Dreams Of My Russian Summers

7

That summer I felt extremely nervous about encountering the tsar again… Yes, of seeing the young emperor and his wife once more in the streets of Paris. Just as you dread meeting a friend whose doctor has informed you of his imminent death and who, in blissful ignorance, proceeds to tell you all about his plans.

For how could I have traveled with Nicholas and Alexandra if I knew them to be doomed? If I knew that even their daughter Olga would not be spared? And that even the other children, to whom Alexandra had not yet given birth, would meet the same tragic fate?

I was secretly overjoyed that evening when I caught sight of a little collection of poems on my grandmother's lap that she was leafing through as she sat amid the flowers upon her balcony. Had she sensed my unease, remembering the incident of the previous summer? Or did she simply want to read us one of her favorite poems?

I came to sit beside her on the floor itself, resting my elbow on the head of the stone bacchante. My sister stood on the other side, leaning on the handrail, her gaze lost in the warm mist of the steppes.

Charlotte's voice was lyrical as the lines demanded:

There is a tune, for which I'd gladly part With all Rossini, Weber, and Mozart, An ancient air, whose languid melody Has secret charms that speak only to me…

The magic of this poem by Nerval conjured up out of the evening shadows a castle of the time of Louis XIII and the chatelaine, "Fair with dark eyes, in robe of ancient style."…

It was then that my sister's voice roused me from my poetic reverie: "And Félix Faure, what became of him?"

She was still standing there, at the corner of the balcony, leaning lightly over the handrail. With absentminded gestures from time to time she plucked at a faded morning glory bloom and tossed it away, watching its gyrations in the nocturnal air. Lost in her young girl's dreams, she had not listened to the reading of the poem. It was the summer of her fifteenth year… Why had she thought about the president? Probably this handsome and imposing man with an elegant mustache and great calm eyes suddenly became a focus, through some capricious play of her amorous daydreams, for her pictured reality of a man's presence. And she asked in Russian – as if better to express the disturbing mystery of this secretly desired presence – "And Félix Faure, what became of him?"

Charlotte threw me a rapid glance with a hint of a smile. Then she closed the book she was holding in her lap, sighed softly, and looked into the distance, toward that horizon where the previous year we had seen Atlantis emerging.

"Some years after the visit of Nicholas II to Paris, the president died…" There was a brief hesitation, an involuntary pause, which only served to increase our attentiveness. "He died suddenly, at the Elysée Palace. In the arms of his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil…"

It was this sentence that sounded the death knell for my childhood. "He died in the arms of his mistress…"

I was overwhelmed by the tragic beauty of these words. A whole new world swept over me.

What struck me above all about this revelation was the setting: this scene of love and death had been played out at the Elysée! At the presidential palace! At the pinnacle of that pyramid of power, of glory, of world fame… I pictured a sumptuous room with tapestries, gilt, rows of mirrors. In the midst of this luxury – a man (the president of the Republic!) and a woman, united in an ardent embrace…

Dumbfounded, I began unconsciously to translate the scene into Russian. That is, to replace the French protagonists with their national equivalents. A series of phantoms, looking cramped in their black suits, appeared before my eyes. Secretaries of the Politburo, masters of the Kremlin: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev. Four very different characters, loved or detested by the population, each of whom had put his stamp on a whole epoch in the history of the empire. Yet they all had one quality in common: at their sides a feminine presence, let alone an amorous one, was inconceivable. It was far easier for us to imagine Stalin in the company of someone like Churchill at Yalta, or with Mao in Moscow, than to picture him with the mother of his children…

"The president died at the Elysée Palace, in the arms of his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil…" This sentence seemed like a coded message coming from another planetary system.

Charlotte went to the Siberian suitcase to look for some of the newspapers of the period, hoping to be able to show us a photo of Madame Steinheil. While I, embroiled in my erotic Franco-Russian translation, recalled a remark that I had heard one evening on the lips of a gangling dunce, a fellow pupil. We were walking along the dark corridors at school after a session of weight lifting, the only subject at which he excelled. Passing the portrait of Lenin, my companion had given a low whistle in a most disrespectful manner and had observed, "You know old Lenin. He didn't have any children, did he? 'Cause he just didn't know how to make love…"

He had used an extremely coarse verb to refer to the sexual activity in which, according to him, Lenin was deficient. A verb I should never have dared to use and which, applied to Vladimir Ilyich, became a monstrous obscenity. Taken aback, I heard the echo of this iconoclastic verb resounding in the long empty corridor…

"Félix Faure… the president of the Republic… in the arms of his mistress…" More than ever Atlantis-France seemed to me a terra incognita where our Russian notions no longer had any currency.

The death of Félix Faure made me aware of my age: I was thirteen; I guessed what "dying in the arms of a woman" meant, and from now on I could be spoken to on such subjects. Furthermore, the courage and total absence of hypocrisy in Charlotte's story demonstrated what I already knew: she was not a grandmother like the others. No Russian babushka would have ventured on such a discussion with her grandson. In this freedom of expression I sensed an unaccustomed perception of the body, of love, of relationships between man and woman – a mysterious "French outlook."

Next morning I went out onto the steppe to brood alone on the fabulous transmutation effected in my life by the death of the president. To my great surprise, rerun in Russian, the scene no longer made a good story. In fact it was impossible to tell! Censored by an inexplicable modesty of words, revised, all of a sudden, by a strange offended morality, when finally told, it swung between pathological obscenity and euphemisms that transformed the pair of lovers into characters in a badly translated sentimental novel.

"No," I said to myself, stretched out in the rippling grass under the warm wind, "it is only in French that he could die in the arms of Marguerite Steinheil…"

Thanks to the lovers of the Elysée Palace, I now grasped the mystery of that young serving maid who, surprised in the bath by her master, gave herself to him with all the terror and fever of a dream finally realized. Yes, before that there had been this bizarre trio I had come across in a novel by Maupassant that I had read in the spring. Throughout the book a Parisian dandy desired the inaccessible love of a female creature, an amalgam of decadent refinements. He sought to gain entry to the heart of this cerebral, indolent courtesan, who was like a fragile orchid, and who always left him to hope in vain. And alongside them – the serving maid, the young woman in her bath with her robust and healthy body. At first reading all I could see was this triangle, which seemed to me artificial and lifeless: for how could the two women even consider one another as rivals…?

From now on I beheld the Parisian trio with new eyes. They became concrete, flesh, palpable – they were alive! I now recognized the blissful dread that caused the young servant maid to shiver when snatched from the bath and carried, all wet, to a bed. I sensed the tickling of the drops meandering over her full breasts, the weight of her haunches in the arms of the man; I even saw the rhythmic stirring of the water in the bath from which her body had just been lifted. Gradually the water grew calm… And the other, the inaccessible mondaine, who had previously reminded me of a dried flower between the pages of a book, now revealed an opaque, subterranean sensuality. Her body contained a perfumed warmth, a disturbing fragrance, made up of the throbbing of her blood, the polish of her skin, the alluring languor of her speech.

The fatal love that had caused the heart of the president to burst reshaped the France that I carried inside me. This came mainly from storybooks. But on that memorable evening the literary characters who rubbed shoulders on its highways seemed to be awakening after a long sleep. Before that – however much they had waved their swords, climbed rope ladders, swallowed arsenic, declared their love, traveled in carriages while holding the severed head of their beloved on their knees – they never escaped from their world of fiction. Exotic, brilliant, comic perhaps, they did not move me. Like that curé in Flaubert, the country priest to whom Emma Bovary confessed her torments, I had not been able to understand the woman either: "But what more can she desire, she who has a beautiful house, an industrious husband, and the respect of her neighbors…?"

The Elysée lovers helped me to understand Madame Bovary. In a flash of intuition I seized on this detail: the plump fingers of the hairdresser deftly tugging and smoothing Emma's hair. In the cramped salon the air is heavy, the light from the candles that banishes the evening darkness is hazy. This woman, seated before the mirror, has just left her young lover and is now preparing to return home. Yes, I guessed what an adulterous woman might feel in the evening, at the hairdresser's, between the last kiss of a rendezvous at the hotel and the first, very ordinary words that must be addressed to the husband… Without being able to explain it myself, I felt as if I heard a string vibrating in the soul of this woman. My own heart sang out in unison. A smiling voice that came from Charlotte's stories prompted me: "Emma Bovary, c'est moi!"

Time passed in our Atlantis according to its own laws. To be precise, it did not pass but rippled around each event described by Charlotte. Each fact, even perfectly accidental ones, became encrusted forever in the daily life of that country. A comet was always crossing its night sky, even though our grandmother, consulting a press cutting, gave us the precise date of this sudden apparition in the heavens: October 17, 1882. We could not picture the Eiffel Tower without seeing the mad Austrian who had leaped from its jagged spire, whose parachute had failed him and who crashed in the midst of a gawking crowd. For us the Père Lachaise was far from being a tranquil cemetery, animated only by the respectful whispers of a few tourists. Not a bit of it: armed men ran among the tombs in all directions, exchanging gunshots and hiding behind the funerary monuments. Recounted to us once, this battle between the Communards and the Versailles government troops was forever associated in our minds with the name Père Lachaise. Furthermore we also heard the echo of this shoot-out in the catacombs of Paris. For according to Charlotte, they did battle in those labyrinths too, with bullets shattering the skulls of the dead of several centuries. And if the night sky above Atlantis was lit by the comet and by German zeppelins, the clear blue of day was filled with the regular chirring of a monoplane: a certain Louis Blériot was crossing the channel.

The choice of events was more or less subjective. Their sequence was chiefly governed by our feverish desire to know, by our random questions. But whatever significance, they never escaped the general rule: the chandelier that fell from the ceiling during the performance of Faust at the Opéra immediately unleashed its crystalline explosion in all the auditoriums of Paris. For us real theater implied a light tinkling from an enormous glass cluster, ripe enough to become detached from the ceiling at the sound of a musical flourish or an alexandrine… And as for real Parisian circus, we knew that the lion tamer was always torn apart by wild beasts, like the "Negro called Delmonico" who was attacked by his seven lionesses.

Charlotte sometimes drew this information from the Siberian suitcase, sometimes from her childhood memories. A number of her stories went back to a still earlier age, related by her uncle or by Albertine, who themselves had inherited them from their parents.

But for us the exact chronology mattered little! Time in Atlantis knew only the marvelous simultaneity of the present. The vibrant baritone of Faust filled the auditorium: "Let me gaze, let me gaze on the form before me…"; the chandelier fell; the lionesses hurled themselves at the unfortunate Delmonico; the comet cut through the night sky; the parachutist took off from the Eiffel Tower; two thieves, taking advantage of the summer season carelessness, walked out of the Louvre at night, carrying off the Mona Lisa; Prince Borghese stuck out his chest, filled with pride at having won the first Peking-Paris via Moscow car race… And somewhere in the half-light of a discreet salon at the Elysée a man with a fine white mustache enfolded his mistress in his arms and suffocated in this last embrace.

This present tense, this time in which actions were repeated indefinitely, was of course an optical illusion. But it was thanks to this illusory perception that we discovered several essential character traits in the inhabitants of our Atlantis. The streets of Paris, in our stories, were constantly shaken by bomb explosions. The anarchists who threw them must have been as numerous as the grisettes or the coachmen in their cabs. For me the names of some of these enemies of the social order will for a long time evoke the roar of an explosion or the sound of gunfire: Ravachol, Sante Caserio…

Yes, it was in these tempestuous streets that one of the peculiarities of this people became clear to us: they were always busy making demands; never content with the status quo already achieved; ready at any moment to surge into the thoroughfares of their city, to unseat, to agitate, to insist. In the perfect social calm of our own fatherland these Frenchmen had the look of born rebels, dedicated demonstrators, professional moaners. And the Siberian suitcase containing newspapers that spoke of strikes, assassination attempts, and fights on the barricades seemed itself to be like a great bomb ticking away amid the somnolent tranquillity of Saranza.

And then a few streets further on from the explosions, still in this present, which never passed away, we came upon a quiet little bistro, the name of which Charlotte spelled out to us, smilingly, as she recalled it: Au Ratafia de Neuilly "This ratafia," she would elaborate, "the patron served it in silver scallop dishes…"

So the people of our Atlantis could feel sentimental attachment to a café, love its name, and discern an atmosphere that was special to it. And for their whole lives retain the memory that it was there, at the corner of a street, that one drank ratafia from silver scallop dishes. Yes, not from thick tumblers, nor from goblets, but from these fine dishes. It was our new discovery: this occult science that linked the place of refreshments, the ritual of the meal, and its psychological tonality.

"In their minds, do their favorite bistros have a soul?" we wondered, "or at least a face of their own?"

There was only one café in Saranza. Despite its pretty name, Snowflake, it did not arouse any special emotion in us, any more than the furniture shop next door or the savings bank opposite. It closed at eight o'clock in the evening, and then it was its dark interior, with the blue eye of a nightlight, which inspired our curiosity. And as for the five or six restaurants in the city on the Volga where our family lived, they were all identical: at seven o'clock precisely the doorkeeper opened the doors to an impatient crowd; and a combination of earsplitting music and the smell of burned fat spilled into the street; at eleven o'clock the same crowd, muted and fuddled, streamed out onto the front steps, near which a flashing police light added a note of fantasy to this immutable rhythm…

"The silver scallop dishes au Ratafia de Neuilly" we repeated to ourselves silently.

Charlotte explained the composition of this unusual drink to us. Her account very naturally brought us to the universe of wines. And it was there, enthralled by a colorful tide of appellations, aromas, and bouquets, that we became acquainted with these extraordinary entities, each with their nuances that the palate could distinguish. And this too was the work of these builders of barricades! Thinking about the labels on a few bottles displayed on the shelves of the Snowflake, we had to admit that they were all French names: Shampanskoye, Konyak, Silvaner, Aligoté, Muskat, Kahor…

Yes, most of all it was this contradiction that left us perplexed: that these anarchists had managed to elaborate such a coherent and complex system of drinks. And what is more, all these innumerable wines, according to Charlotte, formed infinite combinations with cheeses! And the latter in their turn added up to a veritable cheese encyclopedia of tastes, of local colors, of individual humors, almost… Rabelais, who often haunted our evenings on the steppes, had not lied.

We were discovering that a meal, yes, the simple intake of food, could become a theatrical production, a liturgy, an art. As at the Café Anglais on the boulevard des Italiens, where Charlotte's uncle often dined with his friends. It was he who told his niece the story of that incredible bill of ten thousand francs for a hundred… frogs! "It was very cold," he recalled; "all the rivers were covered in ice. They had to summon fifty workmen to disembowel that glacier and find the frogs…" I did not know what amazed us most: this unimaginable dish, contrary to all our own gastronomic notions, or the regiment of muzhiks (which is how we pictured them) busy splitting blocks of ice on the frozen Seine.

In truth, we were beginning to lose our heads: the Louvre; Le Cid at the Comédie-Française; the barricades; the shoot-out in the catacombs; the Académie Française; the deputies in a boat; and the comet; and the chandeliers, falling one after the other; and the Niagara of wines; and the president's last embrace… And the frogs disturbed in their winter sleep! We were up against a people with a fabulous multiplicity of sentiments, attitudes, and viewpoints, as well as manners of speaking, creating, and loving.

And then there was also the celebrated chef, Urbain Dubois, Charlotte told us, who had dedicated a shrimp and asparagus soup to Sarah Bernhardt. This obliged us to picture a borscht being dedicated to someone, like a book… One day we followed a young dandy through the streets of Atlantis; he walked into Chez Weber, a very fashionable café, according to Charlotte's uncle. He ordered what he always ordered: a bunch of grapes and a glass of water. It was Marcel Proust. We contemplated the grapes and the water, which, under our fascinated gaze, became transformed into fare of unequaled elegance. So it was not the variety of wines or the Rabelaisian abundance of food that counted, but…

We thought again about that French spirit, the mystery of which we strove to fathom. And Charlotte, as if she desired to make our investigations even more frenzied, was already telling us about the Restaurant Paillard on the rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, where the princesse de Caraman-Chimay eloped one evening with the Gypsy violinist Rigo…

Without daring to believe it yet, I asked myself a silent question: might not this much-sought-after French quintessence have as its source – love? For all roads in our Atlantis seemed to lead to the domain of Cupid.

Saranza was sinking into the aromatic night of the steppes. Its scents were mingled with the perfume that embalmed a woman's body swathed in precious stones and ermine. Charlotte was telling of the escapades of the divine Otero. With incredulous astonishment I contemplated this last great courtesan, all curves on her couch with its capricious shapes. Her extravagant life was devoted only to love. And around this throne buzzed men – some counting the last few louis d'or of their lost fortunes, others slowly raising the barrels of their revolvers to their temples. And even in this final gesture they could display an elegance worthy of Proust's bunch of grapes. One of these unhappy lovers committed suicide on the very spot where he had first set eyes on Caroline Otero!

In this exotic country, moreover, the cult of love knew no social boundaries: far from the boudoirs brimming with luxury, over in the working-class suburb of Belleville, we saw two rival gangs kill one another because of a woman. Sole difference: the beautiful Otero's locks had the sheen of a raven's wing, while the tresses of this disputed lover glowed like ripe corn in the setting sun. The bandits of Belleville called her "Casque d'or. "

At that moment our critical sense rebelled. We were prepared to believe in the existence of frog eaters, but fancy gangsters slitting one another's throats over a woman's pretty face!

Clearly this was nothing surprising for our Atlantis. Had we not already seen Charlotte's uncle staggering as he emerged from a cab, his eyes dimmed, his arm swathed in a bloodstained kerchief? He had just been fighting a duel in the forest of Marly, defending a lady's honor… And then there was General Boulanger, the fallen dictator: did he not blow his brains out on the grave of his beloved?

One day, returning from a walk, we were all three surprised by a shower of rain… We were strolling in the old streets of Saranza, made up entirely of great izbas blackened with age. It was beneath the porch of one of them that we found refuge. The street, stifling with the heat a moment ago, was plunged into a chilly twilight, raked by flurries of hail. It was paved in the old style – with great round granite cobbles. The rain caused them to give off a strong smell of wet stone. The view of the houses was blurred behind a curtain of water – and, thanks to that smell, one could imagine oneself to be in a big city in the evening under autumn rain. Charlotte's voice, at first hardly louder than the sound of the raindrops, seemed like an echo muted by the torrential downpour.

"It was another shower of rain that led me to discover an inscription engraved on the damp wall of a house in the allée des Arbalétriers in Paris. We had taken refuge under a porch, my mother and I, and while we waited for the rain to stop, all we had in front of our eyes was this commemorative plaque. I learned the text by heart: In this passage, after leaving the Hôtel de Barbette, the due Louis d'Orléans, brother of King Charles VI, was assassinated by Jean sans Peur, duc de Burgundy, on the night of November 23 to 24, 1407… . He was leaving after a visit to the queen, Isabeau de Bavière…"

Our grandmother fell silent, but in the whispering of the raindrops we could still hear these legendary names woven into a tragic monogram of love and death: Louis d'Orléans, Isabeau de Bavière, Jean sans Peur…

Suddenly, without knowing why I thought of the president. A very very simple, obvious notion: it was that during all those ceremonies in honor of the imperial couple – yes, in the procession on the Champs-Elysées and in front of the tomb of Napoleon and at the Opéra – he had never stopped dreaming of her, his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil. He spoke with the tsar, made speeches, replied to the tsarina, exchanged glances with his wife. But she, at every moment, she was there.

The rain streamed onto the mossy roof of the old izba that was sheltering us on its steps. I forgot where I was. The city I had once visited in the company of the tsar was transfigured before my eyes. Now I perceived it from the viewpoint of the president in love.

That time, on leaving Saranza, I felt as if I were returning from an expedition. I was bringing back a sum of knowledge; a glimpse of their habits and customs; a description, still fragmentary, of the mysterious civilization that was reborn each evening in the heart of the steppes.

Every adolescent classifies things, a defensive reflex when faced with the complexity of the adult world as it sucks him in at the end of childhood. I was perhaps more prone to this than most. For the country I had to explore no longer existed, and I had to reconstitute the topography of its high places and its holy places through the thick fog of the past.

I was especially proud of the gallery of human types that I now possessed in my collection. Apart from the president-lover, the deputies in a boat, and a dandy with his bunch of grapes, there were much humbler but no less unusual characters. The children for example, young mineworkers, their smiles ringed with black. A news vendor crying his wares (we did not dare to imagine a madman running through the streets crying "Pravdal Pravda!"). A dog barber who practiced his craft on the quays. A rural constable with his drum. Strikers gathering to be fed "Communist soup." And even a dog turd salesman. I was very proud of knowing that this strange merchandise was used, at the time, to soften leather…

But my greatest initiation that summer was to understand how one could be French. The countless facets of this elusive identity had formed themselves into a living whole. It was a very well ordered mode of existence, despite its eccentric aspects.

France was for me no longer a simple collection of curios but a tangible and solid entity of which a small part had one day been implanted inside me.

8

What I don't understand is why she wanted to bury herself out there in that Saranza. Not at all. She could very well have lived here, close to you…"

I almost leaped from my stool beside the television. For I understood so perfectly Charlotte's reasons for being fond of her little provincial town. It would have been so easy to explain her choice to the adults gathered in our kitchen. I would have talked of the dry air of the steppe, whose silent transparency distilled the past. I would have spoken of the dusty streets that led nowhere, as they emerged, all of them, onto the small endless plain. Of the town where history, by decapitating churches and tearing down "architectural excesses," had banished all notion of time. A town where living meant endlessly reliving one's past, even while at the same time mechanically performing routine tasks.

I said nothing. I was afraid of being banished from the kitchen. For some time now I had noticed that the adults tolerated my presence more readily. I seemed, at the age of fourteen, to have won the right to be present at their late-night conversations – on condition that I remained invisible. I was thrilled by this change, and the last thing I wanted to do was to jeopardize such a privilege.

Charlotte's name came up during these winter gatherings just as often as before. Yes, as previously, my grandmother's life offered our guests a topic of conversation that satisfied everyone's self-esteem.

And besides, this young Frenchwoman had the advantage of concentrating within her life span the crucial moments in the history of our country. She had lived under the tsar and survived Stalin's purges; she had come through the war and witnessed the fall of so many idols. In their eyes, her life, traced against the background of the empire's bloodiest century, took on an epic dimension.

And now this Frenchwoman, born at the other end of the world, was blankly contemplating the undulations of the sands beyond the open door of a railway carriage. ("But what the devil dragged her into that wretched desert?" my father's friend, the wartime pilot, had exclaimed one day.) At her side, equally motionless, stood her husband, Fyodor. The draft rushing through the carriage brought no coolness, despite the speed of the train. They remained for a long moment in the light and heat of this embrasure. The wind pumiced their brows like sandpaper. The sun broke up the view into myriad flashes. But they did not move, as if they wanted a painful past to be erased by this scouring and burning. They had just left Bukhara.

It was she too, after their return to Siberia, who spent interminable hours at a dark window, from time to time breathing on the thick layer of hoarfrost to preserve a little melted circle. Through this watery spyhole she saw a white nocturnal street. From time to time a car suddenly came gliding up, approached their house, and after a moment of indecision drove off. Three o'clock in the morning sounded, and a few minutes later she heard the sharp crunch of snow on the front steps. She closed her eyes for a moment, then went to open up. Her husband always came back at this time… People sometimes disappeared at work, sometimes in the middle of the night, from home, after a black car had driven through the snow-covered streets. She was certain that as long as she waited at the window for him, blowing on the hoarfrost, nothing could happen to him. At three o'clock he would stand up, straighten out the files on his desk, and leave, like all the other public officials throughout the empire. They knew that in the Kremlin the master of the country finished his working day at three o'clock. Without thinking, everyone strove to imitate his timetable. And they did not stop to consider that between Moscow and Siberia, spanning several time zones, this "three o'clock in the morning" no longer corresponded to anything: that Stalin was rising from his bed and filling his first pipe of the day, while in a Siberian town at nightfall his faithful subjects struggled against sleep on chairs that were turning into instruments of torture. From the Kremlin the master seemed to impose his tempo on the passage of time and even on the sun. When he went to bed, all the clocks on the planet showed three o'clock in the morning. At least that was how everyone saw it at the time.

On one occasion Charlotte, exhausted by these nightly vigils, fell asleep several minutes before this planetary hour. A moment later, waking with a start, she heard her husband's footsteps in the children's room. She went in and saw him bending over the bed of their son, this boy with smooth black hair who looked like no one else in the family…

They arrested Fyodor neither in his office in broad daylight nor in the small hours, interrupting his sleep with peremptory drumming on the door. It was on New Year's Eve. He had rigged himself out in the red cloak of Father Christmas, and his face, unrecognizable beneath a long beard, fascinated the children: the boy of twelve and his younger sister – my mother. Charlotte was adjusting the big shapka on her husband's head when they came into the apartment. They entered without having to knock; the door was open; guests were expected.

And this scene of an arrest, which had already been repeated millions of times during a single decade in the life of the country, had that evening as its setting the Christmas tree and these two children with their cardboard masks, he the hare, she the squirrel. And at the center of the room this Father Christmas, transfixed, only too able to guess at the outcome and almost happy that the children cannot see the pallor of his cheeks beneath the cotton-wool beard. In a very calm voice Charlotte says to the hare and the squirrel, who are looking at the intruders without removing their masks, "Come into the next room, children. You can set off the Bengal lights."

She had spoken in French. The two policemen exchanged significant glances…

Fyodor was saved by what logically ought to have been his downfall: his wife's nationality… When, some years earlier, people had begun to disappear, family by family, house by house, he had at once thought of this. Inherent in Charlotte were two grave faults, the ones most often imputed to "enemies of the people": "bourgeois" origins and a link to abroad. Married to a "bourgeois element," and worse still a Frenchwoman, he could see himself quite naturally accused of being "a spy in the pay of French and British imperialists." The formula for some time had been standard.

However, it was on just this perfect evidence that the well-tried machinery of repression ground to a halt. For normally those who fabricated a case were supposed to prove that the accused had cunningly and for years concealed his links to abroad. And when they were dealing with a Siberian who spoke only his mother tongue, had never left his fatherland or met a representative of the capitalist world – such a proof, even if totally falsified, called for a certain adeptness.

But Fyodor hid nothing. Charlotte's passport indicated her nationality in black and white: French. Her birthplace, Neuilly-sur-Seine, in its Russian transliteration only served to emphasize her foreignness. Her trips to France, her "bourgeois" cousins who still lived there, her children who spoke French just as well as Russian – it was all too clear. The confessions that were normally false and extracted under torture after weeks of interrogation had this time been vouchsafed willingly from the beginning. The machinery marked time. Fyodor was imprisoned; then, as he became more and more of an embarrassment, posted to the other end of the empire, in a town annexed from Poland.

They spent a week together – the time it took to travel across the country, and a long and chaotic day of moving into a new house. The next day Fyodor set off for Moscow to be reintegrated into the Party, from which he had been promptly expelled. "It'll only take a couple of days," he said to Charlotte, who went with him to the station. Returning home, she noticed that he had left his cigarette case behind. "It doesn't matter," she thought; "in two days' time…" And this imminent moment (Fyodor would come into the room, see the cigarette case on the table, and, giving himself a little clout on the forehead, exclaim, "What an idiot! I've been looking everywhere for it…"), yes, this June morning would be the first in a long stream of happy days…

They saw one another again four years later. And Fyodor never did recover his cigarette case, which, in the midst of war, Charlotte exchanged for a loaf of black bread.

The adults talked. The television, with its gung-ho news programs, its reports of the latest achievements of the nation's industry, its Bolshoi concerts, provided a soothing background. The vodka mitigated the bitterness of the past. And I felt that our guests, even new arrivals, all cherished this Frenchwoman who had accepted the destiny of their country without flinching.

I learned a lot from these stories. I now guessed why in our family the New Year's celebrations always had a whiff of anxiety about them, like a sly draft making the doors slam in an empty house at twilight. Despite my father's gaiety, despite the presents, the noise of fireworks, and the glittering of the tree, this impalpable malaise was there. As if amid the toasts, the popping of corks, and the laughter, someone's arrival were expected. I believe that, without admitting it to themselves, our parents even welcomed the snowy and humdrum calm of the first days of January with relief. In any event, it was certainly this moment after the holidays that my sister and I preferred to the holiday itself…

My grandmother's Russian days – those days that, at a given moment, ceased to be a "Russian phase" before a return to France and simply became her life – had for me a secret flavor that the others were not aware of. It was a sort of invisible aura that Charlotte carried within her throughout the past, resurrected in our smoke-filled kitchen. I said to myself with marveling astonishment, "This woman who for months waited at a window covered in ice for the famous three a.m. knock, this woman was the same being, both mysterious and so close to me, who had one day seen silver scallop dishes in a café in Neuilly!"

Whenever they spoke of Charlotte they never forgot to tell the story of that morning…

It was her son who woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. He jumped out of his folding bed and walked barefoot, holding out his arms in front of him, toward the window. As he crossed the room in the dark he bumped into his sister's bed. Charlotte was not asleep either. She had been lying with her eyes open in the blackness, trying to understand where the dense and monotonous hum might be coming from that seemed to impregnate the walls with a dull throbbing. She felt her body and her head vibrating in this slow and glutinous sound. The children woke and rushed to the window. Charlotte heard her daughter's astonished cry: "Oh look! All those stars! But they're moving…"

Without switching on the light, Charlotte went to join them. In passing she noticed on the table a faint glint of metal: Fyodor's cigarette case. He was due back from Moscow in the morning. She saw rows of luminous dots sliding slowly through the night sky.

"Planes," said the boy, in his calm voice, which never changed in intonation. "Whole squadrons…"

"But where are they all flying to like that?" sighed the girl, staring with wide eyes, heavy with sleep.

Charlotte took them both by the shoulders.

"Go to bed! Our air force must be on maneuvers. You know the frontier is very close. Maneuvers, or perhaps training for a flypast…"

The son gave a little cough and said softly, as if to himself, and still with that calm sadness that was so surprising in this youth, "Or perhaps it's war…"

"Don't say stupid things, Sergei," Charlotte reproved him. "Go to bed this instant. Tomorrow we'll go to the station to meet your father."

Lighting a bedside lamp, she consulted her watch: "Half past two. So, it's already today…"

They did not have time to go to sleep again. The first bombs tore the night apart. The squadrons, which had already been flying over the town for an hour, had as their target regions farther on into the depths of the country, where their assault might have the appearance of an earthquake. It was only toward half past three in the morning that the Germans began to bombard the line of the frontier, clearing the way for their land army. And that sleepy girl, my mother, fascinated by those strange, too well ordered constellations, had found herself in fact in a lightning parenthesis between peace and war.

It was already almost impossible to leave the house. The earth heaved; tiles, one row after another, slid from the roof and smashed with a dry crack on the front steps. The sound of explosions smothered gestures and words in a deafening blanket.

Charlotte finally managed to push the children outside and went out herself, carrying a big suitcase that weighed heavily on her arm. The apartment blocks opposite had no windows left. A curtain was billowing in the wind that had only just arisen. The movement of the pale fabric still had all the lightness of peacetime mornings.

The street that led to the railway station was strewn with shattered glass and broken branches. Sometimes a tree snapped in two barred the way. At one moment they had to skirt an enormous crater. It was at this point that the crowd of refugees became more dense. As they moved away from the hole, the people laden with bags started to push and suddenly noticed one another. They tried to talk, but the blast, lost among the houses, erupted all at once and gagged them with a deafening echo. They waved their arms helplessly and began running again.

When Charlotte saw the station at the end of the road, she could physically feel the life of yesterday slipping away into a past from which there was no return. Only the front wall was still standing, and through the empty sockets of the windows the pale morning sky could be seen…

The message passed along by hundreds of mouths finally penetrated the noise of the bombs. The last train for the east had just left, observing the usual timetable with an absurd precision. The crowd came up against the ruins of the station, stood still; then, crushed by the howling of a plane, scattered into the neighboring streets and under the trees of a public square.

Charlotte, disconcerted, gazed about her. A placard lay at her feet: "Danger! Do not cross the track!" But the track, torn up by explosions, now consisted only of crazed rails, thrown up in a taut curve against the concrete pillar of a viaduct. They pointed toward the sky, and the sleepers seemed like a staircase in a dream that led straight up into the clouds. "Over there. There's a freight train just about to leave." She heard the murmur of her son's calm and almost bored-sounding voice.

In the distance she saw a train of great brown freight cars around which little human figures were busily moving. Charlotte seized the handle of her suitcase, the children grabbed their bags.

As they arrived beside the last car, the train started, and a fearful sigh of joy could be heard greeting its departure. A compact bunch of frightened people were visible between the sliding walls. Charlotte, aware of the desperate slowness of her movements, pushed her children toward this opening that was slowly moving off. The son climbed on board and grabbed the suitcase. Already his sister had to quicken her pace to grasp hold of the boy's hand, which he held out to her. Charlotte seized the child by the waist, lifted her, and managed to heave her on board the crowded car. Now she had to run, while trying to clutch hold of the great iron latch. It only lasted for a second, but she had time to glimpse the petrified faces of the survivors, her daughter's tears, and with a supernatural clarity, the cracked wood of the wall of the car…

She stumbled, fell to her knees. The rest was so swift that she could not believe she had touched the white gravel of the embankment. Two hands squeezed her sides hard, the sky described an abrupt zigzag, and she felt herself propelled into the car. And in a luminous flash she glimpsed the cap of a railwayman, the silhouette of a man profiled for a fraction of a second against the light between the open partitions…

Toward midday the train passed through Minsk. In the thick smoke the sun shone as red as that of another planet. And strange funereal butterflies – great flakes of ash – fluttered in the air. No one could comprehend how in a few hours of war the city could have been transformed into those rows of blackened carcasses.

The train advanced slowly, as if feeling its way, in this carbonized twilight, under a sun that no longer hurt the eyes. They had already become accustomed to this hesitant progress and to the sky filled with the roaring of planes. And even to the strident whistling sound above the freight car, followed by a hail of bullets on the roof.

As they were leaving the charred city, they came upon the remains of a train gutted by bombs. Several carriages were overturned on the embankment. Others lay on their sides or were embedded in one another in a monstrous telescoping, blocking the track. Several nurses, sunk into stunned helplessness at the number of bodies lying there, were walking the length of the train. Within its black entrails one could see human shapes; sometimes an arm hung from a broken window. The ground was covered with scattered luggage. What was most surprising was the number of dolls lying on the sleepers and in the grass… One of the carriages still left on the rails retained its enamel plaque, on which the destination could be read. Perplexed, Charlotte realized that it was the train they had missed that morning. Yes, that last train for the east, which had observed the prewar timetable.

At nightfall the train accelerated. Charlotte felt her daughter snuggling against her shoulder and shivering. She got up to free the big suitcase on which they were sitting. She must make ready for the night, take out warm clothes and two bags of biscuits. Charlotte half opened the lid, thrust her hand into the case, and froze, unable to stifle a brief cry, which woke their neighbors.

The suitcase was full of old newspapers! In the panic of that morning she had brought the Siberian suitcase…

Still unable to believe her eyes, she drew out a yellowed page and by the gray light of dusk managed to read, "Deputies and senators, irrespective of faction, had responded with enthusiasm to the summons addressed to them by Messieurs Loubert and Brisson… The representatives of the great bodies of the state were gathered in the Salon Murat…"

With a sleepwalker's gesture Charlotte closed the case again, sat down, and looked about her, gently shaking her head, as if she wanted to deny an indisputable fact.

"I have an old jacket in my bag. And I picked up the bread from the kitchen as well, when we were leaving…"

She recognized her son's voice. He must have sensed her feeling of helplessness.

That night Charlotte slept long enough to have a rapid dream, a mixture of sounds and colors from the old days… Somebody slipping along toward the exit woke her. The train had stopped in the middle of fields. The night air did not have the same black density here as in the town they had fled. The plain stretching out beyond the pale rectangle of the open door held the ash-gray tint of the nights of the north. When her eyes had mastered the darkness, she could make out the shape of a sleeping izba beside the track, in the shadow of a copse. And in front of it, in a meadow that bordered on the embankment, she saw a horse. The silence was such that one could hear the light crunching of stems being torn up and the soft tread of hooves on the damp ground. With a bitter serenity that astonished even her, Charlotte sensed a clear thought taking shape and echoing through her mind: "Earlier there was that hell of the burned-out towns: a few hours later – this horse, browsing on the dew-laden grass in the cool of the night. This country is too big for them to conquer. The silence of this boundless plain will resist their bombs…"

Never before had she felt so close to that soil.

During the first months of the war her sleep was punctuated by an endless procession of mutilated bodies, whom she cared for, working fourteen hours a day. In this town, a hundred kilometers from the front line, they brought in the wounded by the trainloads. Charlotte often went to the station with the doctor to meet these trains filled with torn human flesh. She would then sometimes notice on the parallel track another train, filled with freshly mobilized soldiers, setting off in the opposite direction, traveling toward the front.

The round of mutilated bodies did not stop even in her sleep. They passed through her dreams, gathered at the frontier of her nights, waiting for her: the young infantryman with his lower jaw torn off and his tongue hanging out over dirty bandages; another without eyes, without a face… But chiefly all those, ever more numerous, who had lost both arms and legs – horrible limbless trunks, eyes blinded by pain and despair.

Yes, it was these eyes in particular that tore the fragile veil of her dreams. They formed constellations, twinkling in the darkness, followed her everywhere, spoke to her silently.

One night (endless columns of tanks were crossing the town) her sleep was more fragile than ever – a series of brief moments of oblivion followed by reawakening amid the metallic cackling of tank tracks. It was against the pale background of one of these dreams that Charlotte suddenly began to recognize all these constellations of eyes. Yes, she had seen them before, one day in another town. In another life. She woke, surprised at no longer hearing the slightest sound. The tanks had left the street. The silence was deafening. And in that dense and mute darkness Charlotte saw again the eyes of the wounded of the Great War. Her time in the hospital at Neuilly suddenly seemed nearer. "It was yesterday," thought Charlotte.

She got up and went to the window to close it. She stopped in mid-gesture. The white storm (the first snow of this first winter of the war) was carpeting the still black earth in great flurries. The sky, stirred by the waves of snow, drew her thoughts to disturbing profundities. She thought of men's lives. Of their deaths. Of the existence somewhere beneath this tumultuous sky of beings without arms or legs, of their eyes open in the night.

And then life seemed to her like a monotonous sequence of wars, an interminable dressing of ever-open wounds. And the crashing of steel on wet paving stones… She felt a snowflake land on her arm. These endless wars, these wounds, and yes, secretly lying in wait in the midst of them, this moment of the first snow.

The stares of the wounded were blotted out in her dreams only twice during the war. The first time when her daughter fell ill with typhus, and bread and milk had to be found at any cost (they had been eating potato peelings for months). The second time was when she received a notification of death from the front… Arriving at the hospital in the morning, she remained there all the night, hoping to be overcome with tiredness, afraid of going home, of seeing the children, of having to speak to them. Around midnight she finally sat down beside the stove, her head against the wall, closed her eyes, and at once began walking along a street… She heard the pavements echoing in the morning, breathed the bright air of a pale, oblique sun. As she walked through this still-sleeping town, at each step she recognized its simple topography: station café, church, market square… She felt a strange joy in reading the street names, in observing the glint of the windows, the foliage in the square behind the church. The person walking beside her asked her to translate one of these names. Then she realized what had made this stroll through the early morning town such a happy one…

Charlotte emerged from sleep with her last words spoken there still moving her lips. And when she understood the complete improbability of her dream – herself and Fyodor in that French town on a bright autumn morning – when she grasped the absolute unreality of this walk, which was nevertheless so simple, she drew a little rectangle of paper from her pocket and read again for the hundredth time the death printed in blurred letters; and her husband's name written by hand in purple ink. Already someone was calling her from the end of the corridor. The new train of wounded was about to arrive.

"Samovars!" That is what my father and his friends in their nocturnal conversations sometimes called these soldiers without arms or legs, these living trunks in whose eyes all the world's despair was concentrated. They were samovars, yes: with bits of thigh that resembled the feet of those copper vessels and stumps of shoulder that looked like the handles.

Our guests spoke of them with an odd mixture of bravado, mockery, and bitterness. The irony and cruelty of the term "samovar" signified that the war was long over, forgotten by some, of no interest to others, to us, the young – born a decade after their victory. And so as not to seem pitiful, it seemed to me, they talked about the past with this rather coarse flippancy, believing in neither God nor the devil, as the Russian saying has it. It was much later that this cynical tone was to reveal its true secret to me: a "samovar" was a soul imprisoned in a lump of amputated flesh; a brain detached from its body, a feeble gaze trapped in the spongy stuff of life. It was this tortured soul the men called a "samovar."

For them, telling the story of Charlotte's life was also a way of not displaying their own wounds and suffering. All the more because her hospital, with its jumble of hundreds of soldiers, coming from all fronts, condensed innumerable destinies, brought together so many personal histories.

For example, there was the soldier who always made an impression on me with his leg stuffed with… wood. A shell fragment embedded below his knee had crushed a wooden spoon that he had been carrying down the length of his boot. The wound was not serious, but all the debris had to be extracted. "All those splinters," Charlotte had said.

Another wounded man complained all day long that beneath the plaster his leg was itching "enough to tear your guts out." He writhed, scratching at the white carapace, as if his nails could reach through to the wound. "Get it off," he implored. "It's eating into me. Get it off or I'll smash it with a knife myself." The chief doctor, who did not lay down his scalpel for twelve hours a day, took no notice, believing he was dealing with a whiner. "The samovars never complain," he said to himself It was Charlotte who finally persuaded him to cut a little opening in the plaster. It was also she who, with tweezers, drew white worms from the bloody flesh and washed the wound.

Everything in me revolted at this story. My body shuddered at the image of decay. I felt the physical touch of death on my skin. And, wide-eyed, I observed the adults who were amused by these episodes, which were all one to them: wood splinters in a wound or worms…

And then there was that wound that would not close. Yet the scar tissue was forming well, and the soldier, calm and serious, remained lying down, unlike others who, scarcely had they been operated on, started to limp about the corridors. The doctor would bend over this leg and shake his head. Beneath the dressing the wound, which the previous day had been covered by a fine glaze of skin, was bleeding again, its dark edges resembling torn lace. "Bizarre," the doctor remarked in surprise, but he could not tarry there any longer. "Make another dressing," he said to the duty nurse, threading his way between the closely packed beds… It was the following night that Charlotte, unintentionally, surprised the wounded man. All the nurses wore shoes with heels that filled the corridors with a busy clatter. Only Charlotte, in her felt bootees, moved noiselessly. He had not heard her come in. She entered the dark room and stopped near the door. The silhouette of the soldier, sitting on his bed, stood out distinctly against the windows lit by the snow. It took Charlotte several seconds to guess: the soldier was rubbing his wound with a sponge. Rolled up on his pillow were the dressings he had just removed… In the morning she spoke to the head doctor. Having had a sleepless night, he stared at her as if through a fog, not understanding. Then, shaking himself out of his torpor, exclaimed in a harsh voice, "What do you want done about it? I'll telephone them at once, and they can take him away. It's self-mutilation…"

"He'll be court-martialed…"

"What about it? He deserves it, doesn't he? While the others are dying in the trenches… He… He's a deserter!"

There was a moment of silence. The doctor sat down and began to massage his face with palms spotted with tincture of iodine.

"What if we put a plaster cast on him?" said Charlotte.

Behind his hands the doctor's face broke into an angry grimace. He half opened his mouth, then changed his mind. His reddened eyes lit up; he smiled.

"You and your plaster casts. We smash it off one man because it's scratching him. We put it on another because he's scratching himself. You continue to astonish me, Sharlota Norbertovna!"

During his rounds, he examined the wound and in a very natural tone said to the nurses, "We shall have to put a plaster on it. Just one layer. Sharlota will do it before she leaves."

Hope returned when, a year and a half after the first notification of death, she received another. Fyodor could not have been killed twice, she thought, so perhaps he was alive. This double death became a promise of life. Without saying anything to anyone, Charlotte prepared to wait.

He came back, arriving not from the west at the start of the summer, like most of the soldiers, but from the Far East, in September, after the defeat of Japan…

From being a town close to the front line, Saranza was transformed into a peaceful place, reverting to its sleep of the steppes beyond the Volga. Charlotte lived there alone: her son (my uncle Sergei) had entered a military academy; her daughter (my mother) had left for the nearest city, like all the students who wanted to continue their studies.

On a balmy September evening she left the house and walked into the empty street. She wanted to pick some stalks of wild dill at the edge of the steppe for her salted preserves before nightfall. It was on the way back that she saw him. She was carrying a bunch of the tall plants surmounted with yellow umbels. Her dress and her body were permeated with the clarity of the silent fields, with the fluid light of the sunset. The strong scent of the dill and the dry plants clung to her fingers. By now she knew that this life, despite all its pain, could be lived, that one must travel through it slowly; passing from the sunset to the penetrating odor of the stalks; from the infinite calm of the plain to the singing of a bird lost in the sky; yes, going from the sky to that deep reflection of it that she felt within her own breast, as an alert and living presence. And one must even pay heed to the warmth of the dust on this little path leading toward Saranza…

She raised her eyes and saw him. He was walking toward her, still a long way off, far up the road. If Charlotte had welcomed him on the threshold of the room, if he had opened the door and stepped inside, as she had imagined it for so long, as all the soldiers did when they came back from the war, in life or in films, then she would doubtless have uttered a cry, would have hurled herself at him, clinging to his shoulder belt, would have wept…

But he appeared very far away, making himself known little by little, giving his wife the time to come to terms with the road now rendered unrecognizable by the silhouette of a man whose uncertain smile she could already make out. They did not run, they exchanged no words, they did not kiss. It seemed as if they had been walking toward each another for an eternity. The road was empty; the evening light, reflected by the golden foliage of the trees, was of an unreal transparency Stopping near him, she gently waved her bouquet. He nodded his head, as if to say, "Yes, yes, I understand." He was not wearing a shoulder belt, just one at his waist, with a buckle of tarnished bronze. His boots were red with dust.

Charlotte lived on the ground floor of an old wooden house. From year to year, for a century, the ground had been rising imperceptibly and the house subsiding, so much so that the window of her room scarcely came above the level of the pavement… They entered in silence. Fyodor put down his pack on a stool, made to speak, but said nothing, only cleared his throat, bringing his fingers to his lips. Charlotte began to prepare a meal.

She surprised herself by replying to his questions without thinking (they talked about bread, about ration cards, about life in Saranza); by offering him tea, by smiling when he said, "All the knives in this house need sharpening." But as she took part in this first, still hesitant conversation she was elsewhere. In a profound absence where quite different words were being uttered: "This man with short hair that looks as if it were sprinkled with chalk is my husband. I have not seen him for four years. They buried him twice – first in the battle of Moscow, then in the Ukraine. He is here, he has come back. I ought to weep for joy. I ought to… His hair is quite gray…" She guessed that he, too, was far away from their conversation about ration cards. He had come home when the lights of victory had long since gone out. Life was resuming its daily round. He was coming back too late. Like an absentminded man who, invited to lunch, arrives at dinnertime and surprises the mistress of the house as she is saying her farewells to the last of the lingering guests. "I must look very old to him," Charlotte thought suddenly. But not even this idea could disrupt the strange lack of emotion in her heart, this indifference that left her puzzled.

She wept only when she saw his body. After the meal she heated water and brought out a zinc basin, the little child's bath, which she placed in the middle of the room. Fyodor crouched in this gray vessel, whose bottom yielded underfoot, emitting a vibrant sound. And as she poured a trickle of warm water onto the body of her husband, who clumsily rubbed his shoulders and his back, Charlotte began to weep. The tears coursed down her face, whose features remained immobile, and they fell, mixing with the soapy water in the basin.

This body was that of a man she did not know. A body riddled with scars, with gashes – some of them deep, with fleshy edges, like huge voracious lips, some with a smooth shiny surface, like a snail's trail. In one of the shoulder blades a cavity had been dug: Charlotte knew what type of little jagged shell splinters did that. The pink traces of the stitches of a suture surrounded one shoulder, losing themselves in his chest…

Through her tears she viewed the room as if for the first time: a window at ground level; the bunch of dill, already a relic from another epoch in her life; a soldier's pack on the stool near the hall; great boots covered with red dust. And beneath a bare and dim bulb, in the midst of this room half sunk in the ground – this unrecognizable body, as if torn by the wheels of a machine. Stunned words formed unconsciously within her: "this is me, Charlotte Lemonnier, here in this izba buried beneath the grass of the steppes, with this man, this soldier, whose body is lacerated with wounds, the father of my children, the man I love so much… this is me, Charlotte Lemonnier…"

Across one of Fyodor's eyebrows there was a broad white gash, which, as it grew narrower, made a line across his forehead. It gave him a permanently surprised expression. As if he simply could not manage to get used to this postwar life.

He lived for less than a year… In winter they moved into the apartment where, as children, we were to come and stay with Charlotte every summer. They did not even have time to buy new crockery and cutlery. Fyodor cut the bread with the knife he had brought back from the front, fashioned from a bayonet…

As I listened to the adults' stories, this was how I pictured our grandfather during that incredibly brief reunion: a soldier climbs the steps to the izba. His gaze is lost in his wife's, and he has just time to say, "You see, I have come back…," before collapsing and dying of his wounds.

9

That year France enveloped me in deep and studious isolation. At the end of the summer I had returned from Saranza, like a young explorer with a thousand and one discoveries in my luggage – from Proust's bunch of grapes to the plaque bearing witness to the tragic death of the duc d'Orléans. In the autumn and particularly during the winter I turned myself into a fanatic of erudition, an archivist obsessively gleaning all possible information about the country whose mystery he had only managed to scratch the surface on his summer excursion.

I read everything of interest about France that our school library possessed. I immersed myself in the much vaster shelves of our city library. I sought to complement the broad outlines of Charlotte's impressionistic stories with a systematic study, progressing from one century to another, from one Louis to the next, from one novelist to his colleagues, disciples, or imitators.

These long days spent in dusty book-lined labyrinths doubtless corresponded to a monkish inclination that everyone feels at that age. One seeks escape before being caught up in the toils of adult life. One remains alone in order to enjoy fantasies about amorous adventures to come. This waiting, this reclusive life, soon becomes painful. Hence the swarming, tribal collectivism of adolescents – a feverish attempt to act out all the scenarios of adult society in advance. Rare are those who at the age of thirteen or fourteen know how to resist the role-playing that is imposed on the loners and the dreamers, with all the cruelty and intolerance of those who were but children yesterday.

It was thanks to my French quest that I managed to preserve my own attentive isolation as an adolescent.

Sometimes the society in miniature of my schoolfellows displayed a careless condescension toward me (I was "not mature," I did not smoke, and I did not tell salacious stories in which the male and female genital organs became characters in their own right); sometimes an aggressiveness, whose collective violence left me stunned. I did not feel I was very different from the others; I did not feel I merited so much hostility. It is true that I did not go into raptures about the films that their mini-society discussed during breaks, and I could not tell apart the football teams of which they were passionate supporters. My ignorance offended them. They perceived it as a challenge. They attacked me with their taunts and with their fists. It was during that winter that I became aware of a disconcerting truth: to harbor this distant past within oneself, to let one's soul live in this legendary Atlantis, was not guiltless. No, it was well and truly a challenge, a provocation in the eyes of those who lived in the present. One day, worn out with the bullying, I pretended to take an interest in the latest match score; I joined in their conversation and mentioned several players' names, learned the previous day. But everyone smelled the imposture. The discussion broke off. The mini-society dispersed. I earned several almost pitying looks. I felt even more undervalued.

After this pathetic attempt I plunged even deeper into my research and my reading. Fleeting glimpses of Atlantis over the years were not enough for me. Henceforth I aspired to know the intimate details of its history. Wandering through the caverns of our ancient library, I sought to throw light on the reasons for that extravagant marriage between Henri I and the Russian princess Anna. I wanted to know what on earth her father, the celebrated Yaroslav the Wise, could have sent as a dowry. And how he managed to transport herds of horses from Kiev to his French son-in-law when he was attacked by the warlike Normans. And how Anna Yaroslavna spent her days in the somber medieval castles, where she so lamented the absence of Russian baths… I was no longer content with the tragic story depicting the death of the duc d'Orléans beneath the windows of the fair Isabeau. No, I now set off in pursuit of his murderer, this Jean sans Peur, whose lineage had to be traced; military exploits verified; dress and weapons reconstructed; landholdings located… I learned by how much maréchal Grouchy's divisions were delayed, those few extra hours more, fatal for Napoleon at Waterloo…

Of course the library, a hostage of ideology, was very unevenly stocked. I only found a single book there on the period of Louis XIV, whereas the shelves next door offered a score of volumes devoted to the Paris Commune and a dozen on the birth of the French Communist Party. But, hungry for knowledge, I contrived to thwart this manipulation of history. I turned to literature. The great French classics were there and, with the exception of a few famous proscribed authors, like Rétif de la Bretonne, or Sade, or Gide, they had in the main escaped censorship.

My youth and my inexperience made a fetishist of me: rather than grasping history's features, I was a collector. And in particular I sought anecdotes, like those recounted to tourists by guides at ancient monuments. In my collection were Théophile Gautier's red waistcoat, worn at the first night of Hernani; Balzac's walking sticks; George Sand's hookah, and the scene of her treachery in the arms of a doctor, who was supposed to be attending Musset. I admired her elegance in providing her lover with the subject for Lorenzaccio. I never tired of mentally reviewing the sequences, full of images, that my memory recorded, albeit in great disorder. Like the one where Victor Hugo, the grizzled and melancholy patriarch, met Leconte de Lisle under the canopy in a park. "Do you know what I was just thinking about?" the patriarch asked. And, perceiving his interlocutor's confusion, he declared roundly, "I was thinking about what I shall say to God when, very soon perhaps, I enter His Kingdom…" To which Leconte de Lisle, at once ironic and respectful, asserted confidently, "Oh, you will say to him, ' Cher confrère …'"

Strangely enough, it was somebody who knew nothing of France, who had never read a single French author – someone who could not, I am sure, have located that country on the map of the world – he was the one who involuntarily helped me to get away from collecting anecdotes by steering my quest into quite a new direction. It was the dunce who had one day told me that if Lenin had no children, it was because he did not know how to make love…

The mini-society of our class treated him with just as much scorn as it did me, but for quite different reasons. They detested him because he presented them with a very unattractive image of adulthood. Two years older than us, and thus at that age the freedoms of which my fellow pupils looked forward to, and yet my friend the dunce scarcely profited from them at all. Pashka, as everyone called him, led the life of those strange muzhiks who cling until their death to an element of childishness that contrasts strongly with their wild and virile physique. They obstinately avoid the city, society, and comfort; they merge into the forest and often end their days there, as hunters or vagabonds.

Pashka brought into the classroom the smells of fish, of snow, and, at the time of the thaw, of clay. He spent whole days squelching about on the banks of the Volga. And if he came to school it was only so as not to upset his mother. Always late, oblivious of the scornful glances of the future adults, he crossed the classroom and slid behind his desk, right at the back. The pupils sniffed pointedly as he passed; the mistress raised her eyes heavenwards, with a sigh. The smell of snow and wet earth slowly filled the room.

Our status as pariahs in the society of our class ended by uniting us. Without becoming friends, properly speaking, we took note of both our solitudes and saw in them, as it were, a sign of recognition. From now on I often found myself accompanying Pashka in his fishing expeditions on the snow-covered shores of the Volga. He bored a hole in the ice with the aid of a powerful brace and bit, cast his line into the hole, and remained motionless above this round opening, which revealed the green thickness of the ice. I would imagine a fish at the far end of this narrow tunnel, sometimes a meter deep, cautiously approaching the bait… Perch with striped backs, speckled pike, roach with bright red tails, all rose up through the bore hole, were released from the hook, and fell onto the snow. After several somersaults their bodies stiffened, frozen by the icy wind. Their dorsal spines became covered in crystals, like fantastic diadems. We spoke little. The great calm of the snowy plains, the silvery sky, and the deep slumber of the great river rendered words useless.

Sometimes Pashka, in his search for a spot with more fish, drew dangerously close to the long slabs of dark ice, humid, undermined by springs… Hearing a crack, I would turn and see my comrade struggling in the water, digging with splayed-out fingers into the grainy snow. Running toward him, a few meters away from the breach, I would lie flat on my stomach and throw him the end of my scarf. Generally Pashka managed to escape before I could help him. Like a porpoise, he hurled himself out of the water and fell with his chest on the ice, then crawled away, leaving a long wet trail. But occasionally, probably just to please me, no doubt, he caught hold of my scarf and allowed himself to be rescued.

After a ducking like this we would go to one of the carcasses of old boats that could be seen, here and there, projecting out of the snowdrifts. We lit great wood fires in their blackened entrails. Pashka removed his large felt boots and his padded trousers and put them close to the flames. Then, with his bare feet resting on a plank, he began to grill the fish.

It was over these wood fires that we became more talkative. He told me of extraordinary fishing exploits (a fish too big to pass through the hole pierced by the brace and bit!); of thaws that, in the deafening breakup of the ice, carried away boats and uprooted trees and even izbas with cats clinging to the roof… I told him about tournaments between knights (I had just learnt that the warriors of old, on removing their helmets after a joust, had their faces covered in rust: iron plus sweat. I don't know why, but this detail thrilled me more than the tournament itself). Yes, I talked to him about those manly features accentuated with streaks of rust and about that young hero who sounded his horn three times to summon reinforcements. I knew that, as Pashka paced up and down on the banks of the Volga, in both summer and winter, he secretly dreamed of expanses of open sea. I was glad to find for him in my French collection the terrifying fight between a sailor and an enormous octopus. And, as my erudition was essentially nourished by anecdotes, I told him one suitably in keeping with his passion and our haven in the carcass of an old boat. Once on a perilous sea an English warship met a French vessel, and before embarking on a battle with no quarter, the English captain addressed his historic enemies, cupping his hands around his mouth: "You, Frenchmen, fight for money. But we, subjects of the Queen, we fight for honor!" Then from the French vessel this jovial riposte of the captain's could be heard blowing across in a gust of salt wind: "Each man fights for what he does not have, sir!"

One day he very nearly drowned for real. A whole slab of ice – we were in the midst of the thaw – gave way beneath his feet. Only his head appeared above the water, then an arm, seeking a nonexistent support. With a violent effort he hurled his chest up onto the ice, but the porous surface cracked beneath his weight. The current was already dragging on his legs; his boots were full of water. I did not have time to unroll my muffler; I lay flat on the snow, I crawled; I held out my hand to him. It was at that moment that I saw a brief glimmer of fear pass through his eyes… I believe he would have escaped without my help; he was too seasoned, too close to the forces of nature, to allow himself to be trapped by them. But this time he took my hand without his customary grin.

A few minutes later the fire was burning and Pashka, his legs bare and his body covered only by the long pullover I had lent him while his clothes dried, was prancing about on a plank licked by flames. With his red, skinned fingers he was kneading a lump of clay that he wrapped round the fish before putting it into the embers… Around us was the white desert of the Volga in winter; the willows with fine, trembling branches, which formed transparent thickets all along the bank; and buried under the snow, this boat, half disintegrated, whose timber fed our barbaric wood fire. The dancing of the flames seemed to make the twilight denser, the fleeting sensation of well-being more striking.

Why did I tell him the story on that day rather than any other?

There was no doubt a reason for it, something in our conversation that suggested the subject to me… It was a summary, and indeed a very brief one, of a poem by Hugo that Charlotte had narrated to me long ago, the title of which I could not even recall… Somewhere near the smashed barricades, soldiers were shooting insurgents in the heart of that rebellious Paris, where the paving stones had the extraordinary capacity to rear up suddenly as ramparts. A routine execution, brutal, pitiless. The men stood with their backs to the wall, stared for a moment at the barrels of the rifles aimed at their chests, then raised their eyes toward the lightly racing clouds. And they fell. Their comrades took their places facing the soldiers… Among these condemned men there was a kind of young Gavroche, whose age should have inspired clemency Alas, no! The officer ordered him to take his place in the fatal waiting line; the child had the same right to die as the adults. "We're going to shoot you as well!" snarled this executioner-in-chief. But a moment before going to the wall the child ran up to the officer and begged him, "Will you allow me to take this watch to my mother? She lives just round the corner from here by the fountain. I will come back, I swear it!" This childish trick touched even the hardened hearts of the soldiery. They guffawed; it seemed really too naive a ruse. The officer, roaring with laughter, declared, "Away with you, run. Make yourself scarce, little good-for-nothing." And they went on laughing as they loaded their rifles. Suddenly their voices were silenced. The child reappeared and, putting himself against the wall beside the adults, called out, "Here I am!

Throughout my story Pashka hardly seemed to be paying attention. He remained motionless, leaning toward the fire. His face was hidden beneath the turned-down brim of his big fur shapka. But when I reached the final scene – the child returns, his face pale and serious, and stands stock-still in front of the soldiers – yes, when I had spoken his final words, "Here I am!" Pashka shuddered and stood up… And something incredible happened. He stepped over the side of the boat and began walking barefoot in the snow. I heard a kind of stifled groaning that was rapidly dispersed over the white plain by the damp wind.

He took several steps, then stopped, sunk up to his knees in a snowdrift. Dumbfounded, I remained for a moment without moving, watching from the boat this great fellow clad in a stretched pullover that billowed in the wind like a short woolen dress. The earflaps on his shapka swayed slowly in the cold breeze. His bare legs thrust into the snow fascinated me. No longer understanding anything, I jumped over the side and went up to him. Hearing the crunch of my footsteps, he turned swiftly. His face was contorted in an unhappy grimace. An unaccustomed moisture in his eyes mirrored the flames of our wood fire. He hurried to wipe away these reflections with his sleeve. "Ugh, this smoke!" he complained, blinking his eyelids, and without looking at me, he went back to the boat.

* It was there, thrusting his frozen feet toward the embers, that he asked me with an angry insistence, "And after that? They shot him, that fellow, is that right?"

Caught on the hop and finding no enlightenment on this point in my memory, I stammered hesitantly, "Er… I don't know exactly…"

"What d'you mean, you don't know? But you told me the whole story!"

"No, but you see, in the poem…"

"I don't give a shit about the poem! In real life did they kill him or not?"

He stared at me over the flame with a slightly mad glint in his eyes. His voice came over as both rough and imploring. I sighed, as if to beg Hugo's pardon, and with a firm and clear tone I declared, "No, they didn't shoot him. There was an old sergeant there who was reminded of his own son back at his village. And he shouted, 'Whoever touches the boy will have to answer to me!' And the officer had to let him go…"

Pashka lowered his face and began to extract the fish molded in the clay, poking the embers with a branch. In silence we broke off the crust of baked earth, which came away with the scales, and we ate the tender and burning flesh, sprinkling it with coarse salt.

Nor did we speak as we returned to the city at nightfall. I was still under the spell of the magic that had been wrought, the miracle that had demonstrated to me the overwhelming power of poetry. I sensed that it was not even a question of verbal artifice, nor of a skillful arrangement of words. No! For Hugo's had first been reshaped in Charlotte's retelling long ago and again in the course of my own summary. So, doubly betrayed… And yet the echo of this story, so simple in fact, recounted thousands of kilometers away from the place of its genesis, had succeeded in drawing tears from a young barbarian and driving him naked into the snow. I was secretly proud of having caused a tiny spark to shine from the radiance emitted by Charlotte's native land.

And then, that evening I grasped that it was not anecdotes that I must seek out in my reading. Nor words prettily arranged on a page. It was something much more profound and at the same time much more spontaneous: a deep harmony within the visible world, which, once revealed by the poet, became immortal. Without knowing what name to give it, from now on that is what I pursued from one book to the next. Later I was to learn its name: style. And I could never accept the empty exercises of word jugglers under this name. For in my mind's eye, I would see Pashka's blue legs, thrust into a snowdrift on the banks of the Volga, and the reflections of the flames in his moist eyes… Yes, he was more moved by the fate of the young rebel than by his own narrow escape from drowning an hour before!

Leaving me at a crossroads in the suburb where he lived, Pashka gave me my share of the fish: several long carapaces of clay. Then in a gruff tone, avoiding my eyes, he asked, "And that poem about the men they shot, where's it to be found?"

"I'll bring it to you at school tomorrow. I must have got it copied out at home…"

I said it just like that, finding it hard to contain my joy. It was the happiest day of my youth.

10

The truth is, Charlotte has nothing more to teach me."

The morning I arrived in Saranza this disconcerting thought crossed my mind. I jumped down from the carriage at the little station. I was the only one getting off there. At the other end of the platform I saw my grandmother. She caught sight of me, gave a slight wave of her hand, and came to meet me. It was at that moment, walking toward her, that I had this insight: she had nothing new to teach me about France; she had told me everything, and thanks to my reading, I had accumulated a knowledge possibly vaster than her own… As I kissed her, I felt ashamed of this thought, which had caught me unawares. I saw in it a kind of involuntary betrayal.

In fact I had for months been experiencing a strange torment: that of having learned too much… I was like a thrifty man who hopes to see his amassed savings quickly bring him a wholly different way of life, open up prodigious new horizons, and change his vision of things – right up to his way of walking, of breathing, of speaking to women. The savings continue to accumulate, but the dramatic change is slow in coming.

So it was with the sum of my French knowledge. Not that I would have wanted to derive any profit from it. The interest that my comrade the dunce showed in my stories amply fulfilled me. I was hoping rather for a mysterious click, like that of the spring in a music box: the grinding sound that announces the start of the minuet to be danced by the little figures on the platform. I longed for this medley of dates, names, events, and characters to recast itself into the stuff of a hitherto unseen life, to crystallize into a fundamentally new world. I wanted the France that was grafted onto my heart, that had been studied, explored, and learned, to turn me into a new being.

But the only change at the start of this summer was the absence of my sister, who had gone to continue her studies in Moscow. I was afraid to admit to myself that her departure might make our evening gatherings on the balcony impossible.

The first evening, as if to confirm my fears, I began to question my grandmother about the France of her youth. She replied willingly, believing my curiosity to be sincere. As she spoke, Charlotte continued to darn the lace collar of a blouse. She handled the needle with that touch of artistic elegance one always sees in a woman who is working and at the same time engaged in conversation with a guest she believes to be interested in what she has to say.

Leaning on the handrail of the little balcony, I listened to her. My routine questions drew forth scenes from the past that I had contemplated hundreds of times in my childhood, familiar images, known characters: the dog barber on the quay by the Seine; the imperial procession passing along the Champs Elysées; la belle Otéro; the president enfolding his mistress in a fatal embrace… I realized at the time that when Charlotte had repeated all these stories to us every summer, she was responding to our desire to hear a favorite tale once more. That was it precisely. They were simply fairy tales that enchanted our childhood and of which, as with all real tales, we never tired.

I was fourteen that summer. I understood only too well that the time for fairy tales would not return. I had learned too much to let myself be intoxicated by their whirling colorful dance. Strangely, instead of rejoicing at this evident sign of my maturity, that evening I felt nostalgic for my former trusting innocence. My new knowledge, contrary to my expectations, seemed to blot out the pictures I had of France. No sooner did I seek to return to the Atlantis of our youth than a learned voice intervened: I saw pages of books, dates in large print. The voice began to comment, to compare, to quote. And I felt myself stricken with a strange blindness…

At one moment our conversation broke off. I had been listening so inattentively that Charlotte's last remark – it must have been a question – escaped me. Confused, I studied her face, which was raised toward me. In my ears I could hear the melody of the sentence she had just uttered. It was her intonation that helped me to reconstruct the sense. Yes, it was that intonation a storyteller adopts in saying, "No, but you must have heard that one before. I'm not going to weary you with all my old tales…," while secretly hoping that his listeners will urge him on, will assure him that they do not know the story or that they have forgotten it… I shook my head slightly, with a doubtful air. "No, no, I don't think so. Are you sure you've told it to me before?"

I saw a smile light up my grandmother's face. She took up the story. This time I listened alertly. And for the umpteenth time before my eyes appeared a narrow street in medieval Paris, one cold autumn night; and on a wall, that grim plaque that had brought together for all time three destinies and three names from days gone by: Louis d'Orléans, Jean sans Peur, and Isabeau de Bavière…

I do not know why I interrupted her at that moment. No doubt I wanted to show off my erudition to her. But chiefly it was a sudden perception that blinded me: an old lady on a balcony, suspended above the endless steppe, repeating once more a story known by heart; she repeats it with the mechanical precision of a gramophone record, faithful to her more-or-less legendary story that tells of a country that only exists in her memory… Our tête-à-tête in the silence of the evening suddenly seemed to me absurd, and Charlotte's voice reminded me of an automaton's. I seized on the name of the character she had just mentioned and started talking. Jean sans Peur and his shameful conspiracies with the English. Paris, where the butchers became "revolutionaries," laid down the law, and massacred the enemies of Burgundy, or those claimed as such. And the mad king. And the gibbets in the squares of Paris. And the wolves roaming in the suburbs of the city devastated by civil war. And the unimaginable betrayal committed by Isabeau de Bavière, who joined forces with Jean sans Peur and denied the Dauphin, claiming that he was not the king's son. Yes, the fair Isabeau of our childhood…

Suddenly I was gasping for breath; I choked myself with my own words; I had too much to say.

After a moment of silence my grandmother nodded gently and said, with absolutely sincerity, "I'm delighted you know your history so well!"

Yet in her voice, full of conviction, I thought I could detect the echo of an unconscious thought: "It is good to know history. But when I spoke of Isabeau and the allée des Arbalétriers, and that autumn night, I had something different in mind…"

She bent over her task, making little thrusts with her needle, precise and regular. I walked through the apartment, went down into the street. A train whistle sounded in the distance. Its tone, softened by the warm air of the evening, had something of a sigh, a lament about it.

Between the apartment block where Charlotte lived and the steppe there was a kind of little wood, very dense, even impenetrable: thickets of brambles, the claws of hazel branches, collapsed trenches full of nettles. And even if we managed to get through these natural obstacles in the course of our games, others, those made by man, barred the way: rows of barbed wire entanglements, the rusty crossed bars of antitank barriers… This place was known as the "Stalinka," after the name of the defensive line built there during the war. They were afraid that the Germans might get that far. But the Volga and, above all, Stalingrad had halted them… The line had been dismantled; what was left of the war materials had ended up abandoned in this wood, which had inherited its name. The "Stalinka," the inhabitants of Saranza would call it, and thus their town seemed to become involved in the great deeds of history.

It was said that the inside of the wood was mined. This deterred even the boldest among us who might have wanted to venture into this no-man's-land that hugged its rusted treasures to itself.

It was beyond the thickets of the Stalinka that the narrow-gauge railway passed; it was like a miniature railway, with a little locomotive, all black with soot, with little trucks as well and, as in an optical illusion, the driver dressed in a grease-stained jersey: an apparent giant.

leaning out of the window. Each time it was about to cross one of the roads that trailed off toward the horizon, the locomotive emitted its cry, half tender, half plaintive. Doubled by its echo, this signal sounded like the call note of a cuckoo. "The Kukushka" we called it, with a wink, when we caught sight of this train on its narrow track, overrun with dandelion and chamomile…

It was its voice that guided me that evening. I walked round the thickets at the edge of the Stalinka, I saw the last train in a blur slipping into the warm half-light of the dusk. Even this little train gave off the inimitable slightly piquant smell of railways that imperceptibly summons one to go on long journeys. From the distance, from the blue-tinted mist of the evening, I heard a melancholy coo-coo-oo floating on the air. I put my foot on the rail, which was gently vibrating from the vanished train. The silent steppe seemed to be awaiting some action, some movement from me.

"How good it was before," a wordless voice said within me. "I believed the Kukushka went off to an unknown destination, to countries not shown on any map, toward snowcapped mountains, toward a nocturnal sea where the paper lanterns on the boats mingled with the stars. Now I know that this train goes from the Saranza brickworks to the station where its trucks are unloaded. Two or three kilometers in all. Some journey! Yes, now that I know this, I'll never again be able to believe that these rails are endless and this evening unique; with the strong scent from the steppe, the immense sky, and my inexplicable and strangely necessary presence here beside this line with its cracked sleepers; at this precise moment, with that coo-coo-oo echoing in the violet air. Once upon a time everything seemed so natural…"

That night, before going to sleep, I remembered having finally learned the meaning of the enigmatic formula on the menu for the banquet in honor of the tsar: "Roast bartavels and ortolans, garnished with truffles." Yes, I knew now that they were both game birds, much prized by gourmets. A delicate, tasty, rare dish, but nothing more. In vain I repeated "bartavels and ortolans," as before. The magic that had once filled my lungs with the salt air of Cherbourg had faded. And with a hesitant despair I murmured softly to myself, staring wide-eyed into the darkness, "Part of my life is now behind me!

From then onward we talked but said nothing. Coming between us we could see the screen that is formed by those smooth words, those echoes of the everyday we give voice to; the verbal liquid with which we feel obliged, without knowing why, to fill the silence. With stupefaction I discovered that talking was in fact the best way of saying nothing about the essential. Whereas to express it one would have to articulate words in quite a different way, whisper them, weave them into the sounds of evening, into the rays of the sunset. Once again I sensed in myself the mysterious gestation of that language so different from words blunted by use, a language in which I could have said softly, meeting Charlotte's gaze, "Why does my heart miss a beat when I hear the distant call of the Kukushka? Why does an autumn morning in Cherbourg a hundred years ago, yes, a moment I have never lived through, in a town I have never visited, why do its lights and breeze seem to me more alive than the days of my real life? Why does your balcony no longer float in the mauve air of the evening above the steppe? The transparency of dreams that once enveloped it is now broken like an alchemist's flask. And the glass splinters grate together to keep us from talking as we used to… Are not your memories, which I now know by heart, a cage that holds you prisoner? Is not our life simply the daily transformation of the fluid and warm present into a collection of frozen memories, like butterflies crucified on their pins in a dusty glass case? And why then do I sense that I would without hesitation exchange this whole collection for the unique sharp taste left on my lips by that little imaginary silver dish in that illusory café at Neuilly? For a single mouthful of Cherbourg's salt breeze? For a single cry of the Kukushka recalled from my childhood?"

But we continued to pour useless words and hollow remarks into the silence, as if into a sieve of the Danaids: "It's hotter than yesterday! Gavrilych is drunk again… The Kukushka hasn't gone past this evening… There's a fire over there on the steppe, look! No, it's a cloud… I'll make some more tea… Today at the market they were selling watermelons from Uzbekistan…"

The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked, I now understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in this world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words, seemed to me essential. The unsayable was essential.

This equation created a kind of intellectual short circuit in my head. Its conciseness led me that summer to a terrible truth: "People speak because they are afraid of silence. They speak mechanically, whether aloud or to themselves. They are intoxicated by this vocal gruel that ensnares every object and every being. They talk about rain and fine weather; they talk about money, about love, about nothing. And even when they are talking about their most exalted love, they use words uttered a hundred times, threadbare phrases. They talk for the sake of talking. They seek to exorcise silence…"

The alchemist's vessel was broken. Though conscious of the absurdity of our words, we continued our humdrum dialogue: "I think it's going to rain. Look at that big cloud. No, it's a fire on the steppe… That's funny, the Kukushha has gone past earlier than usual… Gavrilych… The tea… At the market…"

Yes, I had lived out a part of my life. Childhood.

In the end, our conversations about the rain and the fine weather that summer were not wholly unjustified. It rained often, and my sadness has colored my memory of those holidays with misty and lukewarm hues.

Sometimes out of the depths of this slow grayness of days, an echo of our evening gatherings in the past surfaced – some photo that I discovered by chance in the Siberian suitcase, the contents of which had long since held no secrets for me. Or from time to time a fleeting detail of the family history, which was as yet unknown to me and which Charlotte offered me with the timid joy of a bankrupt princess, suddenly finding a small coin of fine gold beneath the threadbare lining of her purse.

Thus it was that one day when it was raining hard, as I leafed through the piles of old French newspapers amassed in the suitcase, I lit upon a page that probably came from an illustrated magazine at the turn of the century. It was a reproduction, faintly covered in a brown-and-gray tint, of a painting in that highly wrought realistic style, whose attraction lies in its precise and abundant details. It was through examining these details during the long rainy evening that I retained a memory of the subject. A very disparate column of soldiers, all visibly suffering from exhaustion and old age, was crossing the street of a poor village with bare trees. The soldiers were all of advanced years – old men, it seemed to me, with long white hair escaping from broad-brimmed hats. They 'were the last able-bodied men in a mass recruitment of a people already engulfed in war. I did not memorize the title of the picture, but it contained the word "last." They were the last to face the enemy, the very last to be able to bear arms. The latter, furthermore, were very rudimentary; some pikes, axes, old sabers. Curious, I scrutinized their clothes; their enormous army boots with large copper buckles; their hats and occasionally a tarnished helmet, like that of the conquistadors; their gnarled fingers, gripping the pike handles… France had always appeared before my eyes in the splendor of her palaces, at the glorious hours of her history, but was suddenly revealed in the shape of this northern village, where low houses huddled behind meager hedges, and where stunted trees shivered in the winter wind. Astonishingly, I felt a close affinity for this muddy road and these old warriors, doomed to fall in an unequal battle. No, there was nothing flamboyant in their demeanor. They were not heroes making a show of their gallantry or their self-sacrifice. They were simple, human. In particular there was one, wearing the old conquistador-style helmet, a very tall old man who walked, leaning on a pike, at the end of the column. His face captivated me with its surprising serenity, bitter and smiling at the same time.

Deep in my adolescent melancholy, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a confused joy. I felt I had understood the calm of this old warrior as he confronted imminent defeat, suffering, and death. Neither a stoic nor a holy fool, he walked with his head held high across this flat, cold, and dull country, which he loved despite everything, and called it his "homeland." He appeared invulnerable. For a fraction of a second my heart seemed to beat in time with his, triumphing over fear, death, and solitude. This defiance felt like a new chord in the living harmony that for me was France. I tried at once to find a name for it. Patriotic pride? Panache? Or the famous furia francese that the Italians recognized in French fighters?

As I was calling these labels to mind, I saw that the face of the old soldier was slowly closing and his eyes growing dull. He became once more a figure in an old reproduction of a painting in gray and bister tints. It was as if he had averted his gaze to hide from me that mystery of his, of which I had just caught a glimpse.

Another flash from the past was the woman – the one in a padded jacket and a broad shapka, whose photo I had discovered in an album filled with photos dating from our family's French period. I recalled that this photo had disappeared from the album immediately after I had shown an interest in it and spoken about it to Charlotte. I tried to remember why I had failed to obtain a reply at the time. The scene appeared before my eyes: I am showing the photo to my grandmother, and suddenly I see a rapid shadow passing that makes me forget my question: on the wall I cover a strange moth with my hand, a hawkmoth with two heads, two bodies, and four wings.

I told myself that now, four years later, the double hawkmoth no longer held any mystery for me: quite simply two moths coupling. I thought of people coupling, and tried to imagine the movement of their bodies… And suddenly I understood that for months already, possibly years, I had been thinking of nothing but these bodies, entwined, merging. I had been thinking about this without realizing it, at every moment of the day, while speaking of other things. As if the feverish caress of the hawkmoth had been burning my palm the whole time.

Questioning Charlotte to find out who that woman in the padded jacket was now seemed an absolute impossibility. An impenetrable barrier was arising between my grandmother and myself: the female body, dreamed of, desired, possessed a thousand times in my thoughts.

That evening, pouring me a cup of tea, Charlotte said in a preoccupied voice, "It's funny, the Kukushka hasn't been past yet…"

Emerging from my reverie, I looked up at her. Our eyes met… We said nothing else to each other until the end of the meal.

The three women changed my outlook, my life…

I had discovered them by chance on the back of a press cutting in the depths of the Siberian suitcase. I was reading yet again the article about the first "Peking-Paris via Moscow" car race, as if to prove to myself that there was nothing new to learn, that Charlotte's France was well and truly exhausted. Absentmindedly I had let the page slip onto the carpet. I had been looking through the balcony's open door. It was a special kind of day at the end of the month of August, cool and sunny, when the chill wind blowing across the Urals brought the first breath of autumn to our steppes. Everything shone in this limpid light. The trees of the Stalinka stood out with fragile clarity against a sky of revitalized blue. The line of the horizon was pure and incisive. With bitter relief I told myself that the end of the holidays was approaching. The end also of a stage in my life, an end marked by this extraordinary discovery: that all my knowledge ensured neither happiness nor privileged access to what was essential… Another revelation also: the whole time I was thinking about the female body, about women's bodies. All other thoughts were complementary, accidental, derivative. Yes, I was facing the fact that being a man meant thinking constantly of women, that a man was nothing but a dreamer about women! And that was what I was turning into…

By a whimsical caprice, the page of the magazine had turned over as it slipped onto the carpet. I picked it up, and as I did so I saw them on the back, these three women from the turn of the century. I had never seen them before, having regarded the reverse side of this press cutting as nonexistent. This unexpected encounter intrigued me. I took the photo closer to the light coming from the balcony…

And suddenly I fell in love with them. With their bodies and with their tender and attentive eyes, which allowed one to guess only too well at the presence of a photographer crouched under a black cloth, behind a tripod.

Their femininity was such as would inevitably touch the heart of a solitary and shy adolescent like myself. It was, in a way, a normative femininity. All three wore long black dresses that enhanced the ample roundness of their bosoms and hugged their hips; but notably, before embracing their legs and spreading into graceful folds around their feet, the fabric sketched the discreet curve of their stomachs. The chaste sensuality of this gently rounded triangle fascinated me!

Yes, their beauty was just what a young, still physically innocent dreamer could endlessly call to mind in his erotic fantasies. It was the image of a "classical" woman. The embodiment of femininity. The vision of the ideal mistress. It was in this light, at any rate, that I contemplated the elegant trio, their great eyes shaded in black; their voluminous hats sporting dark velvet ribbons; their old-fashioned air, which in the portraits of previous generations always seems to us to betoken a certain naivete, a candid spontaneity lacking in our own contemporaries that both touches us and inspires our confidence.

And I marveled at the neatness of this correspondence: what my lack of experience in love called for was precisely this generic Woman, a woman still devoid of all those sensual particulars that a mature desire would detect in her body.

I contemplated them with a growing uneasiness. Their bodies were inaccessible to me. Oh, the problem was not the physical impossibility of being with them. For a long time my erotic imagination had learned how to thwart this obstacle. I closed my eyes and saw my fair strollers naked. Like a chemist I could reconstruct their flesh by a skillful synthesis, taking the most banal elements: the heaviness of the thigh of that woman who had brushed against me one day in a crowded bus; the curves of sunburned bodies on beaches; all the nudes in paintings. And even my own body! Yes, despite the taboo imposed on nudity in my native land and, with greater reason, on female nudity, I would have known how to reconstitute the elasticity of a breast beneath my fingers and the suppleness of a thigh.

No, the elegant trio were inaccessible to me in quite a different way… When I sought to recreate their era my memory immediately went into action. I remembered Blériot, who around that time was crossing the Channel with his monoplane; Picasso, who was painting the Demoiselles d'Avignon… The cacophony of historical facts resounded in my head. But the three women remained immobile, inanimate – three museum exhibits with a label: "The elegant ladies of the belle epoque in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées." Then I tried to make them mine, to turn them into my imaginary mistresses. With my erotic synthesis, I modeled their bodies; they moved, but with all the stiffness of sleepers, whom someone is trying to move around, upright and fully clothed, in a semblance of their waking state. And as if to accentuate this impression of sluggishness, in my dilettante synthesis I dredged up from my memory an image that made me grimace: that bare, flaccid breast, the dead breast of a drunk old woman I had seen one day at the railway station. I shook my head to rid myself of this nauseating vision.

So I had to resign myself to a museum peopled with mummies, with waxworks bearing their labels: "Three elegant ladies," "President Faure and his mistress," "Old soldier in a village in the north."… I closed the suitcase.

Leaning on the handrail of the balcony, I let my gaze lose itself in the transparent evening gold above the steppe.

What was the point of their beauty after all? I thought, with a sudden clarity ascendant as the light from this sunset. Yes, what was the point of their fine breasts, their hips, their dresses that hugged their young bodies so prettily? To be so beautiful and to end up thrust into an old suitcase, in a sleepy, dusty town, lost in the middle of an endless plain! In this Saranza, of which, during their lifetime, they hadn't the slightest notion… All that was left of them was this photo, which had survived an unbelievable series of hazards great and small and was only preserved as the back of the page reporting the Peking- Paris car rally. Even Charlotte had no memory of these three feminine figures. I was the only one on this earth to preserve the last thread linking them to the world of the living! My memory was their last refuge, their ultimate abode before final and total oblivion. I was in some sense the god of their trembling universe, of this bit of the Champs-Elysées where their beauty still shone…

I could only offer them the life of puppets. I wound up the spring of my memory, and the elegant trio began their jerky promenade; the president of the Republic embraced Marguerite Steinheil; the duc d'Orléans fell, pierced by perfidious daggers; the old warrior grasped his long pike and stuck out his chest…

"How can it be," I asked with anguish, "that all these passions, griefs, loves, leave so little trace? What an absurdity are the laws of this world in which the lives of such beautiful and desirable women depend on the flutter of a page! For had that page not turned over, I would not have saved them from oblivion, which would have been eternal. What a cosmic blunder is the disappearance of a beautiful woman! Disappearance forever. Complete annihilation. Without shadow. Without reflection, without appeal…"

The sun went down over the far-distant steppe. But for a long time the air retained the crystalline luminosity of cool summer evenings. Beyond the wood the cry of the Kukushka rang out, more resonant in this cold air. The foliage of the trees was flecked with a few yellow leaves. The very first. The cry of the little engine rang out again. Already distant, fainter.

It was then that, returning to the memory of the elegant trio, I had this simple thought, this last echo of the sad reflections in which I had just been sunk. "What they had in their lives was an autumn morning, cool and clear, an avenue in the sun strewn with dead leaves, where they paused for a moment, motionless before the lens. Bringing the moment to a standstill… Yes, there was in their lives a clear autumn morning…"

I suddenly was transported with all my senses into the moment that the smiles of the elegant trio had captured. I found myself amid the ambience of its autumnal smells; so penetrating was the acrid scent of dead leaves that my nostrils palpitated. I blinked in the sun that shone through the branches. I heard the distant sound of a phaeton bowling over the cobblestones. And the still confused murmuring of a few laughing remarks that the three women exchanged before freezing in front of the photographer… Yes, intensely, fully, I was living their time!

The impact of feeling myself beside them on that autumn morning was so great that I tore myself away from its light, almost frightened. I was suddenly afraid of being trapped there forever. Blinded, deafened, I came back into the room and took out the magazine page again…

The surface of the photo seemed to quiver like the wet and vivid colors of a transfer. Its flat perspective suddenly began to deepen, to recede before my eyes. That was how, as a child, I used to contemplate two identical images moving slowly toward each other before blending into a single stereoscopic one. The photo of the elegant trio opened up before me, gradually surrounded me, let me come in under its sky. The branches with broad yellow leaves leaned over me…

My reflections of an hour before (total oblivion, death…) no longer had any meaning. I no longer even needed to look at the photo. I closed my eyes, and I even sensed the joy experienced after the idle heat of summer by the three women as they rediscovered the cool of autumn, the seasonal clothes, the pleasures of city life, and no doubt, soon, the rain and the cold that would add to these attractions.

Their bodies, inaccessible a moment ago, lived in me, bathed in the smell of the dead leaves, in the light mist spangled with sunlight… Yes, I sensed in them that imperceptible shiver with which a woman's body greets the fresh autumn, that mixture of delight and dread, that serene melancholy. There was no longer any barrier between these three women and me. Our fusion, I felt, was more loving and more sensual than any physical possession.

I emerged from that autumn morning and found myself under an almost black sky. Exhausted, as if I had just swum across a great river, I looked about me, scarcely recognizing familiar objects. But I nevertheless wanted to retrace my steps to see the three strollers of the belle epoque once more.

The magic I had just experienced now however, seemed to elude me. My memory unconsciously recreated quite a different scene from the past. I saw a fine man, dressed in black, in the middle of a sumptuous office. The door opened silently; a woman, her face masked by a veil, entered the room. And, very theatrically, the president embraced his mistress. Yes, it was the scene, encountered a thousand times, of the Elysée lovers' secret rendezvous. Summoned up by my memory, they complied by reenacting it one more time, like a hasty vaudeville sketch. But that was no longer enough for me…

The transfiguration of the elegant trio had left me with the hope that the magic could be repeated. I had a clear memory of the very simple sentence that had unleashed it all: "And yet there was in the lives of those three women a cool and sunny morning…" Like a sorcerer's apprentice, I once again pictured the man with the fine mustache in his office at the dark window; and I whispered the magic formula, "And yet there was in his life an autumn evening when he stood before the dark window, beyond which the bare branches stirred in the garden of the Elysée."

I did not notice the moment when the time barrier dissolved… The president stared, unseeing, at the moving reflections of the trees. His lips were so close to the glass that a circle of mist clouded it for a moment. He noticed this and tossed his head slightly in response to his unspoken thoughts. I sensed that he was feeling the strange stiffness of the clothes on his body. He saw himself as a stranger. Yes, as an unknown, tense being that he was obliged to control by his apparent immobility. He thought, no, did not think but sensed, somewhere in the damp darkness beyond the window, the increasingly intimate presence of the woman who would soon enter the room. "The president of the Republic," he said softly, slowly enunciating each syllable. "The Elysée…" And suddenly these words, which were so familiar, seemed to him to have no connection with what he was. Intensely he felt he was the man who in a moment would once again thrill to the warm softness of the woman's lips beneath the veil that sparkled with frozen droplets…

For several seconds I could feel these contrasting sensations on my face.

The magic of this transfigured past had simultaneously exalted and shattered me. Sitting on the balcony, I breathed jerkily, my blind gaze lost in the night of the steppes. I was no doubt becoming obsessed with this alchemy of time. Hardly had I returned to myself when I uttered my "open sesame" again: "And yet there was in the life of that old soldier a winter's day…" And I saw the old man wearing a conquistador's helmet. He walked, leaning on his long pike. His face, flushed by the wind, was once more closed in on bitter thoughts: his age and the war that would continue when he was no longer there. Suddenly, in the dull air of that freezing cold day he smelled the odor of a wood fire. This pleasant and somewhat acid aroma mingled with the chill of the hoarfrost in the bare fields. The old man inhaled deeply a raw mouthful of winter air. The ghost of a smile lit up his austere face. He screwed up his eyes slightly. It was him, this man greedily inhaling the icy wind, that smelt of wood smoke. Him. Here. Now. Under this sky… The battle in which he was going to take part and the war and even his death seemed to him to be events of no importance. Yes, chapters in an infinitely greater destiny, in which he would be – in which he was already – a participant, albeit for the moment an unconscious one. He breathed deeply; he smiled, with his eyes half shut. He guessed that the moment he was living through now was the start of the destiny he foresaw…

Charlotte came back at nightfall. I knew that from time to time she spent the late afternoon at the cemetery. She weeded the little bed of flowers in front of Fyodor's grave, watered it, cleaned the stele surmounted with a red star. When the day began to draw to a close, she would leave. She would walk slowly, passing through the whole of Saranza, sitting down on a bench occasionally. On those evenings we did not go out onto the balcony…

She came in with some agitation. I heard her footsteps in the corridor, then in the kitchen. Without giving myself the time to consider what I was doing, I went and asked her to tell me about the France of her youth. The way she used to.

Now the moments I had just experienced seemed to me like the experiments of a strange madness, beautiful and frightening at the same time. It was impossible to deny them, for my whole body still felt their luminous echo. I had really lived them! But in a sly spirit of contradiction – a mixture of fear and common sense in revolt – I needed to disavow my discovery, destroy the universe of which I had glimpsed a few fragments. From Charlotte I hoped for a soothing fairy story about the France of her youth. A reminiscence as familiar and bland as a photographic plate, which would help me to forget my passing folly.

She did not respond at once to my request. No doubt she realized that only something serious would have made me disrupt our routine in this way. She must have thought about all our empty conversations for several weeks now, and our traditional stories at sunset, a ritual betrayed that summer.

After a moment's silence she sighed, with a little smile at the corner of her lips: "But what can I tell you? You know everything now… Let me think, I will read you a poem instead…"

I was about to live through the most extraordinary evening of my life. For a long time Charlotte could not lay her hand on the book she was looking for. And with that marvelous abandon with which we sometimes saw her overturn the order of things, she, a woman who was otherwise orderly and punctilious, transformed the night into a long vigil. Piles of books accumulated on the floor. We climbed on the table to explore the upper shelves of the bookcases. The book could not be found.

It was at about two o'clock in the morning that, standing up amid a picturesque disarray of books and furniture, Charlotte exclaimed, "What a fool I am! That poem, I began to read it to you, you and your sister, last summer. Do you remember? And then… I can't remember. At any rate, we stopped at the first verse. So it must be here."

And Charlotte bent down to a little cupboard near the door to the balcony, opened it, and beside a straw hat we saw the book.

Seated on the carpet, I listened to her reading. A table lamp placed on the ground lit up her face. On the wall our silhouettes stood out with eerie precision. From time to time a gust of cold air coming from the night steppe burst in through the balcony door. Charlotte's voice carried the tonality of words whose echo can be heard years after their genesis.

Each time its mournful notes sound in my ears My soul grows younger by two hundred years. The thirteenth Louis reigns and I behold A green hill turned by sunset's rays to gold.

A brick-built castle, faced with cornerstones, With lofty windows, stained in crimson tones, Stands in a garden where a river fleet Flows between flowers and swirls about its feet.

A lady at her casement waits the while,

Fair with dark eyes, in robe of ancient style,

I saw her in another life, it seems,

And now remembrance of her haunts my dreams!

We said nothing else to one another during that unusual night. Before going to sleep I thought about the man" in my grandmother's country a century and a half earlier, who had had the courage to tell of his "madness" – that moment in a dream more real than any commonsense reality.

The following morning I woke up late. In the next room order had returned… The wind had changed direction and brought the warm breeze from the Caspian. Yesterday's cold weather seemed very remote.

Around midday, without prior agreement, we went out into the steppe. We walked in silence, side by side, skirting round the thickets of the Stalinka. Then we crossed the narrow rails overgrown with wild plants. From afar the Kukushka emitted its whistling call. We saw the little train appear, looking as if it were traveling between tufts of flowers. It drew near, crossed our path, and melted in the heat haze. Charlotte followed it with her eyes, then murmured softly, as she started walking again, "In my childhood I had occasion to take a train that was a bit like a cousin to our Kukushka. This one carried passengers, and with its little carriages it wound its way slowly through Provence. We used to go and stay with an aunt who lived in… I can no longer remember the name of the town. What I do remember is the sun flooding the hillsides; the loud, dry chirruping of the cicadas when we stopped in sleepy little stations. And on those hills, as far as the eye could see, stretched fields of lavender… Yes, the sun, the cicadas, and the intense blue; and the scent that came in through the open windows on the breeze…"

I walked beside her in silence. I sensed that "Kukushka" would henceforth be the first word in our new language. The new language that would say the unsayable.

Two days later I left Saranza. For the first time in my life the silence of the last moments before the train pulled out did not become embarrassing. Through the window I gazed at Charlotte on the platform, amid people gesticulating like deaf-mutes, for fear of not being understood by those departing. Charlotte was silent. Catching my eye, she smiled softly. We had no need of words.