2
– Even the president was reduced to cold meals by it."
This was the very first remark to ring out through the capital of our France-Atlantis… We imagined a venerable old man – combining in his appearance the noble bearing of our great-grandfather Norbert and the pharaonic solemnity of a Stalin – an old man with a silvery beard, sitting at a table gloomily lit by a candle.
This news report came from a man of about forty with a lively eye and a resolute expression, who appeared in photos in our grandmother's oldest albums. Coming alongside the wall of an apartment block in a boat and putting up a ladder, he was climbing toward one of the first-floor windows. This was Vincent, Charlotte's uncle and a reporter for the Excelsior. Since the start of the flood he had been working his way up and down the streets of the capital in this fashion, seeking out the key news item of the day. The president's cold meals was one such. And it was from Vincent's boat that the mind-boggling photo was taken that we were contemplating. It was on a vellowed press cutting: three men in a precarious little craft crossing a vast expanse of water flanked by apartment blocks. A caption explained: "Messieurs the deputies, on their way to a session of the Assemblée Nationale."…
Vincent stepped over the windowsill and sprang into the arms of his sister, Albertine, and of Charlotte, who were taking refuge with him during their stay in Paris… Atlantis, silent until now, was filling up with sounds, emotions, words. Each evening our grand-mother's stories uncovered some new fragment of this universe engulfed by time.
And then there was the hidden treasure. The suitcase filled with old papers, the massive bulk of which, when we had ventured under the big bed in Charlotte's room, alarmed us. We tugged on the catches, we lifted the lid. What a mass of paper! Adult life, in all its tedium and all its disturbing seriousness, stopped our breath with its smell of dust and things shut away… How could we have guessed that it was in the midst of these old newspapers, these letters with inconceivable dates, that our grandmother would find us the photo of the three deputies in their boat?…
It was Vincent who had passed on to Charlotte the taste for such journalistic sketches and urged her to collect them by cutting these brief chronicles of the day out of the newspapers. After a time, he must have thought, they would be seen in quite a different light, like silver coins colored by the patina of centuries.
During one of those summer evenings filled with the scented breeze of the steppes, a remark from a passerby under our balcony jolted us out of our reverie.
"No, I promise you. They said it on the radio. He went out into space."
And another voice, dubious, answered, receding into the distance, "Do you take me for a fool or what? 'He went out…' But up there there's nowhere you can go out. It's like bailing out of a plane without a parachute…"
This exchange brought us back to reality. All about us there stretched the huge empire that took a particular pride in the exploration of the unfathomable sky above our head. The empire with its redoubtable army; with its atomic icebreakers disemboweling the North Pole; with its factories that would soon be producing more steel than all the countries of the world put together; with its cornfields that rippled from the Black Sea to the Pacific… with this endless steppe. And on our balcony a Frenchwoman was talking about a boat crossing a great flooded city and drawing alongside the wall of an apartment block… We shook ourselves, trying to understand where we were. Here? Back there? The whispering of the waves in our ears fell silent.
It was by no means the first time we had noticed this duality in our lives. To live alongside our grandmother was already to feel you were elsewhere. She would cross the courtyard without ever going to take her place on the babushkas' bench, that institution without which a Russian courtyard is unthinkable. This did not stop her greeting them very cordially, inquiring after the health of one she had not seen for several days, and doing them little kindnesses, for example, showing them how to remove the slightly acid taste from salted milky mushrooms. But in addressing her friendly remarks to them, she remained standing. And the old gossips of the courtyard accepted this difference. Everyone understood that Charlotte was not entirely a Russian babushka.
This did not mean that she lived cut off from the world or that she clung to any social prejudice. Early in the morning we were often roused from our childish sleep by a sonorous cry that rang out in the midst of the courtyard: "Come and get your milk!" Through our dreams we recognized the voice and, above all, the inimitable intonation of Avdotia, the milkwoman, arriving from the neighboring village. The housewives came down with their cans toward two enormous aluminum containers that this vigorous peasant woman, some fifty years of age, dragged from one house to another. One day, awakened by her shout, I did not go back to sleep… I heard our door close softly and muffled voices passing through into the dining room. A moment later one of them whispered with blissful abandon, "Oh, it's so cozy here, Shura! I feel as if I'm lying on a cloud." Intrigued by these words, I peeped behind the curtain that separated off our bedroom.
Avdotia was stretched out on the floor, her arms and legs flung out, her eyes half closed. From her bare, dust-covered feet right up to her hair spread out upon the ground, her whole body lolled in deep repose. An absentminded smile colored her half-open lips. "It's so cozy here, Shura!" she repeated softly, calling my grandmother by that diminutive that people generally used in place of her unusual Christian name.
I sensed the exhaustion of this great female body slumped in the middle of the dining room. I understood that Avdotia could only allow herself such a lack of constraint in my grandmother's apartment. For she was confident of not being snubbed or disapproved of… She would finish her grueling round, bent under the weight of the enormous churns. And when all the milk was gone she would go up to "Shura's," her legs numb, her arms heavy. The floor, uncarpeted and always clean and bare, still had a pleasant morning coolness. Avdotia would come in, greet my grandmother, take off her bulky shoes, and go and stretch out on the bare floor. "Shura" brought her a glass of water and sat beside her on a little stool. And they would chat softly until Avdotia had the courage to continue on her way…
That day I heard some of what my grandmother was saying to the milkwoman as she sprawled in blissful oblivion. The two of them were talking about the work in the fields, the buckwheat harvest… And I was amazed to hear Charlotte talking about this farm life with complete authority. But above all the Russian she spoke, very pure, very refined, did not jar at all with Avdotia's rich, rough, and vivid way of talking. Their conversation also touched on the war, an inevitable topic: the milkwoman's husband had been killed at the front. Harvest, buckwheat, Stalingrad… And that evening she would be talking to us about Paris in flood, or reading us some pages from Hector Malot! I sensed a distant past, obscure – a Russian past, this time – awakening from the depths of her life long ago.
Avdotia got up, embraced my grandmother, and continued on her way, which led her across endless fields, beneath the sun of the steppes, on a farm wagon submerged in the ocean of tall plants and flowers… This time, as she was leaving the room, I saw her great peasant's fingers touch, with tentative hesitation, the delicate statuette on the chest in our halclass="underline" a nymph with a rippling body entwined with sinuous stems, that figurine from the turn of the century, one of the rare fragments from bygone days that had been miraculously preserved…
Bizarre as it may seem, it was thanks to the local drunkard, Gavrilych, that we were able to gain insight into the meaning of that unusual "strange elsewhere" that our grandmother carried within her. He was a man whose very teetering silhouette, looming up from behind the poplar trees in the courtyard, inspired apprehension. A man who defied the militiamen when he held up the traffic in the main street with his capricious zigzag progress; a man who fulminated against the authorities; and whose thunderous oaths rattled windowpanes and swept the row of babushkas from their bench. Yet this same Gavrilych, when he met my grandmother, would stop, attempt to inhale the vodka fumes on his breath, and articulate with an accentuated respect, "Good day, Sharlota Norbertovna!"