The disappearance of the family portraits during his boyhood marked Sergei Erdmann, Oleg’s father, more strongly than the great events of the period. Born in 1924, he had spent his childhood amid their solemn black-and-white faces. Russia was shaken by revolutionary challenges, by futuristic promises. Old people still called it St. Petersburg, but when Sergei was taking his first steps it was already Leningrad. Hundreds of men were arrested every night and their deaths behind barbed wire were acclaimed in the newspapers as the welcome fruit of the most humane of judicial systems. Even school textbooks did not escape punishment. Their teacher would order: “Open your books at page …” (he gave the number). “The photograph here shows an enemy of the people recently unmasked by the Party. Black it out with ink! Begin with his mouth which uttered calumnies against our socialist fatherland.”

From one month to the next a good many pages were sullied by black rectangles. And in his parents’ conversations Sergei detected hints of more discreet disappearances, neighbors on the same landing, colleagues, former acquaintances.

Only the ancestral portraits seemed calmly aloof. Their calm was disrupted in 1936. The photographs came down from their hooks and took refuge in the depths of a wardrobe. His parents’ answer was evasive: “It’s better to be on the safe side.” Now in his teens, he did not try to discover more: the link between the hiding of these portraits and the inked-out squares in his history book was only too evident.

What crime had these ancestors committed? Doctors, engineers, merchants, booksellers, soldiers, they had always kept themselves well clear of politics. The 1917 revolution had not turned them into implacable opponents of the regime. His father, an optician, followed a profession little suited to controversy.

“It’s because we’re German …,” Sergei’s mother murmured one day. German? No! The name of Erdmann had never given rise to suspicion. Not even in 1914. Several Erdmanns had fought at the front, like so many Russians of German origin. It seemed as if the revolution ought to eradicate these survivals: titles, origins, nationalities … And yet the more they preached about “internationalism,” the more this ancient German kinship came under suspicion.

Sergei’s father died of a heart attack early in 1937. During his final months he used to go to bed fully dressed, convinced that one night there would be a knock at their door. Out in the street a black car would be waiting for him, then there would be long sessions of interrogation, torture … The day he was buried, Sergei’s mother burned their family portraits. For some time now the newspapers had taken to denouncing not only “the enemies of the people” but also “Hitler’s lackeys.”

All that had survived was this optical toy: a stereoscope equipped with a hundred photographs of European cities, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Rome … Sergei remembered how one day his parents had talked about their trip to Italy, a few years before the revolution. Nowadays thinking of going abroad seemed more unrealistic than traveling to the moon.

The cities in the stereoscope and their buildings inspired in him a taste for architecture, a passion that forever bore the stamp of the trip he pictured his parents making, when young and in love.

For these Russians, now on the spot because of their German roots, there came a respite, which lasted from August 1939 until June 1941. The pact with Hitler had just been signed, Germany was becoming an almost friendly ally. “This is only borrowed time,” his mother observed. “War will break out and then both sides will regard us as enemies. How can we make them forget about us?”

She decided to get rid of all the optical equipment her husband used to use. “They could accuse us of who knows what military espionage on Hitler’s behalf.”

As for Sergei, his intention seemed even more difficult to achieve: to change nationality. In that land of total surveillance his chances of success were minimal.

He was helped by the chaos of the first days of the war. The bombing caused fires in a number of apartment buildings in their district. Sergei went out into one of the courtyards, threw his papers in the fire, allowed his clothing to become scorched in the flames. Then he rushed to a mobilization center. The military bureaucracy had few scruples. The only hazard was his name, Erdmann. “You’re of German origin!” gasped the official in charge. “No, I’m Jewish …,” replied Sergei. This was duly noted along with more anodyne information: his age (he added an extra year), his status as an architectural student …

To begin with he was posted to an engineering unit that was preparing the ground for the retreat of troops in disarray. His distance from the fighting allowed him to hold on to the memory of a Germany his parents used to speak of, a fatherland of romantic poets and inspired musicians. An image that survived the sight of fields covered in frozen corpses.

The Russian counteroffensive would cure him of the Germany he had dreamed of. Enlisted in the infantry, he one day passed through a village that had been torched about seventy miles from Moscow. The spectacle of izbas burned to a cinder was not new to him. What froze him was the line of four charred bodies punctuating the snow alongside a fence. Bodies of children. Little fugitives who had been caught in the jet of a flamethrower. A German soldier must have killed them, more or less out of curiosity, testing whether his weapon would reach them … Behind the fence Sergei saw one who had escaped—a wild-eyed little boy, babbling incoherently.

There was an intensity about this madness that was contagious, Sergei would never free himself from it, for no words could express the horror of those little faces reduced to the state of smoldering brands.

His war was going to be a long-drawn-out replica of that burned village. Towns reduced to black shreds, bodies crushed by tanks … The memory of the wild-eyed child often returned, giving rise to a thought that pained him more than the wretchedness of a soldier’s life: “If my ancestors had not left Germany, I should probably have come to that village armed with a flamethrower …” He shook his head to drive away this phantom version of himself, noting that if his family had not settled in Russia he would never have been born. His distress was numbed.

Before the war he had always felt himself to be Russian. Back from the front in 1945, he felt as if a small part of the German crimes could be laid at his door. He called himself a fool, fingered the medals that jingled on his uniform jacket, told himself that few of his comrades had gone right through the war, from Moscow to Berlin! But the closer he got to Leningrad the more he was tormented by a feeling of being a German fifth columnist.

This sense of a split personality became unbearable when he learned that from the start of the war Russians of German origin had been deported beyond the Urals. He gathered that his mother had suffered this same fate, made inquiries, and went to look for her in a small town in western Siberia. He was directed to a group of huts where several families lived, a few forlorn old men and three or four young women who had come there as children and grown up without parents. One of them, Marta, told him about how they had fetched up in this deserted spot, the hunger, the snowstorms, the despair, the guilt felt by these innocent Germans, who were being made to pay for the others, Hitler’s lot. This distress killed more of them than disease. Sergei’s mother had died late in the fall of the first year of the war. “She asked me to keep this lamp,” said Marta.

It was not a lamp but a magic lantern, the old Erdmann family relic.

The following year they got married. Marta, legally obliged to live there, managed to leave Siberia—thanks to this purportedly Jewish husband, decorated with medals that bore the image of Stalin.

The apartment where Sergei had lived before the war was occupied. By neighbors who had benefited from the deportation of the “filthy Nazis” … The young married couple rented a room, tried to survive, glad, at least, to see a sky where no bombers flew. Sergei resumed his architectural studies, got through the degree course in two years, completed his qualifying project …

He was not uneasy when a new witch hunt was unleashed in 1948, under the name of the “struggle against cosmopolitanism in culture and the sciences.” What this was about, he thought, was a reining in, aimed at those intellectuals who had been seduced after the war by the brief opening up toward the West. He talked about it to Marta, explained the secret of the false Jewish nationality noted in his passport … “Well, why not tell them the truth?” she asked him.

He would have done so if he had not been arrested in the middle of the following night. They tried to make him admit he had been involved in a clandestine Zionist organization. Subjected to increasingly brutal torture, he stuck by the truth: his German origins, his four years at the front. All this was very easy to check. And in the end it was checked and confirmed. The verification of his life history, undertaken with the usual administrative indolence, took two and a half years.

After his release he found Marta again, and life resumed, but what they lacked now was an essential ingredient: faith in this life of theirs. They were like twigs put into water—the leaf buds open out, they give off a scent of spring, and, where the twig was broken off, they even put forth tiny roots, but these seek solid earth in vain.

They lived like that, in suspense, had a son, Oleg, born in 1954, to whom Marta, who died three years later, managed to give what no ordinary child would have received in so short a time—the certain knowledge of having a mother who loved him as no one else would ever love him.

Oleg was six years old when his father went to live in the attic of that crag-building. Triplets had been born in the family of an old regimental comrade of his, and Sergei had handed over his own room in a communal apartment and moved into this “studio apartment” where the newborn babies would not have survived.

In his teens Oleg knew the humiliation of having to admit where he lived. Little by little he forged a status for himself that was admittedly not very flattering but less ludicrous: he claimed he had been born in a small town in Siberia and therefore could not hope for decent accommodation. All things considered, being saddled with the nickname “Siberian peasant” was less hard to bear than being addressed as “German scum.”

And besides, this invention brought him closer to his mother, to the memory of her bedside table: what he always saw there as a child was a tiny pearl necklace, a porcelain cup, a well-worn book and … There his memory faltered over an object whose position he could recall without being able to picture it. He often told himself that if only he had been able to call its appearance to mind, his mother would have seemed much more present to him. More alive …

“Mica simulates stained glass very well. This will be a copy of the Liboriuskapelle, a masterpiece of High Gothic style that stands in Creuzburg …”

Oleg was listening to his father as he sliced off a layer of mica with a fine blade. Inside the model a lamp shone upon an object that resembled a fragment of coral. Oleg did not dare to ask the why and wherefore of its presence among the columns. His father seemed to him too frail to be brought back to reality.

Only once did Oleg dare to put the question to him that for years he had been burning to ask: “What if you’d been on the other side, Papa, in a German regiment, and they’d ordered you to burn a village … Would you have done it?” An outburst of fury, a shout of laughter, a shrug of the shoulders … Oleg could have imagined any one of those reactions. But not this shaking face that crumpled into little wrinkles of pain and became reduced to eyes, silently weeping.

A week later his father tripped on a crosstie, fell, dislocated an arm. That evening Oleg found him sitting beside the track, moaning softly, oblivious of the passing trains. He took him up to the studio apartment, heated some water, washed the little old man in the zinc bathtub … His father fell asleep holding his hand and it was just as he was beginning to drop off that, in his soft and somewhat ironic old man’s voice, he murmured: “When I think that all this has happened to us because of a little German princess …” Oleg recognized the formula the Erdmanns were given to repeating from time to time, when commenting on their Russian destiny.

His father died at the end of the following year, while Oleg was doing his military service.

In the years ahead, at the most taxing moments, the young man would recall their family saying with a smile: “Well, what do you know? This is all happening to me because of that little German girl who became Catherine the Great.”