From the
With a thrust of her shoulder she pushed the door. In the dark, cold hall she saw a whole store of wood – planks from boxes, floorboards, and even, in a little black-and-white heap, the keys of a piano. Charlotte remembered that it was above all the pianos in the apartments of the rich that provoked the anger of the people. She had seen one, smashed with blows of an ax, frozen into the ice floes on a river…
On entering the room, her first gesture was to touch the stones of the stove. They were warm. Charlotte felt a pleasantly giddy sensation. She was already about to let herself slip down beside the stove when she noticed an open book on the table made of broad timbers, browned with the years. A little ancient volume with rough paper. Leaning on a bench, she bent over the open pages. Strangely the letters began to dance, to melt – as they had done during that night on the train when she dreamed of the Parisian street where her uncle lived. This time the cause was not a dream, but tears. It was a French book.
The old woman in the black shawl came in and seemed not to be surprised to see this slim young woman rising from her bench.
The dry branches she carried under her arm trailed long filaments of snow on the floor. Her withered face resembled that of one of the old peasant women of that Siberian country. Her lips, covered in a fine network of wrinkles, trembled. And it was from this mouth, from the desiccated breast of this unrecognizable being, that the voice of Albertine rang out, a voice of which not a single note had altered.
'All these years I only dreaded one thing: that you might come back here!'
These were the very first words that Albertine addressed to her daughter. And Charlotte understood: what they had lived through since their good-byes on the station platform eight years before, a whole host of actions, faces, words, sufferings, privations, hopes, anxieties, cries, tears – all that buzz of life resounded against a single echo, which refused to die. This meeting, so desired, so feared.
'I wanted to ask someone to write to you and say I was dead. But there was the war, then the revolution. Then war again. And then…'
'I wouldn't have believed the letter…'
'Yes, I told myself that you wouldn't have believed it in any case…'
She threw down the branches near the stove and approached Charlotte. When she had looked at her through the lowered window of the railway carriage in Paris, her daughter was eleven. Now, soon she would be twenty.
'Do you hear?' whispered Albertine, her face lighting up, and she turned toward the stove. 'The mice, you remember? They're still there…'
Later, squatting in front of the fire that was coming to life behind the little cast iron door, Albertine murmured, as if to herself, without looking at Charlotte, who was stretched out on the bench and appeared to be asleep: 'That's how it is in this country. You can come in easily but you never get out…'
Hot water seemed like a whole new, unknown substance. Charlotte held out her hands toward the trickle that her mother poured slowly onto her shoulders and her back from a copper scoop. In the darkness of that room, which was lit only by the flame of a burning wood shaving, the warm drops looked like pine resin and tickled Charlotte's body deliciously as she rubbed herself with a lump of blue clay. Of soap they retained only a vague memory.
'You've become very thin,' Albertine said softly, and her voice broke off.
Charlotte laughed gently. As she lifted her head of wet hair, she saw tears of the same amber color shining in her mother's lackluster eyes. During the days that followed Charlotte tried to find out how they could leave Siberia (superstitiously she dared not say, return to France). She went to the former house of the governor. The soldiers at the entrance smiled at her: a good sign? The secretary of the new ruler of Boyarsk made her wait in a little room – the same, thought Charlotte, where once she used to wait for the parcel of leftovers from lunch…
The ruler received her seated behind his heavy desk: as she came in his brows were furrowed, and he continued to draw energetic lines with a red pencil on the pages of a brochure. A whole stack of identical little pamphlets was piled on his table.
'Good day, citizen!' he said finally, holding out his hand to her.
They spoke. And with stunned incredulity Charlotte became aware that all the official's remarks seemed like a strange, deformed echo of the questions she put to him. She spoke of the French Aid Committee and heard, in echo, a brief speech about the imperialist designs of the West under the cover of bourgeois philanthropy. She referred to their desire to return to Moscow, and then… the echo interrupted her: foreign interventionist forces and internal class enemies were engaged in undermining reconstruction in the young Soviet republic…
After a quarter of an hour of such exchanges Charlotte longed to shout, 'I want to leave! That's all!' But the absurd logic of this conversation would not loosen its grip.
'A train to Moscow…'
'The sabotage of bourgeois specialists on the railways…'
'The poor state of health of my mother…'
'The horrible economic and cultural inheritance of tsarism…'
Finally, exhausted, she whispered weakly, 'Listen, please return my papers to me…'
The administrator's voice seemed to hit an obstacle. A rapid spasm crossed his face. He left his office without saying anything. Profiting from his absence, Charlotte glanced at the pile of brochures. The title plunged her into extreme perplexity: 'Eradicating Sexual Laxity in Party Cells (recommendations).' So it was the recommendations that the administrator had been underlining in red pencil.
'We haven't found your papers,' he said, coming in.
Charlotte pressed him. What happened then was as unbelievable as it was logical. The leader vomited forth such a torrent of oaths that even after two months spent on crowded trains, she was shattered by it. He continued to shout at her while she already had her hand on the door handle. Then, suddenly bringing his face close to hers, he hissed, 'I could arrest you and shoot you right there in the courtyard behind the shithouse! D'you understand, filthy spy!'
On her return, walking through the snow-covered fields, Charlotte told herself that a new language was in the process of being born in this country. A language that she did not know, and that was why the dialogue in the former governor's office had seemed to her incredible. But everything had its meaning: even the revolutionary eloquence that suddenly slid into gutter language; even his 'citizen-spy'; and even the pamphlet regulating the sexual lives of party members. Yes, a new order of things was being established. Everything in this world, albeit so familiar, was going to acquire a new name; they were going to apply a different label to each object, to each being.
'And what about this lazy snow,' she thought, 'the thaw with its sleepy flakes in the mauve evening sky?' She recalled that as a child she was always happy to find the snow again when she came out into the street after her lesson with the governor's daughter. 'Like today…' she said to herself, taking a deep breath.
A few days later life became frozen. One clear night polar cold descended from the sky. The world was transformed into a crystal of ice, within which were encrusted the trees bristling with rime; the still, white columns above the chimneys; the silvery line of the taiga stretching to the horizon; and the sun surrounded by a halo of moire. The human voice no longer carried; its vapor froze on the lips.
Now they thought only of survival from day to day, by keeping a tiny zone of warmth around their bodies.
It was above all the
