As I slept, I thought I could hear the branches making a sound that was more powerful and continuous than usual. As if the wind had not ceased blowing for a single moment. In the morning I discovered that it was the sound of the ocean. In my weariness the previous evening I had stopped, without knowing it, on the frontier where the forest began to merge into the wave-lashed dunes.
I spent the whole morning on that deserted shore, watching the imperceptible rising of the waters… When the tide began to ebb, I resumed my journey. Barefoot on the wet sand I would go down toward the south now. Walking along, I thought about that little bag that from the time of our childhood my sister and I had called "the Pont-Neuf bag" and which contained the little pebbles wrapped in scraps of paper. There was a "Fecamp," a " Verdun," and also a " Biarritz," a name we associated with quartz and not with the town, which was unknown to us… I was going to walk beside the ocean for ten or twelve days and find that town, of which a tiny fragment was lost somewhere in the depths of the Russian steppes.
16
It was in September, through the intermediary of a certain Alex Bond, that the first news from Saranza reached me…
This "Mr. Bond" was in fact a Russian businessman, a very characteristic representative of the generation of "new Russians" who at that time were beginning to make their presence felt in all the capitals of the West. They butchered their names, American style, thus often identifying themselves without realizing it either with the heroes of spy novels or with extraterrestrial beings from the science fiction stories of the fifties. At the time of our first meeting I had advised Alex Bond, alias Alexei Bondarchenko (meaning "Cooper"), to gallicize his name and present himself as "Alexis Tonnelier," rather than mutilate it as he had done. Without a ghost of a smile, he explained to me the advantages of a short and euphonious name in business… I had the impression I was understanding less and less of the Russia that I now saw via these "Bonds," these "Kondrats," and these "Feds."…
He was going to Moscow and, touched by the sentimental aspect of my commission, had agreed to make a detour. Going to Saranza, walking in its streets, meeting Charlotte, now seemed a good deal more strange to me than traveling to another planet. Alex Bond had been there "between two trains," as he put it. And, without an inkling of what Charlotte meant to me, he spoke on the telephone as if this were an exchange of news after the holidays: "No, but what a black hole that Saranza is! Thanks to you, I've discovered darkest Russia, ha ha. All those streets that lead straight out onto the steppe! And the steppe with no end to it… She's very well, your grandmother, don't you worry. Yes, she's still very active. When I arrived she wasn't there. Her neighbor told me she was at a meeting. The tenants in her apartment block have created a support group, or whatever, to save an old izba in the courtyard that they want to demolish. A huge building, two centuries old. So your grandmother… No, I didn't see her; I was between two trains. I had to be in Moscow that evening come hell or high water. But I left a message… You could go and see her. They let everyone in these days. They say the iron curtain's nothing more than a sieve now ha ha ha…"
All I had were my refugee papers, plus a travel document that authorized me to visit "all countries except the USSR." The day after my conversation with the "new Russian" I went to the Préfecture de Police to obtain information about the formalities for naturalization. In my mind I was trying to silence the thought that kept creeping back: "What you are embarking on now is an invisible race against the clock. Charlotte is at an age where every year, every month, could be her last."
For that reason I did not want to write or telephone. I had a superstitious fear of compromising my project with a few banal words. I needed to obtain a French passport quickly, go to Saranza, spend several evenings talking with Charlotte, and bring her to Paris. I saw all these actions being accomplished simply, in a flash, as in a dream. Then abruptly this image became blurred, and I found myself once more caught in the glutinous lava that clogged my movements – time.
The dossier I was required to assemble reassured me: no documents impossible to find, no bureaucratic snares. Only my visit to the doctor left me with a painful impression. Yet the examination lasted a mere five minutes and was, when all's said and done, quite superficiaclass="underline" my state of health turned out to be compatible with French nationality. Having listened to my chest, the doctor told me to bend over, keeping my legs quite straight, and touch the ground with my fingers. I complied. It must have been my excessive alacrity that made him uneasy. The doctor seemed embarrassed and stammered, "Thank you, that's fine," as if he were afraid that in my zeal I might bend over again. Often some trifle in our attitudes is enough to alter the meaning of the most ordinary situations: two men in a small consulting room in a glaring white light; suddenly one of them bends, touches the ground almost at the feet of the other, and remains thus for a moment, awaiting, it seems, the second man's approval.
As I went out into the street I thought of the camps where they used similar physical tests to sort out the prisoners. But this excessively exaggerated comparison still did not explain my unease.
It was the eagerness with which I had fulfilled the command. I came across it again in leafing through the pages of my dossier. I perceived that this desire to convince someone was everywhere present. Even though it was not asked of me in the questionnaires, I had mentioned my distant French origins. Yes, I had mentioned Charlotte, as if I wanted to ward off all objections and dissipate all skepticism in advance. And now I could not rid myself of the feeling that I had in some way betrayed her.
I had to wait several months. I was told there would be a delay until May. And at once those far-off spring days were bathed in a special radiance, standing out from the round of months and forming a universe that lived according to its own rhythm, in its own climate.
For me it was a time of preparations, but above all of long, silent conversations with Charlotte. As I walked along the streets I now had the sensation of observing them through her eyes. Of seeing, as she would have seen, an empty quay where the poplar trees, in a sudden breeze, seemed to be transmitting an urgent, whispered message to one another; of sensing, as she would have done, the resonance of the paving stones in this little old square, within whose provincial tranquility, in the heart of Paris, lay concealed the temptation of a simple happiness, of a life without dazzle.
I understood that throughout the three years of my life in France the slow and discreet progress of my project had never been interrupted. From that vague image of a woman dressed in black passing through a frontier town on foot, my dream had moved on toward a more real vision. I saw myself going to meet my grandmother at the station, and accompanying her to the hotel where she would live during her stay in Paris. Then, once the period of the bleakest poverty was finished, I had begun to picture a more comfortable interior than a hotel room, one where Charlotte would feel more at ease…
Perhaps it was thanks to these dreams that I was able to endure the poverty and humiliation that go with one's first steps in the world in which the book, that most vulnerable organ of our being, becomes merchandise. Merchandise that is hawked, exposed on market stalls, discounted. My dream was an antidote. And the Notes - a refuge.
In those few months of waiting, the topography of Paris changed. As on certain maps where the arrondissements are colored differently, the city became filled in my eyes with varied shades that Charlotte's presence gave nuances to. There were streets whose sun-drenched silence, early in the morning, held the echo of her voice. Café terraces where I guessed at her weariness at the end of a walk. A facade, a stained glass window, which under her eyes assumed the light patina of memory.