Dreams of My Russian Summers (19 page)

It was with concealed relief that I saw Charlotte leave. I felt myself to be covertly implicated in my mother's death. Yes, I bore the vague responsibility for it that a spectator feels when his gaze causes a tightrope walker to stumble or even to fall. It was Charlotte who had taught me to pick out Parisian silhouettes in the midst of a great industrial city on the Volga; it was she who had imprisoned me in this fantasy of the past, from whence I cast absentminded glances at real life.

Real life was the layer of stagnant water that, with a shudder, I had caught sight of at the bottom of the grave on the day of the burial. Under a fine autumn rain, they lowered the coffin slowly into the mixture of water and mud… .

Real life also made itself felt with the arrival of my aunt, my father's elder sister. She lived in a workers' district where the population got up at five o'clock in the morning and streamed in to the gates of the gigantic factories in the city. This woman brought with her a ponderous and powerful breath of Russian life — a strange amalgam of cruelty, compassion, drunkenness, anarchy, invincible joie de vivre, tears, willing slavery, stupid obstinacy, and unexpected delicacy… . With growing astonishment, I discovered a universe previously eclipsed by Charlotte's France.

My aunt was concerned that my father would take to drinking, a fatal move for the men she had known in her life. Each time she
came to see us she repeated, “Whatever you do, Nikolai, keep off the bitter stuff!” That is to say, vodka. He would agree mechanically, without hearing her, then shaking his head energetically, he would declaim: “But it's me who should have died first. That's for sure. With this, you know… .”

And he would touch his bald head with his palm. I knew that above his left ear he had a “hole” — a place covered only with fine, smooth skin that pulsated rhythmically. My mother had always been afraid that if involved in a brawl, my father might be killed by a simple flick of the finger… .

He did not start drinking. But in February, the time of the last winter frosts, the harshest of all, he collapsed in a snowy alleyway one evening, felled by a heart attack. The militiamen who later found him stretched out in the snow thought he was a drunkard and took him to the sobering up station. Only the following morning would the error be discovered… .

Once again real life, with its arrogant power, came to challenge my fantasies. A single sound sufficed: they had transported his body in a van covered with cloth, which was as cold inside as outside; as the body was placed on the table, there was a thud like a block of ice hitting wood… .

I could not lie to myself. Amid a great turmoil of exposed thoughts and unflinching admissions — in my soul — the disappearance of my parents had not left incurable scars. Yes, I admitted during these secret tête-à-têtes with myself, my suffering was not inordinate.

And if on occasion I wept, I was not really mourning their loss. Mine were tears of helplessness at the realization of a stupefying truth: a whole generation of dead, of wounded, of those whose youth had been stolen from them. Tens of millions of human beings whose lives had been blotted out. Those who had fallen on the field of battle at least had the privilege of a heroic death. But those who came back, and who disappeared ten or twenty years after the war, appeared to die quite “normally,” of “old age.” You had to come very close to my father to see the slightly concave mark above his ear where the blood throbbed. You had to know my mother very well to
discern in her that child transfixed in front of the dark window on that first morning of war under a sky with strange rumbling stars. To see in her as well that pale skeletal adolescent, choking as she wolfed down potato peelings… .

I viewed their lives through a mist of tears. I saw my father, on a warm June evening, coming home after demobilization to his native village. He recognized everything: the forest, the river, the curve in the road. And then there was that unknown place, that black street made up of two rows of
izbas,
all burned to a cinder. And not a living soul. Only the merry notes of a cuckoo, keeping time with the burning throbbing of the blood above his ear.

I saw my mother, a student who had just passed her university entrance exams, this petrified young girl standing frozen to attention before a wall of disdainful faces — a Party commission assembled to judge her “crime.” She had known that Charlotte's nationality, yes, her “Frenchness,” was a terrible blemish during that period of the struggle against “cosmopolitanism.” Filling in the questionnaire form before the examination she had written, with a trembling hand, “Mother — of Russian nationality” …

And they had met, these two human beings, so different, yet so alike in their mangled youth. And we were born, my sister and I, and life had continued, despite the wars, the burned villages, the camps.

Yes, if I wept, it was for their silent resignation. They bore no grudge against anyone, demanded no reparations. They lived and tried to make us happy. My father had passed his whole life shuttling back and forth across the endless spaces between the Volga and the Urals, erecting high-tension cables with his team. My mother, expelled from university following her crime, had never had the courage to renew the attempt. She had become a translator in one of the great factories in our city, as if this technical and impersonal French exonerated her from her criminal Frenchness.

I viewed these two lives — at the same time banal and extraordinary — and felt a confused rage mounting within me, against whom, I did not really know. Yes, I did know: against Charlotte! Against the serenity of her French universe. Against the useless refinement of that imaginary past: what madness to be thinking about
three creatures featured on a press cutting from the turn of the century or to try to recreate the states of mind of a president in love! While forgetting about the soldier who was saved by the winter itself when he packed his fractured skull in a shell of ice, thus staunching the blood. While forgetting that if I was alive it was thanks to that train that had slowly edged its way past the carriages filled with crushed human flesh, a train that carried Charlotte and her children away to refuge in the protective depths of Russia… . That propaganda catchphrase — “Twenty million people died so that you might live!” — had always left me indifferent. Suddenly this patriotic refrain acquired a new and grievous meaning for me. And a very personal one.

Russia, like a bear after a long winter, was awakening within me. A pitiless, beautiful, absurd, unique Russia. A Russia pitted against the rest of the world by its somber destiny.

Yes, if I had occasion to weep at the death of my parents, it was because I felt Russian. And the French graft in my heart began, at times, to give me great pain.

My father's sister, my aunt, had also unwittingly contributed to this turnabout… .

She moved into our apartment with her two sons, my young cousins, happy to leave her crowded communal apartment in the workers' district. Far from seeking to impose some other way of life on us and to eradicate the traces of our previous existence, she simply lived as she could. And the eccentricity of our family — its very discreet Frenchness, as remote from France as my mother's technical translations — faded away of its own accord.

My aunt was a true product of the Stalinist era. Stalin had been dead for twenty years, but she had not changed. It was not that she had any great love for the Generalissimo. Her first husband had been killed in the murderous shambles of the first days of the war. My aunt knew where the guilt for this catastrophic start lay, and she would tell anyone who was prepared to listen. The father of her two children, whom she had never married, had spent eight years in a camp. “Because of his wagging tongue,” she would say.

No, her “Stalinism” lay chiefly in her manner of speaking, of dressing, of looking other people in the eye as if we had always been in the thick of war, as if the radio were still capable of announcing in solemn and funereal tones, “After heroic and bitter resistance, our armies have yielded the city of Kiev… . have yielded the city of Smolensk… . have yielded the city of … ,” with everyone's faces frozen as they followed the inexorable advance on Moscow… . She still lived as she did in the years when neighbors would exchange silent glances, indicating a house with a movement of the eyebrows — after a whole family had been taken away in the night in a black car… .

She wore a great brown shawl and an old coat of coarse cloth; in winter, felt boots; in summer, walking shoes with thick soles. I would not have been at all surprised to have seen her donning a military tunic and putting on a soldier's boots. And when she put the cups on the table, her big hands looked as if they were handling shell cases on the conveyor belt of an armaments factory, as they had done during the war… .

Sometimes the father of her children, whom I called by his patronymic, Dmitrich, came to see us, and then our kitchen rang with his raucous voice, which sounded as if it was gradually getting warmed up after several years of winter. Neither my aunt nor he had anything more to lose, and they were afraid of nothing. They talked about everything with an aggressive and desperate forthrightness. He drank a lot, but his eyes remained clear: his jaws simply clamped more and more tightly together, as if better from time to time to spit out the occasional fierce oath from the camps. It was he who made me drink my first glass of vodka. And it was thanks to him that I was able to picture the invisible Russia — a continent encircled by barbed wire and watchtowers. In this forbidden country the simplest words took on a fearful significance, burned the throat like the “bitter stuff” that I drank from a thick glass tumbler.

One day he talked about a little lake in the midst of the taiga, frozen eleven months of the year. At the behest of the camp commander its bed was turned into a cemetery: it was easier than digging into the permafrost. The prisoners died by the score… .

“We went there one day in autumn: we had ten or fifteen to dump in the drink. And then I saw them, all the others, the last lot. Naked; we made a bit from their gear. Yeah, buttnaked, under the ice, not rotted at all. I tell you, it was like a hunk of
kholodets!
”

So
kholodets,
that meat in aspic, of which there was a plateful on our table at that moment, became a terrible word — ice, flesh, and death congealed into one trenchant sound.

What caused me most pain during the course of their nocturnal confessions was the indestructible love for Russia that these revelations inspired in me. My intellect, struggling with the bite of the vodka, rebelled: “This country is monstrous! Evil, torture, suffering, self-mutilation, are the favorite pastimes of its inhabitants. And still I love it? I love it for its absurdity. For its monstrosities. I see in it a higher meaning that no logical reasoning can penetrate… .”

This love was a continual heartbreak. The blacker the Russia I was discovering turned out to be, the more violent my attachment became. As if to love it, one had to tear out one's eyes, plug one's ears, stop oneself thinking.

One evening I heard my aunt and her lover talking about Beria… .

In the old days, from our guests' conversations, I had learned what this terrible name concealed. They uttered it with scorn, but not without a note of awe. Being too young, I could not understand the disturbing zone of darkness in this tyrant's life. I grasped only that some human weakness was involved. They referred to it in hushed tones, and that was generally when they noticed my presence and banished me from the kitchen… .

These days there were three of us in our kitchen. Three adults. Certainly my aunt and Dmitrich had nothing to hide from me. They talked; and through the blue fog of tobacco, through the drunkenness, I pictured a great black car with smoked glass windows. Despite its imposing size, it had the look of a curb-crawling taxi. It traveled with a furtive slowness, almost stopping, then moving off rapidly, as if to catch up with someone. Intrigued, I observed its comings and goings along the streets of Moscow. Suddenly I guessed the purpose
of them: the black car was following women. Beautiful young ones. It studied them from its opaque windows, advanced in time with their footsteps. Then it let them go. Or sometimes, finally making up its mind, dived up a side street after them… .

Dmitrich had no reason to spare me. He recounted everything without mincing his words. On the backseat of the car sprawled a rotund figure, bald, with a pincenez buried in a fat face. Beria. He selected the passing woman's body that aroused his desire, then, his henchmen arrested the woman. Those were the days when not even a pretext was needed. Carried off to his residence, the woman was raped, having been broken with the aid of alcohol, threats, torture… .

Dmitrich did not say — he did not know himself — what happened to these women afterward. Nobody ever saw them again.

I spent several sleepless nights, staring into space. I was thinking about Beria and those condemned women with only one night to live. My brain was on fire. I felt an acid, metallic taste in my mouth. I pictured myself as the father, or the fiancé, or the husband of that young woman pursued by the black car. Yes, for several seconds, for as long as I could bear it, I inhabited the skin of this man, was in his anguish, in his tears, in his useless, powerless anger, in his resignation. For everyone knew how these women disappeared! I felt a knot in my stomach, a horrible spasm of grief. I opened the hinged windowpane, I scooped up the layer of snow that clung to its edge, I rubbed my face with it. This provided temporary relief. Now I saw a fat man, lurking behind the smoked glass of the car, silhouettes of women reflected in the lenses of his pincenez. He picked them, felt them, appraised their attractions… .

And I hated myself! For I could not help admiring this stalker of women. Yes, within me there was someone who — with dread, with repulsion, with shame — reveled in the power of the man with the pincenez. All women belonged to him! He cruised around the vastness of Moscow as if in the middle of a harem. And what fascinated me most was his indifference. He had no need to be loved, he did not care what the women he chose might feel toward him. He selected a woman, desired her, possessed her the same day. Then forgot her. And all the cries, lamentations, sobs, groans, supplications, and curses
that he had occasion to hear were for him only spices that added to the savor of the rape.