Dreams of My Russian Summers (18 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each time its mournful notes sound in my ears

My soul grows younger by two hundred years.

The thirteenth Louis reigns and I behold

A green hill turned by sunset's rays to gold.

 

A brick-built castle, faced with cornerstones,

With lofty windows, stained in crimson tones,

Stands in a garden where a river fleet

Flows between flowers and swirls about its feet.

 

A lady at her casement waits the while,

Fair with dark eyes, in robe of ancient style,

I saw her in another life, it seems,

And now remembrance of her haunts my dreams!

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

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

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

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

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

3

11

T
HAT AUTUMN THERE
were autumn there were only a few days between the time when, ashamed to admit it to myself, I was rejoicing at my mother's absence — she had gone into hospital, “just for tests” she told us — and the afternoon when, coming out of school, I learned of her death.

The day after she left for the hospital an agreeable lack of constraint became established in our apartment. My father stayed in front of the television till one o'clock in the morning. And I, savoring this prelude to adult freedom, sought to delay my return to the house each day a little longer: nine o'clock, half past nine, then ten o'clock …

I spent these evenings at a crossroads that, in the autumn dusk and with a slight effort of the imagination, created a surprising illusion: that of a rainy evening in a metropolis in the West. It was a unique spot amidst the monotonous broad avenues of our city. The streets that met here branched out like the radii of a circle, leaving the front of each apartment block truncated in the form of a trapezium. I had learned that Napoleon ordered this configuration where streets met in Paris to avoid collisions between carriages …

The denser the darkness, the more complete my illusion became. Knowing that one of these buildings housed the local museum of atheism and the walls of others concealed overcrowded communal apartments — all this hardly troubled me at all. I contemplated the yellow and blue watercolor sketch of windows in the rain, the reflections of the street lamps on the oily asphalt, the silhouettes of the
bare trees. I was alone, free. I was happy. Whispering, I talked to myself in French. In front of these trapezium-shaped facades the sound of that language seemed to me very natural. Would the magic I had discovered that summer materialize in some encounter? Each woman who came toward me seemed to want to talk to me. Each extra half hour of night that I gained gave my French mirage more substance. I no longer belonged either to my time or to my country. On this little nocturnal circus I felt wonderfully foreign to myself.

Now the sun wearied me, daytime became a useless waiting period before my true life, the evening… .

However, it was in broad daylight, blinded by the glitter of the first hoarfrost, that I learned the news. As I walked past the cheerful crowd of pupils, who still displayed the same disdainful hostility toward me, a voice rang out.

“Have you heard? His mother's dead.”

I intercepted several inquisitive glances. I recognized the one who had spoken — the son of one of our neighbors… .

It was the lack of concern in the remark that gave me time to grasp the inconceivable situation: my mother was dead. All the events of the past days suddenly fitted together into a coherent picture: my father's frequent absences, his silence, the arrival, two days before, of my sister (although it was not the university vacation time, I now realized)… .

It was Charlotte who opened the door to me. She had arrived from Saranza that very morning. So they all knew! While I was “the child we won't say anything to at the moment.” And this child, unaware of everything, had continued to pace up and down at his “French” crossroads, imagining himself to be adult, free, mysterious. This sobering thought was the first my mother's death gave rise to. This then gave way to shame: while my mother was dying, I, in selfish contentment, had been reveling in my freedom, recreating the Parisian autumn under the windows of the museum of atheism!

During these sad days and on the day of the funeral Charlotte was the only one who did not weep. Her face impassive, her eyes calm, she saw to all the household tasks, greeted visitors, settled in
relatives who came from other towns. Her dry manner displeased people… .

“You can come to me whenever you want,” she said to me in parting. I nodded my head, picturing Saranza again, the balcony, the suitcase stuffed with old French newspapers. Again I felt ashamed: while we were telling each other stories, life had continued with its real joys and its real sorrows. My mother had gone on working, already ill, suffering without admitting it to anyone, knowing herself to be doomed but never betraying it by word or gesture. And all the while we had spent days on end talking about the elegant ladies of the belle epoque… .