simplicity.
It was this woman, this Frenchwoman, lost in the snowy immensity of Russia, who had taught the others the words that bestowed beauty. My maternal grandmother… She was born in France at the beginning of the century in the family of Norbert and Albertine Lemonnier. The mystery of the
One day I came upon a photo I should not have seen… I was spending my holidays with my grandmother in the town at the edge of the Russian steppe where she had been stranded after the war. A warm, slow summer dusk was drawing in and flooding the rooms with a mauve glow. This somewhat unearthly light fell upon the photos that I was examining before an open window, the oldest snapshots in our albums. The pictures spanned the historic watershed of the 1917 revolution; brought to life the era of the tsars; and, moreover, pierced the iron curtain, which was then almost impenetrable, transporting me at one moment to the precinct of a gothic cathedral and the next into the pathways of a garden where the precise geometry of the plants left me perplexed. I was plunging into our family prehistory.
Then suddenly this photo!
I saw it when, out of pure curiosity, I opened a large envelope that had been slipped between the last page and the cover. It was that inevitable batch of snapshots that have not been judged worthy to appear on the rough cardboard of the pages, landscapes that can no longer be identified, faces that evoke neither affection nor memories. One of those batches you always tell yourself you must sort through one day, to decide the fate of all these souls in torment…
It was in the midst of these unknown people and forgotten landscapes that I saw her, a young woman whose attire jarred oddly with the elegance of the people who appeared in the other photos. She was wearing a big dirty gray padded jacket and a man's
'How did she slip in,' I wondered in amazement, 'among all these men in tails and women in evening dress?' And all around her in other snapshots there were these majestic avenues, these colonnades, these Mediterranean vistas. Her presence was anachronistic, out of place, inexplicable. She seemed like an intruder in this family past, with a style of dress nowadays adopted only by the women who cleared snowdrifts from the roads in winter…
I had not heard my grandmother coming in. She placed her hand on my shoulder. I gave a start, then, showing her the photo, 'Who is that woman I asked her.'
A brief flash of panic appeared in my grandmother's unfailingly calm eyes. In an almost nonchalant voice she asked me, 'Which woman?'
We both fell silent, pricking up our ears. A bizarre rustling filled the room. My grandmother turned and cried out, it seemed to me, joyfully, 'A death's-head! Look, a death's-head!'
I saw a large brown insect, a crepuscular hawkmoth, quivering as it tried to plunge into the illusory depths of the mirror. I rushed toward it, my hand outstretched, already feeling the tickling of its wings under my palm. It was then I noticed the unusual shape of this moth. I approached it and could not suppress a cry: 'But there are two of them! They're Siamese twins.'
And indeed the two moths did seem to be attached to one another. And their bodies were animated with feverish trembling. To my surprise this double hawkmoth paid me no attention and did not try to escape. Before catching it I had time to observe the white marks on its back, the famous death's head.
We did not speak again about the woman in the padded jacket… I watched the flight of the liberated hawkmoth – in the sky it divided into two moths, and I understood, as a child of ten can understand, why they had been joined. Now my grandmother's disarray seemed to make sense.
The capture of the coupling hawkmoths brought to my mind two very old memories, the most mysterious of my childhood. The first, going back to when I was eight, was summed up in the words of an old song that my grandmother sometimes murmured rather than sang, sitting on her balcony, her head bowed over a garment on which she was darning the collar or reinforcing the buttons. It was the very last words of her song that plunged me into enchantment:
… We'd sleep together there Till the world comes to an end.
This slumber of the two lovers, of such long duration, was beyond my childish comprehension. I already knew that people who died (like that old woman next door whose disappearance in winter had been so well explained to me) went to sleep forever. Like the lovers in the song? Love and death had now formed a strange alloy in my young head. And the melancholy beauty of the melody could only increase this unease. Love, death, beauty… And the evening sky, the wind, the smell of the steppe that, thanks to the song, I perceived as if my life had just begun at that moment.
The second memory was so distant it could not be dated. There was not even a very precise 'me' in its nebulousness. Just the intense sensation of light, the aromatic scent of plants, and silvery lines crossing the blue density of the air, which many years later I would identify as gossamer threads. Elusive and confused, this vision would nevertheless be dear to me, for I would succeed in persuading myself that it was a memory from before birth. Yes, an echo sent to me by my French ancestry. For in one of my grandmother's stories I was to rediscover all the elements of this memory: the autumn sun of a journey she made to Provence, the scent of the fields of lavender, and even those gossamers floating in the perfumed air. I would never dare to speak to her of my childish prescience. It was in the course of the following summer that my sister and I one day saw our grandmother weep… for the first time in our lives.
In our eyes she was a kind of just and benevolent deity, always true to form and perfectly serene. Her own life story, which had long since become a myth, placed her beyond the griefs of ordinary mortals. In fact we did not see any tears. Just an unhappy contraction of her lips, little tremors running across her cheeks, and a rapid batting of her eyelashes…
We were sitting on the carpet, which was littered with bits of crumpled paper, and were absorbed in a fascinating game: taking out little pebbles that 'were wrapped in white 'sweet papers' and comparing them – now a glitter of quartz, now a pebble, smooth and pleasant to the touch. On each paper were written names that we had, in our ignorance, taken for enigmatic mineralogical labels: Fecamp, La Rochelle, Bayonne… In one of the wrappers we even discovered a rough and ferrous fragment, which bore traces of rust. We thought we were reading the name of this strange metal: ' Verdun. '… A number of pieces from this collection had been thus stripped bare. When our grandmother came in, the game had just begun to take a livelier course. We were quarreling over the most beautiful stones and testing their hardness by striking them one against another, sometimes breaking them. Those we found ugly – like the ' Verdun,' for example – were thrown out of the window into a bed of dahlias. Several wrappers had been torn…
Our grandmother froze above this battlefield scattered with white blisters. We looked up. It was then that her gray eyes seemed to be on the brink of tears -just enough to make it unbearable for us if she broke down.
No, she was not an impassive goddess, our grandmother. She too, it seemed, could suffer unease, or sudden distress. We had always thought she moved in such a measured way through the peaceful sequence of days, yet she too sometimes hovered on the brink of tears!
From that summer onward my grandmother's life revealed new and unexpected facets to me. And above all, much more personal ones.
Previously her past had been summed up by a few talismans, a number of family relics, like the silk fan, which reminded me of a fine maple leaf, or the famous little 'Pont-Neuf bag.' Our legend maintained that it had been found on the bridge in question by Charlotte Lemonnier, aged four at the time. Running ahead of her mother, the little girl had stopped suddenly and exclaimed, 'A bag!' And more than half a century later, the muted echo of her ringing cry could still be heard in a town lost amid the endlessness of Russia, under the sun of the steppes. It was in this pigskin bag, with enamel plaques on the fastening, that my grandmother kept her collection of stones from days gone by.
This old handbag marked one of my grandmother's earliest memories, and for
