And other cries, stifled by the murmuring of the blood in her temples, echoed back: "He was inside my body…" Now she understood why that had remained nameless. For to name it she would not have to speak of emotions but to utter those rough, ugly, uncouth words that came pouring in a glutinous flow into her throat: "He violated me. He had me when he wanted to. He undressed me, took me, dressed me again…"
The horror of these words was such that, panic-stricken, she tried to step back into that afternoon of silence and snow spent under the trees. She half opened the front door. A clear blue dusk was already coloring the meadow that sloped down to the river… No, that afternoon of peace had never existed!
An illusion, a trompe l'oeil of happiness. Now she saw that in reality it had not been a dreamy stroll but a breathless, stumbling race. A mad round amid the dark tree trunks. She had run in circles, trying to escape. Then she had stopped to remove the snow from her shoes and had thought of the peace that death brings. A woman quite other than herself had been born: one who could spend a long time-an eternity-contemplating the low sun entangled in the branches; the slithering of stones cast onto the crystal of frozen water; the eyes of a child lost in the sky…
Yes, it was in thrall to death that she had been able to glimpse the unspeakable happiness of that late afternoon in winter.
As it fell, the black shoe had positioned itself very nimbly beside the other, this time imitating a very small, mincing step. Olga told herself that of all the solutions that had arisen in her shattered mind since that morning-to run away, to explain herself, to say nothing- death was the most tempting, the easiest to accept, and the least real. For every day she must continue carrying out a myriad preventive actions similar to the search for nails lurking inside shoes.
She picked up the one that had fallen to finish examining it… At that moment someone knocked on the door.
Without panic, her heart silent, still, she went to open it, already seeing her son's eyes. She walked along the corridor with a very regular, tense step, as if she were mounting the scaffold.
The appearance on the threshold of the boy with red hair, the little thrower of stones, seemed like a hallucination that must be accepted calmly. From the child's exaggeratedly serious expression it was abundantly clear that he had been sent as a messenger and that he was conscious of the gravity of his mission. He said what he had been asked to say in that mix of Russian phrases and French words common among children born at the Caravanserai. There was a mix-up too, between the seriousness of the circumstance and the nervous smile that stretched his lips. Too overcome, he confused the logical sequence: "Near the bridge… Hospital… Hurt himself… They're asking for you to come…"
She stared at the redhead's mouth as if this mouth had an existence of its own. And her stare ended up by frightening the child. "He didn't even cry!" he shouted and began to run, unable to bear a moment longer the violence with which those eyes were skinning his lips.
By the end of the week she was able to bring her son home. His convalescence was a time of silent reunion. Immobility and pain made him a child again. She felt more a mother than ever.
The night of the first snowfall-that night-formed a vast country of deafness in her mind, that she learned to avoid thinking about and from which only a few sparse fragments came to her. They resembled the strings of air bubbles that are released from time to time by stagnant water. She realized, for example, why that night had taken place on the eve of a Sunday; just like the other one, when she had fallen asleep in the book room. Yes, a Sunday, when an abnormally long sleep could easily take on the appearance of sleeping in… She also recalled that one of the rare games this taciturn child loved to play at the age of seven or eight consisted of ringing the front doorbell and then hiding, to create the mystery of a missing visitor. Within this prank, she told herself, there was an element, no doubt, of that wait for the return of his father, whose "long trip" never came to an end…
These memories disturbed her but they did not last. Any more than the fleeting reflex of revulsion she had on seeing her son's leg, this pale leg from which the plaster had just been removed. The knee and especially the foot were still swollen, and the little row of toes had a childish and strangely equivocal prettiness on this swollen and grayish flesh, on this big man's foot… The doctor palpated the foot with sure and precise gestures, reminiscent of those of a craftsman handling a piece of wood. Dry and far from talkative, he seemed to take a certain delight in the terseness of his own comments, from which there was no appeal. "We shall have to operate to straighten the knee," he explained in a tone designed to avoid all sentimentality. "But we'll do it later, when he's had some rest…" The same evening she reread for the thousandth time the pages especially devoted, as it seemed to her, to this very case, to that very day in the life of her son. Reading these books, she often had the absurd impression that their authors knew her child and could foresee the course of his illness. This illusion was singularly powerful that evening, in the lines that she recited mentally, recognizing them from memory from the shape of the paragraphs:
If the leg is more or less flexed on the thigh this only permits walking on the ball of the foot, which is painful and tiring. The muscles of the lower limb will atrophy…
That night before going to sleep she called to mind, but in an intensely physical way, the infinite complexity of the years she had lived through, a jumble, without beginning or end, without any logic. The memory of the child was woven into this tangled web, like an exposed vein, burning. She pictured again the pale adolescent in the doctor's office, putting on his clothes with abrupt haste. She saw his fragile wrists and, when he looked up, the tiny bluish vessels beneath his eyes… She was unable to stay in bed, went to the window, and with closed eyelids, her forehead pressed against the window, told herself that such was the logic of this painful and chaotic life. And in the spring the boy would be fifteen, if there was a spring for him…
Then one December evening she noticed the light trace of white powder on the fine film that always formed on her infusion. Astonished by her own calmness, she poured away the liquid, washed the little copper vessel, placed it on the drain board. And, feeling herself observed by all the objects, by the walls, went into her bedroom.
The vitality was all in the arches of the eyebrows, in the tense line of the mouth. Only this partial image, like a sketch for a death mask-her face-could be seen, lying profiled on the pillow. The body had vanished, swathed in the icy folds of the sheets. And deep down in this absence, buried in its numb whiteness, her heartbeats were like the grating of damp matches.
What she could see was limited to what was reflected in the long mirror facing the bed. It was tinged with the ruddy glow throbbing in the stove behind its half-open door. In the sleeping depths of the mirror the round enamel face of the clock's great dial stood out clearly. And the hands, traveling backward, marked off this strange reflected time in reverse. She considered the passing of the minutes from back to front with slight irritation. And she was surprised still to be able to think, or to be irritated. She suddenly wanted to understand the logic of this inside-out dial: if it showed a quarter to one in the morning in the mirror, then what in reality…? Her mind plunged with relief into this mathematical glissade. But it turned out to be difficult to guess the time from the position of the hands in the mirror. All at once she felt tormented by one of those whims sometimes imposed by pointless impulses, half caprice, half superstition. It became impossible for her not to turn around, not to look at the dial. She began prying her head up from the pillow… And at that same instant she saw, still in the dark reflection of the mirror, that a long section of shadow between the door and the jamb was slowly growing broader…