Dreams of My Russian Summers Read Free Page B

these old newspapers, these letters with inconceivable dates, that our grandmother would find us the photo of the three deputies in their boat? …
    It was Vincent who had passed on to Charlotte the taste for such journalistic sketches and urged her to collect them by cutting these brief chronicles of the day out of the newspapers. After a time, he must have thought, they would be seen in quite a different light, like silver coins colored by the patina of centuries.
    During one of those summer evenings filled with the scented breeze of the steppes, a remark from a passerby under our balcony jolted us out of our reverie.
    â€œNo, I promise you. They said it on the radio. He went out into space.”
    And another voice, dubious, answered, receding into the distance, “Do you take me for a fool or what? ‘He went out …’ But up there there’s nowhere you can go out. It’s like bailing out of a plane without a parachute… .”
    This exchange brought us back to reality. All about us there stretched the huge empire that took a particular pride in the exploration of the unfathomable sky above our head. The empire with its redoubtable army; with its atomic icebreakers disemboweling the North Pole; with its factories that would soon be producing more steel than all the countries of the world put together; with its cornfields that rippled from the Black Sea to the Pacific … with this endless steppe. And on our balcony a Frenchwoman was talking about a boat crossing a great flooded city and drawing alongside the wall ofan apartment block… . We shook ourselves, trying to understand where we were. Here? Back there? The whispering of the waves in our ears fell silent.
    It was by no means the first time we had noticed this duality in our lives. To live alongside our grandmother was already to feel you were elsewhere. She would cross the courtyard without ever going to take her place on the babushkas’ bench, that institution without which a Russian courtyard is unthinkable. This did not stop her greeting them very cordially, inquiring after the health of one she had not seen for several days, and doing them little kindnesses, for example, showing them how to remove the slightly acid taste from salted milky mushrooms. But in addressing her friendly remarks to them, she remained standing. And the old gossips of the courtyard accepted this difference. Everyone understood that Charlotte was not entirely a Russian babushka.
    This did not mean that she lived cut off from the world or that she clung to any social prejudice. Early in the morning we were often roused from our childish sleep by a sonorous cry that rang out in the midst of the courtyard: “Come and get your milk!” Through our dreams we recognized the voice and, above all, the inimitable intonation of Avdotia, the milkwoman, arriving from the neighboring village. The housewives came down with their cans toward two enormous aluminum containers that this vigorous peasant woman, some fifty years of age, dragged from one house to another. One day, awakened by her shout, I did not go back to sleep… . I heard our door close softly and muffled voices passing through into the dining room. A moment later one of them whispered with blissful abandon, “Oh, it’s so cozy here, Shura! I feel as if I’m lying on a cloud.” Intrigued by these words, I peeped behind the curtain that separated off our bedroom.
    Avdotia was stretched out on the floor, her arms and legs flung out, her eyes half closed. From her bare, dust-covered feet right up to her hair spread out upon the ground, her whole body lolled in deep repose. An absentminded smile colored her half-open lips. “It’s so cozy here, Shura!” she repeated softly, calling my grandmother bythat diminutive that people generally used in place of her unusual Christian name.
    I sensed the exhaustion of this great female body slumped in the middle of the dining