Dreams of My Russian Summers

by Andrei Makine

  But we continued to pour useless words and hollow remarks into the silence, as if into a sieve of the Danaids: “It’s hotter than yesterday! Gavrilych is drunk again… . The Kukushka hasn’t gone past this evening… . There’s a fire over there on the steppe, look! No, it’s a cloud… . I’ll make some more tea… . Today at the market they were selling watermelons from Uzbekistan… .”

  The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked, I now understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in this world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words, seemed to me essential. The unsayable was essential.

  This equation created a kind of intellectual short circuit in my head. Its conciseness led me that summer to a terrible truth: “People speak because they are afraid of silence. They speak mechanically, whether aloud or to themselves. They are intoxicated by this vocal gruel that ensnares every object and every being. They talk about rain and fine weather; they talk about money, about love, about nothing. And even when they are talking about their most exalted love, they use words uttered a hundred times, threadbare phrases. They talk for the sake of talking. They seek to exorcise silence… .”

  The alchemist’s vessel was broken. Though conscious of the absurdity of our words, we continued our humdrum dialogue: “I think it’s going to rain. Look at that big cloud. No, it’s a fire on the steppe… . That’s funny, the Kukushha has gone past earlier than usual….Gavrilych…The tea…At the market…”

  Yes, I had lived out a part of my life. Childhood.

  In the end, our conversations about the rain and the fine weather that summer were not wholly unjustified. It rained often, and my sadness has colored my memory of those holidays with misty and lukewarm hues.

  Sometimes out of the depths of this slow grayness of days, an echo of our evening gatherings in the past surfaced — some photo that I discovered by chance in the Siberian suitcase, the contents of which had long since held no secrets for me. Or from time to time a fleeting detail of the family history, which was as yet unknown to me and which Charlotte offered me with the timid joy of a bankrupt princess, suddenly finding a small coin of fine gold beneath the threadbare lining of her purse.

  Thus it was that one day when it was raining hard, as I leafedthrough the piles of old French newspapers amassed in the suitcase, I lit upon a page that probably came from an illustrated magazine at the turn of the century. It was a reproduction, faintly covered in a brown-and-gray tint, of a painting in that highly wrought realistic style, whose attraction lies in its precise and abundant details. It was through examining these details during the long rainy evening that I retained a memory of the subject. A very disparate column of soldiers, all visibly suffering from exhaustion and old age, was crossing the street of a poor village with bare trees. The soldiers were all of advanced years — old men, it seemed to me, with long white hair escaping from broad-brimmed hats. They were the last able-bodied men in a mass recruitment of a people already engulfed in war. I did not memorize the title of the picture, but it contained the word “last.” They were the last to face the enemy, the very last to be able to bear arms. The latter, furthermore, were very rudimentary; some pikes, axes, old sabers. Curious, I scrutinized their clothes; their enormous army boots with large copper buckles; their hats and occasionally a tarnished helmet, like that of the conquistadors; their gnarled fingers, gripping the pike handles… . France had always appeared before my eyes in the splendor of her palaces, at the glorious hours of her history, but was suddenly revealed in the shape of this northern village, where low houses huddled behind meager hedges, and where stunted trees shivered in the winter wind. Astonishingly, I felt a close affinity for this muddy road and these old warriors, doomed to fall in an unequal battle. No, there was nothing flamboyant in their demeanor. They were not heroes making a show of their gallantry or their self-sacrifice. They were simple, human. In particular there was one, wearing the old conquistador-style helmet, a very tall old man who walked, leaning on a pike, at the end of the column. His face captivated me with its surprising serenity, bitter and smiling at the same time.

  Deep in my adolescent melancholy, I was suddenly over-whelmed with a confused joy. I felt I had understood the calm of this old warrior as he confronted imminent defeat, suffering, and death. Neither a stoic nor a holy fool, he walked with his head held high across this flat, cold, and dull country, which he loved despite every-thing, and called it his “homeland.” He appeared invulnerable. For a fraction of a second my heart seemed to beat in time with his, triumphing over fear, death, and solitude. This defiance felt like a new chord in the living harmony that for me was France. I tried at once to find a name for it. Patriotic pride? Panache? Or the famous furia francese that the Italians recognized in French fighters?

  As I was calling these labels to mind, I saw that the face of the old soldier was slowly closing and his eyes growing dull. He became once more a figure in an old reproduction of a painting in gray and bister tints. It was as if he had averted his gaze to hide from me that mystery of his, of which I had just caught a glimpse.

  Another flash from the past was the woman — the one in a padded jacket and a broad shapka, whose photo I had discovered in an album filled with photos dating from our family’s French period. I recalled that this photo had disappeared from the album immediately after I had shown an interest in it and spoken about it to Charlotte. I tried to remember why I had failed to obtain a reply at the time. The scene appeared before my eyes: I am showing the photo to my grand-mother, and suddenly I see a rapid shadow passing that makes me for-get my question: on the wall I cover a strange moth with my hand, a hawkmoth with two heads, two bodies, and four wings.

  I told myself that now, four years later, the double hawkmoth no longer held any mystery for me: quite simply two moths coupling. I thought of people coupling, and tried to imagine the movement of their bodies… . And suddenly I understood that for months already, possibly years, I had been thinking of nothing but these bodies, entwined, merging. I had been thinking about this without realizing it, at every moment of the day, while speaking of other things. As if the feverish caress of the hawkmoth had been burning my palm the whole time.

  Questioning Charlotte to find out who that woman in the padded jacket was now seemed an absolute impossibility. An impenetrable barrier was arising between my grandmother and myself: the female body, dreamed of, desired, possessed a thousand times in my thoughts.

  That evening, pouring me a cup of tea, Charlotte said in a pre-occupied voice, “It’s funny, the Kukushka hasn’t been past yet… .”

  Emerging from my reverie, I looked up at her. Our eyes met… . We said nothing else to each other until the end of the meal.

  The three women changed my outlook, my life… .

  I had discovered them by chance on the back of a press cutting in the depths of the Siberian suitcase. I was reading yet again the article about the first “Peking–Paris via Moscow” car race, as if to prove to myself that there was nothing new to learn, that Charlotte’s France was well and truly exhausted. Absentmindedly I had let the page slip onto the carpet. I had been looking through the balcony’s open door. It was a special kind of day at the end of the month of August, cool and sunny, when the chill wind blowing across the Urals brought the first breath of autumn to our steppes. Everything shone in this limpid light. The trees of the Stalinka stood out with fragile clarity against a sky of revitalized blue. The line of the horizon was pure and incisive. With bitter relief I told myself that the end of the holidays was approaching. The end also of a stage in my life, an end marked by this extraordinary discovery: that all my knowledge ensured neither happiness nor privileged access to what was essential… . Another revelation also: the whole time I was thinking about the female body, about women’s bodies. All other thoughts were complementary, accidental, derivative. Yes, I was facing the fact that being a man meant thinking constantly of women, that a man was nothing but a dreamer about wo
men! And that was what I was turning into… .

  By a whimsical caprice, the page of the magazine had turned over as it slipped onto the carpet. I picked it up, and as I did so I saw them on the back, these three women from the turn of the century. I had never seen them before, having regarded the reverse side of this press cutting as nonexistent. This unexpected encounter intrigued me. I took the photo closer to the light coming from the balcony… .

  And suddenly I fell in love with them. With their bodies and with their tender and attentive eyes, which allowed one to guess only too well at the presence of a photographer crouched under a black cloth, behind a tripod.

  Their femininity was such as would inevitably touch the heart of a solitary and shy adolescent like myself. It was, in a way, a normative femininity. All three wore long black dresses that enhanced the ample roundness of their bosoms and hugged their hips; but notably, before embracing their legs and spreading into graceful folds around their feet, the fabric sketched the discreet curve of their stomachs. The chaste sensuality of this gently rounded triangle fascinated me!

  Yes, their beauty was just what a young, still physically innocent dreamer could endlessly call to mind in his erotic fantasies. It was the image of a “classical” woman. The embodiment of femininity. The vision of the ideal mistress. It was in this light, at any rate, that I contemplated the elegant trio, their great eyes shaded in black; their voluminous hats sporting dark velvet ribbons; their old-fashioned air, which in the portraits of previous generations always seems to us to betoken a certain naïveté, a candid spontaneity lacking in our own contemporaries that both touches us and inspires our confidence.

  And I marveled at the neatness of this correspondence: what my lack of experience in love called for was precisely this generic Woman, a woman still devoid of all those sensual particulars that a mature desire would detect in her body.

  I contemplated them with a growing uneasiness. Their bodies were inaccessible to me. Oh, the problem was not the physical impossibility of being with them. For a long time my erotic imagination had learned how to thwart this obstacle. I closed my eyes and saw my fair strollers naked. Like a chemist I could reconstruct their flesh by a skillful synthesis, taking the most banal elements: the heaviness of the thigh of that woman who had brushed against me one day in a crowded bus; the curves of sunburned bodies on beaches; all the nudes in paintings. And even my own body! Yes, despite the taboo imposed on nudity in my native land and, with greater reason, on female nudity, I would have known how to reconstitute the elasticity of a breast beneath my fingers and the suppleness of a thigh.

  No, the elegant trio were inaccessible to me in quite a different way…. When I sought to recreate their era my memory immediately went into action. I remembered Blériot, who around that time was crossing the Channel with his monoplane; Picasso, who was painting the Demoiselles d’Avignon. … The cacophony of historical facts resounded in my head. But the three women remained immobile, inanimate — three museum exhibits with a label: “The elegant ladies of the belle epoque in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées.” Then I tried to make them mine, to turn them into my imaginary mistresses. With my erotic synthesis, I modeled their bodies; they moved, but with all the stiffness of sleepers, whom someone is trying to move around, upright and fully clothed, in a semblance of their waking state. And as if to accentuate this impression of sluggishness, in my dilettante synthesis I dredged up from my memory an image that made me grimace: that bare, flaccid breast, the dead breast of a drunk old woman I had seen one day at the railway station. I shook my head to rid myself of this nauseating vision.

  So I had to resign myself to a museum peopled with mummies, with waxworks bearing their labels: “Three elegant ladies,” “Presi-dent Faure and his mistress,” “Old soldier in a village in the north.”… I closed the suitcase.

  Leaning on the handrail of the balcony, I let my gaze lose itself in the transparent evening gold above the steppe.

  What was the point of their beauty after all? I thought, with a sudden clarity ascendant as the light from this sunset. Yes, what was the point of their fine breasts, their hips, their dresses that hugged their young bodies so prettily? To be so beautiful and to end up thrust into an old suitcase, in a sleepy, dusty town, lost in the middle of an endless plain! In this Saranza, of which, during their lifetime, they hadn?t the slightest notion…. All that was left of them was this photo, which had survived an unbelievable series of hazards great and small and was only preserved as the back of the page reporting the Peking–Paris car rally. Even Charlotte had no memory of these three feminine figures. I was the only one on this earth to pre-serve the last thread linking them to the world of the living! My memory was their last refuge, their ultimate abode before final and total oblivion. I was in some sense the god of their trembling universe, of this bit of the Champs-Elysées where their beauty still shone… .

  I could only offer them the life of puppets. I wound up the spring of my memory, and the elegant trio began their jerky promenade; the president of the Republic embraced Marguerite Steinheil; the duc d’Orléans fell, pierced by perfidious daggers; the old warrior grasped his long pike and stuck out his chest… .

  “How can it be,” I asked with anguish, “that all these passions, griefs, loves, leave so little trace? What an absurdity are the laws of this world in which the lives of such beautiful and desirable women depend on the flutter of a page! For had that page not turned over, I would not have saved them from oblivion, which would have been eternal. What a cosmic blunder is the disappearance of a beautiful woman! Disappearance forever. Complete annihilation. Without shadow. Without reflection, without appeal …”

  The sun went down over the far-distant steppe. But for a long time the air retained the crystalline luminosity of cool summer evenings. Beyond the wood the cry of the Kukushka rang out, more resonant in this cold air. The foliage of the trees was flecked with a few yellow leaves. The very first. The cry of the little engine rang out again. Already distant, fainter.

  It was then that, returning to the memory of the elegant trio, I had this simple thought, this last echo of the sad reflections in which I had just been sunk. “What they had in their lives was an autumn morning, cool and clear, an avenue in the sun strewn with dead leaves, where they paused for a moment, motionless before the lens. Bringing the moment to a standstill … Yes, there was in their lives a clear autumn morning… .”

  I suddenly was transported with all my senses into the moment that the smiles of the elegant trio had captured. I found myself amid the ambience of its autumnal smells; so penetrating was the acrid scent of dead leaves that my nostrils palpitated. I blinked in the sun that shone through the branches. I heard the distant sound of a phaeton bowling over the cobblestones. And the still confused murmuring of a few laughing remarks that the three women exchanged before freezing in front of the photographer … Yes, intensely, fully, I was living their time!

  The impact of feeling myself beside them on that autumn morning was so great that I tore myself away from its light, almost frightened. I was suddenly afraid of being trapped there forever. Blinded, deafened, I came back into the room and took out the magazine page again… .

  The surface of the photo seemed to quiver like the wet and vivid colors of a transfer. Its flat perspective suddenly began to deepen, to recede before my eyes. That was how, as a child, I used to contemplate two identical images moving slowly toward each other before blending into a single stereoscopic one. The photo of the elegant trio opened up before me, gradually surrounded me, let me come in under its sky. The branches with broad yellow leaves leaned over me….

  My reflections of an hour before (total oblivion, death …) no longer had any meaning. I no longer even needed to look at the photo. I closed my eyes, and I even sensed the joy experienced after the idle heat of summer by the three women as they rediscovered the cool of autumn, the seasonal clothes, the pleasures of city life, and no doubt, soon, the rain and the cold that would add to these attra
ctions.

  Their bodies, inaccessible a moment ago, lived in me, bathed in the smell of the dead leaves, in the light mist spangled with sun-light…. Yes, I sensed in them that imperceptible shiver with which a woman?s body greets the fresh autumn, that mixture of delight and dread, that serene melancholy. There was no longer any barrier between these three women and me. Our fusion, I felt, was more loving and more sensual than any physical possession.

  I emerged from that autumn morning and found myself under an almost black sky. Exhausted, as if I had just swum across a great river, I looked about me, scarcely recognizing familiar objects. But I nevertheless wanted to retrace my steps to see the three strollers of the belle epoque once more.

  The magic I had just experienced now, however, seemed to elude me. My memory unconsciously recreated quite a different scene from the past. I saw a fine man, dressed in black, in the middle of a sumptuous office. The door opened silently; a woman, her face masked by a veil, entered the room. And, very theatrically, the president embraced his mistress. Yes, it was the scene, encountered a thou-sand times, of the Elysée lovers’ secret rendezvous. Summoned up by my memory, they complied by reenacting it one more time, like a hasty vaudeville sketch. But that was no longer enough for me… .

  The transfiguration of the elegant trio had left me with the hope that the magic could be repeated. I had a clear memory of the very simple sentence that had unleashed it all: “And yet there was in the lives of those three women a cool and sunny morning… .” Like a sorcerer’s apprentice, I once again pictured the man with the fine mustache in his office at the dark window; and I whispered the magic formula, “And yet there was in his life an autumn evening when he stood before the dark window, beyond which the bare branches stirred in the garden of the Elysée.”