Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andreï Makine

death knell for my childhood. “He died in the arms of his mistress.…”
    I was overwhelmed by the tragic beauty of these words. A whole new world swept over me.
    What struck me above all about this revelation was the setting: this scene of love and death had been played out at the Elysée! At the presidential palace! At the pinnacle of that pyramid of power, of glory, of world fame.… I pictured a sumptuous room with tapestries, gilt, rows of mirrors. In the midst of this luxury — a man (the president of the Republic!) and a woman, united in an ardent embrace.…
    Dumbfounded, I began unconsciously to translate the scene into Russian. That is, to replace the French protagonists with their national equivalents. A series of phantoms, looking cramped in their black suits, appeared before my eyes. Secretaries of the Politburo, masters of the Kremlin: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev. Four very different characters, loved or detested by the population, each of whom had put his stamp on a whole epoch in the history of the empire. Yet they all had one quality in common: at their sides a feminine presence, let alone an amorous one, was inconceivable. It was far easier for us to imagine Stalin in the company of someone like Churchill at Yalta, or with Mao in Moscow, than to picture him with the mother of his children.…
    â€œThe president died at the Elysée Palace, in the arms of his mistress, Marguerite Steinhei.l…” This sentence seemed like a coded message coming from another planetary system.
    Charlotte went to the Siberian suitcase to look for some of the newspapers of the period, hoping to be able to show us a photo of Madame Steinheil. While I, embroiled in my erotic Franco-Russian translation, recalled a remark that I had heard one evening on the lips of a gangling dunce, a fellow pupil. We were walking along the dark corridors at school after a session of weight lifting, the only subject at which he excelled. Passing the portrait of Lenin, my companion had given a low whistle in a most disrespectful manner and had observed, “You know old Lenin. He didn’t have any children, did he? ’Cause he just didn’t know how to make love.…”
    He had used an extremely coarse verb to refer to the sexual activity in which, according to him, Lenin was deficient. A verb I should never have dared to use and which, applied to Vladimir Ilyich, became a monstrous obscenity. Taken aback, I heard the echo of this iconoclastic verb resounding in the long empty corridor.…
    â€œFélix Faure … the president of the Republic … in the arms of his mistress …” More than ever Atlantis-France seemed to me a terra incognita where our Russian notions no longer had any currency.
    The death of Félix Faure made me aware of my age: I was thirteen; I guessed what “dying in the arms of a woman” meant, and fromnow on I could be spoken to on such subjects. Furthermore, the courage and total absence of hypocrisy in Charlotte’s story demonstrated what I already knew: she was not a grandmother like the others. No Russian babushka would have ventured on such a discussion with her grandson. In this freedom of expression I sensed an unaccustomed perception of the body, of love, of relationships between man and woman — a mysterious “French outlook.”
    Next morning I went out onto the steppe to brood alone on the fabulous transmutation effected in my life by the death of the president. To my great surprise, rerun in Russian, the scene no longer made a good story. In fact it was impossible to tell! Censored by an inexplicable modesty of words, revised, all of a sudden, by a strange offended morality, when finally told, it swung between pathological obscenity and euphemisms that transformed the pair of lovers into characters in a badly translated sentimental novel.
    â€œNo,” I said to myself, stretched out in the rippling grass under the