Dreams of My Russian Summers

by Andrei Makine

  At each of these encounters, an insistent summons rang out in my head: I must seduce them at once, these unknown women, make them mine, fit their flesh into my rosary of dreamed-of bodies. For each missed opportunity was a defeat, an irremediable loss, an emptiness that other bodies would only partially be able to fill. At such moments my fever became unbearable!

  I had never dared to embark on this subject with Charlotte. Still less to talk to her about the woman cut in two on the barge, or my night with the young drunken dancer. Did she guess at my turmoil herself? Certainly. Without actually picturing that prostitute seen through the portholes, or the young redhead on the old ferry, it seems to me that she identified with great precision “where I was at” in my experience of love. Unconsciously, through my questions, my evasions, my feigned indifference over certain delicate subjects — my silences, even — I was painting my own portrait as apprentice lover. But I was not aware of it, like someone who forgets that his shadow is projecting onto a wall the gestures he is trying to hide.

  Thus, hearing Charlotte speak of Baudelaire, I thought it was mere coincidence when in the first stanza of his sonnet, this feminine presence was sketched:

  When, with closed eyes, on some warm autumn night,

  I breathe your bosom’s sultry fragrances,

  Enchanted shores unfold their promontories,

  Dazed by a sun monotonously bright.

  “You see,” my grandmother continued, in a mixture of Russian and French, for she had to quote the texts of the translations, “InBryussov the first line is rendered as: ‘On an autumn evening, with eyes closed …’

  “In Balmont: ‘When, closing my eyes, on a stifling summer’s night …’

  “In my opinion both of them are simplifying Baudelaire. In his sonnet, you see, the ‘warm autumn night’ is a very particular moment, yes, in mid-autumn, suddenly, like a blessing, this warm night, unique, a parenthesis of light amid the rains and miseries of life. In their translations they have traduced Baudelaire’s idea: ‘an autumn evening,’ ‘a summer’s night,’ is flat. It has no soul. While in his text this moment makes magic possible, you know, a bit like those warm days just before the winter.”

  Charlotte elaborated her commentary at every stage with the lightly assumed dilettantism that disguised her often very broad knowledge, which she was afraid to flaunt. But now all I was hearing was the melody of her voice, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in French.

  In place of my obsession with female flesh, with that omnipresent womanhood whose inexhaustible multiplicity harassed me, I had a feeling of great relief. This had the transparency of that “warm autumn night.” And the serenity of a slow, almost melancholy contemplation of a woman’s beautiful body, stretched out in the blissful lassitude of love. A body whose physical reality is reflected in a series of reminiscences, scents, lights …

  Before the storm reached us, the river became swollen. We shook ourselves, hearing the stream already lapping among the roots of the willows. The sky became purple, black. The steppe, bristling, froze into blinding, livid scenes. A piquant, acid smell assailed us with the chill of the first showers. And Charlotte, as she folded the napkin on which we had taken our lunch, rounded off her exposition: “But in the end, in the last line, there is a real paradox of translation. Bryussov excels Baudelaire! Yes, Baudelaire talks of ‘the song of mariners’ on that island that is born of ‘your bosom’s sultry fragrances.’ And Bryussov, in translating him, gives ‘the voices of sailors calling in several tongues.’ What is wonderful is that the Russian can convey that with a single adjective. These cries in different languages are much more alive than the ‘song of mariners,’ which is rather mawkishly romantic, you have to admit. It’s what we were saying the other day, you see: the translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival. Besides, in this sonnet …”

  She did not have the time to finish her sentence. The water streamed under our feet, carrying away my clothes, several sheets of paper, and one of Charlotte’s espadrilles. The sky, gorged with rain, burst upon the steppe. We rushed to rescue what we still could. I seized my trousers and my shirt, which had happily caught on the branches of the willows as they floated along, and I just managed to fish out Charlotte’s espadrille. Then the sheets of paper — they were the recopied translations. The downpour quickly turned them into little balls spotted with ink.

  We did not notice our fear — the violence of the thunder’s deafening clatter drove out all thought. The cloudburst isolated us inside the shivering confines of our bodies. With a thrilling keenness we felt our hearts laid bare, drowned in this deluge that merged heaven and earth.

  A few minutes later the sun shone. From the top of the bank we contemplated the steppe. Shining, quivering with a thousand iridescent sparks, it seemed to be breathing. We exchanged smiling looks. Charlotte had lost her white headscarf; her wet hair was streaming in swarthy braids on her shoulders. Raindrops glittered on her eyelashes. Her dress, quite soaked, clung to her body. “She is young. And very beautiful. In spite of everything,” declared that involuntary voice within me that disobeys and embarrasses us with its uncompromising frankness, but which reveals what is censored by considered speech.

  We stopped at the railway embankment. In the distance we could see a long freight train approaching. Often a panting train would stop at this point, barring our path for a brief moment. This obstruction, due no doubt to some points or a signal, would amuse us. The cars rose up in a gigantic wall, covered in dust. A dense waveof heat was given off by their sides exposed to the sun. And the silence of the steppe was only broken by the distant hooting of the locomotive. Each time I was tempted not to wait for it to move off, and to cross the track by slipping under a car, Charlotte would restrain me, saying she had just heard the whistle. Sometimes when our wait was really becoming too long, we climbed onto the open deck, which freight cars had at that time, and got off on the other side of the track. These few seconds were filled with gleeful nervousness: what if the train set off and took us to an unknown and fabulous destination?

  This time we could not wait. Soaked as we were, we needed to reach home before nightfall. I climbed up first and held out my hand to Charlotte, who stepped up onto the footboard. Just at that moment the train moved off. We ran across the deck. I could still have jumped. But not Charlotte … We stood facing the embrasure, which was filling with an increasingly biting draft. The line of our footpath vanished in the immensity of the steppe.

  We were not at all worried. We knew that one station or another would halt the progress of our train. It seemed to me that Charlotte was in some ways quite pleased with our unexpected adventure. She gazed at the plain, revived by the storm. Her hair, blowing in the wind, spread across her face. She flung it aside from time to time with a rapid gesture. Despite the sun, a little fine rain began to fall at intervals. Charlotte smiled at me through this shining veil.

  What suddenly struck me on this lurching deck in the middle of the steppe was like the wonder experienced by a child who, after long, fruitless study, discovers a character or an object that has been camouflaged in the cleverly jumbled lines of a drawing. Now he sees it, and the arabesques of the drawing acquire a new meaning, a new life… .

  It was the same with my internal perception. All at once I saw! Or rather I felt, with all my being, the luminous tie that linked this moment full of iridescent reflections to other moments I had inhabited in the past: that evening long ago with Charlotte, the melancholy cry of the Kukushka; then that Parisian morning, shrouded inmy imagination in sunlit mist; that moment at night on the raft with my first lover, when the great riverboat towered above our entwined bodies; and the evening gatherings of my childhood, lived, it already seemed, in another life… . Linked together thus, these moments formed a singular universe, with its own rhythm, its particular air and sun. Another planet, almost. A planet where the death of this woman with her big gray eyes became inconceivable. Where a woman’s body was reflected
in a series of dreamed moments. Where my “language of amazement” would be comprehensible to others.

  This planet was the same world that was unfolding as our wagon hurtled along. Yes, the same station where the train finally came to a halt. The same empty platform, washed by the downpour. Those same rare passersby with their mundane concerns. The same world, but seen differently.

  As I helped Charlotte to step down, I tried to grasp this “differently.” Yes, to see this other planet, one would have to behave in a special way. But how?

  “Come, we’re going to have something to eat,” my grandmother said, drawing me away from my musings, and she set off for the restaurant located in one of the wings of the station.

  The room was empty, the tables were not laid. We sat down near an open window, through which a square lined with trees could be seen. On the front of the apartment blocks were visible long strips of red calico with their customary slogans glorifying the Party, the Fatherland, and Peace… . A waiter came up and told us in a sullen voice that the storm had cut off their electricity and that the restaurant was therefore closing. I was already about to get up, but Charlotte insisted with extreme politeness, which, with its old-fashioned turns of phrase that I knew to be borrowed from French, always impressed Russians. The man hesitated for a second, then went away with a visibly disconcerted air.

  He brought us a dish astonishing in its simplicity. A plate with a dozen rounds of sausage and a huge pickled cucumber, cut into fine slices. But above all, he put in front of us a bottle of wine. I had never had a dinner like it. The waiter himself must have grasped the unusual couple we made and the strangeness of this cold meal. He smiled and stammered some remarks about the weather, as if to excuse the welcome he had just given us.

  We remained alone in the room. The wind coming in at the window smelled of wet foliage. The sky layered itself into gray-and-purple clouds, lit by the setting sun. From time to time the wheels of a car squealed on the wet asphalt. Each mouthful of wine gave these sounds and colors a new density: the cool heaviness of the trees, the shining windows washed by the rain, the red of the slogans on the facades, the wet squealing of the wheels, the sky still stormy. I felt that, little by little, what we were living through in this empty room was becoming detached from the present moment, from that station, from that unknown town, from its daily life… .

  Heavy foliage, long splashes of red on the facades, squealing tires, sky gray and purple. I turned to Charlotte. She was no longer there.

  And it is no longer the restaurant in the station lost in the middle of the steppe. But a caf?in Paris — and outside the window a spring evening. The gray-and-purple sky, still stormy, the squealing of cars on the wet asphalt, the fresh exuberance of the chestnut trees, the red of the blinds belonging to the restaurant on the opposite side of the square. And I, twenty years later, I, who have just recognized this combination of colors and have just relived the giddiness of the moment regained. A young woman facing me is keeping up a conversation about nothing with a very French grace. I watch her smiling face, and occasionally I punctuate her words with a nod of my head. This woman is very close to me. I love her voice, her way of thinking. I know the harmony of her body… . “And what if I were to speak to her about that moment twenty years ago, in the middle of the steppe, in that empty station?” I ask myself, and I know that I will not do it.

  On that distant evening, twenty years ago, Charlotte is already getting up, adjusting her hair in the reflection of the open window, and we leave. And on my lips, with the pleasant sharpness of the wine, these words, never ventured upon, fade away: “If she is so beautiful still, despite her white hair and having lived so many years, it is because all these moments of light and beauty have been filtered through her eyes, her face, her body… .”

  Charlotte leaves the station. I follow her, drunk with my unsayable revelation. And night falls over the steppe. The night that has lasted for twenty years in the Saranza of my childhood.

  I saw Charlotte for a few hours ten years later, before I went abroad. I arrived very late in the evening, and I was due to leave again for Moscow early in the morning. It was an icy night at the end of autumn. For Charlotte it brought together the troubled memories of all the departures in her life; all the nights of farewells… . We did not sleep. She went to make the tea, and I paced up and down in her apartment, which seemed to me strangely small and very touching, through the constancy of familiar objects.

  I was twenty-five. I was ecstatic about my trip. I already knew that I was going away for a long time. Or rather that my visit to Europe would be extended far beyond the planned two weeks. It seemed to me that my departure would shake the calm of our stagnant empire; that its inhabitants would all talk of nothing but my exile; that a new era would begin from my first action, from my first words uttered on the other side of the frontier. I was already living off the procession of new faces I would meet; the dazzle of dreamed-of landscapes; the stimulus of danger.

  It was with the conceited egoism of youth that I said to her, in rather jocular tones, “But you could go abroad as well! To France, for example … Wouldn’t that tempt you, eh?”

  The expression on her face did not change. She simply lowered her eyes. I heard the whistling melody of the kettle, the tinkling of snow crystals against the black windowpane.

  “When I went to Siberia in 1922,” she finally said to me with a weary smile, “half, or maybe a third of that journey, you know, I made on foot. That was as far as from here to Paris. Do you see, I wouldn’t need your airplanes at all… .”

  She smiled again, looking me in the eye. But despite the tone of voice she assumed, I sensed within her voice a deep note of bitterness. Embarrassed, I took a cigarette and went out onto the balcony....

  It was there, above the frozen darkness of the steppe, that I believed I had finally understood what France meant to her.

  4

  14

  IT WA IN FRANCE, that I almost forgot Charlotte’s France forever.…

  Autumn had come, and twenty years now separated me from those times spent in Saranza. I became aware of this interval — of the poignant “twenty years on” — the day our radio station made its last broadcast in Russian. That evening, leaving the newsroom, I pictured an endless expanse yawning between this German city and Russia, asleep under the snows. Henceforth all that nocturnal space, which on the previous evening was still alive with the sound of our voices, would fade, it seemed to me, into the muffled cracking of the empty airwaves.… The goal of our dissident, subversive broadcasts had been achieved. The snowbound empire was waking up, opening it-self up to the rest of the world. The country would soon change its name, its regime, its history, its frontiers. Another country would be born. We were no longer needed. The station was being closed. My colleagues exchanged artificially noisy and warm farewells and departed, each in his own direction. Some wanted to rebuild their lives on the spot, others to pack their bags and go to America. Yet others, the least realistic, dreamed of a return that would take them back into the blizzard of twenty years ago.… Nobody had any illusions. We knew that it was not just a radio station that was disappearing but our era itself. All that we had said, written, thought, fought against, defended, all that we had loved, detested, feared — all those things belonged to that era. We were left with a vacuum, like waxwork figures in a cabinet of curiosities, relics of a defunct empire.

  On board the train taking me to Paris I tried to find words to describe all the years spent far away from Saranza. Exile as a mode of existence? Brute necessity of life? A life half lived and mainly wasted? The meaning of those years seemed to me obscure. So I tried to convert them into what men consider to be sound values in life: recollections of dramatic changes of scene (“In those years I have seen the whole world!” I said to myself with childish arrogance); the bodies of women they have loved.…

  But the recollections remained drab, the bodies strangely inert. Or occasionally they emerged from the dimness of memory wi
th the wild insistence of a shop dummy’s eyes.

  Those years were nothing more than a long journey for which I managed from time to time to find a goal. I would invent it just as I was leaving a place or already en route; or sometimes on arrival, when I had to explain my presence that day, in one particular town, in one particular country rather than another.

  A journey from one nowhere to another, yes. As soon as the place where I was staying began to exert a hold on me, to establish me in its pleasant daily routine, I had to leave at once. My journey knew only two moments: arrival in an unknown town and departure from a town whose facades hardly trembled as I looked at them.… When I had arrived in Munich six months before, as I walked out of the railway station, I was already prudently telling myself that I must find a hotel, then an apartment, as close as possible to my new work at the radio.?

  That morning, in Paris, I had the fleeting illusion of a real return: in a street not far from the station, a street still hardly awake in that misty dawn, I saw an open window and the interior of a room that exuded a simple, everyday, but for me mysterious calmness, with a lamp lit on the table, an old dark wood chest of drawers, a picture on the wall coming slightly unstuck. The warmth of this glimpsed intimacy seemed to me suddenly both ancient and familiar, so much so that I shivered. To climb the stair, knock at the door, recognize a face, be recognized.… I hastened to banish this sensation of rediscovery, which struck me then as nothing other than a vagrant’s sentimental moment of weakness.