She was not at all surprised to see a man appearing slowly in this swirl of white, in the middle of the avenue. She was astonished neither by his giant stature nor by the poverty of his clothes: you could see at a glance that the fabric of the long greatcoat of military style had been darned and patched. Beneath this worn garment a powerful but abnormally emaciated frame could be discerned. He was not wearing a hat, the snow had mingled with his gray hair.
His actions did not seem outlandish to her either. He stopped, set an old traveling bag on the ground, and went to scrape up a handful of snow from the seat of a bench. Then he carefully massaged his face, washing it with the ball of ice that was melting in his hands. Took out a handkerchief, wiped his brow, his cheeks. Picked up the bag and walked toward the entrance of the building.
She made no movement, only let her gaze travel around her, like one who wakes up in a strange place and tries to identify it. It was no longer a secret refuge lost in the labyrinths of that mansion of long ago but simply the top of the building, a narrow loft where she had acquired the habit of coming, prevented at first by the staff, who feared a suicide, then ignored by them. Broken chairs, old newspapers, that pile of yellowed paper from which she extracted the pages for her notes…
Already a woman's voice 'was repeatedly calling her name from the bottom of the staircase…
She knew in advance what the man who had just washed his face with a fistful of snow was going to tell her. He would begin talking at once, as he walked down the avenue, then sitting on the seat in a railway carriage, in a hotel room, in a café, later in some ephemeral dwelling that, for a time, would give them the illusion of a home of their own… He would go on talking during all the years that were left to them to live. And the feeling that she knew it all as soon as he started speaking would never leave her. She would listen to him, weep, signal to him to be silent when the grief was unbearable, but all, absolutely all would already be known to her, endured a thousand times in the course of her nocturnal wanderings along the deceptive corridors of life.
She would know, she knew already, that the émigrés, the moment they returned to Russia, had been stripped of their luggage, screened, loaded into long boxcars. And that it was on the day of the first snowstorm that they had separated father and son. The adults had continued their journey farther eastward, crossed the Urals, traveled up beyond the Arctic Circle as far as the camps of the far North. Young people who had not reached the age of sixteen were considered still capable of purging their "bourgeois past" in reeducation centers. It was at the moment of separation that the father, after a solitary and futile rebellion, had almost died under the heavy rifle butts of the guards…
She would also learn that Li had followed the same route to the North. And that her painted panels had been thrown into the snow behind the railroad station where they were sorting out the prisoners.
For a while the vivid colors of these panoramas were to be seen amid the frozen wastes: a pianist in tails accompanying a monumental prima donna; two vacationers beneath a tropical sun… But little by little the local inhabitants had carried these panels away and burnt them during the great frosts at the end of the winter.
She understood that not knowing what had befallen her son was for her the only chance of believing that he was still alive. And the more improbable this hope was, the more confident she became. He was somewhere beneath the sky; he saw the trees, the light, heard the wind…
One day she finally decided to speak in her turn. She knew that for the man to understand her she must tell everything in a few brief words and speak no more. And then speak again, until her words became fire, darkness, sky… Until that other life, the one they had so clumsily sought together, and that she had so briefly known, was finally made manifest to them in the fragile eternity of human language.
He opens the gate at the moment when the aureole of the streetlamps is beginning to waver and is extinguished. For some moments the darkness seems to have returned. I look back: the door to the keeper's lodge has been left open; and I can see the lamp that lit up his face all through the night. Our two chairs. Our cups on the table. And all about the little house dark tree trunks, the upright stones of monuments, tombs, crosses…
He stays beside me for a moment between the two halves of the gate. Then shakes my hand, moves away, and soon disappears among the trees.