The cause seemed to me just. I loved being awakened by these trains shrouded in mystery.
That night I missed the passing of the nocturnal train. I sat up in bed as the last of the flatcars was already slipping by under the window. All I could make out was the unusual size of the devices being transported: the covers reached up higher than our first floor. "Maybe they're rockets…" I thought, still half asleep, and remained like that for a while, listening to the slow fading of the sound. The night, as so often after the February thaws, was icy and clear. In the upper part of the window, where the fronds of frost had not made inroads, the darkness gleamed like clean-cut granite flecked with mica. Between two stalactites of ice that hung from the gutter, a star stood out clearly, alive and aware of our lives, of the existence of this old wooden house, suspended in total isolation in the somewhat terrifying splendor of this animated sky.
The final reverberations of the rails fell silent, the stillness was about to become absolute. And it was then that I became aware of a barely perceptible murmuring that still clouded the settling of the silence. I pricked up my ears and recognized Alexandra's voice, or rather the shadow of Alexandra's voice. The ceiling was faintly tinged with the glow of her night light. Embarrassed at overhearing this whispering, I was about to get back into bed when I suddenly thought I heard my name. "Perhaps she's having a heart attack," I thought, "and hasn't the strength to call out to me…" Anxious, but not wanting to give myself away, I delicately pushed aside the tired satin of the curtain… In the corner of the room, on the other side of the wardrobe that formed my cubbyhole, I saw an old woman seated on her bed, her feet, below a long nightdress, resting on a small rectangle of carpet. At first she seemed like a stranger. Her white hair was undone and reached her shoulders. Most striking was her pose: her head deeply bowed, her fingers pressed against her brow. Among her faint, tremulous words I once more caught my name…
I did not think, I did not say to myself: "A woman saying her prayers." What occurred to me at that moment was much less considered. My whole being was filled with an awareness of the infinite night in which our house was adrift, the depth of the darkness, of the icy expanses of sky and earth, and, at the heart of this gaping space, of a woman, giving voice to my presence in the universe.
The night light went out. I lay there, unsleeping. Amid the early-morning uproar of the trains, it struck me that she had been murmuring those secret words in her mother tongue.
During the days that followed, when I had managed to find the language to understand that night, I recalled the priest's litany, his quavering voice that had displeased me. Among others, he had called on us to pray "for those who have no one to pray for them." This form of words, incomprehensible to me at the time, now seemed poignantly apt. Knowing nothing about religious practice, I saw prayer as, broadly speaking, the act of thinking about a person, picturing them lost and isolated under the sky and, by this thought, reaching them, even if they were unaware, especially if they were unaware of it.
"… Who have no one to pray for them." In the gray light of a dawn slow to appear, I helped Village retrieve his fishing lines, all of them without a catch. So the little wood fire he had just lit would serve no purpose. "The months with an Y in them are no goddamned use for fishing," he explained, making light of it. We had, in fact, reached the first days of March. The setback did not seem to affect him. He sat down on the carcass of an old boat, took out a hunk of bread, and offered me half of it. The river was still covered with a white carapace. Above it the clouds were beginning to turn pale. He ate, and then he became still, silent, his gaze directed beyond the river. I looked at him attentively, insistently even. "… Those who have no one to pray for them," I thought again.
"So, do you want to go and see her?" he said suddenly, without looking at me.
"See who?" I asked, perplexed.
"Don't talk crap. You know very well. That nurse."
"Why should I? You're crazy."
He said nothing, his eyes once more lost among the bushes along the riverbank. Frantically I racked my brains over what it was in our talks together that had betrayed me. Nothing. And everything… Every word, every gesture.
"Give me your hand," he said in almost brutal tones. He got up. I held out my right hand; he pushed it away, seized my other hand, and, before I could react, slashed the palm with a lump of ice, or so it seemed to me. No, it was a five-kopeck piece, sharpened into a razor blade. The shallow cut glistened, began to bleed.
"You can tell her it was that rusty pile of crap…" I stood there, irresolute, looking now at him, now at the thread of blood. "Go on," he said more softly, without brutality, and he gave me a kindly smile, such as I had never seen on any face at the orphanage.
At the infirmary I was plunged for several minutes in that hypnotic state the woman's slowness caused to reign about her. A blissful state for me, a blend of maternal gentleness and loving tenderness.
Nothing now remained of Samoylov's collection of books in the sealed-off room, apart from volumes badly damaged by the fire. My hands covered in ash, I was trying to resuscitate them, chiefly out of respect for their infirm state. Often, reading became impossible. I would just have time to focus on a page scorched by the fire when it would disintegrate in my fingers, carrying away its contents forever. Thus it was that I read, without being able to reread, a short poem in which the scenes depicted were strangely in harmony with the fragility of this single reading. I did not know the author, doubtless one of the obscure poets on the fringes of the romantic movement. Samoylov's library, assembled with the omnivorous appetite of a neophyte, was well stocked with these names neglected by the anthologies and might well, I would tell myself years later, have formed the basis for an original history of literature, almost parallel to the one that is taught and honored.
The poem had as its title "The Last Square," probably borrowed from Victor Hugo, echoing the warlike epics of the early nineteenth century. The soldiers in their ranks in this square were falling one by one, under attack from an enemy more numerous and better armed. The hero expressed only one fear, that of seeing his companions weaken. They stood firm, however (a couplet would come back to me one day in which "batterie" [the battery] rhymed with "fratrie" [brotherhood]), closing rank in the square to fill the gaps left by the dead. At the end only two were left, the hero and his friend. Back-to-back they fought on, out of pure gallantry, each one fearing to leave the other on his own. When finally the warrior's heart was pierced, he looked around, and in his friend s place saw an angel whose powerful wings were flecked with blood.
The page crumbled between my fingers like a fine sliver of slate. This ephemeral aspect reinforced the impact of the words. Few lines of verse have remained so vividly in my memory as these unknown stanzas.