optical illusion, the driver dressed in a grease-stained jersey: an apparent giant.
leaning out of the window. Each time it was about to cross one of the roads that trailed off toward the horizon, the locomotive emitted its cry, half tender, half plaintive. Doubled by its echo, this signal sounded like the call note of a cuckoo. 'The Kukushka' we called it, with a wink, when we caught sight of this train on its narrow track, overrun with dandelion and chamomile…
It was its voice that guided me that evening. I walked round the thickets at the edge of the Stalinka, I saw the last train in a blur slipping into the warm half-light of the dusk. Even this little train gave off the inimitable slightly piquant smell of railways that imperceptibly summons one to go on long journeys. From the distance, from the blue-tinted mist of the evening, I heard a melancholy
'How good it was before,' a wordless voice said within me. 'I believed the Kukushka went off to an unknown destination, to countries not shown on any map, toward snowcapped mountains, toward a nocturnal sea where the paper lanterns on the boats mingled with the stars. Now I know that this train goes from the Saranza brickworks to the station where its trucks are unloaded. Two or three kilometers in all. Some journey! Yes, now that I know this, I'll never again be able to believe that these rails are endless and this evening unique; with the strong scent from the steppe, the immense sky, and my inexplicable and strangely necessary presence here beside this line with its cracked sleepers; at this precise moment, with that
That night, before going to sleep, I remembered having finally learned the meaning of the enigmatic formula on the menu for the banquet in honor of the tsar: 'Roast bartavels and ortolans, garnished with truffles.' Yes, I knew now that they were both game birds, much prized by gourmets. A delicate, tasty, rare dish, but nothing more. In vain I repeated 'bartavels and ortolans,' as before. The magic that had once filled my lungs with the salt air of Cherbourg had faded. And with a hesitant despair I murmured softly to myself, staring wide-eyed into the darkness, 'Part of my life is now behind me!
From then onward we talked but said nothing. Coming between us we could see the screen that is formed by those smooth words, those echoes of the everyday we give voice to; the verbal liquid with which we feel obliged, without knowing why, to fill the silence. With stupefaction I discovered that talking was in fact the best way of saying nothing about the essential. Whereas to express it one would have to articulate words in quite a different way, whisper them, weave them into the sounds of evening, into the rays of the sunset. Once again I sensed in myself the mysterious gestation of that language so different from words blunted by use, a language in which I could have said softly, meeting Charlotte's gaze, 'Why does my heart miss a beat when I hear the distant call of the Kukushka? Why does an autumn morning in Cherbourg a hundred years ago, yes, a moment I have never lived through, in a town I have never visited, why do its lights and breeze seem to me more alive than the days of my real life? Why does your balcony no longer float in the mauve air of the evening above the steppe? The transparency of dreams that once enveloped it is now broken like an alchemist's flask. And the glass splinters grate together to keep us from talking as we used to… Are not your memories, which I now know by heart, a cage that holds you prisoner? Is not our life simply the daily transformation of the fluid and warm present into a collection of frozen memories, like butterflies crucified on their pins in a dusty glass case? And why then do I sense that I would without hesitation exchange this whole collection for the unique sharp taste left on my lips by that little imaginary silver dish in that illusory cafe at Neuilly? For a single mouthful of Cherbourg's salt breeze? For a single cry of the Kukushka recalled from my childhood?'
But we continued to pour useless words and hollow remarks into the silence, as if into a sieve of the Danaids: 'It's hotter than yesterday! Gavrilych is drunk again… The Kukushka hasn't gone past this evening… There's a fire over there on the steppe, look! No, it's a cloud… I'll make some more tea… Today at the market they were selling watermelons from Uzbekistan…'
The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked, I now understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in this world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words, seemed to me essential. The unsayable was essential.
This equation created a kind of intellectual short circuit in my head. Its conciseness led me that summer to a terrible truth: 'People speak because they are afraid of silence. They speak mechanically, whether aloud or to themselves. They are intoxicated by this vocal gruel that ensnares every object and every being. They talk about rain and fine weather; they talk about money, about love, about nothing. And even when they are talking about their most exalted love, they use words uttered a hundred times, threadbare phrases. They talk for the sake of talking. They seek to exorcise silence…'
The alchemist's vessel was broken. Though conscious of the absurdity of our words, we continued our humdrum dialogue: 'I think it's going to rain. Look at that big cloud. No, it's a fire on the steppe… That's funny, the Kukushha has gone past earlier than usual… Gavrilych… The tea… At the market…'
Yes, I had lived out a part of my life. Childhood.
In the end, our conversations about the rain and the fine weather that summer were not wholly unjustified. It rained often, and my sadness has colored my memory of those holidays with misty and lukewarm hues.
Sometimes out of the depths of this slow grayness of days, an echo of our evening gatherings in the past surfaced – some photo that I discovered by chance in the Siberian suitcase, the contents of which had long since held no secrets for me. Or from time to time a fleeting detail of the family history, which was as yet unknown to me and which Charlotte offered me with the timid joy of a bankrupt princess, suddenly finding a small coin of fine gold beneath the threadbare lining of her purse.
Thus it was that one day when it was raining hard, as I leafed through the piles of old French newspapers amassed in the suitcase, I lit upon a page that probably came from an illustrated magazine at the turn of the century. It was a reproduction, faintly covered in a brown-and-gray tint, of a painting in that highly wrought realistic style, whose attraction lies in its precise and abundant details. It was through examining these details during the long rainy evening that I retained a memory of the subject. A very disparate column of soldiers, all visibly suffering from exhaustion and old age, was crossing the street of a poor village with bare trees. The soldiers were all of advanced years – old men, it seemed to me, with long white hair escaping from broad-brimmed hats. They 'were the last able-bodied men in a mass recruitment of a people already engulfed in war. I did not memorize the title of the picture, but it contained the word 'last.' They were the last to face the enemy, the very last to be able to bear arms. The latter, furthermore, were very rudimentary; some pikes, axes, old sabers. Curious, I scrutinized their clothes; their enormous army boots with large copper buckles; their hats and occasionally a tarnished helmet, like that of the conquistadors; their gnarled fingers, gripping the pike handles… France had always appeared before my eyes in the splendor of her palaces, at the glorious hours of her history, but was suddenly revealed in the shape of this northern village, where low houses huddled behind meager hedges, and where stunted trees shivered in the winter wind. Astonishingly, I felt a close affinity for this muddy road and these old warriors, doomed to fall in an unequal battle. No, there was nothing flamboyant in their demeanor. They were not heroes making a show of their gallantry or their self-sacrifice. They were simple, human. In particular there was one, wearing the old conquistador-style helmet, a very tall old man who walked, leaning on a pike, at the end of the column. His face captivated me with its surprising serenity, bitter and smiling at the same time.
Deep in my adolescent melancholy, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a confused joy. I felt I had understood the calm of this old warrior as he confronted imminent defeat, suffering, and death. Neither a stoic nor a holy fool, he walked with his head held high across this flat, cold, and dull country, which he loved despite everything, and called it his 'homeland.' He appeared invulnerable. For a fraction of a second my heart seemed to beat in time with his, triumphing over fear, death, and solitude. This defiance felt like a new chord in the living harmony that for me was France. I tried at once to find a name for it. Patriotic pride? Panache? Or the famous
As I was calling these labels to mind, I saw that the face of the old soldier was slowly closing and his eyes growing dull. He became once more a figure in an old reproduction of a painting in gray and bister tints. It was as if he had averted his gaze to hide from me that mystery of his, of which I had just
