This blossoming of moments from long ago lasted until nightfall. Almost unaware she pushed open the door, took off her coat, went to light the range and make the tea… But alongside this activity these fragments of the past were unfolding, always quite humble and, it could have been said, useless, allowing her to dwell in their luminous time. She went up to the table, picked up her cup, the teapot… (A spring day, still in Paris in that dark apartment where the only ray of sunlight that ever comes in is at the end of the afternoon, reflected from the windows of the house across the street. The apartment where there is already a feeling of an imminent departure. The wan sunlight sidles onto the table and irradiates a bouquet of wild cherry blossom. Pausing on the threshold, she comes upon the child, his face buried in the white clusters, whispering in imitation of several voices, first pleading in tone, then passionate. She takes a step backward and the creak of a floorboard gives her away. The child raises his head. For a long time they look at each other in silence…) She came to herself in the middle of the kitchen, unable to think what to do with the cup and the teapot she was still holding, as if they were objects whose use was unknown…

Later in the evening she realized she had made an annoying omission, put her coat on again, went out onto the front steps, and cut notches all over the thick layer of ice on them with the help of an old ax. Then she walked back up the little footpath that ran beside the wall and slashed the slippery slope on the incline at the most dangerous spot…

Before she went to sleep there were several more luminous lapses into the past. And once, as she emerged and saw again in a flash all these images that her memory had secretly retained, she had this thought, which was so obvious it dazzled her: "So, I've forgotten nothing, I haven't missed anything at all…" Sleep was already numbing her mind. All she could grasp was that, without knowing it, she had preserved what was essential in this childhood, the part that was silent, true, unique.

… Next morning she would remember that the previous evening, lost in her reverie, she had drunk the infusion without examining its surface. She would guess that he had entered her room and come upon her, relaxed in unfeigned sleep.

It was on that morning, a winter morning, violet with cold, that for her time lost its rhythm of hours, days, and weeks.

She saw the young figure in the long overcoat passing beneath the window, pictured the slippery, frozen footpath he must follow, ran outside and cupped her hands to her mouth. Too late. He was already climbing the little steep, icy section-with that slightly brutal agility adolescents have, as their growing strength affirms itself. Having conquered it, he quickened his pace and turned the corner around the Caravanserai…

The limpid silence that reigned all about gradually seeped into her. The branch beside the steps was quivering where the boy had brushed against it and shedding a light veil of hoarfrost crystals that made rainbows in the air. Her mind was empty, but with her whole being she felt that she could have stood there on the steps forever, looking out at the snow-covered meadow sloping down toward the river; at this slow powder of crystals falling from a branch stirred by already imperceptible vibrations. Yes, stood there in the sundrenched sleepiness of a morning that belonged to no year, to no era, to no country. That did not even belong to her life but to quite another life, in which contemplating glittering snowflakes in silence, in the absence of all thought, was becoming essential…

She looked at other branches, higher up, reaching toward the pale blue of the sky, then at those of the woodland beyond the walls of the Caravanserai. The sun, still low, softened their black, angular lines with a purple-tinged glow. It seemed to her that she had never felt so mysteriously close to these trees, their bark, their bare branches. Nor so intensely exposed beneath the sky, so intensely herself, facing this immense, patient expectation…

The glittering specks of the hoarfrost still meandered in the icy air. The calm seemed infinite. And yet within this silent radiance it was as if you could hear a faint, continuous tinkling-sounds beyond hearing echoed one another with faultless purity and precision. The air faindy pink; the dark tracery of the branches; the dancing of the crystals; the fortress of the Caravanserai still in the blue shadow of the night; the sunlight lightly touching the snow among the trees… This ethereal equilibrium of lights and silences was alive, guarded its own transparency, was not going anywhere. Motionless on the little wooden steps, she was a part of it and felt herself to be strangely necessary to all that surrounded her…

The figure that appeared at the other end of the footpath was that of the postman. He brought a telegram signed "L.M.," offering a choice of two dates for their next meeting. She went indoors and read the few impersonal words a second time. The dates seemed to her as fantastic as the months of the French revolutionary calendar- all those "nivôses" and "pluviôses," very evocative, but from a completely different era. Paris, a gray morning; a man scraping the soles of his shoes on the edge of the sidewalk before getting into his car… "So all of that is still going on somewhere," she told herself, feeling as if she were recalling a life she had abandoned ten years before. The man was still walking about in that busy, humid Paris that smelled of the smoky warmth of cafés, the sweatiness of the Metro. He went to his editorial offices, argued, gesticulated, talked on the telephone, and every evening made his typewriter vibrate with the dry and nervous drumming of his fingers. Then he looked in his calendar and chose these two dates that were still free and sent a telegram…

When she went out again a few minutes later to go to the Caravanserai, the luminosity of the air, the shadows, the branches, the sky, the smell of the cold had imperceptibly reshaped the equilibrium that had linked them a moment ago. She felt this change very intimately. As if she were taking part in the transition from one tonality to another, physically, within her own body.

In the immobility of that winter weather there was one day when, precisely because of these tonalities, she sensed that her son would come to her…

That night the wind howled noisily in the chimney, making the fire blaze in the stove. Sometimes the flames died back, cowed; sometimes they swelled and thrust fine blue tongues out through the chink of the cast iron door. Then suddenly the absence of noise would be deafening, as if the house, snatched up by a squall, were already floating through the night, far from the earth in a soundless, black transparency. The flickering of the candle grew still, and fixed the shadows on the walls of the bedroom. The fire was silent. The scent of burning wood gave contours to the darkness that were invisible but could be perceived if you closed your eyes and inhaled deeply.

Thus it was, her eyes half closed, her breathing intoxicated, that she abandoned herself to this fresh moment of silence… A minute earlier, seeing the sections of a thick branch stacked beside the stove, she had said to herself that this meager firewood would be just enough to give her the illusion, at the start of the night, of going to sleep in a house that was inhabited. She had shivered, picturing herself waking up, well before dawn, in a room smelling of dead, icy smoke… But now even this branch and the fragments of mossy bark scattered on the floor gave off an indefinable happiness. There was, she felt, an unknown joy in the roughness of this bark, in the scented acidity of the smoke, in the thunderous rage of the wind, and in this silence as perfect as the shape of the motionless candle flame… She crouched down, put a part of the branch in the fire, and arranged the rest of the wood carefully beside the stove. A scrap of bark could have cracked beneath the foot of someone walking in the dark…