Dreams of My Russian Summers (9 page)

They spoke. And with stunned incredulity Charlotte became aware that all the official's remarks seemed like a strange, deformed echo of the questions she put to him. She spoke of the French Aid Committee and heard, in echo, a brief speech about the imperialist designs of the West under the cover of bourgeois philanthropy. She referred to their desire to return to Moscow, and then … the echo interrupted her: foreign interventionist forces and internal class enemies were engaged in undermining reconstruction in the young Soviet republic… .

After a quarter of an hour of such exchanges Charlotte longed to shout, “I want to leave! That's all!” But the absurd logic of this conversation would not loosen its grip.

“A train to Moscow …”

“The sabotage of bourgeois specialists on the railways… .”

“The poor state of health of my mother …”

“The horrible economic and cultural inheritance of tsarism …”

Finally, exhausted, she whispered weakly, “Listen, please return my papers to me… .”

The administrator's voice seemed to hit an obstacle. A rapid spasm crossed his face. He left his office without saying anything. Profiting from his absence, Charlotte glanced at the pile of brochures. The title plunged her into extreme perplexity: “Eradicating Sexual Laxity in Party Cells (recommendations).” So it was the recommendations that the administrator had been underlining in red pencil.

“We haven't found your papers,” he said, coming in.

Charlotte pressed him. What happened then was as unbelievable as it was logical. The leader vomited forth such a torrent of oaths that even after two months spent on crowded trains, she was shattered by it. He continued to shout at her while she already had her hand on the door handle. Then, suddenly bringing his face close to hers, he hissed, “I could arrest you and shoot you right there in the courtyard behind the shithouse! D'you understand, filthy spy!”

On her return, walking through the snow-covered fields, Charlotte told herself that a new language was in the process of being born in this country. A language that she did not know, and that was why the dialogue in the former governor's office had seemed to her incredible. But everything had its meaning: even the revolutionary eloquence that suddenly slid into gutter language; even his “citizenspy”; and even the pamphlet regulating the sexual lives of party members. Yes, a new order of things was being established. Everything in this world, albeit so familiar, was going to acquire a new name; they were going to apply a different label to each object, to each being.

“And what about this lazy snow,” she thought, “the thaw with its sleepy flakes in the smiled at her: a good sky?” She recalled that as a child she was always happy to find the snow again when she came out into the street after her lesson with the governor's daughter. “Like today …” she said to herself, taking a deep breath.

A few days later life became frozen. One clear night polar cold descended from the sky. The world was transformed into a crystal of
ice, within which were encrusted the trees bristling with rime; the still, white columns above the chimneys; the silvery line of the taiga stretching to the horizon; and the sun surrounded by a halo of moiré. The human voice no longer carried; its vapor froze on the lips.

Now they thought only of survival from day to day, by keeping a tiny zone of warmth around their bodies.

It was above all the
izba
that saved them. Everything in it had been conceived to resist endless winters, bottomless nights. Even the wood of the great logs was imbued with the harsh experience of several generations of Siberians. Albertine had sensed the secret breathing of this ancient dwelling, had learned to live closely in tune with the slow warmth of the great stove that occupied half the room, with its very vital silence. And Charlotte, observing her mother's daily actions, often said to herself with a smile, “But she's a true Siberian!” From the first day she had noticed the bundles of dried plants in the hall. These reminded her of the bouquets that Russians use at the baths to beat themselves with. It was when the last slice of bread was eaten that she discovered the true function of those sheaves. Albertine soaked one in hot water, and that evening they drank what they were later, jokingly, to call “Siberian soup” — a mixture of stems, grains, and roots. “I am beginning to know the plants of the taiga by heart,” said Albertine, pouring this soup into their plates. “Indeed I wonder why the people here make so little use of them… .”

What saved them was also the presence of the child, the little tzigane whom they found one day, half frozen, on their doorstep. She was scratching the hardened planks of the door with her numb fingers, purple with cold… . To feed her Charlotte did what she would never have done for herself. At the market she could be seen begging: an onion, a few frozen potatoes, a piece of pork. She rummaged in the rubbish tank next to the party canteen, not far from the place where the ruler had threatened to shoot her. She found herself unloading railway trucks for a loaf of bread. The child, skeletal to begin with, hovered for several days on the fragile borderline between light and extinction. Then slowly, with a hesitant astonishment, slipped once more into the extraordinary flow of days, words, and smells that everyone called life… .

In March, on a day filled with sun and the crunching of snow under the feet of passersby, a woman (her mother? her sister?) came looking for her and, without any explanation, took her away. Charlotte caught up with them on the way out of the village and held out to the child the big doll with flaking cheeks with which the little tzigane had played during the long winter evenings… . This doll had originally come from Paris and remained, along with the old news-papers in the “Siberian suitcase,” one of the last relics of their former life.

The real famine, Albertine knew, would come in the spring… . There was not a single bunch of plants left on the walls of the entrance hall, the market was deserted. In May they fled their
izba,
without really knowing where to go. They walked along a path still heavy with springtime humidity and bent down from time to time to pick fine shoots of sorrel.

It was a kulak who accepted them as day laborers on his farm. He was a strong, lean Siberian with his face half hidden by a beard, through which a few rare words emerged, terse and absolute.

“I'll not pay you anything,” he said, making no bones about it. “Bed and board. If I take you on, it's not for your pretty faces. I need hands.”

They had no choice. During the first days, on returning, Charlotte would collapse flat out on her pallet, her hands covered with burst blisters. Albertine, who sewed sacks for the coming harvest all day, looked after her as best she could. One evening Charlotte's tiredness was such that, when she met the owner of the farm, she started speaking to him in French. The peasant's beard was stirred with a profound movement, his eyes widened — he was smiling.

“Right, tomorrow you can rest. If your mother wants to go into the town, go ahead… .” He took several steps, then turned: “The young people in the village dance every evening, you know. Go and see them if you like… .”

As agreed, the peasant paid them nothing. In the autumn, when they were preparing to go back to the town, he showed them a cart with a load covered in a newly homespun cloth.

“He'll drive you,” he said, glancing at the old peasant perched on the driver's seat.

Albertine and Charlotte thanked him and hauled themselves up on the edge of the cart, which was laden with crates, sacks, and packages.

“Are you sending all this to market?” asked Charlotte, to fill the awkward silence of these last few minutes.

“No. That's what you've earned.”

They had no time to reply. The driver tugged on the reins, the cart pitched and began to move off in the hot dust of the farm track… . Beneath the cover Charlotte and her mother discovered three sacks of potatoes, two sacks of corn, a keg of honey, four enormous pumpkins, and several crates of vegetables, beans, and apples. In one corner they caught sight of half a dozen hens with their legs tied; and a cock in their midst, flashing belligerent and angry glances.

“I'm going to dry some bunches of herbs all the same,” said Albertine, when she finally succeeded in tearing her eyes from all this treasure. “You never know… .”

She died two years later. It was an August evening, calm and transparent. Charlotte was returning from the library, where she had been employed to sort through the mountains of books collected from demolished aristocratic homes… . Her mother was seated on a little bench fixed to the wall of the
izba,
her head leaning against the smooth wood of the logs. Her eyes were closed. She must have dozed off and died in her sleep. A light breeze coming from the taiga stirred the pages of the book open on her knees. It was the same little French volume with gilt edges.

They were married in the spring of the following year. He came from a village on the White Sea coast, ten thousand leagues from this Siberian town the civil war had brought him to. Charlotte noticed very quickly that his pride in being a “people's judge” was mingled with a vague unease, whose origin he himself could not have explained at the time. At the wedding supper one of the guests proposed that the death of Lenin be commemorated by one minute's
silence. Everyone stood up… . Three months after the marriage he was posted to the other end of the empire, to Bukhara. Charlotte was absolutely set on taking the great suitcase filled with old French newspapers. Her husband had nothing against this, but on the train, ill concealing his obstinate unease, he gave her to understand that a frontier more impenetrable than any known mountain range you cared to mention would arise now between her French life and their life. He tried to find the words to express what would soon seem so natural: the iron curtain.

6

C
AMELS IN A SNOWSTORM;
frosts that froze the sap in the trees and caused their trunks to burst; Charlotte's numb hands catching huge logs thrown down from the top of a railway truck.…

It was thus in our smoke-filled kitchen, during the long winter evenings, that this legendary past was reborn. Outside the snow-covered window there stretched one of the greatest cities in Russia as well as the gray plain of the Volga; out there arose the fortress-buildings of Stalinist architecture. And inside, amid the chaos of an interminable meal and the iridescent tobacco clouds, the shade of this mysterious Frenchwoman, lost beneath the Siberian sky, made its appearance. The television was pouring out the news of the day, transmitting the sessions of the latest Party congress, but this background noise did not make the slightest impact on the conversations of our guests.

Squatting in a corner of this crowded kitchen, with my shoulder against the shelves on which the television was enthroned, I listened to them avidly while trying to make myself invisible. I knew that soon the face of an adult would loom up through the blue fog, and I should hear a cry of simulated indignation: “Hey, just look at him, the little sleepwalker! It's past midnight and he's still not in bed. Go on, off you go! Stir your stumps! We'll send for you when you've grown a beard.…”

Banished from the kitchen, I found it hard to get to sleep right away, fascinated by the question that kept returning to my young mind: “Why are they so keen on talking about Charlotte?”

At first I thought I understood why this Frenchwoman was an ideal topic of conversation for my parents and their guests. For it only took memories of the last war to be mentioned for an argument to break out. My father, who had spent four years at the front in the infantry, attributed the victory to those troops mired in the earth who, in his phrase, had irrigated this earth with their blood, from Stalingrad to Berlin. His brother, without wishing to upset him, would then observe that, “as everyone knows,” the artillery was the ruling goddess of modern war. The debate would become heated. Little by little the artillerymen would find themselves being labeled “funks,” and the infantry, on account of the mud on the roads in war, became the “infectionary.” It would be at this moment that their best friend, an ex–fighter pilot, would intervene with his own arguments, and the conversation would plunge into an extremely perilous nosedive. And that was before they went into the respective merits of the fronts they had been on, all three different; let alone the role of Stalin during the war.…

This arguing, I sensed, pained them greatly. For they knew that, whatever their own part in the victory had been, the die was cast: their own generation, decimated, massacred, would soon disappear, along with the foot soldier, the gunner, and the pilot. And my mother would precede even them, in accordance with the fate of children born at the beginning of the twenties. At fifteen I would be left alone with my sister. It was as if in their arguments there was an unspoken foreknowledge of this immediate future.… Charlotte's life, I believed, reconciled them, offering a neutral territory.

But as I grew older I began to detect quite a different reason for this French predilection in their interminable discussions. It was that Charlotte's advent under the Russian sky was like that of an extraterrestrial being. The cruel history of this immense empire, of its famines, its revolutions, its civil war, was nothing to do with her.… We Russians had no choice. But she? Through her eyes they could observe a country they did not recognize, because judged by a foreigner, sometimes naive, often more perspicacious than themselves. Charlotte's eyes reflected a disturbing world where unforced truth abounded — an unfamiliar Russia that they needed to discover.

*  *  *

I listened to them, and I too discovered Charlotte's Russian destiny, but in my own way. Certain details, hardly mentioned, became magnified in my mind and created a whole secret universe. Other events, to which the adults attached considerable importance, passed unnoticed.