I began to slap myself, at first holding back the blows, then without pity. I struck myself until my swollen face, wet with tears, disgusted me with its sticky surface. Until that other one, which lurked within me, fell totally silent. Then, stumbling over the pillow I had knocked down in my agitation, I approached the window. The cold air calmed my puffed-up face.
"I am Russian," I said softly, all of a sudden.
12
It was thanks to that body, young and with a still innocent sensuality, that I was cured. Yes, one day in April I felt I was finally liberated from the most painful winter of my youth, from its sorrows, from the deaths, and from the burden of the revelations it had brought.
But the most important thing was that my French implant no longer seemed to exist. As if I had succeeded in stifling that second heart within my breast. The last day of its death throes coincided with the April afternoon that for me was to mark the start of a life without specters…
I saw her from behind, standing under the trees at a table made of thick, unplaned pine planks. An instructor was watching her movements and from time to time threw a glance at the stopwatch he was clutching in his palm.
She must have been the same age as me, fifteen, this young girl, whose body, impregnated with sun, had dazzled me. She was busy dismantling an automatic rifle and then reassembling it as quickly as possible. These were the paramilitary competitions that several of the city schools took part in. We stepped up to the table in turn, awaited the signal from the instructor, and hurled ourselves at the Kalash-nikov, stripping its weighty bulk. The dismantled pieces were spread out on the planks and a moment later, in a droll reverse sequence of movements, reassembled. Some of us dropped the black spring on the ground, others confused the order of assembly… As for her, I thought at first that she was dancing up and down in front of the table. Wearing a tunic and a khaki skirt, a forage cap perched on her russet curls, she made her body undulate in time with her drill. She must have practiced a great deal to be able to handle the slippery bulk of the gun with such dexterity.
I gazed at her, dumbfounded. Everything in her was so simple and so alive. Her hips, responding to the actions of her arms, swayed gently. Her full golden legs quivered. She took pleasure in her own agility, which even allowed her superfluous movements – like the rhythmic arching of her pretty, muscular buttocks. Yes, she was dancing. And even without seeing her face, I guessed she was smiling.
I fell in love with this young russet-haired stranger. It was of course a very physical desire, a carnal wonderment at the contrast between her still childishly fragile waist and her already womanly torso… I performed my own dismantling-assembly routine with all my limbs in a state of numbness. I took more than three minutes, and thus ended up near the bottom of the class… But beyond the desire to embrace this body, to feel its smooth, bronzed surface beneath my fingers, I experienced a new and nameless happiness.
There was this table with thick planks placed at the edge of a wood. The sun and the smell of the last of the snow taking refuge in the shadows of the thickets. Everything was blessedly simple. And luminous. Like this body, with its still insouciant femininity. Like my desire. Like the commands of the instructor. No shadow of the past troubled the clarity of this moment. I breathed, felt desire, carried out orders mechanically. And with unspeakable joy I felt the clot of my painful and confused winter reflections dissolving in my mind… The young russet-haired girl swayed her hips gently before the automatic rifle. The sun lit up the contours of her body through the fine fabric of her tunic. Her fiery locks curled up over the cap. And it was as if from the depths of a well, in a dull and melancholy echo, those grotesque names rang out: Marguerite Steinheil, Isabeau de Bavière… I found it hard to believe that my life had once been made up of these dusty relics. I had lived without sunlight, without desire – in the twilight of books. In search of a phantom country, a mirage of a France of yesteryear, peopled with ghosts…
The instructor uttered a cry of delight and showed his stopwatch to everybody: "One minute fifteen seconds!" It was the best time. The redhead turned round, radiant. She took off her cap and shook her head. Her hair caught fire in the sunlight, her freckles flashed like sparks. I closed my eyes.
And the next day, for the first time in my life, I was discovering the very singular sensual pleasure of squeezing a firearm, a Kalashnikov, and feeling its nervous shuddering against my shoulder. And seeing in the distance a plywood figure target riddled with holes. Yes, its insistent quivering and its male power were for me of a profoundly sensual nature.
Furthermore, from the first burst of fire my head was filled with a buzzing silence. The person on my left had fired first, deafening me. The incessant clatter in my ears, the iridescent flurries of sunlight in my eyelashes, the wild smell of the earth beneath my body – I was at the peak of happiness.
For at last I was coming back to life. Living in the happy simplicity of orderly actions: shooting, marching in file, eating millet kasha from aluminum mess tins. Letting oneself be carried along in a collective movement directed by others, by those who knew the supreme objective, who generously relieved us of all the burden of responsibility, making us light, transparent, clear. The objective was simple and unequivocal too: to defend the fatherland. I could not wait to lose myself in this monumental goal, to dissolve into the marvelously irresponsible mass of my comrades. I hurled practice grenades; I shot; I pitched a tent. Happy. Blissful. Healthy. And that adolescent in an old house at the edge of the steppe, who had spent entire days meditating on the life and death of three women seen in a pile of old newspapers, seemed increasingly unreal. If I had been introduced to this dreamer I would doubtless not have recognized him. I would not have recognized myself…
The next day the instructor took us to watch the arrival of a column of tanks. What we made out first was a gray cloud growing larger on the horizon. Then a mighty vibration spread through the soles of our shoes. The earth shook. And the cloud, turning yellow, rose as high as the sun and eclipsed it. All sounds disappeared, shrouded by the metallic din of the caterpillar tracks. The first gun thrust through the wall of dust, the commander's tank loomed, then the second, the third… And, before stopping, the tanks described a tight arc, so as to line up side by side. Then their tracks clattered even more furiously, tearing up the grass in long slices.
Hypnotized by the power of the empire, I had a sudden vision of the terrestrial globe and how these tanks – our tanks! – could strip it entirely bare. A brief command would have sufficed. I took a pride in this, such as I had never felt before…
And the soldiers who emerged from the turrets fascinated me with their serene virility. They were all alike, carved from the same firm and healthy material. I guessed that they would have been invulnerable to the morbid thoughts that had tortured me during the winter. No, all that mental sludge would not have remained for a single second in the clear stream of their thinking, simple and direct, like the orders they executed. I was terribly jealous of their life. It was exposed there, under the sun, without a spot of shadow. Their strength, the male smell of their bodies, their tunics covered in dust. And the presence, somewhere, of the young russet-haired girl, of that adolescent-woman, of that amorous promise. I had only one wish now: to be able one day to emerge from the narrow turret of a tank, leap down onto its tracks, then onto the soft earth, and to walk with pleasantly weary steps toward the promise of a woman.
This life, actually a very Soviet life on whose margins I had always lived, now exalted me. To blend into its easygoing and collec-tivist routine suddenly seemed to me like a brilliant solution. To live the life of everybody else! To drive a tank; then, when demobilized, to pour molten steel amid the machines in a great factory beside the Volga; to go to the stadium every Saturday to watch a football match. But above all to know that this succession of days, tranquil and predictable, was crowned by a grand messianic project – the communism that, one day, would make us all perpetually happy, clear as crystal in our thoughts, strictly equal…