"The last snows… in Russia." She tried to hold on to the sound of the words in her mind, to make it last. And to say (to Li, or to someone else) what was out of bounds to words. "You see, I talked to you about my youth to justify myself. Everything was disintegrating, going off the rails, and our lives were a reflection of those sick early years of the century. We strove to resemble them. And so instead of living we played at leading unnatural, capricious lives. We were under the impression that alongside us, the normal life that we despised, because it was too rectilinear, continued in parallel and that we could always come back to it when we had had enough of our games. But one day I saw that my two lives had grown too far apart and that I must now follow to the end the one I had chosen for fun, in the defiance of youth. And I have lived this ill-chosen life, with my eyes fixed on the other one. And what is happening to me today- you've guessed, haven't you, without my explaining it to you, you've guessed everything and you haven't turned away from me-Yes, everything in the life I am leading now that is monstrous, criminal, odious, is in the very nature of this unnatural life… Tell me very simply what I must do. Tell me my face gives nothing away, nor the expression in my eyes, nor my voice. Do you think one day I may be able to look at those trees, those rails, that sky the way I did before?"
It was dark when she reached Villiers-la-Forêt. As she was removing her shoes in the hall she noticed that the pair of men's shoes had moved. "He must have tried them on again, looking forward to wearing them in the spring…" She pictured this very young man, slim, with dark hair, a pair of well polished shoes on his feet, preening himself in front of the mirror in her absence…
"All this is what madness must look like," she told herself, and went into her bedroom.
Two weeks later, one December evening, everything was repeated with infallible, fanatical precision: the hint of white powder on the surface of the infusion; the slightly mechanical stiffness of her hand as it poured away the liquid and washed the little copper saucepan. And in her bedroom, the familiar clock face reflected in the mirror, telling the time backward…
A slight tremor almost betrayed her. The response of her flesh- neck, shoulder, breast-to the burning touch of the icy fingers lightly stroking it had been too violent. She felt no connection with this female body. And in the purple void beyond her eyelids there stretched an unknown body. A body with the scent of hoarfrost brought in among the folds of a man's long overcoat… Her brief tremor and a repressed "Oh!" had risked revealing that she was not asleep. The fingers paused in their caress, then came to life again. She became yet more absent. Under the touch of the fingers that were slowly growing warmer, she discovered the delicacy of her collarbone and the dense weight of her breast as it held the caress. She lay on one side, her face half buried in the pillow. An ideal pose, she thought, for her pretense of sleeping, and one that allowed her not to be a part of what was happening to this woman's body as it was caressed. But suddenly the fingers pressed more firmly on her shoulder, then her hip, as if to turn her over. She felt feverishly present in this body once more; imprisoned in it. And, once placed on her back, she was too exposed, could no longer lie…
The fingers squeezing her shoulder relaxed their grip. A dry creak could be heard at the other end of the room. Without opening her eyes she recognized the sound. A burning log, as it collapsed, had pushed against the door of the stove. Between her eyelashes she made out the image in the mirror. A naked youth, crouching beside the stove, was gathering up small sticks, burnt out or still glowing, and tossing them into the embers…
In the morning when he came into the kitchen she noticed a discreet dressing on one of his fingers. "Have you cut your hand?" she asked him without thinking, as she would have done in the old days.
"No," he replied simply. "No…"
It took her some time to realize that after that morning their paths were crossing less and less often.
Several nights followed, calm nights, spent with her eyes open, only rarely punctuated with brief oblivious intervals of sleep. Her days, on the other hand, flew past in a state of distraught weariness, which was intruded on by the faces of the residents of the Caravanserai and the readers at the library. Eyes unbearable in their insistence; lips coming too close; words articulated with a slow, wet sucking sound that distracted her attention and left their meaning unclear. She would reel back and turn aside; then start talking to cover up her awkwardness. Her own voice deafened her, as if it were resonating somewhere behind her. And an obsessive thought, like a frayed thread being vainly thrust into the eye of a needle, revolved in her drowsy mind: "What if I made no more infusions in the evening? He would understand everything… No, I must continue but drink them in my room. No, I can't. He'll guess…"
The following evening she took the little saucepan into her bedroom. And a few minutes later, glancing through a half-open door, glimpsed a shadow flitting down the corridor and slipping into the kitchen. Or perhaps she just thought she glimpsed it? She was no longer entirely sure of what she saw. The next morning she did not find the little vessel on her bedside table. "So I didn't bring it," she noted, dulled by sleep; but then suddenly realized that the business with the cup went back to the night before, or even the night before that. In her memory the days overlapped, then disintegrated, revealing a glimpse of an opaque matter, without hours, without sounds.
And when one evening she again saw the fine white dust on the surface of the infusion, this did not seem like a repetition but rather the continuation of the action interrupted several days earlier, the night when the sparks from the firewood had burst out of the stove. And so, the icy fingers continued their pressure on her shoulder, on her hip. Her body tipped slowly onto her back… And her tiredness, her exhaustion were such that she did not have to feign sleep. For the moment she felt dead. In place of the confused thoughts, the feverish words that for weeks had echoed in her mind day and night, a heavy, regular sound took her over entirely-like the sound of the wind in the tall treetops in a forest in winter…
All at once this deathly calm was broken. Despite her closed eyes she saw, saw the room, the bed, their two bodies. Her fleeting death was at an end. A movement, a slight stiffening, she did not quite know what, must have betrayed her. She heard the rustling of footsteps, had time to glimpse a candle flame, a long flame spread out horizontally, sucked in by the darkness of the corridor.
It was this candle that allowed her to keep madness at bay. She would spend the morning explaining to herself in a quite measured way that on account of the power cuts everyone was reduced to using candles and that one must be wary of fires, especially in families with young children and that… She was afraid of deviating for a moment from the protective logic of these trivialities.
Over several days she would carry on her body the sensation of a supple and timid weight.
And then there would be a night when, without having drunk the infusion dusted with white crystals, she would fall asleep, no longer able to withstand the mountain of lost sleep weighing down her eyelids. She would fall asleep at the very moment when a candle flame appeared in the slow gliding of the door. And would wake a moment later, alone, in the dark. With a sick person's alertness she would smell the odor of the wick and the breath of cold, of ice, of night, that the long overcoat carried in its folds. And she would guess that the gaze that had just been resting on her had sensed the torment of her sleeping body and that his nocturnal visit had only lasted for a moment of brief, silent compassion.