Charlotte continued her story, and with growing amazement, I sensed that her plain words were redolent of sounds, smells, light veiled by the fog of the great frosts… She shook the door handle, and the door opened reluctantly, breaking a frame of ice, with a shrill creaking. She found herself inside the great wooden house, facing a staircase black with age. The treads uttered plaintive groans under her feet. The corridors were cluttered with old cupboards, with great cardboard boxes piled high along the walls, with bikes, with dull mirrors that opened up surprising perspectives in this cavernous space. The smell of burning wood hovered between the dark walls and mingled with the cold that Charlotte carried in the folds of her coat… It was at the end of the corridor on the first floor that my grandmother saw her. A young woman with a baby in her arms was standing near a window covered in scrolls of ice. Without moving, her head slightly inclined, she was watching the dancing flames in the open door of a great stove that occupied the corner of the corridor. Outside the frosted window the winter dusk was slowly drawing in, blue and clear…
Charlotte was silent for a moment, then continued in a slightly hesitant voice, "Of course, it was an illusion, you know… But her face was so pale, so fine… Almost like the ice flowers that covered the windowpane. Yes, as if her features had been lifted out of those hoarfrost ornaments. I have never seen such a fragile beauty. Yes, like an icon sketched on ice…"
We walked in silence for a long time. The steppe was slowly unfolding before us with the resonant chirruping of cicadas. But that dry sound and the heat did not prevent me from feeling in my lungs the freezing air of the great black izba. I saw the window covered with hoarfrost, the glittering blue of the crystals, the young woman with her child. Charlotte had spoken in French. French had gone inside that izba, which had always alarmed me with its somber, heavy, and very Russian life. And within its depths a window had lit up. Yes, she had spoken in French. She could have spoken in Russian. That would have taken nothing away from her recreation of the moment. So a kind of intermediary language did exist. A universal language! I thought again about that "between two languages" that I had discovered, thanks to my slip of the tongue, and I thought of the "language of amazement."…
That day, for the first time, the inspiring thought crossed my mind: Suppose one could express this language in writing?
One afternoon we spent on the banks of the Sumra, I surprised myself thinking about Charlotte's death. Or rather, on the contrary, I was thinking about the impossibility of her death…
The heat had been particularly intense that day. Charlotte had removed her espadrilles and, lifting her dress up to her knees, was paddling in the water. Perched on one of the little islands, I watched her walking along, following the shore. Once again I felt as if I were observing her and the beach of white sand and the steppe from a great distance. Yes, as if I were suspended in the basket of a hot air balloon. This is the way (I was to learn much later) that we perceive the places and the faces that subconsciously we are already locating in the past. I was looking at her from that illusory height, from that future toward which all my young energies tended. She walked in the water with the dreamy carelessness of an adolescent girl. Her book, open, was left behind on the grass, under the willows. Suddenly in a single brilliant illumination I reviewed Charlotte's life in its entirety. It was like a throbbing sequence of lightning flashes: France at the turn of the century; Siberia; the desert; and again endless snows; the war; Saranza… I had never before had the opportunity to examine the life of a living person in this way – from one end to the other – and to say: this life is closed. There would be nothing in Charlotte's life other than Saranza, this steppe. And death.
I stood up on my island, I stared at this woman who was walking slowly in the current of the Sumra. And with an unfamiliar joy that suddenly filled my lungs, I whispered, "No, she won't die." And at once I longed to understand whence this serene assurance came, this confidence, which was so strange, especially in the year marked by the death of my parents.
But instead of a logical explanation I saw a flood of moments streaming by in a dazzling disorder: a morning filled with sunlit mist in an imaginary Paris; the breeze redolent of lavender filling a railway carriage; the cry of the Kukushka in the warm evening air; that distant moment of the first snow that Charlotte had watched swirling around on that terrible night of the war; and also this present moment – this slim woman, with a white scarf over her gray hair, a woman strolling absentmindedly in the clear water of a river that flows through the heart of the endless steppe…
These visions seemed to me both ephemeral and endowed with a kind of eternity. I felt an intoxicating certainty; in a mysterious way they made Charlotte's death impossible. I sensed that the encounter with the young woman beside the frosted window in the black izba – the icon on the ice! – and even Gavrilych's story – the reeds, the young fish, an evening in the war – yes, even these brief flashes of illumination contributed to the impossibility of her death. And the most wonderful thing was that there was no need to prove it, to explain it, to argue it. I looked at Charlotte, climbing onto the bank to sit in her favorite spot under the willows, and I repeated to myself, as if it were something luminously obvious: "No, all those moments will never disappear…"
When I came beside her, my grandmother looked up and said to me, "This morning, you know, I copied out two different translations of a sonnet by Baudelaire for you. Listen, I'm going to read them to you. It will amuse you…"
Thinking that I was in for one of those stylistic curiosities that Charlotte liked to unearth for me in her reading, often in the form of a riddle, I concentrated, eager to show off my knowledge of French literature. I did not dream that this sonnet by Baudelaire would be a veritable liberation for me.
It is true that Woman, during those summer months, had imposed herself on all my senses like a ceaseless oppression. Without knowing it, I was living through that painful transition that lies between the very first experience of physical love, often barely sketched in, and those that will follow. This is often a more delicate path to travel than the one that leads from innocence to the first knowledge of a woman's body.
Even in the marooned town that was Saranza, this multifarious woman, elusive, innumerable, was strangely present. More insinuating, more discreet than in the big cities, but all the more provocative. Like, for example, the girl whom I passed one day in an empty street, dusty and scorched by the sun. She was tall, well built, with that healthy physical robustness that one finds in the provinces. Her blouse clung to powerful rounded breasts. Her miniskirt hugged the very full tops of her thighs. The pointed heels of her glossy white shoes made her gait a little strained. Her fashionable clothes, her makeup, and this stilted gait lent an almost surrealist air to her appearance in the empty street. But above all there was this almost brutish physical superabundance of her body, of her movements! On this afternoon of silent heat. In this sleepy little town. Why? To what end? I could not prevent myself glancing furtively behind me: yes, her strong calves, polished by sunburn, her thighs, the two hemispheres of her buttocks moving with suppleness at each step. Bewildered, I told myself that somewhere in this dead Saranza there must be a room, a bed, where this body would stretch out and, parting its legs, welcome another body into its groin. This obvious thought plunged me into boundless amazement. How simultaneously natural and improbable it all was!