Dreams of My Russian Summers Read online

  DREAMS OF

  MY RUSSIAN

  SUMMERS

  Also by Andreï Makine

  Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

  The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

  The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

  A Hero’s Daughter

  Human Love

  Music of a Life

  Once upon the River Love

  Requiem for a Lost Empire

  The Woman Who Waited

  DREAMS OF

  MY RUSSIAN

  SUMMERS

  Andreï Makine

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY

  Geoffrey Strachan

  ARCADE PUBLISHING • NEW YORK

  Copyright © 1995, 2011 by Mercure de France English-language translation copyright © 1997, 2011 by Geoffrey Strachan Reading group guide copyright © 2008, 2011 by Arcade Publishing, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Makine, Andreï,1957-

  [Testament français. English]

  Dreams of my Russian summers / Andrei Makine ; translated from the

  French by Geoffrey Strachan.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-61145-054-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Grandmothers--Fiction. 2. Grandparent and child--Fiction. 3. Boys

  -Russia--Fiction. I. Strachan, Geoffrey. II. Title.

  PQ2673.A38416T4713 2011

  843’.914--dc22

  2011002155

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Marianne Véron and Herbert Lottman

  For Laura and Thierry de Montalembert

  For Jean-Christophe

  … it was with a childish pleasure and a profound emotion that, being unable to mention the names of so many others who must have acted similarly and thanks to whom France has survived, I gave the real names here …

  — Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé

  Does the Siberian ask heaven for olive trees, or the Provençal for cranberries?

  — Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirées de St. Petersbourg

  I questioned the Russian about his method of work and was astonished that he did not make his translations himself, for he spoke a very pure French with just a hint of hesitation, on account of the subtlety of his thought.

  He confessed to me that the Académie and its dictionary froze him.

  — Alphonse Daudet, Trente ans de Paris

  Translator’s Note

  Andreï Makine was born and brought up in Russia but wrote Dreams of My Russian Summers in French, living in France. In this novel the lives of the characters move back and forth between two countries and two languages. Makine uses a number of Russian words that evoke features of Russian life, and I have generally left these as English transliterations of Russian, for example: izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs); shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with earflaps); babushka (a grandmother); taiga (the virgin pine forest that spreads across Siberia, south of the tundra); kasha (the staple dish of cooked grain or groats); kulak (a peasant farmer, working for his own profit); kolkhoznik (a member of a collective farm).

  But I have also left in French a few phrases where the foreign or evocative sound for Russian ears seems to me as important as the meaning, for example: “petite pomme” (“little apple”); Belle Epoque (the era in France before the First World War); “cher confrère” (“dear colleague”); an echo of Flaubert’s remark, “Madame Bovary c’est moi” (“Madame Bovary is me”); the opening couplet from La Fontaine’s fable of the wolf and the lamb, “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure/Nous l’allons montrer tout à l’heure …” (“The strongest always stand to win/The argument, as shown herein …”), which features in an elocution lesson; and the elusive French “je ne sais quoi” (an indefinable something).

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  WHILE STILL A CHILD, I guessed that this very singular smile represented a strange little victory for each of the women: yes, a fleeting revenge for disappointed hopes, for the coarseness of men, for the rareness of beautiful and true things in this world. Had I known how to say it at the time I would have called this way of smiling “femininity.” … But my language was too concrete in those days. I contented myself with studying the women’s faces in our photograph albums and identifying this glow of beauty in some of them.

  For these women knew that in order to be beautiful, what they must do several seconds before the flash blinded them was to articulate the following mysterious syllables in French, of which few understood the meaning: “petite-pomme.” … As if by magic, the mouth, instead of being extended in counterfeit bliss, or contracting into an anxious grin, would form a gracious round. The whole face was thus transfigured. The eyebrows arched slightly, the oval of the cheeks was elongated. You said “petite pomme,” and the shadow of a distant and dreamy sweetness veiled your gaze, refined your features, and caused the soft light of bygone days to hover over the snapshot.

  This photographic spell had won the confidence of the most diverse women: for example, a relative from Moscow in the only color photo in our albums. Married to a diplomat, she spoke through clenched teeth and sighed with boredom before even hearing you out. But in the photo I could immediately identify the “petite pomme” effect.

  I observed its aura on the face of a dull provincial woman, some anonymous aunt, whose name only came up when the conversation turned to the women left without husbands after the male slaughter of the last war. Even Glasha, the peasant of the family, in the rare photos that we still possessed of her, displayed the miraculous smile. Finally there was a whole swarm of young girl cousins, puffing out their lips while trying to hold on to this elusive French magic during several interminable seconds of posing. As they murmured their “petite pomme,” they still believed that the life that lay ahead would be woven uniquely from such moments of grace….

  Throughout this parade of expressions and faces there recurred here and there that of a woman with fine, regular features and large gray eyes. Young at first, in the earliest of the albums, her smile was suffused with the secret charm of the “petite pomme.” Then, with age, in the more recent albums, closer to our time, this expression became muted and overlaid with a veil of melancholy and simplicity.

  It was this woman, this Frenchwoman, lost in the snowy immensity of Russia, who had taught the others the words that bestowed beauty. My maternal grandmother … She was born in France at the beginning of the century in the family of Norbert and Albertine Lemonnier. The mystery of the “petite pomme” was probably the first of the legends that enchanted our childhood. And these were also among the first words we heard in that language that my mother used, jokingly, to call “your grandmaternal tongue.”

  One day I came upon a photo I should not have seen…. I was spending my holidays with my grandmother in the town at the edge of the Russian steppe where she had been stranded after
the war. A warm, slow summer dusk was drawing in and flooding the rooms with a mauve glow. This somewhat unearthly light fell upon the photos that I was examining before an open window, the oldest snapshots in our albums. The pictures spanned the historic watershed of the 1917 revolution; brought to life the era of the tsars; and, moreover, pierced the iron curtain, which was then almost impenetrable, transporting me at one moment to the precinct of a gothic cathedral and the next into the pathways of a garden where the precise geometry of the plants left me perplexed. I was plunging into our family prehistory.

  Then suddenly this photo!

  I saw it when, out of pure curiosity, I opened a large envelope that had been slipped between the last page and the cover. It was that inevitable batch of snapshots that have not been judged worthy to appear on the rough cardboard of the pages, landscapes that can no longer be identified, faces that evoke neither affection nor memories. One of those batches you always tell yourself you must sort through one day, to decide the fate of all these souls in torment… .

  It was in the midst of these unknown people and forgotten landscapes that I saw her, a young woman whose attire jarred oddly with the elegance of the people who appeared in the other photos. She was wearing a big dirty gray padded jacket and a man’s shapka with the earflaps pulled down. As she posed, she was clasping to her breast a baby muffled up in a wool blanket.

  “How did she slip in,” I wondered in amazement, “among all these men in tails and women in evening dress?” And all around her in other snapshots there were these majestic avenues, these colonnades, these Mediterranean vistas. Her presence was anachronistic, out of place, inexplicable. She seemed like an intruder in this family past, with a style of dress nowadays adopted only by the women who cleared snowdrifts from the roads in winter….

  I had not heard my grandmother coming in. She placed her hand on my shoulder. I gave a start, then, showing her the photo, “Who is that woman I asked her.”

  A brief flash of panic appeared in my grandmother’s unfailingly calm eyes. In an almost nonchalant voice she asked me, “Which woman?”

  We both fell silent, pricking up our ears. A bizarre rustling filled the room. My grandmother turned and cried out, it seemed to me, joyfully, “A death’s-head! Look, a death’s-head!”

  I saw a large brown insect, a crepuscular hawkmoth, quivering as it tried to plunge into the illusory depths of the mirror. I rushed toward it, my hand outstretched, already feeling the tickling of its wings under my palm. It was then I noticed the unusual shape of this moth. I approached it and could not suppress a cry: “But there are two of them! They’re Siamese twins.”

  And indeed the two moths did seem to be attached to one another. And their bodies were animated with feverish trembling. To my surprise this double hawkmoth paid me no attention and did not try to escape. Before catching it I had time to observe the white marks on its back, the famous death’s head.

  We did not speak again about the woman in the padded jacket…. I watched the flight of the liberated hawkmoth — in the sky it divided into two moths, and I understood, as a child of ten can understand, why they had been joined. Now my grandmother’s disarray seemed to make sense.

  The capture of the coupling hawkmoths brought to my mind two very old memories, the most mysterious of my childhood. The first, going back to when I was eight, was summed up in the words of an old song that my grandmother sometimes murmured rather than sang, sitting on her balcony, her head bowed over a garment on which she was darning the collar or reinforcing the buttons. It was the very last words of her song that plunged me into enchantment:

  ...We’d sleep together there

  Till the world comes to an end.

  This slumber of the two lovers, of such long duration, was beyond my childish comprehension. I already knew that people who died (like that old woman next door whose disappearance in winter had been so well explained to me) went to sleep forever. Like the lovers in the song? Love and death had now formed a strange alloy in my young head. And the melancholy beauty of the melody could only increase this unease. Love, death, beauty … And the evening sky, the wind, the smell of the steppe that, thanks to the song, I perceived as if my life had just begun at that moment.

  The second memory was so distant it could not be dated. There was not even a very precise “me” in its nebulousness. Just the intense sensation of light, the aromatic scent of plants, and silvery lines crossing the blue density of the air, which many years later I would identify as gossamer threads. Elusive and confused, this vision would nevertheless be dear to me, for I would succeed in persuading myself that it was a memory from before birth. Yes, an echo sent to me by my French ancestry. For in one of my grandmother’s stories I was to rediscover all the elements of this memory: the autumn sun of a journey she made to Provence, the scent of the fields of lavender, and even those gossamers floating in the perfumed air. I would never dare to speak to her of my childish prescience. It was in the course of the following summer that my sister and I one day saw our grandmother weep … for the first time in our lives.

  In our eyes she was a kind of just and benevolent deity, always true to form and perfectly serene. Her own life story, which had long since become a myth, placed her beyond the griefs of ordinary mortals. In fact we did not see any tears. Just an unhappy contraction of her lips, little tremors running across her cheeks, and a rapid batting of her eyelashes… .

  We were sitting on the carpet, which was littered with bits of crumpled paper, and were absorbed in a fascinating game: taking out little pebbles that were wrapped in white “sweet papers” and comparing them — now a glitter of quartz, now a pebble, smooth and pleasant to the touch. On each paper were written names that we had, in our ignorance, taken for enigmatic mineralogical labels: Fécamp, La Rochelle, Bayonne… . In one of the wrappers we even discovered a rough and ferrous fragment, which bore traces of rust. We thought we were reading the name of this strange metal: “Verdun.” … A number of pieces from this collection had been thus stripped bare. When our grandmother came in, the game had just begun to take a livelier course. We were quarreling over the most beautiful stones and testing their hardness by striking them one against another, sometimes breaking them. Those we found ugly — like the “Verdun,” for example — were thrown out of the window into a bed of dahlias. Several wrappers had been torn… .

  Our grandmother froze above this battlefield scattered with white blisters. We looked up. It was then that her gray eyes seemed to be on the brink of tears — just enough to make it unbearable for us if she broke down.

  No, she was not an impassive goddess, our grandmother. She too, it seemed, could suffer unease, or sudden distress. We had always thought she moved in such a measured way through the peaceful sequence of days, yet she too sometimes hovered on the brink of tears!

  From that summer onward my grandmother’s life revealed new and unexpected facets to me. And above all, much more personal ones.

  Previously her past had been summed up by a few talismans, a number of family relics, like the silk fan, which reminded me of a fine maple leaf, or the famous little “Pont-Neuf bag.” Our legend maintained that it had been found on the bridge in question by Charlotte Lemonnier, aged four at the time. Running ahead of her mother, the little girl had stopped suddenly and exclaimed, “A bag!” And more than half a century later, the muted echo of her ringing cry could still be heard in a town lost amid the endlessness of Russia, under the sun of the steppes. It was in this pigskin bag, with enamel plaques on the fastening, that my grandmother kept her collection of stones from days gone by.

  This old handbag marked one of my grandmother’s earliest memories, and for us, the genesis of the legendary world of her memory: Paris, the Pont-Neuf… . An astonishing galaxy waiting to be born, which began to sketch its still hazy outlines before our fascinated gaze.

  There was, besides, among these relics of the past (I remember the voluptuousness with which we caressed the smooth, gilded edges of those pink
volumes, Memoirs of a Poodle, Gribouille and His Sister … ), an even older testimony. The photo, already taken in Siberia; Albertine, Norbert, and — in front of them, on one of those artificial pieces of furniture that photographers always use, a kind of very tall pedestal table — Charlotte, a child of two, wearing a lacetrimmed bonnet and a doll’s dress. This photo on thick cardboard, with the name of the photographer and replicas of the medals he had been awarded, intrigued us very much: “What does she have in common, this ravishing woman with her pure, fine face, framed in silky curls, with that old man, whose beard is divided into two rigid plaits that look like the tusks of a walrus?”

  We already knew that this old man, our great-grandfather, was twenty-six years older than Albertine. “It’s as if he’d married his own daughter!” my sister said to me indignantly. Their marriage seemed to us ambiguous and unhealthy. All our textbooks at school were full of stories that told of marriages between girls without dowries and rich old men, miserly and hungry for youth, to such an extent that any other kind of conjugal alliance seemed to us impossible in bourgeois society. We strove to discover some malign viciousness in Norbert’s features, a grimace of ill-concealed satisfaction. But his face remained simple and frank, like those of the intrepid explorers in the illustrations to our Jules Verne books. After all, this old man with a long white beard was only forty-eight at the time… .

  As for Albertine, supposed victim of bourgeois morality, she was soon to be standing on the slippery brink of an open grave into which the first spadefuls of earth were already flying. She would struggle so violently against the hands that restrained her and would utter such heartrending cries that even the funeral party of Russians, in that cemetery in a distant Siberian town, would be stunned by them. Accustomed as they were to tragic outbursts at funerals in their native land, to torrential tears and pitiful lamentations, these people would be stricken in the face of the tortured beauty of this young Frenchwoman. She would flail above the grave, crying out in her resonant language, “Throw me in as well! Throw me in!”