Dreams of My Russian Summers

by Andrei Makine

  On the other side of the courtyard, overhung with the foliage of lime and poplar trees, stood a large two-story wooden house, quite black with age, with little dark, suspicious windows. It was this and its fellows that the governor had wanted to replace with the graceful lightness of the modern style. In this structure, two centuries old, lived the most picturesque of the babushkas, straight out of fairy tales with their thick shawls, their deathly pale faces, their bony, almost blue hands resting on their knees. When we had occasion to enter this dark dwelling, the bitter, heavy, but not totally unpleasant smell that hung in the cluttered corridors always caught in my throat. It was that of the old life, dark and very primitive in the way it welcomed death, birth, love, and grief. A kind of oppressive climate, but filled with a strange vitality, and in any case the only one that would have suited the inhabitants of this enormous izba. The breath of Russia … Inside it we were astonished by the number and the asymmetry of the doors that opened onto rooms plunged in smoky shadow. I sensed, almost physically, the carnal density of the lives that intermingled here.

  Gavrilych lived in the cellar, which three families shared with him. The narrow window of his room was located at ground level, and when spring came, it was obstructed by wild plants. The babushkas, sitting on their bench a few yards away, would cast anxious glances at it from time to time — it was not uncommon to see the broad face of the “scandalizer” between the stems at the open window. His head looked as if it were rising out of the earth. But at these moments of contemplation Gavrilych always remained calm. He would tip his face backwards, as if he wanted to glimpse the sky and the brilliance of the sunset in the branches of the poplar trees… . One day, making our way right up to the loft of this great black izba, underneath its roof, warmed by the sun, we pushed open the heavy shutter of a skylight. On the horizon a terrifying fire was setting the steppe ablaze: the smoke was soon going to eclipse the sun… .

  When it came down to it, the revolution had achieved only one innovation in that quiet corner of Saranza. The church, which was situated at one end of the courtyard, had had its cupola removed. They had also taken out the iconostasis and installed in its place a great square of white silk — the screen made up of curtains commandeered from one of the bourgeois apartments in the “decadent” block. The Barricade cinema was ready to welcome its first audience… .

  Yes, our grandmother was a woman who could happily converse with Gavrilych, a woman who was opposed to all the campaigns and who had one day referred to our cinema, with a wink, as “that decapitated church.” Then we had caught a glimpse of the soaring silhouette of a gilded onion and a cross, rising up above the squat edifice, whose past was unknown to us.

  Far more than her clothes or her physique, it was these little touches that revealed to us that she was different. As for the French language, we basically regarded it as our family dialect. After all, every family has its little verbal whims, its tics of language, and its nicknames that never cross the threshold of the house — its private slang.

  The image of our grandmother was woven from these anodyne peculiarities — eccentricities in the eyes of some people, excesses to others. That was up to the day when we discovered that a little pebble covered in rust could cause tears to glisten on her eyelashes and that French, our domestic patois, could — through the magic of its sounds — snatch from the dark and tumultuous waters a fantastical city that was slowly returning to life.

  And from being a lady with obscure, non-Russian origins, Charlotte was transformed that evening into a messenger from an Atlantis, engulfed by time.

  3

  NEUILLY-SUR-SEINE WAS COMPOSED of a dozen log cabins. Real izbas, with roofs covered in slender laths, silvered by the rigors of winter, with windows set in prettily carved wooden frames and hedges with washing hung out to dry on them. Young women carried full pails on yokes that spilled a few drops on the dust of the main street. Men loaded heavy sacks of corn onto a wagon. A slow herd streamed idly toward the cowshed. We heard the heavy sound of their bells and the hoarse crowing of a cock. The agreeable smell of a wood fire — the smell of supper almost ready — hung in the air.

  For our grandmother had indeed said to us one day, when speaking of her birthplace, “Oh! At that time Neuilly was just a village… .”

  She had said it in French, but we only knew Russian villages. And a village in Russia is inevitably a ring of izbas; indeed the very word in Russian, derevnya, comes from derevo — a tree, wood. The confusion persisted, despite the clarifications that Charlotte’s stories would later bring. At the name “Neuilly” we had immediate visions of the village with its wooden houses, its herd, and its cockerel. And when, the following summer, Charlotte spoke to us for the first time about a certain Marcel Proust — “By the way, we used to see him playing tennis at Neuilly, on the boulevard Bineau” — we pictured the dandy with big languorous eyes (she had shown us his photo) there among the izbas!

  Beneath the fragile patina of our French words Russian reality often showed through. The president of the Republic was bound to have something Stalinesque about him in the portrait sketched by our imagination. Neuilly was peopled with kolkhozniks. And the slow emergence of Paris from the waters evoked a very Russian emotion — that of fleeting relief after one more historic cataclysm; the joy of having finished a war, of having survived murderous repressions. We wandered along its streets, which were still wet, covered with sand and mud. The inhabitants were piling furniture and clothes outside their doors to let them dry — as Russians do, after a winter they had been beginning to think would never end.

  And then, when Paris was resplendent once more in the fresh spring air, whose scent we guessed intuitively, there was a fairy-tale train, drawn by a garlanded engine slowing down and coming to a halt at the gates of the city, before the pavilion at Ranelagh station.

  A young man wearing a simple military tunic stepped down from the railway carriage, walking on the purple cloth spread at his feet. He was accompanied by a woman, also very young, in a white dress with a feather boa. An older man, in formal attire, with a magnificent mustache and a fine blue ribbon on his breast, emerged from an impressive gathering grouped under the portico of the pavilion and advanced toward the couple. The gentle breeze caressed the orchids and the amaranths that decorated the pillars and stirred the feather on the young woman’s white velvet hat. The two men shook hands.

  The master of Atlantis resurgent, President Félix Faure, was welcoming the tsar of all the Russias, Nicholas II, and his wife.

  It was the imperial couple, escorted by the elite of the Republic, who were our guides through Paris… . Several years later we learned the true chronology of this glorious visit. Nicholas and Alexandra had not come in the spring of 1910, after the flood, but in October 1896, that is to say well before the rebirth of our French Atlantis. But this real sequence hardly mattered. For us only the chronology of our grandmother’s long stories counted: one day, in their legendary time, Paris arose from the waters; the sun shone, and at once we heard the still distant cry of the imperial train. This sequence of events seemed just as legitimate to us as the appearance of Proust among the peasants of Neuilly.

  Charlotte’s narrow balcony hovered in the aromatic breeze of the plain, at the outer limit of a sleeping town, cut off from the world by the eternal silence of the steppes. Each evening resembled an alchemist’s legendary vessel, in which an astonishing transmutation of the past took place. To us the elements of this magic were no less mysterious than the components of the philosophers’ stone. Charlotte unfolded an old newspaper, brought it close to her lamp with its turquoise shade, and proclaimed for us the menu for the banquet given in honor of the Russian sovereigns when they arrived at Cherbourg:

  Soup

  Bisque of shrimps

  Cassolettes Pompadour

  Loire trout braised in Sauternes

  Fillet of salt lamb with cèpes

  Vine quails à la Lucullus

  Poulardes du Mans Cambacér�
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  Sorbets in Muscat de Lunel

  Punch à la romaine

  Roast bartavels and ortolans, garnished with truffles

  Pâté de foie gras of Nancy

  Salad

  Asparagus spears with sauce mousseline

  Ice cream “Success”

  Dessert

  How could we decipher these cabbalistic formulae? “Bartavels and ortolans!” “Vine quails à la Lucullus”! Our grandmother, understandingly, tried to find equivalents, citing the very rudimentary produce that was still to be found in Saranza’s shops. Enthralled, we savored these imaginary dishes, enhanced by the misty chill of the ocean (Cherbourg!), but already it was time to set off again in pursuit of the tsar.

  Like him, entering the Elysée Palace, we were startled by the spectacle of all the black suits that fell motionless at his approach — just think, more than two hundred senators and three hundred deputies! (Who, according to our own chronology, had only a few days previously been traveling to their session by boat… .) Our grandmother’s voice, which was always calm and a little dreamy, became tinged at that moment with a slight dramatic tremor: “You see, two worlds found themselves face to face. (Look at this photo. It’s a pity the newspaper has been folded for so long… .) Yes, the tsar, an absolute monarch, and the representatives of the French people! The representatives of democracy …”

  The profound import of the confrontation was lost on us. But we could now make out, among five hundred pairs of eyes focused on the tsar, those who, without outward hostility, held back from the general enthusiasm. And who felt free to do so just because of this mysterious “democracy.” This casual attitude filled us with consternation. We inspected the ranks of the black suits to discover potential troublemakers. The president should have identified them and expelled them by pushing them off the steps of Elysée!

  The following evening our grandmother’s lamp was lit on the balcony once more. In her hands we saw some newspaper pages she had just extracted from the Siberian suitcase. She spoke. The balcony slowly detached itself from the wall and hovered, plunging into the scented shadows of the steppe.

  … Nicholas was seated at the table of honor, which was trimmed with magnificent garlands of medeola. At one moment he was listening now to some gracious remark from Madame Faure, seated on his right, at the next to the velvety baritone of the president, speaking to the empress. The reflections from the glasses and the glittering array of silver dazzled the guests… . At the dessert the president stood up, raised his glass, and declared, “The presence of Your Majesty among us, acclaimed by a whole people, has sealed the bonds that unite our two countries in harmonious endeavor and in a mutual confidence in their destinies. The union between a powerful empire and an industrious republic … Fortified by a proven fidelity … As a spokesman for the whole nation, offer to Your Majesty … For the greatness of his reign … For the happiness of Her Majesty, the Empress … I raise my glass in honor of His Majesty, the Emperor Nicholas, and Her Majesty, the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna.”

  The band of the Republican Guard struck up the Russian national anthem… . And the grand gala at the Opéra that evening was an apotheosis.

  Preceded by two torchbearers, the imperial couple ascended the staircase. They seemed to be moving past a living cascade: the white curves of the women’s shoulders; the blossoming flowers on their corsages; the perfumed brilliance of the hairstyles; the glittering of jewels on bare flesh; all this against a background of uniforms and tails. The mighty cry “Long live the Emperor!” almost raised the majestic ceiling to the sky with its echoes, mingling it with the sky… .When at the end of the performance the orchestra launched into the “Marseillaise,” the tsar turned to the president and gave him his hand.

  My grandmother switched off the lamp, and we spent several minutes in the dark, the time it took to let all the midges fly away that had been courting a luminous death beneath the shade. Little by little our eyes began to see again. The stars reformed their constellations. The Milky Way became phosphorescent. And in a corner of our balcony, among the intermingled stems of sweet peas, the fallen bacchante gave us her stone smile.

  Charlotte paused in the doorway and sighed gently. “You know, it was a military march, in fact, nothing more, the ‘Marseillaise.’ A bit like the songs of the Russian revolution. At such times blood doesn’t frighten anyone… .”

  She went back into the room, and it was from there that we heard these lines emerging, which she recited softly, like a strange litany from the past:

  Over us the bloodstained banner

  Of tyranny holds sway… .

  And drench our fields with their tainted blood… .

  We waited for the echo of these words to melt into the darkness, and then with one voice we exclaimed to one another, “And Nicholas? The tsar? Did he know what the song was about?”

  ***

  France-Atlantis was revealing itself as a whole gamut of sounds, colors, and smells. As we followed our guides, we were discovering the different elements that made up this mysterious French essence.

  The Elysée Palace appeared in the glitter of chandeliers and the shimmering of mirrors. The Opéra dazzled us with the nakedness of women’s shoulders and made us drunk with the perfume exhaled by the magnificent hairstyles. For us Notre-Dame was a sensation of cold stone under a stormy sky. Yes, we could almost touch the rough, porous walls — a gigantic rock, shaped over the centuries, it seemed to us, by ingenious erosion… .

  These perceptible facets outlined the still-uncertain contours of the French universe. This emerging continent was filling up with things and people. The empress knelt on a mysterious priedieu that did not suggest any known reality. “It’s a kind of chair with its legs cut off,” explained Charlotte, and the image of this mutilated piece of furniture left us dumbfounded. Like Nicholas, we repressed the desire to touch the purple cloak with its tarnished golds, which Napoleon had worn on the day of his coronation. We craved the sacrilegious contact. This universe in gestation still lacked substance. In the Sainte-Chapelle it was the rough grain of an old parchment that aroused the same desire — Charlotte taught us that these long hand-written letters had been penned a millennium ago by a French queen, a Russian woman furthermore, Anna Yaroslavna, wife of Henri I.

  But what was most exciting was that Atlantis was being built before our very eyes. Nicholas grasped a golden trowel and spread mortar on a great block of granite — the first stone of the Pont Alexandre-III… . And he held out the trowel to Félix Faure — “Your turn, Monsieur le Président!” — and the racing wind, which was whiffing up white horses on the waters of the Seine, carried away the words forcefully uttered by the minister of trade as he battled against the flapping of the flags: “Sire! It was France’s wish to dedicate one of the great monuments of her capital to the memory of your august father. In the name of the government of the Republic I ask Your Imperial Majesty to graciously consecrate this homage by joining the President of the Republic in cementing the first stone of the Pont Alexandre-III, which will link Paris to the Exhibition of 1900 — and thus to extend to our inauguration of this great enterprise of civilization and peace the lofty approbation of Your Majesty and the gracious patronage of the Empress.”

  The president barely had time to give two symbolic taps to the granite block before an incredible incident occurred. A fellow who belonged neither to the imperial entourage nor to the party of French dignitaries rose up before the imperial couple, addressed the tsar with the familiar tu, and with an extraordinary urbane dexterity, kissed the tsarina’s hand! Petrified by such cavalier behavior, we held our breath… .

  Little by little it became evident what was happening. The words of the intruder, overcoming the distance in time and gaps in our French, were clarified. Feverishly we caught their echo: