FICTION: When snowbound in Siberia, waiting for a train that appears destined never to emerge from the vast white nothingness, the narrator takes refuge in the kind of restless meditation that helps to pass the time. Except, of course, the time has long passed, writes Eileen Battersby.
It is not the present. He is instead remembering back over a period of a quarter of a century to an endless night spent in a half life of watching and dozing. During that vigil of darkness and cold, other intending passengers simply become an inert mass of humanity. As always, Makine creates an atmosphere born of pain and philosophy. His narrator, transported back into the past, now recreates events in a present tense that succeeds in adding an urgency to his memory. Images are both vague and precise. Among the more precise are those concerning the desperate antics
of an industrious and self-sacrificing prostitute as well as, more touchingly, the memory of an old man feeding himself before settling down, with the resignation of an ancient saint, to sleep.
Dominating the scene is the narrator's awareness of the "innate disregard of comfort" and "endurance in the face of the absurd" shared by the waiting crowd. "Six hours' delay. I turn and study the waiting room plunged in darkness. The truth is they could all easily spend several more nights here. They could get used to living here."
Slightly less obvious, at least at first, is the way the narrator keeps referring to music. It seems as if the beautiful, unearthly music is intended as a contrast for the all too earthy scents that surround him. Waking, sleeping, it
is vague as to when one ends and the other begins. But then it starts to make sense. A passageway,
off the waiting room and station restaurant, eventually leads him to a cluttered room.
In it, a man with "great, rough, lumpy knuckles, tanned and wrinkled" sits at a grand piano. "The fingers move about on the keyboard without depressing the keys, pausing, springing to life, accelerating their silent
course . . ." Such is the gentle insistence employed by Makine, in this, his seventh novel, it seems churlish to even consider the chances of finding a grand piano in a railway station in the middle of the Siberian wastes.
Petty practicalities become even more irrelevant once the pianist wakes the narrator – who has fallen asleep after a brief exchange – to inform him: "They've just announced the Moscow train!" Adding: "If it's yours you'd
better hurry. It'll be the storming of the Bastille out there." Still sustaining the present tense, the narrator then describes the effort to board the train. Speaker and mystery pianist prepare themselves for the long journey, the
narrator noting of his new travelling companion ". . . his eyes closed, his fingers interlaced on his chest. Fingers that know how to play silent melodies. Is he thinking of Europe?" Without further ado, Makine shifts to a detached third person voice as the old man's story takes over. It is both an unbelievable and an all-too-familiar wartime account of a young boy's life destroyed when his parents disappear in Stalinist Russia. He, Alexi Berg, an aspiring pianist denied his concert début, begins a flight that includes his assuming of a dead soldier's identity and the loss of his own.
The war sequences are brutal, blunt and vivid – particularly the moment when, in the middle of a skirmish he, now a soldier, sees a piano in a wrecked house, touches it and feels nothing. "In a book, he thought, a man in his situation would have rushed to the piano and played it, forgetting everything, weeping perhaps. He smiled." Strange, dream-like, at times improbable, nevertheless this graceful little elegy of private loss is as beautiful as any Makine has yet written.
The Siberian novelist, who sought asylum in France in 1987 and writes in French, possesses the ease of Chekhov, slight echoes of the great W.G. Sebald and a limpid allure all his own.
His fourth novel, Le Testament Francis (Paris, 1995; London 1997), was the first to be translated and it won the Prix Goncourt and Prix Medicis. After that, it was apparent Makine was a major European writer blessed with a profound grasp of history and its impact on the individual. His previous works were then translated, followed by his subsequent
novels, including, most impressively, Requiem For The East (Paris 2000; London 2001).
As in that novel, the horrors of war and the displacement it causes is the major theme of the new book. And, as is true of his fiction, there is always that awareness of the overwhelming size, the sheer tragic mystery and chaos that is Russia. In many ways a spare, rather oblique tale of shifts, shadows and the half spoken, it defies its compressed novella length. Indeed, the achievement of what is a characteristically exquisite piece is that the
old man's long distant experience is so intensely felt that the reader forgets all about the narrator. Any notions about structure or technical logistics become equally irrelevant.
Here is a haunting performance as assured and self contained as a Chopin nocturne – to be enjoyed and remembered.
- Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
of The Irish Times