The Crime Of Olga Arbyelina

Three

A great aristocratic mansion on two floors, a facade with four white columns and, most remarkable of all, the strange garden where they fasten pillows to the trunks of the trees. Yes, apple trees in blossom and white pillows bound with thick ropes… She is six; she already knows that the pillows are there to protect not the trees but this pale, capricious ten-year-old boy, her cousin. She has already noticed that the scratches and bruises she inflicts on herself when playing attract much less attention than a simple mosquito bite on the boy's arm. These oddities do not prevent her relishing the great sweetness of days that pass without seeming to. Every evening, at the moment when the sun lingers in the branches of the apple trees, the aroma of tea spreads over the terrace. An old servant strolls slowly from one tree to the next, collecting the pillows…

The other joys of her early life she notices too late, when only the memory of them remains. She grows up… And through overhearing the conversations of adults, discovers three astonishing things at almost the same time. The first: her mother will never get over the death of her husband, for "she loves him," they say, "even more than when he was alive." The second: she comes to grasp, very vaguely for the moment, the nature of her cousin's condition and senses that she herself is an unconscious participant in a mystery that is both disturbing and rare. And finally the third: she learns that her grandmother, whom they bury one fine day in spring, has always been "conservative and reactionary," words that her adolescent's tongue finds it hard to articulate but which she likes the sound of… The changes that ensue almost immediately after the funeral draw her attention to the simple pleasures now vanished: they no longer tie pillows to the trees; her cousin is fifteen; there is less fear for his health, and in the evening she no longer experiences that blissful moment when the old servant wandered slowly about in the garden untying the ropes, the moment when the smell of tea and the first coolness of the forest hung in the air…

But the new life has its advantages. Nobody pays attention anymore to this adolescent girl spending the summer here at Ostrov, on the estate inherited by her uncle. She is free to go to the village where the peasants no longer raise their caps when they encounter their former masters. The grown-ups congratulate themselves on this; in the days of the grandmother, the old reactionary, they say, the villagers used to bow down to the ground when they greeted her… They often talk about "the People" whom "all decent men" should enlighten, assist, and serve. This is a novelty too. Grandmother would speak of Zakhar, the shoemaker; the blacksmith, Vassily; or Stiopka the drunkard, who stole chickens. She also knew the Christian names of all their children. But she never spoke of "the People." Ostrov was one of the rare estates not to be set fire to during the uprising of the previous year. The adults see this as a consequence of the grandmother's despotism…

But the principal novelty is that they are living their lives in nervous, stimulating anticipation of novelty itself. It is the start of the new century, the "new era," as some of her uncle's friends call it. They rack their brains about how to accelerate the onward march- too slow for their taste-of a country that is itself too ponderous.

No doubt it is thanks to this impatience, this desire for transformations, that the idea of costume balls comes to them. Her uncle's best friend, the one who talks about the People more often than the others, generally dresses as a peasant. Moreover, Olga notices that they all talk about them with the greatest fervor on the eve of the celebrations that bring together the owners of the neighboring estates and city folk from the capital. It is really as if by indulging in this worthy talk they are seeking to excuse themselves in advance for the excesses of the ball…

She is twelve years old when, during the course of one of these balls, she comes upon an unusual couple in the little room that was once the lodging of the old servant, long since dead, whose allotted task was fastening the pillows to the trees. The man disguised as a peasant, the woman in a cloud of muslin, as a bat… The house feels as if it is rocking under waves of music, exploding with firecrackers, ringing with shouts of laughter. It is the first time she has passed unnoticed-her height, she is already tall, plus a simple black mask offer her an invisibility that intoxicates her. She encounters a knight raising the visor of his helmet to down a draft of champagne, a woman dressed as a toreador-Olga guesses that she is a woman from the contours of her body ("I'm grown up if I can guess that" she thinks, proudly)… In a drawing room there is a man stretched out on a divan, his shirt wide open, with a pale face that women are dabbing at with wet towels. In the room next door a table strewn with the ruins of dinner and one solitary guest, who has removed his wig and his mask and is eating, as if to say, "I don't care what anyone says. I'm tired, I'm hungry, and I'm eating!" Suddenly a motley group invades the room; there is an explosion of laughter, several hands pour different wines into his glass, pile his plate high with a mixture of foods. He objects, but his growls are stifled in his full mouth. The pranksters vanish, carrying off his wig… This theft makes her jealous; she, too, would like to make a little mischief. Coming upon a young magician asleep, Li, she carries off her magic wand. A few minutes later the wand slips from her grasp and the sound of it falling interrupts the counterfeit peasant and the woman in muslin in their wild and tender wrestling match. The man lying back in the armchair opens his eyes wide, the upper part of his body rears up. The woman straddling his belly twists and turns so as not to topple over… At the end of the corridor, in the hall with the dinner table: a servant takes a furtive swig from the glass of the man whose wig was stolen… On the staircase the grandmother's portrait has been hung upside down, head downwards… the favorite trick of guests at these celebrations. She unhooks the portrait and turns it the right way up. At that moment the counterfeit peasant appears at the other end of the corridor. She rushes toward the din of a piano, hoping to melt into a crowd of dancers. But the pianist is alone. It is an outrageously Moorish, drunken Othello, swamping the room with a flood of bravura music and despair. The white keys are all stained with black… Tiredness, the darkness, and the two glasses of champagne they gave her, without recognizing her face beneath the mask, make the ground in the garden unstable. The pearly foam of the apple trees invades the pathways, confusing her with the scented whiteness of their branches. Suddenly in the depths of these nocturnal thickets the galloping of a horse is heard. It draws closer, turning toward her, invisible, more and more threatening, seems to be pursuing her, ready to burst forth with the crash of broken branches. She presses herself against a tree trunk and at the same moment the horseman appears. It is an officer cadet who has come to the party with no thought of fancy dress; having quickly wearied of the wine-soaked merriment of the others, he has escaped and is now skimming through the garden and the sleeping fields. His black uniform sparkles with white petals. She realizes that he is the one she has been unconsciously searching for through all the rooms…

Among the adults who speak to her next day she senses a slight hint of embarrassment both in their voices and in their eyes, that sometimes avoid her own, sometimes seem to be questioning her. For the first time in her life she enjoys their weakness. She grasps that their world is much less secure than it appears and that one can play on these insecurities. An unknown voice rings out inside her head: a mocking, aggressive voice that from now on takes it upon itself to seek out the shameful hidden corners of every thought, of every action; to stir the thick sediment of people's hearts… When one of her cousins begins to play a melancholy polonaise in the evening this little voice pipes up: "And what if I told her that yesterday, in a room not ten yards from here, a woman dressed as a bat was writhing like one possessed astride the very man my poor cousin is hopelessly in love with…"

So the world is this exciting, cruel game. A game with inexhaustible permutations, with rules that one can change oneself during the course of play.

Three weeks later another celebration begins, as so often, with fireworks. Li officiates in her magician's cape, delighted with the applause and shouts that accompany each salvo. The merriment reaches its peak when a purple rocket fails to take off properly and propels a violent shower of sparks across the lawn, right up to the roots of the apple trees. Li joins in the general jubilation, her voice drowned in the guests' raucous chorus. It takes them several minutes to realize that her laughter is in fact a terrible sob of pain. The white gash that has ripped open her cheek, from chin to temple, is already filling with blood… That night in the house, heavy with the silence of an aborted celebration, Olga ponders once more the uncertain and changing rules of the game they call life. Li is what the others call "a daughter of poor parents." According to all the storybooks, to common sense, and to the noble sentiments their childhood was reared on, Li deserved a wonderful compensation as a reward for her goodness and her modesty. And there she was atrociously wounded for life… So had they been right to turn the grandmother's portrait upside down? No doubt this wound is a nod and a wink addressed to them by life, by this real, complicated, hidden, provocative, pitiless, mocking life, that delights in thumbing its nose at decent sentiments.

Olga thinks she is getting to the heart of this life's logic: "If I hadn't dropped Li's magic wand in the doorway of the room where the peasant and the bat were embracing, the man wouldn't have sneered at her in front of everyone at the fireworks; he wouldn't have said, 'That magician sticks his nose in where he has no business and listens at doors.' Li wouldn't have heard that hurtful and unfair remark. Her hands would not have trembled. And the rocket would have gone up into the sky… So everything depended on the caprice of that little stick of wood rolling on the floor!"

"Li wouldn't have been disfigured if that counterfeit peasant and the bat hadn't been yoked together by desire…" Four years later in the spring of 1916 she says it again. Like the century, she is sixteen. Meanwhile her uncle has committed suicide, the estate has been sold, the old mansion razed to the ground, the garden destroyed. Where the house once stood all that is left is the rectangle of the foundations, covered in weeds. Little red beetles run along the worm-eaten timbers and across the granite flagstones colored with yellow lichen. And above it all in the springtime void of the sky the eye cannot help seeing again, as in a mirage, the vanished house, the windows that look so alive, the four columns of the facade, the wooden walls, blackened with time. Perplexed, she thinks she can recognize the arrangement of the rooms and the direction of the corridors in this transparent house. This great cube of air contains an unimaginable density of lives from long ago, a long sequence of generations: the chamber where her grandmother's coffin rests for three days; the noise of the parties, and that whole avalanche of words that were ephemeral but could inspire happiness or break hearts; all the nights of love; all the births; even that room, lost in the intersection of galleries and corridors-the one where a man in peasant costume gazes blearily at a woman whose panting gasps keep time with the rhythm of pleasure. And the bed on which a young girl lies, from whose face they will shortly remove the dressings already loosened by her impatient hand…

The sight of this ethereal house crammed with so many existences makes her giddy The walls are already melting into the sky, the windows fading into the blue-she has just time to see the tiny attic room where her grandparents' old servant lived, a cubbyhole that smelled of the resin from burnt wood, lit by a night-light flickering in front of the icon, where, whatever the weather, the narrow window always seemed to be looking out onto a snowy night…

A young man of around twenty, her cousin, whose life used to be protected with the help of pillows tied to the trees, is already calling to her from the carriage, straightening up on his saddle, holding the reins. They are going back to St. Petersburg.

This cousin is one of the last remaining ghosts from those parties of long ago. Olga bumps into him occasionally at poetry evenings, in the restaurants where the artistic bohemia of the capital gather. In his poems he talks of the "the curse of princes" that affects him and gnaws at him. Only a small circle of initiates knows it is a reference to hemophilia. Those not in the know find his verses ridiculously overinflated and lachrymose. A different kind of verse is in fashion; Olga often declaims it like a stimulant before nights filled with rhythmic words, wine, sensuality, and cocaine:

Pineapples in champagne! Pineapples in champagne! An unwonted savor, with sparkle and sting. I have donned a disguise: a Norwegian in Spain! For my pen is drunk and my heart's on the wing!

Indeed, she often has the impression that the costume balls have not come to an end at all and that currently the whole of Russia has succumbed to this craze for dressing up. You no longer know who is who. The great wind of liberty intoxicates them. You can kill a minister and find yourself acquitted. You can insult a policeman, spit in his face, and he will not stir. Apparently that poet rising to his feet at the back of the hall, a champagne flute in his hand, is a well-known revolutionary. And the man over there with his arm around the waist of a woman whose breasts are almost bare is a police informer. The singer just making a sign to the pianist is a conspirator in the plot against the Tsarina's monstrous favorite. And this very young woman here, with a strangely pale face, her eyes ringed with black, is the daughter of one of the most celebrated families in Russia. She has broken with her background, she is the muse of several poets, but has given herself to none of them on account of a mystical vow…

Olga looks at herself in the long mirror that reflects both the room in the restaurant and the pale face with black rings around the eyes-her own…

The ball goes on. The Tsarina's favorite is killed. The Tsar is overthrown. Assisted by his children, he cuts wood. At last the country seems to be responding to the dreams formulated in the old days at her uncle's house. Its onward march accelerates: outmoded traditions are smashed to smithereens, the head of the new government has to wear his arm in a sling after shaking hands with tens of thousands of enthusiastic fellow citizens. But soon the country's breathing becomes spasmodic: menacing groans can be heard…

She joins in the ball with all the impatience of youth. She samples everything: decadence, futurism, workingmen's Sunday schools; she studies to be original in a world that is no longer surprised at anything. All around her debauchery is humdrum, insipid. One of the poets, before possessing his mistress, attaches bear's claws to his fingers. This will soon seem banal… She explains to the men in love with her that she will only give herself to the one who will kill her and take her dead. This is more surprising than the bear's claws, because of her youth, perhaps, or her livid face with a look that is meant to be hellish; or else because of the seriousness with which she utters these idiocies… Secretly she still thinks about that young horseman five years ago-galloping in the night through the white foam of the apple trees. She forbids herself to hope, but hopes all the same that her first love will have this freshness of snow. And the mocking and aggressive little voice lurking inside her never tires of sneering at this last island of sensibility in her heart…

One day, vexed by the dullness of a landscape on her easel, she paints stripes across it savagely with a brush and a painter friend of hers speaks jokingly of "Stripeism." For several weeks she finds herself at the head of a new artistic movement. Until the same joker covers a portrait with curves and, in his turn, launches "Curvism."…

She thinks she has learned all the rules of the game called "life." Two years earlier Li was just starting at medical school. "So that's her compensation as a daughter of poor parents," Olga had thought with a smile and, knowing the rules of the game, began to wait for some ludicrous twist. It came with the war: Li abandoned her studies and, with a nurse's satchel on her shoulder, plunged into the mud of the trenches.

As for the young horseman all covered in petals from the apple trees, one autumn day she will learn of his death and will try to gauge whether her own indifference is real or simulated. So often all their emotions had been a fraud… Irresolute, she will then start singing a German song, which, if there were any justice in heaven, should have brought the sky down on her head. The sky does not fall. Only a shower of freshly printed tracts thrown by someone from the roof. She will pick one up as she goes out. "Seizure of power. Peace Declared. Revolution," she will read distractedly. And she will heave a sigh: "Another one…" She will even smile: to learn that the war is over on the same day as learning of the death of that horseman of long ago will seem to her to conform perfectly to the pitiless mischief of life. The mocking voice within her will be roused and whisper, "It'll make a good masque for this evening-a dance before an open coffin!"

And she will weep all the same, for long hours, amazed herself at the abundance of her tears and the depth of feeling in them. But it will be too late.

Too late; for suddenly History seems to have had enough of their disguises and their pretensions to changing its course, accelerating its onward march. History or, quite simply, life lumbers into action like a great wild beast roused from a deep sleep and, in a monstrous pendulum swing of its mighty forces, begins to crush all these capricious, neurotic manikins embroiled in their sterile reflections. The People, whose name they had a habit of invoking between two glasses of champagne, between two stanzas, suddenly reveal themselves in the guise of a huge sailor from the Baltic, who breaks down their doors with the butt of his rifle; plunges his bayonet into their guts; rapes their wives; stifles the squeals of their children beneath his hobnailed boots. And walks out satisfied, enriched, smiling and proud, for he sniffs the wind of History. It is difficult not to fall under the spell of its elemental power…

There are some who are beguiled and disguise themselves yet again, imitating the wind of History in their costume. Others flee, also in disguise. The head of the government removes his "People's friend" cap, slips into a nurse's dress, and escapes from the palace that has very nearly become his tomb. And the masquerade continues. Those who used to dress up as beggars at costume balls in the old days now beg, swathed in rags. Those who played at being ghosts or bats now hide in lofts, listening for the sound of hobnailed boots. Those who wore the executioner's hood now become executioners, or, more often, victims… Later on, at the time of the exodus, Olga will learn that one of their footmen, now an important personage, has tortured and shot hundreds. "No doubt the very man," she conjectures, "who helped himself to a drink from a guest's glass. He wouldn't be able to pardon his masters for that…" And the man she surprised coupling with a bat woman, the one who was so fond of talking about the People, will escape by disguising himself as a peasant and growing a long beard…

History will far exceed their dreams. Its onward march will change from fast to furious. The mortal poisons of existence once evoked in their poems will now have the humdrum and bitter taste of hunger and continual petty terror, sticky with sweat. As for that equality, whose name was so often invoked on the terrace of the house at Ostrov, they will now taste it complete-in the endless tide of refugees, streaming from town to town, toward the south, toward the void of exile.

At one of these staging posts in a little unknown town, its streets riddled with chaotic rifle fire, she takes refuge in a great izba that astonishes her with the cleanliness and calm of its rooms, where one can hear the sleepy ticking of a clock and the quiet creak of footsteps on floorboards. Suddenly the door, held fast by a heavy hook, begins to rattle beneath violent jolting. The hook gives way. The figure that appears in the doorway looks like a woman of gigantic stature. On account of all the disparate garments it is wearing, in particular the fur coat, a woman's coat, unbuttoned, because too narrow across the shoulders. Beneath the coat several layers of blouses, one of them trimmed with lace. It is one of the soldiers who were shooting in the street a few minutes ago… He catches her at the back of the house. His drunken eyes focus on a medallion under the collar he has just ripped with his hand. He tears it off with its little chain, stuffs it into his pocket, and freezes for a moment, as if undecided, looking at her with an offended air. She is astonished at the dull feebleness of the cry that her lungs manage to squeeze out. In a second her body is overwhelmed, split in two, pinned to the floor by a heavily writhing mass. For months she has heard the threats of the victorious soldiers. "We'll rip your guts out and hang you in them!" The picture conjured up by this one haunted her especially… Now the burning pain in her loins seems almost derisory compared with the tortures she had feared. She suffers more from the acid stench of the copper cross that swings out from her violator's ginger chest hair and which she can feel dangling on her lips. And also from the bitter stench of the great dirty body. Despite this breath suffocating her she is suddenly aware of a rapid footstep and out of the corner of her eye she has time to glimpse a knee touching the ground. A revolver shot fills her head with muffled deafness, makes her screw up her eyes. The only sensation she is still aware of is the slow softening of the hardened flesh thrust into her belly… And the thick trickle that begins to ooze onto her cheek from the soldier's temple. The enormous body becomes heavier still and finally releases her as it slips sideways, an inert mass. She takes refuge in another room. The sensation of a tensed member growing slack deep down within her imprints itself on her flesh… As she passes back through the house she sees her blood-soaked footprints. Out in the yard a man, a real giant with the dark eyes of an Oriental, signals to her to wait. The shooting slowly becomes more distant. The man's clothes are little different from the trappings of the soldier he has just killed. He stares at her and almost smiles. "Prince Arbyelin," he murmurs, inclining his head before disappearing in the direction of the gunshots. She does not know if she has heard him. Her body is still reliving the death of the other man's flesh inside her. "That was your first love!" whispers a mocking voice in her thoughts. "That little bitch!" She suddenly finds this name for it and all at once feels aged… Her pain is quickly dissipated by other pains…

At Kiev, where she spends several weeks hidden in a basement filled with water up to her ankles, she learns of her cousin's death. After the reds have been driven out of the city, but only for a time, the relatives of the victims make their way to the place of execution. It is the courtyard of the former school. Up to the height of a man the walls are covered in a thick layer of dried blood, fragments of brain, shreds of skin with tufts of hair. Blood, black, stagnates in the gutter… Later, when she is capable of thought again, the memory comes back to her of the poems that spoke of the "curse of princes." Now the hemophiliac's blood, the source of so many sorrowful verses, is mingled with the pulp of all these anonymous bloods in a gutter blocked with scraps of flesh.

At one moment she believes she has lost all feeling… She passes through a succession of towns ravaged by fires, houses gutted by pillage, lampposts overloaded with hanged bodies (one day one of these corpses, already ancient, no doubt, falls and brushes her with the shreds of its arms). To be able still to hurt her, pain must now be particularly sharp-the fabric of her dress sticking to a wound and having to be ripped off. Or quite squalid-the maddening itch from fleas. Or quite stupid-waiting, among other women, for some torture to be devised by this puny man, dressed in a leather coat and hence a "commissar," who is suffering from toothache and examines the female prisoners with extra hatred until the moment when one of them offers him a little bottle of perfume (her last talisman of femininity) that eases the pain and affords them an unhoped-for reprieve.

She recognizes herself less and less as this starving creature covered in rags, with inflamed eyes. Seeing her own reflection in a broken shop window near the harbor, she greets it and asks the way to the embarkation quay. She walks barefoot, she no longer has anything to carry. This city on the coast of the Black Sea is the last outpost of freedom. They are already fighting in the suburbs. From time to time she has to walk around a dead body or hide behind a wall to avoid a hail of bullets. Standing in front of the shop window, and realizing her mistake, she experiences a brief stirring of consciousness, feels a strange twitching of her lips-a smile!-and tells herself that in this city at war the freedom they dreamed of for so long has been achieved. Totally. She could pick up the gun from that dead soldier lying beside the wall and kill the first person who came along. Or even rally the besieging army: her rags make her look like one of them. Or she could take shelter in an empty house and resist absurdly until the last cartridge. Or just walk into that theater, settle down in a plush-covered seat, and wait. Or finally, kill herself.

This moment of clear reasoning revives the fear, the suffering. And above all the instinct for survival. Panic-stricken, she loses her way at the intersections of roads, runs, retraces her footsteps, sees the dead soldier again-someone has already taken his rifle. Suddenly she hears notes of music. The ground floor of a deserted restaurant, the windows shattered, the doors torn off. Inside, a man dressed in a fur coat with frayed sleeves, a fur hat on his head, is playing the piano. The mouth of a ceramic stove is belching forth black smoke, covering both the room and the musician in black strands of soot. He is playing a tragic bravura air, from time to time wiping his cheeks, wet with tears. His swollen feet are bare: they slip on the pedals; the man grimaces and crashes his fingers down even more furiously. His face is almost black. "Othello!" a very old memory exclaims within her. She walks out and sees the harbor at the end of the road. She no longer hurries. Indifference and torpor return. As she goes up the gangplank she directs her gaze down into the dirty water between the granite of the quay and the boat. She feels herself to be of the same consistency as this cold, glaucous liquid-foul with oil, with flotsam, with dead fish. There is an immense temptation to lose herself in this substance so close to her, so as to suffer no more, no longer to have to unstick her eyelids with their accretions of dry, yellow crust.

And when her own shuddering becomes one with the painful heaving of the boat ambushed by a winter storm and she weeps from those tortured eyes, it will be neither because of the pains in her body nor because of the fear that draws prayers and cries from some of the other refugees. She is overwhelmed by the feeling that there is no one in the universe to whom she can address a prayer. Her whole being now is nothing more than her raw wounds and her skin infested with lice. And all her thoughts can only lead to this one conclusion: the world is evil. Evil is always more deceitful than man can imagine. Goodness is simply one of its tricks. "I'm suffering," she will groan, knowing that there is no one under heaven from whom she can hope for compassion. All she will see of heaven is the rectangle of cold, of salt breakers and howling squalls outside the door that the sailors fling open as they come running through. Her only heaven. As for this world-this is how she wanted it. So it has become.

And yet she will also weep at the moment when her neighbor, his face emaciated, his look deathly, hesitates for a second, and shares his bread with her…

Later she will learn that the last ship left Russia a few hours after their sailing, carrying the very last refugees and the very last defenders of the city; among whom, when she gets to Constantinople, she will recognize a woman, armed and dressed as a soldier, with a deep scar across her cheek from chin to temple. Li…

Having reached Paris, after long detours across Europe lasting for several months, she finds the simplest things painfully affecting: a piece of scented soap that she often secretly inhales, feeling goose bumps on her skin with a tingling she had forgotten; the sweet scalding of the first mouthful of hot coffee in the morning calm of a bistro; language and gestures that are unthreatening; looks you do not have to scrutinize to guess if you are condemned or acquitted. Paris is like the neck of a funnel-into it immense Russia decants its human masses. It is impossible not to bump into people you have already encountered in the old life. She finds Li again. And a little later, the man who killed her violator and who had introduced himself before disappearing (as she thought, forever) as "Prince Arbyelin."

This new encounter is too perfect, too much like a storybook to be wasted. They sense that together as a couple, the destitute princess and the brave warrior in exile, they already belong to the dreams of these émigrés, who only survive thanks to dreams and memories. And it is without any hypocrisy that they both live out this dream for the others. She believes quite sincerely that she can never smile again, nor experience joy, nor permit herself to be happy after what she has lived through and seen. Above all, she contrives to convince herself that her life, to its very end (she is twenty-two in this year of 1922), will be a solemn and melancholy wake for the past.

Why then, one day, does she no longer believe this? They are in church, still in their roles of princess and exiled warrior; he tilts his head to hold back his tears; and she catches herself doubting the sincerity of their roles… That day, as if he, too, had sensed a change, he eats with the hearty appetite of someone returning to life…

One evening, some months later, she is surprised by the sight of a long feminine leg, her own, as she pulls on a silk stocking. Or rather by the vortex of petty and futile thoughts that fills her mind at that moment: are these stockings too dark? Will it be too hot in the restaurant where he is taking her, as it was yesterday over in Saint-Raphaël? He must be getting impatient, we're late, he's going to knock on the door again… He knocks, scolds her. To defuse his anger she tells him to come in. He comes in, lifting his arms in theatrical indignation and his expression suddenly changes when he sees the soft, delicate whiteness between the stocking she is fastening and the curve of her stomach… She feels the prickle of his mustache on this bare island of her body.

Much later she will try to understand how this new masquerade could have tempted them-and so easily. The contagion of the Roaring Twenties, the gaiety of a people who wanted to forget the war, the reawakening of the émigrés after the shock of exile. The first literary evenings; the revival of fashionable life in this Russian Paris; there are even costumed balls! Yet the real reason, she will admit to herself reluctantly, was quite simply physical. It was the beauty and strength of her own leg, stockinged in gray silk; her body liberating itself from the last traces of suffering and claiming its due. And also this man, angry with himself over his moment of sentimental weakness, his tears in church, who one day casts aside his melancholy warrior's mask and becomes once more the bon vivant and daredevil he has always been.

Their life, a new version of the masquerades of the old days, will take its tempo now from the impatient hammering at the door when that silk stocking was being slowly drawn up her leg; from the spinning clatter of the roulette wheel; and from the mighty swaying of an immense eucalyptus tree in the rain, that very night outside their window.

And then one day there is the suicide: Khodorsky, whose great friend and accomplice Prince Arbyelin is, sells his childhood home and kills himself. "He drank too much… It was his nerves…," the prince mutters, affecting disdain. But they are aware that this death has banished a whole chapter of their lives into the past. "The end of the Roaring Twenties…" is how she thinks about it later. The truth is that during those frivolous and fugitive years they have simply exhausted their roles. And if they now marry in the very year of Khodorsky's death, it is to give themselves the illusion of an uninterrupted love. They set up house in Paris in winter in an apartment where the light comes in through the windows as if through bottle glass. "A good day for hanging oneself," he declaims, in imitation of the hero of a well-known play; later he takes to repeating this phrase, each time with less irony, soon with aggressive bitterness.

The child is born in 1932, the year in which the Russian émigré Pavel Gorgulov kills the French President, Paul Doumer, with a revolver. The Russians pass on to one another the last words of the condemned man as he is dragged to the scaffold: "All power to the Green Troika!" They say he went mad long before his crime. Yes, the very same year. It is hard not to think about the crashing blade and the spurting blood. She thinks of them when she learns of the child's hemophilia (a tiny scratch that occurs during the birth gives rise to an interminable trickle of blood). She already knows the ingenious cruelty of life: the sound of the guillotine simply lends an artistic touch to the despair that engulfs her.

Despair rapidly becomes their way of life. And when, after six and a half years of this harrowing routine, her husband leaves her, she is secretly grateful to him. For some months she lives through a pain that is finally quite pure, undiluted by any words. In her tragic exaltation she even ends up by justifying his departure ("his betrayal," she had called it earlier): the child's illness made other people's happiness a crime. In all innocence, he himself had become their judge, a silent, daunting witness. Later, after settling in Villiers-la-Forêt, she will come to regret having left Paris, and having refused all help…

Yet it is here, in this sleepy little place, where everyone knows the creak of the door in the only bakery in the lower town, here in the monotony of these long provincial days, that, for the first time since her childhood, she will have the feeling of no longer acting a part; of finally being herself; of returning at last, after a tortuous and futile detour, to the life that was destined for her. In the early twenties the old brewery building, overgrown with weeds and long strands of hops, was the first haven for the small Russian community that had landed at Villiers-la-Forêt. The structure of redbrick, turned brown by more than a century of sun and rain, bore a distant resemblance to a fortress, with its rectangle of walls surrounding an inner courtyard and narrow windows, half loopholes, half fanlights. The proximity of the river that ran behind the building increased this impression of an isolated fortification.

The first arrivals embarked on the adaptation of this place-so little intended for human habitation-with the enthusiastic zeal of pioneers, the excessive confidence of colonists. The manufacturing rooms were divided into unusual apartments, all very long. The southern part of the brewery accommodated the residents of the future retirement home. In an area located above the main entrance, which opened onto the lower town, they installed the first sets of shelves for the library. The building rapidly filled up with occupants and during the first months they believed that this spot, set apart from the town, would witness the birth of some new form of human existence-fraternal, just, almost like a family. An old Russian dream…

As the years went by these first hopes were eroded and the old brewery simply became a dwelling place that was remote and lacking in comfort. People hastened to leave as soon as they had the means and settled either in the narrow streets of the lower town, or, better still, in the town hall district, or, ultimately, in Paris. These different departures charted a kind of hierarchy of personal success, and engendered jealousy and rivalry which were occasionally dispelled by a different kind of departure: death. This would bring everyone together around the coffin of an elderly resident who was about to bid good-bye to the redbrick building. For a time this made all the other removals seem inconsequential and very much the same.

In the end only one visible trace remained of that first great dream: the strange structure some twenty yards long, an annex running alongside the wall of the brewery that faced the river. In their ignorance of architecture, the emigres hoped they could easily double the number of apartments by surrounding the whole building with a long lean-to that would only need a single wall. But the materials turned out to be too expensive; some of the occupants were poor payers, and in the spring the river rose and flooded the section already built. A kind of little dinghy, borne there by the current, appeared washed up against the door. The base of the building was plastered with mud. Now the émigrés understood why the original inhabitants of Villiers-la-Forêt had left unoccupied the broad stretch of waste land between the brewery and the river…

The lean-to house remained unoccupied until the arrival of the Princess Arbyelina in 1939. It was she who cleaned it and fitted it out, planted flowers under the windows and a service tree beside the front steps. And during the years that followed she was never confronted by the rising of the waters.

The old brewery was looked down on because of that very tribal aspect which, in the eyes of the first arrivals, should have ensured its renown. It acquired two ironic nicknames, used interchangeably by the émigrés, which, in time, even the French adopted: "the Golden Horde" and "the Caravanserai." Only a few pieces of machinery, overlaid with several layers of plaster and paint, still recalled the building's original function. The steel bar that ran across the refectory ceiling in the retirement home. The great gear wheel mounted between the windows in one corridor. And, above all, the enormous pulley embedded in the wall of the library. They had not risked removing it from its supports, for fear of seeing a whole story collapse. Moreover, the occupants of the Caravanserai had long since ceased to notice these iron relics here and there thrusting out their useless beams or levers.

Living in that strange annex, Olga had the feeling of being very remote from the communal life of the Caravanserai. Tacked on to the back of the old brewery, her house had no connection with the inner courtyard that was the nerve center of this home for exiles. To go to the library each morning she was obliged to walk beside the wall parallel with the riverbank, and make her way around two corners of the building; even sometimes to make a detour along one of the winding alleys of the lower town, so as to avoid waterlogged areas and piles of rubble overgrown with nettles left over from the abandoned building works. Thus each time she came in by the main gateway she had the illusion of arriving from a long way off. Furthermore, at the time when she settled there, half the apartments, overcrowded in earlier days, were uninhabited. During the war this scattering of the Horde would increase. The only occupants who remained there were those who would never be wealthy enough to leave, like the old cavalry officer; or those who were not yet wealthy enough-like the young artist whose smock was caked with motley layers of paint. Then there were the residents of the retirement home, who did not leave because they were waiting to die there. And some owners of vegetable patches, who were waiting for the harvest. And finally there were some eccentrics who were waiting for nothing and who made no distinction between the Caravanserai, Paris, or Nice. Occasionally, through the library window Olga would see one of these dreamers stopping in the middle of the courtyard and for a long time studying the movement of the clouds.

In the late autumn of 1946 her house seemed even more remote than usual from both the Caravanserai and the town; alien to the world. The rains isolated it, transforming the track that led around the wall into a dotted line of tufts of grass. Then came the cold that began to blanket this ephemeral pathway in hoarfrost. The power cuts announced regularly by the newspapers became no more unusual than the flickering of candles at the dark windows of the Caravanserai.

The thoughts and fears that had so tortured her during the preceding months had now been transmuted into a silent dialogue imagined between herself and Li. She confided to her friend, who was very understanding, as our partners in these imaginary conversations always are, that when young she felt she was living not for the sake of living but to prove to somebody that she was free to change the course of her life on a simple whim. Whim! Yes, her whole youth had been corroded by this restlessness, this posturing frenzy, this lust for defiance, for provocation, for negation. A life mistaken, spoiled, led astray, badly begun… No doubt Li would find the right word for it.

These silent dialogues were nothing other than brief interludes within the fabric-at once dense and transparent-through which she viewed everything in this world: the life of her son. She finally accepted him in the guise of the adolescent who had appeared to her one September evening, so composed, so discreet he hardly seemed to be there. Sometimes the tissue of her thoughts, from which the boy was never absent, grew denser and she felt stifled: this was on those occasions, often unexpected, when his illness returned.

She had had the same feeling of suffocation during the latest consultation with the doctor. This dry and almost disagreeable man pleased her. With him she had no fear that the worst might be hidden from her… This time there were discordant notes in the tenor of the rather clumsy words of encouragement he addressed to the boy. She thought she could detect the consciously adopted tone designed to restore the confidence of an elderly invalid. A patient, in fact, whose decline is being closely monitored and to whom the physician promises several more years, with the openhandedness of a benefactor.

Next day there was another power cut. She was delighted: in the dim light at the library the traces of anguish left on her face caused by her conversation with the doctor would be harder to discern. The readers departed. She remained for a long moment at the window, and darkness fell as she watched. In the dusk a little point of light advanced slowly across the vast inner courtyard of the Caravanserai. Some elderly resident, for sure, candle in hand, making a visit to a friend who lived in the opposite wing of the building. In the wind an eddy of dead leaves swirled in broad circles along the walls, drawing with it the whirling pages of a newspaper. In the middle of the courtyard the little light stopped. Another figure could be made out dimly, face to face with the candle carrier. Their heads bent over the flame shielded by a feeble, almost translucent hand… This meeting in the autumn wind over that fragile flame, Olga told herself, was perhaps a faint echo of the dream cherished by the original occupants of the Caravanserai.

It was another day spent without light… A Saturday. The week that had preceded it was punctuated with cold showers that glazed the dull air. During the final night this fluid glass had congealed. The earth covered in frozen footprints and ruts as hard as stone made walking painful. The readers hastened to go home while they could still dimly see where they were putting their feet in the courtyard that bristled with sharp little ridges of frozen earth…

As Olga emerged from the Caravanserai, she noticed how few and far between the windows were where candles flickered; she mused on this strange fortress that emptied more and more each year. At length, feeling her way across the unevenness of the earth, she slowly embarked upon her regular journey. First along an alleyway in the lower town, then around the walls of the old brewery… Reaching the corner of her house, she sensed that an indefinable change had just taken place in nature. A timid softening, a dull, silent relaxation. Even the tonality of the air was different-filled with a hazy, mauve luminosity. At midday the wind had still been blinding her with needles of tears: now it had dropped. Beyond the willow branches the river had the consistency of ink. And, with an old familiar joy, Olga recognized that moment of expectation, when nature holds its breath, that in her childhood days would herald the swirling of snow…

She saw it through the little open window below the bathroom ceiling. The snowflakes entered the warm penumbra and vanished in a brief iridescent glitter. The silence was such that you could hear the rustling of the candle placed on the great porous slabs of the floor…

She was drinking tea, her gaze lost in the wavering orange halo around the wick, when someone knocked on the door. Surprised, but not really, by this late visit, she walked down the corridor carrying the candle, her steps keeping time with the flickering of the flame. It was eleven o'clock in the evening. Only a Russian could appear so late with no other reason than a desire to talk. Or a Frenchman, but then with an urgent, serious reason. At the last minute the idea occurred to her that it might be a prowler. She turned the key, calling out an automatic "Who's there?" and opened the door. The candle blew out. There was nobody… She went out onto the steps and even took several paces along beside the wall, as if to assuage a slight pang of anxiety. Nobody. The snowflakes were drifting sleepily in the gray air, giving off a spellbinding, ashen light. The earth was already half white. This, more than anything, was what lit up the night. Under snow, the meadow seemed more vast, and at each breath she took this emptiness entered her chest with a chill that was piquant and bitter. And remembered from a very long time ago.

Without abandoning her reverie, she slowly drank the tea that was scarcely warm now, and went into her bedroom. The scent of the bark burning in the stove was intoxicating. She went to draw back the curtains and fill the room with the blue reflection of the snow… But she moved too abruptly. One of the rings, a heavy bronze ring, fell onto the carpet. The room seemed to be cut into two halves, one bathed in milky whiteness, the other darker than usual. She pulled up a chair. Then thought she must first find the curtain ring. Bent down. Realized that without a candle she could not see clearly enough in this dark half of the room… Suddenly she felt herself overtaken by a pleasant lassitude that confused her in the sequence of her movements: seek, light, climb on chair, replace. No, first light the candle… or pick up the curtain ring… Her strength failed her. A rapid drowsiness was already making her eyelids heavy, relaxing her body. The pearly brilliance of the snow bewitched her. She moved away from the window. The edge of the bed rose up behind her, made her knees give way. She sat down. Staying awake was now demanding an increasingly concentrated effort. She still believed it was the snow, the aroma of the burning bark, the intensity of her memories that had plunged her into this fog of tiredness. She lay down, undid the belt of her dressing gown. These actions were carried out more and more slowly, like the final few steps of a figurine on a music box. She teetered on the slippery brink of sleep in the absolute certainty that at all costs she must make these few waking moments last…

He came into the room when she was in the ultimate stage of consciousness. The stage when for the last time the drowning swimmer manages to return to the surface, to see the sun, the sky, his life, still so close…

He stopped at the silvery and black frontier that divided the room. Silvery like the snow outside the window, the bluish transparency on the door, the chair, the carpet. Black like the darkness that hovered around the bed. He took a step. Tricked by the snowy phosphorescence of the night, he put his foot on the hem of the curtain that had just slipped down. Another ring fell. Inaudible at first on the carpet, then suddenly beginning to roll on the bare floorboards with a deafening-paralyzing-clatter.

Several interminable seconds of nonlife went by. The boy frozen in the magnesium brilliance. The woman drawing all the darkness in the room around her body… The curtain ring, following its perfidious trajectory, embarked on a slow, clicking roll. Slowly the circles tightened around a center-around a silence that never seemed to come. In this instant of nonlife cadenced by the turning of the ring in ever decreasing circles, she had time to understand everything. Or rather to be blinded by a blazing connect-the-dots line: the movement of the young stranger surprised at the beginning of the autumn; the reptile; the oil on the door hinges… And even that ruined bridge, the steel girder with a boy advancing along it like a sleepwalker… A shout would have made him fall. As now, in crossing this room…

The curtain ring became still. After another endless minute she saw a long, thin shadow detaching itself against the background of the window whitened by snow. The outline of this apparition was lost in the blue twilight. The branches covered in hoarfrost parted as it passed. The crystals swirled slowly, sprinkling their bodies, melting on their skin. She was experiencing all this on the far side of sleep.

The curtains were carefully drawn, the rings rearranged on the curtain rod. It was the first thing she saw on waking and the last thing she was able to note with any kind of calm. "He must have thought the unhooked curtain was his fault and…"

She threw back the blanket, got up, observed her body beneath the open flaps of her dressing gown as if she had never seen it before. Then turned back toward the bed. The blanket! Someone had thrown it over her bare feet… Someone? She caught herself still hoping for a mistake, a misunderstanding, the mysterious intervention of a "someone."… The stove door was closed-although it had been left slightly open the night before… The whole room was booby-trapped with eloquent objects, incriminating evidence of a presence that did not even have to be proved.

Behind the thick velvet of the curtains a sparkling day could be sensed. The folds of material, although dark, were bursting with warm light and were on the brink of yielding to its dazzling torrent from one minute to the next. Isolated in a dark, ominous silence, the bedroom was about to be flooded by the sun, gutted by sounds… She went to the door and hesitated a long time with her hand on the handle. Beyond the door there could only be a blinding void, vibrant with a shrill, intolerable resonance.

She pushed at the handle. She was struck by the utter banality of the long corridor, its dreary look, the old coatrack, the familiar smell. At the far end the walls were lit up by the shafts of light streaming in from her son's bedroom… She walked toward it, vacantly, wide-eyed, with an unthinking faith-that everything would be resolved, by magic, wordlessly, as soon as their eyes met.

There was nobody in this bedroom, all radiant with sunlight. Nobody and yet he was there-in the crayon serving as a bookmark, in the shirt on the back of a chair… As usual. As yesterday, as in two days' time. The cheerful permanence of things terrified her. And when the tea began to brew in her cup, as it did every day, she walked rapidly out of the kitchen, seized her coat, and left the house.

For if she had simply continued with the petty ritual of habitual actions she would have been transformed into a monstrous being: the woman to whom that had happened. That was yesterday evening, last night. She understood it but still managed to avoid naming it: that.

Everything around her resonated. The rays of the sun, the glittering of the drops of melted snow trickling off the roof of the Caravanserai, the fragments of ice beneath her feet. And amid all this din a single thought ricocheted ceaselessly back and forth from one side of her brain to the other: to leave! At first this saving solution took her breath away by its simplicity. Yes, to leave! Bordeaux, Marseilles… She already saw herself settled in a train, running away from what had just happened to her. Then suddenly this absurd recollection: "Trains to run faster: Bordeaux… Marseilles…" So it was the paragraph glimpsed in a newspaper that had suggested destinations for her escape. Yet how could she go away? Leaving the child with whom? The child?

The drumming resumed in her temples even more forcefully. Yes, she must go away but go away forestalling yesterday evening, foiling it, before that could be given its definitive name. She had a presentiment of a place where the night she had just lived through would no longer appear like a horror and a monstrosity. A place or rather a time that was simultaneously now and yesterday but also a very distant day yet to come. A time where everything would be reconciled, mended, would find its justification. For a brief moment she believed she was breathing the airy serenity of this prefigured time.

Reality returned with a jolt: a passerby kept asking her a question.

"Are you going away?" this woman repeated, surprised at receiving no reply.

It was one of the readers from the library.

"Are you going to Paris?"

"No, why?"

Olga glanced around her. She had set off up one of the streets the occupants of the Caravanserai used to take when going to the station.

"Oh, I see. I thought…"

"No, no, I was just going for a walk…"

She turned into a different street and at once bumped into a whole group of Russians. Then an old couple who lived on the ground floor of the Caravanserai. A few steps farther on, a resident of the old people's home. They all stopped, greeted her, studied her with particular interest, it seemed to her. She no longer knew how to avoid this cavalcade of smiling faces, softened by the glorious sunlight, by the festive brilliance of the snow. The next turning was a blind alley. The baker's was closed. She felt as if she were an animal that could be tracked more easily on the whitened earth. And that their words only seemed to be harmless; their eyes were scrutinizing her. What did they guess? How far could their curiosity reach? Making her way past the whole procession, she finally arrived at its source-the Orthodox chapel. So it was a festival. And their words had indeed been harmless and their eyes had seen through nothing. Plunging into the darkness punctuated with lights, she felt a pleasant relaxation in her body. The chapel was deserted. All she could hear was the invisible presence of an old woman behind a pillar, sighing as she cleaned the floor covered in traces of melted snow and sand. Olga took refuge in the furthermost part and stopped before an icon. She had no prayer to formulate. Simply the desire to curl up in a remote corner away from the light, like an animal that has just been wounded and, not yet feeling pain, is preparing for it to come flooding in. Absently she touched the cracked surface of the icon, stared at the dull, expressionless face of the child, then that of the mother, her astonished eyes with heavy, oriental lids. Suddenly a grotesque detail made her step back a pace: the Virgin in the icon had three arms! Yes, two hands were holding the child and the third, parting the folds of the gown, was poised in a sign of the cross. It was the famous Russian Virgin with three arms…

She spent the afternoon strolling slowly amid the trees that grew behind the Caravanserai. As evening approached the snow stopped melting. The sun became embedded in the branches, turned red. Sounds were distilled in the air with the clarity of isolated notes of music. She was all alone-the only other footmarks on the white surface apart from her own were the arrowhead prints of birds and those of a child, a boy with red hair who was throwing stones onto the sheet of frozen water between the wood and the river. His family had left the Caravanserai the previous spring but with a kind of childish faithfulness the young redhead still returned to his old playground. The little stones he was throwing did not succeed in breaking the ice and sped across the pool from one end to the other with a melodious tinkling.

At times, in obedience to a sudden command, she stopped and tried to feel dread, terror, to shiver, to let herself be blinded by the monstrousness of what had happened. "It's monstrous, monstrous, monstrous… How? Why? I must die! Run away. Howl, howl, howl!" But this febrile litany rang out inside her as if as a sop to her conscience, without shaking the dull numbness of her mind. She tried to shatter the torpor, to feign, for want of experiencing them, the emotions she should have felt. But there were no emotions! A nameless nothingness…

And alongside this void, an ample and airy silence that reigned all around; the roughness of the bark that her hand touched, leaning against a tree trunk. And the bitter, piquant chill of the snow; and the imperceptibly changing lights on its surface. The pale blue glitter of the snow-clad land; the orange disk of the low sun in the network of the branches. And a woman, herself, who was going to spend these last hours of the day wandering in the snow, stopping from time to time, as now, pressing a hand flat against the bark of a tree, removing one foot from its shoe, her fingers searching for little fragments of ice caught between the leather and the stocking. On the sheet of frozen water the red-haired boy continues with his game. He breaks off when he notices the presence of a stranger-an intruder, an adult. He waits for her to go away. The noisy sliding of the little stones resumes. For a second she believes she can see what the child sees with acute intensity. The dark bottom beneath the ice, with plants and leaves trapped in the crystal of the brown water. Then his gaze is lost for a long time in the branches set on fire by the sunset, and in the sky. A forgetfulness so profound that the stones he has gathered begin to slip from his fingers and fall into the snow one by one…

She held on to the memory of this gaze as she slowly returned home. And it was in a very calm voice that she called out to her son as she opened the door… He was not there. He had come in for lunch, then gone out again. In his absence she sensed an excessive generosity on the part of fate that she must still be wary of. Her mind was aroused, anxious. And almost at once the shoes caught her eye. The ones she had bought him on the black market some months previously, after selling her wedding ring. Quite fine, elegant shoes, despite their worn leather. He dreamed (she knew he sometimes tried them on) of wearing them next spring.

Now this pair of shoes was transformed in her eyes into something indecent, ambiguous… They were arranged near the wall in the position of a short, very lively and agile pace. The agility of a young male who senses that his presence is both alarming and exciting. Olga bent down, struggling against the repugnance that made her fingers shake, and picked up one of them. Then thrust her hand inside it. The reflex action of many years, feeling to check if there was a nail with a point that might cause bleeding…

She did not have time to finish her examination. The shoe escaped from her hands and fell. And at the same moment a cry choked in her throat: "He was inside me!"

And other cries, stifled by the murmuring of the blood in her temples, echoed back: "He was inside my body…" Now she understood why that had remained nameless. For to name it she would not have to speak of emotions but to utter those rough, ugly, uncouth words that came pouring in a glutinous flow into her throat: "He violated me. He had me when he wanted to. He undressed me, took me, dressed me again…"

The horror of these words was such that, panic-stricken, she tried to step back into that afternoon of silence and snow spent under the trees. She half opened the front door. A clear blue dusk was already coloring the meadow that sloped down to the river… No, that afternoon of peace had never existed!

An illusion, a trompe l'oeil of happiness. Now she saw that in reality it had not been a dreamy stroll but a breathless, stumbling race. A mad round amid the dark tree trunks. She had run in circles, trying to escape. Then she had stopped to remove the snow from her shoes and had thought of the peace that death brings. A woman quite other than herself had been born: one who could spend a long time-an eternity-contemplating the low sun entangled in the branches; the slithering of stones cast onto the crystal of frozen water; the eyes of a child lost in the sky…

Yes, it was in thrall to death that she had been able to glimpse the unspeakable happiness of that late afternoon in winter.

As it fell, the black shoe had positioned itself very nimbly beside the other, this time imitating a very small, mincing step. Olga told herself that of all the solutions that had arisen in her shattered mind since that morning-to run away, to explain herself, to say nothing- death was the most tempting, the easiest to accept, and the least real. For every day she must continue carrying out a myriad preventive actions similar to the search for nails lurking inside shoes.

She picked up the one that had fallen to finish examining it… At that moment someone knocked on the door.

Without panic, her heart silent, still, she went to open it, already seeing her son's eyes. She walked along the corridor with a very regular, tense step, as if she were mounting the scaffold.

The appearance on the threshold of the boy with red hair, the little thrower of stones, seemed like a hallucination that must be accepted calmly. From the child's exaggeratedly serious expression it was abundantly clear that he had been sent as a messenger and that he was conscious of the gravity of his mission. He said what he had been asked to say in that mix of Russian phrases and French words common among children born at the Caravanserai. There was a mix-up too, between the seriousness of the circumstance and the nervous smile that stretched his lips. Too overcome, he confused the logical sequence: "Near the bridge… Hospital… Hurt himself… They're asking for you to come…"

She stared at the redhead's mouth as if this mouth had an existence of its own. And her stare ended up by frightening the child. "He didn't even cry!" he shouted and began to run, unable to bear a moment longer the violence with which those eyes were skinning his lips.

By the end of the week she was able to bring her son home. His convalescence was a time of silent reunion. Immobility and pain made him a child again. She felt more a mother than ever.

The night of the first snowfall-that night-formed a vast country of deafness in her mind, that she learned to avoid thinking about and from which only a few sparse fragments came to her. They resembled the strings of air bubbles that are released from time to time by stagnant water. She realized, for example, why that night had taken place on the eve of a Sunday; just like the other one, when she had fallen asleep in the book room. Yes, a Sunday, when an abnormally long sleep could easily take on the appearance of sleeping in… She also recalled that one of the rare games this taciturn child loved to play at the age of seven or eight consisted of ringing the front doorbell and then hiding, to create the mystery of a missing visitor. Within this prank, she told herself, there was an element, no doubt, of that wait for the return of his father, whose "long trip" never came to an end…

These memories disturbed her but they did not last. Any more than the fleeting reflex of revulsion she had on seeing her son's leg, this pale leg from which the plaster had just been removed. The knee and especially the foot were still swollen, and the little row of toes had a childish and strangely equivocal prettiness on this swollen and grayish flesh, on this big man's foot… The doctor palpated the foot with sure and precise gestures, reminiscent of those of a craftsman handling a piece of wood. Dry and far from talkative, he seemed to take a certain delight in the terseness of his own comments, from which there was no appeal. "We shall have to operate to straighten the knee," he explained in a tone designed to avoid all sentimentality. "But we'll do it later, when he's had some rest…" The same evening she reread for the thousandth time the pages especially devoted, as it seemed to her, to this very case, to that very day in the life of her son. Reading these books, she often had the absurd impression that their authors knew her child and could foresee the course of his illness. This illusion was singularly powerful that evening, in the lines that she recited mentally, recognizing them from memory from the shape of the paragraphs:

If the leg is more or less flexed on the thigh this only permits walking on the ball of the foot, which is painful and tiring. The muscles of the lower limb will atrophy…

That night before going to sleep she called to mind, but in an intensely physical way, the infinite complexity of the years she had lived through, a jumble, without beginning or end, without any logic. The memory of the child was woven into this tangled web, like an exposed vein, burning. She pictured again the pale adolescent in the doctor's office, putting on his clothes with abrupt haste. She saw his fragile wrists and, when he looked up, the tiny bluish vessels beneath his eyes… She was unable to stay in bed, went to the window, and with closed eyelids, her forehead pressed against the window, told herself that such was the logic of this painful and chaotic life. And in the spring the boy would be fifteen, if there was a spring for him…

Then one December evening she noticed the light trace of white powder on the fine film that always formed on her infusion. Astonished by her own calmness, she poured away the liquid, washed the little copper vessel, placed it on the drain board. And, feeling herself observed by all the objects, by the walls, went into her bedroom.

The vitality was all in the arches of the eyebrows, in the tense line of the mouth. Only this partial image, like a sketch for a death mask-her face-could be seen, lying profiled on the pillow. The body had vanished, swathed in the icy folds of the sheets. And deep down in this absence, buried in its numb whiteness, her heartbeats were like the grating of damp matches.

What she could see was limited to what was reflected in the long mirror facing the bed. It was tinged with the ruddy glow throbbing in the stove behind its half-open door. In the sleeping depths of the mirror the round enamel face of the clock's great dial stood out clearly. And the hands, traveling backward, marked off this strange reflected time in reverse. She considered the passing of the minutes from back to front with slight irritation. And she was surprised still to be able to think, or to be irritated. She suddenly wanted to understand the logic of this inside-out dial: if it showed a quarter to one in the morning in the mirror, then what in reality…? Her mind plunged with relief into this mathematical glissade. But it turned out to be difficult to guess the time from the position of the hands in the mirror. All at once she felt tormented by one of those whims sometimes imposed by pointless impulses, half caprice, half superstition. It became impossible for her not to turn around, not to look at the dial. She began prying her head up from the pillow… And at that same instant she saw, still in the dark reflection of the mirror, that a long section of shadow between the door and the jamb was slowly growing broader…

Her head froze, slightly raised, trapped by her whim of curiosity. She closed her eyes and with infinite slowness began to lower her cheek down toward the hollow left in the pillow. Little by little. Her neck stiffened, supporting a lead weight. Her temple probed the distance still left to travel. This distance seemed vertiginous, as if her head were sinking into a bottomless void. Yet her face already felt hot, as it sensed the warmth of the pillow close at hand, and even recognized the texture of the fabric. And through closed eyelids she sensed that a living presence had appeared in the open doorway and was slowly slipping into the room, modifying its volume, the familiar relationships between objects, and even, one might have said, the regular sound of the clock.

The bedroom was filled with the viscous silence of nocturnal rooms where a slow coupling is taking place; or, indeed, a murder; or even the meticulous work needed to eradicate the traces of a murder. It was the numbness of a room, where in the depths of the night bodies are going through the motions of an erotic, or criminal, dumb show.

When her temple finally touched the pillow her eyelashes blinked involuntarily. And this was her last clear perception during the whole night: at the end of the room the long, dark overcoat opened on a naked body, a white body, slim. It did not look like any other body; it did not look like a body at all; it did not look like anything she had ever seen in her life…

Her eyelids were closed again, as if in death. Her face, half buried in the burning down of the pillow. Her body nonexistent. Outside her there was nothing but the purple darkness into which the whole bedroom dissolved, that merged into the darkness outside the windows.

It was in this sanguine ink that suddenly the outline, at once burning and frozen, of a shoulder manifested itself, then that of a woman's breast. And the point of the breast-firm, taut. Another sinuous curve was swiftly felt, that of the arm and a moment later that of the hip. It was neither a sensation nor a caress. It could have been a raindrop making this fleeting trace along her skin…

The line suddenly broke off. There was a rapid movement of air, a whirlwind crossing the bedroom. A slight creak of the door closing told her that she was hearing again. Against her skin, under her skin, she now felt the carnal sketch of an unknown body, an outline poignant in its unfinished beauty.

She fell asleep when the windows were already beginning to turn pale. She woke up again at once. And explained to herself very calmly-only a momentary plunge into despair took her breath away-why he had fled. He must have noticed an unaccustomed tautness in her sleeping body, in its too perfect lethargy… He had snatched up his coat and rushed to the door. And with his hand on the handle he had lived through that momentary but appalling dilemma known to all criminals: to flee or to return to cover your tracks at the risk of being done for. He had gone back toward the bed, had covered up the inert body with a blanket, had straightened out the slippers that he had kicked aside in his flight…

Criminal… She repeated it ceaselessly during that sleepless night. Criminal was the silence she had kept. Her acceptance. Her resignation. Criminal too, the nakedness of the youth, concealed beneath a man's long overcoat. Criminal that whole night…

And yet there was something false about those menacing syllables. Something "too clever," she thought. Crime, perversion, monstrousness, sin… She caught herself seeking out ever more punishing words. But the words merely seemed as if written on the page of a book. Typographical symbols devoid of life.

In the morning she noticed that this time the curtains were open (during the first night they had remained drawn). The day was gray and windy (that other awakening had been to sunlight)… She sensed that these parallels concealed a fearsome truth that would be revealed to her at any minute now. A physical, corporeal truth that gripped the muscles of her stomach, rose up to her heart and closed over it, like a hand around a bunch of grapes in the tangle of leaves.

The truth that the words repeated throughout the night did not suffice to tell.

There were no longer any words but these things that offered themselves to her gaze with their mystery, with a mysterious smile almost. The cold smile of one who already knows the secret. The curtains; the lamp with its great orange shade lording it on the bedside shelf; the well-worn slippers, comfortable to her feet but suddenly unfamiliar; the door handle… struck by an inspiration, she opened the wardrobe, rummaged among several garments on their coat hangers, took out the black dress, her only remaining elegant outfit. Its pleats, its neckline trimmed with silk braid… The dress, too, was silently telling a secret that was about to burst forth…

She went out into the corridor, this time with no fear. And as all the objects seemed to want to confide in her, the big cardboard box on top of the old closet caught her eye. For years now, when dusting or repainting the walls, she had wondered what it could contain and had then forgotten about it until she came to clean again… She pulled up a stool, drew the box toward her, opened it. The thing it contained turned out to be strangely solitary, like a relic at the heart of a shrine. It was a plaster cast, no doubt one of the first of those she had made for her son, something he had learned to fashion for himself while still very young. This one was of such a small size that at first glance she did not know if the plaster had been shaped around a leg or an arm. Of course, it was a child's leg and she recognized the touching delicacy of its shape… She put the cast back in the box and closed it; then unable to curb her desire, seized the plaster mold again, pressed it to her cheek, her lips. And it was then that the secret rang out: "Incest!"

The word shattered into a number of memories, each one earlier than the last. They reverberated in the night of the first snow and even before that night. During the night when the sleeping draft had not worked. And even earlier, when for the first time she had surprised that young stranger beside the kitchen range. And even further back than that in her memories. That old overcoat of her husband's on the youth's naked body. The previous winter she had darned it and, seeing it on her son's shoulders, had had to make a rapid, strenuous effort not to think about her husband's body… And her unique evening dress. And the unique opportunity for wearing it- the evenings when L.M. took her to the theater. She would arrive at Li's house and entrust the boy to her and begin to make herself ready. When she went out, dressed, with her hair up and perfumed, her neck and shoulders very pale, the boy observed her with an insistent and hostile look. That made her laugh. She embraced him, enveloping him in her perfume, ruffling his hair and tickling his ear with her warm voice, imitating a lover's voice, which is, in its turn, an imitation of the voice we use in speaking to children… And there were also the slippers. As quite a young child he had put them on one day for fun when she was still in bed and gone out into the corridor making the soles clatter on the floor. She had protested feebly; he had not obeyed her. She had been overwhelmed by an acute pleasure, that of feeling herself tenderly dominated, of not knowing how to or wanting to resist…

Pushing the box back onto the top of the closet she climbed down from the stool. Now it had all been said. There was nothing else to understand. She knew everything, even that: the word "incest" had already resounded within her but in such cavernous depths of her mind that, surfacing into speech, it had been transmuted into "crime," "monstrousness," "horror." Like those deep sea fish which, drawn to the surface, explode or transform themselves into an unrecognizable lump of flesh.

Even the rhythmic spasm that her final discovery had provoked in her was from now on familiar to her. The hand that arose in the pit of her stomach, pressed on her lungs, taking her breath away; gripped her heart, a bunch of grapes that the hand either squeezed or released, at every thought, then suddenly crushed until there was a red hot throbbing in her temples.

She knew equally that all the means of salvation she had imagined in fact only added up to one. To break the curse of those nights she must both flee and remain; explain herself and above all say nothing; change her life and continue as if nothing had happened; both die and live while forbidding herself all thought of death.

"During the first night the curtains were drawn, during the second, open," she recalled for no reason. Yes, the reason for it was her headlong flight forward, proof that she was already living the life where one could neither live nor die.

It was with the feeling of embarking on this new life, a step at a time, that Olga drank her tea, left a note for her son, and went out, as she did every Sunday morning. She walked through the streets of the lower town, gray streets, their pavements strewn with tiny granules of snow. Without admitting it to herself she was hoping for a sign, a jolt in this provincial calm that might have attested to the irremediable yet utterly mundane deformation of her life. A woman who lived at the Caravanserai appeared at the end of the street, drew level with her, and, after greeting her, asked,"Are you going to Paris?"

"No, I was going for a walk…"

Olga waited for the street to become empty again, then turned toward the station.

In the train, watching the dismal fields and the little towns devoid of life floating past, her heart like a crushed bunch of grapes, she repeated several times, "Enough said. Impossible to live. Impossible to die…"

The train stopped for a few minutes in a little station beyond which there arose the sad, dull houses of a village similar to Villiers-la-Forêt but rendered even more inanimate by this cold, windy day. The only thing that attracted her eye was a window squeezed into the recess of a tiny yard. All around was the network of the alleyways, the naive jumble of doors, roofs, overhanging top stories: and then this window, lit by the feeble light of one bulb, with its Sunday-morning calm…

A sudden intuition struck Olga; she turned away. So somewhere in this world there could be a place where what she had to live through could be lived! A life beyond "Enough said." A secret life, inaccessible to others. Like the one hidden behind the window that a distracted passenger on a train had just noticed.

As she was emerging from the Metro in Paris she felt the tiredness and the nervous exhaustion of the past weeks catching up with her. The steps of the staircase suddenly gave way under her feet; she clung to the . And with half-closed eyes she heard a plaintive, almost childish voice within her begging, "Please make Li understand! If only she can guess everything and tell me what to do. If I can just have a moment of peace…" As she resumed her journey she recognized in this tone close to tears the old familiar voice of the "little bitch."

"When we were at school before the revolution, you remember the plank the headmistress made them tie to the backs of the girls with stooping shoulders, so they held themselves straight. You could tell them a mile off, the poor crucified things, with their shoulders square and their backs straight… And then one fine day no more planks! The newspapers talked about liberty and emancipation…"

She was trying to explain to Li the feeling that had been an unconscious element in all her thoughts since adolescence. The feeling that one day life had lost all its rectitude, correctness, regularity. One day a strange whim had crept into their lives in Russia, into the whole country. Suddenly they had been seized with the desire to prove that this rectitude was no more than a chimera, a shopkeeper's prejudice. And that one could live disregarding it, or, better still, thumbing one's nose at it. Furthermore, life itself seemed to confirm this: a Siberian peasant appointed and dismissed ministers; he "purified" (as he called these couplings) the Tsarina's ladies-in-waiting and even, according to malicious tongues, the Tsarina herself-all of them being in thrall to his inexhaustible carnal drive. Newspapers portrayed the Tsar as an enormous oval pair of buttocks surmounted by a crown. Killing a policeman became an exploit in the name of liberty… And then one day they had stopped strapping planks to the backs of stooping schoolgirls.

In explaining this Olga suddenly believed she could understand herself. Yes, once the planks had been removed everything in the country collapsed. In her memory it was the recollection of a purely physical slackening. For a time to be twisted and ungainly had become quite the fashion… In the very spring when their backs had been liberated she had taken part in a masked ball for the first time. Walking down a corridor (the portrait of her grandmother had been hung upside down) she had come upon a man and a woman coupling in an armchair. And like millions and millions of people at that time she had discovered that a certain order of things was cracking apart, on the brink of crumbling, or indeed that there was no order, no rectitude, merely servile custom binding them (like the plank at your back) to laws that were said to be natural… Later she found herself listening to the poet who fixed bear's claws to his fingers. Another poet claimed he drank champagne from the skull of his suicidal beloved. And then there was that patron of the arts who commissioned an icon portraying a huge naked succubus…

And for a few days each of these caprices, like a drug, offered an intoxicating sense of liberation; but stronger and stronger doses were soon needed, more and more bizarre combinations. They all of them aspired to the ultimate caprice, the one that would have liberated them from the last trappings of this world. She herself had had this feeling one evening in St. Petersburg, returning from a party with a man who pretended to believe what she was telling him in extravagant and funereal tones. She said she was only willing to give herself to a man who would agree to kill her afterward. Or was it before? Obsessed with her playacting she herself forgot the original version. This man, the painter who had just invented "Stripeism," was confident that this seventeen-year-old girl would soon be his umpteenth mistress. And he had no intention of killing her, either afterward or (especially not) before. But he was playacting and hardly noticing that he was playacting. As for her, by dint of thinking and talking about "the curse that had blighted her blood," she had ended up believing that it was to her future lover that she would pass it on and not to her child…

After a moment Olga sensed that Li was listening to her with slight apprehension-the fear of someone who already foresees a confession that may well catch them off guard, invest the friend's familiar face with unknown, disturbing features. And even undermine an old friendship. At intervals she began adding her own comments to the story with a vigor and a passion that each time struck a wrong note. She waxed indignant about the torture that used to be inflicted on pupils straightened out with the plank; mocked the couple surprised in an armchair… And when Olga talked about the depraved life in the capital of her youth, Li had begun to murmur, as if apologizing,"Oh, but you see, I never really saw much of that life. In the trenches what we saw mostly was death…"

From the kitchen came the whistle of the kettle. Their tentative conversation broke off. Left alone for a few minutes, Olga felt relieved. She had lost hope of any miracle of understanding… And yet she seemed to sense that Li, also alone for a moment, was timidly preparing the way for an unutterable confession of her own. And when she came in carrying two cups and an old teapot with a chipped spout on a tray, when she set about arranging the tray and pouring the tea with an exaggeratedly concerned air, and fussing unnecessarily about each little detail ("Wait, I'll get you another spoon…"), Olga understood that behind these words a serious statement, hard to articulate, was already forming.

"You know what I was saying just now about the trenches and soldiers," said Li, while her hands continued to hover around the tray. "Well, I lived among them for three years. So I know what I'm talking about. They were mostly young. And I noticed that some of them-but they were very rare-died without believing in death. And at the moment when they died we didn't believe in it either, at least not right away…"

Her voice faded and, almost in a whisper, turning her eyes away, she breathed, "But for you, it's not the same. There's a child. Your child… I'm sorry, I'm being stupid…"

And not knowing how to break the spell of silence brought on by her words, she disappeared into the next room and returned with a bundle of newspapers in her arms.

"You'll say that I'm not being objective," she announced in an almost cheerful tone, wanting to make a fresh start after the previous sentence. "But, you see, in the field of science and… medicine" (her voice slid once more toward a fear of being hurtful) "the Russians, well, the Soviets, are very advanced. Listen to what I read yesterday, and it wasn't in Pravda but in Le Figaro: 'A Russian scientist, Professor A. A. Isotor, has made the sensational discovery that the radius of the earth measures eight hundred meters more than was previously believed and that the earth itself is apparently not spherical but elliptical…' I just thought that perhaps with your son, you could…, well, take him there, if only for an examination…, for a week or two…"

Olga could not help smiling. And to avoid passing over this suggestion yet again in silence she asked, "So when do you think you'll be leaving?"

"I think everything will be ready by the end of April. The last snows will have melted in Russia and I'll be able to go there by road…"

"The last snows… in Russia…" These words sank into Olga's memory and resurfaced occasionally during the return journey. Each time the echo of them brought with it a brief moment of daydreaming. Then the hardness of dry and final words shattered its snowy aura. Final was the certainty of never being able to tell even her closest friend what had happened to her. The very worst thing that Li could imagine was the deterioration of the child's illness. But that! No, for a person with a healthy mind it was inconceivable… As it was for all these passengers sitting around her in the train. She felt a transparent wall rising up between her and them, a glass dome transforming her, with her desperate desire to confide, into a fish in an aquarium. For an instant it seemed to her that even if she had uttered a long wail of misery none of her neighbors would have turned their heads.

"The last snows… in Russia." She tried to hold on to the sound of the words in her mind, to make it last. And to say (to Li, or to someone else) what was out of bounds to words. "You see, I talked to you about my youth to justify myself. Everything was disintegrating, going off the rails, and our lives were a reflection of those sick early years of the century. We strove to resemble them. And so instead of living we played at leading unnatural, capricious lives. We were under the impression that alongside us, the normal life that we despised, because it was too rectilinear, continued in parallel and that we could always come back to it when we had had enough of our games. But one day I saw that my two lives had grown too far apart and that I must now follow to the end the one I had chosen for fun, in the defiance of youth. And I have lived this ill-chosen life, with my eyes fixed on the other one. And what is happening to me today- you've guessed, haven't you, without my explaining it to you, you've guessed everything and you haven't turned away from me-Yes, everything in the life I am leading now that is monstrous, criminal, odious, is in the very nature of this unnatural life… Tell me very simply what I must do. Tell me my face gives nothing away, nor the expression in my eyes, nor my voice. Do you think one day I may be able to look at those trees, those rails, that sky the way I did before?"

It was dark when she reached Villiers-la-Forêt. As she was removing her shoes in the hall she noticed that the pair of men's shoes had moved. "He must have tried them on again, looking forward to wearing them in the spring…" She pictured this very young man, slim, with dark hair, a pair of well polished shoes on his feet, preening himself in front of the mirror in her absence…

"All this is what madness must look like," she told herself, and went into her bedroom.

Two weeks later, one December evening, everything was repeated with infallible, fanatical precision: the hint of white powder on the surface of the infusion; the slightly mechanical stiffness of her hand as it poured away the liquid and washed the little copper saucepan. And in her bedroom, the familiar clock face reflected in the mirror, telling the time backward…

A slight tremor almost betrayed her. The response of her flesh- neck, shoulder, breast-to the burning touch of the icy fingers lightly stroking it had been too violent. She felt no connection with this female body. And in the purple void beyond her eyelids there stretched an unknown body. A body with the scent of hoarfrost brought in among the folds of a man's long overcoat… Her brief tremor and a repressed "Oh!" had risked revealing that she was not asleep. The fingers paused in their caress, then came to life again. She became yet more absent. Under the touch of the fingers that were slowly growing warmer, she discovered the delicacy of her collarbone and the dense weight of her breast as it held the caress. She lay on one side, her face half buried in the pillow. An ideal pose, she thought, for her pretense of sleeping, and one that allowed her not to be a part of what was happening to this woman's body as it was caressed. But suddenly the fingers pressed more firmly on her shoulder, then her hip, as if to turn her over. She felt feverishly present in this body once more; imprisoned in it. And, once placed on her back, she was too exposed, could no longer lie…

The fingers squeezing her shoulder relaxed their grip. A dry creak could be heard at the other end of the room. Without opening her eyes she recognized the sound. A burning log, as it collapsed, had pushed against the door of the stove. Between her eyelashes she made out the image in the mirror. A naked youth, crouching beside the stove, was gathering up small sticks, burnt out or still glowing, and tossing them into the embers…

In the morning when he came into the kitchen she noticed a discreet dressing on one of his fingers. "Have you cut your hand?" she asked him without thinking, as she would have done in the old days.

"No," he replied simply. "No…"

It took her some time to realize that after that morning their paths were crossing less and less often.

Several nights followed, calm nights, spent with her eyes open, only rarely punctuated with brief oblivious intervals of sleep. Her days, on the other hand, flew past in a state of distraught weariness, which was intruded on by the faces of the residents of the Caravanserai and the readers at the library. Eyes unbearable in their insistence; lips coming too close; words articulated with a slow, wet sucking sound that distracted her attention and left their meaning unclear. She would reel back and turn aside; then start talking to cover up her awkwardness. Her own voice deafened her, as if it were resonating somewhere behind her. And an obsessive thought, like a frayed thread being vainly thrust into the eye of a needle, revolved in her drowsy mind: "What if I made no more infusions in the evening? He would understand everything… No, I must continue but drink them in my room. No, I can't. He'll guess…"

The following evening she took the little saucepan into her bedroom. And a few minutes later, glancing through a half-open door, glimpsed a shadow flitting down the corridor and slipping into the kitchen. Or perhaps she just thought she glimpsed it? She was no longer entirely sure of what she saw. The next morning she did not find the little vessel on her bedside table. "So I didn't bring it," she noted, dulled by sleep; but then suddenly realized that the business with the cup went back to the night before, or even the night before that. In her memory the days overlapped, then disintegrated, revealing a glimpse of an opaque matter, without hours, without sounds.

And when one evening she again saw the fine white dust on the surface of the infusion, this did not seem like a repetition but rather the continuation of the action interrupted several days earlier, the night when the sparks from the firewood had burst out of the stove. And so, the icy fingers continued their pressure on her shoulder, on her hip. Her body tipped slowly onto her back… And her tiredness, her exhaustion were such that she did not have to feign sleep. For the moment she felt dead. In place of the confused thoughts, the feverish words that for weeks had echoed in her mind day and night, a heavy, regular sound took her over entirely-like the sound of the wind in the tall treetops in a forest in winter…

All at once this deathly calm was broken. Despite her closed eyes she saw, saw the room, the bed, their two bodies. Her fleeting death was at an end. A movement, a slight stiffening, she did not quite know what, must have betrayed her. She heard the rustling of footsteps, had time to glimpse a candle flame, a long flame spread out horizontally, sucked in by the darkness of the corridor.

It was this candle that allowed her to keep madness at bay. She would spend the morning explaining to herself in a quite measured way that on account of the power cuts everyone was reduced to using candles and that one must be wary of fires, especially in families with young children and that… She was afraid of deviating for a moment from the protective logic of these trivialities.

Over several days she would carry on her body the sensation of a supple and timid weight.

And then there would be a night when, without having drunk the infusion dusted with white crystals, she would fall asleep, no longer able to withstand the mountain of lost sleep weighing down her eyelids. She would fall asleep at the very moment when a candle flame appeared in the slow gliding of the door. And would wake a moment later, alone, in the dark. With a sick person's alertness she would smell the odor of the wick and the breath of cold, of ice, of night, that the long overcoat carried in its folds. And she would guess that the gaze that had just been resting on her had sensed the torment of her sleeping body and that his nocturnal visit had only lasted for a moment of brief, silent compassion.

THE day after that night she surprised herself in front of the mirror-a face tugged this way and that by grimaces and on her lips a long breathless whisper: "Tarantella, tarantella, tarantula, ta-ra, ta-ra, tarantas…" There was no possibility of stopping, for immediately other words, perfectly reasonable phrases, with all the infallible logic that often characterizes the arguments of the insane, began to hiss within her. Yes, the very same phrases whose good sense had seemed to be her salvation several days earlier. Now their intonation, obtuse and imperturbable, terrified her.

"He came bringing a candle. It's dangerous. What's dangerous? That he came… That coat. He puts it on so he can quickly cover his naked body if I wake suddenly. If I woke up he could say that the French door was open and he came to close it. No doubt he's already thought of all the possible answers… He has only touched my body, a woman's body that intrigues him. Yes, that's how it must be said. He has caressed a woman's body. If I could become that nameless woman. Better still faceless. An accident? A face covered in bandages, invisible. And the body asleep, not responsible… When all is said and done what has happened so far is harmless… I live in hope that it will remain harmless. So I accept it; I'm becoming used to it; I have nothing against what happens next, on condition that it does not go beyond a certain limit. What limit?"

She began reciting her "tarantula-tarantella," again, even more feverishly, her eyes half closed, her head animated by little quivers. At all costs she must not let the thought that was forming be born…

In response to this incoherent prayer there was a sudden knocking at the front door. No, in truth, the knocking had been audible for some time now and it was the noise of it that had sparked off the "tarantella-tarantula." For, hearing someone knocking, she had to stifle the inadmissible thought: "What if it were someone who… ta-ra, ta-ra… someone coming to… tarantella, tarantella… coming to say that… shut up… tarantella… tarantula… the child… shut up… tara, tara… that the child has… shut up… the face under the bandages… ta-ra, ta-ra… my face, mine, mine, mine… tarantella-ta-ra-ta… Certainly not he… and if it is he… months in hospital… no… no… You're hoping for an accident… Shut up… ta-ra, ta-ra…"

She opened the door. In the telegram the postman held out to her she read that someone was informing her of their return to Paris. Left alone, she did not immediately succeed in matching to this someone the initials "L.M." and told herself with stupefaction that to other people these letters signified "her friend" or "her lover."… She knew that after a long absence L.M. would send telegrams-a way of skipping a few stages in a reunion, limiting the period of reproaches, excuses, coldness, and forgiveness eventually granted. "Mountains of work. Will be in Paris Saturday," he wrote this time. Behind these words she heard a tone of voice that sought to forestall all objections.

"How strange it is," she thought. "So that's still going on. In their lives. Down there…"

She understood that from now on "down there" started outside her own front door.

She knew what was going to happen. He would leave the car beneath the row of plane trees near the station, make his way down into the lower town, taking little deserted streets, and would cheerfully proclaim to her that not a single resident of the Caravanserai had seen him. In the hall, after kissing her, he would run his fingers over the top of the chest of drawers, over that corner sawed off so many years ago. And he would inquire after the health of her son with a very labored air of involvement. They would go off to Paris. While driving he would talk a lot, but would fail to hide his slight lack of self-assurance, his nervousness-the awkward uncertainty of a man confronting the woman who has to accept the scraps of life that he grants her… He would talk more copiously still during part of the night, reassured by her affection, by the absence of reproaches, by the constancy of this woman's body which, after a long separation, would be faultlessly adept at resurrecting the delicate erotic memory of the slightest words and caresses… In the morning she would be the first to leave the hotel, citing one of her usual pretexts (a visit to a friend, shopping…), and he, while offering to take her back to Villiers-la-Forêt, would not manage to suppress a note of grateful relief in his voice…

She took a wry pleasure in anticipating how the little scenarios of their reunion would unfold. He came in, kissed her, touched the corner of the chest of drawers, then, lowering his voice, promised to send her the address of "an excellent practitioner, almost a friend, though sadly I've rather lost touch with him." In the car he talked about the camps he had visited in Germany; about the ice on the road that made driving difficult; about their compatriots returning to Russia; about the price of meat. He sensed that he was talking too much, resented the woman's silence, became irritated and allowed a brittle tone to enter his words, that seemed to be saying, "There's no point in sulking. I can't offer you any other way of life. Take it or leave it."

But if she was silent, it was not at all out of resentment. It was almost with admiration that she noted the solidity of this world of routine. The "practitioner," this phantom who materialized every time during the first few minutes of their meetings, like an obligatory form of politeness. This nervousness that she could banish by brushing her hand against his at the wheel. The aggressive nervousness that was instantly transformed into voluble, apologetic affection… In the morning this solidity made her smile. "I could come back with you, you know…" he said, leaving that slight hesitation at the end of his sentence, where she hastened to insert her habitual refusal.

As she left the hotel she thought that for him the obligation to take her back would have been as painful as it is for a man to have to offer caresses in the aftermath of lovemaking… Out in the street she took a couple of turnings at random, went into a café, sat down by the window, and hardly a minute later saw him walking past on the sidewalk. The man who had just kissed her and spoken a few words of farewell… He passed the café, almost brushing against the corner, but did not notice her. She saw him consulting his watch and pulling a face in mild irritation. A little farther on he stopped; before getting into the car he scraped the soles of his shoes, which were covered in dirty snow, against the edge of the sidewalk.

"A man came yesterday to a muddy and mournful little town," she noted, observing his actions, "and brought a woman to Paris, whose body he hugged, whose breasts he squeezed, whose belly he crushed for several hours. And now he is carefully cleaning his shoes while this woman watches him in a cold street, with houses that look as if they were patched together from gray and black. A man who, during the night, while he was waiting for the next upsurge of desire, kept talking about thousands of corpses dug up in mass graves in Germany. He said he wanted to write a collection of poems on this theme but that 'the subject matter' was 'resistant.' He spoke with anxious excitement, clearly in order to compensate with words for the slow return of his desire…"

She broke off, already feeling herself drawn toward a descent into madness that was all too close. No, it was better to remain in… she almost thought "their world." The world in which they called "love" what had just passed between the man scraping his shoes and the woman watching him through a café window…

She did not go to see Li, precisely because she was afraid that the latter, convinced of the intensity of this "love," might question her about the man who had just left.

In spite of everything, that night in Paris was a great comfort to her. Their meeting was just like the previous ones, so there was nothing about her that gave away to other people what she was living through in her house in Villiers-la-Forêt…

It was only on the day after her return that she dared to admit to herself the real reason for the secretly beneficial effect of that night in Paris: at no time had any gesture, any caress, any pleasure received or given reminded her of what it was that henceforth bound them to each other, herself and her son.