Even the rhythmic spasm that her final discovery had provoked in her was from now on familiar to her. The hand that arose in the pit of her stomach, pressed on her lungs, taking her breath away; gripped her heart, a bunch of grapes that the hand either squeezed or released, at every thought, then suddenly crushed until there was a red hot throbbing in her temples.

She knew equally that all the means of salvation she had imagined in fact only added up to one. To break the curse of those nights she must both flee and remain; explain herself and above all say nothing; change her life and continue as if nothing had happened; both die and live while forbidding herself all thought of death.

"During the first night the curtains were drawn, during the second, open," she recalled for no reason. Yes, the reason for it was her headlong flight forward, proof that she was already living the life where one could neither live nor die.

It was with the feeling of embarking on this new life, a step at a time, that Olga drank her tea, left a note for her son, and went out, as she did every Sunday morning. She walked through the streets of the lower town, gray streets, their pavements strewn with tiny granules of snow. Without admitting it to herself she was hoping for a sign, a jolt in this provincial calm that might have attested to the irremediable yet utterly mundane deformation of her life. A woman who lived at the Caravanserai appeared at the end of the street, drew level with her, and, after greeting her, asked,"Are you going to Paris?"

"No, I was going for a walk…"

Olga waited for the street to become empty again, then turned toward the station.

In the train, watching the dismal fields and the little towns devoid of life floating past, her heart like a crushed bunch of grapes, she repeated several times, "Enough said. Impossible to live. Impossible to die…"

The train stopped for a few minutes in a little station beyond which there arose the sad, dull houses of a village similar to Villiers-la-Forêt but rendered even more inanimate by this cold, windy day. The only thing that attracted her eye was a window squeezed into the recess of a tiny yard. All around was the network of the alleyways, the naive jumble of doors, roofs, overhanging top stories: and then this window, lit by the feeble light of one bulb, with its Sunday-morning calm…

A sudden intuition struck Olga; she turned away. So somewhere in this world there could be a place where what she had to live through could be lived! A life beyond "Enough said." A secret life, inaccessible to others. Like the one hidden behind the window that a distracted passenger on a train had just noticed.

As she was emerging from the Metro in Paris she felt the tiredness and the nervous exhaustion of the past weeks catching up with her. The steps of the staircase suddenly gave way under her feet; she clung to the . And with half-closed eyes she heard a plaintive, almost childish voice within her begging, "Please make Li understand! If only she can guess everything and tell me what to do. If I can just have a moment of peace…" As she resumed her journey she recognized in this tone close to tears the old familiar voice of the "little bitch."

"When we were at school before the revolution, you remember the plank the headmistress made them tie to the backs of the girls with stooping shoulders, so they held themselves straight. You could tell them a mile off, the poor crucified things, with their shoulders square and their backs straight… And then one fine day no more planks! The newspapers talked about liberty and emancipation…"

She was trying to explain to Li the feeling that had been an unconscious element in all her thoughts since adolescence. The feeling that one day life had lost all its rectitude, correctness, regularity. One day a strange whim had crept into their lives in Russia, into the whole country. Suddenly they had been seized with the desire to prove that this rectitude was no more than a chimera, a shopkeeper's prejudice. And that one could live disregarding it, or, better still, thumbing one's nose at it. Furthermore, life itself seemed to confirm this: a Siberian peasant appointed and dismissed ministers; he "purified" (as he called these couplings) the Tsarina's ladies-in-waiting and even, according to malicious tongues, the Tsarina herself-all of them being in thrall to his inexhaustible carnal drive. Newspapers portrayed the Tsar as an enormous oval pair of buttocks surmounted by a crown. Killing a policeman became an exploit in the name of liberty… And then one day they had stopped strapping planks to the backs of stooping schoolgirls.

In explaining this Olga suddenly believed she could understand herself. Yes, once the planks had been removed everything in the country collapsed. In her memory it was the recollection of a purely physical slackening. For a time to be twisted and ungainly had become quite the fashion… In the very spring when their backs had been liberated she had taken part in a masked ball for the first time. Walking down a corridor (the portrait of her grandmother had been hung upside down) she had come upon a man and a woman coupling in an armchair. And like millions and millions of people at that time she had discovered that a certain order of things was cracking apart, on the brink of crumbling, or indeed that there was no order, no rectitude, merely servile custom binding them (like the plank at your back) to laws that were said to be natural… Later she found herself listening to the poet who fixed bear's claws to his fingers. Another poet claimed he drank champagne from the skull of his suicidal beloved. And then there was that patron of the arts who commissioned an icon portraying a huge naked succubus…

And for a few days each of these caprices, like a drug, offered an intoxicating sense of liberation; but stronger and stronger doses were soon needed, more and more bizarre combinations. They all of them aspired to the ultimate caprice, the one that would have liberated them from the last trappings of this world. She herself had had this feeling one evening in St. Petersburg, returning from a party with a man who pretended to believe what she was telling him in extravagant and funereal tones. She said she was only willing to give herself to a man who would agree to kill her afterward. Or was it before? Obsessed with her playacting she herself forgot the original version. This man, the painter who had just invented "Stripeism," was confident that this seventeen-year-old girl would soon be his umpteenth mistress. And he had no intention of killing her, either afterward or (especially not) before. But he was playacting and hardly noticing that he was playacting. As for her, by dint of thinking and talking about "the curse that had blighted her blood," she had ended up believing that it was to her future lover that she would pass it on and not to her child…

After a moment Olga sensed that Li was listening to her with slight apprehension-the fear of someone who already foresees a confession that may well catch them off guard, invest the friend's familiar face with unknown, disturbing features. And even undermine an old friendship. At intervals she began adding her own comments to the story with a vigor and a passion that each time struck a wrong note. She waxed indignant about the torture that used to be inflicted on pupils straightened out with the plank; mocked the couple surprised in an armchair… And when Olga talked about the depraved life in the capital of her youth, Li had begun to murmur, as if apologizing,"Oh, but you see, I never really saw much of that life. In the trenches what we saw mostly was death…"

From the kitchen came the whistle of the kettle. Their tentative conversation broke off. Left alone for a few minutes, Olga felt relieved. She had lost hope of any miracle of understanding… And yet she seemed to sense that Li, also alone for a moment, was timidly preparing the way for an unutterable confession of her own. And when she came in carrying two cups and an old teapot with a chipped spout on a tray, when she set about arranging the tray and pouring the tea with an exaggeratedly concerned air, and fussing unnecessarily about each little detail ("Wait, I'll get you another spoon…"), Olga understood that behind these words a serious statement, hard to articulate, was already forming.