Dreams of My Russian Summers

by Andrei Makine

  In the morning, back on the road (a gashed pine trunk, which I had not noticed the previous evening, was weeping its resin — what the local people called its gemme), I remembered, for no special reason, those shelves at the back of the bookshop, “Eastern European Literature.” My first books were there, sandwiched, and at the risk of inspiring giddy megalomania in me, between those of Lermontov and Nabokov. All this was the fruit of a pure and simple literary hoax on my part. For the novels had been written directly in French and rejected by publishers. I was “some funny little Russian who thought he could write in French.” In a gesture of despair I had then invented a translator and submitted the manuscript, presenting it as translated from the Russian. It had been accepted, published, and hailed for the quality of the translation. I told myself, at first bitterly, later with a smile, that my Franco-Russian curse was still upon me. But whereas in childhood I had been obliged to conceal my French graft, now it was my Russianness that failed to find favor.

  That evening, settled down for the night, I reread the latest pages of my Notes. In the fragment jotted down the previous evening I had written,

  A boy of two has died in the big izba facing the apartment block where Charlotte lives. I see the child?s father propping up against the handrail on the front steps an oblong box draped with red cloth ? a little coffin. Its doll-like dimensions terrify me. I need immediately to find a place under heaven, or on earth, where one could imagine this child still alive. The death of a human being younger than oneself calls the whole universe into question. I rush to Charlotte. She perceives my anguish and says something to me that is astonishing in its simplicity: “Do you remember how we saw a flight of migrating birds in the autumn? They flew over the courtyard, yes, and then they disappeared. That was that, but somewhere in distant lands they are still flying. It is only because our eyesight is too weak that we can’t see them. It’s the same with people who die… .”

  As I slept, I thought I could hear the branches making a sound that was more powerful and continuous than usual. As if the wind had not ceased blowing for a single moment. In the morning I discovered that it was the sound of the ocean. In my weariness the previous evening I had stopped, without knowing it, on the frontier where the forest began to merge into the wave-lashed dunes.

  I spent the whole morning on that deserted shore, watching the imperceptible rising of the waters… . When the tide began to ebb, I resumed my journey. Barefoot on the wet sand I would go down to-ward the south now. Walking along, I thought about that little bag that from the time of our childhood my sister and I had called “the Pont-Neuf bag” and which contained the little pebbles wrapped in scraps of paper. There was a “Fécamp,” a “Verdun,” and also a “Biarritz,” a name we associated with quartz and not with the town, which was unknown to us… . I was going to walk beside the ocean for ten or twelve days and find that town, of which a tiny fragment was lost somewhere in the depths of the Russian steppes.

  16

  IT WAS IN SEPTEMBER, through the intermediary of a certain Alex Bond, that the first news from Saranza reached me… .

  This “Mr. Bond” was in fact a Russian businessman, a very characteristic representative of the generation of “new Russians” who at that time were beginning to make their presence felt in all the capitals of the West. They butchered their names, American style, thus often identifying themselves without realizing it either with the heroes of spy novels or with extraterrestrial beings from the science fiction stories of the fifties. At the time of our first meeting I had advised Alex Bond, alias Alexei Bondarchenko (meaning “Cooper”), to gallicize his name and present himself as “Alexis Tonnelier,” rather than mutilate it as he had done. Without a ghost of a smile, he explained to me the advantages of a short and euphonious name in business… . I had the impression I was understanding less and less of the Russia that I now saw via these “Bonds,” these “Kondrats,” and these “Feds.” …

  He was going to Moscow and, touched by the sentimental aspect of my commission, had agreed to make a detour. Going to Saranza, walking in its streets, meeting Charlotte, now seemed a good deal more strange to me than traveling to another planet. Alex Bond had been there “between two trains,” as he put it. And, with-out an inkling of what Charlotte meant to me, he spoke on the telephone as if this were an exchange of news after the holidays: “No, but what a black hole that Saranza is! Thanks to you, I’ve discovered darkest Russia, ha ha. All those streets that lead straight out onto thesteppe! And the steppe with no end to it? . She?s very well, your grandmother, don?t you worry. Yes, she?s still very active. When I arrived she wasn?t there. Her neighbor told me she was at a meeting. The tenants in her apartment block have created a support group, or whatever, to save an old izba in the courtyard that they want to demolish. A huge building, two centuries old. So your grandmother … No, I didn’t see her; I was between two trains. I had to be in Moscow that evening come hell or high water. But I left a message… . You could go and see her. They let everyone in these days. They say the iron curtain’s nothing more than a sieve now, ha ha ha….”

  All I had were my refugee papers, plus a travel document that authorized me to visit “all countries except the USSR.” The day after my conversation with the “new Russian” I went to the Préfecture de Police to obtain information about the formalities for naturalization. In my mind I was trying to silence the thought that kept creeping back: “What you are embarking on now is an invisible race against the clock. Charlotte is at an age where every year, every month, could be her last.”

  For that reason I did not want to write or telephone. I had a superstitious fear of compromising my project with a few banal words. I needed to obtain a French passport quickly, go to Saranza, spend several evenings talking with Charlotte, and bring her to Paris. I saw all these actions being accomplished simply, in a flash, as in a dream. Then abruptly this image became blurred, and I found myself once more caught in the glutinous lava that clogged my movements — time.

  The dossier I was required to assemble reassured me: no documents impossible to find, no bureaucratic snares. Only my visit to the doctor left me with a painful impression. Yet the examination lasted a mere five minutes and was, when all’s said and done, quite superficial: my state of health turned out to be compatible with French nationality. Having listened to my chest, the doctor told me to bend over, keeping my legs quite straight, and touch the ground with my fingers. I complied. It must have been my excessive alacrity that made him uneasy. The doctor seemed embarrassed and stammered, “Thank you, that?s fine,” as if he were afraid that in my zeal I might bend over again. Often some trifle in our attitudes is enough to alter the meaning of the most ordinary situations: two men in a small consulting room in a glaring white light; suddenly one of them bends, touches the ground almost at the feet of the other, and remains thus for a moment, awaiting, it seems, the second man’s approval.

  As I went out into the street I thought of the camps where they used similar physical tests to sort out the prisoners. But this excessively exaggerated comparison still did not explain my unease.

  It was the eagerness with which I had fulfilled the command. I came across it again in leafing through the pages of my dossier. I perceived that this desire to convince someone was everywhere present. Even though it was not asked of me in the questionnaires, I had mentioned my distant French origins. Yes, I had mentioned Charlotte, as if I wanted to ward off all objections and dissipate all skepticism in advance. And now I could not rid myself of the feeling that I had in some way betrayed her.

  I had to wait several months. I was told there would be a delay until May. And at once those far-off spring days were bathed in a special radiance, standing out from the round of months and forming a universe that lived according to its own rhythm, in its own climate.

  For me it was a time of preparations, but above all of long, silent conversations with Charlotte. As I walked along the streets I now had the sensation of observing them through her eyes. Of
seeing, as she would have seen, an empty quay where the poplar trees, in a sudden breeze, seemed to be transmitting an urgent, whispered message to one another; of sensing, as she would have done, the resonance of the paving stones in this little old square, within whose provincial tranquility, in the heart of Paris, lay concealed the temptation of a simple happiness, of a life without dazzle.

  I understood that throughout the three years of my life in France the slow and discreet progress of my project had never been interrupted. From that vague image of a woman dressed in black passing through a frontier town on foot, my dream had moved on to-ward a more real vision. I saw myself going to meet my grandmotherat the station, and accompanying her to the hotel where she would live during her stay in Paris. Then, once the period of the bleakest poverty was finished, I had begun to picture a more comfortable interior than a hotel room, one where Charlotte would feel more at ease… .

  Perhaps it was thanks to these dreams that I was able to endure the poverty and humiliation that go with one’s first steps in the world in which the book, that most vulnerable organ of our being, be-comes merchandise. Merchandise that is hawked, exposed on market stalls, discounted. My dream was an antidote. And the Notes —a refuge.

  In those few months of waiting, the topography of Paris changed. As on certain maps where the arrondissements are colored differently, the city became filled in my eyes with varied shades that Charlotte’s presence gave nuances to. There were streets whose sun-drenched silence, early in the morning, held the echo of her voice. Café terraces where I guessed at her weariness at the end of a walk. A facade, a stained glass window, which under her eyes assumed the light patina of memory.

  This daydream topography left a good many white patches on the colored mosaic of the arrondissements. Our outings would quite spontaneously avoid the architectural audacities of recent years. Charlotte’s days in Paris would be too brief. We would not have time to come to terms with all those new pyramids, glass towers, and arches by looking at them. Their silhouettes would congeal into a strange, futuristic tomorrow, which would not disturb the eternal present of our excursions.

  Nor did I want Charlotte to see the district where I lived… . Alex Bond, when he came to meet me, had exclaimed disdainfully, “For goodness sake, we’re not in France here. This is Africa!” And he embarked on a harangue, whose content reminded me of the re-marks of so many “new Russians.” It was all there: the degeneracy of the West and the imminent end of white Europe; the invasion of the new barbarians (“including us Slavs,” he had added, to be fair); a new Mahomet “who will torch all their Pompidou Centres”; and a newGenghis Khan “who will put an end to all their democratic kowtowing.” Drawing inspiration from the endless procession of people of color walking past the café terrace where we were sitting, his discourse was a mixture of apocalyptic prophecies and hope for a Europe regenerated by the young blood of the barbarians, promises of a total race war, and faith in universal interbreeding… . The subject fascinated him. He must sometimes have felt on the side of the moribund West, for his skin was white and his culture European, and sometimes on the side of the new Huns. “I don’t care what you say,” he concluded his speech, “the fact remains, there are too many of these wogs!” forgetting that a minute before it was to them that he had been entrusting the salvation of the old continent… .

  In my dreams our excursions made a detour round this quarter and the intellectual ferment that its reality would give rise to. Not that its population could have shocked Charlotte?s sensibility. An ?igr?par excellence, she had always lived in the midst of an extreme multiplicity of peoples, cultures, and languages. From Siberia to the Ukraine, from the Russian North to the steppe, she had known the whole ethnic diversity of the empire’s melting pot. During the war she had encountered them in hospital, facing death in absolute equality; in naked equality, as bodies undergoing surgery.

  It was by no means the new population of that old district of Paris that might have upset Charlotte. If I did not want to take her there it was because you could walk along whole streets without hearing a word of French spoken. Some saw the promise of a new world in this exoticism, others, a disaster. But we were not seeking exoticism, whether architectural or human. The change of scene we would experience in our days together I thought would be much more profound.

  The Paris that I was preparing to let Charlotte rediscover was an incomplete Paris and even, in some respects, illusory. I remembered Nabokov’s memoirs, where he spoke of his grandfather living out his last days; as he lay in bed he believed that what he could perceive through the thick material of the curtain was the brilliance of the southern sun, with attendant clusters of mimosa. He smiled, believing himself to be in Nice, in the spring sunlight. He did not suspect that he was dying in Russia in the depths of winter, and that the sun was a lamp that his daughter had fixed up behind the curtain, to give him that happy illusion… .

  I knew that Charlotte, while respecting my itineraries, would see everything. The lamp behind the curtain would not deceive her. I could see the quick wink she would give me in front of some in-describable contemporary sculpture. I could hear her comments, full of very subtle humor, the delicacy of which would only serve to emphasize the dull aggressiveness of the work observed. She would also see that district, mine, which I was trying to avoid… . She would go there all alone, in my absence, searching for a house in the rue de l’Ermitage where the Great War soldier once lived, the one who had given her that little ferrous splinter that as children we called “Verdun.”

  I also knew that I should do my very best not to talk about books. And that we would talk about them all the same, a great deal, often till late into the night. For the France that had appeared one day in the middle of the steppes of Saranza owed its birth to books. It was indeed essentially a bookish country, a country composed of words, whose rivers flowed like lines of verse, whose women wept in alexandrines and whose men quarreled in broadsides. That was how we discovered France as children, through its literary life, its verbal substance, shaped into a sonnet and honed by an author. Our family mythology attested that a little volume with a battered cover and a tarnished gilt top traveled with Charlotte on all her journeys. As the last link with France. Or perhaps as the constant possibility of magic. “There is a tune for which I?d gladly part ?” How many times in the wastes of the Siberian snows had these lines shaped themselves into “a brick-built castle, faced with cornerstones,/With lofty windows, stained in crimson tones”? We confused France with her literature. And true literature was that magic, a word, a verse, a chapter of which transported us into a changeless moment of beauty.

  I wanted to tell Charlotte that that kind of literature was dead in France. And that in the multitude of books I had devoured since the start of my reclusive life as a writer, I had looked in vain for one thatI could imagine in her hands in the middle of a Siberian izba. Yes, the book open, a little gleam of tears in her eyes …

  In those imaginary conversations with Charlotte I became an adolescent again. My youthful extremism, long since quenched by the realities of life, was awakened. Once again I sought an absolute, unique work. I dreamed of a book that could remake the world with its beauty. And I heard my grandmother’s voice responding to me, understanding and smiling, as in the old days at Saranza on her balcony: “Do you still remember those tiny apartments in Russia that groaned under the weight of books? You know, books under the bed, in the kitchen, in the hall, piled right up to the ceiling? And those unobtainable books that you were lent for one night and which you had to give back at six o’clock sharp in the morning? And yet others, retyped, with six carbons at the same time; they gave you the sixth copy, almost illegible, or ‘blind,’ as they called it… . You see, it’s difficult to compare. In Russia the writer was a god. The Last Judgment and the Kingdom of Heaven were expected from him at the same time. Did you ever hear anyone there talk about the price of a book? No, because books had no price! You could go without buying a pair of shoes and
freeze your feet in winter, but you bought a book… .”

  Charlotte’s voice broke off, as if to give me to understand that this cult of the book in Russia was only a memory now.

  “But the unique book, the definitive book. Judgment and Kingdom at the same time?” exclaimed the adolescent I had once more become.

  My feverish whisperings jerked me out of my invented conversation. Ashamed, like someone who has been caught talking to him-self, I saw myself for what I was. A man gesticulating in the middle of a little dark room, where a blind window faces onto a brick wall and needs neither curtains nor shutters. A room that can be crossed in three steps, where objects, for lack of space, crowd together, encroach on one another, become entangled: old typewriter, electric stove, chairs, shelves, shower, table, spectral clothes hanging on the walls. And everywhere sheets of paper, bits of manuscripts andbooks, which give this cluttered interior a kind of highly logical madness. Outside the window the start of a wet winter?s night, and ? floating up from the maze of ancient houses ? an Arabic melody, a mixture of lament and celebration. And the man is dressed in an old light-colored overcoat (it is very cold). On his hands he wears mittens, necessary for typing in the freezing room. He is talking to a woman. He addresses her with that confidence that one does not always have, even for the intimacy of one’s own voice. He is questioning her about the unique, definitive work, without fear of seeming naive or ridiculously pathetic. She is about to reply to him… .

  Before I went to sleep, I had the thought that in coming to France, Charlotte would seek to understand what had happened to that literature from which a few old books represented for her, in Siberia, a miniature French archipelago. I imagined coming into the apartment where she would be living one evening and seeing on the edge of a table or the windowsill a book open, a recent book, which Charlotte was reading in my absence. I would lean over the pages, and my gaze would fall on these lines: