She was no longer capable of thinking or remembering. The past assaulted her eyes, her face, with brief clusters of lights and sounds…

A man, handsome, and with a giant's frame, getting into a taxi. The guilty one. Her husband… Before slipping into the vehicle he turned and, guessing with ruthless accuracy the window from which she was secretly watching his departure, gave her a military salute as a clownish gesture of good-bye. And in the days that followed, a child dressed up as a soldier stood at attention in the hall of that Parisian apartment, listening for the familiar footsteps on the stairs…

She did not even have time to grasp how the departure of this man and his mocking salute were connected with the terrifying night she was living through. Already another fragment from an even more distant past was surging up. A man who thought he was dying struggled to master the trembling of his cracked lips and confess his crime to her; he had escaped execution (the hydra of the counterrevolution, he whispered) by thrusting a comrade to his death… Yet this deathbed penitent was the same character as the one who only months after that confession would be directing his ironic military salute at the woman hidden behind the curtains. And the same who in earlier times leaned with all his weight on a roulette table in a room where the smell of cigars mingled with that of the sea at night. The same, only a little younger, who wore an officer's uniform, four St. George's Crosses on his heart, and listened with a solemn and bitter air to the singing at the Russian church in Paris, clutching a candle too slender for his powerful fingers. The same who…

Other masks slipped onto the face of the officer listening to the funeral service. They came around again more and more rapidly. The man saluted the woman behind the curtains, settled onto the seat in the taxi, and closed his eyes, letting his head tilt gently backward, following the motion of the vehicle… No, it is no longer he but the dying man, his head tilting back as he slumps onto the pillows with a mournful groan… No, it is the man at the casino, emitting a guttural laugh, his head flung back, his fingers clutching the last bill left to him… These same fingers knead the wax of a candle, for it is now the officer, tilting his head back to contain the tears in his eyes that are like two brimming lakes…

Olga tore herself violently away from these memories; the sequence of these metamorphoses was already becoming lost in sleep. "Both of us are guilty," she heard herself whispering. Once again, no thought could explain when, how, or by what error she had ended up surprising that young adolescent as he pranced nervously beside the kitchen range. And then, quite simply, those words, "both of us," suddenly brought back to her the sour smell that lingered on the ground floor of an apartment building in Paris and floated heavily upward as far as their apartment on the third floor: a pungent smell, suggestive of pieces of fish vitrified in the fierce hissing of rancid oil… They are returning from the hospital. The child has finally been able to get up and take several steps, with outstretched arms to give him better balance. They have promised to go back the next day… On the staircase there is this smell. "It's always going to be like this," they each tell themselves inwardly. Each suspects the other of thinking the same. The apartment door has hardly closed before the argument erupts. "A wasted life," "cowardice," "patience," "after so many years," "melodramatic," "for the sake of the child," "you're free," "death." The words, too familiar to wound, are marked this time by their tone of finality. If only their weary fury could be interrupted by a single second of truth they would have to tell one another: we are at each other's throats because of the foul smell of frying on the staircase…

So everything had been prefigured in that greasy stench. A week later her husband would become that man giving her a farcical salute before plunging into the taxi.

"We are both guilty."… The proof had been found. With an instinct as deeply rooted as the instinct for survival, she grasped that she must leave it at that. Not seek anything else. And already the reek of burned fat that still lingered in her nostrils was fading, becoming distilled, taking on the perfume of fine cigar smoke, swirling in nacreous spirals in the vast hotel room with windows open onto the Mediterranean night, onto a eucalyptus tree whose foliage rustles in a warm wind glutted with rain… He has laid his cigar down on the marble of the fireplace, he laughs. His whole giant's body is shaking with very youthful laughter. Youthful with drunkenness, with carelessness, with his desire for her. He pulls wads of bills out of his pockets, they litter the carpet at his feet, slip under the bed, whirl in the breeze that stirs the air in the room that is lit by a great glass chandelier. "Did you win?" she asks him, also infected by his merriment. "At first I won; then I lost everything and was ready to hang myself- or at any rate to drown myself, that would be a better joke! And suddenly that brigand Khodorsky arrives, bringing all this! A month ago we sold a house near Moscow to an Englishman, do you remember?

Ha ha ha! And what kept me from going straight back to the tables was that I was too hungry for you…"

She is only half dressed, as she often is when awaiting his return, not knowing if he will come back with the hangdog expression of a bankrupt or drunk with gambling and laughter, like today, unloading from his pockets the booty that will grant them a lease of another week or two of the airy and frivolous merrymaking that is their life… She keeps some garments on her to the end, others-like the corset with snaps that click as they open-are hurled away, and land on the carpet of crumpled bills. Lifted into the air by this giant, she, who looks tall, suddenly feels weighdess, fragile, and totally engulfed by him. Standing there he appears to be pounding his own belly with this woman's body and it now seems slight and compact in his enormous arms. A pump dangles, suspended at the end of her foot, and falls, turning over several times. That evening, like so many others, will only remain in her memory because of a thought that suddenly rips into the pulp of her pleasure: "All this will have to be paid for one day…" She utters an even more vibrant moan to drive the specter away. The man lets her fall back onto him in the frenzy of a climax reaching its peak…

"Both guilty"… The long eucalyptus leaves rusde as the wind gets up again. The smell of the cigar grows lighter, refines its substance, changes into the smell of incense. The candle he is holding drips wax on his fingers. He tilts his head back, his eyes brimming with tears. She watches him out of the corner of her eye and cannot forestall that mocking young voice that rings out inside her head: "Are you sure he's not acting?"… A year later he throws back his head, collapses onto the bed, dragging her with him, still bound to him by pleasure. On top of this great male body, still tumultuous with love, she surfaces, slowly draws away from him, observes his fearsomely powerful hands, abandoned in the folds of the sheets. One of them comes to life, gropes toward her, finds her breast, squeezes it with blind and loving violence… The fingers knead the wax of the burnt-out candle. Then they gather to slap her and lash her cheek. Still later they mime a military salute. And make a rapid sign of the cross over a child stretched out on his hospital bed. And…

All she could see now was this flotsam of gestures, bodies, lights. Everything grew fluid as she looked at it. Herself? In her rambling she now latched on to this ultimately certain, indisputable point. "I am the only guilty one." She and the youth caught in his criminal act; there was nothing else, no intermediary. She was guilty of rejecting the apologies of the man on his knees who had just struck her. And before that guilty of not saying, "It's the smell of frying fish that's making us get mad at each other: let's drop this pointless argument." Guilty at the hospital of not saying to herself, "I could forgive this man a great deal for that sign of the cross coming from a nonbeliever like him." And before that, guilty of enjoying the warm evening breeze that stirred the noisy eucalyptus leaves, and guessing that the blind hand was approaching to bring erotic torment to her breast. And a few minutes earlier when she heard a voice within her saying, "This will have to be paid for one day," guilty of thinking, "I don't care," in reply to somebody who seemed to be waiting for her reply. Guilty of not believing in those eyes uplifted toward the roof of the church. Guilty of being herself, as she was.