Her eyes resting on the boy's deformed face struggled constantly against growing accustomed to it: not to accept this puffy mask, to wipe it clean with the intensity of her look. She turned the compresses on the swollen brow, lifted the blanket and wiped away the trickles of sweat on his chest, in the hollow between his collarbones, on his neck. And each time she touched him, simply and almost without thinking, it woke the seething nocturnal visions within her, drew her toward a winter's night, toward a carnal encounter that was increasingly frenzied, increasingly real… Even the town outside the dark window, shimmering in a beam of light, was also an improbable ghost town, with its gigantic ruin of the wrecked bridge and the station from which, for several days now no trains had departed. "Rail strike," she repeated mentally, and the words murmured above this body on fire betokened a wide-eyed, intelligent madness… She looked at the thermometer (one hundred and four degrees, fever, as an hour earlier), switched off the lamp, closed her eyes.
When he became delirious in a headlong, seething hiss, she failed to wrest herself from sleep immediately. Listening to him, she believed she was still in a painful and confused dream. Little by little his gasping words formed into a confession that only delirium could have brought to the level of his lips. She did not so much hear but- with each painful whisper-saw a place materializing that it took her only a moment to recognize…
… It was a little ground floor apartment crammed with a jumble of furniture. A woman, youthful again, in her long black dress. A boy watching the woman's final preparations. She puts on the earrings that cast iridescent gleams onto her neck and her bare shoulders. The bell rings at the front door, she kisses the boy, who is already bedded down on the armchairs pushed together as a makeshift bed, and goes to open it. Mingling with the warm, piquant perfume she gives off as she passes, he can smell the damp odor of the street and the strong, invasive scent of the intruder's eau de cologne…
The sick boy's voice petered out in a series of brief, sibilant groans. She changed the compresses. The swelling of dark, shining blood had extended toward his temple. The right eye opened for a moment but did not focus on anything, flitted onto the lamp, onto the hand that was applying the icy cloth to his brow. Almost at once the delirium started again. Eventually she could even grasp the words that were being swallowed up in the hissing spasms of the fever.
… It was still the woman in evening dress getting ready to go to the theater and waiting for the man who was supposed to come and fetch her. This time she and her son are sitting at table drinking tea. Half an hour later, as she puts on her earrings in front of a mirror she suddenly feels pleasantly weary. She sits down on the little sofa and even decides to lie down for a few moments while awaiting her companion's arrival. Sleep overtakes her before the end of this thought…
She changed the compresses, already burning hot, shook the thermometer, inserted it with care. The whispering still emanating from his dry lips had become indistinct.
And suddenly he began to cry out in an almost conscious voice. In his cry the woman in the black dress suddenly found herself half naked, laid out in sinister beauty, for she was dead! Dead, dead, dead…
He repeated the word "dead," choking violently, shaking his disfigured head and scratching at the blanket with his fingernails.
Dumbfounded, powerless, she knew she should get up, run to the book room, wake the doctor. But then he would have heard this all too clear delirium! And guessed everything!
The cries ceased abruptly and a second later the doctor-just-between-ourselves opened the door. "Ah, he's found his voice, our young man." He grunted and yawned elaborately.
An hour later he operated. He had flung back the curtains with energetic abruptness, admitting a still pale dawn, unhoped for in that room that seemed doomed to darkness… He made incisions, removed blood clots, swabbed. And gave a commentary on his actions in an almost tender voice, all the time using Russian diminutives, even for the scalpel, the swabs, the saline. She felt as if she were watching a game, and participating in it when from time to time she passed him a bottle, a syringe…
When he left he kissed her hand and promised to come back at noon and even to stay and "browse" (a wink) in the little book room if need be…
She spent the afternoon sometimes in the boy's room, sometimes, when he slept, sitting on the front steps that were all overgrown with wild plants. What the night had revealed to her was unfolding now in a clear and definitive sequence of scenes…
… It had been in the spring of the previous year, possibly exactly a year before. Generally, when she went to Paris with her son, L.M. invited her out to the theater. Or at least, when he invited her, she came to Paris, left the boy at Li's, and came back to collect him in the morning. On that occasion Li had been away and the boy was to spend the night on his own. It was hard to guess how deeply he detested those theater evenings; those nights (when, in theory, his mother came home after the play); and the man who rang the doorbell… Li used to take sleeping drafts-the little sachet that made her vague when she woke up.
"What if you took two of them?" he asked one day.
"Oh, I shouldn't wake up till noon."
"Three?"
"I should sleep like a dead woman."
That evening he emptied three sachets into the cup of tea that the young woman in her black dress was about to drink… An hour afterward he lived through long, frightening, and delicious minutes. The doorbell rang impatiently, furiously; he even heard several oaths, then a drumming on the shutters. The woman lay stretched out on the sofa, her impassive and remote beauty untroubled. There was a squeal of tires as they pulled away outside the window, soon lost in the other sounds of cars in the street… There he was in that little sitting room lit only by a table lamp, a room cluttered with curios, books, and icons… And in the middle of it this woman, this stranger whom he found it impossible to recognize as his mother. Her face was disturbingly youthful; a little capricious crease that he had never noticed before gave a slight upward lift to the corners of her mouth. The curve of her body expressed a strange expectancy.
And apart from the fine haze of perfume he detected quite a new, carnal scent about her, more a ghost than a scent, that filled him with wonder and almost hurt his lungs… He did not yet know how to assess the deepness of her slumber. Ready to take flight at the first flicker of her eyelashes, he stretched out his arm, touched her hand that lay on her stomach, then her shoulder. Then, emboldened, telling himself that, if need be, he would have a good excuse for waking her, he touched the delicate hollow hinted at between her breasts, the beginnings of which were revealed by her décolletage. He had always been fascinated by this spot on a woman's body. She did not stir… Already uneasy, he brought his ear close to the sleeping woman's face. And could hear no breathing. He remembered Li's words: "I should sleep like a dead woman!" Dead! He jumped up in a panic, thought of running to the kitchen to fetch water, then changed his mind. He had seen or read somewhere that doctors put their ear to the patient's chest and even massage it in order to restore breathing. With trembling fingers he unfastened two hooks on the crossed flaps of the décolletage, laid bare a shoulder, then a breast, pressed his ear to it… Finally stood up with a singing in his ears, his breathing irregular. And gazed at her endlessly, this woman unrecognizable beneath her light makeup, with her hair piled high, her black velvet dress, and, above all, her nakedness. This woman who should have belonged to another and who now remained with him, so deliciously accessible to his eyes, to his caress…