Decline and fall of a Russian hero
Digby Durrant
A HERO'S DAUGHTER by Andrei Makine Sceptre, £16.99, pp. 163, ISBN 0340751274 It was only by a hoax that Andrel Makine came to be published. He was seen, he says, as 'some funny little Russian who thought he could write in French'. So he took another name, pretended his books were French translations from Russian and received high praise. His fourth novel Le Testament Francais won both the Prix Goncourt and Prix Medicis: A Hero's Daughter is his first.
It is only 163 pages, but this relentless account of the fall of a national hero into disillusionment, squalor and public disgrace is also nothing less than the history of Russia from the German invasion in 1941 to Gorbachev and glasnost as seen through the eyes of Ivan Demidov, a soldier who becomes a Hero of the Soviet Union. He was taken for dead on the battlefield by Tatyana, a medical orderly, but holding a mirror to his mouth she watches as it mists over. He proposes marriage, but when she, too, gets wounded she frees him from his promise saying she has a shell splinter inside her and can't have a child, to say nothing of a scarred breast and missing three fingers. Nevertheless Ivan honours his promise, finds a job driving a lorry and they move to Moscow.
They are as happy as they can hope to be in a country where people are turned away from queues they've stood in for hours to return empty-handed to freezing, barely habitable homes to nibble potato peelings, yet despite all this Ivan continues to worship Stalin, Give communism a chance, he says, soon plenty will abound, screams in the night will cease, people will stop vanishing, and it's only when he's one of those selected to demolish Stalin's statue that the last scale falls from his eyes.
Better times come and also Olya, the daughter her mother never expected and one who will have a glittering future thanks to the education guaranteed by the state to children of a Hero. But Ivan hates Stalin's successors, wasting money putting monkeys into space and holding the Olympic Games in Moscow, allowing the West to swarm in with their bulging wallets and swaggering lack of fear. It's to Olya he turns when the splinter finally pierces Tatyana's heart and she falls dead in a food queue.
Olya is a translator at the Trade Centre and a very chic and desirable one at that, though Ivan naturally doesn't know that she's a KGB agent whose job is to drug the businessmen she sleeps with and slip their documents out to be photographed during the night while they slumber. A drinking companion sick of Ivan's boasting about Olya takes him to the hotel where she works to see for himself. Ivan is finished. Days go by soaking vodka and nights in 'sobering-up centres' until he strays into a jewellery shop reserved for tourists and, when ordered out, goes berserk, breaks the place up and is arrested. Olya's chance of marrying a diplomat vanishes and when she goes to her father's trial he collapses in the box, his dying shout ringing in her ears: 'You have turned my daughter into a prostitute!'
Even in this starkly grim story Makine strains hard to believe that life, however ghastly, brings moments of tranquillity and peace if you look about you closely enough. Even doomed and crazed Ivan only seconds from death is 'astonished to see that the windowsill was gleaming in the sunlight' while Olya just before an abortion becomes absorbed in 'joy and silent wonder' at a cat stretching, arching its back. In Le Testament Francais Makine is the highly romantic Russian boy who drinks in the beauty of the Siberian steppes as he gazes out on them while listening to his French grandmother's stories about the beauty of France and the life there. Still under their spell, Makine sought asylum in France when he was 30 but he knew it was in Russia he learnt to look.
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