Dreams Of My Russian Summers

1

While still a child, I guessed that this very singular smile represented a strange little victory for each of the women: yes, a fleeting revenge for disappointed hopes, for the coarseness of men, for the rareness of beautiful and true things in this world. Had I known how to say it at the time I would have called this way of smiling "femininity."… But my language was too concrete in those days. I contented myself with studying the women's faces in our photograph albums and identifying this glow of beauty in some of them.

For these women knew that in order to be beautiful, what they must do several seconds before the flash blinded them was to articulate the following mysterious syllables in French, of which few understood the meaning: "pe-tite-pomme. "… As if by magic, the mouth, instead of being extended in counterfeit bliss, or contracting into an anxious grin, would form a gracious round. The whole face was thus transfigured. The eyebrows arched slightly, the oval of the cheeks was elongated. You said "petite pomme," and the shadow of a distant and dreamy sweetness veiled your gaze, refined your features, and caused the soft light of bygone days to hover over the snapshot.

This photographic spell had won the confidence of the most diverse women: for example, a relative from Moscow in the only color photo in our albums. Married to a diplomat, she spoke through clenched teeth and sighed with boredom before even hearing you out. But in the photo I could immediately identify the "petite pomme" effect.

I observed its aura on the face of a dull provincial woman, some anonymous aunt, whose name only came up when the conversation turned to the women left without husbands after the male slaughter of the last war. Even Glasha, the peasant of the family, in the rare photos that we still possessed of her, displayed the miraculous smile. Finally there was a whole swarm of young girl cousins, puffing out their lips while trying to hold on to this elusive French magic during several interminable seconds of posing. As they murmured their "petite pomme," they still believed that the life that lay ahead would be woven uniquely from such moments of grace…

Throughout this parade of expressions and faces there recurred here and there that of a woman with fine, regular features and large gray eyes. Young at first, in the earliest of the albums, her smile was suffused with the secret charm of the "petite pomme. " Then, with age, in the more recent albums, closer to our time, this expression became muted and overlaid with a veil of melancholy and simplicity.

It was this woman, this Frenchwoman, lost in the snowy immensity of Russia, who had taught the others the words that bestowed beauty. My maternal grandmother… She was born in France at the beginning of the century in the family of Norbert and Albertine Lemonnier. The mystery of the "petite pomme" was probably the first of the legends that enchanted our childhood. And these were also among the first words we heard in that language that my mother used, jokingly, to call "your grandmaternal tongue."

One day I came upon a photo I should not have seen… I was spending my holidays with my grandmother in the town at the edge of the Russian steppe where she had been stranded after the war. A warm, slow summer dusk was drawing in and flooding the rooms with a mauve glow. This somewhat unearthly light fell upon the photos that I was examining before an open window, the oldest snapshots in our albums. The pictures spanned the historic watershed of the 1917 revolution; brought to life the era of the tsars; and, moreover, pierced the iron curtain, which was then almost impenetrable, transporting me at one moment to the precinct of a gothic cathedral and the next into the pathways of a garden where the precise geometry of the plants left me perplexed. I was plunging into our family prehistory.

Then suddenly this photo!

I saw it when, out of pure curiosity, I opened a large envelope that had been slipped between the last page and the cover. It was that inevitable batch of snapshots that have not been judged worthy to appear on the rough cardboard of the pages, landscapes that can no longer be identified, faces that evoke neither affection nor memories. One of those batches you always tell yourself you must sort through one day, to decide the fate of all these souls in torment…

It was in the midst of these unknown people and forgotten landscapes that I saw her, a young woman whose attire jarred oddly with the elegance of the people who appeared in the other photos. She was wearing a big dirty gray padded jacket and a man's shapka with the earflaps pulled down. As she posed, she was clasping to her breast a baby muffled up in a wool blanket.

"How did she slip in," I wondered in amazement, "among all these men in tails and women in evening dress?" And all around her in other snapshots there were these majestic avenues, these colonnades, these Mediterranean vistas. Her presence was anachronistic, out of place, inexplicable. She seemed like an intruder in this family past, with a style of dress nowadays adopted only by the women who cleared snowdrifts from the roads in winter…

I had not heard my grandmother coming in. She placed her hand on my shoulder. I gave a start, then, showing her the photo, "Who is that woman I asked her."

A brief flash of panic appeared in my grandmother's unfailingly calm eyes. In an almost nonchalant voice she asked me, "Which woman?"

We both fell silent, pricking up our ears. A bizarre rustling filled the room. My grandmother turned and cried out, it seemed to me, joyfully, "A death's-head! Look, a death's-head!"

I saw a large brown insect, a crepuscular hawkmoth, quivering as it tried to plunge into the illusory depths of the mirror. I rushed toward it, my hand outstretched, already feeling the tickling of its wings under my palm. It was then I noticed the unusual shape of this moth. I approached it and could not suppress a cry: "But there are two of them! They're Siamese twins."

And indeed the two moths did seem to be attached to one another. And their bodies were animated with feverish trembling. To my surprise this double hawkmoth paid me no attention and did not try to escape. Before catching it I had time to observe the white marks on its back, the famous death's head.

We did not speak again about the woman in the padded jacket… I watched the flight of the liberated hawkmoth – in the sky it divided into two moths, and I understood, as a child of ten can understand, why they had been joined. Now my grandmother's disarray seemed to make sense.

The capture of the coupling hawkmoths brought to my mind two very old memories, the most mysterious of my childhood. The first, going back to when I was eight, was summed up in the words of an old song that my grandmother sometimes murmured rather than sang, sitting on her balcony, her head bowed over a garment on which she was darning the collar or reinforcing the buttons. It was the very last words of her song that plunged me into enchantment:

… We'd sleep together there Till the world comes to an end.

This slumber of the two lovers, of such long duration, was beyond my childish comprehension. I already knew that people who died (like that old woman next door whose disappearance in winter had been so well explained to me) went to sleep forever. Like the lovers in the song? Love and death had now formed a strange alloy in my young head. And the melancholy beauty of the melody could only increase this unease. Love, death, beauty… And the evening sky, the wind, the smell of the steppe that, thanks to the song, I perceived as if my life had just begun at that moment.

The second memory was so distant it could not be dated. There was not even a very precise "me" in its nebulousness. Just the intense sensation of light, the aromatic scent of plants, and silvery lines crossing the blue density of the air, which many years later I would identify as gossamer threads. Elusive and confused, this vision would nevertheless be dear to me, for I would succeed in persuading myself that it was a memory from before birth. Yes, an echo sent to me by my French ancestry. For in one of my grandmother's stories I was to rediscover all the elements of this memory: the autumn sun of a journey she made to Provence, the scent of the fields of lavender, and even those gossamers floating in the perfumed air. I would never dare to speak to her of my childish prescience. It was in the course of the following summer that my sister and I one day saw our grandmother weep… for the first time in our lives.

In our eyes she was a kind of just and benevolent deity, always true to form and perfectly serene. Her own life story, which had long since become a myth, placed her beyond the griefs of ordinary mortals. In fact we did not see any tears. Just an unhappy contraction of her lips, little tremors running across her cheeks, and a rapid batting of her eyelashes…

We were sitting on the carpet, which was littered with bits of crumpled paper, and were absorbed in a fascinating game: taking out little pebbles that 'were wrapped in white "sweet papers" and comparing them – now a glitter of quartz, now a pebble, smooth and pleasant to the touch. On each paper were written names that we had, in our ignorance, taken for enigmatic mineralogical labels: Fecamp, La Rochelle, Bayonne… In one of the wrappers we even discovered a rough and ferrous fragment, which bore traces of rust. We thought we were reading the name of this strange metal: " Verdun. "… A number of pieces from this collection had been thus stripped bare. When our grandmother came in, the game had just begun to take a livelier course. We were quarreling over the most beautiful stones and testing their hardness by striking them one against another, sometimes breaking them. Those we found ugly – like the " Verdun," for example – were thrown out of the window into a bed of dahlias. Several wrappers had been torn…

Our grandmother froze above this battlefield scattered with white blisters. We looked up. It was then that her gray eyes seemed to be on the brink of tears -just enough to make it unbearable for us if she broke down.

No, she was not an impassive goddess, our grandmother. She too, it seemed, could suffer unease, or sudden distress. We had always thought she moved in such a measured way through the peaceful sequence of days, yet she too sometimes hovered on the brink of tears!

From that summer onward my grandmother's life revealed new and unexpected facets to me. And above all, much more personal ones.

Previously her past had been summed up by a few talismans, a number of family relics, like the silk fan, which reminded me of a fine maple leaf, or the famous little "Pont-Neuf bag." Our legend maintained that it had been found on the bridge in question by Charlotte Lemonnier, aged four at the time. Running ahead of her mother, the little girl had stopped suddenly and exclaimed, "A bag!" And more than half a century later, the muted echo of her ringing cry could still be heard in a town lost amid the endlessness of Russia, under the sun of the steppes. It was in this pigskin bag, with enamel plaques on the fastening, that my grandmother kept her collection of stones from days gone by.

This old handbag marked one of my grandmother's earliest memories, and for us, the genesis of the legendary world of her memory: Paris, the Pont-Neuf… An astonishing galaxy waiting to be born, which began to sketch its still hazy outlines before our fascinated gaze.

There was, besides, among these relics of the past (I remember the voluptuousness with which we caressed the smooth, gilded edges of those pink volumes, Memoirs of a Poodle, Gribouille and His Sister…), an even older testimony. The photo, already taken in Siberia; Albertine, Norbert, and – in front of them, on one of those artificial pieces of furniture that photographers always use, a kind of very tall pedestal table – Charlotte, a child of two, wearing a lace-trimmed bonnet and a doll's dress. This photo on thick cardboard, with the name of the photographer and replicas of the medals he had been awarded, intrigued us very much: "What does she have in common, this ravishing woman with her pure, fine face, framed in silky curls, with that old man, whose beard is divided into two rigid plaits that look like the tusks of a walrus?"

We already knew that this old man, our great-grandfather, was twenty-six years older than Albertine. "It's as if he'd married his own daughter!" my sister said to me indignantly. Their marriage seemed to us ambiguous and unhealthy. All our textbooks at school were full of stories that told of marriages between girls without dowries and rich old men, miserly and hungry for youth, to such an extent that any other kind of conjugal alliance seemed to us impossible in bourgeois society. We strove to discover some malign viciousness in Nor-bert's features, a grimace of ill-concealed satisfaction. But his face remained simple and frank, like those of the intrepid explorers in the illustrations to our Jules Verne books. After all, this old man with a long white beard was only forty-eight at the time…

As for Albertine, supposed victim of bourgeois morality, she was soon to be standing on the slippery brink of an open grave into which the first spadefuls of earth were already flying. She would struggle so violently against the hands that restrained her and would utter such heartrending cries that even the funeral party of Russians, in that cemetery in a distant Siberian town, would be stunned by them. Accustomed as they were to tragic outbursts at funerals in their native land, to torrential tears and pitiful lamentations, these people would be stricken in the face of the tortured beauty of this young Frenchwoman. She would flail above the grave, crying out in her resonant language, "Throw me in as well! Throw me in!"

For a long time this terrible lament echoed in our childish ears.

"Perhaps it was because she… she loved him," my sister, who was older than me, said to me one day. And she blushed.

But more than that unusual union between Norbert and Albertine, it was Charlotte, in this photo from the turn of the century, who aroused my curiosity. Especially her little bare toes. By a simple irony of chance, or through some involuntary coquetry, she had curled them back tightly against the soles of her feet. This trifling detail conferred a special significance on what was overall a very ordinary photo. Not knowing how to formulate my thought, I contented myself with repeating in a dreamy voice, "This little girl who finds herself, heaven knows why, on this comical pedestal table, on that summer's day that has gone forever, July 22, 1905, right in the depths of Siberia. Yes, this tiny French girl, who was that day celebrating her second birthday, this child, who is looking at the photographer and by an unconscious caprice curling up her incredibly small toes, in this way allows me to enter into that day, to taste its climate, its time, its color…"

And the mystery of this childish presence seemed to me so breathtaking that I would close my eyes.

This child was… our grandmother. Yes, it was her, this woman whom we saw that evening, crouching down and silently gathering up the fragments of stone scattered over the carpet. Dumbfounded and sheepish, my sister and I stood with our backs to the wall, not daring to murmur a word of excuse nor to help our grandmother retrieve the scattered talismans. We guessed that in her lowered eyes tears were forming…

On the evening of our sacrilegious game we no longer saw an old-fashioned good fairy before us, a storyteller with her Bluebeard or her Sleeping Beauty, but a woman hurt and vulnerable despite all her strength of spirit. For her it was that agonizing moment when suddenly the adult betrays herself, allows her weakness to appear, feels like a naked emperor under the penetrating gaze of the child. Now she is like a tightrope walker who has made a false move and who, off balance for several seconds, is sustained only by the gaze of the spectator, who is in turn embarrassed at having this unexpected power…

She closed the "Pont-Neuf bag," took it into her room, then called us to the table. After a moment's silence she began to speak in French in a calm and steady voice, while pouring tea for us with her familiar gesture: "Among the stones you threw away there was one I should really like to get back…"

And still in this neutral tone and still in French, even though at mealtimes (because of friends or neighbors who often dropped in unexpectedly) we generally spoke in Russian, she told us about the parade of the Grande Armée and the story of the little brown pebble known as " Verdun." We scarcely grasped the sense of her tale – it was her tone that held us in thrall. Our grandmother was addressing us like adults! All we saw was a handsome officer with a mustache emerging from the column of the victory parade, approaching a young woman squeezed in the midst of an enthusiastic crowd, and offering her a little fragment of brown metal…

After supper, armed with a flashlight, I vainly combed through the bed of dahlias in front of our apartment block: the " Verdun " was not there. I found it the following morning on the pavement, a little metallic pebble surrounded by several cigarette stubs, broken bottles, and streaks of sand. Under my gaze it seemed to stand out from these banal surroundings like a meteorite fallen from an unknown galaxy, which had almost disappeared amidst the gravel on a path…

Thus we guessed at our grandmother's hidden tears and sensed the existence in her heart of that distant French lover who had preceded our grandfather, Fyodor. Yes, a dashing officer from the Grande Armée, the man who had slipped that rough splinter, the "Verdun," into Charlotte's palm. This discovery made us uneasy. We felt bound to our grandmother by a secret to which possibly no one else in the family had access. Beyond the dates and anecdotes of family legend we could now hear life welling up, in all its sorrowful beauty.

That evening we joined our grandmother on the little balcony of her apartment. Covered in flowers, it seemed suspended above the hot haze of the steppes. A copper sun nudged the horizon, remained undecided for a moment, then plunged rapidly. The first stars trembled in the sky. Powerful, penetrating scents rose to us with the evening breeze.

"We were silent. While the daylight lasted, our grandmother darned a blouse spread out on her knees. Then, when the air was impregnated with ultramarine shadow, she raised her head, abandoning her task, her gaze lost in the hazy distance of the plain. Not daring to break her silence, we cast furtive glances at her from time to time: was she going to share a new and even more secret confidence with us? or would she fetch her lamp with the turquoise shade, as if nothing had happened, and read us a few pages of Daudet or Jules Verne, who often kept us company on our long summer evenings? Without admitting it to ourselves, we were lying in wait for her first word, her intonation. Our suspense – the spectator's fascination with the tightrope walker – was a mixture of rather cruel curiosity and a vague unease. We felt as if we were seeking to trap this woman who faced us alone.

However, she seemed not even to notice our tense presence. Her hands remained motionless in her lap; her gaze was lost in the transparency of the sky. The trace of a smile illuminated her lips…

Little by little we abandoned ourselves to this silence. Leaning over the handrail, we stared wide-eyed, trying to see as much sky as possible. The balcony reeled slightly, giving way under our feet, and began to float. The horizon drew closer, as if we were hurtling toward it across the night breeze.

It was above the line of the horizon that we discerned a pale reflection – it was like the sparkle of little waves on the surface of a river. Incredulous, we peered into the darkness that surged over our flying balcony. Yes, far away on the steppe there shone an expanse of water, rising, spreading the bitter cold of the great rains. The sheet seemed to be lightening steadily, with a dull, wintry glow.

Now we saw emerging from this fantastic tide the black masses of apartment blocks, the spires of cathedrals, the posts of street lamps – a city! Gigantic, harmonious despite the waters that flooded its avenues, a ghost city was emerging before our eyes…

Suddenly we realized that someone had been talking to us for quite a while. Our grandmother was talking to us!

"At that time I must have been almost your age; it was the winter of 1910. The Seine had turned into a real sea. The people of Paris traveled round by boat. The streets were like rivers; the squares, like great lakes. And what astonished me most was the silence…"

On our balcony we heard the sleepy silence of flooded Paris. The lapping of a few waves when a boat went by, a muffled voice at the end of a drowned avenue.

The France of our grandmother, like a misty Atlantis, was emerging from the waves.

2

– Even the president was reduced to cold meals by it."

This was the very first remark to ring out through the capital of our France-Atlantis… We imagined a venerable old man – combining in his appearance the noble bearing of our great-grandfather Norbert and the pharaonic solemnity of a Stalin – an old man with a silvery beard, sitting at a table gloomily lit by a candle.

This news report came from a man of about forty with a lively eye and a resolute expression, who appeared in photos in our grandmother's oldest albums. Coming alongside the wall of an apartment block in a boat and putting up a ladder, he was climbing toward one of the first-floor windows. This was Vincent, Charlotte's uncle and a reporter for the Excelsior. Since the start of the flood he had been working his way up and down the streets of the capital in this fashion, seeking out the key news item of the day. The president's cold meals was one such. And it was from Vincent's boat that the mind-boggling photo was taken that we were contemplating. It was on a vellowed press cutting: three men in a precarious little craft crossing a vast expanse of water flanked by apartment blocks. A caption explained: "Messieurs the deputies, on their way to a session of the Assemblée Nationale."…

Vincent stepped over the windowsill and sprang into the arms of his sister, Albertine, and of Charlotte, who were taking refuge with him during their stay in Paris… Atlantis, silent until now, was filling up with sounds, emotions, words. Each evening our grand-mother's stories uncovered some new fragment of this universe engulfed by time.

And then there was the hidden treasure. The suitcase filled with old papers, the massive bulk of which, when we had ventured under the big bed in Charlotte's room, alarmed us. We tugged on the catches, we lifted the lid. What a mass of paper! Adult life, in all its tedium and all its disturbing seriousness, stopped our breath with its smell of dust and things shut away… How could we have guessed that it was in the midst of these old newspapers, these letters with inconceivable dates, that our grandmother would find us the photo of the three deputies in their boat?…

It was Vincent who had passed on to Charlotte the taste for such journalistic sketches and urged her to collect them by cutting these brief chronicles of the day out of the newspapers. After a time, he must have thought, they would be seen in quite a different light, like silver coins colored by the patina of centuries.

During one of those summer evenings filled with the scented breeze of the steppes, a remark from a passerby under our balcony jolted us out of our reverie.

"No, I promise you. They said it on the radio. He went out into space."

And another voice, dubious, answered, receding into the distance, "Do you take me for a fool or what? 'He went out…' But up there there's nowhere you can go out. It's like bailing out of a plane without a parachute…"

This exchange brought us back to reality. All about us there stretched the huge empire that took a particular pride in the exploration of the unfathomable sky above our head. The empire with its redoubtable army; with its atomic icebreakers disemboweling the North Pole; with its factories that would soon be producing more steel than all the countries of the world put together; with its cornfields that rippled from the Black Sea to the Pacific… with this endless steppe. And on our balcony a Frenchwoman was talking about a boat crossing a great flooded city and drawing alongside the wall of an apartment block… We shook ourselves, trying to understand where we were. Here? Back there? The whispering of the waves in our ears fell silent.

It was by no means the first time we had noticed this duality in our lives. To live alongside our grandmother was already to feel you were elsewhere. She would cross the courtyard without ever going to take her place on the babushkas' bench, that institution without which a Russian courtyard is unthinkable. This did not stop her greeting them very cordially, inquiring after the health of one she had not seen for several days, and doing them little kindnesses, for example, showing them how to remove the slightly acid taste from salted milky mushrooms. But in addressing her friendly remarks to them, she remained standing. And the old gossips of the courtyard accepted this difference. Everyone understood that Charlotte was not entirely a Russian babushka.

This did not mean that she lived cut off from the world or that she clung to any social prejudice. Early in the morning we were often roused from our childish sleep by a sonorous cry that rang out in the midst of the courtyard: "Come and get your milk!" Through our dreams we recognized the voice and, above all, the inimitable intonation of Avdotia, the milkwoman, arriving from the neighboring village. The housewives came down with their cans toward two enormous aluminum containers that this vigorous peasant woman, some fifty years of age, dragged from one house to another. One day, awakened by her shout, I did not go back to sleep… I heard our door close softly and muffled voices passing through into the dining room. A moment later one of them whispered with blissful abandon, "Oh, it's so cozy here, Shura! I feel as if I'm lying on a cloud." Intrigued by these words, I peeped behind the curtain that separated off our bedroom.

Avdotia was stretched out on the floor, her arms and legs flung out, her eyes half closed. From her bare, dust-covered feet right up to her hair spread out upon the ground, her whole body lolled in deep repose. An absentminded smile colored her half-open lips. "It's so cozy here, Shura!" she repeated softly, calling my grandmother by that diminutive that people generally used in place of her unusual Christian name.

I sensed the exhaustion of this great female body slumped in the middle of the dining room. I understood that Avdotia could only allow herself such a lack of constraint in my grandmother's apartment. For she was confident of not being snubbed or disapproved of… She would finish her grueling round, bent under the weight of the enormous churns. And when all the milk was gone she would go up to "Shura's," her legs numb, her arms heavy. The floor, uncarpeted and always clean and bare, still had a pleasant morning coolness. Avdotia would come in, greet my grandmother, take off her bulky shoes, and go and stretch out on the bare floor. "Shura" brought her a glass of water and sat beside her on a little stool. And they would chat softly until Avdotia had the courage to continue on her way…

That day I heard some of what my grandmother was saying to the milkwoman as she sprawled in blissful oblivion. The two of them were talking about the work in the fields, the buckwheat harvest… And I was amazed to hear Charlotte talking about this farm life with complete authority. But above all the Russian she spoke, very pure, very refined, did not jar at all with Avdotia's rich, rough, and vivid way of talking. Their conversation also touched on the war, an inevitable topic: the milkwoman's husband had been killed at the front. Harvest, buckwheat, Stalingrad… And that evening she would be talking to us about Paris in flood, or reading us some pages from Hector Malot! I sensed a distant past, obscure – a Russian past, this time – awakening from the depths of her life long ago.

Avdotia got up, embraced my grandmother, and continued on her way, which led her across endless fields, beneath the sun of the steppes, on a farm wagon submerged in the ocean of tall plants and flowers… This time, as she was leaving the room, I saw her great peasant's fingers touch, with tentative hesitation, the delicate statuette on the chest in our hall: a nymph with a rippling body entwined with sinuous stems, that figurine from the turn of the century, one of the rare fragments from bygone days that had been miraculously preserved…

Bizarre as it may seem, it was thanks to the local drunkard, Gavrilych, that we were able to gain insight into the meaning of that unusual "strange elsewhere" that our grandmother carried within her. He was a man whose very teetering silhouette, looming up from behind the poplar trees in the courtyard, inspired apprehension. A man who defied the militiamen when he held up the traffic in the main street with his capricious zigzag progress; a man who fulminated against the authorities; and whose thunderous oaths rattled windowpanes and swept the row of babushkas from their bench. Yet this same Gavrilych, when he met my grandmother, would stop, attempt to inhale the vodka fumes on his breath, and articulate with an accentuated respect, "Good day, Sharlota Norbertovna!"

Yes, he was the only person in the courtyard who called her by her French Christian name, albeit slightly Russified. What is more, he had got hold of Charlotte's father's name – no one knew any longer when, or how – and formed the exotic patronymic "Norbertovna," on his lips the pinnacle of courtesy and eagerness to please. His cloudy eyes lit up, his giant's body recovered a relative equilibrium, his head sketched a series of somewhat uncoordinated nods, and he forced his alcohol-soaked tongue to perform this act of verbal acrobatics: "Are you well, Sharlota Norbertovna?"

My grandmother returned his greeting and even exchanged some thoughtful remarks with Gavrilych. On these occasions the courtyard had a very singular appearance: the babushkas, driven away by the tempestuous appearance onstage of the drunkard, took refuge on the steps of the great wooden house that faced our apartment block; the children hid behind the trees; at the windows one could see half-curious, half-frightened faces. And down in the arena our grandmother held conversation with a tamed Gavrilych. Nor was he by any means a fool. He had long since understood that his role went beyond drunkenness and scandal. He felt that he was in some way indispensable to the psychic well-being of the courtyard. Gavrilych had become a character, a type, a curiosity – the spokesman for that unpredictable and capricious fate so dear to Russian hearts. And suddenly there was this Frenchwoman with the calm gaze of her gray eyes, elegant despite the simplicity of her dress, slim, and so different from the women of her generation, the babushkas, whom he had just driven from their perch.

One day, wanting to say something other than a simple "Good morning" to Charlotte, he gave a little cough into his great fist and rumbled, "So that's it, Sharlota Norbertovna, you're all alone here in our steppes…"

It was thanks to this clumsy remark that I found it possible to picture (as up until then I had never done) my grandmother without us, in winter, alone in her room.

In Moscow or Leningrad everything would have turned out otherwise. The motley humanity of the big city would have eclipsed what was different about Charlotte. But she had found herself in this little Saranza, ideal for living out endless days, each like the last. Her past life remained intensely present to her, as if lived only yesterday.

She was Saranza: transfixed at the edge of the steppes in profound astonishment before the boundlessness that opened at its gates. Winding, dusty streets that constantly climbed up hillsides; wooden fences beneath the greenery of gardens. Sun, sleepy vistas. And passersby who, appearing at the end of a street, seemed to be perpetually approaching without ever drawing level with you.

My grandmother's building was situated at the edge of the town in the "Western Glade" district: a coincidence (West Europe- France) that amused us greatly. According to the plan of an ambitious governor, this three-story apartment block, built in the second decade of the century, was intended to inaugurate a whole avenue bearing the imprint of the modern style. Yes, the building was a faint replica of the fashion of the turn of the century. It was as if all the sinuosities, twists, and curves of that architecture had flowed in a stream from its European source and, diluted and partly effaced, had reached the depths of Russia. And in the icy wind of the steppes this flow had become frozen into an apartment block with strange oval bull's-eye windows and ornamental rose stems around the doorways… The enlightened governor's scheme had foundered. The October Revolution put a stop to all these decadent tendencies of bourgeois art. And this building – a narrow segment of the dreamed-of avenue – had remained the only one of its kind. Indeed, after many repairs, it retained only a shadow of its original style. It was in particular the official campaign of struggle against "architectual excesses," which we had witnessed as young children, that had dealt it the death blow. All of it seemed "excessive": workmen had torn off the rose stems, condemned the bull's-eye windows… And, as there are always individuals who want to make a show of their zeal (it is thanks to them that campaigns really succeed), the downstairs neighbor had excelled himself in detaching the most flagrant architectural superfluity from the wall: the faces of two pretty bacchantes, who had exchanged melancholy smiles on each side of our grandmother's balcony To achieve this, he must have performed feats of great daring, standing up on his own windowsill with a long steel tool in his hand. The two faces, one after the other, had come unstuck from the wall and had fallen to the ground. One of them had shattered into a thousand fragments on the asphalt; the other, following a different trajectory, had hurtled into the dense vegetation of the dahlias, which had broken its fall. We had recovered it at dusk and carried it home. Henceforward, during our long summer evenings on the balcony this stone face, with its faded smile and its tender eyes, 'would gaze at us from among the pots of flowers and seem to listen to Charlotte's stories.

On the other side of the courtyard, overhung with the foliage of lime and poplar trees, stood a large two-story wooden house, quite black with age, with little dark, suspicious windows. It was this and its fellows that the governor had wanted to replace with the graceful lightness of the modern style. In this structure, two centuries old, lived the most picturesque of the babushkas, straight out of fairy tales with their thick shawls, their deathly pale faces, their bony, almost blue hands resting on their knees. When we had occasion to enter this dark dwelling, the bitter, heavy, but not totally unpleasant smell that hung in the cluttered corridors always caught in my throat. It was that of the old life, dark and very primitive in the way it welcomed death, birth, love, and grief. A kind of oppressive climate, but filled with a strange vitality, and in any case the only one that would have suited the inhabitants of this enormous izba. The breath of Russia…

Inside it we were astonished by the number and the asymmetry of the doors that opened onto rooms plunged in smoky shadow. I sensed, almost physically, the carnal density of the lives that intermingled here.

Gavrilych lived in the cellar, which three families shared with him. The narrow window of his room was located at ground level, and when spring came, it was obstructed by wild plants. The babushkas, sitting on their bench a few yards away, would cast anxious glances at it from time to time – it was not uncommon to see the broad face of the "scandalizer" between the stems at the open window. His head looked as if it were rising out of the earth. But at these moments of contemplation Gavrilych always remained calm. He would tip his face backwards, as if he wanted to glimpse the sky and the brilliance of the sunset in the branches of the poplar trees… One day, making our way right up to the loft of this great black izba, underneath its roof, warmed by the sun, we pushed open the heavy shutter of a skylight. On the horizon a terrifying fire was setting the steppe ablaze: the smoke was soon going to eclipse the sun…

When it came down to it, the revolution had achieved only one innovation in that quiet corner of Saranza. The church, which was situated at one end of the courtyard, had had its cupola removed. They had also taken out the iconostasis and installed in its place a great square of white silk – the screen made up of curtains commandeered from one of the bourgeois apartments in the "decadent" block. The Barricade cinema was ready to welcome its first audience…

Yes, our grandmother was a woman who could happily converse with Gavrilych, a woman who was opposed to all the campaigns and who had one day referred to our cinema, with a wink, as "that decapitated church." Then we had caught a glimpse of the soaring silhouette of a gilded onion and a cross, rising up above the squat edifice, whose past was unknown to us.

Far more than her clothes or her physique, it was these little touches that revealed to us that she was different. As for the French language, we basically regarded it as our family dialect. After all, every family has its little verbal whims, its tics of language, and its nicknames that never cross the threshold of the house – its private slang.

The image of our grandmother was woven from these anodyne peculiarities – eccentricities in the eyes of some people, excesses to others. That was up to the day when we discovered that a little pebble covered in rust could cause tears to glisten on her eyelashes and that French, our domestic patois, could – through the magic of its sounds – snatch from the dark and tumultuous waters a fantastical city that was slowly returning to life.

And from being a lady with obscure, non-Russian origins, Charlotte was transformed that evening into a messenger from an Atlantis, engulfed by time.

3

Neuilly-sur-Seine was composed of a dozen log cabins. Real izbas, with roofs covered in slender laths, silvered by the rigors of winter, with windows set in prettily carved wooden frames and hedges with washing hung out to dry on them. Young women carried full pails on yokes that spilled a few drops on the dust of the main street. Men loaded heavy sacks of corn onto a wagon. A slow herd streamed idly toward the cowshed. We heard the heavy sound of their bells and the hoarse crowing of a cock. The agreeable smell of a wood fire – the smell of supper almost ready – hung in the air.

For our grandmother had indeed said to us one day, when speaking of her birthplace, "Oh! At that time Neuilly was just a village…"

She had said it in French, but we only knew Russian villages. And a village in Russia is inevitably a ring of izbas; indeed the very word in Russian, derevnya, comes from derevo – a tree, wood. The confusion persisted, despite the clarifications that Charlotte's stories would later bring. At the name " Neuilly " we had immediate visions of the village with its wooden houses, its herd, and its cockerel. And when, the following summer, Charlotte spoke to us for the first time about a certain Marcel Proust – "By the way, we used to see him playing tennis at Neuilly, on the boulevard Bineau" – we pictured the dandy with big languorous eyes (she had shown us his photo) there among the izbas!

Beneath the fragile patina of our French words Russian reality often showed through. The president of the Republic was bound to have something Stalinesque about him in the portrait sketched by our imagination. Neuilly was peopled with kolkhozniks. And the slow emergence of Paris from the waters evoked a very Russian emotion – that of fleeting relief after one more historic cataclysm; the joy of having finished a war, of having survived murderous repressions. We wandered along its streets, which were still wet, covered with sand and mud. The inhabitants were piling furniture and clothes outside their doors to let them dry – as Russians do, after a winter they had been beginning to think would never end.

And then, when Paris was resplendent once more in the fresh spring air, whose scent we guessed intuitively, there was a fairy-tale train, drawn by a garlanded engine slowing down and coming to a halt at the gates of the city, before the pavilion at Ranelagh station.

A young man wearing a simple military tunic stepped down from the railway carriage, walking on the purple cloth spread at his feet. He was accompanied by a woman, also very young, in a white dress with a feather boa. An older man, in formal attire, with a magnificent mustache and a fine blue ribbon on his breast, emerged from an impressive gathering grouped under the portico of the pavilion and advanced toward the couple. The gentle breeze caressed the orchids and the amaranths that decorated the pillars and stirred the feather on the young woman's white velvet hat. The two men shook hands.

The master of Atlantis resurgent, President Félix Faure, was welcoming the tsar of all the Russias, Nicholas II, and his wife.

It was the imperial couple, escorted by the elite of the Republic, who were our guides through Paris… Several years later we learned the true chronology of this glorious visit. Nicholas and Alexandra had not come in the spring of 1910, after the flood, but in October 1896, that is to say well before the rebirth of our French Atlantis. But this real sequence hardly mattered. For us only the chronology of our grandmother's long stories counted: one day, in their legendary time, Paris arose from the waters; the sun shone, and at once we heard the still distant cry of the imperial train. This sequence of events seemed just as legitimate to us as the appearance of Proust among the peasants of Neuilly.

Charlotte's narrow balcony hovered in the aromatic breeze of the plain, at the outer limit of a sleeping town, cut off from the world by the eternal silence of the steppes. Each evening resembled an alchemist's legendary vessel, in which an astonishing transmutation of the past took place. To us the elements of this magic were no less mysterious than the components of the philosophers' stone. Charlotte unfolded an old newspaper, brought it close to her lamp with its turquoise shade, and proclaimed for us the menu for the banquet given in honor of the Russian sovereigns when they arrived at Cherbourg:

Soup

Bisque of shrimps

Cassolettes Pompadour

Loire trout braised in Sauternes

Fillet of salt lamb with cèpes

Vine quails à la Lucullus

Poulardes du Mans Cambacérès

Sorbets in Muscat de Lunel

Punch à la romaine

Roast bartavels and ortolans, garnished with truffles

Pâté de joie gras of Nancy

Salad

Asparagus spears with sauce mousseline

Ice cream "Success"

Dessert

How could we decipher these cabbalistic formulae? "Bartavels and ortolans!" "Vine quails à la Lucullus "! Our grandmother, under-standingly, tried to find equivalents, citing the very rudimentary produce that was still to be found in Saranza's shops. Enthralled, we savored these imaginary dishes, enhanced by the misty chill of the ocean (Cherbourg!), but already it was time to set off again in pursuit of the tsar.

Like him, entering the Elysée Palace, we were startled by the spectacle of all the black suits that fell motionless at his approach – just think, more than two hundred senators and three hundred deputies! (Who, according to our own chronology, had only a few days previously been traveling to their session by boat…) Our grandmother's voice, which was always calm and a little dreamy, became tinged at that moment with a slight dramatic tremor: "You see, two worlds found themselves face to face. (Look at this photo. It's a pity the newspaper has been folded for so long…) Yes, the tsar, an absolute monarch, and the representatives of the French people! The representatives of democracy…"

The profound import of the confrontation was lost on us. But we could now make out, among five hundred pairs of eyes focused on the tsar, those who, without outward hostility, held back from the general enthusiasm. And who felt free to do so just because of this mysterious "democracy." This casual attitude filled us with consternation. We inspected the ranks of the black suits to discover potential troublemakers. The president should have identified them and expelled them by pushing them off the steps of Elysée!

The following evening our grandmother's lamp was lit on the balcony once more. In her hands we saw some newspaper pages she had just extracted from the Siberian suitcase. She spoke. The balcony slowly detached itself from the wall and hovered, plunging into the scented shadows of the steppe.

… Nicholas was seated at the table of honor, which was trimmed with magnificent garlands of medeola. At one moment he was listening now to some gracious remark from Madame Faure, seated on his right, at the next to the velvety baritone of the president, speaking to the empress. The reflections from the glasses and the glittering array of silver dazzled the guests… At the dessert the president stood up, raised his glass, and declared, "The presence of Your Majesty among us, acclaimed by a whole people, has sealed the bonds that unite our two countries in harmonious endeavor and in a mutual confidence in their destinies. The union between a powerful empire and an industrious republic… Fortified by a proven fidelity… As a spokesman for the whole nation, offer to Your Majesty… For the greatness of his reign… For the happiness of Her Majesty, the Empress… I raise my glass in honor of His Majesty, the Emperor Nicholas, and Her Majesty, the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna."

The band of the Republican Guard struck up the Russian national anthem… And the grand gala at the Opéra that evening was an apotheosis.

Preceded by two torchbearers, the imperial couple ascended the staircase. They seemed to be moving past a living cascade: the white curves of the women's shoulders; the blossoming flowers on their corsages; the perfumed brilliance of the hairstyles; the glittering of jewels on bare flesh; all this against a background of uniforms and tails. The mighty cry "Long live the Emperor!" almost raised the majestic ceiling to the sky with its echoes, mingling it with the sky… When at the end of the performance the orchestra launched into the "Marseillaise," the tsar turned to the president and gave him his hand.

My grandmother switched off the lamp, and we spent several minutes in the dark, the time it took to let all the midges fly away that had been courting a luminous death beneath the shade. Little by little our eyes began to see again. The stars reformed their constellations. The Milky Way became phosphorescent. And in a corner of our balcony, among the intermingled stems of sweet peas, the fallen bacchante gave us her stone smile.

Charlotte paused in the doorway and sighed gently. "You know, it was a military march, in fact, nothing more, the 'Marseillaise.' A bit like the songs of the Russian revolution. At such times blood doesn't frighten anyone…"

She went back into the room, and it was from there that we heard these lines emerging, which she recited softly, like a strange litany from the past:

We waited for the echo of these words to melt into the darkness, and then with one voice we exclaimed to one another, "And Nicholas? The tsar? Did he know what the song was about?"

France-Atlantis was revealing itself as a whole gamut of sounds, colors, and smells. As we followed our guides, we were discovering the different elements that made up this mysterious French essence.

The Elysée Palace appeared in the glitter of chandeliers and the shimmering of mirrors. The Opéra dazzled us with the nakedness of women's shoulders and made us drunk with the perfume exhaled by the magnificent hairstyles. For us Notre-Dame was a sensation of cold stone under a stormy sky. Yes, we could almost touch the rough, porous walls – a gigantic rock, shaped over the centuries, it seemed to us, by ingenious erosion…

These perceptible facets outlined the still-uncertain contours of the French universe. This emerging continent was filling up with things and people. The empress knelt on a mysterious prie-dieu that did not suggest any known reality. "It's a kind of chair with its legs cut off," explained Charlotte, and the image of this mutilated piece of furniture left us dumbfounded. Like Nicholas, we repressed the desire to touch the purple cloak with its tarnished golds, which Napoleon had worn on the day of his coronation. We craved the sacrilegious contact. This universe in gestation still lacked substance. In the Sainte-Chapelle it was the rough grain of an old parchment that aroused the same desire – Charlotte taught us that these long handwritten letters had been penned a millennium ago by a French queen, a Russian woman furthermore, Anna Yaroslavna, wife of Henri I.

But what was most exciting was that Atlantis was being built before our very eyes. Nicholas grasped a golden trowel and spread mortar on a great block of granite – the first stone of the Pont Alexandre-Ill… And he held out the trowel to Félix Faure – "Your turn, Monsieur le Président!" - and the racing wind, which was whiffing up white horses on the waters of the Seine, carried away the words forcefully uttered by the minister of trade as he battled against the flapping of the flags: "Sire! It was France's wish to dedicate one of the great monuments of her capital to the memory of your august father. In the name of the government of the Republic I ask Your Imperial Majesty to graciously consecrate this homage by joining the President of the Republic in cementing the first stone of the Pont Alexandre-III, which will link Paris to the Exhibition of 1900 – and thus to extend to our inauguration of this great enterprise of civilization and peace the lofty approbation of Your Majesty and the gracious patronage of the Empress."

The president barely had time to give two symbolic taps to the granite block before an incredible incident occurred. A fellow who belonged neither to the imperial entourage nor to the party of French dignitaries rose up before the imperial couple, addressed the tsar with the familiar tu, and with an extraordinary urbane dexterity, kissed the tsarina's hand! Petrified by such cavalier behavior, we held our breath…

Little by little it became evident what was happening. The words of the intruder, overcoming the distance in time and gaps in our French, were clarified. Feverishly we caught their echo:

Illustrious Emperor, Alexander's heir, France welcomes thee, on this occasion fair. In tongue of gods she bids me greetings bring; Poets alone may thus address a King.

We uttered a "phew" of relief. The insolent braggart was none other than a poet, whose name Charlotte told us was José Maria de Heredia!

And you, Madame, who on this happy day Alone a peerless loveliness display, Let me, through you, bestow an accolade On grace divine, of which your own is made!

The cadence of the verses intoxicated us. To our ears the resonance of the rhymes celebrated extraordinary marriages between words that were far apart: "stream-dream," "gold-untold."… We sensed that only such verbal artifices could express the exotic nature of our French Atlantis:

And like thy sire, keep earth in balance still:

this line, which had initially passed almost unnoticed in the melodious flow of the verses, struck home. The French, a free people… Now we understood why the poet had dared to offer advice to the master of the most powerful empire on earth. And why to be loved by these free citizens was such an honor. On that evening, in the overheated air of the nocturnal steppes, this freedom seemed to us like a harsh and chilly gust from the wind that had made waves on the Seine, and it filled our lungs with a breeze that was heady and a little mad…

Later we would learn to put the ponderous bombast of this declamation into perspective. But at the time, despite its focus on the particular occasion, what we could already detect in his verses was a French jene sais quoi, which for the moment went without a name. French wit? French politeness? We could not yet say.

Meanwhile the poet turned toward the Seine and held out his hand, gesturing toward the dome of the Hôtel des Invalides on the opposite bank. His rhymed address was coming to a very painful point in the Franco-Russian past: Napoleon, Moscow in flames, the disastrous Berezina crossing… Anxiously, biting our lips, we awaited his voice at this passage so fraught with risk. The tsar's face went blank. Alexandra lowered her eyes. Would it not have been better to pass over it in silence, to pretend nothing had happened and go straight from Peter the Great to the current entente cordiale?

But Heredia seemed to set his sights even higher:

Bewildered, we kept asking ourselves this question: Why do we detest the Germans as much as we do – still recall the Teutonic aggression of seven centuries ago at the time of Alexander Nevski, as well as that of the last war? Why can we never forget the ravages of the Polish and Swedish invaders, ancient history from three and a half centuries ago? Not to mention the Tartars… So why hasn't the memory of the terrible catastrophe of 1812 tarnished the reputation of the French in Russian minds? Is it precisely because of the verbal elegance of that "jousting without rage"?

But the French je ne sais quoi was revealed, above all, as the presence of a woman. Alexandra was there, drawing unobtrusive attention to herself, hailed in every speech in a much less pompous but considerably more elegant manner than her husband. And even within the walls of the Académie Française, where the smell of old furniture and fat, dusty volumes stifled us, this je ne sais quoi allowed her to preserve her femininity. Yes, even among these old men, whom we imagined to be peevish, pedantic, and a little deaf, on account of the hairs in their ears. One of them, the director, rose and with a glum expression declared the session open. Then he fell silent, as if to gather up his thoughts, which, we were sure, would quickly make all his listeners aware of the hardness of their wooden seats. The smell of dust grew thicker. Suddenly the old man lifted his head; a sly twinkle came into his eye, and he spoke: "Sire, Madame! Almost two hundred years ago Peter the Great arrived one day unexpectedly at the place where the members of the Académie were gathered and joined in their deliberations… Your Majesty does even more today: you have added one honor to another by not coming alone." (He turned to the empress.) "Your presence, Madame, will bring to our solemn proceedings something quite unaccustomed… Charm."

Nicholas and Alexandra exchanged rapid glances. And the orator, as if he had sensed that it was time to turn to the main topic, amplified the vibrations in his voice as he asked himself in a highly rhetorical manner: "May I be permitted to say it? Your show of interest addresses not only the Académie but our national language itself… Which for you is not a foreign language. In this we sense a particular desire to enter into more intimate communication with French taste and the French spirit…"

"Our language"! Over the top of the pages that our grandmother was reading out to us, my sister and I looked at one another, struck by the same insight. "… Which for you is not a foreign language." So that was it, the key to our Atlantis! Language, that mysterious substance, invisible and omnipresent, whose sonorous essence reached into every corner of the universe we were in the process of exploring. This language that shaped men, molded objects, rippled in verse, bellowed in streets invaded by crowds, caused a young tsarina who had come from the other end of the world to smile… But above all throbbed within us, like a magical graft implanted in our hearts, already bringing forth leaves and flowers, bearing within it the fruit of a whole civilization. Yes, this implant, the French language.

And it was thanks to this twig blossoming within us that we gained access that evening to the box prepared to welcome the imperial couple at the Comédie Française. We unfolded the program: Un Caprice by Alfred de Musset; fragments from Le Cid; the third act of Les Femmes savantes. At that time we had not read any of those. It was a slight change of timbre in Charlotte s voice that enabled us to grasp the importance of these names for the inhabitants of Atlantis.

The curtain rose. The whole company was onstage in ceremonial roles. The leading player stepped forward, bowed, and spoke of a country that we did not immediately recognize:

Like a vast world, there is a country fair, Whose far horizons never terminate, Whose soul is rich and rare, Great in the past, in future yet more great.

Blond with her corn, white with the white of snow, Leaders and men, her sons walk firm and sure. Let fate smile on her so She harvests gold on virgin earth and pure.

For the first time in my life I was looking at my country from the outside, from a distance, as if I were no longer a part of it. Transported to a great European capital, I looked back to contemplate the immensity of the cornfields and the snow-covered plains by moonlight. I was seeing Russia in French! I was somewhere else. Outside my Russian life. To be thus torn asunder was so painful and at the same time so thrilling that I had to close my eyes. I was afraid of not being able to return to myself, of being stranded in that Parisian evening. Screwing up my eyes, I inhaled deeply. The warm wind of the nocturnal steppe suffused my being once more.

That day I decided to steal her magic from her. I wanted to be one step ahead of Charlotte, to make my way into the festive city before her, join the tsar's entourage without waiting for the hypnotic halo of the turquoise lampshade.

The day was dull, gray – a sad and colorless summer's day, one of those that, amazingly, stay in the memory. The breeze, which smelled of wet earth, billowed out the white net curtains on the open window. The fabric came to life, acquired density, then fell back again, letting someone invisible enter the room.

Happy in my solitude, I put my plan into execution. I pulled out the Siberian suitcase onto the rug near the bed. The catches emitted that light clicking that we awaited each evening. I threw back the great lid and bent over those old papers like a pirate over the treasure in a chest…

At the top I recognized certain photos; I saw the tsar and tsarina again in front of the Panthéon, then on the banks of the Seine. No, what I was looking for was located farther down, in that compact mass blackened with printer's type. Like an archaeologist, I lifted up one layer after another. Nicholas and Alexandra appeared in places unknown to me. One more layer, and I lost sight of them. Then I saw long battleships on a slack sea, airplanes with ridiculous short wings, soldiers in trenches. In my attempt to locate a trace of the imperial couple, I was now digging at random, mixing up all the cuttings. For a moment the tsar came into view on horseback, an icon in his hands, in front of a row of kneeling foot soldiers… His face seemed aged, somber. But I wanted him to be young again, accompanied by the beautiful Alexandra, cheered by the crowds, celebrated in fervent verses.

It was right at the bottom of the suitcase that I came upon a clue at last. The headline in large letters – "Glory to Russia!" – left no room for doubt. I smoothed out the paper on my knees, as Charlotte used to do, and began softly to mouth the lines:

It was only when I reached the chorus that I paused, seized by a doubt: "Glory to Russia "? But what had become of that land, "blond with her corn, white with the white of snow"? That "country fair" whose soul was "rich and rare"? And what were these slaves doing here, groaning their lives away? And who was the tyrant whose downfall was being celebrated?

In confusion, I went on to recite the chorus:

All hail, Russia, all hail to you! People and soldiers together stand! All hail to you, all hail to you, Who now redeem your Fatherland! All hail the Duma's newfound power, Its sovereign voice will soon have spoken, For happiness now comes the hour, With all your chains forever broken.

Suddenly some headlines caught my eye, poised above the lines of verse:

Nicholas II Abdicates: Russia's 1789. Russia Finds Freedom. Kerensky – The Russian Danton. Peter and Paul Fortress – Russia's Bastille – Taken by Storm. Collapse of Autocracy…

Most of these words meant nothing to me. But I grasped the essential. Nicholas was no longer the tsar, and the news of his downfall had inspired an ecstatic explosion of joy among the people who, only yesterday, were cheering him and wishing him a long and prosperous reign. Indeed I had a very clear memory of Heredia's voice, which still echoed round our balcony:

It was thy father forged a bond that tied Russia to France, in brotherly hope allied. Hear now great Tsar, how France and Russia bless Thine own name, with thy patron's name, no less!

Such a reversal seemed to me inconceivable. I could not credit so base a betrayal. Especially on the part of a president of the Republic!

The front door banged. Hastily I gathered up all the papers, closed the suitcase, and pushed it under the bed.

At dusk, because of the rain, Charlotte lit her lamp indoors. We took our places beside her exactly as we used to in our evenings on the balcony. I listened to her story: Nicholas and Alexandra were in their box at the theater, applauding Le Cid. … I observed their faces with a disillusioned sadness. I was the one who had glimpsed the future. This knowledge weighed heavily on my child's heart.

"Where is the truth?" I wondered, as I followed the narrative distractedly. (The imperial pair stand up, the audience turn to give them an ovation.) "These same spectators will soon be cursing them. And nothing will remain of these few fairy-tale days! Nothing…"

The ending, which I was condemned to know in advance, suddenly seemed to me so absurd and so unjust, especially at the height of the celebration, amid all the bright lights of the Comédie Française, that I burst into tears, pushed aside my little stool, and fled to the kitchen. I had never wept so uncontrollably. Furiously I shrugged off my sister's hands when she tried to comfort me… (I so resented her, she who still knew nothing!) Through my tears I cried out despairingly: "It's all a cheat! They're traitors! That liar with his mustaches… Some president! It's all lies…"

I do not know if Charlotte had guessed the reason for my distress (doubtless she had noticed the disarray caused by my rummaging in the Siberian suitcase: perhaps she had even come across the fateful page). In any event, touched by this unexpected outburst of weeping, she came and sat on my bed, listened to my fitful sighs for a moment, and then, finding my palm in the darkness, slipped a little rough pebble into it. I closed my fist round it. Just from the feel of it, without opening my eyes, I recognized the " Verdun " pebble. From now on it was mine.

4

At the end of the holidays we left our grandmother's. Now atlantis was blotted out by the mists of autumn and the first snowstorms – by our Russian life.

For the city we went home to had nothing in common with silent Saranza. This city stretched along both banks of the Volga and, with its million and a half inhabitants, its arms factories, its broad avenues with large apartment blocks in the Stalinist style, it was the incarnation of the power of the empire. A gigantic hydroelectric station downstream, a subway under construction, and an enormous river port proclaimed, for all to see, the very image of our fellow countryman – one who triumphed over the forces of nature, lived in the name of a radiant future, strove mightily for it, and cared little for the ridiculous relics of the past. Furthermore our city, because of its factories, was out of bounds to foreigners… Yes, it was a city where one could feel the pulse of the empire very strongly.

Once we had returned, this rhythm began to set the tempo for our own gestures and thoughts. We were drawn into the snowy breathing of our fatherland.

The French implant grafted in our hearts did not stop either my sister or myself from leading an existence similar to that of our comrades: Russian became our regular language once more, school shaped us in the mold of exemplary Soviet youngsters, paramilitary exercises accustomed us to the smell of powder; to the crack of practice grenades; to the idea of the western enemy we should one day have to fight.

The evenings on our grandmother's balcony were no more, it seemed to us, than a childish dream. And when during our history lessons the teacher spoke of "Nicholas II, known to the people as Nicholas the Bloody," we made no connection between this mythical executioner and the young monarch who had applauded Le Cid in Paris. Not at all; they were two different men.

One day, however, more or less by chance, this juxtaposition took place in my head: without being asked, I began to talk about Nicholas and Alexandra and their visit to Paris. My intervention was so unexpected and the biographical details so abundant that the teacher seemed taken aback. Snorts of amazement spread around the classroom: the rest of the class did not know whether to regard my speech as an act of provocation or as a simple fit of delirium. But already the teacher was regaining control of the situation; he rapped out, "It was the tsar who was responsible for the terrible catastrophe at Khodynka Field – thousands of people trampled to death. It was he who gave the order to open fire on the peaceful demonstration of January 9, 1905 – hundreds of victims. It was his regime that was guilty of the massacres on the River Lena – a hundred and two people killed! It was by no means a coincidence that Lenin picked his name. He even used his own pseudonym to excoriate the crimes of tsarism!"

But what affected me most was not the vehement tone of this diatribe. It was a disconcerting question that formulated itself in my head during the break, while the other pupils were assailing me with their mockery. ("Oh, look! He's wearing a crown, this tsar!" yelled one of them, pulling my hair.) The question was apparently quite simple: "Yes, I know he was a bloody tyrant; it says that in our history book. But if so, what is to be done about that brisk wind, smelling of the sea, that blew over the Seine? about the music of those verses that were carried away by that wind? about the scraping of the golden trowel on the granite? What is to be done about that day long ago? For I feel its atmosphere so strongly."

No, for me it was not a question of rehabilitating Nicholas II. I believed my history book and my teacher. But that far-off day; that wind, that sunny air? I was confused in these disordered reflections, part thoughts, part images. As I pushed away my laughing comrades, who were snatching at me and deafening me with their taunts, I suddenly felt terribly jealous of them: "How fortunate not to carry within oneself that day of great wind, that past so palpable and apparently so useless. Yes, to have only one view of life. Not to see as I see…"

This last thought seemed to me so strange that I stopped repelling my tormentors' attacks and turned toward the window, beyond which lay the snow-covered city. So I saw things differently! Was it an advantage? Or a handicap, a blemish? Perhaps this double vision could be explained by my two languages; thus, when I pronounced the Russian word "" a cruel tyrant rose up before me; while the word "tsar" in French was redolent of lights, of sounds, of wind, of glittering chandeliers, of the radiance of women's bare shoulders, of mingled perfumes, of the inimitable air of our Atlantis. I understood that this second view of things would have to be hidden, for it could only provoke mockery from others.

This secret meaning of words was subsequently revealed once more in a situation just as tragicomic as that of our history lesson.

I had joined an interminable queue that wound round outside the premises of a food shop, crossed the threshold, and then extended inside it. It was all, no doubt, for some foodstuff rare in winter – oranges, or perhaps simply apples, I no longer recall. I had already passed the most important psychological milestone of this wait, entering the door of the shop, outside which dozens of people were still squelching about in muddy snow. It was at that moment that my sister came to join me: as two people, we were entitled to a double quantity of the rationed goods.

We did not understand what suddenly provoked the anger of the crowd. The people standing behind us must have thought that my sister was trying to worm her way in without queuing – an unforgivable crime! Angry shouts erupted: the long snake contracted, threatening faces surrounded us. We both tried to explain that we were brother and sister. But the crowd never admits a mistake. Those who had not yet crossed the threshold – the shrillest – uttered indignant yells, without knowing exactly against whom. And as all mass actions exaggerate absurdly the impact of their efforts, it was me whom they now pushed out. The serpent quivered, the shoulders stiffened. One heave, and I found myself outside the queue, beside my sister, facing the serried row of hate-filled faces. I tried to return to my place, but the elbows formed a wall of shields. Distraught, with quivering lips, I met my sister's eyes. Unconsciously I sensed that we were particularly vulnerable, she and I. Two years older than me, she was not quite fifteen and did not have the presence of a young woman, while having lost the advantage of being a child, which might have touched this hard-boiled crowd. It was the same for me: at the age of twelve and a half I could not throw my weight about like young lads of fourteen or fifteen, strong in their irresponsible teenage aggression.

We slipped along the queue, hoping at least to be admitted some yards farther back from my lost place. But as we went past them the bodies closed ranks, and soon we found ourselves outside in the melted snow once more. Despite the cry of a saleswoman – "You there, beyond the door: you can give up waiting: there won't be enough for everyone!" – the people still came flocking.

We remained at the end of the queue, hypnotized by the anonymous power of the crowd. I was afraid to look up, or even to move. My hands, thrust into my pockets, were trembling. And when I suddenly heard my sister's voice, a few words tinged with a smiling melancholy, it was as if they came from another planet. "Do you remember? 'Roast bartavels and ortolans, garnished with truffles'?"

She laughed softly.

And as for me, as I looked at her pale face with the winter sky reflected in her eyes, I felt my lungs fill with an entirely new air – that of Cherbourg – with the smell of salt mist, of wet pebbles on the beach, and the echoing cries of seagulls over the endless ocean. For a moment I was struck blind. The queue was moving forward, slowly pushing me on toward the door. I allowed this to happen without letting go of the moment of illumination expanding within me.

Bartavels and ortolans… I smiled and gave my sister a discreet wink. It was not that we felt superior to the people squeezed together in the queue. We were like them, we may well have lived more modestly than many of them. We all belonged to the same class: that of people squelching about in trampled snow in the middle of a great industrial city outside the doors of a shop, hoping to fill their bags with two kilos of oranges.

And yet when I heard the magic words, learned from the banquet in Cherbourg, I felt different from them. Not because of my erudition (at the time I had no idea what these famous bartavels and ortolans looked like). It was simply that the moment held within me – with its misty lights and its marine smells – had put all that surrounded us into perspective: the city and its very Stalinist squareness, the anxious waiting, and the obtuse violence of the crowd. Instead of anger toward the people who had pushed me out I now felt a surprising compassion toward them: for by slightly screwing up their eyes, they could not gain access to that day with its fresh scents of seaweed, its cries of gulls, its veiled sun… I was seized by a terrible desire to tell everybody about it. But how to tell it? I would need to invent a language that did not yet exist. For the moment I only knew the first two words: bartavels and ortolans…

5

After the death of my great-grandfather Norbert, the white immensity of Siberia had slowly closed in on Albertine. True, she returned to Paris two or three times more, taking Charlotte with her. But the planet of the snows never relinquished its hold on the souls who had fallen under the spell of its uncharted spaces and its slumbering time.

Furthermore, the visits to Paris were marked by a bitterness that my grandmother's stories did not manage to conceal. Some family quarrel, the reasons for which we were not given to know. Or perhaps a very European coldness in the relationships between close family members, inconceivable to us Russians, with our exuberant collectivism. Or quite simply the understandable attitude of unpretentious people toward one of four sisters, the adventuress of the family who, far from returning with a fair dream of gold, each time brought back the anguish of a barbarous country and a broken life.

In any event, the fact that Albertine preferred to live at her brother's apartment and not in the family home in Neuilly did not go unnoticed, even by us.

Each time she returned to Russia, she felt more and more fated for Siberia – it was inevitable, a part of her own destiny. It was not only Norbert's grave that bound her to this land of ice, but also that somber Russian life experience, whose intoxicating poison she felt entering her veins.

From being a respectable doctor's wife, known in the entire town, Albertine had become transformed into a most strange widow – a Frenchwoman who seemed to find it hard to make up her mind to return to her country. Worse still, each time she came back again!

She was still too young and too beautiful to avoid the malicious gossip of Boyarsk society. Too unusual to be accepted as she was. And soon too poor.

Charlotte noticed that after each trip to Paris, they settled into smaller and smaller apartments. At the school where she had been admitted, thanks to a former patient of her father's, she quickly became "that Lemonnier." One day her teacher made her come to the blackboard – but not to test her… When Charlotte stood before her, the lady looked at the little girl's feet and, with a disdainful smile, asked, "What do you have on your feet, Mademoiselle Lemonnier?"

The thirty pupils rose from their seats, craning their necks and staring. On the well-polished parquet floor they saw two woolen coverings, two "shoes" that Charlotte had concocted herself. Crushed by all these stares, Charlotte lowered her head and involuntarily screwed up her toes inside the socks, as if she wanted to make her feet disappear…

At that time they lived in an old izba on the outskirts of the town. Charlotte was no longer surprised to see her mother almost always stretched out upon a high peasant bed behind a curtain. When Albertine got up, the black shadows of dreams seethed in her eyes, even though they were open. She no longer even tried to smile at her daughter. She dipped a copper ladle into a bucket, drank deeply, and went out. Charlotte already knew that they had been surviving for a long time thanks to the glitter of a few jewels in the case with the mother-of-pearl inlaid work…

She liked the izba, far from the fashionable districts of Boyarsk. Their poverty was less visible in these narrow, winding streets, buried under the snow. And it was so good, on returning from school, to climb up the old wooden steps that crunched under your feet; to pass through a dim entrance hall with walls made of great logs, which were covered in a thick coat of hoarfrost; and to push at the heavy door, which yielded with a brief, very lifelike groan. And there, in the room, one could remain for a moment without lighting the lamp, watching the little low window becoming suffused with the violet dusk, listening to snowy gusts of wind tinkling against the window-pane. Leaning back against the broad, hot flank of the big stove, Charlotte felt the heat slowly penetrating beneath her coat. She held her frozen hands to the warm stone – the stove seemed to her to be the enormous heart of this old izba. And beneath the soles of her felt boots the last lumps of ice were melting.

One day a splinter of ice broke beneath her feet unusually loudly. Charlotte was surprised – she had already been home a good half hour, all the snow on her coat and her shapka had long since melted and dried out. But this icicle… She bent down to pick it up. It was a splinter of glass! A very fine one, from a broken medical vial…

It was thus that the terrible word morphine entered her life. It explained the silence behind the curtain, the seething shadows in her mother's eyes, a Siberia absurd and inevitable as fate.

Albertine no longer had anything to hide from her daughter. From now on it was Charlotte who would be seen going into the pharmacy and murmuring timidly, "It's for Madame Lemonnier's medicine…"

She always returned home alone, crossing the vast wastelands that separated their cluster of houses from the last streets of the town, with its shops and lighting. Often a snowstorm would descend on these dead spaces. Tired of struggling against a wind laden with ice crystals, deafened by its whistling, one evening Charlotte stopped in the midst of this desert of snow, turning her back on the squalls, her gaze lost in the giddy flight of the snowflakes. She had an intense awareness of her own life, the warmth of her thin body concentrated into a minuscule "I." She felt the tickling of a drop that crept under the earflap of her shapka, and the beating of her heart, and next to her heart – the fragile presence of the vials she had just bought. "It's me," a muffled voice suddenly rang out inside her, "I, who am here in these snow squalls at the end of the world, in this Siberia, I, Charlotte Lemonnier; I, who have nothing in common with this ' barbarous place, not with this sky, nor with this frozen earth. Nor with these people. Here I am, all alone, taking morphine to my mother…" It seemed as if her mind were reeling before tipping over into an abyss, where all this absurdity, suddenly perceived, would become natural. She shook herself. No, this Siberian desert must end somewhere, and at that place there was a city, with broad avenues lined with chestnut trees, lighted cafés, her uncle's apartment, and all those books that began with such dear words utterly beloved simply for the way their letters looked. There was France…

The city with chestnut-lined avenues was transformed into a fine spangle of gold that glittered in her eyes, but nobody noticed. Charlotte could even glimpse its brilliance in the reflection of a beautiful brooch on the dress of a young lady with a capricious and haughty smile: she was sitting in a fine armchair in the middle of a large room with elegant furniture and silk cushions at the windows. "La raison du plus fort est toujours meilleure," recited the young woman in a pinched voice.

"…est toujours la meilleure," Charlotte corrected discreetly and, with lowered eyes, added, "It would be more correct to pronounce it 'meilleure' and not 'meillaire.' 'Meill-eu-eure.' "

She rounded her lips and made the sound last until it was lost in a velvety "r." The young orator, with a sullen expression, resumed her declamation. This was the daughter of the governor of Boyarsk. Charlotte gave her French lessons every Wednesday. She had initially hoped that she might become the friend of this very well groomed adolescent, hardly older than herself. Now, no longer hoping for anything, she endeavored simply to give a good lesson. Her pupil's swift, scornful glances did not find their mark anymore. Charlotte listened to her, intervening from time to time, but her gaze was lost in the glitter of the beautiful amber brooch. Only the governor's daughter was allowed to wear an open-collared dress at school, with this adornment at its center. Conscientiously, Charlotte pointed out all the mistakes of pronunciation or grammar. And from the gilded depths of the amber arose a city with beautiful autumn foliage. She knew that for a whole hour she would have to bear the little grimaces of this great, plump, beautifully dressed child, and then, in the corner of the kitchen, receive from the hands of a maid her parcel, the leftovers from a meal; then she must wait in the street for a good opportunity to find herself alone with the pharmacist and murmur, "Madame Lemonnier's medicine, please…" The little puff of warm air stolen at the pharmacy would quickly be driven from under her coat by the icy blast of the wastelands.

When Albertine appeared at the top of the steps the cabdriver raised his eyebrows and got up from his seat. He was not expecting this. The izba, with its sagging roof covered in moss; the worm-eaten flight of steps invaded by nettles. And especially not in this village, with its street buried under gray sand…

The door opened, and in its twisted frame there appeared a woman. She wore a long, extremely elegantly cut dress, such as the cabdriver had only seen on the fine ladies coming out of the theater in the evening right at the center of Boyarsk. Her hair was gathered up in a chignon; it was crowned with a large hat. The springlike wind fluttered the veil that was thrown back on the broad, gracefully turned-up brim.

"We are going to the station!" she cried, further astonishing the taxi driver still more with the vibrant and very foreign resonance of her voice.

"To the station," repeated the little girl, who had just now hailed him in the street. She, on the other hand, spoke very good Russian, with a slight Siberian accent…

Charlotte knew that Albertine's emergence at the top of the steps had been preceded by a long and painful battle, interrupted by several relapses – like the struggle of that man, battling in a black hole in the midst of the ice, which Charlotte had seen one day in spring, as she crossed the bridge. He clung to a long branch that was being pushed toward him and crawled up the slippery slope of the riverbank, sprawled flat on his stomach on the icy surface, progressing centimeter by centimeter, already stretching out his red hand, as he touched those of his rescuers. Suddenly, incomprehensively, his body shuddered, started to slip, and fell back once more into the black water. The current dragged him a little farther. Everything had to begin again… Yes, like that man.

But on that luminous and verdant summer's afternoon their actions were lightness itself. "What about the big suitcase?" cried Charlotte, when they were installed on the seats.

"We'll leave it. It only has old papers in it, and all those newspapers of your uncle's… We'll come back one day to collect it."

They crossed the bridge, passing beside the governor's house. The Siberian town seemed to unfold like a strange past, where it was possible to forgive with a smile…

Once they were settled in Paris again, it was with just such a lack of bitterness that they would look back on Boyarsk. And when that summer Albertine resolved to return to Russia (in order, as her family understood, to put a definitive end to the Siberian period of her life), Charlotte even showed a little jealousy toward her mother: she too would have liked to spend a couple of weeks in that town, now perceived as being inhabited by people from their past, where the houses, their izba among them, were turning into monuments to days gone by. A town where nothing could hurt her anymore.

"Maman, don't forget to look and see if there is still a nest of mice there. Beside the stove, remember?" she called to her mother as she stood at the lowered window of the railway carriage.

It was July 1914. Charlotte was eleven.

Her own life did not experience any interruption. It was simply that, as time went by, her last words ("Don't forget the mice!") seemed to her more and more stupid and childish. She ought to have kept silent and scrutinized the face at the carriage window, feasted her eyes on its features. Months, years, passed, and that last remark still carried the same resonance of a foolish happiness. Now the only time in Charlotte's life was waiting time.

That time ("in wartime," the newspapers wrote) was like a gray afternoon, a Sunday in the deserted streets of a provincial town: suddenly a gust of wind appears at the corner of a house, raising a whirlwind of dust; a shutter swings silently; a man melts easily into this colorless air, disappears without reason.

Thus it was that Charlotte's uncle disappeared – "fallen on the field of honor," "dead for France," according to the newspaper's formula. And this form of words made his absence all the more disconcerting – like the pencil sharpener on his desk, with a pencil inserted in the hole and several fine parings undisturbed since his departure. Thus it was that the house at Neuilly gradually emptied – women and men would bend down to kiss Charlotte and, with a very serious air, tell her to be a good girl.

That strange time had its capricious moments. All of a sudden, with the jerky rapidity of films, one of her aunts dressed herself in white and summoned her relatives, who gathered about her with all the speed of the cinema of that period. Then they headed off at a spanking pace to the church, where the aunt appeared beside a man with a mustache and sleek, oily hair. And almost at once – as Charlotte remembered it, they did not even have time to leave the church – the young bride was robed in black and unable to raise her eyes, which were weighed down with tears. The change was so rapid it seemed as if she had already been alone as she left the church, and dressed in full mourning, hiding her reddened eyes from the sun. The two days merged into one, colored by a radiant sky and enlivened by the church bells and the summer breeze, which seemed to accelerate the coming and going of the guests even more. And what the warm breeze pressed against the face of the young woman was a white bridal veil one moment and a widow's black veil the next.

Later this eerie time resumed its regular pace and was punctuated with sleepless nights and a long procession of mutilated bodies. The passing hours now echoed with the resonance of the big classrooms in the school at Neuilly, converted into a hospital. Her first knowledge of a man's body was the sight of male flesh, torn and bloody… And the nocturnal sky of those years would be forever overhung. with the pallid monstrosity of two German zeppelins among the luminous stalagmites of the searchlights.

Finally there came a day, on July 14, 1919, when countless columns of soldiers came marching through Neuilly, heading for the capital. Spick and span, with brave looks and well-polished army boots: war was resuming the guise of a parade. Was he among them, that warrior who was to slip a little brown pebble into Charlotte's hand, that shell splinter covered in rust? Were they lovers? Engaged? This encounter did not alter Charlotte's decision, made several years earlier. At the first opportunity that came along, a miraculous opportunity, she left for Russia. There was still no communication with that country ravaged by civil war. It was 1921. A Red Cross mission was preparing to travel to the Volga region, where famine had claimed hundreds of thousands of victims. Charlotte was taken on as a nurse. Her application had been quickly accepted: volunteers for the expedition were rare. But above all, she spoke Russian.

Once over there she believed that she had come to know hell. In the distance it looked like peaceful Russian villages – izbas, wells, hedges – swathed in the mists of the great river. Close to, it froze into shots taken by the mission photographer in those somber days: a group of male and female peasants in lambskin greatcoats, transfixed before a heap of human carcasses, dismembered bodies, unrecognizable fragments of flesh. Then this naked child in the snow with long, tangled hair, an old man's piercing stare, and the body of an insect. Finally, on an icy road – that head, alone, with open eyes, glassy Worst of all, these pictures did not remain fixed. The photographer folded up his tripod, and the peasants left, stopping outside the frame of the photo – that terrifying photo of the cannibals – and resumed the daily round of their lives with all its disconcerting simplicity. Yes, they continued living! A woman bent over the child and recognized him as her son. And she did not know what to do with this old-man-insect, she who for weeks had fed on human flesh. Then what could be heard arising from her throat was the howl of a wolf. No photo could capture that cry… A peasant looked into the eyes of the head thrown down onto the road and sighed. Then he leaned over and with a clumsy hand thrust it into a great homespun sack. "I'll bury it," he muttered. "After all, we're not Tartars…"

And you had to go into the izbas of this tranquil hell to discover that the old woman watching the street through the window was the mummified corpse of a girl who had died several weeks previously, seated at that window in the vain hope of rescue.

Once back in Moscow Charlotte left the mission. Walking out of the hotel, she plunged into the motley throng on the square and disappeared. At Sukharevka market, where barter was king, she exchanged a silver five-franc piece (the trader marked the coin with his molar, then made it ring on the blade of an ax) for two loaves of bread, which would provide for the first days of her journey. She was already dressed like a Russian, and at the station, in the violent and disorderly assault on the carriages, nobody paid any attention to this young woman hitching up her knapsack and fighting her way into the frenetic heavings of the human chaos.

She set off and she saw everything. She braved the country's endlessness, its fleeting space in which days and years are swallowed up. She went forward nonetheless, squelching through this stagnant time. By train, by farm cart, on foot…

She saw everything. Horses in harness, a whole herd of them, galloping riderless across a plain, stopping for a moment, then taking fright and resuming their mad race, both happy and fearful at their new-won liberty. One of these fugitives caught everyone's eye. A saber, deeply embedded in the saddle, stood erect upon its back. As the horse galloped, the long blade jammed into the thick leather swayed pliantly, glittering in the sinking sun. People kept their eyes fixed on the scarlet flashes, which gradually faded in the mist of the fields. They knew that this saber, its hilt filled with lead, must have cut a body in two – from shoulder to stomach – before becoming stuck in the leather. And the two halves had slipped off into the trampled grass, one each side.

She also saw dead horses being hauled out of wells. And new wells being dug in the thick, heavy earth. The timbers of the cage that the peasants lowered to the bottom of the pit smelled of fresh wood.

She saw a group of villagers, under the direction of a man in a black leather jacket, pulling on a thick rope wound round the cupola of a church, round the cross. The repeated cracking sounds seemed to fire their enthusiasm. And in another village, very early in the morning, she saw an old woman kneeling before the dome of a church cast down among the tombs of an unfenced cemetery, open to the fragile resonance of the fields.

She went through deserted villages where the orchards were glutted with overripe fruit, falling into the grass or withering on the bough. She stayed in a town where, one day at the market, a salesman mutilated a child who had tried to steal an apple from him. All the men she encountered seemed either to be rushing toward an unknown goal, mobbing trains, getting crushed on landing stages, or else waiting, one never knew for whom, before the closed doors of shops, at gates guarded by soldiers, and sometimes quite simply by the roadside.

The space she confronted knew no happy medium: incredible throngs of people would suddenly give way to a complete wilderness where the immensity of the sky and the depth of the forests made the presence of man unthinkable. Then without transition this emptiness would run into a ferocious jostling of peasants, slithering about on the muddy bank of a river, swollen by the autumn rains. That was something else Charlotte saw. Angry peasants with long poles pushing away a barge, from which arose an unceasing lament. On board could be seen silhouettes holding out their emaciated hands toward the shore. They were victims of typhus, abandoned, who had been drifting on their floating cemetery for several days. At each attempt to go ashore the bank dwellers mobilized to prevent them from doing so. The barge continued its funerary voyage; the people were dying from hunger now as well. Soon they would no longer have the strength to attempt a landing, and the last survivors, woken one day by the powerful and rhythmic sound of the waves, would behold the indifferent horizon of the Caspian Sea…

At the edge of a wood, one glittering frosty morning, she saw shadows hanging from the trees, saw the emaciated rictuses of hanged men nobody had any thought of burying. And very high up, in the sunlit blue of the sky, a flock of migratory birds was slowly melting away, accentuating the silence with the echo of their noisy cries.

The heavy and syncopated breathing of this Russian world no longer terrified her. She had learned so much since she began her journey. She knew that in a railway carriage or on a farm wagon it was practical to carry a bag stuffed with straw, with a few pebbles right at the bottom. This was what the bandits would snatch in their nocturnal raids. She knew that the best place on the roof of a railway carriage was the one near the ventilation hole: it was to this opening that ropes were attached, which enabled you to get down and climb up again quickly. And when by good fortune she found a place in a crowded corridor, she would not be surprised to see a frightened child being passed from hand to hand toward the exit by the people piled on the ground floor. The ones crouched near the door would open it and hold the child above the footboard while it did its business. This passing down the line seemed rather to amuse them: they smiled, touched by this little creature wordlessly allowing itself to be handled in this way, moved by its very natural urge in this inhuman universe… No surprise either when whispering was heard above the clatter of the rails in the night: they were communicating the death of a passenger, lost deep among this confusion of lives.

Only once in the course of this long journey, punctuated by suffering, blood, illness, mud, did she believe she had caught a glimpse of a modicum of serenity and wisdom. She had already reached the far side of the Urals. On the way out of a village half consumed by a fire she saw several men sitting on a bank scattered with dead leaves. Their pale faces, turned toward the mild late autumn sun, radiated a blissful calm. The peasant who was driving the cart jerked his head and explained softly, "Poor people, there are a dozen of them wandering round here now. Their asylum was burnt down. Oh, yes, madmen, you know."

Nothing could surprise her anymore, nothing.

Often, squeezed into the airless darkness of a railway carriage, she had a dream – brief, luminous, and completely improbable. For example, those enormous camels in falling snow, turning their disdainful heads toward a church as four soldiers emerged from the door, dragging behind them a priest who was admonishing them in a broken voice. The camels with snow-covered humps, the church, the gleeful crowd… As she slept, Charlotte recalled that time was when such humped silhouettes would be inseparable from palm trees in the desert, oases…

Then she emerged from her torpor: and it was not a dream! She was actually standing there in the midst of a noisy market in an unknown town. The heavy snow clung to her eyelashes. Passersby came up and felt the little silver medallion she was hoping to exchange for bread. The camels towered over the swarming traders, like strange drakkar ships mounted on stilts. And under the amused stares of the crowd the soldiers were pushing the priest along in a sledge stuffed with straw.

After that spurious dream the evening stroll she took was so ordinary, so real. She crossed a street with paving stones that shone by the misty light of a street lamp, pushed open the door of a baker's shop. Its warm, well-lit interior seemed familiar to her, right down to the color of the varnished wood of the counter and the arrangement of the cakes and chocolates in the window. The shopkeeper smiled kindly at her, as she would to a regular customer, and offered her a loaf. In the street Charlotte stopped, overcome with perplexity. She should have bought much more bread! Two, three, no, four loaves! She should have noted the name of the street where this excellent bakery was located. She approached the corner house and looked up. But the letters had an odd, hazy look: they merged into one another, twinkled. "Oh, how stupid I am!" she suddenly thought. "This is the street where my uncle lives…"

She woke with a start. The train, stopped in open countryside, was filled with a confused hubbub: a gang had killed the driver and was currently working its way through the train, confiscating everything it could lay its hands on. Charlotte took off her shawl and covered her head, knotting the corners under her chin as old peasant women do. Then, still smiling at the memory of her dream, she placed on her lap a bag stuffed with old rags wrapped round a stone…

And if she was spared during those two months of her journey, it was because the immense continent she was crossing was sated with blood. Death, for several years at least, was losing its attraction, becoming too banal and no longer worth the effort.

Charlotte walked through Boyarsk, the Siberian town of her childhood, without wondering if this was still a dream or reality. She felt too weak to think about it.

On the governor's house, above the entrance, hung a red flag. Two soldiers armed with guns were stamping their feet in the snow on either side of the door… Some of the windows in the theater had been broken and blocked, for want of anything better, with pieces of scenery as reinforcement. Here one could see foliage covered with white blossom, probably from The Cherry Orchard, there the facade of a dacha. And above the gateway two workmen were engaged in stretching a long strip of red calico. "Everyone to the People's Meeting of the Atheists' Society!" Charlotte read, slowing her pace a little. One of the workmen took out a nail he was holding between clenched teeth and drove it in with force beside the exclamation mark.

"There you are, you see; all finished before nightfall, thank God!" he called to his comrade.

Charlotte smiled and continued on her way. No, she was not dreaming.

A soldier, posted near the bridge, barred her way and asked her to show him her papers. Charlotte obliged him. He took them and, probably being unable to read, decided to withhold them from her. He seemed, moreover, quite surprised himself by his own decision. "You can recover them from the Revolutionary Council after the necessary verifications," he announced, visibly repeating somebody else's words. Charlotte did not have the strength to argue.

Here at Boyarsk, winter had taken hold some time ago. But that day the air was mild, the ice under the bridge covered with large damp patches. First sign of thaw. And great lazy snowflakes fluttered down in the white silence of the wastelands she had crossed so many times in her childhood.

With its two narrow windows, the izba seemed to observe her from afar. Yes, the house was watching her approach, its wrinkled facade lit up with an imperceptible little grimace, with a bitter joy of reunion.

Charlotte hoped for little from this visit. For a long time she had prepared herself to receive the news that would leave no hope: death, madness, disappearance. Or a pure and simple absence, inexplicable, natural, surprising no one. She forbade herself to hope and hoped all the same.

In the last days her exhaustion had been such that she thought only of the warmth of the great stove, against whose flank she would lean her back as she collapsed on the floor.

From the izba steps she caught sight of an old woman underneath a stunted apple tree, her head muffled in a black shawl. Bent over, the woman was pulling at a thick branch buried in the snow. Charlotte called to her, but the old peasant woman did not turn round. Her voice was too weak and was quickly dissipated in the heavy air of the thaw. She felt incapable of uttering another sound.

With a thrust of her shoulder she pushed the door. In the dark, cold hall she saw a whole store of wood – planks from boxes, floorboards, and even, in a little black-and-white heap, the keys of a piano. Charlotte remembered that it was above all the pianos in the apartments of the rich that provoked the anger of the people. She had seen one, smashed with blows of an ax, frozen into the ice floes on a river…

On entering the room, her first gesture was to touch the stones of the stove. They were warm. Charlotte felt a pleasantly giddy sensation. She was already about to let herself slip down beside the stove when she noticed an open book on the table made of broad timbers, browned with the years. A little ancient volume with rough paper. Leaning on a bench, she bent over the open pages. Strangely the letters began to dance, to melt – as they had done during that night on the train when she dreamed of the Parisian street where her uncle lived. This time the cause was not a dream, but tears. It was a French book.

The old woman in the black shawl came in and seemed not to be surprised to see this slim young woman rising from her bench.

The dry branches she carried under her arm trailed long filaments of snow on the floor. Her withered face resembled that of one of the old peasant women of that Siberian country. Her lips, covered in a fine network of wrinkles, trembled. And it was from this mouth, from the desiccated breast of this unrecognizable being, that the voice of Albertine rang out, a voice of which not a single note had altered.

"All these years I only dreaded one thing: that you might come back here!"

These were the very first words that Albertine addressed to her daughter. And Charlotte understood: what they had lived through since their good-byes on the station platform eight years before, a whole host of actions, faces, words, sufferings, privations, hopes, anxieties, cries, tears – all that buzz of life resounded against a single echo, which refused to die. This meeting, so desired, so feared.

"I wanted to ask someone to write to you and say I was dead. But there was the war, then the revolution. Then war again. And then…"

"I wouldn't have believed the letter…"

"Yes, I told myself that you wouldn't have believed it in any case…"

She threw down the branches near the stove and approached Charlotte. When she had looked at her through the lowered window of the railway carriage in Paris, her daughter was eleven. Now, soon she would be twenty.

"Do you hear?" whispered Albertine, her face lighting up, and she turned toward the stove. "The mice, you remember? They're still there…"

Later, squatting in front of the fire that was coming to life behind the little cast iron door, Albertine murmured, as if to herself, without looking at Charlotte, who was stretched out on the bench and appeared to be asleep: "That's how it is in this country. You can come in easily but you never get out…"

Hot water seemed like a whole new, unknown substance. Charlotte held out her hands toward the trickle that her mother poured slowly onto her shoulders and her back from a copper scoop. In the darkness of that room, which was lit only by the flame of a burning wood shaving, the warm drops looked like pine resin and tickled Charlotte's body deliciously as she rubbed herself with a lump of blue clay. Of soap they retained only a vague memory.

"You've become very thin," Albertine said softly, and her voice broke off.

Charlotte laughed gently. As she lifted her head of wet hair, she saw tears of the same amber color shining in her mother's lackluster eyes. During the days that followed Charlotte tried to find out how they could leave Siberia (superstitiously she dared not say, return to France). She went to the former house of the governor. The soldiers at the entrance smiled at her: a good sign? The secretary of the new ruler of Boyarsk made her wait in a little room – the same, thought Charlotte, where once she used to wait for the parcel of leftovers from lunch…

The ruler received her seated behind his heavy desk: as she came in his brows were furrowed, and he continued to draw energetic lines with a red pencil on the pages of a brochure. A whole stack of identical little pamphlets was piled on his table.

"Good day, citizen!" he said finally, holding out his hand to her.

They spoke. And with stunned incredulity Charlotte became aware that all the official's remarks seemed like a strange, deformed echo of the questions she put to him. She spoke of the French Aid Committee and heard, in echo, a brief speech about the imperialist designs of the West under the cover of bourgeois philanthropy. She referred to their desire to return to Moscow, and then… the echo interrupted her: foreign interventionist forces and internal class enemies were engaged in undermining reconstruction in the young Soviet republic…

After a quarter of an hour of such exchanges Charlotte longed to shout, "I want to leave! That's all!" But the absurd logic of this conversation would not loosen its grip.

"A train to Moscow…"

"The sabotage of bourgeois specialists on the railways…"

"The poor state of health of my mother…"

"The horrible economic and cultural inheritance of tsarism…"

Finally, exhausted, she whispered weakly, "Listen, please return my papers to me…"

The administrator's voice seemed to hit an obstacle. A rapid spasm crossed his face. He left his office without saying anything. Profiting from his absence, Charlotte glanced at the pile of brochures. The title plunged her into extreme perplexity: "Eradicating Sexual Laxity in Party Cells (recommendations)." So it was the recommendations that the administrator had been underlining in red pencil.

"We haven't found your papers," he said, coming in.

Charlotte pressed him. What happened then was as unbelievable as it was logical. The leader vomited forth such a torrent of oaths that even after two months spent on crowded trains, she was shattered by it. He continued to shout at her while she already had her hand on the door handle. Then, suddenly bringing his face close to hers, he hissed, "I could arrest you and shoot you right there in the courtyard behind the shithouse! D'you understand, filthy spy!"

On her return, walking through the snow-covered fields, Charlotte told herself that a new language was in the process of being born in this country. A language that she did not know, and that was why the dialogue in the former governor's office had seemed to her incredible. But everything had its meaning: even the revolutionary eloquence that suddenly slid into gutter language; even his "citizen-spy"; and even the pamphlet regulating the sexual lives of party members. Yes, a new order of things was being established. Everything in this world, albeit so familiar, was going to acquire a new name; they were going to apply a different label to each object, to each being.

"And what about this lazy snow," she thought, "the thaw with its sleepy flakes in the mauve evening sky?" She recalled that as a child she was always happy to find the snow again when she came out into the street after her lesson with the governor's daughter. "Like today…" she said to herself, taking a deep breath.

A few days later life became frozen. One clear night polar cold descended from the sky. The world was transformed into a crystal of ice, within which were encrusted the trees bristling with rime; the still, white columns above the chimneys; the silvery line of the taiga stretching to the horizon; and the sun surrounded by a halo of moiré. The human voice no longer carried; its vapor froze on the lips.

Now they thought only of survival from day to day, by keeping a tiny zone of warmth around their bodies.

It was above all the izba that saved them. Everything in it had been conceived to resist endless winters, bottomless nights. Even the wood of the great logs was imbued with the harsh experience of several generations of Siberians. Albertine had sensed the secret breathing of this ancient dwelling, had learned to live closely in tune with the slow warmth of the great stove that occupied half the room, with its very vital silence. And Charlotte, observing her mother's daily actions, often said to herself with a smile, "But she's a true Siberian!" From the first day she had noticed the bundles of dried plants in the hall. These reminded her of the bouquets that Russians use at the baths to beat themselves with. It was when the last slice of bread was eaten that she discovered the true function of those sheaves. Albertine soaked one in hot water, and that evening they drank what they were later, jokingly, to call "Siberian soup" – a mixture of stems, grains, and roots. "I am beginning to know the plants of the taiga by heart," said Albertine, pouring this soup into their plates. "Indeed I wonder why the people here make so little use of them…"

What saved them was also the presence of the child, the little tzigane whom they found one day, half frozen, on their doorstep. She was scratching the hardened planks of the door with her numb fingers, purple with cold… To feed her Charlotte did what she would never have done for herself. At the market she could be seen begging: an onion, a few frozen potatoes, a piece of pork. She rummaged in the rubbish tank next to the party canteen, not far from the place where the ruler had threatened to shoot her. She found herself unloading railway trucks for a loaf of bread. The child, skeletal to begin with, hovered for several days on the fragile borderline between light and extinction. Then slowly, with a hesitant astonishment, slipped once more into the extraordinary flow of days, words, and smells that everyone called life…

In March, on a day filled with sun and the crunching of snow under the feet of passersby, a woman (her mother? her sister?) came looking for her and, without any explanation, took her away. Charlotte caught up with them on the way out of the village and held out to the child the big doll with flaking cheeks with which the little tzigane had played during the long winter evenings… This doll had originally come from Paris and remained, along with the old newspapers in the "Siberian suitcase," one of the last relics of their former life.

The real famine, Albertine knew, would come in the spring… There was not a single bunch of plants left on the walls of the entrance hall, the market was deserted. In May they fled their izba, without really knowing where to go. They walked along a path still heavy with springtime humidity and bent down from time to time to pick fine shoots of sorrel.

It was a kulak who accepted them as day laborers on his farm. He was a strong, lean Siberian with his face half hidden by a beard, through which a few rare words emerged, terse and absolute.

"I'll not pay you anything," he said, making no bones about it. "Bed and board. If I take you on, it's not for your pretty faces. I need hands."

They had no choice. During the first days, on returning, Charlotte would collapse flat out on her pallet, her hands covered with burst blisters. Albertine, who sewed sacks for the coming harvest all day, looked after her as best she could. One evening Charlotte's tiredness was such that, when she met the owner of the farm, she started speaking to him in French. The peasant's beard was stirred with a profound movement, his eyes widened – he was smiling.

"Right, tomorrow you can rest. If your mother wants to go into the town, go ahead…" He took several steps, then turned: "The young people in the village dance every evening, you know. Go and see them if you like…"

As agreed, the peasant paid them nothing. In the autumn, when they were preparing to go back to the town, he showed them a cart with a load covered in a newly homespun cloth.

"He'll drive you," he said, glancing at the old peasant perched on the driver's seat.

Albertine and Charlotte thanked him and hauled themselves up on the edge of the cart, which was laden with crates, sacks, and packages.

"Are you sending all this to market?" asked Charlotte, to fill the awkward silence of these last few minutes.

"No. That's what you've earned."

They had no time to reply. The driver tugged on the reins, the cart pitched and began to move off in the hot dust of the farm track… Beneath the cover Charlotte and her mother discovered three sacks of potatoes, two sacks of corn, a keg of honey, four enormous pumpkins, and several crates of vegetables, beans, and apples. In one corner they caught sight of half a dozen hens with their legs tied; and a cock in their midst, flashing belligerent and angry glances.

"I'm going to dry some bunches of herbs all the same," said Albertine, when she finally succeeded in tearing her eyes from all this treasure. "You never know…"

She died two years later. It was an August evening, calm and transparent. Charlotte was returning from the library, where she had been employed to sort through the mountains of books collected from demolished aristocratic homes… Her mother was seated on a little bench fixed to the wall of the izba, her head leaning against the smooth wood of the logs. Her eyes were closed. She must have dozed off and died in her sleep. A light breeze coming from the taiga stirred the pages of the book open on her knees. It was the same little French volume with gilt edges.

They were married in the spring of the following year. He came from a village on the White Sea coast, ten thousand leagues from this Siberian town the civil war had brought him to. Charlotte noticed very quickly that his pride in being a "people's judge" was mingled with a vague unease, whose origin he himself could not have explained at the time. At the wedding supper one of the guests proposed that the death of Lenin be commemorated by one minute's silence. Everyone stood up… Three months after the marriage he was posted to the other end of the empire, to Bukhara. Charlotte was absolutely set on taking the great suitcase filled with old French newspapers. Her husband had nothing against this, but on the train, ill concealing his obstinate unease, he gave her to understand that a frontier more impenetrable than any known mountain range you cared to mention would arise now between her French life and their life. He tried to find the words to express what would soon seem so natural: the iron curtain.

6

CAMELS in a snowstorm; frosts that froze the sap in the trees and caused their trunks to burst; Charlotte's numb hands catching huge logs thrown down from the top of a railway truck…

It was thus in our smoke-filled kitchen, during the long winter evenings, that this legendary past was reborn. Outside the snow-covered window there stretched one of the greatest cities in Russia as well as the gray plain of the Volga; out there arose the fortress-buildings of Stalinist architecture. And inside, amid the chaos of an interminable meal and the iridescent tobacco clouds, the shade of this mysterious Frenchwoman, lost beneath the Siberian sky, made its appearance. The television was pouring out the news of the day, transmitting the sessions of the latest Party congress, but this background noise did not make the slightest impact on the conversations of our guests.

Squatting in a corner of this crowded kitchen, with my shoulder against the shelves on which the television was enthroned, I listened to them avidly while trying to make myself invisible. I knew that soon the face of an adult would loom up through the blue fog, and I should hear a cry of simulated indignation: "Hey, just look at him, the little sleepwalker! It's past midnight and he's still not in bed. Go on, off you go! Stir your stumps! We'll send for you when you've grown a beard…"

Banished from the kitchen, I found it hard to get to sleep right away, fascinated by the question that kept returning to my young mind: "Why are they so keen on talking about Charlotte?"

At first I thought I understood why this Frenchwoman was an ideal topic of conversation for my parents and their guests. For it only took memories of the last war to be mentioned for an argument to break out. My father, who had spent four years at the front in the infantry, attributed the victory to those troops mired in the earth who, in his phrase, had irrigated this earth with their blood, from Stalingrad to Berlin. His brother, without wishing to upset him, would then observe that, "as everyone knows," the artillery was the ruling goddess of modern war. The debate would become heated. Little by little the artillerymen would find themselves being labeled "funks," and the infantry, on account of the mud on the roads in war, became the "infectionary" It would be at this moment that their best friend, an ex-fighter pilot, would intervene with his own arguments, and the conversation would plunge into an extremely perilous nosedive. And that was before they went into the respective merits of the fronts they had been on, all three different; let alone the role of Stalin during the war…

This arguing, I sensed, pained them greatly. For they knew that, whatever their own part in the victory had been, the die was cast: their own generation, decimated, massacred, would soon disappear, along with the foot soldier, the gunner, and the pilot. And my mother would precede even them, in accordance with the fate of children born at the beginning of the twenties. At fifteen I would be left alone with my sister. It was as if in their arguments there was an unspoken foreknowledge of this immediate future… Charlotte's life, I believed, reconciled them, offering a neutral territory.

But as I grew older I began to detect quite a different reason for this French predilection in their interminable discussions. It was that Charlotte's advent under the Russian sky was like that of an extraterrestrial being. The cruel history of this immense empire, of its famines, its revolutions, its civil war, was nothing to do with her… We Russians had no choice. But she? Through her eyes they could observe a country they did not recognize, because judged by a foreigner, sometimes naive, often more perspicacious than themselves. Charlotte's eyes reflected a disturbing world where unforced truth abounded – an unfamiliar Russia that they needed to discover.

I listened to them, and I too discovered Charlotte's Russian destiny, but in my own way. Certain details, hardly mentioned, became magnified in my mind and created a whole secret universe. Other events, to which the adults attached considerable importance, passed unnoticed.

Thus, strangely, the horrible images of cannibalism in the villages of the Volga affected me very little. I had just read Robinson Crusoe, and Man Friday's fellow countrymen with their joyful rites of anthropophagy had inoculated me, through fiction, against real atrocities.

And the feature of Charlotte's rural past that made the greatest impression on me was not the hard labor at the farm. What I remembered above all was her visit to the young people of the village. She had gone to see them that very evening and had found them engaged in a metaphysical discussion: the topic was what kind of death would befall someone who dared to go to the cemetery on the dot of midnight. Charlotte had smiled and said she was capable of confronting all supernatural powers among the tombs that night. Distractions were few and far between. The young people, secretly hoping for some macabre outcome, had saluted her courage with tumultuous enthusiasm. They only needed to find an object that this harebrained Frenchwoman could leave on one of the tombs in the village cemetery. And it was not easy. For everything that had been proposed could be replaced by a duplicate: scarf, stone, coin… Yes, the wily foreigner could very well go there at dawn and hang up this shawl while everyone else slept. No, a unique object had to be chosen… Next morning what an entire delegation had found, hanging from a cross in the shadiest corner of the cemetery, was "the little Pont-Neuf bag."

It was in picturing this woman's handbag amid the crosses, under the Siberian sky, that I began to have a feeling for the incredible destiny of things. They traveled; beneath their commonplace exterior they logged the different periods of our lives, linking moments that were very far apart.

As for the marriage of my grandmother to the people's judge, doubtless I did not notice all the historical piquancies that the adults could detect in this. Charlotte's love, my grandfather's courtship of her, the couple they made, so unusual in that Siberian country – of all that I grasped only a fragment. Fyodor, his tunic well pressed, his boots gleaming, makes his way toward the place for their crucial rendezvous. A few paces behind him his clerk, the young son of a priest, conscious of the gravity of the moment, walks slowly, carrying an enormous bunch of roses. A people's judge, even when in love, must not look like a mere operatic suitor. Charlotte sees them from afar, understands at once the scene that has been prepared, and with a mischievous smile accepts the bouquet that Fyodor takes from the hands of the clerk. The latter, intimidated but curious, backs away.

Or perhaps this fragment as well: the one and only wedding photo (all the others, those in which my grandfather appeared, would be confiscated at the time of his arrest): their two faces, slightly inclined toward one another, and on the lips of an incredibly young and beautiful Charlotte the smiling reflection of the "petite pomme"…

Furthermore, in those long nocturnal narratives, all was not always clear to my childish ears. That sudden rush of blood to the head of Charlotte's father, for example… One day this respectable and wealthy doctor learns from one of his patients, a senior official in the police, that the big demonstration by workers, which at any minute was about to spill onto the main square at Boyarsk, would be met at one of the crossroads with machine-gun fire. As soon as his patient has left, Dr. Lemonnier removes his white coat and, without summoning his driver, leaps into his carriage and hurtles through the streets to warn the workers.

The massacre did not take place… And I often wondered why this "bourgeois," this privileged man, had acted thus. We were accustomed to seeing the world in black and white: the rich and the poor, the exploiters and the exploited – in a word, the class enemies and the just. Charlotte's father's action confused me. Out of the mass of humanity, so conveniently divided into two, suddenly arose a man, with his unpredictable liberty.

Nor did I understand what had happened at Bukhara. I guessed only that it was a terrible occurrence. It was surely not by chance that the adults only hinted at it, shaking their heads eloquently. It was a kind of taboo, which their narrative skirted around by describing the setting in the following way. First I saw a river flowing over smooth pebbles, then a path running beside the endless desert. And the sun began to dance in Charlotte's eyes, and her cheek was inflamed with the burning of the sand, and the heavens resounded with a neighing… The scene, the sense of which I did not understand but whose physical density I entered, was blotted out. The adults sighed, changed the subject, and poured themselves another glass of vodka.

In the end I sensed that this event, which had occurred in the sands of Central Asia, had marked our family's history forever in a mysterious and very intimate fashion. I also noticed that it was never spoken of when Charlotte's son, my uncle Sergei, was among the guests…

The truth is that if I spied on these nocturnal confidences it was, above all, to explore my grandmother's French past. The Russian side of her life interested me less. I was like that investigator who, in examining a meteorite, is primarily attracted by the little gleaming crystals embedded in its basalt surface. And just as one dreams of a distant journey whose goal is yet unknown, so I dreamed of Charlotte's balcony, of her Atlantis, where I believed I had left a part of myself the previous summer.