A Woman Loved by Andreï Makine

Author:Andreï Makine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-342-1
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2015-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

The books are arranged in piles along his bed—a slab paved with bindings, reminiscent of a sarcophagus.

He is back in his old room, where he has not lived for several months. He had rented a space with his girlfriend, Tanya. But after the operation she called him. If he wanted to see her again, she said, he would first of all have to “work out his problems.” In plain terms, no more getting on the wrong side of the people who had nearly disemboweled him …

This expression, “work out your problems,” is currently in frequent use; it can cover anything from having to change a lightbulb to a pressing need to liquidate a competitor. Tanya does not want to encounter that hooded gang on her doorstep one day. “You know St. Petersburg holds the record for the number of murders. And by the way, I’ve already changed the lock …”

She is a young, beautiful woman, not prepared to die for the freedom of expression championed by the fly-by-night magazine Oleg works for. And he can understand her.

His return to the communal beehive helps him to take stock of the course Russia has now embarked on. Previously the apartment was lived in by people who were certainly of modest means but who all had a job or a pension. Among them, too, were artists who had come to take Leningrad by storm, divorced people hoping to find something better quite soon. Now social rejects are crowding in, the losers in the sifting out of the strong from the weak, the only way of life now in this new country. Their poverty can be seen from the laundry they hang out to dry, from the meals cooking on the stove.

Year five, following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

To be ranked among the defeated is unpleasant. He, too, has had his good years! Not an airline, but good jobs and therefore good salaries. During the first years of liberalization a simple cigarette salesman in a plywood kiosk became a “businessman” … Oleg has written radio plays, made short films, worked for a theater, even ventured into the field of selling used cars … And on Saturdays he filmed weddings: the emerging middle class needed to immortalize the brilliance of their family celebrations. From this nuptial merry-go-round he has moved on to making commissioned documentaries, tracing the rise of oligarchs. Always the same scenario: impoverished youth under the Soviets, first steps taken into the harsh world of business, the awakening of the entrepreneur of genius, and, at the end, a luxurious gilt-and-marble office, where this self-made man was telling his story … Some of these tycoons would be murdered shortly afterward (“I’m not in this for nothing,” Oleg joked). The times Russia was living through pulsated with a frenzy that was pathological. Fortunes were made in a matter of months and lost in a matter of hours. Seeing a man lying in a pool of blood out in the street was as commonplace an occurrence as stepping over a drunkard asleep on the sidewalk had been in the old days.

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