Dreams of My Russian Summers

by Andrei Makine

  During his rounds, he examined the wound and in a very natural tone said to the nurses, “We shall have to put a plaster on it. Just one layer. Carlota will do it before she leaves.”

  Hope returned when, a year and a half after the first notification of death, she received another. Fyodor could not have been killed twice, she thought, so perhaps he was alive. This double death became a promise of life. Without saying anything to anyone, Charlotte prepared to wait.

  He came back, arriving not from the west at the start of the summer, like most of the soldiers, but from the Far East, in September, after the defeat of Japan… .

  From being a town close to the front line, Saranac was transformed into a peaceful place, reverting to its sleep of the steppes beyond the Volga. Charlotte lived there alone: her son (my uncle Sergey) had entered a military academy; her daughter (my mother) had left for the nearest city, like all the students who wanted to continue their studies.

  On a balmy September evening she left the house and walked into the empty street. She wanted to pick some stalks of wild dill at the edge of the steppe for her salted preserves before nightfall. It was on the way back that she saw him. She was carrying a bunch of the tall plants surmounted with yellow umbels. Her dress and her body were permeated with the clarity of the silent fields, with the fluid light of the sunset. The strong scent of the dill and the dry plants clung to her fingers. By now she knew that this life, despite all its pain, could be lived, that one must travel through it slowly; passing from the sunset to the penetrating odor of the stalks; from the infinite calm of the plain to the singing of a bird lost in the sky; yes, going from the sky to that deep reflection of it that she felt within her own breast, as an alert and living presence. And one must even pay heed to the warmth of the dust on this little path leading toward Saranac… .

  She raised her eyes and saw him. He was walking toward her, still a long way off, far up the road. If Charlotte had welcomed him on the threshold of the room, if he had opened the door and stepped inside, as she had imagined it for so long, as all the soldiers did when they came back from the war, in life or in films, then she would doubtless have uttered a cry, would have hurled herself at him, clinging to his shoulder belt, would have wept… .

  But he appeared very far away, making himself known little by little, giving his wife the time to come to terms with the road nowrendered unrecognizable by the silhouette of a man whose uncertain smile she could already make out. They did not run, they exchanged no words, they did not kiss. It seemed as if they had been walking toward each another for an eternity. The road was empty; the evening light, reflected by the golden foliage of the trees, was of an unreal transparency. Stopping near him, she gently waved her bouquet. He nodded his head, as if to say, “Yes, yes, I understand.” He was not wearing a shoulder belt, just one at his waist, with a buckle of tarnished bronze. His boots were red with dust.

  Charlotte lived on the ground floor of an old wooden house. From year to year, for a century, the ground had been rising imperceptibly and the house subsiding, so much so that the window of her room scarcely came above the level of the pavement? . They entered in silence. Fyodor put down his pack on a stool, made to speak, but said nothing, only cleared his throat, bringing his fingers to his lips. Charlotte began to prepare a meal.

  She surprised herself by replying to his questions without thinking (they talked about bread, about ration cards, about life in Saranac); by offering him tea, by smiling when he said, “All the knives in this house need sharpening.” But as she took part in this first, still hesitant conversation she was elsewhere. In a profound absence where quite different words were being uttered: “This man with short hair that looks as if it were sprinkled with chalk is my husband. I have not seen him for four years. They buried him twice — first in the battle of Moscow, then in the Ukraine. He is here, he has come back. I ought to weep for joy. I ought to … His hair is quite gray....” She guessed that he, too, was far away from their conversation about ration cards. He had come home when the lights of victory had long since gone out. Life was resuming its daily round. He was coming back too late. Like an absentminded man who, invited to lunch, arrives at dinnertime and surprises the mistress of the house as she is saying her farewells to the last of the lingering guests. “I must look very old to him,” Charlotte thought suddenly. But not even this idea could disrupt the strange lack of emotion in her heart, this indifference that left her puzzled.

  She wept only when she saw his body. After the meal she heated water and brought out a zinc basin, the little child’s bath, which she placed in the middle of the room. Fyodor crouched in this gray vessel, whose bottom yielded underfoot, emitting a vibrant sound. And as she poured a trickle of warm water onto the body of her husband, who clumsily rubbed his shoulders and his back, Charlotte began to weep. The tears coursed down her face, whose features remained immobile, and they fell, mixing with the soapy water in the basin.

  This body was that of a man she did not know. A body riddled with scars, with gashes — some of them deep, with fleshy edges, like huge voracious lips, some with a smooth shiny surface, like a snail’s trail. In one of the shoulder blades a cavity had been dug: Charlotte knew what type of little jagged shell splinters did that. The pink traces of the stitches of a suture surrounded one shoulder, losing themselves in his chest… .

  Through her tears she viewed the room as if for the first time: a window at ground level; the bunch of dill, already a relic from another epoch in her life; a soldier’s pack on the stool near the hall; great boots covered with red dust. And beneath a bare and dim bulb, in the midst of this room half sunk in the ground — this unrecognizable body, as if torn by the wheels of a machine. Stunned words formed unconsciously within her: “this is me, Charlotte Lemonier, here in this isobar buried beneath the grass of the steppes, with this man, this soldier, whose body is lacerated with wounds, the father of my children, the man I love so much… . this is me, Charlotte Lemonier …”

  Across one of Fyodor’s eyebrows there was a broad white gash, which, as it grew narrower, made a line across his forehead. It gave him a permanently surprised expression. As if he simply could not manage to get used to this postwar life.

  He lived for less than a year… . In winter they moved into the apartment where, as children, we were to come and stay with Charlotte every summer. They did not even have time to buy new crockery and cutlery. Fyodor cut the bread with the knife he had brought back from the front, fashioned from a bayonet… . As I listened to the adults’ stories, this was how I pictured our grandfather during that incredibly brief reunion: a soldier climbs the steps to the isobar. His gaze is lost in his wife’s, and he has just time to say, “You see, I have come back … ,” before collapsing and dying of his wounds.

  * * *

  9

  THAT YEAR FRANCE ENVELOPED me in deep and studious isolation. At the end of the summer I had returned from Saranza, like a young explorer with a thousand and one discoveries in my luggage — from Proust’s bunch of grapes to the plaque bearing witness to the tragic death of the duc d’Orléans. In the autumn and particularly during the winter I turned myself into a fanatic of erudition, an archivist obsessively gleaning all possible information about the country whose mystery he had only managed to scratch the surface on his summer excursion.

  I read everything of interest about France that our school library possessed. I immersed myself in the much vaster shelves of our city library. I sought to complement the broad outlines of Charlotte’s impressionistic stories with a systematic study, progressing from one century to another, from one Louis to the next, from one novelist to his colleagues, disciples, or imitators.

  These long days spent in dusty book-lined labyrinths doubtless corresponded to a monkish inclination that everyone feels at that age. One seeks escape before being caught up in the toils of adult life. One remains alone in order to enjoy fantasies about amorous adventures to come. This waiting, this reclusive life, soon becomes painful. Hence
the swarming, tribal collectivism of adolescents — a feverish attempt to act out all the scenarios of adult society in advance. Rare are those who at the age of thirteen or fourteen know how to resist the role-playing that is imposed on the loners and the dreamers, withall the cruelty and intolerance of those who were but children yesterday.

  It was thanks to my French quest that I managed to preserve my own attentive isolation as an adolescent.

  Sometimes the society in miniature of my schoolfellows displayed a careless condescension toward me (I was “not mature,” I did not smoke, and I did not tell salacious stories in which the male and female genital organs became characters in their own right); sometimes an aggressiveness, whose collective violence left me stunned. I did not feel I was very different from the others; I did not feel I merited so much hostility. It is true that I did not go into raptures about the films that their minisociety discussed during breaks, and I could not tell apart the football teams of which they were passionate supporters. My ignorance offended them. They perceived it as a challenge. They attacked me with their taunts and with their fists. It was during that winter that I became aware of a disconcerting truth: to harbor this distant past within oneself, to let one’s soul live in this legendary Atlantis, was not guiltless. No, it was well and truly a challenge, a provocation in the eyes of those who lived in the present. One day, worn out with the bullying, I pretended to take an interest in the latest match score; I joined in their conversation and mentioned several players’ names, learned the previous day. But everyone smelled the imposture. The discussion broke off. The mini-society dispersed. I earned several almost pitying looks. I felt even more undervalued.

  After this pathetic attempt I plunged even deeper into my research and my reading. Fleeting glimpses of Atlantis over the years were not enough for me. Henceforth I aspired to know the intimate details of its history. Wandering through the caverns of our ancient library, I sought to throw light on the reasons for that extravagant marriage between Henri I and the Russian princess Anna. I wanted to know what on earth her father, the celebrated Yaroslav the Wise, could have sent as a dowry. And how he managed to transport herds of horses from Kiev to his French son-in-law when he was attacked by the warlike Normans. And how Anna Yaroslavna spent her days in the somber medieval castles, where she so lamented the absence of Russian baths.… I was no longer content with the tragic story depicting the death of the duc d’Orléans beneath the windows of the fair Isabeau. No, I now set off in pursuit of his murderer, this Jean sans Peur, whose lineage had to be traced; military exploits verified; dress and weapons reconstructed; landholdings located.… I learned by how much maréchal Grouchy’s divisions were delayed, those few extra hours more, fatal for Napoleon at Waterloo.…

  Of course the library, a hostage of ideology, was very unevenly stocked. I only found a single book there on the period of Louis XIV, whereas the shelves next door offered a score of volumes devoted to the Paris Commune and a dozen on the birth of the French Communist Party. But, hungry for knowledge, I contrived to thwart this manipulation of history. I turned to literature. The great French classics were there and, with the exception of a few famous proscribed authors, like Rétif de la Bretonne, or Sade, or Gide, they had in the main escaped censorship.

  My youth and my inexperience made a fetishist of me: rather than grasping history’s features, I was a collector. And in particular I sought anecdotes, like those recounted to tourists by guides at ancient monuments. In my collection were Théophile Gautier’s red waistcoat, worn at the first night of Hernani; Balzac’s walking sticks; George Sand’s hookah, and the scene of her treachery in the arms of a doctor, who was supposed to be attending Musset. I admired her elegance in providing her lover with the subject for Lorenzaccio. I never tired of mentally reviewing the sequences, full of images, that my memory recorded, albeit in great disorder. Like the one where Victor Hugo, the grizzled and melancholy patriarch, met Leconte de Lisle under the canopy in a park. “Do you know what I was just thinking about?” the patriarch asked. And, perceiving his interlocutor’s confusion, he declared roundly, “I was thinking about what I shall say to God when, very soon perhaps, I enter His Kingdom.…” To which Leconte de Lisle, at once ironic and respectful, asserted confidently, “Oh, you will say to him, ‘Cher confrère …’”Strangely enough, it was somebody who knew nothing of France, who had never read a single French author — someone who could not, I am sure, have located that country on the map of the world — he was the one who involuntarily helped me to get away from collecting anecdotes by steering my quest into quite a new direction. It was the dunce who had one day told me that if Lenin had no children, it was because he did not know how to make love.…

  * * *

  The mini-society of our class treated him with just as much scorn as it did me, but for quite different reasons. They detested him because he presented them with a very unattractive image of adulthood. Two years older than us, and thus at that age the freedoms of which my fellow pupils looked forward to, and yet my friend the dunce scarcely profited from them at all. Pashka, as everyone called him, led the life of those strange muzhiks who cling until their death to an element of childishness that contrasts strongly with their wild and virile physique. They obstinately avoid the city, society, and comfort; they merge into the forest and often end their days there, as hunters or vagabonds.

  Pashka brought into the classroom the smells of fish, of snow, and, at the time of the thaw, of clay. He spent whole days squelching about on the banks of the Volga. And if he came to school it was only so as not to upset his mother. Always late, oblivious of the scornful glances of the future adults, he crossed the classroom and slid behind his desk, right at the back. The pupils sniffed pointedly as he passed; the mistress raised her eyes heavenwards, with a sigh. The smell of snow and wet earth slowly filled the room.

  Our status as pariahs in the society of our class ended by uniting us. Without becoming friends, properly speaking, we took note of both our solitudes and saw in them, as it were, a sign of recognition. From now on I often found myself accompanying Pashka in his fishing expeditions on the snow-covered shores of the Volga. He bored a hole in the ice with the aid of a powerful brace and bit, cast his line into the hole, and remained motionless above this round opening, which revealed the green thickness of the ice. I would imagine a fish at the far end of this narrow tunnel, sometimes a meter deep, cautiously approaching the bait.… Perch with striped backs, speckled pike, roach with bright red tails, all rose up through the bore hole, were released from the hook, and fell onto the snow. After several somersaults their bodies stiffened, frozen by the icy wind. Their dorsal spines became covered in crystals, like fantastic diadems. We spoke little. The great calm of the snowy plains, the silvery sky, and the deep slumber of the great river rendered words useless.

  Sometimes Pashka, in his search for a spot with more fish, drew dangerously close to the long slabs of dark ice, humid, undermined by springs.… Hearing a crack, I would turn and see my comrade struggling in the water, digging with splayed-out fingers into the grainy snow. Running toward him, a few meters away from the breach, I would lie flat on my stomach and throw him the end of my scarf. Generally Pashka managed to escape before I could help him. Like a porpoise, he hurled himself out of the water and fell with his chest on the ice, then crawled away, leaving a long wet trail. But occasionally, probably just to please me, no doubt, he caught hold of my scarf and allowed himself to be rescued.

  After a ducking like this we would go to one of the carcasses of old boats that could be seen, here and there, projecting out of the snowdrifts. We lit great wood fires in their blackened entrails. Pashka removed his large felt boots and his padded trousers and put them close to the flames. Then, with his bare feet resting on a plank, he began to grill the fish.

  It was over these wood fires that we became more talkative. He told me of extraordinary fishing exploits (a fish too big to pass through the hole pierced by the brace and bit!); of thaws that,
in the deafening breakup of the ice, carried away boats and uprooted trees and even izbas with cats clinging to the roof.… I told him about tournaments between knights (I had just learnt that the warriors of old, on removing their helmets after a joust, had their faces covered in rust: iron plus sweat. I don’t know why, but this detail thrilled me more than the tournament itself ). Yes, I talked to him about those manly features accentuated with streaks of rust and about that young hero who sounded his horn three times to summon reinforcements. I knew that, as Pashka paced up and down on the banks of the Volga,in both summer and winter, he secretly dreamed of expanses of open sea. I was glad to find for him in my French collection the terrifying fight between a sailor and an enormous octopus. And, as my erudition was essentially nourished by anecdotes, I told him one suitably in keeping with his passion and our haven in the carcass of an old boat. Once on a perilous sea an English warship met a French vessel, and before embarking on a battle with no quarter, the English captain addressed his historic enemies, cupping his hands around his mouth: “You, Frenchmen, fight for money. But we, subjects of the Queen, we fight for honor!” Then from the French vessel this jovial riposte of the captain’s could be heard blowing across in a gust of salt wind: “Each man fights for what he does not have, sir!”

  One day he very nearly drowned for real. A whole slab of ice — we were in the midst of the thaw — gave way beneath his feet. Only his head appeared above the water, then an arm, seeking a nonexistent support. With a violent effort he hurled his chest up onto the ice, but the porous surface cracked beneath his weight. The current was already dragging on his legs; his boots were full of water. I did not have time to unroll my muffler; I lay flat on the snow, I crawled; I held out my hand to him. It was at that moment that I saw a brief glimmer of fear pass through his eyes.… I believe he would have escaped without my help; he was too seasoned, too close to the forces of nature, to allow himself to be trapped by them. But this time he took my hand without his customary grin.