Dreams of My Russian Summers Read Online Free PDF Page A

magic of its sounds — snatch from the dark and tumultuous waters a fantastical city that was slowly returning to life.
    And from being a lady with obscure, non-Russian origins, Charlotte was transformed that evening into a messenger from an Atlantis, engulfed by time.

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    N EUILLY-SUR-SEINE WAS COMPOSED of a dozen log cabins. Real izbas, with roofs covered in slender laths, silvered by the rigors of winter, with windows set in prettily carved wooden frames and hedges with washing hung out to dry on them. Young women carried full pails on yokes that spilled a few drops on the dust of the main street. Men loaded heavy sacks of corn onto a wagon. A slow herd streamed idly toward the cowshed. We heard the heavy sound of their bells and the hoarse crowing of a cock. The agreeable smell of a wood fire — the smell of supper almost ready — hung in the air.
    For our grandmother had indeed said to us one day, when speaking of her birthplace, “Oh! At that time Neuilly was just a village… .”
    She had said it in French, but we only knew Russian villages. And a village in Russia is inevitably a ring of izbas; indeed the very word in Russian, derevnya, comes from derevo — a tree, wood. The confusion persisted, despite the clarifications that Charlotte’s stories would later bring. At the name “Neuilly” we had immediate visions of the village with its wooden houses, its herd, and its cockerel. And when, the following summer, Charlotte spoke to us for the first time about a certain Marcel Proust — “By the way, we used to see him playing tennis at Neuilly, on the boulevard Bineau” — we pictured the dandy with big languorous eyes (she had shown us his photo) there among the izbas!
    Beneath the fragile patina of our French words Russian reality often showed through. The president of the Republic was bound tohave something Stalinesque about him in the portrait sketched by our imagination. Neuilly was peopled with kolkhozniks. And the slow emergence of Paris from the waters evoked a very Russian emotion — that of fleeting relief after one more historic cataclysm; the joy of having finished a war, of having survived murderous repressions. We wandered along its streets, which were still wet, covered with sand and mud. The inhabitants were piling furniture and clothes outside their doors to let them dry — as Russians do, after a winter they had been beginning to think would never end.
    And then, when Paris was resplendent once more in the fresh spring air, whose scent we guessed intuitively, there was a fairy-tale train, drawn by a garlanded engine slowing down and coming to a halt at the gates of the city, before the pavilion at Ranelagh station.
    A young man wearing a simple military tunic stepped down from the railway carriage, walking on the purple cloth spread at his feet. He was accompanied by a woman, also very young, in a white dress with a feather boa. An older man, in formal attire, with a magnificent mustache and a fine blue ribbon on his breast, emerged from an impressive gathering grouped under the portico of the pavilion and advanced toward the couple. The gentle breeze caressed the orchids and the amaranths that decorated the pillars and stirred the feather on the young woman’s white velvet hat. The two men shook hands.
    The master of Atlantis resurgent, President Félix Faure, was welcoming the tsar of all the Russias, Nicholas II, and his wife.
    It was the imperial couple, escorted by the elite of the Republic, who were our guides through Paris… . Several years later we learned the true chronology of this glorious visit. Nicholas and Alexandra had not come in the spring of 1910, after the flood, but in October 1896, that is to say well before the rebirth of our French Atlantis. But this real sequence hardly mattered. For us only the chronology of our grandmother’s long stories counted: one day, in their legendary time, Paris arose from the