The Life of an Unknown Man Read Free Page A

girlfriend, they laugh. The light goes out.
    “That could be Léa with her boyfriend,” thinks Shutov, and, curiously enough, the scene eases the pangs of jealousy in the pit of his stomach. “They’re young. What do you expect…?”
    He moves away from the window, collapses onto the sofa. Yes, his fatal error was to complicate everything. “She was rising with me to glorious heights…” What crap! A man unhappily close to the age of fifty suddenly has the luck to meet a pretty young woman who is no fool. And genuinely fond of him. He ought to take wing with joy, soaring aloft like a paraglider. Sing, bless heaven. And, above all, make the most of it. In the greediest sense of the phrase. Make the most of her clumsy, because genuine, tenderness, of their excursions (“We’re off to Paris,” they would say, traveling down from their patch in Ménilmontant), of the whispering of the rain on the roof at night. Of all those clichés of a love affair in Paris (oh, that singing of the rain!), intolerable in a book but so sweet in real life. Of this remake of a sixties romantic comedy…
    For their love did last two and a half years, after all. Which is a good deal longer than an affair in one of today’s novels. He could very well have lived out one of those little stories that crowd the bookstore shelves: two characters meet, fall in love, laugh, weep, part, are reunited, and then she leaves or kills herself (according to taste) while he, with a tormented but handsome face, drives away into the night along an autoroute, heading for Paris, for oblivion. They were both of them in good health, as it happened, and with no suicidal tendencies. And, as for autoroutes, Shutov avoided them, not being a very confident driver. Yes, he could quite simply have been happy.
    To achieve this, he should have risked being clear from the start: a young woman from the provinces leaves her parents, or rather her single-parent family, living in a region with a stricken economy to the north of the Ardennes, arrives in Paris where she runs into an “unusual” man who can give her a roof over her head. The young woman dreams of writing (“like all the French,” thinks Shutov) and although he is a writer with a limited readership, he will give her advice, possibly even help her to get published.
    That, objectively, was their situation. All Shutov had to do was to accept it… But, like so many Russians, he believed that a happiness derived from petty practical arrangements was unworthy of people in love. At the age of fourteen he had read a story by Chekhov in which a couple’s material well-being counted for nothing beside the heady thrill of a moment on a snow-covered hill, on a toboggan run. At the age of eighteen, he had spent weeks strolling up and down in Leningrad’s parks beneath a golden canopy of foliage in the company of a girl: more than a quarter of a century later he would remember this as a vitally important time in his life. At twenty-two, as a young soldier sent to Afghanistan, he had seen an old woman lying dead in the courtyard of a house, clutching her dog in her arms, both of them killed by an exploding shell. Noticing his tears, his regimental comrades had called him a wimp (several years later this choking back of a sob would lead him on to political dissidence…). From his university studies he would retain the memory of a Latin text, words that had inspired Dante: “Amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.” He meditated long on a woman “loved as none will ever be loved.” Such a love called for a sacred language. Not necessarily Latin, but one that would elevate the beloved above the mundane. Amata nobis… I love you, Nadenka…
    Shutov stirs, woken by a dull cry escaping from his own throat, which was pressed against a cushion on the sofa. The drink tastes like a dentist’s local anesthetic. A useless swig, it would take three or four like that for him to reach a level of drunkenness that would turn Léa’s