Dreams of My Russian Summers (20 page)

I lost consciousness at the start of my fourth sleepless night. Just before fainting I felt I had grasped the fevered thought of one of those raped women, who must have realized that whatever happened she would not be allowed to leave. This thought, which cut through her enforced intoxication, her pain, her disgust, resounded in my head and threw me to the ground.

When I came to, I felt different. Calmer, stronger. Like a patient after an operation, I progressed slowly from one word to the next. I needed to put everything in order again. In the darkness I murmured short sentences that took stock of my new state: “So, within me there is someone who can contemplate these rapes. While I order it to be silent, it is still there. Beria has taught me that everything is allowed. Russia knows no limits, neither in goodness nor in evil. Especially not in evil. And here I was, fascinated by this hunter of women's bodies. And hating myself for it. I felt one with this brutalized woman, crushed by the weight of sweaty flesh, guessing her last clear thought: the thought of the death that will follow this hideous coupling. I longed to die at the same time as her. How could I go on living while carrying within myself this other me that admires Beria… .”

Yes, I was Russian. Now I understood, in a still confused fashion, what that meant. Carrying within one's soul all those human beings disfigured by grief, those burned villages, those lakes filled with naked corpses. Knowing the resignation of a human herd violated by a despot. And the horror of feeling oneself participating in this crime. And the wild desire to reenact all these stories from the past — so as to eradicate from them the suffering, injustice, and death. Yes, to catch the black car in the streets of Moscow and destroy it beneath one's giant palm. Then, while holding one's breath, to watch the young woman pushing open the door of her house, going up the stairs … Remaking history. Purifying the world. Hunting down evil. Giving all these people refuge in one's heart, so as to be able to release them one day into a world liberated from evil. But meanwhile sharing the sorrow that oppresses them. Detesting oneself for every lapse. Pushing this commitment to the point of delirium, to the
point of fainting. Living very mundanely on the edge of the abyss. Yes, that's what Russia is.

Thus it was that in my juvenile confusion, I latched onto my new identity. I was Russian. It became life itself for me, and one, I believed, that would erase forever my French illusion.

But this life quickly revealed its chief characteristic (which daily routine prevents us from seeing) — its total improbability.

Formerly I had lived in books. I moved from one character to another, following the logic of an amorous intrigue or of a war. But one March evening, so warm that my aunt had opened our kitchen window, I learned that in this life there was no logic, no coherence. And that perhaps only death was predictable.

That evening I learned about what my parents had always hidden from me. That murky episode in central Asia: Charlotte, the armed men, the jostling, the shouting. I had only a hazy and childish memory of their accounts from the old days. The adults' words had been so obscure!

This time their clarity blinded me. In a very matter-of-fact voice, while emptying the steaming potatoes into a dish, my aunt remarked, addressing our guest, who was sitting beside Dmitrich, “Of course down there they don't live like us. Imagine, they pray to their god five times a day! And what's more, they eat without a table. Yes, all on the ground. Well, on a carpet. And without spoons; with their fingers!”

The guest, mainly to make conversation, argued back in reasonable tones, “Weell, ‘not like us' is pitching it a bit high. I was in Tashkent last summer. You know, it's not so different from here… .”

“And their desert — have you been there?” (She raised her voice, happy to have hit upon a good talking point, so that the supper promised to be lively and convivial.) “Yes, in the desert? His grandmother, for example” — my aunt motioned with her chin in my direction — “that Sherl … Shourl … anyway that French-woman, her. It was no joke what happened to her down there. Those
basmachi,
those bandits who wouldn't have anything to do with the Soviets, they caught her on the road; she was still very young, and
they raped her, just like wild animals! All of them, one after the other. There were maybe six or seven. And you say, ‘They're just like us.'… Then they shot her in the head with a bullet. The murderer missed his aim, thank goodness. And the farmer who was carrying her in his cart, they slit his throat like a sheep. And you say, ‘It's just like here.'”

“Hang on. You're talking about ancient history,” interrupted Dmitrich.

And they continued arguing, while drinking vodka and eating. Outside the open window you could hear the tranquil sounds of our courtyard. The evening air was blue, soft. They went on talking without noticing that frozen to my chair, I was holding my breath, seeing nothing, failing to understand the sense of anything else they said. Finally I stepped out of the kitchen like a sleepwalker. I went out into the street and walked through the melting snow, more alien to that clear spring evening than a Martian.

It was not that I was terrified by the episode in the desert. Told in that matter-of-fact way, it could never, I sensed, shake off that layer of words and everyday gestures. Its sharp edge would remain blunted by the fat fingers seizing a gherkin; by the bobbing up and down of the Adam's apple in our guest's neck as he swallowed his vodka; by the merry squeals of the children in the courtyard. It was like that human arm I had seen one day on a motorway beside two cars rammed into one another. A torn-off arm that someone had wrapped in a piece of newspaper while waiting for the arrival of the ambulances. The printer's typeface, and the photos stuck to the bloody flesh, made it almost neutral… .

No, what had really shattered me was the improbability of life. The previous week I was learning the mystery of Beria, his harem of raped and murdered women. And now it was the rape of that young Frenchwoman, whom I could never, it seemed to me, recognize as Charlotte.

It was too much all at once. The gratuitous, absurdly obvious coincidence confused my thoughts. I told myself that in a novel, after that appalling tale of women abducted in the heart of Moscow,
the reader would have been left to recover his spirits over long pages. He could have prepared himself for the appearance of a hero who would bring the tyrant down. But life did not bother about the coherence of subject matter. It spilled out its contents in disorder, pellmell. In its clumsiness it spoiled the purity of our compassion and compromised our just anger. Life, in fact, was an endless rough draft, in which events, badly organized, encroached on one another, in which the characters were too numerous and prevented one another from speaking, suffering, being loved or hated individually.

I was struggling between these two tragic stories. Beria and the young women whose lives ended with their rapist's last gasp of pleasure; and Charlotte, young, unrecognizable, hurled down onto the sand, beaten, tortured. I felt myself overcome by a strange numbness. I was disillusioned, and I reproached myself for this obtuse indifference.

That night all my earlier musings on the reassuring incoherence of life seemed to me false. In a half-waking reverie I again saw the arm wrapped in a newspaper… . No. It was a hundred times more alarming in that banal package! Reality, with all its implausibility, by far exceeded fiction. I shook my head to drive away the vision of the little blisters in the newspaper stuck to the bloody skin. Suddenly without any interference, clear, sharply etched in the translucent desert air, another vision became fixed in my eyes. That of a young woman's body stretched out on the sand. A body already inert, despite the unbridled convulsions of the men who hurled themselves savagely upon it. The ceiling turned green as I stared at it. The pain was so great that within my breast I felt the burning shape of my heart. The pillow beneath my neck was as hard and rough as the sand… .

I began to slap myself, at first holding back the blows, then without pity. I struck myself until my swollen face, wet with tears, disgusted me with its sticky surface. Until that other one, which lurked within me, fell totally silent. Then, stumbling over the pillow I had knocked down in my agitation, I approached the window. The cold air calmed my puffed-up face.

“I am Russian,” I said softly, all of a sudden.

12

I
T WAS THANKS TO THAT BODY,
young and with a still innocent sensuality, that I was cured. Yes, one day in April I felt I was finally liberated from the most painful winter of my youth, from its sorrows, from the deaths, and from the burden of the revelations it had brought.

But the most important thing was that my French implant no longer seemed to exist. As if I had succeeded in stifling that second heart within my breast. The last day of its death throes coincided with the April afternoon that for me was to mark the start of a life without specters… .

I saw her from behind, standing under the trees at a table made of thick, unplaned pine planks. An instructor was watching her movements and from time to time threw a glance at the stopwatch he was clutching in his palm.

She must have been the same age as me, fifteen, this young girl, whose body, impregnated with sun, had dazzled me. She was busy dismantling an automatic rifle and then reassembling it as quickly as possible. These were the paramilitary competitions that several of the city schools took part in. We stepped up to the table in turn, awaited the signal from the instructor, and hurled ourselves at the Kalashnikov, stripping its weighty bulk. The dismantled pieces were spread out on the planks and a moment later, in a droll reverse sequence of movements, reassembled. Some of us dropped the black spring on the ground, others confused the order of assembly… . As for her, I thought at first that she was dancing up and down in front of the
table. Wearing a tunic and a khaki skirt, a forage cap perched on her russet curls, she made her body undulate in time with her drill. She must have practiced a great deal to be able to handle the slippery bulk of the gun with such dexterity.

I gazed at her, dumbfounded. Everything in her was so simple and so alive. Her hips, responding to the actions of her arms, swayed gently. Her full golden legs quivered. She took pleasure in her own agility, which even allowed her superfluous movements — like the rhythmic arching of her pretty, muscular buttocks. Yes, she was dancing. And even without seeing her face, I guessed she was smiling.

I fell in love with this young russet-haired stranger. It was of course a very physical desire, a carnal wonderment at the contrast between her still childishly fragile waist and her already womanly torso….I performed my own dismantling-assembly routine with all my limbs in a state of numbness. I took more than three minutes, and thus ended up near the bottom of the class… . But beyond the de-sire to embrace this body, to feel its smooth, bronzed surface beneath my fingers, I experienced a new and nameless happiness.

There was this table with thick planks placed at the edge of a wood. The sun and the smell of the last of the snow taking refuge in the shadows of the thickets. Everything was blessedly simple. And luminous. Like this body, with its still insouciant femininity. Like my desire. Like the commands of the instructor. No shadow of the past troubled the clarity of this moment. I breathed, felt desire, carried out orders mechanically. And with unspeakable joy I felt the clot of my painful and confused winter reflections dissolving in my mind… . The young russet-haired girl swayed her hips gently be-fore the automatic rifle. The sun lit up the contours of her body through the fine fabric of her tunic. Her fiery locks curled up over the cap. And it was as if from the depths of a well, in a dull and melancholy echo, those grotesque names rang out: Marguerite Steinheil, Isabeau de Bavière… . I found it hard to believe that my life had once been made up of these dusty relics. I had lived without sunlight, without desire — in the twilight of books. In search of a phantom country, a mirage of a France of yesteryear, peopled with ghosts… .

The instructor uttered a cry of delight and showed his stop-watch to everybody: “One minute fifteen seconds!” It was the best time. The redhead turned round, radiant. She took off her cap and shook her head. Her hair caught fire in the sunlight, her freckles flashed like sparks. I closed my eyes.

And the next day, for the first time in my life, I was discovering the very singular sensual pleasure of squeezing a firearm, a Kalashnikov, and feeling its nervous shuddering against my shoulder. And seeing in the distance a plywood figure target riddled with holes. Yes, its insistent quivering and its male power were for me of a profoundly sensual nature.

Furthermore, from the first burst of fire my head was filled with a buzzing silence. The person on my left had fired first, deafening me. The incessant clatter in my ears, the iridescent flurries of sunlight in my eyelashes, the wild smell of the earth beneath my body — I was at the peak of happiness.

For at last I was coming back to life. Living in the happy simplicity of orderly actions: shooting, marching in file, eating millet kasha from aluminum mess tins. Letting oneself be carried along in a collective movement directed by others, by those who knew the supreme objective, who generously relieved us of all the burden of responsibility, making us light, transparent, clear. The objective was simple and unequivocal too: to defend the fatherland. I could not wait to lose myself in this monumental goal, to dissolve into the marvelously irresponsible mass of my comrades. I hurled practice grenades; I shot; I pitched a tent. Happy. Blissful. Healthy. And that adolescent in an old house at the edge of the steppe, who had spent entire days meditating on the life and death of three women seen in a pile of old newspapers, seemed increasingly unreal. If I had been introduced to this dreamer I would doubtless not have recognized him. I would not have recognized myself… .