To my extreme amazement, the door to the izba was not closed. The steps and the threshold of the house were Ht with a soft light. First of all I heard a light knocking, a series of little taps, the sound generally made by a hatchet when you cut small sticks to light the stove. Yes, someone was chopping wood and had opened the door to let some air into the buried izba. This familiar sound disconcerted me. Should I go down straightaway? Or wait a little?
It was at that moment that I heard her voice…
It was a song that seemed to come from very far away, as if it had had to cross infinite spaces before beginning to ripple through this snowbound izba. The voice was almost frail, but it had about it that remarkable freedom, pure and true, of songs sung in solitude, for oneself, for the wind, for the silence of the evening. The words matched the rhythm of the breathing, interrupted from time to time by the crack of split wood. They were not addressed to anyone but melted imperceptibly into the blue shadows of the cooling air, into the smell of the snow, into the sky.
I did not stir as I lent an ear to this voice arising from the depths of the snow.
The tale told by the song was simple. One that any woman might have evoked in the evening, her gaze lost in the fluid dancing of the flames. The despairing wait for a loved one; a bird flying away – happy bird! – over the steppe; frosts that burn the flowers of summer…
I knew the story by heart. All I was listening to was the voice. And now I understood nothing anymore!
Here was this voice, simple and soft; the sky whose darkening vastness was filling with the first stars; the pungent exhalation of the nearby taiga. And the solitary birch tree, its birdhouse still empty, this tree keeping an attentive silence in the violet air of dusk.
I stood upright above the passage and looked about me. The song pouring out beneath the sky, rising up from the purple shadows at my feet, seemed to forge a mysterious connection between the limpid silence of the evening and our two presences, so close and so different. And the more I became impregnated with this secret harmony, the more insignificant my febrile fantasies seemed to me. Within my tipsy young head all the arguments advanced in those debates that had obsessed me for so many days were slowly fading. Now came monotonous words, not unlike those of the old Chinese in our coach. Yes, they said, that's how life goes. Here's a red-haired prostitute whose body will quench the desires of young men and old, all of whom will die when their time comes; and another woman will come, brunet or blond, perhaps, and yet other men will seek in her body the elusive spark of love; there will be more winters and more mild spells. And more snowstorms and more summers as short as the instant of pleasure. And there will always be an evening in the life of this woman when she is seated before the fire, softly singing a song that no one will hear…
Thus spoke the impassive voice of Asia in my head.
Another interrupted it, murmuring: The first time, you were naive and unaware; now try to enjoy your desire as you have conceived of it; your understanding of your desire, the triumph of your intellect. Take this body and the range of your sensations, and compose from them a beautiful love story. Tell it, recount it, think it!
The echo of these words fell silent… Moving away from the red-haired woman's izba, I went and sat in the snow, my back against the trunk of a cedar tree. I took off my shapka, I unbuttoned my sheepskin coat. The rippling wind froze my damp brow. A star low in the sky shone like a hesitant tear. This moment in my life had the fragile purity of a tear too. This whole nighttime universe was like a living crystal, suspended on the fluttering eyelashes of an invisible being. I felt I was being watched by that person's immense eyes. I was inside this fragile tear, within its limpid destiny.
The distant voice of the red-haired woman floated up from the narrow passage. That woman "with her great faded body, her face eroded by the eyes of all the men who had thrashed around on her belly. That woman who waited endlessly for a train to nowhere, with her carefully trimmed photos and her wine-soaked tears…
She was all that. And she was quite different. The voice that soared up toward the trembling of the first star. The white plain overlaid with the blue transparency of the night. The scent of the smoke from the rekindled fire. And those immense eyes that filled the whole vastness of the sky.
My eyelids trembled; everything melted, was troubled. Something warm tickled my cheek as it ran down…
I had never before returned to the village in the middle of the night. I had never spent so long walking on the long ridge of snow above the Olyei, in the shadow of the sleeping taiga. I made slow progress, with no thought of any danger or of the invisible presence of wolves. At moments like this, man is in the hands of destiny, guided by the moonlight like a sleepwalker… I tried hard to remember the red-haired woman's face. In vain. Where I looked for her features there appeared the dim oval painted in watercolors. Suddenly the memory of the photos returned. A young woman holding a child in her arms, her silhouette against the sunlit grass, the glittering of a river… As I walked along, I was looking at these smiling eyes.
And like a monogram detected in the middle of tracery, the dull oval ht up, suddenly became clear. The red-haired woman was looking at me with the eyes of the young stranger in the photos. Her face of long ago returned. In my memory of her.
On my return, my aunt said nothing to me. She opened the door, trying not to meet my eyes, and went back to bed, thinking, no doubt, that I was returning from my first erotic rendezvous, my first adventure as a man…
I woke in the middle of the night. As I slept, I thought I had finally understood why the little birdhouse persistently aroused some vague memory in me. It was because it had been constructed with great care and delicacy. The walls, the sloping roof, and the perch were ornamented with fluting carved in wood. It reminded me of the trimmed edges of the photos. These were the vestiges of a hoped-for life that someone had wanted to be beautiful, even in the trivia of existence. "How he must have loved her, that woman!" I whispered softly in the darkness, surprised, myself, by these words.
Several days later, in the blazing sunlight, the village broke loose from its moorings: the Olyei was on the move, shattering its ice, hurtling southward. Toward the river Amur.
Intoxicated by the luminous freshness of this motion, we were overcome with vertigo. The sky turned upside down in the cascading torrent. Our izbas sailed along amid snows still intact, between the somber walls of the taiga.
We were all three of us there, gazing at the slow slide. Utkin stood a couple of steps behind us. It was the first time after all those years that he had come out to see the breakup…
But here the unleashing of the springtime spate had none of the devastating power of the Amur. Nor was there anything symbolic about it. It was quite simply the disintegration of the river's winter shell. A shell of days, memories, moments, taking itself off toward the south amid the melodious creaking of the ice floes and the lapping of the liberated torrents, bombarded by the sun's rays.
As the slabs of ice floated by, we saw the marks of our snow-shoes and the holes made by our pikes. Then it was the turn of the Devil's Bend, the deep ruts dug in the snow by the wheels of heavy trucks, and the stippling with black oil…
Suddenly there was an unexpected commotion. A broad section of ice near the little izba bathhouse detached itself, slid down onto the shore, and joined the general convoy. Our eyes were riveted to its angular surface. On it one could see distinctly, molded in the snow, the imprints of two naked bodies. These were the ones left by Samurai and myself on the occasion of our last nocturnal bath, two days previously – the marks of our mute ecstasy as we gazed at the starry sky. These two bodies, with their long legs wide open and their outstretched arms, moved off slowly toward the mighty river. Toward the sun of Asia. Toward the Amur…