Olga was hardly listening to her. When Li stopped talking and they could not let the silence continue any longer, they both spoke at the same time, in a swift collision of words, looks, and gestures:

"You know, I'm leaving L.M. for good."

"You know, I'm going back to live in Russia."

Their expressions of surprise, their comments, also clashed in a disorganized exchange of questions and answers.

"In Russia? Do you really think your fantastic photos will appeal to them over there? All those satyrs…"

"Olga, I'm sure he still loves you. Read his last book again, it's you he's talking about… Why rush to break it off like that?"

"But, of course they will. It'll be a breeze. You know, Olga, under that regime they've become too serious. They need to learn to laugh again."

"But you see, when there are some little things you can't stand any longer, it feels as if it's all over. We always see each other in hotel rooms. Every time he brings me a pair of embroidered slippers, a kind of pumps made of fabric. When we part in the morning he takes them back until the next time. It's his talisman. I suppose the pumps stay hidden in a drawer in his desk… Do you know what I mean?"

It was only in the street, on her way to the station, that Olga had this thought: for months each of them had been preparing to announce her break with the past. The man, this L.M., that she was going to leave. The Russia that Li was going to rediscover. And when the moment had come they had announced it as one, in a confused, breathless, false exchange. As they said their good-byes they were each in a hurry to return to solitude to explore the other's sudden future-the "tragedy" pictured by Li; Russia, that white gulf that had suddenly become a possible destination. They parted and the real conversation began, in their minds, the endless discussion with the other's ghost. "That exchange of words in which we spend half our lives," Olga said to herself as she left Li's house.

The street did not liberate her as she had hoped. The two days spent in Paris were concentrated into a dull weariness, filling her head with a buzz of obsessions, ones she had returned to a thousand times during the operation. Obsessions not easily brushed aside, massive as tablets of stone, that constantly tormented her mind: her age; this hollow sham of an exhausted love, very probably her last love; the need to consider this life as the only possible one… And now the vertiginous nothingness of Russia, which took her breath away; she did not even know what to think of it.

In a passageway in the Metro, when changing trains, she noticed a little gathering, their heads raised toward a commemorative plaque fixed to the wall. She went up to it, read the inscription: "At this spot on August 23, 1941, Colonel Fabien shot and killed the first German…" The newspaper she unfolded in the train contained an account of the second anniversary of the Liberation of Paris. One of the photos showed Molotov with a sour expression on his face, leaving the official platform as a mark of protest. "That was yesterday," she thought, "while Li was operating on me…" She felt she had her finger on the very essence of life: its chaotic improbability, the farcical absurdity of all this intermingling of destinies, dates, chances…

She opened her bag and took out a thick leatherbound volume, the concealed camera that, with childish curiosity, she had asked Li to lend her as they said their good-byes. The leather smelled good and the object itself was alluring; it had the compact efficiency of an intelligent machine. Above all, it reminded her of the panels in Li's studio. The marvelous simplicity of their subjects. "One should live like those characters on the plywood," thought Olga, suddenly happy. "I make everything complicated, I can't leave well enough alone. All that rubbish about embroidered slippers! No, Li's right: two characters, one situation. She ought to paint me: a woman leaving her lover. On plywood, with broad brushstrokes, without psychology: because that's where all the trouble starts!"

This brief explosion of cheerful indignation gave her the energy to climb the staircase at the exit, to cross the square without collapsing onto the seat her eye had spotted. And even to silence the poisonous little voice that was hissing inside her head. "You're a tired old woman: you're putting up a brave front and breaking it off first so your lover doesn't kick you out." She managed to resist this voice and even to answer it back. "You bitch!" It was a young voice, coming from another period of her life, one of her former selves, that had not grown old and often irritated her with these cynical remarks. They were always woundingly accurate. "Little bitch, I'm going to have to take her apart one day…" she repeated, and these words kept at bay the tears of weariness that were already burning her eyelids.

In the train with its almost empty coaches the two days spent in Paris seemed to her very remote, experienced by someone other than herself. Days filled with feverish, excessive words and thoughts. A kind of flight forward, a spiral of errors that then had to be corrected by making further mistaken gestures.

Outside the window a drowsy dusk was slowly spreading. On the platforms of the little stations the sky high above was reflected in the puddles of water, mauveish gray, a wintry sky, you might have said, despite the warmth of that August evening and the dark, heavy profusion of the greenery.

The names of the villages followed one another in the agreeable procession she knew by heart: Cléanty, Saint-Albin, Buissières. From time to time the smell of a fire of fallen branches, burning at the end of a kitchen garden, came in at the lowered window, evoking a gentle life, tempting in its imagined simplicity.

It was in the midst of this deep tranquillity that her child, her son, returned to her thoughts. During those two days in Paris he had been in her at every moment, in every stirring of her soul, but protected, separated from what she was living through. Now he was there and it was he who brought this calm, in which she was slowly catching her breath as if after a long escape… She pictured him already returning next day at noon: with other children of Russian émigrés, from their holiday camp. More than a specific being, she felt him within herself rather like a very physical atmosphere, made up of a myriad delicate elements, a constant vibration of these delicate elements; a throbbing of the blood that must be listened to with a deep instinctive ear, on the alert for the slightest vacillation in this equilibrium. She heard his body; his blood; his life; the silent music, one false note of which could break the rhythm. She heard it, just as, on this return journey she heard the calm of the sky, the silence of the fields… She forgot Paris.

And she remembered how one day in the spring she had been cleaning the windows and he had almost broken one of them, heaving himself up onto the sill of a window that he thought was open because of its new transparency. The glass had resounded vibrantly but resisted. With a rapid movement she had pushed open the two halves of the window, and recognized in the frightened eyes of the child the reflection of her own alarm. It was as if they could hear the shattering of the glass, see a shower of sharp fragments. They knew what that meant for a child like him. "I only wanted to give you a hug…" he said softly and sheepishly climbed down from the window…

As she walked along the platform at Villiers-la-Forêt, where night had already fallen, Olga once more heard in her temples and in her throat (she never knew where it would be hiding) that mocking, aggressive voice she called the "little bitch." The voice told her this calm would be short lived, that new, petty, persistent worries would swiftly erode the serenity of the evening, and that… Olga managed to shake it off by tossing her hair back, as if all the better to feel the coolness of the rain on her brow.