Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andreï Makine

brows were furrowed, and he continued to draw energetic lines with a red pencil on the pages of a brochure. A whole stack of identical little pamphlets was piled on his table.
    â€œGood day, citizen!” he said finally, holding out his hand to her.
    They spoke. And with stunned incredulity Charlotte became aware that all the official’s remarks seemed like a strange, deformed echo of the questions she put to him. She spoke of the French Aid Committee and heard, in echo, a brief speech about the imperialist designs of the West under the cover of bourgeois philanthropy. She referred to their desire to return to Moscow, and then … the echo interrupted her: foreign interventionist forces and internal class enemies were engaged in undermining reconstruction in the young Soviet republic… .
    After a quarter of an hour of such exchanges Charlotte longed to shout, “I want to leave! That’s all!” But the absurd logic of this conversation would not loosen its grip.
    â€œA train to Moscow …”
    â€œThe sabotage of bourgeois specialists on the railways… .”
    â€œThe poor state of health of my mother …”
    â€œThe horrible economic and cultural inheritance of tsarism …”
    Finally, exhausted, she whispered weakly, “Listen, please return my papers to me… .”
    The administrator’s voice seemed to hit an obstacle. A rapid spasm crossed his face. He left his office without saying anything. Profiting from his absence, Charlotte glanced at the pile of brochures. The title plunged her into extreme perplexity: “Eradicating Sexual Laxity in Party Cells (recommendations).” So it was the recommendations that the administrator had been underlining in red pencil.
    â€œWe haven’t found your papers,” he said, coming in.
    Charlotte pressed him. What happened then was as unbelievable as it was logical. The leader vomited forth such a torrent of oaths that even after two months spent on crowded trains, she was shattered by it. He continued to shout at her while she already had her hand on the door handle. Then, suddenly bringing his face close to hers, he hissed, “I could arrest you and shoot you right there in the courtyard behind the shithouse! D’you understand, filthy spy!”
    On her return, walking through the snow-covered fields, Charlotte told herself that a new language was in the process of being born in this country. A language that she did not know, and that was why the dialogue in the former governor’s office had seemed to her incredible. But everything had its meaning: even the revolutionary eloquence that suddenly slid into gutter language; even his “citizenspy”; and even the pamphlet regulating the sexual lives of party members. Yes, a new order of things was being established. Everything in this world, albeit so familiar, was going to acquire a new name; they were going to apply a different label to each object, to each being.
    â€œAnd what about this lazy snow,” she thought, “the thaw with its sleepy flakes in the smiled at her: a good sky?” She recalled that as a child she was always happy to find the snow again when she came out into the street after her lesson with the governor’s daughter. “Like today …” she said to herself, taking a deep breath.
    A few days later life became frozen. One clear night polar cold descended from the sky. The world was transformed into a crystal ofice, within which were encrusted the trees bristling with rime; the still, white columns above the chimneys; the silvery line of the taiga stretching to the horizon; and the sun surrounded by a halo of moiré. The human voice no longer carried; its vapor froze on the lips.
    Now they thought only of survival from day to day, by keeping a tiny zone of warmth around their bodies.
    It was above all the izba that saved them. Everything in it had been conceived to resist endless winters,