My French education resembled the efforts of a paleontologist to reconstruct a vanished world, starting from discovered bones. The isolation in which our country lived at that time turned the French universe into a landscape as mysterious as that of the Cretaceous or the Carboniferous eras. Every novel on Alexandra's shelves became the vestigial remains of a vanished – not to say extraterrestrial – civilization, a fossil, a droplet of amber that held within it not an imprisoned insect but some character, a French town, a district of Paris.
In the ensuing years Alexandra made me read some of the classics, but it was thanks to the little sealed-orf room that my sense of being engaged in exploration was at its most vivid. I found many French books there, some of them eaten away by damp and now unreadable, some of them printed with the old spelling of verbs in the imperfect tense ending in "-oit," instead of "-ait," which confused me at first. In one of these abandoned volumes I came across an anecdote that made a greater impression on me (I have long been ashamed to admit) than the work of many a famous novelist. It concerned the actress Madeleine Brohant, celebrated in her day, but who lived out her last years in great penury, lodging on the fifth floor of an ancient apartment building in the rue de Rivoli. One of the rare friends who remained faithful to her complained breathlessly one day about the exhausting climb. "But my dear friend," replied the actress, "this staircase is all I have now to make men's hearts beat faster!" The most glittering alexandrines, the most cunningly plotted novels, would never teach me more about the nature of Frenchness than that gentle, wry remark, whose rhythmic resonance, it seems to me, I can still hear.
Was there any logic to this apprenticeship? A work of fiction could easily invent stages in this, progress made, things learned. My memory only retains a handful of moments or apparently unconnected insights. Madeleine Brohant's remark and also that day in the troubled and tempestuous life of the Duchesse de Longeville. When they brought her a glass of water, the adventuress, parched with thirst, hurled herself upon it and declared, with a voluptuous sigh: "Such a shame this is not a sin!"
And yet there was a connection, all the same, between these fragments preserved in the memory. The art of eloquence and epigram, the cult of sense turned on its head, wordplay that made reality less absolute and judgments less predictable. At that time Russian life still resonated with echoes of Stalin's day: "enemy of the People" and "traitor to the Country" were not really out of current use. At the orphanage, indeed, despite our daydreams of heroes, we knew that our fathers had been described in precisely those terms. Once poured into the mold of propaganda, words had the hardness of steel, the heaviness of lead. As he burned Khrushchev's pamphlets, the old heating engineer had muttered the words "arbitrary voluntarism" (an official accusation he must have heard on the radio and had difficulty in articulating), as if it were the complicated name of a shameful disease. We did not know what it meant but we felt an obscure respect for the power of this "ism," which had just brought down the country's top man and compelled our teachers to steer clear of certain passages in our textbooks.
Unconsciously, perhaps, I drew a parallel between this steely language and the lightness of the glass of water that became a sin on the Duchesse de Longeville's lips, or the airy sweetness of an arduous staircase that caused hearts to beat faster. Words that killed and words that, when used in a certain way, liberated.
This contrast had led me one day to Alphonse Martin-ville… My fingers grimy with soot, I was laying out volumes that often fell to pieces in my hands. The doorway of the abandoned room framed a spring sky, tender and luminous, and yet the pages of the book I had discovered beneath a bundle of old newspapers quivered with Jacobinic fury and the clatter of the guillotine. It was Year II of the Revolution and the crowd thirsted for blood. One day, it was the fifteenth of the month of Ventôse, the March rain streamed down the blade of the machine onto the scaffold there had been no time to wash down. A young condemned man appeared: "Stand before us, Alphonse de Martinville!" ordered the Presiding Judge. Surprised to be awarded an aristocratic "de," the young man retorted with a desperado's courage: "But I have come here to be made shorter – not longer." This repartee won over the crowd and pleased the tribunal. A cry went up: "Citizens! Release him!" The rejoicing was general. Martinville was acquitted.
Among all these books, I have remembered some rather against my will on account of the notes in purple ink in the margin. In particular one very heavily annotated one: Will the Human Race Improve? I was at an age when this title did not yet seem comical. I spent a long time studying the elegant "NB"s and "sic"s added by the former owner of the house, the merchant Samoylov, the doughty autodidact, whom I pictured in his study of an evening, with big round spectacles perched on his nose, his brow creased, running his finger along sentences penned by a long-forgotten French thinker.
But as it happens, more than the great classics and the vicissitudes of History, it was a textbook in French dealing with various processes used for tempering blades that for a long time fascinated me. I spent hours deciphering the methods described (I recalclass="underline" powdered graphite mixed with oil…), trying to construct the replica of a dagger that bore the exciting name of Misericordia. The book gave details of its origin and use. When a knight, brought to the ground and protected by his armor, refused to yield, recourse was had to this long, slender blade, "that pierced the heart like a scorpion's sting."
The French education I was receiving was really not ah that academic.
This particular November evening was like all the others and utterly different. I had ended up telling Alexandra about the fight in which I was confronted by the others, their mocking taunts: "… your father, gunned down like a dog." She broke off from her task, sewing the buttons back onto my shirt, laid it down on the table, and began talking very naturally about my parents, going back over the story I already knew fragments of: their flight, their settling in the north of the Caucasus, my birth, their death…
In a novel, the child would perforce have listened to such an account with grief-stricken attention (how many books would I read, subsequently, often pathetic and lachrymose, about the quest for family origins). But in fact I was sunk in a dull insensibility and followed it with a kind of resigned deafness. Alexandra noticed this, no doubt understanding that what counted for me, for all of us at the orphanage, was not the truth of the facts (broadly speaking similar for all our parents), but the fine legend of an officer unjustly condemned, who would one day throw open the classroom door. She persevered, however, knowing that what she confided to me was being inscribed in my memory, without my being aware of it, and might thus escape being forgotten.
I listened to her distractedly, from time to time glancing at the pages of the book open in front of me, at the sentence I preferred to all the truths of reality: "Thus it came to pass that… one of the purest and fairest soldiers of old France gave his life for the three fleurs-de-lis…"
THE BRAWL THAT HAD MADE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO picture a heroic father also had another consequence. Some days later there was this bone that one of the pupils fished up from his plate and threw across the refectory table in my direction. His shout: "Here. Give the dog a bone!" was followed by an outburst of laughter from the whole table and immediately afterward a tense silence, everyone looking down at their food: a supervisor had just appeared at the door. "What do you think you're doing, throwing filth about?" he said angrily, pointing his finger at the bone that had landed near my plate. "No supper tonight! You can clean the corridor outside the 'Lenin Room.' I don't want to see a speck of dirt left there!"