Olga drank the infusion in her room. As she put the bowl on her bedside table she heard the voice of the "little bitch" once more: "You've got all the quirks of an older woman. Your bowl; soon it'll be little medicine bottles, a shrine for your declining years…" But the words hurt less than usual. For now she knew the hiding place of the mocking voice: in the great mansion during a party, where a twelve-year-old girl was discovering the cavernous complexity of life. As she ran through the corridors there was, among other things, the servant she caught drinking champagne from the guests' glasses… Now her thoughts were quite confused: "It's really effective, this infusion," she had time to say to herself. "I must recommend it to Li. She stuffs herself with sleeping pills and then cries in her nightmares…" Sleep overcame her so quickly that her hand, stretched out toward the lamp, stopped halfway.
On Monday morning at the library there was a constant procession of readers, as if they were deliberately conferring outside the door and coming in one after the other, each to tell her their story. And indeed for a number of them, solitary and often ashamed of their solitude, the library was the only place where there was someone, she, Olga Arbyelina, to listen to them.
The first to come was the nurse from the retirement home, the "Russian retreat" located on the ground floor of the former brewery. A tall, dry woman, whose youthfulness had been overlaid by the air of arrogant and peevish mourning she had imposed on herself. She wore mourning for a person who had never existed and who had been born by chance in conversation when, to conceal her loneliness, she had hinted at a distant loved one, an English fighter pilot, about whom she could not say very much in wartime, for obvious reasons. From one admission to the next this phantom had lived his invisible life, blossoming with a multitude of details, in the heart of the woman who had invented him, adding to his exploits, being promoted… His life had inevitably come to an end at the end of the war. Otherwise she would either have had to admit the lie or else transform him into a lover who was in no hurry to return to his beloved… None of the Russian émigrés at Villiers-la-Forêt was taken in but in the end they became rather fond of this pilot, shot down in one of the last battles of the war…
Scarcely had the door closed behind her when it opened again. A man came in looking over his shoulder and continuing his conversation with someone in the corridor. He did not break it off but simply directed his remarks at Olga as she sat behind her display shelf. This made no difference to the sense of his tale because it was always the same story, with no beginning and no end, and could be heard at any given moment. The former cavalry officer was telling the tale of his fights with the Bolsheviks. Single combat; offensives involving several divisions; ambuscades; and the wounding and deaths of horses that grieved him, it seemed, even more than those of his best friends… From time to time his interminable harangue was interrupted by the hiss of a saber cutting into the flesh of an enemy. His face contracted into a savage grimace and he shouted out a brief "s-s-shlim!" and rounded his eyes at the same time, imitating the expression of a decapitated head…
The readers came in, leaned their elbows on the display shelves, commented on the books they were returning, asked for advice and embarked ineluctably on their own stories… Not all, however. One of them, for example, was discreet and swift. Olga called him the "doctor-just-between-ourselves" in memory of their first encounter: one day he had treated her son, but as he left he had murmured, "I should like this to remain just between ourselves. You know, practicing illegally in this country…"
Shortly before closing time Olga had a visit from the pretty young woman, who two years previously had married an elderly art collector, the owner of several galleries. For a woman who had spent her youth in the poverty of the Caravanserai, had worked there as a waitress in the canteen, and had the banal name of Masha, this marriage seemed like the arrival of the handsome prince, even though her husband was neither handsome nor a prince but ugly and morose. The Russians of Villiers-la-Forêt tried to turn a blind eye to that side of things, knowing how rare miracles, even imperfect ones, were in this world… Masha's tale consisted of a catalog of Parisian personalities whom she had met in her husband's galleries. The all-too-visible effort she had made to memorize all their names, often classy aristocratic names, was as great as the one she was making now to refer to them with worldly indifference. It seemed clear that if she came back to Villiers-la-Forêt and to the Caravanserai from time to time, it was to relish her wonderful deliverance from such places, and from her wretched past; to stroll about among all these people, as if through a bad dream, but one from which she could awaken at any time, by going back to Paris…
The director of the retirement home was the last one to come that day. She had to wait patiently for Masha to finish her list of celebrities. When the latter had finally left the room, she exhaled a noisy sigh of relief.
"Phew! And I thought it was people of our generation who couldn't stop talking. Looking forward to old age when there's nothing else to do… But you heard that chatterbox. I'm sure it would take the two of us a week to get through as much gossip as that."
The director's words turned into a whispering inside Olga's head that nagged at her all evening. "People of our generation… looking forward to old age…" It is in such trivial conversations, thanks to a chance remark, that the truth can be laid bare and wound us mortally. Of those two women, Masha and the director, she naturally felt she was closer to the former, who was thirty-five or thirty-six. Yet here was the latter, who had long since passed fifty hustling her along, she who was only on the brink of forty-six, toward this "looking forward to old age."…
In the bathroom she spent a moment studying the mirror. "In fact it's very simple," she told herself. "Hair like mine turns gray quite early. I should explain to everybody: you see, I have hair of this type but I'm not as old as my hair looks…" Then she shook her head to banish the stupid vision of a woman pleading that she had unusual hair.
As she went into the kitchen she saw her infusion cooling in the little copper saucepan and suddenly experienced a gentle sense of relief that came from resignation. Yes, to resign oneself, to settle down into "looking forward to old age," with little, slightly eccentric rituals. To grind down one's former desires into tiny particles, very light, readily accessible-live these evening moments of vagueness in the soul, like the slender trickle of liquid she will shortly pour into the bowl…
Olga herself did not understand what it was that suddenly rebelled in her. She acted with the zest of the very first, still unconsidered impulse. The infusion was poured down the sink, the sediment of petals gathered into a lump and tossed through the open window. She thought of Li and said to herself that it was thinking of her that had provoked her rebellion: "She's older than me (again that arithmetic: three years older!) and yet she's embarking on a crazy project. On a new life!"
She was seized with the slightly nervous gaiety of someone who would have liked to thumb her nose at sober citizens. "Li really is a hell of a woman! She sure has guts," she kept repeating, pacing up and down her room. Then she stopped, snatched up an object, rubbed it, as if to remove the dust, adjusted the little cloth on the pedestal table, tugged hard on the corners of the pillow. "That Li!" Suddenly the great leatherbound volume caught her eye. The camera! The spy camera Li had lent her, forgotten since then, had almost been transformed, through the habit of looking at it, into a quite ordinary book in the row of other books. As her fingers manipulated the nickel-plated mechanism of the fake book Olga felt them tingling with gleeful excitement. She switched out the light, put the camera on the shelf, and pressed the smooth catch on the top as her friend had instructed her…