This daydream topography left a good many white patches on the colored mosaic of the arrondissements. Our outings would quite spontaneously avoid the architectural audacities of recent years. Charlotte's days in Paris would be too brief. We would not have time to come to terms with all those new pyramids, glass towers, and arches by looking at them. Their silhouettes would congeal into a strange, futuristic tomorrow, which would not disturb the eternal present of our excursions.
Nor did I want Charlotte to see the district where I lived… Alex Bond, when he came to meet me, had exclaimed disdainfully, "For goodness sake, we're not in France here. This is Africa!" And he embarked on a harangue, whose content reminded me of the remarks of so many "new Russians." It was all there: the degeneracy of the West and the imminent end of white Europe; the invasion of the new barbarians ("including us Slavs," he had added, to be fair); a new Mahomet "who will torch all their Pompidou Centres"; and a new Genghis Khan "who will put an end to all their democratic kowtowing." Drawing inspiration from the endless procession of people of color walking past the café terrace where we were sitting, his discourse was a mixture of apocalyptic prophecies and hope for a Europe regenerated by the young blood of the barbarians, promises of a total race war, and faith in universal interbreeding… The subject fascinated him. He must sometimes have felt on the side of the moribund West, for his skin was white and his culture European, and sometimes on the side of the new Huns. "I don't care what you say," he concluded his speech, "the fact remains, there are too many of these wogs!" forgetting that a minute before it was to them that he had been entrusting the salvation of the old continent…
In my dreams our excursions made a detour round this quarter and the intellectual ferment that its reality would give rise to. Not that its population could have shocked Charlotte's sensibility. An émigré par excellence, she had always lived in the midst of an extreme multiplicity of peoples, cultures, and languages. From Siberia to the Ukraine, from the Russian North to the steppe, she had known the whole ethnic diversity of the empire's melting pot. During the war she had encountered them in hospital, facing death in absolute equality; in naked equality, as bodies undergoing surgery.
It was by no means the new population of that old district of Paris that might have upset Charlotte. If I did not want to take her there it was because you could walk along whole streets without hearing a word of French spoken. Some saw the promise of a new world in this exoticism, others, a disaster. But we were not seeking exoticism, whether architectural or human. The change of scene we would experience in our days together I thought would be much more profound.
The Paris that I was preparing to let Charlotte rediscover was an incomplete Paris and even, in some respects, illusory. I remembered Nabokov's memoirs, where he spoke of his grandfather living out his last days; as he lay in bed he believed that what he could perceive through the thick material of the curtain was the brilliance of the southern sun, with attendant clusters of mimosa. He smiled, believing himself to be in Nice, in the spring sunlight. He did not suspect that he was dying in Russia in the depths of winter, and that the sun was a lamp that his daughter had fixed up behind the curtain, to give him that happy illusion…
I knew that Charlotte, while respecting my itineraries, would see everything. The lamp behind the curtain would not deceive her. I could see the quick wink she would give me in front of some indescribable contemporary sculpture. I could hear her comments, full of very subtle humor, the delicacy of which would only serve to emphasize the dull aggressiveness of the work observed. She would also see that district, mine, which I was trying to avoid… She would go there all alone, in my absence, searching for a house in the rue de l'Ermitage where the Great War soldier once lived, the one who had given her that little ferrous splinter that as children we called "Verdun."
I also knew that I should do my very best not to talk about books. And that we would talk about them all the same, a great deal, often till late into the night. For the France that had appeared one day in the middle of the steppes of Saranza owed its birth to books. It was indeed essentially a bookish country, a country composed of words, whose rivers flowed like lines of verse, whose women wept in alexandrines and whose men quarreled in broadsides. That was how we discovered France as children, through its literary life, its verbal substance, shaped into a sonnet and honed by an author. Our family mythology attested that a little volume with a battered cover and a tarnished gilt top traveled with Charlotte on all her journeys. As the last link with France. Or perhaps as the constant possibility of magic. "There is a tune for which I'd gladly part…" How many times in the wastes of the Siberian snows had these lines shaped themselves into "a brick-built castle, faced with cornerstones,/With lofty windows, stained in crimson tones"? We confused France with her literature. And true literature was that magic, a word, a verse, a chapter of which transported us into a changeless moment of beauty.
I wanted to tell Charlotte that that kind of literature was dead in France. And that in the multitude of books I had devoured since the start of my reclusive life as a writer, I had looked in vain for one that I could imagine in her hands in the middle of a Siberian izba. Yes, the book open, a little gleam of tears in her eyes…
In those imaginary conversations with Charlotte I became an adolescent again. My youthful extremism, long since quenched by the realities of life, was awakened. Once again I sought an absolute, unique work. I dreamed of a book that could remake the world with its beauty. And I heard my grandmother's voice responding to me, understanding and smiling, as in the old days at Saranza on her balcony: "Do you still remember those tiny apartments in Russia that groaned under the weight of books? You know, books under the bed, in the kitchen, in the hall, piled right up to the ceiling? And those unobtainable books that you were lent for one night and which you had to give back at six o'clock sharp in the morning? And yet others, retyped, with six carbons at the same time; they gave you the sixth copy, almost illegible, or 'blind,' as they called it… You see, it's difficult to compare. In Russia the writer was a god. The Last Judgment and the Kingdom of Heaven were expected from him at the same time. Did you ever hear anyone there talk about the price of a book? No, because books had no price! You could go without buying a pair of shoes and freeze your feet in winter, but you bought a book…"
Charlotte's voice broke off, as if to give me to understand that this cult of the book in Russia was only a memory now.
"But the unique book, the definitive book. Judgment and Kingdom at the same time?" exclaimed the adolescent I had once more become.
My feverish whisperings jerked me out of my invented conversation. Ashamed, like someone who has been caught talking to himself, I saw myself for what I was. A man gesticulating in the middle of a little dark room, where a blind window faces onto a brick wall and needs neither curtains nor shutters. A room that can be crossed in three steps, where objects, for lack of space, crowd together, encroach on one another, become entangled: old typewriter, electric stove, chairs, shelves, shower, table, spectral clothes hanging on the walls. And everywhere sheets of paper, bits of manuscripts and books, which give this cluttered interior a kind of highly logical madness. Outside the window the start of a wet winter's night, and – floating up from the maze of ancient houses – an Arabic melody, a mixture of lament and celebration. And the man is dressed in an old light-colored overcoat (it is very cold). On his hands he wears mittens, necessary for typing in the freezing room. He is talking to a woman. He addresses her with that confidence that one does not always have, even for the intimacy of one's own voice. He is questioning her about the unique, definitive work, without fear of seeming naive or ridiculously pathetic. She is about to reply to him…