Dreams of My Russian Summers

by Andrei Makine

  Later this eerie time resumed its regular pace and was punctuated with sleepless nights and a long procession of mutilated bodies. The passing hours now echoed with the resonance of the big classrooms in the school at Neuilly, converted into a hospital. Her first knowledge of a man’s body was the sight of male flesh, torn and bloody… . And the nocturnal sky of those years would be forever overhung with the pallid monstrosity of two German zeppelins among the luminous stalagmites of the searchlights.

  Finally there came a day, on July 14, 1919, when countless columns of soldiers came marching through Neuilly, heading for the capital. Spick and span, with brave looks and well-polished armyboots: war was resuming the guise of a parade. Was he among them, that warrior who was to slip a little brown pebble into Charlotte’s hand, that shell splinter covered in rust? Were they lovers? Engaged?

  This encounter did not alter Charlotte’s decision, made several years earlier. At the first opportunity that came along, a miraculous opportunity, she left for Russia. There was still no communication with that country ravaged by civil war. It was 1921. A Red Cross mission was preparing to travel to the Volga region, where famine had claimed hundreds of thousands of victims. Charlotte was taken on as a nurse. Her application had been quickly accepted: volunteers for the expedition were rare. But above all, she spoke Russian.

  Once over there she believed that she had come to know hell. In the distance it looked like peaceful Russian villages — izbas, wells, hedges — swathed in the mists of the great river. Close to, it froze into shots taken by the mission photographer in those somber days: a group of male and female peasants in lambskin greatcoats, transfixed before a heap of human carcasses, dismembered bodies, unrecognizable fragments of flesh. Then this naked child in the snow with long, tangled hair, an old man’s piercing stare, and the body of an insect. Finally, on an icy road — that head, alone, with open eyes, glassy. Worst of all, these pictures did not remain fixed. The photographer folded up his tripod, and the peasants left, stopping outside the frame of the photo — that terrifying photo of the cannibals ’ and resumed the daily round of their lives with all its disconcerting simplicity. Yes, they continued living! A woman bent over the child and recognized him as her son. And she did not know what to do with this old-man-insect, she who for weeks had fed on human flesh. Then what could be heard arising from her throat was the howl of a wolf. No photo could capture that cry… . A peasant looked into the eyes of the head thrown down onto the road and sighed. Then he leaned over and with a clumsy hand thrust it into a great homespun sack. “I’ll bury it,” he muttered. “After all, we’re not Tartars… .”

  And you had to go into the izbas of this tranquil hell to discover that the old woman watching the street through the window was the mummified corpse of a girl who had died several weeks previously, seated at that window in the vain hope of rescue.

  Once back in Moscow Charlotte left the mission. Walking out of the hotel, she plunged into the motley throng on the square and disappeared. At Sukharevka market, where barter was king, she exchanged a silver five-franc piece (the trader marked the coin with his molar, then made it ring on the blade of an ax) for two loaves of bread, which would provide for the first days of her journey. She was already dressed like a Russian, and at the station, in the violent and disorderly assault on the carriages, nobody paid any attention to this young woman hitching up her knapsack and fighting her way into the frenetic heavings of the human chaos.

  She set off and she saw everything. She braved the country’s endlessness, its fleeting space in which days and years are swallowed up. She went forward nonetheless, squelching through this stagnant time. By train, by farm cart, on foot …

  She saw everything. Horses in harness, a whole herd of them, galloping riderless across a plain, stopping for a moment, then taking fright and resuming their mad race, both happy and fearful at their new-won liberty. One of these fugitives caught everyone’s eye. A saber, deeply embedded in the saddle, stood erect upon its back. As the horse galloped, the long blade jammed into the thick leather swayed pliantly, glittering in the sinking sun. People kept their eyes fixed on the scarlet flashes, which gradually faded in the mist of the fields. They knew that this saber, its hilt filled with lead, must have cut a body in two — from shoulder to stomach — before becoming stuck in the leather. And the two halves had slipped off into the trampled grass, one each side.

  She also saw dead horses being hauled out of wells. And new wells being dug in the thick, heavy earth. The timbers of the cage that the peasants lowered to the bottom of the pit smelled of fresh wood.

  She saw a group of villagers, under the direction of a man in a black leather jacket, pulling on a thick rope wound round the cupola of a church, round the cross. The repeated cracking sounds seemed to fire their enthusiasm. And in another village, very early in the morning, she saw an old woman kneeling before the dome of a church cast down among the tombs of an unfenced cemetery, open to the fragile resonance of the fields.

  She went through deserted villages where the orchards were glutted with overripe fruit, falling into the grass or withering on the bough. She stayed in a town where, one day at the market, a salesman mutilated a child who had tried to steal an apple from him. All the men she encountered seemed either to be rushing toward an unknown goal, mobbing trains, getting crushed on landing stages, or else waiting, one never knew for whom, before the closed doors of shops, at gates guarded by soldiers, and sometimes quite simply by the roadside.

  The space she confronted knew no happy medium: incredible throngs of people would suddenly give way to a complete wilderness where the immensity of the sky and the depth of the forests made the presence of man unthinkable. Then without transition this emptiness would run into a ferocious jostling of peasants, slithering about on the muddy bank of a river, swollen by the autumn rains. That was something else Charlotte saw. Angry peasants with long poles pushing away a barge, from which arose an unceasing lament. On board could be seen silhouettes holding out their emaciated hands toward the shore. They were victims of typhus, abandoned, who had been drifting on their floating cemetery for several days. At each attempt to go ashore the bank dwellers mobilized to prevent them from doing so. The barge continued its funerary voyage; the people were dying from hunger now as well. Soon they would no longer have the strength to attempt a landing, and the last survivors, woken one day by the powerful and rhythmic sound of the waves, would behold the indifferent horizon of the Caspian Sea… .

  At the edge of a wood, one glittering frosty morning, she saw shadows hanging from the trees, saw the emaciated rictuses of hanged men nobody had any thought of burying. And very high up, in the sunlit blue of the sky, a flock of migratory birds was slowly melting away, accentuating the silence with the echo of their noisy cries.The heavy and syncopated breathing of this Russian world no longer terrified her. She had learned so much since she began her journey. She knew that in a railway carriage or on a farm wagon it was practical to carry a bag stuffed with straw, with a few pebbles right at the bottom. This was what the bandits would snatch in their nocturnal raids. She knew that the best place on the roof of a railway carriage was the one near the ventilation hole: it was to this opening that ropes were attached, which enabled you to get down and climb up again quickly. And when by good fortune she found a place in a crowded corridor, she would not be surprised to see a frightened child being passed from hand to hand toward the exit by the people piled on the ground floor. The ones crouched near the door would open it and hold the child above the footboard while it did its business. This passing down the line seemed rather to amuse them: they smiled, touched by this little creature wordlessly allowing itself to be handled in this way, moved by its very natural urge in this inhuman universe…. No surprise either when whispering was heard above the clatter of the rails in the night: they were communicating the death of a passenger, lost deep among this confusion of lives.

  * * *

  Only once in the course of this long journ
ey, punctuated by suffering, blood, illness, mud, did she believe she had caught a glimpse of a modicum of serenity and wisdom. She had already reached the far side of the Urals. On the way out of a village half consumed by a fire she saw several men sitting on a bank scattered with dead leaves. Their pale faces, turned toward the mild late autumn sun, radiated a blissful calm. The peasant who was driving the cart jerked his head and explained softly, “Poor people, there are a dozen of them wandering round here now. Their asylum was burnt down. Oh, yes, madmen, you know.”

  Nothing could surprise her anymore, nothing.

  Often, squeezed into the airless darkness of a railway carriage, she had a dream — brief, luminous, and completely improbable. For example, those enormous camels in falling snow, turning their disdainful heads toward a church as four soldiers emerged from the door, dragging behind them a priest who was admonishing them in a broken voice. The camels with snow-covered humps, the church,the gleeful crowd… . As she slept, Charlotte recalled that time was when such humped silhouettes would be inseparable from palm trees in the desert, oases… .

  Then she emerged from her torpor: and it was not a dream! She was actually standing there in the midst of a noisy market in an unknown town. The heavy snow clung to her eyelashes. Passersby came up and felt the little silver medallion she was hoping to exchange for bread. The camels towered over the swarming traders, like strange drakkar ships mounted on stilts. And under the amused stares of the crowd the soldiers were pushing the priest along in a sledge stuffed with straw.

  After that spurious dream the evening stroll she took was so ordinary, so real. She crossed a street with paving stones that shone by the misty light of a street lamp, pushed open the door of a baker’s shop. Its warm, well-lit interior seemed familiar to her, right down to the color of the varnished wood of the counter and the arrangement of the cakes and chocolates in the window. The shopkeeper smiled kindly at her, as she would to a regular customer, and offered her a loaf. In the street Charlotte stopped, overcome with perplexity. She should have bought much more bread! Two, three, no, four loaves! She should have noted the name of the street where this excellent bakery was located. She approached the corner house and looked up. But the letters had an odd, hazy look: they merged into one another, twinkled. “Oh, how stupid I am!” she suddenly thought. “This is the street where my uncle lives… .”

  She woke with a start. The train, stopped in open countryside, was filled with a confused hubbub: a gang had killed the driver and was currently working its way through the train, confiscating everything it could lay its hands on. Charlotte took off her shawl and covered her head, knotting the corners under her chin as old peasant women do. Then, still smiling at the memory of her dream, she placed on her lap a bag stuffed with old rags wrapped round a stone… .

  And if she was spared during those two months of her journey, it was because the immense continent she was crossing was sated with blood. Death, for several years at least, was losing its attraction, becoming too banal and no longer worth the effort.

  Charlotte walked through Boyarsk, the Siberian town of her childhood, without wondering if this was still a dream or reality. She felt too weak to think about it.

  On the governor’s house, above the entrance, hung a red flag. Two soldiers armed with guns were stamping their feet in the snow on either side of the door… . Some of the windows in the theater had been broken and blocked, for want of anything better, with pieces of scenery as reinforcement. Here one could see foliage covered with white blossom, probably from The Cherry Orchard, there the facade of a dacha. And above the gateway two workmen were engaged in stretching a long strip of red calico. “Everyone to the People’s Meeting of the Atheists’ Society!” Charlotte read, slowing her pace a little. One of the workmen took out a nail he was holding between clenched teeth and drove it in with force beside the exclamation mark.

  “There you are, you see; all finished before nightfall, thank God!” he called to his comrade.

  Charlotte smiled and continued on her way. No, she was not dreaming.

  A soldier, posted near the bridge, barred her way and asked her to show him her papers. Charlotte obliged him. He took them and, probably being unable to read, decided to withhold them from her. He seemed, moreover, quite surprised himself by his own decision. “You can recover them from the Revolutionary Council after the necessary verifications,” he announced, visibly repeating somebody else’s words. Charlotte did not have the strength to argue.

  Here at Boyarsk, winter had taken hold some time ago. But that day the air was mild, the ice under the bridge covered with large damp patches. First sign of thaw. And great lazy snowflakes fluttered down in the white silence of the wastelands she had crossed so many times in her childhood.

  With its two narrow windows, the izba seemed to observe her from afar. Yes, the house was watching her approach, its wrinkled facade lit up with an imperceptible little grimace, with a bitter joy of reunion.

  Charlotte hoped for little from this visit. For a long time she had prepared herself to receive the news that would leave no hope: death, madness, disappearance. Or a pure and simple absence, inexplicable, natural, surprising no one. She forbade herself to hope and hoped all the same.

  In the last days her exhaustion had been such that she thought only of the warmth of the great stove, against whose flank she would lean her back as she collapsed on the floor.

  From the izba steps she caught sight of an old woman underneath a stunted apple tree, her head muffled in a black shawl. Bent over, the woman was pulling at a thick branch buried in the snow. Charlotte called to her, but the old peasant woman did not turn round. Her voice was too weak and was quickly dissipated in the heavy air of the thaw. She felt incapable of uttering another sound.

  With a thrust of her shoulder she pushed the door. In the dark, cold hall she saw a whole store of wood — planks from boxes, floor-boards, and even, in a little black-and-white heap, the keys of a piano. Charlotte remembered that it was above all the pianos in the apartments of the rich that provoked the anger of the people. She had seen one, smashed with blows of an ax, frozen into the ice floes on a river… .

  On entering the room, her first gesture was to touch the stones of the stove. They were warm. Charlotte felt a pleasantly giddy sensation. She was already about to let herself slip down beside the stove when she noticed an open book on the table made of broad timbers, browned with the years. A little ancient volume with rough paper. Leaning on a bench, she bent over the open pages. Strangely the letters began to dance, to melt — as they had done during that night on the train when she dreamed of the Parisian street where her uncle lived. This time the cause was not a dream, but tears. It was a French book.

  The old woman in the black shawl came in and seemed not to be surprised to see this slim young woman rising from her bench.The dry branches she carried under her arm trailed long filaments of snow on the floor. Her withered face resembled that of one of the old peasant women of that Siberian country. Her lips, covered in a fine network of wrinkles, trembled. And it was from this mouth, from the desiccated breast of this unrecognizable being, that the voice of Albertine rang out, a voice of which not a single note had altered.

  “All these years I only dreaded one thing: that you might come back here!”

  These were the very first words that Albertine addressed to her daughter. And Charlotte understood: what they had lived through since their good-byes on the station platform eight years before, a whole host of actions, faces, words, sufferings, privations, hopes, anxieties, cries, tears — all that buzz of life resounded against a single echo, which refused to die. This meeting, so desired, so feared.

  “I wanted to ask someone to write to you and say I was dead. But there was the war, then the revolution. Then war again. And then …”

  “I wouldn’t have believed the letter… .”

  “Yes, I told myself that you wouldn’t have believed it in any case… .”

  She threw down the bran
ches near the stove and approached Charlotte. When she had looked at her through the lowered window of the railway carriage in Paris, her daughter was eleven. Now, soon she would be twenty.

  “Do you hear?” whispered Albertine, her face lighting up, and she turned toward the stove. “The mice, you remember? They’re still there… .”

  Later, squatting in front of the fire that was coming to life be-hind the little cast iron door, Albertine murmured, as if to herself, without looking at Charlotte, who was stretched out on the bench and appeared to be asleep: “That’s how it is in this country. You can come in easily but you never get out… .”

  Hot water seemed like a whole new, unknown substance. Charlotte held out her hands toward the trickle that her mother poured slowly onto her shoulders and her back from a copper scoop. In thedarkness of that room, which was lit only by the flame of a burning wood shaving, the warm drops looked like pine resin and tickled Charlotte’s body deliciously as she rubbed herself with a lump of blue clay. Of soap they retained only a vague memory.

  “You’ve become very thin,” Albertine said softly, and her voice broke off.

  Charlotte laughed gently. As she lifted her head of wet hair, she saw tears of the same amber color shining in her mother’s lackluster eyes. During the days that followed Charlotte tried to find out how they could leave Siberia (superstitiously she dared not say, return to France). She went to the former house of the governor. The soldiers at the entrance smiled at her: a good sign? The secretary of the new ruler of Boyarsk made her wait in a little room — the same, thought Charlotte, where once she used to wait for the parcel of leftovers from lunch… .