Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andreï Makine Page B

them nothing. In the autumn, when they were preparing to go back to the town, he showed them a cart with a load covered in a newly homespun cloth.
    â€œHe’ll drive you,” he said, glancing at the old peasant perched on the driver’s seat.
    Albertine and Charlotte thanked him and hauled themselves up on the edge of the cart, which was laden with crates, sacks, and packages.
    â€œAre you sending all this to market?” asked Charlotte, to fill the awkward silence of these last few minutes.
    â€œNo. That’s what you’ve earned.”
    They had no time to reply. The driver tugged on the reins, the cart pitched and began to move off in the hot dust of the farm track… . Beneath the cover Charlotte and her mother discovered three sacks of potatoes, two sacks of corn, a keg of honey, four enormous pumpkins, and several crates of vegetables, beans, and apples. In one corner they caught sight of half a dozen hens with their legs tied; and a cock in their midst, flashing belligerent and angry glances.
    â€œI’m going to dry some bunches of herbs all the same,” said Albertine, when she finally succeeded in tearing her eyes from all this treasure. “You never know… .”
    She died two years later. It was an August evening, calm and transparent. Charlotte was returning from the library, where she had been employed to sort through the mountains of books collected from demolished aristocratic homes… . Her mother was seated on a little bench fixed to the wall of the izba, her head leaning against the smooth wood of the logs. Her eyes were closed. She must have dozed off and died in her sleep. A light breeze coming from the taiga stirred the pages of the book open on her knees. It was the same little French volume with gilt edges.
    They were married in the spring of the following year. He came from a village on the White Sea coast, ten thousand leagues from this Siberian town the civil war had brought him to. Charlotte noticed very quickly that his pride in being a “people’s judge” was mingled with a vague unease, whose origin he himself could not have explained at the time. At the wedding supper one of the guests proposed that the death of Lenin be commemorated by one minute’ssilence. Everyone stood up… . Three months after the marriage he was posted to the other end of the empire, to Bukhara. Charlotte was absolutely set on taking the great suitcase filled with old French newspapers. Her husband had nothing against this, but on the train, ill concealing his obstinate unease, he gave her to understand that a frontier more impenetrable than any known mountain range you cared to mention would arise now between her French life and their life. He tried to find the words to express what would soon seem so natural: the iron curtain.

6
    C AMELS IN A SNOWSTORM; frosts that froze the sap in the trees and caused their trunks to burst; Charlotte’s numb hands catching huge logs thrown down from the top of a railway truck.…
    It was thus in our smoke-filled kitchen, during the long winter evenings, that this legendary past was reborn. Outside the snow-covered window there stretched one of the greatest cities in Russia as well as the gray plain of the Volga; out there arose the fortress-buildings of Stalinist architecture. And inside, amid the chaos of an interminable meal and the iridescent tobacco clouds, the shade of this mysterious Frenchwoman, lost beneath the Siberian sky, made its appearance. The television was pouring out the news of the day, transmitting the sessions of the latest Party congress, but this background noise did not make the slightest impact on the conversations of our guests.
    Squatting in a corner of this crowded kitchen, with my shoulder against the shelves on which the television was enthroned, I listened to them avidly while trying to make myself invisible. I knew that soon the face of an adult would loom up through the blue fog, and I