Dreams of My Russian Summers (12 page)

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 mysWterious 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
“Pravda! 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

W
HAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND
is why she wanted to bury herself out there in that Saranac. 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 Burkhart.

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 spy hole 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
shake
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 Bolshevik 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 Neville!”

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 fly-past… .”

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, Sergey,” 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.