I stood up abruptly and turned toward Charlotte. I was going to ask her the question that had tortured me for months, which I had formulated and reformulated in my mind a thousand times: "Tell me, in a word, in a sentence. Love. What is it?"
But Charlotte, doubtless anticipating what would have been a much more logical question, spoke first: "And do you know what saved me?… Did no one ever tell you?"
I looked at her. Telling me about the rape had left no mark at all on her features. There was simply the flickering of shadow and sunlight through the leaves of the willows that brushed against her face.
She had been saved by a saiga, that desert antelope with enormous nostrils, like an elephant's trunk cut short, and – in astonishing contrast – huge, timid, and gentle eyes. Charlotte had often seen herds of them bounding across the desert… When she was finally able to get up she saw a saiga slowly crawling along a sand dune. Charlotte followed it, without thinking, instinctively – the animal was the only beacon in the midst of the endless undulations of the sands. As if in a dream (the lilac sky had the deceptive emptiness of visions), she managed to draw close to the animal. The saiga did not run away. In the hazy light of dusk Charlotte saw dark patches on the sand – blood. The animal collapsed, then, lunging violently with its head, picked itself up from the ground, staggered on long, trembling legs, made several uncoordinated leaps. Fell again. It had been mortally wounded. By the same men who had almost killed her? Perhaps. It was spring. The night was icy cold. Charlotte curled up, pressing her body against the animal's back. The saiga did not move anymore. Shivers ran across its skin. Its sibilant breathing was like human sighs, like whispered words. Numb with cold and pain, Charlotte woke frequently, aware of this murmuring, which was obstinately trying to say something. In one of these waking moments, in the middle of the night, she was amazed to see a star, close at hand, shining in the sand. A star fallen from the sky… Charlotte leaned toward this luminous dot. It was the great open eye of the saiga – with a glorious, fragile constellation reflected in its tear-filled globe… She did not notice the moment when the heartbeats of this living creature, which kept her alive, stopped… In the morning the desert was glittering with hoarfrost. Charlotte remained standing for several minutes before the motionless body scattered with crystals. Then, slowly, she scaled the dune that the beast had not managed to cross the previous evening. When she reached the crest she uttered an "Oh" that rang out in the morning air. A lake, pink with the first rays, stretched out at her feet. It was this water that the saiga was trying to reach… They found Charlotte sitting on the shore that same evening.
In the streets of Saranza, at nightfall, she added this emotional epilogue to her story: "Your grandfather," she said softly, "never referred to that business. Never… And he loved your uncle Sergei as if he were his own son. Even more, perhaps. It's hard for a man to accept that his first child is the result of a rape. Especially as Sergei, you know, doesn't look like anyone else in the family. No, he never spoke about it…"
I sensed her voice shaking slightly. "She loved Fyodor," I thought quite simply. "It was he who made it possible for this country, where she has suffered so much, to be her own. And she still loves him. After all these years without him. She loves him out here on the steppes at night, in this Russian immensity. She loves him…"
Love appeared to me anew in all its sorrowful simplicity. Inexplicable. Inexpressible. Like that constellation reflected in the eye of a wounded animal in the middle of a desert covered in ice.
It was a chance slip of the tongue that revealed an unsettling reality to me: the way I was speaking French was no longer the same…
In asking Charlotte a question that day, I got my words twisted. I must have come up against one of those pairs of words, a deceptive pair, of which there are many in French. Yes, it was couples along the lines of "mitigate-militate" or "prefabricate-prevaricate." In the old days my verbal clumsiness with such perfidious duos, some as fraught with risk as "luxe-luxure" ("luxury-lewdness"), used to provoke mockery from my sister and discreet corrections from Charlotte.
This time I did not need prompting with the appropriate word. After a second of hesitation I corrected myself. But much more shocking than this momentary hesitation was a devastating revelation: I was speaking a foreign language!
So the months of my rebellion had left their mark. It was not that henceforth I found it hard to express myself in French. But the break was there. As a child I had absorbed all the sounds of Charlotte's language. I swam in them, without wondering why that glint in the grass, that colored, scented, living brilliance, sometimes existed in the masculine and had a crunchy, fragile, crystalline identity, imposed, it seemed, by one of its names, tsvetok; and was sometimes enveloped in a velvety, feltlike, and feminine aura, becoming une fleur.
I was later reminded of the story of the millipede that, when questioned about its dancing technique, immediately muddled the – normally instinctive – movements of its innumerable limbs.
My case was not quite as desperate. But from the day of my slip, the question of technique became unavoidable. Now French became a tool whose capacity I measured as I was speaking. Yes. An instrument independent of me, which I would employ, even as I became aware from time to time of the strangeness of this activity.
My discovery, disconcerting though it was, gave me a penetrating insight into style. This language-tool, employed, sharpened, perfected, was, I told myself, nothing other than literary composition. I had already sensed that the anecdotes about France with which I had amused my fellow pupils throughout that year were the first draft for this novelist's language: had I not manipulated it to please sometimes the "proletarians" and sometimes the "aesthetes"? Literature was now revealed as being perpetual amazement at the flow of words into which the world dissolved. French, my grandmaternal tongue, was, I saw now, the supreme language of amazement.
Ever since that particular day in the distant past, spent beside a little river, lost in the midst of the steppe, occasionally when I am in midconversation in French I recall my surprise of long ago: a gray-haired lady with great calm eyes and her grandson are seated at the heart of the empty plain, beneath the burning sun, very Russian in the endlessness of its isolation, and they are speaking in French, the most natural thing in the world… I see this scene again and I am amazed to be speaking French. Then I stumble and feel as if the cat had got my French. Strangely, or rather quite logically, it is at moments like this, when I find myself between two languages, that I believe I can see and feel more intensely than ever.