Dreams of My Russian Summers (28 page)

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

I
T 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 with 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.

Life was rapidly exhausted. Time stagnated, measurable from now on only by the wearing out of heels on the wet asphalt, the succession of sounds, soon learned by heart, that the drafts carried along the corridors of the hotel from dawn till dusk. The window of my room looked out on an apartment block under demolition. A wall covered with wallpaper stood there amid the rubble. Fixed to this colored surface a mirror, without a frame, reflected the delicate and ephemeral depth of the sky. Each morning I wondered whether I was going to see this reflection again when I drew open my curtains. The daily suspense gave a rhythm to the stagnant time, to which I was becoming more and more accustomed. And even the idea that one day I must quit this life, that I must make a break with what little still bound me to those autumn days, to that city, kill myself, perhaps — even such a notion soon became habitual.… And then one morning — when I heard the dry sound of collapsing masonry, and outside the curtains, in the place of the wall, I saw an empty space smoking with dust — the idea seemed to me like a marvelous way of leaving the game.

I remembered it several days later.… I was sitting on a bench in the middle of a boulevard soaked in drizzle. Through the numbness of a fever I felt within myself a kind of silent dialogue between a frightened child and a man: the adult, himself troubled, was trying to reassure the child, speaking in a falsely cheerful tone. The encouraging voice told me that I could get up and return to the café; drink another glass of wine and stay out of the cold for an hour. Or go down into the clammy warmth of the Métro. Or even try to spend another night at the hotel without having anything left to pay with. Or if need be, walk into that pharmacy at the corner of the boulevard and sit down on a leather chair, stay still, say nothing, and when people gather round me, whisper very softly, “Leave me in peace for a moment, in this light and this warmth. I will go soon, I promise you.…”

The keen air above the boulevard condensed and began to fall as a fine, dogged rain. I got up. The reassuring voice had fallen silent. I felt as if my head were wrapped in a cloud of red-hot cotton wool. I dodged a passerby who was walking along holding a little girl by the hand. I was afraid I might alarm the child with my inflamed face, and the cold shivers shaking me.…Wanting to cross the road, I stumbled against the edge of the pavement and waved my arms like a tightrope walker. A car braked and just avoided me. I felt a brief grazing of the door handle against my hand. The driver took the trouble to lower his window and hurl an oath at me. I saw his scowl, but his words reached me with a strange cotton-wool slowness. At the same moment a thought dazzled me with its simplicity: “That's what I need. That impact, that encounter with metal, but much more violent. An impact that would shatter my head, my throat, my chest. That impact, and then instant, final silence.” Several whistle blasts pierced the fog of the fever that burned my face. Absurdly, I got the idea that a policeman might have set off in pursuit of me. I sped up my pace, floundering on a saturated patch of lawn. I could not breathe. My vision broke up into a multitude of sharp-edged facets. I had an urge to burrow in the ground like an animal.

I was drawn in by a misty void, which opened up into a broad avenue, beyond a wide-open gate. It seemed to be floating between two lines of trees, in the dull air of the twilight. Almost at once the avenue was filled with strident whistle blasts. I turned into a narrower path, skidded on a smooth stone slab, and plunged between strange gray cubes. Finally, without strength, I crouched behind one of them. The whistle blasts rang out for a moment, then fell silent. From a long way off I heard the grating sound of the gate's metal bars. On the porous wall of the cube I read these words, without immediately grasping the sense of them:
Plot held in perpetuity. Number … Year 18 …

Somewhere behind the trees a whistle blast rang out, followed by a conversation. Two men, two keepers, were walking up the avenue.

I got up slowly. And through the weariness and the torpor of the start of my illness, I felt a flicker of a smile on my lips; “mockery
must enter into the nature of the things of this world. By the same token as the law of gravity.…”

All the gates of the cemetery were now closed. I walked round the family vault behind which I had collapsed. The glass door yielded easily. The interior seemed to me almost spacious. Apart from the dust and a few dead leaves, the paving was clean and dry. My legs would not support me any longer. I sat down, and then stretched out full length. In the darkness my head brushed against a wooden object. I touched it. It was a priedieu. I rested my neck on its faded velvet. Oddly, its surface seemed warm, as if someone had just been kneeling on it.…

For the first two days I left my refuge only to go and look for bread and to wash. I returned at once, stretched out, and sank into a feverish numbness from which I was only roused for a few minutes by the whistle blasts at closing time. The great gate creaked in the fog, the world was reduced to these walls of soft porous stone, which I could touch if I spread out my arms in the form of a cross; to the reflection of the ground glass panes of the door; and to the resonant silence, which I believed I could hear beneath the paving stones, beneath my body.…

I rapidly became confused about the sequence of dates and days. I remember only that one afternoon I finally felt a little better. Walking slowly, screwing up my eyes in the returning sunlight, I was going back … home. Home! Yes, that was my thought: I surprised myself thinking it, and started to laugh, choking in a fit of coughing that made the passersby turn. This family tomb more than a century old, in the least-visited part of the cemetery, where there were no famous tombs to honor — my “home.” With amazement I told myself I had not used the word since my childhood.…

It was during that afternoon, by the light of the autumn sun shining into my vault, that I read the inscriptions on the marble tablets fixed to its walls. It was, in fact, a little chapel belonging to the Belval and Castelot families. And the laconic epitaphs on the tablets retraced their history in outline.

I was still too weak. I read one or two inscriptions and then sat down on the paving stones, breathing as if after a great effort, my head buzzing with giddiness.
Born September 27, 1837, at Bordeaux. Died June 4, 1888, in Paris
. Perhaps it was the dates that made me giddy. I took note of their time as acutely as if I were hallucinating.
Born the 6th March 1849. Recalled to God the 12th December 1901
. The intervals between these dates became filled with sounds, with silhouettes, mixing history and literature. There was a flow of images, the vivid and very concrete sharpness of which was almost painful. I thought I could hear the rustling of a lady's long dress as she stepped into a cab. In this simple action of times past she embodied all those anonymous women who had lived, loved, and suffered; who had seen this sky, breathed this air.… Now I felt physically the cramped stiffness of a dignitary in his black suit: the sun, the great square of a provincial town, the speeches, the brand new republican emblems.… Now the wars, the revolutions, the swarming crowds, the great holidays, all fused for a second into one character, one explosion, one voice, one song, one salvo, one poem, one sensation — and the flow of time resumed its course between the date of birth and the date of death. She was born
August 26, 1861, at Biarritz. Deceased February 11, 1922, at Vincennes
.