The image of our grandmother was woven from these anodyne peculiarities – eccentricities in the eyes of some people, excesses to others. That was up to the day when we discovered that a little pebble covered in rust could cause tears to glisten on her eyelashes and that French, our domestic patois, could – through the 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.
3
Neuilly-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!