Dreams Of My Russian Summers

11

That autumn there were only a few days between the time when, ashamed to admit it to myself, I was rejoicing at my mother's absence – she had gone into hospital, "just for tests" she told us – and the afternoon when, coming out of school, I learned of her death.

The day after she left for the hospital an agreeable lack of constraint became established in our apartment. My father stayed in front of the television till one o'clock in the morning. And I, savoring this prelude to adult freedom, sought to delay my return to the house each day a little longer: nine o'clock, half past nine, then ten o'clock…

I spent these evenings at a crossroads that, in the autumn dusk and with a slight effort of the imagination, created a surprising illusion: that of a rainy evening in a metropolis in the West. It was a unique spot amidst the monotonous broad avenues of our city. The streets that met here branched out like the radii of a circle, leaving the front of each apartment block truncated in the form of a trapezium. I had learned that Napoleon ordered this configuration where streets met in Paris to avoid collisions between carriages…

The denser the darkness, the more complete my illusion became. Knowing that one of these buildings housed the local museum of atheism and the walls of others concealed overcrowded communal apartments – all this hardly troubled me at all. I contemplated the yellow and blue watercolor sketch of windows in the rain, the reflections of the street lamps on the oily asphalt, the silhouettes of the bare trees. I was alone, free. I was happy. Whispering, I talked to myself in French. In front of these trapezium-shaped facades the sound of that language seemed to me very natural. Would the magic I had discovered that summer materialize in some encounter? Each woman who came toward me seemed to want to talk to me. Each extra half hour of night that I gained gave my French mirage more substance. I no longer belonged either to my time or to my country. On this little nocturnal circus I felt wonderfully foreign to myself.

Now the sun wearied me, daytime became a useless waiting period before my true life, the evening…

However, it was in broad daylight, blinded by the glitter of the first hoarfrost, that I learned the news. As I walked past the cheerful crowd of pupils, who still displayed the same disdainful hostility toward me, a voice rang out.

"Have you heard? His mother's dead."

I intercepted several inquisitive glances. I recognized the one who had spoken – the son of one of our neighbors…

It was the lack of concern in the remark that gave me time to grasp the inconceivable situation: my mother was dead. All the events of the past days suddenly fitted together into a coherent picture: my father's frequent absences, his silence, the arrival, two days before, of my sister (although it was not the university vacation time, I now realized)…

It was Charlotte who opened the door to me. She had arrived from Saranza that very morning. So they all knew! While I was "the child we won't say anything to at the moment." And this child, unaware of everything, had continued to pace up and down at his "French" crossroads, imagining himself to be adult, free, mysterious. This sobering thought was the first my mother's death gave rise to. This then gave way to shame: while my mother was dying, I, in selfish contentment, had been reveling in my freedom, recreating the Parisian autumn under the windows of the museum of atheism!

During these sad days and on the day of the funeral Charlotte was the only one who did not weep. Her face impassive, her eyes calm, she saw to all the household tasks, greeted visitors, settled in relatives who came from other towns. Her dry manner displeased people…

"You can come to me whenever you want," she said to me in parting. I nodded my head, picturing Saranza again, the balcony, the suitcase stuffed with old French newspapers. Again I felt ashamed: while we were telling each other stories, life had continued with its real joys and its real sorrows. My mother had gone on working, already ill, suffering without admitting it to anyone, knowing herself to be doomed but never betraying it by word or gesture. And all the while we had spent days on end talking about the elegant ladies of the belle epoque…

It was with concealed relief that I saw Charlotte leave. I felt myself to be covertly implicated in my mother's death. Yes, I bore the vague responsibility for it that a spectator feels when his gaze causes a tightrope walker to stumble or even to fall. It was Charlotte who had taught me to pick out Parisian silhouettes in the midst of a great industrial city on the Volga; it was she who had imprisoned me in this fantasy of the past, from whence I cast absentminded glances at real life.

Real life was the layer of stagnant water that, with a shudder, I had caught sight of at the bottom of the grave on the day of the burial. Under a fine autumn rain, they lowered the coffin slowly into the mixture of water and mud…

Real life also made itself felt with the arrival of my aunt, my father's elder sister. She lived in a workers' district where the population got up at five o'clock in the morning and streamed in to the gates of the gigantic factories in the city. This woman brought with her a ponderous and powerful breath of Russian life – a strange amalgam of cruelty, compassion, drunkenness, anarchy, invincible joie de vivre, tears, willing slavery, stupid obstinacy, and unexpected delicacy… With growing astonishment, I discovered a universe previously eclipsed by Charlotte's France.

My aunt was concerned that my father would take to drinking, a fatal move for the men she had known in her life. Each time she came to see us she repeated, "Whatever you do, Nikolai, keep off the bitter stuff!" That is to say, vodka. He would agree mechanically, without hearing her, then shaking his head energetically, he would declaim: "But it's me who should have died first. That's for sure. With this, you know…"

And he would touch his bald head with his palm. I knew that above his left ear he had a "hole" – a place covered only with fine, smooth skin that pulsated rhythmically. My mother had always been afraid that if involved in a brawl, my father might be killed by a simple flick of the finger…

He did not start drinking. But in February, the time of the last winter frosts, the harshest of all, he collapsed in a snowy alleyway one evening, felled by a heart attack. The militiamen who later found him stretched out in the snow thought he was a drunkard and took him to the sobering-up station. Only the following morning would the error be discovered…

Once again real life, with its arrogant power, came to challenge my fantasies. A single sound sufficed: they had transported his body in a van covered with cloth, which was as cold inside as outside; as the body was placed on the table, there was a thud like a block of ice hitting wood…

I could not lie to myself. Amid a great turmoil of exposed thoughts and unflinching admissions – in my soul – the disappearance of my parents had not left incurable scars. Yes, I admitted during these secret tête-à-têtes with myself, my suffering was not inordinate.

And if on occasion I wept, I was not really mourning their loss. Mine were tears of helplessness at the realization of a stupefying truth: a whole generation of dead, of wounded, of those whose youth had been stolen from them. Tens of millions of human beings whose lives had been blotted out. Those who had fallen on the field of battle at least had the privilege of a heroic death. But those who came back, and who disappeared ten or twenty years after the war, appeared to die quite "normally," of "old age." You had to come very close to my father to see the slightly concave mark above his ear where the blood throbbed. You had to know my mother very well to discern in her that child transfixed in front of the dark window on that first morning of war under a sky with strange rumbling stars. To see in her as well that pale skeletal adolescent, choking as she wolfed down potato peelings…

I viewed their lives through a mist of tears. I saw my father, on a warm June evening, coming home after demobilization to his native village. He recognized everything: the forest, the river, the curve in the road. And then there was that unknown place, that black street made up of two rows of izbas, all burned to a cinder. And not a living soul. Only the merry notes of a cuckoo, keeping time with the burning throbbing of the blood above his ear.

I saw my mother, a student who had just passed her university entrance exams, this petrified young girl standing frozen to attention before a wall of disdainful faces – a Party commission assembled to judge her "crime." She had known that Charlotte's nationality, yes, her "Frenchness," was a terrible blemish during that period of the struggle against "cosmopolitanism." Filling in the questionnaire form before the examination she had written, with a trembling hand, "Mother – of Russian nationality"…

And they had met, these two human beings, so different, yet so alike in their mangled youth. And we were born, my sister and I, and life had continued, despite the wars, the burned villages, the camps.

Yes, if I wept, it was for their silent resignation. They bore no grudge against anyone, demanded no reparations. They lived and tried to make us happy. My father had passed his whole life shuttling back and forth across the endless spaces between the Volga and the Urals, erecting high-tension cables with his team. My mother, expelled from university following her crime, had never had the courage to renew the attempt. She had become a translator in one of the great factories in our city, as if this technical and impersonal French exonerated her from her criminal Frenchness.

I viewed these two lives – at the same time banal and extraordinary – and felt a confused rage mounting within me, against whom, I did not really know. Yes, I did know: against Charlotte! Against the serenity of her French universe. Against the useless refinement of that imaginary past: what madness to be thinking about three creatures featured on a press cutting from the turn of the century or to try to recreate the states of mind of a president in love! While forgetting about the soldier who was saved by the winter itself when he packed his fractured skull in a shell of ice, thus staunching the blood. While forgetting that if I was alive it was thanks to that train that had slowly edged its way past the carriages filled with crushed human flesh, a train that carried Charlotte and her children away to refuge in the protective depths of Russia… That propaganda catchphrase – "Twenty million people died so that you might live!" – had always left me indifferent. Suddenly this patriotic refrain acquired a new and grievous meaning for me. And a very personal one.

Russia, like a bear after a long winter, was awakening within me. A pitiless, beautiful, absurd, unique Russia. A Russia pitted against the rest of the world by its somber destiny.

Yes, if I had occasion to weep at the death of my parents, it was because I felt Russian. And the French graft in my heart began, at times, to give me great pain.

My father's sister, my aunt, had also unwittingly contributed to this turnabout…

She moved into our apartment with her two sons, my young cousins, happy to leave her crowded communal apartment in the workers' district. Far from seeking to impose some other way of life on us and to eradicate the traces of our previous existence, she simply lived as she could. And the eccentricity of our family – its very discreet Frenchness, as remote from France as my mother's technical translations – faded away of its own accord.

My aunt was a true product of the Stalinist era. Stalin had been dead for twenty years, but she had not changed. It was not that she had any great love for the Generalissimo. Her first husband had been killed in the murderous shambles of the first days of the war. My aunt knew where the guilt for this catastrophic start lay, and she would tell anyone who was prepared to listen. The father of her two children, whom she had never married, had spent eight years in a camp. "Because of his wagging tongue," she would say.

No, her "Stalinism" lay chiefly in her manner of speaking, of dressing, of looking other people in the eye as if we had always been in the thick of war, as if the radio were still capable of announcing in solemn and funereal tones, "After heroic and bitter resistance, our armies have yielded the city of Kiev… have yielded the city of Smolensk… have yielded the city of…," with everyone's faces frozen as they followed the inexorable advance on Moscow… She still lived as she did in the years when neighbors would exchange silent glances, indicating a house with a movement of the eyebrows – after a whole family had been taken away in the night in a black car…

She wore a great brown shawl and an old coat of coarse cloth; in winter, felt boots; in summer, walking shoes with thick soles. I would not have been at all surprised to have seen her donning a military tunic and putting on a soldier's boots. And when she put the cups on the table, her big hands looked as if they were handling shell cases on the conveyor belt of an armaments factory, as they had done during the war…

Sometimes the father of her children, whom I called by his patronymic, Dmitrich, came to see us, and then our kitchen rang with his raucous voice, which sounded as if it was gradually getting warmed up after several years of winter. Neither my aunt nor he had anything more to lose, and they were afraid of nothing. They talked about everything with an aggressive and desperate forthrightness. He drank a lot, but his eyes remained clear: his jaws simply clamped more and more tightly together, as if better from time to time to spit out the occasional fierce oath from the camps. It was he who made me drink my first glass of vodka. And it was thanks to him that I was able to picture the invisible Russia – a continent encircled by barbed wire and watchtowers. In this forbidden country the simplest words took on a fearful significance, burned the throat like the "bitter stuff" that I drank from a thick glass tumbler.

One day he talked about a little lake in the midst of the taiga, frozen eleven months of the year. At the behest of the camp commander its bed was turned into a cemetery: it was easier than digging into the permafrost. The prisoners died by the score…

"We went there one day in autumn: we had ten or fifteen to dump in the drink. And then I saw them, all the others, the last lot. Naked; we made a bit from their gear. Yeah, butt-naked, under the ice, not rotted at all. I tell you, it was like a hunk of kholodets!"

So kholodets, that meat in aspic, of which there was a plateful on our table at that moment, became a terrible word – ice, flesh, and death congealed into one trenchant sound.

What caused me most pain during the course of their nocturnal confessions was the indestructible love for Russia that these revelations inspired in me. My intellect, struggling with the bite of the vodka, rebelled: "This country is monstrous! Evil, torture, suffering, self-mutilation, are the favorite pastimes of its inhabitants. And still I love it? I love it for its absurdity. For its monstrosities. I see in it a higher meaning that no logical reasoning can penetrate…"

This love was a continual heartbreak. The blacker the Russia I was discovering turned out to be, the more violent my attachment became. As if to love it, one had to tear out one's eyes, plug one's ears, stop oneself thinking.

One evening I heard my aunt and her lover talking about Beria…

In the old days, from our guests' conversations, I had learned what this terrible name concealed. They uttered it with scorn, but not without a note of awe. Being too young, I could not understand the disturbing zone of darkness in this tyrant's life. I grasped only that some human weakness was involved. They referred to it in hushed tones, and that was generally when they noticed my presence and banished me from the kitchen…

These days there were three of us in our kitchen. Three adults. Certainly my aunt and Dmitrich had nothing to hide from me. They talked; and through the blue fog of tobacco, through the drunkenness, I pictured a great black car with smoked glass windows. Despite its imposing size, it had the look of a curb-crawling taxi. It traveled with a furtive slowness, almost stopping, then moving off rapidly, as if to catch up with someone. Intrigued, I observed its comings and goings along the streets of Moscow. Suddenly I guessed the purpose of them: the black car was following women. Beautiful young ones. It studied them from its opaque windows, advanced in time with their footsteps. Then it let them go. Or sometimes, finally making up its mind, dived up a side street after them…

Dmitrich had no reason to spare me. He recounted everything without mincing his words. On the backseat of the car sprawled a rotund figure, bald, with a pince-nez buried in a fat face. Beria. He selected the passing woman's body that aroused his desire, then, his henchmen arrested the woman. Those were the days when not even a pretext was needed. Carried off to his residence, the woman was raped, having been broken with the aid of alcohol, threats, torture…

Dmitrich did not say – he did not know himself- what happened to these women afterward. Nobody ever saw them again.

I spent several sleepless nights, staring into space. I was thinking about Beria and those condemned women with only one night to live. My brain was on fire. I felt an acid, metallic taste in my mouth. I pictured myself as the father, or the fiance, or the husband of that young woman pursued by the black car. Yes, for several seconds, for as long as I could bear it, I inhabited the skin of this man, was in his anguish, in his tears, in-his useless, powerless anger, in his resignation. For everyone knew how these women disappeared! I felt a knot in my stomach, a horrible spasm of grief. I opened the hinged win-dowpane, I scooped up the layer of snow that clung to its edge, I rubbed my face with it. This provided temporary relief. Now I saw a fat man, lurking behind the smoked glass of the car, silhouettes of women reflected in the lenses of his pince-nez. He picked them, felt them, appraised their attractions…

And I hated myself! For I could not help admiring this stalker of women. Yes, within me there was someone who – with dread, with repulsion, with shame – reveled in the power of the man with the pince-nez. All women belonged to him! He cruised around the vast-ness of Moscow as if in the middle of a harem. And what fascinated me most was his indifference. He had no need to be loved, he did not care what the women he chose might feel toward him. He selected a woman, desired her, possessed her the same day. Then forgot her. And all the cries, lamentations, sobs, groans, supplications, and curses that he had occasion to hear were for him only spices that added to the savor of the rape.

I lost consciousness at the start of my fourth sleepless night. Just before fainting I felt I had grasped the fevered thought of one of those raped women, who must have realized that whatever happened she would not be allowed to leave. This thought, which cut through her enforced intoxication, her pain, her disgust, resounded in my head and threw me to the ground.

When I came to, I felt different. Calmer, stronger. Like a patient after an operation, I progressed slowly from one word to the next. I needed to put everything in order again. In the darkness I murmured short sentences that took stock of my new state: "So, within me there is someone who can contemplate these rapes. While I order it to be silent, it is still there. Beria has taught me that everything is allowed. Russia knows no limits, neither in goodness nor in evil. Especially not in evil. And here I was, fascinated by this hunter of women's bodies. And hating myself for it. I felt one with this brutalized woman, crushed by the weight of sweaty flesh, guessing her last clear thought: the thought of the death that will follow this hideous coupling. I longed to die at the same time as her. How could I go on living while carrying within myself this other me that admires Beria…"

Yes, I was Russian. Now I understood, in a still confused fashion, what that meant. Carrying within one's soul all those human beings disfigured by grief, those burned villages, those lakes filled with naked corpses. Knowing the resignation of a human herd violated by a despot. And the horror of feeling oneself participating in this crime. And the wild desire to reenact all these stories from the past – so as to eradicate from them the suffering, injustice, and death. Yes, to catch the black car in the streets of Moscow and destroy it beneath one's giant palm. Then, while holding one's breath, to watch the young woman pushing open the door of her house, going up the stairs… Remaking history. Purifying the world. Hunting down evil. Giving all these people refuge in one's heart, so as to be able to release them one day into a world liberated from evil. But meanwhile sharing the sorrow that oppresses them. Detesting oneself for every lapse. Pushing this commitment to the point of delirium, to the point of fainting. Living very mundanely on the edge of the abyss. Yes, that's what Russia is.

Thus it was that in my juvenile confusion, I latched onto my new identity. I was Russian. It became life itself for me, and one, I believed, that would erase forever my French illusion.

But this life quickly revealed its chief characteristic (which daily routine prevents us from seeing) – its total improbability.

Formerly I had lived in books. I moved from one character to another, following the logic of an amorous intrigue or of a war. But one March evening, so warm that my aunt had opened our kitchen window, I learned that in this life there was no logic, no coherence. And that perhaps only death was predictable.

That evening I learned about what my parents had always hidden from me. That murky episode in central Asia: Charlotte, the armed men, the jostling, the shouting. I had only a hazy and childish memory of their accounts from the old days. The adults' words had been so obscure!

This time their clarity blinded me. In a very matter-of-fact voice, while emptying the steaming potatoes into a dish, my aunt remarked, addressing our guest, who was sitting beside Dmitrich, "Of course down there they don't live like us. Imagine, they pray to their god five times a day! And what's more, they eat without a table. Yes, all on the ground. Well, on a carpet. And without spoons; with their fingers!"

The guest, mainly to make conversation, argued back in reasonable tones, "We-ell, 'not like us' is pitching it a bit high. I was in Tashkent last summer. You know, it's not so different from here…"

"And their desert – have you been there?" (She raised her voice, happy to have hit upon a good talking point, so that the supper promised to be lively and convivial.) "Yes, in the desert? His grandmother, for example" – my aunt motioned with her chin in my direction – "that Sherl… Shourl.,. anyway that Frenchwoman, her. It was no joke what happened to her down there. Those basmachi, those bandits who wouldn't have anything to do with the Soviets, they caught her on the road; she was still very young, and they raped her, just like wild animals! All of them, one after the other. There were maybe six or seven. And you say, 'They're just like us.'… Then they shot her in the head with a bullet. The murderer missed his aim, thank goodness. And the farmer who was carrying her in his cart, they slit his throat like a sheep. And you say, 'It's just like here.' "

"Hang on. You're talking about ancient history," interrupted Dmitrich.

And they continued arguing, while drinking vodka and eating. Outside the open window you could hear the tranquil sounds of our courtyard. The evening air was blue, soft. They went on talking without noticing that frozen to my chair, I was holding my breath, seeing nothing, failing to understand the sense of anything else they said. Finally I stepped out of the kitchen like a sleepwalker. I went out into the street and walked through the melting snow, more alien to that clear spring evening than a Martian.

It was not that I was terrified by the episode in the desert. Told in that matter-of-fact way, it could never, I sensed, shake off that layer of words and everyday gestures. Its sharp edge would remain blunted by the fat fingers seizing a gherkin; by the bobbing up and down of the Adam's apple in our guest's neck as he swallowed his vodka; by the merry squeals of the children in the courtyard. It was like that human arm I had seen one day on a motorway beside two cars rammed into one another. A torn-off arm that someone had wrapped in a piece of newspaper while waiting for the arrival of the ambulances. The printer's typeface, and the photos stuck to the bloody flesh, made it almost neutral…

No, what had really shattered me was the improbability of life. The previous week I was learning the mystery of Beria, his harem of raped and murdered women. And now it was the rape of that young Frenchwoman, whom I could never, it seemed to me, recognize as Charlotte.

It was too much all at once. The gratuitous, absurdly obvious coincidence confused my thoughts. I told myself that in a novel, after that appalling tale of women abducted in the heart of Moscow, the reader would have been left to recover his spirits over long pages. He could have prepared himself for the appearance of a hero who would bring the tyrant down. But life did not bother about the coherence of subject matter. It spilled out its contents in disorder, pell-mell. In its clumsiness it spoiled the purity of our compassion and compromised our just anger. Life, in fact, was an endless rough draft, in which events, badly organized, encroached on one another, in which the characters were too numerous and prevented one another from speaking, suffering, being loved or hated individually.

I was struggling between these two tragic stories. Beria and the young women whose lives ended with their rapist's last gasp of pleasure; and Charlotte, young, unrecognizable, hurled down onto the sand, beaten, tortured. I felt myself overcome by a strange numbness. I was disillusioned, and I reproached myself for this obtuse indifference.

That night all my earlier musings on the reassuring incoherence of life seemed to me false. In a half-waking reverie I again saw the arm wrapped in a newspaper… No. It was a hundred times more alarming in that banal package! Reality, with all its implausibility, by far exceeded fiction. I shook my head to drive away the vision of the little blisters in the newspaper stuck to the bloody skin. Suddenly without any interference, clear, sharply etched in the translucent desert air, another vision became fixed in my eyes. That of a young woman's body stretched out on the sand. A body already inert, despite the unbridled convulsions of the men who hurled themselves savagely upon it. The ceiling turned green as I stared at it. The pain was so great that within my breast I felt the burning shape of my heart. The pillow beneath my neck was as hard and rough as the sand…

I began to slap myself, at first holding back the blows, then without pity. I struck myself until my swollen face, wet with tears, disgusted me with its sticky surface. Until that other one, which lurked within me, fell totally silent. Then, stumbling over the pillow I had knocked down in my agitation, I approached the window. The cold air calmed my puffed-up face.

"I am Russian," I said softly, all of a sudden.

12

It was thanks to that body, young and with a still innocent sensuality, that I was cured. Yes, one day in April I felt I was finally liberated from the most painful winter of my youth, from its sorrows, from the deaths, and from the burden of the revelations it had brought.

But the most important thing was that my French implant no longer seemed to exist. As if I had succeeded in stifling that second heart within my breast. The last day of its death throes coincided with the April afternoon that for me was to mark the start of a life without specters…

I saw her from behind, standing under the trees at a table made of thick, unplaned pine planks. An instructor was watching her movements and from time to time threw a glance at the stopwatch he was clutching in his palm.

She must have been the same age as me, fifteen, this young girl, whose body, impregnated with sun, had dazzled me. She was busy dismantling an automatic rifle and then reassembling it as quickly as possible. These were the paramilitary competitions that several of the city schools took part in. We stepped up to the table in turn, awaited the signal from the instructor, and hurled ourselves at the Kalash-nikov, stripping its weighty bulk. The dismantled pieces were spread out on the planks and a moment later, in a droll reverse sequence of movements, reassembled. Some of us dropped the black spring on the ground, others confused the order of assembly… As for her, I thought at first that she was dancing up and down in front of the table. Wearing a tunic and a khaki skirt, a forage cap perched on her russet curls, she made her body undulate in time with her drill. She must have practiced a great deal to be able to handle the slippery bulk of the gun with such dexterity.

I gazed at her, dumbfounded. Everything in her was so simple and so alive. Her hips, responding to the actions of her arms, swayed gently. Her full golden legs quivered. She took pleasure in her own agility, which even allowed her superfluous movements – like the rhythmic arching of her pretty, muscular buttocks. Yes, she was dancing. And even without seeing her face, I guessed she was smiling.

I fell in love with this young russet-haired stranger. It was of course a very physical desire, a carnal wonderment at the contrast between her still childishly fragile waist and her already womanly torso… I performed my own dismantling-assembly routine with all my limbs in a state of numbness. I took more than three minutes, and thus ended up near the bottom of the class… But beyond the desire to embrace this body, to feel its smooth, bronzed surface beneath my fingers, I experienced a new and nameless happiness.

There was this table with thick planks placed at the edge of a wood. The sun and the smell of the last of the snow taking refuge in the shadows of the thickets. Everything was blessedly simple. And luminous. Like this body, with its still insouciant femininity. Like my desire. Like the commands of the instructor. No shadow of the past troubled the clarity of this moment. I breathed, felt desire, carried out orders mechanically. And with unspeakable joy I felt the clot of my painful and confused winter reflections dissolving in my mind… The young russet-haired girl swayed her hips gently before the automatic rifle. The sun lit up the contours of her body through the fine fabric of her tunic. Her fiery locks curled up over the cap. And it was as if from the depths of a well, in a dull and melancholy echo, those grotesque names rang out: Marguerite Steinheil, Isabeau de Bavière… I found it hard to believe that my life had once been made up of these dusty relics. I had lived without sunlight, without desire – in the twilight of books. In search of a phantom country, a mirage of a France of yesteryear, peopled with ghosts…

The instructor uttered a cry of delight and showed his stopwatch to everybody: "One minute fifteen seconds!" It was the best time. The redhead turned round, radiant. She took off her cap and shook her head. Her hair caught fire in the sunlight, her freckles flashed like sparks. I closed my eyes.

And the next day, for the first time in my life, I was discovering the very singular sensual pleasure of squeezing a firearm, a Kalashnikov, and feeling its nervous shuddering against my shoulder. And seeing in the distance a plywood figure target riddled with holes. Yes, its insistent quivering and its male power were for me of a profoundly sensual nature.

Furthermore, from the first burst of fire my head was filled with a buzzing silence. The person on my left had fired first, deafening me. The incessant clatter in my ears, the iridescent flurries of sunlight in my eyelashes, the wild smell of the earth beneath my body – I was at the peak of happiness.

For at last I was coming back to life. Living in the happy simplicity of orderly actions: shooting, marching in file, eating millet kasha from aluminum mess tins. Letting oneself be carried along in a collective movement directed by others, by those who knew the supreme objective, who generously relieved us of all the burden of responsibility, making us light, transparent, clear. The objective was simple and unequivocal too: to defend the fatherland. I could not wait to lose myself in this monumental goal, to dissolve into the marvelously irresponsible mass of my comrades. I hurled practice grenades; I shot; I pitched a tent. Happy. Blissful. Healthy. And that adolescent in an old house at the edge of the steppe, who had spent entire days meditating on the life and death of three women seen in a pile of old newspapers, seemed increasingly unreal. If I had been introduced to this dreamer I would doubtless not have recognized him. I would not have recognized myself…

The next day the instructor took us to watch the arrival of a column of tanks. What we made out first was a gray cloud growing larger on the horizon. Then a mighty vibration spread through the soles of our shoes. The earth shook. And the cloud, turning yellow, rose as high as the sun and eclipsed it. All sounds disappeared, shrouded by the metallic din of the caterpillar tracks. The first gun thrust through the wall of dust, the commander's tank loomed, then the second, the third… And, before stopping, the tanks described a tight arc, so as to line up side by side. Then their tracks clattered even more furiously, tearing up the grass in long slices.

Hypnotized by the power of the empire, I had a sudden vision of the terrestrial globe and how these tanks – our tanks! – could strip it entirely bare. A brief command would have sufficed. I took a pride in this, such as I had never felt before…

And the soldiers who emerged from the turrets fascinated me with their serene virility. They were all alike, carved from the same firm and healthy material. I guessed that they would have been invulnerable to the morbid thoughts that had tortured me during the winter. No, all that mental sludge would not have remained for a single second in the clear stream of their thinking, simple and direct, like the orders they executed. I was terribly jealous of their life. It was exposed there, under the sun, without a spot of shadow. Their strength, the male smell of their bodies, their tunics covered in dust. And the presence, somewhere, of the young russet-haired girl, of that adolescent-woman, of that amorous promise. I had only one wish now: to be able one day to emerge from the narrow turret of a tank, leap down onto its tracks, then onto the soft earth, and to walk with pleasantly weary steps toward the promise of a woman.

This life, actually a very Soviet life on whose margins I had always lived, now exalted me. To blend into its easygoing and collec-tivist routine suddenly seemed to me like a brilliant solution. To live the life of everybody else! To drive a tank; then, when demobilized, to pour molten steel amid the machines in a great factory beside the Volga; to go to the stadium every Saturday to watch a football match. But above all to know that this succession of days, tranquil and predictable, was crowned by a grand messianic project – the communism that, one day, would make us all perpetually happy, clear as crystal in our thoughts, strictly equal…

It was then that, almost grazing the forest treetops, the fighter aircraft hurtled over our heads. Flying in groups of three, they caused the exploded sky to fall in about our ears. They surged past, wave after wave, ripping the air, their decibels cutting into my brain.

Later, in the silence of evening, I spent a long time gazing at the empty plain, with the dark streaks of torn-up grass here and there. I said to myself that once upon a time there had been a child who had imagined a fabulous city arising above that misty horizon… That child was no more. I was cured.

After that memorable April day the mini-society at school accepted me. They welcomed me with that condescending magnanimity that people have toward neophytes, the born-again, or enthusiastic penitents. That is what I was. At every opportunity I was eager to show them that my singularity had been put behind me for good. That I was like them. And furthermore, ready for anything in order to expiate my eccentricity.

The mini-society itself had also changed, meanwhile. Imitating the world of adults more and more closely, it had divided itself into several tribes. Yes, almost into social classes. I could distinguish three. They already foreshadowed the future of these adolescents, yesterday still united in a homogeneous little pack. There was now a group of "proletarians." The most numerous, they came for the most part from the workers' families, who provided manual labor for the workshops of the enormous river port. There was in addition a core of students who were good at mathematics, future tekhnars who, having previously been lumped together with the proletarians and dominated by them, increasingly stood out from them, as they occupied the scholastic front ranks. Finally, the most exclusive and the most elitist, as well as the most restrained, that coterie in which one could detect the budding intelligentsia.

In each of these classes I became one of them. My intermediate presence was appreciated by them all. There was even a time when I believed myself irreplaceable. Thanks to… France.

For, cured of France, I now dined out on her. I was happy to be able to pass on my whole stock of anecdotes, accumulated over the years, to those who had now accepted me among them. My stories found favor. Battles in the catacombs; frogs' legs paid for in gold; entire streets in Paris devoted to the sale of love – these subjects earned me the reputation of an established storyteller.

I talked, and I felt my recovery to be complete. The bouts of that madness that had earlier plunged me into the vertiginous sensation of the past did not recur. France became simply a source of stories – entertaining and exotic in the eyes of my fellow pupils, arousing when I described love à la française, but overall little different from the funny and often smutty stories that we told one another during the breaks, as we puffed on our hasty cigarettes.

I noticed fairly quickly that it was necessary to season my French stories according to the tastes of my listeners. The same story would change in tone according to whether I was telling it to the "proletarians," the "tekhnars," or the "intellectuals." Proud of my talent as a raconteur, I varied genres, adapted my style, chose my words. Thus, to please the first group, I dwelled at length on the torrid frolics of the president and Marguerite. A man, and what's more a president of the Republic, who died from too much lovemaking – this picture alone had them in ecstasy. The tekhnars, on the other hand, were more interested in the twists and turns of psychological intrigue. They wanted to know what happened to Marguerite after her erotic masterstroke. So I talked about the mysterious double murder in the impasse Ronsin; about that terrible May morning when Marguerite's husband was discovered, garrotted with the aid of a curtain cord; and likewise her mother-in-law, also choked, but on her own false teeth… Nor did I fail to point out that her husband, a painter by profession, had been overwhelmed with official commissions, while his wife had never forgone friendships in high places. According to one version, it was one of the late Félix Faure's successors, evidently a minister, who had been surprised by her husband…

As for the intellectuals, the subject seemed to leave my new friends cold. Some of them even yawned from time to time, to show their lack of interest. They only abandoned this assumed indifference when they found a pretext to make a play on words. The name of French President "Faure" quickly fell victim to a pun: in Russian, giving foru means giving odds to a rival. The laughter, knowingly blasé, erupted. I realized that the language spoken in this narrow circle was made up almost exclusively of twisted words, punning riddles, camp remarks, and turns of phrase known only to its members. With a mixture of admiration and anguish, it became clear to me that their language had no need of the world about us, the sun, the wind. And I was soon contriving to imitate these word jugglers with ease…

The only person who did not appreciate my turnabout was Pashka, the dunce, whose fishing expeditions I once used to share in. From time to time he would approach our group and listen to us, and when I embarked on telling my French stories he would stare at me with a suspicious air.

One day the gathering round me was more numerous than usual. My story must have been particularly interesting. I was talking (summarizing the novel by that poor Spivalski, who was accused of all the mortal sins and killed in Paris) about the two lovers who had spent a long night in an almost empty train, fleeing across the dying empire of the tsars. The next day they parted forever…

On this occasion my listeners belonged to all three castes – sons of proletarians, future engineers, and intelligentsia. I described the passionate embraces in the depths of a sleeping compartment as the train hurtled through dead villages and over burned bridges. They listened to me avidly. It was certainly easier for them to picture this pair of lovers in a train than a president of the Republic with his beloved in a palace… And to satisfy the aficionados of wordplay I described the train stopping in a provincial town: the hero lowered the window and asked the few people who were walking alongside the track what the name of the place was. But no one could tell him. It was a town without a name! A town peopled with strangers. A sigh of satisfaction arose from the group of aesthetes. And then in a cunning flashback, I returned to the compartment, to talk again of the restless love of my crazy travelers…

It was at that moment that above the crowd I saw Pashka's tousled head appearing. Pashka listened for several minutes, then growled, easily drowning my voice with his rough bass. "You've got these fools with their tongues hanging out over your pack of fibs!"

No one would have dared to contradict Pashka in a solo confrontation. But the crowd has a courage of its own. Snorts of indignation came in response.

In order to cool tempers I said in a conciliatory tone, "They're not fibs, Pashka! It's an autobiographical novel. This guy really did escape from Russia with his mistress after the Revolution, and then in Paris he was murdered…"

"Right. So why don't you tell them what happened at the station?"

I was left openmouthed. Now I remembered having already told this story to my friend, the dunce. In the morning the two lovers had found themselves beside the Black Sea, in a deserted café, in a town buried in snow. They drank scalding tea by a window covered with hoarfrost… Several years later when they met again in Paris they admitted to one another that those few hours that morning were more dear to them than all the transports of love in their lives. Yes, that dull, gray morning; the muffled sounds of the foghorns; and their complicit presence at the height of the murderous storm of history…

It was that station café that Pashka was speaking of… The school bell rescued me from my embarrassment. My listeners stubbed out their cigarettes and streamed into the classroom. While I, abashed, told myself that none of my styles – not the one I adopted when speaking to the prolos, nor the one for the tekhnars, nor even the verbal acrobatics that the intellectuals adored – no, none of these ways of speaking could have recreated the mysterious charm of that snowy morning on the edge of the abyss of the times. The light, the silence… Furthermore none of my fellow students would have been interested! It was too simple: without erotic attractions, without intrigue, without wordplay.

As I went home from school I remembered that when telling my comrades the story of the French president in love, I had never yet spoken of his silent vigil beside the black window at the Elysée. He alone, facing the autumn night, and – somewhere out there in that world of darkness and rain – a woman with her face hidden beneath a veil that sparkled with mist. But who would have listened to me if I had ventured to speak of that moist veil in the autumn night?

Pashka tried again two or three times, and always clumsily, to tear me away from my new friends. To no avail. One day he invited me to go fishing on the Volga. I refused in the presence of everybody, with a vaguely scornful air. He remained for several seconds in front of our group-alone, hesitant, strangely frail despite his broad shoulders… On another occasion he caught up with me on the journey home and asked me to bring him Spivalski's book. I promised I would. The next day I had forgotten all about it…

I was too absorbed in a new collective pleasure: the Mountain of Joy. That was the name given in our city to an enormous open-air dance floor situated on the summit of a hill high above the Volga. We scarcely knew how to dance. But it was clear that our rhythmic gyrations had only one objective: to hold a girl's body in our arms, to touch it, to tame it. On our evening excursions to the Mountain, castes and coteries no longer existed. In the feverishness of our desire we were all equal. Only the young soldiers on leave formed a group apart. I observed them jealously.

One evening I heard someone calling me. The voice seemed to come from the foliage on the trees. I looked up and there was Pashka! The square dance floor was surrounded by a high wooden fence. Outside, wild vegetation grew thickets somewhere between a park run to seed and a forest. It was on a broad branch of a maple tree, above the fence, that I saw him…

I had just left the dance floor after having clumsily bumped against my partner's breasts… It was the first time I had danced with such a buxom girl. My palms, resting on her back, were all moist. Caught out by an unexpected flourish from the band, I made a false move, and my chest pressed against hers. The effect was more powerful than an electric shock! The soft elasticity of a female breast overwhelmed me. I continued to shuffle without hearing the music: instead of the dancing girl's fair face, all I saw was a shining oval.

When the band stopped playing, she walked away without saying a word, visibly piqued. I crossed the floor, sliding between couples, as if I were walking on ice, and went out.

I needed to be alone, to recover my spirits. I walked along the path that ran beside the dance floor. The wind coming from the Volga cooled my burning brow. "But suppose it was her, my partner herself," I thought suddenly, "who chose to bump into me on purpose?" Yes, perhaps she had wanted me to feel her bosom and was sending me a signal that in my naivete and my timidity I had failed to decode. Had I missed the chance of a lifetime?

Like a child that has just broken a cup and closes its eyes, hoping that this momentary darkness will put everything back together again, I screwed up my eyes: why couldn't the band play the same number again and I find my partner again and repeat all the same movements? I had never felt and would never again feel so intensely the intimate proximity and at the same time, the most irretrievable remoteness of a female body…

It was in the midst of this emotional disarray that I heard the voice of Pashka, hidden in the foliage. I looked up. He was smiling at me, half stretched out along a thick branch: "Climb up! I'll make room for you," he said, folding up his legs.

Clumsy and heavy in the city, as soon as he was in the wild Pashka was transfigured. On that branch he looked like a big cat, resting before its nightly prowl…

In any other circumstances I would have ignored his invitation. But his position was too unusual, and in addition I felt I had been caught in flagrante delicto. I felt as if he had intercepted my feverish thoughts from his branch! He held his hand out to me, and I hauled myself up beside him. The tree was a veritable observation post.

Seen from above, the swaying of hundreds of entwined bodies had quite a different look to it. It seemed at one and the same time absurd (all these creatures pawing the ground!) and endowed with a certain logic. Bodies circulated, coalesced for the space of a dance, separated, sometimes remained glued to one another during several numbers. From our tree, at a single glance, I could take in all the little emotional games unfolding on the dance floor. Rivalries, challenges, betrayals, loves at first sight, breakups, explanations, potential brawls quickly brought under control by the vigilant keepers of order. But above all, it was desire that was visible through the veil of the music and the ritual of the dance. Within that human tide I located the girl whose breasts I had brushed against. For a moment I followed her trajectory from one partner to another…

In short, I felt all this whirling about reminded me insidiously of something. "Life!" a silent voice suddenly suggested to me, and my lips repeated silently, "Life…" The same mingling of bodies driven by desire and hiding it under innumerable pretences. Life… "And where am I, myself, at this moment?" I asked myself, sensing that the answer to this question would shed light on an extraordinary truth, which would explain everything once and for all.

Shouts rang out beside the path. I recognized my classmates returning to the city. I seized the branch, ready to jump. Pashka's voice, tinged with embittered resignation, rang out uncertainly: "Wait! Look, they're going to switch off the floodlights. There'll be masses of stars! If we climb higher we'll see Sagittarius…"

I was not listening to him. I jumped to the ground. The earth, ribbed with thick roots, bruised the soles of my feet violently. I ran to catch up with my classmates, who were moving off, gesticulating. I wanted to tell them, as quickly as possible, about my partner with the beautiful bosom, to hear their remarks, to deafen myself with words. I was in a hurry to get back to life. And with cruel glee I parodied the strange question that had formed inside my head a moment before: "Where am I? Where was I? On a branch beside that idiot, Pashka, obviously. On the edge of real life!"

By a freakish coincidence (I already knew that reality is made up of implausible repetitions of the kind that novelists hound down as serious faults) we met again the next day, with that unease experienced by two companions who at night have exchanged grave, exalted, and emotional confidences, have revealed themselves to the very intimate core of their souls, and who meet again in the morning by the mundane and skeptical light of day.

I wandered around outside the still-closed dance floor. I wanted to be the first partner for the dancer of the night before. I wanted time to go into reverse and glue my broken cup back together again.

Pashka appeared in the scrub of the park, saw me, hesitated for a second, then walked toward me. He was laden with his fishing gear. Under his arm he carried a big loaf of black bread from which he tore off and ate pieces, chewing them with relish. Once more I felt I had been caught in flagrante delicto. He inspected me, scrutinizing my light-colored shirt wide open at the neck, my fashionable trousers, very flared at the bottom. Then, tossing his head as a sign of good-bye, he moved off. I heaved a sigh of relief. But suddenly Pashka turned and called out to me in a slightly coarse voice, "Here, come with me, I'll show you something! Come on, you won't be sorry…"

I followed him with a hesitant tread.

We went down toward the Volga, walked beside the port with its enormous cranes, its workshops, its corrugated iron warehouses. Farther downstream we made our way into a broad wasteland littered with old barges; with misty metallic constructions; with pyramids of lengthy, rotten tree trunks. Pashka hid his lines and nets under one of these worm-eaten boles and began to jump from one boat to another. There was also an abandoned landing stage, and several pontoon bridges that yielded buoyantly beneath our feet. In following Pashka, I had not in fact noticed the moment when we left dry land to find ourselves on this floating island of abandoned craft. I held on to a broken handrail, leaped into a kind of junk, stepped over its side, slipped on the wet timbers of a raft…

We finally found ourselves in a channel that had steep banks all covered in flowering elder trees. Its surface, from one shore to the other, was hidden under the hulks of ancient vessels packed close together, side by side, in fantastic disorder.

We settled ourselves on the thwart of a little boat. Above it arose the side of a barge that bore traces of fire. Craning my neck, I noticed up there, on the deck of the barge, a rope strung out near the cabin: several fragments of faded cloth undulated gently – washing that had been hanging out to dry for years…

The evening was warm, misty. The smell of the water mingled with the insipid emanations from the elder trees. From time to time a vessel that we could see passing in the distance in the middle of the Volga sent a series of lazy waves into our channel. Our boat began to pitch up and down, rubbing against the black side of the barge. The whole half-submerged graveyard came to life. One could hear the grating of a cable, the lapping of the water under a pontoon, the lisping of the reeds.

"They are great, all these bulwarks!" I exclaimed, using a word whose maritime application was only vaguely known to me.

Pashka gave me a rather confused glance. I got up, in a hurry to return to the Mountain of Joy… But my friend tugged me forcefully by the sleeve to make me sit down and announced in a nervous whisper, "Hang on! They're coming!"

I heard the sound of footsteps, the click of heels on the wet clay of the bank, then a tattoo on the wood of a footbridge. Finally a metallic hammering right above us on the deck of the barge… And already muffled voices reaching to us from its bowels.

Pashka stood up straight and pressed himself against the side of the barge. It was only then that I noticed the three portholes. Their panes were broken and blocked up from the inside with pieces of plywood. The surfaces of these were covered in fine holes made by a knife blade. Without leaving his porthole, my friend gestured with his hand, inviting me to imitate him. Clinging onto a steel projection that ran the length of the side, I glued myself to the left-hand porthole. The one in the center remained unoccupied.

What I saw through the crack was at the same time banal and extraordinary. A woman, of whom I could only see her head in profile and the upper part of her body, seemed to be leaning with her elbows on a table, her arms parallel, her hands motionless. Her face appeared calm and even drowsy. Only her presence here, on this barge, seemed surprising. Although after all… She kept gently nodding her head, which had fair, curly hair, as if she were continually agreeing with an invisible speaker.

I moved away from my porthole and glanced at Pashka. I was perplexed. "But after all, what's there to see?" But he had his palms stuck to the flaking surface of the barge, and his forehead against the plywood.

Then I moved to the neighboring porthole, peering into one of the cracks that perforated the wood that blocked it.

It was as if our boat were sinking, going to the bottom of that cluttered canal, and the side of the barge, on the other hand, were hurtling up toward the sky. Feverishly I let myself be magnetized by its rough metal, while trying to keep within my sight the vision that had just blinded me.

It was a woman's buttocks, white, nude, massive. Yes, the haunches of a kneeling woman, still seen in profile, her legs, her thighs, the breadth of which terrified me; and the start of her back, cut off by the field of vision allowed by the crack. Behind that enormous backside there was a soldier, also on his knees, his trousers unbuttoned, his tunic in disorder. He was grasping the hips of the woman and drawing them toward him, as if he wanted to be swallowed up into that mass of flesh, which at the same time he kept thrusting away from him with violent shudders of his whole body.

Our boat began to slip away beneath my feet. A vessel sailing up the Volga had sent its waves into our channel. One of them managed to unbalance me. In saving myself from falling I took a step to the left and found myself by the first porthole. I pressed my forehead against its steel frame. In the crack appeared the woman with curly hair and an indifferent and somnolent face, the one I had seen at first; leaning on what resembled a tablecloth, dressed in a white blouse, she continued acquiescing with little nods of her head and was distractedly examining her fingers…

This first porthole. And the second. The woman whose eyelids were heavy with sleep, her dress and her hairstyle very ordinary. And the other. This naked, erect backside; this white flesh into which there plunged a man who seemed slender beside her; those broad thighs; that heavy movement of the hips. In my shocked young head no link could associate these two images. Impossible to join this upper half of a woman's body to that lower half!

My excitement was such that the side of the barge suddenly seemed to me to be stretched out horizontally Lying flat on the surface like a lizard, I moved toward the porthole with the naked woman. She was still there, but the powerful curve of her flesh was now motionless. The soldier, now facing me, was buttoning himself up with limp and clumsy movements. And another one, smaller than the first, was kneeling down beside the white backside. His movements, on the other hand, were of a nervous and fearful rapidity. But as soon as he began wrestling, pushing the heavy white hemispheres with his belly, you could not have told him apart from the first one. There was no difference in their actions.

My eyes were already filling with black needles. My legs were giving way And my heart, pressed against the rusty metal, was making the whole vessel vibrate with its deep, breathless echoes. A new series of little waves shook the boat. The side of the barge became vertical again, and, losing my lizard's agility, I slid toward the first porthole. The woman in the white blouse was nodding her head mechanically while examining her hands. I saw her scratching one nail with another, to remove the layer of varnish…

Their footsteps resounded in reverse order this time: the hammering of the heels on the deck; the tattoo on the planks of the footbridge; the slapping of the wet clay. Without looking at me, Pashka stepped over the side of our boat, bounded onto a half-submerged pontoon, then onto a landing stage. I followed him, jumping limply like a rag doll on strings.

Reaching the bank, he sat down, removed his shoes, rolled up his trousers to the knees, and walked into the water, parting the long stems of the reeds. He thrust aside the duckweed and splashed water over his face for a long time, uttering groans of pleasure, which in the distance could have been taken for cries of distress.

It was a great day in her life. On that June evening she was, for the first time in her life, going to give herself to one of her young friends, to one of those dancers who shuffled on the dance floor at the Mountain of Joy.

She was rather frail. Her face had the neutral features that pass unnoticed in the crowd. The color of her pale russet hair could only be detected by daylight. Under the floodlights of the Mountain or in the bluish glow of the street lamps she appeared simply blond.

I had discovered this erotic custom just a few days ago. In the human swarm at the dance floor I saw groups forming – a swirling knot of adolescents came together, wriggling, getting excited, and as they left, they would scatter to be initiated into what sometimes seemed to me stupidly simple, sometimes fabulously mysterious and profound: love.

She must have been passed over in one of those groups. Like the others, she had been secretly drinking among the bushes that covered the slopes of the Mountain. Then, when their excited little circle had exploded into couples, she was left alone: the accidents of arithmetic did not provide her with a partner. The couples had vanished. Drunkenness was already overtaking her. She was not used to alcohol and had drunk too much, out of eagerness, out of fear of not matching up to the others, and also from the desire to overcome her nervousness on this great day… She had come back onto the floor, not knowing what to do with her body now, every fiber of which was filled with impatient excitement. But already they were beginning to switch off the floodlights.

All this I was to guess later… That night I simply saw a girl pacing up and down in a corner of the park at night, walking round the wan pool of light from a street lamp. Like a moth held prisoner by a ray of light. Her gait surprised me. She moved forward as if on a tightrope, with steps that were at once floating and tense. I could see that in every one of her movements she was struggling against drunkenness. Her face had a fixed expression. Her whole being was mobilized in this single effort – not to fall over, to let nothing be suspected, to continue walking round on this circle of light until the black trees stopped swaying and leaping when she approached them, waving their noisy branches.

I went toward her. I entered the blue circle of the street lamp. Her body (black skirt, light top) suddenly focused all my desire. Yes, she instantly became the woman I had always desired. Despite her breathless frailty, despite her features being blurred with drunkenness, despite everything in her body and her face that should have displeased me but which at that moment I found so beautiful.

Making her rounds, she bumped into me and lifted her eyes. I saw a succession of masks on her face – fear, anger, a smile. It was the smile that triumphed, a vague smile that seemed to be directed at someone other than myself. She took my arm. We descended from the Mountain.

At first she talked without stopping. Her tipsy young voice would not remain steady. She whispered, then almost shouted. Clinging to my arm, she stumbled from time to time and let fly an oath, then put her hand to her lips with affected haste. Or else she suddenly broke away from me with an offended air, only to snuggle against my shoulder a moment later. I guessed that my companion was now acting out a love scene rehearsed long ago – a performance intended to show her partner she was somebody special. But in her intoxication she was confusing the sequence of these little interludes. While I, a bad actor, remained dumb, enthralled by this feminine presence, suddenly so accessible; and above all by the staggering ease with which this body was about to offer itself to me. I had always believed that such an offer would be preceded by a long emotional journey, by a thousand speeches, by subtle flirting. I was silent as I felt a little feminine breast squeezed against my arm. Next my nocturnal companion, jabbering animatedly, rejected the advance of a overly forward phantom and puffed out her cheeks for several seconds to show that she was sulking; then she enveloped her imaginary lover in what she believed was a languorous look, but which was simply blurred with the wine and the excitement.

I led her toward the only place that could accommodate our love – toward that floating island where at the beginning of the summer Pashka and I had spied on the prostitute and the soldiers.

In the darkness I must have taken a wrong turn. After wandering for a long time amid sleeping boats we stopped on a kind of old ferry – its ramp had broken supports and was half sunk in the water.

Abruptly she fell silent. Her drunkenness must have been gradually wearing off. I remained motionless, confronting her tense expectation in the darkness. I did not know what I was supposed to do. Kneeling down, I felt the boards, and threw into the water first a tangle of worn ropes, then a bundle of dried seaweed. It was by accident that, busy with my clearing up, I brushed her leg. My fingers, slipping over her skin, gave her goose bumps…

She remained silent until it was over. Her eyes closed, she seemed absent, abandoning to me her body that quaked with little shivers… I must have hurt her badly with my hasty actions. This act, so dreamed of, blundered into a series of clumsy, thwarted manipulations. Love was apparently like a hasty, nervous excavation. The knees and the elbows stuck out with a strange anatomical stiffness.

The pleasure was like the flame of a match in an icy wind – a fire that has just enough time to burn your fingers before going out, leaving a blinding spot in your eyes.

I tried to kiss her (I believed that one should do so at this moment); beneath my mouth I felt her lip being bitten hard…

And what frightened me the most was that a second later I no longer needed either her lips or her erect breast in her gaping blouse, or her slender thighs, over which she had pulled down her skirt with a rapid movement. Her body was becoming indifferent to me, useless. Sunk in my dull physical contentment, I was self-sufficient. "Why is she still stretched out like that, half naked?" I wondered, irritated. I felt the uneven boards beneath my back, several splinters burning in my palm. The wind had the heavy taste of stagnant water.

In this nocturnal interval there may well have been a fleeting moment of oblivion, a lightning sleep of several minutes. For I did not see the ship approaching. When we opened our eyes, all its white enormity, glittering with lights, was already looming above us. I had thought that our refuge was located deep in one of the countless bays cluttered up with rusty wrecks. But the opposite had occurred. In the darkness we had reached the tip of a headland that projected almost into the middle of the river… The brightly lit passenger ship, cruising slowly down the Volga, suddenly rose up above our old ferryboat, towering with its three decks. Human silhouettes were outlined against the somber sky. They were dancing on the top deck by the blaze of the lights. The warm flow of a tango spilled over us, enveloped us. The cabin windows, more discreetly lit, seemed to lean over, allowing us to enter their intimacy… The swell caused by the riverboat was so powerful that our raft swung in a half circle, a swirling glissade that made us giddy. The ship with its light and its music seemed to be circling round us… It was at that moment that she squeezed my hand and pressed herself against me. It seemed as if the hot-blooded denseness of her body could be concentrated entirely in my hands, like the trembling body of a bird. Her arms and her waist had the suppleness of that armful of water lilies I had picked one day, embracing several slippery stems in the water…

But already the ship was melting into the darkness. The echo of the tango faded. On its voyage toward Astrakhan, it carried the night with it. The sky around our ferry was filling with a hesitant pallor. I found it strange to see us in the middle of a great river at the timid birth of that day on the damp timbers of a raft. And along the shore the outlines of the port slowly took shape.

She did not wait for me. Without looking at me, she began to jump from one boat to the next. She was escaping with the shy haste of a young ballerina after a muffed exit. As I followed her leaping flight my heart stood still. At any moment she could slip on the wet wood, be betrayed by a broken footbridge, fall between two boats whose sides would close over her head. The concentration of my gaze sustained her in her acrobatics through the morning mist.

A moment later I saw her walking along the shore. In the silence the sand crunched softly beneath her feet… Here was a woman to whom I had felt so close a quarter of an hour before, who was now leaving. I experienced a pain quite new to me; a woman was leaving, breaking the invisible ties that still bound us. And there on that deserted shore she was transformed into an extraordinary being – a woman I love who is becoming independent of me again, a stranger to me, and who will soon be speaking to other people, smiling…

Living!

She turned, hearing me running after her. I saw her pale face, her hair that I now noticed was of a very light auburn color. Unsmiling, she looked at me in silence. I no longer remembered what I had wanted to say to her while listening, a moment before, to the wet sand crunching beneath her heels. "I love you" would have been a lie I could not utter. Alone her crumpled black skirt, and her arms, childishly slender, meant more to me than all the "I love you"s in the world. To suggest to her that we should meet again that day or the next was unthinkable. Our night must remain unique. Like the passing of the riverboat, like our momentary sleep, like her body in the cool of the great somnolent river.

I tried to tell her. I spoke, at random, of the crunching of the sand under her feet; of her solitude on this shore; of her fragility that night, which had reminded me of the stems of water lilies. I felt suddenly and with an acute happiness that I must also tell her about Charlotte's balcony, about our evenings on the steppes, about the elegant trio on an autumn morning on the Champs-Elysées…

Her face screwed up into an expression at once scornful and anxious. Her lips trembled.

"Are you sick or what?" she said, interrupting me in that slightly nasal tone that girls on the Mountain of Joy adopted to rebuff unwanted attention.

I stood stock-still. She went off, climbing toward the first buildings of the port, and soon plunging into their massive shadow. The workers were beginning to appear at the gates of their workshops.

Some days later, in the nocturnal gathering at the Mountain, I heard a conversation between my classmates, who had not noticed that I was close by. One of the girls in their little circle had complained, they were saying, about her partner who did not know how to make love (they expressed the notion much more crudely); and apparently she had confided some comic details ("killing," said one of them) of his behavior. I was listening to them in the hope of some erotic revelations. Suddenly the name of the despised partner was mentioned – "Frantsuz" – it was my nickname, of which I was generally proud. "Frantsuz" – the Russian for a Frenchman. Through their laughter I picked up a quiet exchange of remarks between two friends, in the manner of a secret agreement: "Let's take care of her tonight, after the dancing. Us two. Agreed?"

I guessed they were still talking about her. I left my corner and went toward the exit. They saw me. "Frantsuz! Frantsuz…" The whispering accompanied me for a moment, then was lost in the first surge of the music.

The next day, without warning anyone, I left for Saranza.

13

I was going to that sleepy little town, lost in the middle of the steppes, to destroy France. I must put an end to Charlotte's France, which had made of me a strange mutant, incapable of living in the real world.

In my mind this destruction had to resemble a long cry, a howl of rage that would best express my whole revolt. So far this howl was welling up without words. They would come, I was sure of it, as soon as Charlotte's calm eyes rested on me. For the moment I was shouting silently. There were only images hurtling by in a chaotic and motley flood.

I saw the gleam of a pince-nez in the well-upholstered shadows of a huge black car. Beria was choosing a woman's body for the night. And our neighbor across the street, a quiet, smiling pensioner, was watering the flowers on his balcony, listening to the warbling of a transistor. And in our kitchen a man with his arms covered in tattoos was speaking of a frozen lake filled with naked corpses. And none of the people in the third-class carriage that was taking me toward Saranza seemed to notice these shattering paradoxes. They got on with their lives, calmly.

In my cry I wanted to spill out these images over Charlotte. I awaited a response from her. I wanted her to explain herself, to justify herself. For it was she who had passed on to me this French sensibility – her own – condemning me to live painfully between two worlds.

I would speak to her of my father with the hole in his head, that little crater where his life pulsed. And of my mother, from whom we had inherited the fear of an unexpected ring at the door on the eve of holidays. Both of them dead. Unconsciously I resented her for her calm during my mother's burial. And for the life, so European in its good sense and neatness, that she led at Saranza. I found in her the West personified, that rational and cold West against which Russians harbor an incurable grudge. That Europe which looks down condescendingly from the stronghold of its civilization on our barbarian miseries… the wars in which we died by the million, the revolutions whose scenarios it wrote for us… In my juvenile rebellion there was a large dose of this innate mistrust.

The French implant, which I thought had atrophied, was still within me and was preventing me from seeing. It split reality in two. As it had done with the body of that woman I had spied on through two different portholes: there was one woman in a white blouse, calm and very ordinary – and the other – that immense backside, whose potent carnality rendered the rest of the body almost useless.

And yet I knew that the two women were only one. Just like my shattered reality. It was my French illusion that confused my vision, like an intoxication, giving the world a deceptively lifelike mirage as its double…

My cry was ripening. The images I would find words for swirled in my eyes more and more rapidly: Beria murmuring to the driver, "Faster! Catch that one! Let me see…"; and a man in a Father Christmas costume, my grandfather Fyodor, arrested on New Year's Eve; and my father's charred village; and the slender arms of my beloved – childlike arms with blue veins; and that erect backside with its animal power; and that woman removing red varnish from her nails while the lower part of her body is possessed; and the little Pont-Neuf bag; and the "Verdun"; and all that French nonsense that was ruining my youth!

At Saranza station I remained on the platform for a moment. From force of habit I was looking for Charlotte's silhouette. Then with scornful anger I called myself a fool. No one was waiting for me this time. My grandmother had not the slightest inkling that I was coming! Furthermore, the train that brought me had no connection with the one I used to take each summer to come to this town. I had arrived in Saranza not in the morning but in the evening. And the incredibly long train, too long and massive for this little provincial station, moved off heavily, traveling to Tashkent, near the Asiatic border of the empire. Urgench, Bukhara, Samarkand, the echo of the forward stops reverberated in my head, awakening a yearning for the Orient, which is mournful and profound for every Russian.

This time everything was different.

The door was unlocked. It was still the period when one only locked one's apartment at night. I pushed it open, as in a dream. I had pictured this moment so clearly I thought I knew word for word what I was going to say to Charlotte, what I was going to accuse her of…

However, as I heard the imperceptible click of the door, as familiar to me as the voice of a friend, and breathed the light and pleasant aroma that always hung on the air in Charlotte's apartment, I felt my head emptying of words. Only a few snatches of my prepared howl still rang in my ears: "Beria! And that old man calmly watering his gladioli. And that woman cut in two! And the forgotten war! And your rape! And that Siberian suitcase, filled with old French scraps of paper, which I drag about like a prisoner's ball and chain! And our Russia, which you, a Frenchwoman, do not understand and will never understand! And my beloved, whom those two young swine are going to 'take care of!"

She did not hear me come in. I saw her sitting before the balcony door. Her face was bent over a light-colored garment spread out on her lap, her needle flashing (I do not know why, but in my memory Charlotte was always engaged in darning a lace collar)…

I heard her voice. It was not singing, but rather a slow recitation, a melodious murmur interrupted by pauses, which kept time with the flow of her silent thoughts. Yes, a French song, half hummed, half spoken. In the overheated torpor of the evening her notes gave an impression of freshness, like the thin resonance of a harpsichord. I listened to the words, and for several seconds I had the feeling of listening to an unknown foreign language – a language that meant nothing to me. After a minute I recognized it as French… Charlotte was crooning very slowly, sighing from time to time, letting the bottomless silence of the steppe intervene between two verses of her recitation.

It was the song whose charm I had discovered while still a very young child, and which now focused all my rancor on her.

At each corner of the bed Periwinkles in a bunch…

"Yes. That's just the kind of French sentimentality that is choking my life!" I thought angrily.

We'd sleep together there

Till the world comes to an end…

No, I could not listen to these words anymore!

I entered the room and announced with deliberate abruptness, in Russian, "It's me! I'll bet you weren't expecting me!"

To my amazement, to my chagrin as well, the look Charlotte gave me was quite calm. I read in her eyes the faultless self-control that is acquired through coping daily with grief, anguish, danger.

Having established, via a few discreet and apparently humdrum questions, that I had not come as the bearer of bad tidings, she went to the hall and telephoned my aunt to tell her of my arrival. And once again Charlotte surprised me by the ease with which she spoke to this woman, who was so different from her. Her voice, the same voice that a moment ago had been softly crooning an old French song, took on a slightly rough accent, and in a few words she managed to explain everything, arrange everything, putting my escapade on the same level with our regular summer reunions.

"She's trying to mimic us," I thought, as I listened to her talking. "She's parodying us." Charlotte's calm and that very Russian voice only served to exacerbate my bitterness.

I began to lie in wait for each and every word. One of them was going to unleash my explosion. Charlotte would offer me her boules de neige, our favorite dessert, and then I could let fly against all her French fripperies. Or else, trying to recreate the atmosphere of our evenings together in the old days, she would start talking about her childhood, that's right, about some dog barber on a quay beside the Seine…

But Charlotte was silent. She paid very little attention to me. As if my presence had not in the least disturbed the atmosphere of one more ordinary evening in her life. From time to time she caught my eye and smiled at me, and then her face became blank again.

Our supper astonished me by its simplicity. There were no boules de neige, nor any of our childhood treats. I was amazed to realize that this black bread and weak tea was Charlotte's normal fare.

After the meal I waited for her on the balcony. The same garlands of flowers, the same endless steppe beneath the heat haze. And between two rosebushes – the face of the stone bacchante. I had a sudden impulse to hurl this head over the handrail, to snatch at the flowers, to shatter the stillness of the plain with my cry. Yes, and now Charlotte would come and sit on her little chair and spread out a piece of fabric on her lap…

She did appear, but instead of settling down on her low seat she came and leaned on the handrail beside me. This was how my sister and I used to stand in the old days, side by side, watching the steppe as it sank slowly into the night and listening to our grandmother's stories.

Yes, she rested her elbows on the cracked wood, gazing at the endless plain that was tinged with transparent violet light. And suddenly, without looking at me, she began to speak in a remote and pensive voice, which seemed to be addressing both me and someone else besides.

"You know, it's strange… A week ago I met a woman at the cemetery. Her son is buried in the same row as your grandfather. We talked about them, their deaths and the war. What else can one talk about in the presence of graves? Her son was wounded a month before the end of the war. Our soldiers were already advancing on Berlin. Every day she prayed that they would keep her son in the hospital one more week, three more days (she was a believer – or was turning into one during that waiting time)… He was killed in Berlin, during the very last of the fighting. Actually on the streets of Berlin. She told me all that very simply. Even her tears were simple as she told me how she prayed… And do you know what her story reminded me of? A wounded soldier in our hospital. He was afraid to go back to the front, and every night he reopened his wound with a sponge. I surprised him doing it and told the head doctor. We put a plaster cast on this wounded man, and some time later when his leg was healed, he went back to the front… At the time, you see, it all seemed so clear, so right. And now I feel a bit lost. Yes, my life is behind me, and suddenly everything has to be reconsidered. Perhaps it may seem silly to you, but from time to time I ask myself,'suppose I sent him to his death, that young soldier?' I tell myself that probably somewhere in the heart of Russia there was a woman who was praying every day that they would keep him in the hospital for as long as possible. Yes, like that woman at the cemetery. I don't know… I can't forget that mother's face. It's quite untrue, you see, but now it seems to me as if there was a little note of reproach in her voice. I don't know how to explain all that to myself…"

She fell silent and remained quite still for a long moment, her eyes wide open; the pupils seemed to retain the light of the sunset, now faded. Transfixed, I watched her sideways, without being able to turn my head, change the position of my arms, or relax my crossed fingers…

"I'll go and make your bed," she said finally, leaving the balcony.

I stood up and glanced around in amazement. Charlotte's little chair, the lamp with its turquoise shade, the stone bacchante with her melancholy smile, the narrow balcony poised above the nocturnal steppe – all suddenly seemed so fragile! I was bewildered to recall my desire to destroy this ephemeral setting. Now the balcony was tiny – as if I were observing it from a great distance – yes, tiny and defenseless.

The next day a dry burning wind invaded Saranza. At the corners of the streets baked hard by the sun there arose little tornadoes of dust. And their appearance was followed by an explosion of sound – a military band struck up on the central square, and the hot gusts carried snatches of their valiant uproar all the way to Charlotte's house. Then the silence abruptly returned, and one could hear the grating of sand against the windowpanes and the feverish buzzing of a fly. It was the first day of maneuvers that were taking place several kilometers away from Saranza.

We walked for a long time. First of all crossing the town, then out over the steppe. Charlotte spoke with the same calm and detached voice as the previous evening on the balcony Her story mingled with the merry tumult of the band, then suddenly the wind dropped, and her words resounded with a strange clarity in the emptiness of sun and silence.

She told of her brief stay in Moscow two years after the war… One fine afternoon in May as she was walking along the network of lanes in the Presnya district, which led down toward the Moskva River, she felt she was convalescing, recovering from the war, from fear, and even, without daring to admit it to herself, from Fyodor's death, or rather from her obsession with his absence… On the corner of a street, she heard a snatch of a remark as two women passed close by her in conversation, "Samovars…" said one of them.

"The good tea in the old days," thought Charlotte, echoing them. Then as she emerged onto the square, in front of the market, with its wooden booths, its kiosks, and its fencing of thick planks, she realized that she had been mistaken. A man without legs, installed in a kind of box on wheels, advanced toward her, his one arm outstretched.

"Now then, my lovely, spare a little ruble for the invalid."

Instinctively Charlotte turned away from him, so much did this stranger resemble a man rising from the earth. It was then she perceived that the outskirts of the market were swarming with disabled soldiers – with these "samovars." Trundling along in their boxes, some equipped with little wheels with rubber tires, some with simple ball bearings, they confronted people at the exit, asking them for money or tobacco. Some people gave, some hurried past, yet others let fly with a curse, adding in reproving tones, "The state supports you already… Shame on you!" The samovars were almost all young, several of them visibly drunk. All had piercing, slightly mad eyes… Three or four boxes came hurtling toward Charlotte. The soldiers thrust their sticks down against the trampled soil of the square, writhing as they propelled themselves along with violent convulsions of their whole bodies. Despite their pain it almost looked like a game.

Charlotte stopped, hastily withdrew a bill from her bag, and gave it to the first one to reach her. He could not take hold of it – his only hand, his left hand, had lost its fingers. He thrust the bill into the bottom of his box, then suddenly pitched over on his seat and, reaching out with his stump toward Charlotte, brushed against her ankle. And looked up at her with a demented and bitter gaze…

She did not have time to grasp what occurred next. She saw another disabled man, but this time 'with two good arms, suddenly appear beside the first one and brutally snatch the crumpled bill from the one-armed man's box. Charlotte uttered a cry, and opened her bag again. But the soldier who had just caressed her foot seemed resigned. Turning his back on his aggressor, he was already making his way up a steeply sloping little alley, the top of which was open to the sky. Charlotte remained undecided for a moment – should she go after him? Give him more money? She saw several more samovars steering their boxes in her direction. She felt a terrible unease. Fear, shame as well. An abrupt raucous cry cut through the dull hubbub that hung over the square.

Charlotte turned rapidly: it was a vision swifter than a lightning flash. The one-armed man in his box on wheels came hurtling down the sloping alley with a thunderous grinding of ball bearings. His stump pushed repeatedly against the ground, steering his crazy descent. And in his mouth, which was twisted into a horrible grimace, there quivered a knife, clenched between his teeth. The cripple who had stolen his money had just enough time to grasp his stick. The one-armed man's box crashed into his own. Blood gushed. Charlotte saw two other samovars racing toward the one-armed man, who turned his head from side to side as he lacerated the body of his enemy. Other knives appeared, flashing between teeth. The yelling spread all around. Boxes collided with one another. Passersby, petrified by what was now becoming a general battle, did not dare to intervene. Another soldier rolled down the slope of the street at full tilt, his blade between his teeth, and plunged into the terrifying confusion of mutilated bodies… Charlotte tried to get closer, but the fighting was taking place almost at ground level – you would have had to go on all fours to come between them. Already the militiamen were running up, emitting shrill whistle blasts. The bystanders came to themselves. Some hurried away. Others withdrew to the shade of the poplar trees to watch the end of the fighting. Charlotte saw one woman bend over and pick up a samovar from the pile of bodies, repeating in a tearful voice, "Lyosha! You promised me not to come here anymore! You promised!" And she went off, carrying the crippled man like a child. Charlotte tried to see if her one-armed man was still there. One of the militiamen pushed her away…

We were walking in a straight line farther and farther from Saranza. The uproar of the military band had been absorbed into the silence of the steppe. All we heard now was the rustling of plants in the wind. And it was in that great space of light and heat that Charlotte's voice broke the silence once more.

"No, they weren't fighting over that stolen money. Not at all. Everybody understood that. They were fighting to… to be revenged on life. Its cruelty, its stupidity. And on that May sky above their heads… They were fighting as if they wanted to defy someone. The one who had combined within a single life the spring sky and their crippled bodies…"

"Stalin? God?" I was on the point of asking, but the air of the steppe made the words rough, hard to articulate.

We had never walked this far before. Saranza had long since sunk into the flickering haze of the horizon. This excursion with no end in view was vital to us. At my back I could feel, almost physically, the shade of a little square in Moscow…

Finally we came upon a railway embankment. The line marked a surrealist frontier in this infinite space, whose only defining features were the sun and the sky. Curiously, on the other side of the tracks the terrain changed. We had to skirt several ravines, gigantic faults lined inside with sand, before descending into a valley. Suddenly, through the willow thickets there came a glint of water. We exchanged smiles and exclaimed with a single voice, "Sumra!"

It was a remote tributary of the Volga, one of those modest streams, lost in the immensity of the steppe, whose existence is known only because they flow into the great river.

We remained in the shade of the willows until evening… It was on the road home that Charlotte finished her story.

"The authorities finally grew tired of all those cripples on the square, their shouting and their brawling. But above all, they were giving the great victory a bad image. You see, people prefer a soldier either to be gallant and smiling or else… dead on the field of honor. But these men… In short, one day several lorries drove up, and the militiamen began to snatch the samovars out of their boxes and throw them into the trucks. The way you throw logs onto a cart. A Muscovite told me they took them to an island, in the northern lakes. They had fixed up a former leper hospital for it… In autumn I tried to find out about this place. I thought I might be able to go and work there. But when I went to that region in the spring they told me that there wasn't a single cripple left on the island and that the leper hospital was closed for good… It was a very beautiful spot. Pine trees as far as the eye could see, great lakes, and above all, very pure air…"

After we had been walking for an hour Charlotte gave me a little wry smile.

"Wait, I'm going to sit down for a moment…"

She sat down on the dry grass and stretched out her legs. I walked on automatically for a few paces and turned round. Once again, as if from an unfamiliar perspective or from a great height, I saw a woman with white hair, wearing a very simple dress of pale satin, a woman seated on the ground in the midst of this immensity that stretches from the Black Sea to Mongolia, and which is known as "the steppe." My grandmother… I saw her with that inexplicable detachment that the previous evening I had taken for a kind of optical illusion caused by my nervous tension. I felt I had a glimpse of that vertiginous disorientation that must be a common experience for Charlotte: an almost cosmic alienation. There she was under this violet sky: she seemed totally alone on this planet, there on the mauve grass, under the first stars. And her France and her youth were more remote from her than the pale moon – left behind in another galaxy, under another sky…

She raised her face. Her eyes seemed larger than usual to me. She spoke in French. The resonance of this language gave off vibrations like a last message from that distant galaxy.

"You know, Alyosha, sometimes it seems to me that I understand nothing about the life of this country. Yes. That I am still a foreigner. After living here for almost half a century. Those'samovars'… I don't understand. There were people laughing as they watched them fight!"

She made a movement to stand up. I hastened toward her, holding out my hand. She smiled at me, taking hold of my arm. And as I leaned toward her, she murmured several brief words in a firm and solemn tone that surprised me. It is probably because I mentally translated them into Russian that I have remembered them. They made a long sentence, whereas Charlotte's French captured everything in a single image: the one-armed samovar sitting with his back against the trunk of an immense pine tree, silently watching the reflection of the waves fading behind the trees…

In the Russian translation, which my memory retained, Charlotte's voice added in a tone of justification, "Yet sometimes I tell myself that I understand this country better than the Russians themselves. For I have carried that soldier's face with me over so many years… I have felt his solitude beside the lake…"

She got up and walked on slowly, leaning on my arm. In my body and in my breathing I could feel the disappearance of that aggressive and nervous adolescent who had arrived in Saranza the previous day.

That is how our summer began, my last summer spent in Charlotte's house. The next day I woke up with the feeling that I was myself at last. A great calm, at the same time both bitter and serene, spread through me. I no longer had to struggle between my Russian and my French identities. I accepted myself.

Now we spent almost all our days on the banks of the Sumra. We set off very early in the morning, carrying with us a big gourd of water, bread, cheese. In the evening, taking advantage of the first cool breeze, we would return.

Once the path was known to us, it did not seem so long. In the sun-drenched monotony of the steppe we discerned hundreds of features, landmarks that quickly became familiar to us. A block of granite on which mica glittered in the sun from a long way off. A strip of sand that resembled a miniature desert. The area covered with brambles that had to be avoided. When Saranza disappeared from sight we knew that soon the line of the embankment would emerge from the horizon, the rails would gleam. And once this frontier was crossed we had almost arrived: beyond the ravines that cut into the steppes with their abrupt gullies, we already sensed the presence of the river. It seemed to be waiting for us…

Charlotte would settle down with a book in the shade of the willows, a step away from the stream, while I would swim and dive until exhausted, several times crossing the river, which was narrow and not very deep. Along its shores there was a string of little islands, covered with thick grass, where there was just enough room to stretch out and imagine oneself to be on a desert island in the middle of the ocean…

Then, lying on the sand, I listened to the bottomless silence of the steppe… Our conversations started spontaneously and seemed to flow from the sunny babbling of the Sumra, from the rustling of the long leaves of the willows. Charlotte, her hands resting on the open book, would gaze across the river toward the plain scorched by the sun and begin to talk, sometimes replying to my questions, sometimes anticipating them intuitively as she spoke.

It was during those long summer afternoons, in the midst of the steppe, where every plant resonated with dryness and heat, that I learned what had previously been concealed from me in Charlotte's life. And also what my childish intelligence had not managed to grasp.

I learned that he really was her first lover, the first man in her life, that Great War soldier who had slipped the little pebble known as " Verdun " into her hand. Only they had not met on the day of the solemn parade on July 14, 1919: it was two years later, some months before Charlotte's departure for Russia. I learned also that this soldier was very far from being the mustached hero, glittering with medals, of our naive imaginings. He turned out rather to have been thin, with a pale face and sad eyes. He had frequent coughing fits. His lungs had been scorched in the course of one of the first gas attacks. And he did not step out of the ranks of the great parade to approach Charlotte and give her the " Verdun." He had handed this talisman to her at the station, the day of her departure for Moscow, certain of seeing her again soon.

One day she spoke to me about the rape… Her calm voice had that tone that seemed to be saying, "Of course you already know what happened… It's no secret to you." I confirmed this implication by repeating briefly, "Yes, yes," with studied nonchalance. I was very much afraid, after this story, that I might get up and see a different Charlotte, a different face, bearing the indelible expression of a violated woman. But it was chiefly this blinding vision that lodged itself in my brain.

A man in a turban, wearing a kind of long coat, very thick and very hot, particularly in the midst of the desert sands that lie all about him. Veiled eyes, like two razor blades; the copper-colored sunburn of his round face, glistening with sweat. He is young. With feverish gestures, he tries to grasp the curved dagger that hangs from his belt, on the other side from the rifle. These few seconds seem interminable. For the desert and the man with his hasty movements are seen only with a tiny fraction of her vision – the chink between her eyelashes. A woman lying on the ground, her dress torn, her disheveled hair half buried in the sand, looks as if she is embedded forever in this empty landscape. There is a strand of red across her left temple. But she is alive. The bullet has torn the skin under her hair and buried itself in the sand. The man twists round to grasp at his weapon. He would like the death to be more physical – the throat cut, a surge of blood soaking the sand. But the dagger he is reaching for slid round to the other side when, just now, with the folds of his long garment open, he was writhing on the crushed body… He pulls at his belt angrily, throwing hate-filled glances at the transfixed face of the woman. Suddenly he hears a whinny. He turns. His companions are galloping already far away; their silhouettes, at the top of a ridge, stand out clearly against the sky. And all at once he feels oddly alone: himself, the desert in the evening light, the dying woman. He spits angrily, kicks the inert body with his pointed boot, and leaps onto the saddle with the agility of a caracal. When the sound of the hoofbeats has died away, the woman, slowly, opens her eyes. And she begins to breathe hesitantly, as if she had lost the habit. The air tastes of stone and blood…

Charlotte's voice mingled with the soft sighing of the willows. She fell silent. I thought of the rage of that young Uzbek: "He needed to slit her throat at any price, reduce her to lifeless flesh!" And, with what was already a man's perception, I understood that this was not mere cruelty. I recalled the first minutes after the act of love, when the body, desired a moment ago, suddenly became useless, unpleasant to see and to touch, almost hostile. I remembered my young companion on our raft that night: it was true; I resented her because I no longer desired her; because I was disappointed; because I could feel her there, clinging to my shoulder… And pursuing my thought to its logical conclusion, laying bare the male egoism that both frightened and tempted me, I said to myself, "It's true: after love the woman should disappear!" And I again pictured that hand feverishly reaching for the dagger.

I stood up abruptly and turned toward Charlotte. I was going to ask her the question that had tortured me for months, which I had formulated and reformulated in my mind a thousand times: "Tell me, in a word, in a sentence. Love. What is it?"

But Charlotte, doubtless anticipating what would have been a much more logical question, spoke first: "And do you know what saved me?… Did no one ever tell you?"

I looked at her. Telling me about the rape had left no mark at all on her features. There was simply the flickering of shadow and sunlight through the leaves of the willows that brushed against her face.

She had been saved by a saiga, that desert antelope with enormous nostrils, like an elephant's trunk cut short, and – in astonishing contrast – huge, timid, and gentle eyes. Charlotte had often seen herds of them bounding across the desert… When she was finally able to get up she saw a saiga slowly crawling along a sand dune. Charlotte followed it, without thinking, instinctively – the animal was the only beacon in the midst of the endless undulations of the sands. As if in a dream (the lilac sky had the deceptive emptiness of visions), she managed to draw close to the animal. The saiga did not run away. In the hazy light of dusk Charlotte saw dark patches on the sand – blood. The animal collapsed, then, lunging violently with its head, picked itself up from the ground, staggered on long, trembling legs, made several uncoordinated leaps. Fell again. It had been mortally wounded. By the same men who had almost killed her? Perhaps. It was spring. The night was icy cold. Charlotte curled up, pressing her body against the animal's back. The saiga did not move anymore. Shivers ran across its skin. Its sibilant breathing was like human sighs, like whispered words. Numb with cold and pain, Charlotte woke frequently, aware of this murmuring, which was obstinately trying to say something. In one of these waking moments, in the middle of the night, she was amazed to see a star, close at hand, shining in the sand. A star fallen from the sky… Charlotte leaned toward this luminous dot. It was the great open eye of the saiga – with a glorious, fragile constellation reflected in its tear-filled globe… She did not notice the moment when the heartbeats of this living creature, which kept her alive, stopped… In the morning the desert was glittering with hoarfrost. Charlotte remained standing for several minutes before the motionless body scattered with crystals. Then, slowly, she scaled the dune that the beast had not managed to cross the previous evening. When she reached the crest she uttered an "Oh" that rang out in the morning air. A lake, pink with the first rays, stretched out at her feet. It was this water that the saiga was trying to reach… They found Charlotte sitting on the shore that same evening.

In the streets of Saranza, at nightfall, she added this emotional epilogue to her story: "Your grandfather," she said softly, "never referred to that business. Never… And he loved your uncle Sergei as if he were his own son. Even more, perhaps. It's hard for a man to accept that his first child is the result of a rape. Especially as Sergei, you know, doesn't look like anyone else in the family. No, he never spoke about it…"

I sensed her voice shaking slightly. "She loved Fyodor," I thought quite simply. "It was he who made it possible for this country, where she has suffered so much, to be her own. And she still loves him. After all these years without him. She loves him out here on the steppes at night, in this Russian immensity. She loves him…"

Love appeared to me anew in all its sorrowful simplicity. Inexplicable. Inexpressible. Like that constellation reflected in the eye of a wounded animal in the middle of a desert covered in ice.

It was a chance slip of the tongue that revealed an unsettling reality to me: the way I was speaking French was no longer the same…

In asking Charlotte a question that day, I got my words twisted. I must have come up against one of those pairs of words, a deceptive pair, of which there are many in French. Yes, it was couples along the lines of "mitigate-militate" or "prefabricate-prevaricate." In the old days my verbal clumsiness with such perfidious duos, some as fraught with risk as "luxe-luxure" ("luxury-lewdness"), used to provoke mockery from my sister and discreet corrections from Charlotte.

This time I did not need prompting with the appropriate word. After a second of hesitation I corrected myself. But much more shocking than this momentary hesitation was a devastating revelation: I was speaking a foreign language!

So the months of my rebellion had left their mark. It was not that henceforth I found it hard to express myself in French. But the break was there. As a child I had absorbed all the sounds of Charlotte's language. I swam in them, without wondering why that glint in the grass, that colored, scented, living brilliance, sometimes existed in the masculine and had a crunchy, fragile, crystalline identity, imposed, it seemed, by one of its names, tsvetok; and was sometimes enveloped in a velvety, feltlike, and feminine aura, becoming une fleur.

I was later reminded of the story of the millipede that, when questioned about its dancing technique, immediately muddled the – normally instinctive – movements of its innumerable limbs.

My case was not quite as desperate. But from the day of my slip, the question of technique became unavoidable. Now French became a tool whose capacity I measured as I was speaking. Yes. An instrument independent of me, which I would employ, even as I became aware from time to time of the strangeness of this activity.

My discovery, disconcerting though it was, gave me a penetrating insight into style. This language-tool, employed, sharpened, perfected, was, I told myself, nothing other than literary composition. I had already sensed that the anecdotes about France with which I had amused my fellow pupils throughout that year were the first draft for this novelist's language: had I not manipulated it to please sometimes the "proletarians" and sometimes the "aesthetes"? Literature was now revealed as being perpetual amazement at the flow of words into which the world dissolved. French, my grandmaternal tongue, was, I saw now, the supreme language of amazement.

Ever since that particular day in the distant past, spent beside a little river, lost in the midst of the steppe, occasionally when I am in midconversation in French I recall my surprise of long ago: a gray-haired lady with great calm eyes and her grandson are seated at the heart of the empty plain, beneath the burning sun, very Russian in the endlessness of its isolation, and they are speaking in French, the most natural thing in the world… I see this scene again and I am amazed to be speaking French. Then I stumble and feel as if the cat had got my French. Strangely, or rather quite logically, it is at moments like this, when I find myself between two languages, that I believe I can see and feel more intensely than ever.

Perhaps it was on that same day, when I said précepteur (tutor) instead of percepteur (tax collector) and thus entered a silent zone between two languages, that I also noticed Charlotte's beauty…

The idea of this beauty at first seemed to me improbable. In Russia at that time every woman reaching the age of fifty was transformed into a "babushka" – a being in whom it would have been absurd to look for femininity, let alone beauty. And as for stating, "My grandmother is beautiful"…

Yet Charlotte, who must have been sixty-four or sixty-five at the time, was beautiful. Settling down at the bottom of the steep, sandy bank of the Sumra, she read beneath the branches of the willows that covered her dress with a network of shadow and sunlight. Her silver hair was gathered at the nape of her neck. Her eyes looked at me from time to time with a faint smile. I tried to understand what it was in this face, in this very simple dress, that radiated the beauty whose existence I was almost embarrassed to recognize.

No. Charlotte was not "a woman who does not look her age." Nor did her features have that haggard prettiness seen in the "well-cared-for" faces of women who wage unending war on wrinkles. She did not seek to camouflage her age, but her aging did not provoke the shrinking that emaciates the features and withers the body. I took in with my eyes the silvery gleam of her hair, the lines of her face, her arms lightly tanned, her bare feet almost touching the lazy rippling of the Sumra… And with an unwonted joy I observed that there was no strict boundary between the flowered fabric of her dress and the shadows dappled with sunlight. The contours of her body merged imperceptibly into the luminosity of the air; her eyes, in the manner of a watercolor, mingled with the warm brilliance of the sky; the movements of her fingers turning the pages wove themselves into the undulation of the long willow branches… So it was this fusion that hid the mystery of her beauty!

Yes, her face and her body were not tensed, fearful of the arrival of old age; they absorbed sun and wind; the bitter scents of the steppe; the freshness of the willow groves. And her presence conferred an astonishing harmony on this desert space. Charlotte was there, and in the monotony of the plain scorched by the heat, an elusive consonance was formed: the melodious gurgling of the stream, the tart smell of the wet clay and the aromatic one of the dry plants; the play of shadow and light beneath the branches. A unique moment, inimitable in the blurred sequence of days, of years, of ages…

A moment that did not pass away.

I was discovering Charlotte's beauty. And almost at the same moment her isolation.

That day, lying on the shore, I was listening to her talking about the book she took on our excursions. Ever since my slip of the tongue, I could not prevent myself taking note, while keeping up with the conversation, of the way in which my grandmother employed French. I compared her style with that of the authors I was reading and with that of the rare French newspapers that got through into our country. I knew all the distinctive features of her French, her favorite expressions, her personal syntax, her vocabulary, and even the patina of time that her sentences bore – the belle époque flavor…

On this occasion, more than all these linguistic observations, a surprising thought came into my mind: "For half a century this style has lived in complete isolation, very rarely spoken, grappling with a reality foreign to its nature, like a plant striving to grow on a bare rock face…" And yet Charlotte's French had retained an extraordinary vigor, rich and pure, that amber transparency that wine acquires with aging. This style had survived Siberian snowstorms, the burning sands in the desert of central Asia. And it resonates still on the banks of this river in the midst of the endless steppe…

It was then that this woman's isolation came into focus in all its shattering and mundane simplicity. "She has no one to talk to," I said to myself with stupefaction. "No one to talk to in French…" I suddenly understood what might be the significance for Charlotte of these few weeks that we spent together each summer. I understood that this French, this fabric of sentences that seemed so natural to me, would be frozen, when I left, for a whole year; replaced by Russian, by the rustling of pages, by silence. And I pictured Charlotte alone, walking along the dim streets of Saranza buried under the snow…

The next day I saw my grandmother talking to Gavrilych, the drunkard and scandalizer of our courtyard. The babushkas' bench was empty – the man's arrival must have driven them away. The children hid behind the poplar trees. The inhabitants at their windows watched the scene with interest: the strange Frenchwoman who dared to approach the monster. I thought again of my grandmother's isolation. I felt a pricking in my eyelids: "This is what her life is. This courtyard, this drunkard Gavrilych, this huge black izba across the yard. With all those families piled on top of one another…" Charlotte came in, a bit out of breath but smiling, her eyes veiled in tears of joy

"Do you know," she said to me in Russian, as if she had not had the time to switch from one language to the other, "Gavrilych has been talking to me about the war; he was defending Stalingrad on the same front as your father. He often speaks to me about it. He was describing a battle on the banks of the Volga. They were fighting to take a hill back from the Germans. He said he had never before seen such a chaos of tanks in flames, mangled corpses, bloody earth. That evening on the hilltop he was one of a dozen survivors. He went down to the Volga; he was dying of thirst. And there, on the shore, he saw the water, very calm, white sand, reeds, and young fish leaping as he approached. Just like the days of his childhood in his own village…"

I listened to her, and Russia, the country of her isolation, no longer seemed to me hostile to her "Frenchness." Touched, I said to myself that this big man, drunk, with his fierce gaze, this Gavrilych would not have dared to talk to anyone else about his feelings. They would have laughed in his face: Stalingrad, the war, and then all at once these reeds, and young fish! No one else in that courtyard would have even taken the trouble to listen to him: what can a drunkard tell you that is interesting? He had spoken to Charlotte. With confidence, with the certainty of being understood. This Frenchwoman was closer to him at that moment than all those people who were staring at him and counting on a free show. He had stared at them darkly, grumbling privately to himself, "There they all are, like in a circus…" All at once he had seen Charlotte crossing the courtyard with a bag of provisions. He had straightened himself up and greeted her. A minute later, with a face that seemed to have grown lighter, he was telling her, "And you know, Sharlota Norbertovna, it was no longer the earth under our feet but hacked-up meat. I've never seen anything like it, not since the start of the war. And then, that evening, when we had finished with the Germans, I went down toward the Volga. And there, how can I tell you…"

That morning when we went out, we walked past the great black izba. It was already alive with a dense hum. One could hear the angry hissing of oil on a stove, the female and male duet of a quarrel, the jumble of the voices and music from several radios… I glanced at Charlotte, raising my eyebrows with a mocking grimace. She had no difficulty in guessing the significance of my smile. But the great stirring anthill seemed not to interest her.

It was only when we began walking over the steppe that she spoke: "Last winter," she said, "I took some medicines to dear old Frossia, you know, that babushka who is always the first one to make herself scarce as soon as Gavrilych is sighted… It was very cold that day. I had great difficulty in opening the door of their izba…"

Charlotte continued her story, and with growing amazement, I sensed that her plain words were redolent of sounds, smells, light veiled by the fog of the great frosts… She shook the door handle, and the door opened reluctantly, breaking a frame of ice, with a shrill creaking. She found herself inside the great wooden house, facing a staircase black with age. The treads uttered plaintive groans under her feet. The corridors were cluttered with old cupboards, with great cardboard boxes piled high along the walls, with bikes, with dull mirrors that opened up surprising perspectives in this cavernous space. The smell of burning wood hovered between the dark walls and mingled with the cold that Charlotte carried in the folds of her coat… It was at the end of the corridor on the first floor that my grandmother saw her. A young woman with a baby in her arms was standing near a window covered in scrolls of ice. Without moving, her head slightly inclined, she was watching the dancing flames in the open door of a great stove that occupied the corner of the corridor. Outside the frosted window the winter dusk was slowly drawing in, blue and clear…

Charlotte was silent for a moment, then continued in a slightly hesitant voice, "Of course, it was an illusion, you know… But her face was so pale, so fine… Almost like the ice flowers that covered the windowpane. Yes, as if her features had been lifted out of those hoarfrost ornaments. I have never seen such a fragile beauty. Yes, like an icon sketched on ice…"

We walked in silence for a long time. The steppe was slowly unfolding before us with the resonant chirruping of cicadas. But that dry sound and the heat did not prevent me from feeling in my lungs the freezing air of the great black izba. I saw the window covered with hoarfrost, the glittering blue of the crystals, the young woman with her child. Charlotte had spoken in French. French had gone inside that izba, which had always alarmed me with its somber, heavy, and very Russian life. And within its depths a window had lit up. Yes, she had spoken in French. She could have spoken in Russian. That would have taken nothing away from her recreation of the moment. So a kind of intermediary language did exist. A universal language! I thought again about that "between two languages" that I had discovered, thanks to my slip of the tongue, and I thought of the "language of amazement."…

That day, for the first time, the inspiring thought crossed my mind: Suppose one could express this language in writing?

One afternoon we spent on the banks of the Sumra, I surprised myself thinking about Charlotte's death. Or rather, on the contrary, I was thinking about the impossibility of her death…

The heat had been particularly intense that day. Charlotte had removed her espadrilles and, lifting her dress up to her knees, was paddling in the water. Perched on one of the little islands, I watched her walking along, following the shore. Once again I felt as if I were observing her and the beach of white sand and the steppe from a great distance. Yes, as if I were suspended in the basket of a hot air balloon. This is the way (I was to learn much later) that we perceive the places and the faces that subconsciously we are already locating in the past. I was looking at her from that illusory height, from that future toward which all my young energies tended. She walked in the water with the dreamy carelessness of an adolescent girl. Her book, open, was left behind on the grass, under the willows. Suddenly in a single brilliant illumination I reviewed Charlotte's life in its entirety. It was like a throbbing sequence of lightning flashes: France at the turn of the century; Siberia; the desert; and again endless snows; the war; Saranza… I had never before had the opportunity to examine the life of a living person in this way – from one end to the other – and to say: this life is closed. There would be nothing in Charlotte's life other than Saranza, this steppe. And death.

I stood up on my island, I stared at this woman who was walking slowly in the current of the Sumra. And with an unfamiliar joy that suddenly filled my lungs, I whispered, "No, she won't die." And at once I longed to understand whence this serene assurance came, this confidence, which was so strange, especially in the year marked by the death of my parents.

But instead of a logical explanation I saw a flood of moments streaming by in a dazzling disorder: a morning filled with sunlit mist in an imaginary Paris; the breeze redolent of lavender filling a railway carriage; the cry of the Kukushka in the warm evening air; that distant moment of the first snow that Charlotte had watched swirling around on that terrible night of the war; and also this present moment – this slim woman, with a white scarf over her gray hair, a woman strolling absentmindedly in the clear water of a river that flows through the heart of the endless steppe…

These visions seemed to me both ephemeral and endowed with a kind of eternity. I felt an intoxicating certainty; in a mysterious way they made Charlotte's death impossible. I sensed that the encounter with the young woman beside the frosted window in the black izba – the icon on the ice! – and even Gavrilych's story – the reeds, the young fish, an evening in the war – yes, even these brief flashes of illumination contributed to the impossibility of her death. And the most wonderful thing was that there was no need to prove it, to explain it, to argue it. I looked at Charlotte, climbing onto the bank to sit in her favorite spot under the willows, and I repeated to myself, as if it were something luminously obvious: "No, all those moments will never disappear…"

When I came beside her, my grandmother looked up and said to me, "This morning, you know, I copied out two different translations of a sonnet by Baudelaire for you. Listen, I'm going to read them to you. It will amuse you…"

Thinking that I was in for one of those stylistic curiosities that Charlotte liked to unearth for me in her reading, often in the form of a riddle, I concentrated, eager to show off my knowledge of French literature. I did not dream that this sonnet by Baudelaire would be a veritable liberation for me.

It is true that Woman, during those summer months, had imposed herself on all my senses like a ceaseless oppression. Without knowing it, I was living through that painful transition that lies between the very first experience of physical love, often barely sketched in, and those that will follow. This is often a more delicate path to travel than the one that leads from innocence to the first knowledge of a woman's body.

Even in the marooned town that was Saranza, this multifarious woman, elusive, innumerable, was strangely present. More insinuating, more discreet than in the big cities, but all the more provocative. Like, for example, the girl whom I passed one day in an empty street, dusty and scorched by the sun. She was tall, well built, with that healthy physical robustness that one finds in the provinces. Her blouse clung to powerful rounded breasts. Her miniskirt hugged the very full tops of her thighs. The pointed heels of her glossy white shoes made her gait a little strained. Her fashionable clothes, her makeup, and this stilted gait lent an almost surrealist air to her appearance in the empty street. But above all there was this almost brutish physical superabundance of her body, of her movements! On this afternoon of silent heat. In this sleepy little town. Why? To what end? I could not prevent myself glancing furtively behind me: yes, her strong calves, polished by sunburn, her thighs, the two hemispheres of her buttocks moving with suppleness at each step. Bewildered, I told myself that somewhere in this dead Saranza there must be a room, a bed, where this body would stretch out and, parting its legs, welcome another body into its groin. This obvious thought plunged me into boundless amazement. How simultaneously natural and improbable it all was!

Or again the plump, bare woman's arm that appeared at a window one evening. A little winding street, overhung with still, heavy foliage – and this very white, very rounded arm, uncovered to the shoulder, which had swayed for a few seconds, the time it took to draw a muslin curtain over the darkness of the room. And I do not know by what intuition I had recognized the somewhat excited impatience of this gesture, and had understood on what interior this naked woman's arm was drawing the curtain… I even felt the smooth coolness of the arm on my lips.

At each of these encounters, an insistent summons rang out in my head: I must seduce them at once, these unknown women, make them mine, fit their flesh into my rosary of dreamed-of bodies. For each missed opportunity was a defeat, an irremediable loss, an emptiness that other bodies would only partially be able to fill. At such moments my fever became unbearable!

I had never dared to embark on this subject with Charlotte. Still less to talk to her about the woman cut in two on the barge, or my night with the young drunken dancer. Did she guess at my turmoil herself? Certainly. Without actually picturing that prostitute seen through the portholes, or the young redhead on the old ferry, it seems to me that she identified with great precision "where I was at" in my experience of love. Unconsciously, through my questions, my evasions, my feigned indifference over certain delicate subjects – my silences, even – I was painting my own portrait as apprentice lover. But I was not aware of it, like someone who forgets that his shadow is projecting onto a wall the gestures he is trying to hide.

Thus, hearing Charlotte speak of Baudelaire, I thought it was mere coincidence when in the first stanza of his sonnet, this feminine presence was sketched:

When, with closed eyes, on some warm autumn night, I breathe your bosom's sultry fragrances, Enchanted shores unfold their promontories, Dazed by a sun monotonously bright.

"You see," my grandmother continued, in a mixture of Russian and French, for she had to quote the texts of the translations, "In Bryussov the first line is rendered as: 'On an autumn evening, with eyes closed…'

"In Balmont: 'When, closing my eyes, on a stifling summer's night…'

"In my opinion both of them are simplifying Baudelaire. In his sonnet, you see, the 'warm autumn night' is a very particular moment, yes, in mid-autumn, suddenly, like a blessing, this warm night, unique, a parenthesis of light amid the rains and miseries of life. In their translations they have traduced Baudelaire's idea: 'an autumn evening,' 'a summer's night,' is flat. It has no soul. While in his text this moment makes magic possible, you know, a bit like those warm days just before the winter."

Charlotte elaborated her commentary at every stage with the hghtly assumed dilettantism that disguised her often very broad knowledge, which she was afraid to flaunt. But now all I was hearing was the melody of her voice, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in French.

In place of my obsession with female flesh, with that omnipresent womanhood whose inexhaustible multiplicity harassed me, I had a feeling of great relief. This had the transparency of that "warm autumn night." And the serenity of a slow, almost melancholy contemplation of a woman's beautiful body, stretched out in the blissful lassitude of love. A body whose physical reality is reflected in a series of reminiscences, scents, lights…

Before the storm reached us, the river became swollen. We shook ourselves, hearing the stream already lapping among the roots of the willows. The sky became purple, black. The steppe, bristling, froze into blinding, livid scenes. A piquant, acid smell assailed us with the chill of the first showers. And Charlotte, as she folded the napkin on which we had taken our lunch, rounded off her exposition: "But in the end, in the last line, there is a real paradox of translation. Bryussov excels Baudelaire! Yes, Baudelaire talks of 'the song of mariners' on that island that is born of 'your bosom's sultry fragrances.' And Bryussov, in translating him, gives 'the voices of sailors calling in several tongues.' What is wonderful is that the Russian can convey that with a single adjective. These cries in different languages are much more alive than the'song of mariners,' which is rather mawkishly romantic, you have to admit. It's what we were saying the other day, you see: the translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival. Besides, in this sonnet…"

She did not have the time to finish her sentence. The water streamed under our feet, carrying away my clothes, several sheets of paper, and one of Charlotte's espadrilles. The sky, gorged with rain, burst upon the steppe. We rushed to rescue what we still could. I seized my trousers and my shirt, which had happily caught on the branches of the willows as they floated along, and I just managed to fish out Charlotte's espadrille. Then the sheets of paper – they were the recopied translations. The downpour quickly turned them into little balls spotted with ink.

We did not notice our fear – the violence of the thunder's deafening clatter drove out all thought. The cloudburst isolated us inside the shivering confines of our bodies. With a thrilling keenness we felt our hearts laid bare, drowned in this deluge that merged heaven and earth.

A few minutes later the sun shone. From the top of the bank we contemplated the steppe. Shining, quivering with a thousand iridescent sparks, it seemed to be breathing. We exchanged smiling looks. Charlotte had lost her white headscarf; her wet hair was streaming in swarthy braids on her shoulders. Raindrops glittered on her eyelashes. Her dress, quite soaked, clung to her body. "She is young. And very beautiful. In spite of everything," declared that involuntary voice within me that disobeys and embarrasses us with its uncompromising frankness, but which reveals what is censored by considered speech.

We stopped at the railway embankment. In the distance we could see a long freight train approaching. Often a panting train would stop at this point, barring our path for a brief moment. This obstruction, due no doubt to some points or a signal, would amuse us. The cars rose up in a gigantic wall, covered in dust. A dense wave of heat was given off by their sides exposed to the sun. And the silence of the steppe was only broken by the distant hooting of the locomotive. Each time I was tempted not to wait for it to move off, and to cross the track by slipping under a car, Charlotte would restrain me, saying she had just heard the whistle. Sometimes when our wait was really becoming too long, we climbed onto the open deck, which freight cars had at that time, and got off on the other side of the track. These few seconds were filled with gleeful nervousness: what if the train set off and took us to an unknown and fabulous destination?

This time we could not wait. Soaked as we were, we needed to reach home before nightfall. I climbed up first and held out my hand to Charlotte, who stepped up onto the footboard. Just at that moment the train moved off. We ran across the deck. I could still have jumped. But not Charlotte… We stood facing the embrasure, which was filling with an increasingly biting draft. The line of our footpath vanished in the immensity of the steppe.

We were not at all worried. We knew that one station or another would halt the progress of our train. It seemed to me that Charlotte was in some ways quite pleased with our unexpected adventure. She gazed at the plain, revived by the storm. Her hair, blowing in the wind, spread across her face. She flung it aside from time to time with a rapid gesture. Despite the sun, a little fine rain began to fall at intervals. Charlotte smiled at me through this shining veil.

What suddenly struck me on this lurching deck in the middle of the steppe was like the wonder experienced by a child who, after long, fruitless study, discovers a character or an object that has been camouflaged in the cleverly jumbled lines of a drawing. Now he sees it, and the arabesques of the drawing acquire a new meaning, a new life…

It was the same with my internal perception. All at once I saw! Or rather I felt, with all my being, the luminous tie that linked this moment full of iridescent reflections to other moments I had inhabited in the past: that evening long ago with Charlotte, the melancholy cry of the Kukushka; then that Parisian morning, shrouded in my imagination in sunlit mist; that moment at night on the raft with my first lover, when the great riverboat towered above our entwined bodies; and the evening gatherings of my childhood, lived, it already seemed, in another life… Linked together thus, these moments formed a singular universe, with its own rhythm, its particular air and sun. Another planet, almost. A planet where the death of this woman with her big gray eyes became inconceivable. Where a woman's body was reflected in a series of dreamed moments. Where my "language of amazement" would be comprehensible to others.

This planet was the same world that was unfolding as our wagon hurtled along. Yes, the same station where the train finally came to a halt. The same empty platform, washed by the downpour. Those same rare passersby with their mundane concerns. The same world, but seen differently.

As I helped Charlotte to step down, I tried to grasp this "differently." Yes, to see this other planet, one would have to behave in a special way. But how?

"Come, we're going to have something to eat," my grandmother said, drawing me away from my musings, and she set off for the restaurant located in one of the wings of the station.

The room was empty, the tables were not laid. We sat down near an open window, through which a square lined with trees could be seen. On the front of the apartment blocks were visible long strips of red calico with their customary slogans glorifying the Party, the Fatherland, and Peace… A waiter came up and told us in a sullen voice that the storm had cut off their electricity and that the restaurant was therefore closing. I was already about to get up, but Charlotte insisted with extreme politeness, which, with its old-fashioned turns of phrase that I knew to be borrowed from French, always impressed Russians. The man hesitated for a second, then went away with a visibly disconcerted air.

He brought us a dish astonishing in its simplicity. A plate with a dozen rounds of sausage and a huge pickled cucumber, cut into fine slices. But above all, he put in front of us a bottle of wine. I had never had a dinner like it. The waiter himself must have grasped the unusual couple we made and the strangeness of this cold meal. He smiled and stammered some remarks about the weather, as if to excuse the welcome he had just given us.

We remained alone in the room. The wind coming in at the window smelled of wet foliage. The sky layered itself into gray-and-purple clouds, lit by the setting sun. From time to time the wheels of a car squealed on the wet asphalt. Each mouthful of wine gave these sounds and colors a new density: the cool heaviness of the trees, the shining windows washed by the rain, the red of the slogans on the facades, the wet squealing of the wheels, the sky still stormy. I felt that, little by little, what we were living through in this empty room was becoming detached from the present moment, from that station, from that unknown town, from its daily life…

Heavy foliage, long splashes of red on the facades, squealing tires, sky gray and purple. I turned to Charlotte. She was no longer there.

And it is no longer the restaurant in the station lost in the middle of the steppe. But a café in Paris – and outside the window a spring evening. The gray-and-purple sky, still stormy, the squealing of cars on the wet asphalt, the fresh exuberance of the chestnut trees, the red of the blinds belonging to the restaurant on the opposite side of the square. And I, twenty years later, I, who have just recognized this combination of colors and have just relived the giddiness of the moment regained. A young woman facing me is keeping up a conversation about nothing with a very French grace. I watch her smiling face, and occasionally I punctuate her words with a nod of my head. This woman is very close to me. I love her voice, her way of thinking. I know the harmony of her body… "And what if I were to speak to her about that moment twenty years ago, in the middle of the steppe, in that empty station?" I ask myself, and I know that I will not do it.

On that distant evening, twenty years ago, Charlotte is already getting up, adjusting her hair in the reflection of the open window and we leave. And on my lips, with the pleasant sharpness of the wine, these words, never ventured upon, fade away: "If she is so beautiful still, despite her white hair and having lived so many years, it is because all these moments of light and beauty have been filtered through her eyes, her face, her body…"

Charlotte leaves the station. I follow her, drunk with my un-sayable revelation. And night falls over the steppe. The night that has lasted for twenty years in the Saranza of my childhood.

I saw Charlotte for a few hours ten years later, before I went abroad. I arrived very late in the evening, and I was due to leave again for Moscow early in the morning. It was an icy night at the end of autumn. For Charlotte it brought together the troubled memories of all the departures in her life; all the nights of farewells… We did not sleep. She went to make the tea, and I paced up and down in her apartment, which seemed to me strangely small and very touching, through the constancy of familiar objects.

I was twenty-five. I was ecstatic about my trip. I already knew that I was going away for a long time. Or rather that my visit to Europe would be extended far beyond the planned two weeks. It seemed to me that my departure would shake the calm of our stagnant empire; that its inhabitants would all talk of nothing but my exile; that a new era would begin from my first action, from my first words uttered on the other side of the frontier. I was already living off the procession of new faces I would meet; the dazzle of dreamed-of landscapes; the stimulus of danger.

It was with the conceited egoism of youth that I said to her, in rather jocular tones, "But you could go abroad as well! To France, for example… Wouldn't that tempt you, eh?"

The expression on her face did not change. She simply lowered her eyes. I heard the whistling melody of the kettle, the tinkling of snow crystals against the black windowpane.

"When I went to Siberia in 1922," she finally said to me with a weary smile, "half, or maybe a third of that journey, you know, I made on foot. That was as far as from here to Paris. Do you see, I wouldn't need your airplanes at all…"

She smiled again, looking me in the eye. But despite the tone of voice she assumed, I sensed within her voice a deep note of bitterness. Embarrassed, I took a cigarette and went out onto the balcony…

It was there, above the frozen darkness of the steppe, that I believed I had finally understood what France meant to her.