The Crime Of Olga Arbyelina

Four

But for her fear of appearing ridiculous in her own eyes she would have schooled herself before Christmas Eve to be more natural in the gestures, smiles, and words she would need during their meal together. But her lips trembled slightly when repeating the words she had just addressed to her son, asking him to go and find some branches in the wood behind the Caravanserai. She had spoken with such artificial casualness it seemed to her that he had acquiesced and gone out before she had even finished her sentence. And now, over and over, she was silently reshaping the words that, by their self-conscious tone, must have given away what was inadmissible… From time to time she got up, readjusted the tablecloth on the kitchen table, made slight changes to the place settings, the plates, the little basket with very thin slices of bread. Then, going out into the corridor, she looked at herself in the mirror between the front door and the chest of drawers. Her black dress, the one she used to wear to go to the theater, struck her as too tight-fitting, the neckline too plunging. She removed the belt, put it on again, removed it again. Then covered her shoulders with a shawl. Going back into the kitchen she felt the lid of the pan on the range. "Everything's going to be cold now. What on earth's keeping you?" She was relieved to hear herself addressing this question to her son. Her words seemed to be rediscovering their innocence…

The end of the year had arrived too suddenly. She had almost forgotten about the winter festive season. Generally, several families at the Caravanserai gathered in the refectory at the retirement home for a joint celebration, children and elderly residents together. But since last winter more families, like the red-haired boy's, had moved out; and two of the old people, including Xenia, had died. That evening all that could be heard along the bare corridors of the unlit building was the discreet clicking of locks, as one resident or another half opened the door and listened for a long time, hoping to recognize the sounds of people at dinner…

Several times she had to trim the wicks of the two candles that were beginning to flicker and throw out little strands of soot. The lid of the pan was scarcely warm. "What on earth's keeping you? I'll have to reheat everything now," she repeated, but her voice seemed tense again and already tinged with anxiety. The cold was rapidly invading the kitchen now that the fire had gone out. She gathered up some wood shavings, then a handful of black dust, from the coal that was long since used up, and threw it all into the depths of the range. She washed her hands and, unable to bear it any longer, went into the hall, opened the door. The clear, icy night took her breath away. She wanted to call out, changed her mind, closed the door. And, walking back along the corridor, stopped, undecided, in her bedroom. The reflection of her black dress in the mirror slyly awakened a tender and obscure memory…

The front door banged, footsteps rang out on the floor, and from the kitchen there came the hollow rattle of a bucket. A shout, quite unaccustomed in the boy's mouth, a shout that was simultaneously joyful and commanding, seemed to seek her out through the house: "Mom, can you help me? It's very urgent! Otherwise they're going to die…"

She ran along the corridor, took her coat off the hook, and, without asking for explanations, followed her son, who was already leaping down off the front steps.

He led her in the darkness to the bottom of a great snow-covered meadow at the edge of the wood. He ran in among the first of the trees, from time to time disappearing behind a trunk, turning to see if she was coming after him. She followed close on his heels, as if in a strange dream, blinded by the moon every now and then when it pierced through the network of branches.

They found themselves beside a broad sheet of water, the pool that sometimes formed a small loop in the river, sometimes, when it rained less, shrank into a tiny pond, filled with weed. The pool the red-haired boy was playing beside, she remembered, on the day of the first snow…

"Look!" Her son's voice was muted now, speaking like one afraid to cause an echo in some terrible or holy place. "Another night of frost and they would all be dead…"

The surface of the pond was covered in ice; a single breach, smaller than a footprint, gave a glimpse of the black, open water. And the dark, glazed surface was streaked with incessant movements, a brief, frenetic shuddering, followed by a slow, drowsy rotation. Sometimes, in the watery reflection of the moon, there was a glint of scales; one could make out the shape of fins, the silvery patches of gills…

They began the rescue with excessive haste, as if these few fish trapped by the cold had only minutes to live. She watched her son plunging his hand into the icy water up to the elbow, and lifting out the slippery bodies, numbed by the lack of air and hardly struggling anymore. He released them into the bucket she held out to him and, lying down on the snow again, resumed his fishing. To ease his task she cleared the water of slivers of ice, pulled out skeins of weed, and occasionally helped him roll up the soaking sleeves of his jacket. Their hurried efforts merged everything into a feverish whole, the gestures, the crunch of snow under their feet, the glittering of the moon broken up on the black surface of the open water, the creaking of the ice, the trickle of the dripping water, their terse exchanges, like orders given on board ship in the midst of a storm. In this flurry their eyes met from time to time for a fraction of a second-and they were surprised at how much the silence of these exchanged looks was detached from their haste… She noticed that her son's right hand had several grazes on the knuckles. But there was so much ice and so much cold water around that the blood had scarcely made the skin pink and had stopped flowing. Perhaps for the first time since the boy's birth, she could contemplate his bleeding without anxiety and said nothing to him…

He released the fish, one by one, coming as close as possible to the icy river bank. Their bodies shuddered for a moment in his hand, then their quivering lives blended with the dark current, the cold, dense weight of which was palpable. After that he emptied the bucket, pouring out the rest of the water with several tufts of weed and lumps of ice. The tinkling of the last drops had a rare resonance, a purity that etched the outlines of the trees and rekindled the reflection of the moon in a frozen puddle. They looked at one another mutely: two ghosts with their faces silvered by the moon, their clothes in disarray; two motionless figures in the night on the bank of a smooth, impenetrable stream… A scrap of wind suddenly brought with it an imperceptible whisper of life, a faint mixture of shouts and music. She turned her gaze in the direction of the upper town.

"They're having a party down there," he said, as if in a daydream and without taking his eyes off the water that glittered at his feet.

"Down there," she repeated to herself as she walked beside him. "Down there…" So he, too, was conscious of living somewhere else.

In the course of that night on the riverbank he must have cut his knee without being aware of it in the flurry of the rescue. Next day a blood-filled swelling formed and grew rapidly larger. In the evening his temperature went up abruptly. On several previous occasions the doctor who was based in the upper town had refused to come. There was no longer a proper road between Villiers-la-Forêt and the Caravanserai, now swathed in darkness. She herself took a good quarter of an hour simply to make her way around the building and reach the main gateway. The footpath that followed the wall had disappeared; in certain places the squalls had sculpted long snowdrifts that barred the way.

She knocked at the house of the "doctor-just-between-ourselves." He opened it at once, although it was past midnight, as if he were expecting her visit. As he walked along with her, he kept up a conversation with professional sagacity about "the harshest winter for a hundred years." All the time he was operating, as on previous occasions, he gave vent to little whispering laughs. It was as if he did not believe what he was being told and had his own opinion on the boy's illness. "It's nothing at all, really nothing at all," he repeated, without interrupting his chuckles. And, just as before, he accompanied his actions with patter, like a fairground magician. "Now then. First of all, all nice and neat, we dra-a-a-in off all the fluid, like so-o-o-o! And now a mag-ni-fi-cent saline dressing…" Before leaving he leaned his face toward the boy and, still in the style of an illusionist, proclaimed, "And tomorrow you'll be back on your feet, all right? Like a real trooper." As he went out he said again, but this time in his normal voice, "Naturally, all this is just between ourselves."

Next day the boy got up… She noticed that it was only at these moments of unexpected and unhoped-for recovery that she prayed. The rest of the time her inner vows took the form of a continuous babble of words that she was scarcely aware of anymore. Her rare conscious prayers, on the other hand, included violent threats to the one they were addressed to and demanded a complete turnaround in her son's life, an impossible rehabilitation that must be possible because it was her son. And so that evening, with her face pressed into her hands, her lips dry with the whispering of silent words, she implored, insisted on a miracle… Later on, during the night, now calmer, she realized with bitter sadness that this miracle was linked to that strange personage, the "doctor-just-between-ourselves" who had opened his door to her, wearing an old, neatly pressed tuxedo, with a bow tie beneath his Adam's apple, just as if at midnight, in the dark and icy fortress of the Caravanserai, he were preparing to go to a party. "A poor madman, like all the rest of us here," she thought. The words of her feverish prayer came back to her now as a weary echo. Listening to them, she reluctantly admitted to herself that her secret hope was at least to delay the arrival of the next relapse, the next hemorrhage. Just to win a few days' respite, during which she could live with the illusion of a successful miracle, without feeling too ashamed of her weakness.

It was during those days, one evening, that he appeared in her room again…

The last week of the year was always a very singular time in the lives of the inhabitants of the Caravanserai. The days that came after Christmas and New Year's Day seemed suddenly to backtrack, for the Russian Christmas and New Year came two weeks later than the French celebrations and created the illusion of a fresh end to the year. This delay gave rise to an astonishing confusion in time; to a parenthesis that could not be found in any calendar; to a delight, often unconscious, at not being a part of the life that resumed its sad rhythm in January.

In that winter of 1947 those two lost weeks between the holidays, in the last days of the Russian December, seemed to the émigrés even more empty, even more detached from the ordinary life of Villiers-la-Forêt, than usual. On the ground floor occupied by the retirement home, in a small hall next to the refectory, they had brought in a Christmas tree, as they did every year. But this time there was nothing festive about the presence of the tree in this bleak, cold building: it felt more as if the forest were invading an abandoned house. One evening as she was leaving the library, Olga came upon a man twirling softly in front of the tree in the darkness. Hearing her footsteps, he fled. She realized that he had been waltzing all alone by the light of a candle fixed lopsidedly to one of the branches. She had an impulse to blow it out but did nothing, thinking that the man might perhaps be waiting for her to go before resuming his solitary twirling…

One day, on a particularly cold morning, she went into the lower town in search of bread. As she left the Caravanserai she noticed that her own footprints on the smooth surface of the snow were the very first of the day. The bakery was closed; she had to go all the way up to the one located in the upper town, next to the church. She tried several times to button up the collar of her coat, but her numb fingers no longer obeyed her, and the wind came streaming in at her unbuttoned collar, up her sleeves. Speaking to the baker's wife, she suddenly felt dumb, her frozen lips articulating with great difficulty. The woman listened to her with the exaggerated and scornful patience people have for stammerers, then held out a round loaf to her. Olga did not dare to say that she had asked for something else. And all through the day at the corners of her mouth she retained that painful sensation of congealed words.

That night, for several eternal seconds, he slept pressed against the inert woman's body-against herself.

This, too, was one of those days lost between two calendars, a day of pale colors, hazy in the cold and the wind, a long twilight that lasted from dawn until dusk… As the night began she saw him appearing once more on the threshold of her room. She molded herself almost effortlessly into the temporary death that made her body limp. He lifted her arm carefully, to rearrange it, and it fell back with the soft heaviness of sleep. This death only required one thing of her: to feel totally removed from the stealthy rearrangement imposed on her body; from the caresses, barely perceptible and always seemingly amazed at themselves; from the whole slow and timid enchantment of gestures and held breaths. Yes, to distance herself from her body, to be intensely dead within it…

An infinitely remote sound, the chimes of a clock lost in the night, reached her in her death, woke her. Her eyelashes quivered, creating a fine, iridescent chink. She saw. A candle placed on the floor in a narrow china mug, the fierce flickering of the flames behind the stove door… And these two naked beings that she contemplated with a gaze still removed, external, like someone observing them from outside, through the window. The body of a woman lying on her back, tall, beautiful, in perfect repose. And, like a bowstring suddenly slackened, the body of a youth, fragile and very pale, stretched out on its side, the head tilted back, the mouth half open. He was asleep…

During the few moments that this sleep lasted, she had the time to grasp everything. Or rather all that she would sense next morning and reflect on in the course of the days that followed, all already foreseen, was condensed in her eyes, still dazzled by their ability to remain wide open. She understood the tiredness beyond human endurance of this young body, the exhaustion accumulated over weeks, months. This brief, trancelike swoon after countless nights of wakefulness. Thanks to this momentary collapse, she believed she could plumb the abyss he bore within himself, without ever letting anything show. He had fallen asleep as children do, in midgesture, in midword… The distant striking of the hours fell silent. Now there was just the tinkling of crystals against the window, gusts of invisible air coming warm from the fire and cold from the window, and the subtle scent of burning wood. And these two naked bodies. Located beyond words, outside all judgment. The mind could brush against them, situate their whiteness in the shadows, in the silence, in the penetrating aroma from the fire; but shattered against the threshold beyond which it could articulate nothing more.

From very far away, a few seconds after the first chimes, came a response: the same twelve strokes, now stilled, now heightened by the wind. She quickly closed her eyes again. He got up so swiftly that he gave the impression of flying as he crossed the room, snatched up the coat and the candle, and pulled open the door…

His sleep had lasted for as long as the interval between midnight striking and its echo on a New Year's Eve that existed only in the old calendar.

On the day after that phantom New Year's Eve the morning began for her well before daybreak, still in the confused sleepiness of the night, with its long smoky flame flickering on the stub of a melted candle. Padding about, she came and went in the bedroom, opened boxes filled with letters and old papers, sifted through them, and threw most of them into a plywood chest beside the stove where everything accumulated that could be used to stoke the fire. The empty space that was gradually cleared on top of the closet, hitherto piled high with these cardboard boxes, afforded her a vague but real delight. The feeling you have before an impending journey or moving house…

She heard her son opening the front door and walking down the wooden steps-some slivers of ice between the planks creaked under his feet. Hidden by the curtain, she watched him all along the footpath as he followed it. Who was he?

A youth clad in an overcoat too broad and still too long for him. Was he her son who would greet the occupants of the Caravanserai he encountered, as well as some French people he knew in the upper town, receiving their greetings in the most natural way in the world? Or was he that unrecognizable young being in a fleeting moment of sleep spent beside a woman's body at night in this room, as it flickered and swayed in the light of a candle placed on the ground?

When her eyes had got used to the rhythm of this figure's tread as he walked beside the wall, she noticed that at each step his foot, his heel seemed to be stamping on the frozen footpath in anger. She just managed to suppress the thought that was already spreading like acid: "He's limping…" The words cut off. Now she remembered that in the night, when observing this fragile body stretched out beside her own, she had noticed a blue and yellow mark around the knee, the trace of the last hematoma… As a gust of wind blew open the panels of his coat his silhouette broadened and disappeared around the corner of the building. Again she imagined all the faces the boy's eyes would encounter on the road and in the town. They bore a strange resemblance to the outraged and disdainful ones that she pictured one day condemning the life they led as this odd couple. It was then that she murmured harshly, while intending something other than these half-irrational words, "To hell with them all, with their chimes and their bakeries! They'll never understand…"

The next day the postman did not deliver the newspapers subscribed to by the library at the Caravanserai. Some of the rare readers, who were still braving the cold and the snow-covered paths, spoke of a journalists' strike, or a printers' strike, nobody knew exactly what. The postman repeated his explanation three or four more times and in the end they stopped noticing the absence of news… The train that went to Paris every morning suffered several delays as a result of snowfalls and one fine day (it was said that ice had warped the joints on the track) it stayed immobilized all day. Henceforth the capital and the outside world seemed improbable places. Power cuts plunged even the upper town into darkness from six o'clock in the evening. As for the fortress, the old brewery, the people of Villiers took to wondering if it was still inhabited.

The library often remained deserted. Nor was anyone ever seen in the courtyard that was strewn with the humps of snowdrifts. Entrenched in their homes, the occupants spent these brief twilit days on the alert for the slightest sounds in the corridors, and trying to interpret them, picturing one another shivering as they kept watch under a blanket or with a shoulder pressed against the stone of a meagerly heated stove. And if they did appear in the library it was only to leave again almost at once, without even telling their usual stories, simply embellishing this information, culled from a newspaper a week old: "The coldest winter for eighty years… For a hundred years… For a hundred and twenty years…"

During these lifeless days her thoughts often returned to that boy clad in a heavy man's overcoat, stamping with his foot on the frozen earth as he walked, as if in a gesture of childish anger. "He had no childhood," she said to herself. None of the simple joys the world owes a child. A garden around the family house, visits to grandparents… And more besides… None of all that. Pain. Anxious anticipation of further pain. An uneasy respite that would only last long enough to allow hope to be born and disappear.

One day she tried to rescue what could still be recovered from that void, insignificant scraps; a smile here, a moment of relief there. There was so little. Almost nothing. This memory perhaps: a cold, sunny day, a recollection from one of those winters lost in the first years of the impoverished childhood that she had not noticed passing… He is five or six and is seeing snow for the first time in his life. He runs toward her, making the dead leaves strewn with crystals crackle under his feet, and he shows her a fragment of ice with several blades of grass and a tiny flower head imprisoned in its moist transparency. She is on the brink of going into raptures, or embarking on scientific explanations. But some intuition holds back her words. They remain side by side, silent, watching the slow melting of the beauty and the release of the stalks, which, once outside the ice, become limp, and lose their magic.

She was lost so deeply in this moment of time past that it took her an instant for her eyes to focus on the winter dusk and the footpath running beside the wall of the Caravanserai. She was on her way back from the library. In one place she was obliged to press firmly against the wall, almost to flatten herself against its rough surface, in order to scramble over a big pile of snow. She accomplished this sequence of intricate maneuvers slowly and mechanically, already feeling she was somewhere else… In a long summer's evening several years before. The light of a hot, hazy sunset. The walls of the Caravanserai are warm and, as they were every summer, garlanded with hops. She is sitting on her wooden front steps, motionless, daydreaming, watching the footsteps of the child, this seven-year-old boy as he walks along the riverbank, stoops, rummages in the sand. Then comes over to her, radiant. "Look at this shape!" It is a fragment of limestone containing the broad, hollow spiral, studded with iridescent spangles, of an ammonite. The hollow is reminiscent of something and the similarity is disturbing. "It looks like a plaster cast for my knee," murmurs the child. She catches his eye, feels at a loss, and feigns gaiety: "Yes, but you know, your plaster cast…" The child interrupts her. Pressing his ear to the imprint of the shell, he is listening: "You can hear the sound of the sea… it's a sea that's not there anymore…" He holds out his treasure to her. She puts it to her ear, listens. What can be heard is the still of the evening, the cry of a bird, the carefully held in breathing of the child…

This blossoming of moments from long ago lasted until nightfall. Almost unaware she pushed open the door, took off her coat, went to light the range and make the tea… But alongside this activity these fragments of the past were unfolding, always quite humble and, it could have been said, useless, allowing her to dwell in their luminous time. She went up to the table, picked up her cup, the teapot… (A spring day, still in Paris in that dark apartment where the only ray of sunlight that ever comes in is at the end of the afternoon, reflected from the windows of the house across the street. The apartment where there is already a feeling of an imminent departure. The wan sunlight sidles onto the table and irradiates a bouquet of wild cherry blossom. Pausing on the threshold, she comes upon the child, his face buried in the white clusters, whispering in imitation of several voices, first pleading in tone, then passionate. She takes a step backward and the creak of a floorboard gives her away. The child raises his head. For a long time they look at each other in silence…) She came to herself in the middle of the kitchen, unable to think what to do with the cup and the teapot she was still holding, as if they were objects whose use was unknown…

Later in the evening she realized she had made an annoying omission, put her coat on again, went out onto the front steps, and cut notches all over the thick layer of ice on them with the help of an old ax. Then she walked back up the little footpath that ran beside the wall and slashed the slippery slope on the incline at the most dangerous spot…

Before she went to sleep there were several more luminous lapses into the past. And once, as she emerged and saw again in a flash all these images that her memory had secretly retained, she had this thought, which was so obvious it dazzled her: "So, I've forgotten nothing, I haven't missed anything at all…" Sleep was already numbing her mind. All she could grasp was that, without knowing it, she had preserved what was essential in this childhood, the part that was silent, true, unique.

… Next morning she would remember that the previous evening, lost in her reverie, she had drunk the infusion without examining its surface. She would guess that he had entered her room and come upon her, relaxed in unfeigned sleep.

It was on that morning, a winter morning, violet with cold, that for her time lost its rhythm of hours, days, and weeks.

She saw the young figure in the long overcoat passing beneath the window, pictured the slippery, frozen footpath he must follow, ran outside and cupped her hands to her mouth. Too late. He was already climbing the little steep, icy section-with that slightly brutal agility adolescents have, as their growing strength affirms itself. Having conquered it, he quickened his pace and turned the corner around the Caravanserai…

The limpid silence that reigned all about gradually seeped into her. The branch beside the steps was quivering where the boy had brushed against it and shedding a light veil of hoarfrost crystals that made rainbows in the air. Her mind was empty, but with her whole being she felt that she could have stood there on the steps forever, looking out at the snow-covered meadow sloping down toward the river; at this slow powder of crystals falling from a branch stirred by already imperceptible vibrations. Yes, stood there in the sundrenched sleepiness of a morning that belonged to no year, to no era, to no country. That did not even belong to her life but to quite another life, in which contemplating glittering snowflakes in silence, in the absence of all thought, was becoming essential…

She looked at other branches, higher up, reaching toward the pale blue of the sky, then at those of the woodland beyond the walls of the Caravanserai. The sun, still low, softened their black, angular lines with a purple-tinged glow. It seemed to her that she had never felt so mysteriously close to these trees, their bark, their bare branches. Nor so intensely exposed beneath the sky, so intensely herself, facing this immense, patient expectation…

The glittering specks of the hoarfrost still meandered in the icy air. The calm seemed infinite. And yet within this silent radiance it was as if you could hear a faint, continuous tinkling-sounds beyond hearing echoed one another with faultless purity and precision. The air faindy pink; the dark tracery of the branches; the dancing of the crystals; the fortress of the Caravanserai still in the blue shadow of the night; the sunlight lightly touching the snow among the trees… This ethereal equilibrium of lights and silences was alive, guarded its own transparency, was not going anywhere. Motionless on the little wooden steps, she was a part of it and felt herself to be strangely necessary to all that surrounded her…

The figure that appeared at the other end of the footpath was that of the postman. He brought a telegram signed "L.M.," offering a choice of two dates for their next meeting. She went indoors and read the few impersonal words a second time. The dates seemed to her as fantastic as the months of the French revolutionary calendar- all those "nivôses" and "pluviôses," very evocative, but from a completely different era. Paris, a gray morning; a man scraping the soles of his shoes on the edge of the sidewalk before getting into his car… "So all of that is still going on somewhere," she told herself, feeling as if she were recalling a life she had abandoned ten years before. The man was still walking about in that busy, humid Paris that smelled of the smoky warmth of cafés, the sweatiness of the Metro. He went to his editorial offices, argued, gesticulated, talked on the telephone, and every evening made his typewriter vibrate with the dry and nervous drumming of his fingers. Then he looked in his calendar and chose these two dates that were still free and sent a telegram…

When she went out again a few minutes later to go to the Caravanserai, the luminosity of the air, the shadows, the branches, the sky, the smell of the cold had imperceptibly reshaped the equilibrium that had linked them a moment ago. She felt this change very intimately. As if she were taking part in the transition from one tonality to another, physically, within her own body.

In the immobility of that winter weather there was one day when, precisely because of these tonalities, she sensed that her son would come to her…

That night the wind howled noisily in the chimney, making the fire blaze in the stove. Sometimes the flames died back, cowed; sometimes they swelled and thrust fine blue tongues out through the chink of the cast iron door. Then suddenly the absence of noise would be deafening, as if the house, snatched up by a squall, were already floating through the night, far from the earth in a soundless, black transparency. The flickering of the candle grew still, and fixed the shadows on the walls of the bedroom. The fire was silent. The scent of burning wood gave contours to the darkness that were invisible but could be perceived if you closed your eyes and inhaled deeply.

Thus it was, her eyes half closed, her breathing intoxicated, that she abandoned herself to this fresh moment of silence… A minute earlier, seeing the sections of a thick branch stacked beside the stove, she had said to herself that this meager firewood would be just enough to give her the illusion, at the start of the night, of going to sleep in a house that was inhabited. She had shivered, picturing herself waking up, well before dawn, in a room smelling of dead, icy smoke… But now even this branch and the fragments of mossy bark scattered on the floor gave off an indefinable happiness. There was, she felt, an unknown joy in the roughness of this bark, in the scented acidity of the smoke, in the thunderous rage of the wind, and in this silence as perfect as the shape of the motionless candle flame… She crouched down, put a part of the branch in the fire, and arranged the rest of the wood carefully beside the stove. A scrap of bark could have cracked beneath the foot of someone walking in the dark…

She knew he would come that night. Everything proclaimed it.

In the kitchen she saw a slight trace of white on the brown surface of the infusion, emptied it into the sink, and went out. Coming back into her bedroom she hesitated for a second, then thrust another scrap of the branch into the depths of the stove.

It was his going, always abrupt, as if running away, that broke the night. The moment was shattered. Taking fright, the body vanished beneath the flaps of the overcoat; the feet, in a ballet of lightning movements, avoided the floorboards booby-trapped with creaks… He stopped on the threshold of the room, returned toward the stove with the same tightrope walker's nimbleness, seized the last piece of the branch, almost threw it into the embers, then decided not to, put the wood down, glanced at the bed, crossed the room, and vanished behind the door as it cautiously slid to.

She waited for a long while without any notion of hours or minutes. Then got up, put the rest of the wood in among the barely flickering flames, and got back into bed. Her reverie, that veered between vigil and dream, lasted through the revival, then the dying of the fire. The whole night was condensed into the unique sensation that hasty visit had left her with; the chilled young body, with warmth flooding into it, first the fingers, a little later the lips, the arm that lay for a moment across her shoulder, her breast… The memory of it, still fresh, could be inhaled, like the scent of the fire, like the gusts of icy air that spilled into the room with each squall.

She had to get up again in the dark. The cold was becoming unbearable. It was as if it were lurking in her clothes; they felt stiff and seemed shrunken. The rough sides of the stove no longer retained a spark of life… Outside the wind had died down, or rather it had risen far above the earth and was driving the clouds along at an unusual height in a rapid, spellbinding flight. From time to time their billowing was swollen with a milky pallor, the moon appeared, then a star, both immediately hidden again. In this shifting gloom she crossed the meadow, a creaking carapace of hardened snow. She found nothing. Everything that could be burned had long since been gathered up by the inhabitants of the Caravanserai… She went toward the wood and after a long, vain trawl, wrenched a twisted branch out of the snow-derisory when she pictured the flames that would only last a few minutes on these little sticks. She straightened up, her head buzzing, her eyes confused with the effort. The vision forming in her eyes was wholly inward: a house tacked on to the wall of a somber, half inhabited building, a winter night, infinite isolation; and in the very depths of this solitude, a room, the silent life of a fire. And this couple, a woman sunk in a sleep more unshakable than a lethargy and a youth with slow movements and a dazzled look, himself surprised by the magic of his crime… A mother and her son.

"So I'm mad," she said to herself with calm resignation, studying the pieces of the branch she had just broken up. Her gaze strayed between the dark trunks around her, into the thickets burdened with snow, and then soared up toward the tops of the trees. She saw that over its whole nocturnal expanse the sky had cleared. The last clouds, in a wispy procession, seemed to be streaming vertically away from the earth, as if attracted by the moon, and disappearing into its faintly iridescent halo.

It was then, with her gaze focused on that ascending flight, that she pictured the whole earth, the globe, the world peopled by men. Yes, all those men talking, smiling, weeping, embracing one another, praying to their gods, killing millions of their fellows, and, just as if nothing had happened, continuing to love one another, pray, and hope, before crossing through the fine layer of earth that separated all that ferment from the immobility of the dead.

The words she heard herself whispering surprised her less than the little cloud of her breath shining in a moonbeam: "They are the ones living in complete madness. They, down there, on their globe…" She stooped and began to pick up the pieces of the broken branch… Beyond the last trees in the wood she saw the house: the moon appeared around the wall of the Caravanserai, shone down on the snow-covered front steps, and turned one of the windows blue. She still saw it from that distant perspective, toppling down from the vertical flight of the clouds. Still saw the planet as a whole and on the dark, nocturnal side of it a long dwelling, leaned up against a wall. And that couple forgotten by the world. A woman and a youth. A mother and her son… A slight cloud arose from her lips once more. The murmur of her words melted into the frozen air… A strange couple. A youth who will die. His last winter, perhaps. Last spring. He thinks about it. And the woman's body that he loves, the first body in his life. And the last…

The faint cloudiness about her lips from these words was dispersed. Now there was only the blue of the moonlight on the snow-covered steps. And a trace of snow, too, on that branch above the footpath. The footprints beneath the trees, her own, those of another. The silence. The night when he had come, stayed, and left. A night so agonizingly alive, so close to death.

That was precisely how it must be, she now understood: the woman; the youth; their unspeakable intimacy in the house poised on the brink of a winter's night, on the brink of a void, quite foreign to the globe that seethed with human lives, hasty and cruel. She experienced it as a supreme truth. A truth made manifest through the bluish translucency on the steps, through the trembling of a constellation just above the wall of the Caravanserai, through her solitude under this sky. Nobody in the world, in the universe, knew she was standing there, her body limpid with cold, her eyes wide open… She understood that, if expressed in words, this truth would signify madness. But this was a moment when words were being transformed into white vapor and their only message was their brief gleaming in the stellar light…

She planned to burn her trophies in the kitchen range to make some tea and at the same time to wait for the dawn, when looking for firewood would be easier. She could not believe her eyes when she saw all the branches stacked together beside the range. There were still some drops of melted snow glistening on the bark… She remembered the glance he had directed at the dying fire in the stove as he fled the room. So, an hour or two before her he had been wandering about in the darkness among the trees. The footprints she had seen in the snow were his… What amazed her most was knowing that they had both looked at the same night sky, seen the same mists escaping from their mouths. Some unfathomable minutes apart.

She did not write a fresh letter to L.M. but sent him the old one, that laborious letter breaking things off. She even forgot to correct the date on it.

The life she lived now was no longer divided into days or hours, nor into coming and going; nor into actions; nor into fears; nor into expectations; nor into causes and their effects. There was suddenly a particular light (like the calm pallor above an abandoned railroad track that she had been obliged to follow, one afternoon of milder weather); her eyes took in everything, discerning all the nuances in the air (the silvery tint of the fields, the unexpected gold of the sun shining on the rooftops of the already distant town); and she experienced this light, these subtle colorations of the air as profound events in her life.

It was to avoid her usual path, now awash under the porous snow of the thaw, that on her way home that day she had walked around the station and approached the Caravanserai from the opposite direction. A train went by; she continued on her way, stepping from one tie to the next, listening for a long time to the fading vibration of the rails. Then the track branched into two. This one, the old one, that in days gone by used to serve the brewery, soon ended in a buffer stop… In the distance the roofs of the town clustered about the church were bathed in a golden radiance that shone through a fleeting rift in the clouds. Over here, beside the buffer stop, it was almost dark. Leaning her elbows on the barrier, she remained stock still for a moment, her gaze lost in the expanse of the fields, which in this pale light had the softness of suede. The patch of sunlight on the town faded… She was alone at the end of this forgotten track. She felt secretly at one with the misty distances, and close to this bare shrub that grew between the rails. The rain began to fall, merging her still further with the low sky and the soft snow that gave off a vivid, heady coolness…

That evening there was another moment that absorbed her into its profound harmony. The rain continued to pour down heavily, but its torrents were arrested by the return of the cold that put an end to a day and a half of mild weather. The earth hardened and the streams of water seemed to freeze in midflight. They crashed against the ground, against the layer of ice on the fields, against the roof, in the branches of the trees-and the night rang with an infinite variety of ceaseless tinklings. This crystalline cascade drowned all other sounds, crushed any shadow of a thought with its glass beads, permeated her body with its delicate flow.

She could hardly hear the crackling of the fire any longer above this headache-inducing din. Only the tallest flames that rose above the tangle of the wood could pierce through the incessant roar of the icy torrent. Its deafening rattle had the fluidity of rain, while the ferocity of its noise kept her awake. And the flames surged up in that nocturnal bedroom besieged by an icy downpour, now on this side of sleep, now in her dreams, amid countless warm, supple, aromatic spurts of resin…

When he came in, shielding the candle with his hand, his footsteps, his movements, the whiteness of his body that she could sense without lifting her eyelids, all these things hovered between the two nights, sometimes deep in her dream, then suddenly breaking the boundary of it with an incredibly vibrant caress. The hesitant hand seemed to be making its way between long rivulets of sound to enfold her breast, to find peace upon it, while they awaited an ebb tide back into the dream. There, where their bodies would be nothing but the same endless wave, a shadow with the scent of snow, the flickering amber of fire.

He remained in her without moving, his breath suspended, his body weightless. A motionless flight above a sleeping lake… She could still feel the weight of him in her groin, in her belly when he was no longer there, as she slowly returned across the tides of fire and crystal and again found herself in a room surrounded by a rainy winter's night.

… In the morning the treads of the front steps rang out underfoot like glass. She walked down them and made her way across the upside-down sky, a looking glass colored pink by the day's dawning. The trees, the windows of the house, the wall of the Caravanserai were all reflected in it with the clarity of an engraving. The bushes laden with thousands of frozen drops of water looked like strange crystal candelabra abandoned here and there in the snow. She took several steps and lost her balance but had time to realize that she was going to fall and anticipated her tumble by letting herself slide. Half stretched out, she pressed against the ground to raise herself and suddenly encountered her own face reflected in the ice, so calm and so distant that, once on her feet, she turned back with an unconscious urge to see that calm expression in the same place again…

There was a day when everything swirled in a hypnotic flurry of snowflakes. The roofs of the town, the Caravanserai, the willows along the riverbank-everything disappeared piece by piece, as if delicately coated in white with a paintbrush…

Then another day when the color was extraordinary. A pale violet, very faint, scarcely mauve out in the, whiteness of the fields; denser, dark blue beneath the wall and in the alleys of the lower town; and more vibrant, almost palpable in a broad, plum colored sweep above the horizon…

And another day, when in the evening she was intoxicated by suddenly discovering the various scents given off by the branches thrown down beside the stove-a whole forest, with different essences, some acid, some heady, with the coolness of the frost that emitted shrill whistles in the flames as it melted. The aroma of moss, of wet bark, of the life asleep in all the trees.

Each of these moments carried within itself a mystery ready to be revealed, ripe to be experienced, but which was still hidden, making their abundance painful, like some mountain landscapes that are too beautiful, too awesome, for our lungs, which begin to struggle for air…

On the day of the dancing blizzard the long overcoat he took off when he came into the room was white with snowflakes. His hair as well. She felt several drops of melted snow trickling onto her breast… On the day of the amazing violet light they ran into each other in the upper town, he returning from school, she with her shopping bag. There was no embarrassment, no forced words. In that mauve, blue, and violet light everything became at once unreal and natural: the street, an inhabitant of the Caravanserai greeting them, the two of them together. They walked along, looked at each other from time to time, recognized each other as people recognize each other in dreams, with a clairvoyance sharpened by reality, but in a fantastic setting. At one moment, as she crossed a long strip of bare ice beside the bombed-out pharmacy, she leaned on his arm…

And it was thanks to him that she discovered the different scents of the flesh of trees. One night, as he left the room, he crouched down and touched one of the branches drying beside the stove. She repeated this gesture an hour later as she put more wood on the fire. And also out of curiosity. A mossy shape reminded her of a moth. She touched it, as he had just done, and suddenly inhaled a complex mixture of scents. Kneeling there with her eyes closed, she smelled their elusive range. She sensed the coolness of a body, of the body that, before joining her (she knew it now), had been impregnated with cold in a frenzied coming and going on the frozen slope between the house and the river. He had just left her and his presence was slowly awakening within her, in her groin, in her belly, and mingling with the slightly bitter or acid tastes of the branches, with the perfumed warmth of the fire, with the silence. And what she was living through became so full then, so painfully close to the revelation of a mystery, that she opened the French door, filled her hands with snow, and buried her face in it, as if in an ether mask.

This elation was broken some nights later when once again he remained in her for long, still minutes. It was at that moment that the dilated suspense at the base of her belly trapped her. For a fraction of a second she felt it like a caress and for a moment lost the regularity of breathing she had taught herself. On previous nights this suspense had represented an ordeal that must be passed through in a transient death of all her senses, skimming silently over the void. This time it was a caress, a dense, titillating gust that snaked upward toward her chest and exploded in her throat… Two other nights the same spasm was repeated, the same flaring up of the air she was breathing. Her surprise diminished and during the third night it became a kind of inadmissible anticipation that prepared her breathing and shaped her body… She no longer had to die in order to give herself to him.

By midday the broad halo around the pale sun was already visible-a sign of great frosts. The air rang out with sharp, dry rustling. At nightfall the windows were covered with hoarfrost patterns… That evening she examined the infusion, threw it away, went to her room and stopped for a moment, holding the candle, to contemplate the fragile beauty of the curlicues of ice: chiseled stems, crystalline corollas… That night he got up in such haste that she stiffened, believing she must have unconsciously given herself away. A little light filtered between her lashes. She saw him standing between the door and the window, his body tensely arched, his head and shoulders thrown back, his eyes tightly shut… No longer hiding in sleep, she watched him, her breath held in pity, in distress. He was pounding the base of his belly with his hands; which were closed, as if over a prey, and shook with rapid tremors. Now his uplifted face, with the same grimace of brutal pain, expressed a kind of prayer, a supplication addressed to someone whom only his own closed eyes could see. His mouth, gasping, swallowed air with a rictus that laid bare his teeth. His hands, crossing over one another, tensed more violently, a convulsion and then another ran through his body-he looked like a butterfly beating against a windowpane… But already, slowly, the muscles were relaxing. A clarity of repose softened his features, then, very quickly gave way to bitterness, weariness. With a clumsy gait, as if he needed to learn how to walk all over again, he went to pick up his long overcoat, took out a handkerchief, applied it to his stomach, crumpled it, put it away…

It was as he was going out that he tripped, stumbled, and rocked back on his heels. As he sought to steady himself, he placed the flat of his hand against the window for a moment. This light touch was enough. He straightened himself up and left the room. In the darkness she thought she could hear his young heart, arrested by fear, starting to beat again…

She got up often that night. Put wood on the fire, went back to bed again. No word, not even the beginnings of a thought, interrupted the silence that reigned within her. The visions that exploded silently before her eyes were inaccessible to words. She saw again the young face with its tortured and blissful rictus, the eyes closed but dazzled with light. The body assaulted by violent spurts of pleasure. But above all the knee that remained bent back, though the body was tensed like an arrow, a knee bulkier than the other, an interruption in the pure white line of his nakedness.

No, it would have been impossible to put that into words. This fusion of love with death lent itself only to mute fascination, to absolute incomprehension, more penetrating than any thought… She got up, thrust a fragment of wood into the embers, and noticed the phosphorescence of the hoarfrost on the dark window. The suppleness of her own movements astonished her. There was something almost joyful in the agility with which her body stood up, crouched beside the stove, skimmed across the room in a few steps. Without trying to put it into words, she sensed that a new bond was being formed between her own life and this death so close, so freighted with love…

That night she could still see no more in this bond than the quite physical simplicity with which, on the days that followed, she would learn how to hold within her groin this young body assaulted by waves of pleasure. He would no longer be the butterfly beating against a windowpane. He would not flee. He would remain in her until the end, until the bitterness, that would spread like the shadow of a loving hand across his face, now at peace.

In the morning the window covered in hoarfrost was ablaze with a thousand sparks of sunlight and resembled a fault in granular quartz. The rekindled fire appeared pale in these red rays that split the facets of the ice. No sound, not one birdcall, came from outside. The peace and the cold of that winter's Sunday surrounded their house just as an immense snow-covered pine forest would have done.

She spent several long minutes at the frozen window all streaked with sun. Her gaze distractedly picked out the stems and fronds that the ice had woven on the glass… Suddenly amid this capricious tapestry she noticed an astonishing contour. A hand! Yes, the print he had left the previous evening when he leaned lightly on the glass to stop himself falling. The outline of his fingers that the night had covered in delicate tendrils of frost. She brought her face closer, intending to study this crystalline design in more detail. A cold breath intoxicated her. All she had experienced since the fall was mysteriously concentrated in that chill, a single sensation of pain and joy beyond her strength. Everything, the past night, even those days buried in periods of her life she no longer ever thought about, everything returned in a single inspiration. A draft that inhaled all those nights that could not be spoken of. A gust that also breathed in the snowy scent of the immense forest surrounding their house, a forest that did not exist, but whose wintry calm was already entering her breast, dilating it still more, to infinity…

She regained consciousness several seconds later. Got up, feeling a strange heaviness in her movements, saw reflected in the mirror a long scratch filling with blood that traced a fine curve from her cheekbone to the corner of her mouth. Taking confused, dull steps, she stood a small round table upright that had been knocked over, picked up a little ceramic vase that had lost its handle but was not broken… While she did this she was living intensely elsewhere. She was walking into a great wooden mansion, a great silent house surrounded by snow-laden trees. She walked along corridors, whose walls were crowded with portraits that followed her with suspicious looks; and slipped into a tiny room tucked away on the top floor… There at a narrow window decorated with hoarfrost patterns she forgets herself for a long time. She, the growing girl, who is elated to the point of giddiness by these crystal flowers and fronds. Bringing her lips close to the windowpane she blows lightly. Through the little melted hole she sees a forest burdened with snow as far as the eye can see…

Without detaching her eyes from that moment, she wiped the blood from her cheek; chopped some wood; prepared the meal and later spoke to the people at the library; lived other nights and other days. Her gaze forever focused on the endless forest in the snow. She no longer remembered having lived any other way.