I remember, too, one of the last times (perhaps the very last) I spent reading in Alexandra's company. That evening at the end of March, it stayed light for a long time; we could drink our tea and read without lighting the lamps. Sometimes a train would go by and in its lit sleeping compartments the lives of the passengers could be covertly observed: a woman tucking in a sheet on her berth, a young man, his hands held up like blinders, his brow pressed against the window, as if he hoped to see those he had just left behind… Alexandra had opened the window, the mild air brought in with it the pleasantly bitter scent of the last mounds of snow, the swollen bark of the trees. The promise of spring. I thought of this as I observed Alexandra reading aloud, the ghost of a smile playing over her lips. For the first time I thought about what a woman could feel at the coming of a new spring. A woman of her age. Or perhaps age did not count?
The book she was reading came from the devastated library, the accumulation of volumes by forgotten authors that had included "The Last Square." This one was a collection of short tales, interesting only for their elegant construction, maintaining the suspense for the space of half a page before the final triumph of Good. I was listening, lulled by all these predictable happy endings, when the next story, even shorter than the others, suddenly upset all these neat narrative rhythms. A young man falls passionately in love with a young woman, as cruel as she is beautiful, he declares his love to her and offers her his heart. "No, my dear, I already have your heart. To prove to me that you love me truly, bring me your mother's heart. Yes, rip the heart out from her breast." The lover runs home, stabs his mother, makes off with her heart. In his haste to satisfy his beloved, he stumbles on the journey, falls, and drops the heart, which lands among stones. The lover groans, gets up, and suddenly hears an anxious voice, his mother's heart speaking: "You're not hurt, are you, my son?"
I had no memory of getting to my feet, leaving the room, running. Quite simply, after a total loss of awareness, I found myself standing in the sealed-off room, to which I had gained access by going out onto the landing, sliding along against the wall of the house on an old skirting board, and pushing open the door. There I was, biting my lip until it bled, so as not to howl, my eyes seeing nothing at first, then seeing the space outside the door: the fields blanketed with tired gray snow, the dull sky, spring. A world at once perfectly familiar and unrecognizable. Alexandra did not call me, she left me alone, waited quietly for me to come down. And never referred to that story again.
Many years later the difference between one's mother tongue and an acquired language was to become a fashionable topic. I would often hear it said that only the former could evoke the deepest and most subtle – the most untranslatable – ties that bind our souls. Then I would think of maternal love, which I had first discovered and experienced in French, in a very simple little book, its pages tarnished by the fire.
UNDER the sun's blaze, immense slabs of ice slid down the river, collided, broke up, revealing their greenish rims, sometimes several feet thick. Just as we were crossing the bridge a section of floating ice struck one of the pillars. The roadway shook beneath our feet. The impact made an explosion of sound. Breaking rank, we rushed over to the handrail. It was giddy intoxication: the dazzle of the shafts of light, the wild chill of the liberated waters, the brutish power of the ice floes, rearing against the pillar, jolting upward in spasms. On the opposite bank, looking like black ants, children played at rafting, leaping from one slab of floating ice to the next. As the white surface broke up, the young daredevils would dash onto the broadest fragment, which in its turn disintegrated, now driving them back onto terra firma, now, for the wildest of them, onto a slab whose instability demanded the contortions of a tightrope walker. Seen from the eminence of the bridge, these games were reminiscent of the flickering of a kaleidoscope.
During those spring months our own life, too, was reminiscent of a kaleidoscope where the tube has been shattered so that, bit by bit, the glass sequins and mirrors spill out. Events followed one another, not so much leading us on to the future as draining our years in the orphanage, down to the last fragment of a dream.
During the course of a few weeks, several people ran away – really ran away, never to return – one of them ending up, so we learned, in the Far East. Then, just before the May celebrations, one of the girls was escorted by the director into an ambulance parked near the entrance. It was difficult to grasp that an adolescent of fourteen, a thin girl with drab features, was about to become a mother, and that since the previous autumn she had been carrying this other life within her and had contrived not to give herself away, while we scribbled on the pages of our textbooks and told jokes about Brezhnev.
On one of the first evenings of May, it became clear to me that the world of other people was going to exact a tribute from us. I was leaning against a tall table beside a kiosk where they served beer. I had no money, but as long as the serving woman did not notice my presence, I could listen to the customers' conversations. They were almost all men who, before returning joylessly to their homes (I was discovering that a family home could be joyless), were here flaunting their virility, discussing women (two categories: those who "did it" and the rest), and cursing the injustice of fate. There were not many women in this male preserve. Only one that evening, two tables away from mine. The man with her was addressing her in tones of such contempt that it was as if at every word he was gathering up his saliva to spit. At one moment he struck her with a dry, furtive little slap. She turned her face away, I recognized her. It was Muza, a girl from the orphanage, three years older than me. She may have had some Caucasian or Tartar blood in her veins, for her features were remarkably finely formed, one of those faces whose nobility and harmony make one doubt the animal origins of the human race. No one among the pupils at the orphanage had ever ventured to court her. For us, such a degree of beauty placed her in another living species, somewhere between a snow-laden branch and a shooting star…
There were not many customers; the booth was about to close. I could clearly hear the words the man was hissing through his teeth: "You'll go just where I tell you, you dirty little whore… If it weren't for me you wouldn't even have anything to cover your ass with…" Muza shook her head in protest. At this, with a hate-filled grimace, the man very calmly pinched her lower lip, thrusting his finger into her now distorted mouth. He was twice her age and his beige suit and the color of his sparse hair made him look like a long cigar with the tobacco spilling out of it. She tried to break free but he squeezed her mouth more violently, preventing her from speaking. With this thumb thrust in behind her cheek she managed to mumble in pitifully comic tones: "I know where to go, I do. I won't sleep in the street…" He released his grip, sneering as if disgusted: "Oh, sure! Go back to your filthy hole. They'll soon be kicking you all out…" She began to weep and I was struck by these tears, for she sobbed like a woman already mature, already wearied by life.
The waitress made half a dozen empty tankards clink as she picked them up with fanned-out fingers. "All right, you. Finish your popsicle right now or I'll call the militiaman. He's not far away. Beat it, before I get angry!"
I walked away regretting that I had not intervened, with that feeling of shame every man experiences a dozen or more times in his life. This particular time would remain one of the most painful for me.
I was not alone in having seen Muza in the company of the man who looked like a beige cigar. Some days later one of the boys claimed to have spied on them in a boat moored upstream from the orphanage. Despite the salacious exaggerations in his story, I believed him, for the behavior of the beige man as he described it corresponded precisely to what I had seen. Stuttering with excitement, he described the man seated in the boat with his pants unbuttoned and his lower abdomen exposed, whistling to himself, while Muza, on her knees, had her head pressed against his stomach, although her hair made it impossible to see anything. Proud of his success, the storyteller went over the scene once more, described how the man stared at the clouds and whistled to himself, while the woman's mouth was distorted by the strenuous thrusting… Village, who never took part in our discussions, suddenly broke into our circle and, without saying anything, struck. The storyteller collapsed, his arms flailing. His lips bloody, he got up, hurled an oath, and fell silent as he met Village's look. A look not threatening, but sad.