return home. Yes, I guessed what an adulterous woman might feel in the evening, at the hairdresser's, between the last kiss of a rendezvous at the hotel and the first, very ordinary words that must be addressed to the husband… Without being able to explain it myself, I felt as if I heard a string vibrating in the soul of this woman. My own heart sang out in unison. A smiling voice that came from Charlotte's stories prompted me:
Time passed in our Atlantis according to its own laws. To be precise, it did not pass but rippled around each event described by Charlotte. Each fact, even perfectly accidental ones, became encrusted forever in the daily life of that country. A comet was always crossing its night sky, even though our grandmother, consulting a press cutting, gave us the precise date of this sudden apparition in the heavens: October 17, 1882. We could not picture the Eiffel Tower without seeing the mad Austrian who had leaped from its jagged spire, whose parachute had failed him and who crashed in the midst of a gawking crowd. For us the Pere Lachaise was far from being a tranquil cemetery, animated only by the respectful whispers of a few tourists. Not a bit of it: armed men ran among the tombs in all directions, exchanging gunshots and hiding behind the funerary monuments. Recounted to us once, this battle between the Communards and the Versailles government troops was forever associated in our minds with the name Pere Lachaise. Furthermore we also heard the echo of this shoot-out in the catacombs of Paris. For according to Charlotte, they did battle in those labyrinths too, with bullets shattering the skulls of the dead of several centuries. And if the night sky above Atlantis was lit by the comet and by German zeppelins, the clear blue of day was filled with the regular chirring of a monoplane: a certain Louis Bleriot was crossing the channel.
The choice of events was more or less subjective. Their sequence was chiefly governed by our feverish desire to know, by our random questions. But whatever significance, they never escaped the general rule: the chandelier that fell from the ceiling during the performance of
Charlotte sometimes drew this information from the Siberian suitcase, sometimes from her childhood memories. A number of her stories went back to a still earlier age, related by her uncle or by Albertine, who themselves had inherited them from their parents.
But for us the exact chronology mattered little! Time in Atlantis knew only the marvelous simultaneity of the present. The vibrant baritone of Faust filled the auditorium: 'Let me gaze, let me gaze on the form before me…'; the chandelier fell; the lionesses hurled themselves at the unfortunate Delmonico; the comet cut through the night sky; the parachutist took off from the Eiffel Tower; two thieves, taking advantage of the summer season carelessness, walked out of the Louvre at night, carrying off the
This present tense, this time in which actions were repeated indefinitely, was of course an optical illusion. But it was thanks to this illusory perception that we discovered several essential character traits in the inhabitants of our Atlantis. The streets of Paris, in our stories, were constantly shaken by bomb explosions. The anarchists who threw them must have been as numerous as the grisettes or the coachmen in their cabs. For me the names of some of these enemies of the social order will for a long time evoke the roar of an explosion or the sound of gunfire: Ravachol, Sante Caserio…
Yes, it was in these tempestuous streets that one of the peculiarities of this people became clear to us: they were always busy making demands; never content with the status quo already achieved; ready at any moment to surge into the thoroughfares of their city, to unseat, to agitate, to insist. In the perfect social calm of our own fatherland these Frenchmen had the look of born rebels, dedicated demonstrators, professional moaners. And the Siberian suitcase containing newspapers that spoke of strikes, assassination attempts, and fights on the barricades seemed itself to be like a great bomb ticking away amid the somnolent tranquillity of Saranza.
And then a few streets further on from the explosions, still in this present, which never passed away, we came upon a quiet little bistro, the name of which Charlotte spelled out to us, smilingly, as she recalled it: Au Ratafia de Neuilly 'This ratafia,' she would elaborate, 'the patron served it in silver scallop dishes…'
So the people of our Atlantis could feel sentimental attachment to a cafe, love its name, and discern an atmosphere that was special to it. And for their whole lives retain the memory that it was there, at the corner of a street, that one drank ratafia from silver scallop dishes. Yes, not from thick tumblers, nor from goblets, but from these fine dishes. It was our new discovery: this occult science that linked the place of refreshments, the ritual of the meal, and its psychological tonality.
'In their minds, do their favorite bistros have a soul?' we wondered, 'or at least a face of their own?'
There was only one cafe in Saranza. Despite its pretty name, Snowflake, it did not arouse any special emotion in us, any more than the furniture shop next door or the savings bank opposite. It closed at eight o'clock in the evening, and then it was its dark interior, with the blue eye of a nightlight, which inspired our curiosity. And as for the five or six restaurants in the city on the Volga where our family lived, they were all identical: at seven o'clock precisely the doorkeeper opened the doors to an impatient crowd; and a combination of earsplitting music and the smell of burned fat spilled into the street; at eleven o'clock the same crowd, muted and fuddled, streamed out onto the front steps, near which a flashing police light added a note of fantasy to this immutable rhythm…
'The silver scallop dishes
Charlotte explained the composition of this unusual drink to us. Her account very naturally brought us to the universe of wines. And it was there, enthralled by a colorful tide of
Yes, most of all it was this contradiction that left us perplexed: that these anarchists had managed to elaborate such a coherent and complex system of drinks. And what is more, all these innumerable wines, according to Charlotte, formed infinite combinations with cheeses! And the latter in their turn added up to a veritable cheese encyclopedia of tastes, of local colors, of individual humors, almost… Rabelais, who often haunted our evenings on the steppes, had not lied.
We were discovering that a meal, yes, the simple intake of food, could become a theatrical production, a liturgy, an art. As at the Cafe Anglais on the boulevard des Italiens, where Charlotte's uncle often dined with his friends. It was he who told his niece the story of that incredible bill of ten thousand francs for a hundred… frogs! 'It was very cold,' he recalled; 'all the rivers were covered in ice. They had to summon fifty workmen to disembowel that glacier and find the frogs…' I did not know what amazed us most: this unimaginable dish, contrary to all our own gastronomic notions, or the regiment of muzhiks (which is how we pictured them) busy splitting blocks of ice on the frozen Seine.
In truth, we were beginning to lose our heads: the Louvre;
