The feeling is sincere, almost a prayer, it makes me realize that something essential is lacking from the freewheeling frivolity of my life.
I snap out of it and shake off these solemn thoughts, picture my girlfriend’s return this evening, being reunited with her, the carefree hunger of desire, a night spent making love, laughing, delighting in juggling with words, caresses, plans for a summer that will soon be here … The prospect of this takes me further still from the purpose of our mushroom hunt, I smile: my setting off at the drop of a hat to meander through a damp wood in the company of a hunchback who looks like a character from a fairy tale is all of a piece with my casual lifestyle. The real charm of it, indeed, is being able to flit like a butterfly from one possibility to another, each one a little anarchic, a little ludicrous. I walk on, relax, no longer thinking about Zhorka …
I locate him from the snapping of a branch at the edge of an aspen spinney. His lame leg has caught on a root. Fallen to his knees, he gets up with tangled clumsiness. I am distressed to see how awkward his disability makes him: it costs him an effort, pushing against the ground with both hands, to stand up …
“We won’t go any farther,” he tells me, showing me a field beyond which the blue glow of a fine ancient forest can be seen, with temptingly majestic trees. “Those fields were mined during the war. There’s no knowing what might still be hidden there …”
His voice is dull, marked by anger held in check, which quickly exhausts itself in weariness.
“There are so many of those damned things still buried …”
“But what about your morels? You’ve not found many, have you?”
I laugh to distract him from the vision of that field where death lurks.
He shakes his basket gently, the mushrooms in it are covered by fern fronds, it is only half full.
“It’s OK. I’ve picked ten. That’ll pay for my ticket. That’ll do …”
He gives me his little oblique smile and we set out on the return journey.
I follow in Zhorka’s footsteps and our jaunt seems to me even more pointless than before. He had gone out to earn a bit of money, with which, no doubt, to buy himself some cheap alcohol, his philter for love and dreams. But he has only gathered enough to pay for the journey. Poor fellow! I try to turn my thoughts away from this short figure, limping along in front of me; I no longer want to expose myself to the heartbreaking stupidity of his tormented life.
The train we catch is packed, we have to travel standing up, surrounded by other passengers. Zhorka lowers his head, like an animal at bay, and can no longer hide the scars on his face from public gaze. People climb on board, hot after a long afternoon of gardening, their faces red from the sun, their voices raw with thirst. They jostle us unceremoniously; some of them notice Zhorka’s disfigurements and move away, not troubling to hide their embarrassment or disgust. In the end he presses a hand to his brow and remains motionless, with the gesture of a person trying to remember something extremely important. His eyes are closed.
On arrival, we take a few steps together, suddenly aware that the trip is over and we are bound to separate now, perhaps for many years, as before this encounter, diverging into lives too different for our paths often to cross. We stop at a road junction, which is indeed the parting of our ways.
“So, it was great to see you again, Zhorka! We really must …”
My tone is almost natural, I manage to convince myself that tomorrow or the next day, who knows, we are going to meet again, renew the ties of our boyhood friendship of long ago … Zhorka nods, his head tilted on one side, then, as I am preparing to say good-bye and make myself scarce, he raises his basket a little, parting the fern fronds that protect his morels …
And he lifts out a round, compact little bouquet made up of a multitude of white flowers, snowdrops, like the ones I saw in the forest.
“Take them,” he says. “You could give them to … to someone. But wrap something around the stalks, or the heat of your hand will wither them. Look, here’s a bit of newspaper … Yes, I was glad to see you, too … Well, good luck.”
He is already walking away without looking back, moving as fast as his legs will allow. I am tempted to go after him, to thank him … But I am afraid of meeting his gaze again. As he gave me the bouquet he stared at me and I believed both his eyes were equally alive, so intense did the fluid sparkle seem to me that flashed out briefly from beneath his eyelids.
I go home walking slowly, mentally repeating his words: “You could give them to … to someone.” This someone is my girlfriend, whom he saw climbing into the bus this morning. He saw our lovers’ embrace, our kiss … And so while walking in the forest he must have been thinking about that young woman, about her beauty, about the love between us. It made him forget his morels and pick mainly flowers, dreaming of the moment when she would come back and find them in the evening.
At home, I put the bouquet in a short vase and the flowers revive, forming a superb, snowy cluster. Their corollas are faintly tinged with blue, like the incrustations of that pale sky that were reflected in the puddles of melted snow in among the trees. I picture Zhorka, alone in his room, thinking about my girlfriend’s surprise when she sees the flowers and asks me, “Goodness, where do these marvelous things come from?” And I shall reply, “An old school friend picked these snowdrops for you …” And so he will feature in the thoughts of a young woman in love, whose affection will extend to him a very little bit through the reflection of the bouquet in her big, beautifully made-up eyes … Yes, he must be living that dream now.
My friend reaches me late, arriving on one of the last buses from Leningrad. She comes in, kisses me, sees the bouquet. And asks no questions. She quite simply leans forward, buries her face in the subtly scented halo of flowers, closes her eyes. And when she stands up, her eyes are misty with tears. “They smell of winter,” she says. “We met in December, didn’t we …”
That night there is an unaccustomed gentleness in the way we make love, as if we had found one another again after a very long separation, having suffered greatly and grown old.
A quarter of a century later a memory returns to me like something out of a run-of-the-mill psychological noveclass="underline" during that day she spent in Leningrad, my friend had met a man, her future husband. The rest of our love affair has now faded into a hazy glimmering of juvenile frivolity, insouciance, futile sentimentality. With an effort of memory I could reconstruct snatches of jealousy, faint echoes of remarks exchanged at the time we broke up, two or three physical recollections that have survived erasure. Nothing else. Nothing.
But far removed from this slipping away of phantoms, a slow dusk in May persists. The half-light of a room, the bluish glow of a bouquet in a vase. A woman goes up to it, plunges her face into the chill of the flowers, stands up again dreamily, her eyes brimming with a sadness that I do not yet understand. And a night of love persists in which every gesture seems endowed with a new meaning, a fervent tenderness. A night in which we feel very frail, already condemned by time. And in that night utterly immortal.
When speaking of Zhorka’s death, those of my friends who knew him always refer to a fatal accident that occurred when he was twenty-six. So, a few months after we went out to pick morels. An accident …
That day, in October, Zhorka took the same little train, followed the same footpaths, made his way through the forest, this time glowing with golden foliage. He was not carrying a basket, nor a knife for cutting mushrooms. At the edge of a broad field strewn with russet leaves he stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, then walked straight ahead … There were two explosions: the first mine killed him; the second was set off by the detonation of the first. A hunter who was in the area raised the alarm.