Very early in the morning Pavel got up, quite numbed by a night of watching, his head filled with fleeting visions of the day before. He slid open the heavy door of the freight car and suddenly stepped back a pace, alarmed, dazzled. Against a still-dark sky, beyond heavily wooded valleys, there gleamed the snowy peaks of the Caucasus, almost menacing in their beauty. Their faintly bluish bulk seemed to be growing closer with every second, towering over the train. And, thanks to their height, the whole space reared up vertically. It was impossible for someone who had always lived on the plain to imagine life at the foot of this silent grandeur.
The young woman came to the door as well and looked out, tossing aside her long hair which the wind blew in her face. Through the clattering of the wheels Pavel cried out in admiration. She nodded her head but expressed neither surprise nor fear. She seemed not to be interested in the snowy peaks on the horizon but was studying the wooded hills and the rare villages, still slumbering.
Pavel wanted to get off at the first opportunity, attracted by a large town the train stopped in for a few minutes. This vertical country seemed too foreign to him. The woman held him back.
They jumped from the car when the train slowed down on a bend as it emerged from a long tunnel in the middle of the mountains.
The woman walked quickly, climbing down the slope covered in trees and shrubs that were unfamiliar to Pavel. He followed her with difficulty, getting caught up in brambles that she knew how to avoid, slipping on little screes concealed beneath the heather. With no pathway the forest seemed virgin. Emerging onto the bank of a stream, the woman stopped. Catching up with her ("Does she want to shake me off or what?" he had said to himself a few moments earlier), and without being able to conceal his anxiety beneath a tone of bravado, Pavel asked, "So, are we going to climb up Kazbek mountain, while we're at it? Where are you taking me?" The woman smiled and it was at that moment he noticed how tired she was. Without replying she walked out over the pebbles and into the stream, plunged into it fully clothed, and remained still, letting the water wash her body, her face, and her dress with its frayed sleeves. Pavel wanted to call out to her, then changed his mind. He smiled and walked off toward the rocks that led into the river a little downstream. Everything suddenly seemed simple to him, as if foreseen by an unusual order of things that he had yet to fathom. He undressed behind the rocks and slipped into the water. The sun was already at its height and roasted their skin. Their clothes dried in a few minutes.
During this halt on the bank he learned what he had already guessed. The woman was a Balkar. One of those Caucasian people deported in 1944. Some of them had tried to return secretly, but were caught well before they had seen the snow of the mountain peaks.
She showed him her village in the distance: a deserted street, orchards with branches bowed down to the ground under a vain abundance of fruit, and in the yard of one house, hanging on a line, a row of washing in tatters.
For reasons of prudence they settled several miles from there. From time to time Pavel went down into the empty village where he found a few carpenter's tools, a box of nails, an old tinder box. One day he saw wheel marks imprinted in the thick dust of the road. He identified them as a military four-wheel-drive. The months passed, the vehicle did not reappear. He said nothing to the woman. "My wife," he often thought now.
The shelter they had built in the rocky fold of a valley was a day's walk from a little town with a railroad station. It was from this town that Pavel sent a letter to Sasha. She was the only one to know of their secret life. The only one to come and see them once or twice a year.
She came, too, for the birth of their child and stayed longer that time. One evening Pavel was returning from the beehives set up on the other side of the valley at the edge of a chestnut forest. He crossed the stream, carrying a pail filled with fresh honey on his shoulder, and stopped to catch his breath at the foot of the little slope that led up to their house. Through the half-open door he saw the figures of the two women. Sasha was standing, a candle in her hand, his wife was sitting down, her face bent over the child. He heard not the words but just the music, slow and even, of their hushed conversation. He thought of Sasha with the wistful gratitude inspired by a person who expects no word of thanks, who never even thinks of such a thing, and who gives much too much for it ever to be possible to repay her. "If she were Russian she would never have dared to come here," he said to himself, realizing that this was a very imperfect manner of expressing the woman's nature. A foreigner, she took greater liberties with the weighty laws and customs governing the country: she did not consider them to be absolute, so they ceased to be absolute.
From the place where Pavel had stopped he heard the rippling of the stream, the supple and resonant murmur that filled their house at night, merging with the sounds of the forest, the crackling of the fire. Below the rock, facing their house, the water was smooth and very black. The sky tossed into it the reflection of a constellation that swayed gently, changing its shape. He was amazed to think that man needed so little in order to live in happiness. And that in the world they had fled, this little got lost in innumerable stupidities, in lies, in wars, in the desire to snatch this little away from others, in the fear of having only this little.
He lifted the pail and began climbing toward the house. His wife was standing on the threshold with their son in her arms. The child had waked up but was not crying. The stars cast a weak light on his tiny brow. They remained there for a moment in that night, without moving, without saying a word.
She who was telling me the story of Pavel's life broke off the narrative at this nocturnal moment. I thought it was simply a pause between two words, between two sentences, and that the past would once more come alive in her voice. But little by little her silence merged with the immensity of the steppe surrounding us, with the silence of the sky that had the dense luminosity of the first moments after the sunset. She was seated in the middle of an endless expanse of undulating grass, her head tilted slightly upward, her eyes half closed, gazing into the distance. And it was when I realized there was nothing more to come, that I suddenly understood: the end of the story was already known to me. I already knew what would happen to the soldier, his wife, their child. The tale had been confided to me more than a year before, one winter's evening in the great dark izba, the day when the words a youth yelled at me had almost been the death of me. "The firing squad gunned your father down like a dog." After that, from one Saturday evening to the next, the story had continued, giving me what I had missed most at the orphanage-the certainty that I had been preceded on this earth by people who loved me.
As I looked at this white-haired woman seated a few yards away from me, it was becoming clearer to me all the time that the real ending to her story was this silence, this tide of light hovering over the steppe and the two of us, bonded together by the lives and deaths of beings who now survived only in ourselves. In her words and henceforth in my memory. She did not speak but now I could picture her shade: in the depths of the house hidden in a narrow valley in the Caucasus. There she was, a woman holding a candle, smiling at a young mother as she walked in, carrying a child in her arms, at a man who was setting down on a bench a heavy pail covered with a cotton cloth.
Mentally I spoke her name, Sasha, as if to ensure that the woman sitting on the grass of the steppe beside me was one and the same as that other who had so discreetly, so constantly, threaded her way through the life of my family. At that moment she made an effort to get up, no doubt noticing that the night was drawing in. Clumsily, I hurried to come to her aid, to offer her my arm, sensing for the first time the frailty of her body, the frailty of age, which at fourteen one finds hard to imagine. In this hasty gesture my fingers grasped her injured hand. I felt an instinctive trembling, that decorous reflex certain disabled people have when they do not want to cause alarm or elicit sympathy. She smiled at me and spoke in a voice that had rediscovered its serene and precise tones.