During the few moments that this sleep lasted, she had the time to grasp everything. Or rather all that she would sense next morning and reflect on in the course of the days that followed, all already foreseen, was condensed in her eyes, still dazzled by their ability to remain wide open. She understood the tiredness beyond human endurance of this young body, the exhaustion accumulated over weeks, months. This brief, trancelike swoon after countless nights of wakefulness. Thanks to this momentary collapse, she believed she could plumb the abyss he bore within himself, without ever letting anything show. He had fallen asleep as children do, in midgesture, in midword… The distant striking of the hours fell silent. Now there was just the tinkling of crystals against the window, gusts of invisible air coming warm from the fire and cold from the window, and the subtle scent of burning wood. And these two naked bodies. Located beyond words, outside all judgment. The mind could brush against them, situate their whiteness in the shadows, in the silence, in the penetrating aroma from the fire; but shattered against the threshold beyond which it could articulate nothing more.
From very far away, a few seconds after the first chimes, came a response: the same twelve strokes, now stilled, now heightened by the wind. She quickly closed her eyes again. He got up so swiftly that he gave the impression of flying as he crossed the room, snatched up the coat and the candle, and pulled open the door…
His sleep had lasted for as long as the interval between midnight striking and its echo on a New Year's Eve that existed only in the old calendar.
On the day after that phantom New Year's Eve the morning began for her well before daybreak, still in the confused sleepiness of the night, with its long smoky flame flickering on the stub of a melted candle. Padding about, she came and went in the bedroom, opened boxes filled with letters and old papers, sifted through them, and threw most of them into a plywood chest beside the stove where everything accumulated that could be used to stoke the fire. The empty space that was gradually cleared on top of the closet, hitherto piled high with these cardboard boxes, afforded her a vague but real delight. The feeling you have before an impending journey or moving house…
She heard her son opening the front door and walking down the wooden steps-some slivers of ice between the planks creaked under his feet. Hidden by the curtain, she watched him all along the footpath as he followed it. Who was he?
A youth clad in an overcoat too broad and still too long for him. Was he her son who would greet the occupants of the Caravanserai he encountered, as well as some French people he knew in the upper town, receiving their greetings in the most natural way in the world? Or was he that unrecognizable young being in a fleeting moment of sleep spent beside a woman's body at night in this room, as it flickered and swayed in the light of a candle placed on the ground?
When her eyes had got used to the rhythm of this figure's tread as he walked beside the wall, she noticed that at each step his foot, his heel seemed to be stamping on the frozen footpath in anger. She just managed to suppress the thought that was already spreading like acid: "He's limping…" The words cut off. Now she remembered that in the night, when observing this fragile body stretched out beside her own, she had noticed a blue and yellow mark around the knee, the trace of the last hematoma… As a gust of wind blew open the panels of his coat his silhouette broadened and disappeared around the corner of the building. Again she imagined all the faces the boy's eyes would encounter on the road and in the town. They bore a strange resemblance to the outraged and disdainful ones that she pictured one day condemning the life they led as this odd couple. It was then that she murmured harshly, while intending something other than these half-irrational words, "To hell with them all, with their chimes and their bakeries! They'll never understand…"
The next day the postman did not deliver the newspapers subscribed to by the library at the Caravanserai. Some of the rare readers, who were still braving the cold and the snow-covered paths, spoke of a journalists' strike, or a printers' strike, nobody knew exactly what. The postman repeated his explanation three or four more times and in the end they stopped noticing the absence of news… The train that went to Paris every morning suffered several delays as a result of snowfalls and one fine day (it was said that ice had warped the joints on the track) it stayed immobilized all day. Henceforth the capital and the outside world seemed improbable places. Power cuts plunged even the upper town into darkness from six o'clock in the evening. As for the fortress, the old brewery, the people of Villiers took to wondering if it was still inhabited.
The library often remained deserted. Nor was anyone ever seen in the courtyard that was strewn with the humps of snowdrifts. Entrenched in their homes, the occupants spent these brief twilit days on the alert for the slightest sounds in the corridors, and trying to interpret them, picturing one another shivering as they kept watch under a blanket or with a shoulder pressed against the stone of a meagerly heated stove. And if they did appear in the library it was only to leave again almost at once, without even telling their usual stories, simply embellishing this information, culled from a newspaper a week old: "The coldest winter for eighty years… For a hundred years… For a hundred and twenty years…"
During these lifeless days her thoughts often returned to that boy clad in a heavy man's overcoat, stamping with his foot on the frozen earth as he walked, as if in a gesture of childish anger. "He had no childhood," she said to herself. None of the simple joys the world owes a child. A garden around the family house, visits to grandparents… And more besides… None of all that. Pain. Anxious anticipation of further pain. An uneasy respite that would only last long enough to allow hope to be born and disappear.
One day she tried to rescue what could still be recovered from that void, insignificant scraps; a smile here, a moment of relief there. There was so little. Almost nothing. This memory perhaps: a cold, sunny day, a recollection from one of those winters lost in the first years of the impoverished childhood that she had not noticed passing… He is five or six and is seeing snow for the first time in his life. He runs toward her, making the dead leaves strewn with crystals crackle under his feet, and he shows her a fragment of ice with several blades of grass and a tiny flower head imprisoned in its moist transparency. She is on the brink of going into raptures, or embarking on scientific explanations. But some intuition holds back her words. They remain side by side, silent, watching the slow melting of the beauty and the release of the stalks, which, once outside the ice, become limp, and lose their magic.
She was lost so deeply in this moment of time past that it took her an instant for her eyes to focus on the winter dusk and the footpath running beside the wall of the Caravanserai. She was on her way back from the library. In one place she was obliged to press firmly against the wall, almost to flatten herself against its rough surface, in order to scramble over a big pile of snow. She accomplished this sequence of intricate maneuvers slowly and mechanically, already feeling she was somewhere else… In a long summer's evening several years before. The light of a hot, hazy sunset. The walls of the Caravanserai are warm and, as they were every summer, garlanded with hops. She is sitting on her wooden front steps, motionless, daydreaming, watching the footsteps of the child, this seven-year-old boy as he walks along the riverbank, stoops, rummages in the sand. Then comes over to her, radiant. "Look at this shape!" It is a fragment of limestone containing the broad, hollow spiral, studded with iridescent spangles, of an ammonite. The hollow is reminiscent of something and the similarity is disturbing. "It looks like a plaster cast for my knee," murmurs the child. She catches his eye, feels at a loss, and feigns gaiety: "Yes, but you know, your plaster cast…" The child interrupts her. Pressing his ear to the imprint of the shell, he is listening: "You can hear the sound of the sea… it's a sea that's not there anymore…" He holds out his treasure to her. She puts it to her ear, listens. What can be heard is the still of the evening, the cry of a bird, the carefully held in breathing of the child…