Dreams of My Russian Summers Read Free Page A

were seeking to trap this woman who faced us alone.
    However, she seemed not even to notice our tense presence. Her hands remained motionless in her lap; her gaze was lost in the transparency of the sky. The trace of a smile illuminated her lips… .
    Little by little we abandoned ourselves to this silence. Leaning over the handrail, we stared wide-eyed, trying to see as much sky as possible. The balcony reeled slightly, giving way under our feet, and began to float. The horizon drew closer, as if we were hurtling toward it across the night breeze.
    It was above the line of the horizon that we discerned a pale reflection — it was like the sparkle of little waves on the surface of a river. Incredulous, we peered into the darkness that surged over our flying balcony. Yes, far away on the steppe there shone an expanse of water, rising, spreading the bitter cold of the great rains. The sheet seemed to be lightening steadily, with a dull, wintry glow.
    Now we saw emerging from this fantastic tide the black masses of apartment blocks, the spires of cathedrals, the posts of street lamps — a city! Gigantic, harmonious despite the waters that flooded its avenues, a ghost city was emerging before our eyes… .
    Suddenly we realized that someone had been talking to us for quite a while. Our grandmother was talking to us!
    â€œAt that time I must have been almost your age; it was the winter of 1910. The Seine had turned into a real sea. The people of Paris traveled round by boat. The streets were like rivers; the squares, like great lakes. And what astonished me most was the silence… .”
    On our balcony we heard the sleepy silence of flooded Paris. The lapping of a few waves when a boat went by, a muffled voice at the end of a drowned avenue.
    The France of our grandmother, like a misty Atlantis, was emerging from the waves.

2
    E VEN THE PRESIDENT WAS REDUCED to cold meals by it.”
    This was the very first remark to ring out through the capital of our France-Atlantis… . We imagined a venerable old man — combining in his appearance the noble bearing of our great-grandfather Norbert and the pharaonic solemnity of a Stalin — an old man with a silvery beard, sitting at a table gloomily lit by a candle.
    This news report came from a man of about forty with a lively eye and a resolute expression, who appeared in photos in our grandmother’s oldest albums. Coming alongside the wall of an apartment block in a boat and putting up a ladder, he was climbing toward one of the first-floor windows. This was Vincent, Charlotte’s uncle and a reporter for the Excelsior. Since the start of the flood he had been working his way up and down the streets of the capital in this fashion, seeking out the key news item of the day. The president’s cold meals was one such. And it was from Vincent’s boat that the mind-boggling photo was taken that we were contemplating. It was on a yellowed press cutting: three men in a precarious little craft crossing a vast expanse of water flanked by apartment blocks. A caption explained: “Messieurs the deputies, on their way to a session of the Assemblée Nationale.” …
    Vincent stepped over the windowsill and sprang into the arms of his sister, Albertine, and of Charlotte, who were taking refuge with him during their stay in Paris… . Atlantis, silent until now, was filling up with sounds, emotions, words. Each evening our grandmother’sstories uncovered some new fragment of this universe engulfed by time.
    And then there was the hidden treasure. The suitcase filled with old papers, the massive bulk of which, when we had ventured under the big bed in Charlotte’s room, alarmed us. We tugged on the catches, we lifted the lid. What a mass of paper! Adult life, in all its tedium and all its disturbing seriousness, stopped our breath with its smell of dust and things shut away … How could we have guessed that it was in the midst of