Dreams of My Russian Summers (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never before had she felt so close to that soil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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