I did not notice the moment when the time barrier dissolved…. The president stared, unseeing, at the moving reflections of the trees. His lips were so close to the glass that a circle of mist clouded it for a moment. He noticed this and tossed his head slightly in response to his unspoken thoughts.I sensed that he was feeling the strange stiffness of the clothes on his body. He saw himself as a stranger. Yes, as an unknown, tense being that he was obliged to control by his apparent immobility. He thought, no, did not think but sensed, somewhere in the damp darkness beyond the window, the increasingly intimate presence of the woman who would soon enter the room. “The president of the Republic,” he said softly, slowly enunciating each syllable. “The Elysée ?” And suddenly these words, which were so familiar, seemed to him to have no connection with what he was. Intensely he felt he was the man who in a moment would once again thrill to the warm softness of the woman?s lips beneath the veil that sparkled with frozen droplets… .
For several seconds I could feel these contrasting sensations on my face.
The magic of this transfigured past had simultaneously exalted and shattered me. Sitting on the balcony, I breathed jerkily, my blind gaze lost in the night of the steppes. I was no doubt becoming obsessed with this alchemy of time. Hardly had I returned to myself when I uttered my “open sesame” again: “And yet there was in the life of that old soldier a winter?s day….” And I saw the old man wearing a conquistador?s helmet. He walked, leaning on his long pike. His face, flushed by the wind, was once more closed in on bitter thoughts: his age and the war that would continue when he was no longer there. Suddenly, in the dull air of that freezing cold day he smelled the odor of a wood fire. This pleasant and somewhat acid aroma mingled with the chill of the hoarfrost in the bare fields. The old man inhaled deeply a raw mouthful of winter air. The ghost of a smile lit up his austere face. He screwed up his eyes slightly. It was him, this man greedily inhaling the icy wind, that smelt of wood smoke. Him. Here. Now. Under this sky …The battle in which he was going to take part and the war and even his death seemed to him to be events of no importance. Yes, chapters in an infinitely greater destiny, in which he would be ? in which he was already ? a participant, albeit for the moment an unconscious one. He breathed deeply; he smiled, with his eyes half shut. He guessed that the moment he was living through now was the start of the destiny he fore-saw….
Charlotte came back at nightfall. I knew that from time to time she spent the late afternoon at the cemetery. She weeded the little bed of flowers in front of Fyodor’s grave, watered it, cleaned the stele surmounted with a red star. When the day began to draw to a close, she would leave. She would walk slowly, passing through the whole of Saranza, sitting down on a bench occasionally. On those evenings we did not go out onto the balcony….
She came in with some agitation. I heard her footsteps in the corridor, then in the kitchen. Without giving myself the time to consider what I was doing, I went and asked her to tell me about the France of her youth. The way she used to.
Now the moments I had just experienced seemed to me like the experiments of a strange madness, beautiful and frightening at the same time. It was impossible to deny them, for my whole body still felt their luminous echo. I had really lived them! But in a sly spirit of contradiction — a mixture of fear and common sense in revolt — I needed to disavow my discovery, destroy the universe of which I had glimpsed a few fragments. From Charlotte I hoped for a soothing fairy story about the France of her youth. A reminiscence as familiar and bland as a photographic plate, which would help me to forget my passing folly.
She did not respond at once to my request. No doubt she realized that only something serious would have made me disrupt our routine in this way. She must have thought about all our empty conversations for several weeks now, and our traditional stories at sunset, a ritual betrayed that summer.
After a moment’s silence she sighed, with a little smile at the corner of her lips: “But what can I tell you? You know everything now…. Let me think, I will read you a poem instead. …”
I was about to live through the most extraordinary evening of my life. For a long time Charlotte could not lay her hand on the book she was looking for. And with that marvelous abandon with which we sometimes saw her overturn the order of things, she, a woman who was otherwise orderly and punctilious, transformed the night into a long vigil. Piles of books accumulated on the floor. We climbed on the table to explore the upper shelves of the bookcases. The book could not be found.
It was at about two o’clock in the morning that, standing up amid a picturesque disarray of books and furniture, Charlotte ex-claimed, “What a fool I am! That poem, I began to read it to you, you and your sister, last summer. Do you remember? And then … I can’t remember. At any rate, we stopped at the first verse. So it must be here.”
And Charlotte bent down to a little cupboard near the door to the balcony, opened it, and beside a straw hat we saw the book.
Seated on the carpet, I listened to her reading. A table lamp placed on the ground lit up her face. On the wall our silhouettes stood out with eerie precision. From time to time a gust of cold air coming from the night steppe burst in through the balcony door. Charlotte’s voice carried the tonality of words whose echo can be heard years after their genesis.
Each time its mournful notes sound in my ears
My soul grows younger by two hundred years.
The thirteenth Louis reigns and I behold
A green hill turned by sunset’s rays to gold.
A brick-built castle, faced with cornerstones,
With lofty windows, stained in crimson tones,
Stands in a garden where a river fleet
Flows between flowers and swirls about its feet.
A lady at her casement waits the while,
Fair with dark eyes, in robe of ancient style,
I saw her in another life, it seems,
And now remembrance of her haunts my dreams!
We said nothing else to one another during that unusual night. Before going to sleep I thought about the man in my grandmother’s country a century and a half earlier, who had had the courage to tell of his “madness” — that moment in a dream more real than any commonsense reality.
The following morning I woke up late. In the next room order had returned… . The wind had changed direction and brought the warm breeze from the Caspian. Yesterday’s cold weather seemed very remote.
Around midday, without prior agreement, we went out into the steppe. We walked in silence, side by side, skirting round the thickets of the Stalinka. Then we crossed the narrow rails overgrown with wild plants. From afar the Kukushka emitted its whistling call. We saw the little train appear, looking as if it were traveling between tufts of flowers. It drew near, crossed our path, and melted in the heat haze. Charlotte followed it with her eyes, then murmured softly, as she started walking again, “In my childhood I had occasion to take a train that was a bit like a cousin to our Kukushka. This one carried passengers, and with its little carriages it wound its way slowly through Provence. We used to go and stay with an aunt who lived in …I can no longer remember the name of the town. What I do remember is the sun flooding the hillsides; the loud, dry chirruping of the cicadas when we stopped in sleepy little stations. And on those hills, as far as the eye could see, stretched fields of lavender… . Yes, the sun, the cicadas, and the intense blue; and the scent that came in through the open windows on the breeze …”
I walked beside her in silence. I sensed that “Kukushka” would henceforth be the first word in our new language. The new language that would say the unsayable.
Two days later I left Saranza. For the first time in my life the silence of the last moments before the train pulled out did not become embarrassing. Through the window I gazed at Charlotte on the plat-form, amid people gesticulating like deaf-mutes, for fear of not be-ing understood by those departing. Charlotte was silent. Catching my eye, she smiled softly. We had no need of words.
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11
THAT AUTUMN THERE were autumn there were only a few days between the time when, ashamed to admit it to myself, I was rejoicing at my mother’s absence — she had gone into hospital, “just for tests” she told us — and the afternoon when, coming out of school, I learned of her death.
The day after she left for the hospital an agreeable lack of constraint became established in our apartment. My father stayed in front of the television till one o’clock in the morning. And I, savoring this prelude to adult freedom, sought to delay my return to the house each day a little longer: nine o’clock, half past nine, then ten o’clock …
I spent these evenings at a crossroads that, in the autumn dusk and with a slight effort of the imagination, created a surprising illusion: that of a rainy evening in a metropolis in the West. It was a unique spot amidst the monotonous broad avenues of our city. The streets that met here branched out like the radii of a circle, leaving the front of each apartment block truncated in the form of a trapezium. I had learned that Napoleon ordered this configuration where streets met in Paris to avoid collisions between carriages …
The denser the darkness, the more complete my illusion became. Knowing that one of these buildings housed the local museum of atheism and the walls of others concealed overcrowded communal apartments — all this hardly troubled me at all. I contemplated the yellow and blue watercolor sketch of windows in the rain, the reflections of the street lamps on the oily asphalt, the silhouettes of thebare trees. I was alone, free. I was happy. Whispering, I talked to myself in French. In front of these trapezium-shaped facades the sound of that language seemed to me very natural. Would the magic I had discovered that summer materialize in some encounter? Each woman who came toward me seemed to want to talk to me. Each extra half hour of night that I gained gave my French mirage more substance. I no longer belonged either to my time or to my country. On this little nocturnal circus I felt wonderfully foreign to myself.
Now the sun wearied me, daytime became a useless waiting period before my true life, the evening… .
However, it was in broad daylight, blinded by the glitter of the first hoarfrost, that I learned the news. As I walked past the cheerful crowd of pupils, who still displayed the same disdainful hostility toward me, a voice rang out.
“Have you heard? His mother’s dead.”
I intercepted several inquisitive glances. I recognized the one who had spoken — the son of one of our neighbors… .
It was the lack of concern in the remark that gave me time to grasp the inconceivable situation: my mother was dead. All the events of the past days suddenly fitted together into a coherent picture: my father’s frequent absences, his silence, the arrival, two days before, of my sister (although it was not the university vacation time, I now realized)… .
It was Charlotte who opened the door to me. She had arrived from Saranza that very morning. So they all knew! While I was “the child we won’t say anything to at the moment.” And this child, unaware of everything, had continued to pace up and down at his “French” crossroads, imagining himself to be adult, free, mysterious. This sobering thought was the first my mother’s death gave rise to. This then gave way to shame: while my mother was dying, I, in selfish contentment, had been reveling in my freedom, recreating the Parisian autumn under the windows of the museum of atheism!
During these sad days and on the day of the funeral Charlotte was the only one who did not weep. Her face impassive, her eyes calm, she saw to all the household tasks, greeted visitors, settled in relatives who came from other towns. Her dry manner displeased people… .
“You can come to me whenever you want,” she said to me in parting. I nodded my head, picturing Saranza again, the balcony, the suitcase stuffed with old French newspapers. Again I felt ashamed: while we were telling each other stories, life had continued with its real joys and its real sorrows. My mother had gone on working, already ill, suffering without admitting it to anyone, knowing herself to be doomed but never betraying it by word or gesture. And all the while we had spent days on end talking about the elegant ladies of the belle epoque… .
It was with concealed relief that I saw Charlotte leave. I felt myself to be covertly implicated in my mother’s death. Yes, I bore the vague responsibility for it that a spectator feels when his gaze causes a tightrope walker to stumble or even to fall. It was Charlotte who had taught me to pick out Parisian silhouettes in the midst of a great industrial city on the Volga; it was she who had imprisoned me in this fantasy of the past, from whence I cast absentminded glances at real life.
Real life was the layer of stagnant water that, with a shudder, I had caught sight of at the bottom of the grave on the day of the burial. Under a fine autumn rain, they lowered the coffin slowly into the mixture of water and mud… .
Real life also made itself felt with the arrival of my aunt, my father’s elder sister. She lived in a workers’ district where the population got up at five o’clock in the morning and streamed in to the gates of the gigantic factories in the city. This woman brought with her a ponderous and powerful breath of Russian life — a strange amalgam of cruelty, compassion, drunkenness, anarchy, invincible joie de vivre, tears, willing slavery, stupid obstinacy, and unexpected delicacy… . With growing astonishment, I discovered a universe previously eclipsed by Charlotte’s France.
My aunt was concerned that my father would take to drinking, a fatal move for the men she had known in her life. Each time shecame to see us she repeated, “Whatever you do, Nikolai, keep off the bitter stuff!” That is to say, vodka. He would agree mechanically, without hearing her, then shaking his head energetically, he would declaim: “But it’s me who should have died first. That’s for sure. With this, you know… .”
And he would touch his bald head with his palm. I knew that above his left ear he had a “hole” — a place covered only with fine, smooth skin that pulsated rhythmically. My mother had always been afraid that if involved in a brawl, my father might be killed by a simple flick of the finger… .
He did not start drinking. But in February, the time of the last winter frosts, the harshest of all, he collapsed in a snowy alleyway one evening, felled by a heart attack. The militiamen who later found him stretched out in the snow thought he was a drunkard and took him to the sobering up station. Only the following morning would the error be discovered… .
Once again real life, with its arrogant power, came to challenge my fantasies. A single sound sufficed: they had transported his body in a van covered with cloth, which was as cold inside as outside; as the body was placed on the table, there was a thud like a block of ice hitting wood… .
I could not lie to myself. Amid a great turmoil of exposed thoughts and unflinching admissions — in my soul — the disappearance of my parents had not left incurable scars. Yes, I admitted during these secret tête-à-têtes with myself, my suffering was not inordinate.
And if on occasion I wept, I was not really mourning their loss. Mine were tears of helplessness at the realization of a stupefying truth: a whole generation of dead, of wounded, of those whose youth had been stolen from them. Tens of millions of human beings whose lives had been blotted out. Those who had fallen on the field of battle at least had the privilege of a heroic death. But those who came back, and who disappeared ten or twenty years after the war, appeared to die quite “normally,” of “old age.” You had to come very close to my father to see the slightly concave mark above his ear where the blood throbbed. You had to know my mother very well to discern in her that child transfixed in front of the dark window on that first morning of war under a sky with strange rumbling stars. To see in her as well that pale skeletal adolescent, choking as she wolfed down potato peelings… .
I viewed their lives through a mist of tears. I saw my father, on a warm June evening, coming home after demobilization to his native village. He recognized everything: the forest, the river, the curve in the road. And then there was that unknown place, that black st
reet made up of two rows of izbas, all burned to a cinder. And not a living soul. Only the merry notes of a cuckoo, keeping time with the burning throbbing of the blood above his ear.
I saw my mother, a student who had just passed her university entrance exams, this petrified young girl standing frozen to attention before a wall of disdainful faces — a Party commission assembled to judge her “crime.” She had known that Charlotte’s nationality, yes, her “Frenchness,” was a terrible blemish during that period of the struggle against “cosmopolitanism.” Filling in the questionnaire form before the examination she had written, with a trembling hand, “Mother — of Russian nationality” …
And they had met, these two human beings, so different, yet so alike in their mangled youth. And we were born, my sister and I, and life had continued, despite the wars, the burned villages, the camps.
Yes, if I wept, it was for their silent resignation. They bore no grudge against anyone, demanded no reparations. They lived and tried to make us happy. My father had passed his whole life shuttling back and forth across the endless spaces between the Volga and the Urals, erecting high-tension cables with his team. My mother, expelled from university following her crime, had never had the courage to renew the attempt. She had become a translator in one of the great factories in our city, as if this technical and impersonal French exonerated her from her criminal Frenchness.
I viewed these two lives — at the same time banal and extraordinary — and felt a confused rage mounting within me, against whom, I did not really know. Yes, I did know: against Charlotte! Against the serenity of her French universe. Against the useless refinement of that imaginary past: what madness to be thinking aboutthree creatures featured on a press cutting from the turn of the century or to try to recreate the states of mind of a president in love! While forgetting about the soldier who was saved by the winter itself when he packed his fractured skull in a shell of ice, thus staunching the blood. While forgetting that if I was alive it was thanks to that train that had slowly edged its way past the carriages filled with crushed human flesh, a train that carried Charlotte and her children away to refuge in the protective depths of Russia… . That propaganda catchphrase — “Twenty million people died so that you might live!” — had always left me indifferent. Suddenly this patriotic refrain acquired a new and grievous meaning for me. And a very personal one.
Dreams of My Russian Summers Page 14