Dreams of My Russian Summers (26 page)

My case was not quite as desperate. But from the day of my slip, the question of technique became unavoidable. Now French became a tool whose capacity I measured as I was speaking. Yes. An instrument independent of me, which I would employ, even as I became aware from time to time of the strangeness of this activity.

My discovery, disconcerting though it was, gave me a penetrating insight into style. This language-tool, employed, sharpened, perfected, was, I told myself, nothing other than literary composition. I had already sensed that the anecdotes about France with which I had amused my fellow pupils throughout that year were the first draft for this novelist's language: had I not manipulated it to please sometimes the “proletarians” and sometimes the “aesthetes”? Literature was now revealed as being perpetual amazement at the flow of words into which the world dissolved. French, my grandmaternal tongue, was, I saw now, the supreme language of amazement.

Ever since that particular day in the distant past, spent beside a little river, lost in the midst of the steppe, occasionally when I am in midconversation in French I recall my surprise of long ago: a gray-haired lady with great calm eyes and her grandson are seated at the heart of the empty plain, beneath the burning sun, very Russian in the endlessness of its isolation, and they are speaking in French, the most natural thing in the world? . I see this scene again and I am amazed to be speaking French. Then I stumble and feel as if the cat had got my French. Strangely, or rather quite logically, it is at moments like this, when I find myself between two languages, that I believe I can see and feel more intensely than ever.

Perhaps it was on that same day, when I said
précepteur
(tutor) instead of
percepteur
(tax collector) and thus entered a silent zone between two languages, that I also noticed Charlotte's beauty… .

The idea of this beauty at first seemed to me improbable. In Russia at that time every woman reaching the age of fifty was transformed into a “babushka” — a being in whom it would have been absurd to look for femininity, let alone beauty. And as for stating, “My grandmother is beautiful” …

Yet Charlotte, who must have been sixty-four or sixty-five at
the time, was beautiful. Settling down at the bottom of the steep, sandy bank of the Sumra, she read beneath the branches of the willows that covered her dress with a network of shadow and sunlight. Her silver hair was gathered at the nape of her neck. Her eyes looked at me from time to time with a faint smile. I tried to understand what it was in this face, in this very simple dress, that radiated the beauty whose existence I was almost embarrassed to recognize.

No. Charlotte was not “a woman who does not look her age.” Nor did her features have that haggard prettiness seen in the “well-cared-for” faces of women who wage unending war on wrinkles. She did not seek to camouflage her age, but her aging did not provoke the shrinking that emaciates the features and withers the body. I took in with my eyes the silvery gleam of her hair, the lines of her face, her arms lightly tanned, her bare feet almost touching the lazy rippling of the Sumra… . And with an unwonted joy I observed that there was no strict boundary between the flowered fabric of her dress and the shadows dappled with sunlight. The contours of her body merged imperceptibly into the luminosity of the air; her eyes, in the manner of a watercolor, mingled with the warm brilliance of the sky; the movements of her fingers turning the pages wove themselves into the undulation of the long willow branches… . So it was this fusion that hid the mystery of her beauty!

Yes, her face and her body were not tensed, fearful of the arrival of old age; they absorbed sun and wind; the bitter scents of the steppe; the freshness of the willow groves. And her presence conferred an astonishing harmony on this desert space. Charlotte was there, and in the monotony of the plain scorched by the heat, an elusive consonance was formed: the melodious gurgling of the stream, the tart smell of the wet clay and the aromatic one of the dry plants; the play of shadow and light beneath the branches. A unique moment, inimitable in the blurred sequence of days, of years, of ages… .

A moment that did not pass away.

I was discovering Charlotte's beauty. And almost at the same moment her isolation.

That day, lying on the shore, I was listening to her talking about the book she took on our excursions. Ever since my slip of the tongue, I could not prevent myself taking note, while keeping up with the conversation, of the way in which my grandmother employed French. I compared her style with that of the authors I was reading and with that of the rare French newspapers that got through into our country. I knew all the distinctive features of her French, her favorite expressions, her personal syntax, her vocabulary, and even the patina of time that her sentences bore — the belle epoque flavor....

On this occasion, more than all these linguistic observations, a surprising thought came into my mind: “For half a century this style has lived in complete isolation, very rarely spoken, grappling with a reality foreign to its nature, like a plant striving to grow on a bare rock face… .” And yet Charlotte's French had retained an extraordinary vigor, rich and pure, that amber transparency that wine acquires with aging. This style had survived Siberian snowstorms, the burning sands in the desert of central Asia. And it resonates still on the banks of this river in the midst of the endless steppe… .

It was then that this woman's isolation came into focus in all its shattering and mundane simplicity. “She has no one to talk to,” I said to myself with stupefaction. “No one to talk to in French …” I suddenly understood what might be the significance for Charlotte of these few weeks that we spent together each summer. I understood that this French, this fabric of sentences that seemed so natural to me, would be frozen, when I left, for a whole year; replaced by Russian, by the rustling of pages, by silence. And I pictured Charlotte alone, walking along the dim streets of Saranza buried under the snow… .

The next day I saw my grandmother talking to Gavrilych, the drunkard and scandalizer of our courtyard. The babushkas' bench was empty — the man's arrival must have driven them away. The children hid behind the poplar trees. The inhabitants at their windows watched the scene with interest: the strange Frenchwoman who dared to approach the monster. I thought again of my grandmother's isolation. I felt a pricking in my eyelids: “This is what her life is. This courtyard, this drunkard Gavrilych, this huge black
izba
across the yard. With all those families piled on top of one another …” Charlotte came in, a bit out of breath but smiling, her eyes veiled in tears of joy.

“Do you know,” she said to me in Russian, as if she had not had the time to switch from one language to the other, “Gavrilych has been talking to me about the war; he was defending Stalingrad on the same front as your father. He often speaks to me about it. He was describing a battle on the banks of the Volga. They were fighting to take a hill back from the Germans. He said he had never before seen such a chaos of tanks in flames, mangled corpses, bloody earth. That evening on the hilltop he was one of a dozen survivors. He went down to the Volga; he was dying of thirst. And there, on the shore, he saw the water, very calm, white sand, reeds, and young fish leaping as he approached. Just like the days of his childhood in his own village …”

I listened to her, and Russia, the country of her isolation, no longer seemed to me hostile to her “Frenchness.” Touched, I said to myself that this big man, drunk, with his fierce gaze, this Gavrilych would not have dared to talk to anyone else about his feelings. They would have laughed in his face: Stalingrad, the war, and then all at once these reeds, and young fish! No one else in that courtyard would have even taken the trouble to listen to him: what can a drunkard tell you that is interesting? He had spoken to Charlotte. With confidence, with the certainty of being understood. This Frenchwoman was closer to him at that moment than all those people who were staring at him and counting on a free show. He had stared at them darkly, grumbling privately to himself, “There they all are, like in a circus… .” All at once he had seen Charlotte crossing the courtyard with a bag of provisions. He had straightened himself up and greeted her. A minute later, with a face that seemed to have grown lighter, he was telling her, “And you know, Sharlota Norbertovna, it was no longer the earth under our feet but hackedup meat. I've never seen anything like it, not since the start of the war. And then, that evening, when we had finished with the Germans, I went down toward the Volga. And there, how can I tell you...”

That morning when we went out, we walked past the great black
izba
. It was already alive with a dense hum. One could hear the angry hissing of oil on a stove, the female and male duet of a quarrel, the jumble of the voices and music from several radios… . I glanced at Charlotte, raising my eyebrows with a mocking grimace. She had no difficulty in guessing the significance of my smile. But the great stirring anthill seemed not to interest her.

It was only when we began walking over the steppe that she spoke: “Last winter,” she said, “I took some medicines to dear old Frossia, you know, that babushka who is always the first one to make herself scarce as soon as Gavrilych is sighted… . It was very cold that day. I had great difficulty in opening the door of their
izba
....”

Charlotte continued her story, and with growing amazement, I sensed that her plain words were redolent of sounds, smells, light veiled by the fog of the great frosts… . She shook the door handle, and the door opened reluctantly, breaking a frame of ice, with a shrill creaking. She found herself inside the great wooden house, facing a staircase black with age. The treads uttered plaintive groans under her feet. The corridors were cluttered with old cupboards, with great cardboard boxes piled high along the walls, with bikes, with dull mirrors that opened up surprising perspectives in this cavernous space. The smell of burning wood hovered between the dark walls and mingled with the cold that Charlotte carried in the folds of her coat… . It was at the end of the corridor on the first floor that my grandmother saw her. A young woman with a baby in her arms was standing near a window covered in scrolls of ice. Without moving, her head slightly inclined, she was watching the dancing flames in the open door of a great stove that occupied the corner of the corridor. Outside the frosted window the winter dusk was slowly drawing in, blue and clear… .

Charlotte was silent for a moment, then continued in a slightly hesitant voice, “Of course, it was an illusion, you know… . But her face was so pale, so fine… . Almost like the ice flowers that covered the windowpane. Yes, as if her features had been lifted out of those hoarfrost ornaments. I have never seen such a fragile beauty. Yes, like an icon sketched on ice… .”

We walked in silence for a long time. The steppe was slowly unfolding before us with the resonant chirruping of cicadas. But that dry sound and the heat did not prevent me from feeling in my lungs the freezing air of the great black
izba
. I saw the window covered with hoarfrost, the glittering blue of the crystals, the young woman with her child. Charlotte had spoken in French. French had gone inside that
izba,
which had always alarmed me with its somber, heavy, and very Russian life. And within its depths a window had lit up. Yes, she had spoken in French. She could have spoken in Russian. That would have taken nothing away from her recreation of the moment. So a kind of intermediary language did exist. A universal language! I thought again about that “between two languages” that I had discovered, thanks to my slip of the tongue, and I thought of the “language of amazement.” …

That day, for the first time, the inspiring thought crossed my mind: Suppose one could express this language in writing?

One afternoon we spent on the banks of the Sumra, I surprised myself thinking about Charlotte's death. Or rather, on the contrary, I was thinking about the impossibility of her death… .

The heat had been particularly intense that day. Charlotte had removed her espadrilles and, lifting her dress up to her knees, was paddling in the water. Perched on one of the little islands, I watched her walking along, following the shore. Once again I felt as if I were observing her and the beach of white sand and the steppe from a great distance. Yes, as if I were suspended in the basket of a hot air balloon. This is the way (I was to learn much later) that we perceive the places and the faces that subconsciously we are already locating in the past. I was looking at her from that illusory height, from that future toward which all my young energies tended. She walked in the water with the dreamy carelessness of an adolescent girl. Her book, open, was left behind on the grass, under the willows. Suddenly in a single brilliant illumination I reviewed Charlotte's life in its entirety. It was like a throbbing sequence of lightning flashes: France at the turn of the century; Siberia; the desert; and again endless snows; the
war; Saranza … I had never before had the opportunity to examine the life of a living person in this way — from one end to the other — and to say: this life is closed. There would be nothing in Charlotte's life other than Saranza, this steppe. And death.

I stood up on my island, I stared at this woman who was walking slowly in the current of the Sumra. And with an unfamiliar joy that suddenly filled my lungs, I whispered, “No, she won't die.” And at once I longed to understand whence this serene assurance came, this confidence, which was so strange, especially in the year marked by the death of my parents.

But instead of a logical explanation I saw a flood of moments streaming by in a dazzling disorder: a morning filled with sunlit mist in an imaginary Paris; the breeze redolent of lavender filling a railway carriage; the cry of the Kukushka in the warm evening air; that distant moment of the first snow that Charlotte had watched swirling around on that terrible night of the war; and also this present moment — this slim woman, with a white scarf over her gray hair, a woman strolling absentmindedly in the clear water of a river that flows through the heart of the endless steppe… .