On a marble island lapped by an azure sea
A sorceress waits, in her castle’s gilded glow,
At ease each night beneath a spreading tree,
She weeps and calls me …
“Well, she can go fuck herself beneath her tree!” he concluded abruptly, giving my brides a sneering look.
All at once he disappeared, as if he had fallen backward onto the floor, the way figures somersault out of sight in a puppet show.
Hurriedly the girls retreated toward me, their only defender.
“The train’s at four twenty. We’re going back,” they said, reconciled to the failure of their fashion parade. “We’ll wait in the station café. It’ll be more fun there than in this hole. There’s no point in hanging around here. That friend of Lenin’s won’t come now, that’s for sure.”
“I’m going to stay. I know she’ll come.”
“Well, watch out. The four twenty’s the last train. Don’t miss it or those old witches’ll bite off your … ears, ha, ha, ha!”
They set off toward the station; the street became empty, a cigarette stub lay smoking in the dust. I hesitated, then walked back to the blue building. This time no faces appeared at the row of windows half covered by weeds. The inmates had probably just gathered in the dining room. Or did each one eat lunch in her own room?
Hesitating over what tactics to employ, I pushed open the front door and found myself face-to-face with the caretaker at a table. She had opened her little lodge and was having a meal there. I particularly noticed a bottle of wine placed on the floor, behind one of the table legs, which would make it possible to conceal this solitary libation in the case of an unexpected visit from a superior. I knew the label on the bottle: a poor-quality wine, a rotgut people referred to as “ink” because it was so dark, the color of walnut stain.
The caretaker recognized me easily (a boy among five girls!), and instead of the rebuff I was expecting, her greeting was almost affectionate: “No, she’s still not come back, our poor lady … Oh yes, that’s the truth: she’s a poor lady …” Her gaze clouded over with a veil of melancholy. I believe she had just reached the stage of intoxication that, for a while, makes us soft, forgiving, understanding.
“Come on then, have a bite to eat!” she invited me, noticing how hungrily I was swallowing my saliva. She offered me bread; cut me a slice of sausage. Then, with a hefty movement of her foot, pushed a little stool toward me and watched me eating with a sympathetic air.
“Oh yes, she’s poor, all right!” she exclaimed after a moment, as if I had expressed reservations about the truth of her remarks. “Not because she’s been dumped here in this shack. When you’re old you don’t need a palace. No, it’s that … she’s got nobody who loves her …”
The caretaker sniffed, wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her blouse, spoke in a broken voice: “Oh, she did have a husband … But he ratted on her, the bastard. It was after the war. Before you were born. She was arrested and her husband disowned her to save his own skin. He even denounced her. Said she was an enemy of the people and a … What do they call it? … A cosmo … a conso … Anyway he said she wasn’t patriotic, you know. And he divorced her. They had a daughter and a son. When Stalin died they let her out, but no one in the family wanted to have anything to do with her anymore. Her husband had married another woman long ago. And her children were in good jobs in Moscow. They were ashamed of their mother, her being fresh out of prison. And what’s more, she hadn’t a penny and nowhere to live … Look what she gave me as a present …”
The caretaker thrust her hand into a drawer, took out a pretty round comb, and slipped it into her hair with a young girl’s coquetry. Then, catching a look of amazement in my gaze, she quickly removed the comb and gabbled on in haste, to conclude her story: “She gets a pauper’s pension but she’s ready to part with her last kopeck. Even to Sashka, who’s our singer here and tattooed worse than a savage … Right, that’s it. On your way now! That’s enough talk. I’ve told you already, she’s not here and I don’t know when she’ll be back. In any case, she never talks about Lenin. Go on. Away with you!”
Suddenly in a bad temper, she stood up, giving me little thumps on my back to direct me toward the door. I guessed she needed another draft of alcohol to restore her to the level of intoxication that fills our hearts with floods of benevolence.
I left both better informed and less certain of what I knew. “The woman who had seen Lenin” thrown into prison! Forgotten by her nearest and dearest. Sharing her meager funds with a tattooed drunkard … All this was a long way from our history textbooks and the yarn that fresh-faced mountebank of a lecturer had spun us.
Disconcerted, I loitered for a moment in the village’s empty street, walked past the drunkard Sashka’s house, went as far as the edge of a wood that extended down into a broad valley covered in meadowland that had not been threatened with scything for a long time. A combine harvester, brown with rust, all its tires flat, lay idle there, surrounded by a profusion of grasses and flowers. There was a silence now, as if settled by the imminence of rain. Even the birds had stopped singing. My own presence was painful to me; I felt I had strayed into a time well before my own life. I decided to go back to the station, rejoin my five brides.
As I walked past the blue building I had an idea that whetted my curiosity. “The woman who had seen Lenin” lived in room nine. Room one was located just next door to the caretaker’s lodge. And, as there was only one window per room, it would be easy to locate room nine. Proud of my deduction, I slipped along beside the wall like a thief, crouching low and glancing rapidly into each room: numbers one, two, three, four …
I was certain that in room nine, the very last in the row, I should see a portrait of Lenin, possibly even photographs of him in the company of the lady we were looking for.
Slowly, with a pounding heart, I peered in at the window opening. First I saw a narrow worktable, or rather a desk, on which a few books, a pen, and a stack of paper were arranged in perfect order. One of the volumes lay open, pencil marks on the page showed signs of an interrupted reading … then there was a bed, a blanket drawn tight, military fashion … A very simple lamp of an antiquated type. And finally a portrait. It was not Lenin. A young man, dressed in the uniform of a cavalryman in the Red Army, a long cape and this cap, with its design based on a medieval helmet, the famous budyonovka …
The woman was not there, the caretaker had not lied. No longer hiding, I became glued to the window, feeling as if I were looking into a display cabinet in a museum showing the reconstruction of a way of life in a remote past. All the little space was filled with books and the remainder of the walls covered in photographs. Views of places where the architecture was very unlike that of our Russian towns. Group portraits, a color verging on ocher, static poses that gave away just how old the snapshots were …
And then this photograph: a young woman with long, dark hair, a mother holding a child in her arms whose gaze was curiously directed to one side.
“Does that interest you?”
I gave a start, backing away abruptly from the window and colliding with the person who had just called out to me. I turned around, openmouthed, trying to find excuses, explanations. An adolescent girl, scarcely older than myself, was staring at me fearlessly, but also without hostility, which gave me courage and left me time to study her: a mass of raven hair tied back with a scarlet ribbon, big, dark eyes, and a rather grown-up air that, mysteriously, seemed familiar to me … I hastened to give high-sounding reasons for my espionage. “It’s for our history lessons. I’d like to meet the woman who’d seen Lenin …”