In the solitude of this long corridor that led to the "Lenin Room" (part museum, part treasure house, which honored the great man's memory in every school in the country), I felt almost happy. With that happiness that follows the extinguishing of all hope and teaches us that in the end every grief is bearable. The wet floorboards reflected the light of the single lamp at the end of the corridor. Dazed by the to-ing and fro-ing of the floorcloth, it was as if, beneath the dark, watery surface, my gaze were discovering the illusory depths of a secret world.
The task finished, I lugged the bucket along to the bathrooms. As I washed my hands I noticed brown stains on the wall around the faucet. They were the dried specks of my blood, traces of the fight three days before. There I had bled and with wistful tenderness had thought about the woman massaging her left breast… I threw water over the soiled place, rubbing it hastily, as if someone might have been able to divine its mystery.
I remained for a while in the storage room where the cleaning women kept their brushes and where I had put away my bucket. I liked this place: boxes of brown soap that gave off a pleasant, musky smell, a narrow transom open onto a freezing night, my body pressed against the radiator that warmed my knees through the cloth of my pants… My personal space. It was precisely on that evening that I became aware of it: a tiny island where the world was not an open wound. Away from it, everything hurt. In a claustrophobic reflex, no doubt, I was racking my brains for an escape, a continuation of these moments of tranquillity, an archipelago of brief joys. I recalled one of the last readings at Alexandra's house. I had come across an unfamiliar French word, "estran," meaning "foreshore." She had explained its meaning to me in French. I had pictured this strip of sand liberated by the waves, and, without ever having seen the sea, I had a perfect sense of being there, studying everything the ocean leaves behind on a beach as it retreats. I now understood that this "estran," for which I did not know the word in Russian, was also my life, just like the fifth floor of that ancient apartment building where Madeleine Brohant lived.
That evening was probably the time when I first perceived with so much clarity what it was that Alexandra's language had given me…
The door opened abruptly. The intruder looked like someone coming home. It was Village. He stared at me, vexed, but not fiercely. "So you're the one that's been spilling all that water down the hallway. I just slid ten yards along it on my ass. It's worse than a skating rink…" Under his coat he was clutching a bundle wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. The cool of the snow that he had brought in with him stood out clearly from a very appetizing, smoky smell that made me swallow my saliva and reminded me I had eaten nothing since midday. Village noticed my famished grimace and gave a satisfied smile. "So, didn't they give you a scrap to eat, the two-faced devils?" he asked, taking off his jacket.
"No, nothing," I choked, in another contraction of the throat, surprised by this description of the others.
"Ah well, too bad for them. They get the same grub every single day Enough to give a cockroach the runs. Now you and me are going to enjoy this…"
In the twinkling of an eye he transformed the cubbyhole into a dining room. The lid of a crate laid over a bucket formed the table. Two other buckets, upturned, became chairs. From out of the folded newspaper a grilled fish made its appearance, with a broad, curved body, its fins blackened by the fire… We began to eat… Village told me tales of his secret fishing trips, his tricks for escaping from the orphanage. From time to time, he cocked an ear, then resumed his talk, speaking more softly… At the end of our meal footsteps outside the door gave us a start. A supervisor's voice called out my name. Village stood up, handed me a bucket, opened the door, and hid behind it.
"What are you doing in there?" the man demanded, patting the wall, but not finding the switch.
"Well, I was just putting the bucket away, that's all," I replied with rough assurance that surprised even myself.
The supervisor, still in the half-light, sniffed the air, but the supposition that came to him seemed so far-fetched that he withdrew, growling: "All right. Put all that stuff away and get to bed immediately." Squeezed behind the door, Village gave me the thumbs-up: "Well acted!"
It was up on the dormitory floor, before we went our separate ways, that he then said to me, with that shaky intonation that betrays words deeply buried that are painful to bring readily to the lips: "You know… my dad, they… shot him too. With a comrade. He was trying to escape… But the guard caught them and machine-gunned them. An old man once told me that in the camps, when fellows were killed trying to escape, they left them in full view for three days, in front of the barrack huts, so the others knew what to expect… When my mother heard the news she took to drinking. And when she died the doctor said it was like she was burned from the inside. And just before she went, she kept saying to me: 'It was to see you he did that.' But I never believed her, you know…"
The laconic friendship that bound us together taught me a lot. The most despised pariah in the orphanage, Village was in reality the freest of us all. Almost every day he was to be seen engaged on garbage duty, but what we did not know was that he volunteered for it and could thus spend long, stolen moments pacing up and down on the banks of the river, sometimes venturing as far as the Volga. He was also the only one to accept reality, not to invoke the phantom of the officer who was going to come knocking at the classroom door. What he did not accept was the reality they constructed for us, with its myths, its lapsed heroes, its books burned in the boiler-room stove. And while we were lined up in our grades in the hallway, before lessons started, listening, without listening, to the singsong ranting of the loudspeaker ("The party of Lenin, a people's force, leads us on to the triumph of Communism!"), Village was slipping through the willow plantations in the morning mist, in the fragile awakening of the waters fringed with the first ice. That was his reality.
I told myself that my "estran" was not so far removed from Village's misty mornings.
The land of the "estran," a land of refuge, where it was still possible for me to dream, revealed itself bit by bit, without any logic, amid the relics of Samoylov's library. It was there, one day, that a torn page, marked by the fire, came to hand; on it, the opening lines of a poem, whose author I was never able to identify:
When upon Nancy the sun doth rise Already he's shining in Burgundy 's skies. He'll soon be here to start our day, Then on to Gascony make his way.
No geography would ever give me a more concrete sense of the land of France, a territory that had always seemed to me much too tiny on the maps to have pretensions to time zones. What the poet had expressed was his feeling for the beloved space, a physical perception of one's native land that enables us to take in a whole country at a single glance, to perceive its tonalities very distinctively, as they differ, from one valley to the next, the variation in landscapes, the unique substance of each of its towns, the mineral texture of their walls. From Nancy to Gascony…
As I explored the ruins of these books in the sealed-off room, I did not feel as if I were in pursuit of any goal. Mine was the simple curiosity of one who pokes about in attics, the pleasure of coming upon a book spared by the fire, an unblemished engraving, a note calligraphed in the old style. The joy, above all, of descending, my arms piled high with these treasures, and showing them to Alexandra. Yet shortly after reading those four lines of verse on that torn-out page I grasped what it was that drove me to spend long hours in the company of these mutilated books. From the bottom of a box in which the wood was disintegrating like sand, I drew out a History of the Late Roman Empire with the pages stuck together by damp, then a book in German, printed in flamboyant Gothic lettering, and finally, from a collection of texts with its cover missing, an obituary notice. I no longer remember whom it concerned. The shade of a great, vanished lineage is linked, all too confusedly, with my reading of this. All I can recall, but I recall them by heart, are the words of François I, quoted by the author, which were underlined in that violet ink whose faded tint I recognized: "We are four noblemen from Aquitaine, who will fight in the lists against all comers from France: myself, Sansac, Montalembert, and la Châtaigneraie. " I pictured that country, encompassed by a loving gaze that followed the sun's course from Nancy to Gascony, knowing now that it was the gaze of these four knights, scanning their native land, the better to defend it.