I went toward her. I entered the blue circle of the street lamp. Her body (black skirt, light top) suddenly focused all my desire. Yes, she instantly became the woman I had always desired. Despite her breathless frailty, despite her features being blurred with drunkenness, despite everything in her body and her face that should have displeased me but which at that moment I found so beautiful.
Making her rounds, she bumped into me and lifted her eyes. I saw a succession of masks on her face – fear, anger, a smile. It was the smile that triumphed, a vague smile that seemed to be directed at someone other than myself. She took my arm. We descended from the Mountain.
At first she talked without stopping. Her tipsy young voice would not remain steady. She whispered, then almost shouted. Clinging to my arm, she stumbled from time to time and let fly an oath, then put her hand to her lips with affected haste. Or else she suddenly broke away from me with an offended air, only to snuggle against my shoulder a moment later. I guessed that my companion was now acting out a love scene rehearsed long ago – a performance intended to show her partner she was somebody special. But in her intoxication she was confusing the sequence of these little interludes. While I, a bad actor, remained dumb, enthralled by this feminine presence, suddenly so accessible; and above all by the staggering ease with which this body was about to offer itself to me. I had always believed that such an offer would be preceded by a long emotional journey, by a thousand speeches, by subtle flirting. I was silent as I felt a little feminine breast squeezed against my arm. Next my nocturnal companion, jabbering animatedly, rejected the advance of a overly forward phantom and puffed out her cheeks for several seconds to show that she was sulking; then she enveloped her imaginary lover in what she believed was a languorous look, but which was simply blurred with the wine and the excitement.
I led her toward the only place that could accommodate our love – toward that floating island where at the beginning of the summer Pashka and I had spied on the prostitute and the soldiers.
In the darkness I must have taken a wrong turn. After wandering for a long time amid sleeping boats we stopped on a kind of old ferry – its ramp had broken supports and was half sunk in the water.
Abruptly she fell silent. Her drunkenness must have been gradually wearing off. I remained motionless, confronting her tense expectation in the darkness. I did not know what I was supposed to do. Kneeling down, I felt the boards, and threw into the water first a tangle of worn ropes, then a bundle of dried seaweed. It was by accident that, busy with my clearing up, I brushed her leg. My fingers, slipping over her skin, gave her goose bumps…
She remained silent until it was over. Her eyes closed, she seemed absent, abandoning to me her body that quaked with little shivers… I must have hurt her badly with my hasty actions. This act, so dreamed of, blundered into a series of clumsy, thwarted manipulations. Love was apparently like a hasty, nervous excavation. The knees and the elbows stuck out with a strange anatomical stiffness.
The pleasure was like the flame of a match in an icy wind – a fire that has just enough time to burn your fingers before going out, leaving a blinding spot in your eyes.
I tried to kiss her (I believed that one should do so at this moment); beneath my mouth I felt her lip being bitten hard…
And what frightened me the most was that a second later I no longer needed either her lips or her erect breast in her gaping blouse, or her slender thighs, over which she had pulled down her skirt with a rapid movement. Her body was becoming indifferent to me, useless. Sunk in my dull physical contentment, I was self-sufficient. "Why is she still stretched out like that, half naked?" I wondered, irritated. I felt the uneven boards beneath my back, several splinters burning in my palm. The wind had the heavy taste of stagnant water.
In this nocturnal interval there may well have been a fleeting moment of oblivion, a lightning sleep of several minutes. For I did not see the ship approaching. When we opened our eyes, all its white enormity, glittering with lights, was already looming above us. I had thought that our refuge was located deep in one of the countless bays cluttered up with rusty wrecks. But the opposite had occurred. In the darkness we had reached the tip of a headland that projected almost into the middle of the river… The brightly lit passenger ship, cruising slowly down the Volga, suddenly rose up above our old ferryboat, towering with its three decks. Human silhouettes were outlined against the somber sky. They were dancing on the top deck by the blaze of the lights. The warm flow of a tango spilled over us, enveloped us. The cabin windows, more discreetly lit, seemed to lean over, allowing us to enter their intimacy… The swell caused by the riverboat was so powerful that our raft swung in a half circle, a swirling glissade that made us giddy. The ship with its light and its music seemed to be circling round us… It was at that moment that she squeezed my hand and pressed herself against me. It seemed as if the hot-blooded denseness of her body could be concentrated entirely in my hands, like the trembling body of a bird. Her arms and her waist had the suppleness of that armful of water lilies I had picked one day, embracing several slippery stems in the water…
But already the ship was melting into the darkness. The echo of the tango faded. On its voyage toward Astrakhan, it carried the night with it. The sky around our ferry was filling with a hesitant pallor. I found it strange to see us in the middle of a great river at the timid birth of that day on the damp timbers of a raft. And along the shore the outlines of the port slowly took shape.
She did not wait for me. Without looking at me, she began to jump from one boat to the next. She was escaping with the shy haste of a young ballerina after a muffed exit. As I followed her leaping flight my heart stood still. At any moment she could slip on the wet wood, be betrayed by a broken footbridge, fall between two boats whose sides would close over her head. The concentration of my gaze sustained her in her acrobatics through the morning mist.
A moment later I saw her walking along the shore. In the silence the sand crunched softly beneath her feet… Here was a woman to whom I had felt so close a quarter of an hour before, who was now leaving. I experienced a pain quite new to me; a woman was leaving, breaking the invisible ties that still bound us. And there on that deserted shore she was transformed into an extraordinary being – a woman I love who is becoming independent of me again, a stranger to me, and who will soon be speaking to other people, smiling…
Living!
She turned, hearing me running after her. I saw her pale face, her hair that I now noticed was of a very light auburn color. Unsmiling, she looked at me in silence. I no longer remembered what I had wanted to say to her while listening, a moment before, to the wet sand crunching beneath her heels. "I love you" would have been a lie I could not utter. Alone her crumpled black skirt, and her arms, childishly slender, meant more to me than all the "I love you"s in the world. To suggest to her that we should meet again that day or the next was unthinkable. Our night must remain unique. Like the passing of the riverboat, like our momentary sleep, like her body in the cool of the great somnolent river.
I tried to tell her. I spoke, at random, of the crunching of the sand under her feet; of her solitude on this shore; of her fragility that night, which had reminded me of the stems of water lilies. I felt suddenly and with an acute happiness that I must also tell her about Charlotte's balcony, about our evenings on the steppes, about the elegant trio on an autumn morning on the Champs-Elysées…
Her face screwed up into an expression at once scornful and anxious. Her lips trembled.
"Are you sick or what?" she said, interrupting me in that slightly nasal tone that girls on the Mountain of Joy adopted to rebuff unwanted attention.