Dreams Of My Russian Summers

14

It was in France that I almost forgot Charlotte's France forever…

Autumn had come, and twenty years now separated me from those times spent in Saranza. I became aware of this interval – of the poignant "twenty years on" – the day our radio station made its last broadcast in Russian. That evening, leaving the newsroom, I pictured an endless expanse yawning between this German city and Russia, asleep under the snows. Henceforth all that nocturnal space, which on the previous evening was still alive with the sound of our voices, would fade, it seemed to me, into the muffled cracking of the empty airwaves… The goal of our dissident, subversive broadcasts had been achieved. The snowbound empire was waking up, opening itself up to the rest of the world. The country would soon change its name, its regime, its history, its frontiers. Another country would be born. We were no longer needed. The station was being closed. My colleagues exchanged artificially noisy and warm farewells and departed, each in his own direction. Some wanted to rebuild their lives on the spot, others to pack their bags and go to America. Yet others, the least realistic, dreamed of a return that would take them back into the blizzard of twenty years ago… Nobody had any illusions. We knew that it was not just a radio station that was disappearing but our era itself. All that we had said, written, thought, fought against, defended, all that we had loved, detested, feared – all those things belonged to that era. We were left with a vacuum, like waxwork figures in a cabinet of curiosities, relics of a defunct empire.

On board the train taking me to Paris I tried to find words to describe all the years spent far away from Saranza. Exile as a mode of existence? Brute necessity of life? A life half lived and mainly wasted? The meaning of those years seemed to me obscure. So I tried to convert them into what men consider to be sound values in life: recollections of dramatic changes of scene ("In those years I have seen the whole world!" I said to myself with childish arrogance); the bodies of women they have loved…

But the recollections remained drab, the bodies strangely inert. Or occasionally they emerged from the dimness of memory with the wild insistence of a shop dummy's eyes.

Those years were nothing more than a long journey for which I managed from time to time to find a goal. I would invent it just as I was leaving a place or already en route; or sometimes on arrival, when I had to explain my presence that day, in one particular town, in one particular country rather than another.

A journey from one nowhere to another, yes. As soon as the place where I was staying began to exert a hold on me, to establish me in its pleasant daily routine, I had to leave at once. My journey knew only two moments: arrival in an unknown town and departure from a town whose facades hardly trembled as I looked at them… When I had arrived in Munich six months before, as I walked out of the railway station, I was already prudently telling myself that I must find a hotel, then an apartment, as close as possible to my new work at the radio…

That morning, in Paris, I had the fleeting illusion of a real return: in a street not far from the station, a street still hardly awake in that misty dawn, I saw an open window and the interior of a room that exuded a simple, everyday, but for me mysterious calmness, with a lamp lit on the table, an old dark wood chest of drawers, a picture on the wall coming slightly unstuck. The warmth of this glimpsed intimacy seemed to me suddenly both ancient and familiar, so much so that I shivered. To climb the stair, knock at the door, recognize a face, be recognized… I hastened to banish this sensation of rediscovery, which struck me then as nothing other than a vagrant's sentimental moment of weakness.

Life was rapidly exhausted. Time stagnated, measurable from now on only by the wearing out of heels on the wet asphalt, the succession of sounds, soon learned by heart, that the drafts carried along the corridors of the hotel from dawn till dusk. The window of my room looked out on an apartment block under demolition. A wall covered with wallpaper stood there amid the rubble. Fixed to this colored surface a mirror, without a frame, reflected the delicate and ephemeral depth of the sky. Each morning I wondered whether I was going to see this reflection again when I drew open my curtains. The daily suspense gave a rhythm to the stagnant time, to which I was becoming more and more accustomed. And even the idea that one day I must quit this life, that I must make a break with what little still bound me to those autumn days, to that city, kill myself, perhaps – even such a notion soon became habitual… And then one morning – when I heard the dry sound of collapsing masonry, and outside the curtains, in the place of the wall, I saw an empty space smoking with dust – the idea seemed to me like a marvelous way of leaving the game.

I remembered it several days later… I was sitting on a bench in the middle of a boulevard soaked in drizzle. Through the numbness of a fever I felt within myself a kind of silent dialogue between a frightened child and a man: the adult, himself troubled, was trying to reassure the child, speaking in a falsely cheerful tone. The encouraging voice told me that I could get up and return to the café; drink another glass of wine and stay out of the cold for an hour. Or go down into the clammy warmth of the Métro. Or even try to spend another night at the hotel without having anything left to pay with. Or if need be, walk into that pharmacy at the corner of the boulevard and sit down on a leather chair, stay still, say nothing, and when people gather round me, whisper very softly, "Leave me in peace for a moment, in this light and this warmth. I will go soon, I promise you…"

The keen air above the boulevard condensed and began to fall as a fine, dogged rain. I got up. The reassuring voice had fallen silent. I felt as if my head were wrapped in a cloud of red-hot cotton wool. I dodged a passerby who was walking along holding a little girl by the hand. I was afraid I might alarm the child with my inflamed face, and the cold shivers shaking me… Wanting to cross the road, I stumbled against the edge of the pavement and waved my arms like a tightrope walker. A car braked and just avoided me. I felt a brief grazing of the door handle against my hand. The driver took the trouble to lower his window and hurl an oath at me. I saw his scowl, but his words reached me with a strange cotton-wool slowness. At the same moment a thought dazzled me with its simplicity: "That's what I need. That impact, that encounter with metal, but much more violent. An impact that would shatter my head, my throat, my chest. That impact, and then instant, final silence." Several whistle blasts pierced the fog of the fever that burned my face. Absurdly, I got the idea that a policeman might have set off in pursuit of me. I sped up my pace, floundering on a saturated patch of lawn. I could not breathe. My vision broke up into a multitude of sharp-edged facets. I had an urge to burrow in the ground like an animal.

I was drawn in by a misty void, which opened up into a broad avenue, beyond a wide-open gate. It seemed to be floating between two lines of trees, in the dull air of the twilight. Almost at once the avenue was filled with strident whistle blasts. I turned into a narrower path, skidded on a smooth stone slab, and plunged between strange gray cubes. Finally, without strength, I crouched behind one of them. The whistle blasts rang out for a moment, then fell silent. From a long way off I heard the grating sound of the gate's metal bars. On the porous wall of the cube I read these words, without immediately grasping the sense of them: Plot held in perpetuity. Number… Year 18…

Somewhere behind the trees a whistle blast rang out, followed by a conversation. Two men, two keepers, were walking up the avenue.

I got up slowly. And through the weariness and the torpor of the start of my illness, I felt a flicker of a smile on my lips; "mockery must enter into the nature of the things of this world. By the same token as the law of gravity…"

All the gates of the cemetery were now closed. I walked round the family vault behind which I had collapsed. The glass door yielded easily. The interior seemed to me almost spacious. Apart from the dust and a few dead leaves, the paving was clean and dry. My legs would not support me any longer. I sat down, and then stretched out full length. In the darkness my head brushed against a wooden object. I touched it. It was a prie-dieu. I rested my neck on its faded velvet. Oddly, its surface seemed warm, as if someone had just been kneeling on it…

For the first two days I left my refuge only to go and look for bread and to wash. I returned at once, stretched out, and sank into a feverish numbness from which I was only roused for a few minutes by the whistle blasts at closing time. The great gate creaked in the fog, the world was reduced to these walls of soft porous stone, which I could touch if I spread out my arms in the form of a cross; to the reflection of the ground glass panes of the door; and to the resonant silence, which I believed I could hear beneath the paving stones, beneath my body…

I rapidly became confused about the sequence of dates and days. I remember only that one afternoon I finally felt a little better. Walking slowly, screwing up my eyes in the returning sunlight, I was going back… home. Home! Yes, that was my thought: I surprised myself thinking it, and started to laugh, choking in a fit of coughing that made the passersby turn. This family tomb more than a century old, in the least-visited part of the cemetery, where there were no famous tombs to honor – my "home." With amazement I told myself I had not used the word since my childhood…

It was during that afternoon, by the light of the autumn sun shining into my vault, that I read the inscriptions on the marble tablets fixed to its walls. It was, in fact, a little chapel belonging to the Belval and Castelot families. And the laconic epitaphs on the tablets retraced their history in outline.

I was still too weak. I read one or two inscriptions and then sat down on the paving stones, breathing as if after a great effort, my head buzzing with giddiness. Born September 27, 1837, at Bordeaux. Died June 4, 1888, in Paris. Perhaps it was the dates that made me giddy. I took note of their time as acutely as if I were hallucinating. Born the 6th March 1849. Recalled to God the 12th December 1901. The intervals between these dates became filled with sounds, with silhouettes, mixing history and literature. There was a flow of images, the vivid and very concrete sharpness of which was almost painful. I thought I could hear the rustling of a lady's long dress as she stepped into a cab. In this simple action of times past she embodied all those anonymous women who had lived, loved, and suffered; who had seen this sky, breathed this air… Now I felt physically the cramped stiffness of a dignitary in his black suit: the sun, the great square of a provincial town, the speeches, the brand new republican emblems… Now the wars, the revolutions, the swarming crowds, the great holidays, all fused for a second into one character, one explosion, one voice, one song, one salvo, one poem, one sensation – and the flow of time resumed its course between the date of birth and the date of death. She was born August 26, 1861, at Biarritz. Deceased February 11, 1922, at Vincennes.

I progressed slowly from one epitaph to the next: Captain of the Empress's Dragoons. Divisional General. Painter of History, attached to the French armies: Africa, Italy, Syria, Mexico. Intendant General. Section President of the Conseil d'Etat. Woman of letters. Former Public Auditor to the Senate. Lieutenant in the 224th Infantry Regiment. Croix de Guerre with palms. Died for France… They were the shades of an empire once resplendent at all four corners of the world… The most recent inscription was also the shortest: Françoise, November 2, 1952-May 10, 1969. Sixteen years old; any other words would have been excessive.

I sat down on the paving stones and closed my eyes. I sensed the vibrant density of all those lives in myself. And without trying to formulate my thoughts, I murmured, "I feel the climate of their days and of their deaths. And the mystery of that birth at Biarritz on August 26, 1861. The inconceivable individuality of that birth, precisely at Biarritz, that day, more than a century ago. And I feel the fragility of that face that disappeared on May 10, 1969, I feel it like an emotion that I myself have lived through intensely… These unknown lives are close to me."

I left in the middle of the night. The stone wall was not high at that point. But the hem of my coat caught on one of the iron spikes set in the top of the wall. I almost fell head first. In the darkness the blue eye of a street lamp described a question mark. I fell on a thick layer of dead leaves. My descent seemed to take a very long time; I had the impression of landing in an unknown town. Its houses at this night hour resembled the monuments of an abandoned city. Its air smelled of wet forest.

I began to walk down an empty avenue. All the streets I followed went downhill, as if to keep thrusting me farther toward the heart of this opaque megalopolis. The few cars that passed me looked as if they were fleeing from it at top speed, driving straight ahead. As I walked past him, a tramp stirred in his carapace of cardboard boxes. He put his head out; it was lit by the shop window across the street. He was an African, his eyes heavy with a kind of resigned, calm madness. He spoke. I leaned toward him, but I understood nothing. It was doubtless the language of his country… The cardboard boxes of his shelter were covered in hieroglyphs.

When I crossed the Seine, the sky began to grow pale. For a while I had been walking with a sleepwalker's tread. The joyful fever of convalescence had disappeared. I felt as if I were wading through the still-deep shadows of the houses. My giddiness curved the perspectives inward, rolled them around me. The accumulation of apartment blocks along the quays and on the island looked like a gigantic film set in darkness when the arc lights have been switched off. I could no longer remember why I had left the cemetery.

On the wooden footbridge I looked back several times. I thought I could hear the sound of footsteps behind me. Or the throbbing of the blood in my temples. The echo became more resonant in a winding street that drew me along like a toboggan. I made an about-face. I thought I saw the outline of a woman in a long coat slipping under an archway. I remained standing, without strength, leaning against a wall. The world disintegrated, the wall gave way under my palm, the windows trickled down the pale fronts of the houses…

It was as if by magic that those few words appeared, outlined on a blackened metal plaque. I clung to their message, as a man on the brink of sinking into drunkenness or madness may cling to a maxim that has a banal but flawless logic that saves him from tipping over the edge… The little plaque was fixed a meter from the ground. I read its inscription three or four times:

Flood level. January 1910

… It was not a memory, but life itself. I was not reliving; I was living. Sensations that seemed very humble sensations. The warmth of the wooden handrail of a balcony hanging in the air on a summer's evening. The dry, piquant scents of plants. The distant and melancholy call of a locomotive. The soft rustling of pages on the knees of a woman seated amid flowers. Her gray hair. Her voice… And now the rustling and the voice are mingled with the whispering of the long boughs of willows – I was already living on the bank of that stream, lost in the sun-drenched immensity of the steppe. I saw that woman with gray hair, sunk in a clear reverie, slowly walking in the water and looking so young. And these youthful looks transported me onto the deck of a flatcar hurtling across a plain that sparkled with rain and light. The woman facing me smiled, tossing back the wet locks from her brow. Her eyelashes were iridescent in the rays of the setting sun…

Flood level. January 1910. I heard the misty silence, the lapping of the water when a boat passed. A little girl, her forehead pressed against the windowpane, was looking at the pale mirror of a flooded avenue. I lived that silent morning in a great Parisian apartment early in the century so intensely… And that morning led in sequence to another, with the crunching of gravel in an avenue gilded with autumn foliage. Three women in long black silk dresses, their broad hats trimmed with veils and feathers, were walking away, as if carrying the moment with them, its sunlight and the air of a fleeting era… Yet another morning: Charlotte (I recognized her now) accompanied by a man in the resonant streets of the Neuilly of her childhood. Charlotte, happy in a slightly confused 'way, is acting as guide. I felt I could distinguish the clarity of the morning light on each paving stone, see the trembling of each leaf, picture this unknown town in the man's gaze and the view of the streets, so familiar to Charlotte's eyes.

What I now understood was that ever since my childhood, Charlotte's Atlantis had enabled me to glimpse the mysterious consonance of eternal moments. Without my knowing it, they had traced the pattern of another life, as it were; invisible, inadmissible, alongside my own. Thus a carpenter who spends his days making chair legs or planing planks does not notice that the lacework of the shavings forms a beautiful ornament on the floor, shining with resin; one day, its clear transparency catches a ray of sunlight breaking through the narrow window piled high with tools, and the next, the blue-tinged reflection of snow.

It was this life that now revealed itself to be essential. Somehow, I did not yet know how, I must let it unfold within me. Through the silent work of memory I must learn the notation of these moments. Learn to preserve their timelessness amid the routine of everyday actions, amid the numbness of banal words. Live, conscious of this timelessness…

I returned to the cemetery just before the gate closed. The evening was clear. I sat down on the threshold and began writing in my address book, long since useless:

My situation beyond the grave is ideal, not only for discovering this essential life but also for recreating it, by recording it in a style that has yet to be invented. Or rather, this style will henceforth be my way of life. I will have no other life than these moments reborn on a page…

For want of paper my manifesto was soon going to peter out. Writing was a very important action for my project. In this high-sounding credo, I declared that only works created on the brink of the grave or indeed beyond the grave would withstand the test of time. I cited the epilepsy of some; asthma and the cork-lined room for others; exile, deeper than any tomb, for yet others… The pompous tone of this profession of faith was soon to disappear. It would be replaced by the pad of rough paper that I purchased the next day with the last of my money, and on whose first page I would write very simply:

CharlotteLemonnier: Biographical Notes.

Indeed that very morning I left the family vault of the Belvals and the Castelots forever… I had woken up in the middle of the night. An impossible, crazy thought had just crossed my mind, like a tracer bullet. I had to utter it aloud to gauge its extraordinary reality: "What if Charlotte were still alive?"

Stunned, I pictured her coming out onto her little flower-covered balcony, bent over a book. For many years I had received no news from Saranza. So Charlotte could still be living much as before, as she had during my childhood. She would be over eighty now, but in my memory this age did not touch her. For me she always remained the same.

Then the dream flashed into my mind. It was probably its aura that had just woken me. To find Charlotte again, to bring her to France…

The unrealistic nature of this project, formulated by a vagrant stretched out on the stone slabs of a family tomb, was so evident that I made no effort to spell it out to myself. For the moment, I decided not to think about the details, to live, and to keep this unreasonable hope at the heart of each day. To live off this hope.

I was unable to get to sleep again that night. Wrapping myself in my coat, I went out. The warmth of the late autumn had given way to a north wind. I remained standing, watching the low clouds, which were gradually becoming infused with a gray pallor. I remembered that one day, in an unsmiling jest, Charlotte had said to me that, after all her journeys across the vastness of Russia, for her to come to France on foot would have had nothing impossible about it…

To begin with, during my long months of poverty and wanderings, my crazy dream was to seem very similar to her sad bravado. I would picture a woman dressed in black entering a little frontier town in the very early hours of a dark winter morning. The hem of her coat would be caked with mud, her big shawl drenched with the cold mist. She would push open the door of a café at the corner of a small sleeping square, would sit down near the window, beside a radiator. The patronne would bring her a cup of tea. And looking through the window at the quiet fronts of the half-timbered houses, the woman would murmur softly, "It's France… I have returned to France. After… after a whole lifetime."

15

When I left the bookshop I walked through the town and began to cross the bridge poised above the sunlit expanse of the Garonne. I recalled that old films had a time-honored trick for skipping over several years in the lives of their heroes in a few seconds. The action would be interrupted, and this legend would appear on a black background with an unashamed frankness that had always appealed to me: "Two years later," or "three years went by." But who would use this outmoded device nowadays?

And yet on entering that empty bookshop in the middle of a heat-stunned provincial town, and on finding my latest book on the shelf, I had just that impression. "Three years went by." The cemetery, the family vault of the Belvals and the Castelots. And now this book in the colorful mosaic of jackets under the sign "New French Novels"…

Toward evening I reached the forest of the Landes. I wanted to walk, for two days or perhaps more, sensing that beyond this rolling country covered in pine trees the ocean lay perpetually in wait. Two days, two nights… Thanks to the Notes, time had acquired an extraordinary density for me. Despite living in Charlotte's past, it seemed to me that I had never experienced the present so intensely! Those landscapes of days gone by threw into a singular relief this patch of sky between the clusters of pine needles; this glade lit by the setting sun like a river of amber…

In the morning, back on the road (a gashed pine trunk, which I had not noticed the previous evening, was weeping its resin – what the local people called its gemmé), I remembered, for no special reason, those shelves at the back of the bookshop, "Eastern European Literature." My first books were there, sandwiched, and at the risk of inspiring giddy megalomania in me, between those of Lermontov and Nabokov. All this was the fruit of a pure and simple literary hoax on my part. For the novels had been written directly in French and rejected by publishers. I was "some funny little Russian who thought he could write in French." In a gesture of despair I had then invented a translator and submitted the manuscript, presenting it as translated from the Russian. It had been accepted, published, and hailed for the quality of the translation. I told myself, at first bitterly, later with a smile, that my Franco-Russian curse was still upon me. But whereas in childhood I had been obliged to conceal my French graft, now it was my Russianness that failed to find favor.

That evening, settled down for the night, I reread the latest pages of my Notes. In the fragment jotted down the previous evening I had written,

A boy of two has died in the big izba facing the apartment block where Charlotte lives. I see the child's father propping up against the handrail on the front steps an oblong box draped with red cloth – a little coffin. Its doll-like dimensions terrify me. I need immediately to find a place under heaven, or on earth, where one could imagine this child still alive. The death of a human being younger than oneself calls the whole universe into question. I rush to Charlotte. She perceives my anguish and says something to me that is astonishing in its simplicity: "Do you remember how we saw a flight of migrating birds in the autumn? They flew over the courtyard, yes, and then they disappeared. That was that, but somewhere in distant lands they are still flying. It is only because our eyesight is too weak that we can't see them. It's the same with people who die…"

As I slept, I thought I could hear the branches making a sound that was more powerful and continuous than usual. As if the wind had not ceased blowing for a single moment. In the morning I discovered that it was the sound of the ocean. In my weariness the previous evening I had stopped, without knowing it, on the frontier where the forest began to merge into the wave-lashed dunes.

I spent the whole morning on that deserted shore, watching the imperceptible rising of the waters… When the tide began to ebb, I resumed my journey. Barefoot on the wet sand I would go down toward the south now. Walking along, I thought about that little bag that from the time of our childhood my sister and I had called "the Pont-Neuf bag" and which contained the little pebbles wrapped in scraps of paper. There was a "Fecamp," a " Verdun," and also a " Biarritz," a name we associated with quartz and not with the town, which was unknown to us… I was going to walk beside the ocean for ten or twelve days and find that town, of which a tiny fragment was lost somewhere in the depths of the Russian steppes.

16

It was in September, through the intermediary of a certain Alex Bond, that the first news from Saranza reached me…

This "Mr. Bond" was in fact a Russian businessman, a very characteristic representative of the generation of "new Russians" who at that time were beginning to make their presence felt in all the capitals of the West. They butchered their names, American style, thus often identifying themselves without realizing it either with the heroes of spy novels or with extraterrestrial beings from the science fiction stories of the fifties. At the time of our first meeting I had advised Alex Bond, alias Alexei Bondarchenko (meaning "Cooper"), to gallicize his name and present himself as "Alexis Tonnelier," rather than mutilate it as he had done. Without a ghost of a smile, he explained to me the advantages of a short and euphonious name in business… I had the impression I was understanding less and less of the Russia that I now saw via these "Bonds," these "Kondrats," and these "Feds."…

He was going to Moscow and, touched by the sentimental aspect of my commission, had agreed to make a detour. Going to Saranza, walking in its streets, meeting Charlotte, now seemed a good deal more strange to me than traveling to another planet. Alex Bond had been there "between two trains," as he put it. And, without an inkling of what Charlotte meant to me, he spoke on the telephone as if this were an exchange of news after the holidays: "No, but what a black hole that Saranza is! Thanks to you, I've discovered darkest Russia, ha ha. All those streets that lead straight out onto the steppe! And the steppe with no end to it… She's very well, your grandmother, don't you worry. Yes, she's still very active. When I arrived she wasn't there. Her neighbor told me she was at a meeting. The tenants in her apartment block have created a support group, or whatever, to save an old izba in the courtyard that they want to demolish. A huge building, two centuries old. So your grandmother… No, I didn't see her; I was between two trains. I had to be in Moscow that evening come hell or high water. But I left a message… You could go and see her. They let everyone in these days. They say the iron curtain's nothing more than a sieve now ha ha ha…"

All I had were my refugee papers, plus a travel document that authorized me to visit "all countries except the USSR." The day after my conversation with the "new Russian" I went to the Préfecture de Police to obtain information about the formalities for naturalization. In my mind I was trying to silence the thought that kept creeping back: "What you are embarking on now is an invisible race against the clock. Charlotte is at an age where every year, every month, could be her last."

For that reason I did not want to write or telephone. I had a superstitious fear of compromising my project with a few banal words. I needed to obtain a French passport quickly, go to Saranza, spend several evenings talking with Charlotte, and bring her to Paris. I saw all these actions being accomplished simply, in a flash, as in a dream. Then abruptly this image became blurred, and I found myself once more caught in the glutinous lava that clogged my movements – time.

The dossier I was required to assemble reassured me: no documents impossible to find, no bureaucratic snares. Only my visit to the doctor left me with a painful impression. Yet the examination lasted a mere five minutes and was, when all's said and done, quite superficial: my state of health turned out to be compatible with French nationality. Having listened to my chest, the doctor told me to bend over, keeping my legs quite straight, and touch the ground with my fingers. I complied. It must have been my excessive alacrity that made him uneasy. The doctor seemed embarrassed and stammered, "Thank you, that's fine," as if he were afraid that in my zeal I might bend over again. Often some trifle in our attitudes is enough to alter the meaning of the most ordinary situations: two men in a small consulting room in a glaring white light; suddenly one of them bends, touches the ground almost at the feet of the other, and remains thus for a moment, awaiting, it seems, the second man's approval.

As I went out into the street I thought of the camps where they used similar physical tests to sort out the prisoners. But this excessively exaggerated comparison still did not explain my unease.

It was the eagerness with which I had fulfilled the command. I came across it again in leafing through the pages of my dossier. I perceived that this desire to convince someone was everywhere present. Even though it was not asked of me in the questionnaires, I had mentioned my distant French origins. Yes, I had mentioned Charlotte, as if I wanted to ward off all objections and dissipate all skepticism in advance. And now I could not rid myself of the feeling that I had in some way betrayed her.

I had to wait several months. I was told there would be a delay until May. And at once those far-off spring days were bathed in a special radiance, standing out from the round of months and forming a universe that lived according to its own rhythm, in its own climate.

For me it was a time of preparations, but above all of long, silent conversations with Charlotte. As I walked along the streets I now had the sensation of observing them through her eyes. Of seeing, as she would have seen, an empty quay where the poplar trees, in a sudden breeze, seemed to be transmitting an urgent, whispered message to one another; of sensing, as she would have done, the resonance of the paving stones in this little old square, within whose provincial tranquility, in the heart of Paris, lay concealed the temptation of a simple happiness, of a life without dazzle.

I understood that throughout the three years of my life in France the slow and discreet progress of my project had never been interrupted. From that vague image of a woman dressed in black passing through a frontier town on foot, my dream had moved on toward a more real vision. I saw myself going to meet my grandmother at the station, and accompanying her to the hotel where she would live during her stay in Paris. Then, once the period of the bleakest poverty was finished, I had begun to picture a more comfortable interior than a hotel room, one where Charlotte would feel more at ease…

Perhaps it was thanks to these dreams that I was able to endure the poverty and humiliation that go with one's first steps in the world in which the book, that most vulnerable organ of our being, becomes merchandise. Merchandise that is hawked, exposed on market stalls, discounted. My dream was an antidote. And the Notes - a refuge.

In those few months of waiting, the topography of Paris changed. As on certain maps where the arrondissements are colored differently, the city became filled in my eyes with varied shades that Charlotte's presence gave nuances to. There were streets whose sun-drenched silence, early in the morning, held the echo of her voice. Café terraces where I guessed at her weariness at the end of a walk. A facade, a stained glass window, which under her eyes assumed the light patina of memory.

This daydream topography left a good many white patches on the colored mosaic of the arrondissements. Our outings would quite spontaneously avoid the architectural audacities of recent years. Charlotte's days in Paris would be too brief. We would not have time to come to terms with all those new pyramids, glass towers, and arches by looking at them. Their silhouettes would congeal into a strange, futuristic tomorrow, which would not disturb the eternal present of our excursions.

Nor did I want Charlotte to see the district where I lived… Alex Bond, when he came to meet me, had exclaimed disdainfully, "For goodness sake, we're not in France here. This is Africa!" And he embarked on a harangue, whose content reminded me of the remarks of so many "new Russians." It was all there: the degeneracy of the West and the imminent end of white Europe; the invasion of the new barbarians ("including us Slavs," he had added, to be fair); a new Mahomet "who will torch all their Pompidou Centres"; and a new Genghis Khan "who will put an end to all their democratic kowtowing." Drawing inspiration from the endless procession of people of color walking past the café terrace where we were sitting, his discourse was a mixture of apocalyptic prophecies and hope for a Europe regenerated by the young blood of the barbarians, promises of a total race war, and faith in universal interbreeding… The subject fascinated him. He must sometimes have felt on the side of the moribund West, for his skin was white and his culture European, and sometimes on the side of the new Huns. "I don't care what you say," he concluded his speech, "the fact remains, there are too many of these wogs!" forgetting that a minute before it was to them that he had been entrusting the salvation of the old continent…

In my dreams our excursions made a detour round this quarter and the intellectual ferment that its reality would give rise to. Not that its population could have shocked Charlotte's sensibility. An émigré par excellence, she had always lived in the midst of an extreme multiplicity of peoples, cultures, and languages. From Siberia to the Ukraine, from the Russian North to the steppe, she had known the whole ethnic diversity of the empire's melting pot. During the war she had encountered them in hospital, facing death in absolute equality; in naked equality, as bodies undergoing surgery.

It was by no means the new population of that old district of Paris that might have upset Charlotte. If I did not want to take her there it was because you could walk along whole streets without hearing a word of French spoken. Some saw the promise of a new world in this exoticism, others, a disaster. But we were not seeking exoticism, whether architectural or human. The change of scene we would experience in our days together I thought would be much more profound.

The Paris that I was preparing to let Charlotte rediscover was an incomplete Paris and even, in some respects, illusory. I remembered Nabokov's memoirs, where he spoke of his grandfather living out his last days; as he lay in bed he believed that what he could perceive through the thick material of the curtain was the brilliance of the southern sun, with attendant clusters of mimosa. He smiled, believing himself to be in Nice, in the spring sunlight. He did not suspect that he was dying in Russia in the depths of winter, and that the sun was a lamp that his daughter had fixed up behind the curtain, to give him that happy illusion…

I knew that Charlotte, while respecting my itineraries, would see everything. The lamp behind the curtain would not deceive her. I could see the quick wink she would give me in front of some indescribable contemporary sculpture. I could hear her comments, full of very subtle humor, the delicacy of which would only serve to emphasize the dull aggressiveness of the work observed. She would also see that district, mine, which I was trying to avoid… She would go there all alone, in my absence, searching for a house in the rue de l'Ermitage where the Great War soldier once lived, the one who had given her that little ferrous splinter that as children we called "Verdun."

I also knew that I should do my very best not to talk about books. And that we would talk about them all the same, a great deal, often till late into the night. For the France that had appeared one day in the middle of the steppes of Saranza owed its birth to books. It was indeed essentially a bookish country, a country composed of words, whose rivers flowed like lines of verse, whose women wept in alexandrines and whose men quarreled in broadsides. That was how we discovered France as children, through its literary life, its verbal substance, shaped into a sonnet and honed by an author. Our family mythology attested that a little volume with a battered cover and a tarnished gilt top traveled with Charlotte on all her journeys. As the last link with France. Or perhaps as the constant possibility of magic. "There is a tune for which I'd gladly part…" How many times in the wastes of the Siberian snows had these lines shaped themselves into "a brick-built castle, faced with cornerstones,/With lofty windows, stained in crimson tones"? We confused France with her literature. And true literature was that magic, a word, a verse, a chapter of which transported us into a changeless moment of beauty.

I wanted to tell Charlotte that that kind of literature was dead in France. And that in the multitude of books I had devoured since the start of my reclusive life as a writer, I had looked in vain for one that I could imagine in her hands in the middle of a Siberian izba. Yes, the book open, a little gleam of tears in her eyes…

In those imaginary conversations with Charlotte I became an adolescent again. My youthful extremism, long since quenched by the realities of life, was awakened. Once again I sought an absolute, unique work. I dreamed of a book that could remake the world with its beauty. And I heard my grandmother's voice responding to me, understanding and smiling, as in the old days at Saranza on her balcony: "Do you still remember those tiny apartments in Russia that groaned under the weight of books? You know, books under the bed, in the kitchen, in the hall, piled right up to the ceiling? And those unobtainable books that you were lent for one night and which you had to give back at six o'clock sharp in the morning? And yet others, retyped, with six carbons at the same time; they gave you the sixth copy, almost illegible, or 'blind,' as they called it… You see, it's difficult to compare. In Russia the writer was a god. The Last Judgment and the Kingdom of Heaven were expected from him at the same time. Did you ever hear anyone there talk about the price of a book? No, because books had no price! You could go without buying a pair of shoes and freeze your feet in winter, but you bought a book…"

Charlotte's voice broke off, as if to give me to understand that this cult of the book in Russia was only a memory now.

"But the unique book, the definitive book. Judgment and Kingdom at the same time?" exclaimed the adolescent I had once more become.

My feverish whisperings jerked me out of my invented conversation. Ashamed, like someone who has been caught talking to himself, I saw myself for what I was. A man gesticulating in the middle of a little dark room, where a blind window faces onto a brick wall and needs neither curtains nor shutters. A room that can be crossed in three steps, where objects, for lack of space, crowd together, encroach on one another, become entangled: old typewriter, electric stove, chairs, shelves, shower, table, spectral clothes hanging on the walls. And everywhere sheets of paper, bits of manuscripts and books, which give this cluttered interior a kind of highly logical madness. Outside the window the start of a wet winter's night, and – floating up from the maze of ancient houses – an Arabic melody, a mixture of lament and celebration. And the man is dressed in an old light-colored overcoat (it is very cold). On his hands he wears mittens, necessary for typing in the freezing room. He is talking to a woman. He addresses her with that confidence that one does not always have, even for the intimacy of one's own voice. He is questioning her about the unique, definitive work, without fear of seeming naive or ridiculously pathetic. She is about to reply to him…

Before I went to sleep, I had the thought that in coming to France, Charlotte would seek to understand what had happened to that literature from which a few old books represented for her, in Siberia, a miniature French archipelago. I imagined coming into the apartment where she would be living one evening and seeing on the edge of a table or the windowsill a book open, a recent book, which Charlotte was reading in my absence. I would lean over the pages, and my gaze would fall on these lines:

It was, in fact, the mildest morning of that winter. The sun shone as in the first days of April; the hoarfrost was melting, and the wet grass glistened, as if drenched with dew… I had spent this unique morning reviewing a thousand things, with an ever-increasing melancholy beneath the clouds of winter – I had forgotten the old garden and the cradle of vine, in whose shadow my life had been decided… How to live in the image of this beauty? that is what I should like to learn. The clarity of this country, the transparency, the profundity, and the miracle of this meeting of water, stone, and light – that is the only knowledge, the first morality. This harmony is not illusory. It is real, and faced with it, I feel the necessity of the word…

17

The blissful disappearance of routine is something young betrothed couples on the eve of their wedding, or people who have just moved house, must have a sense of. It feels to them as if the few days of celebration or the happy chaos of settling in will last forever, becoming the very stuff of their lives, light and sparkling.

During my last weeks of waiting I lived in a similar intoxication. I left my little room, and rented an apartment I knew I could only afford for four or five months. That was of scant importance to me. From the room where Charlotte would live one could see the blue-gray expanse of roofs reflecting the April sky… I borrowed what I could; I bought furniture, curtains, a carpet, and the household paraphernalia that I had always dispensed with in my previous dwelling. The flat as a whole remained empty; I slept on a mattress. Only the room destined for my grandmother now had a habitable air.

And as the month of May drew closer, so my cheerful recklessness and my spendthrift madness increased. From secondhand shops I began buying small antique objects that might, as I saw it, give a soul to this rather ordinary looking room. At an antique dealer's I found a table lamp. He lit it, to give me a demonstration; I pictured Charlotte's face by the light of its shade. I could not leave without that lamp. I filled the shelves with old leather-backed volumes of illustrated magazines from the turn of the century. Each evening I spread out my trophies on the round table that stood in the middle of this decorated room: half a dozen glasses, an old bellows, a pile of ancient postcards…

In vain I told myself that Charlotte would never want to leave Saranza, and above all Fyodor's grave, for long, and that she would have been as comfortable in a hotel as in this improvised museum: I could no longer stop myself buying and adding finishing touches. For even when initiated into the magic of memory, the art of recreating a lost moment, man remains overwhelmingly attached to the physical fetishes of the past: like that conjurer whom God blessed with the gift of working miracles, but who preferred the nimbleness of his own fingers and his suitcases with false bottoms, which had the advantage of not upsetting his common sense.

And I knew that the real magic would be revealed in the bluish reflection of the roofs, in the aerial fragility of the skyline outside the window that she would open on the day after she arrived, very early in the morning. And in the sound of the first words that she exchanged in French with someone on a street corner…

On one of the last evenings of my waiting I caught myself praying… It was not a formal prayer. I had of course never learned one; I grew up by the skeptical light of an atheism so militant, it was almost religious in its tireless crusade against God. This was more a kind of dilettante and confused plea, whose addressee remained unknown. Catching myself red-handed in this unaccustomed act, I hastened to make a mockery of it. I thought that, given the impiety of my past life, I could have exclaimed, like that sailor in Voltaire's story, "I have trodden on the crucifix four times on four voyages to Japan!" I told myself I was a pagan, an idolater. Nevertheless these jibes did not banish the vague internal murmuring that I had become aware of deep within me. Its intonation had something childish about it. It was as if I were proposing a bargain to my unnamed interlocutor; I would only live another twenty years, well, fifteen years – all right, only ten – provided this meeting, these moments regained, were possible…

I got up, and pushed open the door to the next room. In the half-light of a spring night the room was awake, animated by a subdued expectancy. Even the old fan, though bought only two days ago, looked as if it had lain on the little low table for long years in the nocturnal paleness of the windowpanes.

It was a happy day. One of those lazy, gray days adrift among the days of holiday at the beginning of May. In the morning I nailed a big coat-rack to the wall in the hall. You could hang at least ten garments on it. I did not even ask myself whether we would need it in summer.

Charlotte's window remained open. Now between the silvery surfaces of the roofs one could see, here and there, the light patches of first greenery.

That morning I added another short fragment to my Notes. I remembered that one day at Saranza Charlotte had talked to me about her life in Paris after World War I. She told me that the postwar era, which, without anyone having any inkling of this, was turning into the years between the wars, had something deeply false about its atmosphere. A false joy, a too easy forgetfulness. It reminded her strangely of the advertisements she used to read in the wartime newspapers: "Warm yourself without coal!" led to an explanation of how one could use "balls of paper." Or again: "Housewives, do your washing without fire!" And even "Housewives, economize: pot-au-feu without fire!" When Charlotte went off to join Albertine in Siberia, she had hoped that when she returned with her to Paris, they would discover prewar France again…

As I noted down these few lines, I told myself that I would soon be able to ask Charlotte so many questions, verify a thousand details, learn for example who the gentleman in the tails was in one of our family photos and why half of this picture had been carefully cut off. And who that woman in a padded jacket was, whose presence among the people of the belle époque had long ago startled me.

It was when I went out at the end of the afternoon that I found the envelope in my mailbox. Cream in color, it bore the insignia of the Préfecture de Police. Stopping in the middle of the pavement, I took a long time to open it, tearing it clumsily.

The eyes understand more quickly than the brain, especially when there is news the latter does not wish to understand. In that brief moment of indecision the eye tries to disrupt the implacable sequence of words, as if it could change the message before the intellect is prepared to grasp their meaning.

The letters danced before my eyes, riddling me with bursts of words, with bits of sentences. Then heavily, the essential word loomed up, printed in large letters, spaced out, as if to be intoned: unacceptability. And, mingling with the throbbing of the blood in my temples, the explanatory formulas followed it: "Your situation does not correspond to…," "You do not combine, in your case…" I remained motionless for at least a quarter of an hour, my eyes glued to the letter. Finally I began to walk straight in front of me, forgetting where I was supposed to be going.

I was not thinking about Charlotte yet. What upset me in these first few moments was the memory of my visit to the doctor: yes, that absurd bending to touch the ground and my eagerness to do so now seemed to me doubly useless and humiliating.

It was only on returning home that I really grasped what was happening to me. I hung up my jacket on the coatrack. Beyond the inner door I saw Charlotte's room… So it was not Time (oh, how wary one must be of capital letters!) that threatened to thwart my project, but the decision of this petty public official, by means of a few sentences on a single typewritten sheet. A man whom I would never know and who only knew me obliquely through the forms I had filled in. It was to him, in fact, that I should have addressed my dilettante prayers…

The next day I lodged an appeal: "an appeal for grace" was the term for it in the letter. Never had I written a letter so falsely personal, so stupidly arrogant and so imploring at the same time.

I no longer noticed the days slipping by May, June, July. Here was this apartment that I had filled up with old objects and with feelings from times past, this disaffected museum of which I was the useless curator. And the absence of the one I awaited. As for the Notes, I had not added a single one since the day of the refusal. I knew that the very nature of this manuscript depended on that meeting, our meeting, which despite everything I still hoped to be possible.

And often during those months I had that recurring dream that woke me in the middle of the night. A woman in a long dark coat entered a little frontier town on a silent winter's morning.

It is an old game. You select an adjective expressing an extreme quality: "abominable," for example. Then you find a synonym for it that, while being very close, expresses the same quality slightly less strongly: "horrible," if you will. Next time there will be the same imperceptible dilution: "awful." And so on, descending each time a tiny amount in the stated quality: "wretched," "intolerable," "disagreeable"… To arrive eventually at quite simply "bad" and, going via "mediocre," "average," and "so-so," to begin to climb the scale again with "modest," "satisfactory," "acceptable," "suitable," pleasant," "good." Arriving, a dozen words later, at "excellent," "wonderful," "sublime."

The news I received from Saranza at the beginning of August must have followed a similar modification. For, transmitted first to Alex Bond (he had left Charlotte his telephone number in Moscow), this news and the little package that came with it had been a long time in transit, passing from one person to another. At each transmission its tragic import was reduced, the emotion was eroded. And it was almost on a jovial note that an unknown man told me over the telephone: "Listen, I've been given a little packet for you. It is from… I don't know who it was, anyway your relative who has died… In Russia. I expect you've heard about it already Yes, well, she's sent you your testament, eh, what…"

He had meant, jokingly, to say "your inheritance." By mistake, thanks in particular to that verbal imprecision that I had often noted in the "new Russians," for whom English was becoming their principal working language, he had used the word "testament."

I spent a long time waiting for him in the foyer of one of the better Paris hotels. The cold emptiness of the mirrors on each side of the armchairs corresponded perfectly to the blank that filled my gaze and my thoughts.

The stranger emerged from the lift, stepping aside for a tall, dazzling blond woman, with a smile that seemed directed at everyone and no one. Another man, very broad shouldered, followed them.

"Val Grig," the stranger introduced himself, shaking me by the hand, and introduced his companions to me, specifying, "My flighty interpreter, my faithful bodyguard."

I knew that I could not avoid the invitation to the bar. Listening to Val Grig would be a way of thanking him for the service rendered. He needed me in order to enjoy to the full the comfort of this hotel, his new status as an "international businessman," and the beauty of his "flighty interpreter." He held forth about his own triumphs as well as the Russian disaster, perhaps not realizing that a hilarious relationship of cause and effect was thus unintentionally established between these two subjects. The interpreter, who had certainly heard these stories many times before, seemed to be asleep with her eyes open. The bodyguard, as if to justify his presence, glared at all the people who came and went. "It would be easier," I suddenly thought, "to explain how I feel to Martians than to these three…"

I opened the package in the Métro train. One of Alex Bond's visiting cards slipped onto the floor. There were a few words of sympathy, excuses (Taiwan, Canada…) for not having been able to hand me the package in person. But, above all, the date of Charlotte's death. September 9 of the previous year!

I no longer noticed the sequence of stations, only coming to my senses at the last stop. September of the previous year… Alex Bond had been to Saranza in August a year ago. A few weeks after that I had submitted my application for naturalization. Perhaps at the very moment when Charlotte was dying. And all my initiatives, all my projects, all those months of waiting, had already occurred after her life. Outside her life. Without any possibility of connecting with that life, which was finished… The parcel had been kept by the neighbor, and then given to Bond only in the spring. On the brown paper there were a few words written in Charlotte's hand: "Please ensure that this envelope reaches Alexei Bondarchenko, who will be good enough to convey it to my grandson."

I got onto another train at the end of the line. As I opened the envelope I offered myself the sad solace that it was not the decision of the official that had in the end wrecked my project. It was time. Time, endowed with a grinding irony, and which, by means of its tricks and inconsistencies, is forever reminding us of its indifferent power.

All the envelope contained was a score of manuscript pages stapled together. I was expecting to read a farewell letter, so I could not understand this length, knowing how little Charlotte was given to solemn turns of phrase and verbal effusions. Not feeling able to embark on a full reading, I leafed through the first few pages, without anywhere encountering expressions in the manner of "when you read these lines I shall no longer be here," which was just what I was afraid of finding.

In fact, at its start the letter did not seem to be addressed to anyone. Skimming rapidly from one line to another, from one paragraph to the next, I thought I grasped that this was a history quite unconnected with our life at Saranza, or with the imminent end that Charlotte might have hinted at for me…

I left the Métro and, not wanting to go up right away, continued with my absentminded reading, seated on a bench in a park. I now saw that Charlotte's story did not concern us. In her elegant and precise handwriting, she was transcribing a woman's life. Inattentive, I must have skipped over the place where my grandmother explained how they had become acquainted. In any case, that mattered little to me. For the tale of this life was only the fate of one more woman, one of those tragic destinies from Stalin's time, which shocked us when we were young, whose pain had since become dulled. This woman, the daughter of a kulak, had as a child experienced exile in the marshlands of western Siberia. Then after the war, accused of "anti-kolkhoz propaganda," she had ended up in a camp… I perused these pages like those of a book I knew by heart. The camp; the cedar trees that the prisoners cut down, sinking in the snow up to their waists; the daily, banal cruelty of the guards; sickness; death. And the forced love, under the threat of a weapon or of an inhuman workload; and the love bought with a bottle of alcohol… The child that this woman had brought into the world won relief for its mother: such was the law. In this "women's camp" there was a hut, set apart, provided for those births. Then the woman died, crushed by a tractor, a few months after the amnesty, decreed at the time of the thaw. The child was almost two and a half…

The rain drove me from my bench. I hid Charlotte's letter under my jacket. I ran toward our house. The interrupted story seemed to me very typical: at the first signs of liberalization, all Russians had begun to bring out the censored past from the deep hiding places of their memory. And they did not understand that history had no need for all these innumerable little Gulags. A single monumental one, recognized as a classic, sufficed. In sending me her testimonies, Charlotte must have succumbed like the others, by the intoxication of glasnost. The touching uselessness of this missive upset me. Once again I had a measure of the disdainful indifference of time. This woman prisoner with her child was hovering on the brink of ultimate oblivion, held back only by these few manuscript pages. And Charlotte herself?

I pushed open the door. A draft stirred the two halves of an open window with a dull crash. I went to my grandmother's room to close it.

I thought about her life. A life that linked such different eras; the start of the century, that almost archaic age, almost as legendary as the reign of Napoleon, and – the end of our century, the end of the millennium. All those revolutions, wars, failed Utopias, and successful terrors: she had distilled their essence in the sorrows and joys of her days. And this throbbing body of lived experience would soon sink into oblivion. Like the miniature Gulag of the prisoner and her child.

I stayed at Charlotte's window for a moment. For a number of weeks I had imagined her gaze resting on that view…

That evening, mainly from an access of conscience, I decided to read Charlotte's pages to the end. I went back to the imprisoned woman, the atrocities at the camp, and the child who had brought a few moments of serenity into this hard, defiled world. Charlotte wrote that she had been able to obtain permission to come to the hospital where the woman was dying…

Suddenly the page I was holding in my hand was transformed into a fine sheet of silver. Yes, it dazzled me with a metallic reflection and seemed to emit a cold, thin sound. One line flashed out – like the filament of a lightbulb lacerating one's eyeball. The letter was written in Russian, and it was only at this line that Charlotte switched to French, as if she were no longer sure of her Russian. Or as if French, that French of another era, would allow me a certain detachment from what she was about to tell me: "That woman, who was called Maria Stepanovna Dolina, was your mother. It was she who wanted you to be told nothing for as long as possible…"

A little envelope was stapled to that last page. I opened it. In it was a photo that I recognized without difficulty: a woman in a big shapka with the earflaps pulled down, wearing a padded jacket. On a little rectangle of white cloth sewn beside the row of buttons – a number. In her arms a baby swathed in a cocoon of wool…

That night I rediscovered in my memory the image that I had always believed to be a kind of prenatal reminiscence, coming to me from my French ancestors, and of which, as a child, I was very proud. I used to see in it a proof of my hereditary Frenchness. It was that autumn day bathed in sun, at the edge of a wood, with an invisible feminine presence, a very pure air, and the gossamer threads rippling across the luminous space… I now understood that the wood was in fact an endless taiga, and that the delightful Indian summer was about to be swallowed up into a Siberian winter that would last nine months. The gossamer threads, silvery and light in my French fantasy, were nothing other than new strands of barbed wire that had not had time to rust. I was out for a walk with my mother in the territory of the "women's camp."… It was my first childhood memory.

Two days later I left the apartment. The owner had come round the day before and had agreed on an amicable solution: I left him all the furniture and antique objects I had accumulated over several months…

I slept little. At four o'clock I was already up. I packed my rucksack, planning to leave that very day for my habitual journey on foot. Before departing I glanced one last time into Charlotte's room. By the gray light of morning its silence no longer evoked a museum. No longer did it seem uninhabited. I hesitated for a moment, then I seized an old volume laid on the windowsill and went out.

The streets were empty, misted over with sleep. Scenic views seemed to take shape as I walked toward them.

I thought of the Notes I was carrying away in my bag. That evening, or the next day, I told myself, I would add a new fragment that had come to mind that night. It was at Saranza during my last summer at my grandmother's… That day, instead of taking the path that led us across the steppe, Charlotte had turned in among the trees of the copse cluttered with weaponry that the locals called "Stalinka." I had followed her with a wary tread: according to rumor, you could step on a mine in the thickets of the Stalinka… Charlotte had stopped in the middle of a broad clearing and had murmured, "Look!" I had seen three or four identical plants that reached up to our knees. Great indented leaves, tendrils clinging to the slender canes stuck in the ground. Dwarf maples? Young blackcurrant bushes? I did not understand Charlotte's mysterious joy.

"It's a grapevine, a real one," she told me at last.

"Oh. Good…"

This revelation did not heighten my curiosity. In my head I could not connect this modest plant with the cult dedicated to wine by my grandmother's homeland. We remained for several minutes in front of Charlotte's secret plantation at the heart of the Stalinka…

Recalling that vine now, I experienced almost unbearable grief and at the same time profound joy. A joy that had at first seemed to me shameful. Charlotte was dead, and on the site of the Stalinka, to judge by Alex Bond's account, they had built a stadium. There could hardly be a more tangible proof of total, final disappearance. But joy carried the day. Its source lay in that moment I had lived at the center of a clearing; in the breeze from the steppes; in the serene silence of this woman standing before four plants, under whose leaves I now detected the young clusters.

As I walked, I looked from time to time at the photo of the woman in a padded jacket. And now I understood what gave her face a distant resemblance to the people in the albums of my adoptive family. It was that slight smile that appeared thanks to Charlotte's magic formula, "petite pomme"! Yes, the woman photographed beside the camp fence must have pronounced those enigmatic syllables to herself… I stopped for a moment; I stared at her eyes. Then I said to myself, "I must get used to the idea that this woman, younger than me, is my mother."

I put away the photo, and went on. And when I thought of Charlotte, her presence in these drowsy streets had the reality, discreet and spontaneous, of life itself.

What I still had to find were the words to tell it with.