about the men they shot, where's it to be found?'
'I'll bring it to you at school tomorrow. I must have got it copied out at home…'
I said it just like that, finding it hard to contain my joy. It was the happiest day of my youth.
10
The truth is, Charlotte has nothing more to teach me.'
The morning I arrived in Saranza this disconcerting thought crossed my mind. I jumped down from the carriage at the little station. I was the only one getting off there. At the other end of the platform I saw my grandmother. She caught sight of me, gave a slight wave of her hand, and came to meet me. It was at that moment, walking toward her, that I had this insight: she had nothing new to teach me about France; she had told me everything, and thanks to my reading, I had accumulated a knowledge possibly vaster than her own… As I kissed her, I felt ashamed of this thought, which had caught me unawares. I saw in it a kind of involuntary betrayal.
In fact I had for months been experiencing a strange torment: that of having learned too much… I was like a thrifty man who hopes to see his amassed savings quickly bring him a wholly different way of life, open up prodigious new horizons, and change his vision of things – right up to his way of walking, of breathing, of speaking to women. The savings continue to accumulate, but the dramatic change is slow in coming.
So it was with the sum of my French knowledge. Not that I would have wanted to derive any profit from it. The interest that my comrade the dunce showed in my stories amply fulfilled me. I was hoping rather for a mysterious click, like that of the spring in a music box: the grinding sound that announces the start of the minuet to be danced by the little figures on the platform. I longed for this medley of dates, names, events, and characters to recast itself into the stuff of a hitherto unseen life, to crystallize into a fundamentally new world. I wanted the France that was grafted onto my heart, that had been studied, explored, and learned, to turn me into a new being.
But the only change at the start of this summer was the absence of my sister, who had gone to continue her studies in Moscow. I was afraid to admit to myself that her departure might make our evening gatherings on the balcony impossible.
The first evening, as if to confirm my fears, I began to question my grandmother about the France of her youth. She replied willingly, believing my curiosity to be sincere. As she spoke, Charlotte continued to darn the lace collar of a blouse. She handled the needle with that touch of artistic elegance one always sees in a woman who is working and at the same time engaged in conversation with a guest she believes to be interested in what she has to say.
Leaning on the handrail of the little balcony, I listened to her. My routine questions drew forth scenes from the past that I had contemplated hundreds of times in my childhood, familiar images, known characters: the dog barber on the quay by the Seine; the imperial procession passing along the Champs Elysees;
I was fourteen that summer. I understood only too well that the time for fairy tales would not return. I had learned too much to let myself be intoxicated by their whirling colorful dance. Strangely, instead of rejoicing at this evident sign of my maturity, that evening I felt nostalgic for my former trusting innocence. My new knowledge, contrary to my expectations, seemed to blot out the pictures I had of France. No sooner did I seek to return to the Atlantis of our youth than a learned voice intervened: I saw pages of books, dates in large print. The voice began to comment, to compare, to quote. And I felt myself stricken with a strange blindness…
At one moment our conversation broke off. I had been listening so inattentively that Charlotte's last remark – it must have been a question – escaped me. Confused, I studied her face, which was raised toward me. In my ears I could hear the melody of the sentence she had just uttered. It was her intonation that helped me to reconstruct the sense. Yes, it was that intonation a storyteller adopts in saying, 'No, but you must have heard that one before. I'm not going to weary you with all my old tales…,' while secretly hoping that his listeners will urge him on, will assure him that they do not know the story or that they have forgotten it… I shook my head slightly, with a doubtful air. 'No, no, I don't think so. Are you sure you've told it to me before?'
I saw a smile light up my grandmother's face. She took up the story. This time I listened alertly. And for the umpteenth time before my eyes appeared a narrow street in medieval Paris, one cold autumn night; and on a wall, that grim plaque that had brought together for all time three destinies and three names from days gone by: Louis d'Orleans, Jean sans Peur, and Isabeau de Baviere…
I do not know why I interrupted her at that moment. No doubt I wanted to show off my erudition to her. But chiefly it was a sudden perception that blinded me: an old lady on a balcony, suspended above the endless steppe, repeating once more a story known by heart; she repeats it with the mechanical precision of a gramophone record, faithful to her more-or-less legendary story that tells of a country that only exists in her memory… Our tete-a-tete in the silence of the evening suddenly seemed to me absurd, and Charlotte's voice reminded me of an automaton's. I seized on the name of the character she had just mentioned and started talking. Jean sans Peur and his shameful conspiracies with the English. Paris, where the butchers became 'revolutionaries,' laid down the law, and massacred the enemies of Burgundy, or those claimed as such. And the mad king. And the gibbets in the squares of Paris. And the wolves roaming in the suburbs of the city devastated by civil war. And the unimaginable betrayal committed by Isabeau de Baviere, who joined forces with Jean sans Peur and denied the Dauphin, claiming that he was not the king's son. Yes, the fair Isabeau of our childhood…
Suddenly I was gasping for breath; I choked myself with my own words; I had too much to say.
After a moment of silence my grandmother nodded gently and said, with absolutely sincerity, 'I'm delighted you know your history so well!'
Yet in her voice, full of conviction, I thought I could detect the echo of an unconscious thought: 'It is good to know history. But when I spoke of Isabeau and the allee des Arbaletriers, and that autumn night, I had something different in mind…'
She bent over her task, making little thrusts with her needle, precise and regular. I walked through the apartment, went down into the street. A train whistle sounded in the distance. Its tone, softened by the warm air of the evening, had something of a sigh, a lament about it.
Between the apartment block where Charlotte lived and the steppe there was a kind of little wood, very dense, even impenetrable: thickets of brambles, the claws of hazel branches, collapsed trenches full of nettles. And even if we managed to get through these natural obstacles in the course of our games, others, those made by man, barred the way: rows of barbed wire entanglements, the rusty crossed bars of antitank barriers… This place was known as the 'Stalinka,' after the name of the defensive line built there during the war. They were afraid that the Germans might get that far. But the Volga and, above all, Stalingrad had halted them… The line had been dismantled; what was left of the war materials had ended up abandoned in this wood, which had inherited its name. The 'Stalinka,' the inhabitants of Saranza would call it, and thus their town seemed to become involved in the great deeds of history.
It was said that the inside of the wood was mined. This deterred even the boldest among us who might have wanted to venture into this no-man's-land that hugged its rusted treasures to itself.
It was beyond the thickets of the Stalinka that the narrow-gauge railway passed; it was like a miniature railway, with a little locomotive, all black with soot, with little trucks as well and, as in an
