Free Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andreï Makine Page B

the rich that provoked the anger of the people. She had seen one, smashed with blows of an ax, frozen into the ice floes on a river… .
    On entering the room, her first gesture was to touch the stones of the stove. They were warm. Charlotte felt a pleasantly giddy sensation. She was already about to let herself slip down beside the stove when she noticed an open book on the table made of broad timbers, browned with the years. A little ancient volume with rough paper. Leaning on a bench, she bent over the open pages. Strangely the letters began to dance, to melt — as they had done during that night on the train when she dreamed of the Parisian street where her uncle lived. This time the cause was not a dream, but tears. It was a French book.
    The old woman in the black shawl came in and seemed not to be surprised to see this slim young woman rising from her bench.The dry branches she carried under her arm trailed long filaments of snow on the floor. Her withered face resembled that of one of the old peasant women of that Siberian country. Her lips, covered in a fine network of wrinkles, trembled. And it was from this mouth, from the desiccated breast of this unrecognizable being, that the voice of Albertine rang out, a voice of which not a single note had altered.
    â€œAll these years I only dreaded one thing: that you might come back here!”
    These were the very first words that Albertine addressed to her daughter. And Charlotte understood: what they had lived through since their good-byes on the station platform eight years before, a whole host of actions, faces, words, sufferings, privations, hopes, anxieties, cries, tears — all that buzz of life resounded against a single echo, which refused to die. This meeting, so desired, so feared.
    â€œI wanted to ask someone to write to you and say I was dead. But there was the war, then the revolution. Then war again. And then …”
    â€œI wouldn’t have believed the letter… .”
    â€œYes, I told myself that you wouldn’t have believed it in any case… .”
    She threw down the branches near the stove and approached Charlotte. When she had looked at her through the lowered window of the railway carriage in Paris, her daughter was eleven. Now, soon she would be twenty.
    â€œDo you hear?” whispered Albertine, her face lighting up, and she turned toward the stove. “The mice, you remember? They’re still there… .”
    Later, squatting in front of the fire that was coming to life be-hind the little cast iron door, Albertine murmured, as if to herself, without looking at Charlotte, who was stretched out on the bench and appeared to be asleep: “That’s how it is in this country. You can come in easily but you never get out… .”
    Hot water seemed like a whole new, unknown substance. Charlotte held out her hands toward the trickle that her mother poured slowly onto her shoulders and her back from a copper scoop. In thedarkness of that room, which was lit only by the flame of a burning wood shaving, the warm drops looked like pine resin and tickled Charlotte’s body deliciously as she rubbed herself with a lump of blue clay. Of soap they retained only a vague memory.
    â€œYou’ve become very thin,” Albertine said softly, and her voice broke off.
    Charlotte laughed gently. As she lifted her head of wet hair, she saw tears of the same amber color shining in her mother’s lackluster eyes. During the days that followed Charlotte tried to find out how they could leave Siberia (superstitiously she dared not say, return to France). She went to the former house of the governor. The soldiers at the entrance smiled at her: a good sign? The secretary of the new ruler of Boyarsk made her wait in a little room — the same, thought Charlotte, where once she used to wait for the parcel of leftovers from lunch… .
    The ruler received her seated behind his heavy desk: as she came in his