What I was searching for in my reading was what I lacked. Attachment to a place (that of my own birth was too ill defined), a personal mythology, a family past. But, above all, that thing of which the others had just robbed me: the divine freedom to reinvent life, and to people it with heroes. For me the four knights of Aquitaine were much more real than those ghosts of handsome officers that haunted the orphanage dormitories. Did I really believe in these equestrian figures standing guard over France? I think I did, just as at the age of eleven or twelve one believes in nobility, compassion, self-sacrifice. After all, it was not the reality of this vision that interested me, but its beauty. A road high on a hillside, the dust muffling the clatter of the hooves, the four companions advancing slowly, their gaze directed into the distance, now toward the mountains, where they cluster in the mists, now toward the gap where the ocean glistens. That was how I saw them; it was my way of hoping.
One day this dreamed-of land finally imprinted its space within me, as the pattern of the constellations is imprinted in our visual memory, and the ups and downs of a familiar road in the soles of our feet. I became aware of this during the last literature lesson before the New Year holidays. The atmosphere was not very studious. Some of us were dozing, hypnotized by the swirling of great snowflakes outside the window, others were choking with whispered laughter at the back of the class as they passed a textbook, open at a disfigured illustration, from hand to hand beneath the desks. From time to time, the voice of the teacher, a tall, bony woman with a massive, prominent chin, thundered out: "Who wants to go without food until tomorrow?" The class would freeze, she would resume her dissection of a poem by Lermontov, and the textbook would provoke new spasms of hilarity. When I set eyes on it I could not help smiling. The poem we were studying (dedicated to Napoleon) was illustrated with the painting that shows the emperor just after his abdication. An unfortunate choice, if one knows the penchant naughty schoolboys have for desecrating images of famous people in textbooks. Napoleon was seated, with a downcast air, his body shrunken, his gaze fixed, his legs wide apart. And it was in this space, between the imperial legs, that a sacrilegious hand had drawn a monstrous hairy tube adorned with two enormous balls. Another, more innocent hand had covered his face with long, stitched-up scars and hidden his left eye behind a pirate's patch. I smiled, pondering those famous people in our textbooks who acquired even more infamous addenda, even more muscular appendages… It was at that moment that the teacher began to recite the poem.
She read it both badly and well. Badly, because her voice was monotonous and evidently concerned by the somnolence of one camp and the giggling whispers of another. Well, because the banality of this voice enabled me to forget it, to forget this tall woman with her angular frame, to forget this classroom, and to enter into the nocturnal world of these stanzas, finding myself on an island lost in the middle of an ocean beside a stone tomb that opens once a year, at midnight on the anniversary of the emperor's death. The dead man arises and climbs aboard the ghost ship, which sets sail for "that beloved France where he had left his glory, his throne, his son and heir, and his faithful Guard." He lands by night and rouses the deserted shore with a powerful call that reverberates into the very depths of the country. But his native land remains deaf: "The mustachioed grenadiers are all asleep now, on the plain where the Elbe's waters flow, beneath the snows of cold Russia, in the burning sands of the pyramids." Then he summons his marshals: "Ney! Lannes! Murat…" No one comes to his side. "Some have fallen in battle, others have betrayed him and sold their swords." With a despairing cry he calls out to his son, but in reply hears only the deathly silence of the void. Dawn compels him to leave his native land. He boards the ghost ship, and it carries him back to his remote island.
I had never before had such a feeling of freedom in the face of reality. The beauty of this nocturnal voyage rendered the so-called real world all around me so insignificant that I wanted to laugh: the walls of this classroom, decorated with strips of red calico bearing quotations from Lenin and the last Party Congress; the orphanage building; the chimneys of a vast factory beyond the icebound river. The man who stood on the deck of that spectral ship, this figure in its tricorne hat, had nothing to do with the Bonaparte whose adventures we learned about from our history books, nor with the "literary personage" analyzed by our teacher, nor with that fat little man with his legs apart portrayed in the illustration. The exile returning to the shores of Brittany, sending out his calls to his marshals, was a reality divined by the poet. More true than History itself. More believable, because beautiful.
I knew the voyager on the ghost ship belonged to the land of the four noblemen from Aquitaine, and that he could, like them, encompass it in a single look, from the forests of the east to the dunes beside the ocean. When the hinged lids of our old desks came clattering down at the end of the lesson, I reflected that it might somehow be possible never to lose contact in my mind with this dreamed-of land.
According to the logic of my adolescent quest, I should have plunged into an increasingly disdainful and untamed solitude and adopted the posture of the young king in exile.
A being torn between his dreams of France and reality. A logic both novelistic and romantic. But it all turned out differently. It was reality that suddenly produced a dramatic twist in the plot.
At first it was just a rumor, so improbable that, talking about it during the New Year vacation, we treated it as a bizarre hoax. Our vacations, in any case, were not like those of normal schoolchildren. We would be sent out to clear railroad tracks, often blocked by snowstorms, or else, from time to time, we were lined up in a guard of honor on the occasion of some official visit. Our city's glorious past attracted foreign delegations. Lining the perimeter of a monument to the fallen, we represented "Soviet youth, assembled in evergreen commemoration of the war." It was especially during vacations that they had recourse to us, because at such times normal children were difficult to mobilize. Or when it was particularly cold, too, since parents would refuse to expose their little ones to snowstorms at twenty-five below.
That December it was indeed very cold. Despite being ordered to stand at attention, we jumped up and down in our ranks, the soles of our ancient shoes thumping on the ice, and to warm the cockles of our hearts while waiting for the official procession to pass we discussed this stupid rumor. What joker could have started it?
When lessons resumed the news broke – the rumor was true: next fall the orphanage was going to close.
In the months that followed we learned the details: the pupils would be transferred to ordinary boarding schools, the older ones to professional schools and factories, possibly even in distant towns. But we only really believed it all in June, when after lessons had finished, they ordered us to drag our old desks over to the boiler room. Right up to that day we went on clinging to the hope that it was all a false alarm. And yet each one of us, in his own way, was getting ready to leave.