The sun went down over the far-distant steppe. But for a long time the air retained the crystalline luminosity of cool summer evenings. Beyond the wood the cry of the Kukushka rang out, more resonant in this cold air. The foliage of the trees was flecked with a few yellow leaves. The very first. The cry of the little engine rang out again. Already distant, fainter.
It was then that, returning to the memory of the elegant trio, I had this simple thought, this last echo of the sad reflections in which I had just been sunk. 'What they had in their lives was an autumn morning, cool and clear, an avenue in the sun strewn with dead leaves, where they paused for a moment, motionless before the lens. Bringing the moment to a standstill… Yes, there was in their lives a clear autumn morning…'
I suddenly was transported with all my senses into the moment that the smiles of the elegant trio had captured. I found myself amid the ambience of its autumnal smells; so penetrating was the acrid scent of dead leaves that my nostrils palpitated. I blinked in the sun that shone through the branches. I heard the distant sound of a phaeton bowling over the cobblestones. And the still confused murmuring of a few laughing remarks that the three women exchanged before freezing in front of the photographer… Yes, intensely, fully, I was living their time!
The impact of feeling myself beside them on that autumn morning was so great that I tore myself away from its light, almost frightened. I was suddenly afraid of being trapped there forever. Blinded, deafened, I came back into the room and took out the magazine page again…
The surface of the photo seemed to quiver like the wet and vivid colors of a transfer. Its flat perspective suddenly began to deepen, to recede before my eyes. That was how, as a child, I used to contemplate two identical images moving slowly toward each other before blending into a single stereoscopic one. The photo of the elegant trio opened up before me, gradually surrounded me, let me come in under its sky. The branches with broad yellow leaves leaned over me…
My reflections of an hour before (total oblivion, death…) no longer had any meaning. I no longer even needed to look at the photo. I closed my eyes, and I even sensed the joy experienced after the idle heat of summer by the three women as they rediscovered the cool of autumn, the seasonal clothes, the pleasures of city life, and no doubt, soon, the rain and the cold that would add to these attractions.
Their bodies, inaccessible a moment ago, lived in me, bathed in the smell of the dead leaves, in the light mist spangled with sunlight… Yes, I sensed in them that imperceptible shiver with which a woman's body greets the fresh autumn, that mixture of delight and dread, that serene melancholy. There was no longer any barrier between these three women and me. Our fusion, I felt, was more loving and more sensual than any physical possession.
I emerged from that autumn morning and found myself under an almost black sky. Exhausted, as if I had just swum across a great river, I looked about me, scarcely recognizing familiar objects. But I nevertheless wanted to retrace my steps to see the three strollers of the belle epoque once more.
The magic I had just experienced now however, seemed to elude me. My memory unconsciously recreated quite a different scene from the past. I saw a fine man, dressed in black, in the middle of a sumptuous office. The door opened silently; a woman, her face masked by a veil, entered the room. And, very theatrically, the president embraced his mistress. Yes, it was the scene, encountered a thousand times, of the Elysee lovers' secret rendezvous. Summoned up by my memory, they complied by reenacting it one more time, like a hasty vaudeville sketch. But that was no longer enough for me…
The transfiguration of the elegant trio had left me with the hope that the magic could be repeated. I had a clear memory of the very simple sentence that had unleashed it all: 'And yet there was in the lives of those three women a cool and sunny morning…' Like a sorcerer's apprentice, I once again pictured the man with the fine mustache in his office at the dark window; and I whispered the magic formula, 'And yet there was in his life an autumn evening when he stood before the dark window, beyond which the bare branches stirred in the garden of the Elysee.'
I did not notice the moment when the time barrier dissolved… The president stared, unseeing, at the moving reflections of the trees. His lips were so close to the glass that a circle of mist clouded it for a moment. He noticed this and tossed his head slightly in response to his unspoken thoughts. I sensed that he was feeling the strange stiffness of the clothes on his body. He saw himself as a stranger. Yes, as an unknown, tense being that he was obliged to control by his apparent immobility. He thought, no, did not think but sensed, somewhere in the damp darkness beyond the window, the increasingly intimate presence of the woman who would soon enter the room. 'The president of the Republic,' he said softly, slowly enunciating each syllable. 'The Elysee…' And suddenly these words, which were so familiar, seemed to him to have no connection with what he was. Intensely he felt he was the man who in a moment would once again thrill to the warm softness of the woman's lips beneath the veil that sparkled with frozen droplets…
For several seconds I could feel these contrasting sensations on my face.
The magic of this transfigured past had simultaneously exalted and shattered me. Sitting on the balcony, I breathed jerkily, my blind gaze lost in the night of the steppes. I was no doubt becoming obsessed with this alchemy of time. Hardly had I returned to myself when I uttered my 'open sesame' again: 'And yet there was in the life of that old soldier a winter's day…' And I saw the old man wearing a conquistador's helmet. He walked, leaning on his long pike. His face, flushed by the wind, was once more closed in on bitter thoughts: his age and the war that would continue when he was no longer there. Suddenly, in the dull air of that freezing cold day he smelled the odor of a wood fire. This pleasant and somewhat acid aroma mingled with the chill of the hoarfrost in the bare fields. The old man inhaled deeply a raw mouthful of winter air. The ghost of a smile lit up his austere face. He screwed up his eyes slightly. It was him, this man greedily inhaling the icy wind, that smelt of wood smoke. Him. Here. Now. Under this sky… The battle in which he was going to take part and the war and even his death seemed to him to be events of no importance. Yes, chapters in an infinitely greater destiny, in which he would be – in which he was already – a participant, albeit for the moment an unconscious one. He breathed deeply; he smiled, with his eyes half shut. He guessed that the moment he was living through now was the start of the destiny he foresaw…
Charlotte came back at nightfall. I knew that from time to time she spent the late afternoon at the cemetery. She weeded the little bed of flowers in front of Fyodor's grave, watered it, cleaned the stele surmounted with a red star. When the day began to draw to a close, she would leave. She would walk slowly, passing through the whole of Saranza, sitting down on a bench occasionally. On those evenings we did not go out onto the balcony…
She came in with some agitation. I heard her footsteps in the corridor, then in the kitchen. Without giving myself the time to consider what I was doing, I went and asked her to tell me about the France of her youth. The way she used to.
Now the moments I had just experienced seemed to me like the experiments of a strange madness, beautiful and frightening at the same time. It was impossible to deny them, for my whole body still felt their luminous echo. I had really lived them! But in a sly spirit of contradiction – a mixture of fear and common sense in revolt – I needed to disavow my discovery, destroy the universe of which I had glimpsed a few fragments. From Charlotte I hoped for a soothing fairy story about the France of her youth. A reminiscence as familiar and bland as a photographic plate, which would help me to forget my passing folly.
She did not respond at once to my request. No doubt she realized that only something serious would have made me disrupt our routine in this way. She must have thought about all our empty conversations for several weeks now, and our traditional stories at sunset, a ritual betrayed that summer.
After a moment's silence she sighed, with a little smile at the corner of her lips: 'But what can I tell you? You know everything now… Let me think, I will read you a poem instead…'
I was about to live through the most extraordinary evening of my life. For a long time Charlotte could not lay her hand on the book she was looking for. And with that marvelous abandon with which we sometimes saw her overturn the order of things, she, a woman who was otherwise orderly and punctilious, transformed the night into a long vigil. Piles of books accumulated on the floor. We climbed on the table to explore the upper shelves of the bookcases. The book could not be found.
It was at about two o'clock in the morning that, standing up amid a picturesque disarray of books and furniture, Charlotte exclaimed, 'What a fool I am! That poem, I began to read it to you, you
