And besides, this young Frenchwoman had the advantage of concentrating within her life span the crucial moments in the history of our country. She had lived under the tsar and survived Stalin's purges; she had come through the war and witnessed the fall of so many idols. In their eyes, her life, traced against the background of the empire's bloodiest century, took on an epic dimension.
And now this Frenchwoman, born at the other end of the world, was blankly contemplating the undulations of the sands beyond the open door of a railway carriage. ('But what the devil dragged her into that wretched desert?' my father's friend, the wartime pilot, had exclaimed one day.) At her side, equally motionless, stood her husband, Fyodor. The draft rushing through the carriage brought no coolness, despite the speed of the train. They remained for a long moment in the light and heat of this embrasure. The wind pumiced their brows like sandpaper. The sun broke up the view into myriad flashes. But they did not move, as if they wanted a painful past to be erased by this scouring and burning. They had just left Bukhara.
It was she too, after their return to Siberia, who spent interminable hours at a dark window, from time to time breathing on the thick layer of hoarfrost to preserve a little melted circle. Through this watery spyhole she saw a white nocturnal street. From time to time a car suddenly came gliding up, approached their house, and after a moment of indecision drove off. Three o'clock in the morning sounded, and a few minutes later she heard the sharp crunch of snow on the front steps. She closed her eyes for a moment, then went to open up. Her husband always came back at this time… People sometimes disappeared at work, sometimes in the middle of the night, from home, after a black car had driven through the snow-covered streets. She was certain that as long as she waited at the window for him, blowing on the hoarfrost, nothing could happen to him. At three o'clock he would stand up, straighten out the files on his desk, and leave, like all the other public officials throughout the empire. They knew that in the Kremlin the master of the country finished his working day at three o'clock. Without thinking, everyone strove to imitate his timetable. And they did not stop to consider that between Moscow and Siberia, spanning several time zones, this 'three o'clock in the morning' no longer corresponded to anything: that Stalin was rising from his bed and filling his first pipe of the day, while in a Siberian town at nightfall his faithful subjects struggled against sleep on chairs that were turning into instruments of torture. From the Kremlin the master seemed to impose his tempo on the passage of time and even on the sun. When he went to bed, all the clocks on the planet showed three o'clock in the morning. At least that was how everyone saw it at the time.
On one occasion Charlotte, exhausted by these nightly vigils, fell asleep several minutes before this planetary hour. A moment later, waking with a start, she heard her husband's footsteps in the children's room. She went in and saw him bending over the bed of their son, this boy with smooth black hair who looked like no one else in the family…
They arrested Fyodor neither in his office in broad daylight nor in the small hours, interrupting his sleep with peremptory drumming on the door. It was on New Year's Eve. He had rigged himself out in the red cloak of Father Christmas, and his face, unrecognizable beneath a long beard, fascinated the children: the boy of twelve and his younger sister – my mother. Charlotte was adjusting the big
And this scene of an arrest, which had already been repeated millions of times during a single decade in the life of the country, had that evening as its setting the Christmas tree and these two children with their cardboard masks, he the hare, she the squirrel. And at the center of the room this Father Christmas, transfixed, only too able to guess at the outcome and almost happy that the children cannot see the pallor of his cheeks beneath the cotton-wool beard. In a very calm voice Charlotte says to the hare and the squirrel, who are looking at the intruders without removing their masks, 'Come into the next room, children. You can set off the Bengal lights.'
She had spoken in French. The two policemen exchanged significant glances…
Fyodor was saved by what logically ought to have been his downfall: his wife's nationality… When, some years earlier, people had begun to disappear, family by family, house by house, he had at once thought of this. Inherent in Charlotte were two grave faults, the ones most often imputed to 'enemies of the people': 'bourgeois' origins and a link to abroad. Married to a 'bourgeois element,' and worse still a Frenchwoman, he could see himself quite naturally accused of being 'a spy in the pay of French and British imperialists.' The formula for some time had been standard.
However, it was on just this perfect evidence that the well-tried machinery of repression ground to a halt. For normally those who fabricated a case were supposed to prove that the accused had cunningly and for years concealed his links to abroad. And when they were dealing with a Siberian who spoke only his mother tongue, had never left his fatherland or met a representative of the capitalist world – such a proof, even if totally falsified, called for a certain adeptness.
But Fyodor hid nothing. Charlotte's passport indicated her nationality in black and white: French. Her birthplace, Neuilly-sur-Seine, in its Russian transliteration only served to emphasize her foreignness. Her trips to France, her 'bourgeois' cousins who still lived there, her children who spoke French just as well as Russian – it was all too clear. The confessions that were normally false and extracted under torture after weeks of interrogation had this time been vouchsafed willingly from the beginning. The machinery marked time. Fyodor was imprisoned; then, as he became more and more of an embarrassment, posted to the other end of the empire, in a town annexed from Poland.
They spent a week together – the time it took to travel across the country, and a long and chaotic day of moving into a new house. The next day Fyodor set off for Moscow to be reintegrated into the Party, from which he had been promptly expelled. 'It'll only take a couple of days,' he said to Charlotte, who went with him to the station. Returning home, she noticed that he had left his cigarette case behind. 'It doesn't matter,' she thought; 'in two days' time…' And this imminent moment (Fyodor would come into the room, see the cigarette case on the table, and, giving himself a little clout on the forehead, exclaim, 'What an idiot! I've been looking everywhere for it…'), yes, this June morning would be the first in a long stream of happy days…
They saw one another again four years later. And Fyodor never did recover his cigarette case, which, in the midst of war, Charlotte exchanged for a loaf of black bread.
The adults talked. The television, with its gung-ho news programs, its reports of the latest achievements of the nation's industry, its Bolshoi concerts, provided a soothing background. The vodka mitigated the bitterness of the past. And I felt that our guests, even new arrivals, all cherished this Frenchwoman who had accepted the destiny of their country without flinching.
I learned a lot from these stories. I now guessed why in our family the New Year's celebrations always had a whiff of anxiety about them, like a sly draft making the doors slam in an empty house at twilight. Despite my father's gaiety, despite the presents, the noise of fireworks, and the glittering of the tree, this impalpable malaise was there. As if amid the toasts, the popping of corks, and the laughter, someone's arrival were expected. I believe that, without admitting it to themselves, our parents even welcomed the snowy and humdrum calm of the first days of January with relief. In any event, it was certainly this moment after the holidays that my sister and I preferred to the holiday itself…
My grandmother's Russian days – those days that, at a given moment, ceased to be a 'Russian phase' before a return to France and simply became her life – had for me a secret flavor that the others were not aware of. It was a sort of invisible aura that Charlotte carried within her throughout the past, resurrected in our smoke-filled kitchen. I said to myself with marveling astonishment, 'This woman who for months waited at a window covered in ice for the famous three a.m. knock, this woman was the same being, both mysterious and so close to me, who had one day seen silver scallop dishes in a cafe in Neuilly!'
Whenever they spoke of Charlotte they never forgot to tell the story of that morning…
