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Her blood flowed in my veins. Her breathing filled my lungs. Her body writhed into me. When I kissed her breast I was drinking the foam from the snowy clusters in the orchard. I thrust myself into that nocturnal space through which the wind had traveled, perfuming itself with a thousand aromas, carrying away with it the pollen of coundess flowers. She cried out as she sensed the peak approaching, her nails tore at my shoulders. A crazy liana intoxicated with the sap of the trunk it held entwined. I flooded her, I filled her with myself. In her I touched the giddy depths of the sky, the cool of the dark waves. Her heart was already beating somewhere beyond the nocturnal taiga…

The wind scattered white petals over our bodies as we lay there in the blissful exhaustion of love. The wood fire we had lit on arrival flared up at intervals into a tall red plume, then quieted down, stretched out on the ground in the silent glowing of its embers. The boat fastened to the steps of the izba, washed occasionally by a wave, gave out a whisper, followed by sleepy lapping. And the hammock, the hammock of our crazy fantasies, swung about our heads amid the bubbling foam of the blossom. It looked like a fantastic net hurled into the dark heavens by a demented fisherman so as to make a catch of quivering stars…

On a gray, calm day in July that same summer I was walking in the streets of Nerlug, a bag of provisions in my hand. The gardens were spilling their abundant foliage over the fences. In the courtyards you could hear the lazy clucking of hens. The sparrows bathed in the warm dust at the sides of the little streets. Everything was so familiar, so ordinary! There was just me, carrying within me, through this tranquil day, the trembling immensity of my first love.

I was waiting in Une with several women in front of the ticket window in the little building at the bus station. Filled with my secret fever, I did not at first pay any attention to their talk. Suddenly the name of the Redhead broke in on my blissful oblivion.

"But what could he do? They fished her out a good three miles below the bridge. Doctor or not, what do you expect him to do?"

"I don't know… Artificial respiration, maybe. They say that helps."

"Well, she was completely rotten already, that one, I tell you. And if it wasn't that, it would have been syphilis or some such…"

"She had it coming to her. When I think of the number of folk she passed on her filth to…"

That last observation seemed to the women too harsh. They fell silent, lowering their eyes and turning away, but internally they must have approved of the remark. It was then that an old woman with fine, pale lips, who had so far said nothing, began to talk, giving little chuckles as if to relax the atmosphere: "I've seen her. , hee, hee! I've often seen her at the train station, that one! She was real crafty, I can tell you. More than most. All the time she pretended she was waiting for a train. She went this way, she went that way. She looked at the clock. As if she was a passenger. , hee, hee!"

"Some passenger! A filthy cow!" cut in one woman, adjusting the straps on her knapsack. "May God forgive me, but I tell you she had it coming to her!"

I left my place in the waiting Une and pushed open the door. As I came away, the sound of that little laugh grated in my head like ground glass… I went to Kazhdai.

I did not have the courage to go right up to her izba. I saw the door barricaded with two long crossed planks, the window with its panes broken. The branches of the birch tree held hidden within their foliage the light, tuneful lives of several invisible birds. A pure and delicate song in this silent garden…

I left, taking the same route as in winter. But at this season the plain that led down to the Olyei was all covered with flowers.

The death of the red-haired woman – or rather the conversation about her suicide – decided me: I must go away. Leave the village, escape from Nerlug, never again set eyes on that country where ultimately the saga of the old Chinese would triumph over the elegance of the Western World and its adventures. Where in some dark corner of a bus station you would hear the grating of ground glass. And once Belmondo had gone again, this grating and grinding would crop up all over the place. It would be the sound of the heavy boots of prisoners taken out in serried ranks to do hard labor; the strident screaming of the saws biting into the tender flesh of the cedar trees; and the clatter of the coupling between the coaches on the Transsiberian – which no one would wait for in Kazhdai anymore. This grinding would once more become the very stuff of the harsh life of all who lived here. Of those, in fact, who did not know how to escape it by fleeing west of Lake Baikal, west of the Urals, beyond that frontier, invisible but so substantial, with Europe.

Yes, I had decided to flee as quickly as possible. I wanted to tear myself away from the liana that penetrated further into my body every night. Flee my love. My mute love. My beautiful Nivkh upturned onto me the starry sky that flashed in her slanting eyes, she drew me in a giddy tumble through the wind of the steppes. Her love mingled our cries with the bellowing of the stags in the moonlit forest skirts; our bodies with the wild flow of the resin on the cedar trunks; the beating of our hearts with the throbbing of the stars. But…

But this love was mute. It did without words. It was impenetrable to thought. And I had already had my European education. I had already tasted the terrible Western temptation of the word. "What is not said does not exist!" this tempting voice whispered to me. And what could I say about my Nivkh's face with its Buddha's smile? How could I focus my mind on that fusion of our desire with the mighty respiration of the taiga and the waves on the Olyei without carving everything up into words? And killing the living harmony?

I aspired to a love story. Told with all the complexity of Western novels. I dreamed of breathless confessions, love letters, seduction strategies, pangs of jealousy, intrigue. I dreamed of "words of love." I dreamed of words…

And one day when we were walking in the taiga, my Nivkh suddenly went down on her knees and carefully parted the tangle of leaves and the tufted layer of moss. I saw a plump brown bulb, from which grew, balanced on a short, pale stem, a flower of an unspeakable delicacy and beauty. Its oblong body, transparent mauve, seemed to be gently quivering in the half shadow of the undergrowth. And as always, Nivkh said nothing. Her hands thrust into the moss seemed to be faintly illumined by the calyx of the flower…

I had made up my mind. And as the intensity of our longings logically gives rise to coincidences that do not occur at normal times, I soon received apparent encouragement…

When I got back from Kazhdai I took a crumpled newspaper out of my shopping bag. It was a rare newspaper, impossible to find even on the newsstands of Nerlug. One of the papers we were always so pleased to pick up off the seat of a bus or in a station waiting room. A Leningrad Evening News, left behind, no doubt, by some traveler whom a bizarre chance had brought to our doomed territories.

I read all four pages straight through, leaving out neither the Leningrad television programs nor the weather reports. It was odd to learn that two weeks previously, in that fabulously distant city, it had rained and the wind had blown from the northeast. It was on the fourth page, between the help wanted and the advertisements for the sale of pets (poodle puppy, Siamese cats…), that my eye lit upon these few lines surrounded by a decorative border: