Le testament français, Andreï Makine

It is not the first time I visit a place following the pages of a book, but this time the spell was subtler: I was travelling towards a country that exixts just in the memories of a man. His words were a mighty suggestion. They woke up a vague curiosity and gave it shape and substance, those of a travel to Russia.

I never thought about the book while I was away, but once at home pictures of that country glide in my thoughts. Sometimes, they echo the pages of the book.

In the morning, in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, a woman sat on a chair observed the mass of adoring and exhausted tourists without a word, wrapped in a shawl, with a long, thick braid, where she had collected her hair now white and comfortable shoes. In a maze of collections and floors, every room opened to the public is controlled by a woman who spends the day walking within the narrow boundaries marked by the doors and trying to resist to sneaky attacks of slumber, favoured by the warmth and the boredom.
Late in the afternoon, not far from the Moskovskaya metro station, old women sold flowers and berries. They stood in small groups; covered with layers of clothes, equipped to face sudden rains and cold winds not unusual in August. Bags and bundles put behind; at their feet, violet berries filled up plastic glasses and bunches of season flowers leant out capacious buckets. As the month progressed, the electric blue centaureas left way to warm yellow rudbeckias and cheerfully, bold dahlias, nicely arranged in simple compositions. They wrapped quickly the chosen bouquet in a plastic bag while money disappeared in their pockets, a needed contribution for their pensions. Attentive and proud, they turned away easy smiles and photographic machines with torrents of unintelligible words and eloquent gestures.

Babushka is the Russian for grandmother. In the book the term is extended to the middle-aged women depicted in the first pages. In a not distant past, in a village lost at the edges of the Russian steppe, they lived in rural, wooden houses that, among their planks, kept the intense smell of traditional life, of dark shawls and frozen winters. As the mad man of the village entered the courtyard, where a group of old Caucasian women was perched in whispers, they swarmed scandalised in their houses. Just the narrator’s grandmother, Charlotte, did not escape but talked to him with hearty and controlled words. She was not a babushka. In spite of the harsh experiences of her life, so exceptional for an Italian reader but so sadly common for people who live in the Russia, she had not lost kindness and concern for people, she never gave up. Her face mirrored her inner peace. The endless horizon of the steppe, the limpid, silent air and the pungent smell of the grass had damped bitterness and pain in a simple life of readings and friendship.

I found woods of pine and birches, marshes, pastures and small lakes outside Saint Petersburg. Wooden houses submerged by late summer flowers lined the road where, on Sunday evening, women and men sold their vegetables to people who were driving back to the town. That evening I sipped a soup with mutton and dried cherries, with fragments of dill scattered on the surface, sit alone in a smoky restaurant.

“Le potage de Sibérie”, these words flashed in my mind a couple of days ago, when I saw tidy bundles of herbs arranged in a corner of the stall, at the market. The Siberian soup, dried grass and roots soaked in hot water, was the last resource for a starving, young Charlotte and her mother, during an unreasoning cold winter in a country ravaged by war and revolution.

In the daily food market on Vasileskij Island fruits, vegetables, flowers, cheese, poultry and more were attractively on display. The Neva River was right at the end of the road, with huge keels unloading wood and cruise boats. People moved quietly among the booths. But, under a leaden sky that threatened rain, I did not see a boy and his sister who, expelled unjustly from the long, desperate queue, looked at each other with understanding glances and whispered words in a foreign language: “Bartavelles et ortolans truffé rotis…” These words took them away, in a distant town by the sea, with a misty air stirred by seagulls and a salty smell, away from a gloomy day, and nervous, tired people who queued for hours to buy few oranges.
Their grandmother, Charlotte, had taught them those French words.

At twilight, on a terrace flooded by flowers, overlooking a blazing steppe, a French woman told her grandchildren about France, her native country. She mixed memories with fragments of historical events, the romantic characters of popular books with the sensual rhyme of lyric poems; she used foreign words and clippings, following the bounds and unexpected turns of curiosity rather than the regular pace of a chronological order. It emerged the “Atlantide français”, the French Atlantis. It was a magic, unintelligible world to which the narrator’s studies and researches gave more solid foundations but less dreamy atmosphere. Then, it became his secret refuge, a hidden world for a solitary, proud and surly adolescent, who did not hesitate to renegade it when his life changed dramatically. It was turned into jokes and anecdotes for his new friends, with the rage of a deceived boy and the pain of a now orphan child. But, he could not cancel it, as he could not deny the reality in which he was living. Mad with rage he faced Charlotte. In a melting summer, he reconciled with her and himself following new words that told him about her Russian world. Adult, he left Russia for France where reality almost killed him until the memory of Charlotte invaded his thoughts. Her words were a mighty suggestion. They seized him and showed his way, that of a writer that today lives in France.

Further reading:
Le testament français, Andreï Makine Mercure de France, Collection Folio

Photos:
Travel in a garden