the future” …
Then I became bewildered to realize that one thing was missing from this sublime enterprise.
“Love …,” an incredulous voice murmured within me. Everything was provided for in the ideal society: enthusiastic work by the masses, incredible advances in science and technology, the conquest of space, taking man into unknown galaxies, material abundance and rational consumption, linked to radical changes of attitude. Everything, absolutely everything! Except …
I did not think “love” again, I simply had a renewed vision of that young woman amid the great tranquillity of the snows bathed in sunlight. A woman with closed eyes and her face reaching out toward the one she loved.
Forty years later, when military secrets were made public, I learned the name of the submarine that had foundered at sea, carrying with it the man whose beloved ghost I had glimpsed on the face of the young woman seated on the parade grandstand. The events tallied: our encounter in the park had taken place just over a year after that disaster …
Now the story seemed clear, from start to finish. The only mystery that remained was this echo of both grief and serenity reflected in the young woman’s expression. A superstitious fear held me back from putting words to this contradiction, I was afraid lest too much quibbling might destroy the frail beauty of the moment I had experienced as a child on top of the grandstand. With time this puzzlement came to form one of those nebulous memories we avoid clarifying, knowing it is the very haziness of our recollection that makes them dear to us. All I had to do to recall it was to pronounce these words, like a magic spell from my childhood: “She was the very first woman I fell in love with.”
I would have been left with no more than this gentle echo from the past, had I not many years later encountered the same expression of a love, both radiant and tormented, in the eyes of another woman.
A town in the Var in southern France. I am passing through, between two trains, strolling rather at random. A winter’s day, blinding with sunlight and the mistral, it feels as if the force of the blast is going to blow everything away in its shining fury. And everything takes off, the paper tablecloths and napkins on the café terraces, an old gentleman’s hat, which he manages to pin to the ground with the help of his walking stick, plastic bags that become caught on the bare branches of plane trees, shutters that bang, the skirts of passing women’s overcoats, which they thrust down against their buffeted bodies with the gestures of bullfighters … The wind’s eddies of powdered emery hone the sun’s rays, sharpen sounds. Car horns pierce the eardrums, snatches of words slice through the air in little fragments. The town is an old-fashioned photographer’s magnesium flash.
My eyes dazzled, blinking with dust, I take refuge behind a wall and walk, almost groping my way, until I come upon gravestones and crosses. A cemetery, as white as the facades, but behind a row of cypress trees, sheltered from the wind, one can recover one’s wits, breathe, turn one’s back on the sun’s relentless pounding, slow down again …
I am preparing to continue on my way, plunging back into the full force of wind and fire, when suddenly I see a dark smudge, motionless beside a gravestone. The smudge trembles, becomes the figure of a woman, turns, walks along beside the cypress hedge. A young face, eyes iridescent with tears … Drawing level with me, the woman gives me a faint smile and moves away toward the exit. When she is out of sight I go up to the grave she has just left, read the name, do a rapid calculation, alive for eighteen years before the year 2000, plus ten years after it. Twenty-eight. A husband? A fiancé? A brother? Dead the previous year …
In the street the sunlight’s dazzling whiteness reminds me of a brilliant late winter’s day in my native land. An unknown woman seated on that grandstand, profoundly calm, drowsing amid the snows. I have just rediscovered her face in the features of the young woman I passed in the cemetery. Her look of grief and serenity.
I realize this was a very fleeting moment, and yet a vital one in the life of a tortured being. All the pain is still there but love is already breaking free from it and is alive, briefly, in its absolute truth: the world, with its absurdities, its lies, and all its ugliness, no longer comes between the woman and the one she loves.
The world … I remember those steel cages where I flailed about as a child beneath the parade grandstand. And those drab hierarchs saluting the crowd. And the wars and revolutions, and the promises of global freedom and happiness that were proclaimed from the eastern frontier to the western. The thought plunges me into boundless amazement: nothing is left of it all!
At the end of the street I can still make out the young woman in black who has just walked away. An intense feeling of communion. Then her silhouette fades into the impetuous mistral’s blue and gold.