Utkin never came with us. He washed at baths closer to his izba. He was afraid of freezing his leg.
The baths we went to every Sunday were not different in any way from the others. The little izba was divided into two unequal sections: a small entrance hall, where we left our clothes and our felt boots, then a square room with a bench along one wall and a great stove that heated an enormous cast-iron vessel. We filled it with water from the Brook. All around this bowl was piled up a great heap of pebbles, which quickly became burning hot and had to be sprinkled so that the room should be engulfed in hot steam. Finally there was a kind of little mezzanine, made from two wooden planks, on which you took turns stretching out while your companion whipped you with a bunch of fine birch twigs dipped in the bubbling water. These bunches had been hung up to dry since the summer, under the ceiling in the entrance hall. It was their leaves that, when swollen by the boiling water, made the whole room fragrant with their penetrating scent.
Yes, there was nothing special about the baths. Except that they were located not at the bottom of a kitchen garden but some distance from the village, on the riverbank where the Brook flowed into the Olyei. The izba had been abandoned for years. We had cleaned the great cast-iron bowl and repaired the sunken door. Once established as our Sunday headquarters, the bathhouse seemed to be preparing, through the alchemy of its vapors, for the astonishing transmutation of our bodies…
The cold was such that evening that when we arrived we could no longer feel our numb fingers.
"Forty-eight below!" Samurai exclaimed happily as he slid down the icy path that led toward our baths. "I looked as I went out."
"It'll go down to at least fifty below tonight, that's for sure," I added, understanding his delight very well.
The stars glittered with a shimmering, provocative fragility. The snow spurted up under our feet with a dry, sonorous whispering.
The door was frozen solid. We pushed at it with all our strength. It gave way with a rending squeal, like a smashed windowpane. We lit a candle stuck to the bottom of an empty can. Around its hesitant flame there glowed an iridescent halo. Squatting down, Samurai began to fill the stove: I tore off the birch bark that was needed for the first flames.
Little by little the icy interior of the dark room was coming back to life. Its somber walls, made of logs, became warm. Above the bowl a fine cloud of steam arose.
Samurai filled a ladle and sprinkled the pebbles. The angry hiss was a good sign. We went to undress in the entrance hall, which now seemed arctic…
A true bath should resemble hell. The flames dart through the little door of the stove. As the pebbles are sprinkled more and more copiously, they hiss like a thousand serpents. The planks become slippery. Movements, in the darkness, become clumsy. And as for the bunches of birch twigs, they are a veritable torture! But also an intense pleasure. It is my turn first. I stretch out on the narrow planks of the mezzanine, and Samurai begins to whip me with fury. He dips his bunch of twigs into the boiling water and lashes my back with it. I yell with pain and joy. The fine and supple twigs seem to penetrate between my ribs. My mind is dulled. The steam grows hotter and hotter. With satanic relish, Samurai continues to riddle my back with smarting stabs. Nor does he forget to empty a ladle over the burning pebbles from time to time. For several seconds the fresh cloud of steam hides my torturer…
At length my mind, annihilated by the excess of pain and pleasure, announced to me in its final message that I no longer had a body. It was true! Where my body had once been I experienced a blissful absence, a delicious void made up of misty shadow, of the slightly piquant aroma of birch leaves macerated in boiling water. And also of the rhythmic strokes of the twigs, which were now striking a vacuum, passing through me as if I were air…
At that moment, exhausted, Samurai stopped, let fall the bunch of twigs, and stretched out on the planks at right angles to mine. I performed my task while remaining a stranger to my body. It was my arms that rose and fell, flagellating Samurai's muscular back as he groaned with pleasure. Everything happened without my being aware of it…
Strangely enough, it was Samurai's great body that first revealed to me how naked flesh could be beautiful.
The steam was so burning hot that we could no longer breathe. Our heads buzzed, and red bubbles swelled and burst in our eyes. It was time to perform the essential act.
We opened the door to the room, then that to the entrance hall. We rushed outside under the resonant, trembling stars, into the dense cold of the night…
A second later we stopped, naked, at the base of the slope that led down toward the Olyei. One, two, three! and we flung ourselves backward into the virgin snow. We felt no cold. For we no longer had bodies.
The crystalline sound of the stars. The dull sound of our heartbeats. Our hearts seem as if they are abandoned, all alone, sunk in the pure, dry snow. The dark sky draws us into its abyss, crammed with constellations.
An instant… And then the wisps of steam that had been rising above us vanished. We began to feel our skin being burned by the melted snow, our shoulders and our wet hair being tugged at by the crust of ice already forming…
We returned to our bodies.
And jumping to our feet with one bound, so as not to spoil the fine imprints we had made in the snow, we ran toward the baths…
That evening Samurai was seated as usual in his favorite tub. It was made of copper that he polished from time to time with sand from the river: almost a little bathtub. He folded up his long legs and immersed himself. I stretched out on a bench.
The room seemed quite different after our mad excursion under the icy sky The heat was no longer suffocating but swathed our rediscovered bodies pleasantly. The scents were still vivid but more distinct, clarified. It was so delicious to inhale the warm, dry breath of the stones and then, turning one's head slightly, to ingest the scent of a bunch of birch twigs left in the bowl. And to follow the slow progress through the darkness of another odor, that of the bark burning in the stove.
After the frenzy of hell, after the moment of disappearance under the stars, this room, filled with a soft, warm half-light, would become a strange paradise for us as night approached. We would remain still for a long time, dreaming. Then Samurai would light his cigar…
He Ht one that evening too. A real Havana, which he drew out of a tube of fine aluminum. I knew cigars like that were sold only in the city, in Nerlug, twenty-three miles from our village, and that they cost sixty kopecks each, including the tube – a fortune! Four school lunches!
But Samurai seemed not to be concerned about the price. He stretched out his arm, seized the ax that was lying near the stove, and, resting his fat cigar on the flat edge of the bathtub, cut off a stray end with a swift and precise action.
After the first puff he settled still more comfortably into the water and announced without preamble, gazing up at the blackened ceiling of the izba: "Olga says that all those little muzhiks who smoke their little cigs, their stinking cigarettes, don't know how to live."
"How do you mean, they don't know how to live?" I asked, lifting my head up from the bench.
"They settle for mediocrity."
"What?"
"Yes, they all want to be average. She's got it right. They all imitate one another. An average job. An average wife. They're average in bed. Mediocrities, you see…"
"And you?"
"I smoke cigars."
"It costs more, is that it?"
"Not just that. Smoking a cigar is a – um – a… it's an aesthetic act."
"What?"
"How can I explain it? Olga knows how to say it…"
"Aesthet… What's that?"
"Well, it's the way. Everything depends on the way you do things and not what you do."