Dreams Of My Russian Summers

loving.

And then there was also the celebrated chef, Urbain Dubois, Charlotte told us, who had dedicated a shrimp and asparagus soup to Sarah Bernhardt. This obliged us to picture a borscht being dedicated to someone, like a book… One day we followed a young dandy through the streets of Atlantis; he walked into Chez Weber, a very fashionable cafe, according to Charlotte's uncle. He ordered what he always ordered: a bunch of grapes and a glass of water. It was Marcel Proust. We contemplated the grapes and the water, which, under our fascinated gaze, became transformed into fare of unequaled elegance. So it was not the variety of wines or the Rabelaisian abundance of food that counted, but…

We thought again about that French spirit, the mystery of which we strove to fathom. And Charlotte, as if she desired to make our investigations even more frenzied, was already telling us about the Restaurant Paillard on the rue de la Chaussee d'Antin, where the princesse de Caraman-Chimay eloped one evening with the Gypsy violinist Rigo…

Without daring to believe it yet, I asked myself a silent question: might not this much-sought-after French quintessence have as its source – love? For all roads in our Atlantis seemed to lead to the domain of Cupid.

Saranza was sinking into the aromatic night of the steppes. Its scents were mingled with the perfume that embalmed a woman's body swathed in precious stones and ermine. Charlotte was telling of the escapades of the divine Otero. With incredulous astonishment I contemplated this last great courtesan, all curves on her couch with its capricious shapes. Her extravagant life was devoted only to love. And around this throne buzzed men – some counting the last few louis d'or of their lost fortunes, others slowly raising the barrels of their revolvers to their temples. And even in this final gesture they could display an elegance worthy of Proust's bunch of grapes. One of these unhappy lovers committed suicide on the very spot where he had first set eyes on Caroline Otero!

In this exotic country, moreover, the cult of love knew no social boundaries: far from the boudoirs brimming with luxury, over in the working-class suburb of Belleville, we saw two rival gangs kill one another because of a woman. Sole difference: the beautiful Otero's locks had the sheen of a raven's wing, while the tresses of this disputed lover glowed like ripe corn in the setting sun. The bandits of Belleville called her 'Casque d'or. '

At that moment our critical sense rebelled. We were prepared to believe in the existence of frog eaters, but fancy gangsters slitting one another's throats over a woman's pretty face!

Clearly this was nothing surprising for our Atlantis. Had we not already seen Charlotte's uncle staggering as he emerged from a cab, his eyes dimmed, his arm swathed in a bloodstained kerchief? He had just been fighting a duel in the forest of Marly, defending a lady's honor… And then there was General Boulanger, the fallen dictator: did he not blow his brains out on the grave of his beloved?

One day, returning from a walk, we were all three surprised by a shower of rain… We were strolling in the old streets of Saranza, made up entirely of great izbas blackened with age. It was beneath the porch of one of them that we found refuge. The street, stifling with the heat a moment ago, was plunged into a chilly twilight, raked by flurries of hail. It was paved in the old style – with great round granite cobbles. The rain caused them to give off a strong smell of wet stone. The view of the houses was blurred behind a curtain of water – and, thanks to that smell, one could imagine oneself to be in a big city in the evening under autumn rain. Charlotte's voice, at first hardly louder than the sound of the raindrops, seemed like an echo muted by the torrential downpour.

'It was another shower of rain that led me to discover an inscription engraved on the damp wall of a house in the allee des Arbaletriers in Paris. We had taken refuge under a porch, my mother and I, and while we waited for the rain to stop, all we had in front of our eyes was this commemorative plaque. I learned the text by heart: In this passage, after leaving the Hotel de Barbette, the due Louis d'Orleans, brother of King Charles VI, was assassinated by Jean sans Peur, duc de Burgundy, on the night of November 23 to 24, 1407… . He was leaving after a visit to the queen, Isabeau de Baviere…'

Our grandmother fell silent, but in the whispering of the raindrops we could still hear these legendary names woven into a tragic monogram of love and death: Louis d'Orleans, Isabeau de Baviere, Jean sans Peur…

Suddenly, without knowing why I thought of the president. A very very simple, obvious notion: it was that during all those ceremonies in honor of the imperial couple – yes, in the procession on the Champs-Elysees and in front of the tomb of Napoleon and at the Opera – he had never stopped dreaming of her, his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil. He spoke with the tsar, made speeches, replied to the tsarina, exchanged glances with his wife. But she, at every moment, she was there.

The rain streamed onto the mossy roof of the old izba that was sheltering us on its steps. I forgot where I was. The city I had once visited in the company of the tsar was transfigured before my eyes. Now I perceived it from the viewpoint of the president in love.

That time, on leaving Saranza, I felt as if I were returning from an expedition. I was bringing back a sum of knowledge; a glimpse of their habits and customs; a description, still fragmentary, of the mysterious civilization that was reborn each evening in the heart of the steppes.

Every adolescent classifies things, a defensive reflex when faced with the complexity of the adult world as it sucks him in at the end of childhood. I was perhaps more prone to this than most. For the country I had to explore no longer existed, and I had to reconstitute the topography of its high places and its holy places through the thick fog of the past.

I was especially proud of the gallery of human types that I now possessed in my collection. Apart from the president-lover, the deputies in a boat, and a dandy with his bunch of grapes, there were much humbler but no less unusual characters. The children for example, young mineworkers, their smiles ringed with black. A news vendor crying his wares (we did not dare to imagine a madman running through the streets crying 'Pravdal Pravda!'). A dog barber who practiced his craft on the quays. A rural constable with his drum. Strikers gathering to be fed 'Communist soup.' And even a dog turd salesman. I was very proud of knowing that this strange merchandise was used, at the time, to soften leather…

But my greatest initiation that summer was to understand how one could be French. The countless facets of this elusive identity had formed themselves into a living whole. It was a very well ordered mode of existence, despite its eccentric aspects.

France was for me no longer a simple collection of curios but a tangible and solid entity of which a small part had one day been implanted inside me.

8

What I don't understand is why she wanted to bury herself out there in that Saranza. Not at all. She could very well have lived here, close to you…'

I almost leaped from my stool beside the television. For I understood so perfectly Charlotte's reasons for being fond of her little provincial town. It would have been so easy to explain her choice to the adults gathered in our kitchen. I would have talked of the dry air of the steppe, whose silent transparency distilled the past. I would have spoken of the dusty streets that led nowhere, as they emerged, all of them, onto the small endless plain. Of the town where history, by decapitating churches and tearing down 'architectural excesses,' had banished all notion of time. A town where living meant endlessly reliving one's past, even while at the same time mechanically performing routine tasks.

I said nothing. I was afraid of being banished from the kitchen. For some time now I had noticed that the adults tolerated my presence more readily. I seemed, at the age of fourteen, to have won the right to be present at their late-night conversations – on condition that I remained invisible. I was thrilled by this change, and the last thing I wanted to do was to jeopardize such a privilege.

Charlotte's name came up during these winter gatherings just as often as before. Yes, as previously, my grandmother's life offered our guests a topic of conversation that satisfied everyone's self-esteem.