Dreams of My Russian Summers (32 page)

In fact, at its start the letter did not seem to be addressed to anyone. Skimming rapidly from one line to another, from one paragraph to the next, I thought I grasped that this was a history quite unconnected with our life at Saranza, or with the imminent end that Charlotte might have hinted at for me… .

I left the Métro and, not wanting to go up right away, continued with my absentminded reading, seated on a bench in a park. I now saw that Charlotte's story did not concern us. In her elegant and precise handwriting, she was transcribing a woman's life. Inattentive, I must have skipped over the place where my grandmother explained how they had become acquainted. In any case, that mattered little to me. For the tale of this life was only the fate of one more woman, one of those tragic destinies from Stalin's time, which shocked us when we were young, whose pain had since become dulled. This woman, the daughter of a kulak, had as a child experienced exile in the marshlands of western Siberia. Then after the war, accused of “anti-kolkhoz propaganda,” she had ended up in a camp… . I perused these pages like those of a book I knew by heart. The camp; the cedar trees that the prisoners cut down, sinking in the snow up to their waists; the daily, banal cruelty of the guards; sickness; death. And the forced love, under the threat of a weapon or of an inhuman workload; and the love bought with a bottle of alcohol… . The child that this woman had brought into the world won relief for its mother: such was the law. In this “women's camp” there was a hut, set apart, provided for those births. Then the woman died, crushed by a tractor, a few months after the amnesty, decreed at the time of the thaw. The child was almost two and a half… .

The rain drove me from my bench. I hid Charlotte's letter under my jacket. I ran toward
our
house. The interrupted story seemed to me very typical: at the first signs of liberalization, all Russians had begun to bring out the censored past from the deep hiding places of their memory. And they did not understand that history had no need for all these innumerable little Gulags. A single monumental one, recognized as a classic, sufficed. In sending me her testimonies, Charlotte must have succumbed like the others, by the intoxication of glasnost. The touching uselessness of this missive upset me. Once again I had a measure of the disdainful indifference of time. This woman prisoner with her child was hovering on the brink of ultimate oblivion, held back only by these few manuscript pages. And Charlotte herself… .

I pushed open the door. A draft stirred the two halves of an open window with a dull crash. I went to my grandmother's room to close it.

I thought about her life. A life that linked such different eras; the start of the century, that almost archaic age, almost as legendary as the reign of Napoleon, and — the end of our century, the end of the millennium. All those revolutions, wars, failed utopias, and successful terrors: she had distilled their essence in the sorrows and joys of her days. And this throbbing body of lived experience would soon sink into oblivion. Like the miniature Gulag of the prisoner and her child.

I stayed at Charlotte's window for a moment. For a number of weeks I had imagined her gaze resting on that view… .

That evening, mainly from an access of conscience, I decided to read Charlotte's pages to the end. I went back to the imprisoned woman, the atrocities at the camp, and the child who had brought a few moments of serenity into this hard, defiled world. Charlotte wrote that she had been able to obtain permission to come to the hospital where the woman was dying… .

Suddenly the page I was holding in my hand was transformed into a fine sheet of silver. Yes, it dazzled me with a metallic reflection and seemed to emit a cold, thin sound. One line flashed out — like the filament of a lightbulb lacerating one's eyeball. The letter was written in Russian, and it was only at this line that Charlotte
switched to French, as if she were no longer sure of her Russian. Or as if French, that French of another era, would allow me a certain detachment from what she was about to tell me: “That woman, who was called Maria Stepanovna Dolina, was your mother. It was she who wanted you to be told nothing for as long as possible… .”

A little envelope was stapled to that last page. I opened it. In it was a photo that I recognized without difficulty: a woman in a big
shapka
with the earflaps pulled down, wearing a padded jacket. On a little rectangle of white cloth sewn beside the row of buttons — a number. In her arms a baby swathed in a cocoon of wool …

That night I rediscovered in my memory the image that I had always believed to be a kind of prenatal reminiscence, coming to me from my French ancestors, and of which, as a child, I was very proud. I used to see in it a proof of my hereditary Frenchness. It was that autumn day bathed in sun, at the edge of a wood, with an invisible feminine presence, a very pure air, and the gossamer threads rippling across the luminous space… . I now understood that the wood was in fact an endless taiga, and that the delightful Indian summer was about to be swallowed up into a Siberian winter that would last nine months. The gossamer threads, silvery and light in my French fantasy, were nothing other than new strands of barbed wire that had not had time to rust. I was out for a walk with my mother in the territory of the “women's camp.” … It was my first childhood memory.

Two days later I left the apartment. The owner had come round the day before and had agreed on an amicable solution: I left him all the furniture and antique objects I had accumulated over several months… .

I slept little. At four o'clock I was already up. I packed my rucksack, planning to leave that very day for my habitual journey on foot. Before departing I glanced one last time into Charlotte's room. By the gray light of morning its silence no longer evoked a museum. No longer did it seem uninhabited. I hesitated for a moment, then I seized an old volume laid on the windowsill and went out.

The streets were empty, misted over with sleep. Scenic views seemed to take shape as I walked toward them.

I thought of the
Notes
I was carrying away in my bag. That evening, or the next day, I told myself, I would add a new fragment that had come to mind that night. It was at Saranza during my last summer at my grandmother's… . That day, instead of taking the path that led us across the steppe, Charlotte had turned in among the trees of the copse cluttered with weaponry that the locals called “Stalinka.” I had followed her with a wary tread: according to rumor, you could step on a mine in the thickets of the Stalinka… . Charlotte had stopped in the middle of a broad clearing and had murmured, “Look!” I had seen three or four identical plants that reached up to our knees. Great indented leaves, tendrils clinging to the slender canes stuck in the ground. Dwarf maples? Young blackcurrant bushes? I did not understand Charlotte's mysterious joy.

“It's a grapevine, a real one,” she told me at last.

“Oh. Good …”

This revelation did not heighten my curiosity. In my head I could not connect this modest plant with the cult dedicated to wine by my grandmother's homeland. We remained for several minutes in front of Charlotte's secret plantation at the heart of the Stalinka… .

Recalling that vine now, I experienced almost unbearable grief and at the same time profound joy. A joy that had at first seemed to me shameful. Charlotte was dead, and on the site of the Stalinka, to judge by Alex Bond's account, they had built a stadium. There could hardly be a more tangible proof of total, final disappearance. But joy carried the day. Its source lay in that moment I had lived at the center of a clearing; in the breeze from the steppes; in the serene silence of this woman standing before four plants, under whose leaves I now detected the young clusters.

As I walked, I looked from time to time at the photo of the woman in a padded jacket. And now I understood what gave her face a distant resemblance to the people in the albums of my adoptive family. It was that slight smile that appeared thanks to Charlotte's magic formula,
“petite pomme”
! Yes, the woman photographed beside the camp fence must have pronounced those enigmatic syllables to herself… . I stopped for a moment; I stared at her eyes. Then I said to myself, “I
must get used to the idea that this woman, younger than me, is my mother.”

I put away the photo, and went on. And when I thought of Charlotte, her presence in these drowsy streets had the reality, discreet and spontaneous, of life itself.

What I still had to find were the words to tell it with.

Dreams of My Russian Summers

Reading Group Guide

 

 

 

 

 

Reading Group Questions for Discussion
 

1. Critics have often compared
Dreams of My Russian Summers
to Pasternak's
Dr. Zhivago
. Do you find these books comparable? If so, in what ways do you find
Dreams of My Russian Summers
similar to Pasternak's novel?

2. Makine has also been referred to as “the Russian Proust.” What in Makine's work would bring you to think of Proust? Is it his style? Makine's juxtaposition of themes? The way the reader profoundly inhabits the protagonist's mind? Literary references? The author's subtle play with memory?

3. What role did Charlotte, his French grandmother, play in this young Soviet boy's life?

4. As Charlotte exposes her grandson to France's literary history and cultural landscape, and as it gradually makes its way into the young boy's mind, how and at what point does he begin to distance himself from his own country and look at the Soviet Union “from the outside in”?

5. The
Los Angeles Times
calls
Dreams of My Russian Summers
“one of the best autobiographical novels of the century.” Do you agree?

6. Do you sense that this poignant work of fiction might reflect the author's actual life?

7. When and why does the protagonist — very abruptly, it seems — detach himself from and turn his back on Charlotte, and again embrace Soviet life?

8. How does Makine's heightened and extremely poetic language contribute to the narrator's storytelling?

9. As the narrator matures, consider how changes in his relationship with Charlotte affect the relationships he develops with other characters in the novel.

10. Consider Makine's ability to interweave both French and Russian history throughout the length of the novel while avoiding information overload.

11. When does the narrator begin to see value in the struggle between his two identities?

12. Though a work of fiction, would you consider
Dreams of My Russian Summers
an ode?

13. The truths Charlotte reveals to her grandson are often harsh and unsettling. Consider how Makine's use of language allows the novel to remain dreamlike and delicate in nature.

14. The novel's protagonist, though appealing, is often passive and excessively sensitive. What specific instances in the narrative reaffirm his likability?

15. Does
Dreams of My Russian Summers
remind you of French literature or Russian literature?