On one occasion Charlotte, exhausted by these nightly vigils, fell asleep several minutes before this planetary hour. A moment later, waking with a start, she heard her husband's footsteps in the children's room. She went in and saw him bending over the bed of their son, this boy with smooth black hair who looked like no one else in the family…
They arrested Fyodor neither in his office in broad daylight nor in the small hours, interrupting his sleep with peremptory drumming on the door. It was on New Year's Eve. He had rigged himself out in the red cloak of Father Christmas, and his face, unrecognizable beneath a long beard, fascinated the children: the boy of twelve and his younger sister – my mother. Charlotte was adjusting the big shapka on her husband's head when they came into the apartment. They entered without having to knock; the door was open; guests were expected.
And this scene of an arrest, which had already been repeated millions of times during a single decade in the life of the country, had that evening as its setting the Christmas tree and these two children with their cardboard masks, he the hare, she the squirrel. And at the center of the room this Father Christmas, transfixed, only too able to guess at the outcome and almost happy that the children cannot see the pallor of his cheeks beneath the cotton-wool beard. In a very calm voice Charlotte says to the hare and the squirrel, who are looking at the intruders without removing their masks, "Come into the next room, children. You can set off the Bengal lights."
She had spoken in French. The two policemen exchanged significant glances…
Fyodor was saved by what logically ought to have been his downfalclass="underline" his wife's nationality… When, some years earlier, people had begun to disappear, family by family, house by house, he had at once thought of this. Inherent in Charlotte were two grave faults, the ones most often imputed to "enemies of the people": "bourgeois" origins and a link to abroad. Married to a "bourgeois element," and worse still a Frenchwoman, he could see himself quite naturally accused of being "a spy in the pay of French and British imperialists." The formula for some time had been standard.
However, it was on just this perfect evidence that the well-tried machinery of repression ground to a halt. For normally those who fabricated a case were supposed to prove that the accused had cunningly and for years concealed his links to abroad. And when they were dealing with a Siberian who spoke only his mother tongue, had never left his fatherland or met a representative of the capitalist world – such a proof, even if totally falsified, called for a certain adeptness.
But Fyodor hid nothing. Charlotte's passport indicated her nationality in black and white: French. Her birthplace, Neuilly-sur-Seine, in its Russian transliteration only served to emphasize her foreignness. Her trips to France, her "bourgeois" cousins who still lived there, her children who spoke French just as well as Russian – it was all too clear. The confessions that were normally false and extracted under torture after weeks of interrogation had this time been vouchsafed willingly from the beginning. The machinery marked time. Fyodor was imprisoned; then, as he became more and more of an embarrassment, posted to the other end of the empire, in a town annexed from Poland.
They spent a week together – the time it took to travel across the country, and a long and chaotic day of moving into a new house. The next day Fyodor set off for Moscow to be reintegrated into the Party, from which he had been promptly expelled. "It'll only take a couple of days," he said to Charlotte, who went with him to the station. Returning home, she noticed that he had left his cigarette case behind. "It doesn't matter," she thought; "in two days' time…" And this imminent moment (Fyodor would come into the room, see the cigarette case on the table, and, giving himself a little clout on the forehead, exclaim, "What an idiot! I've been looking everywhere for it…"), yes, this June morning would be the first in a long stream of happy days…
They saw one another again four years later. And Fyodor never did recover his cigarette case, which, in the midst of war, Charlotte exchanged for a loaf of black bread.
The adults talked. The television, with its gung-ho news programs, its reports of the latest achievements of the nation's industry, its Bolshoi concerts, provided a soothing background. The vodka mitigated the bitterness of the past. And I felt that our guests, even new arrivals, all cherished this Frenchwoman who had accepted the destiny of their country without flinching.
I learned a lot from these stories. I now guessed why in our family the New Year's celebrations always had a whiff of anxiety about them, like a sly draft making the doors slam in an empty house at twilight. Despite my father's gaiety, despite the presents, the noise of fireworks, and the glittering of the tree, this impalpable malaise was there. As if amid the toasts, the popping of corks, and the laughter, someone's arrival were expected. I believe that, without admitting it to themselves, our parents even welcomed the snowy and humdrum calm of the first days of January with relief. In any event, it was certainly this moment after the holidays that my sister and I preferred to the holiday itself…
My grandmother's Russian days – those days that, at a given moment, ceased to be a "Russian phase" before a return to France and simply became her life – had for me a secret flavor that the others were not aware of. It was a sort of invisible aura that Charlotte carried within her throughout the past, resurrected in our smoke-filled kitchen. I said to myself with marveling astonishment, "This woman who for months waited at a window covered in ice for the famous three a.m. knock, this woman was the same being, both mysterious and so close to me, who had one day seen silver scallop dishes in a café in Neuilly!"
Whenever they spoke of Charlotte they never forgot to tell the story of that morning…
It was her son who woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. He jumped out of his folding bed and walked barefoot, holding out his arms in front of him, toward the window. As he crossed the room in the dark he bumped into his sister's bed. Charlotte was not asleep either. She had been lying with her eyes open in the blackness, trying to understand where the dense and monotonous hum might be coming from that seemed to impregnate the walls with a dull throbbing. She felt her body and her head vibrating in this slow and glutinous sound. The children woke and rushed to the window. Charlotte heard her daughter's astonished cry: "Oh look! All those stars! But they're moving…"
Without switching on the light, Charlotte went to join them. In passing she noticed on the table a faint glint of metaclass="underline" Fyodor's cigarette case. He was due back from Moscow in the morning. She saw rows of luminous dots sliding slowly through the night sky.
"Planes," said the boy, in his calm voice, which never changed in intonation. "Whole squadrons…"