The Crime Of Olga Arbyelina

Two

She knew that the pain we feel, physical as well as mental, is partly due to our indignation at pain, our astonishment at it, our refusal to accept it. To avoid suffering, she always employed the same trick: making a mental list. What you have to do is take note, as dispassionately as possible, of the presence of things and people brought together by the painful situation. Name them very simply, one after the other, until their total improbability hits you in the eye. And so she was listing them now, first of all noticing the drawn curtains, the edges of which were fastened together by half a dozen clothespins. The dark curtains, the ceiling lit from the side by a lamp placed on a chair. And on the ceiling, as well as on the wall, those two angular shadows, dark and clear cut: the outline, like a capital M, of the legs of a woman lying on her back with her knees up. And another shape, this one moving; a gigantic head with two horns, appearing at intervals between the triangles of the bent legs. Yes, these two women linked by the silent work one of them was carrying out on the other one's body, in a stifling room, late one afternoon in August.

A precise pain, sharp as an injection, made her interrupt her list-making and close her eyes tightly. But she must start again quickly, so as to leave herself no time for indignation. So; the August sun, whose dusty indolence could be sensed, despite the drawn curtains and the closed shutters. Beyond the shutters, on the sidewalk, a few inches away from the insulated interior of the room, an encounter between two passersby, their conversation ("Mark my words, we won't be seeing a lot of meat next year"); then the clatter of a streetcar and the faint answering tinkle of the glasses in the cupboard. Then, like an amplification of that tenuous sound-the rattling of a metallic instrument on a tray.

The head swathed in a large white square with two horns reappeared at the end of the improvised operating table. "I'm not hurting you too much, am I?" And it dived in again between the patient's parted knees.

This silent smile too, must be added to the inventory. In resuming it she must strive for the greatest possible precision in the details. A cramped room, an incredible accumulation of furniture: that cupboard made of dark wood, almost black; a writing desk; a piano with candelabra fixed to it at each end of the keyboard; two armchairs close together like in a cinema auditorium; a pedestal table; sets of shelves-everything piled high with books, statuettes, knickknacks, vases with bunches of dried stems. On the walls a patchwork of pictures: antique portraits with barely visible features and bright, airy landscapes cheek by jowl with abstract geometry. In the corner, almost up against the ceiling, the brown, gilded rectangle of an icon, concealed beneath a long draped fabric… And in the middle of this chaos, straight, clean sheets, the smell of alcohol, a table that looks like an ice floe. Outside the window, some rhythmic chanting, those fleeting echoes that people carry away with them mechanically after a demonstration or a carnival. A snatch of music is woven into it- the joyful sob of an accordion, the sound of which conjures up a vision of the avenue in its August heat…

The nature of the pain altered, becoming harsher, more humiliating in its physiological banality. Olga sensed that the words were already trembling in her mind and that, in an indignant, silent protest they were about to blame her own stupidity ("What an idiot! At my age!"); as well as the vigilant, petty perfidiousness of life ("The moment was well chosen, enough said! Or rather I was the one well chosen, otherwise I might have been able to cling to a few illusions about the best of all possible worlds…"). She hurriedly resumed her game of stocktaking. Yes, the festive shouts outside the window: the second anniversary of the Liberation of Paris… In the morning, on her way to her friend's house, she had noticed the profusion of flags on the fronts of buildings… Yes, this city at once animated and drowsy; this one-story house at the edge of the fifteenth arrondissement; this sun beating against the closed shutters on the ground floor. And, in a room isolated from the world, two women. One of them stretched out on a table, covered by a sheet, the other bent over the first's lower abdomen, her head swollen by an enormous white headdress with horns, engaged in performing a clandestine abortion.

Olga felt her indignation thwarted by the absurdity of the situation. She could have been indignant if the pain had violated some logic, flown in the face of justice. But there was no logic to it. Just scattered fragments; unpleasant pricks that raised goose bumps on her thighs on that stifling afternoon of August 25, 1946; the room crammed with furniture; a woman subjecting another woman to an operation held to be criminal. "A clandestine abortion," Olga repeated mentally, thinking that the improbability of her situation might well have been even more striking. One had only to picture how close her half naked body was to the passersby outside the shutters. Her body that had been surgically amputated from the tiny life enclosed within it, a body now singular but which, from tomorrow onward, would melt back into the crowd of other bodies, indistinguishable from their mass.

She heard another click of metal on the tray. Her friend's horned head bobbed up at the end of the table.

"That's it?!" They spoke with one voice, one asking, one stating, in unintended unison, as often happens with people who have known one another for a very long time and end up unconsciously following the course of one another's thoughts…

"And yet," thought Olga, "we'll never breathe a word about the most important things. I'll never even tell her how I make lists to help me forget the pain. The second anniversary of the Liberation; this tiny death in my womb; the portrait on the wall looking at me. How could I explain? I'd have to be able to ask her if she has thoughts of this kind; if trivia like this fill her mind, too, and seem important to her…" Those accordion notes just now; they brought on that sudden longing for an easy happiness, spine-tingling, very French, or at least what people imagine as French. The fleeting but burning desire to be without past, without thoughts, without weight; to be merry, intoxicated with being alive here and now. And all at once the shame at having had this longing. The vigilant censorship that watches over our happiness, a pitiless voice, always on the alert. A voice that reproaches her with the little life destroyed in her womb-as an immediate punishment for this longing to be happy. So many fragments of joy and fear we are made up of and never speak of.

But there had been no mention of any of this in their conversation at noon before the operation. They recalled the Parisian midwife who had been guillotined some years previously, for having practiced clandestine abortions. They chattered jokingly, making faces and feigning theatrical terror: "The French will guillotine us!" The anecdote allowed them to remain silent about what was on the tips of their tongues, in their eyes, their real lives, made up of little nothings that were serious, essential, inadmissible.

"I'm putting away my instruments of torture. You can get up. I've put your dressing gown here on the armchair."

Her friend touched her shoulder, smiling, then went out, taking with her the tray covered in a crumpled napkin. "That smile, I've already added it to my painkilling inventory" August 25, 1946. A room transformed into a used furniture store filled with Russian curios. The smiling face of a woman-a scarred face that since adolescence had borne a deep gash cut into her left cheek, like a pink butterfly with torn wings. Her smile made the butterfly move; the most childlike, the most vulnerable smile in the world, one from which strangers turned away, so as not to let their revulsion be seen… The face of Li. Li, lily… At a party in the days of their childhood in Russia long ago a ten-year-old child weeps: the others are in fancy dress as flowers; her own costume, a lily-dress, has gone astray. People hear her lamenting: "Li-li-lia!" They laugh. They make up a nickname. The child becomes Li. She is consoled with a replacement costume-that of a magician: she has a turban with a peacock's feather, a star-spangled cape, a magic wand. She falls in love with the role. At every party from now on it is she who takes charge of the magic; she learns conjuring, knows how to set off fireworks. People have almost forgotten her real name, Alexandra… One festive evening a many-colored rocket hits her in the face before falling into the grass and exploding in a shower of stars that makes the children shout with glee. Her own cry is lost amid the tumult of laughter and applause. She is fifteen…

In her inventory just now Olga included that child. A child disfigured because someone had once found her a magician's costume. A child who would survive wars, famines, indifference, and disgust in the eyes of others and end up in a stifling room, lost in the midst of the Parisian ant-heap, on August 25, 1946, causing pain, while she tended it, to the bared body of a woman.

Along with the cool from the windows, opened at last, the evening also brought the marvelous sensation of the pain fading. Lying on a sofa squeezed between the piano and the armchairs, Olga heard her friend busying herself in the kitchen. The clatter of crockery, the swish of the water. Li… pleasantly distracted, as a woman can feel in the evening, soothed by the routine sequence of tasks. Li… so close, a friend for so long and at the same time unknowable. Other people are made up of questions that one dare not put to them…

Li stuck her head through the half open door: "You're not bored?"

"So she was thinking about me. It's one of those questions you can never ask: What do you think of me? And yet we spend our days picturing how other people see us, picturing ourselves living in their minds. And I certainly have a life in hers. But what a strange creature that must be!"

She tried to picture Olga as imagined by Li, an Olga in love and very much loved, in the midst of a passionate affair with her lover. ("She doubtless calls him my 'lover.' ") For this imaginary Olga, pregnancy is a real disaster. The lover, a married man, is too prominent in the Russian colony in Paris to recognize an illegitimate child. Hence an abortion. The heroine of a pretty romantic tale…

She pricked up her ears. A little hummed tune was now mingled with the sound of the dishes being washed. "My dear old Li," thought Olga. "I must be something like that in her thoughts-a lover, passion, palpitations. If she only knew that the thing that really upset me in this business is that I can't remember when this 'lover' of mine last came to see me. That I'm almost sure he didn't come in June, nor more recently. So this pregnancy strongly resembles an immaculate conception. No, he must have come in June, the proof of it is… But I simply don't recall, I have no memory of it. And so where Li pictures a tragedy there is just this infuriating confrontation with forgotten dates, meetings that have slipped the memory… Other people make us live in surprising worlds. And we live in them; they go and see us down there; they talk to these doubles, who are their own invention. And in reality we do not meet at all in this life."

Li's laughter woke her in the night. Sleeping in two armchairs arranged face to face for the occasion, her friend gave a rather shrill, childish little laugh. It took Olga several seconds to realize that Li was weeping softly in her sleep. The moon was melting on the lid of the piano; the furniture and objects seemed to be in suspense, interrupting the existence they had been leading a moment before. And her friend's wail rang out both close at hand and in the infinite remoteness of the life that enfolded her dreams… Olga remained awake for quite some time, listening as Li's breathing gradually calmed down.

In the morning, finding her friend neither in the room nor in the kitchen, Olga went out into the little yard at the back of the house. She sat down on an old stool in the soft, transparent sunlight and did not stir, her gaze fixed on a little stunted tree that persisted in growing in a crack under the gutter. It was important to her not to disturb the simple happiness, the absence of thoughts, the slow drifting of the air that still had the freshness of cold paving stones, of the night, but already carried the smell of grilled onions. Olga leaned the back of her neck against the rough surface of the wall. She suddenly felt she could live solely by following the permeation of these smells, live in this light, in the immediate physical sensation of happiness. On the wall facing her, several narrow windows, cut through at random, spoke of unknown lives that seemed touching to her in their simplicity…

This happiness lasted for the time she needed to take stock of her own reality. It was still there, but yesterday's thoughts, the thoughts of every day, in the guise they had had yesterday, were already flooding in: that "lover," certainly the last man in her life; the tiny lethal operation in her body. During the coming days all of that would give rise to a long, futile inner debate, arguments that excused her and those that damned her. She could already hear words forming in her head, that vigilant voice that kept watch over her moments of happiness: "So, you've had your instant of bliss thanks to a little murder. Bliss in a backyard that smells of onions. Well done!"

She got up, went closer to the tree, inhaled the bright little blossoms scattered over its branches… Her friend's words could be heard at the other end of the yard, coming from the cellar-Li's studio. Olga went down the steps: she could not yet imagine who might be on the receiving end of these cheerful and encouraging remarks.

"No no, my dear man, don't forget you're a satyr! Come on, give me a lewd grimace. Yes, very good, that's right, a look inflamed with desire, licking your lips with lust. Perfect! Hold it there… And you, Madame, look alarmed, tremble! A nymph already feeling this lubricious monster's breath on her neck… Good! Don't move…"

The cellar was lit with a sharp, theatrical light. Li, motionless behind a tripod, her eye glued to her camera, was pointing it at a huge plywood panel. Against an exuberant painted background of plants and leaves, it portrayed a beautiful nymph with a white, shapely body being embraced by a satyr surging up out of the rushes. The nymph blinked her eyes a little nervously. The satyr coughed.

"And-now-quite-still-everyone!" repeated Li in a magician's voice, and there was a click.

The faces of the satyr and the nymph detached themselves from the plywood and left two dark, empty circles in their place.

Li stood up, noticed Olga, and gave her a wink. A man and woman came out from behind the panel. It was comical to see their heads detach themselves from the painted figures and come down to earth on very correctly dressed bodies: a summer dress, a light shirt with a tie. They themselves seemed a little disconcerted by this sudden transformation.

"The photos will be ready the day after tomorrow, about noon," Li explained as she led them out.

They had lunch in this cellar where there were several painted panels arranged along the walls. On one of them Olga made out a castle in flames with a musketeer escaping out the window, clasping a swooning beauty in his arms. A little farther on a couple of suntanned bathers were basking at the edge of an expanse of blue, beneath the palm trees. The holes for their faces stood out oddly against the background of the tropical sky. In the foreground Olga was surprised to detect a streak of real sand, and a large seashell… Li followed her gaze.

"Oh that's quite an old one. From the days when I was going all out for the illusion of depth, trompe l'oeil. I noticed that people very much enjoyed the realism…"

Olga listened to her, amazed and touched, thinking: "This is Li. Elusive. Who is she? Conjurer. Painter. Photographer. Nurse. Three years at the front during the First World War. Imprisoned and tortured under the Occupation, yes, those hands covered in burns… Last night she cried in her sleep. What was she dreaming about?"

Li got up, forgetting the meal, and took out one panel after another, placing them all on the stands. It was not the first time she had shown her collection to Olga, but, as with all great enthusiasts, her passion was rekindled each time and gave spectators the impression of experiencing anew things they had seen before.

"I just had to keep inventing," she explained, putting her head through a cutout circle. "This is my mythological period. Recognize it?"

A girl clad in a transparent tunic was approaching a bed, by the light of a candle. A winged cupid lay there asleep in voluptuous abandon. Li's face appeared now in the aura of the candle, now on the pillow.

"And after that, one day, a flash of inspiration. And my literary period begins. Look!"

This time it was a man with a bushy beard, wearing a long peasant blouse, a giant standing beside an izba and leaning on the handle of a swing plow. The character posed beside him seemed, in his city clothes, to be the very epitome of the average man.

"You see," exclaimed the photographer, thrusting her face into the cutout, "a certain Mr. N calling on Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. And you can't imagine how many Mr. Ns have already succeeded in convincing people they were on intimate terms with the writer. And not only the French: even the Russians allow themselves to be taken in."

Olga was beginning to feel slightly drunk. It was not the taste, now forgotten, of the wine Li had served, but intoxication at the nonchalance with which her friend conducted her life.

"I've even concocted my little theory on the subject of all these fantasies. This Mr. N who wants (mainly as a joke, but not only as a joke) to have himself photographed in the company of Tolstoy. What stopped him from shaking hands with him in real life? Minor hazards of existence. Not even his modest origins. Tolstoy used to walk about on foot just like him and lived in Moscow in the next street. It was not even his age: this Mr. N was twenty when Tolstoy died. In short, what kept them apart was the most trivial bad luck. The same that causes one passerby to slip on a banana peel and break his leg, while the one before just misses it."

"So you decided to give fate a little helping hand?"

"No. I simply wanted people who come here to learn to defy chance. To liberate themselves. Not to assume their own lives are the only possible existence. You know, I've even found a motto: Listen to this! 'Tolstoy is walking by on the opposite side of the street… Cross over!' They send one another these photos for April Fools' Day. But I want them to change their lives. I want to make them live waiting for the unexpected, miracles. I want…"

Olga nearly asked: "But Cupid and Psyche? Isn't it rather unlikely that your clients will meet them, even if they do cross the road?…" She held her peace. Despite Li's playful tone, she had sensed a vibrant, tense intonation in her voice. Which is how one presents one's credo to a friend, behind a smokescreen of jokes.

At that moment Li's face appeared in the next cutout, breathing life into a lady holding a white Pomeranian on a leash. The man who accompanied her had a pince-nez fixed in the empty oval of the face by means of a very fine wire. "Cunning, no?" exclaimed the photographer with a laugh, and… leaving the lady with her lapdog, she thrust her head into the hole with the pince-nez. When Olga went and placed herself behind the panel with the nymph laughter overcame them. They looked at each other from the two ends of the cellar-Li as the writer with his pince-nez and Olga as the satyr leaping out of the reeds. Then the satyr confronted the lady with the lapdog; after that it was Psyche and the huge vacationer in his striped bathing suit… Laughing, they stuck their heads into different panels and improvised conversations between the characters. "The satyr is walking by on the opposite bank… Cross over," cried Li between two outbursts of laughter.

A client arrived for a simple passport photo. And, without admitting it to themselves, they both became aware that the presence of this man, motionless in his dark suit, with his serious expression in front of the lens, was in reality no less strange, in his anonymous personal mystery, than all the nymphs, satyrs, and musketeers…

When the day drew to a close, and the sun's rays steadily lengthened, a feeling stole over them that their interlude of unreflecting laughter was coming to an end. Time was turned upside down, no longer flowing from its morning source but toward that moment when they would have to get up and say their good-byes, while trying to maintain a lighthearted, cheerful tone. It was that brief moment when solitudes are revealed; when one feels disarmed, incapable of checking the flight of the impalpable, gossamer stuff of happiness. Perhaps in an effort to hold onto the gaiety of the afternoon a little longer, Li gave a demonstration of a special camera. Its mechanism was concealed in a big book, a very clever simulation, with a thick binding and a gilded top. You could hardly see the reflection of the tiny lens…

"I bought it from an American officer," explained Li. "You put it on a shelf. It reacts automatically to a change of light. It takes five pictures at three-second intervals…"

Olga was hardly listening to her. When Li stopped talking and they could not let the silence continue any longer, they both spoke at the same time, in a swift collision of words, looks, and gestures:

"You know, I'm leaving L.M. for good."

"You know, I'm going back to live in Russia."

Their expressions of surprise, their comments, also clashed in a disorganized exchange of questions and answers.

"In Russia? Do you really think your fantastic photos will appeal to them over there? All those satyrs…"

"Olga, I'm sure he still loves you. Read his last book again, it's you he's talking about… Why rush to break it off like that?"

"But, of course they will. It'll be a breeze. You know, Olga, under that regime they've become too serious. They need to learn to laugh again."

"But you see, when there are some little things you can't stand any longer, it feels as if it's all over. We always see each other in hotel rooms. Every time he brings me a pair of embroidered slippers, a kind of pumps made of fabric. When we part in the morning he takes them back until the next time. It's his talisman. I suppose the pumps stay hidden in a drawer in his desk… Do you know what I mean?"

It was only in the street, on her way to the station, that Olga had this thought: for months each of them had been preparing to announce her break with the past. The man, this L.M., that she was going to leave. The Russia that Li was going to rediscover. And when the moment had come they had announced it as one, in a confused, breathless, false exchange. As they said their good-byes they were each in a hurry to return to solitude to explore the other's sudden future-the "tragedy" pictured by Li; Russia, that white gulf that had suddenly become a possible destination. They parted and the real conversation began, in their minds, the endless discussion with the other's ghost. "That exchange of words in which we spend half our lives," Olga said to herself as she left Li's house.

The street did not liberate her as she had hoped. The two days spent in Paris were concentrated into a dull weariness, filling her head with a buzz of obsessions, ones she had returned to a thousand times during the operation. Obsessions not easily brushed aside, massive as tablets of stone, that constantly tormented her mind: her age; this hollow sham of an exhausted love, very probably her last love; the need to consider this life as the only possible one… And now the vertiginous nothingness of Russia, which took her breath away; she did not even know what to think of it.

In a passageway in the Metro, when changing trains, she noticed a little gathering, their heads raised toward a commemorative plaque fixed to the wall. She went up to it, read the inscription: "At this spot on August 23, 1941, Colonel Fabien shot and killed the first German…" The newspaper she unfolded in the train contained an account of the second anniversary of the Liberation of Paris. One of the photos showed Molotov with a sour expression on his face, leaving the official platform as a mark of protest. "That was yesterday," she thought, "while Li was operating on me…" She felt she had her finger on the very essence of life: its chaotic improbability, the farcical absurdity of all this intermingling of destinies, dates, chances…

She opened her bag and took out a thick leatherbound volume, the concealed camera that, with childish curiosity, she had asked Li to lend her as they said their good-byes. The leather smelled good and the object itself was alluring; it had the compact efficiency of an intelligent machine. Above all, it reminded her of the panels in Li's studio. The marvelous simplicity of their subjects. "One should live like those characters on the plywood," thought Olga, suddenly happy. "I make everything complicated, I can't leave well enough alone. All that rubbish about embroidered slippers! No, Li's right: two characters, one situation. She ought to paint me: a woman leaving her lover. On plywood, with broad brushstrokes, without psychology: because that's where all the trouble starts!"

This brief explosion of cheerful indignation gave her the energy to climb the staircase at the exit, to cross the square without collapsing onto the seat her eye had spotted. And even to silence the poisonous little voice that was hissing inside her head. "You're a tired old woman: you're putting up a brave front and breaking it off first so your lover doesn't kick you out." She managed to resist this voice and even to answer it back. "You bitch!" It was a young voice, coming from another period of her life, one of her former selves, that had not grown old and often irritated her with these cynical remarks. They were always woundingly accurate. "Little bitch, I'm going to have to take her apart one day…" she repeated, and these words kept at bay the tears of weariness that were already burning her eyelids.

In the train with its almost empty coaches the two days spent in Paris seemed to her very remote, experienced by someone other than herself. Days filled with feverish, excessive words and thoughts. A kind of flight forward, a spiral of errors that then had to be corrected by making further mistaken gestures.

Outside the window a drowsy dusk was slowly spreading. On the platforms of the little stations the sky high above was reflected in the puddles of water, mauveish gray, a wintry sky, you might have said, despite the warmth of that August evening and the dark, heavy profusion of the greenery.

The names of the villages followed one another in the agreeable procession she knew by heart: Cléanty, Saint-Albin, Buissières. From time to time the smell of a fire of fallen branches, burning at the end of a kitchen garden, came in at the lowered window, evoking a gentle life, tempting in its imagined simplicity.

It was in the midst of this deep tranquillity that her child, her son, returned to her thoughts. During those two days in Paris he had been in her at every moment, in every stirring of her soul, but protected, separated from what she was living through. Now he was there and it was he who brought this calm, in which she was slowly catching her breath as if after a long escape… She pictured him already returning next day at noon: with other children of Russian émigrés, from their holiday camp. More than a specific being, she felt him within herself rather like a very physical atmosphere, made up of a myriad delicate elements, a constant vibration of these delicate elements; a throbbing of the blood that must be listened to with a deep instinctive ear, on the alert for the slightest vacillation in this equilibrium. She heard his body; his blood; his life; the silent music, one false note of which could break the rhythm. She heard it, just as, on this return journey she heard the calm of the sky, the silence of the fields… She forgot Paris.

And she remembered how one day in the spring she had been cleaning the windows and he had almost broken one of them, heaving himself up onto the sill of a window that he thought was open because of its new transparency. The glass had resounded vibrantly but resisted. With a rapid movement she had pushed open the two halves of the window, and recognized in the frightened eyes of the child the reflection of her own alarm. It was as if they could hear the shattering of the glass, see a shower of sharp fragments. They knew what that meant for a child like him. "I only wanted to give you a hug…" he said softly and sheepishly climbed down from the window…

As she walked along the platform at Villiers-la-Forêt, where night had already fallen, Olga once more heard in her temples and in her throat (she never knew where it would be hiding) that mocking, aggressive voice she called the "little bitch." The voice told her this calm would be short lived, that new, petty, persistent worries would swiftly erode the serenity of the evening, and that… Olga managed to shake it off by tossing her hair back, as if all the better to feel the coolness of the rain on her brow.

JLt was one evening in September (she was preparing her infusion of hop flowers) that Olga finally realized what memory it was that the painted characters in Li's studio had called up for her. The memory of that masked ball…

During the war this infusion that helped her to sleep also gave her the ulusion of an evening meal or, at any rate, was a substitute for tea. Later on, preparing it was transformed into an evening ritual that, through the repetition of actions that had become routine, put her troubled thoughts to rest, let her live in silent intimacy with herself. She loved this vague hour, outside the measure of time, this floating in repose. The flowers looked like tiny pinecones, their petals swelled up in the boiling water, then cooled down and sank one by one to the bottom of the little copper saucepan. Her gaze was lost in the imperceptible transmutation of the golden liquid, becoming clear again after it was decanted…

That evening the voice of the "little bitch" managed to disrupt the pleasant vacuity of her thoughts. At first Olga was almost pleased to hear the latest reproaches of her persecutrix, so anodyne were the comments. "You aren't consistent even in this stupid ritual. Sometimes you drink your infusion every evening, sometimes a week passes without you remembering. You drink it when you're upset. It's just another trick, a device for banishing unhappiness…" Olga offered no retort, hoping that the reproaches would stop there. But, sensing this hope, the voice started again: "Given the life you've led, and the child that you have, you ought to have become marble long ago, invulnerable to all the little hurts of existence. You ought to be a mater dolorosa… smiling, yes a faint smile of disdain, in defiance of destiny. But look at you, mere words wound you; a remark made by some old madman at the library haunts you for weeks. You mentioned the embroidered slippers to Li and now you picture them each time you put on your own slippers… Mater dolorosa in embroidered slippers. You've missed your vocation!"

This time Olga retorted, "But my life is almost entirely behind me." She knew that this argument silenced the voice of the little bitch when all other reasoning proved fruitless. "Yes. I'm approaching the age when nothing really new can happen to me before my death. No miracles. A highly improbable very last fling? The kind you embark on mainly to prove you still can. Yes, I'm a mater dolorosa in embroidered slippers…"

The little bitch fell silent and in that innermost recess of her mind Olga experienced something of the quiet satisfaction of a person whose superiority has perforce been recognized. At least she could now resume her long drift through the evening. Distractedly she stirred the flowers in the infusion, made ready the drinking bowl and a little strainer. "And now it has to cool…," she thought, relishing the delicious idleness of those minutes.

The boy was already asleep in his room. And the calm and the purity of this sleep seemed to be deepened by the distant chiming of the clock on the church tower in Villiers-la-Forêt. She ended up by matching her thoughts to this nocturnal rhythm. All that remained in these weary thoughts was resignation. Acceptance of this two-pronged house tacked on to the length of the wall of the former brewery where the other emigres lived, which was known as the Caravanserai. The acceptance of her life here in this little town with no special charm; a completely random place and yet predestined; the only one that would take her in after her flight from Paris, her break with Parisian émigré society, and the departure of her husband.

The only place under heaven. This house between the wall of the Caravanserai and the riverbank. She smiled: her place here below.

Holding back the gilded sediment of the flowers with a spoon, she began to pour the infusion into the bowl. She was still smiling, thinking that Li might very well paint her as an old witch mixing her magic potion…

Suddenly her mind made a rapid connection: the characters on those panels, Li and… that masked ball! How had she failed to notice the resemblance earlier?

A good many of the guests in costume were destined to crop up thirty years later on panels created by a whimsical photographer installed in the basement of an old house in Paris. In the feverish gyrations of that carnival long ago Olga had indeed glimpsed an operatic musketeer, a queen with her tall medieval headdress, a ghost making its white garb ripple. And even, in one of the little empty rooms in that mansion, an Othello, a fat man outrageously daubed with black, and drunk, no doubt, thundering out a desperate bravura melody on a piano, while smearing the white keys with muddy fingerprints… The twelve-year-old girl threading her way secretly across the great estate filled with music and laughter is herself, a distant reflection of herself. The adults are too busy with their masquerade to notice her shadow slipping along the walls, avoiding the costumed whirlpools. It is with a disturbing sharpness that the girl, who has just stolen out without permission from the little estate cottage where she was supposed to spend this festive night, experiences her autonomy, her liberty, her strangeness in a world clothed in merry madness. Above all, she is aware of the singularity of these, her childhood years: her father was killed in the Russo-Japanese War; her mother has "buried herself alive" (so say the grown-ups) in a fervent isolation made up of prayers, long hours spent upon her husband's grave, and nocturnal séances with a famous spiritualist, who gives her glimpses of the features of the dear departed and is ruining her. The girl lives in her uncle's family, a man who "will sell his last shirt to throw a party." This masked ball one fine June evening marks the start of a long series of festivities, hunting parties, amateur theatricals on a stage by the entrance to the garden… The girl senses that the freedom she enjoys proves something is out of control in this great mansion. She knows that in her grandmother's time they would never have allowed a child to join in a grown-up party. This casual attitude disturbs her and at the same time excites her… In a drawing room she comes upon a strange figure: an adolescent girl, dressed as a magician, sitting in the angle of a little sofa, fast asleep. Her tall headdress covered in stars sits beside her; her magic wand has slipped onto the floor. The girl picks up this instrument of magic and, not knowing what to do with it, touches the magician's forehead lightly with the end of it. The magician murmurs something in a whisper but does not wake up. The magician is "a daughter of poor parents" whom they put in charge of the fireworks and magic tricks at parties… The girl steals the wand and goes off to continue her exploration. In the corridors she is jostled by groups of people in costume suddenly spilling out in an explosion of shouting, a fiery rustling of silks, a clattering of heels… Exhausted at last, almost sleepwalking, she comes to a kind of small drawing room with no window, a remote corner: she has never known what it was for. It is lit by one candle, around which the melted wax is already forming a little glistening pool on the varnished surface of the table. The girl stops on the threshold. Her first impression fascinates her: she sees a man, a veritable colossus, dressed like a peasant in the folktales, half lying in a broad armchair and using his hands to manipulate a big puppet he has mounted on his stomach. But the puppet begins to speak with a woman's voice, musical, strangely musical and somehow tearful… Yes, it is a woman straddling the huge body of the man, who has his arms stretched out along the armrests. From time to time the woman interrupts her murmuring and her face is transformed into that of a bird of prey: she peppers the somnolent face of the man with swift, insistent, stabbing kisses… All of this is quite bizarre, especially in this room where it feels as if the coughing of the grandparents' old servant can still be heard. The girl would like to touch the woman's body, a very slender, nervous body swathed in a froth of muslin. This restless body seems to grow directly out of the man's stomach. It appears as if she has no legs, just this gauze of muslin that looks as if it covered the hollow trunk of a puppet. And the fine, long cigarette she holds in one hand extended far away from their bodies gives the impression of fluttering about on its own in the darkness… Suddenly the man's face lights up, he utters a noisy gasp. His hands grip the armrests. And the girl realizes that they are not armrests but the woman's legs, her long thighs clad in gleaming black stockings. The man half stretched out in the chair moves heavily, plunges his hands into the muslin, and shakes the woman with such violence that the long cigarette rolls upon the ground. His huge hands plunge into the woman's flimsy dress as if it were a puppet's empty costume. The idea of this missing body is alarming. The girl prepares to run away, takes two steps backward, and suddenly, with a noise that seems to her deafening, drops the magician's wand. The woman turns, pivoting on the man's body…

Olga drank the infusion in her room. As she put the bowl on her bedside table she heard the voice of the "little bitch" once more: "You've got all the quirks of an older woman. Your bowl; soon it'll be little medicine bottles, a shrine for your declining years…" But the words hurt less than usual. For now she knew the hiding place of the mocking voice: in the great mansion during a party, where a twelve-year-old girl was discovering the cavernous complexity of life. As she ran through the corridors there was, among other things, the servant she caught drinking champagne from the guests' glasses… Now her thoughts were quite confused: "It's really effective, this infusion," she had time to say to herself. "I must recommend it to Li. She stuffs herself with sleeping pills and then cries in her nightmares…" Sleep overcame her so quickly that her hand, stretched out toward the lamp, stopped halfway.

On Monday morning at the library there was a constant procession of readers, as if they were deliberately conferring outside the door and coming in one after the other, each to tell her their story. And indeed for a number of them, solitary and often ashamed of their solitude, the library was the only place where there was someone, she, Olga Arbyelina, to listen to them.

The first to come was the nurse from the retirement home, the "Russian retreat" located on the ground floor of the former brewery. A tall, dry woman, whose youthfulness had been overlaid by the air of arrogant and peevish mourning she had imposed on herself. She wore mourning for a person who had never existed and who had been born by chance in conversation when, to conceal her loneliness, she had hinted at a distant loved one, an English fighter pilot, about whom she could not say very much in wartime, for obvious reasons. From one admission to the next this phantom had lived his invisible life, blossoming with a multitude of details, in the heart of the woman who had invented him, adding to his exploits, being promoted… His life had inevitably come to an end at the end of the war. Otherwise she would either have had to admit the lie or else transform him into a lover who was in no hurry to return to his beloved… None of the Russian émigrés at Villiers-la-Forêt was taken in but in the end they became rather fond of this pilot, shot down in one of the last battles of the war…

Scarcely had the door closed behind her when it opened again. A man came in looking over his shoulder and continuing his conversation with someone in the corridor. He did not break it off but simply directed his remarks at Olga as she sat behind her display shelf. This made no difference to the sense of his tale because it was always the same story, with no beginning and no end, and could be heard at any given moment. The former cavalry officer was telling the tale of his fights with the Bolsheviks. Single combat; offensives involving several divisions; ambuscades; and the wounding and deaths of horses that grieved him, it seemed, even more than those of his best friends… From time to time his interminable harangue was interrupted by the hiss of a saber cutting into the flesh of an enemy. His face contracted into a savage grimace and he shouted out a brief "s-s-shlim!" and rounded his eyes at the same time, imitating the expression of a decapitated head…

The readers came in, leaned their elbows on the display shelves, commented on the books they were returning, asked for advice and embarked ineluctably on their own stories… Not all, however. One of them, for example, was discreet and swift. Olga called him the "doctor-just-between-ourselves" in memory of their first encounter: one day he had treated her son, but as he left he had murmured, "I should like this to remain just between ourselves. You know, practicing illegally in this country…"

Shortly before closing time Olga had a visit from the pretty young woman, who two years previously had married an elderly art collector, the owner of several galleries. For a woman who had spent her youth in the poverty of the Caravanserai, had worked there as a waitress in the canteen, and had the banal name of Masha, this marriage seemed like the arrival of the handsome prince, even though her husband was neither handsome nor a prince but ugly and morose. The Russians of Villiers-la-Forêt tried to turn a blind eye to that side of things, knowing how rare miracles, even imperfect ones, were in this world… Masha's tale consisted of a catalog of Parisian personalities whom she had met in her husband's galleries. The all-too-visible effort she had made to memorize all their names, often classy aristocratic names, was as great as the one she was making now to refer to them with worldly indifference. It seemed clear that if she came back to Villiers-la-Forêt and to the Caravanserai from time to time, it was to relish her wonderful deliverance from such places, and from her wretched past; to stroll about among all these people, as if through a bad dream, but one from which she could awaken at any time, by going back to Paris…

The director of the retirement home was the last one to come that day. She had to wait patiently for Masha to finish her list of celebrities. When the latter had finally left the room, she exhaled a noisy sigh of relief.

"Phew! And I thought it was people of our generation who couldn't stop talking. Looking forward to old age when there's nothing else to do… But you heard that chatterbox. I'm sure it would take the two of us a week to get through as much gossip as that."

The director's words turned into a whispering inside Olga's head that nagged at her all evening. "People of our generation… looking forward to old age…" It is in such trivial conversations, thanks to a chance remark, that the truth can be laid bare and wound us mortally. Of those two women, Masha and the director, she naturally felt she was closer to the former, who was thirty-five or thirty-six. Yet here was the latter, who had long since passed fifty hustling her along, she who was only on the brink of forty-six, toward this "looking forward to old age."…

In the bathroom she spent a moment studying the mirror. "In fact it's very simple," she told herself. "Hair like mine turns gray quite early. I should explain to everybody: you see, I have hair of this type but I'm not as old as my hair looks…" Then she shook her head to banish the stupid vision of a woman pleading that she had unusual hair.

As she went into the kitchen she saw her infusion cooling in the little copper saucepan and suddenly experienced a gentle sense of relief that came from resignation. Yes, to resign oneself, to settle down into "looking forward to old age," with little, slightly eccentric rituals. To grind down one's former desires into tiny particles, very light, readily accessible-live these evening moments of vagueness in the soul, like the slender trickle of liquid she will shortly pour into the bowl…

Olga herself did not understand what it was that suddenly rebelled in her. She acted with the zest of the very first, still unconsidered impulse. The infusion was poured down the sink, the sediment of petals gathered into a lump and tossed through the open window. She thought of Li and said to herself that it was thinking of her that had provoked her rebellion: "She's older than me (again that arithmetic: three years older!) and yet she's embarking on a crazy project. On a new life!"

She was seized with the slightly nervous gaiety of someone who would have liked to thumb her nose at sober citizens. "Li really is a hell of a woman! She sure has guts," she kept repeating, pacing up and down her room. Then she stopped, snatched up an object, rubbed it, as if to remove the dust, adjusted the little cloth on the pedestal table, tugged hard on the corners of the pillow. "That Li!" Suddenly the great leatherbound volume caught her eye. The camera! The spy camera Li had lent her, forgotten since then, had almost been transformed, through the habit of looking at it, into a quite ordinary book in the row of other books. As her fingers manipulated the nickel-plated mechanism of the fake book Olga felt them tingling with gleeful excitement. She switched out the light, put the camera on the shelf, and pressed the smooth catch on the top as her friend had instructed her…

She only remembered about it three days later when her rebellion, the night she threw away the infusion, already seemed remote and futile, as is often the case with big exalted decisions taken late at night about which you feel embarrassed next morning.

That day she had to go to Paris: someone had promised to introduce her to a leading specialist in diseases of the blood who could probably… Thus it was, going from pillar to post via slight acquaintances, that she continued her search for the miracle doctor that parents of doomed children never despair of finding… She knew she would be calling on Li and decided to take the opportunity to return her spy camera to her.

A week later she was extremely surprised to receive a little note that came with three black-and-white snapshots. "The first two didn't come out; there wasn't enough light," Li commented.

Olga spread them out on the windowsill and saw a vision of her own body that for several seconds took her breath away.

On the first photograph, in point of fact, she was not seen. The space was lit from the side and in the part that had come out you could see the cat, which generally slept in the kitchen. This time it was awake and seemed to have been caught red-handed in some mysterious nocturnal activity. Its ears were pricked up, on the alert for sounds, its eyes with pupils like razor blades were outlined against the weak light shining on it. Its whole body was tensed in preparation for a velvety, leaping escape… Olga was forced to utter a little laugh in order to rid herself of the disturbing impression left, for some unknown reason, by the attentive watchfulness of the cat.

As she examined the other two photos she remembered that on the night of her exuberant rebellion, when she had set the spy camera, she had had to get up to remove her nightgown and open the window, so warm was the September night. At that moment she had completely forgotten the camera hidden on the shelf. And yet the tiny lens had been activated and with perfect discretion had taken five pictures, at three-second intervals.

On the next photo Olga saw herself from behind, seated on the edge of the bed, her arm raised, her head swathed in the turban of the unwanted nightgown… On the last she was standing up in front of the French door, her body leaning forward, one hand surrounding her breasts, as if to shield them from onlookers, the other resting on the handle. The features of her face were not clear. Of her eyes the snapshot had only retained a triangle of shadow. But you felt that her gaze was filled with the airy silence of the night and that along the white curve of her arm there flowed almost palpable coolness.

This naked woman in front of the open door seemed very different from herself, a stranger to her. She could easily perceive the beauty of this body, its youthfulness, even; when she caught sight of the photo, it had taken her breath away. And something else, a singular element she could not define, a secret beyond words, the taste of which, like that of mint, froze her nostrils, made her gorge rise…

All the while she was examining the photos, the voice of the "little bitch" persisted in pointing out strange inconsistencies. "Why are the first two completely blank and the third one hardly lit while the last two came out?"

"Shut up. It's probably a defect in the camera."

"And why is the door open?"

"A draft."

"And the cat?"

"Shut up. I don't want to know anything about it."

This altercation did nothing to reduce her amazement at the woman in the photos. It was only late in the evening (she heard a slight sound from the direction of the boy's room and got up rapidly, ready to come at the slightest call) that the reproaches of the little bitch again reverberated in her mind: "All these photographs are very nice but you'd do better to think about your son once in a while…"

Olga did not reply. She went to the door, opened it, listened to the silence along the corridor. Their strange house consisted of this corridor with her room, the kitchen, and the bathroom at one end, and the boy's room at the other. A storeroom furnished with a tiny window was located halfway along it and served as a library. The boy called it "the book room…"

Hearing nothing, she went back to bed. What could she reply to the voice hounding her with its reproaches? Tell it that on the top shelf in the "book room," inaccessible to the boy, there were a good dozen volumes devoted to his illness. And that she knew every paragraph of them by heart, all the treatments described, the tiniest details of every stage in the progress of the illness. Reply that on occasion she had nightmares in which the course of the illness was speeded up and completed in a single day. But that to think about it all the time would not have been living; it would be losing one's reason and therefore not allowing the child to live. He needed a quite stupidly normal mother, that is to say unique, constant in her affection and her calm, constant in her youthfulness…

The little bitch was silent. Olga got up again (she was already regretting not having brewed up her infusion), went to the mirror, gathered up her hair in a thick tress, and began to cut it shorter with a large pair of scissors… She told herself that the photographs, the tales told by readers at the library, the endless arguments with the little bitch, the anxious arithmetic of women's ages, all this torrent that filled her days, was in fact the only way to avoid spending all her time thinking about the books perched on the top shelf in the book room out of bounds to the boy. To immerse herself in this torrent was her way of letting him see her as a mother like all the others. Of seeming to herself to be a woman like the others, in order better to play the part of that mother.

Before falling asleep she repeated several times in a silent whisper, trying to sound as natural as possible, "You know, perhaps we could go to Paris tomorrow or the day after, I'd like to show you… No! Look, we're going to Paris: I've been told about a doctor who… No. Someone who's a really nice man, a leading specialist in your… No. In your problems…" Generally her mind functioned without her being aware of it. Now she became conscious of this almost automatic mental process. "So I'm thinking about him all the time," she said to herself, as if she had won a bitterly disputed victory over the voice that persecuted her.

Next day at the library she was eager to be over and done with

the usual preparations for the start of the day. She could not resist the ludicrous impulse to spread out the three snapshots in secret behind her display shelf and examine them once more before the arrival of the first readers. Actually to examine them here in a neutral setting that ought to allow the photographs to be seen in an impartial light. An element in her desire to do this was that obsessive fascination of particular photos that one longs to keep looking at with the dependency of a morphine addict either to confirm that their mysterious charm has not vanished or, by contrast, in the hope of discovering some new detail in them that will transform their snapshot world.

She opened two parcels of new publications, but in her impatience decided to enter them later and began to clip the French and Russian newspapers into their rods. She generally took the trouble to leaf through them, though she was sure of learning their contents from the readers' interminable commentaries. This time she merely looked at the headlines on the first few pages, theft of duchess of Windsor's jewels… Josephine baker, officer in the resistance… algerian unrest: fever attack or growing pains… trains to run faster october 7: new drive by sncf, paris-bordeaux in 6 hours 10 minutes; paris-marseilles in 10 hours 28 minutes.

At last she was able to examine the three snapshots in peace. The beauty and youthfulness of the woman in the photographs fascinated her yet again. While listening alertly for footsteps outside the door, she studied this body, striving to be pitiless. But the unknown woman casting off her nightgown and in the next photograph standing in front of the window had nothing about her that betrayed a sagging, a decline. The back revealed beneath the nightgown was of an almost juvenile suppleness. And although this instant in her life was captured at random, the camera had recorded what in her own eyes distinguished her body from those of other women she had observed: ankles with very slender Achilles tendons, as if pinched between the thumb and forefinger of a giant sculptor; and also the delicacy of the collarbones, that looked as if they were too slender to support the opulence of her full, heavy breasts. One never knows, often until one's dying day, whether other people notice such features and appreciate them or judge them to be graceless.

Yet more intensely than the day before, this woman surprised in front of the dark window gave the impression of trembling on the brink of an amazing revelation. "She is totally… how can I put it? Unrecognizable? Other? The fact is, at that moment I was-other…" She tilted the snapshot to change the angle of lighting, hoping that the words she sought might suddenly emerge from its surface and capture its mystery in a formula… The first readers of the day were already arriving at the door.

To begin with, a very elderly boarder from the retirement home came into the room. Generally books were brought to her by the nurse. But that morning she had had the strength to come in person, quite amazed, quite radiant, to have managed to endure the long trek from one floor to the next, and quite dazzled, too, by the brilliance of the autumn sun that was shining through the windows. One could picture the feats this little body, almost transparent in its dressing gown, must have had to perform in order to climb stairs and walk down long corridors, filled with howling drafts that smelled of cooking, the street, and river damp. She had a long struggle with the door: as it closed it almost dragged her with it, almost wrenched her arm off by the force of its spring. In the look she leveled at Olga, along with her amazement, there was a reflection, at once anxious and proud, of all the dangers overcome… As Olga escorted her back to her room she was addressing her, often breathlessly. "In the springtime… in spring I really must show you those flowers. You see they grow almost at the foot of the trees, coming up through the dead leaves. I'm sure even the French don't know them. In the spring. We'll go together. You'll see. They're pale white. And quite beautiful!"

Going to look for these white flowers in the woods in springtime was a promise Olga had been hearing for several years now…

The round of the readers resumed. The cavalry officer told the story of his best horse, the one that was trained to lie down and stand up in obedience to a prearranged whistle. Then he acted out another saber fight and did his "S-s-shlim!" impression.

Then there were the readers whom Olga privately called "the climbers." These were the ones who had managed to leave their much-maligned quarters in the old brewery and had moved into the upper part of Villiers-la-Forêt while dreaming, secretly or openly, of one day going to live in Paris.

Masha came as well and, leaning on the display shelves, she murmured confidentially, "I won't be coming again for a couple of weeks now. I'm off to Nice. With him…"

The significance of "with him" was already clear to Olga: not with the husband.

Into this intermittent sequence of conversationalists slipped the former pharmacist who lived in forced idleness following the destruction of his premises by Allied bombers. Since that catastrophe he had drawn closer to the émigré community in the lower town, had even begun to learn their language and had gradually assumed the role of the Frenchman par excellence that every Frenchman adopts when living among foreigners. Unconsciously perhaps, he exaggerated certain characteristics that are considered to be typically Gallic and was delighted if the inhabitants of the Caravanserai exclaimed, in response to his racy puns or his gallantry, "Oh, these French-they're incorrigible!"

When he had left, Olga said to herself with a smile, "Whatever they may say about him, he was the only one to notice that I'd cut my hair." And she went over the pharmacist's words in her mind: "Oh Madame! What a blow you strike at our hearts. Quel coup! 'Cou,' of course, without the final 'p.' The curve of your neck is exquisite. I hope this is not the last of your treasures you will lay bare for us to see…" She went to put away the books the pharmacist had returned and, recalling the man's gestures and performance, thought, "You know, they really are incorrigible, these Frenchmen."

The tall, peevish nurse who was constantly in mourning came at the end of the morning and asked for a recently published book in which, she said, there should be maps that would enable her to establish the exact location of her British beloved's final air battle…

Olga did not notice the day passing. Or rather it passed in the stories of all the readers, drowning her in their words. "They've driven me out of my own life," she said to herself bitterly.

Only at the end of the day, after closing time, did she feel she was returning into her own life. Generally she left at eight o'clock sharp, otherwise the library turned into a debating chamber: and the readers, particularly those who lived in the Caravanserai building itself, would only leave at midnight, after drinking several cups of tea, reliving all the revolutions and all the wars in the world and telling the stories of their lives for the umpteenth time… That evening she locked the door and remained sitting there for a while behind the display shelves where the returned books were piled up. The faces of the day still hovered like ghosts in the half-light of the empty room. She saw herself just as all these visitors must see her: a librarian for life, a woman abandoned by her husband who had cut herself off from her own caste, the mother of a doomed child…

A slight rattling interrupted this silent colloquy. She looked up. The handle of the door was slowly turning down. For no reason the slowness of this movement was alarming. A hand shook the door several times with the same strong, sure force. After a moment of silence, a man's voice, not speaking to anyone and yet not excluding the possibility that someone might have locked themselves into the library, almost hummed, "And the bird has flown! Forgetting to switch off the light. Strange…" And a moment later the same voice was replying to a tardy reader, "Too late, my dear! Madame Arbyelina is punctuality itself. It is a quarter past eight. Punctuality, as you know, is the politeness of kings… and of princesses…"

Olga tried to fit this or that face she knew to the voice, then abandoned the attempt. A voice she had never heard before. She took the last book to be put away, the volume that had been covering up that patch of ink on the light wood of her desk. It was unpleasant to look at because it resembled a potbellied man; she always hid it with a sheet of paper or a book. Suddenly, like a moth fluttering out of the folds of a curtain, the three snapshots slithered to the ground. Since that morning, amid the hubbub of words, she had forgotten all about them. The blood rushed to her cheeks. "Suppose a reader had taken this book out tomorrow?" She pictured the scene, the shame, the laughter, the tittle-tattle…

And when her eyes peered deeply once more into the nocturnal room where a naked woman stood beside a French door in darkness, the mystery of this moment could be approached very simply. Nobody knew the woman was there, in the middle of the night, in the coolness that arose from the river. "Just as nobody knows that I am in this empty library now, lit only by this little table lamp. I have lived a half hour of my life they will never know about." She told herself the woman in the photograph could have walked out through the French door and taken a few steps across the meadow that sloped down to the river… The freedom of it was heady. A naked woman walking on the grass, on a moonless night, no longer a librarian, nor an abandoned wife, nor a certain Princess Arbyelina…

On her way home she stopped from time to time and looked about her: the little houses of the lower town, the trees, the first stars seen through their branches.

Her most intense amazement was at discovering the very close presence of a life that could remain unknown to other people.

Two days after that strange evening hidden from the others she received a letter from L.M. (her "Parisian lover," as she knew the inmates of the Caravanserai called him). It was in such half-page letters that he used to invite her to Paris. The latest one differed from previous ones in its serious and, it appeared, mildly vexed tone. Reading between the lines there was a kind of reproach: I'm just back from Germany where I've been given a guided tour of hell and here you are in France, living your little operetta of a life. The tone also meant: yes, I know we haven't seen one another for several months but you have no right to judge me: my work as a journalist takes precedence over all the tender sentiments in the world.

That evening she drafted a reply. A letter that put an end to this long sequence of meetings that they had referred to, for a certain time at least, as "love." In the lines she set down, crossed out, rewrote, this word no longer occurred. And once this linchpin was removed, all that they had lived through became simply a collection of dates, tones of voice, hotel rooms, ends of the street, different silences in the night, pleasures of which only the shell of the memory remained. She tried to tell him all that… The rhythm of the sentences was transferred to her body and made her walk up and down mechanically in the corridor of her narrow house. In the hall her eye lingered on the old chest of drawers. The corner of the top had been sawed in an irregular curve. It was L.M. who had done that; so that the child should not cut himself when playing, he explained. He was very proud of this service rendered. "Like all men who give practical help to a single mother," she thought. Each time, as he came in, when he visited her at Villiers, he would finger the sawed-off corner, as if checking his work, and sometimes he would even ask her, "So it's doing the job? Don't hesitate to let me know if you need any other sawing done." Now, as she walked through the hall, she told herself that she should have risked the truth and mentioned that sawed-off corner in her letter-one of the real reasons for breaking with him! But would he have understood? She could just have written about that corner and nothing else. Or perhaps this scenario as well: a man with a pale torso, stretched out in the darkness beside her, talks without stopping, now spurred on by his desire, now deflated by the lack of it… The whole truth could be summed up in those two fragments.

Having completed the draft she went to the kitchen where the wood stove had gone out and her infusion was cooling. It seemed to her that her letter breaking it off marked the start of a new era. Perhaps it would indeed be one spent "looking forward to old age" as the director had said. Everything that seemed transitory, still capable of changing, would become fixed-this kitchen with the familiar blisters on the tired paintwork of the walls; this long, low brick structure, her house; and her presence in Villiers-la-Forêt, daily less surprising to her amid a cycle of seasons, almost indistinguishable from one another, as they are in France, where the summer lingers long into the fall and where the winter, without snow, is merely a continuation of the fall. Henceforth her life would be rather like this vague slippage… Before going to bed (that evening the infusion had no effect on her emotional state) she darned her son's shirt. Spread out on her knees, the fabric was rapidly impregnated with the warmth of her body, of her hands. The shirt with its frayed collar already belonged visibly to this new era in her life, when nothing extraneous would any longer come between her and her child. No visits, no affairs. She would drive away any thought that would take her further from him. But he would not notice this change, any more than next morning he would notice a cluster of stitches of blue thread on the collar of his shirt…

Scarcely a few days after that evening when the final letter was written and the great decision taken with intense and tender bitterness, Olga was to forget all about it. Her resolutions, her mature collect-edness, her resignation-all this would be swept away by a single gesture.

In the course of a light, cool evening in the last days of summer, in a moment of great serenity, she would catch her son unawares, standing beside the little copper vessel in which she brewed her infusion of hop flowers. She would spot him poised in the brief moment of tense alertness that follows one of those actions a person is trying to keep secret at all costs. The trancelike immobility that forms a bridge between a dangerous or criminal act and the exaggerated relaxation of movements and words that follows it. What she would think she had guessed at seemed to her such an improbably monstrous action that instinctively she stepped back several paces. As if she desired to turn time backward, already sensing that a return to their old life had at that moment become impossible.

Later on she would find herself trembling to think that at the moment when she caught sight of him, he could himself have observed her through the slightly parted curtains at the kitchen window…

The sky had still been light; and the trees stood out against its transparency with the clarity of an etching. The mauve luminosity of the air gave their silhouettes an unreal appearance. From time to time Olga would pick up a dead leaf or a fragment of spar and examine them by this deceptive, translucent light. Even her fingers, as they grasped the handle of a spade, had a supernatural glow in this fluid pink. The cold, pure start to the dusk, she knew, promised a calm and limpid night. A fine night at summer's end.

She was working slowly, following the rhythm of lights and colors that grew richer with an ever darkening blue before turning purple. The dry stalks she uprooted from the bed beside the wall came up comfortably, easily, with the resignation of summer flowers that are over. From the dug earth there arose a pungent, heady smell. It was dark now, but she continued the slow ceremony of simple tasks that left the mind at rest…

It was a Saturday. During the afternoon she had recopied her farewell letter to L.M. for the second time. And to avoid the temptation of starting all over again she had put it in an envelope, deciding to mail it on Monday morning. For two days, now that the deed was done, she had had a sense of living in a soothing ebb of emotions. It was just as if she were walking at low tide on an uncovered seabed, distractedly picking up a pebble here and the fragment of a shell there…

It was in this blissful, distracted state that she was working now. Bent low over the earth, she finally reached a spot below the kitchen window and stood up.

Too abruptly! Giddiness overcame her and made the lit window and the curtains sway. Her body was flooded with a dull, hazy weakness. As she leaned her hand against the wall it seemed to yield gently. To check this wavering she fixed her gaze on the bright gap between the curtains. And saw a stranger, a very young man standing beside the stove…

She saw his gesture. With the clarity that movements and objects have when observed at night from outside a window in cold weather. An almost incredible clarity, on account of her giddiness.

The young stranger's hand hovered rapidly above the little copper saucepan. Then his fingers crumpled up a thin rectangle of paper and slipped it into his pants pocket. He moved away from the kitchen range and glanced anxiously at the door…

Still reeling, she took a few steps backward. A bush rose up behind her, repelling her with its springy branches. She stopped, hearing only the dull throbbing of the blood in her temples, seeing only the strip of light between the curtains.

Sensing everything, but as yet understanding nothing, she saw scattered fragments coalescing beneath her eyelids: the fingers hovering over the hop flowers; the three photographs of the naked woman; the open door the night when they were taken; two days spent at Li's; the abortion… Her eyes, swimming with the thick fog of her giddiness, were already making horrified sense of this scattered mosaic. But her mind, numbed by her blood rising, held its peace.

Little by little, however, the mists cleared, the mosaic became more and more irremediable. Its colored fragments evoked a great dark red reptile, rapidly swelling in her brain. At that moment the giddiness vanished, clarity returned. Olga had a fraction of a second to understand… But the reptile swollen with blood exploded, burned the back of her neck, froze her lips in a cry. The mosaic remained shattered: three photos; the open door; herself standing, quite naked; the infusion that occasionally made her sleep for so long. It was like a word at the back of your mind, the letters and sound of which are glimpsed for an instant and disappear immediately, leaving behind only the certainty of its existence.

True, this slimy reptile, swollen with brown blood, did exist. It was this that her mind, now cleared, retained, like the proof of a moment of madness. And even the voice of the "little bitch" had fallen silent, terrified by what had just been sensed.

Now her gaze was riveted on the young stranger who was nonchalantly leafing through a notebook open on the table in the brightly lit kitchen. It was her son!

But before she could grasp how he could have grown up to this extent, the child of seven that, after so many years, he still remained for her, there occurred in her vision a kind of rapid adjustment that hurt her eyes. The face of the young man bent over the notebook and the face of the child that lived within her mind trembled at the same instant, swam toward one another, and melted into intermediate features. Halfway between one thing and the other: those of a fourteen-year-old boy.

The young man, she now understood, had appeared at the moment of her giddiness, his face and body matured by the horror of the mosaic that had revealed the unthinkable. Yes, this very young man, slim, pale with the transparent, almost invisible shadow of his first mustache, belonged to the world of the mosaic that, once thought about, was transformed into a glistening reptile, with glassy, enigmatic eyes. A world that was horrifying but could neither be thought nor spoken.

The light between the curtains went out. In the darkness, following the wall with her hand, she made her way toward the door. She caught her foot against clods of earth and uprooted stalks. She felt as if she were returning to the house after several years… In the hall the patterns on the wallpaper amazed her, as if she were seeing them for the first time. She bent down and automatically performed the action she repeated almost every day. Picking up a pair of dusty shoes she thrust her hand into first one, then the other, feeling the insides. To detect the point of any nail lurking in the sole. Suddenly she lost her grip on the shoe and it fell to the ground. Her hand had slipped inside the worn leather quite easily. She realized she was still living with the memory of her fingers, that used to have to wriggle painfully into the child's narrow shoes.

She stood up and her hand retained the sensation of the shoes growing gradually broader. "Fourteen. He's fourteen…," she caught herself murmuring softly. The face of the adolescent whom she had recognized as her son was very deeply embedded in her eyes. She perceived in it the invisible mutation linking the face of the child to that of the young man. Everything in his features was still malleable, everything still had the softness of childhood… And yet he was a new being. And almost as tall as she! Indeed, in a few weeks he would be the same height… So a whole period in her son's life must have passed unnoticed!

She put the shoes away and went out into the darkness again. "I didn't notice him growing up… He was an endlessly silent, discreet child… An absent child. When his father left it froze him at the age he was then. And after that there was the war, those four empty years. And, above all, there was his illness: I paid more attention to a scratch than to him growing three inches. And his shy independence. And his isolation. And this benighted spot, this Villiers-la-Forêt…"

The words reassured her. She prolonged their exaggeratedly reasonable flow because she did not know what she was going to be able to do when they dried up. She simply did not know. She was walking in the dark on the grassy slope that lay between their house and the river. And whispering these explanations that, she sensed, would never express the essence of the bond between them, her and her child. The branch of a willow tree suddenly checked her. A branch that stroked her cheek with a caress that felt alive. Olga stopped. There was the willow with its silent cascade of branches. In their net a few stars. The reflection of the moon in the hollow of a footprint filled with water. The fresh, nocturnal scent of the reeds, asleep at the water's edge, the scent of the wet clay…

"Suppose I stayed here? Not to return, not to go back into the life of that house… To walk endlessly on this silvery grass…" But her footsteps were already leading her back toward the door. As she climbed the little wooden steps she pictured again the strip of freshly dug earth along the wall where she had been gardening scarcely an hour earlier. That time now seemed remote to her and filled with a paradisiacal happiness and simplicity.

In the hall, hooked onto the coatrack, hung her son's jacket, one of its sleeves screwed up comically short. Olga gave it a rapid tug, as if discreetly to correct a blunder. No gesture could have been more innocent…

She pressed the switch and put her hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp, so reduced in size did the interior of the kitchen seem to her. The figure of the young man, even when invisible, imposed itself on the walls and the furniture, shrinking them, as in those bad dreams where you are propelled into a familiar apartment, which contracts as you watch and ends up like a little house for the figures on a music box… Indeed, halting in the middle of the kitchen she felt as if she were examining the inside of a dolls' house, whose smallness, at once enchanting and unnatural, was obscurely menacing. Even the little saucepan on the range looked smaller than before and at last revealed its true shape-slightly bell-shaped, potbellied.

Olga knew that she would shordy strain off the infusion's brownish liquid and throw away the sediment of the flowers. She turned on the tap, preparing to wash her hands, but at that moment her eye Ht upon the orange crayon that had been slipped as a bookmark into the notebook left on the table by mistake. She took it out, and studied the color. "No action could be more innocent," she repeated in a whispered echo. And swiftly, without her being able to offer the least resistance, the fragments of the mosaic, seen when she had her attack of giddiness, began to come together: a nervous hand hovering over the range; the cat in the first snapshot watching a woman asleep; the open door through which the animal had slipped in; the young man who from now on would be living under the same roof as she… She felt a great mass of slimy, lumpy skin swelling in her head. The reptile… The mosaic coalesced more and more quickly: the hand above the infusion; her deathlike sleep on certain days; the child who was as tall as she was; the orange crayon… One more round and these fragments were going to become fixed in an inescapable certainty.

She glanced at the range. The flowers that had been steeped for too long, had turned brown: under a shallow layer of liquid they resembled the damp skin of a hunched beast, the same one that, grotesquely bloated, was tearing at her brain. The mosaic began its round again: the hand; the young man near the range; the sleep…

Olga seized the little vessel and with a febrile gesture poured the infusion into the big bowl and gulped it down… The mosaic vanished. The reptile in her brain died noiselessly, thrusting a multitude of red needles under her eyelids. The kitchen resumed its normal dimensions. She felt pathetically relieved, as if she had just convinced a skeptical interlocutor.

Walking along the corridor, she noticed a light inside the book room. A lamp on a narrow table squeezed between the sets of shelves had been left switched on. Her eye was caught by an engraving on the page of a large old book that had been left open. It was one of the volumes of the zoological encyclopedia her son liked to leaf through. She leaned over the engraving and read the caption: "A boa constrictor attacking an antelope." The engraving, punctilious in its realism, had an unexpected effect, like all excesses of zeal. For even though the smallest tufts of hair on the antelope's spotted hide were visible, its whole aspect was evocative of a vaguely human form: the expression of the eyes, the position of the body surrounded by the coils of the gigantic snake. As for the boa constrictor: its muscular body, covered in arabesques and prodigiously thick, resembled the broad thigh of a woman, a rounded leg, indecently plump and clad in a stocking ornamented with patterns…

She sat down to study it better. The engraving amused her: the boy certainly did not suspect this double vision of boa-woman. It was reassuring. So she was wrong to have been so alarmed just now. As long as all he saw was this huge, gaudy snake…

As she looked at it the picture began to sway slowly. The tiredness was pleasant, soft, as it touched her eyes. She wanted to lower her lids, to go on enjoying these peaceful moments. Her eyes were already closing of their own accord. Still believing it was no more than the lassitude of evening, she tried to shake herself but only succeeded in provoking this last thought: "I must get up; my hands are still covered in earth, I shall make the book dirty…"

Sleep rapidly overcame her with calm, irresistible violence, mingling with the pleasant, delicate aroma of the old pages. Pages you smell with closed eyes, inhaling deeply.

It was the last few knocks on the front door that woke her. That type of insistent hammering into which people annoyed by waiting weave a kind of drumming melody, in the hope that the variations in the rhythm will attract attention.

She leaped up from the chair, trying to make sense of her immediate surroundings: the dazzling sun at the tiny window; the clock with its hands in an odd position, showing almost eleven o'clock; and above all, herself, this woman in a crumpled dress, her hands covered in streaks of earth, a woman turning around in a tiny storeroom, knocking books over and unable to find a mirror…

The hammering rose to a climax with the measures of a military drum roll and fell silent. Olga went out into the corridor then came back and, without really knowing why, closed the volume of the encyclopedia.

"What if they've guessed?" she asked herself in perplexity. "But guessed what?" The absurd notion occurred to her that the others might discover she had concealed her son's age from them. The senseless fear crossed her still drowsy mind that they would suddenly notice the boy was no longer a child, but an adolescent, almost as tall as she…

In front of the mirror in the hall she quickly straightened her dress, tidied her hair, and seemed to recover the use of her features. Nevertheless, as she opened the door she was expecting, in spite of herself, to see a whole cluster of faces animated by malevolent and mocking curiosity.

The door opened on the luminous void of the sky. There was nobody on the steps; the meadow that sloped down to the river sparkled with drops of melted frost, and was also deserted. The sunny freshness of the air cleansed the lungs, penetrated the body. If only it could be possible! To have this morning as it was, but free of all the rest: the voices in her head contradicting one another from one moment to the next; other people's stares emptying her out of herself; numberless fears, above all, those of the previous evening…

Her hope did not last longer than the deep breath she took, inhaling the scent of the frozen grass… Then her gaze slipped along the wall and she saw a woman leaning on the windowsill, trying to look inside. Fear returned to her so abruptly that it gave rise to an improbable idea: "But that's me! Yesterday…" In a veritable flash of madness, Olga saw the woman leaning toward the window as herself. But at once another thought, less fantastic and still more distressing, banished the resemblance: "She's spying on me!"

The woman began tapping on the window with a bent forefinger, shading her eyes with the other hand to avoid the reflection…

Olga called to her. The woman straightened up: it was the nurse from the retirement home. "Something's happened to the child." This panic, like a squall of wind, raised a maelstrom of further anxious reflexes: "If something's happened to him it's my fault, it's because of that moment of bliss there on the steps…" They were not even thoughts but a sequence of images-the flow of blood that would have to be stanched on the child's body; and the blame she would have to take upon herself in order to pacify fate.

The nurse came up to her and greeted her mournfully and coldly. "No, it's something else, otherwise she would have spoken straight away," thought Olga. She had seen these bringers of bad tidings arriving so many times…

At that moment she sensed an inquisitive stare on the part of the nurse. The latter must have noticed the residue of sleep on her face, the traces of earth on her hands. Olga clenched her fists, hid them behind her back, and with a nod invited the nurse to come in. In the corridor her anxiety increased. The nurse stopped, her hand resting on the chest of drawers, precisely at the spot where the dangerous corner had been sawed off. "She has guessed something," Olga thought again, and shook herself immediately: "Idiot! What is there to guess in this hovel?"

"I hope you'll have a cup of tea with me?"

Olga s voice sounded like a line from a role too well learned.

In the kitchen she saw the little copper saucepan and on the table the orange crayon. The nurse followed her look. She felt the visitor had not taken her eyes off her once and experienced an improper desire to call her to order: "All this is none of your business!"

"No tea, thank you, I don't have time. I've come to tell you… to tell you that last night… Xenia Yefimovna…"

Xenia, the elderly boarder who for years had been promising Olga to show her the famous "white flowers" that nobody knew about, had just died… And now someone must go to Paris, the nurse said, to see her son and her daughter-in-law and let them know. In her role as the Princess Arbyelina, Olga had already carried out such delicate missions on several occasions.

"I know it's Sunday today," apologized the young woman. "It will spoil your whole day. I know… But no one but you could find the right words…"

Listening to her, Olga tasted the delicious simplicity of life. The wholesome, robust common sense of life, in which death, too, has its place.

In the train it was the memory of the white flowers beneath the trees in a fantasy woodland that saved her from the thought that suddenly assailed her: "Supposing I had waked up of my own accord this morning after that abnormally long sleep."

She understood that with all her strength she must hang on to the clear, dull appearances of life.

In Paris she carried out her mission with a kind of fervor. On this occasion the solemn murmuring of condolences, the son's contrite expression, his wife's sighs had the value of a proof. Yes, the interlude they were all three of them applying themselves to acting out demonstrated that in other people's eyes she remained uniquely the "Princess Arbyelina." And that no one had any inkling of the existence within her of the woman who, only the previous evening, rooted to the spot under the window of her own house, had been observing the actions of an adolescent boy…

Another proof was the street. Olga walked through the crowd scrutinizing the expressions on people's faces, like someone on her first outing after an operation, trying to guess from the looks of the passersby if the aftereffects are visible or not.

She also called on Li. That Sunday her friend was painting. The features of a pair of characters were already emerging on a plywood panel: a woman in a white dress, with bare shoulders, and a man slightly shorter than she, with curly hair framing the round hole for his face…

"By the way, I meant to ask you." Olga s voice was tinged with careful nonchalance. "That infusion I recommended to you, does it have any effect on your insomnia?"

"Oh yes! It certainly does…"

Li replied in the same absentminded tone without lifting her brush from the surface of the painting…

During the return journey, it seemed to Olga as if all the passengers had their newspapers open at the same page. She glanced at the one her neighbor was reading. It was the same twelve portraits that fascinated them all. Nuremberg tribunal: the verdict ran the headline above the photos. The condemned men had their eyes shut: their portraits were there as evidence of their deaths. At the bottom of the page an American soldier could be seen demonstrating the noose that was used in the executions. The thickness of the rope, very white, even beautiful, seemed out of proportion. It looked like the rigging of a ship or a long roll of dough for some gigantic pretzel… Olga's neighbor got off the train, leaving his newspaper on the seat. She glanced at the article. Two columns of figures in a box indicated the precise time at which the hanging of each of the condemned men had started and the time death had occurred. "In other words, the amount of time they were struggling in that pretzel," thought Olga.

The numbers reminded her of the boring, enigmatic figures showing stock market prices.

Trap Opened At: Pronounced Dead At:

Ribbentrop 1:14 p.m. 1:32 p.m.

Keitel 1:20 p.m. 1:34 p.m.

Rosenberg 1:49 p.m. 1:59 p.m.

She looked up. The passengers were discussing the story as they read it, calling out comments to one another from one seat to the next, pointing their fingers at this or that part of the report. "No, not the stock market prices," Olga said to herself, watching this animation. "More like the results of a game." On her right a man reminiscent of a poorly acted father in a character comedy was leaning toward the person across from him, undoubtedly his wife, and reading the report of the trial aloud to her. For her part the woman seemed visibly embarrassed by her husband's overexcited declamation. She sat very upright, her handbag on her knees, looking down onto the bowed head of the man as he read, raising her eyebrows from time to time, sighing and lifting her eyes heavenward. Her husband failed to notice these condescending little grimaces, and kept wagging his finger to lend emphasis to his reading:

"'They all died with dignity'-Dignity! Who are they kidding?-'apart from Streicher, who shouted abuse at those present… Only Hermann Goering succeeded in escaping the shame of the gallows… Emmy Sonnemann, Frau Goering, kissed her husband through the mesh of the grill and transferred the vial of potassium cyanide from her mouth to his…' Look, there's a picture of the vial…"

The little station at Villiers-la-Forêt was deserted. The arrival and departure times on the timetable board reminded her with cruel grotesqueness of the figures in the box about the hangings. She crossed the square, which was surrounded by plane trees, and turned toward the lower town. The vibration of the rails hung for a moment in the silence of the evening…

The day she had just lived through was overflowing with complete madness. A madness that was nevertheless reassuring because everyone accepted it as life. You had to do as they did. To be happy, as she had been that morning, playing the role of the Princess Arbyelina offering her condolences. To tolerate those passengers who got a thrill from the vial passing through the mesh in a prison visiting room during a long, wet kiss. For months they had been learning in their newspapers about the countless millions of people killed, burned alive, gassed. And now all History had boiled down to a woman pushing a tiny vial between a man's lips with her tongue…

She went home almost serene. As she climbed up the little wooden steps she managed to look at the flower bed beside the wall with no special emotion…

That same evening, however, an apparently inoffensive detail upset her equilibrium… She was combing her hair in front of the mirror in her room. The smooth action of the comb was pleasantly emptying her mind. And as she gazed, lulled by her own reflection, she saw the door shudder softly and stop halfway. This silent half-opening caused by a gust of air from an open window created a strange expectation. Olga remembered that night when a draft had awoken her as it made her bedroom door creak, yes, it was the night of the three snapshots taken by the book-camera. For as long as she could recall, that door had always creaked slightly (in any house there is always one knife that cuts better than the others and one chair that you avoid giving to guests). But this time the door had opened noiselessly… Olga put down the comb and, with a keen sense of wantonly committing a dangerous act, she went out into the corridor, pulled the handle toward her, then pushed the door open again. It swung through its arc and came to rest against the little doorstop nailed to the floor. In silence. Without emitting the slightest creak. Olga became aware of an icy tension in her temples, as if her hair were stuffed with snow. She repeated the action. The door swung, opened wide. Without a murmur. Olga had the feeling that all this was happening outside her normal life. In one of life's strange back rooms. She bent down and touched the lower hinge, then the hinge at the top. In the glow of the lamp her fingers glistened. The oil was clear, almost without any trace of grease. Recent… The snow in her hair seemed to melt into a ferment of little burning sparks. She pushed against the door one more time with a slow sleepwalker's action. Her eyes fixed on the hinges, holding her breath, she waited for an interminable second. The door swung smoothly, neatly shrinking its shadow on the wall, like a hand reducing its angle on a clock face… Just before it touched the doorstop it emitted a brief groan. Olga leaned her hand against the wall and sat down on a little low stool in the corridor. She was breathing jerkily. Her bedroom beyond the open door had an unfamiliar look. It was like a hotel room, whose interior can be pictured in advance, but which, despite this, seems alien. The bed, the lamp on a shelf, the wardrobe with a mirror… She herself, seated outside the threshold, seemed on the point of leaving again. It took a muscular effort to banish the tense smile from her face-the delight at having rejected, or at least delayed, the final conclusion…

That evening she did not dare touch the door handle again and slept with the door wide open.

She spent the days that followed belatedly entering books in the catalog. And this mechanical work matched the tidying up that was gradually taking place in her mind. Even the daily routine of clipping together the newspapers, which had always been a burden to her, helped in coming to terms with life. She now found herself quickly reading through complete passages from one article or another. She enjoyed the sheer absurdity of them, which seemed to her the best possible proof that nothing could upset the common sense of human routine…

"The Fiihrer pretended to have a fit of hysterics every time anyone opposed him…" Interrupted by a visitor, she did not immediately find her place again in the text where she had broken off. Her eyes strayed over the neighboring columns. The complaint of the Parisian woman who in "Letters to the Editor" expressed indignation that "the plaques indicating street names are hidden by café awnings." Then a feature about a young actress: "Educated at the Des Oiseaux convent, she is currently appearing in Antoine and Antoinette. …" Locating the earlier article again, she discovered that it was the last confessions of Ribbentrop: "I cannot understand it. Hider was a vegetarian. He could not bear to eat the flesh of a dead animal. He called us Leichefresser, 'corpse eaters.' When I went hunting I even had to do it in secret because he disapproved of the sport. So how could such a man have ordered mass murders?"… The following page was devoted to a big diagram of a "plutonium bomb," with almost lip-smacking explanations of its murderous power. Before the next reader arrived Olga also had time to notice the photo of a young musician with a gleaming permanent wave. The caption read: "Romano Mussolini is a fine guitar player. The Duce's son is a young man who has forgotten all about the past and would like the whole world to do the same."…

The readers came in and deposited their books on the display shelves: this action served as a pretext for embarking on conversations. The former cavalry officer blamed the Americans for "letting Goering get away." Masha gave a whispered account of her secret trip to Nice, glancing repeatedly toward the door with exaggerated alarm. They all took the librarian's smile to be a sign of interest, but Olga was unaware that she was smiling as she responded inwardly to the deep echoes of her own thoughts. "I always thought wisdom consisted of pointing a finger at all the madness that escaped other people's attention. And it turns out that quite the opposite is true. You are wise if in some way you can turn a blind eye. If you don't eat your heart out tilting at this daily folly. If you can live with the reassuring falseness of words: war; criminals; triumph of justice; this innocent young guitarist who has forgotten the past; oh, and Masha, who doesn't care a hoot for the past because she has a beautiful body that gives and takes pleasure…"

Abruptly she surfaced from her thoughts. In front of the display shelves the director of the old people's home was talking about Xe-nia's funeral the next morning. "Well you know, Olga my dear, at our age (you're much younger than me, of course) one can't help wondering: Will I be the next to go?"…

During these days of tidying up she also managed to explain how her son's sudden maturing had passed her by unnoticed. The excuse of the war took on an arithmetical simplicity: '39-45, six years. Six years of strange survival when everything that could protect her child had disappeared. Medicines, food, the increasingly grudging sympathy of other people… One particular memory came back insistently: returning from the market one bleak day chilled with rain. A dreary market, deserted, where a hunter had sold her-at an unbelievably high price, like all food at that time-a bird with speckled plumage and a beak stained with dried blood. Wrapped in a piece of paper, the bird seemed still warm, despite the fall wind. Its body was supple, almost fluid, on account of the very smooth feathers and the paucity of the flesh that lay beneath them… At one moment on the road Olga had to scramble onto the roadside to avoid the mud splashing up from the wheels of a convoy of army trucks. The strident laughter of a harmonica lashed her ears. She continued on her way under the low sky, in the rain. The body of the bird that had grown warm in the hollow of her hand was the only particle of life surviving in this universe of mud and cold… She had enough time to prepare the meal before the child, lying with his leg in a plaster cast, should ask her to show him the bird…

Yes, the whole of the war came down to that return from the market, to her fear lest the child should see the beautiful bird transformed into a piece of food… He had been seven years old when they left Paris and came to Villiers-la-Forêt in the spring of 1939. Seven years plus six more, lost in the war. Plus this year, '46, that would soon be finished. Fourteen.

In any case, the émigrés, especially those living at the Caravanserai, inhabited a very singular time. A time made up of their Russian past, from which they emerged sometimes, into the midst of French life, distraught, clumsy, and continuing, as soliloquies, conversations begun in their former lives. They were all stuck at the age of their last years in Russia. And nobody was surprised to see a man with gray hair leaping about like a little boy as he acted out saber fights, fiery cavalry charges, and decapitations…

Thinking one day about the child who had not changed in her mind over so many years, she pictured him dressed up as a young sentry… Some time before their separation her husband had taught the child to stand guard in the hall of their apartment in Paris. The child put on a tunic she had made for him out of her husband's old uniform, took his wooden rifle, and stood solemnly at attention, rooted to the spot, listening for the sound of footsteps on the staircase. After their split and his father's departure, he had continued to mount guard for several weeks. She would see his little silhouette, motionless in the dark hall, and longed to explain everything to him, but her courage failed her: his father had supposedly gone away on a long trip, a very long one. The child had guessed for himself and had abandoned his guard duties. As if he had perceived his mother's unease and wanted to protect her from any further pain…

For her, since then, he had always been that silent child on secret and desperate sentry duty.

On the day of Xenia's funeral everyone in the little Russian church at Villiers-la-Forêt made a surprising discovery, apparently banal, but all the more striking for that: people at the Caravanserai died just like everywhere else, they grew up and became old there-and a whole generation of Russians had been born on this foreign soil, all these young people who had never seen Russia. Like Princess Arbyelina's son, for example, standing there behind a pillar, staring curiously at an icon turned brown by the candle flames…

Olga listened, without really hearing, to the voice of the priest and the vibrant resonance of the choir and was amazed at the triviality of the thoughts that such a solemn moment could not banish. Again she recalled Xenia 's dream: of going to pick the mysterious white flowers in the woods behind the Caravanserai in springtime. "But what is left of that dream now?" The question seemed stupid. And yet Olga sensed that by replying "Nothing!" she would have betrayed someone who was listening to her thoughts. She saw the outline of Xenia 's pale face in the midst of the white ornamentation of the coffin. And this question whose naïveté had irritated her- "What will be left of the woods in spring?"-suddenly touched the very essence of her life; of the lives of all these people, who were so different, packed together beneath the low vault of the church; of the life of this blue fall day, whose sky could be glimpsed when a latecomer timidly opened the door…

At that moment she saw her son half hidden by a pillar. The sight of this young adolescent mingling with the others, detached from her, independent and lost in his own thoughts, caused such radiant and poignant tenderness to well up in her that she had to close her eyes.

That same evening, as night was falling, Olga noticed underneath the kitchen sideboard an orange crayon that had rolled into a narrow and dusty corner, out of reach of the coming and going of the dust-mop…

The infusion of hop flowers was cooling in its little copper saucepan. As before… The hour was striking in the distance, but the trees around the Caravanserai, now bare, had lost their musical resonance. While she was waiting Olga was cleaning the floor: coming into a spruce kitchen in the morning would make it easier to begin her day, she thought. However, she was also angry with herself over all these little weaknesses that were destined to fill her days from now on.

She saw the crayon without immediately noticing its color. Her hand patted the dust a couple of inches away from its hiding place but could not reach it. She crouched down even lower, her face almost on the ground, her arm outstretched, her shoulder pressed against the corner of the sideboard. Some kind of superstitious whim impelled her on this quest… Several broad swings of the floor cloth finally swept out the crayon. It rolled across the floor with a thin rattling sound. It was the crayon she had seen slipped into her son's notebook. An orange crayon. She removed the dust from it, washed her hands. And suddenly the gleaming color blinded her. "But it's the same as…," she murmured, and in a trice she was walking down the corridor and pushing open the door into the book room.

She climbed onto a chair and took down several volumes at random from the farthest corner of the bookshelf. Opened one, then another. Here a paragraph was marked with a vertical line, there a sentence with a horizontal line, almost on every page. They were medical books dealing with diseases of the blood. Her son's illness in particular.

She had always thought the lines on it, drawn with heavy pressure, were the result of her husband's readings. She had often pictured him thus: a man with his brow furrowed by grief, his eyes raw, scanning these paragraphs for reasons to hope. She had forgiven him a good deal, almost everything, because of those pages marked with orange… The last two books on that shelf had been purchased after they split up. Standing on tiptoe she managed to grasp them. The pages fluttered in a hasty fan beneath her hands. They, too, carried the marks of the orange crayon.

The contents of these two books were well known to her, down to the very chapter divisions, and in one of them down to the transparent mark on page 42, which looked like melted candle grease. She was not reading but hearing the intonation of her own voice that had silently pronounced every one of these words so many times, hoping to come upon an encouraging prognosis, a new treatment… And now she could feel her son's eyes resting on these pages. She looked up, still incredulous, and murmured: "So he knows all this…" Then looked again at the sentences he had underlined.

"A hemophiliac should work in an office and should not undertake heavy manual work…"

"Ninety per cent of hemophiliacs do not reach the age of twenty…"

"Transmission can skip one or two generations…"

"One of the hemophiliacs followed up by Professor Lacombe had developed ankylosis of all four knee and elbow joints, to the extent of being effectively incapacitated…"

"Without repeated transfusions these losses of blood would have caused death…"

"He attended a different department where he was not transfused and died of a hemorrhage…"

"Injection of calcium chloride causes no problems whatever in man, though intravenous injection of as little as 50 cg of this salt may be enough to kill off a large dog within a few seconds…"

"Following the taking of an ordinary blood sample a hematoma developed, extending from the shoulder to the middle of the forearm…"

"Sufferers must be forbidden to marry…"

"According to Carrière, 45 percent of hemophiliacs die before reaching the age of four, and only 11 percent reach the age of twenty…"

"In the night the patient several times vomited black blood…"

On one of the pages a big mark had been made, still in orange crayon, against a strange genealogical tree: the hereditary and familial antecedents of a hemophiliac. Olga knew this anonymous family like her own, with which she had often compared it.

Her eyes took in at a glance the lines of relationship which resembled vessels that transmitted the diseased blood:

She looked up above the lamp and felt as if she were meeting a young, calm gaze with no illusions. "So he knew everything. He knows everything," she repeated. The eyes seemed to signify acquiescence with a slight flutter of the eyelids.

If she had not guessed the secret of these markings with the orange crayon, she would certainly have passed a remark the following evening when she once again surprised this delicate and very young man, who moved like a dancer, wheeling about near the kitchen range.

The stranger's actions repeated the scene she had observed before as precisely as a hallucination: a rapid quivering of his hand above the copper vessel; an about-turn toward the table, toward the notebook, his alibi; a moment of stillness, the exaggerated nonchalance with which his fingers turned the pages…

Yes, when she noticed these fluttering movements through the half open bathroom door she would have interrupted him with a cry of reproach, a remonstration… Or rather with some trivial comment to spare him the shame.

But now she remained silent. And yet the similarity with that September evening, the evening when she was gardening, was total. Save for one nuance, perhaps: this time it took her only a second to recognize the young stranger as her son. No more than a second, the time it took to suppress the cry that rose to her lips, to transform it into anodyne words and then, finally, into silence. But this time, above all, there was no longer any doubt.

Later on she would realize that the cry had stuck in her throat because of one memory in particular…

It was two years ago. The last spring under the Occupation. Through the open kitchen window she sees her son running toward the house. All that she sees is his hand pressed to his chest. He has been swimming and has collided with one of the timbers of the old landing stage… He bolts into his room. She goes in, makes him show her what he was trying to hide. "It's nothing serious, honestly." His childish voice is desperately calm. But he lifts his hand. On his chest, above his heart, there is a bruise, turning into a purple swelling, then a whole pouch of blood, almost before her eyes. This hematoma is reminiscent of a woman's breast, smooth, black. She senses that in a confused way the boy is embarrassed by this similarity… During the healing process she recalls the advice given by one of the books that sit on the top shelf in the book room. The parents of a hemophiliac child must, says the author, "win his trust," let him understand that he is "no different from his schoolmates"; they must know how to "disarm fear" with a friendly tone of voice… She tries talking to her son in these borrowed tones that have always been alien to them both. Politely, he remains silent, avoids her eye. With each fresh word she feels she is floundering deeper into a lie it will be difficult to put behind them. In order to break away from the falseness of this dialogue invented for an abstract parent and child, she wills herself to a more confident tone. "So, were you scared? I've written to your father, you know…" He leaps up and rushes out. Ten minutes later a resident of the Caravanserai arrives all out of breath to alert her. They run toward the ruined bridge. Her son, a slim elongated figure, is stepping out, like a tightrope walker, along a steel girder that overhangs the river. A heterogeneous little crowd is following his shaky progress. Olga stops, her gaze hypnotized by the swaying of this body as it makes its way above the void. The cry freezes on her lips. He is a sleepwalker whose tread is supported by the held breaths of everyone else… Reaching the end of the girder he turns round, teeters, waves his arms, clinging at the air that solidifies beneath the petrified gaze of the onlookers, stands up straight again, returns to his starting point, comes down… They return home without exchanging a word. It is only when the door has closed behind them that he says very softly, "I'm not scared of anything." She does not listen to him. She is watching the tiny red trickle snaking between the beauty spots on his forearm, slender and speckled with rust. A quite fresh little scratch that she will compress, recognizing beneath her fingers the unique consistency of his blood.

It was seeing that sleepwalker above the void, in a flash of memory, that made her repress her cry…

That evening she could not help understanding. It was all too evident: the copper vessel; a hand hovering over it with the tingling precision of a criminal act, shaking a little rectangle of paper over the brown liquid; his shadow, already moving away from the range, pivoting and taking refuge in a deliberately neutral pose.

She closed the bathroom door. A second later rapid footsteps went along the corridor. She caught sight of her own face in the slightly misted mirror. What struck her about this oval framed with wet braids was the unrecognizable expression of frightened youthful-ness. But it was the ease of her whole body that was particularly distressing; the fine tone of each of her muscles beneath the fabric of the dressing gown. It was almost with terror that she sensed the supple weight of her breasts, the moist warmth of her skin…

In the kitchen she drank the infusion in a few drafts, pausing only to remove the petals that stuck to her tongue… Then, settled in the book room, she began to wait, like one condemned, for sleep to come flooding over her. The tension only lasted for a few minutes, in fact. A very natural thought, but natural to insanity, made her tremble. "But… before going to sleep, I absolutely must… if not…" She saw her hands clenched on the table in an unaccustomed rigidity, as if they did not belong to her. In the middle of that narrow space her glance hovered against the tight rows of books, against the window layered with opaque darkness. Yes, before she gave way she must at all costs understand how what was happening to her had become possible. The young man with black hair, his features refined by long, secret suffering; the hands that hovered over the kitchen range… Her mind gave way without her being able to put a name to what that action signified for her and for him. Again she saw the plump reptile swollen with blood. She urgently needed to understand how this creature could have invaded her life, their lives. Already she felt the first waves of sleep clouding her vision. She must understand. Otherwise waking up again would be unthinkable. Waking up to what life? How could it be lived? How could she live alongside this mysterious being who had just walked down the corridor with furtive steps? During these last minutes of wakefulness she must find the guilty party. Identify the person, the action, the day that had warped the normal course of things.

She was no longer capable of thinking or remembering. The past assaulted her eyes, her face, with brief clusters of lights and sounds…

A man, handsome, and with a giant's frame, getting into a taxi. The guilty one. Her husband… Before slipping into the vehicle he turned and, guessing with ruthless accuracy the window from which she was secretly watching his departure, gave her a military salute as a clownish gesture of good-bye. And in the days that followed, a child dressed up as a soldier stood at attention in the hall of that Parisian apartment, listening for the familiar footsteps on the stairs…

She did not even have time to grasp how the departure of this man and his mocking salute were connected with the terrifying night she was living through. Already another fragment from an even more distant past was surging up. A man who thought he was dying struggled to master the trembling of his cracked lips and confess his crime to her; he had escaped execution (the hydra of the counterrevolution, he whispered) by thrusting a comrade to his death… Yet this deathbed penitent was the same character as the one who only months after that confession would be directing his ironic military salute at the woman hidden behind the curtains. And the same who in earlier times leaned with all his weight on a roulette table in a room where the smell of cigars mingled with that of the sea at night. The same, only a little younger, who wore an officer's uniform, four St. George's Crosses on his heart, and listened with a solemn and bitter air to the singing at the Russian church in Paris, clutching a candle too slender for his powerful fingers. The same who…

Other masks slipped onto the face of the officer listening to the funeral service. They came around again more and more rapidly. The man saluted the woman behind the curtains, settled onto the seat in the taxi, and closed his eyes, letting his head tilt gently backward, following the motion of the vehicle… No, it is no longer he but the dying man, his head tilting back as he slumps onto the pillows with a mournful groan… No, it is the man at the casino, emitting a guttural laugh, his head flung back, his fingers clutching the last bill left to him… These same fingers knead the wax of a candle, for it is now the officer, tilting his head back to contain the tears in his eyes that are like two brimming lakes…

Olga tore herself violently away from these memories; the sequence of these metamorphoses was already becoming lost in sleep. "Both of us are guilty," she heard herself whispering. Once again, no thought could explain when, how, or by what error she had ended up surprising that young adolescent as he pranced nervously beside the kitchen range. And then, quite simply, those words, "both of us," suddenly brought back to her the sour smell that lingered on the ground floor of an apartment building in Paris and floated heavily upward as far as their apartment on the third floor: a pungent smell, suggestive of pieces of fish vitrified in the fierce hissing of rancid oil… They are returning from the hospital. The child has finally been able to get up and take several steps, with outstretched arms to give him better balance. They have promised to go back the next day… On the staircase there is this smell. "It's always going to be like this," they each tell themselves inwardly. Each suspects the other of thinking the same. The apartment door has hardly closed before the argument erupts. "A wasted life," "cowardice," "patience," "after so many years," "melodramatic," "for the sake of the child," "you're free," "death." The words, too familiar to wound, are marked this time by their tone of finality. If only their weary fury could be interrupted by a single second of truth they would have to tell one another: we are at each other's throats because of the foul smell of frying on the staircase…

So everything had been prefigured in that greasy stench. A week later her husband would become that man giving her a farcical salute before plunging into the taxi.

"We are both guilty."… The proof had been found. With an instinct as deeply rooted as the instinct for survival, she grasped that she must leave it at that. Not seek anything else. And already the reek of burned fat that still lingered in her nostrils was fading, becoming distilled, taking on the perfume of fine cigar smoke, swirling in nacreous spirals in the vast hotel room with windows open onto the Mediterranean night, onto a eucalyptus tree whose foliage rustles in a warm wind glutted with rain… He has laid his cigar down on the marble of the fireplace, he laughs. His whole giant's body is shaking with very youthful laughter. Youthful with drunkenness, with carelessness, with his desire for her. He pulls wads of bills out of his pockets, they litter the carpet at his feet, slip under the bed, whirl in the breeze that stirs the air in the room that is lit by a great glass chandelier. "Did you win?" she asks him, also infected by his merriment. "At first I won; then I lost everything and was ready to hang myself- or at any rate to drown myself, that would be a better joke! And suddenly that brigand Khodorsky arrives, bringing all this! A month ago we sold a house near Moscow to an Englishman, do you remember?

Ha ha ha! And what kept me from going straight back to the tables was that I was too hungry for you…"

She is only half dressed, as she often is when awaiting his return, not knowing if he will come back with the hangdog expression of a bankrupt or drunk with gambling and laughter, like today, unloading from his pockets the booty that will grant them a lease of another week or two of the airy and frivolous merrymaking that is their life… She keeps some garments on her to the end, others-like the corset with snaps that click as they open-are hurled away, and land on the carpet of crumpled bills. Lifted into the air by this giant, she, who looks tall, suddenly feels weighdess, fragile, and totally engulfed by him. Standing there he appears to be pounding his own belly with this woman's body and it now seems slight and compact in his enormous arms. A pump dangles, suspended at the end of her foot, and falls, turning over several times. That evening, like so many others, will only remain in her memory because of a thought that suddenly rips into the pulp of her pleasure: "All this will have to be paid for one day…" She utters an even more vibrant moan to drive the specter away. The man lets her fall back onto him in the frenzy of a climax reaching its peak…

"Both guilty"… The long eucalyptus leaves rusde as the wind gets up again. The smell of the cigar grows lighter, refines its substance, changes into the smell of incense. The candle he is holding drips wax on his fingers. He tilts his head back, his eyes brimming with tears. She watches him out of the corner of her eye and cannot forestall that mocking young voice that rings out inside her head: "Are you sure he's not acting?"… A year later he throws back his head, collapses onto the bed, dragging her with him, still bound to him by pleasure. On top of this great male body, still tumultuous with love, she surfaces, slowly draws away from him, observes his fearsomely powerful hands, abandoned in the folds of the sheets. One of them comes to life, gropes toward her, finds her breast, squeezes it with blind and loving violence… The fingers knead the wax of the burnt-out candle. Then they gather to slap her and lash her cheek. Still later they mime a military salute. And make a rapid sign of the cross over a child stretched out on his hospital bed. And…

All she could see now was this flotsam of gestures, bodies, lights. Everything grew fluid as she looked at it. Herself? In her rambling she now latched on to this ultimately certain, indisputable point. "I am the only guilty one." She and the youth caught in his criminal act; there was nothing else, no intermediary. She was guilty of rejecting the apologies of the man on his knees who had just struck her. And before that guilty of not saying, "It's the smell of frying fish that's making us get mad at each other: let's drop this pointless argument." Guilty at the hospital of not saying to herself, "I could forgive this man a great deal for that sign of the cross coming from a nonbeliever like him." And before that, guilty of enjoying the warm evening breeze that stirred the noisy eucalyptus leaves, and guessing that the blind hand was approaching to bring erotic torment to her breast. And a few minutes earlier when she heard a voice within her saying, "This will have to be paid for one day," guilty of thinking, "I don't care," in reply to somebody who seemed to be waiting for her reply. Guilty of not believing in those eyes uplifted toward the roof of the church. Guilty of being herself, as she was.

But who was she? The woman hiding behind the curtains to watch a man leaving her. She, who later walked along that muddy road clutching the supple body of a slain bird in her hand. She, who felt as if she had spent long years rooted to the spot as she compressed the blood of an everlastingly fresh wound with paralyzed fingers. A woman who, years before this interminable vigil began, used to enjoy watching the movements of her companion's hands in restaurants, as they grasped a glass, prepared a cigar-hands that had just now been lifting her own body. A woman who when she saw the man in his officer's uniform tilting back his head could not prevent herself saying, "What little devil lurks within me? I have this mad urge to burst out laughing and hear the echo and see their shocked faces!" A woman in rags, covered in filth and lice, barefoot, swaying on an unstable gangway, staring at the water crammed with dead fish and rotten timbers, unable to understand that she is leaving Russia forever…

She felt as if she were running from one woman to the next; recognizing them; running straight through a day, a room, a compartment in a railroad car.

It was as she continued running that she realized she was still not asleep…

Then she pushed open the little window between the bookshelves. The freshness of the night made her nostrils tingle. The yellow light of the lampshade sealed off the darkness, made it gleam. There was just this bare branch reaching toward the window that emerged from the night, surprised her with its living, watching presence. And from this branch, from this breathing of the night air she derived a timid but intense happiness, like the end of an illness. The clock read: five past midnight. She was still not asleep. She had not fallen asleep. She was not sleepy. The young man whirling about by the kitchen range, the infusion, the reptile-so all that was no more than a delirium. Born in the head of a woman who would not accept her used-up life. A woman who still hoped. A woman who refused to look forward to old age and die before death came. It was a madness that had lasted for less than an hour and had taken her to the frontier of a deformed world from which there is no return. The bizarre and suspicious movement of the boy in the kitchen? No more than one of those eccentric, often crazy gestures people make when they think they are alone in a room. "The potbellied man on my desk, that ink blot I always hide under a book, is a little whim of the same kind. Our solitary hours are made up of such routines…"

She closed the window and sat down at the narrow table once more. The night spread out before her and seemed endless. An ample amount of unoccupied time, that was offered to her personally. Her thoughts now had the limpidity of extreme insomnia. It remained for her to understand how she could have imagined what she had imagined behind that harmless gesture of an adolescent boy. To understand her own life at last.

A very few days after this sleepless night that seemed to have dissipated her oppressive doubts for good, Olga was to guess why the sleeping draft had not taken effect on that November evening. She realized that the powder the boy emptied into her infusion had not had time to dissolve and that, in her haste to give the lie to her horrible intuition, she had swallowed the liquid without stirring it… She realized everything.

But such were the intensity and richness of her passion already, the immensity and purity of her grief, that the unveiling of this little secret merely surprised her by its materialistic futility. A ridiculous chemical curiosity, a superfluous piece of evidence. A petty detail that was now quite meaningless within the wholly fresh surge of days and nights-that she no longer even dared to call "my life."