And if she was spared during those two months of her journey, it was because the immense continent she was crossing was sated with blood. Death, for several years at least, was losing its attraction, becoming too banal and no longer worth the effort.
Charlotte walked through Boyarsk, the Siberian town of her childhood, without wondering if this was still a dream or reality. She felt too weak to think about it.
On the governor's house, above the entrance, hung a red flag. Two soldiers armed with guns were stamping their feet in the snow on either side of the door… Some of the windows in the theater had been broken and blocked, for want of anything better, with pieces of scenery as reinforcement. Here one could see foliage covered with white blossom, probably from The Cherry Orchard, there the facade of a dacha. And above the gateway two workmen were engaged in stretching a long strip of red calico. "Everyone to the People's Meeting of the Atheists' Society!" Charlotte read, slowing her pace a little. One of the workmen took out a nail he was holding between clenched teeth and drove it in with force beside the exclamation mark.
"There you are, you see; all finished before nightfall, thank God!" he called to his comrade.
Charlotte smiled and continued on her way. No, she was not dreaming.
A soldier, posted near the bridge, barred her way and asked her to show him her papers. Charlotte obliged him. He took them and, probably being unable to read, decided to withhold them from her. He seemed, moreover, quite surprised himself by his own decision. "You can recover them from the Revolutionary Council after the necessary verifications," he announced, visibly repeating somebody else's words. Charlotte did not have the strength to argue.
Here at Boyarsk, winter had taken hold some time ago. But that day the air was mild, the ice under the bridge covered with large damp patches. First sign of thaw. And great lazy snowflakes fluttered down in the white silence of the wastelands she had crossed so many times in her childhood.
With its two narrow windows, the izba seemed to observe her from afar. Yes, the house was watching her approach, its wrinkled facade lit up with an imperceptible little grimace, with a bitter joy of reunion.
Charlotte hoped for little from this visit. For a long time she had prepared herself to receive the news that would leave no hope: death, madness, disappearance. Or a pure and simple absence, inexplicable, natural, surprising no one. She forbade herself to hope and hoped all the same.
In the last days her exhaustion had been such that she thought only of the warmth of the great stove, against whose flank she would lean her back as she collapsed on the floor.
From the izba steps she caught sight of an old woman underneath a stunted apple tree, her head muffled in a black shawl. Bent over, the woman was pulling at a thick branch buried in the snow. Charlotte called to her, but the old peasant woman did not turn round. Her voice was too weak and was quickly dissipated in the heavy air of the thaw. She felt incapable of uttering another sound.
With a thrust of her shoulder she pushed the door. In the dark, cold hall she saw a whole store of wood – planks from boxes, floorboards, and even, in a little black-and-white heap, the keys of a piano. Charlotte remembered that it was above all the pianos in the apartments of the rich that provoked the anger of the people. She had seen one, smashed with blows of an ax, frozen into the ice floes on a river…
On entering the room, her first gesture was to touch the stones of the stove. They were warm. Charlotte felt a pleasantly giddy sensation. She was already about to let herself slip down beside the stove when she noticed an open book on the table made of broad timbers, browned with the years. A little ancient volume with rough paper. Leaning on a bench, she bent over the open pages. Strangely the letters began to dance, to melt – as they had done during that night on the train when she dreamed of the Parisian street where her uncle lived. This time the cause was not a dream, but tears. It was a French book.
The old woman in the black shawl came in and seemed not to be surprised to see this slim young woman rising from her bench.
The dry branches she carried under her arm trailed long filaments of snow on the floor. Her withered face resembled that of one of the old peasant women of that Siberian country. Her lips, covered in a fine network of wrinkles, trembled. And it was from this mouth, from the desiccated breast of this unrecognizable being, that the voice of Albertine rang out, a voice of which not a single note had altered.
"All these years I only dreaded one thing: that you might come back here!"
These were the very first words that Albertine addressed to her daughter. And Charlotte understood: what they had lived through since their good-byes on the station platform eight years before, a whole host of actions, faces, words, sufferings, privations, hopes, anxieties, cries, tears – all that buzz of life resounded against a single echo, which refused to die. This meeting, so desired, so feared.
"I wanted to ask someone to write to you and say I was dead. But there was the war, then the revolution. Then war again. And then…"
"I wouldn't have believed the letter…"
"Yes, I told myself that you wouldn't have believed it in any case…"
She threw down the branches near the stove and approached Charlotte. When she had looked at her through the lowered window of the railway carriage in Paris, her daughter was eleven. Now, soon she would be twenty.
"Do you hear?" whispered Albertine, her face lighting up, and she turned toward the stove. "The mice, you remember? They're still there…"
Later, squatting in front of the fire that was coming to life behind the little cast iron door, Albertine murmured, as if to herself, without looking at Charlotte, who was stretched out on the bench and appeared to be asleep: "That's how it is in this country. You can come in easily but you never get out…"
Hot water seemed like a whole new, unknown substance. Charlotte held out her hands toward the trickle that her mother poured slowly onto her shoulders and her back from a copper scoop. In the darkness of that room, which was lit only by the flame of a burning wood shaving, the warm drops looked like pine resin and tickled Charlotte's body deliciously as she rubbed herself with a lump of blue clay. Of soap they retained only a vague memory.
"You've become very thin," Albertine said softly, and her voice broke off.
Charlotte laughed gently. As she lifted her head of wet hair, she saw tears of the same amber color shining in her mother's lackluster eyes. During the days that followed Charlotte tried to find out how they could leave Siberia (superstitiously she dared not say, return to France). She went to the former house of the governor. The soldiers at the entrance smiled at her: a good sign? The secretary of the new ruler of Boyarsk made her wait in a little room – the same, thought Charlotte, where once she used to wait for the parcel of leftovers from lunch…
The ruler received her seated behind his heavy desk: as she came in his brows were furrowed, and he continued to draw energetic lines with a red pencil on the pages of a brochure. A whole stack of identical little pamphlets was piled on his table.
"Good day, citizen!" he said finally, holding out his hand to her.
They spoke. And with stunned incredulity Charlotte became aware that all the official's remarks seemed like a strange, deformed echo of the questions she put to him. She spoke of the French Aid Committee and heard, in echo, a brief speech about the imperialist designs of the West under the cover of bourgeois philanthropy. She referred to their desire to return to Moscow, and then… the echo interrupted her: foreign interventionist forces and internal class enemies were engaged in undermining reconstruction in the young Soviet republic…
After a quarter of an hour of such exchanges Charlotte longed to shout, "I want to leave! That's all!" But the absurd logic of this conversation would not loosen its grip.