For several miles the splendor surrounding us has not varied. Foaming blossom along the boughs, the whipped cream of petals, a white wave spilling the length of an avenue of apple trees where we walk, intoxicated by their scent, which has gradually replaced the air. As if, finding ourselves on an unknown planet, we had grown used to breathing an atmosphere made up of supernatural perfumes instead of the customary combination of terrestrial gases.
After a while our heads begin to spin, it feels as if we are slowly floating along this aromatic corridor that stretches out before us to infinity.
I have never in my life seen such an immense orchard, “ten miles by fourteen,” the young woman I am escorting has informed me. It is already an hour and a half since we entered this realm of blossom so that, if we keep straight on along the central avenue, it will take us another two or three hours to walk the length of this gigantic apple orchard. But, more than its extravagant dimensions, what dazzles me is its beauty. Under a powerful sun, this frothy tide washes over us, dazes us with its fragrances, sets us reeling in the dream every man cherishes, that of finding himself walking upon the clouds’ curvaceous vapors …
There is perfect silence: not one insect, no birds, an unchanging light, the sky deep blue, the immaculate purity of the flower heads, a sweetness hangs in the air. It is paradise!
And yet we are here to demonstrate that all this is a hell. Such is the task undertaken by my friend, a journalist and a passionate dissident, determined to denounce this “model orchard” in a samizdat article as one of the absurd creations of Soviet socialism in decline.
“Look, the whole madness of the communist system is concentrated here. A monstrous orchard with a purely ideological purpose: to create the biggest plantation in the world. A triumph of collectivist agriculture! And that’s not all. Whenever the old crocodiles in the Kremlin drive past from Moscow to Kiev, what they see from their limousines is a continuous spread of white. Because the trees, as you can observe, are planted close together …”
“It’s very pretty …”
“Pretty! Grow up, for goodness sake! You’ve got a mental age of ten: and you’ve had it ever since we were at the orphanage … ‘Pretty’! What you need to know, my poor friend, is that this orchard is completely unproductive. No bee wants to bust its guts flying five miles to reach the center of this crazy plantation. As a result, the flowers are not pollinated and the trees don’t bear fruit. No apples will ever grow in this ideal apple orchard. It’s sterile! Just like the regime we have the misfortune to live under. Now do you get it?”
I have concurred, with my head hunched between my shoulders, like a slightly stupid but eager and willing pupil. My friend has now concluded her exposition.
“Well, it may be pretty. But it’s a beauty that’s perfectly useless.”
I felt tempted to speak up for the wonderful uselessness of beauty, but this argument suddenly seemed devoid of interest. The white ocean we were slowly immersing ourselves in made all critical judgments increasingly beside the point. Of course one could mock the Soviet obsession with size, the will to transform every detail of reality into a propaganda message. And this inevitable slide into absurdity, a tendency typical of totalitarian regimes in the throes of senility. I could hardly fail to agree with my friend’s caustic comments. But the mind was quickly exhausted, as the white tide turned into an intoxication, one’s gaze dilated and offered quite a different way of seeing, of understanding, of situating oneself in relation to the world.
At first my friend had wanted to photograph this example of a “Potemkin village, Soviet style,” as she called it. She took several shots, realized she was defeated.
“You’d have to go to the moon to get the perspective needed for megalomania on this scale!”
She put away her camera and we began walking again, no longer venturing any commentary on the floral torrent as it swept us along in its glorious madness.
Little by little we have lost all track of time and space.
And yet the moment in history when our walk took place, back in the mid-eighties, was particularly significant. The old crocodiles in the Kremlin my friend had referred to were dying one after the other. A young leader, whose name was hardly known as yet, was giving rise to confused hopes. Our disillusioned compatriots had little faith in this. The existing regime seemed to be destined for a pathetic, protracted old age, encroaching on our thirst for freedom, deluging us with lies, provoking ridicule with creations as monstrous as they were absurd. Yes, this apple orchard among them.
The little breeze of change that arose that spring produced an unexpected reaction on the part of intellectuals hostile to the regime: instead of rejoicing at these first signs of the thaw, the dissidents attacked the decrepit regime more virulently than ever and, with redoubled intransigence, demanded immediate and radical liberalization. And it was notable that now everyone declared himself to be a dissident. They were not so common in the years when Shalamov was in the Kolyma gulag …
I did not dare mention the paradox of this tardy militancy to my companion. I was too keen for us to remain friends. First of all, because I had known her since she was a child and was aware that, already in her teens, she was fiercely rebellious, hence her nickname at the orphanage, “Red Riding Hood”: she had moved heaven and earth to get herself a scarlet knitted hat, to thumb her nose at our regulation gray headgear … She had also come to see me a month earlier at the military hospital where I was receiving treatment for burns sustained in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. I was touched by her visit, being already aware that in this life ties of affection can easily be broken, particularly when one goes off to a war everybody thinks is pointless. In reality, she had not come because she carried a torch for me, nor to indulge in nostalgia for our childhood. Her aim was to publish what I had to say in her samizdat newspaper … But I was a poor storyteller, capable only of echoing her own views: yes, a dirty war, a moribund ideology trying to export itself and sacrificing thousands of young lives in the process … My friend was hoping I would talk to her about the opposition, which, according to her, must necessarily be making itself felt in the regiments. I had disappointed her there too: a soldier becomes a fairly basic creature who simply wants to survive, and for this he finds it convenient not to think too much. “So, no way of resisting?” “Yes, there is. Drink. And drugs …”
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 …
The memory of our childhood returns, the more than sibling solidarity that bonded us together, a redirection onto our schoolfellows of our longing for a close relative to love. The search indeed for an absent mother in the features of a female teacher, a fellow pupil … As a child, I must have stared at Kira’s face in that way.
I should like to reassure the little girl whose presence I sense deep inside this beautiful, self-confident young woman, in reality so defenseless.
“You’re right, Kira. Absolutely right. This society can’t last much longer. And your artist friends, I can understand them: censorship, the impossibility of traveling, empty shops. Except that … Look at the two of us, for instance. We were brought up in an orphanage, right? Did you ever go without food? No. The same for clothes. It was very simple, but we didn’t walk around in rags. And later on you and I were both able to go to college without rich parents paying for private tutors and lodging for us. But above all …”
I am interrupted by a mighty shout of laughter. Kira stands up in the pool and hurls great spurts of water at me, with both hands.
“You’re a hopeless Leninist! Yes, I remember now. You were the one who dragged us off, me and some other girls, trying to find an old madwoman who’d met Lenin, or so she said! Look, by the age of twelve you were already completely brainwashed … It’s unbelievable how people still hang on to that rotten concept of communism! You’d be a first-rate propagandist for the Soviet paradise. Free education, free health care. What are you going to give us next? Free rail travel to the gulag, I suppose?”
She weeps tears of laughter and for a short while I begin to have doubts about that vulnerability covered up by her self-assurance. She seems like a young woman completely comfortable in the life she has chosen.
“Go on. Take off your shirt and pants! Do a bit of sunbathing; it’ll drive away your gloom. If you haven’t got trunks it doesn’t matter. We all know Soviet industry only produces a single type of underpants, big enough to fit three fellows like you at once …”
Embarrassed and reverting to being a schoolboy confronted by a mocking girl, I take off my shirt, murmuring, “Actually the doctor told me to be careful of the sun. On account of my burns …”
My back, in particular, is still marked with red patches where the new skin is delicate and sensitive. Kira abandons her jeering manner.
“Go into the shade. But, you know, those wounds will form scar tissue better out in the air …”
Our generation has retained this pious respect for wounded soldiers. Very soon, however, my friend remembers she is dealing with a special kind of soldier, one of those who took part in a war waged by an abominable regime. So this is an army man not entitled to the customary consideration.
“And you still dare to find excuses for those geriatrics in the Kremlin who’ve turned you into a leopard! Have you seen your back in a mirror? It looks like squashed tomatoes. I hope they gave you a medal for your bravery!”
I hesitate for a moment, then tell myself that, in her eyes, I have nothing left to lose.
“It was even more stupid than you might think. Our helicopter crashed just before landing. When we jumped clear the chopper was already on fire. I was lucky enough to land on something like a mattress—a very big guy. I don’t know how many of his ribs I cracked. And this saved me from breaking anything myself. And thanks to me, he escaped burns on his face. In point of fact I took all the heat on my back. We used to tease one another at the hospital. He’d say, ‘You smashed my ribs, you bastard!’ and I’d say, ‘Feast your eyes on this, you swine. This is how your face would look if I hadn’t protected you!’ And I’d turn and show him my back. Yes, squashed tomatoes, as you say … So, you see there was no reason to stick a medal on me …”
Kira laughs again, this time with a hint of contempt. And I regret having told her about my regimental comrade. He and I, she thinks, belong in the same category: we are stupid enough not to have totally rejected the world we were born into and grew up in, which is now dying of a pitiful and often ridiculous old age. I ought to spit out this past, deride the people who had the misfortune to live through it, that way I could satisfy Kira and her friends. How can I explain to her that the past of this country, which is on the brink of disappearing forever, also contains our childhood? And this brief fragment of memory, too: high up on a grandstand, in the middle of a huge park covered in snow, I see the pupils from our class, far away, heading toward the orphanage after clearing the pathways, and there, apart from the others, already bridling at discipline, walks a little girl, whom I can recognize by her red hat … Must that memory also be rejected? And this apple orchard, too? And its intoxicating beauty? Must it be derided, seen as a failure on the part of a society that promised a dreamlike future and has lamentably run aground? But derided in the name of what other future?
Kira’s laughter calms down, she gives a pitying sigh.
“Your problem is that you can’t free yourself mentally. You can’t even imagine how people could live and think differently. How life could be radically different!”
“Wait, this radically different life interests me. So tomorrow communism’s rotten shanty will be razed to the ground. That’s clear. But what, in fact, do you and your friends propose to replace it? What kind of society? What way of life?”
“We propose freedom! And a civilized society, do you understand? A way of life where you don’t have to stand in line for three hours to get hold of a pair of boots. Where you can travel without a visa. Where you can publish your manuscripts freely. Yes, a material and social life to a modern standard. And where you can happily …”
“Drive your convertible along Sunset Boulevard …”
“You satirize everything. That’s another habit of the good little Soviet citizen you’ve never stopped being … Well, why not a convertible? Why despise people who like to own nice things and enjoy life to the full? After all, God created men the way they are …”
“Well, I think it was more a case of men creating that kind of god. But let it pass … OK, no more satire, I promise. So tomorrow, thanks to your friends, we’ll have freedom. Shoes bought without having to stand in line. Thirty television channels. In a word, a multiparty system plus material comfort for everyone, or almost everyone … And then what?”
“How do you mean: then what? Well, that’s how it’ll go on being.”
“And that’s all? Don’t you find the prospect a bit dispiriting?”
The thought that the society her friends long for might become a matter of routine, might lose its dazzle as a future dream, is an idea that puzzles Kira. I suspect she has never foreseen a sequel to the paradise of freedom and abundance that inspires her dissident activity. She stretches out on the sand again, somewhat sulkily, like a child not wanting to admit reality, and grumbles with a sigh, “OK, if you prefer to remain stuck in the communist lunatic asylum, stay right here in this orchard. You couldn’t have chosen a place more suited to your tastes. Only, as I warned you, these apple trees are barren. You’ll never get a bite to eat here. It’s just like the empty stores in this country …”
The voice she says it in allows a weary indifference to be heard, a refusal to argue. With a yawn she turns away, stretches out her hand, scoops up a little water, pats her forehead and her neck, then lies still.
I do not reply. I have a dawning perception it is not easy to put into words. I simply sense that in this pointless debate, something essential has eluded us. And this essential point is the red hat belonging to the little girl who wanted to be different at all costs. Her revolt arose out of a violent longing for identity in a world that did all it could to impose a collective, leveled-out life and what it called “social equality.” In adolescence she became aware that this equality meant mind-numbing work for starvation wages and cramming several families into one communal apartment. As a young woman, when she wanted to reach for the stratosphere on high heels and bombard the crowd with the staccato of her inimitable footsteps, what she found was dreary queues waiting at counters where cantankerous saleswomen offered ankle boots reminiscent of medieval instruments of torture. She came to loathe this regime, considering that it prohibited her from being unique. All the rest came later: dissidence, drink-fueled secret meetings in kitchens blue with tobacco smoke where, for whole nights at a time, banned artists would read aloud from their unfinished novels, excoriate the Soviet hell, and extol the paradise of the West. There she felt happy, finding in this agitation the opportunity for an incomparable way forward such as she had always dreamed of, yes, the chance to put on her red hat …
And then time had gone by and on the threshold of being thirty, a formidable milestone for any young woman, she had come across a former fellow pupil from the orphanage, a bit of an oaf, who could not understand how wonderfully exciting her life was and how mind-blowing the project was that she and her friends were developing for their sorry country. And now, to cap it all, this backward-looking comrade has been stupid enough to ask her a ridiculous question that has nevertheless made her thoughtful. “Imagine your dream has come true,” he has said. “The queues disappear, people live in material comfort and travel all over the world the way retired people in rich countries do. But would this collection of benefits totally change the course of your life, give you a happiness unlike any other, the Red Riding Hood hat you used to sport at the orphanage?”
I know what I should say to Kira is just this: “The unique existence you’ve always been looking for is right here. In this dreamlike apple orchard, like nowhere else on earth. In this fine day poised between spring and summer. In this moment so singular it’s not even a part of your life. It’s a blip in time, a meeting, a fruitless one for you, with a man you’ll never love, me, and the specter of a man you do love. This will never happen again in your life. It’s here, your destiny and yours alone. If I were you I’d utter a long shout of joy in salute to the incredible madness of the regime you hate. For it’s given you this breathtaking flight through the beauty of this mass of white trees, trees, as if laden with snow, just as they were at that moment when I saw you in childhood, walking apart from the others, with your red hat on your head …”
I wake up, realizing I have dreamed those words, utterly true and equally impossible to share with her. Lying beside the water, her head resting on one arm, Kira is drowsing, too, and the expression on her face betrays a childish disarray. In a murmur I now address this sleeping beauty, this little girl of long ago, who shows through as she sleeps. “You’re right, Kira, these apple trees will never bear fruit. It’s a failed project, like my hope for an ideal city lived in by fraternal men, cured of hatred and greed … But just wait and see. Here, in the realm of this barren apple orchard, beside this half-finished fountain, a single apple is going to ripen, just one, an exception to nature’s logic, a fruit that’ll be here for us, with a flavor no one on earth has ever tasted. We’ll have to return in September …”
Kira stirs, opens her eyes, shakes her head, gives me a rather defiant look.
A droning noise fills the air, I recognize a helicopter flying low. It was doubtless this thundering clatter, a sound imprinted in every cell of my scalded body, that woke me just now. A little veil of clouds dulls the sun. A swift breeze passes through the tops of the apple trees, causes some petals to flutter down. Kira shivers, I see the reflection of her face shimmering in the mirror of the water, a strangely wan image, that of a bitter woman, weary of believing and being mistaken … She dresses and we leave.
At the moment when the central circle is about to be lost to view behind the avenue’s massed branches, I turn: a ray of sunlight picks out the imprint of our bodies on the sand.
A few years after our expedition to the model apple orchard, the project cherished by Kira’s friends came to fruition. Communism collapsed in a great tragicomic hurly-burly of palace revolutions, liberal promises, putsches, appalling economic pillage, edifying credos, and contempt for the old and weak.
In fact, History overtook this tardy generation of rebels, and the most exalted of their dreams soon appeared timid beside the savage violence with which Russia was reformed. The nice, cozy bourgeois society whose advent they hoped for found itself submerged under the muddy torrent of a capitalism of predators and mafiosi. By then most of the dissidents had already emigrated to America, where they could meditate on the unpredictable character of their country, quoting this old adage: “Russians never achieve their goals, because they always overshoot.”
Kira never knew that cataclysmic time. She died in the winter of the year following our brief encounter. As a rebellious militant, she would doubtless have preferred to perish in a camp or on the scaffold. But it was an ill-tended pneumonia. I would learn, much later, that she had contracted it when she went to visit her companion in his exile thirty miles from Moscow. This version, which I have always tried to believe in, had the advantage of allowing my childhood friend a heroic life, sacrificed on the altar of a great cause.
The man Kira was so in love with has been living in Berlin for several years now. I find his surname, Svistunov (“whistler”), with its comic hint of frivolity, hard to forget, an uncommon name. His profession, on the other hand, is not at all rare among the dissident intellectuals of his generation: he is a journalist, or more precisely a reporter who runs, as it were, an import-export business in ideas. Sometimes in Moscow, sometimes in Europe, he feeds the Western press with terrifying stories about the rebirth of dictatorship in Russia and the Russian press with reports on the perfidious designs of the Europeans and Americans …
We met recently and he was the one who told me, amid laughter, about this double game. He struck me as a lighthearted, jovial man, barely affected by his former exile. After Kira’s account I had pictured a pale martyr with a feverish look, his lips on fire with the truth. As I stared at him I was trying to work out the incredible physical resemblance he had to someone I was familiar with. Suddenly it came to me: Svistunov’s smooth, pink visage was not very different from the baby face of “the man who had known Lenin.” Yes, that sprightly and youthful apparatchik whose story we had listened to. Only a woman’s blind love could have endowed Svistunov’s humdrum face with an insurgent’s tragic nobility.
I talked to him about Kira. With an emotion that took me by surprise—I had not expected that day spent in the apple orchard to remain such a vivid memory.
“Kira … who? Wait, was she a blonde or a brunette? More auburn haired? … No. I’m sorry. I don’t remember her. Are you sure she was one of my … admirers? No. Not even the KGB will make me confess to it, ha, ha, ha!”
He seemed perfectly sincere and it was the one moment when his face took on an air of frankness, being otherwise overlaid with expressions that were always somewhat elusive and ambiguous, as required by his professional duplicity. No, he was not lying; he really did not remember the young woman who had idolized him.
“And your novel, that book you were writing in exile, Captives in Absurdia, was it?”
“Oh, that. That was just juvenile rubbish. Besides, after Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, what is there to tell? They’ve said it all … And, as for girls, well, I was a superstud at the time. And another thing, you know what women are like. They take a great fancy to outlaws, persecuted people, exiles … So many came to see me, hordes of them, in that dump in the sticks where they made me live …”
He began to tell me about his extremely active and dissolute love life, in total contradiction to the grim picture his generation used to paint of the country crushed beneath the ideology’s puritanism. His voice shook with positively nostalgic vibrato. Yes, he missed that youth made up of clandestine meetings, dissident daydreams, and fleeting multiple love affairs, spiced with danger. I saw his eyes cloud over … Quickly he pulled himself together.
“So, shall we do it, our little interview? I should tell you straight away, this is for a Russian paper, so …”
The fact that Kira was totally forgotten by him upset me at first, as if this ideas merchant’s boorishness were directed at me personally. Then I discovered a silver lining in it: for that stroll we took long ago in the middle of the apple orchard’s silent paradise had thus remained permanently apart from the lives of other people. My only fear now was of learning that a new freeway had drawn a line forever through that useless orchard’s beautiful madness. A motorway, a Coca-Cola bottling plant, or some kind of sports center with swimming pools and casinos, celebratory symbols of the recent upheavals.
One day in a plane flying from Paris to Japan I passed over the region of that giant plantation from the Soviet era. The spring sky was exceptionally clear and on the ground one could see the tiniest dots of houses, the tracery of rivers, the mirrors of lakes. And the line of a road, probably the one linking Moscow and Kiev, which in the old days ran beside innumerable apple trees. At one moment I thought I could see them: a sea of snow-white foam, the vast size of which was surprising, even observed from that altitude. Or was it a long drift of clouds lit up by the sunset?
My fears of seeing that white dream replaced by a superstore were dispelled then. For now I knew that very distant day when I wandered in Kira’s company was no longer of this world and therefore ran no risk of being destroyed.
“That apple orchard is still in flower,” I told myself. “Time has passed it by, leaving it behind in a moment that does not pass. An idea that seems as insane as the beauty of those flowering trees that will never bear fruit. But to believe in it gives a supreme meaning to our lives, our encounters, our loves.”
Then I caught myself mentally addressing Kira, as on so many occasions during these last twenty years.
The truth is, I have never stopped walking beside her along an endless avenue lined with snow-clad boughs.