"We are going to the station!" she cried, further astonishing the taxi driver still more with the vibrant and very foreign resonance of her voice.
"To the station," repeated the little girl, who had just now hailed him in the street. She, on the other hand, spoke very good Russian, with a slight Siberian accent…
Charlotte knew that Albertine's emergence at the top of the steps had been preceded by a long and painful battle, interrupted by several relapses – like the struggle of that man, battling in a black hole in the midst of the ice, which Charlotte had seen one day in spring, as she crossed the bridge. He clung to a long branch that was being pushed toward him and crawled up the slippery slope of the riverbank, sprawled flat on his stomach on the icy surface, progressing centimeter by centimeter, already stretching out his red hand, as he touched those of his rescuers. Suddenly, incomprehensively, his body shuddered, started to slip, and fell back once more into the black water. The current dragged him a little farther. Everything had to begin again… Yes, like that man.
But on that luminous and verdant summer's afternoon their actions were lightness itself. "What about the big suitcase?" cried Charlotte, when they were installed on the seats.
"We'll leave it. It only has old papers in it, and all those newspapers of your uncle's… We'll come back one day to collect it."
They crossed the bridge, passing beside the governor's house. The Siberian town seemed to unfold like a strange past, where it was possible to forgive with a smile…
Once they were settled in Paris again, it was with just such a lack of bitterness that they would look back on Boyarsk. And when that summer Albertine resolved to return to Russia (in order, as her family understood, to put a definitive end to the Siberian period of her life), Charlotte even showed a little jealousy toward her mother: she too would have liked to spend a couple of weeks in that town, now perceived as being inhabited by people from their past, where the houses, their izba