But already the ship was melting into the darkness. The echo of the tango faded. On its voyage toward Astrakhan, it carried the night with it. The sky around our ferry was filling with a hesitant pallor. I found it strange to see us in the middle of a great river at the timid birth of that day on the damp timbers of a raft. And along the shore the outlines of the port slowly took shape.
She did not wait for me. Without looking at me, she began to jump from one boat to the next. She was escaping with the shy haste of a young ballerina after a muffed exit. As I followed her leaping flight my heart stood still. At any moment she could slip on the wet wood, be betrayed by a broken footbridge, fall between two boats whose sides would close over her head. The concentration of my gaze sustained her in her acrobatics through the morning mist.
A moment later I saw her walking along the shore. In the silence the sand crunched softly beneath her feet? . Here was a woman to whom I had felt so close a quarter of an hour before, who was now leaving. I experienced a pain quite new to me; a woman was leaving, breaking the invisible ties that still bound us. And there on that deserted shore she was transformed into an extraordinary being — a woman I love who is becoming independent of me again, a stranger to me, and who will soon be speaking to other people, smiling… . Living!
She turned, hearing me running after her. I saw her pale face, her hair that I now noticed was of a very light auburn color. Un-smiling, she looked at me in silence. I no longer remembered what Ihad wanted to say to her while listening, a moment before, to the wet sand crunching beneath her heels. “I love you” would have been a lie I could not utter. Alone her crumpled black skirt, and her arms, childishly slender, meant more to me than all the “I love you”s in the world. To suggest to her that we should meet again that day or the next was unthinkable. Our night must remain unique. Like the passing of the riverboat, like our momentary sleep, like her body in the cool of the great somnolent river.
I tried to tell her. I spoke, at random, of the crunching of the sand under her feet; of her solitude on this shore; of her fragility that night, which had reminded me of the stems of water lilies. I felt suddenly and with an acute happiness that I must also tell her about Charlotte’s balcony, about our evenings on the steppes, about the elegant trio on an autumn morning on the Champs-Elysées… .
Her face screwed up into an expression at once scornful and anxious. Her lips trembled.
“Are you sick or what?” she said, interrupting me in that slightly nasal tone that girls on the Mountain of Joy adopted to rebuff un-wanted attention.
I stood stock-still. She went off, climbing toward the first buildings of the port, and soon plunging into their massive shadow. The workers were beginning to appear at the gates of their workshops.
Some days later, in the nocturnal gathering at the Mountain, I heard a conversation between my classmates, who had not noticed that I was close by. One of the girls in their little circle had complained, they were saying, about her partner who did not know how to make love (they expressed the notion much more crudely); and apparently she had confided some comic details (“killing,” said one of them) of his behavior. I was listening to them in the hope of some erotic revelations. Suddenly the name of the despised partner was mentioned — “Frantsuz” — it was my nickname, of which I was generally proud. “Frantsuz” — the Russian for a Frenchman. Through their laughter I picked up a quiet exchange of remarks between two friends, in the manner of a secret agreement: “Let’s take care of her tonight, after the dancing. Us two. Agreed?”
I guessed they were still talking about her. I left my corner and went toward the exit. They saw me. “Frantsuz! Frantsuz …” The whispering accompanied me for a moment, then was lost in the first surge of the music.
The next day, without warning anyone, I left for Saranza.
13
I WAS GOING TO THAT SLEEPY LITTLE TOWN, lost in the middle of the steppes, to destroy France. I must put an end to Charlotte’s France, which had made of me a strange mutant, incapable of living in the real world.
In my mind this destruction had to resemble a long cry, a howl of rage that would best express my whole revolt. So far this howl was welling up without words. They would come, I was sure of it, as soon as Charlotte’s calm eyes rested on me. For the moment I was shouting silently. There were only images hurtling by in a chaotic and motley flood.
I saw the gleam of a pincenez in the well-upholstered shadows of a huge black car. Beria was choosing a woman’s body for the night. And our neighbor across the street, a quiet, smiling pensioner, was watering the flowers on his balcony, listening to the warbling of a transistor. And in our kitchen a man with his arms covered in tattoos was speaking of a frozen lake filled with naked corpses. And none of the people in the third-class carriage that was taking me toward Saranza seemed to notice these shattering paradoxes. They got on with their lives, calmly.
In my cry I wanted to spill out these images over Charlotte. I awaited a response from her. I wanted her to explain herself, to justify herself. For it was she who had passed on to me this French sensibility — her own — condemning me to live painfully between two worlds.
I would speak to her of my father with the hole in his head, thatlittle crater where his life pulsed. And of my mother, from whom we had inherited the fear of an unexpected ring at the door on the eve of holidays. Both of them dead. Unconsciously I resented her for her calm during my mother’s burial. And for the life, so European in its good sense and neatness, that she led at Saranza. I found in her the West personified, that rational and cold West against which Russians harbor an incurable grudge. That Europe which looks down condescendingly from the stronghold of its civilization on our barbarian miseries … the wars in which we died by the million, the revolutions whose scenarios it wrote for us… . In my juvenile rebellion there was a large dose of this innate mistrust.
The French implant, which I thought had atrophied, was still within me and was preventing me from seeing. It split reality in two. As it had done with the body of that woman I had spied on through two different portholes: there was one woman in a white blouse, calm and very ordinary — and the other — that immense backside, whose potent carnality rendered the rest of the body almost useless.
And yet I knew that the two women were only one. Just like my shattered reality. It was my French illusion that confused my vision, like an intoxication, giving the world a deceptively lifelike mirage as its double… .
My cry was ripening. The images I would find words for swirled in my eyes more and more rapidly: Beria murmuring to the driver, “Faster! Catch that one! Let me see …”; and a man in a Father Christmas costume, my grandfather Fyodor, arrested on New Year’s Eve; and my father’s charred village; and the slender arms of my beloved — childlike arms with blue veins; and that erect backside with its animal power; and that woman removing red varnish from her nails while the lower part of her body is possessed; and the little Pont-Neuf bag; and the “Verdun”; and all that French nonsense that was ruining my youth!
At Saranza station I remained on the platform for a moment. From force of habit I was looking for Charlotte’s silhouette. Then with scornful anger I called myself a fool. No one was waiting for me this time. My grandmother had not the slightest inkling that I was coming! Furthermore, the train that brought me had no connection with the one I used to take each summer to come to this town. I had arrived in Saranza not in the morning but in the evening. And the incredibly long train, too long and massive for this little provincial station, moved off heavily, traveling to Tashkent, near the Asiatic border of the empire. Urgench, Bukhara, Samarkand, the echo of the forward stops reverberated in my head, awakening a yearning for the Orient, which is mournful and profound for every Russian.
This time everything was different.
The door was unlocked. It was still the period when one only locked one’s apartment at night. I pushed it open, as in a dream. I had pictured this moment so clearly I thought I knew word for word
what I was going to say to Charlotte, what I was going to accuse her of....
However, as I heard the imperceptible click of the door, as familiar to me as the voice of a friend, and breathed the light and pleasant aroma that always hung on the air in Charlotte’s apartment, I felt my head emptying of words. Only a few snatches of my prepared howl still rang in my ears: “Beria! And that old man calmly watering his gladioli. And that woman cut in two! And the forgotten war! And your rape! And that Siberian suitcase, filled with old French scraps of paper, which I drag about like a prisoner’s ball and chain! And our Russia, which you, a Frenchwoman, do not understand and will never understand! And my beloved, whom those two young swine are going to ‘take care of’!”
She did not hear me come in. I saw her sitting before the balcony door. Her face was bent over a light-colored garment spread out on her lap, her needle flashing (I do not know why, but in my memory Charlotte was always engaged in darning a lace collar)… .
I heard her voice. It was not singing, but rather a slow recitation, a melodious murmur interrupted by pauses, which kept time with the flow of her silent thoughts. Yes, a French song, half hummed, half spoken. In the overheated torpor of the evening her notes gave an impression of freshness, like the thin resonance of a harpsichord. I listened to the words, and for several seconds I had the feeling of listening to an unknown foreign language — a language that meant nothing to me. After a minute I recognized it as French? . Charlotte was crooning very slowly, sighing from time to time, letting the bottomless silence of the steppe intervene between two verses of her recitation.
It was the song whose charm I had discovered while still a very young child, and which now focused all my rancor on her.
At each corner of the bed
Periwinkles in a bunch …
“Yes. That’s just the kind of French sentimentality that is choking my life!” I thought angrily.
We’d sleep together there
Till the world comes to an end… .
No, I could not listen to these words anymore!
I entered the room and announced with deliberate abruptness, in Russian, “It’s me! I’ll bet you weren’t expecting me!”
To my amazement, to my chagrin as well, the look Charlotte gave me was quite calm. I read in her eyes the faultless self-control that is acquired through coping daily with grief, anguish, danger.
Having established, via a few discreet and apparently humdrum questions, that I had not come as the bearer of bad tidings, she went to the hall and telephoned my aunt to tell her of my arrival. And once again Charlotte surprised me by the ease with which she spoke to this woman, who was so different from her. Her voice, the same voice that a moment ago had been softly crooning an old French song, took on a slightly rough accent, and in a few words she managed to explain everything, arrange everything, putting my escapade on the same level with our regular summer reunions.
“She’s trying to mimic us,” I thought, as I listened to her talking. “She’s parodying us.” Charlotte’s calm and that very Russian voice only served to exacerbate my bitterness.
I began to lie in wait for each and every word. One of them was going to unleash my explosion. Charlotte would offer me her boules de neige, our favorite dessert, and then I could let fly against all her French fripperies. Or else, trying to recreate the atmosphere of our evenings together in the old days, she would start talking about her childhood, that’s right, about some dog barber on a quay beside the Seine… .
But Charlotte was silent. She paid very little attention to me. As if my presence had not in the least disturbed the atmosphere of one more ordinary evening in her life. From time to time she caught my eye and smiled at me, and then her face became blank again.
Our supper astonished me by its simplicity. There were no boules de neige, nor any of our childhood treats. I was amazed to realize that this black bread and weak tea was Charlotte’s normal fare.
After the meal I waited for her on the balcony. The same garlands of flowers, the same endless steppe beneath the heat haze. And between two rosebushes — the face of the stone bacchante. I had a sudden impulse to hurl this head over the handrail, to snatch at the flowers, to shatter the stillness of the plain with my cry. Yes, and now Charlotte would come and sit on her little chair and spread out a piece of fabric on her lap… .
She did appear, but instead of settling down on her low seat she came and leaned on the handrail beside me. This was how my sister and I used to stand in the old days, side by side, watching the steppe as it sank slowly into the night and listening to our grandmother’s stories.
Yes, she rested her elbows on the cracked wood, gazing at the endless plain that was tinged with transparent violet light. And suddenly, without looking at me, she began to speak in a remote and pensive voice, which seemed to be addressing both me and someone else besides.
“You know, it’s strange… . A week ago I met a woman at the cemetery. Her son is buried in the same row as your grandfather. We talked about them, their deaths and the war. What else can one talk about in the presence of graves? Her son was wounded a month before the end of the war. Our soldiers were already advancing on Berlin. Every day she prayed that they would keep her son in the hospital one more week, three more days (she was a believer — or was turning into one during that waiting time)? . He was killed in Berlin, during the very last of the fighting. Actually on the streets of Berlin. She told me all that very simply. Even her tears were simple as she told me how she prayed? . And do you know what her story reminded me of? A wounded soldier in our hospital. He was afraid to go back to the front, and every night he reopened his wound with a sponge. I surprised him doing it and told the head doctor. We put a plaster cast on this wounded man, and some time later when his leg was healed, he went back to the front? . At the time, you see, it all seemed so clear, so right. And now I feel a bit lost. Yes, my life is behind me, and suddenly everything has to be reconsidered. Perhaps it may seem silly to you, but from time to time I ask myself, ?Suppose I sent him to his death, that young soldier? I tell myself that probably somewhere in the heart of Russia there was a woman who was praying every day that they would keep him in the hospital for as long as possible. Yes, like that woman at the cemetery. I don’t know… . I can’t forget that mother’s face. It’s quite untrue, you see, but now it seems to me as if there was a little note of reproach in her voice. I don’t know how to explain all that to myself… .”
She fell silent and remained quite still for a long moment, her eyes wide open; the pupils seemed to retain the light of the sunset, now faded. Transfixed, I watched her sideways, without being able to turn my head, change the position of my arms, or relax my crossed fingers… .
“I’ll go and make your bed,” she said finally, leaving the balcony.
I stood up and glanced around in amazement. Charlotte’s little chair, the lamp with its turquoise shade, the stone bacchante with her melancholy smile, the narrow balcony poised above the nocturnal steppe — all suddenly seemed so fragile! I was bewildered to recall my desire to destroy this ephemeral setting. Now the balcony was tiny — as if I were observing it from a great distance — yes, tiny and defenseless.
The next day a dry burning wind invaded Saranza. At the corners of the streets baked hard by the sun there arose little tornadoes of dust. And their appearance was followed by an explosion of sound — a military band struck up on the central square, and the hot gusts carried snatches of their valiant uproar all the way to Charlotte’s house. Then the silence abruptly returned, and one could hear the grating of sand against the windowpanes and the feverish buzzing of a fly. It was the first day of maneuvers that were taking place several kilometers away from Saranza.
We walked for a long time. First of all crossing the town, then out over the steppe. Charlotte spoke with the same calm and detached voice as the previous evening on the balcony. Her story mingled with the merry tumult of the band, then suddenly the wind dropped, and her words resounded with a strange cl
arity in the emptiness of sun and silence.
She told of her brief stay in Moscow two years after the war… . One fine afternoon in May as she was walking along the network of lanes in the Presnya district, which led down toward the Moskva River, she felt she was convalescing, recovering from the war, from fear, and even, without daring to admit it to herself, from Fyodor’s death, or rather from her obsession with his absence… . On the corner of a street, she heard a snatch of a remark as two women passed close by her in conversation, “Samovars …” said one of them.
“The good tea in the old days,” thought Charlotte, echoing them. Then as she emerged onto the square, in front of the market, with its wooden booths, its kiosks, and its fencing of thick planks, she realized that she had been mistaken. A man without legs, installed in a kind of box on wheels, advanced toward her, his one arm outstretched.
“Now then, my lovely, spare a little ruble for the invalid.”
Instinctively Charlotte turned away from him, so much did this stranger resemble a man rising from the earth. It was then she perceived that the outskirts of the market were swarming with disabled soldiers — with these “samovars.” Trundling along in their boxes, some equipped with little wheels with rubber tires, some with simple ball bearings, they confronted people at the exit, asking them for money or tobacco. Some people gave, some hurried past, yet others let fly with a curse, adding in reproving tones, “The state supports you already… . Shame on you!” The samovars were almost allyoung, several of them visibly drunk. All had piercing, slightly mad eyes? . Three or four boxes came hurtling toward Charlotte. The soldiers thrust their sticks down against the trampled soil of the square, writhing as they propelled themselves along with violent convulsions of their whole bodies. Despite their pain it almost looked like a game.
Dreams of My Russian Summers Page 18