She only remembered about it three days later when her rebellion, the night she threw away the infusion, already seemed remote and futile, as is often the case with big exalted decisions taken late at night about which you feel embarrassed next morning.

That day she had to go to Paris: someone had promised to introduce her to a leading specialist in diseases of the blood who could probably… Thus it was, going from pillar to post via slight acquaintances, that she continued her search for the miracle doctor that parents of doomed children never despair of finding… She knew she would be calling on Li and decided to take the opportunity to return her spy camera to her.

A week later she was extremely surprised to receive a little note that came with three black-and-white snapshots. "The first two didn't come out; there wasn't enough light," Li commented.

Olga spread them out on the windowsill and saw a vision of her own body that for several seconds took her breath away.

On the first photograph, in point of fact, she was not seen. The space was lit from the side and in the part that had come out you could see the cat, which generally slept in the kitchen. This time it was awake and seemed to have been caught red-handed in some mysterious nocturnal activity. Its ears were pricked up, on the alert for sounds, its eyes with pupils like razor blades were outlined against the weak light shining on it. Its whole body was tensed in preparation for a velvety, leaping escape… Olga was forced to utter a little laugh in order to rid herself of the disturbing impression left, for some unknown reason, by the attentive watchfulness of the cat.

As she examined the other two photos she remembered that on the night of her exuberant rebellion, when she had set the spy camera, she had had to get up to remove her nightgown and open the window, so warm was the September night. At that moment she had completely forgotten the camera hidden on the shelf. And yet the tiny lens had been activated and with perfect discretion had taken five pictures, at three-second intervals.

On the next photo Olga saw herself from behind, seated on the edge of the bed, her arm raised, her head swathed in the turban of the unwanted nightgown… On the last she was standing up in front of the French door, her body leaning forward, one hand surrounding her breasts, as if to shield them from onlookers, the other resting on the handle. The features of her face were not clear. Of her eyes the snapshot had only retained a triangle of shadow. But you felt that her gaze was filled with the airy silence of the night and that along the white curve of her arm there flowed almost palpable coolness.

This naked woman in front of the open door seemed very different from herself, a stranger to her. She could easily perceive the beauty of this body, its youthfulness, even; when she caught sight of the photo, it had taken her breath away. And something else, a singular element she could not define, a secret beyond words, the taste of which, like that of mint, froze her nostrils, made her gorge rise…

All the while she was examining the photos, the voice of the "little bitch" persisted in pointing out strange inconsistencies. "Why are the first two completely blank and the third one hardly lit while the last two came out?"

"Shut up. It's probably a defect in the camera."

"And why is the door open?"

"A draft."

"And the cat?"

"Shut up. I don't want to know anything about it."

This altercation did nothing to reduce her amazement at the woman in the photos. It was only late in the evening (she heard a slight sound from the direction of the boy's room and got up rapidly, ready to come at the slightest call) that the reproaches of the little bitch again reverberated in her mind: "All these photographs are very nice but you'd do better to think about your son once in a while…"

Olga did not reply. She went to the door, opened it, listened to the silence along the corridor. Their strange house consisted of this corridor with her room, the kitchen, and the bathroom at one end, and the boy's room at the other. A storeroom furnished with a tiny window was located halfway along it and served as a library. The boy called it "the book room…"

Hearing nothing, she went back to bed. What could she reply to the voice hounding her with its reproaches? Tell it that on the top shelf in the "book room," inaccessible to the boy, there were a good dozen volumes devoted to his illness. And that she knew every paragraph of them by heart, all the treatments described, the tiniest details of every stage in the progress of the illness. Reply that on occasion she had nightmares in which the course of the illness was speeded up and completed in a single day. But that to think about it all the time would not have been living; it would be losing one's reason and therefore not allowing the child to live. He needed a quite stupidly normal mother, that is to say unique, constant in her affection and her calm, constant in her youthfulness…

The little bitch was silent. Olga got up again (she was already regretting not having brewed up her infusion), went to the mirror, gathered up her hair in a thick tress, and began to cut it shorter with a large pair of scissors… She told herself that the photographs, the tales told by readers at the library, the endless arguments with the little bitch, the anxious arithmetic of women's ages, all this torrent that filled her days, was in fact the only way to avoid spending all her time thinking about the books perched on the top shelf in the book room out of bounds to the boy. To immerse herself in this torrent was her way of letting him see her as a mother like all the others. Of seeming to herself to be a woman like the others, in order better to play the part of that mother.

Before falling asleep she repeated several times in a silent whisper, trying to sound as natural as possible, "You know, perhaps we could go to Paris tomorrow or the day after, I'd like to show you… No! Look, we're going to Paris: I've been told about a doctor who… No. Someone who's a really nice man, a leading specialist in your… No. In your problems…" Generally her mind functioned without her being aware of it. Now she became conscious of this almost automatic mental process. "So I'm thinking about him all the time," she said to herself, as if she had won a bitterly disputed victory over the voice that persecuted her.

Next day at the library she was eager to be over and done with

the usual preparations for the start of the day. She could not resist the ludicrous impulse to spread out the three snapshots in secret behind her display shelf and examine them once more before the arrival of the first readers. Actually to examine them here in a neutral setting that ought to allow the photographs to be seen in an impartial light. An element in her desire to do this was that obsessive fascination of particular photos that one longs to keep looking at with the dependency of a morphine addict either to confirm that their mysterious charm has not vanished or, by contrast, in the hope of discovering some new detail in them that will transform their snapshot world.

She opened two parcels of new publications, but in her impatience decided to enter them later and began to clip the French and Russian newspapers into their rods. She generally took the trouble to leaf through them, though she was sure of learning their contents from the readers' interminable commentaries. This time she merely looked at the headlines on the first few pages, theft of duchess of Windsor's jewels… Josephine baker, officer in the resistance… algerian unrest: fever attack or growing pains… trains to run faster october 7: new drive by sncf, paris-bordeaux in 6 hours 10 minutes; paris-marseilles in 10 hours 28 minutes.

At last she was able to examine the three snapshots in peace. The beauty and youthfulness of the woman in the photographs fascinated her yet again. While listening alertly for footsteps outside the door, she studied this body, striving to be pitiless. But the unknown woman casting off her nightgown and in the next photograph standing in front of the window had nothing about her that betrayed a sagging, a decline. The back revealed beneath the nightgown was of an almost juvenile suppleness. And although this instant in her life was captured at random, the camera had recorded what in her own eyes distinguished her body from those of other women she had observed: ankles with very slender Achilles tendons, as if pinched between the thumb and forefinger of a giant sculptor; and also the delicacy of the collarbones, that looked as if they were too slender to support the opulence of her full, heavy breasts. One never knows, often until one's dying day, whether other people notice such features and appreciate them or judge them to be graceless.