For a long time this terrible lament echoed in our childish ears.
“Perhaps it was because she … she loved him,” my sister, who was older than me, said to me one day. And she blushed.
But more than that unusual union between Norbert and Albertine, it was Charlotte, in this photo from the turn of the century, who aroused my curiosity. Especially her little bare toes. By a simple irony of chance, or through some involuntary coquetry, she had curled them back tightly against the soles of her feet. This trifling detail conferred a special significance on what was overall a very ordinary photo. Not knowing how to formulate my thought, I contented myself with repeating in a dreamy voice, “This little girl who finds herself, heaven knows why, on this comical pedestal table, on that summer’s day that has gone forever, July 22, 1905, right in the depths of Siberia. Yes, this tiny French girl, who was that day celebrating her second birthday, this child, who is looking at the photographer and by an unconscious caprice curling up her incredibly small toes, in this way allows me to enter into that day, to taste its climate, its time, its color… .”
And the mystery of this childish presence seemed to me so breathtaking that I would close my eyes.
This child was … our grandmother. Yes, it was her, this woman whom we saw that evening, crouching down and silently gathering up the fragments of stone scattered over the carpet. Dumbfounded and sheepish, my sister and I stood with our backs to the wall, not daring to murmur a word of excuse nor to help our grandmother retrieve the scattered talismans. We guessed that in her lowered eyes tears were forming… .
On the evening of our sacrilegious game we no longer saw an old-fashioned good fairy before us, a storyteller with her Bluebeard or her Sleeping Beauty, but a woman hurt and vulnerable despite all her strength of spirit. For her it was that agonizing moment when suddenly the adult betrays herself, allows her weakness to appear, feels like a naked emperor under the penetrating gaze of the child. Now she is like a tightrope walker who has made a false move and who, off balance for several seconds, is sustained only by the gaze of the spectator, who is in turn embarrassed at having this unexpected power… .
She closed the “Pont-Neuf bag,” took it into her room, then called us to the table. After a moment’s silence she began to speak in French in a calm and steady voice, while pouring tea for us with her familiar gesture: “Among the stones you threw away there was one I should really like to get back… .”
And still in this neutral tone and still in French, even though at mealtimes (because of friends or neighbors who often dropped in unexpectedly) we generally spoke in Russian, she told us about the parade of the Grande Armée and the story of the little brown pebble known as “Verdun.” We scarcely grasped the sense of her tale — it was her tone that held us in thrall. Our grandmother was addressing us like adults! All we saw was a handsome officer with a mustache emerging from the column of the victory parade, approaching a young woman squeezed in the midst of an enthusiastic crowd, and offering her a little fragment of brown metal… .
After supper, armed with a flashlight, I vainly combed through the bed of dahlias in front of our apartment block: the “Verdun” was not there. I found it the following morning on the pavement, a little metallic pebble surrounded by several cigarette stubs, broken bottles, and streaks of sand. Under my gaze it seemed to stand out from these banal surroundings like a meteorite fallen from an unknown galaxy, which had almost disappeared amidst the gravel on a path… .
Thus we guessed at our grandmother’s hidden tears and sensed the existence in her heart of that distant French lover who had preceded our grandfather, Fyodor. Yes, a dashing officer from the Grande Armée, the man who had slipped that rough splinter, the “Verdun,” into Charlotte’s palm. This discovery made us uneasy. We felt bound to our grandmother by a secret to which possibly no one else in the family had access. Beyond the dates and anecdotes of family legend we could now hear life welling up, in all its sorrowful beauty.
That evening we joined our grandmother on the little balcony of her apartment. Covered in flowers, it seemed suspended above the hot haze of the steppes. A copper sun nudged the horizon, remained undecided for a moment, then plunged rapidly. The first stars trembled in the sky. Powerful, penetrating scents rose to us with the evening breeze.
We were silent. While the daylight lasted, our grandmother darned a blouse spread out on her knees. Then, when the air was impregnated with ultramarine shadow, she raised her head, abandoning her task, her gaze lost in the hazy distance of the plain. Not daring to break her silence, we cast furtive glances at her from time to time: was she going to share a new and even more secret confidence with us? or would she fetch her lamp with the turquoise shade, as if nothing had happened, and read us a few pages of Daudet or Jules Verne, who often kept us company on our long summer evenings? Without admitting it to ourselves, we were lying in wait for her first word, her intonation. Our suspense — the spectator’s fascination with the tightrope walker — was a mixture of rather cruel curiosity and a vague unease. We felt as if we were seeking to trap this woman who faced us alone.
However, she seemed not even to notice our tense presence. Her hands remained motionless in her lap; her gaze was lost in the transparency of the sky. The trace of a smile illuminated her lips… .
Little by little we abandoned ourselves to this silence. Leaning over the handrail, we stared wide-eyed, trying to see as much sky as possible. The balcony reeled slightly, giving way under our feet, and began to float. The horizon drew closer, as if we were hurtling toward it across the night breeze.
It was above the line of the horizon that we discerned a pale reflection — it was like the sparkle of little waves on the surface of a river. Incredulous, we peered into the darkness that surged over our flying balcony. Yes, far away on the steppe there shone an expanse of water, rising, spreading the bitter cold of the great rains. The sheet seemed to be lightening steadily, with a dull, wintry glow.
Now we saw emerging from this fantastic tide the black masses of apartment blocks, the spires of cathedrals, the posts of street lamps — a city! Gigantic, harmonious despite the waters that flooded its avenues, a ghost city was emerging before our eyes… .
Suddenly we realized that someone had been talking to us for quite a while. Our grandmother was talking to us!
“At that time I must have been almost your age; it was the winter of 1910. The Seine had turned into a real sea. The people of Paris traveled round by boat. The streets were like rivers; the squares, like great lakes. And what astonished me most was the silence… .”
On our balcony we heard the sleepy silence of flooded Paris. The lapping of a few waves when a boat went by, a muffled voice at the end of a drowned avenue.
The France of our grandmother, like a misty Atlantis, was emerging from the waves.
2
EVEN THE PRESIDENT WAS REDUCED to cold meals by it.”
This was the very first remark to ring out through the capital of our France-Atlantis… . We imagined a venerable old man — combining in his appearance the noble bearing of our great-grandfather Norbert and the pharaonic solemnity of a Stalin — an old man with a silvery beard, sitting at a table gloomily lit by a candle.
This news report came from a man of about forty with a lively eye and a resolute expression, who appeared in photos in our grandmother’s oldest albums. Coming alongside the wall of an apartment block in a boat and putting up a ladder, he was climbing toward one of the first-floor windows. This was Vincent, Charlotte’s uncle and a reporter for the Excelsior. Since the start of the flood he had been working his way up and down the streets of the capital in this fashion, seeking out the key news item of the day. The president’s cold meals was one such. And it was from Vincent’s boat that the mind-boggling photo was taken that we were contemplating. It was on a yellowed press cutting: three men in a precarious little craft crossing a vast expanse of water flanked by apartment blocks. A caption explained: “Messieurs the deputies, on their wa
y to a session of the Assemblée Nationale.” …
Vincent stepped over the windowsill and sprang into the arms of his sister, Albertine, and of Charlotte, who were taking refuge with him during their stay in Paris… . Atlantis, silent until now, was filling up with sounds, emotions, words. Each evening our grandmother’s stories uncovered some new fragment of this universe engulfed by time.
And then there was the hidden treasure. The suitcase filled with old papers, the massive bulk of which, when we had ventured under the big bed in Charlotte’s room, alarmed us. We tugged on the catches, we lifted the lid. What a mass of paper! Adult life, in all its tedium and all its disturbing seriousness, stopped our breath with its smell of dust and things shut away … How could we have guessed that it was in the midst of these old newspapers, these letters with inconceivable dates, that our grandmother would find us the photo of the three deputies in their boat? …
It was Vincent who had passed on to Charlotte the taste for such journalistic sketches and urged her to collect them by cutting these brief chronicles of the day out of the newspapers. After a time, he must have thought, they would be seen in quite a different light, like silver coins colored by the patina of centuries.
During one of those summer evenings filled with the scented breeze of the steppes, a remark from a passerby under our balcony jolted us out of our reverie.
“No, I promise you. They said it on the radio. He went out into space.”
And another voice, dubious, answered, receding into the distance, “Do you take me for a fool or what? ‘He went out …’ But up there there’s nowhere you can go out. It’s like bailing out of a plane without a parachute… .”
This exchange brought us back to reality. All about us there stretched the huge empire that took a particular pride in the exploration of the unfathomable sky above our head. The empire with its redoubtable army; with its atomic icebreakers disemboweling the North Pole; with its factories that would soon be producing more steel than all the countries of the world put together; with its cornfields that rippled from the Black Sea to the Pacific … with this endless steppe. And on our balcony a Frenchwoman was talking about a boat crossing a great flooded city and drawing alongside the wall of an apartment block… . We shook ourselves, trying to understand where we were. Here? Back there? The whispering of the waves in our ears fell silent.
It was by no means the first time we had noticed this duality in our lives. To live alongside our grandmother was already to feel you were elsewhere. She would cross the courtyard without ever going to take her place on the babushkas’ bench, that institution without which a Russian courtyard is unthinkable. This did not stop her greeting them very cordially, inquiring after the health of one she had not seen for several days, and doing them little kindnesses, for example, showing them how to remove the slightly acid taste from salted milky mushrooms. But in addressing her friendly remarks to them, she remained standing. And the old gossips of the courtyard accepted this difference. Everyone understood that Charlotte was not entirely a Russian babushka.
This did not mean that she lived cut off from the world or that she clung to any social prejudice. Early in the morning we were often roused from our childish sleep by a sonorous cry that rang out in the midst of the courtyard: “Come and get your milk!” Through our dreams we recognized the voice and, above all, the inimitable intonation of Avdotia, the milkwoman, arriving from the neighboring village. The housewives came down with their cans toward two enormous aluminum containers that this vigorous peasant woman, some fifty years of age, dragged from one house to another. One day, awakened by her shout, I did not go back to sleep… . I heard our door close softly and muffled voices passing through into the dining room. A moment later one of them whispered with blissful abandon, “Oh, it’s so cozy here, Shura! I feel as if I’m lying on a cloud.” Intrigued by these words, I peeped behind the curtain that separated off our bedroom.
Avdotia was stretched out on the floor, her arms and legs flung out, her eyes half closed. From her bare, dust-covered feet right up to her hair spread out upon the ground, her whole body lolled in deep repose. An absentminded smile colored her half-open lips. “It’s so cozy here, Shura!” she repeated softly, calling my grandmother by that diminutive that people generally used in place of her unusual Christian name.
I sensed the exhaustion of this great female body slumped in the middle of the dining room. I understood that Avdotia could only allow herself such a lack of constraint in my grandmother’s apartment. For she was confident of not being snubbed or disapproved of… . She would finish her grueling round, bent under the weight of the enormous churns. And when all the milk was gone she would go up to “Shura’s,” her legs numb, her arms heavy. The floor, uncarpeted and always clean and bare, still had a pleasant morning coolness. Avdotia would come in, greet my grandmother, take off her bulky shoes, and go and stretch out on the bare floor. “Shura” brought her a glass of water and sat beside her on a little stool. And they would chat softly until Avdotia had the courage to continue on her way… .
That day I heard some of what my grandmother was saying to the milkwoman as she sprawled in blissful oblivion. The two of them were talking about the work in the fields, the buckwheat harvest… . And I was amazed to hear Charlotte talking about this farm life with complete authority. But above all the Russian she spoke, very pure, very refined, did not jar at all with Avdotia’s rich, rough, and vivid way of talking. Their conversation also touched on the war, an inevitable topic: the milkwoman’s husband had been killed at the front. Harvest, buckwheat, Stalingrad … And that evening she would be talking to us about Paris in flood, or reading us some pages from Hector Malot! I sensed a distant past, obscure — a Russian past, this time — awakening from the depths of her life long ago.
Avdotia got up, embraced my grandmother, and continued on her way, which led her across endless fields, beneath the sun of the steppes, on a farm wagon submerged in the ocean of tall plants and flowers….This time, as she was leaving the room, I saw her great peasant’s fingers touch, with tentative hesitation, the delicate statuette on the chest in our hall: a nymph with a rippling body entwined with sinuous stems, that figurine from the turn of the century, one of the rare fragments from bygone days that had been miraculously preserved… .
Bizarre as it may seem, it was thanks to the local drunkard, Gavrilych, that we were able to gain insight into the meaning of that unusual “strange elsewhere” that our grandmother carried within her. He was a man whose very teetering silhouette, looming up from behind the poplar trees in the courtyard, inspired apprehension. A man who defied the militiamen when he held up the traffic in the main street with his capricious zigzag progress; a man who fulminated against the authorities; and whose thunderous oaths rattled windowpanes and swept the row of babushkas from their bench. Yet this same Gavrilych, when he met my grandmother, would stop, attempt to inhale the vodka fumes on his breath, and articulate with an accentuated respect, “Good day, Sharlota Norbertovna!”
Yes, he was the only person in the courtyard who called her by her French Christian name, albeit slightly Russified. What is more, he had got hold of Charlotte’s father’s name — no one knew any longer when, or how — and formed the exotic patronymic “Norbertovna,” on his lips the pinnacle of courtesy and eagerness to please. His cloudy eyes lit up, his giant’s body recovered a relative equilibrium, his head sketched a series of somewhat uncoordinated nods, and he forced his alcohol-soaked tongue to perform this act of verbal acrobatics: “Are you well, Sharlota Norbertovna?”
My grandmother returned his greeting and even exchanged some thoughtful remarks with Gavrilych. On these occasions the courtyard had a very singular appearance: the babushkas, driven away by the tempestuous appearance onstage of the drunkard, took refuge on the steps of the great wooden house that faced our apartment block; the children hid behind the trees; at the windows one could see half-curious, half-frightened faces. And down in the arena our grandmother held conversatio
n with a tamed Gavrilych. Nor was he by any means a fool. He had long since understood that his role went beyond drunkenness and scandal. He felt that he was in some way indispensable to the psychic well-being of the courtyard. Gavrilych had become a character, a type, a curiosity — the spokesman for that unpredictable and capricious fate so dear to Russian hearts. And suddenly there was this Frenchwoman with the calm gaze of her gray eyes, elegant despite the simplicity of her dress, slim, and so different from the women of her generation, the babushkas, whom he had just driven from their perch.
One day, wanting to say something other than a simple “Good morning” to Charlotte, he gave a little cough into his great fist and rumbled, “So that’s it, Sharlota Norbertovna, you’re all alone here in our steppes… .”
It was thanks to this clumsy remark that I found it possible to picture (as up until then I had never done) my grandmother without us, in winter, alone in her room.
In Moscow or Leningrad everything would have turned out otherwise. The motley humanity of the big city would have eclipsed what was different about Charlotte. But she had found herself in this little Saranza, ideal for living out endless days, each like the last. Her past life remained intensely present to her, as if lived only yesterday.
She was Saranza: transfixed at the edge of the steppes in profound astonishment before the boundlessness that opened at its gates. Winding, dusty streets that constantly climbed up hillsides; wooden fences beneath the greenery of gardens. Sun, sleepy vistas. And passersby who, appearing at the end of a street, seemed to be perpetually approaching without ever drawing level with you.
My grandmother’s building was situated at the edge of the town in the “Western Glade” district: a coincidence (West Europe–France) that amused us greatly. According to the plan of an ambitious governor, this three-story apartment block, built in the second decade of the century, was intended to inaugurate a whole avenue bearing the imprint of the modern style. Yes, the building was a faint replica of the fashion of the turn of the century. It was as if all the sinuosities, twists, and curves of that architecture had flowed in a stream from its European source and, diluted and partly effaced, had reached the depths of Russia. And in the icy wind of the steppes this flow had become frozen into an apartment block with strange oval bull’s-eye windows and ornamental rose stems around the doorways… . The enlightened governor’s scheme had foundered. The October Revolution put a stop to all these decadent tendencies of bourgeois art. And this building — a narrow segment of the dreamed-of avenue — had remained the only one of its kind. Indeed, after many repairs, it retained only a shadow of its original style. It was in particular the official campaign of struggle against “architectual excesses,” which we had witnessed as young children, that had dealt it the death blow. All of it seemed “excessive”: workmen had torn off the rose stems, condemned the bull’s-eye windows… . And, as there are always individuals who want to make a show of their zeal (it is thanks to them that campaigns really succeed), the downstairs neighbor had excelled himself in detaching the most flagrant architectural superfluity from the wall: the faces of two pretty bacchantes, who had exchanged melancholy smiles on each side of our grandmother’s balcony. To achieve this, he must have performed feats of great daring, standing up on his own windowsill with a long steel tool in his hand. The two faces, one after the other, had come unstuck from the wall and had fallen to the ground. One of them had shattered into a thousand fragments on the asphalt; the other, following a different trajectory, had hurtled into the dense vegetation of the dahlias, which had broken its fall. We had recovered it at dusk and carried it home. Henceforward, during our long summer evenings on the balcony this stone face, with its faded smile and its tender eyes, would gaze at us from among the pots of flowers and seem to listen to Charlotte’s stories.
Dreams of My Russian Summers Page 2
