He released the fish, one by one, coming as close as possible to the icy river bank. Their bodies shuddered for a moment in his hand, then their quivering lives blended with the dark current, the cold, dense weight of which was palpable. After that he emptied the bucket, pouring out the rest of the water with several tufts of weed and lumps of ice. The tinkling of the last drops had a rare resonance, a purity that etched the outlines of the trees and rekindled the reflection of the moon in a frozen puddle. They looked at one another mutely: two ghosts with their faces silvered by the moon, their clothes in disarray; two motionless figures in the night on the bank of a smooth, impenetrable stream… A scrap of wind suddenly brought with it an imperceptible whisper of life, a faint mixture of shouts and music. She turned her gaze in the direction of the upper town.

"They're having a party down there," he said, as if in a daydream and without taking his eyes off the water that glittered at his feet.

"Down there," she repeated to herself as she walked beside him. "Down there…" So he, too, was conscious of living somewhere else.

In the course of that night on the riverbank he must have cut his knee without being aware of it in the flurry of the rescue. Next day a blood-filled swelling formed and grew rapidly larger. In the evening his temperature went up abruptly. On several previous occasions the doctor who was based in the upper town had refused to come. There was no longer a proper road between Villiers-la-Forêt and the Caravanserai, now swathed in darkness. She herself took a good quarter of an hour simply to make her way around the building and reach the main gateway. The footpath that followed the wall had disappeared; in certain places the squalls had sculpted long snowdrifts that barred the way.

She knocked at the house of the "doctor-just-between-ourselves." He opened it at once, although it was past midnight, as if he were expecting her visit. As he walked along with her, he kept up a conversation with professional sagacity about "the harshest winter for a hundred years." All the time he was operating, as on previous occasions, he gave vent to little whispering laughs. It was as if he did not believe what he was being told and had his own opinion on the boy's illness. "It's nothing at all, really nothing at all," he repeated, without interrupting his chuckles. And, just as before, he accompanied his actions with patter, like a fairground magician. "Now then. First of all, all nice and neat, we dra-a-a-in off all the fluid, like so-o-o-o! And now a mag-ni-fi-cent saline dressing…" Before leaving he leaned his face toward the boy and, still in the style of an illusionist, proclaimed, "And tomorrow you'll be back on your feet, all right? Like a real trooper." As he went out he said again, but this time in his normal voice, "Naturally, all this is just between ourselves."

Next day the boy got up… She noticed that it was only at these moments of unexpected and unhoped-for recovery that she prayed. The rest of the time her inner vows took the form of a continuous babble of words that she was scarcely aware of anymore. Her rare conscious prayers, on the other hand, included violent threats to the one they were addressed to and demanded a complete turnaround in her son's life, an impossible rehabilitation that must be possible because it was her son. And so that evening, with her face pressed into her hands, her lips dry with the whispering of silent words, she implored, insisted on a miracle… Later on, during the night, now calmer, she realized with bitter sadness that this miracle was linked to that strange personage, the "doctor-just-between-ourselves" who had opened his door to her, wearing an old, neatly pressed tuxedo, with a bow tie beneath his Adam's apple, just as if at midnight, in the dark and icy fortress of the Caravanserai, he were preparing to go to a party. "A poor madman, like all the rest of us here," she thought. The words of her feverish prayer came back to her now as a weary echo. Listening to them, she reluctantly admitted to herself that her secret hope was at least to delay the arrival of the next relapse, the next hemorrhage. Just to win a few days' respite, during which she could live with the illusion of a successful miracle, without feeling too ashamed of her weakness.

It was during those days, one evening, that he appeared in her room again…

The last week of the year was always a very singular time in the lives of the inhabitants of the Caravanserai. The days that came after Christmas and New Year's Day seemed suddenly to backtrack, for the Russian Christmas and New Year came two weeks later than the French celebrations and created the illusion of a fresh end to the year. This delay gave rise to an astonishing confusion in time; to a parenthesis that could not be found in any calendar; to a delight, often unconscious, at not being a part of the life that resumed its sad rhythm in January.

In that winter of 1947 those two lost weeks between the holidays, in the last days of the Russian December, seemed to the émigrés even more empty, even more detached from the ordinary life of Villiers-la-Forêt, than usual. On the ground floor occupied by the retirement home, in a small hall next to the refectory, they had brought in a Christmas tree, as they did every year. But this time there was nothing festive about the presence of the tree in this bleak, cold building: it felt more as if the forest were invading an abandoned house. One evening as she was leaving the library, Olga came upon a man twirling softly in front of the tree in the darkness. Hearing her footsteps, he fled. She realized that he had been waltzing all alone by the light of a candle fixed lopsidedly to one of the branches. She had an impulse to blow it out but did nothing, thinking that the man might perhaps be waiting for her to go before resuming his solitary twirling…

One day, on a particularly cold morning, she went into the lower town in search of bread. As she left the Caravanserai she noticed that her own footprints on the smooth surface of the snow were the very first of the day. The bakery was closed; she had to go all the way up to the one located in the upper town, next to the church. She tried several times to button up the collar of her coat, but her numb fingers no longer obeyed her, and the wind came streaming in at her unbuttoned collar, up her sleeves. Speaking to the baker's wife, she suddenly felt dumb, her frozen lips articulating with great difficulty. The woman listened to her with the exaggerated and scornful patience people have for stammerers, then held out a round loaf to her. Olga did not dare to say that she had asked for something else. And all through the day at the corners of her mouth she retained that painful sensation of congealed words.

That night, for several eternal seconds, he slept pressed against the inert woman's body-against herself.

This, too, was one of those days lost between two calendars, a day of pale colors, hazy in the cold and the wind, a long twilight that lasted from dawn until dusk… As the night began she saw him appearing once more on the threshold of her room. She molded herself almost effortlessly into the temporary death that made her body limp. He lifted her arm carefully, to rearrange it, and it fell back with the soft heaviness of sleep. This death only required one thing of her: to feel totally removed from the stealthy rearrangement imposed on her body; from the caresses, barely perceptible and always seemingly amazed at themselves; from the whole slow and timid enchantment of gestures and held breaths. Yes, to distance herself from her body, to be intensely dead within it…

An infinitely remote sound, the chimes of a clock lost in the night, reached her in her death, woke her. Her eyelashes quivered, creating a fine, iridescent chink. She saw. A candle placed on the floor in a narrow china mug, the fierce flickering of the flames behind the stove door… And these two naked beings that she contemplated with a gaze still removed, external, like someone observing them from outside, through the window. The body of a woman lying on her back, tall, beautiful, in perfect repose. And, like a bowstring suddenly slackened, the body of a youth, fragile and very pale, stretched out on its side, the head tilted back, the mouth half open. He was asleep…