The rain drove me from my bench. I hid Charlotte's letter under my jacket. I ran toward our house. The interrupted story seemed to me very typicaclass="underline" at the first signs of liberalization, all Russians had begun to bring out the censored past from the deep hiding places of their memory. And they did not understand that history had no need for all these innumerable little Gulags. A single monumental one, recognized as a classic, sufficed. In sending me her testimonies, Charlotte must have succumbed like the others, by the intoxication of glasnost. The touching uselessness of this missive upset me. Once again I had a measure of the disdainful indifference of time. This woman prisoner with her child was hovering on the brink of ultimate oblivion, held back only by these few manuscript pages. And Charlotte herself?
I pushed open the door. A draft stirred the two halves of an open window with a dull crash. I went to my grandmother's room to close it.
I thought about her life. A life that linked such different eras; the start of the century, that almost archaic age, almost as legendary as the reign of Napoleon, and – the end of our century, the end of the millennium. All those revolutions, wars, failed Utopias, and successful terrors: she had distilled their essence in the sorrows and joys of her days. And this throbbing body of lived experience would soon sink into oblivion. Like the miniature Gulag of the prisoner and her child.
I stayed at Charlotte's window for a moment. For a number of weeks I had imagined her gaze resting on that view…
That evening, mainly from an access of conscience, I decided to read Charlotte's pages to the end. I went back to the imprisoned woman, the atrocities at the camp, and the child who had brought a few moments of serenity into this hard, defiled world. Charlotte wrote that she had been able to obtain permission to come to the hospital where the woman was dying…
Suddenly the page I was holding in my hand was transformed into a fine sheet of silver. Yes, it dazzled me with a metallic reflection and seemed to emit a cold, thin sound. One line flashed out – like the filament of a lightbulb lacerating one's eyeball. The letter was written in Russian, and it was only at this line that Charlotte switched to French, as if she were no longer sure of her Russian. Or as if French, that French of another era, would allow me a certain detachment from what she was about to tell me: "That woman, who was called Maria Stepanovna Dolina, was your mother. It was she who wanted you to be told nothing for as long as possible…"
A little envelope was stapled to that last page. I opened it. In it was a photo that I recognized without difficulty: a woman in a big shapka with the earflaps pulled down, wearing a padded jacket. On a little rectangle of white cloth sewn beside the row of buttons – a number. In her arms a baby swathed in a cocoon of wool…
That night I rediscovered in my memory the image that I had always believed to be a kind of prenatal reminiscence, coming to me from my French ancestors, and of which, as a child, I was very proud. I used to see in it a proof of my hereditary Frenchness. It was that autumn day bathed in sun, at the edge of a wood, with an invisible feminine presence, a very pure air, and the gossamer threads rippling across the luminous space… I now understood that the wood was in fact an endless taiga, and that the delightful Indian summer was about to be swallowed up into a Siberian winter that would last nine months. The gossamer threads, silvery and light in my French fantasy, were nothing other than new strands of barbed wire that had not had time to rust. I was out for a walk with my mother in the territory of the "women's camp."… It was my first childhood memory.
Two days later I left the apartment. The owner had come round the day before and had agreed on an amicable solution: I left him all the furniture and antique objects I had accumulated over several months…
I slept little. At four o'clock I was already up. I packed my rucksack, planning to leave that very day for my habitual journey on foot. Before departing I glanced one last time into Charlotte's room. By the gray light of morning its silence no longer evoked a museum. No longer did it seem uninhabited. I hesitated for a moment, then I seized an old volume laid on the windowsill and went out.
The streets were empty, misted over with sleep. Scenic views seemed to take shape as I walked toward them.
I thought of the Notes I was carrying away in my bag. That evening, or the next day, I told myself, I would add a new fragment that had come to mind that night. It was at Saranza during my last summer at my grandmother's… That day, instead of taking the path that led us across the steppe, Charlotte had turned in among the trees of the copse cluttered with weaponry that the locals called "Stalinka." I had followed her with a wary tread: according to rumor, you could step on a mine in the thickets of the Stalinka… Charlotte had stopped in the middle of a broad clearing and had murmured, "Look!" I had seen three or four identical plants that reached up to our knees. Great indented leaves, tendrils clinging to the slender canes stuck in the ground. Dwarf maples? Young blackcurrant bushes? I did not understand Charlotte's mysterious joy.
"It's a grapevine, a real one," she told me at last.
"Oh. Good…"
This revelation did not heighten my curiosity. In my head I could not connect this modest plant with the cult dedicated to wine by my grandmother's homeland. We remained for several minutes in front of Charlotte's secret plantation at the heart of the Stalinka…
Recalling that vine now, I experienced almost unbearable grief and at the same time profound joy. A joy that had at first seemed to me shameful. Charlotte was dead, and on the site of the Stalinka, to judge by Alex Bond's account, they had built a stadium. There could hardly be a more tangible proof of total, final disappearance. But joy carried the day. Its source lay in that moment I had lived at the center of a clearing; in the breeze from the steppes; in the serene silence of this woman standing before four plants, under whose leaves I now detected the young clusters.
As I walked, I looked from time to time at the photo of the woman in a padded jacket. And now I understood what gave her face a distant resemblance to the people in the albums of my adoptive family. It was that slight smile that appeared thanks to Charlotte's magic formula, "petite pomme"! Yes, the woman photographed beside the camp fence must have pronounced those enigmatic syllables to herself… I stopped for a moment; I stared at her eyes. Then I said to myself, "I must get used to the idea that this woman, younger than me, is my mother."
I put away the photo, and went on. And when I thought of Charlotte, her presence in these drowsy streets had the reality, discreet and spontaneous, of life itself.
What I still had to find were the words to tell it with.