Dreams of My Russian Summers

by Andrei Makine

  This last thought seemed to me so strange that I stopped repelling my tormentors’ attacks and turned toward the window, beyond which lay the snow-covered city. So I saw things differently! Was it an advantage? Or a handicap, a blemish? Perhaps this double vision could be explained by my two languages; thus, when I pronounced the Russian word “ЦАРЬ” a cruel tyrant rose up before me; while the word “tsar” in French was redolent of lights, of sounds, of wind, of glittering chandeliers, of the radiance of women’s bare shoulders, of mingled perfumes, of the inimitable air of our Atlantis. I understood that this second view of things would have to be hidden, for it could only provoke mockery from others.

  This secret meaning of words was subsequently revealed once more in a situation just as tragicomic as that of our history lesson.

  I had joined an interminable queue that wound round outside the premises of a food shop, crossed the threshold, and then extended inside it. It was all, no doubt, for some foodstuff rare in winter — oranges, or perhaps simply apples, I no longer recall. I had already passed the most important psychological milestone of this wait, entering the door of the shop, outside which dozens of people were still squelching about in muddy snow. It was at that moment that my sister came to join me: as two people, we were entitled to a double quantity of the rationed goods.

  We did not understand what suddenly provoked the anger of the crowd. The people standing behind us must have thought that my sister was trying to worm her way in without queuing — an unforgivable crime! Angry shouts erupted: the long snake contracted, threatening faces surrounded us. We both tried to explain that we were brother and sister. But the crowd never admits a mistake. Those who had not yet crossed the threshold — the shrillest — uttered indignant yells, without knowing exactly against whom. And as all mass actions exaggerate absurdly the impact of their efforts, it was me whom they now pushed out. The serpent quivered, the shoulders stiffened. One heave, and I found myself outside the queue, beside my sister, facing the serried row of hate-filled faces. I tried to return to my place, but the elbows formed a wall of shields. Distraught, with quivering lips, I met my sister’s eyes. Unconsciously I sensed that we were particularly vulnerable, she and I. Two years older than me, she was not quite fifteen and did not have the presence of a young woman, while having lost the advantage of being a child, which might have touched this hard-boiled crowd. It was the same for me: at the age of twelve and a half I could not throw my weight about like young lads of fourteen or fifteen, strong in their irresponsible teenage aggression.

  We slipped along the queue, hoping at least to be admitted some yards farther back from my lost place. But as we went past them the bodies closed ranks, and soon we found ourselves outside in the melted snow once more. Despite the cry of a saleswoman — “You there, beyond the door: you can give up waiting: there won’t be enough for everyone!” — the people still came flocking.

  We remained at the end of the queue, hypnotized by the anonymous power of the crowd. I was afraid to look up, or even to move. My hands, thrust into my pockets, were trembling. And when I suddenly heard my sister’s voice, a few words tinged with a smiling melancholy, it was as if they came from another planet. “Do you remember? ‘Roast bartavels and ortolans, garnished with truffles’?”

  She laughed softly.

  And as for me, as I looked at her pale face with the winter sky reflected in her eyes, I felt my lungs fill with an entirely new air — that of Cherbourg — with the smell of salt mist, of wet pebbles on the beach, and the echoing cries of seagulls over the endless ocean. For a moment I was struck blind. The queue was moving forward, slowly pushing me on toward the door. I allowed this to happen without letting go of the moment of illumination expanding within me.

  Bartavels and ortolans … I smiled and gave my sister a discreet wink. It was not that we felt superior to the people squeezed together in the queue. We were like them, we may well have lived more modestly than many of them. We all belonged to the same class: that of people squelching about in trampled snow in the middle of a great industrial city, outside the doors of a shop, hoping to fill their bags with two kilos of oranges.

  And yet when I heard the magic words, learned from the banquet in Cherbourg, I felt different from them. Not because of my erudition (at the time I had no idea what these famous bartavels and ortolans looked like). It was simply that the moment held within me — with its misty lights and its marine smells — had put all that surrounded us into perspective: the city and its very Stalinist squareness, the anxious waiting, and the obtuse violence of the crowd. Instead of anger toward the people who had pushed me out I now felt a surprising compassion toward them: for by slightly screwing up their eyes, they could not gain access to that day with its fresh scents of seaweed, its cries of gulls, its veiled sun.… I was seized by a terrible desire to tell everybody about it. But how to tell it? I would need to invent a language that did not yet exist. For the moment I only knew the first two words: bartavels and ortolans.…

  5

  AFTER THE DEATH OF MY great-grandfather Norbert, the white immensity of Siberia had slowly closed in on Albertine. True, she returned to Paris two or three times more, taking Charlotte with her. But the planet of the snows never relinquished its hold on the souls who had fallen under the spell of its uncharted spaces and its slumbering time.

  Furthermore, the visits to Paris were marked by a bitterness that my grandmother’s stories did not manage to conceal. Some family quarrel, the reasons for which we were not given to know. Or perhaps a very European coldness in the relationships between close family members, inconceivable to us Russians, with our exuberant collectivism. Or quite simply the understandable attitude of unpretentious people toward one of four sisters, the adventuress of the family who, far from returning with a fair dream of gold, each time brought back the anguish of a barbarous country and a broken life.

  In any event, the fact that Albertine preferred to live at her brother’s apartment and not in the family home in Neuilly did not go unnoticed, even by us.

  Each time she returned to Russia, she felt more and more fated for Siberia — it was inevitable, a part of her own destiny. It was not only Norbert’s grave that bound her to this land of ice, but also that somber Russian life experience, whose intoxicating poison she felt entering her veins.

  From being a respectable doctor’s wife, known in the entire town, Albertine had become transformed into a most strangewidow — a Frenchwoman who seemed to find it hard to make up her mind to return to her country. Worse still, each time she came back again!

  She was still too young and too beautiful to avoid the malicious gossip of Boyarsk society. Too unusual to be accepted as she was. And soon too poor.

  Charlotte noticed that after each trip to Paris, they settled into smaller and smaller apartments. At the school where she had been admitted, thanks to a former patient of her father’s, she quickly became “that Lemonnier.” One day her teacher made her come to the blackboard — but not to test her… . When Charlotte stood before her, the lady looked at the little girl’s feet and, with a disdainful smile, asked, “What do you have on your feet, Mademoiselle Lemonnier?”

  The thirty pupils rose from their seats, craning their necks and staring. On the well-polished parquet floor they saw two woolen coverings, two “shoes” that Charlotte had concocted herself. Crushed by all these stares, Charlotte lowered her head and involuntarily screwed up her toes inside the socks, as if she wanted to make her feet disappear… .

  At that time they lived in an old izba on the outskirts of the town. Charlotte was no longer surprised to see her mother almost always stretched out upon a high peasant bed behind a curtain. When Albertine got up, the black shadows of dreams seethed in her eyes, even though they were open. She no longer even tried to smile at her daughter. She dipped a copper ladle into a bucket, drank deeply, and went out. Charlotte already knew that they had been surviving for a long time thanks to the glitter of a few jewels in the case with the mother
-of-pearl inlaid work… .

  She liked the izba, far from the fashionable districts of Boyarsk. Their poverty was less visible in these narrow, winding streets, buried under the snow. And it was so good, on returning from school, to climb up the old wooden steps that crunched under your feet; to pass through a dim entrance hall with walls made of great logs, which were covered in a thick coat of hoarfrost; and to push at the heavy door, which yielded with a brief, very lifelike groan. And there, in the room, one could remain for a moment without lighting the lamp, watching the little low window becoming suffused with the violet dusk, listening to snowy gusts of wind tinkling against the window-pane. Leaning back against the broad, hot flank of the big stove, Charlotte felt the heat slowly penetrating beneath her coat. She held her frozen hands to the warm stone — the stove seemed to her to be the enormous heart of this old izba. And beneath the soles of her felt boots the last lumps of ice were melting.

  One day a splinter of ice broke beneath her feet unusually loudly. Charlotte was surprised — she had already been home a good half hour, all the snow on her coat and her shapka had long since melted and dried out. But this icicle … She bent down to pick it up. It was a splinter of glass! A very fine one, from a broken medical vial… .

  It was thus that the terrible word morphine entered her life. It explained the silence behind the curtain, the seething shadows in her mother’s eyes, a Siberia absurd and inevitable as fate.

  Albertine no longer had anything to hide from her daughter. From now on it was Charlotte who would be seen going into the pharmacy and murmuring timidly, “It’s for Madame Lemonnier’s medicine… .”

  She always returned home alone, crossing the vast wastelands that separated their cluster of houses from the last streets of the town, with its shops and lighting. Often a snowstorm would descend on these dead spaces. Tired of struggling against a wind laden with ice crystals, deafened by its whistling, one evening Charlotte stopped in the midst of this desert of snow, turning her back on the squalls, her gaze lost in the giddy flight of the snowflakes. She had an intense awareness of her own life, the warmth of her thin body concentrated into a minuscule “I.” She felt the tickling of a drop that crept under the earflap of her shapka, and the beating of her heart, and next to her heart — the fragile presence of the vials she had just bought. “It’s me,” a muffled voice suddenly rang out inside her, “I, who am here in these snow squalls at the end of the world, in this Siberia, I, Charlotte Lemonnier; I, who have nothing in common with this barbarous place, not with this sky, nor with this frozen earth. Nor with these people. Here I am, all alone, taking morphine to my mother….” It seemed as if her mind were reeling before tipping over into an abyss, where all this absurdity, suddenly perceived, would become natural. She shook herself. No, this Siberian desert must end somewhere, and at that place there was a city, with broad avenues lined with chestnut trees, lighted cafés, her uncle’s apartment, and all those books that began with such dear words utterly beloved simply for the way their letters looked. There was France… .

  The city with chestnut-lined avenues was transformed into a fine spangle of gold that glittered in her eyes, but nobody noticed. Charlotte could even glimpse its brilliance in the reflection of a beautiful brooch on the dress of a young lady with a capricious and haughty smile: she was sitting in a fine armchair in the middle of a large room with elegant furniture and silk cushions at the windows. “La raison du plus fort est toujours meilleure,” recited the young woman in a pinched voice.

  “… est toujours la meilleure,” Charlotte corrected discreetly and, with lowered eyes, added, “It would be more correct to pronounce it ‘meilleure’ and not ‘meillaire.’ ‘Meill-eu-eure.’”

  She rounded her lips and made the sound last until it was lost in a velvety “r.” The young orator, with a sullen expression, resumed her declamation. This was the daughter of the governor of Boyarsk. Charlotte gave her French lessons every Wednesday. She had initially hoped that she might become the friend of this very well groomed adolescent, hardly older than herself. Now, no longer hoping for anything, she endeavored simply to give a good lesson. Her pupil’s swift, scornful glances did not find their mark anymore. Charlotte listened to her, intervening from time to time, but her gaze was lost in the glitter of the beautiful amber brooch. Only the governor’s daughter was allowed to wear an open-collared dress at school, with this adornment at its center. Conscientiously, Charlotte pointed out all the mistakes of pronunciation or grammar. And from the gilded depths of the amber arose a city with beautiful autumn foliage. She knew that for a whole hour she would have to bear the little grimaces of this great, plump, beautifully dressed child, and then, in the corner of the kitchen, receive from the hands of a maid her parcel, the leftovers from a meal; then she must wait in the street for a good opportunity to find herself alone with the pharmacist and murmur, “Madame Lemonnier’s medicine, please… .” The little puff of warm air stolen at the pharmacy would quickly be driven from under her coat by the icy blast of the wastelands.

  When Albertine appeared at the top of the steps the cabdriver raised his eyebrows and got up from his seat. He was not expecting this. The izba, with its sagging roof covered in moss; the worm-eaten flight of steps invaded by nettles. And especially not in this village, with its street buried under gray sand… .

  The door opened, and in its twisted frame there appeared a woman. She wore a long, extremely elegantly cut dress, such as the cabdriver had only seen on the fine ladies coming out of the theater in the evening right at the center of Boyarsk. Her hair was gathered up in a chignon; it was crowned with a large hat. The springlike wind fluttered the veil that was thrown back on the broad, gracefully turned-up brim.

  “We are going to the station!” she cried, further astonishing the taxi driver still more with the vibrant and very foreign resonance of her voice.

  “To the station,” repeated the little girl, who had just now hailed him in the street. She, on the other hand, spoke very good Russian, with a slight Siberian accent… .

  Charlotte knew that Albertine’s emergence at the top of the steps had been preceded by a long and painful battle, interrupted by several relapses — like the struggle of that man, battling in a black hole in the midst of the ice, which Charlotte had seen one day in spring, as she crossed the bridge. He clung to a long branch that was being pushed toward him and crawled up the slippery slope of the riverbank, sprawled flat on his stomach on the icy surface, progressing centimeter by centimeter, already stretching out his red hand, as he touched those of his rescuers. Suddenly, incomprehensively, his body shuddered, started to slip, and fell back once more into the black water. The current dragged him a little farther. Everything had to begin again… . Yes, like that man.

  But on that luminous and verdant summer’s afternoon their actions were lightness itself. “What about the big suitcase?” cried Charlotte, when they were installed on the seats.

  “We’ll leave it. It only has old papers in it, and all those newspapers of your uncle’s… . We’ll come back one day to collect it.”

  They crossed the bridge, passing beside the governor’s house. The Siberian town seemed to unfold like a strange past, where it was possible to forgive with a smile… .

  Once they were settled in Paris again, it was with just such a lack of bitterness that they would look back on Boyarsk. And when that summer Albertine resolved to return to Russia (in order, as her family understood, to put a definitive end to the Siberian period of her life), Charlotte even showed a little jealousy toward her mother: she too would have liked to spend a couple of weeks in that town, now perceived as being inhabited by people from their past, where the houses, their izba among them, were turning into monuments to days gone by. A town where nothing could hurt her anymore.

  “Maman, don’t forget to look and see if there is still a nest of mice there. Beside the stove, remember?” she called to her mother as she stood at the lowered window of the railway carriage.

  It wa
s July 1914. Charlotte was eleven.

  Her own life did not experience any interruption. It was simply that, as time went by, her last words (“Don’t forget the mice!”s) seemed to her more and more stupid and childish. She ought to have kept silent and scrutinized the face at the carriage window, feasted her eyes on its features. Months, years, passed, and that last remark still carried the same resonance of a foolish happiness. Now the only time in Charlotte’s life was waiting time.

  That time (“in wartime,” the newspapers wrote) was like a gray afternoon, a Sunday in the deserted streets of a provincial town: suddenly a gust of wind appears at the corner of a house, raising a whirlwind of dust; a shutter swings silently; a man melts easily into this colorless air, disappears without reason.

  Thus it was that Charlotte’s uncle disappeared — “fallen on the field of honor,” “dead for France,” according to the newspaper’s formula. And this form of words made his absence all the more disconcerting — like the pencil sharpener on his desk, with a pencil inserted in the hole and several fine parings undisturbed since his departure. Thus it was that the house at Neuilly gradually emptied — women and men would bend down to kiss Charlotte and, with a very serious air, tell her to be a good girl.

  That strange time had its capricious moments. All of a sudden, with the jerky rapidity of films, one of her aunts dressed herself in white and summoned her relatives, who gathered about her with all the speed of the cinema of that period. Then they headed off at a spanking pace to the church, where the aunt appeared beside a man with a mustache and sleek, oily hair. And almost at once — as Charlotte remembered it, they did not even have time to leave the church — the young bride was robed in black and unable to raise her eyes, which were weighed down with tears. The change was so rapid it seemed as if she had already been alone as she left the church, and dressed in full mourning, hiding her reddened eyes from the sun. The two days merged into one, colored by a radiant sky and enlivened by the church bells and the summer breeze, which seemed to accelerate the coming and going of the guests even more. And what the warm breeze pressed against the face of the young woman was a white bridal veil one moment and a widow’s black veil the next.