She knew he would come that night. Everything proclaimed it.
In the kitchen she saw a slight trace of white on the brown surface of the infusion, emptied it into the sink, and went out. Coming back into her bedroom she hesitated for a second, then thrust another scrap of the branch into the depths of the stove.
It was his going, always abrupt, as if running away, that broke the night. The moment was shattered. Taking fright, the body vanished beneath the flaps of the overcoat; the feet, in a ballet of lightning movements, avoided the floorboards booby-trapped with creaks… He stopped on the threshold of the room, returned toward the stove with the same tightrope walker's nimbleness, seized the last piece of the branch, almost threw it into the embers, then decided not to, put the wood down, glanced at the bed, crossed the room, and vanished behind the door as it cautiously slid to.
She waited for a long while without any notion of hours or minutes. Then got up, put the rest of the wood in among the barely flickering flames, and got back into bed. Her reverie, that veered between vigil and dream, lasted through the revival, then the dying of the fire. The whole night was condensed into the unique sensation that hasty visit had left her with; the chilled young body, with warmth flooding into it, first the fingers, a little later the lips, the arm that lay for a moment across her shoulder, her breast… The memory of it, still fresh, could be inhaled, like the scent of the fire, like the gusts of icy air that spilled into the room with each squall.
She had to get up again in the dark. The cold was becoming unbearable. It was as if it were lurking in her clothes; they felt stiff and seemed shrunken. The rough sides of the stove no longer retained a spark of life… Outside the wind had died down, or rather it had risen far above the earth and was driving the clouds along at an unusual height in a rapid, spellbinding flight. From time to time their billowing was swollen with a milky pallor, the moon appeared, then a star, both immediately hidden again. In this shifting gloom she crossed the meadow, a creaking carapace of hardened snow. She found nothing. Everything that could be burned had long since been gathered up by the inhabitants of the Caravanserai… She went toward the wood and after a long, vain trawl, wrenched a twisted branch out of the snow-derisory when she pictured the flames that would only last a few minutes on these little sticks. She straightened up, her head buzzing, her eyes confused with the effort. The vision forming in her eyes was wholly inward: a house tacked on to the wall of a somber, half inhabited building, a winter night, infinite isolation; and in the very depths of this solitude, a room, the silent life of a fire. And this couple, a woman sunk in a sleep more unshakable than a lethargy and a youth with slow movements and a dazzled look, himself surprised by the magic of his crime… A mother and her son.
"So I'm mad," she said to herself with calm resignation, studying the pieces of the branch she had just broken up. Her gaze strayed between the dark trunks around her, into the thickets burdened with snow, and then soared up toward the tops of the trees. She saw that over its whole nocturnal expanse the sky had cleared. The last clouds, in a wispy procession, seemed to be streaming vertically away from the earth, as if attracted by the moon, and disappearing into its faintly iridescent halo.
It was then, with her gaze focused on that ascending flight, that she pictured the whole earth, the globe, the world peopled by men. Yes, all those men talking, smiling, weeping, embracing one another, praying to their gods, killing millions of their fellows, and, just as if nothing had happened, continuing to love one another, pray, and hope, before crossing through the fine layer of earth that separated all that ferment from the immobility of the dead.
The words she heard herself whispering surprised her less than the little cloud of her breath shining in a moonbeam: "They are the ones living in complete madness. They, down there, on their globe…" She stooped and began to pick up the pieces of the broken branch… Beyond the last trees in the wood she saw the house: the moon appeared around the wall of the Caravanserai, shone down on the snow-covered front steps, and turned one of the windows blue. She still saw it from that distant perspective, toppling down from the vertical flight of the clouds. Still saw the planet as a whole and on the dark, nocturnal side of it a long dwelling, leaned up against a wall. And that couple forgotten by the world. A woman and a youth. A mother and her son… A slight cloud arose from her lips once more. The murmur of her words melted into the frozen air… A strange couple. A youth who will die. His last winter, perhaps. Last spring. He thinks about it. And the woman's body that he loves, the first body in his life. And the last…
The faint cloudiness about her lips from these words was dispersed. Now there was only the blue of the moonlight on the snow-covered steps. And a trace of snow, too, on that branch above the footpath. The footprints beneath the trees, her own, those of another. The silence. The night when he had come, stayed, and left. A night so agonizingly alive, so close to death.
That was precisely how it must be, she now understood: the woman; the youth; their unspeakable intimacy in the house poised on the brink of a winter's night, on the brink of a void, quite foreign to the globe that seethed with human lives, hasty and cruel. She experienced it as a supreme truth. A truth made manifest through the bluish translucency on the steps, through the trembling of a constellation just above the wall of the Caravanserai, through her solitude under this sky. Nobody in the world, in the universe, knew she was standing there, her body limpid with cold, her eyes wide open… She understood that, if expressed in words, this truth would signify madness. But this was a moment when words were being transformed into white vapor and their only message was their brief gleaming in the stellar light…
She planned to burn her trophies in the kitchen range to make some tea and at the same time to wait for the dawn, when looking for firewood would be easier. She could not believe her eyes when she saw all the branches stacked together beside the range. There were still some drops of melted snow glistening on the bark… She remembered the glance he had directed at the dying fire in the stove as he fled the room. So, an hour or two before her he had been wandering about in the darkness among the trees. The footprints she had seen in the snow were his… What amazed her most was knowing that they had both looked at the same night sky, seen the same mists escaping from their mouths. Some unfathomable minutes apart.
She did not write a fresh letter to L.M. but sent him the old one, that laborious letter breaking things off. She even forgot to correct the date on it.
The life she lived now was no longer divided into days or hours, nor into coming and going; nor into actions; nor into fears; nor into expectations; nor into causes and their effects. There was suddenly a particular light (like the calm pallor above an abandoned railroad track that she had been obliged to follow, one afternoon of milder weather); her eyes took in everything, discerning all the nuances in the air (the silvery tint of the fields, the unexpected gold of the sun shining on the rooftops of the already distant town); and she experienced this light, these subtle colorations of the air as profound events in her life.
It was to avoid her usual path, now awash under the porous snow of the thaw, that on her way home that day she had walked around the station and approached the Caravanserai from the opposite direction. A train went by; she continued on her way, stepping from one tie to the next, listening for a long time to the fading vibration of the rails. Then the track branched into two. This one, the old one, that in days gone by used to serve the brewery, soon ended in a buffer stop… In the distance the roofs of the town clustered about the church were bathed in a golden radiance that shone through a fleeting rift in the clouds. Over here, beside the buffer stop, it was almost dark. Leaning her elbows on the barrier, she remained stock still for a moment, her gaze lost in the expanse of the fields, which in this pale light had the softness of suede. The patch of sunlight on the town faded… She was alone at the end of this forgotten track. She felt secretly at one with the misty distances, and close to this bare shrub that grew between the rails. The rain began to fall, merging her still further with the low sky and the soft snow that gave off a vivid, heady coolness…