One day he talked about a little lake in the midst of the taiga, frozen eleven months of the year. At the behest of the camp commander its bed was turned into a cemetery: it was easier than digging into the permafrost. The prisoners died by the score…
"We went there one day in autumn: we had ten or fifteen to dump in the drink. And then I saw them, all the others, the last lot. Naked; we made a bit from their gear. Yeah, butt-naked, under the ice, not rotted at all. I tell you, it was like a hunk of kholodets!"
So kholodets, that meat in aspic, of which there was a plateful on our table at that moment, became a terrible word – ice, flesh, and death congealed into one trenchant sound.
What caused me most pain during the course of their nocturnal confessions was the indestructible love for Russia that these revelations inspired in me. My intellect, struggling with the bite of the vodka, rebelled: "This country is monstrous! Evil, torture, suffering, self-mutilation, are the favorite pastimes of its inhabitants. And still I love it? I love it for its absurdity. For its monstrosities. I see in it a higher meaning that no logical reasoning can penetrate…"
This love was a continual heartbreak. The blacker the Russia I was discovering turned out to be, the more violent my attachment became. As if to love it, one had to tear out one's eyes, plug one's ears, stop oneself thinking.
One evening I heard my aunt and her lover talking about Beria…
In the old days, from our guests' conversations, I had learned what this terrible name concealed. They uttered it with scorn, but not without a note of awe. Being too young, I could not understand the disturbing zone of darkness in this tyrant's life. I grasped only that some human weakness was involved. They referred to it in hushed tones, and that was generally when they noticed my presence and banished me from the kitchen…
These days there were three of us in our kitchen. Three adults. Certainly my aunt and Dmitrich had nothing to hide from me. They talked; and through the blue fog of tobacco, through the drunkenness, I pictured a great black car with smoked glass windows. Despite its imposing size, it had the look of a curb-crawling taxi. It traveled with a furtive slowness, almost stopping, then moving off rapidly, as if to catch up with someone. Intrigued, I observed its comings and goings along the streets of Moscow. Suddenly I guessed the purpose of them: the black car was following women. Beautiful young ones. It studied them from its opaque windows, advanced in time with their footsteps. Then it let them go. Or sometimes, finally making up its mind, dived up a side street after them…
Dmitrich had no reason to spare me. He recounted everything without mincing his words. On the backseat of the car sprawled a rotund figure, bald, with a pince-nez buried in a fat face. Beria. He selected the passing woman's body that aroused his desire, then, his henchmen arrested the woman. Those were the days when not even a pretext was needed. Carried off to his residence, the woman was raped, having been broken with the aid of alcohol, threats, torture…
Dmitrich did not say – he did not know himself- what happened to these women afterward. Nobody ever saw them again.
I spent several sleepless nights, staring into space. I was thinking about Beria and those condemned women with only one night to live. My brain was on fire. I felt an acid, metallic taste in my mouth. I pictured myself as the father, or the fiance, or the husband of that young woman pursued by the black car. Yes, for several seconds, for as long as I could bear it, I inhabited the skin of this man, was in his anguish, in his tears, in-his useless, powerless anger, in his resignation. For everyone knew how these women disappeared! I felt a knot in my stomach, a horrible spasm of grief. I opened the hinged win-dowpane, I scooped up the layer of snow that clung to its edge, I rubbed my face with it. This provided temporary relief. Now I saw a fat man, lurking behind the smoked glass of the car, silhouettes of women reflected in the lenses of his pince-nez. He picked them, felt them, appraised their attractions…
And I hated myself! For I could not help admiring this stalker of women. Yes, within me there was someone who – with dread, with repulsion, with shame – reveled in the power of the man with the pince-nez. All women belonged to him! He cruised around the vast-ness of Moscow as if in the middle of a harem. And what fascinated me most was his indifference. He had no need to be loved, he did not care what the women he chose might feel toward him. He selected a woman, desired her, possessed her the same day. Then forgot her. And all the cries, lamentations, sobs, groans, supplications, and curses that he had occasion to hear were for him only spices that added to the savor of the rape.
I lost consciousness at the start of my fourth sleepless night. Just before fainting I felt I had grasped the fevered thought of one of those raped women, who must have realized that whatever happened she would not be allowed to leave. This thought, which cut through her enforced intoxication, her pain, her disgust, resounded in my head and threw me to the ground.
When I came to, I felt different. Calmer, stronger. Like a patient after an operation, I progressed slowly from one word to the next. I needed to put everything in order again. In the darkness I murmured short sentences that took stock of my new state: "So, within me there is someone who can contemplate these rapes. While I order it to be silent, it is still there. Beria has taught me that everything is allowed. Russia knows no limits, neither in goodness nor in evil. Especially not in evil. And here I was, fascinated by this hunter of women's bodies. And hating myself for it. I felt one with this brutalized woman, crushed by the weight of sweaty flesh, guessing her last clear thought: the thought of the death that will follow this hideous coupling. I longed to die at the same time as her. How could I go on living while carrying within myself this other me that admires Beria…"
Yes, I was Russian. Now I understood, in a still confused fashion, what that meant. Carrying within one's soul all those human beings disfigured by grief, those burned villages, those lakes filled with naked corpses. Knowing the resignation of a human herd violated by a despot. And the horror of feeling oneself participating in this crime. And the wild desire to reenact all these stories from the past – so as to eradicate from them the suffering, injustice, and death. Yes, to catch the black car in the streets of Moscow and destroy it beneath one's giant palm. Then, while holding one's breath, to watch the young woman pushing open the door of her house, going up the stairs… Remaking history. Purifying the world. Hunting down evil. Giving all these people refuge in one's heart, so as to be able to release them one day into a world liberated from evil. But meanwhile sharing the sorrow that oppresses them. Detesting oneself for every lapse. Pushing this commitment to the point of delirium, to the point of fainting. Living very mundanely on the edge of the abyss. Yes, that's what Russia is.
Thus it was that in my juvenile confusion, I latched onto my new identity. I was Russian. It became life itself for me, and one, I believed, that would erase forever my French illusion.