Charlotte's voice broke off, as if to give me to understand that this cult of the book in Russia was only a memory now.

"But the unique book, the definitive book. Judgment and Kingdom at the same time?" exclaimed the adolescent I had once more become.

My feverish whisperings jerked me out of my invented conversation. Ashamed, like someone who has been caught talking to himself, I saw myself for what I was. A man gesticulating in the middle of a little dark room, where a blind window faces onto a brick wall and needs neither curtains nor shutters. A room that can be crossed in three steps, where objects, for lack of space, crowd together, encroach on one another, become entangled: old typewriter, electric stove, chairs, shelves, shower, table, spectral clothes hanging on the walls. And everywhere sheets of paper, bits of manuscripts and books, which give this cluttered interior a kind of highly logical madness. Outside the window the start of a wet winter's night, and – floating up from the maze of ancient houses – an Arabic melody, a mixture of lament and celebration. And the man is dressed in an old light-colored overcoat (it is very cold). On his hands he wears mittens, necessary for typing in the freezing room. He is talking to a woman. He addresses her with that confidence that one does not always have, even for the intimacy of one's own voice. He is questioning her about the unique, definitive work, without fear of seeming naive or ridiculously pathetic. She is about to reply to him…

Before I went to sleep, I had the thought that in coming to France, Charlotte would seek to understand what had happened to that literature from which a few old books represented for her, in Siberia, a miniature French archipelago. I imagined coming into the apartment where she would be living one evening and seeing on the edge of a table or the windowsill a book open, a recent book, which Charlotte was reading in my absence. I would lean over the pages, and my gaze would fall on these lines:

It was, in fact, the mildest morning of that winter. The sun shone as in the first days of April; the hoarfrost was melting, and the wet grass glistened, as if drenched with dew… I had spent this unique morning reviewing a thousand things, with an ever-increasing melancholy beneath the clouds of winter – I had forgotten the old garden and the cradle of vine, in whose shadow my life had been decided… How to live in the image of this beauty? that is what I should like to learn. The clarity of this country, the transparency, the profundity, and the miracle of this meeting of water, stone, and light – that is the only knowledge, the first morality. This harmony is not illusory. It is real, and faced with it, I feel the necessity of the word…

17

The blissful disappearance of routine is something young betrothed couples on the eve of their wedding, or people who have just moved house, must have a sense of. It feels to them as if the few days of celebration or the happy chaos of settling in will last forever, becoming the very stuff of their lives, light and sparkling.

During my last weeks of waiting I lived in a similar intoxication. I left my little room, and rented an apartment I knew I could only afford for four or five months. That was of scant importance to me. From the room where Charlotte would live one could see the blue-gray expanse of roofs reflecting the April sky… I borrowed what I could; I bought furniture, curtains, a carpet, and the household paraphernalia that I had always dispensed with in my previous dwelling. The flat as a whole remained empty; I slept on a mattress. Only the room destined for my grandmother now had a habitable air.

And as the month of May drew closer, so my cheerful recklessness and my spendthrift madness increased. From secondhand shops I began buying small antique objects that might, as I saw it, give a soul to this rather ordinary looking room. At an antique dealer's I found a table lamp. He lit it, to give me a demonstration; I pictured Charlotte's face by the light of its shade. I could not leave without that lamp. I filled the shelves with old leather-backed volumes of illustrated magazines from the turn of the century. Each evening I spread out my trophies on the round table that stood in the middle of this decorated room: half a dozen glasses, an old bellows, a pile of ancient postcards…

In vain I told myself that Charlotte would never want to leave Saranza, and above all Fyodor's grave, for long, and that she would have been as comfortable in a hotel as in this improvised museum: I could no longer stop myself buying and adding finishing touches. For even when initiated into the magic of memory, the art of recreating a lost moment, man remains overwhelmingly attached to the physical fetishes of the past: like that conjurer whom God blessed with the gift of working miracles, but who preferred the nimbleness of his own fingers and his suitcases with false bottoms, which had the advantage of not upsetting his common sense.

And I knew that the real magic would be revealed in the bluish reflection of the roofs, in the aerial fragility of the skyline outside the window that she would open on the day after she arrived, very early in the morning. And in the sound of the first words that she exchanged in French with someone on a street corner…

On one of the last evenings of my waiting I caught myself praying… It was not a formal prayer. I had of course never learned one; I grew up by the skeptical light of an atheism so militant, it was almost religious in its tireless crusade against God. This was more a kind of dilettante and confused plea, whose addressee remained unknown. Catching myself red-handed in this unaccustomed act, I hastened to make a mockery of it. I thought that, given the impiety of my past life, I could have exclaimed, like that sailor in Voltaire's story, "I have trodden on the crucifix four times on four voyages to Japan!" I told myself I was a pagan, an idolater. Nevertheless these jibes did not banish the vague internal murmuring that I had become aware of deep within me. Its intonation had something childish about it. It was as if I were proposing a bargain to my unnamed interlocutor; I would only live another twenty years, well, fifteen years – all right, only ten – provided this meeting, these moments regained, were possible…

I got up, and pushed open the door to the next room. In the half-light of a spring night the room was awake, animated by a subdued expectancy. Even the old fan, though bought only two days ago, looked as if it had lain on the little low table for long years in the nocturnal paleness of the windowpanes.

It was a happy day. One of those lazy, gray days adrift among the days of holiday at the beginning of May. In the morning I nailed a big coat-rack to the wall in the hall. You could hang at least ten garments on it. I did not even ask myself whether we would need it in summer.

Charlotte's window remained open. Now between the silvery surfaces of the roofs one could see, here and there, the light patches of first greenery.

That morning I added another short fragment to my Notes. I remembered that one day at Saranza Charlotte had talked to me about her life in Paris after World War I. She told me that the postwar era, which, without anyone having any inkling of this, was turning into the years between the wars, had something deeply false about its atmosphere. A false joy, a too easy forgetfulness. It reminded her strangely of the advertisements she used to read in the wartime newspapers: "Warm yourself without coal!" led to an explanation of how one could use "balls of paper." Or again: "Housewives, do your washing without fire!" And even "Housewives, economize: pot-au-feu without fire!" When Charlotte went off to join Albertine in Siberia, she had hoped that when she returned with her to Paris, they would discover prewar France again…