She knocked at the house of the "doctor-just-between-ourselves." He opened it at once, although it was past midnight, as if he were expecting her visit. As he walked along with her, he kept up a conversation with professional sagacity about "the harshest winter for a hundred years." All the time he was operating, as on previous occasions, he gave vent to little whispering laughs. It was as if he did not believe what he was being told and had his own opinion on the boy's illness. "It's nothing at all, really nothing at all," he repeated, without interrupting his chuckles. And, just as before, he accompanied his actions with patter, like a fairground magician. "Now then. First of all, all nice and neat, we dra-a-a-in off all the fluid, like so-o-o-o! And now a mag-ni-fi-cent saline dressing…" Before leaving he leaned his face toward the boy and, still in the style of an illusionist, proclaimed, "And tomorrow you'll be back on your feet, all right? Like a real trooper." As he went out he said again, but this time in his normal voice, "Naturally, all this is just between ourselves."
Next day the boy got up… She noticed that it was only at these moments of unexpected and unhoped-for recovery that she prayed. The rest of the time her inner vows took the form of a continuous babble of words that she was scarcely aware of anymore. Her rare conscious prayers, on the other hand, included violent threats to the one they were addressed to and demanded a complete turnaround in her son's life, an impossible rehabilitation that must be possible because it was her son. And so that evening, with her face pressed into her hands, her lips dry with the whispering of silent words, she implored, insisted on a miracle… Later on, during the night, now calmer, she realized with bitter sadness that this miracle was linked to that strange personage, the "doctor-just-between-ourselves" who had opened his door to her, wearing an old, neatly pressed tuxedo, with a bow tie beneath his Adam's apple, just as if at midnight, in the dark and icy fortress of the Caravanserai, he were preparing to go to a party. "A poor madman, like all the rest of us here," she thought. The words of her feverish prayer came back to her now as a weary echo. Listening to them, she reluctantly admitted to herself that her secret hope was at least to delay the arrival of the next relapse, the next hemorrhage. Just to win a few days' respite, during which she could live with the illusion of a successful miracle, without feeling too ashamed of her weakness.
It was during those days, one evening, that he appeared in her room again…
The last week of the year was always a very singular time in the lives of the inhabitants of the Caravanserai. The days that came after Christmas and New Year's Day seemed suddenly to backtrack, for the Russian Christmas and New Year came two weeks later than the French celebrations and created the illusion of a fresh end to the year. This delay gave rise to an astonishing confusion in time; to a parenthesis that could not be found in any calendar; to a delight, often unconscious, at not being a part of the life that resumed its sad rhythm in January.
In that winter of 1947 those two lost weeks between the holidays, in the last days of the Russian December, seemed to the émigrés even more empty, even more detached from the ordinary life of Villiers-la-Forêt, than usual. On the ground floor occupied by the retirement home, in a small hall next to the refectory, they had brought in a Christmas tree, as they did every year. But this time there was nothing festive about the presence of the tree in this bleak, cold building: it felt more as if the forest were invading an abandoned house. One evening as she was leaving the library, Olga came upon a man twirling softly in front of the tree in the darkness. Hearing her footsteps, he fled. She realized that he had been waltzing all alone by the light of a candle fixed lopsidedly to one of the branches. She had an impulse to blow it out but did nothing, thinking that the man might perhaps be waiting for her to go before resuming his solitary twirling…
One day, on a particularly cold morning, she went into the lower town in search of bread. As she left the Caravanserai she noticed that her own footprints on the smooth surface of the snow were the very first of the day. The bakery was closed; she had to go all the way up to the one located in the upper town, next to the church. She tried several times to button up the collar of her coat, but her numb fingers no longer obeyed her, and the wind came streaming in at her unbuttoned collar, up her sleeves. Speaking to the baker's wife, she suddenly felt dumb, her frozen lips articulating with great difficulty. The woman listened to her with the exaggerated and scornful patience people have for stammerers, then held out a round loaf to her. Olga did not dare to say that she had asked for something else. And all through the day at the corners of her mouth she retained that painful sensation of congealed words.
That night, for several eternal seconds, he slept pressed against the inert woman's body-against herself.
This, too, was one of those days lost between two calendars, a day of pale colors, hazy in the cold and the wind, a long twilight that lasted from dawn until dusk… As the night began she saw him appearing once more on the threshold of her room. She molded herself almost effortlessly into the temporary death that made her body limp. He lifted her arm carefully, to rearrange it, and it fell back with the soft heaviness of sleep. This death only required one thing of her: to feel totally removed from the stealthy rearrangement imposed on her body; from the caresses, barely perceptible and always seemingly amazed at themselves; from the whole slow and timid enchantment of gestures and held breaths. Yes, to distance herself from her body, to be intensely dead within it…
An infinitely remote sound, the chimes of a clock lost in the night, reached her in her death, woke her. Her eyelashes quivered, creating a fine, iridescent chink. She saw. A candle placed on the floor in a narrow china mug, the fierce flickering of the flames behind the stove door… And these two naked beings that she contemplated with a gaze still removed, external, like someone observing them from outside, through the window. The body of a woman lying on her back, tall, beautiful, in perfect repose. And, like a bowstring suddenly slackened, the body of a youth, fragile and very pale, stretched out on its side, the head tilted back, the mouth half open. He was asleep…
During the few moments that this sleep lasted, she had the time to grasp everything. Or rather all that she would sense next morning and reflect on in the course of the days that followed, all already foreseen, was condensed in her eyes, still dazzled by their ability to remain wide open. She understood the tiredness beyond human endurance of this young body, the exhaustion accumulated over weeks, months. This brief, trancelike swoon after countless nights of wakefulness. Thanks to this momentary collapse, she believed she could plumb the abyss he bore within himself, without ever letting anything show. He had fallen asleep as children do, in midgesture, in midword… The distant striking of the hours fell silent. Now there was just the tinkling of crystals against the window, gusts of invisible air coming warm from the fire and cold from the window, and the subtle scent of burning wood. And these two naked bodies. Located beyond words, outside all judgment. The mind could brush against them, situate their whiteness in the shadows, in the silence, in the penetrating aroma from the fire; but shattered against the threshold beyond which it could articulate nothing more.