Read Online Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andreï Makine - Free Book Online

Russian, with a slight Siberian accent… .
    Charlotte knew that Albertine’s emergence at the top of the steps had been preceded by a long and painful battle, interrupted by several relapses — like the struggle of that man, battling in a black hole in the midst of the ice, which Charlotte had seen one day in spring, as she crossed the bridge. He clung to a long branch that was being pushed toward him and crawled up the slippery slope of the riverbank, sprawled flat on his stomach on the icy surface, progressing centimeter by centimeter, already stretching out his red hand, as he touched those of his rescuers. Suddenly, incomprehensively, his body shuddered, started to slip, and fell back once more into the black water. The current dragged him a little farther. Everything had to begin again… . Yes, like that man.
    But on that luminous and verdant summer’s afternoon their actions were lightness itself. “What about the big suitcase?” cried Charlotte, when they were installed on the seats.
    â€œWe’ll leave it. It only has old papers in it, and all those newspapers of your uncle’s… . We’ll come back one day to collect it.”
    They crossed the bridge, passing beside the governor’s house. The Siberian town seemed to unfold like a strange past, where it was possible to forgive with a smile… .
    Once they were settled in Paris again, it was with just such a lack of bitterness that they would look back on Boyarsk. And when that summer Albertine resolved to return to Russia (in order, as her family understood, to put a definitive end to the Siberian period of her life), Charlotte even showed a little jealousy toward her mother: she too would have liked to spend a couple of weeks in that town, now perceived as being inhabited by people from their past, where the houses, their izba among them, were turning into monuments to days gone by. A town where nothing could hurt her anymore.
    â€œ Maman, don’t forget to look and see if there is still a nest of mice there. Beside the stove, remember?” she called to her mother as she stood at the lowered window of the railway carriage.
    It was July 1914. Charlotte was eleven.
    Her own life did not experience any interruption. It was simply that, as time went by, her last words (“Don’t forget the mice!”s) seemed to her more and more stupid and childish. She ought to have kept silent and scrutinized the face at the carriage window, feasted her eyes on its features. Months, years, passed, and that last remark still carried the same resonance of a foolish happiness. Now the only time in Charlotte’s life was waiting time.
    That time (“in wartime,” the newspapers wrote) was like a gray afternoon, a Sunday in the deserted streets of a provincial town: suddenly a gust of wind appears at the corner of a house, raising a whirlwind of dust; a shutter swings silently; a man melts easily into this colorless air, disappears without reason.
    Thus it was that Charlotte’s uncle disappeared — “fallen on the field of honor,” “dead for France,” according to the newspaper’s formula. And this form of words made his absence all the more disconcerting — like the pencil sharpener on his desk, with a pencil inserted in the hole and several fine parings undisturbed since his departure. Thus it was that the house at Neuilly gradually emptied — women and men would bend down to kiss Charlotte and, with a very serious air, tell her to be a good girl.
    That strange time had its capricious moments. All of a sudden, with the jerky rapidity of films, one of her aunts dressed herself in white and summoned her relatives, who gathered about her with all the speed of the cinema of that period. Then they headed off at a spanking pace to the church, where the aunt appeared beside a man with a mustache and sleek, oily hair. And almost at once — as Charlotte remembered it, they did not