What can it be? he asked.
It was a hip flask for gnôle with leather round it. I saved up for a month to buy it. Stepan had complained about the cold when he was working on the night shift.
Charge Peter with shovels, six tons, schest! Stay near and his heat dries up the sweat so it burns you. Step back and you freeze in the night air. Minus twenty-eight. Minus dvadtzat vossiem.
He taught me to count in Russian, and I learnt like boys learn to imitate birds.
May a mouthful of gnôle on your night shift keep you company between the hot and the cold! I wrote that sentence on an envelope and I stuck the envelope to the flask before I gave it to him.
When he read the message on the envelope, he threw the flask up in the air and caught it in one hand. We were standing in front of the bus station in Cluses. Then he kissed me. On the mouth. Each time it was for longer.
Father’s friend, César the water-diviner, used to hold a pendulum over a local map and wherever there was buried water in the earth, it began to turn in circles like a duckling. Am I circling over the Mole because on a Sunday in May Stepan and I climbed there to pick globeflowers? A woman I could shout to on the path below is wearing a dress I never had. How much we will be forgotten!
Whilst we climbed, Stepan told me about his childhood. I was brought up, he said, to the smell of fish glue — the smell of the ocean bed. And I don’t know if you’ll believe me but it’s true: I could hold nails between my teeth as soon as I was eating solid food. I made my first chair when I was fifteen, and Father maintained — like a true disciple of Makhno — he maintained it was better than any throne in the world!
The sun was hot and it was the time of May when the grass goes mad with growth. As a child I believed I could see it growing. The tin roofs of the chalets when we reached the alpage were crackling in the heat. Stepan didn’t know where the noise came from. Somebody’s throwing stones! he said. There was nobody. Just the two of us.
My father and I disagreed about one thing, he went on, only one thing and what a thing! Stepan had never seen globeflowers before. I picked some for him. They’re like brass buttons, he said, who cleans them? I laughed. We disagreed about one thing, he went on. I thought of Russia as my country and I wanted to go back and my father, who was really my stepfather, was against it. When I was eighteen, after the victory over the Germans, I filled in the forms for repatriation. Repatriation! he screamed at me in Russian. You weren’t even born there! You don’t know anything! You have to be Russian to be so stupid!
Stepan held five golden flowers to my shoulder and said in his singsong voice: Five Stars! The rest is ashes. You’re a General. Generalissimo Odile Achilovich!
Did you get your passport? I asked him.
No, they refused me. No homeland.
I put our bunch of flowers in a little spring so they could drink, and we lay on our backs looking up at the sky, just as now I’m on my stomach looking down on the earth. Stepan put his hand on me and started to caress me. Today I won’t stop him, I said to myself. He was talking about cities, asking me which one I’d like to go to — to London, to Milan, to Rotterdam, to Oslo, to Glasgow? It had never occurred to me before that somebody could choose where to live. It seemed unnatural. No, said Stepan, it’s simple with these — he held up both huge hands over my face — I can work anywhere in the world. Where, where will we go, Odile? Instead of answering him, I scrambled to my feet and ran like a wild thing down the hill towards the pine trees. When he came after me I shouted at him: You’re a Bohemian! A Bohemian, that’s what you are. I never want to see you again! I left him at the bus station. I wouldn’t let him walk me to the widow Besson’s house. I gave her the flowers and the old lady thanked me and touched my forehead. Haven’t you a little fever? You look all flushed. I shook my head to hide my tears from her. Go to bed, Odile, and I’ll make you some verveine tea, she said. Perhaps you had too much sun.
After the day of the globeflowers, Stepan posted me a letter. It was the only piece of writing I ever saw by him. I will look to see whether it’s still in the tilleul tin. He had written everything in capitals, as children do when they are first learning. The letter said: We need go nowhere, we’ll stay here, I’m arranging it, will be waiting for you by the bridge, Saturday. Mischka. I never heard him before or afterwards refer to himself as Mischka.
I was able to get home on that Friday night. Mother was still not talking to me. Emile grinned as he always grinned, and after the soup conspiratorially offered me one of his cigarettes. I was still smoking it when Régis came in. It was several weeks since I’d seen Régis. He was furious. It’s got to stop, Odile, do you hear me? He was shouting very loud. It can’t go on, do you hear me? You’ve got to put an end to it, do you hear me? If Father was alive, he’d have stopped you long ago, and you would have obeyed him, do you hear me? Father wouldn’t have shouted like you do, I said, and he wouldn’t have thought like you and Mother do. Don’t be stupid, Sister. Jesus, don’t be stupid! Father knew I’d be married by the age of seventeen. There was a silence. Emile was cleaning his nails with a pocketknife. Do you realise that your dolt from Sweden is married? It’s a lie, you’ve made it up! What do you expect, Odile, he’s nearly thirty. You don’t know anything about him! We’ve often worked on the same shift, we call him the Snow Shovel, he’s crap. Why do you say he’s married? Listen, Sister, to what I have to say, married or unmarried, if you persist in going out with that shit we plan to give him a lesson. Back to your field, Swede. He’s Russian! All the better, back behind his Iron Curtain!
Was he a married man? The priest later asked me when I confessed, and I had to confess further that I didn’t know, and that I’d never asked him. I went to meet him by the footbridge the day after the evening of Régis’s threats. I told him nothing because as soon as Stepan was there, palpable, before my eyes, I realised that, should it come to a fight, Régis didn’t stand a chance.
We crossed the river, left the Barracks behind us, and climbed to the forest. There we walked along its edge until the factory and the house were out of sight. By the old chapel with its broken windows and the wall behind its altar pocked with bullet marks, we turned in and crossed the forest to come out on the path that leads to Le Mont. There we owned a small barn for storing hay. Now it is in ruins. I’d been there as a child with my father in the days when he brought down hay on a sledge. In my pocket I had the key.
I’d never before seen a man naked like Stepan. I’d seen my father and my brothers at the sink washing all over, I’d seen everything, but I’d never seen a man naked like that. The sight of him brought back to me the night I’d first met him in the Ram’s Run, for I was filled with the same kind of pity — was it a pity for both of us? — and this pity was mixed with fear. Yet it wasn’t with fear that my heart was pounding. My heart was pounding with excitement at the news it received: its life would never be the same again, the body it pumped for would never be the same again.
Father was an expert grafter of fruit trees. He scarcely ever failed. Onto our wild apple trees he grafted pippins and russets, onto the wild pears, dolbos and williams. He knew at exactly which moment to graft, where to cut, how to bandage. It was as if the sap were in his thumbs. He’s grafting me! I said to myself with my arms round Stepan’s body. Along the new branches fruit will come like we’ve never known, neither he nor me. It wasn’t easy for Stepan. I wasn’t easy to break through. For a moment he was discouraged. I could feel it. Everything about men is so obvious that even I, at seventeen, could understand. And I shared his impatience, that’s what I shared with him. So I helped him, like I used to help Father when he was grafting. I’d hold the shoot at the angle needed — whilst Father bound with the cord.