"Dreams Of My Russian Summers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Makine Andrei)

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Neuilly-sur-Seine was composed of a dozen log cabins. Real izbas, with roofs covered in slender laths, silvered by the rigors of winter, with windows set in prettily carved wooden frames and hedges with washing hung out to dry on them. Young women carried full pails on yokes that spilled a few drops on the dust of the main street. Men loaded heavy sacks of corn onto a wagon. A slow herd streamed idly toward the cowshed. We heard the heavy sound of their bells and the hoarse crowing of a cock. The agreeable smell of a wood fire – the smell of supper almost ready – hung in the air.

For our grandmother had indeed said to us one day, when speaking of her birthplace, "Oh! At that time Neuilly was just a village…"

She had said it in French, but we only knew Russian villages. And a village in Russia is inevitably a ring of izbas; indeed the very word in Russian, derevnya, comes from derevo – a tree, wood. The confusion persisted, despite the clarifications that Charlotte's stories would later bring. At the name " Neuilly " we had immediate visions of the village with its wooden houses, its herd, and its cockerel. And when, the following summer, Charlotte spoke to us for the first time about a certain Marcel Proust – "By the way, we used to see him playing tennis at Neuilly, on the boulevard Bineau" – we pictured the dandy with big languorous eyes (she had shown us his photo) there among the izbas!

Beneath the fragile patina of our French words Russian reality often showed through. The president of the Republic was bound to have something Stalinesque about him in the portrait sketched by our imagination. Neuilly was peopled with kolkhozniks. And the slow emergence of Paris from the waters evoked a very Russian emotion – that of fleeting relief after one more historic cataclysm; the joy of having finished a war, of having survived murderous repressions. We wandered along its streets, which were still wet, covered with sand and mud. The inhabitants were piling furniture and clothes outside their doors to let them dry – as Russians do, after a winter they had been beginning to think would never end.

And then, when Paris was resplendent once more in the fresh spring air, whose scent we guessed intuitively, there was a fairy-tale train, drawn by a garlanded engine slowing down and coming to a halt at the gates of the city, before the pavilion at Ranelagh station.

A young man wearing a simple military tunic stepped down from the railway carriage, walking on the purple cloth spread at his feet. He was accompanied by a woman, also very young, in a white dress with a feather boa. An older man, in formal attire, with a magnificent mustache and a fine blue ribbon on his breast, emerged from an impressive gathering grouped under the portico of the pavilion and advanced toward the couple. The gentle breeze caressed the orchids and the amaranths that decorated the pillars and stirred the feather on the young woman's white velvet hat. The two men shook hands.

The master of Atlantis resurgent, President Félix Faure, was welcoming the tsar of all the Russias, Nicholas II, and his wife.

It was the imperial couple, escorted by the elite of the Republic, who were our guides through Paris… Several years later we learned the true chronology of this glorious visit. Nicholas and Alexandra had not come in the spring of 1910, after the flood, but in October 1896, that is to say well before the rebirth of our French Atlantis. But this real sequence hardly mattered. For us only the chronology of our grandmother's long stories counted: one day, in their legendary time, Paris arose from the waters; the sun shone, and at once we heard the still distant cry of the imperial train. This sequence of events seemed just as legitimate to us as the appearance of Proust among the peasants of Neuilly.

Charlotte's narrow balcony hovered in the aromatic breeze of the plain, at the outer limit of a sleeping town, cut off from the world by the eternal silence of the steppes. Each evening resembled an alchemist's legendary vessel, in which an astonishing transmutation of the past took place. To us the elements of this magic were no less mysterious than the components of the philosophers' stone. Charlotte unfolded an old newspaper, brought it close to her lamp with its turquoise shade, and proclaimed for us the menu for the banquet given in honor of the Russian sovereigns when they arrived at Cherbourg:

Soup

Bisque of shrimps

Cassolettes Pompadour

Loire trout braised in Sauternes

Fillet of salt lamb with cèpes

Vine quails à la Lucullus

Poulardes du Mans Cambacérès

Sorbets in Muscat de Lunel

Punch à la romaine

Roast bartavels and ortolans, garnished with truffles

Pâté de joie gras of Nancy

Salad

Asparagus spears with sauce mousseline

Ice cream "Success"

Dessert

How could we decipher these cabbalistic formulae? "Bartavels and ortolans!" "Vine quails à la Lucullus "! Our grandmother, under-standingly, tried to find equivalents, citing the very rudimentary produce that was still to be found in Saranza's shops. Enthralled, we savored these imaginary dishes, enhanced by the misty chill of the ocean (Cherbourg!), but already it was time to set off again in pursuit of the tsar.

Like him, entering the Elysée Palace, we were startled by the spectacle of all the black suits that fell motionless at his approach – just think, more than two hundred senators and three hundred deputies! (Who, according to our own chronology, had only a few days previously been traveling to their session by boat…) Our grandmother's voice, which was always calm and a little dreamy, became tinged at that moment with a slight dramatic tremor: "You see, two worlds found themselves face to face. (Look at this photo. It's a pity the newspaper has been folded for so long…) Yes, the tsar, an absolute monarch, and the representatives of the French people! The representatives of democracy…"

The profound import of the confrontation was lost on us. But we could now make out, among five hundred pairs of eyes focused on the tsar, those who, without outward hostility, held back from the general enthusiasm. And who felt free to do so just because of this mysterious "democracy." This casual attitude filled us with consternation. We inspected the ranks of the black suits to discover potential troublemakers. The president should have identified them and expelled them by pushing them off the steps of Elysée!

The following evening our grandmother's lamp was lit on the balcony once more. In her hands we saw some newspaper pages she had just extracted from the Siberian suitcase. She spoke. The balcony slowly detached itself from the wall and hovered, plunging into the scented shadows of the steppe.

… Nicholas was seated at the table of honor, which was trimmed with magnificent garlands of medeola. At one moment he was listening now to some gracious remark from Madame Faure, seated on his right, at the next to the velvety baritone of the president, speaking to the empress. The reflections from the glasses and the glittering array of silver dazzled the guests… At the dessert the president stood up, raised his glass, and declared, "The presence of Your Majesty among us, acclaimed by a whole people, has sealed the bonds that unite our two countries in harmonious endeavor and in a mutual confidence in their destinies. The union between a powerful empire and an industrious republic… Fortified by a proven fidelity… As a spokesman for the whole nation, offer to Your Majesty… For the greatness of his reign… For the happiness of Her Majesty, the Empress… I raise my glass in honor of His Majesty, the Emperor Nicholas, and Her Majesty, the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna."

The band of the Republican Guard struck up the Russian national anthem… And the grand gala at the Opéra that evening was an apotheosis.

Preceded by two torchbearers, the imperial couple ascended the staircase. They seemed to be moving past a living cascade: the white curves of the women's shoulders; the blossoming flowers on their corsages; the perfumed brilliance of the hairstyles; the glittering of jewels on bare flesh; all this against a background of uniforms and tails. The mighty cry "Long live the Emperor!" almost raised the majestic ceiling to the sky with its echoes, mingling it with the sky… When at the end of the performance the orchestra launched into the "Marseillaise," the tsar turned to the president and gave him his hand.

My grandmother switched off the lamp, and we spent several minutes in the dark, the time it took to let all the midges fly away that had been courting a luminous death beneath the shade. Little by little our eyes began to see again. The stars reformed their constellations. The Milky Way became phosphorescent. And in a corner of our balcony, among the intermingled stems of sweet peas, the fallen bacchante gave us her stone smile.

Charlotte paused in the doorway and sighed gently. "You know, it was a military march, in fact, nothing more, the 'Marseillaise.' A bit like the songs of the Russian revolution. At such times blood doesn't frighten anyone…"

She went back into the room, and it was from there that we heard these lines emerging, which she recited softly, like a strange litany from the past:

We waited for the echo of these words to melt into the darkness, and then with one voice we exclaimed to one another, "And Nicholas? The tsar? Did he know what the song was about?"

France-Atlantis was revealing itself as a whole gamut of sounds, colors, and smells. As we followed our guides, we were discovering the different elements that made up this mysterious French essence.

The Elysée Palace appeared in the glitter of chandeliers and the shimmering of mirrors. The Opéra dazzled us with the nakedness of women's shoulders and made us drunk with the perfume exhaled by the magnificent hairstyles. For us Notre-Dame was a sensation of cold stone under a stormy sky. Yes, we could almost touch the rough, porous walls – a gigantic rock, shaped over the centuries, it seemed to us, by ingenious erosion…

These perceptible facets outlined the still-uncertain contours of the French universe. This emerging continent was filling up with things and people. The empress knelt on a mysterious prie-dieu that did not suggest any known reality. "It's a kind of chair with its legs cut off," explained Charlotte, and the image of this mutilated piece of furniture left us dumbfounded. Like Nicholas, we repressed the desire to touch the purple cloak with its tarnished golds, which Napoleon had worn on the day of his coronation. We craved the sacrilegious contact. This universe in gestation still lacked substance. In the Sainte-Chapelle it was the rough grain of an old parchment that aroused the same desire – Charlotte taught us that these long handwritten letters had been penned a millennium ago by a French queen, a Russian woman furthermore, Anna Yaroslavna, wife of Henri I.

But what was most exciting was that Atlantis was being built before our very eyes. Nicholas grasped a golden trowel and spread mortar on a great block of granite – the first stone of the Pont Alexandre-Ill… And he held out the trowel to Félix Faure – "Your turn, Monsieur le Président!" - and the racing wind, which was whiffing up white horses on the waters of the Seine, carried away the words forcefully uttered by the minister of trade as he battled against the flapping of the flags: "Sire! It was France's wish to dedicate one of the great monuments of her capital to the memory of your august father. In the name of the government of the Republic I ask Your Imperial Majesty to graciously consecrate this homage by joining the President of the Republic in cementing the first stone of the Pont Alexandre-III, which will link Paris to the Exhibition of 1900 – and thus to extend to our inauguration of this great enterprise of civilization and peace the lofty approbation of Your Majesty and the gracious patronage of the Empress."

The president barely had time to give two symbolic taps to the granite block before an incredible incident occurred. A fellow who belonged neither to the imperial entourage nor to the party of French dignitaries rose up before the imperial couple, addressed the tsar with the familiar tu, and with an extraordinary urbane dexterity, kissed the tsarina's hand! Petrified by such cavalier behavior, we held our breath…

Little by little it became evident what was happening. The words of the intruder, overcoming the distance in time and gaps in our French, were clarified. Feverishly we caught their echo:

Illustrious Emperor, Alexander's heir, France welcomes thee, on this occasion fair. In tongue of gods she bids me greetings bring; Poets alone may thus address a King.

We uttered a "phew" of relief. The insolent braggart was none other than a poet, whose name Charlotte told us was José Maria de Heredia!

And you, Madame, who on this happy day Alone a peerless loveliness display, Let me, through you, bestow an accolade On grace divine, of which your own is made!

The cadence of the verses intoxicated us. To our ears the resonance of the rhymes celebrated extraordinary marriages between words that were far apart: "stream-dream," "gold-untold."… We sensed that only such verbal artifices could express the exotic nature of our French Atlantis:

And like thy sire, keep earth in balance still:

this line, which had initially passed almost unnoticed in the melodious flow of the verses, struck home. The French, a free people… Now we understood why the poet had dared to offer advice to the master of the most powerful empire on earth. And why to be loved by these free citizens was such an honor. On that evening, in the overheated air of the nocturnal steppes, this freedom seemed to us like a harsh and chilly gust from the wind that had made waves on the Seine, and it filled our lungs with a breeze that was heady and a little mad…

Later we would learn to put the ponderous bombast of this declamation into perspective. But at the time, despite its focus on the particular occasion, what we could already detect in his verses was a French jene sais quoi, which for the moment went without a name. French wit? French politeness? We could not yet say.

Meanwhile the poet turned toward the Seine and held out his hand, gesturing toward the dome of the Hôtel des Invalides on the opposite bank. His rhymed address was coming to a very painful point in the Franco-Russian past: Napoleon, Moscow in flames, the disastrous Berezina crossing… Anxiously, biting our lips, we awaited his voice at this passage so fraught with risk. The tsar's face went blank. Alexandra lowered her eyes. Would it not have been better to pass over it in silence, to pretend nothing had happened and go straight from Peter the Great to the current entente cordiale?

But Heredia seemed to set his sights even higher:

Bewildered, we kept asking ourselves this question: Why do we detest the Germans as much as we do – still recall the Teutonic aggression of seven centuries ago at the time of Alexander Nevski, as well as that of the last war? Why can we never forget the ravages of the Polish and Swedish invaders, ancient history from three and a half centuries ago? Not to mention the Tartars… So why hasn't the memory of the terrible catastrophe of 1812 tarnished the reputation of the French in Russian minds? Is it precisely because of the verbal elegance of that "jousting without rage"?

But the French je ne sais quoi was revealed, above all, as the presence of a woman. Alexandra was there, drawing unobtrusive attention to herself, hailed in every speech in a much less pompous but considerably more elegant manner than her husband. And even within the walls of the Académie Française, where the smell of old furniture and fat, dusty volumes stifled us, this je ne sais quoi allowed her to preserve her femininity. Yes, even among these old men, whom we imagined to be peevish, pedantic, and a little deaf, on account of the hairs in their ears. One of them, the director, rose and with a glum expression declared the session open. Then he fell silent, as if to gather up his thoughts, which, we were sure, would quickly make all his listeners aware of the hardness of their wooden seats. The smell of dust grew thicker. Suddenly the old man lifted his head; a sly twinkle came into his eye, and he spoke: "Sire, Madame! Almost two hundred years ago Peter the Great arrived one day unexpectedly at the place where the members of the Académie were gathered and joined in their deliberations… Your Majesty does even more today: you have added one honor to another by not coming alone." (He turned to the empress.) "Your presence, Madame, will bring to our solemn proceedings something quite unaccustomed… Charm."

Nicholas and Alexandra exchanged rapid glances. And the orator, as if he had sensed that it was time to turn to the main topic, amplified the vibrations in his voice as he asked himself in a highly rhetorical manner: "May I be permitted to say it? Your show of interest addresses not only the Académie but our national language itself… Which for you is not a foreign language. In this we sense a particular desire to enter into more intimate communication with French taste and the French spirit…"

"Our language"! Over the top of the pages that our grandmother was reading out to us, my sister and I looked at one another, struck by the same insight. "… Which for you is not a foreign language." So that was it, the key to our Atlantis! Language, that mysterious substance, invisible and omnipresent, whose sonorous essence reached into every corner of the universe we were in the process of exploring. This language that shaped men, molded objects, rippled in verse, bellowed in streets invaded by crowds, caused a young tsarina who had come from the other end of the world to smile… But above all throbbed within us, like a magical graft implanted in our hearts, already bringing forth leaves and flowers, bearing within it the fruit of a whole civilization. Yes, this implant, the French language.

And it was thanks to this twig blossoming within us that we gained access that evening to the box prepared to welcome the imperial couple at the Comédie Française. We unfolded the program: Un Caprice by Alfred de Musset; fragments from Le Cid; the third act of Les Femmes savantes. At that time we had not read any of those. It was a slight change of timbre in Charlotte s voice that enabled us to grasp the importance of these names for the inhabitants of Atlantis.

The curtain rose. The whole company was onstage in ceremonial roles. The leading player stepped forward, bowed, and spoke of a country that we did not immediately recognize:

Like a vast world, there is a country fair, Whose far horizons never terminate, Whose soul is rich and rare, Great in the past, in future yet more great.

Blond with her corn, white with the white of snow, Leaders and men, her sons walk firm and sure. Let fate smile on her so She harvests gold on virgin earth and pure.

For the first time in my life I was looking at my country from the outside, from a distance, as if I were no longer a part of it. Transported to a great European capital, I looked back to contemplate the immensity of the cornfields and the snow-covered plains by moonlight. I was seeing Russia in French! I was somewhere else. Outside my Russian life. To be thus torn asunder was so painful and at the same time so thrilling that I had to close my eyes. I was afraid of not being able to return to myself, of being stranded in that Parisian evening. Screwing up my eyes, I inhaled deeply. The warm wind of the nocturnal steppe suffused my being once more.

That day I decided to steal her magic from her. I wanted to be one step ahead of Charlotte, to make my way into the festive city before her, join the tsar's entourage without waiting for the hypnotic halo of the turquoise lampshade.

The day was dull, gray – a sad and colorless summer's day, one of those that, amazingly, stay in the memory. The breeze, which smelled of wet earth, billowed out the white net curtains on the open window. The fabric came to life, acquired density, then fell back again, letting someone invisible enter the room.

Happy in my solitude, I put my plan into execution. I pulled out the Siberian suitcase onto the rug near the bed. The catches emitted that light clicking that we awaited each evening. I threw back the great lid and bent over those old papers like a pirate over the treasure in a chest…

At the top I recognized certain photos; I saw the tsar and tsarina again in front of the Panthéon, then on the banks of the Seine. No, what I was looking for was located farther down, in that compact mass blackened with printer's type. Like an archaeologist, I lifted up one layer after another. Nicholas and Alexandra appeared in places unknown to me. One more layer, and I lost sight of them. Then I saw long battleships on a slack sea, airplanes with ridiculous short wings, soldiers in trenches. In my attempt to locate a trace of the imperial couple, I was now digging at random, mixing up all the cuttings. For a moment the tsar came into view on horseback, an icon in his hands, in front of a row of kneeling foot soldiers… His face seemed aged, somber. But I wanted him to be young again, accompanied by the beautiful Alexandra, cheered by the crowds, celebrated in fervent verses.

It was right at the bottom of the suitcase that I came upon a clue at last. The headline in large letters – "Glory to Russia!" – left no room for doubt. I smoothed out the paper on my knees, as Charlotte used to do, and began softly to mouth the lines:

It was only when I reached the chorus that I paused, seized by a doubt: "Glory to Russia "? But what had become of that land, "blond with her corn, white with the white of snow"? That "country fair" whose soul was "rich and rare"? And what were these slaves doing here, groaning their lives away? And who was the tyrant whose downfall was being celebrated?

In confusion, I went on to recite the chorus:

All hail, Russia, all hail to you! People and soldiers together stand! All hail to you, all hail to you, Who now redeem your Fatherland! All hail the Duma's newfound power, Its sovereign voice will soon have spoken, For happiness now comes the hour, With all your chains forever broken.

Suddenly some headlines caught my eye, poised above the lines of verse:

Nicholas II Abdicates: Russia's 1789. Russia Finds Freedom. Kerensky – The Russian Danton. Peter and Paul Fortress – Russia's Bastille – Taken by Storm. Collapse of Autocracy…

Most of these words meant nothing to me. But I grasped the essential. Nicholas was no longer the tsar, and the news of his downfall had inspired an ecstatic explosion of joy among the people who, only yesterday, were cheering him and wishing him a long and prosperous reign. Indeed I had a very clear memory of Heredia's voice, which still echoed round our balcony:

It was thy father forged a bond that tied Russia to France, in brotherly hope allied. Hear now great Tsar, how France and Russia bless Thine own name, with thy patron's name, no less!

Such a reversal seemed to me inconceivable. I could not credit so base a betrayal. Especially on the part of a president of the Republic!

The front door banged. Hastily I gathered up all the papers, closed the suitcase, and pushed it under the bed.

At dusk, because of the rain, Charlotte lit her lamp indoors. We took our places beside her exactly as we used to in our evenings on the balcony. I listened to her story: Nicholas and Alexandra were in their box at the theater, applauding Le Cid. … I observed their faces with a disillusioned sadness. I was the one who had glimpsed the future. This knowledge weighed heavily on my child's heart.

"Where is the truth?" I wondered, as I followed the narrative distractedly. (The imperial pair stand up, the audience turn to give them an ovation.) "These same spectators will soon be cursing them. And nothing will remain of these few fairy-tale days! Nothing…"

The ending, which I was condemned to know in advance, suddenly seemed to me so absurd and so unjust, especially at the height of the celebration, amid all the bright lights of the Comédie Française, that I burst into tears, pushed aside my little stool, and fled to the kitchen. I had never wept so uncontrollably. Furiously I shrugged off my sister's hands when she tried to comfort me… (I so resented her, she who still knew nothing!) Through my tears I cried out despairingly: "It's all a cheat! They're traitors! That liar with his mustaches… Some president! It's all lies…"

I do not know if Charlotte had guessed the reason for my distress (doubtless she had noticed the disarray caused by my rummaging in the Siberian suitcase: perhaps she had even come across the fateful page). In any event, touched by this unexpected outburst of weeping, she came and sat on my bed, listened to my fitful sighs for a moment, and then, finding my palm in the darkness, slipped a little rough pebble into it. I closed my fist round it. Just from the feel of it, without opening my eyes, I recognized the " Verdun " pebble. From now on it was mine.