Enfin, essoufflés, transpercés d'un froid enivrant, nous rebroussâmes chemin. Nous vîmes l'invalidka garée près de la haie, la petite cour déserte de l'isba. Nous tendîmes l'oreille. Il nous sembla entendre les voix de nos pères au-delà du bosquet. Nous les imaginions assis sur un tronc d'arbre en train de fumer et de causer tranquillement. L'idée de leur faire peur nous vint en même temps. Oui, s'approcher lentement, à pas de loup, en contournant le bosquet et, tout à coup: «A-aa!», sauter en avant, en agitant les bras.

Nous avançâmes en écartant de nos mains les hautes tiges pour qu'elles ne se cassent pas sous nos pas. Nous contournâmes le bosquet. La présence des deux hommes se devinait toute proche. Nous prîmes notre élan, nous nous précipitâmes vers eux. Mais le cri ne partit pas…

Iacha marchait à pas lents, rythmés, la tête et les épaules rejetées en arrière. Il nous tournait le dos. Dans ses bras croisés sur son ventre il portait mon père. Il ne l'avait jamais porté ainsi. Et mon père dans un geste large et libre maniait une faux. L'herbe frémissait et se couchait, dans un ample éventail argenté. Ils ne se disaient rien. Ils semblaient avoir trouvé leur cadence.

Je me retournai vers toi, t'adressai un clin d'œil, comme pour dire: «Pas mal, non?» Mais tout à coup je vis tes lèvres trembler et tes paupières battre rapidement. Tu te détournas et te mis à courir vers la rivière en secouant la tête. Je pensai à un jeu. Je te suivis. Quelques mètres plus loin, comme un avion qui perd son élan, tu piquas dans l'herbe, le visage caché dans le creux de ton bras replié. Les sanglots perçaient entre tes dents serrées. Je te poussai au coude:

– Écoute, qu'est-ce qui t'arrive?

Tu rejetas ma main avec une violence sauvage.

Je me relevai en haussant les épaules, retournai sur mes pas. Il y avait, apparemment, une chose que tu avais comprise et qui m'échappait…

De nouveau je vis nos deux pères. J'entendis Iacha dire d'une voix rieuse:

– Dis, Piotr, on n'est pas encore arrivés sur la Nevski, non?

Je regardai son grand crâne pâle. Sur sa tempe battait une grosse veine sombre. On sentait une lourde fatigue dans la courbe de ses épaules, dans ses jambes tendues…

Ils marchaient, entourés de la fraîcheur amère de l'herbe coupée. Les fleurs aux coloris endormis, tamisés, tombaient à leurs pieds. Ils marchaient et chaque envolée de la lame couverte de rosée les portait au-devant de cette naissance du jour, fragile et silencieuse.

Ils marchaient et semblaient être seuls sur la terre. Très loin, par-delà les ondoiements argentés de la plaine se formait un long nuage mauve. Le vent sentait la vase, la fumée de la première cheminée allumée. Ils étaient seuls.

Tout seuls dans l'infini primitif et heureux de cette plaine. Tout seuls dans l'immensité de ce ciel du Nord…

Tu sais, un jour nous rejouerons cette silencieuse mélodie de la nuit lointaine. Te rappelles-tu ce duo de murmures cuivrés et de battements sous la caresse des doigts? Pour l'apprendre il nous a fallu les châteaux nuageux du Passage, notre cour et même l'horizon radieux. Mais une fois apprise, elle pourra couler partout où nous serons. Pourvu qu'il y ait un bout de ciel au-dessus de nos têtes.

The story of Andreï Makine's arrival as a writer has passed into French literary legend. He was 30 when he came to Paris from Siberia, where he had worked as a teacher and toiled over a slim portfolio of verse. A nook in the Père Lachaise cemetery became his home. During the warm summer of 1987, as he slept and wrote among the tombs, he would watch women scurrying to the tomb of Victor Noir, a 19th-century journalist murdered for lèse-majesté against Napoleon III. His bronze form now lies on his grave as he fell, flat on his back, his top hat by his side. Rubbing his bulging groin is supposed to cure infertility.

"I would see women lying on top of him, spread-eagled, all night long," says Makine, who speaks perfect French, in a theatrical bass that would carry well through a Siberian snowstorm.

Gaggles of Brazilians would gather round the nearby tomb of Allan Kardec, a pioneering student of spirits and the paranormal who gained an enormous following in South America. "It wasn't frightening at all living there," he said. "There were lots of cats and lots of people living there, mad people mostly. The mad have a lot of faith."

No publisher believed Makine at first when he said he had written in French. But when he lied and said his book was translated from Russian, he sailed into print. His first novel, A Hero's Daughter, was originally published in France as a purported translation. Only with his third book, Once Upon the River Love, was the sham abandoned.

Finally, after 14 years, A Hero's Daughter has been translated into English – beautifully so, like all of Makine's books – by Geoffrey Strachan. In the meantime, Makine has become one of the most celebrated writers in Europe. His fourth book, Le Testament Français, was the first to win both of France 's top literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis, and was a monumental bestseller.

His success enabled him to leave his sepulchral nook. He now lives in a former lunatic asylum in Montmartre. "The poet Gérard de Nerval was taken care of in my building," says Makine excitedly, sitting in a room at his publisher's office on the Left Bank. "It was the only place he felt really well. He found real happiness there."

Makine has the long, chiselled features of a Soviet labourer and, despite his loosely tied cravat, looks more like a Russian graduate exchange student than a polished Parisian writer. He describes a romantically austere writing life. "It's not very original. I drink a lot of coffee, like Balzac," he says, throwing back his head as if gulping down another double espresso.

"When one has made the choice to write, one must never speak of material things," he says. "The choice is the ideal." Besides his garret in Montmartre, he rents a small farmhouse in the Vendée, where he says he can feel nature, smell the earth and write his early drafts. "Whoooo, whoooo," he says, imitating the wind that blows across western France. "There is a giant emptiness out there, big, flat spaces. The sky is a powerful presence and the wind makes a constant noise."

All the furniture he owns he has built himself, including his bed, desk and cupboards. It is basic carpentry, he says, with no fancy marquetry. He strives for the minimum of material things, but the maximum liberty. "I have the freedom to say, ‘There's a flight tonight to Sydney from Paris. I'll take the taxi and go tonight, not tomorrow.' " He claims to be a disorganised writer, working hard in spurts, then indulging in periods of anarchic laziness. He says he writes quickly, on an electric typewriter, but only after months of detailed cogitation.

A family would be impossible. "I work at nights often. You can't impose all that on someone else. The rhythm of my work would mean the other person would have to be your slave."

Tolstoy tried to mix domesticity and family life, but he would "come downstairs after writing and see his family playing and his eyes would well up. He would say, ‘You are joking around down here and upstairs Prince Andrei is dying'."

Makine's prose is as spare as his life. He describes his novels as "external", unlike the lumpen mass of contemporary French novels that are hung up on a narrow set of overwrought emotions. Everything in a Makine novel is tightly observed and described, from the colour of a tree to the sound of a broken-down piano to the texture of the snow on a Siberian train station.

The story of A Hero's Daughter spans almost 50 years of Soviet life, from the Second World War to perestroika. It tells of a father who fought and was honoured in the war, only to see his status decline over the years, and his daughter, who is employed by the KGB as a honey-trap for foreign businessmen. Both, in different ways, are victims of the same Soviet system.