Read Online Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andreï Makine - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Andreï Makine
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king, she exchanged a silver five-franc piece (the trader marked the coin with his molar, then made it ring on the blade of an ax) for two loaves of bread, which would provide for the first days of her journey. She was already dressed like a Russian, and at the station, in the violent and disorderly assault on the carriages, nobody paid any attention to this young woman hitching up her knapsack and fighting her way into the frenetic heavings of the human chaos.
She set off and she saw everything. She braved the countryâs endlessness, its fleeting space in which days and years are swallowed up. She went forward nonetheless, squelching through this stagnant time. By train, by farm cart, on foot â¦
She saw everything. Horses in harness, a whole herd of them, galloping riderless across a plain, stopping for a moment, then taking fright and resuming their mad race, both happy and fearful at their new-won liberty. One of these fugitives caught everyoneâs eye. A saber, deeply embedded in the saddle, stood erect upon its back. As the horse galloped, the long blade jammed into the thick leather swayed pliantly, glittering in the sinking sun. People kept their eyes fixed on the scarlet flashes, which gradually faded in the mist of the fields. They knew that this saber, its hilt filled with lead, must have cut a body in two â from shoulder to stomach â before becoming stuck in the leather. And the two halves had slipped off into the trampled grass, one each side.
She also saw dead horses being hauled out of wells. And new wells being dug in the thick, heavy earth. The timbers of the cage that the peasants lowered to the bottom of the pit smelled of fresh wood.
She saw a group of villagers, under the direction of a man in a black leather jacket, pulling on a thick rope wound round the cupola of a church, round the cross. The repeated cracking sounds seemedto fire their enthusiasm. And in another village, very early in the morning, she saw an old woman kneeling before the dome of a church cast down among the tombs of an unfenced cemetery, open to the fragile resonance of the fields.
She went through deserted villages where the orchards were glutted with overripe fruit, falling into the grass or withering on the bough. She stayed in a town where, one day at the market, a salesman mutilated a child who had tried to steal an apple from him. All the men she encountered seemed either to be rushing toward an unknown goal, mobbing trains, getting crushed on landing stages, or else waiting, one never knew for whom, before the closed doors of shops, at gates guarded by soldiers, and sometimes quite simply by the roadside.
The space she confronted knew no happy medium: incredible throngs of people would suddenly give way to a complete wilderness where the immensity of the sky and the depth of the forests made the presence of man unthinkable. Then without transition this emptiness would run into a ferocious jostling of peasants, slithering about on the muddy bank of a river, swollen by the autumn rains. That was something else Charlotte saw. Angry peasants with long poles pushing away a barge, from which arose an unceasing lament. On board could be seen silhouettes holding out their emaciated hands toward the shore. They were victims of typhus, abandoned, who had been drifting on their floating cemetery for several days. At each attempt to go ashore the bank dwellers mobilized to prevent them from doing so. The barge continued its funerary voyage; the people were dying from hunger now as well. Soon they would no longer have the strength to attempt a landing, and the last survivors, woken one day by the powerful and rhythmic sound of the waves, would behold the indifferent horizon of the Caspian Sea⦠.
At the edge of a wood, one glittering frosty morning, she saw shadows hanging from the trees, saw the emaciated rictuses of hanged men nobody had any thought of burying. And very high up, in the sunlit blue of the
She set off and she saw everything. She braved the countryâs endlessness, its fleeting space in which days and years are swallowed up. She went forward nonetheless, squelching through this stagnant time. By train, by farm cart, on foot â¦
She saw everything. Horses in harness, a whole herd of them, galloping riderless across a plain, stopping for a moment, then taking fright and resuming their mad race, both happy and fearful at their new-won liberty. One of these fugitives caught everyoneâs eye. A saber, deeply embedded in the saddle, stood erect upon its back. As the horse galloped, the long blade jammed into the thick leather swayed pliantly, glittering in the sinking sun. People kept their eyes fixed on the scarlet flashes, which gradually faded in the mist of the fields. They knew that this saber, its hilt filled with lead, must have cut a body in two â from shoulder to stomach â before becoming stuck in the leather. And the two halves had slipped off into the trampled grass, one each side.
She also saw dead horses being hauled out of wells. And new wells being dug in the thick, heavy earth. The timbers of the cage that the peasants lowered to the bottom of the pit smelled of fresh wood.
She saw a group of villagers, under the direction of a man in a black leather jacket, pulling on a thick rope wound round the cupola of a church, round the cross. The repeated cracking sounds seemedto fire their enthusiasm. And in another village, very early in the morning, she saw an old woman kneeling before the dome of a church cast down among the tombs of an unfenced cemetery, open to the fragile resonance of the fields.
She went through deserted villages where the orchards were glutted with overripe fruit, falling into the grass or withering on the bough. She stayed in a town where, one day at the market, a salesman mutilated a child who had tried to steal an apple from him. All the men she encountered seemed either to be rushing toward an unknown goal, mobbing trains, getting crushed on landing stages, or else waiting, one never knew for whom, before the closed doors of shops, at gates guarded by soldiers, and sometimes quite simply by the roadside.
The space she confronted knew no happy medium: incredible throngs of people would suddenly give way to a complete wilderness where the immensity of the sky and the depth of the forests made the presence of man unthinkable. Then without transition this emptiness would run into a ferocious jostling of peasants, slithering about on the muddy bank of a river, swollen by the autumn rains. That was something else Charlotte saw. Angry peasants with long poles pushing away a barge, from which arose an unceasing lament. On board could be seen silhouettes holding out their emaciated hands toward the shore. They were victims of typhus, abandoned, who had been drifting on their floating cemetery for several days. At each attempt to go ashore the bank dwellers mobilized to prevent them from doing so. The barge continued its funerary voyage; the people were dying from hunger now as well. Soon they would no longer have the strength to attempt a landing, and the last survivors, woken one day by the powerful and rhythmic sound of the waves, would behold the indifferent horizon of the Caspian Sea⦠.
At the edge of a wood, one glittering frosty morning, she saw shadows hanging from the trees, saw the emaciated rictuses of hanged men nobody had any thought of burying. And very high up, in the sunlit blue of the
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