The Crime Of Olga Arbyelina

Five

The doctor, as ever, said little, but after long weeks of solitude these few sentences seemed to her like an elaborate, almost overwhelming speech. Nor was she listening to him properly. It was an old habit of hers: the doctor's observations caused pages to appear in her memory with the description of the illness, the symptoms, and the treatments, pages she knew right down to the very arrangement of paragraphs. The doctor spoke as he wrote out the prescription, breaking off to reread it, and it was into these pauses that fragments of the pages learned by heart would insert themselves: "… the softened bone began to cavitate; small pockets of dead tissue formed cysts. The bony extremities became deformed, and adopted unaccustomed postures. The joint gave rise to a progressive chronic disability…

There was nothing new to her either in what she was hearing or in the trains of thought unfolding in her mind. She could not stop herself following through these prognoses to the limit; first picturing the worst case, then the cure; the two extremes, despair and a miracle. All parents of sick children, she already knew, came to terms with their distress in this way.

The lamp on the desk flickered. In a brief moment of darkness she saw the pale ghost, her son, still half undressed, tugging at the inside-out sleeve of his shirt. And outside the window waves of drifting snow clung to the panes… The light returned, the doctor finished writing and, in his voice that always sounded as if he were irritated by incomprehension, reached his conclusion: they would have to think of an operation. "This summer, so as not to make him miss his academic year," he added in a less dry tone, turning toward the boy… The lamp went out again, they spent several moments in silence, gradually growing accustomed to the soporific blue of the night-light above the door. In the corridor cries could be heard and the drumming of footsteps.

This wait in the darkness was salutary. All morning Paris had assaulted them with too many words, too many objects, too much gesticulation. And even in this office she had suffered from the same excess: sheets of paper, files; pens, the paper knife; the doctor's voice that had to be decoded; his apparently indifferent glances, in which, nevertheless, she saw herself perceived as a woman obliged to please… The minutes they spent in the half light eradicated the brutal superabundance of sensations. They could hear flurries of snow being hurled against the windowpanes, and somewhere in the depths of the city the muffled hoot of a siren… The doctor grumbled and struck a match. The light of an oil lamp shone. They said good-bye but he chose to accompany them to the exit; that wait in the darkness had brought them closer together… As he walked beside her in the ill-lit corridor, he felt obliged to speak and uttered a sentence that was clearly meaningless but which crucified her. It was one of those very French turns of phrase that mislead foreigners with their disconcerting thoughtlessness. "At this stage in the game, you know," he sighed, "it's best to take each day as it comes." There was a note of melancholy, almost of tenderness in his voice. He abandoned the caution reflected in his customary tone, dry and feigning irritation. "In which case," he added, in an already neutral voice, as he opened the door for them, "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." He must have sensed himself that his remark was double-edged.

The whole of Paris was plunged in darkness. Only the car headlights cut through the whirling clouds of snow. They crossed the Seine on a ghostly bridge, whose gigantic steel curves seemed to sway in time with the surging of the snow squalls. In one street, hemmed in between blind houses, a small gathering was gesticulating around a woman who lay on the trodden snow. A little farther on, a bus was unable to get started, the acid air flayed the nostrils and blocked the throat; then a fresh gust of wind swept them clean. It was at this point, trying to escape the asphyxiating cacophony of the cars, that she mistook the road. Instead of emerging onto the avenue that would have led them straight to Li's house, they came upon a monotonous, endless wall. Should they go right? Left? What she wanted most of all was to turn her back on the squalls. From the other side of the enclosure repulsive, sickly sweet effluvia wafted over; in calmer weather, no doubt, these stagnated within the walls of the abattoir… They walked along, often slipping, catching hold of each other's arms. She raised her brow into the snow, as if to drive out the sentence that was absurdly matching the rhythm of her footsteps: "At-this-stage-in-the-game-at-this-stage-in-the-game…"

Suddenly in the darkness lashed with squalls a cry arose quite inhuman in its power, a bellow torn from the entrails of an animal, a maddened and tragic call. She shivered, quickened her step, stumbled. He grasped her elbow, supported her as she almost fell. Their faces came so close that she could see the slight trembling of his lips and heard his voice despite the wind's fury: "Don't be afraid…"

She gazed into his eyes and asked, in total unawareness, simply echoing his voice, "Afraid of what…?"

"Of anything," he replied and they continued walking.

Li went off to sleep in her studio, leaving them in the tiny sitting room crammed not only with furniture but also, a recent addition, cardboard boxes and cases, in preparation for her departure.

They were alone: she, bedded down on the little sofa, whose curve she had to mold herself to in order to sleep; he on the armchairs pushed together, squeezed between the piano and the table… They could not sleep and both sensed this, sensed the discreet wakefulness of the other in the darkness… Finally she recognized breathing that was no longer careful of the other's presence, the inimitable syncopated, touching music of a sleeper's respiration. She turned over onto her back, prepared for long sleepless hours, happy, even, with the strangeness of this place, where conjuring up the impressions that had assailed her could pass for an insomniac's game… By reaching out her arm she could have touched the armchairs in which her son was asleep. This dark apartment in a great dark, deserted city; the two of them, so near to each other, with this unique, unspeakable, monstrous bond between them… The night began to ring in her ears. She moved, reached out with her hand, grasped a box of matches, held the flame close to her watch. It was half past four in the morning. She got up and put on her clothes; this action already felt like a welcome prelude to their escape. The water in the tiny bathroom was icy, like in an abandoned house; the minor domestic disorder in the kitchen also heralded preparations for departure. She opened the door at the back that looked onto the little yard. The snowstorm had abated. The last flakes drifted down slowly, attracted by the light of the candle. The snow was smooth, virgin, even the birds had not yet had time to star it with their footprints. In their garments of white the walls, cornices, and chimney pots had a fluid, downy beauty…

She sensed that someone was coming, then heard his footsteps. She turned, and met his gaze; they understood it was pointless to exchange ritual questions. He stood beside her and watched the spinning of the snowflakes, detaching themselves from the gray sky and falling slowly toward the candle flame… They were already in flight as they drank a cup of quickly cooled tea, nibbled some bread, and wrote a note of thanks to Li. They both sensed, without putting it into words, that they had to be gone from the city in advance of the light, in advance of the crowds in the streets, in advance of the trampled snow… And when they collapsed, breathless, onto the seat of an empty car, in the first train of the morning; when she saw the young face opposite her in the twilight, his eyes closing, already weighed down with sleep, she understood, without wanting to understand, that this escape, this empty train, swaying as it clattered drowsily along, these windows blinded with snowflakes, the two of them with their deep abyss and even his still childlike hands, quivering slightly as he started to dream-all this was another life, the very first moments of which she was just discovering.

From now on it seemed to her that other people could understand her, though not because of the words she spoke. An object, she felt, a gesture, a scent would suffice. Back in January, during that lost time between the old and the new calendars, she had given the nurse at the retirement home a gray angora openwork shawl. The young woman had come to the library looking for accounts of the war, hoping, she said, to find in them some information about the place where her lover had died. Beneath the worn fabric of her woolen dress the shivering of her thin body was perceptible; and on her lips and in her eyes the fierce struggle between pride at having lived through such a beautiful and tragic love affair and humiliating fear at being suspected of lying… She had gone away, with the shawl around her shoulders, quite perplexed, not knowing what to make of this gift; and at that moment Olga had had a dizzying insight into this woman's life: the evenings in a poorly heated room, the tiny scrap of comfort the gray wool might bring to her body…

One day, after their return from Paris, she interrupted the old swordsman who had launched into his usual tale of fighting. She spoke very softly, as if to herself, of a carnival night long ago, in a great mansion at the edge of a forest; of a garden, all foaming with apple blossom. And of the young horseman who had suddenly appeared before a girl overcome with giddiness. It seemed to her that this man who for years had tirelessly been waving his arm about in imitation of saber fighting, this cutter-off of heads, was no different from that young horseman long ago in the midst of the garden at night. And that she needed to say to him very simply, "Forget the wars and the blood. I know you are haunted by the look of a man you killed. The eyes of a man who can already feel the blade cutting into his neck. And that to escape him you are forever calling out your 's-s-shlim' and laughing and frightening other people with your laughter. Forget. For in your own youth there must have been a night, meadows with cool grass, a garden white with flowers that you rode through on your horse…" The only words she actually uttered were: "night," "apple blossom," "white petals in the horse's mane…" It seemed to her that the face of the man listening to her was freed of its grimaces, became simple and serious. He never performed his swordsman act in front of her again.

From now on she perceived herself as being much closer to other people. Closer to the fields, to the nights, the trees, the clouds, the skies these people carried within them, that formed a silent language in which they could understand her without words. One day, with a joy that stung her brow as if peppered with grapeshot, she had this crazy hope: perhaps even what she was living through could one day be admitted?

Among the new messages, whose increasingly clear resonance she was now receiving, there was a night when all one could hear was the drowsy rhythm of rare, heavy drops trickling down from the mass of soft snow on the roof, splashing in a melodious cascade, close to the steps and under the windows. Her body, for several nights past, had learned to give itself, while seeming still, to avoid the brutal break, to preserve the slow settling of bodies that have taken pleasure… That night she found the rhythm of that silent separation. When his body was exhausted she felt his temple laid, for a moment, against her lips. A vein was throbbing, crazily. As she gave this involuntary kiss she sensed the pulsations gradually calming down…

Another occasion for her to speak to the being whose understanding she already hoped for came on that evening of the thaw. She made a mistake when examining the infusion, no doubt confusing the pollen of the macerated flowers with traces of the powder. He did not come… She waited for a long time, beyond what was already an unlikely hour, then, to break the spell of this waiting and to find sleep again, she got up, dressed, went out onto the steps.

The night was clear. The air was softer; scents, long imprisoned by the cold, were flowing readily, like the slightly bitter aroma of damp bark. The snow had been undermined by a multitude of invisible tricklings, still covert, that filled the night with an incessant peal of water drops. She felt she was moving forward across an endless musical instrument, snapping several strings at each sacrilegious step…

She stopped halfway between the house and the river, no longer wanting to disturb the melodious trembling of the slowly subsiding snows. Tilting her head back, she plunged in among the stars for a long time. A silent, unflagging wind descended from these nocturnal depths. She staggered, suddenly exalted, her eyes looked around for support. The shadow of the wood, the dark reflection of the water, the dim fields on the opposite bank. The sky from which spilled the powerful and constant wind. All this lived, breathed, and seemed to see her, to be focusing some kind of infinite gaze upon her. A gaze that understood everything but did not judge. It was there, facing her, about her, within her. Everything was said by this immense wordless, motionless presence… The wind was still blowing from the summit of the sky, from its dark reaches scarcely marked with the buoys of stars. She was responding to the eyes staring at her, impassive eyes, but whose absolute compassion she sensed…

She went home with the feeling of descending slowly from a very great height. Moving forward, she sought unconsciously to tread in the footprints left from her outward journey, so as not to snap any more strings. Up on the steps she cast a glance behind her: on the stretch of snow a string of footprints led out into the night with no return. And when she looked up a powerful gust of wind, falling vertically, struck her eyelids.

One evening she noticed that the great pile of snow that had accumulated behind the wall of their house had shrunk into a grayish sponge around which the glistening, naked clay of the earth lay uncovered. Confused feelings gripped her: this exhaustion of the cold was quite natural, quite expected, but at the same time heavy with hidden menace. Was the winter (their winter!) now going to be woven imperceptibly back into the indifferent round of the seasons? This very normality seemed at once salutary and fraught with vague dangers… A few days later when she was clipping together the newspapers that the postman had once more started delivering to the Caravanserai after several months of eclipse, she came upon this headline: rhine ice dynamited to open way for shipping delayed by unprecedented frosts. Strangely, her heart missed a beat and she heard a little silent cry: "But why all this hurry?"

Then there was the night of all-enveloping fog, smelling of the sea… With closed eyes she gave herself, happy, unthinking, liberated even by her blindness, by the uselessness of words, by the abandon she no longer had to feign… It was this forgetfulness that must have given her away She sighed, or rather took a breath like a child about to cry. He detached himself from her body and fled. She went through a long moment of nonlife before understanding the real reason for his flight.

It was a continuous sound, growing louder, more fluid. It was gradually permeating the muffled heaviness of the fog… At the first light of dawn, when she opened the window, she saw the meadow flooded, the willows standing in the middle of a lake, the water rippling gently a few yards away from the front steps…

By evening the entire Caravanserai had become an island and their house a little promontory above the calm, misty expanse of the waters.

It was the "doctor-just-between-ourselves," wearing long rubber boots, who brought them bread on the second day of the flood. Then the water rose several inches more and even this equipment became inadequate. People forgot them as they waited for the sun to return and the waters to fall.

The days were misty and mild, seeming not so much to exist now as to be a return to a far distant past when even pain was obliterated. At night all one could hear was the soothing lapping of the water on the front steps. And that night, when he came into her room, the cries of a flock of birds-no doubt migrants exhausted by their flight that had found no place to land and were alighting on the roof of the Caravanserai… It was beneath the rising tide of these innumerable cries that she surrendered her body to him again, her body which imperceptibly, from one night to the next, had won a secret freedom, inaccessible in aroused love. Her body that, in a death that was profoundly alive, responded to caresses and fashioned desire. A sleeping lover's body. Born in the depths of a dream that the boy could relive indefinitely.

When she opened the door in the morning she alarmed a dozen birds that had settled on the roof. They emitted indignant cries and began to circle over the dull mirror of the waters. Over the inverted sky that began at the top of the front steps, in which their silent, white wings could be seen slipping along…

Several days and nights were swamped in this misty calm, the drowsy idleness of the waters. Finally, one evening when it was still light, she noticed that the reflections of the clouds on the flooded meadow had moved farther from the house. A strip of bruised land emerged, bristling with stalks and clumps of grass, like the dorsal fin of an immense fish. This terra firma saturated with moisture surrounded the house and ran along the wall of the Caravanserai… Through the window she saw her son, a shopping bag on his shoulder, walking away slowly, sounding out with his feet the uncertain dotted line of this first footpath. An hour later he returned, laden. His shape was reflected in the waters now ablaze with the sunset. She hesitated, then went to greet him on the steps. They stayed there for a time, both of them, without looking at each other, motionless before the now tranquil expanse.

That evening, or perhaps it was the next, a thought struck her with the painfulness and beauty of its truth. If what they were living through could be called love, then it was an absolute love, for it was fashioned from a prohibition inviolable yet violated, a love visible only in the sight of God, because monstrously inconceivable to mankind, a love experienced as the everlasting first moment of another life…

For months her thoughts had spilled into the unthinkable and had become meaningless. Their return now disturbed her. She would have liked to go on living in the transparent and silent simplicity of the senses. Yes, to go back to the scent of the fire, to the powdery hoarfrost tumbling through the air from a snowy branch… But already a new link of chain was latching on to her mind: "For the boy this may be his first and last love. And for me? It is also my first and last love; for no one has ever loved me like this, with such a passionate fear of causing me harm. No one will ever love me like this again…" The truth of these words was born of lightness but, once uttered, became disturbing.

That night anxiety returned in the guise of a strange noise: it was as if someone were walking along in the water beside the house with careful steps, attempting, through the somnambulistic slowness of their pace, to minimize the little telltale splashes.

Next morning a bleak wind was blowing with inhuman, menacing power. It tore at a number of long, dry strands of hops on the walls of the Caravanserai, brandishing them in its rainy squalls like a monstrous topknot of snakes. As she went into the building through the porch, she heard the sound of an unusual tumult, the slamming of shutters in one of the empty apartments, but, in particular, a slow, distant, metallic creaking, like the noise of rusty hinges. Along the corridor that led to the main library hall this creaking increased in volume, becoming a ponderous, rhythmical crashing. The sounds of voices, on the other hand, became fainter and fainter, then faded away; and it was amid a crowd of dumbfounded spectators that this scene met her eyes.

High up near the ceiling the huge gearwheel for the pulley, mounted on girders fixed into the wall, was revolving with a mesmerizing slowness. Had the wind dislodged some locking wedge in the machinery, stopped for long decades? Or had the electrician who came to repair a breakdown in the current the previous day made a mistake over the cable? A cleaner had noticed the wheel moving that morning and alerted the others… Now the gearwheel was continuing to rotate steadily and inexorably in its blind power. The chain that ran around it could be seen traveling down, inch by inch, through a hole in the floor that had been hidden by a square of plywood. And, having disappeared, it rose again from the depths of the cellar… Suddenly, with a brief grinding, the plywood gave way, and there, welded to the chain, a bucket covered in rust and slime could be seen surging up, slowly bringing to the surface what must once have been water from a deep well that supplied the brewery… A bitter, earthy smell, an odor, it seemed, of flesh and death, invaded the room. Another bucket appeared, then another and yet another. The first one was already at the top of the chain and tipped, spilling out its viscous liquid where once, no doubt, there was a large vessel. The odor became more pungent, with its sweetish base of grain rotting in the bowels of the earth, with its disturbing, wild savor of fermentation. The subterranean mud from a fresh bucket was already decanting itself over its tilting rim… As if suddenly roused from sleep, a man rushed into the corridor to switch off the current.

There was an abundance of light, almost too much for eyes accustomed to the fog; an abundance of sparkling sky; an abundance of damp, glistening watercolor tones. The meadow that the river had gradually uncovered as it receded looked like a broad russet-and-yellow pelt, all ruffled, drying in the sun.

She perceived this surge of light with the sensibility of an invalid. Each ray of sun, each new color was simultaneously a joy and a torture. One day she told herself she must dig the ground in the narrow bed beneath the windows and plant the first flowers. Her heart stood still: she had a vision of herself the previous autumn on a fine September evening, pulling up the dead stalks at that same spot… On another occasion, returning late from the Caravanserai, she went down as far as the little expanse of water at the bottom of the meadow. The moon was shining on it and in the distance the tiny pond looked as if it were frozen. She went up to it and touched the surface with the sole of her shoe. Lazy rings rippled across the moon's liquid gold. As on that unimaginable Christmas night when they had broken the ice and rescued the fish…

Each evening was imperceptibly gaining a few more moments of light. And that evening it was particularly noticeable, for a narrow ray of coppery sunlight came streaming in obliquely at the kitchen window; from now on it was going to return, less unexpectedly and a little wider, each day.

It was by this already springlike light that she noticed a fine white film on the brown flowers of the infusion. She emptied it automatically on returning from the bathroom; went into the bedroom and froze, stunned. The bedroom, too, was bathed in light and had nothing nocturnal about it. And yet he could come in from one minute to the next!

She quickly drew the curtains (they were too narrow and always left a gap), threw some fragments of wood into the stove (they had stopped having fires more than a week before), and decided to put a lamp on her bedside table, the heavy lamp with the silk shade that generally stood on the shelves. Once switched on, it reduced the brilliance of the sun that was tangled in the branches of the willows and seemed determined not to set…

It was one of those clumsy and vague gestures that are made in the act of love. A hand suddenly forgetting how to move in the real world. She felt this hand, these cool, gentle fingers, touching her shoulder, folding round her breast…

Then the hand flitted away, describing a hesitant circle, unnecessarily broad (was he trying to move the lampshade that was too big, too close; to switch off the light?). With her eyes closed she sensed the movement and a second later came the noise. The start of the noise…

What happened was so swift and so irremediable that several hours later and even some days later she went on living in that instant just before the noise. She would come to the Caravanserai, meet the residents, and listen to them, but in the innermost part of herself the same scene continued to unfold; it could not end, once it ended life would have become impossible.

… From beneath her closed eyelids she was aware of a hand flitting about, as clumsy as a nocturnal bird obliged to fly in broad daylight. Feeling its way in the void, the hand knocked against the lampshade… The start of the noise came from the grinding of the lamp's china base against the wood of the little bedside table. Through her eyelashes she sensed the beginnings of a fall. Her reflex-china, breakage, cut hand, blood-forestalled all thought. She stretched out her arm. Realized immediately. Froze. The lamp fell. He tore himself away from this woman's body that had suddenly come to life, hurled himself from the room.

An elderly resident was talking to her about how the days were warm now but the nights still chilly. She agreed, echoing the trivial remarks made to her, but her own life was condensed into the vision of those few gestures: a hand reaches out aimlessly into the half light; a lampshade tilts; an arm is flung out; freezes…

And the scene explodes under the violent lighting of horror: a youth mired in a woman's groin. A mother and her son…

Her mind's eye remained imprisoned in that room, in the endless repetition of a suspended gesture. And also in that terrifying reflection in the mirror: a woman lying on her back, her knees apart, her belly offered, one arm outstretched, petrified.

And when she glanced outside, the flood tide of spring blinded her with its headlong joy. Everything in the world was changing before one's eyes-the trees, still bare the day before, became covered with the bluish veil of the first leaves; the tall stem of a wild plant thrust up toward the sun between the planks of the front steps; people emerged from their snug dens at the Caravanserai as if at a prearranged signal. The throng of them oppressed her. They were incredibly numerous and noisy, full of familiarity and a coarse appetite for life. Their remarks (she had the impression that they always shouted when they addressed one another) left her perplexed. In the library hall one day they were commenting enthusiastically on the announcement that the bridge would be rebuilt. They acclaimed the new bridge as if a new era in their lives were promised. "A direct road link with Paris!" bellowed an old army officer who went to Paris once a year. They were also rubbing their hands over the decision of the authorities to "clear the scrub from both banks." She was stunned to realize that by scrub they meant the woodland behind the Caravanserai. She intervened, trying to say that the trees there, even those that were too old or stunted, had a magic on icy mornings, or at night, covered in hoarfrost… But her words made no impact, as if spoken in a totally different conversation.

The days had become so warm that the residents often left their windows open, which was how, one day when she was walking around the building, she involuntarily overheard a remark. Without difficulty she recognized the voice of the nurse; not her usual voice, however, she sounded almost gleeful.

"And this shawl," she was saying. "She presents it to me like a queen giving it to her servant. A lot of use it'll be to me in this hot weather, that's for sure…"

Another voice, that of the director, was acquiescing less distinctly… Olga quickened her step for fear of being seen; dumbfounded and appalled, with an unconscious murmur on her lips: "But it's not true! I gave her that shawl in the depths of winter…" Then she calmed down, recalling the nurse's animated and excited voice, and told herself that, strangely enough, people can readily derive immediate and much more varied satisfaction from malice and evil than from good…

Some days later as she closed the library door she heard a hissing cry at the end of the corridor: "S-s-shlim! S-s-shlim!"

Everything blinded her, numbed her, jostled her in this world of light and noise. Numbing too was the opinion of the "doctor-just-between-ourselves" whom she met one day in the town. He spoke boldly, smiling and staring at her without concealing his curiosity. According to him ("in the first place" he said, crooking his little finger) her son's condition was not that serious; furthermore, all French doctors (he crooked the fourth finger) were scaremongers; but, above all (the middle finger and an emphatic smile), one must not lose one's joie de vivre. His tone astonished her. She glimpsed a fleeting meaning in these encouraging words. He was dressed with an elegance that struck her as aggressive and almost deranged in this modest street (his bow tie, the tight-fitting suit over a squat body, his pointed black shoes). But everything seemed aggressive and strange to her now in this renewed life. And, after all, he did have a habit of joking, even when operating.

Her son changed greatly. His existence as a self-effacing adolescent was transformed into a conspicuous absence, a manifest state of siege, which she would not have dared to break in any case… One evening he was in the kitchen when she came home from the Caravanserai. In the kitchen… He must have known what that signified for the two of them. He heard her footfall on the front steps and made such a frenzied headlong dash to his room, flew down the long corridor with such desperate speed, that in the movement of air created by his flight she seemed to sense a breath from the deep abyss he carried within him.

This abyss opened up in the middle of a hot day in May, almost like high summer…

Even the first days of May were incredible. The month arrived suddenly, while she felt she was still in February or, at most, March; it was burning hot and the residents of the Caravanserai, who only the day before had been speaking of an unprecedented winter, now began quoting from the newspapers that promised "an early, scorching summer…"

More incredible still was the obsessive, tortured watch she found herself keeping behind the branches of the willow trees, near the ruined bridge. There she waited, her eyes bruised by what she saw through the swaying branches. On one of the steel girders, several yards from the bank, stood three young bodies in bathing suits. One by one they plunged into the water, diving in among concrete blocks bristling with their rusty armature… She recognized the figure of her son by the violent aura of fragility that emanated from this very pale, slim body, so different from the other two-sturdy, reddened by the sun, with rather short, curved legs, bodies that already prefigured ordinary, male stockiness. When he swayed slightly on the beam before diving he looked like a tall plaster statue, tilting dangerously and falling. "He's the most handsome!" clamored the voice within her that she could no longer control. At that moment she saw him heaving himself up onto a higher girder. His companions seemed to be hesitating, then deciding against. He stood all alone, above their heads. She saw his face, indifferent and almost sad; his arms held behind him, like a bird's wings; and suddenly his knee, disproportionately swollen, shining in the harsh light, like a ball of ivory. Without thinking she waved her hand, on the brink of calling to him…

But her cry froze on her lips. On the bank, near the half ruined pillar, stood a group of very young girls who were going through a complete performance, switching from squeals of admiration after a dive to somewhat disdainful indifference-which was even more provocative to the three divers.

He pushed off from the girder, bending his knees briefly, turned a somersault in the air, split the waters, and vanished into darkness- she had screwed up her eyelids tight. The young female audience applauded when they saw him surfacing. He did not so much as glance at them and went to climb up the derelict shell once more. This time he climbed a little bit higher, standing with his feet on a narrow ledge. The mood in the small group changed to one that children display spontaneously when a game becomes too dangerous. There were a few cries of merriment, but it was clearly put on; then they exchanged uneasy looks, wrongfooted, as they watched his climb, his stillness before the plunge, his flight…

When he reappeared on the surface their voices were almost frightened and discordant, as if they had discovered the existence of a secret, insane reason behind his courage.

He climbed up once more, swayed for a moment on the top girder (one of the girls shouted out a shrill "No!" and sobbed), then regained his balance, opened his arms, flew.

She opened her eyes, became aware of the twigs brushing against her face, the sun causing the smell of hot mud to hover above the glittering water. Her son was alone down there, sitting on a concrete slab. Already dressed, he was lacing up his shoes (that pair he had dreamed of wearing when spring came…). The little group of colorful dresses and his two companions were far away. They were walking along the bank: the boys throwing stones, trying to skim them over the water; their girlfriends shouting as they counted, arguing. Moods change quickly when you're young, observed a voice within her head that she was not listening to… He smoothed down his hair, tucked his shirt into his trousers, threw a glance in the direction of the young people as they walked away, then set off toward the Caravanserai… She did not stir, both hoping and fearing that he might turn and see her and that then by magic, all would be resolved and filled with light, would become simple, like the swaying of these long leaves in front of her eyelashes… But he walked on, his head bowed, without looking behind him. He limped; he seemed used to walking like this.

That night she saw his silhouette once more standing up on the steel shelf before diving. At this stage she found the recollection still heart-stopping but bearable; beneath his fine skin she thought she could detect the pulsing of his heart. He hurled himself from the girder, flew, and in that instant his body became perfect-a shaft of light amid the blackened concrete and the rust…

One by one she pictured the faces of the adolescent girls who had egged on the divers. Those long plunges into a rectangle of water surrounded by ironwork were for the benefit of one of them. (And it was she, perhaps, who had let out a hysterical cry.) Or perhaps it was for the one who, on the contrary, displayed the most complete indifference to the spectacle. The caprices of these youthful attractions are always unpredictable. With all its sentimental banality, this thought suddenly made her feel better, releasing the tension in her body which, since the scene on the riverbank, had been reduced to a stifling, clammy spasm. "Yes, it's the age he's at," she thought, buoyed along by this inner relaxation. "His age and the fine spring weather." She recalled the brightly colored dresses and the naive, innocent cut of them, the stroll beside the water… And nature's sweet daily progress toward the joy and idleness of summer. Her son was simply being drawn into the wholly seasonal tide of first loves, and late sunsets. Important too, was the cheerful assurance the doctor-just-between-ourselves had given her: everything was not all that serious. A momentary vision flashed before her eyes, the ghost of a dream – one of those little dresses walking beside the painfully recognizable figure of her son…

With a start she broke free from this reverie, got up, and switched on the lamp whose base had been stuck together again with strips of paper. The lamp. The bed. The dark, cold stove. The curtains with the narrow strip of night. And in her mind's eye that couple, two young people in love on a summer's evening… The discord was agonizing. All that had happened in that room during the winter nights was accepted and acceptable, pardonable and pardoned on this one condition: that afterward there would be nothing, a void, a bottomless nothingness… death. But now this springtime, the summer evening stroll she had pictured, that seemed so likely; this puppy love so stupidly natural and legitimate; all this naive and sunny healthiness of life was banishing their winter into the realms of the unspeakable. In his eyes, after all, what could this room be to him now?

Her thoughts flitted among a thousand things, seeking the solace of a memory, the ghost of a day; but the summer sun hounded her, hounded her on the riverbank, toward sounds, toward voices. "How easy it is," she said to herself with sudden bitterness. "A little cotton print dress, a little coquetry, and presto, he's ready to do anything for you…" She stopped herself, this jealousy seemed too absurd. And, above all: "No, no, he didn't give a hoot for any of their dresses… He was diving to… to…"

To kill himself… She could not check the racing of her thoughts-accurate, trivial, serious, futile, essential… She needed to hit upon some idea that was logical and perfectly obvious; one that would offer her a respite. "Wait, wait. The bridge. Yes, the bridge… Well, the bridge was not as high as all that. The topmost girder was probably only six feet above the water…"

Then a surprising visual change took place. The giddy height she had observed in terror during those suicidal dives subsided in her memory, and was now scarcely as tall as a human figure. She no longer knew if she had really seen that girder poised, as it had seemed to her, high against the sky. Indeed, she was now sure that it had all been almost harmless sport, a few perfectly safe dives. She remembered the young spectators on the bank. She thought she could clearly see one of them holding hands with her son and coming back to the Caravanserai with him…

"No! He came home alone!" a very precise memory objected within her. But already the vision of the two young people on a path beside the river seemed to her to have been actually, certainly, observed, indelibly fixed in her mind. She was astonished to realize that it was enough to picture a face or a place for them to become quite naturally transformed into things experienced.

Dazed, she attempted to find some clear, indisputable reality amid the chaos of her thoughts. By an inexplicable caprice of memory this turned out to be the face of the nurse at the retirement home. The unhappy woman who took pleasure in making fun of the gift she had received, the shawl she had accepted one winter's evening… Now her face was tinged with a repentant softness, her lips trembled as she uttered words of apology. And once again this repentance seemed… no! quite simply it was completely authentic. Yes, the encounter had occurred several days previously.

For a moment she succeeded in thinking of nothing, still sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning forward slightly, her eyes half closed, expressionless. That was how she saw herself in the mirror facing the bed. A naked woman, motionless, in the middle of a spring night. This precise mirror image calmed her. She turned her head toward the window, her double in the glass did the same. Smoothed the blanket. The other one repeated her gesture with precision. It was then that the lamp caught her eye…

The scene that had since then been played out a thousand times in her memory once more embarked on its sequence of actions: a hand knocks the lampshade; an arm tries to stop it falling; that instinctive, blind lunge; his escape; and the reflection in the mirror that shows a woman lying there, more inert than a corpse… She observed this woman and noticed a new expression on her face that appeared to be more and more accentuated: a mixture of tenderness, sensuality, immodesty, and lasciviousness. Her knees remained wide apart, her belly lay exposed between long, supple thighs…

She tapped on the switch, as if swatting an insect that refuses to die. But in the darkness everything became even more real. Now there was the young face buried in the hollow of the naked woman's shoulder, the lips drowning in her breast… And now the woman's body was arching, closing about the other one, guiding it…

She stood at the French door and, without being aware of it, repeated over and over again in a feverish whisper, "No, it was never like that… never… never… never like that…" But to the slow, stubborn flow of memories her mind had just added the woman's arms embracing the fragile form of a boy; a moaning that she no longer concealed; and their newfound courage, for both of them knew that her sleeping was only pretense…

For several hours weariness interrupted the growth of this incurable tumor that was slowly swelling in her memory.

In the morning imagined reality, false, but terrifying in its truth, continued to gain ground, but calmly now, as if in a country definitively conquered… In the afternoon there were a lot of people in the library. At one moment she turned away and began drawing the curtains across the windows. "Too much sun!" she murmured, trying to keep her face hidden in the dusty folds for as long as possible… In a room lit by the flames flickering out of a stove she had just seen a woman slowly combing the thick flow of her hair, standing at a French door open onto a snowy night, out of which an almost warm breath of air was blowing. Her head was tilted, her gaze lost in the reflection in the windowpane, watching the movements of a youth who came into the room, stopped, and gazed at her in silence… She knew, she could not deny that had happened to her. She simply did not want other people to guess it by peering into her eyes.

The evening was light and long. She was in the kitchen, mechanically tearing up a letter (one of the many letters from L.M. that she no longer even read), when the front door banged with unusual haste. She did not stir, her back turned, so as to let him slip by without her seeing him. But he came in and she heard his voice, which, while striving for calm, had a childish ring to it: "Mom, I think I've just done something stupid. Could you call the… what's his name… the doctor-just-between-ourselves?"

She turned. He lifted the hand that he had been pressing against his left temple. A pocket of blood bulged over his left eyebrow; already he could not open the eye.

For the second time running she was up all night in the boy's room. At an uncertain hour, when the sky was still very dark, objects began to break free of the ties that normally held them. This made their presence more and more inexplicable. She had brought the lamp in here to have more light in case of need. Now that explanation no longer sufficed. The lamp stood beside the bed where the boy slept. Switched off and almost frightening in its silent idleness, no longer linked with brightness, but with dark, indecipherable visions… And the doctor-just-between-ourselves? He had stayed, for his help might be needed urgently. But… No, nothing… He had installed himself in the book room, in no way embarrassed about this nocturnal sojourn in their house. He had filled the little cubbyhole with his cigar smoke and was now reading or dozing. And from time to time came to the patient's bedside. Each time she gave a start, his arrival was so silken: for greater comfort he was in his stocking feet. He took visible pleasure in seeing her tremble. He smiled but at once adopted a firm and reassuring air, felt the swelling that by now almost entirely covered the boy's left eye, and went away again… At one moment in the darkness she thought she could see this man in his socks lurking at the end of the corridor, watching. She was very much afraid but then immediately woke up.

Her eyes resting on the boy's deformed face struggled constantly against growing accustomed to it: not to accept this puffy mask, to wipe it clean with the intensity of her look. She turned the compresses on the swollen brow, lifted the blanket and wiped away the trickles of sweat on his chest, in the hollow between his collarbones, on his neck. And each time she touched him, simply and almost without thinking, it woke the seething nocturnal visions within her, drew her toward a winter's night, toward a carnal encounter that was increasingly frenzied, increasingly real… Even the town outside the dark window, shimmering in a beam of light, was also an improbable ghost town, with its gigantic ruin of the wrecked bridge and the station from which, for several days now no trains had departed. "Rail strike," she repeated mentally, and the words murmured above this body on fire betokened a wide-eyed, intelligent madness… She looked at the thermometer (one hundred and four degrees, fever, as an hour earlier), switched off the lamp, closed her eyes.

When he became delirious in a headlong, seething hiss, she failed to wrest herself from sleep immediately. Listening to him, she believed she was still in a painful and confused dream. Little by little his gasping words formed into a confession that only delirium could have brought to the level of his lips. She did not so much hear but- with each painful whisper-saw a place materializing that it took her only a moment to recognize…

… It was a little ground floor apartment crammed with a jumble of furniture. A woman, youthful again, in her long black dress. A boy watching the woman's final preparations. She puts on the earrings that cast iridescent gleams onto her neck and her bare shoulders. The bell rings at the front door, she kisses the boy, who is already bedded down on the armchairs pushed together as a makeshift bed, and goes to open it. Mingling with the warm, piquant perfume she gives off as she passes, he can smell the damp odor of the street and the strong, invasive scent of the intruder's eau de cologne…

The sick boy's voice petered out in a series of brief, sibilant groans. She changed the compresses. The swelling of dark, shining blood had extended toward his temple. The right eye opened for a moment but did not focus on anything, flitted onto the lamp, onto the hand that was applying the icy cloth to his brow. Almost at once the delirium started again. Eventually she could even grasp the words that were being swallowed up in the hissing spasms of the fever.

… It was still the woman in evening dress getting ready to go to the theater and waiting for the man who was supposed to come and fetch her. This time she and her son are sitting at table drinking tea. Half an hour later, as she puts on her earrings in front of a mirror she suddenly feels pleasantly weary. She sits down on the little sofa and even decides to lie down for a few moments while awaiting her companion's arrival. Sleep overtakes her before the end of this thought…

She changed the compresses, already burning hot, shook the thermometer, inserted it with care. The whispering still emanating from his dry lips had become indistinct.

And suddenly he began to cry out in an almost conscious voice. In his cry the woman in the black dress suddenly found herself half naked, laid out in sinister beauty, for she was dead! Dead, dead, dead…

He repeated the word "dead," choking violently, shaking his disfigured head and scratching at the blanket with his fingernails.

Dumbfounded, powerless, she knew she should get up, run to the book room, wake the doctor. But then he would have heard this all too clear delirium! And guessed everything!

The cries ceased abruptly and a second later the doctor-just-between-ourselves opened the door. "Ah, he's found his voice, our young man." He grunted and yawned elaborately.

An hour later he operated. He had flung back the curtains with energetic abruptness, admitting a still pale dawn, unhoped for in that room that seemed doomed to darkness… He made incisions, removed blood clots, swabbed. And gave a commentary on his actions in an almost tender voice, all the time using Russian diminutives, even for the scalpel, the swabs, the saline. She felt as if she were watching a game, and participating in it when from time to time she passed him a bottle, a syringe…

When he left he kissed her hand and promised to come back at noon and even to stay and "browse" (a wink) in the little book room if need be…

She spent the afternoon sometimes in the boy's room, sometimes, when he slept, sitting on the front steps that were all overgrown with wild plants. What the night had revealed to her was unfolding now in a clear and definitive sequence of scenes…

… It had been in the spring of the previous year, possibly exactly a year before. Generally, when she went to Paris with her son, L.M. invited her out to the theater. Or at least, when he invited her, she came to Paris, left the boy at Li's, and came back to collect him in the morning. On that occasion Li had been away and the boy was to spend the night on his own. It was hard to guess how deeply he detested those theater evenings; those nights (when, in theory, his mother came home after the play); and the man who rang the doorbell… Li used to take sleeping drafts-the little sachet that made her vague when she woke up.

"What if you took two of them?" he asked one day.

"Oh, I shouldn't wake up till noon."

"Three?"

"I should sleep like a dead woman."

That evening he emptied three sachets into the cup of tea that the young woman in her black dress was about to drink… An hour afterward he lived through long, frightening, and delicious minutes. The doorbell rang impatiently, furiously; he even heard several oaths, then a drumming on the shutters. The woman lay stretched out on the sofa, her impassive and remote beauty untroubled. There was a squeal of tires as they pulled away outside the window, soon lost in the other sounds of cars in the street… There he was in that little sitting room lit only by a table lamp, a room cluttered with curios, books, and icons… And in the middle of it this woman, this stranger whom he found it impossible to recognize as his mother. Her face was disturbingly youthful; a little capricious crease that he had never noticed before gave a slight upward lift to the corners of her mouth. The curve of her body expressed a strange expectancy.

And apart from the fine haze of perfume he detected quite a new, carnal scent about her, more a ghost than a scent, that filled him with wonder and almost hurt his lungs… He did not yet know how to assess the deepness of her slumber. Ready to take flight at the first flicker of her eyelashes, he stretched out his arm, touched her hand that lay on her stomach, then her shoulder. Then, emboldened, telling himself that, if need be, he would have a good excuse for waking her, he touched the delicate hollow hinted at between her breasts, the beginnings of which were revealed by her décolletage. He had always been fascinated by this spot on a woman's body. She did not stir… Already uneasy, he brought his ear close to the sleeping woman's face. And could hear no breathing. He remembered Li's words: "I should sleep like a dead woman!" Dead! He jumped up in a panic, thought of running to the kitchen to fetch water, then changed his mind. He had seen or read somewhere that doctors put their ear to the patient's chest and even massage it in order to restore breathing. With trembling fingers he unfastened two hooks on the crossed flaps of the décolletage, laid bare a shoulder, then a breast, pressed his ear to it… Finally stood up with a singing in his ears, his breathing irregular. And gazed at her endlessly, this woman unrecognizable beneath her light makeup, with her hair piled high, her black velvet dress, and, above all, her nakedness. This woman who should have belonged to another and who now remained with him, so deliciously accessible to his eyes, to his caress…

"It was a year ago," she thought, calling to mind a dazzling halo of days, of skies seen since then… On the footpath that led across the meadow from the Caravanserai a man appeared. She recognized the doctor-just-between-ourselves approaching with his bag. For the second night.

It rained that night. After the heat of the previous weeks the air seemed cold, autumnal. She remained in an armchair beside the bed until morning. The fever had abated. The wound was no longer bleeding. He slept peacefully and only woke once, in the middle of the night. They looked at each other for a long moment without speaking. Then he screwed up his eyes tightly, as if under the effect of a sudden scalding. She saw his eyelashes gleaming with tiny sparks and hastened to switch off the lamp.

The cool, gray days at the beginning of June marked the habitual lassitude of spring, breathless after a riot of blooming and the heat of May. The foliage was already heavy, dense and dark, like the end of summer. The meadow that sloped down to the river was once more covered with tall grasses, tinged with white here and there by the silvery down of dandelions gone to seed. And steady, quiet rainfall interrupted the mists that hung in the air, as on October mornings.

She liked the calming effect of this brief foretaste of the fall. Since that night of the delirium she knew everything from start to finish about that year of her life. Now, amid the haze of a temporary fall, it seemed as if she had come through, as if she were timidly resuming the interrupted course of her days.

One evening, when walking around the Caravanserai, she noticed that the bushes growing beneath the walls and beside the track were all pearly with white clusters. The dusk air also had this snowy tinge… The night was so chilly she had to light the fire. And did not sleep. Winter nights arose in her mind's eye one after another, beyond words in their hard beauty, with the trembling chasms of their skies, with that same scent of burning bark, a mere detail but which opened up an unfathomable cavalcade of hours. It was the first time she had returned to it. This return still had a bruising intensity. Yet her memory was already initiating her into the mysterious science of entering into that other life.

During these few autumnal days in mid-June, days of her son's convalescence, there flickered within her once more the crazy hope: that someone would listen to her, would understand her, understand, above all, that what she had lived through belonged to a life quite other than her own. So far this someone had no face, only a soul, vast and silent.

THE summer returned with unprecedented storms and a blazing sun that the citizens of Villiers-la-Forêt welcomed as dazzling evidence of the "first real vacation of peacetime" that was the talk of the papers. And even the little community of the Caravanserai sniffed this new air and gathered in the library, animatedly discussing the articles about the Tour de France 47, the first since the war; the new Paris Peace Conference; and especially the headline that proclaimed:

FRANCE FINALLY TURNS THE CORNER…

In spite of herself, or rather with secret complicity, she succumbed to this seasonal excitement. One day she caught herself studying the photos in a newspaper accompanying a long feature, "Where to Spend your Vacation," with envious admiration. A family (the parents and their two children) were cycling along a country road. She could not tear herself away from it. She liked everything about these vacationers: their family togetherness; their provisions well wrapped up on their carriers; the quiet road; and the gentle, orderly countryside. She suddenly longed to lose herself, like them, in the happy banality of these summer days, to have their French common sense, "so wonderfully French," she thought. Then she remembered her hope of finding a soul in whom she could confide, to whom she could speak about the depths of despair she had known. That seemed grotesque to her now. She must forget. Yes, forget! For these much-vaunted depths were in fact nothing more than moments of uneasy tenderness that no mother and no son can escape. Quite simply, they had gone a little further than others had done in this forbidden temptation. Besides, there had only been, all in all, eight or perhaps ten nights when…

She felt strong now, because she had decided not to remember. She must become a bit more stupid, be confident, talk about vacations. And it was as if she wanted to punish, wound, and destroy a being silently present within her that she forced herself to read the text of the article: "This year many foreign visitors-English, Scandinavians, Americans-plan to sample the delights of France. We owe a warm welcome to these visitors when they come to the places where for two years soldiers from their own countries fought for the liberation of Europe…"

This summery and agreeably simple world accepted her. She gave herself over to it, its joys and its gossip, with the fervor of a convert. Each new day seemed to justify her. The readers seemed happy to see her taking part in their discussions, just as in the old days.

At the end of the month she took her son to Paris. The doctor ("the French doctor" they called him, so as not to confuse him with the doctor-just-between-ourselves) examined the boy, arranged for him to be admitted to his ward, and told them the date of the operation. "The crooked leg will be straightened out under general anesthesia," she read again that same evening in the pages she could recite by heart; their technical language reassured her. She could already picture her son walking normally in a life that had become ordinary again…

After the operation, the date of which, so much dreaded in advance, arrived with surprising ease, the boy was to remain in the hospital for a number of days. And even her almost daily trips to Paris became a real apprenticeship for her in the blissful triviality of life.

Always in a hurry to get back to the Caravanserai, to the library, she had no time to see Li. It was only on July 14, thanks to the public holiday, that she could visit the photographer's little apartment…

The evening was unbearably oppressive with the smell that dusty streets have just before a storm, with a hazy, purple sky and the turmoil of leaves in brief gusts of wind. Li was still in her studio in the cellar, busy with the last clients of the day. And indeed it was only the studio that retained an air of habitability. In the main rooms the furniture had been replaced by pyramids of cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes. On the bare walls there were countless dark punctures-left by the hooks on which pictures, photos, and icons had hung…

She waited for a moment in the miniature courtyard, surrounded by windows on several floors. They were all open, to capture every tiniest breath of cool air on that stifling evening. You could hear the sizzling of oil in a frying pan, the gurgling of water running away, the clatter of crockery, scraps of conversation, snatches of music. An aroma, compounded of roofs cooling after the heat of the day, laundry, and burned fat, hung in the darkness above the paved square of ground. She was just about to go down into the studio when suddenly she noticed, in the shadiest corner of the yard, the shrub that was struggling to grow against the wall, beneath the drainpipe. And to flower invisibly, out of sight of all those noisy windows. She went up to it and buried her face in the clusters of flowers with which it was studded. The scent was subtle. A freshness of snow… The feeling that she could enter, linger, and merge into this cold breath made her giddy. For a moment she thought she was walking through a snow-covered forest in winter, on a morning barely silvered by the dawn, in the midst of trees, sleeping but secretly aware of her presence. She was not alone. She had a companion on this slow stroll. An infinite peace filled the space that lay between their two souls…

Li called her from the studio doorway. She was leaving for Russia in ten days. All she had left to do was to pack up the last of her panels: a sailor with incredibly broad shoulders presenting a bunch of flowers to a wasp-waisted young thing and, on the other one, a naked man and woman squeezed in among a crowd in tuxedos and evening gowns.

Two days later, coming back from Paris, she ran into the doctor-just-between-ourselves. He behaved as if he just happened to be in the road that led out into the square in front of the station. She would have believed him if she had not glanced through the window of the coach a few seconds before the train stopped. She recognized this man in a brown suit. The speed with which he moved as he left the shade of a plane tree, where he had been sheltering from the sun, gave him away. The train was slowing down and through the win-dowpane she saw him watching the station exit then slightly adjusting his shirt collar…

They walked back together. Listening to him she thought that, had she not glanced through that coach window, his words would have had quite another meaning. And that he himself, the man walking beside her, chatting, animated andjovial, would have been somebody else. Yes, he would still have been the "doctor-just-between-ourselves," self-effacing and obliging. Now she was aware of the suppressed energy in him, with which he had emerged out of the shadows. And also the easy smoothness that had colored his feigned surprise: "My goodness, it's you! What fair wind has brought you my way?" Now she was seeing things she had never noticed before: his heavy and strangely unpleasant-looking cuff links, the backs of his very broad hands, covered in hairs on which little drops of sweat glistened… But, in particular, his brown, oily eyes, with which he gave her swift sidelong glances that seemed, as they slid away, to hold her prisoner in their reflection. Yes, he walked without looking at her but she felt she was held, snared beneath his eyelids.

She had no recollection of inviting him to take tea with her. And yet there he was, seated opposite her in the kitchen that still glowed with the sunset; and he was talking, only breaking off to take a little sip for form's sake. She got up from time to time, chased a bee, set about pretending to listen to him but in reality was noticing, despite herself, fresh, absurd, and mysteriously important details: his square, yellowish fingernails; his forehead that filled with wrinkles when he gave a theatrical sigh, wrinkles that went right up to his bald pate and made it less shiny… It was one of those odd moments when you sense the imminent approach of some gesture, drawing inexorably closer.

As he was leaving he stopped in the hall and kissed her hand. Or rather, without bowing, he raised her hand and pressed it for a long time to his lips. When she made a movement of impatience he caught her by the waist with unexpected agility. She drew back to avoid his face. But to her surprise he did not go for her mouth. He remained still for a moment, forcing her into this precariously off-center posture, and supporting the weight of her body arched against his palm. Clumsily she pulled herself free from him and collided with the door frame. And her shout of "Go away!" was mingled with a brief cry of pain and her hand rubbing her bruised elbow. Facing her, he smiled, massive, sure of himself. But the voice that emerged from this mass was strangely shrill, stammering, like those sentences that have been long prepared but which, when the time comes, emerge quite convoluted and breathless: "I'll come again tomorrow… Maybe we could first… Well, I know a little restaurant…"

That night her focus switched restlessly between several very different personages. The elderly gentleman who had come out from the Caravanserai several times, often at nightfall in the snow, to care for an ailing boy… The man in the brown suit who came walking toward her without noticing her and suddenly uttered a cry of joy… The man who took little sips of tea and spoke of the solitude "we must confront together"… And that other man, again, who confessed that for years he had wanted to speak to her. And as he said it, his cuff links and his hairy wrists seemed to belong to someone else. She found it impossible to reassemble all these men into one, this aging male with his smooth, tanned, bald head, who had seized her waist, already taking delight in her submissive body.

On her return from Paris the next day she studied with concern the trees at the edge of the station square. Nobody. On the door of her house there was a little rectangle of paper. "I called for tea, I will be back for dinner." It was in deciphering the signature that she recognized the element that was common to all the men who had troubled her in the night. As if this commonplace, mildly ridiculous name, that she had known but forgotten-yes, as if simply seeing it written down, "Sergei Golets," had created a generic term for all these characters.

He was the man who had fathomed her secret (she did not know how, nor to what extent). The madness of her secret. Her madness… Yes, he was someone who treated her as he would have treated a simpleminded person who can be exploited.

It was already almost nine o'clock in the evening. She walked along beside the house with hurried steps, plunged in under the trees of the wood. You could cross it in five minutes, but the maze of footpaths created the illusion of a refuge. The ground was dappled with long copper rays, slowly turning pale. Darkness was gradually spilling into the shady corners. The moonlight turned the glades into lakes, into streams of a somnolent blue. The repeated cry of a bird rang out with the sound of icicles snapping. She had the sudden idea that it might be possible to stay there, not to leave these moments in time, to travel back through them… Then, remembering the madness a man had just detected in her, she hastened to return.

As she pressed the switch she thought that Golets might notice the light and come… At the same moment she heard the steady, almost nonchalant rapping at the door. She switched off the light, then at once switched it on again, annoyed by her own cowardice, went to the hall but decided not to open up and to say nothing. He knocked again and remarked without raising his voice, sensing that she was close at hand, "I know you're there. Open the door… I have a message for you." There was a jarring note of barely disguised mockery in his voice. "Yes, he talks as if to a feebleminded woman," she thought again. She went back into the kitchen and suddenly heard the snapping of a stem: he was walking along beside the wall, treading on the flowers in the darkness. She remembered that the French door in her bedroom had been left ajar. Hardly had the thought occurred when it became reality: at the end of the corridor the ancient hinges emitted a long musical creak. She rushed to the other end of the apartment, switched on the light, just had time to focus her eyes on the familiar and woeful interior: the lamp with the patched-up china base, the stove, the bed, the wardrobe with a mirror…

And amid all these objects, with their patina of familiarity, a man putting his head through the gap where the French door was ajar, just like one of those volatile interiors in a bad dream.

"Just two words… Yesterday I forgot to tell you…" He smiled, hypnotizing her with his fixed stare, and made his way into the room with brief, swift advances, while seeming to be motionless every time she was on the point of rebuking him.

She felt desperately distant from this scene. The words that rang out in her head and then burst forth from her lips seemed to emanate from somebody else: "Go away! Get out! Quickly!" Ineffectual commands that had not affected the distracted look on her own face nor produced any effect on the man who did not move and yet kept coming closer. She, too, was absent from her body and the man knew it: infancy, drunkenness, and madness all disarm the body in this way and it becomes an easy prey.

"I didn't tell you yesterday," he began, with the excitement of one who sees his strategy coming to fruition. "I love you. I have loved you for years… No, let me…"

She swung her hand clumsily. He intercepted her slap and kissed her hand passionately, then grasped her waist, caught her dispossessed body off balance and thrust it toward the bed. She saw a round face, gleaming with sweat, and heard herself shouting out a completely illogical remark: "Let me go! Your neck is hideous!"

It was these absurd, half-choking words that stopped him in his tracks. The man straightened up, let her go, and felt his neck. "What did you say? What's the matter with my neck?"

His skin was shaved too close, red, and covered in tiny swellings. He took a step toward the mirror, realized that this movement was ridiculous, lost countenance.

"Go away!" she said in a weary voice. "I beg you…"

She went to the French door, drew back the curtain, and flung it open. He obeyed her, murmuring with a vexed sneer, "All right, all right… But all the same you won't refuse me the pleasure of an excursion with you? Tomorrow afternoon…" He went out, turned, and waited for her reply. She shook her head and tugged at the handle. The cuff link glittered-he was quick enough to block the door.

"One last word," he called, his lips unable to achieve a reconciliation between smiling and twitching with rage. "The very last, I assure you. Now this glass door you are crushing my arm with"-she let go of the handle-"this French door, which is somewhat too wide for these curtains, or rather the curtains are too narrow, if you prefer…"

She was seized by a profound internal shuddering that rose rapidly in her stomach and up to her chest and constricted the muscles of her throat. The man was about to blurt out something irreparable, she had a precise, blinding intuition of it. She had sensed it unconsciously, ever since his maneuvering began, and it was this presentiment that had left her disarmed in confronting him.

"… These curtains, that really are too narrow you see, are not wholly unknown to me. I have this strange habit, you see: I like to go for a walk late in the evening before going to bed. You know how it is, when you live alone… And then, I'm very observant…"

She should have interrupted him, stopped him on the brink of the next sentence… She should have let him have his way just now, accepted his kisses, given herself to him, for what he was about to say was a thousand times more monstrous. But the air was becoming heavy, like damp cotton wool, hindering gestures, stifling the voice.

"Especially with the frosts last winter, I was often worried: you have a… mm… sick child in this shack; one never knows. One evening when I was passing very close by, almost beneath your windows, I glanced your way; the curtains were drawn but they are, as I've said, too narrow… So I looked in and…

"… And I saw you, you and your son, naked, in an act of love."

No! He did not say it. She thought he was going to and the sentence immediately became real, inseparable from what had gone before. Perhaps he did then speak of their nakedness as well, of the carnal strangeness of the couple they made… She no longer knew.

"So at all events, no doubt you will understand my astonishment… I've seen worse things in my time… I'm no choirboy myself, far from it. But even so! Fortunately I'm not a gossip, otherwise, you know what the wagging tongues are like at the Caravanserai and elsewhere…

"… And when I offered you my… friendship, it was so as to be able to talk to you more freely about all this, you understand, in intimacy. And to give you the possibility of living a normal life as a woman, with a man who would enable you to enjoy…"

No! He did not speak those last words, but even so, they were real, and inescapable, for she had imagined them.

In fact, he was no longer there. She was alone, sitting on the bed, facing the mirror. He had gone, bidding her a good night and proposing that they should take a trip in a boat the next day. She had agreed, nodding several times.

That night she found herself wandering for some time in an endless, shadowy apartment, exploring its labyrinthine passages before going to lie down on a bed. Her son came in, just as she had seen him on the afternoon when he was diving-naked, his body wet, making the sheets damp and cooling them deliriously. She felt this coolness against her breast, in her thighs. He kissed her; his lips tasted of the stems and leaves of water plants. Their freedom was such that their bodies moved as if underwater, their gestures marvelously weightless. It was when she found herself on her knees, dominated by him, that she noticed that the armchair turned toward the wall in the corner of this unknown room had someone in it… She could only see the arm on the armrest-a heavy cuff link glittered in the half-darkness. And the more violent their sensual enjoyment became, the more the profile of the seated man detached itself from the back of the chair. She was on the brink of recognizing him when at last, with a cry, still choked with pleasure, she wrested herself from sleep. An object was digging into her shoulder. She switched on the light and from within the folds of the tangled sheets she plucked out a cuff link.

With a final effort at sane reasoning she formulated this eerie and incongruous thought and rejoiced in its absurdity: "There was no dragon!" That was it, she needed to speak of improbable things that had no chance of becoming real. No dragon! An unknown apartment, that man in the armchair, perhaps. But no dragon. Like that she would finally manage to distinguish the true from the false…

This exercise seemed to calm her. A respite of several minutes during which she got up, went into the book room, took down a fat encyclopedic volume, leafed through it with a clumsy, nervous hand. And quickly hit upon the engraving: "A boa constrictor attacking an antelope." The glistening body, covered in arabesques, was strangling its victim. "The dragon…," she whispered and recalled that, in the vast apartment she had just left, she had forgotten to switch off the lamp on the bedside table.

The sounds coming through the heat haze were blurred, liquid. The cries of children paddling at the edge of the river, the lowing of a herd… And the lazy plashing of oars. To push the boat clear from the low, muddy bank just now he had had to take off his shoes, roll up his pants, and step into the water. Now she could see the broad, hardened soles of his feet. And on his forehead the smear of clay he had left when wiping away drops of sweat. For her this brown streak was a particularly odd source of distress in this world of sunlight and apathy. She could not say to him, "You've made a mark on your face," still less could she dip her fingers into the water and wash his brow for him…

That would have been quite unthinkable. The man sitting facing her, his bare heels wedged against the timbers of the boat, was an utterly strange being: a man who desired her and who was taking her out in a boat on a stifling July day, fulfilling a ritual that was a prelude to the night, when he would violate her as much as he desired, as of right, without any resistance on her part. Before their boat trip, as they walked through the upper town, he had invited her into the shooting gallery. He had not missed a single target; as he walked out he had looked at her with the air of a child expecting praise… This was the very man who had materialized in a labyrinthine apartment in the armchair facing the wall, the man spying on them with a smile of connivance. She recalled the great bed, the sheets with their scent of the river, yes, precisely the same smell as this tepid water rippling beneath the low sides of the dinghy. Under this watchful gaze she and the boy, whose body was still wet, had tried to mask their love. Yes, they were searching in all innocence for some object lost among the folds of the devastated bed. But while going through the motions of this search they were embracing, exchanging kisses, giving themselves to each other…

She forced herself to listen. Golets had just spoken to her. Doubtless it was his "We really must make hay while the sun shines: because you never know," that he kept repeating every five minutes. The smear of clay on his forehead was drawing out into a long, sinuous trickle. "If only I could ask him: that apartment, that simulated search in a disordered bed-were they real?" said a hopeless voice within her. It was the "little bitch," she recognized it almost joyfully, for these words were the only ones that still linked her to this day, to this man's conversation, to life… She leaned forward, thrust her hand into the water. She was going to wash away the muddy mark on his forehead…

At that moment they touched land. Golets jumped onto the bank and drew the bow of the vessel into a little gap between the willows in the middle of the tangle of weeds. Then he helped her to step ashore and settled her in a little clearing surrounded by bushes. He did it with the care you would have for an important patient; or for a vase filled with water with a bunch of flowers in it, that you dread breaking just at the last moment. Or perhaps (the voice of the "little bitch" pierced the silence that enveloped her) yes, especially, for a person whose social standing made this riverside picnic somewhat inappropriate. "The Princess Arbyelina," the voice whispered. "That is what you still are to him. He is still susceptible to your body's added value."

Golets spread out a tablecloth and set down the bottle. From his bag he took two glasses, some bread, and a packet covered in grease stains. "Princess Arbyelina," she thought, picturing the life where the word had a meaning, where the people lived who knew her. The Caravanserai, Villiers, Paris… This world now seemed to her non-existent, beheld in a dream long since dissipated. Now there was only the damp sauna of this July afternoon, the sweetish smell of the tepid, muddy water; this woman half reclining in the grass, with a glass in her hand that she raised to her lips from time to time, yielding to the pleas of a man who talked incessantly. A man who, when night came, would crush her breasts, penetrate her, fall asleep beside her. He already had all these actions imprinted in him, in his forearms, blue with their thick veins, in his fingers with broad, yellow nails…

"And to think that last winter all this was under the snow!"

He was stretched out, his elbow planted in the earth, his legs crossed, and, without letting go of his glass, he extended his arm, indicating the fields beyond the river. She closed her eyes and signaled to him to say nothing more. A fragile night was forming within her in which she walked along, recognizing, with mournful felicity, a branch crystallized in the hoarfrost; a little frozen pond; but, above all, a floral tapestry of ice on a dark windowpane…

It was Golets who roused her from her reverie. He must have thought her closed eyes-she had covered them with her hand to shut out the light more completely-were a sign of drunkenness. Without getting up he executed a rapid crawl and got behind her. He took her by the shoulders, tilted her toward him, slipped a hand beneath her back. When he met her suddenly opened eyes he froze: a glassy stare that expressed nothing, did not see him, saw nothing… Detaching himself from her, he emitted, in spite of himself, a sort of moan of thwarted pleasure, almost a meowing. She got up, stared at the man crouching at her feet, then lifted her eyes toward the roofs of the upper town where they climbed up the hill, toward the flat curve of the river… So after all, there was nothing in the warm, soft stuff of life but this whine of desire; this flesh forever hungering for fusion.

He picked up the remains of the meal, folded the tablecloth. And it was then that there was this moment of hesitation: should he throw away the almost empty bottle or take it with him? Already visibly drunk, he was brought up short by this ridiculous indecision. He stuffed the bottle into his bag, took it out again, examined it, perplexed… These few seconds of uncertainty (she later felt it that way but no one chose to believe her) marked the start of that ticking away of minutes that preceded the end. If he had not delayed, turning the bottle over and over, if they had left a little sooner, or if he had ended up keeping the bottle, everything would have turned out differently. But he swung his arm, essaying a jocular war whoop, and threw the bottle into the water.

But with the intuition of drunken men, he must have felt as if there were a taut cord linking him to something invisible. His mood changed. He tried to joke. Now they were drifting downstream. Several yards farther on they caught up with the bottle that had not sunk; he gave it a poke with an oar, the neck disappeared, releasing a brief gurgling of air bubbles. He roared with laughter. And at once became somber again.

It was no doubt in order to cast off this obscure uneasiness that he suddenly abandoned the oars, stretched himself, raising his face toward the sky, and declared in a voice slurred by drunkenness, "Man is made for pleasure as birds are made for flight."

He half stood up and, shaken by the instability of the boat, lurched headlong toward the stern where she was sitting. She moved aside so as not to be crushed by this unbalanced mass, braying with laughter. He reached her all the same, hung over her, and tugged roughly at her dress.

At this moment she saw a twisted, rusty steel structure rising up out of the water and growing rapidly larger. It seemed to her that the boat overturned almost gently…

She would never know if the violence with which Golets hurled himself at her and clung to her body was due to his drunkenness, his desire to save her, or his inability to swim. Perhaps he, in his turn, was trying to push away the woman who threatened to drown him. Or was it already the death throes? Nor would she ever know whether he had been wounded at the very moment when he fell or afterward, when he sank and resurfaced, already lifeless.

Whatever the reason for his brutality, by a macabre coincidence, Golets s gestures parodied the carnal act of which he had dreamed. He clasped the body he desired, did violence to it, tore off the upper part of her clothes, laying bare her shoulders and her breasts, lacerating the skin with his nails.

This savage struggle lasted scarcely a few seconds. He disappeared beneath the water and surfaced a little farther off, closer to the bank, at a spot sheltered from the force of the current. His body came to rest between a block of concrete, a narrow spit of sand, and the stems of reeds on which green and blue dragonflies continued to settle.

She swam, or rather allowed herself to be carried, surrounded by the tatters of her dress, as far as this sheltered spot. Just a few yards from the place of their shipwreck her foot touched the bottom. It all seemed like a game. And yet a few feet away from her floated this fully dressed body and the water around his head was turning brown.

On the bank two men could be seen running along, led by a boy who still had his fishing rod in his hand.

It seemed to her as if she remained for weeks on that sunny river-bank, on the ancient tree stump where the first witnesses had found her sitting. There were no nights anymore, nothing but that interminable day, the muggy effluvia arising from the water, the smell of the plants and the mud; and the hot, slightly hazy light, more dazzling to the eye than glaring sunlight.

Interminably, people came and went, surrounded her; dispersed; timidly approached the corpse of the drowned man; made their comments. She recognized almost all of them: the Russified pharmacist, the director of the retirement home, the old swordsman, the nurse, the woman from the station ticket office… She noticed that they all of them, even in these exceptional circumstances, remained true to their roles, to their masks. The nurse, with her bitter expression, did not fail to let it be understood that the mourning she wore was a good deal more worthy of respect than this stupid accident. The ticket office woman was constantly consulting her watch. The director managed the tragedy. The pharmacist moved from one group to another, happily taking part in discussions both in French and Russian without distinction. And beside the willow trees, mingling with the buzz of conversations, there rang out the merry "s-s-shlim!"…

She felt herself to be the focus of dozens of inquiring-or quite simply curious-looks. These excited spectators were attempting, as they might have done in adjusting binoculars, to bring together into a single focus the Princess Arbyelina and this woman clad in water-soaked rags, a woman who made no effort to cover up her breast that was streaked with scratches. Some of them, those who felt they knew her better, addressed her in hushed voices-as if sounding out the silence of a bedroom to see if the person in there is asleep… She remained motionless, seemed blind, inaccessible to words. Yet her eyes were alive, noting the new faces in the parade of gawkers, observing that the smear of clay on the man's forehead had disappeared, washed away, no doubt, at the moment of drowning…

But what could she say to those who, like the director, leaned toward her and murmured questions that were unbelievable in their human triviality, supposedly intended to bring her out of her state of shock? Shock… shock… shock, the voices kept repeating in all the little groups. She should have told them about that smear of clay, about the impossibility of wiping it away that she had experienced in the boat, yes, her inability to wet her fingers, to touch that brow. Told them, too, about that unique fragment of beauty that had, by chance, sprung from that hopelessly ugly man-the phrase he had uttered a quarter of an hour before his death: "And to think that these water meadows were all covered in snow…" But would they have understood? Perhaps only the old lady from the retirement home who suddenly went up to the corpse and removed a long strand of waterweed from its face. Whispered reproaches arose on all sides-nothing must move.

And nothing moved. The humid, stifling afternoon went on forever. The police arrived, the crowd regrouped itself. The days passed, but there were no nights. Always the same sun, the same lukewarm river, the same people, the corpse. The clothes it was dressed in gradually dried. And the scratches on the woman's breast ("On my breast," she said, but while recognizing herself less and less) closed up, faded…

The investigating magistrate questioned her in his office-and yet she was still that woman sitting on the riverbank where nothing had changed: the drowned man, the gawkers, and, from now on, this magistrate bending over the corpse, feeling the sides of the boat, going from one spectator to another and then stopping face to face with the half-undressed woman. He called this woman "Madame Arbélina"; she became it and, at least initially, even felt relieved to be it. It was thus easier for her to admit that she had detested Golets, that the idea of killing him had often occurred to her. And that she had in fact killed him, even killed him twice over, for first of all she had not wiped his mud-spotted forehead (and that gesture could have changed everything!); and later on, when he did not know what to do with the empty bottle and the moment of his death was approaching, she had remained absolutely passive, an accomplice as the minutes fatally drained away.

One day she felt she could finally relate the essence of the case to this man who listened to her with such interest. Visibly the investigating magistrate was beginning to realize that he had in front of him not a certain "Madame Arbélina" but a woman who carried within her strange winter nights and terrible fissures that an ordinary object, an innocent word, could cause to erupt at any given moment. Encouraged by his understanding, she talked about the inexpressible beauty of the winter she had just lived through; about the tiny pond with the trapped fish; about the branch forever letting its hoarfrost crystals fall… She lived again through those moments of silence and marveled to discover that her listener, too, went along with it more each day She was certain now that she could confide her secret to him…

So why did the stammerer suddenly appear, claiming to be Golets's best friend? Was she confronted by him, or did she learn of his existence thanks to the more and more numerous theories about the crime that had the Caravanserai, and indeed the whole town, in turmoil? She no longer remembered. In any event this Loo-loo's evidence turned everything upside down. Struggling painfully against his diction he testified: Golets knew that before the war Prince Ar-byelin had engaged in a dubious traffic in properties in Russia owned by émigrés and so… The magistrate considered this new theory to be fanciful. Golets scarcely knew the prince and would never have been able to prove in what way these sales were illicit…

It was she who saw in this testimony the destruction of everything she had built up, word by word, in her conversations with the magistrate. So Golets knew nothing about her winter nights. The threats he had made came down to that old secret of the estates sold by the prince. That was his ridiculous blackmail! While she, in her confusion, in her madness, had imagined this man lying in wait beneath their windows… No, he had seen nothing. But in that case his death that she had so desired, the murder she had confessed to the magistrate, was totally gratuitous. She had killed him for nothing…

Strangely, the magistrate listened to her this time with ill concealed impatience, frequently looking at his watch, acquiescing with a distracted air. And the clerk was absent. She insisted that she should be accompanied to the scene of the crime but met with a refusal, repeated her demand in categorical tones, explaining that they would be gathering crucial evidence for the truth, and finally she had her wish granted. Despite the late hour she went to the riverbank, found the exact spot where they had landed, indicated the position of their bodies on the grass, described the end of their meal… And suddenly noticed that she was alone on the bank, that the sun had long since set and that her explanations were being addressed to no one… In fact, they were being heard by several young ruffians who chased her, throwing lumps of clay at her and shouting obscenities.

It was probably on that evening, on the homeward path, that she met the stammerer. He told her they did not want his testimony either. And yet he had explained to the magistrate that Golets had kept himself to himself because he had a past to hide: as an army doctor he had been captured by the reds and had served in their army for two years… Thirty years ago.

They were standing facing each other in a street in the lower town that was already almost in darkness. She, her hair disheveled from running, her dress smeared with the mud thrown by her pursuers. He, small, frail, his face distorted by the impossibility of speech. Both of them felt intolerably mute. Finally he was able to gain control of the air stuck in his throat and exhaled in a painful groan, "Y-you-you k-k-killed him!"

After this encounter she did not go back home. It even seemed to her as if she never again saw the house tacked on to the wall of the Caravanserai. Inexplicably she had become this woman lying on a narrow, white bed in a small room where there was a smell of medicines in the air. Someone woke her, forcing her to abandon the comfortable absence of unconsciousness. She opened her eyes: she felt no surprise at seeing a man of about fifty, an inaccurate portrait, aged and tired, of her husband, and a grave, tense young man- the future portrait of her son.

Their appearance transported her into a distant life, a forgotten city, and, above all, into another body. They seemed not to notice that she had gone and continued to address this pale, immobile woman, deprived of speech. It was her husband who did the talking. She heard him from the depths of her fog, smiled at him, understood nothing… She had to sign a sheet of paper-the man guided her hand. When they took their leave her maternal instinct must have roused her from her unconsciousness. She heard her husband replying to her, "It's better like this. For him…" She understood that he was going to Russia and taking their son with him. "For a month or two," he said.

When the door closed behind them the memory of the previous days returned, or at least that of the cold, of the fragment of glass that had gone into the vein in her wrist so easily-a fragment of ice, it seemed to her, that put an end to the pain, to the stifling afternoon on the riverbank where the drowned man lay, to the clamor of the voices talking about her, forever talking about her…

One night she was able to get up, went out into the corridor, and, advancing in a rapid ethereal glissade, passed through the echoing, nocturnal building. Despite the darkness the rooms in it were full of animation. She heard cries of joy, sad conversations, secret meetings, sighs. After she turned one corner the corridor took on a new aspect; she saw old portraits on the walls in their faded gilt frames. Through a half open door waves of operatic music spilled out. A woman dressed in an ample party dress walked ahead of her. A motley, laughing group suddenly appeared in a brief shaft of light and vanished at once at the end of a passage… She already knew what there would be in the room whose door she slowly pushed open. The wood fire, the branches covered in melted snow, the big mirror, the bed that held the imprint of a body. She undressed and molded herself into the hollow, feigned sleep. A moment later a long, endless caress enveloped her, filled her body, began to dilate it… She interrupted it suddenly. Within an armchair pushed against the wall a heavy profile stood out in which there glinted an eye that was at once malevolent and obliging…

It was to escape this look that she hurtled along the corridors that had once more become monotonous. Hurried footsteps, sure of their strength, rang out behind her. The only refuge, she now remembered, was in that tiny room under the rooftops, the one whose narrow window looked out over a snow-covered forest… She could already make out the little, low door, seized the handle, shook it desperately. Expert hands, almost nonchalant in their calm brutality, stopped her, twisting her arms…

Her own cry woke her. So it had all simply been a long dream, tortuous and painful. The winter nights, that unspeakable love, the man hounding them from his armchair… She lifted her left arm-the scar was still red. Why had she done it, when everything was only a slow parade of ghosts? For she had learned, she did not know how (from the nurses' conversations, no doubt), that her son would not be coming back on the appointed date. Or perhaps he would not come back because she had opened her veins? Or perhaps she had wanted to die to escape the building from which there was no escape? For she was no longer in the hospital where her husband and her son had come to see her… Or perhaps, precisely, they had gone away because they knew she was going to end up here? The cut vein, the building, their departure. Or rather: their departure; the cut wrist; the building one cannot leave. No, in yet another order: building; desire to die; their departure… How simple and insoluble it all is. And yet if I went to the window and if I saw it snowing, perhaps I could… Wait, first there was that fragment of glass, the blood, but there was no ice to stop it…

She did not know that years were passing. Time wound slowly through the bowels of the building she was exploring, feeling her way, day after day. Not the building of the asylum, a banal, rectilinear construction where dwelled all those troubled souls, but the cavernous, changing building that had arisen in her sleep. Distilling the sounds, she learned to identify the music of a grand piano in a remote drawing room. She ran toward it, could already see the clusters of candelabra, caught the aroma of the food for a festive dinner… But the rooms suddenly grew dark, filled with smoke and the fragments of windowpanes crunched beneath her feet. She made her way into a devastated restaurant where a man with a fur hat pulled down over his brow was playing a triumphal tune, from time to time wiping away the drunken tears from his soot-stained face with a rapid gesture… She went out through a yard at the back, hoping to protect herself from the machine gun fire that suddenly started to riddle the wall. And found herself in a hotel room whose window opened out onto a hot southern night, onto the rustling of foliage in the humid, perfumed breeze… She wandered from one room to the next, occasionally ran into someone, embarked on a conversation with them and was never surprised if her interlocutor left her in midword, disappearing into a gallery that suddenly opened up at the end of a room…

Among the people who came to see her there was a woman who never vanished unexpectedly and, as if to demonstrate that she was undeniably real, offered her her bony hand, kept warm beneath an angora shawl. She was the nurse from the Caravanserai, the one who used to be in mourning for her English fiance. Strangely, she had preserved the memory of a certain Princess Arbyelina and came each month, despite a journey that took a whole day. She no longer spoke of the English pilot, her mythical beloved. No doubt, as even myths grow old, this unhappy princess was now becoming the new passion in her all-too-colorless life… She would come on a Sunday, in rain, or in summer sunshine, making her way along the long avenue of lime trees, beneath branches sometimes studded with the first green shoots, sometimes gilded by October days. She explained to the others, gravely and sadly, that Princess Arbyelina had once been her closest friend and indeed her confidant. It was solely thanks to this new legend that Olga Arbyelina still had any existence in the land of the living…

After the visit, the princess (the staff called her that without really knowing if it was her title or a nom de folie) would remain at the window at the end of the corridor, watching the figure disappearing down the avenue and observing the simple and repetitive life of the outside world. The drops of rain; the sky, blue or white with clouds; the trees, bare or green… Then she would move away from the window, follow a wall, and, as she turned the corner, plunge into a vast shadowy apartment where, in the midst of the sumptuous disorder of a bedroom, her gaze fell upon a great black leather armchair. Empty for the moment…

The meetings with the nurse from the Caravanserai and the few scraps gleaned from the chatter of the housekeeping staff taught her little of what went on outside the walls. Wars; the hardships of life; the pompous mockery of the commonplace; the banality of dying. Were these things more important than the falling of leaves? More reasonable than her wanderings through that endless mansion?

One of the housekeepers noticed that the princess filled dozens of sheets of paper with cramped handwriting and hid them in her bedside table. Her curiosity was fruitless: the notes were illegible, either written in an unknown language or, even in French, too muddled. As for the few lines that could be deciphered, they gave the details of a winter's day such as occur plentifully in everybody's lives.

One day, without having any notion of time, she guessed that the nurse from the Caravanserai would not come. In fact she never came again. Neither beneath the autumn rain nor beneath the branches bespangled with the first leaves…

Finally after an indistinct cycle of weeks, months, and seasons, an icy morning arrived. At the top of an old wooden staircase, with high treads and a rail polished by many hands, the door opened, behind which there could only be that tiny room with the window looking out over a snow-covered forest.

SHE had to bend double to creep toward that tiny window, a kind of skylight, dull with dust, covered in a tapestry of spiders' webs. With a piece of rag drawn from a pile of old clothes she wiped the window. Outside was the same avenue of lime trees but seen from much higher up, and that day veiled in a slow blanket of snowflakes. The ground was all white as well and the world beyond the boundary wall seemed half blotted out by filaments of snow.

She was not at all surprised to see a man appearing slowly in this swirl of white, in the middle of the avenue. She was astonished neither by his giant stature nor by the poverty of his clothes: you could see at a glance that the fabric of the long greatcoat of military style had been darned and patched. Beneath this worn garment a powerful but abnormally emaciated frame could be discerned. He was not wearing a hat, the snow had mingled with his gray hair.

His actions did not seem outlandish to her either. He stopped, set an old traveling bag on the ground, and went to scrape up a handful of snow from the seat of a bench. Then he carefully massaged his face, washing it with the ball of ice that was melting in his hands. Took out a handkerchief, wiped his brow, his cheeks. Picked up the bag and walked toward the entrance of the building.

She made no movement, only let her gaze travel around her, like one who wakes up in a strange place and tries to identify it. It was no longer a secret refuge lost in the labyrinths of that mansion of long ago but simply the top of the building, a narrow loft where she had acquired the habit of coming, prevented at first by the staff, who feared a suicide, then ignored by them. Broken chairs, old newspapers, that pile of yellowed paper from which she extracted the pages for her notes…

Already a woman's voice 'was repeatedly calling her name from the bottom of the staircase…

She knew in advance what the man who had just washed his face with a fistful of snow was going to tell her. He would begin talking at once, as he walked down the avenue, then sitting on the seat in a railway carriage, in a hotel room, in a café, later in some ephemeral dwelling that, for a time, would give them the illusion of a home of their own… He would go on talking during all the years that were left to them to live. And the feeling that she knew it all as soon as he started speaking would never leave her. She would listen to him, weep, signal to him to be silent when the grief was unbearable, but all, absolutely all would already be known to her, endured a thousand times in the course of her nocturnal wanderings along the deceptive corridors of life.

She would know, she knew already, that the émigrés, the moment they returned to Russia, had been stripped of their luggage, screened, loaded into long boxcars. And that it was on the day of the first snowstorm that they had separated father and son. The adults had continued their journey farther eastward, crossed the Urals, traveled up beyond the Arctic Circle as far as the camps of the far North. Young people who had not reached the age of sixteen were considered still capable of purging their "bourgeois past" in reeducation centers. It was at the moment of separation that the father, after a solitary and futile rebellion, had almost died under the heavy rifle butts of the guards…

She would also learn that Li had followed the same route to the North. And that her painted panels had been thrown into the snow behind the railroad station where they were sorting out the prisoners.

For a while the vivid colors of these panoramas were to be seen amid the frozen wastes: a pianist in tails accompanying a monumental prima donna; two vacationers beneath a tropical sun… But little by little the local inhabitants had carried these panels away and burnt them during the great frosts at the end of the winter.

She understood that not knowing what had befallen her son was for her the only chance of believing that he was still alive. And the more improbable this hope was, the more confident she became. He was somewhere beneath the sky; he saw the trees, the light, heard the wind…

One day she finally decided to speak in her turn. She knew that for the man to understand her she must tell everything in a few brief words and speak no more. And then speak again, until her words became fire, darkness, sky… Until that other life, the one they had so clumsily sought together, and that she had so briefly known, was finally made manifest to them in the fragile eternity of human language.

He opens the gate at the moment when the aureole of the streetlamps is beginning to waver and is extinguished. For some moments the darkness seems to have returned. I look back: the door to the keeper's lodge has been left open; and I can see the lamp that lit up his face all through the night. Our two chairs. Our cups on the table. And all about the little house dark tree trunks, the upright stones of monuments, tombs, crosses…

He stays beside me for a moment between the two halves of the gate. Then shakes my hand, moves away, and soon disappears among the trees.