Once Upon The River Love

1

Her body is a softened, glowing crystal on a glassblower's

pipe…

Can you hear me clearly, Utkin? Under your fevered pen, the

woman I'm telling you about in our transatlantic conversation tonight will flower. Her body, this glass with the hot brilliance of a ruby, will become a softer color. Her breasts will become firmer, turning a milky pink. Her thighs will bear a swarm of beauty spots – the hallmarks of your impatient fingers… Speak of her, Utkin!

The closeness of the sea can be guessed at from the light on the ceiling. It is still too hot to go down to the beach. Everything is drowsing in this great house lost amid the greenery: a broad-brimmed straw hat, glowing in the sunlight on the terrace; in the garden, twisted cherry trees with motionless branches and trunks oozing resin. And then this newspaper, several weeks old, with its columns that carry news of the ending of our distant empire. And the sea, a turquoise incrustation between the branches of the cherry trees… I am stretched out in a room that seems to be tilting across the great glassy bay with its sparkling expanse of sea. All is white, all is sunlight. Apart from the great black stain of the piano, a refugee from rainy evenings. And in an armchair: she. Still a little distant – we have known each other only two weeks. A few swims together in the foam; a few evening strolls in the fragrant shade of the cypress trees. A few kisses. She's a princess of the blood -just imagine, Utkin! Even if she is royally indifferent to the fact. I am her bear, her barbarian, all the way from the land of everlasting snows. An ogre! This amuses her…

At this moment she is bored with the long wait of the afternoon. She gets up, crosses to the piano, opens the lid. The slow notes stir as if unwillingly, quiver like butterflies whose wings are weighed down with pollen, and sink into the sun-drenched silence of the empty building…

I stand up in my turn. With the litheness of a wild animal. I am quite naked. Does she sense me drawing close? She does not even turn her head when I embrace her hips. She continues to plunge her long, lazy notes into the air liquefied by the heat.

She pauses and cries out only when she suddenly feels me inside her. And seeking to recover her balance, overtaken by a joyful delirium, she leans on the piano, no longer looking at the keys. With both hands. Her fingers fanned out. A thunderous drunken major chord erupts. And the wild sounds coincide with her first moans. As I penetrate her, I push her, I lift her, I take her weight. Her only point of support is her hands, moving on the keyboard once more… A chord noisier and still more insistent. She is all curved now, her head thrown back, the lower part of her body abandoned to me. Yes, trembling, rippling, like a red-hot mass on a glassblower's pipe. The beads of sweat make this oval of flesh swaying beneath my fingers quite transparent…

And the chords follow one another, more and more staccato, breathless. And her cries answer them in a deafening symphony of pleasure: sunlight, the clangor of the chords, the loud outbursts of her voice, mingling happy sobs with cries of fury. And when she feels me exploding inside her, the symphony breaks up into a stream of shrill and feverish notes, bursting forth beneath her fingers. Her hands drum furiously as she clings to the smooth keys. As if they were clinging to the invisible edge of the pleasure that is already slipping away from her body…

And in this silence, still throbbing with a thousand echoes, I can see her glowing transparent form slowly suffused with the bronzed opacity of repose…

Utkin calls that "raw material." One day he telephoned me from New York and asked me, in a slightly bashful voice, to tell him in a letter about one of my adventures. "Don't polish it," he warned me. "In any case I'll change everything around… What interests me is the raw material."

Utkin writes. He has always dreamed of writing. Even when we were boys in the depths of eastern Siberia. But he lacks subject matter. With his lame leg and his shoulder that sticks up at an acute angle, he has never had any luck in love. This tragic paradox has tortured him since his childhood: why was he the one to be catapulted under blocks of ice in the frenzied breakup of a great river, which crushed his body and then spewed it out, irremediably mutilated? While the other one, myself… And I would murmur the name of the river – Amur – that bears the same name as the god of love, and enter into its cool resonance, as if into the body of a woman in a dream, one created from similar matter, supple, soft, and misty.

All that is long ago now. Utkin writes. He asks me not to polish. I understand him; he wants to be the sole architect. He wants to outwit blind fate. And as for the sea's turquoise incrustations between the branches of the cherry trees – it is he who will add them to my story. I do not make refinements. I present him with my mass of red-hot glass just as it is. I do not engrave it with the point of my chisel or inflate it with my breath. Just as it is: a young woman with a bronzed back, a woman crying out, sobbing with pleasure and beating the clusters of her fingers against the keys of the piano…

2

Beauty was the least of our preoccupations in the land where we were born, Utkin, me, and the others. You could spend your whole life there and never discover whether you were ugly or beautiful, never seek out the secrets of the mosaic of the human face or the mystery of the sensual topography of the human body.

Love, too, did not easily take root in this austere country. Love for love's sake had, I think, simply been forgotten – had atrophied in the bloodbath of the war, been garroted by the barbed-wire entanglements of the nearby camp, frozen by the breath of the Arctic. And if love survived, it took only one form, that of love-as-sin. Always more or less fictitious, it brightened up the routine of harsh winter days. Women muffled up in several shawls would stop in the middle of the village and pass on the exciting news. They believed they were whispering, but because of their shawls they were obliged to shout. And our young ears would pick up the secret being divulged. On this occasion the headmistress of the school had apparently been seen in the cabin of a refrigerator truck… Yes, you know, those broad cabins with a little berth behind them. And the truck had been parked just by the Devil's Bend, yes, the very place where a truck overturns at least once a year. It was impossible to imagine the headmistress, a curt woman of an improbable age, who wore a whole carapace of flannelette-lined garments, romping in the arms of a truckdriver who smelled of cedar resin, tobacco, and gasoline. Especially at the Devil's Bend. But this fantasy of copulation in a cabin with frosted-up windows released little fizzing bubbles into the icy air of the village. The parade of indignation warmed their chilled hearts. And people almost resented the headmistress for not being seen scrambling up into every truck carrying the trunks of huge pine trees through the taiga… The stir aroused by this latest piece of tittle-tattle quickly faded away, as if congealed under the icy wind of endless nights. In our eyes the headmistress became once more as everyone knew her: a woman irremediably alone and resigned to her misery. And the trucks roared by as usual, obsessed with transporting the number of cubic meters of load specified in the plan. The taiga closed in on the brilliance of their headlights. The white breath of the women's voices dissolved in the biting wind. And the village, sobered up from its erotic fantasies, huddled up and settled into the eternity known as "winter."

From the time of its birth, the village was not conceived as a haven for love. The czar's cossacks, who had founded it three centuries earlier, never even thought about it. They were a handful of men overwhelmed with fatigue from their crazy trek into the depths of the endless taiga. The haughty stares of the wolves followed them even into their turbulent dreams. The cold was quite different from that in Russia. It seemed to know no limits. Covered with thick hoarfrost, their beards stood out like ax blades. And if you closed your eyes for a moment, your lashes would not come unstuck. The cossacks cursed in vexation and despair. And their spit tinkled as it fell in little lumps of ice on the dark surface of a motionless river.

Of course, they too experienced love on occasion. There were these women with slanting eyes and impassive faces that seemed as if haunted by mysterious smiles. The cossacks made love to them on bearskins in the smoky darkness of yurts, beside the glowing embers. But the bodies of these taciturn lovers were passing strange. Anointed with reindeer fat, their bodies slipped from your grasp. To hold on to them, you had to twist their long glistening tresses, as black and coarse as a horse's mane, around your fist. Their breasts were flat and round, like the domes of the oldest churches in Kiev, and their hips were firm and resistant. But once tamed by the hand holding back their manes, their bodies no longer slipped away. Their eyes blazed like the cutting edges of sabers, their lips grew rounded, ready to bite. And the scent of their skin, tanned by the fire and the cold, became more and more pungent, intoxicating. And this intoxication did not fade away… The cossack would wind the tresses around his fist a second time. And in the narrow eyes of the woman there flashed a spark of mischief. Has he not drunk a draft of that viscous, brownish infusion – the blood of the Kharg root – which floods your veins with the power of all your ancestors?

Breaking the spell, the cossack would go back to his companions, and for several more days he would be impervious to the bite of the cold. The Kharg root was singing in his veins.

Their goal was always that improbable Far East with its thrilling promise of the land's end: the great misty void, so dear to their souls, that detested constraints, limits, frontiers. In the west, when it had conclusively driven back barbarian Muscovy, Europe had established a line that could not be crossed. And so they had gone headlong toward the east. Hoping to reach the Western World from the other end? The ruse of a neglected admirer? The ploy of a banished lover?

Most of all, though, they were venturers into the misty void. To stop at the land's end in the warm spring dusk and to let their gaze soar up from that ultimate brink toward the shy pallor of the first stars…

After several months, their numbers much reduced since the start, they finally halted, on this extremity of their native Eurasia. There, where the earth, the sky, and the ocean are one… And in a smoke-filled yurt, in the heart of the taiga, where winter still reigned, a woman, whose snake body was horribly distorted, writhed as she expelled an extraordinarily large infant onto a bearskin. He had slanting eyes like his mother, and prominent cheekbones like all his kinsmen. But his damp hair glistened. A flash of dark gold.

And the people thronged around the young mother in silent contemplation of this new Siberian.

What had come down to us of this mythical past was but a remote legend. An echo muted by the confused hubbub of the centuries. In our imaginations the cossacks had still not finished hacking a route for themselves through the virgin taiga. And a young Yakut girl, clad in a short sable coat, was forever rummaging in the tangle of stems and branches in search of the famous Kharg root… It was surely no coincidence if the power that dreams, songs, and legends had over our barbarian hearts was irresistible. Our own life was turning into a dream!

And yet in our day all that was left of this memory of the centuries was a heap of worm-eaten wood on top of granite blocks covered in lichen. The ruins of the church built by the descendants of the cossacks and dynamited during the Revolution. Or elsewhere rusty nails, as thick as a man's thumb, driven into the trunks of huge cedar trees. Even the old people of the village retained only a very vague memory of these: sometimes it was the Whites who had brutally executed a group of partisans by having them hanged from these nails; sometimes it was the Reds who had meted out revolutionary justice… The nails, and the bits of rotted rope, had risen, over long years, to twice a man's height, in accordance with the slow and stately growth of the cedars. To our marveling eyes the Reds and the Whites, who had gone in for these cruel hangings, had the stature of giants…

The village had not contrived to preserve anything of its past. From the start of the century, history, like a titanic pendulum, had begun to sweep fearsomely to and fro across the empire. The men went away; the women dressed in black. The pendulum kept the measure of passing time: the war against Japan; the war against Germany; the Revolution; the civil war… And then once again, but in reverse order: the war against the Germans; the war against the Japanese. And the men went away, now crossing the twelve thousand leagues of the empire to fill the trenches in the west, now disappearing into the misty void of the ocean to the east. The pendulum swung westward, and the Whites drove the Reds back beyond the Urals, beyond the Volga. Its weight returned, sweeping across Siberia: now the Reds drove the Whites back toward the Far East. They hammered nails into the trunks of cedar trees and dynamited churches – as if all the better to assist the pendulum in wiping out every trace of the past.

One day the mighty swing even catapulted men from our own village toward that fabled Western World that had long since marked itself off from barbaric Muscovy. From the Volga they traveled as far as Berlin, paving the route with their corpses. There in Berlin the crazy clock stopped for an instant – a short moment of victory. Then the survivors returned toward the east: now accounts had to be settled with Japan…

Ever since our childhood, however, the pendulum seemed to have stuck. It was as if its immense weight had become entangled in the innumerable lines of barbed-wire fencing stretched across its path. Indeed, there was a camp about a dozen miles from our village. There was a place on the road leading to the town where the taiga opened up and in the cold glitter of the fog you could see the silhouettes of the watchtowers. How many of these snares strewn across the empire did the pendulum encounter as it swung? God alone knows.

The village, depopulated, did not amount to more than a score of izbas. There, close by that pent-up mass of human lives, it seemed to be asleep. The camp, a black speck amid the endless snows…

A child needs very little in order to construct its personal universe: a few natural landmarks whose harmony it can readily uncover and which it arranges into a coherent world. It was thus that the microcosm of our young years organized itself. We knew the place in a deep thicket in the taiga where a stream arose, emerging from the dark mirror of an underground wellspring. This stream – the Brook as everyone called it – circled the village and flowed into the river near the abandoned bathhouse: a river that wound its way between two dark walls of the taiga, wide and deep. It had a proper name, Olyei, and figured in a broader geographical role, since the direction in which it flowed marked the north-south line, and a long way from the village it met up with a mighty river: the river Amur. This was marked on the dusty globe that our old geography teacher occasionally showed to us. In our primitive microcosm, the human habitations were also arranged according to this hierarchy of three levels: our village, Svetlaya; then, six miles from the village, farther downstream on the Olyei, Kazhdai, a district center; and finally, on the great river itself, the only real city, Nerlug, which had a store where you could even buy lemonade in bottles…

The upheavals caused by the pendulum had made the population of the village very motley, despite the primitive simplicity of its existence. Among us there was a former "kulak," exiled here during the collectivization of the Ukraine in the thirties; a family of old believers, the Klestovs, who lived in fierce isolation, hardly talking to anyone else; and a ferryman, Verbin, who had only one arm and who always told the same story to his passengers. He was one of the first to have inscribed his name on the walls of the conquered Reichstag; and it was at that ecstatic moment of victory that a stray shell splinter had severed his right arm – when he was only halfway through his name!

The pendulum had also crushed families. There were hardly any complete ones apart from that of the old believers. My friend Utkin lived with his mother, alone. As long as he was a child and could not understand, she would tell him that his father had been a pilot in the war and that he had perished in a kamikaze attack, hurling his blazing plane at a column of German tanks. But one day Utkin had realized that since he was born twelve years after the war, it was physically impossible for him to have had such a father. Mortified, he said this to his mother. She explained, blushing, that it had been the Korean War… Fortunately, there was no shortage of wars.

As for myself, I had only my aunt… The pendulum in its flight must have scraped the frozen soil of our land and uncovered rivers with golden sand. Or perhaps some of the gilding on its heavy disk had rubbed off on the rough earth… My aunt had no need to invent aeronautical exploits. My father, a geologist, had followed the pendulum's gilded trail. He must secretly have hoped to discover some new gold-bearing terrain for the day of my birth. His body was never found. And my mother died in labor…

As for Samurai, who was fifteen at this time, neither Utkin nor I could ever properly understand who the hook-nosed old woman was in whose izba he lived. His mother? His grandmother? He always called her by her first name and cut short all our attempts to learn anything more about her.

The pendulum stopped swinging. And the life of the village was gradually reduced to three essential matters: timber, gold, and the chill shadow of the camp. It was beyond us to imagine our futures unfolding outside these three prime elements. One day, we thought, we would have to join the men who disappeared into the taiga with their toothed chain saws. Some of these loggers had come to our icy hell in pursuit of the "northern bonus," the premium that doubled their meager wages. Others – prisoners on parole on condition of good work and exemplary conduct – counted not rubles but days… Or perhaps we would be among those gold prospectors we sometimes saw coming into the workers' canteen: huge fox-fur shapkas; short fur coats, held in with broad belts; gigantic boots lined with smooth, glistening fur. It was said that among them were some who "stole gold from the state." Yes, they washed sand on unknown terrains and disposed of their nuggets on a mysterious "black market." As children, we were certainly much tempted by such a future.

There was one more choice open to us: to freeze there in the chill shadow, aiming an automatic rifle from the top of a watch-tower at the ranks of prisoners drawn up beside their huts. Or ourselves disappear into the seething humanity of those barrack huts…

All the latest news in Svetlaya revolved around those three elements: taiga, gold, shadow. We would learn that once again a gang of loggers had disturbed a bear in its lair and escaped by piling, all six of them, into the cabin of their tractor. There was talk of the record weight of a gold nugget "as big as your fist." And there were whispers of yet another escapee… Then came the season of violent snowstorms, and even this thin trickle of information was interrupted. Now the talk was of strictly local news: an electric cable that had snapped, traces of wolves found near the barn. Finally, one day, the village did not wake up…

The villagers got up, prepared breakfast. And suddenly they surprised a strange silence reigning around their izbas. No crunch of footsteps in the snow; no wind whistling around the roof edges, no dogs barking. Nothing. A cotton-wool silence, opaque, absolute. This deaf outside world filtered out all the household sounds that normally went unnoticed. You could hear the sighing of a kettle on the stove, the slight, regular hiss of a lightbulb. We listened, my aunt and I, to the unfathomable depth of this silence. We looked at the clock with its weights. Normally the day should have dawned by then. With our foreheads pressed against the windowpane, we peered into the darkness. The window was completely blocked by snow. Then we rushed to the entrance hall and, already anticipating the unimaginable, which recurred almost every winter, we opened the door…

A wall of snow rose on the threshold of our izba. The village was entirely buried.

With a yell of wild joy, I seized hold of a shovel. No school! No homework! A day of happy chaos awaited us.

I began by digging out a narrow section; then, by packing down the light and feathery snow, I fashioned steps. From time to time my aunt sprinkled the depths of my cavern with hot water from the kettle to ease my task. I was climbing up slowly, compelled at times to proceed almost horizontally. My aunt encouraged me from the threshold of the izba, begging me not to go too fast. I was beginning to be short of breath, I experienced a strange giddiness, my bare hands were burning, my pulse was throbbing heavily in my temples. The light of the dim bulb coming from the izba now scarcely reached the corner where I was hacking away.

Dripping with sweat, despite the snow that surrounded me, I felt as if I were within warm and protective entrails. My body seemed to have memories of prenatal darkness. My brain, dulled by the lack of air, feebly suggested to me that it might have been sensible to go back down into the izba to recover my breath…

It was at that moment that my head pierced the crusty surface of the snow! I closed my eyes; the light was blinding.

Infinite calm reigned over the sun-drenched plain: the serenity of nature at rest after the turmoil of the night. Now the blue distances of the taiga were clearly revealed: it seemed to be asleep in the sweet air. And above the glittering expanse, white columns of smoke arose from invisible chimneys.

The first men appeared, emerging from the snow, and stood up. With dazed looks they took in the glittering desert now spread out where the village had been. Laughing, we hugged one another, pointing at the smoke – it was really comic to picture somebody cooking a meal under six feet of snow! A dog bounded out of the tunnel and seemed to be equally bemused by the unaccustomed spectacle… I saw Klestov, the old believer, appearing. He turned toward the east, crossed himself slowly, then greeted everyone with an air of exaggerated dignity.

Little by little the village rediscovered its familiar sounds. The few men of Svetlaya, helped by all the rest of us, began to dig corridors linking the izbas with one another and opened up the path to the well.

We knew that this abundance of snow in our country of dry cold had been brought by winds that blew from the misty void of the ocean. We also knew that the storm had been the very first sign of spring. The sunlight of this mild spell would soon beat down the snow, would reduce it to heavy piles below our windows. And the cold weather would begin again, even more extreme, as if to take revenge on this brief interval of light abandon. But spring would come! We were sure of it now. A spring as brilliant and sudden as the light that had blinded us as we emerged from our tunnels.

And spring did come: one fine day the village broke its moorings. Our river began to move. Vast acres of ice began their stately procession. Their progress grew faster; the glittering layers of water dazzled us. The raw smell of the ice mingled with the wind from the steppes. And the earth slipped away under our feet. And it was our village, with its izbas, its worm-eaten fences, its sails of multicolored linen on the lines, it was Svetlaya that was embarking on a joyful cruise.

The eternity of winter was coming to an end.

The voyage did not last long. A few weeks later the river returned to its bed and the village landed on the shores of a fleeting Siberian summer. And during this brief interlude the sun spilled out the warm scent of cedar resin. We talked of nothing now but the taiga.

It was in the course of one of our expeditions into the heart of the taiga that Utkin discovered the Kharg root…

With his lame leg, he always lagged behind us. From time to time he would call out to Samurai and me: "Hey, wait up!" Understandingly we would slacken our pace.

This time instead of his usual "Wait up!" he gave a long whistle of surprise. We turned back.

How could he have unearthed it, this root that only the expert eyes of the Yakut women could manage to detect in the soft layer of the humus? Maybe thanks to his leg. His left foot, which he dragged along like a rake, dug up extraordinary things, often without his being aware of it…

We looked closely at the Kharg root. Without admitting it to ourselves, we sensed that there was something feminine about its shape. It was, in fact, a kind of plump, dark-hued pear, with a skin like suede, slightly cracked, the underside was covered in purplish down. From top to bottom the root was divided by a groove that resembled the line of a vertebral column.

The Kharg was very pleasant to touch. Its velvety skin seemed to respond to contact with the fingers. This bulb with its sensual contours hinted at a strange life that animated its mysterious interior.

Intrigued by its secret, I made a scratch on its chubby surface with my thumbnail. A blood-red liquid poured into the scratch mark. We exchanged puzzled looks. "Let me see," demanded Samurai, taking the Kharg from my hands.

He produced his knife and cut into the bulb of the root of love, following the groove. Then, thrusting his thumbs into the down at the base of the fleshy oval, he pulled them apart smartly.

We heard a kind of brief creak – like the sound of a door frozen fast with ice when it finally yields under pressure.

We all bent forward to get a better view. Within a pinkish fleshy lap we saw a long, pale leaf. It was curled up with that moving delicacy often encountered in nature. And it inspired mixed feelings in us: to destroy, to smash this useless harmony, or… We really did not know what should be done with it. And thus for several moments we gazed at the leaf; it was reminiscent of the transparency and fragility of the wings of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

Even Samurai seemed vaguely embarrassed, faced with this unexpected and disconcerting beauty.

Finally, with a brisk movement, he stuck the two halves of the Kharg together and thrust the root into a pocket of his knapsack.

"I'll ask Olga," he called out to us as he moved off. "She must have heard of it…"

3

WE lived in a strange universe, without women. The discovery of the bulb of love simply brought this reality out into the open.

Yes, there were a few shadowy figures who were often dear to us; we were fond of them. But for us they had no feminine aura. My aunt; Utkin's mother; old Olga… Some of the faces of the women teachers at the school located at Kazhdai. Their femininity had long since been eroded in the harsh business of daily resisting the cold, the solitude, the absence of any foreseeable change. No, they were not ugly. Utkin's mother, for example, had a fine pale face, with a kind of ethereal transparency in her features. But did she know this herself? It is only long afterward, seeing her again in my memory, that I have been able to perceive this: yes, she could have been attractive, desirable. But attractive to whom? Desirable where? Cold, darkness, the eternity known as "winter"… And the pendulum had gone to sleep, enmeshed in the ice-covered barbed wire.

It happened that, owing to the chance of some allocation decided a thousand leagues from our village, a young woman teacher found herself at our school. A rare commodity. A figure who became the focus of intense curiosity. But we detected such anguish on her face, such a desire to escape as quickly as possible, that we ourselves were made uneasy by it: was our life really so unbearable? Her anguish distorted her features. Her beauty, her fascinating strangeness, became blurred beneath this grimace of terror. We all felt that she was mentally counting the days – she looked at us as if we were already in the past. People who figured in an unhappy memory. Characters in a nightmare.

And the men, in thrall to those three elements – taiga, gold, and the shadow of the watchtowers – were doing their counting as well… in cubic meters of cedarwood or kilograms of gold-bearing sand. They, too, dreamed of a completely different existence, when all this counting was over; of a life ten thousand leagues distant from this country – beyond the Urals, at the other end of the empire. They would mention the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Crimea. As their saws bit into the aromatic flesh of the cedar trees, they seemed to be shrieking: "Crrr-i-mea," out of yearning for it. And the dredging machines of the gold prospectors echoed them as they dug: "Crrr-i-mea."

And as for love… The only word we ever heard them use was "have." Not "have a night with," which might have evoked the occasion. Still less "have an affair"; that might even have suggested a process of seduction; but simply "have a woman." Lurking in a corner of the workers' canteen, behind our glasses of stewed fruit, we listened to them exchanging secrets and were always desperately disappointed by them. Their stories only told us of one thing: that one of them had "had" an unknown woman. No backdrops, no portraits, no erotic imagery. They did not even bother trying to characterize their exploits by using one of the obscene verbs that regularly reverberated in their throats, burned with vodka and the wind.

"Huh! I've had her, that little Yakut…"

"You know that Maria on the cash till? I've had her." We hoped at least for some details: What was she like, that young Yakut woman? Beneath her fur coat hardened by the fierce hoarfrosts, her body must have seemed particularly warm and smooth. And her hair must have had the scent of cedar smoke; and her strong, slightly curved legs and her muscular thighs doubtless made her groin a veritable trap that closed in on her lover's body… We awaited just one of these revelations so feverishly! But the men had already started talking about cubic meters of wood, or a tube that needed to be extended so that the nuggets could be dislodged more readily… We swallowed the soft fruits in our stew noisily, we cracked the apricot stones with the heavy handles of our knives. And chewing on the kernels, we went out into the icy wind, with a bitter taste on our lips.

Love seemed to us to be something carved from the gray dusk of a dreary district center, where all the streets led out into wastelands covered by wet sawdust.

And then one day we had this encounter in the heart of the taiga. It was the same summer that Utkin's injured foot had unearthed the love root. I was just fourteen, and I still did not know whether I was ugly or handsome, or whether there was any more to love than "I've had her."

On the bank of a river, on a hot August afternoon, we had lit a wood fire. Casting off our clothes, we hurled ourselves into the water. Despite the sun, it was icy cold. A few moments later we were already warming ourselves by the fire. Then once more a dive and quickly the burning caress of the flames. It was the only way to spend all day in the water. Utkin – he never bathed because of his leg – kept the fire going, and we two, Samurai and I, stark naked, would pit ourselves against the rapid current of the Olyei. Then, our teeth chattering, we rushed back toward the fire, jostling each other but never forgetting to bring a little water in the hollow of our palms. We hurled it at Utkin so that he could share in our pleasure. Dragging his leg, he would try clumsily to dodge these cascades that flashed in the air like fleeting rainbows. The drops of water scattered over the fire. Utkin's cries of outrage were mingled with the furious hissing of the flames.

Then came the moment of great silence. Our frozen bodies were gradually impregnated with the heat. The smoke enveloped us, tickled our nostrils. We stood stock-still, in the contented torpor of basking lizards. With the transparent dance of the flames. The plenitude of the sun caressing our wet hair. The piercing cold of the river, its rippling, lulling melody. And around us the infinite quiet of the taiga. Its slow breathing, its blue-tinted immensity, dense and profound…

It was the throbbing of the engine that shattered our blissful trance. We did not even have time to pick up our clothes. A four-wheel-drive loomed up on the riverbank, turned in a rapid curve, and stopped a few paces from our wood fire.

Samurai and I had barely enough time to cross our hands over our crotches; then we froze, caught off guard in our languid nakedness.

The vehicle had its top down. Apart from the driver, there were two passengers, two young women. One of them in the parked vehicle held out a large plastic bottle to the driver. The man opened his door and set off toward the river.

Dumbfounded, keeping our genitals covered, we stared at the two strangers. The women got up from their seats and perched themselves on the folded top. As if to get a better look at us. Seated on the ground at the other side of the fire, Utkin awaited the outcome of the scene with a mischievous smile, meanwhile stuffing blueberries into his mouth.

The two young women were, no doubt, fledgling geologists; their companion too. Probably students who had come for a period of training on the terrain. Their relaxed air, as of city dwellers, fascinated us.

They stared at us with little sign of embarrassment over our nudity. With the curiosity one has for wild animals at the zoo. They were blond. Our eyes, unaccustomed to differentiating women's taces with precision, took them for twin sisters…

At length one of them, whose stare was more insistent, said to her colleague with a grin: "That little one, he looks like a real angel."

And she gave a slight nudge with her shoulder, glancing at her companion roguishly.

The other one stared at me, but without smiling. I noticed a subtle fluttering of her long eyelashes.

"Yes, an angel, but with little horns," she replied with slight irritation, and without paying us any further attention, she slid down onto her seat.

The driver returned, the full bottle in his hand. The first blond woman, before settling down in her turn, continued to look at me with a persistent smile. And I felt the touch of her look on my lips, on my eyebrows, on my chest, almost physically… At that moment the twin sisters became two totally different women to me. One of them, reserved and sensitive, who seemed as if she had a tense string within her, was a fragile blonde, reminiscent of the splinters of crystal we found in the rocks. The other was amber, warm, enveloping, sensual. So women, too, could be different!

Samurai jerked me out of my reverie by splashing my back with long cold gushes. He was already in the water.

"Utkin," he shouted. "Push him in the drink! I'm going to drown this bare-assed Don Juan!"

"Who's that?" I asked, taking the name for some swear word that was unknown to me.

But Samurai did not reply. He was already swimming toward the opposite bank… We often heard such strange words on his lips. They were doubtless all part of the Olga mystery.

Utkin, instead of pushing me, came up to me and muttered in a dull, broken voice: "Go on, then, swim! What are you waiting for?"

He looked at me. And for the first time I noticed that sorrowful, questioning glint: that effort to fathom the sense of the mosaic of beauty… Then, turning away, he started throwing fresh branches on the fire.

On the way home, I noticed that even Samurai had been affected by the encounter alongside the wood fire. He was trying to find an excuse to talk about the two strangers.

"They must be on the faculty at Novosibirsk," he declared, not finding a better opening gambit.

Novosibirsk, the capital city of Siberia, was almost as unreal to us as the Crimea. Anything that was located to the west of Lake Baikal was already redolent of the Western World.

Samurai was silent. Then, giving me a coarsely flippant look, he remarked: "I'll bet he has those two every day, that driver!"

"Sure, he has them," I said, eager to echo his opinion, as well as his man-of-the-world tone of voice.

The conversational exchange stopped there. We sensed something deeply false in our words. It should have been said differently. But how? Should I speak of the tense string, the crystal, the amber? Samurai would certainly have taken me for a madman…

Utkin only caught up with us close to the ferry. In the taiga, as always, he dragged his foot a hundred yards behind us. But for once we had not heard any of his usual shouts. It was we, in turn, who tried anxiously to make out his figure among the dark tree trunks, as we yelled: "Hey, Utkin! The wolves haven't eaten you up, have they? Ow-ooo!"

The ferry over the Olyei – a great raft of blackened logs – provided a shuttle in summer three times a day. The left bank was us, Svetlaya, the East. The right bank was Nerlug, with its brick houses and the Red October cinema. In short, a more or less civilized city, antechamber to the Western World…

The passengers on the ferry were for the most part returning from the city. Their shopping bags were crammed "with paper-wrapped packages of provisions that could not be found in the village.

The one-armed ferryman, Verbin, grasped a great paddle with a special groove in it and began to pull on the steel cable, jamming it adroitly. Passing through iron rings on the handrail of the ferry, the cable guided us toward the opposite bank. Samurai took the auxiliary paddle to assist the ferryman.

I sat on the planks that covered the raft. I listened to the soft lapping of the water and absentmindedly watched the village drawing nearer, with its low izbas surrounded by gardens, the maze of paths and fences, the blue smoke rising from a chimney.

The sun was setting above the right bank, on the city side, that of the distant Lake Baikal, that of the Western World. And our village was completely bathed in its coppery light.

When we reached the middle of the river, Utkin nudged me with his elbow, indicating something in the distance with a swift movement of his chin.

I followed his gaze. On the bank where we were to land I saw the figure of a woman. I recognized her easily. She was standing at the water's edge, shading her eyes with her hand and watching the ferry as it slipped slowly across the orange flood of the setting sun.

It was Vera. She lived in a little izba at the edge of the village. Everyone said she was mad. We knew she would stand like that until all the passengers had alighted on the bank and started climbing toward the village. Then she would approach the ferryman and ask him a question in a low voice. Nobody knew either what she said to him or what Verbin replied to her.

For years and years she had been making her way down to the riverbank, waiting for someone who could come only in summer, in the evening, with the dreamlike slowness of this old ferry blackened by time. She watched, certain that one day she would make out his face in the midst of the crowd in its Sunday best.

When the ferry was close to shore, Samurai abandoned his paddle and came to join us. Like us, he was watching the woman waiting for the ferry to arrive.

"Hey! She must really have loved him!" he said, shaking his head with conviction.

We were the first to jump out onto the sand. And as we passed close to Vera, what we saw in her somber eyes was the death of hope for that day…

The sun, now stranded on top of the taiga on the western bank, might have been the gilded disk of that immobilized pendulum. Time had stood still. The vast swings of days gone by had narrowed down to the back and forth of an old ferry guided by a rusty cable…

When I reached the izba, I took a mirror with an oval frame out of my aunt's chest of drawers and studied myself in it, taking advantage of the pale luminosity of the summer twilight. This study, I knew, was unworthy of a real man. I did not dare to imagine all the taunts of Samurai and Utkin if they had chanced to catch me at this occupation for ladies. But the words of the two blond women were still ringing in my ears: "An angel"… "but with little horns." The dull oval, which was slowly growing dim, was crammed with many secrets. So the features it reflected could be loved… and make a woman mad… and bring her back to the riverbank over long years, with an impossible hope…

A strange confirmation of my first intimations of love came to me on the anniversary of the Revolution.

My aunt had invited three of her best friends, two of whom, like her, worked on the railroad as switch operators; the third worked as a sales clerk in a food store in Kazhdai. They were all single women.

On the table, on a great china dish, there was a block of pork in aspic, looking like a cube of grayish, shiny ice; cold sauerkraut, reasoned with oil and garnished with cranberries; gherkins, of course; stroganina, the fish gelatinized and cut into transparent slices that you eat raw; potatoes with fresh cream; beef rissoles grilled in the stove. And vodka, which they mixed with blueberry syrup.

The sales clerk had brought pancakes, little biscuits, and chocolates, otherwise impossible to find, that she had saved up.

The women drank; as their voices grew soft, it was as if one could hear the chink of the ice breaking, melting. Long live the Revolution! Despite the rivers of blood, it had given birth to this fleeting moment of happiness… Don't think about all the rest! It's too hard; don't think about it anymore! Not this evening, at least… It won't bring back their dear faces; or that handful of happy days; or those kisses redolent of the first snows – or was it the last? It's hard to remember now. Or the eyes in which you could see the clouds hurrying toward Lake Baikal, toward the Urals, toward siege-struck Moscow. They set off in pursuit of those clouds, caught up with them at the walls of Moscow, in the frozen fields gutted by the tanks. And they stopped them with their wide-open eyes, staring at them forever as they floated lightly westward. Lying in a frozen rut, their faces buried in the black sky…

But let's not speak of it. The first snows, the last snows…

Hold on, Tanya, let me give you this piece; it's not so burned… I had a couple of letters from him, and then… Don't think about it… Two letters in two years… Let's not think about it…

Perched on the broad, warm surface of the great stone stove, on top of which were piled old felt boots, a woolen blanket, and two limp pillows, I was drowsing. I knew them by heart, these conversations that were forever slipping off into their wartime past. They tried to get away from it and began to talk about the latest village news. Apparently, they said, the headmistress had been seen again with… now, what is his name?

It was the singing that came and rescued them from the clouds frozen in the eyes of their fleeting lovers and the gossip several years old. Their voices grew bright, soared. And I was always surprised to see the extent to which these women, these shadowy figures from another era, could suddenly become grave and remote… They sang, and in the haze of my sleep I could picture the horseman battling through a snowstorm and his fair one waiting for him at the dark window. And that other lovesick damsel, begging the wild geese to carry her words to her true love, who has gone "beyond the steppes, beyond the blue sea." And I began to dream of all that might he hidden beyond this blue sea that had suddenly surged up in our snowbound izba…

My aunt always checked to see if I had gone to sleep before they began to talk about the headmistress's imaginary cavortings. "Mitya!" she would call, turning her head toward the stove. "Are you asleep?" I did not reply. And for good reason. I was absolutely determined not to miss the recital of the latest adventures of the only woman deemed to be capable of having any. I remained silent. I was listening.

This time I heard my aunt's question once again. And then her sigh.

"And there's another worry," she said in a low voice. "As if I didn't have enough on my plate. The girls are soon going to start clinging to him like burrs to a dog's tail. I can see it coming already…"

"That's right," agreed the sales clerk. "With his good looks, Petrovna, you'll have more fiancees than you know what to do with…"

"Oh yes, they'll soon spoil him for you, your Dmitri," put in another friend.

I raised myself on one elbow, listening avidly. Spoil me! I was desperate for a set of instructions for this appalling activity, which I sensed must be intensely voluptuous. But they had already begun to talk about a good recipe for salted mushrooms…

And I was left feeling that even the limp pillow beneath my cheek concealed, within the warmth of its stuffing, a strange disguised concupiscence. The promise of some fabulous night when the hours, the darkness… and even the air would have the consistency of flesh and the taste of desire. I saw myself on the banks of the Olyei. Standing stark naked in front of a wood fire. My body pierced through with the icy cold of the water. And one of the blond strangers – crystal or amber: I no longer knew which – was standing on the other side of the flames, naked as well. And she smiled at me, bathed in sunlight, in the rich scent of cedar resin, in the bottomless silence of the taiga. I entered ever more deeply into that moment. I stretched out my hand across the fire to touch that of the stranger… The bank suddenly became white, the silence of the taiga wintry. And the slow eddying of the snowflakes enveloped our bodies in muted sunlight.

4

That winter Samurai and I formed the habit of going to the baths together…

Despite his air of a village tough guy, he was quite a sensitive person. The attitude of the two blond women when we were bathing in the summer had not been lost on him. From that encounter onward he started to treat me as his equal. Even though I had only been fourteen at the time! While he was almost sixteen. A difference that to me seemed infinite.

Utkin never came with us. He washed at baths closer to his izba. He was afraid of freezing his leg.

The baths we went to every Sunday were not different in any way from the others. The little izba was divided into two unequal sections: a small entrance hall, where we left our clothes and our felt boots, then a square room with a bench along one wall and a great stove that heated an enormous cast-iron vessel. We filled it with water from the Brook. All around this bowl was piled up a great heap of pebbles, which quickly became burning hot and had to be sprinkled so that the room should be engulfed in hot steam. Finally there was a kind of little mezzanine, made from two wooden planks, on which you took turns stretching out while your companion whipped you with a bunch of fine birch twigs dipped in the bubbling water. These bunches had been hung up to dry since the summer, under the ceiling in the entrance hall. It was their leaves that, when swollen by the boiling water, made the whole room fragrant with their penetrating scent.

Yes, there was nothing special about the baths. Except that they were located not at the bottom of a kitchen garden but some distance from the village, on the riverbank where the Brook flowed into the Olyei. The izba had been abandoned for years. We had cleaned the great cast-iron bowl and repaired the sunken door. Once established as our Sunday headquarters, the bathhouse seemed to be preparing, through the alchemy of its vapors, for the astonishing transmutation of our bodies…

The cold was such that evening that when we arrived we could no longer feel our numb fingers.

"Forty-eight below!" Samurai exclaimed happily as he slid down the icy path that led toward our baths. "I looked as I went out."

"It'll go down to at least fifty below tonight, that's for sure," I added, understanding his delight very well.

The stars glittered with a shimmering, provocative fragility. The snow spurted up under our feet with a dry, sonorous whispering.

The door was frozen solid. We pushed at it with all our strength. It gave way with a rending squeal, like a smashed windowpane. We lit a candle stuck to the bottom of an empty can. Around its hesitant flame there glowed an iridescent halo. Squatting down, Samurai began to fill the stove: I tore off the birch bark that was needed for the first flames.

Little by little the icy interior of the dark room was coming back to life. Its somber walls, made of logs, became warm. Above the bowl a fine cloud of steam arose.

Samurai filled a ladle and sprinkled the pebbles. The angry hiss was a good sign. We went to undress in the entrance hall, which now seemed arctic…

A true bath should resemble hell. The flames dart through the little door of the stove. As the pebbles are sprinkled more and more copiously, they hiss like a thousand serpents. The planks become slippery. Movements, in the darkness, become clumsy. And as for the bunches of birch twigs, they are a veritable torture! But also an intense pleasure. It is my turn first. I stretch out on the narrow planks of the mezzanine, and Samurai begins to whip me with fury. He dips his bunch of twigs into the boiling water and lashes my back with it. I yell with pain and joy. The fine and supple twigs seem to penetrate between my ribs. My mind is dulled. The steam grows hotter and hotter. With satanic relish, Samurai continues to riddle my back with smarting stabs. Nor does he forget to empty a ladle over the burning pebbles from time to time. For several seconds the fresh cloud of steam hides my torturer…

At length my mind, annihilated by the excess of pain and pleasure, announced to me in its final message that I no longer had a body. It was true! Where my body had once been I experienced a blissful absence, a delicious void made up of misty shadow, of the slightly piquant aroma of birch leaves macerated in boiling water. And also of the rhythmic strokes of the twigs, which were now striking a vacuum, passing through me as if I were air…

At that moment, exhausted, Samurai stopped, let fall the bunch of twigs, and stretched out on the planks at right angles to mine. I performed my task while remaining a stranger to my body. It was my arms that rose and fell, flagellating Samurai's muscular back as he groaned with pleasure. Everything happened without my being aware of it…

Strangely enough, it was Samurai's great body that first revealed to me how naked flesh could be beautiful.

The steam was so burning hot that we could no longer breathe. Our heads buzzed, and red bubbles swelled and burst in our eyes. It was time to perform the essential act.

We opened the door to the room, then that to the entrance hall. We rushed outside under the resonant, trembling stars, into the dense cold of the night…

A second later we stopped, naked, at the base of the slope that led down toward the Olyei. One, two, three! and we flung ourselves backward into the virgin snow. We felt no cold. For we no longer had bodies.

The crystalline sound of the stars. The dull sound of our heartbeats. Our hearts seem as if they are abandoned, all alone, sunk in the pure, dry snow. The dark sky draws us into its abyss, crammed with constellations.

An instant… And then the wisps of steam that had been rising above us vanished. We began to feel our skin being burned by the melted snow, our shoulders and our wet hair being tugged at by the crust of ice already forming…

We returned to our bodies.

And jumping to our feet with one bound, so as not to spoil the fine imprints we had made in the snow, we ran toward the baths…

That evening Samurai was seated as usual in his favorite tub. It was made of copper that he polished from time to time with sand from the river: almost a little bathtub. He folded up his long legs and immersed himself. I stretched out on a bench.

The room seemed quite different after our mad excursion under the icy sky The heat was no longer suffocating but swathed our rediscovered bodies pleasantly. The scents were still vivid but more distinct, clarified. It was so delicious to inhale the warm, dry breath of the stones and then, turning one's head slightly, to ingest the scent of a bunch of birch twigs left in the bowl. And to follow the slow progress through the darkness of another odor, that of the bark burning in the stove.

After the frenzy of hell, after the moment of disappearance under the stars, this room, filled with a soft, warm half-light, would become a strange paradise for us as night approached. We would remain still for a long time, dreaming. Then Samurai would light his cigar…

He Ht one that evening too. A real Havana, which he drew out of a tube of fine aluminum. I knew cigars like that were sold only in the city, in Nerlug, twenty-three miles from our village, and that they cost sixty kopecks each, including the tube – a fortune! Four school lunches!

But Samurai seemed not to be concerned about the price. He stretched out his arm, seized the ax that was lying near the stove, and, resting his fat cigar on the flat edge of the bathtub, cut off a stray end with a swift and precise action.

After the first puff he settled still more comfortably into the water and announced without preamble, gazing up at the blackened ceiling of the izba: "Olga says that all those little muzhiks who smoke their little cigs, their stinking cigarettes, don't know how to live."

"How do you mean, they don't know how to live?" I asked, lifting my head up from the bench.

"They settle for mediocrity."

"What?"

"Yes, they all want to be average. She's got it right. They all imitate one another. An average job. An average wife. They're average in bed. Mediocrities, you see…"

"And you?"

"I smoke cigars."

"It costs more, is that it?"

"Not just that. Smoking a cigar is a – um – a… it's an aesthetic act."

"What?"

"How can I explain it? Olga knows how to say it…"

"Aesthet… What's that?"

"Well, it's the way. Everything depends on the way you do things and not what you do."

"Well, that's obvious. Or we'd have been flogging each other with nettles…"

"Hm… Only you see, Juan, Olga says beauty begins when the way becomes everything. When only the way matters. We weren't flogging each other so as to get clean. Do you understand?"

"No, not really…"

Samurai was silent. The aromatic cloud from his cigar drifted above his tub. I sensed that he was trying to find words to express what Olga had explained to him.

"Look," he murmured finally, inhaling a puff, with his eyes half closed. "For example, she says that when you are with a woman, you don't need to have a prick as big as that!" Samurai grabbed the ax and brandished its long, slightly curved handle. "That's not what counts…"

"She talked to you about that?"

"Sure… Well, not in those words."

I raised myself on my bench to get a better look at Samurai. I hoped that he was going to reveal a great mystery.

"So. What does count when you 'have' a woman?" I asked in a falsely neutral voice, so as not to disturb his confidences.

Samurai remained silent, then, as if he was disappointed in advance by my incomprehension, he replied a little curtly: "Harmony."

"Huh? Harmony…How?"

"Everything being in harmony – lights, smells, colors…" He stirred in his tub. Turning toward me, he warmed to his theme: "Olga says a woman's body makes time stand still. By its beauty. Everyone else is running and jumping around… and you, you live in that beauty…"

He went on talking, at first hesitantly, then in an increasingly assured voice. He probably had not understood what Olga had confided to him until he began to explain it to me.

I listened absentmindedly. I thought I caught the main drift. What I was seeing again now was the face of the blond stranger on the riverbank. Yes, there was a harmony: the rippling of the Olyei, its coldness, the aromatic breath of the wood fire, the pregnant silence of the taiga. And that feminine presence intensely concentrated in the soft curve of the blond stranger's neck as I stared at her over the dance of the flames.

"Otherwise, Juan, you know, love would be like it is with the animals. Do you remember last summer at the farm?"

Yes, I remembered. It was one of the first warm days of spring. On the way back from school we were crossing the neighboring kolkhoz. Suddenly the furious bellowing of a cow exploded within a long building made of logs, a barn rising up out of thick mud composed of a mixture of snow and dung.

"They must be slaughtering it, the bastards," exclaimed Utkin indignandy, his face distorted with dismay.

Samurai uttered a brief guffaw and beckoned us to follow him. We drew close to the half-open door, lifting our boots with difficulty out of the clinging mud.

Inside, in a section separated from the rest of the barn by a solid barrier of thick planks, we saw a russet cow with fine white patches on its belly. Its legs were shackled. Its head – the horns were cut – was tied to the planks of the barrier. The cow was moving heavily within its enclosure. And an enormous bull was heaving itself up onto the cow's rump with ponderous and ferocious clumsiness. Three men, with the aid of thick ropes, were guiding this relentless assault. The bull had a ring through its nostrils, with a chain attached to it that was being held by one of the men. The bull was uttering ferocious roars as it trampled the muddy ground with its hind feet while with the other two it held the cow's back. That animal's body was supported by a kind of prop, so that its legs should not be broken under this monstrous weight.

The erect thing beneath the bull's belly held our gaze mesmerized on account of the mightiness of its gnarled, purplish shaft. This shaft, glistening with dark blood, was beating heavily against the cow's white rump. A man gave a shout to the one standing closest to the bull. Amid the agitation and trampling, the man addressed seemed not to hear him.

It was at this moment that the bull uttered a deafening groan. We saw the enormous shaft beneath its belly quiver and propel a powerful jet against the white rump. The men began shouting. Then the kolkhoznik who was closest very deftly grasped the shaft and planted it in the right place. The other two men went on yelling and appeared to be bawling him out because he had been slow.

The whole mass of the bull shuddered with ponderous tremors. The props supporting the cow's body shook and gave out repeated creaks. We saw rapid shivers running across the bull's skin. Its bellowing became duller, as if it was out of breath.

The coupling machine slowed down, and as they watched its functioning, the men were already uttering sighs of relief and mopping their sweaty brows.

Outside, in brilliant sunlight, we headed toward Svetlaya. And we felt a painful numbness in all our limbs… as one feels after a superhuman effort or a long illness. Utkin looked at the two of us, his face contracted, and exclaimed in a cracked voice: "My uncle's right when he says man is the cruelest animal on earth!"

"Your uncle is a poet." Samurai sighed, smiling. "Like you, Utkin. And poets are always afraid of life…"

"Life?" echoed Utkin in a very sharp tone.

And he walked on faster, pointing his right shoulder toward the sky. His exclamation echoed in my head for a long time…

Samurai was looking at me from his tub. He was clearly waiting for me to reply to a question I had not heard, engrossed as I was in my recollections of that carnal machine at the farm.

"So Olga, who is she?" I asked, to conceal my inattention.

"He who learns much grows old soon," replied Samurai with a vague smile.

He got up slowly, stepping over the edge of the tub. "Let's go; it's late already," he added, throwing my linen towel to me.

On the way back we walked quickly. The bodies we now had beneath our short sheepskin coats were once more susceptible to the cold, as our eyes were to the terrifying beauty of the frozen sky. The sky was no longer drawing us up but bearing down on us with its hard nocturnal clarity. The biting wind lashed our faces.

Olga's izba was at the other end of the village. Before leaving me, Samurai stopped and said in a somewhat strained voice, because his lips were frozen: "She thinks the most important thing is to make a success of your death. That the man who dreams of a fine death will have an extraordinary life. But that's something I don't quite understand yet…"

"Who can make a success of his death?" I asked, parting my lips with difficulty.

Samurai had already turned and taken several paces away from me. He called out into the icy wind: "A warrior!"

5

It was A phantom train, a dream, an extraterrestrial. The peaceful flow of time in the switch operator's house took its rhythm from the thundering passage of it. Every evening.

The little izba, where my aunt spent twenty-four hours at a time on duty, nestled between the taiga, which overhung its roof, and the tracks. It took you a good three hours to get there on foot. But my aunt fixed it with the carriers of wood who passed through the village early in the morning. They gave her a lift as far as the Devil's Bend, where there was a fork in the road. This gave her a good start. She now had only an hour's walk.

The coziness of this shanty had the ephemeral quality about it that you always find in dwellings where you are not really at home.

A narrow iron bed. A table covered with a waxed cloth on which the pattern had long since faded. A cast-iron stove. A few postcards fixed above the bed in the manner of an iconostasis.

The most important object in this small room was a round clock. The front, where the hands were, had come to take on the look of a human physiognomy. On this familiar face we read all the timetables and the delays, linking each hour and each train with a different expression. In this mimicry there was one evocation that I particularly enjoyed on the occasions when I came to spend the evening with my aunt.

This was the moment of dusk. The sun had completed its low course in the winter sky, grazing the dark tips of the pine trees. It was now asleep at the far end of the tracks, in the direction of the city, to the west. I went out and saw the double Une of the rails, shining under the hoarfrost and tinted with pink rays. The fog was growing thicker. The mauve light above the snowy tracks was vanishing.

I went into the izba, I heard the gentle hissing of the great kettle on the stove, I saw my aunt preparing supper: a few potatoes, some frozen bacon that she had just removed from a lean-to attached to the izba – our fridge – some tea, and some poppy-seed biscuits… Outside the little window, which was garlanded with arabesques of ice, the blue slowly changed to purple, then to black.

With our last cup of tea we began glancing at the clock face. We already sensed its coming, that train, as it wound its way along, somewhere in the depths of the sleeping taiga.

We went out well in advance. And in the silence of the evening we heard it approaching. First of all a distant murmur that seemed to arise from the depths of the earth. Then the dull sound of a cap of snow falling from the summit of a pine tree. Finally a drumming, more and more resonant, more and more insistent.

When it appeared I had eyes only for the luminous carnival of the coaches. And the locomotive – a real old-fashioned one – with enormous wheels painted red and glittering connecting rods. It looked like a dark monster covered in flakes of hoarfrost. And, on its breastplate, a broad red star! This nocturnal meteor emitted a fierce roar and made us step back several paces with its powerful draft. My aunt flashed her lantern, and I opened my eyes very wide.

The snug comfort that I guessed at behind the brightly Ht windows fascinated me. What mysterious beings did that comfort shelter? From time to time I managed to focus on a female silhouette, a couple seated at a little table with two glasses of tea. Occasionally even a shadowy figure reclining on her berth. But such snatched sightings were very rare. Thick hoarfrost or a drawn curtain would make my observation impossible. And yet a glimpsed silhouette was more than enough for me…

I knew that within the train there was one special coach, bearing inscriptions in three languages: Wagon-lit – Schlafwagen – Vagoni-letti. It was in these coaches that the extraterrestrials, which is what people from the Western World were to us, crossed the empire.

I imagined a woman who had been in her compartment for a day already and was going to spend a whole week there! Mentally I pieced together her long journey: Lake Baikal, the Urals, the Volga, Moscow… How I longed to be at the side of this unknown traveler! To be within, in the warm and narrow confines of the compartment where you sit so close together that every movement, every look, takes on an erotic significance, especially with the approach of night. And the night itself, with the rhythmic swaying of the car, is long, so long…

But already the snow squall provoked by the passage of this fabulous train was calming down, and all one could see in the cold fog down the track was two red lights fading from view…

I went again to see my aunt in the switch operator s izba one gray afternoon in February. On the path through the taiga I had noticed a strange languor abroad in the air. The blue distance was misty, but this mist did not glitter like the fog of the great frosts. It clouded over the brilliance of the snows, softened outlines. The taiga no longer seemed like a block of ice streaked with the black lines of the pine trees. Not at all. Every tree was alive, awaiting a sign, already recovering from the long immobility of winter.

On the branches of the pine tree that touched the roof of the little house I saw two crows. As they uttered their guttural cries, they seemed to be conversing. And in these cries one could also hear a soft, languorous weariness. Their voices no longer barked out, as in the deep heart of winter, but floated in the pleasantly mild air, occasionally summoning up a lazy echo.

"We're going to have one of those mild spells!" my aunt said to me when I appeared at the door. "And then if it starts to snow it certainly won't stop tonight…"

The misty languor in nature that day was strangely close to me. For several weeks now I had felt within myself- more in my heart than in my head – a bizarre uneasiness. Its presence was so new to me that I experienced it very physically, I could almost touch it, like the box of matches in my pocket. But the reason for it escaped me.

It sometimes seemed to me that it had all begun that evening at the bathhouse when Samurai spoke of the beauty of the female body, which, according to him, made time stand still. From then on, the smell of his cigar gave me the feeling of a singular nostalgia. One of the most terrible kind: for places and faces one has never seen. Which one mourns as being lost forever. Young savage that I was, I could not know that this was simply love that had not yet found its object. This gave it a violent but blind intensity. For instance, just now I had almost started running after the crows as they flew away slowly, hoping to lose myself in the lascivious idleness of their guttural calls. I felt that nature was already instinctively preparing for its amorous rite of spring. I yearned to be a part of it by surrendering entirely… But to whom?

I was angry with Samurai for having talked about all these weighty things – love, life, death – in a way that was incomprehensible to me, rhetorical, bookish. I was used to perceiving life very concretely. Love – and I saw the graceful curve of the beautiful stranger's body beyond the wood fire. Life – and I saw the living procession of faces that gravitated around the three poles of our universe: taiga, gold, camp. Death – a truck sinking slowly beneath the ice in a long hole at that accursed place the Devil's Bend. And also the wolf, large and handsome, that some loggers had killed and then flung down from their tractor near Verbin's izba, calling out to him: "Here! Make yourself a new shapka, grandpa!" The wolf was already rigid, its paws hard, inert. And at the corner of its proud eye there was a great frozen tear…

I wanted to continue experiencing life in only that way, in all its joy and all its sorrow, immediate, unthinking. Samurai, with his unanswered questions, had made me uneasy.

Waiting for the night train seemed to me stupid. Yes, waiting for this famous Transsiberian, with wide eyes and a thumping heart, to catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure who did not even have an inkling of my existence – what stupidity! And how many of these female silhouettes had there been already, whom I had fallen in love with and accompanied on their journey across the empire? Without knowing if beside my beautiful strangers their husbands were snoring peacefully?

I felt disillusioned, duped, almost betrayed by my night-walking woman of the West.

Outside in the gray air swirled the great fluffy snowflakes that everything had predicted. The view above the track was woven with their white filaments.

I went up to my aunt, who was polishing the nuts of the switch system.

"I'm going off," I said, wrapping my hand around the lever.

"What's got into you? Without supper? Just as it's getting dark?"

"No, I've looked – it's only half past six…"

"But by the time you get to the Devil's Bend it'll be night… And besides, take a look at the sky: in an hour we'll have a real blizzard."

She wanted to stop me from going at all costs. Did she even have some kind of presentiment, derived from her acute intuition as a solitary and unhappy woman? She gave me all possible reasons.

"What about the wolves? You know it's not autumn now, when their bellies are full…"

"I've got my pike… and something to light a torch with."

Finally she mentioned the temptation that she thought irresistible:

"Don't you even want to wait for the Transsiberian?"

"No, not today," I replied, after a brief hesitation. "Besides, if it really starts to snow there's going to be a hell of a delay to the train."

"Yes, that's true," she agreed, seeing that nothing could stop me.

She slipped several poppy-seed biscuits into my pocket and offered me a box of matches – for all eventualities.

I grasped my pike – a long pole with a steel point. I gave my aunt a farewell wave. And I set off walking beside the track, ahead of the train in one of whose compartments was the unknown woman of my dreams. Who did not yet know that our rendezvous was not going to be kept…

The castellated ramparts of the taiga retained their look of happy abandonment and soft idleness. The curtain of snowy plumes enchanted the eye with its silent eddying. The start of a mild, wan evening… I had an intense feeling for its beauty and its aroused expectations!

In every movement of the air, woman was present. Nature was a woman! In the intoxicating giddiness of the great flakes as they caressed my face. In the long, languid calls of the jackdaws as they greeted the mild weather. In the heightened tawny color of the pine trunks beneath the damp luster of the melted hoarfrost.

The soft snow, the cries of the birds, the red bark… everything was woman. And not knowing how to express my desire for her, I suddenly uttered a terrible animal roar.

And panting heavily, I heard its long echo through the still warmth of the air, into the resounding secret depths of the taiga…

For a while I followed the metal track, walking on the ties. Then, when the rails were covered in ever-deepening snow, I put on my snowshoes and plunged into the forest. To take a shortcut. I decided to go to Kazhdai. I could no longer wait. I needed to know who I was right away. To make something of myself. To give myself a shape. To transform myself, to recast myself. To test myself. And, above all, to discover love. Outflank the beautiful traveler, that glittering woman from the West on the Transsiberian. Yes, before the train passed, I must implant into my heart and into my body that mysterious organ: love.

6

The town was immersed in the dismal daily routine of winter and seemed little inclined to share in my exaltation. Its streets quaked heavily as enormous trucks loaded with the long trunks of cedar trees drove through. Men appeared in the doorway of the only liquor store, thrusting bottles deep into their sheepskin coats. Women, their arms weighed down with shopping bags full of provisions, walked along ponderously, clad in the armor of their thick overcoats. The wind was whipping up and peppering their faces with snow crystals. They had no hands free to wipe them clean. They had to bow their foreheads and from time to time blow noisily, shaking their heads, like horses trying to drive away hornets. Between the men, eager to drown the traces of a hard day in a draft of vodka, and the women, advancing like icebreakers through the raging blizzard, no connection was imaginable. Two alien races. Furthermore, the wind must have caused a power failure. First one side of the street, then the other, was plunged into darkness. The women quickened their pace, gripping the handles of their bags. After a while they all looked so much alike that I thought I was seeing the same faces. As if they had got lost and were walking around and around in that dark town…

I, too, spent a good quarter of an hour wandering around under the white flurries, lacking the courage to approach the place where everything was to be acted out: that deserted wing of the station. The place where I could find the one I sought. I already knew what you had to do. I had seen it one day with Samurai. She was sitting at the end of a row of low varnished wooden seats, in that annex to the waiting room where no one was ever waiting for anybody. There was also a buffet, where an attendant, half asleep, shuffled the cups and the sandwiches with slices of shriveled cheese in them. And a newsstand with dusty display shelves, forever closed. And this woman, who from time to time got up and walked over to the timetable board and studied it with exaggerated attention. As if she were searching for some train known only to herself. Then she went and sat down again.

We had seen the man who took a seat beside her, showing her a creased five-ruble bill. We were in front of the newsstand, pretending to be absorbed in the covers of magazines several months old. We had heard their brief whispering. We had seen them go off. Her hair was a dull russet color and covered in an openwork woolen head scarf.

She was the one whom I now saw in the little deserted waiting room. I crossed the resonant space with tense steps, my boots making footmarks on the slippery tiles. She was there, on her seat. My terrified glance only took in the color of her hair. And the outline of her autumn coat, unbuttoned to show a necklace with two rows of red pearls.

I walked up to the closed newsstand. I examined the photo of the latest two cosmonauts, with their radiant smiles, then the smooth face of Brezhnev on another cover. There was no sound other than the creaking of the door in the adjoining main hall and the clink of glasses as the drowsy attendant arranged them in her buffet.

I stared at the shining faces of the cosmonauts without seeing them, but all my senses, like the antennae of an insect, were exploring the tenuous connection that was in the process of being forged between me and the red-haired woman. The dim air of that waiting room seemed to be wholly impregnated with the invisible matter formed by our two presences. The silence of this woman behind my back. Her feigned interest in the muffled loudspeaker announcements. Her real expectation. Her body beneath the chestnut coat. A body in which my desire was already making its habitation. The presence of a woman whom I was going to possess – who did not yet know it. And who was for me a singular and terrifying being in this universe of snow…

I detached myself with an effort from the magazine display rack and took several steps in her direction. But involuntarily my trajectory veered away, circled round the seats, and thrust me back in the direction of the main hall. With a thumping heart, I found myself again in front of the timetable board. The Transsiberian was posted there in large letters and several local trains in smaller ones.

I suddenly experienced a faint glimmer of that infinite sadness the red-haired prostitute must have experienced each evening before this board. The cities, the hours. Departures, arrivals. And always this unique Track One. Yes, all the strange trains she apparently missed week after week. She was forever getting up and consulting the timetables so attentively. She strained to hear every word of the croaking loudspeaker. And yet each train would depart without her…

Standing in front of the board, I summoned up all my strength before crossing the threshold of the little room. I checked if my shapka was on my head at a good angle – in an "adult" style, tilted toward one ear, with a few curls showing above my temples. In the cossack manner. In my pocket I fingered the note that had become damp from my burning palm. As unfortunately I had no five-ruble bill but only a three, wrapped around two ruble coins, I told myself there was a risk the Redhead would see this greenish three-ruble bundle and send me packing with a scornful little smile. Neither could I spread out all my treasure before her! And as for trying to change it for a single note, that would have given the game away immediately. Any of the sales assistants would easily have guessed, I thought, what these fateful five rubles were the price of.

In my short sheepskin coat, drawn in at the waist by a soldier's belt of thick leather, with a bronze buckle that bore a well-polished star, I looked like any young logger. This garb, common to all the men in those parts, made my age undetectable. Furthermore, I had a wolf's eyes, gray, tilted back slightly toward the temples. Those of a child born with the eyes of an adult…

I took one more look at the departure time of some useless train. I turned. All my anxiety and all the frenzy of my desire were concentrated on the handle of the glass door into the little room. Beyond it was a space filled to overflowing by the rosy glitter of her necklace…

I pulled the handle. This time I went straight toward the red-haired woman without turning aside… I was two steps from her when the light went out. There were several squawks of alarm from passengers in the main hall, several curses, the footfalls of a railroad worker sweeping the darkness with his lamp.

We found ourselves on the platform, she and I, under the white tide of the storm. It was the only place that was more or less Ht. By the lights of the Transsiberian, ponderously strung out now, as it flowed into the station. Panting and all covered in snow, the locomotive threw a long beam of light through the white blizzard from its front spotlight. The windows of the coaches cast rectangles of soft light onto the platform. The snowy eddies hurtled toward these yellow rectangles, like moths toward the halo of a streetlamp.

Soon the few passengers due to board the train at this station had climbed into their coaches. Those due to get off had already plunged out into the storm, into the winding streets of Kazhdai… We were left alone, she and I. Travelers without luggage, poised to leap onto the footboard when we heard the whistle? Or improbable relatives determined to wait until the end… until the very last glimpse of the face of a dear one as it was carried away into the night?

At our backs we sensed the gaze of Sorokin, the formidable militiaman, who was pacing up and down on the snow-covered platform, with his nose buried in the broad collar of his sheepskin coat. He, too, was waiting for the departure whistle. He seemed to be hesitating: Should he go and corner the Redhead and extort three rubles from her, his usual tax? Or nab the young peasant, me, drag him off into a little smoke-filled office and have some fun scaring him for part of the night? What disconcerted this obtuse, dull man was us as a couple. Conscious of the menacing presence of this dubious guardian of the peace, we had gradually drawn closer to each other. Together, we were becoming strangely unassailable. In particular, I was protecting her. Yes, I was protecting this tall woman clad in an autumn coat that scarcely covered her knees. With my hand on my belt buckle, I stuck out my chest and fixed my eyes on the lighted square from the window that she, too, was staring at. The militiaman could not quite dissociate the two of us: what if this young village boy were some nephew or cousin of the Redhead?

The fresh snow held the imprint of our footsteps, which had drawn imperceptibly closer to one another. And behind the window, in a snug compartment, the silhouette of a woman could be made out. The calm gestures of the evening; the great glass of hot tea that you have to blow on for a long time; the absent gaze into the white storm rattling against the window. The gaze settles distractedly on two shadowy figures in the middle of the empty platform. What on earth could they be waiting for there?

Aroused by the whistle, the train moved off and withdrew the illuminated square from under our feet. The station was still in complete darkness. We could exist as a couple for only a few more seconds…

It was by the light of the last coach that I abruptly produced my five rubles. She saw my gesture, smiled a little disdainfully (no doubt she had guessed the point of my comings and goings in the waiting room), and inclined her head slightly. I did not know whether this was a refusal or an invitation. I followed her anyway.

We walked for a long time along narrow alleys, beside fences covered in snow. The blizzard had by now spread its wings with unbridled force, hurling volleys of snow against our faces and taking our breath away. I walked behind the red-haired woman, who was holding the woolen head scarf knotted under her chin with one hand and, with the other, beating down the panels of her coat. Every so often I saw her legs uncovered, and then my mind went blank, stunned as I was by the whistling of the wind and drained by the sharpness of my desire.

"Where are we going?" said a strange, heavy voice inside me. "And what hidden meaning do these powerful legs have, with their broad thighs and their full calves squeezed into black leather boots? And this body with its flimsy coat? What connects it to me?" This body beneath its thin covering of fabric. Its warmth, which I felt had already profoundly entered into me… "Why this warm and vital density, under this cold sky, amid these dead streets?"

We tramped for a long time through the dark, white town. Advancing through a storm, confronting the snow flurries, makes you weary. The crunch of footsteps; the whispering of the wind sliding in under the fur of your shapka and murmuring into your ear the lament of the snowflakes melting on your face… At one moment I smelled the scent of burning cedarwood, of a fire, floating in the wind. I raised my head. I looked at the woman walking in front of me. I saw her quite differently. It suddenly seemed as if she were taking me to a house that had been waiting for me for a long time, that was my real home; and as if this woman was the being closest to me. A being I had miraculously rediscovered in this snowstorm.

It was an izba at the very edge of the town, a building tucked away at the bottom of a little snow-covered yard. The red-haired woman – who had not spoken a word to me since the station – all of a sudden smiled and exclaimed almost cheerfully, as she mounted the wooden steps: "Here we are. Welcome to the mariner!"

Her voice had a strange resonance at this frontier between the white fury of the storm and the dark interior of the izba. A phrase from some ritual she made a point of performing once the frontier was crossed. Here was where I became her man, her client.

We passed through the shadowy entrance hall and climbed several stairs, which groaned under our feet. She pushed open the door, patted the wall, trying to find the switch, and pressed it several times. Then uttered a forced giggle: "Oh, silly me! The whole town's playing blindman's buff, and there's me saying: Come on, dynamo – get turning!"

I heard her opening a drawer and striking a match. The room was Ht up by the diffuse halo of a candle. No doubt it was this flickering flame that fragmented my perception. Gestures, words, and smells began to materialize out of the wavering darkness. One by one, randomly. And they cast their own shadows – of gestures, words, and smells.

Her profile appeared sharply on the wall – black on yellow. So did the glass whose brown contents she poured between her lips, lapping them up avidly. She filled the same glass, held it out to me. I recognized the local brew: alcohol mixed with cranberry jam. It flooded into me, like one of the shadows flitting across the bare wall of the izba. It burned, flayed my palate, filled me with darkness. As before, I could see only fragments. But the candle had remained in the room next door, and these shards were fading, becoming dull. Everything was splitting up. One piece: her torso rearing up before my eyes, strongly, terrifyingly white. (One could never have imagined how broad it would be!) The whiteness tinged with yellow shadow. This bright patch was suddenly drowned in the darkness that erupted, causing an explosion of metallic creaks from the bed. Another fragment: her hand, large and red, pulling the blanket over my bare shoulder. With an absurd solicitude and insistence. And then a china statuette on the shelves by the bed: a slender ballerina with her partner. I saw their smooth faces, their unmoving eyes, very close to me.

And all that happened in the hollow of this bed, with its smell of cold smoke and sugary perfume, was only a series of abrupt, hopeless attempts to join the odd fragments together.

By accident and in my fear of not doing what a man had to do, I caught hold of a breast, heavy and cold. It did not respond to the clasp of my fingers. I let it go, as one lays a dead bird down in the grass. I tried with all my weight to crush the body that spilled off into the shadows, to keep it together in the unity of my desire. I buried my face in the russet curls. And once more I came up against a separate shard – the drops of melted snow in her hair. And an earring, quite simple and worn, sliding toward my lips…

I had expected love to have the intensity of my nocturnal plunge into the snow with Samurai, beneath the frozen sky: that unique moment when the heat of the bath and the cold of the stars produced a searing fusion. I had expected that there would be nothing to touch, to feel, to recognize, for everything would be a single incandescent touching. And that I would be wholly outside and inside, the organ of that indescribable touching…

The red-haired prostitute must have sensed that I was at a loss. She parted her legs heavily to let me slide into her groin. Her body gathered itself up, became taut. Her hand penetrated under my belly, grasped me, thrust me into her. With a precise, deft movement. She seemed to be putting me in tune with her body, plugging me into her flesh… And rearing up slightly, she shook me, pushed me into action.

I writhed between her broad thighs. I clung onto her breasts, which yielded with a soft, lazy resignation. My belly seemed to be stretching a great hot, sticky wound beneath her.

So this was the stuff of love: slippery, glutinous. And lovers were heavy, breathless. It was as if each, laboriously, were hauling the other one's body along… But where to?

All that I understood only later. I lived through it again when, bowed under the snow squalls, I was running to get away from the bed with its slimy depths, and the izba that smelled of cold smoke. My cheek was burning from two terrible blows. The red-haired prostitute had slapped me with a hoarse exclamation and a look filled with hate.

I was running toward the great bridge that spanned the Olyei. I was plunging into the white tide without thinking about what I was going to do. Everything was too clear for it to be thought about. As clear as the white abyss that opened at my feet on the crown of the bridge. It was in this abyss that I must flee the stare of the red-haired woman. Her look and the horrible mess that was love. Climb over the handrail and escape from the vision that was gradually becoming more vivid in my head…

This vision had arisen when, in the midst of my feverish thrashings on her great body, the light shone. Absurdly, the electricity had come on again. The room was frozen by the ghastly, stunning light of a great bulb. The red-haired prostitute screwed up her eyes, her face twisted into a grimace of disgust. I stared at this broad face.

This heavily made-up mask. This tired paint. These shining pores. I sensed that the harsh light made it vulnerable, trapped by the stupid return of the current. But I, too, was caught in the trap. I could not turn my gaze elsewhere. The mask held it. I was thrashing around, my face a couple of inches away from that unhappy grimace. I felt a strange pity for the mask, and it was at that moment that my desire exploded.

I did not know, then, if what I experienced was fear, pity, love, or disgust. There was that face, with its pathetic grimace; the red lips with a sickening breath of alcohol; the dark-red hair spangled with drops of water… And this violent spasm wrenching my stomach – in a warped replica of our nocturnal ecstasy in the snow on the banks of the Olyei.

I caught just a glimpse of the glittering night sky, filled with constellations… Then the red-haired prostitute let her thighs fall back and pushed me away slightly, to free herself. She was unplugging me from her body…

There was none of the humid warmth of the bath for me to get into. None of the intoxicating smell of Samurai's cigar. A pitiless light with a dry and powdery whiteness. I saw the red-haired woman get up and stand in the middle of the room. Her nakedness terrified me. Especially viewed from behind. I hoped she was going to put out the light. But she started to dress. Her body went through the actions with difficulty, balancing clumsily now on one leg, now on the other. From time to time I saw her profile bending over the garments she was buttoning up. Her lips moved slowly, as if she were addressing silent words to herself. Her eyelids were heavy with sleep. The alcohol must be affecting her more and more.

Finally she turned around, probably to urge me to hurry. Her gaze met mine. Her eyes grew wide. She saw me! Her lips trembled. Putting her great hand to her mouth, she repressed a cry. Only a kind of dull choking sound was heard.

Leaving her blouse half unbuttoned, she rushed to a little cupboard, opened it with a violent movement, and took out a bottle. Then, without offering me the slightest explanation, she sat on the edge of the bed beside me and flung back the blanket. I had no time to react. She poured what I took to be water into the hollow of her palm and began to rub my genitals and the lower part of my belly vigorously. Dumbfounded, I allowed this to be done to me. The rubbing burned my skin: the water turned out to be alcohol… Every now and then the woman gave me a look that I could not understand. It was both sorrowful and pitying. Like the one I would observe in Utkin's mother when she saw her son limping across the courtyard.

Besides, there was no longer anything to understand. What I was experiencing simply could not be thought about at all. The burning of the alcohol, equally incomprehensible, was welcome, rather: it corresponded to the intoxication that was slowly invading every corner of my being.

It was this drunkenness that freed me from all amazement. What was happening to me was becoming absurdly natural: both the red-haired woman, who, before putting away the bottle, filled herself a glass right to its lipstick-stained brim; and the light that suddenly went out again; and the packet of old photos she fetched at the same time as the candle…

Everything was natural. This great woman in her unbuttoned blouse sitting beside me, laying out these black-and-white snapshots on the blanket. She wept silently, whispering explanations that I could not hear. I did not see the photos; I lived their tarnished images. There was almost always a young, smiling woman, shading her eyes from the sun. In her arms she held an infant who looked like her. Sometimes a man appeared beside them, dressed in wide trousers and an open-necked shirt such as nobody had worn for a long time now. And I breathed the air of these unknown days that I recognized by the flickering light of the candle. A fragment of river, the shadow of a forest. Their looks, their smiles. Their family complicity. In spite of myself, I experienced the happiness of these unknown people.

The commentaries the red-haired woman gave me through her silent tears constantly referred to that heavenly summer. And then came the fateful dissolution of the warmth focused on these yellowed snapshots. Someone had gone away, disappeared, died. And the sun that had made the young woman screw up her eyes in those photos had given way to the deceptive halo of the night trains at the snow-covered station in Kazhdai…

The edges of the photos had been carefully shaped. The person who had trimmed them must have dreamed of the long family history they would one day evoke, gathered together in an album. I picked up a photo and stroked the trimmed edge: I felt the breeze of the sunny days on my face, I heard the laughter of the young woman, the crying of the baby…

The candle flame was flagging, flickering; the storm rattled noisily in the chimney; the fire, revived, embalmed the darkness with warm, penetrating odors. My drunkenness detached this moment from what had gone before. The red-haired woman's izba became my rediscovered home. And this woman sitting beside me was someone close to me, whose absence, from now on, I would be aware of.

When there were no more photos, the woman tried to smile at me through the mist of her tears. Closing her eyes, she leaned toward me. With a tentative hand, I touched her shoulder. Everything was mixed up in my wine-soaked young head. The woman was this body and this stormy night and this moment with the smell of the fire… and this rediscovered being. I wanted to cling to her, to live in the shade of her body, by the rhythm of her silent sighs. Not to depart from this moment.

She touched my forehead with her chin. My hands brushed against the collar of her blouse, touched her breasts. I closed my eyes…

She pushed me away violently. On the wall I saw the rapid swing of a shadow. My head was shaken by two resounding slaps. I came to my senses.

She was standing up, her face closed, hard.

"I… What…?" I stammered, completely lost.

"Beat it, quick, you dirty little shit!" she said in a weary, disgusted voice.

And in one armful she threw my clothes at me.

If I did not hurl myself into the white abyss right away, it is because when I reached the crown of the bridge I became aware that there was no longer any me. There was no longer a person to be hurled into the icy river.

There was certainly a ghost from before – that adolescent who would avidly seize on any tale of love; that spy on sexual confidences let fall by the hulking great loggers in the workers' canteen. An unrecognizable ghost.

And there was that other one who, a few moments before, was thrashing around between the thighs of an unknown woman, his eyes fixed on her face with the pitiless light beating down on it. That one, too, was a stranger.

As for the one who had just been exploring old photos, this was a being I had never encountered within me…

I found myself on the bridge with several scraps of myself being scattered into the snow-lashed darkness. The wind was so violent that it seemed to empty my body of all the warmth from my short sheepskin coat. I could no longer feel my lips, or my cheeks, now covered with a layer of crystals. I no longer existed.

Unhappiness and madness have their own logic too…

It was in accordance with this logic that the bridge suddenly lit up. The headlights of a truck, late, untimely, fortuitous, crazy. The driver should have crossed the bridge at full speed and disappeared in pursuit of his own obscure goal. But he braked abruptly. For – that was it – he had no goal. Other than this absurd race through the storm. Quite simply he was drunk. Drunk and sad. Like the brawl he had just been involved in on the steps of the liquor store under a dim streetlamp. The light had gone out, and he could not even hit the man who had cut his cheek with a fragment of bottle glass. Cursing, they had gone their ways into the darkness…

Now it was vital not to stop. The two patches of yellow from the headlights were the only source of light, the throbbing of the engine was the only reservoir of warmth. Yes, his drunken heartbeats and that engine. Despite the snow, the whole universe was black.

And if he stopped suddenly on the crown of the bridge, it was because he must have detected the presence of a tiny parcel of life in this icy pass. He saw a shadowy figure transfixed behind the parapet, clinging to the cast-iron railing. A shadowy figure that seemed to be waiting for the ultimate extinction of its last spark. When the numbed fingers let go…

Or maybe, quite simply, he saw this solitary silhouette and his cloudy brain imagined a woman. One he could accost and cheer up with whatever was left of the vodka in the bottle he kept hidden behind the seat. Some desperate girl whose whole life had been rather like this teetering on the parapet of a bridge at night. A crumpled body he could lay down on the narrow bench behind the seats. A woman he could "have."

Or maybe he guessed what kind of shadowy figure it was; and felt bad about his own thoughts; and would even have had pity on that frozen girl he wanted to drag into his cabin.

Maybe… Who knows what went on inside the head of a drunken Siberian truckdriver, a big, rough man, his forearms covered by tattoos (anchors, crosses on a tombstone, women with big breasts), with one cheek covered in dried blood, and sad gray eyes that were forced to peer out through a fog of drunkenness?

He saw a shadowy figure, thought of an easy body stretched out on the bench, felt a pleasant heaviness at the base of his stomach. And he was angry; the whole of life is governed by this heaviness. Food, woman, blood!

He braked and jumped down into the snow, slamming the door. Rubbing his cheek with a ball of ice scooped up from the slatted side of the truck, he walked toward the shadowy figure. You could no longer see anything three yards ahead. The waves of snow were so dense that you would have thought the earth itself was rocking and tipping into the Olyei.

The figure stood behind the parapet, above the white abyss of the river. The driver tapped it on the shoulder. Then he cast a look down below. His eyes opened wide. It was the void: the invisible frontier of a vertiginous beyond. He grabbed the collar of the snow-covered sheepskin coat and pulled the figure over the parapet.

"What the hell are you doing there?" he demanded, dragging his burden toward the truck. "Where'd you get pissed like that, idiot? Why, at your age I was sweating my guts out in the factory! And today all these kids can think about is getting pissed out of their skulls."

The shadowy figure made no reply. In any case the truckdriver was really asking himself these questions, while thinking about something quite different. About that nameless abyss, about the solitude he had just encountered in the night, about the fine trickle of warmth the frozen ghost was still giving off.

He went on talking in the same way in the cabin. The storm wind had woken him up, had made him garrulous. These snatches of nighttime conversation were the first things I was aware of when, slowly, I began to reinhabit the inanimate ghost shaken by the jolting of the road.

I was warming up, becoming myself again. I needed to assume my new identity. The unrecognizable strangers were once again assembling within me: the virgin of a few days ago who spied on adult confidences; the young frenzied body ripping the belly of a prostitute with his sex; and the figure in the storm, waiting to take the final step, waiting for his numbed fingers to give way… All this was me!

The man asked where I lived and read my reply in the quivering of my lips, which I could still hardly control. I stared at him. His face swollen from the cold, the alcohol, and the blows he had just received. His broad, hairy wrists. His hands covered in shiny scars, his thick fingers with their broad, hardened nails…

And without being able to reach the logical conclusion of my thought, I was feeling: Now I am like him; yes, I am in the same boat he is; in his skin, pretty much. Instead of the immense joy that, for years, I expected at this turning point of my life, a cruel despair! Like him… Soon the same tattooed hands on the steering wheel of a heavy truck, the same face, the same smell of vodka. But above all the same experience with women. I gave a sidelong glance at his heavy legs and imagined the force with which they would part a woman's thighs. The thighs of a woman… Of the red-haired woman! I felt something tremble inside me: of course he had "had" her. Before me…

"So what are you gawking at me like that for?" he muttered, noticing how intently I was staring at him. "One thing's for sure: we can't go any faster. Have you seen the road?"

At each stroke the windshield wipers flung aside a thick layer of clinging snow. It seemed as if only the taiga was guiding the truck, as it plowed on into the storm.

I looked away. No further need to look at my man: he was an exact replica of me in a few years' time…

Now I knew precisely what was going to happen. I knew that we had only a few minutes left to live!

I was waiting for the Devil's Bend. Drunk as he was, the driver was sure to miss it. I could already picture the long sideways slide of the truck, the frantic and useless wrenching of the steering wheel; I heard the engine choking in an impotent roar. I saw the black breach in the ice, which was always very thin at that point on account of warm springs in the bed of the Olyei.

I swallowed my saliva nervously, focusing on the road. I was like the bullet in a revolver primed for firing. Abrupt burning thoughts, searing images, propelled the tension to its peak. Those hands resting on the steering wheel had crushed the breasts of the red-haired woman. We had both of us been ensnared in the same moist wound at the base of her belly. We would both of us be forever floundering in the same narrow space at the edge of the endlessness of Siberia: the dreary streets of the district center; the cabins of trucks stinking of diesel il; the taiga – wounded, pillaged, hostile. And that red-haired woman. Open to all. And this stormy night that cut us off from the world. And this tiny cabin crammed with homogeneous soiled flesh that was going to disappear. As my fingers gripped the door handle, the nails became white…

The driver braked and shouted at me, grinning: "Before that bitch of a corner I need to take a leak…"

I saw him open the door, climb onto the running board, and begin to unbutton his padded pants. My anticipation had been so frenzied that I perceived in his smile a hidden meaning, which seemed to be saying: Ha ha! So that's it, you little squirt – you thought you had me with your goddamned bend. Well, I'm not stupid.

I understood that this dark and absurd world was also endowed with wily and sly cunning. It wasn't so easy to annihilate it by killing yourself. Even as it slid along the razor's edge, this world knew how to stop abruptly and smile with cunning geniality. "A red-haired woman, you say? Some photos spread out on a blanket? First love?

Solitude? Well, look at me! I'm going to unbutton my pants and piss on every one of your first loves and solitudes!"

I jumped down from the truck and began to run in the opposite direction, following the tracks of its wheels…

Against all expectation, I heard neither shouts from the man nor the noise of the engine. No, the driver did not call out, did not rush off in pursuit of me, did not make a U-turn to catch up with me… When I stopped after twenty yards I could no longer see the outline of the truck, could hear no noise. The white blizzard, the fierce whistling of the wind in the branches of the cedar trees, nothing more. The truck had vanished! As I continued on my way, I wondered whether the red-haired woman, the bridge, and that drunken driver had not been a dream. A kind of delirium similar to the one I had once had when ill with scarlet fever… Even the wheel tracks I was following were becoming less and less visible and soon disappeared…

I found the dark streets of Kazhdai again. Instinctively, I headed for the station. I went into the barely lit main hall. In fact, it was largely the white reflection of the blizzard that filled this deserted space with a somewhat ghostly luminosity.

I went up to the clock. It was half past ten. The Transsiberian had left at nine. Dumbfounded, I could not manage to do the simple arithmetic, so astounding did the answer seem to me. All that had been lived through in no more than an hour and a half! The interminable wait in front of the newsstand; the Redhead's izba; her body and that pain they called "love"; my flight; the frozen eternity on the bridge; the drunken truck… Its disappearance. My return.

Then, as if to add to the unreality of what I was living through, I heard a voice behind my back, probably that of the deputy station-master, explaining to some passenger: "Oh, you know. It'll be when it stops snowing… As you saw, even the Transsiberian had to come back. It'd hardly left the station and there was already three feet of snow on the track…"

I pushed open the glass door and went out onto the platform. So this mass of sleeping coaches was the Transsiberian. Its windows gleamed feebly with the blue reflection of the night-lights on the compartment ceilings. Behind the tracery of hoarfrost you could sense the silent comfort within. And the presence of the beautiful Western woman, who had kept our rendezvous after all. I remembered her, or, more precisely, how I used to spy on her in the old days near the switch operator's izba. My memories of all that were so intense that the events of this evening were now firmly transformed into no more than a particularly vivid daydream. Afraid of shattering this certainty, I went back into the station. So nothing at all had happened. Nothing… Nothing!

The door opposite, the one that led out onto the square in front of the station, opened. In the dim light of the main hall I saw a woman coming in, glancing rapidly around her. She was wearing an autumn coat and a thick woolen shawl. She came up to me, as if finding me there were the most natural thing in the world. I watched her approaching. It seemed to me that she no longer had a face. Her features, without makeup, washed out – cleansed by the snow or by tears – were only pale watercolor outlines. All one saw of her face was the expression: an intensity of extreme suffering and weariness.

"Come on. You're going to spend the night at our house," she said in a very calm voice that could only be obeyed.

7

In my dream the corridor of the sleeping car led to a compartment that was a replica of the switch operator's izba, but still smaller. As if that house, being a part of the corridor, were perched on the track, waiting for an improbable departure. A woman was seated at the little table under the window of this strange – but quite natural – compartment. She seemed to be staring out into the darkness of the night outside the window. Not in order to see what the thick hoarfrost was hiding, but so as to avoid seeing what was happening around her. At the center of the little table there was an extraordinary fleshy bulb, cut in two. Inside it could be seen a kind of cocoon composed of semitransparent leaves, delicately folded over one another. It resembled a carefully swaddled baby.

I was supposed – I did not know why – to unwrap its fragile leaves without attracting the attention of the silent passenger. My numb, clumsy fingers were fumbling with this cocoon, this silken cone. I already sensed that what would appear would be painful to see… The further I progressed with my meticulous efforts, the more my anxiety about this revelation increased. I was going to see a living thing whose birth would be compromised by my curiosity but whose vitality I could ascertain only by stripping off the leaves. I was killing it by opening the bulb. But it would not have existed if I had not dared to rip open the cocoon. In my dream the tragic significance of my action did not appear so clearly. It was the slow upsurge of a harrowing cry that expressed it. A cry that rose to my throat – a dry, strangled cry. My fingers were stripping off the leaves with scant ceremony. And the woman sitting by the window began, at that moment, to turn her head slowly in my direction… The cry burst forth, shook me, woke me up…

I saw the halo of a candle and the face of the red-haired woman – an oval, calm, subdued. Her hand was lightly stroking my head.

Seeing me awake, she smiled at me and blew out the candle. I quickly screwed up my eyes. I wanted to go to sleep again before she took away her hand…

After tea in the morning she said to me in a neutral voice, as if it were a trivial daily occurrence: "We've got snow up to the chimney. It's midday already, but look at the windows: it's pitch dark."

"I'll make a passage!" I exclaimed joyfully. "I know how to do it! You'll see…"

"No, no! You just dig a hole for yourself and then go…"

I did not argue. I understood that my joy was stupid. I must go. Quickly. Without looking back…

With my snowshoes attached to my belt, I hurled myself at the wall of snow that rose outside the front door. I became mole, snake, and dolphin all at the same time. I dug, wriggled, swam. I battled away at the heart of a white landslide, climbing up within its tide, which grew darker the farther I moved from the house. The rush of snow even penetrated my body, burned it, making my progress more fraught. I opened my mouth to inhale rare puffs of air and swallowed spurts of crystals that stung. My eyelids were immobilized, weighed down with minuscule ice diamonds. At one stage I felt as if I no longer knew the right direction and had lost my sense of up and down. I was surely crawling horizontally, within this mass where there was less and less air left. Or, worse, I was thrusting down into its depths. Such moments of panic are almost inevitable for someone clearing a way for himself after a great snowstorm. My heart thumped. Convulsively, I realigned the angle of my scaling upward. I mounted toward the light like a fish thrusting upstream against the current in a waterfall…

With a resounding crack, my head broke the fine layer of ice.

Dazzled, I stretched out on the smooth, sparkling surface. The sunny air resounded with freshness, seemed as if it were quite a different substance from what I had been breathing hitherto. The sky, revitalized by the mild spell, extended as far as the eye could see. The silence of the taiga was so deep that all the little sounds gathered around me, coming only from my movements – the crunch of snow under my elbow; the echo of my hungry breathing; the resonant slithering of white slabs breaking as they fell from my shapka, from the collar of my sheepskin…

All I could see of Kazhdai was a few dark patches: the roofs of the tallest houses. Some straight outlines as well: the buried trains sleeping on the tracks. I could identify streets thanks to the columns of white smoke rising from the chimneys. The tiny black dots were the inhabitants busy around these columns, making passageways.

The house I had just left was a little distance from the town, at the edge of the taiga. Its smoke seemed as if it were rising from the midst of a deserted plain. And on the branch of a birch tree, buried in the snow, I saw a miniature house designed to give shelter to the birds.

I put on my snowshoes and went up to the solitary chimney. Bending toward its mouth, which was shielded by a pitch-black iron cap, I uttered a resounding yell. It was the custom. The signal for the person left behind… I heard the creaking of the stove door, then an echo that seemed to come from the depths of the earth. A kind of slow sigh that was dissipated in the dazzling clarity of this day after the storm…

I glided briskly along on my snowshoes, crossing the valley that ran down to the Olyei. The taiga, half awake, stayed beside me at a distance. Great pine trees covered in snow had within their shade the brilliance of a bluish, transparent silver. And their tops glittered, dusted with nuggets of gold.

From time to time I glanced behind me. The column of smoke in the midst of the plain still marked the entombed izba, that room buried beneath the snow, the flickering light of a candle, that interior where the darkness of a winter's night still reigned. An unreal evening spent beneath the compact silence of the snows… The red-haired woman!

I remained still for a moment. I gazed at the plain with its thousands of crystals, flooded with sunlight, the endless sky extending its blue freshness; the mother-of-pearl shadow of the taiga. And in the distance, that column of smoke, white, all alone, in the midst of it all… Suddenly, with an unbearable clarity, I understood: I am condemned both to this beauty and to the suffering that it conceals. The snow would melt. Kazhdai would become a dark little town once again. The Transsiberian would move off and make up for its delay. And the red-haired prostitute would return to the waiting room. There could not be any other life.

For some time I followed the ample curve of the Olyei, overhung with immense dunes of snow.

Passing close to the three legendary cedar trees, where they hanged the men in the civil war, I stopped, stupefied. This morning the great rusty nails, which I was used to seeing high above me as I tilted my head back, were within easy reach. Yes, they were there, immediately before my eyes. I went up to them and, taking off my mittens, touched the rough brown metal. A slow cold, accumulated over long decades, invaded my fingers. I quickly withdrew my hand. I caressed the rough scales of the trunk. They seemed to harbor a warmth that was sleeping but alive. And suddenly what had happened long ago at the foot of these giant trees – that brutal but swift death – did not seem to me all that terrible. A moment of sharp pain and then this silence in the sun-drenched air, this secret life, sleeping, in perfect fusion with the breathing of this great trunk, with the sharp smell of the clusters of needles, with the glittering of the resin frozen in the indentations on the bark. This life without thoughts, without memories. This oblivion.

I gripped the great nail, I leaned my full weight on it. With half-closed eyes, I tried to enter into that narrow zone which separated me from the blissful silence of the trunk…

Suddenly, through my closed eyelids, I saw them: two black specks were following the blue ridge of the snowdrifts above the riverbank. Soon they were on a level with the three cedars. They hurtled down the ridge and crossed the Olyei. Their tiny silhouettes were becoming more and more distinct. The first of them moved forward with long strides, stopping at intervals to wait for the other one. I recognized them. And I was struck by their rustic and naive appearance. There was something childish about their sheepskins and their faces, which I could see more and more clearly. The earflaps of their shapkas bounced up and down – dogs' ears. They turned the corner by the forest, and in a few moments they were going to pass beside me. I wanted to run away. To hide deep among the snowy pine trees. I was certain I could no longer be a part of their lives…

But already the first of the skiers, Samurai, had noticed me. His harsh cry broke the silence. He came toward me.

Smiles, greetings, teasing. They gave me friendly pats on the shoulder. Told me the latest news from the village…

"They are children," observed some voice deep within me. "Absolute children, carefree and divinely insubstantial."

It seemed inconceivable that only yesterday morning we had been at school together. That only yesterday I had been like them.

"Have you swallowed your tongue or what?" exclaimed Samurai, shoving my shapka down onto my eyebrows. "Look at him, Utkin. He's not a Don Juan anymore. He's a bear that's half asleep!"

Tears came to my eyes. I was so jealous I could have howled. To be like them once again. To glide across the plain, light as the wind, as translucent as this sun-drenched air, as fresh as the breath of the taiga. Innocent!

Samurai must have noticed my tortured expression. He turned away and called out as he sped off, without looking at me: "Come on! There's no time to lose. Otherwise there won't be any seats left. Get going, you sleeping bear! You sleeping beauty!"

I followed them automatically, without even asking where we were going.

After we had been on the move for an hour I saw that Samurai, following an oblique course, was moving away from Kazhdai and heading toward a distant gray cloud that hung above the taiga – toward the city, toward Nerlug.

Another two and a half hours to go, I thought bitterly. Why am I trailing after them? What business do I have in that city?

Now they were walking side by side, chatting. Everything was so luminous, so serene, in the sunny little world that traveled with them. My gaze reached it as if from the depths of a prison cell. From time to time Samurai turned and called out to me cheerfully: "Come on, bear, move your great paws!"

It was no longer jealousy I felt toward them but a sort of malevolent contempt. Especially toward Samurai. I remembered his long discourses at the baths. About women. About love. His endless quotations from that old madwoman Olga. What was it he had said? "Love is harmony." What an idiot! Love, my dear Samurai, is an izba that smells of cold smoke. And the horrible solitude of two naked bodies under a garish yellow lightbulb. And the ice-cold knees of the red-haired prostitute that I brushed against when it was over, when I slid out from her belly, which had shaken me around in the damp hollow of the bed. And the bleary features of her face. And her heavy breasts, stretched by so many callused, blind, hasty hands. Like the hands of my phantom truckdriver – covered with scars, stained with grease. Oh, Samurai, if you had seen him! Before tackling the Devil's Corner he unbuttoned his pants and with his hand took out this huge swollen flesh; it looked like a huge piece of raw, warm, flaccid meat. Don't talk to me about love… And you will be like him, Samurai, in spite of your cigar and all that rubbish Olga tells you. You won't get away from it! Nor will I, or even Utkin. And we shall stay in this district center where the endless brawling stops only when the light goes out in a snowstorm. In our village, where the only memory is of the war thirty years ago that turned the whole of life into a memory. And in this railroad station, where the only woman one could still love waits for the Transsiberian that will never take her anywhere. This world will not let us go… You both are laughing as you hurry along there in your little circle of sunlight. But just wait. I know how to escape from it all. I know…

I stopped for a moment. They were moving on, taking with them their aureole filled with ringing voices. I had a vision of the cedar trees with the big rusty nails. How close at hand it was, that final silence, that escape with no return. How good it was!

"You haven't even asked what we are going to do in the city, Juan!"

Samurai's voice rang out suddenly and roused me from my daydreams.

The seething mass of words I had so far been holding in exploded: "And what could you be doing? Going like feebleminded idiots to the post office to listen to the telephone operators: 'Please, who is the stupid fucker who wants to speak to Novosibirsk? Cabin number two!' Wow! Novosibirsk! You're already drooling at the thought of it, both of you!"

Instead of losing his temper, Samurai burst out laughing.

"Look, Utkin! The bear's waking up. Ha ha ha!"

Then, winking at his companion, he announced: "We are going to see… Belmondo!"

"Bel-mon-do," Utkin corrected him, laughing.

"No, Belmon-do! Shut up, Duckling. You don't know a thing about films."

It must have been the air of the taiga that had intoxicated them. For they began to laugh, to shout this incomprehensible word louder and louder, each one insisting on his own pronunciation. Samurai pushed Utkin and knocked him over, as he went on yelling those three resounding syllables. Utkin retaliated by throwing fistfuls of snow at Samurai's face.

"Belmon-do!"

"Bel-mon-do! In Italian it's Bel-mon-do…"

"Is it a man or a woman?" I asked, dangerously serious, baffled by the neuter "o" ending.

Their laughter became torrential.

"Hey, Samurai! Just listen to him! If it's not a chick, he won't come with us! Ha ha ha!"

"Sure, sure, she's a woman, Juan! With a mustache… And with a… with a big… a big…" Samurai could not get to the end of his sentence.

They were laughing Uke madmen, crawling about on all fours, their feet tied in knots by their snowshoes, which they had not unfastened. The name rang out so strangely in the midst of the taiga…

No doubt they thought their laughter had won me over. I let myself fall into the snow beside them, shaking my head frenetically and guffawing noisily. And it was the laughter that allowed me to weep all my drunkenness away…

Then, when the last groans of our orgy had ceased, when we found ourselves, all three, stretched out across a sunlit clearing, our eyes filled with the sky, Samurai whispered in an enfeebled but vibrant voice: "Belmondo!"