She felt herself to be the focus of dozens of inquiring-or quite simply curious-looks. These excited spectators were attempting, as they might have done in adjusting binoculars, to bring together into a single focus the Princess Arbyelina and this woman clad in water-soaked rags, a woman who made no effort to cover up her breast that was streaked with scratches. Some of them, those who felt they knew her better, addressed her in hushed voices-as if sounding out the silence of a bedroom to see if the person in there is asleep… She remained motionless, seemed blind, inaccessible to words. Yet her eyes were alive, noting the new faces in the parade of gawkers, observing that the smear of clay on the man's forehead had disappeared, washed away, no doubt, at the moment of drowning…
But what could she say to those who, like the director, leaned toward her and murmured questions that were unbelievable in their human triviality, supposedly intended to bring her out of her state of shock? Shock… shock… shock, the voices kept repeating in all the little groups. She should have told them about that smear of clay, about the impossibility of wiping it away that she had experienced in the boat, yes, her inability to wet her fingers, to touch that brow. Told them, too, about that unique fragment of beauty that had, by chance, sprung from that hopelessly ugly man-the phrase he had uttered a quarter of an hour before his death: "And to think that these water meadows were all covered in snow…" But would they have understood? Perhaps only the old lady from the retirement home who suddenly went up to the corpse and removed a long strand of waterweed from its face. Whispered reproaches arose on all sides-nothing must move.
And nothing moved. The humid, stifling afternoon went on forever. The police arrived, the crowd regrouped itself. The days passed, but there were no nights. Always the same sun, the same lukewarm river, the same people, the corpse. The clothes it was dressed in gradually dried. And the scratches on the woman's breast ("On my breast," she said, but while recognizing herself less and less) closed up, faded…
The investigating magistrate questioned her in his office-and yet she was still that woman sitting on the riverbank where nothing had changed: the drowned man, the gawkers, and, from now on, this magistrate bending over the corpse, feeling the sides of the boat, going from one spectator to another and then stopping face to face with the half-undressed woman. He called this woman "Madame Arbélina"; she became it and, at least initially, even felt relieved to be it. It was thus easier for her to admit that she had detested Golets, that the idea of killing him had often occurred to her. And that she had in fact killed him, even killed him twice over, for first of all she had not wiped his mud-spotted forehead (and that gesture could have changed everything!); and later on, when he did not know what to do with the empty bottle and the moment of his death was approaching, she had remained absolutely passive, an accomplice as the minutes fatally drained away.
One day she felt she could finally relate the essence of the case to this man who listened to her with such interest. Visibly the investigating magistrate was beginning to realize that he had in front of him not a certain "Madame Arbélina" but a woman who carried within her strange winter nights and terrible fissures that an ordinary object, an innocent word, could cause to erupt at any given moment. Encouraged by his understanding, she talked about the inexpressible beauty of the winter she had just lived through; about the tiny pond with the trapped fish; about the branch forever letting its hoarfrost crystals fall… She lived again through those moments of silence and marveled to discover that her listener, too, went along with it more each day She was certain now that she could confide her secret to him…
So why did the stammerer suddenly appear, claiming to be Golets's best friend? Was she confronted by him, or did she learn of his existence thanks to the more and more numerous theories about the crime that had the Caravanserai, and indeed the whole town, in turmoil? She no longer remembered. In any event this Loo-loo's evidence turned everything upside down. Struggling painfully against his diction he testified: Golets knew that before the war Prince Ar-byelin had engaged in a dubious traffic in properties in Russia owned by émigrés and so… The magistrate considered this new theory to be fanciful. Golets scarcely knew the prince and would never have been able to prove in what way these sales were illicit…
It was she who saw in this testimony the destruction of everything she had built up, word by word, in her conversations with the magistrate. So Golets knew nothing about her winter nights. The threats he had made came down to that old secret of the estates sold by the prince. That was his ridiculous blackmail! While she, in her confusion, in her madness, had imagined this man lying in wait beneath their windows… No, he had seen nothing. But in that case his death that she had so desired, the murder she had confessed to the magistrate, was totally gratuitous. She had killed him for nothing…
Strangely, the magistrate listened to her this time with ill concealed impatience, frequently looking at his watch, acquiescing with a distracted air. And the clerk was absent. She insisted that she should be accompanied to the scene of the crime but met with a refusal, repeated her demand in categorical tones, explaining that they would be gathering crucial evidence for the truth, and finally she had her wish granted. Despite the late hour she went to the riverbank, found the exact spot where they had landed, indicated the position of their bodies on the grass, described the end of their meal… And suddenly noticed that she was alone on the bank, that the sun had long since set and that her explanations were being addressed to no one… In fact, they were being heard by several young ruffians who chased her, throwing lumps of clay at her and shouting obscenities.
It was probably on that evening, on the homeward path, that she met the stammerer. He told her they did not want his testimony either. And yet he had explained to the magistrate that Golets had kept himself to himself because he had a past to hide: as an army doctor he had been captured by the reds and had served in their army for two years… Thirty years ago.
They were standing facing each other in a street in the lower town that was already almost in darkness. She, her hair disheveled from running, her dress smeared with the mud thrown by her pursuers. He, small, frail, his face distorted by the impossibility of speech. Both of them felt intolerably mute. Finally he was able to gain control of the air stuck in his throat and exhaled in a painful groan, "Y-you-you k-k-killed him!"
After this encounter she did not go back home. It even seemed to her as if she never again saw the house tacked on to the wall of the Caravanserai. Inexplicably she had become this woman lying on a narrow, white bed in a small room where there was a smell of medicines in the air. Someone woke her, forcing her to abandon the comfortable absence of unconsciousness. She opened her eyes: she felt no surprise at seeing a man of about fifty, an inaccurate portrait, aged and tired, of her husband, and a grave, tense young man- the future portrait of her son.
Their appearance transported her into a distant life, a forgotten city, and, above all, into another body. They seemed not to notice that she had gone and continued to address this pale, immobile woman, deprived of speech. It was her husband who did the talking. She heard him from the depths of her fog, smiled at him, understood nothing… She had to sign a sheet of paper-the man guided her hand. When they took their leave her maternal instinct must have roused her from her unconsciousness. She heard her husband replying to her, "It's better like this. For him…" She understood that he was going to Russia and taking their son with him. "For a month or two," he said.