We were walking in a straight line farther and farther from Saranza. The uproar of the military band had been absorbed into the silence of the steppe. All we heard now was the rustling of plants in the wind. And it was in that great space of light and heat that Charlotte's voice broke the silence once more.

"No, they weren't fighting over that stolen money. Not at all. Everybody understood that. They were fighting to… to be revenged on life. Its cruelty, its stupidity. And on that May sky above their heads… They were fighting as if they wanted to defy someone. The one who had combined within a single life the spring sky and their crippled bodies…"

"Stalin? God?" I was on the point of asking, but the air of the steppe made the words rough, hard to articulate.

We had never walked this far before. Saranza had long since sunk into the flickering haze of the horizon. This excursion with no end in view was vital to us. At my back I could feel, almost physically, the shade of a little square in Moscow…

Finally we came upon a railway embankment. The line marked a surrealist frontier in this infinite space, whose only defining features were the sun and the sky. Curiously, on the other side of the tracks the terrain changed. We had to skirt several ravines, gigantic faults lined inside with sand, before descending into a valley. Suddenly, through the willow thickets there came a glint of water. We exchanged smiles and exclaimed with a single voice, "Sumra!"

It was a remote tributary of the Volga, one of those modest streams, lost in the immensity of the steppe, whose existence is known only because they flow into the great river.

We remained in the shade of the willows until evening… It was on the road home that Charlotte finished her story.

"The authorities finally grew tired of all those cripples on the square, their shouting and their brawling. But above all, they were giving the great victory a bad image. You see, people prefer a soldier either to be gallant and smiling or else… dead on the field of honor. But these men… In short, one day several lorries drove up, and the militiamen began to snatch the samovars out of their boxes and throw them into the trucks. The way you throw logs onto a cart. A Muscovite told me they took them to an island, in the northern lakes. They had fixed up a former leper hospital for it… In autumn I tried to find out about this place. I thought I might be able to go and work there. But when I went to that region in the spring they told me that there wasn't a single cripple left on the island and that the leper hospital was closed for good… It was a very beautiful spot. Pine trees as far as the eye could see, great lakes, and above all, very pure air…"

After we had been walking for an hour Charlotte gave me a little wry smile.

"Wait, I'm going to sit down for a moment…"

She sat down on the dry grass and stretched out her legs. I walked on automatically for a few paces and turned round. Once again, as if from an unfamiliar perspective or from a great height, I saw a woman with white hair, wearing a very simple dress of pale satin, a woman seated on the ground in the midst of this immensity that stretches from the Black Sea to Mongolia, and which is known as "the steppe." My grandmother… I saw her with that inexplicable detachment that the previous evening I had taken for a kind of optical illusion caused by my nervous tension. I felt I had a glimpse of that vertiginous disorientation that must be a common experience for Charlotte: an almost cosmic alienation. There she was under this violet sky: she seemed totally alone on this planet, there on the mauve grass, under the first stars. And her France and her youth were more remote from her than the pale moon – left behind in another galaxy, under another sky…

She raised her face. Her eyes seemed larger than usual to me. She spoke in French. The resonance of this language gave off vibrations like a last message from that distant galaxy.

"You know, Alyosha, sometimes it seems to me that I understand nothing about the life of this country. Yes. That I am still a foreigner. After living here for almost half a century. Those'samovars'… I don't understand. There were people laughing as they watched them fight!"

She made a movement to stand up. I hastened toward her, holding out my hand. She smiled at me, taking hold of my arm. And as I leaned toward her, she murmured several brief words in a firm and solemn tone that surprised me. It is probably because I mentally translated them into Russian that I have remembered them. They made a long sentence, whereas Charlotte's French captured everything in a single image: the one-armed samovar sitting with his back against the trunk of an immense pine tree, silently watching the reflection of the waves fading behind the trees…

In the Russian translation, which my memory retained, Charlotte's voice added in a tone of justification, "Yet sometimes I tell myself that I understand this country better than the Russians themselves. For I have carried that soldier's face with me over so many years… I have felt his solitude beside the lake…"

She got up and walked on slowly, leaning on my arm. In my body and in my breathing I could feel the disappearance of that aggressive and nervous adolescent who had arrived in Saranza the previous day.

That is how our summer began, my last summer spent in Charlotte's house. The next day I woke up with the feeling that I was myself at last. A great calm, at the same time both bitter and serene, spread through me. I no longer had to struggle between my Russian and my French identities. I accepted myself.

Now we spent almost all our days on the banks of the Sumra. We set off very early in the morning, carrying with us a big gourd of water, bread, cheese. In the evening, taking advantage of the first cool breeze, we would return.

Once the path was known to us, it did not seem so long. In the sun-drenched monotony of the steppe we discerned hundreds of features, landmarks that quickly became familiar to us. A block of granite on which mica glittered in the sun from a long way off. A strip of sand that resembled a miniature desert. The area covered with brambles that had to be avoided. When Saranza disappeared from sight we knew that soon the line of the embankment would emerge from the horizon, the rails would gleam. And once this frontier was crossed we had almost arrived: beyond the ravines that cut into the steppes with their abrupt gullies, we already sensed the presence of the river. It seemed to be waiting for us…

Charlotte would settle down with a book in the shade of the willows, a step away from the stream, while I would swim and dive until exhausted, several times crossing the river, which was narrow and not very deep. Along its shores there was a string of little islands, covered with thick grass, where there was just enough room to stretch out and imagine oneself to be on a desert island in the middle of the ocean…

Then, lying on the sand, I listened to the bottomless silence of the steppe… Our conversations started spontaneously and seemed to flow from the sunny babbling of the Sumra, from the rustling of the long leaves of the willows. Charlotte, her hands resting on the open book, would gaze across the river toward the plain scorched by the sun and begin to talk, sometimes replying to my questions, sometimes anticipating them intuitively as she spoke.

It was during those long summer afternoons, in the midst of the steppe, where every plant resonated with dryness and heat, that I learned what had previously been concealed from me in Charlotte's life. And also what my childish intelligence had not managed to grasp.

I learned that he really was her first lover, the first man in her life, that Great War soldier who had slipped the little pebble known as " Verdun " into her hand. Only they had not met on the day of the solemn parade on July 14, 1919: it was two years later, some months before Charlotte's departure for Russia. I learned also that this soldier was very far from being the mustached hero, glittering with medals, of our naive imaginings. He turned out rather to have been thin, with a pale face and sad eyes. He had frequent coughing fits. His lungs had been scorched in the course of one of the first gas attacks. And he did not step out of the ranks of the great parade to approach Charlotte and give her the " Verdun." He had handed this talisman to her at the station, the day of her departure for Moscow, certain of seeing her again soon.