Charlotte smiled at me through this shining veil.
What suddenly struck me on this lurching deck in the middle of the steppe was like the wonder experienced by a child who, after long, fruitless study, discovers a character or an object that has been camouflaged in the cleverly jumbled lines of a drawing. Now he sees it, and the arabesques of the drawing acquire a new meaning, a new life…
It was the same with my internal perception. All at once I saw! Or rather I felt, with all my being, the luminous tie that linked this moment full of iridescent reflections to other moments I had inhabited in the past: that evening long ago with Charlotte, the melancholy cry of the Kukushka; then that Parisian morning, shrouded in my imagination in sunlit mist; that moment at night on the raft with my first lover, when the great riverboat towered above our entwined bodies; and the evening gatherings of my childhood, lived, it already seemed, in another life… Linked together thus, these moments formed a singular universe, with its own rhythm, its particular air and sun. Another planet, almost. A planet where the death of this woman with her big gray eyes became inconceivable. Where a woman's body was reflected in a series of dreamed moments. Where my 'language of amazement' would be comprehensible to others.
This planet was the same world that was unfolding as our wagon hurtled along. Yes, the same station where the train finally came to a halt. The same empty platform, washed by the downpour. Those same rare passersby with their mundane concerns. The same world, but seen differently.
As I helped Charlotte to step down, I tried to grasp this 'differently.' Yes, to see this other planet, one would have to behave in a special way. But how?
'Come, we're going to have something to eat,' my grandmother said, drawing me away from my musings, and she set off for the restaurant located in one of the wings of the station.
The room was empty, the tables were not laid. We sat down near an open window, through which a square lined with trees could be seen. On the front of the apartment blocks were visible long strips of red calico with their customary slogans glorifying the Party, the Fatherland, and Peace… A waiter came up and told us in a sullen voice that the storm had cut off their electricity and that the restaurant was therefore closing. I was already about to get up, but Charlotte insisted with extreme politeness, which, with its old-fashioned turns of phrase that I knew to be borrowed from French, always impressed Russians. The man hesitated for a second, then went away with a visibly disconcerted air.
He brought us a dish astonishing in its simplicity. A plate with a dozen rounds of sausage and a huge pickled cucumber, cut into fine slices. But above all, he put in front of us a bottle of wine. I had never had a dinner like it. The waiter himself must have grasped the unusual couple we made and the strangeness of this cold meal. He smiled and stammered some remarks about the weather, as if to excuse the welcome he had just given us.
We remained alone in the room. The wind coming in at the window smelled of wet foliage. The sky layered itself into gray-and-purple clouds, lit by the setting sun. From time to time the wheels of a car squealed on the wet asphalt. Each mouthful of wine gave these sounds and colors a new density: the cool heaviness of the trees, the shining windows washed by the rain, the red of the slogans on the facades, the wet squealing of the wheels, the sky still stormy. I felt that, little by little, what we were living through in this empty room was becoming detached from the present moment, from that station, from that unknown town, from its daily life…
Heavy foliage, long splashes of red on the facades, squealing tires, sky gray and purple. I turned to Charlotte. She was no longer there.
And it is no longer the restaurant in the station lost in the middle of the steppe. But a cafe in Paris – and outside the window a spring evening. The gray-and-purple sky, still stormy, the squealing of cars on the wet asphalt, the fresh exuberance of the chestnut trees, the red of the blinds belonging to the restaurant on the opposite side of the square. And I, twenty years later, I, who have just recognized this combination of colors and have just relived the giddiness of the moment regained. A young woman facing me is keeping up a conversation about nothing with a very French grace. I watch her smiling face, and occasionally I punctuate her words with a nod of my head. This woman is very close to me. I love her voice, her way of thinking. I know the harmony of her body… 'And what if I were to speak to her about that moment twenty years ago, in the middle of the steppe, in that empty station?' I ask myself, and I know that I will not do it.
On that distant evening, twenty years ago, Charlotte is already getting up, adjusting her hair in the reflection of the open window and we leave. And on my lips, with the pleasant sharpness of the wine, these words, never ventured upon, fade away: 'If she is so beautiful still, despite her white hair and having lived so many years, it is because all these moments of light and beauty have been filtered through her eyes, her face, her body…'
Charlotte leaves the station. I follow her, drunk with my un-sayable revelation. And night falls over the steppe. The night that has lasted for twenty years in the Saranza of my childhood.
I saw Charlotte for a few hours ten years later, before I went abroad. I arrived very late in the evening, and I was due to leave again for Moscow early in the morning. It was an icy night at the end of autumn. For Charlotte it brought together the troubled memories of all the departures in her life; all the nights of farewells… We did not sleep. She went to make the tea, and I paced up and down in her apartment, which seemed to me strangely small and very touching, through the constancy of familiar objects.
I was twenty-five. I was ecstatic about my trip. I already knew that I was going away for a long time. Or rather that my visit to Europe would be extended far beyond the planned two weeks. It seemed to me that my departure would shake the calm of our stagnant empire; that its inhabitants would all talk of nothing but my exile; that a new era would begin from my first action, from my first words uttered on the other side of the frontier. I was already living off the procession of new faces I would meet; the dazzle of dreamed-of landscapes; the stimulus of danger.
It was with the conceited egoism of youth that I said to her, in rather jocular tones, 'But you could go abroad as well! To France, for example… Wouldn't that tempt you, eh?'
The expression on her face did not change. She simply lowered her eyes. I heard the whistling melody of the kettle, the tinkling of snow crystals against the black windowpane.
'When I went to Siberia in 1922,' she finally said to me with a weary smile, 'half, or maybe a third of that journey, you know, I made on foot. That was as far as from here to Paris. Do you see, I wouldn't need your airplanes at all…'
She smiled again, looking me in the eye. But despite the tone of voice she assumed, I sensed within her voice a deep note of bitterness. Embarrassed, I took a cigarette and went out onto the balcony…
It was there, above the frozen darkness of the steppe, that I believed I had finally understood what France meant to her.
4
14
It was in France that I almost forgot Charlotte's France forever…
Autumn had come, and twenty years now separated me from those times spent in Saranza. I became aware of this interval – of the poignant 'twenty years on' – the day our radio station made its last broadcast in Russian. That evening, leaving the newsroom, I pictured an endless expanse yawning between this German city and Russia, asleep under the snows. Henceforth all that nocturnal space, which on the previous evening was still alive with the sound of our voices, would fade, it seemed to me, into the muffled cracking of the empty airwaves… The goal of our dissident, subversive broadcasts had been achieved. The snowbound empire was waking up, opening itself up to the rest of the world. The country would soon change its name, its regime, its history, its frontiers. Another country would be born. We were no longer needed. The station was being closed. My colleagues exchanged artificially noisy and warm farewells and departed, each in his own direction. Some wanted to rebuild their lives on the spot, others to pack their bags and go to America. Yet others, the least realistic,
