Dreams Of My Russian Summers

Then the dream flashed into my mind. It was probably its aura that had just woken me. To find Charlotte again, to bring her to France…

The unrealistic nature of this project, formulated by a vagrant stretched out on the stone slabs of a family tomb, was so evident that I made no effort to spell it out to myself. For the moment, I decided not to think about the details, to live, and to keep this unreasonable hope at the heart of each day. To live off this hope.

I was unable to get to sleep again that night. Wrapping myself in my coat, I went out. The warmth of the late autumn had given way to a north wind. I remained standing, watching the low clouds, which were gradually becoming infused with a gray pallor. I remembered that one day, in an unsmiling jest, Charlotte had said to me that, after all her journeys across the vastness of Russia, for her to come to France on foot would have had nothing impossible about it…

To begin with, during my long months of poverty and wanderings, my crazy dream was to seem very similar to her sad bravado. I would picture a woman dressed in black entering a little frontier town in the very early hours of a dark winter morning. The hem of her coat would be caked with mud, her big shawl drenched with the cold mist. She would push open the door of a cafe at the corner of a small sleeping square, would sit down near the window, beside a radiator. The patronne would bring her a cup of tea. And looking through the window at the quiet fronts of the half-timbered houses, the woman would murmur softly, 'It's France… I have returned to France. After… after a whole lifetime.'

15

When I left the bookshop I walked through the town and began to cross the bridge poised above the sunlit expanse of the Garonne. I recalled that old films had a time-honored trick for skipping over several years in the lives of their heroes in a few seconds. The action would be interrupted, and this legend would appear on a black background with an unashamed frankness that had always appealed to me: 'Two years later,' or 'three years went by.' But who would use this outmoded device nowadays?

And yet on entering that empty bookshop in the middle of a heat-stunned provincial town, and on finding my latest book on the shelf, I had just that impression. 'Three years went by.' The cemetery, the family vault of the Belvals and the Castelots. And now this book in the colorful mosaic of jackets under the sign 'New French Novels'…

Toward evening I reached the forest of the Landes. I wanted to walk, for two days or perhaps more, sensing that beyond this rolling country covered in pine trees the ocean lay perpetually in wait. Two days, two nights… Thanks to the Notes, time had acquired an extraordinary density for me. Despite living in Charlotte's past, it seemed to me that I had never experienced the present so intensely! Those landscapes of days gone by threw into a singular relief this patch of sky between the clusters of pine needles; this glade lit by the setting sun like a river of amber…

In the morning, back on the road (a gashed pine trunk, which I had not noticed the previous evening, was weeping its resin – what the local people called its gemme), I remembered, for no special reason, those shelves at the back of the bookshop, 'Eastern European Literature.' My first books were there, sandwiched, and at the risk of inspiring giddy megalomania in me, between those of Lermontov and Nabokov. All this was the fruit of a pure and simple literary hoax on my part. For the novels had been written directly in French and rejected by publishers. I was 'some funny little Russian who thought he could write in French.' In a gesture of despair I had then invented a translator and submitted the manuscript, presenting it as translated from the Russian. It had been accepted, published, and hailed for the quality of the translation. I told myself, at first bitterly, later with a smile, that my Franco-Russian curse was still upon me. But whereas in childhood I had been obliged to conceal my French graft, now it was my Russianness that failed to find favor.

That evening, settled down for the night, I reread the latest pages of my Notes. In the fragment jotted down the previous evening I had written,

A boy of two has died in the big izba facing the apartment block where Charlotte lives. I see the child's father propping up against the handrail on the front steps an oblong box draped with red cloth – a little coffin. Its doll-like dimensions terrify me. I need immediately to find a place under heaven, or on earth, where one could imagine this child still alive. The death of a human being younger than oneself calls the whole universe into question. I rush to Charlotte. She perceives my anguish and says something to me that is astonishing in its simplicity: 'Do you remember how we saw a flight of migrating birds in the autumn? They flew over the courtyard, yes, and then they disappeared. That was that, but somewhere in distant lands they are still flying. It is only because our eyesight is too weak that we can't see them. It's the same with people who die…'

As I slept, I thought I could hear the branches making a sound that was more powerful and continuous than usual. As if the wind had not ceased blowing for a single moment. In the morning I discovered that it was the sound of the ocean. In my weariness the previous evening I had stopped, without knowing it, on the frontier where the forest began to merge into the wave-lashed dunes.

I spent the whole morning on that deserted shore, watching the imperceptible rising of the waters… When the tide began to ebb, I resumed my journey. Barefoot on the wet sand I would go down toward the south now. Walking along, I thought about that little bag that from the time of our childhood my sister and I had called 'the Pont-Neuf bag' and which contained the little pebbles wrapped in scraps of paper. There was a 'Fecamp,' a ' Verdun,' and also a ' Biarritz,' a name we associated with quartz and not with the town, which was unknown to us… I was going to walk beside the ocean for ten or twelve days and find that town, of which a tiny fragment was lost somewhere in the depths of the Russian steppes.

16

It was in September, through the intermediary of a certain Alex Bond, that the first news from Saranza reached me…

This 'Mr. Bond' was in fact a Russian businessman, a very characteristic representative of the generation of 'new Russians' who at that time were beginning to make their presence felt in all the capitals of the West. They butchered their names, American style, thus often identifying themselves without realizing it either with the heroes of spy novels or with extraterrestrial beings from the science fiction stories of the fifties. At the time of our first meeting I had advised Alex Bond, alias Alexei Bondarchenko (meaning 'Cooper'), to gallicize his name and present himself as 'Alexis Tonnelier,' rather than mutilate it as he had done. Without a ghost of a smile, he explained to me the advantages of a short and euphonious name in business… I had the impression I was understanding less and less of the Russia that I now saw via these 'Bonds,' these 'Kondrats,' and these 'Feds.'…

He was going to Moscow and, touched by the sentimental aspect of my commission, had agreed to make a detour. Going to Saranza, walking in its streets, meeting Charlotte, now seemed a good deal more strange to me than traveling to another planet. Alex Bond had been there 'between two trains,' as he put it. And, without an inkling of what Charlotte meant to me, he spoke on the telephone as if this were an exchange of news after the holidays: 'No, but what a black hole that Saranza is! Thanks to you, I've discovered darkest Russia, ha ha. All those streets that lead straight out onto the steppe! And the steppe with no end to it… She's very well, your grandmother, don't you worry. Yes, she's still very active. When I arrived she wasn't there. Her neighbor told me she was at a meeting. The tenants in her apartment block have created a support group, or whatever, to save an old izba in the courtyard that they want to demolish. A huge building, two centuries old. So your grandmother… No, I didn't see her; I was between two trains. I had to be in Moscow that evening come hell or high water. But I left a message… You could go and see her. They let everyone in these days. They say the iron curtain's nothing more than a sieve now ha ha ha…'