But who was she? The woman hiding behind the curtains to watch a man leaving her. She, who later walked along that muddy road clutching the supple body of a slain bird in her hand. She, who felt as if she had spent long years rooted to the spot as she compressed the blood of an everlastingly fresh wound with paralyzed fingers. A woman who, years before this interminable vigil began, used to enjoy watching the movements of her companion's hands in restaurants, as they grasped a glass, prepared a cigar-hands that had just now been lifting her own body. A woman who when she saw the man in his officer's uniform tilting back his head could not prevent herself saying, "What little devil lurks within me? I have this mad urge to burst out laughing and hear the echo and see their shocked faces!" A woman in rags, covered in filth and lice, barefoot, swaying on an unstable gangway, staring at the water crammed with dead fish and rotten timbers, unable to understand that she is leaving Russia forever…

She felt as if she were running from one woman to the next; recognizing them; running straight through a day, a room, a compartment in a railroad car.

It was as she continued running that she realized she was still not asleep…

Then she pushed open the little window between the bookshelves. The freshness of the night made her nostrils tingle. The yellow light of the lampshade sealed off the darkness, made it gleam. There was just this bare branch reaching toward the window that emerged from the night, surprised her with its living, watching presence. And from this branch, from this breathing of the night air she derived a timid but intense happiness, like the end of an illness. The clock read: five past midnight. She was still not asleep. She had not fallen asleep. She was not sleepy. The young man whirling about by the kitchen range, the infusion, the reptile-so all that was no more than a delirium. Born in the head of a woman who would not accept her used-up life. A woman who still hoped. A woman who refused to look forward to old age and die before death came. It was a madness that had lasted for less than an hour and had taken her to the frontier of a deformed world from which there is no return. The bizarre and suspicious movement of the boy in the kitchen? No more than one of those eccentric, often crazy gestures people make when they think they are alone in a room. "The potbellied man on my desk, that ink blot I always hide under a book, is a little whim of the same kind. Our solitary hours are made up of such routines…"

She closed the window and sat down at the narrow table once more. The night spread out before her and seemed endless. An ample amount of unoccupied time, that was offered to her personally. Her thoughts now had the limpidity of extreme insomnia. It remained for her to understand how she could have imagined what she had imagined behind that harmless gesture of an adolescent boy. To understand her own life at last.

A very few days after this sleepless night that seemed to have dissipated her oppressive doubts for good, Olga was to guess why the sleeping draft had not taken effect on that November evening. She realized that the powder the boy emptied into her infusion had not had time to dissolve and that, in her haste to give the lie to her horrible intuition, she had swallowed the liquid without stirring it… She realized everything.

But such were the intensity and richness of her passion already, the immensity and purity of her grief, that the unveiling of this little secret merely surprised her by its materialistic futility. A ridiculous chemical curiosity, a superfluous piece of evidence. A petty detail that was now quite meaningless within the wholly fresh surge of days and nights-that she no longer even dared to call "my life."

Three

A great aristocratic mansion on two floors, a facade with four white columns and, most remarkable of all, the strange garden where they fasten pillows to the trunks of the trees. Yes, apple trees in blossom and white pillows bound with thick ropes… She is six; she already knows that the pillows are there to protect not the trees but this pale, capricious ten-year-old boy, her cousin. She has already noticed that the scratches and bruises she inflicts on herself when playing attract much less attention than a simple mosquito bite on the boy's arm. These oddities do not prevent her relishing the great sweetness of days that pass without seeming to. Every evening, at the moment when the sun lingers in the branches of the apple trees, the aroma of tea spreads over the terrace. An old servant strolls slowly from one tree to the next, collecting the pillows…

The other joys of her early life she notices too late, when only the memory of them remains. She grows up… And through overhearing the conversations of adults, discovers three astonishing things at almost the same time. The first: her mother will never get over the death of her husband, for "she loves him," they say, "even more than when he was alive." The second: she comes to grasp, very vaguely for the moment, the nature of her cousin's condition and senses that she herself is an unconscious participant in a mystery that is both disturbing and rare. And finally the third: she learns that her grandmother, whom they bury one fine day in spring, has always been "conservative and reactionary," words that her adolescent's tongue finds it hard to articulate but which she likes the sound of… The changes that ensue almost immediately after the funeral draw her attention to the simple pleasures now vanished: they no longer tie pillows to the trees; her cousin is fifteen; there is less fear for his health, and in the evening she no longer experiences that blissful moment when the old servant wandered slowly about in the garden untying the ropes, the moment when the smell of tea and the first coolness of the forest hung in the air…

But the new life has its advantages. Nobody pays attention anymore to this adolescent girl spending the summer here at Ostrov, on the estate inherited by her uncle. She is free to go to the village where the peasants no longer raise their caps when they encounter their former masters. The grown-ups congratulate themselves on this; in the days of the grandmother, the old reactionary, they say, the villagers used to bow down to the ground when they greeted her… They often talk about "the People" whom "all decent men" should enlighten, assist, and serve. This is a novelty too. Grandmother would speak of Zakhar, the shoemaker; the blacksmith, Vassily; or Stiopka the drunkard, who stole chickens. She also knew the Christian names of all their children. But she never spoke of "the People." Ostrov was one of the rare estates not to be set fire to during the uprising of the previous year. The adults see this as a consequence of the grandmother's despotism…

But the principal novelty is that they are living their lives in nervous, stimulating anticipation of novelty itself. It is the start of the new century, the "new era," as some of her uncle's friends call it. They rack their brains about how to accelerate the onward march- too slow for their taste-of a country that is itself too ponderous.

No doubt it is thanks to this impatience, this desire for transformations, that the idea of costume balls comes to them. Her uncle's best friend, the one who talks about the People more often than the others, generally dresses as a peasant. Moreover, Olga notices that they all talk about them with the greatest fervor on the eve of the celebrations that bring together the owners of the neighboring estates and city folk from the capital. It is really as if by indulging in this worthy talk they are seeking to excuse themselves in advance for the excesses of the ball…