Dreams of My Russian Summers (23 page)

Making her rounds, she bumped into me and lifted her eyes. I saw a succession of masks on her face — fear, anger, a smile. It was the smile that triumphed, a vague smile that seemed to be directed at someone other than myself. She took my arm. We descended from the Mountain.

At first she talked without stopping. Her tipsy young voice would not remain steady. She whispered, then almost shouted. Clinging to my arm, she stumbled from time to time and let fly an oath, then put her hand to her lips with affected haste. Or else she suddenly broke away from me with an offended air, only to snuggle against my shoulder a moment later. I guessed that my companion was now acting out a love scene rehearsed long ago — a performance intended to show her partner she was somebody special. But in her intoxication she was confusing the sequence of these little interludes. While I, a bad actor, remained dumb, enthralled by this feminine presence, suddenly so accessible; and above all by the staggering ease with which this body was about to offer itself to me. I had always believed that such an offer would be preceded by a long emotional journey, by a thousand speeches, by subtle flirting. I was silent as I felt a little feminine breast squeezed against my arm. Next my nocturnal companion, jabbering animatedly, rejected the advance of a overly forward phantom and puffed out her cheeks for several seconds to show that she was sulking; then she enveloped her imaginary lover in what she believed was a languorous look, but which was simply blurred with the wine and the excitement.

I led her toward the only place that could accommodate our love — toward that floating island where at the beginning of the summer Pashka and I had spied on the prostitute and the soldiers.

In the darkness I must have taken a wrong turn. After wandering for a long time amid sleeping boats we stopped on a kind of old ferry — its ramp had broken supports and was half sunk in the water.

Abruptly she fell silent. Her drunkenness must have been gradually wearing off. I remained motionless, confronting her tense
expectation in the darkness. I did not know what I was supposed to do. Kneeling down, I felt the boards, and threw into the water first a tangle of worn ropes, then a bundle of dried seaweed. It was by accident that, busy with my clearing up, I brushed her leg. My fingers, slipping over her skin, gave her goose bumps… .

She remained silent until it was over. Her eyes closed, she seemed absent, abandoning to me her body that quaked with little shivers….I must have hurt her badly with my hasty actions. This act, so dreamed of, blundered into a series of clumsy, thwarted manipulations. Love was apparently like a hasty, nervous excavation. The knees and the elbows stuck out with a strange anatomical stiffness.

The pleasure was like the flame of a match in an icy wind — a fire that has just enough time to burn your fingers before going out, leaving a blinding spot in your eyes.

I tried to kiss her (I believed that one should do so at this moment); beneath my mouth I felt her lip being bitten hard… .

And what frightened me the most was that a second later I no longer needed either her lips or her erect breast in her gaping blouse, or her slender thighs, over which she had pulled down her skirt with a rapid movement. Her body was becoming indifferent to me, use-less. Sunk in my dull physical contentment, I was self-sufficient. “Why is she still stretched out like that, half naked?” I wondered, irritated. I felt the uneven boards beneath my back, several splinters burning in my palm. The wind had the heavy taste of stagnant water.

In this nocturnal interval there may well have been a fleeting moment of oblivion, a lightning sleep of several minutes. For I did not see the ship approaching. When we opened our eyes, all its white enormity, glittering with lights, was already looming above us. I had thought that our refuge was located deep in one of the countless bays cluttered up with rusty wrecks. But the opposite had occurred. In the darkness we had reached the tip of a headland that projected almost into the middle of the river… . The brightly lit passenger ship, cruising slowly down the Volga, suddenly rose up above our old ferryboat, towering with its three decks. Human silhouettes were outlined against the somber sky. They were dancing on the top deck
by the blaze of the lights. The warm flow of a tango spilled over us, enveloped us. The cabin windows, more discreetly lit, seemed to lean over, allowing us to enter their intimacy? . The swell caused by the riverboat was so powerful that our raft swung in a half circle, a swirling glissade that made us giddy. The ship with its light and its music seemed to be circling round us? . It was at that moment that she squeezed my hand and pressed herself against me. It seemed as if the hot-blooded denseness of her body could be concentrated entirely in my hands, like the trembling body of a bird. Her arms and her waist had the suppleness of that armful of water lilies I had picked one day, embracing several slippery stems in the water… .

But already the ship was melting into the darkness. The echo of the tango faded. On its voyage toward Astrakhan, it carried the night with it. The sky around our ferry was filling with a hesitant pallor. I found it strange to see us in the middle of a great river at the timid birth of that day on the damp timbers of a raft. And along the shore the outlines of the port slowly took shape.

She did not wait for me. Without looking at me, she began to jump from one boat to the next. She was escaping with the shy haste of a young ballerina after a muffed exit. As I followed her leaping flight my heart stood still. At any moment she could slip on the wet wood, be betrayed by a broken footbridge, fall between two boats whose sides would close over her head. The concentration of my gaze sustained her in her acrobatics through the morning mist.

A moment later I saw her walking along the shore. In the silence the sand crunched softly beneath her feet? . Here was a woman to whom I had felt so close a quarter of an hour before, who was now leaving. I experienced a pain quite new to me; a woman was leaving, breaking the invisible ties that still bound us. And there on that deserted shore she was transformed into an extraordinary being — a woman I love who is becoming independent of me again, a stranger to me, and who will soon be speaking to other people, smiling… . Living!

She turned, hearing me running after her. I saw her pale face, her hair that I now noticed was of a very light auburn color. Un-smiling, she looked at me in silence. I no longer remembered what I
had wanted to say to her while listening, a moment before, to the wet sand crunching beneath her heels. “I love you” would have been a lie I could not utter. Alone her crumpled black skirt, and her arms, childishly slender, meant more to me than all the “I love you”s in the world. To suggest to her that we should meet again that day or the next was unthinkable. Our night must remain unique. Like the passing of the riverboat, like our momentary sleep, like her body in the cool of the great somnolent river.

I tried to tell her. I spoke, at random, of the crunching of the sand under her feet; of her solitude on this shore; of her fragility that night, which had reminded me of the stems of water lilies. I felt suddenly and with an acute happiness that I must also tell her about Charlotte's balcony, about our evenings on the steppes, about the elegant trio on an autumn morning on the Champs-Elysées… .

Her face screwed up into an expression at once scornful and anxious. Her lips trembled.

“Are you sick or what?” she said, interrupting me in that slightly nasal tone that girls on the Mountain of Joy adopted to rebuff un-wanted attention.

I stood stock-still. She went off, climbing toward the first buildings of the port, and soon plunging into their massive shadow. The workers were beginning to appear at the gates of their workshops.

Some days later, in the nocturnal gathering at the Mountain, I heard a conversation between my classmates, who had not noticed that I was close by. One of the girls in their little circle had complained, they were saying, about her partner who did not know how to make love (they expressed the notion much more crudely); and apparently she had confided some comic details (“killing,” said one of them) of his behavior. I was listening to them in the hope of some erotic revelations. Suddenly the name of the despised partner was mentioned — “Frantsuz” — it was my nickname, of which I was generally proud. “Frantsuz” — the Russian for a Frenchman. Through their laughter I picked up a quiet exchange of remarks between two friends, in the manner of a secret agreement: “Let's take care of her tonight, after the dancing. Us two. Agreed?”

I guessed they were still talking about her. I left my corner and went toward the exit. They saw me. “Frantsuz! Frantsuz …” The whispering accompanied me for a moment, then was lost in the first surge of the music.

The next day, without warning anyone, I left for Saranza.

13

I
WAS GOING TO THAT SLEEPY LITTLE TOWN,
lost in the middle of the steppes, to destroy France. I must put an end to Charlotte's France, which had made of me a strange mutant, incapable of living in the real world.

In my mind this destruction had to resemble a long cry, a howl of rage that would best express my whole revolt. So far this howl was welling up without words. They would come, I was sure of it, as soon as Charlotte's calm eyes rested on me. For the moment I was shouting silently. There were only images hurtling by in a chaotic and motley flood.

I saw the gleam of a pincenez in the well-upholstered shadows of a huge black car. Beria was choosing a woman's body for the night. And our neighbor across the street, a quiet, smiling pensioner, was watering the flowers on his balcony, listening to the warbling of a transistor. And in our kitchen a man with his arms covered in tattoos was speaking of a frozen lake filled with naked corpses. And none of the people in the third-class carriage that was taking me toward Saranza seemed to notice these shattering paradoxes. They got on with their lives, calmly.

In my cry I wanted to spill out these images over Charlotte. I awaited a response from her. I wanted her to explain herself, to justify herself. For it was she who had passed on to me this French sensibility — her own — condemning me to live painfully between two worlds.

I would speak to her of my father with the hole in his head, that
little crater where his life pulsed. And of my mother, from whom we had inherited the fear of an unexpected ring at the door on the eve of holidays. Both of them dead. Unconsciously I resented her for her calm during my mother's burial. And for the life, so European in its good sense and neatness, that she led at Saranza. I found in her the West personified, that rational and cold West against which Russians harbor an incurable grudge. That Europe which looks down condescendingly from the stronghold of its civilization on our barbarian miseries … the wars in which we died by the million, the revolutions whose scenarios it wrote for us… . In my juvenile rebellion there was a large dose of this innate mistrust.

The French implant, which I thought had atrophied, was still within me and was preventing me from seeing. It split reality in two. As it had done with the body of that woman I had spied on through two different portholes: there was one woman in a white blouse, calm and very ordinary — and the other — that immense backside, whose potent carnality rendered the rest of the body almost useless.

And yet I knew that the two women were only one. Just like my shattered reality. It was my French illusion that confused my vision, like an intoxication, giving the world a deceptively lifelike mirage as its double… .

My cry was ripening. The images I would find words for swirled in my eyes more and more rapidly: Beria murmuring to the driver, “Faster! Catch that one! Let me see …”; and a man in a Father Christmas costume, my grandfather Fyodor, arrested on New Year's Eve; and my father's charred village; and the slender arms of my beloved — childlike arms with blue veins; and that erect backside with its animal power; and that woman removing red varnish from her nails while the lower part of her body is possessed; and the little Pont-Neuf bag; and the “Verdun”; and all that French nonsense that was ruining my youth!

At Saranza station I remained on the platform for a moment. From force of habit I was looking for Charlotte's silhouette. Then with scornful anger I called myself a fool. No one was waiting for me this time. My grandmother had not the slightest inkling that I was
coming! Furthermore, the train that brought me had no connection with the one I used to take each summer to come to this town. I had arrived in Saranza not in the morning but in the evening. And the incredibly long train, too long and massive for this little provincial station, moved off heavily, traveling to Tashkent, near the Asiatic border of the empire. Urgench, Bukhara, Samarkand, the echo of the forward stops reverberated in my head, awakening a yearning for the Orient, which is mournful and profound for every Russian.

This time everything was different.

The door was unlocked. It was still the period when one only locked one's apartment at night. I pushed it open, as in a dream. I had pictured this moment so clearly I thought I knew word for word what I was going to say to Charlotte, what I was going to accuse her of....

However, as I heard the imperceptible click of the door, as familiar to me as the voice of a friend, and breathed the light and pleasant aroma that always hung on the air in Charlotte's apartment, I felt my head emptying of words. Only a few snatches of my prepared howl still rang in my ears: “Beria! And that old man calmly watering his gladioli. And that woman cut in two! And the forgotten war! And your rape! And that Siberian suitcase, filled with old French scraps of paper, which I drag about like a prisoner's ball and chain! And our Russia, which you, a Frenchwoman, do not understand and will never understand! And my beloved, whom those two young swine are going to ‘take care of'!”

She did not hear me come in. I saw her sitting before the balcony door. Her face was bent over a light-colored garment spread out on her lap, her needle flashing (I do not know why, but in my memory Charlotte was always engaged in darning a lace collar)… .