One evening I heard someone calling me. The voice seemed to come from the foliage on the trees. I looked up and there was Pashka! The square dance floor was surrounded by a high wooden fence. Outside, wild vegetation grew thickets somewhere between a park run to seed and a forest. It was on a broad branch of a maple tree, above the fence, that I saw him…
I had just left the dance floor after having clumsily bumped against my partner's breasts… It was the first time I had danced with such a buxom girl. My palms, resting on her back, were all moist. Caught out by an unexpected flourish from the band, I made a false move, and my chest pressed against hers. The effect was more powerful than an electric shock! The soft elasticity of a female breast overwhelmed me. I continued to shuffle without hearing the music: instead of the dancing girl's fair face, all I saw was a shining oval.
When the band stopped playing, she walked away without saying a word, visibly piqued. I crossed the floor, sliding between couples, as if I were walking on ice, and went out.
I needed to be alone, to recover my spirits. I walked along the path that ran beside the dance floor. The wind coming from the Volga cooled my burning brow. "But suppose it was her, my partner herself," I thought suddenly, "who chose to bump into me on purpose?" Yes, perhaps she had wanted me to feel her bosom and was sending me a signal that in my naivete and my timidity I had failed to decode. Had I missed the chance of a lifetime?
Like a child that has just broken a cup and closes its eyes, hoping that this momentary darkness will put everything back together again, I screwed up my eyes: why couldn't the band play the same number again and I find my partner again and repeat all the same movements? I had never felt and would never again feel so intensely the intimate proximity and at the same time, the most irretrievable remoteness of a female body…
It was in the midst of this emotional disarray that I heard the voice of Pashka, hidden in the foliage. I looked up. He was smiling at me, half stretched out along a thick branch: "Climb up! I'll make room for you," he said, folding up his legs.
Clumsy and heavy in the city, as soon as he was in the wild Pashka was transfigured. On that branch he looked like a big cat, resting before its nightly prowl…
In any other circumstances I would have ignored his invitation. But his position was too unusual, and in addition I felt I had been caught in flagrante delicto. I felt as if he had intercepted my feverish thoughts from his branch! He held his hand out to me, and I hauled myself up beside him. The tree was a veritable observation post.
Seen from above, the swaying of hundreds of entwined bodies had quite a different look to it. It seemed at one and the same time absurd (all these creatures pawing the ground!) and endowed with a certain logic. Bodies circulated, coalesced for the space of a dance, separated, sometimes remained glued to one another during several numbers. From our tree, at a single glance, I could take in all the little emotional games unfolding on the dance floor. Rivalries, challenges, betrayals, loves at first sight, breakups, explanations, potential brawls quickly brought under control by the vigilant keepers of order. But above all, it was desire that was visible through the veil of the music and the ritual of the dance. Within that human tide I located the girl whose breasts I had brushed against. For a moment I followed her trajectory from one partner to another…
In short, I felt all this whirling about reminded me insidiously of something. "Life!" a silent voice suddenly suggested to me, and my lips repeated silently, "Life…" The same mingling of bodies driven by desire and hiding it under innumerable pretences. Life… "And where am I, myself, at this moment?" I asked myself, sensing that the answer to this question would shed light on an extraordinary truth, which would explain everything once and for all.
Shouts rang out beside the path. I recognized my classmates returning to the city. I seized the branch, ready to jump. Pashka's voice, tinged with embittered resignation, rang out uncertainly: "Wait! Look, they're going to switch off the floodlights. There'll be masses of stars! If we climb higher we'll see Sagittarius…"
I was not listening to him. I jumped to the ground. The earth, ribbed with thick roots, bruised the soles of my feet violently. I ran to catch up with my classmates, who were moving off, gesticulating. I wanted to tell them, as quickly as possible, about my partner with the beautiful bosom, to hear their remarks, to deafen myself with words. I was in a hurry to get back to life. And with cruel glee I parodied the strange question that had formed inside my head a moment before: "Where am I? Where was I? On a branch beside that idiot, Pashka, obviously. On the edge of real life!"
By a freakish coincidence (I already knew that reality is made up of implausible repetitions of the kind that novelists hound down as serious faults) we met again the next day, with that unease experienced by two companions who at night have exchanged grave, exalted, and emotional confidences, have revealed themselves to the very intimate core of their souls, and who meet again in the morning by the mundane and skeptical light of day.
I wandered around outside the still-closed dance floor. I wanted to be the first partner for the dancer of the night before. I wanted time to go into reverse and glue my broken cup back together again.
Pashka appeared in the scrub of the park, saw me, hesitated for a second, then walked toward me. He was laden with his fishing gear. Under his arm he carried a big loaf of black bread from which he tore off and ate pieces, chewing them with relish. Once more I felt I had been caught in flagrante delicto. He inspected me, scrutinizing my light-colored shirt wide open at the neck, my fashionable trousers, very flared at the bottom. Then, tossing his head as a sign of good-bye, he moved off. I heaved a sigh of relief. But suddenly Pashka turned and called out to me in a slightly coarse voice, "Here, come with me, I'll show you something! Come on, you won't be sorry…"
I followed him with a hesitant tread.
We went down toward the Volga, walked beside the port with its enormous cranes, its workshops, its corrugated iron warehouses. Farther downstream we made our way into a broad wasteland littered with old barges; with misty metallic constructions; with pyramids of lengthy, rotten tree trunks. Pashka hid his lines and nets under one of these worm-eaten boles and began to jump from one boat to another. There was also an abandoned landing stage, and several pontoon bridges that yielded buoyantly beneath our feet. In following Pashka, I had not in fact noticed the moment when we left dry land to find ourselves on this floating island of abandoned craft. I held on to a broken handrail, leaped into a kind of junk, stepped over its side, slipped on the wet timbers of a raft…
We finally found ourselves in a channel that had steep banks all covered in flowering elder trees. Its surface, from one shore to the other, was hidden under the hulks of ancient vessels packed close together, side by side, in fantastic disorder.
We settled ourselves on the thwart of a little boat. Above it arose the side of a barge that bore traces of fire. Craning my neck, I noticed up there, on the deck of the barge, a rope strung out near the cabin: several fragments of faded cloth undulated gently – washing that had been hanging out to dry for years…
The evening was warm, misty. The smell of the water mingled with the insipid emanations from the elder trees. From time to time a vessel that we could see passing in the distance in the middle of the Volga sent a series of lazy waves into our channel. Our boat began to pitch up and down, rubbing against the black side of the barge. The whole half-submerged graveyard came to life. One could hear the grating of a cable, the lapping of the water under a pontoon, the lisping of the reeds.