Dreams of My Russian Summers

by Andrei Makine

  We were discovering that a meal, yes, the simple intake of food, could become a theatrical production, a liturgy, an art. As at the Café Anglais on the boulevard des Italiens, where Charlotte’s uncle often dined with his friends. It was he who told his niece the story of that incredible bill of ten thousand francs for a hundred … frogs! “It was very cold,” he recalled; “all the rivers were covered in ice. They had to summon fifty workmen to disembowel that glacier and find the frogs.…” I did not know what amazed us most: this unimaginable dish, contrary to all our own gastronomic notions, or the regiment of muzhiks (which is how we pictured them) busy splitting blocks of ice on the frozen Seine.

  In truth, we were beginning to lose our heads: the Louvre; Le Cid at the Comédie-Française; the barricades; the shoot-out in the catacombs; the Académie Française; the deputies in a boat; and the comet; and the chandeliers, falling one after the other; and the Niagara of wines; and the president’s last embrace … And the frogs disturbed in their winter sleep! We were up against a people with a fabulous multiplicity of sentiments, attitudes, and viewpoints, as well as manners of speaking, creating, and loving.

  And then there was also the celebrated chef, Urbain Dubois, Charlotte told us, who had dedicated a shrimp and asparagus soup to Sarah Bernhardt. This obliged us to picture a borscht being dedicated to someone, like a book.… One day we followed a young dandy through the streets of Atlantis; he walked into Chez Weber, a very fashionable café, according to Charlotte’s uncle. He ordered what healways ordered: a bunch of grapes and a glass of water. It was Marcel Proust. We contemplated the grapes and the water, which, under our fascinated gaze, became transformed into fare of unequaled elegance. So it was not the variety of wines or the Rabelaisian abundance of food that counted, but …

  We thought again about that French spirit, the mystery of which we strove to fathom. And Charlotte, as if she desired to make our investigations even more frenzied, was already telling us about the Restaurant Paillard on the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, where the princesse de Caraman-Chimay eloped one evening with the Gypsy violinist Rigo.…

  Without daring to believe it yet, I asked myself a silent question: might not this much-sought-after French quintessence have as its source — love? For all roads in our Atlantis seemed to lead to the domain of Cupid.

  Saranza was sinking into the aromatic night of the steppes. Its scents were mingled with the perfume that embalmed a woman’s body swathed in precious stones and ermine. Charlotte was telling of the escapades of the divine Otero. With incredulous astonishment I contemplated this last great courtesan, all curves on her couch with its capricious shapes. Her extravagant life was devoted only to love. And around this throne buzzed men — some counting the last few louis d’or of their lost fortunes, others slowly raising the barrels of their revolvers to their temples. And even in this final gesture they could display an elegance worthy of Proust’s bunch of grapes. One of these unhappy lovers committed suicide on the very spot where he had first set eyes on Caroline Otero!

  In this exotic country, moreover, the cult of love knew no social boundaries: far from the boudoirs brimming with luxury, over in the working-class suburb of Belleville, we saw two rival gangs kill one another because of a woman. Sole difference: the beautiful Otero’s locks had the sheen of a raven’s wing, while the tresses of this disputed lover glowed like ripe corn in the setting sun. The bandits of Belleville called her “Casque d’or.”

  At that moment our critical sense rebelled. We were prepared to believe in the existence of frog eaters, but fancy gangsters slitting one another’s throats over a woman’s pretty face!

  Clearly this was nothing surprising for our Atlantis. Had we not already seen Charlotte’s uncle staggering as he emerged from a cab, his eyes dimmed, his arm swathed in a bloodstained kerchief? He had just been fighting a duel in the forest of Marly, defending a lady’s honor.… And then there was General Boulanger, the fallen dictator: did he not blow his brains out on the grave of his beloved?

  One day, returning from a walk, we were all three surprised by a shower of rain.… We were strolling in the old streets of Saranza, made up entirely of great izbas blackened with age. It was beneath the porch of one of them that we found refuge. The street, stifling with the heat a moment ago, was plunged into a chilly twilight, raked by flurries of hail. It was paved in the old style — with great round granite cobbles. The rain caused them to give off a strong smell of wet stone. The view of the houses was blurred behind a curtain of water — and, thanks to that smell, one could imagine oneself to be in a big city in the evening under autumn rain. Charlotte’s voice, at first hardly louder than the sound of the raindrops, seemed like an echo muted by the torrential downpour.

  “It was another shower of rain that led me to discover an inscription engraved on the damp wall of a house in the allée des Arbalétriers in Paris. We had taken refuge under a porch, my mother and I, and while we waited for the rain to stop, all we had in front of our eyes was this commemorative plaque. I learned the text by heart: In this passage, after leaving the Hôtel de Barbette, the duc Louis d’Orléans, brother of King Charles VI, was assassinated by Jean sans Peur, duc de Burgundy, on the night of November 23 to 24, 1407. … He was leaving after a visit to the queen, Isabeau de Bavière… .”

  Our grandmother fell silent, but in the whispering of the raindrops we could still hear these legendary names woven into a tragic monogram of love and death: Louis d’Orléans, Isabeau de Bavière, Jean sans Peur …

  Suddenly, without knowing why, I thought of the president. Avery very simple, obvious notion: it was that during all those cere-monies in honor of the imperial couple — yes, in the procession on the Champs-Elysées and in front of the tomb of Napoleon and at the Opéra — he had never stopped dreaming of her, his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil. He spoke with the tsar, made speeches, replied to the tsarina, exchanged glances with his wife. But she, at every moment, she was there.

  The rain streamed onto the mossy roof of the old izba that was sheltering us on its steps. I forgot where I was. The city I had once visited in the company of the tsar was transfigured before my eyes. Now I perceived it from the viewpoint of the president in love.

  That time, on leaving Saranza, I felt as if I were returning from an expedition. I was bringing back a sum of knowledge; a glimpse of their habits and customs; a description, still fragmentary, of the mysWterious civilization that was reborn each evening in the heart of the steppes.

  Every adolescent classifies things, a defensive reflex when faced with the complexity of the adult world as it sucks him in at the end of childhood. I was perhaps more prone to this than most. For the country I had to explore no longer existed, and I had to reconstitute the topography of its high places and its holy places through the thick fog of the past.

  I was especially proud of the gallery of human types that I now possessed in my collection. Apart from the president-lover, the deputies in a boat, and a dandy with his bunch of grapes, there were much humbler but no less unusual characters. The children for example, young mineworkers, their smiles ringed with black. A news vendor crying his wares (we did not dare to imagine a madman running through the streets crying “Pravda! Pravda!”). A dog barber who practiced his craft on the quays. A rural constable with his drum. Strikers gathering to be fed “Communist soup.” And even a dog turd salesman. I was very proud of knowing that this strange merchandise was used, at the time, to soften leather.…

  But my greatest initiation that summer was to understand how one could be French. The countless facets of this elusive identity had formed themselves into a living whole. It was a very well ordered mode of existence, despite its eccentric aspects.

  France was for me no longer a simple collection of curios but a tangible and solid entity of which a small part had one day been implanted inside me.

  8

  WHAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND is why she wanted to bury herself out there in that Saranac. Not at all. She could very well have lived
here, close to you… .”

  I almost leaped from my stool beside the television. For I understood so perfectly Charlotte’s reasons for being fond of her little provincial town. It would have been so easy to explain her choice to the adults gathered in our kitchen. I would have talked of the dry air of the steppe, whose silent transparency distilled the past. I would have spoken of the dusty streets that led nowhere, as they emerged, all of them, onto the small endless plain. Of the town where history, by decapitating churches and tearing down “architectural excesses,” had banished all notion of time. A town where living meant endlessly reliving one’s past, even while at the same time mechanically performing routine tasks.

  I said nothing. I was afraid of being banished from the kitchen. For some time now I had noticed that the adults tolerated my presence more readily. I seemed, at the age of fourteen, to have won the right to be present at their late-night conversations — on condition that I remained invisible. I was thrilled by this change, and the last thing I wanted to do was to jeopardize such a privilege.

  Charlotte’s name came up during these winter gatherings just as often as before. Yes, as previously, my grandmother’s life offered our guests a topic of conversation that satisfied everyone’s self-esteem.

  And besides, this young Frenchwoman had the advantage of concentrating within her life span the crucial moments in the history of our country. She had lived under the tsar and survived Stalin’s purges; she had come through the war and witnessed the fall of so many idols. In their eyes, her life, traced against the background of the empire’s bloodiest century, took on an epic dimension.

  And now this Frenchwoman, born at the other end of the world, was blankly contemplating the undulations of the sands beyond the open door of a railway carriage. (“But what the devil dragged her into that wretched desert?” my father’s friend, the wartime pilot, had exclaimed one day.) At her side, equally motionless, stood her husband, Fyodor. The draft rushing through the carriage brought no coolness, despite the speed of the train. They remained for a long moment in the light and heat of this embrasure. The wind pumiced their brows like sandpaper. The sun broke up the view into myriad flashes. But they did not move, as if they wanted a painful past to be erased by this scouring and burning. They had just left Burkhart.

  It was she too, after their return to Siberia, who spent interminable hours at a dark window, from time to time breathing on the thick layer of hoarfrost to preserve a little melted circle. Through this watery spy hole she saw a white nocturnal street. From time to time a car suddenly came gliding up, approached their house, and after a moment of indecision drove off. Three o’clock in the morning sounded, and a few minutes later she heard the sharp crunch of snow on the front steps. She closed her eyes for a moment, then went to open up. Her husband always came back at this time? . People sometimes disappeared at work, sometimes in the middle of the night, from home, after a black car had driven through the snow-covered streets. She was certain that as long as she waited at the window for him, blowing on the hoarfrost, nothing could happen to him. At three o’clock he would stand up, straighten out the files on his desk, and leave, like all the other public officials throughout the empire. They knew that in the Kremlin the master of the country finished his working day at three o’clock. Without thinking, everyone strove to imitate his timetable. And they did not stop to consider that between Moscow and Siberia, spanning several time zones, this “three o’clock in the morning” no longer corresponded to anything: that Stalin was rising from his bed and filling his first pipe of the day, while in a Siberian town at nightfall his faithful subjects struggled against sleep on chairs that were turning into instruments of torture. From the Kremlin the master seemed to impose his tempo on the passage of time and even on the sun. When he went to bed, all the clocks on the planet showed three o’clock in the morning. At least that was how everyone saw it at the time.

  On one occasion Charlotte, exhausted by these nightly vigils, fell asleep several minutes before this planetary hour. A moment later, waking with a start, she heard her husband’s footsteps in the children’s room. She went in and saw him bending over the bed of their son, this boy with smooth black hair who looked like no one else in the family… .

  They arrested Fyodor neither in his office in broad daylight nor in the small hours, interrupting his sleep with peremptory drumming on the door. It was on New Year’s Eve. He had rigged himself out in the red cloak of Father Christmas, and his face, unrecognizable beneath a long beard, fascinated the children: the boy of twelve and his younger sister — my mother. Charlotte was adjusting the big shake on her husband’s head when they came into the apartment. They entered without having to knock; the door was open; guests were expected.

  And this scene of an arrest, which had already been repeated millions of times during a single decade in the life of the country, had that evening as its setting the Christmas tree and these two children with their cardboard masks, he the hare, she the squirrel. And at the center of the room this Father Christmas, transfixed, only too able to guess at the outcome and almost happy that the children cannot see the pallor of his cheeks beneath the cotton-wool beard. In a very calm voice Charlotte says to the hare and the squirrel, who are looking at the intruders without removing their masks, “Come into the next room, children. You can set off the Bengal lights.”

  She had spoken in French. The two policemen exchanged significant glances… .Fyodor was saved by what logically ought to have been his downfall: his wife’s nationality… . When, some years earlier, people had begun to disappear, family by family, house by house, he had at once thought of this. Inherent in Charlotte were two grave faults, the ones most often imputed to “enemies of the people”: “bourgeois” origins and a link to abroad. Married to a “bourgeois element,” and worse still a Frenchwoman, he could see himself quite naturally accused of being “a spy in the pay of French and British imperialists.” The formula for some time had been standard.

  * * *

  However, it was on just this perfect evidence that the well-tried machinery of repression ground to a halt. For normally those who fabricated a case were supposed to prove that the accused had cunningly and for years concealed his links to abroad. And when they were dealing with a Siberian who spoke only his mother tongue, had never left his fatherland or met a representative of the capitalist world — such a proof, even if totally falsified, called for a certain adeptness.

  But Fyodor hid nothing. Charlotte’s passport indicated her nationality in black and white: French. Her birthplace, Neuilly-sur-Seine, in its Russian transliteration only served to emphasize her foreignness. Her trips to France, her “bourgeois” cousins who still lived there, her children who spoke French just as well as Russian — it was all too clear. The confessions that were normally false and extracted under torture after weeks of interrogation had this time been vouchsafed willingly from the beginning. The machinery marked time. Fyodor was imprisoned; then, as he became more and more of an embarrassment, posted to the other end of the empire, in a town annexed from Poland.

  They spent a week together — the time it took to travel across the country, and a long and chaotic day of moving into a new house. The next day Fyodor set off for Moscow to be reintegrated into the Party, from which he had been promptly expelled. “It’ll only take a couple of days,” he said to Charlotte, who went with him to the station. Returning home, she noticed that he had left his cigarette case behind. “It doesn’t matter,” she thought; “in two days’ time …” And this imminent moment (Fyodor would come into the room, see the cigarette case on the table, and, giving himself a little clout on the forehead, exclaim, “What an idiot! I’ve been looking everywhere for it… .”), yes, this June morning would be the first in a long stream of happy days… .

  They saw one another again four years later. And Fyodor never did recover his cigarette case, which, in the midst of war, Charlotte exchanged for a loaf of black bread.

  The adults talked. The televisio
n, with its gung-ho news programs, its reports of the latest achievements of the nation’s industry, its Bolshevik concerts, provided a soothing background. The vodka mitigated the bitterness of the past. And I felt that our guests, even new arrivals, all cherished this Frenchwoman who had accepted the destiny of their country without flinching.

  I learned a lot from these stories. I now guessed why in our family the New Year’s celebrations always had a whiff of anxiety about them, like a sly draft making the doors slam in an empty house at twilight. Despite my father’s gaiety, despite the presents, the noise of fireworks, and the glittering of the tree, this impalpable malaise was there. As if amid the toasts, the popping of corks, and the laughter, someone’s arrival were expected. I believe that, without admitting it to themselves, our parents even welcomed the snowy and humdrum calm of the first days of January with relief. In any event, it was certainly this moment after the holidays that my sister and I preferred to the holiday itself… .

  My grandmother’s Russian days — those days that, at a given moment, ceased to be a “Russian phase” before a return to France and simply became her life — had for me a secret flavor that the others were not aware of. It was a sort of invisible aura that Charlotte carried within her throughout the past, resurrected in our smoke-filled kitchen. I said to myself with marveling astonishment, “This woman who for months waited at a window covered in ice for the famous three a.m. knock, this woman was the same being, both mysterious and so close to me, who had one day seen silver scallop dishes in a café in Neville!”

  Whenever they spoke of Charlotte they never forgot to tell the story of that morning… .

  * * *

  It was her son who woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. He jumped out of his folding bed and walked barefoot, holding out his arms in front of him, toward the window. As he crossed the room in the dark he bumped into his sister’s bed. Charlotte was not asleep either. She had been lying with her eyes open in the blackness, trying to understand where the dense and monotonous hum might be coming from that seemed to impregnate the walls with a dull throbbing. She felt her body and her head vibrating in this slow and glutinous sound. The children woke and rushed to the window. Charlotte heard her daughter’s astonished cry: “Oh look! All those stars! But they’re moving… .”