'infectionary' It would be at this moment that their best friend, an ex-fighter pilot, would intervene with his own arguments, and the conversation would plunge into an extremely perilous nosedive. And that was before they went into the respective merits of the fronts they had been on, all three different; let alone the role of Stalin during the war…
This arguing, I sensed, pained them greatly. For they knew that, whatever their own part in the victory had been, the die was cast: their own generation, decimated, massacred, would soon disappear, along with the foot soldier, the gunner, and the pilot. And my mother would precede even them, in accordance with the fate of children born at the beginning of the twenties. At fifteen I would be left alone with my sister. It was as if in their arguments there was an unspoken foreknowledge of this immediate future… Charlotte's life, I believed, reconciled them, offering a neutral territory.
But as I grew older I began to detect quite a different reason for this French predilection in their interminable discussions. It was that Charlotte's advent under the Russian sky was like that of an extraterrestrial being. The cruel history of this immense empire, of its famines, its revolutions, its civil war, was nothing to do with her… We Russians had no choice. But she? Through her eyes they could observe a country they did not recognize, because judged by a foreigner, sometimes naive, often more perspicacious than themselves. Charlotte's eyes reflected a disturbing world where unforced truth abounded – an unfamiliar Russia that they needed to discover.
I listened to them, and I too discovered Charlotte's Russian destiny, but in my own way. Certain details, hardly mentioned, became magnified in my mind and created a whole secret universe. Other events, to which the adults attached considerable importance, passed unnoticed.
Thus, strangely, the horrible images of cannibalism in the villages of the Volga affected me very little. I had just read
And the feature of Charlotte's rural past that made the greatest impression on me was not the hard labor at the farm. What I remembered above all was her visit to the young people of the village. She had gone to see them that very evening and had found them engaged in a metaphysical discussion: the topic was what kind of death would befall someone who dared to go to the cemetery on the dot of midnight. Charlotte had smiled and said she was capable of confronting all supernatural powers among the tombs that night. Distractions were few and far between. The young people, secretly hoping for some macabre outcome, had saluted her courage with tumultuous enthusiasm. They only needed to find an object that this harebrained Frenchwoman could leave on one of the tombs in the village cemetery. And it was not easy. For everything that had been proposed could be replaced by a duplicate: scarf, stone, coin… Yes, the wily foreigner could very well go there at dawn and hang up this shawl while everyone else slept. No, a unique object had to be chosen… Next morning what an entire delegation had found, hanging from a cross in the shadiest corner of the cemetery, was 'the little Pont-Neuf bag.'
It was in picturing this woman's handbag amid the crosses, under the Siberian sky, that I began to have a feeling for the incredible destiny of things. They traveled; beneath their commonplace exterior they logged the different periods of our lives, linking moments that were very far apart.
As for the marriage of my grandmother to the people's judge, doubtless I did not notice all the historical piquancies that the adults could detect in this. Charlotte's love, my grandfather's courtship of her, the couple they made, so unusual in that Siberian country – of all that I grasped only a fragment. Fyodor, his tunic well pressed, his boots gleaming, makes his way toward the place for their crucial rendezvous. A few paces behind him his clerk, the young son of a priest, conscious of the gravity of the moment, walks slowly, carrying an enormous bunch of roses. A people's judge, even when in love, must not look like a mere operatic suitor. Charlotte sees them from afar, understands at once the scene that has been prepared, and with a mischievous smile accepts the bouquet that Fyodor takes from the hands of the clerk. The latter, intimidated but curious, backs away.
Or perhaps this fragment as well: the one and only wedding photo (all the others, those in which my grandfather appeared, would be confiscated at the time of his arrest): their two faces, slightly inclined toward one another, and on the lips of an incredibly young and beautiful Charlotte the smiling reflection of the
Furthermore, in those long nocturnal narratives, all was not always clear to my childish ears. That sudden rush of blood to the head of Charlotte's father, for example… One day this respectable and wealthy doctor learns from one of his patients, a senior official in the police, that the big demonstration by workers, which at any minute was about to spill onto the main square at Boyarsk, would be met at one of the crossroads with machine-gun fire. As soon as his patient has left, Dr. Lemonnier removes his white coat and, without summoning his driver, leaps into his carriage and hurtles through the streets to warn the workers.
The massacre did not take place… And I often wondered why this 'bourgeois,' this privileged man, had acted thus. We were accustomed to seeing the world in black and white: the rich and the poor, the exploiters and the exploited – in a word, the class enemies and the just. Charlotte's father's action confused me. Out of the mass of humanity, so conveniently divided into two, suddenly arose a man, with his unpredictable liberty.
Nor did I understand what had happened at Bukhara. I guessed only that it was a terrible occurrence. It was surely not by chance that the adults only hinted at it, shaking their heads eloquently. It was a kind of taboo, which their narrative skirted around by describing the setting in the following way. First I saw a river flowing over smooth pebbles, then a path running beside the endless desert. And the sun began to dance in Charlotte's eyes, and her cheek was inflamed with the burning of the sand, and the heavens resounded with a neighing… The scene, the sense of which I did not understand but whose physical density I entered, was blotted out. The adults sighed, changed the subject, and poured themselves another glass of vodka.
In the end I sensed that this event, which had occurred in the sands of Central Asia, had marked our family's history forever in a mysterious and very intimate fashion. I also noticed that it was never spoken of when Charlotte's son, my uncle Sergei, was among the guests…
The truth is that if I spied on these nocturnal confidences it was, above all, to explore my grandmother's French past. The Russian side of her life interested me less. I was like that investigator who, in examining a meteorite, is primarily attracted by the little gleaming crystals embedded in its basalt surface. And just as one dreams of a distant journey whose goal is yet unknown, so I dreamed of Charlotte's balcony, of her Atlantis, where I believed I had left a part of myself the previous summer.
2
7
That summer I felt extremely nervous about encountering the tsar again… Yes, of seeing the young emperor and his wife once more in the streets of Paris. Just as you dread meeting a friend whose doctor has informed you of his imminent death and who, in blissful ignorance, proceeds to tell you all about his plans.
For how could I have traveled with Nicholas and Alexandra if I knew them to be doomed? If I knew that even their daughter Olga would not be spared? And that even the other children, to whom Alexandra had not yet given birth, would meet the same tragic fate?
I was secretly overjoyed that evening when I caught sight of a little collection of poems on my grandmother's lap that she was leafing through as she sat amid the flowers upon her balcony. Had she sensed my unease, remembering the incident of the previous summer? Or did she simply want to read us one of her favorite poems?
I came to sit beside her on the floor itself, resting my elbow on the head of the
