A few minutes later the fire was burning and Pashka, his legs bare and his body covered only by the long pullover I had lent him while his clothes dried, was prancing about on a plank licked by flames. With his red, skinned fingers he was kneading a lump of clay that he wrapped round the fish before putting it into the embers.… Around us was the white desert of the Volga in winter; the willows with fine, trembling branches, which formed transparent thickets all along the bank; and buried under the snow, this boat, half disintegrated, whose timber fed our barbaric wood fire. The dancing of the flames seemed to make the twilight denser, the fleeting sensation of well-being more striking.
Why did I tell him the story on that day rather than any other?
There was no doubt a reason for it, something in our conversation that suggested the subject to me.… It was a summary, and indeed a very brief one, of a poem by Hugo that Charlotte had narrated to me long ago, the title of which I could not even recall.… Somewhere near the smashed barricades, soldiers were shooting insurgents in the heart of that rebellious Paris, where the paving stones had the extraordinary capacity to rear up suddenly as ramparts. A routine execution, brutal, pitiless. The men stood with their backs to the wall, stared for a moment at the barrels of the rifles aimed at their chests, then raised their eyes toward the lightly racing clouds. And they fell. Their comrades took their places facing the soldiers.… Among these condemned men there was a kind of young Gavroche, whose age should have inspired clemency. Alas, no! The officer ordered him to take his place in the fatal waiting line; the child had the same right to die as the adults. “We’re going to shoot you as well!” snarled this executioner-in-chief. But a moment before going to the wall the child ran up to the officer and begged him, “Will you allow me to take this watch to my mother? She lives just round the corner from here by the fountain. I will come back, I swear it!” This childish trick touched even the hardened hearts of the soldiery. They guffawed; it seemed really too naive a ruse. The officer, roaring with laughter, declared, “Away with you, run. Make yourself scarce, little good-for-nothing.” And they went on laughing as they loaded their rifles. Suddenly their voices were silenced. The child reappeared and, putting himself against the wall beside the adults, called out, “Here I am!”
Throughout my story Pashka hardly seemed to be paying attention. He remained motionless, leaning toward the fire. His face was hidden beneath the turned-down brim of his big fur shapka. But when I reached the final scene — the child returns, his face pale and serious, and stands stock-still in front of the soldiers — yes, when I had spoken his final words, “Here I am!” Pashka shuddered and stood up.… And something incredible happened. He stepped over the side of the boat and began walking barefoot in the snow. I heard a kind of stifled groaning that was rapidly dispersed over the white plain by the damp wind.
He took several steps, then stopped, sunk up to his knees in a snowdrift. Dumbfounded, I remained for a moment without moving, watching from the boat this great fellow clad in a stretched pullover that billowed in the wind like a short woolen dress. The earflaps on his shapka swayed slowly in the cold breeze. His bare legs thrust into the snow fascinated me. No longer understanding anything, I jumped over the side and went up to him. Hearing the crunch of my footsteps, he turned swiftly. His face was contorted in an unhappy grimace. An unaccustomed moisture in his eyes mirrored the flames of our wood fire. He hurried to wipe away these reflections with his sleeve. “Ugh, this smoke!” he complained, blinking his eyelids, and without looking at me, he went back to the boat.
It was there, thrusting his frozen feet toward the embers, that he asked me with an angry insistence, “And after that? They shot him, that fellow, is that right?”
Caught on the hop and finding no enlightenment on this point in my memory, I stammered hesitantly, “Er ? I don’t know exactly.…”
“What d’you mean, you don’t know? But you told me the whole story!”
“No, but you see, in the poem …”
“I don’t give a shit about the poem! In real life did they kill him or not?”
He stared at me over the flame with a slightly mad glint in his eyes. His voice came over as both rough and imploring. I sighed, as if to beg Hugo’s pardon, and with a firm and clear tone I declared, “No, they didn’t shoot him. There was an old sergeant there who was reminded of his own son back at his village. And he shouted, ‘Whoever touches the boy will have to answer to me!’ And the officer had to let him go.…”
Pashka lowered his face and began to extract the fish molded in the clay, poking the embers with a branch. In silence we broke off the crust of baked earth, which came away with the scales, and we ate the tender and burning flesh, sprinkling it with coarse salt.
Nor did we speak as we returned to the city at nightfall. I was still under the spell of the magic that had been wrought, the miracle that had demonstrated to me the overwhelming power of poetry. I sensed that it was not even a question of verbal artifice, nor of a skillful arrangement of words. No! For Hugo’s had first been reshaped in Charlotte’s retelling long ago and again in the course of my own summary. So, doubly betrayed.… And yet the echo of this story, so simple in fact, recounted thousands of kilometers away from the place of its genesis, had succeeded in drawing tears from a young barbarian and driving him naked into the snow. I was secretly proud of having caused a tiny spark to shine from the radiance emitted by Charlotte’s native land.
And then, that evening I grasped that it was not anecdotes that I must seek out in my reading. Nor words prettily arranged on a page. It was something much more profound and at the same time much more spontaneous: a deep harmony within the visible world, which, once revealed by the poet, became immortal. Without knowing what name to give it, from now on that is what I pursued from one book to the next. Later I was to learn its name: style. And I could never accept the empty exercises of word jugglers under this name. For in my mind’s eye, I would see Pashka’s blue legs, thrust into a snowdrift on the banks of the Volga, and the reflections of the flames in his moist eyes.… Yes, he was more moved by the fate of the young rebel than by his own narrow escape from drowning an hour before!
Leaving me at a crossroads in the suburb where he lived, Pashka gave me my share of the fish: several long carapaces of clay. Then in a gruff tone, avoiding my eyes, he asked, “And that poem about the men they shot, where’s it to be found?”
“I’ll bring it to you at school tomorrow. I must have got it copied out at home.…”
I said it just like that, finding it hard to contain my joy. It was the happiest day of my youth.
10
THE TRUTH IS, Charlotte has nothing more to teach me.”
The morning I arrived in Saranza this disconcerting thought crossed my mind. I jumped down from the carriage at the little station. I was the only one getting off there. At the other end of the platform I saw my grandmother. She caught sight of me, gave a slight wave of her hand, and came to meet me. It was at that moment, walking toward her, that I had this insight: she had nothing new to teach me about France; she had told me everything, and thanks to my reading, I had accumulated a knowledge possibly vaster than her own… . As I kissed her, I felt ashamed of this thought, which had caught me unawares. I saw in it a kind of involuntary betrayal.
In fact I had for months been experiencing a strange torment: that of having learned too much… . I was like a thrifty man who hopes to see his amassed savings quickly bring him a wholly different way of life, open up prodigious new horizons, and change his vision of things — right up to his way of walking, of breathing, of speaking to women. The savings continue to accumulate, but the dramatic change is slow in coming.
So it was with the sum of my French knowledge. Not that I would have wanted to derive any profit from it. The interest that my comrade the dunce showed in my s tories amply fulfilled me. I was hoping rather for a mysterious click, like that of the spring in a music box: the grinding sound that announces the start of the minuet to be
danced by the little figures on the platform. I longed for this medley of dates, names, events, and characters to recast itself into the stuffof a hitherto unseen life, to crystallize into a fundamentally new world. I wanted the France that was grafted onto my heart, that had been studied, explored, and learned, to turn me into a new being.
But the only change at the start of this summer was the absence of my sister, who had gone to continue her studies in Moscow. I was afraid to admit to myself that her departure might make our evening gatherings on the balcony impossible.
The first evening, as if to confirm my fears, I began to question my grandmother about the France of her youth. She replied willingly, believing my curiosity to be sincere. As she spoke, Charlotte continued to darn the lace collar of a blouse. She handled the needle with that touch of artistic elegance one always sees in a woman who is working and at the same time engaged in conversation with a guest she believes to be interested in what she has to say.
Leaning on the handrail of the little balcony, I listened to her. My routine questions drew forth scenes from the past that I had contemplated hundreds of times in my childhood, familiar images, known characters: the dog barber on the quay by the Seine; the imperial procession passing along the Champs Elysées; la belle Otéro; the president enfolding his mistress in a fatal embrace… . I realized at the time that when Charlotte had repeated all these stories to us every summer, she was responding to our desire to hear a favorite tale once more. That was it precisely. They were simply fairy tales that enchanted our childhood and of which, as with all real tales, we never tired.
I was fourteen that summer. I understood only too well that the time for fairy tales would not return. I had learned too much to let myself be intoxicated by their whirling colorful dance. Strangely, instead of rejoicing at this evident sign of my maturity, that evening I felt nostalgic for my former trusting innocence. My new knowledge, contrary to my expectations, seemed to blot out the pictures I had of France. No sooner did I seek to return to the Atlantis of our youth than a learned voice intervened: I saw pages of books, dates in large print. The voice began to comment, to compare, to quote. And I felt myself stricken with a strange blindness… .
At one moment our conversation broke off. I had been listening so inattentively that Charlotte?s last remark ? it must have been a question ? escaped me. Confused, I studied her face, which was raised toward me. In my ears I could hear the melody of the sentence she had just uttered. It was her intonation that helped me to reconstruct the sense. Yes, it was that intonation a storyteller adopts in saying, “No, but you must have heard that one before. I’m not going to weary you with all my old tales … ,” while secretly hoping that his listeners will urge him on, will assure him that they do not know the story or that they have forgotten it… . I shook my head slightly, with a doubtful air. “No, no, I don’t think so. Are you sure you’ve told it to me before?”
I saw a smile light up my grandmother’s face. She took up the story. This time I listened alertly. And for the umpteenth time before my eyes appeared a narrow street in medieval Paris, one cold autumn night; and on a wall, that grim plaque that had brought together for all time three destinies and three names from days gone by: Louis d’Orléans, Jean sans Peur, and Isabeau de Bavière… .
I do not know why I interrupted her at that moment. No doubt I wanted to show off my erudition to her. But chiefly it was a sudden perception that blinded me: an old lady on a balcony, suspended above the endless steppe, repeating once more a story known by heart; she repeats it with the mechanical precision of a gramophone record, faithful to her more-or-less legendary story that tells of a country that only exists in her memory… . Our tête-à-tête in the silence of the evening suddenly seemed to me absurd, and Charlotte’s voice reminded me of an automaton’s. I seized on the name of the character she had just mentioned and started talking. Jean sans Peur and his shameful conspiracies with the English. Paris, where the butchers became “revolutionaries,” laid down the law, and massacred the enemies of Burgundy, or those claimed as such. And the mad king. And the gibbets in the squares of Paris. And the wolves roaming in the suburbs of the city devastated by civil war. And the unimaginable betrayal committed by Isabeau de Bavière, who joined forces with Jean sans Peur and denied the Dauphin, claiming that he was not the king’s son. Yes, the fair Isabeau of our childhood …
Suddenly I was gasping for breath; I choked myself with my own words; I had too much to say.
After a moment of silence my grandmother nodded gently and said, with absolutely sincerity, “I’m delighted you know your history so well!”
Yet in her voice, full of conviction, I thought I could detect the echo of an unconscious thought: “It is good to know history. But when I spoke of Isabeau and the allée des Arbalétriers, and that autumn night, I had something different in mind… .”
She bent over her task, making little thrusts with her needle, precise and regular. I walked through the apartment, went down into the street. A train whistle sounded in the distance. Its tone, softened by the warm air of the evening, had something of a sigh, a lament about it.
Between the apartment block where Charlotte lived and the steppe there was a kind of little wood, very dense, even impenetrable: thickets of brambles, the claws of hazel branches, collapsed trenches full of nettles. And even if we managed to get through these natural obstacles in the course of our games, others, those made by man, barred the way: rows of barbed wire entanglements, the rusty crossed bars of antitank barriers… . This place was known as the “Stalinka,” after the name of the defensive line built there during the war. They were afraid that the Germans might get that far. But the Volga and, above all, Stalingrad had halted them… . The line had been dismantled; what was left of the war materials had ended up abandoned in this wood, which had inherited its name. The “Stalinka,” the inhabitants of Saranza would call it, and thus their town seemed to become involved in the great deeds of history.
It was said that the inside of the wood was mined. This deterred even the boldest among us who might have wanted to venture into this no-man’s-land that hugged its rusted treasures to itself.
It was beyond the thickets of the Stalinka that the narrow-gauge railway passed; it was like a miniature railway, with a little locomotive, all black with soot, with little trucks as well and, as in an optical illusion, the driver dressed in a grease-stained jersey: an apparent giant, leaning out of the window. Each time it was about to cross one of the roads that trailed off toward the horizon, the locomotive emitted its cry, half tender, half plaintive. Doubled by its echo, this signal sounded like the call note of a cuckoo. “The Kukushka” we called it, with a wink, when we caught sight of this train on its narrow track, overrun with dandelion and chamomile… .
It was its voice that guided me that evening. I walked round the thickets at the edge of the Stalinka, I saw the last train in a blur slipping into the warm half-light of the dusk. Even this little train gave off the inimitable slightly piquant smell of railways that imperceptibly summons one to go on long journeys. From the distance, from the blue-tinted mist of the evening, I heard a melancholy coo-coo-oo floating on the air. I put my foot on the rail, which was gently vibrating from the vanished train. The silent steppe seemed to be awaiting some action, some movement from me.
“How good it was before,” a wordless voice said within me. “I believed the Kukushka went off to an unknown destination, to countries not shown on any map, toward snowcapped mountains, toward a nocturnal sea where the paper lanterns on the boats mingled with the stars. Now I know that this train goes from the Saranza brickworks to the station where its trucks are unloaded. Two or three kilometers in all. Some journey! Yes, now that I know this, I’ll never again be able to believe that these rails are endless and this evening unique; with the strong scent from the steppe, the immense sky, and my inexplicable and strangely necessary presence here beside this line with its cracked sleepers; at this precise moment, with that coo-coo-oo echoing in
the violet air. Once upon a time everything seemed so natural… .”
That night, before going to sleep, I remembered having finally learned the meaning of the enigmatic formula on the menu for the banquet in honor of the tsar: “Roast bartavels and ortolans, garnished with truffles.” Yes, I knew now that they were both game birds, much prized by gourmets. A delicate, tasty, rare dish, but nothing more. In vain I repeated “bartavels and ortolans,” as before. The magic that had once filled my lungs with the salt air of Cherbourghad faded. And with a hesitant despair I murmured softly to myself, staring wide-eyed into the darkness, “Part of my life is now behind me!”
From then onward we talked but said nothing. Coming between us we could see the screen that is formed by those smooth words, those echoes of the everyday we give voice to; the verbal liquid with which we feel obliged, without knowing why, to fill the silence. With stupefaction I discovered that talking was in fact the best way of saying nothing about the essential. Whereas to express it one would have to articulate words in quite a different way, whisper them, weave them into the sounds of evening, into the rays of the sunset. Once again I sensed in myself the mysterious gestation of that language so different from words blunted by use, a language in which I could have said softly, meeting Charlotte’s gaze, “Why does my heart miss a beat when I hear the distant call of the Kukushka? Why does an autumn morning in Cherbourg a hundred years ago, yes, a moment I have never lived through, in a town I have never visited, why do its lights and breeze seem to me more alive than the days of my real life? Why does your balcony no longer float in the mauve air of the evening above the steppe? The transparency of dreams that once enveloped it is now broken like an alchemist’s flask. And the glass splinters grate together to keep us from talking as we used to… . Are not your memories, which I now know by heart, a cage that holds you prisoner? Is not our life simply the daily transformation of the fluid and warm present into a collection of frozen memories, like butterflies crucified on their pins in a dusty glass case? And why then do I sense that I would without hesitation exchange this whole collection for the unique sharp taste left on my lips by that little imaginary silver dish in that illusory café at Neuilly? For a single mouthful of Cherbourg’s salt breeze? For a single cry of the Kukushka recalled from my childhood?”
Dreams of My Russian Summers Page 12