Dreams of My Russian Summers (11 page)

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 door-keeper 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 duc 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 cere-monies 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.