At that moment our critical sense rebelled. We were prepared to believe in the existence of frog eaters, but fancy gangsters slitting one another's throats over a woman's pretty face!
Clearly this was nothing surprising for our Atlantis. Had we not already seen Charlotte's uncle staggering as he emerged from a cab, his eyes dimmed, his arm swathed in a bloodstained kerchief? He had just been fighting a duel in the forest of Marly, defending a lady's honor… And then there was General Boulanger, the fallen dictator: did he not blow his brains out on the grave of his beloved?
One day, returning from a walk, we were all three surprised by a shower of rain… We were strolling in the old streets of Saranza, made up entirely of great izbas blackened with age. It was beneath the porch of one of them that we found refuge. The street, stifling with the heat a moment ago, was plunged into a chilly twilight, raked by flurries of hail. It was paved in the old style – with great round granite cobbles. The rain caused them to give off a strong smell of wet stone. The view of the houses was blurred behind a curtain of water – and, thanks to that smell, one could imagine oneself to be in a big city in the evening under autumn rain. Charlotte's voice, at first hardly louder than the sound of the raindrops, seemed like an echo muted by the torrential downpour.
"It was another shower of rain that led me to discover an inscription engraved on the damp wall of a house in the allée des Arbalétriers in Paris. We had taken refuge under a porch, my mother and I, and while we waited for the rain to stop, all we had in front of our eyes was this commemorative plaque. I learned the text by heart: In this passage, after leaving the Hôtel de Barbette, the due Louis d'Orléans, brother of King Charles VI, was assassinated by Jean sans Peur, duc de Burgundy, on the night of November 23 to 24, 1407… . He was leaving after a visit to the queen, Isabeau de Bavière…"
Our grandmother fell silent, but in the whispering of the raindrops we could still hear these legendary names woven into a tragic monogram of love and death: Louis d'Orléans, Isabeau de Bavière, Jean sans Peur…
Suddenly, without knowing why I thought of the president. A very very simple, obvious notion: it was that during all those ceremonies in honor of the imperial couple – yes, in the procession on the Champs-Elysées and in front of the tomb of Napoleon and at the Opéra – he had never stopped dreaming of her, his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil. He spoke with the tsar, made speeches, replied to the tsarina, exchanged glances with his wife. But she, at every moment, she was there.
The rain streamed onto the mossy roof of the old izba that was sheltering us on its steps. I forgot where I was. The city I had once visited in the company of the tsar was transfigured before my eyes. Now I perceived it from the viewpoint of the president in love.
That time, on leaving Saranza, I felt as if I were returning from an expedition. I was bringing back a sum of knowledge; a glimpse of their habits and customs; a description, still fragmentary, of the mysterious civilization that was reborn each evening in the heart of the steppes.
Every adolescent classifies things, a defensive reflex when faced with the complexity of the adult world as it sucks him in at the end of childhood. I was perhaps more prone to this than most. For the country I had to explore no longer existed, and I had to reconstitute the topography of its high places and its holy places through the thick fog of the past.
I was especially proud of the gallery of human types that I now possessed in my collection. Apart from the president-lover, the deputies in a boat, and a dandy with his bunch of grapes, there were much humbler but no less unusual characters. The children for example, young mineworkers, their smiles ringed with black. A news vendor crying his wares (we did not dare to imagine a madman running through the streets crying "Pravdal Pravda!"). A dog barber who practiced his craft on the quays. A rural constable with his drum. Strikers gathering to be fed "Communist soup." And even a dog turd salesman. I was very proud of knowing that this strange merchandise was used, at the time, to soften leather…
But my greatest initiation that summer was to understand how one could be French. The countless facets of this elusive identity had formed themselves into a living whole. It was a very well ordered mode of existence, despite its eccentric aspects.
France was for me no longer a simple collection of curios but a tangible and solid entity of which a small part had one day been implanted inside me.
8
What I don't understand is why she wanted to bury herself out there in that Saranza. Not at all. She could very well have lived here, close to you…"
I almost leaped from my stool beside the television. For I understood so perfectly Charlotte's reasons for being fond of her little provincial town. It would have been so easy to explain her choice to the adults gathered in our kitchen. I would have talked of the dry air of the steppe, whose silent transparency distilled the past. I would have spoken of the dusty streets that led nowhere, as they emerged, all of them, onto the small endless plain. Of the town where history, by decapitating churches and tearing down "architectural excesses," had banished all notion of time. A town where living meant endlessly reliving one's past, even while at the same time mechanically performing routine tasks.
I said nothing. I was afraid of being banished from the kitchen. For some time now I had noticed that the adults tolerated my presence more readily. I seemed, at the age of fourteen, to have won the right to be present at their late-night conversations – on condition that I remained invisible. I was thrilled by this change, and the last thing I wanted to do was to jeopardize such a privilege.
Charlotte's name came up during these winter gatherings just as often as before. Yes, as previously, my grandmother's life offered our guests a topic of conversation that satisfied everyone's self-esteem.
And besides, this young Frenchwoman had the advantage of concentrating within her life span the crucial moments in the history of our country. She had lived under the tsar and survived Stalin's purges; she had come through the war and witnessed the fall of so many idols. In their eyes, her life, traced against the background of the empire's bloodiest century, took on an epic dimension.
And now this Frenchwoman, born at the other end of the world, was blankly contemplating the undulations of the sands beyond the open door of a railway carriage. ("But what the devil dragged her into that wretched desert?" my father's friend, the wartime pilot, had exclaimed one day.) At her side, equally motionless, stood her husband, Fyodor. The draft rushing through the carriage brought no coolness, despite the speed of the train. They remained for a long moment in the light and heat of this embrasure. The wind pumiced their brows like sandpaper. The sun broke up the view into myriad flashes. But they did not move, as if they wanted a painful past to be erased by this scouring and burning. They had just left Bukhara.
It was she too, after their return to Siberia, who spent interminable hours at a dark window, from time to time breathing on the thick layer of hoarfrost to preserve a little melted circle. Through this watery spyhole she saw a white nocturnal street. From time to time a car suddenly came gliding up, approached their house, and after a moment of indecision drove off. Three o'clock in the morning sounded, and a few minutes later she heard the sharp crunch of snow on the front steps. She closed her eyes for a moment, then went to open up. Her husband always came back at this time… People sometimes disappeared at work, sometimes in the middle of the night, from home, after a black car had driven through the snow-covered streets. She was certain that as long as she waited at the window for him, blowing on the hoarfrost, nothing could happen to him. At three o'clock he would stand up, straighten out the files on his desk, and leave, like all the other public officials throughout the empire. They knew that in the Kremlin the master of the country finished his working day at three o'clock. Without thinking, everyone strove to imitate his timetable. And they did not stop to consider that between Moscow and Siberia, spanning several time zones, this "three o'clock in the morning" no longer corresponded to anything: that Stalin was rising from his bed and filling his first pipe of the day, while in a Siberian town at nightfall his faithful subjects struggled against sleep on chairs that were turning into instruments of torture. From the Kremlin the master seemed to impose his tempo on the passage of time and even on the sun. When he went to bed, all the clocks on the planet showed three o'clock in the morning. At least that was how everyone saw it at the time.