No, the Amur had no interest in contemplative intellectuals. It seemed to be motionless, so slow was its nocturnal gestation. What you saw was an expanse of snow opening up like gigantic eyelids. The black pupil – the water – appeared, expanded, became another sky, a sky upside down. It was a legendary dragon awakening, slowly shedding its old skin, its scales of ice, tearing them from its body. This worn skin, porous, with greenish fissures, formed into folds, broke, hurled fragments against the pillars of the bridge. You could hear the noise of the powerful impact as the current made the walls of the coach vibrate. The dragon uttered a long dull hiss, scraping up against the granite of the pillars, tearing away the smooth snow from the banks with its claws. And the wind carried in the mists of the Pacific – toward which the dragon's head was flowing – and the breath of the icy steppes, where its tail was still lost…
Gradually coming to myself again, I looked at the Western Woman. Her face impressed me with its complete calm. The spectacle, it seemed, amused her. Nothing more. As I observed her, I sensed, almost physically, that her transparent aura was much more impenetrable than I had believed. "It's the breakup on the river Amur," one could read on her lips. Yes, that night was labeled, understood, ready to be recounted.
Whereas I understood nothing! I did not understand where the titanic breathing of the river ended and my own respiration, my own life, began. I did not understand why the light on the knee of an unknown woman was such torture to me and why it tasted the same in my mouth as the mist saturated with marine smells. I did not understand how, knowing nothing about this woman, I could feel so intensely the velvety suppleness of her thighs, imagine their golden softness under my fingers, under my cheek, under my lips. Or why to possess this body hardly mattered once the secret of its golden warmth had been divined. And why spreading this warmth into the wild breath of the night already seemed to me to be an infinitely more vital prize…
I understood nothing. But unconsciously, I took delight in it…
The last pillars of the bridge marched by. The Amur vanished into the night. The Transsiberian entered the dense silence of the taiga.
I saw the nocturnal traveler stub out the rest of her cigarette in the ashtray fixed to the wall… Without closing the door, I began to hurry back through the coaches. I knew that I was returning to the East, Asia and the interminable tale of the ageless Chinese. A life where everything was both fortuitous and fated. Where death and pain were accepted with the resignation and the indifference of the grass on the steppes. Where a she-wolf brought food every night to her six little ones whose paws were bound with wire and watched them eat and sometimes uttered a long plaintive howl, as if she guessed that they would be killed and that their absurd deaths would shortly be followed by the death of their assassin, a cruel and absurd one as well. And no one could say why it happened like that, and only the monotonous saga in the depths of a crowded compartment could take account of this absurdity…
I walked along empty corridors and corridors where bare feet or feet in woolen socks stuck out; coaches filled with the heavy breathing and the groans of sleepers; and coaches buzzing with interminable stories of the war, of the camps, of the taiga – all those coaches that separated us from the Western World.
As I climbed onto the narrow plank of the luggage rack, I began to whisper in the darkness for the benefit of Samurai, who was stretched out opposite: "Asia, Samurai, Asia…"
A single word says it all. There's nothing we can do about it. Asia holds us with its infinite spaces; with the endlessness of its winters; and with this interminable saga that a Chinese, both Russified and mad – which comes to the same thing – continues to recount in his dark corner. This jam-packed coach is Asia. But I have seen a woman – a woman, Samurai! – at the other end of the train. Beyond the piles of dirty luggage and shopping bags dripping with melting fish; beyond the hundreds of bodies chewing over their wars and their camps. This woman, Samurai, was the Western World that Belmondo revealed to us. But you know, he forgot to tell us that you have to choose that coach once and for alclass="underline" you cannot be here and there at the same time. The train is long, Samurai. And the Western Woman's coach had already crossed the Amur while we were still getting drunk from its wild winds…
I was tossing these random remarks into the darkness without even knowing if Samurai could hear me. I spoke of the Western Woman, the light on her knee beneath the transparent patina of a stocking, such as we had never seen on the legs of a woman. But the more I spoke of it, the more I sensed the shimmering singularity of my encounter with her slipping away… In the end I fell silent. And it was not Samurai but Utkin (we were lying head-to-foot on our luggage racks) who asked in a nervous whisper: "And us, where are we?"
Samurai's voice answered him, as if emerging from a long nocturnal meditation: "We are the pendulum… between the two. Russia is a pendulum."
"In other words, nowhere at all," muttered Utkin. "Neither one thing nor the other…"
Samurai sighed in the darkness, as he turned over onto his back, then he murmured: "You know, Duckling, to be neither one thing nor the other is also a destiny…"
I woke with a start. Utkin had nudged me with his foot in his sleep. Samurai was also asleep, with his long arm dangling in space. " Asia… the West…" So all that had been a dream. Utkin and Samurai knew nothing of my encounter. I derived a strange comfort from this: their Western World remained intact. And in his corner the Chinese was still mumbling: "… And this neighbor, when he came back from the war, married another one; he has three big children already; and his first wife, his fiancee, he forgot her long ago. But as for her, she waits for him every evening on the riverbank. She still hopes he will come back… Ever since the war she's been waiting for him… waiting for him… waiting for him…"
3
14
The last time I went to Paris was in June 1914… My father thought I was big enough to go up the Eiffel Tower. I was eleven…"
That was how on an April evening, in an izba buried amid snowdrifts, Olga began her story.
Once we were back from our trip to the Western World – in other words, the Far East – Samurai had decided that we were ripe for initiation into Olga s secret life. He had revealed its significance to us in brief but solemn tones: "Olga is a noblewoman. And she has seen Paris…"
Taken aback, neither Utkin nor I managed to find words for the tiniest question, despite the crowd of queries buzzing in our heads. The reality of a being who had seen Paris was too much for us…
We listened to Olga. The samovar emitted its light hissing and its soft melodious sighs. The snow tinkled on the windowpane. Olga had swept up her gray hair into a becoming wave, held in place by a little silver comb. She was wearing a long dress edged with black lace, which we had never seen before. Her words were tinged with a dreamy indulgence that seemed to be saying: "I know you regard me as an old madwoman. Well… my madness consists in having lived through an era whose richness and beauty you cannot even imagine. My madness is to have seen Paris…"
Listening to her, we learned, with incredulity, of a time when the Western World was practically next door. People went there on vacation! Better stilclass="underline" just to climb up a tower!… We could not get over it. So the Western World had not always been a forbidden planet, accessible only obliquely, via the magic of the cinema?
No, in Olga's memories this planet was a kind of picturesque suburb of Saint Petersburg. And from that suburb there had one day come into her family a certain Mademoiselle Verrière, who taught the little Olga a language with strange r's, vibrant and sensual…