My father's sister, my aunt, had also unwittingly contributed to this turnabout…
She moved into our apartment with her two sons, my young cousins, happy to leave her crowded communal apartment in the workers' district. Far from seeking to impose some other way of life on us and to eradicate the traces of our previous existence, she simply lived as she could. And the eccentricity of our family – its very discreet Frenchness, as remote from France as my mother's technical translations – faded away of its own accord.
My aunt was a true product of the Stalinist era. Stalin had been dead for twenty years, but she had not changed. It was not that she had any great love for the Generalissimo. Her first husband had been killed in the murderous shambles of the first days of the war. My aunt knew where the guilt for this catastrophic start lay, and she would tell anyone who was prepared to listen. The father of her two children, whom she had never married, had spent eight years in a camp. "Because of his wagging tongue," she would say.
No, her "Stalinism" lay chiefly in her manner of speaking, of dressing, of looking other people in the eye as if we had always been in the thick of war, as if the radio were still capable of announcing in solemn and funereal tones, "After heroic and bitter resistance, our armies have yielded the city of Kiev… have yielded the city of Smolensk… have yielded the city of…," with everyone's faces frozen as they followed the inexorable advance on Moscow… She still lived as she did in the years when neighbors would exchange silent glances, indicating a house with a movement of the eyebrows – after a whole family had been taken away in the night in a black car…
She wore a great brown shawl and an old coat of coarse cloth; in winter, felt boots; in summer, walking shoes with thick soles. I would not have been at all surprised to have seen her donning a military tunic and putting on a soldier's boots. And when she put the cups on the table, her big hands looked as if they were handling shell cases on the conveyor belt of an armaments factory, as they had done during the war…
Sometimes the father of her children, whom I called by his patronymic, Dmitrich, came to see us, and then our kitchen rang with his raucous voice, which sounded as if it was gradually getting warmed up after several years of winter. Neither my aunt nor he had anything more to lose, and they were afraid of nothing. They talked about everything with an aggressive and desperate forthrightness. He drank a lot, but his eyes remained clear: his jaws simply clamped more and more tightly together, as if better from time to time to spit out the occasional fierce oath from the camps. It was he who made me drink my first glass of vodka. And it was thanks to him that I was able to picture the invisible Russia – a continent encircled by barbed wire and watchtowers. In this forbidden country the simplest words took on a fearful significance, burned the throat like the "bitter stuff" that I drank from a thick glass tumbler.
One day he talked about a little lake in the midst of the taiga, frozen eleven months of the year. At the behest of the camp commander its bed was turned into a cemetery: it was easier than digging into the permafrost. The prisoners died by the score…
"We went there one day in autumn: we had ten or fifteen to dump in the drink. And then I saw them, all the others, the last lot. Naked; we made a bit from their gear. Yeah, butt-naked, under the ice, not rotted at all. I tell you, it was like a hunk of kholodets!"
So kholodets, that meat in aspic, of which there was a plateful on our table at that moment, became a terrible word – ice, flesh, and death congealed into one trenchant sound.
What caused me most pain during the course of their nocturnal confessions was the indestructible love for Russia that these revelations inspired in me. My intellect, struggling with the bite of the vodka, rebelled: "This country is monstrous! Evil, torture, suffering, self-mutilation, are the favorite pastimes of its inhabitants. And still I love it? I love it for its absurdity. For its monstrosities. I see in it a higher meaning that no logical reasoning can penetrate…"
This love was a continual heartbreak. The blacker the Russia I was discovering turned out to be, the more violent my attachment became. As if to love it, one had to tear out one's eyes, plug one's ears, stop oneself thinking.
One evening I heard my aunt and her lover talking about Beria…
In the old days, from our guests' conversations, I had learned what this terrible name concealed. They uttered it with scorn, but not without a note of awe. Being too young, I could not understand the disturbing zone of darkness in this tyrant's life. I grasped only that some human weakness was involved. They referred to it in hushed tones, and that was generally when they noticed my presence and banished me from the kitchen…
These days there were three of us in our kitchen. Three adults. Certainly my aunt and Dmitrich had nothing to hide from me. They talked; and through the blue fog of tobacco, through the drunkenness, I pictured a great black car with smoked glass windows. Despite its imposing size, it had the look of a curb-crawling taxi. It traveled with a furtive slowness, almost stopping, then moving off rapidly, as if to catch up with someone. Intrigued, I observed its comings and goings along the streets of Moscow. Suddenly I guessed the purpose of them: the black car was following women. Beautiful young ones. It studied them from its opaque windows, advanced in time with their footsteps. Then it let them go. Or sometimes, finally making up its mind, dived up a side street after them…
Dmitrich had no reason to spare me. He recounted everything without mincing his words. On the backseat of the car sprawled a rotund figure, bald, with a pince-nez buried in a fat face. Beria. He selected the passing woman's body that aroused his desire, then, his henchmen arrested the woman. Those were the days when not even a pretext was needed. Carried off to his residence, the woman was raped, having been broken with the aid of alcohol, threats, torture…
Dmitrich did not say – he did not know himself- what happened to these women afterward. Nobody ever saw them again.
I spent several sleepless nights, staring into space. I was thinking about Beria and those condemned women with only one night to live. My brain was on fire. I felt an acid, metallic taste in my mouth. I pictured myself as the father, or the fiance, or the husband of that young woman pursued by the black car. Yes, for several seconds, for as long as I could bear it, I inhabited the skin of this man, was in his anguish, in his tears, in-his useless, powerless anger, in his resignation. For everyone knew how these women disappeared! I felt a knot in my stomach, a horrible spasm of grief. I opened the hinged win-dowpane, I scooped up the layer of snow that clung to its edge, I rubbed my face with it. This provided temporary relief. Now I saw a fat man, lurking behind the smoked glass of the car, silhouettes of women reflected in the lenses of his pince-nez. He picked them, felt them, appraised their attractions…
And I hated myself! For I could not help admiring this stalker of women. Yes, within me there was someone who – with dread, with repulsion, with shame – reveled in the power of the man with the pince-nez. All women belonged to him! He cruised around the vast-ness of Moscow as if in the middle of a harem. And what fascinated me most was his indifference. He had no need to be loved, he did not care what the women he chose might feel toward him. He selected a woman, desired her, possessed her the same day. Then forgot her. And all the cries, lamentations, sobs, groans, supplications, and curses that he had occasion to hear were for him only spices that added to the savor of the rape.
I lost consciousness at the start of my fourth sleepless night. Just before fainting I felt I had grasped the fevered thought of one of those raped women, who must have realized that whatever happened she would not be allowed to leave. This thought, which cut through her enforced intoxication, her pain, her disgust, resounded in my head and threw me to the ground.