In a way, with her failing memory, she was the absent one, alone except for a few women helpers who came every day to attend to her in that apartment, immobile behind its closed doors. I was thinking of her as I walked through the corridor in the train to get to the samovar. I had left without telling anyone except for the magazines I was working for and the old lady in my building, seated on her sofa at the end of the long hallway. For the first six months he had written often, telling me he had time to go fishing for omul in the lake and make kites for the children. No point trying to hold him back, no one and nothing had ever held him back. His choice worried me, but I could understand how both symbolic and desperate it was. On a whim, he had gone to live at the edge of Lake Baikal, to paint, perform plays with the people there and put on plays by Vampilov who had spent his whole career in Irkutsk. That world we dreamt of, that lovely utopia-to be oneself, completely oneself, but also to transform all of society-could that be mere childishness? Was that merely consoling us for being the orphaned heirs of the crimes committed in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, crimes that some of our elders had pretended to be unaware of ?Īs for Gyl, he didn’t want to abandon everything that had lent meaning to his life up to then, the idea of building an ideal world. In a novel about the death of theories, I had read: ‘We wonder just how seriously we had taken them.’ I resented the author for his cruel hypothesis. I was not the only one to perceive that insidious erosion of the certainties which had filled our youth with enthusiasm, but what really frightened me was the feeling, shared by some of my friends, of being unable to do anything but sink into this realization. At any rate, it felt like all our hopes were slowly, inexorably reaching an end. It seemed I had nothing to hold on to, time wanted to swallow me up, was swallowing me up. I was at a point in my life when the insistent presence of the world, the lack of power of all discourses and worn-out theories tormented my days and my nights. Even today, I sometimes think of the brief apparition of that stranger I caught in a private moment and of others who have mysteriously settled into my memory, like silent witnesses of my wanderings. Not so much a glance for the train that was gathering speed again and I thought that’s what travel was like, too, waking up somewhere in Siberia, but where? To see a man rolling a cigarette, to lose him from view very quickly and to remember him always. A suspended moment in time, an intimate ritual. I could almost hear the rustling of the tobacco, I could imagine the deft fingers, the absent-minded, mechanical gesture. The smell of honey and hay floated in the air, even though I was behind the window of the compartment and the man about ten metres away. He would keep the pinch of tobacco in the hollow of his hand, crumble it with his fingertips, spread it over the fold of the paper and close the whole thing after a little lick of the tongue on the edge of the gummed paper. I could recognize his gestures from afar-Gyl used to roll his own cigarettes, too. He was standing by his green sidecar, a gigantic Beetle, a companion in solitude. On a dirt road, a man was rolling a cigarette. As the train moves across post-Soviet Russia and its devastated landscapes, Anne reflects on her past with Gyl and their patriotic struggles, as well as on the neighbour she has just left behind, Clémence Barrot. In Michelle Lesbre’s The Red Sofa, we meet Anne, a young woman setting off on the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to find her former lover, Gyl, who left twenty years before.
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