That evening there was another moment that absorbed her into its profound harmony. The rain continued to pour down heavily, but its torrents were arrested by the return of the cold that put an end to a day and a half of mild weather. The earth hardened and the streams of water seemed to freeze in midflight. They crashed against the ground, against the layer of ice on the fields, against the roof, in the branches of the trees-and the night rang with an infinite variety of ceaseless tinklings. This crystalline cascade drowned all other sounds, crushed any shadow of a thought with its glass beads, permeated her body with its delicate flow.

She could hardly hear the crackling of the fire any longer above this headache-inducing din. Only the tallest flames that rose above the tangle of the wood could pierce through the incessant roar of the icy torrent. Its deafening rattle had the fluidity of rain, while the ferocity of its noise kept her awake. And the flames surged up in that nocturnal bedroom besieged by an icy downpour, now on this side of sleep, now in her dreams, amid countless warm, supple, aromatic spurts of resin…

When he came in, shielding the candle with his hand, his footsteps, his movements, the whiteness of his body that she could sense without lifting her eyelids, all these things hovered between the two nights, sometimes deep in her dream, then suddenly breaking the boundary of it with an incredibly vibrant caress. The hesitant hand seemed to be making its way between long rivulets of sound to enfold her breast, to find peace upon it, while they awaited an ebb tide back into the dream. There, where their bodies would be nothing but the same endless wave, a shadow with the scent of snow, the flickering amber of fire.

He remained in her without moving, his breath suspended, his body weightless. A motionless flight above a sleeping lake… She could still feel the weight of him in her groin, in her belly when he was no longer there, as she slowly returned across the tides of fire and crystal and again found herself in a room surrounded by a rainy winter's night.

… In the morning the treads of the front steps rang out underfoot like glass. She walked down them and made her way across the upside-down sky, a looking glass colored pink by the day's dawning. The trees, the windows of the house, the wall of the Caravanserai were all reflected in it with the clarity of an engraving. The bushes laden with thousands of frozen drops of water looked like strange crystal candelabra abandoned here and there in the snow. She took several steps and lost her balance but had time to realize that she was going to fall and anticipated her tumble by letting herself slide. Half stretched out, she pressed against the ground to raise herself and suddenly encountered her own face reflected in the ice, so calm and so distant that, once on her feet, she turned back with an unconscious urge to see that calm expression in the same place again…

There was a day when everything swirled in a hypnotic flurry of snowflakes. The roofs of the town, the Caravanserai, the willows along the riverbank-everything disappeared piece by piece, as if delicately coated in white with a paintbrush…

Then another day when the color was extraordinary. A pale violet, very faint, scarcely mauve out in the, whiteness of the fields; denser, dark blue beneath the wall and in the alleys of the lower town; and more vibrant, almost palpable in a broad, plum colored sweep above the horizon…

And another day, when in the evening she was intoxicated by suddenly discovering the various scents given off by the branches thrown down beside the stove-a whole forest, with different essences, some acid, some heady, with the coolness of the frost that emitted shrill whistles in the flames as it melted. The aroma of moss, of wet bark, of the life asleep in all the trees.

Each of these moments carried within itself a mystery ready to be revealed, ripe to be experienced, but which was still hidden, making their abundance painful, like some mountain landscapes that are too beautiful, too awesome, for our lungs, which begin to struggle for air…

On the day of the dancing blizzard the long overcoat he took off when he came into the room was white with snowflakes. His hair as well. She felt several drops of melted snow trickling onto her breast… On the day of the amazing violet light they ran into each other in the upper town, he returning from school, she with her shopping bag. There was no embarrassment, no forced words. In that mauve, blue, and violet light everything became at once unreal and natural: the street, an inhabitant of the Caravanserai greeting them, the two of them together. They walked along, looked at each other from time to time, recognized each other as people recognize each other in dreams, with a clairvoyance sharpened by reality, but in a fantastic setting. At one moment, as she crossed a long strip of bare ice beside the bombed-out pharmacy, she leaned on his arm…

And it was thanks to him that she discovered the different scents of the flesh of trees. One night, as he left the room, he crouched down and touched one of the branches drying beside the stove. She repeated this gesture an hour later as she put more wood on the fire. And also out of curiosity. A mossy shape reminded her of a moth. She touched it, as he had just done, and suddenly inhaled a complex mixture of scents. Kneeling there with her eyes closed, she smelled their elusive range. She sensed the coolness of a body, of the body that, before joining her (she knew it now), had been impregnated with cold in a frenzied coming and going on the frozen slope between the house and the river. He had just left her and his presence was slowly awakening within her, in her groin, in her belly, and mingling with the slightly bitter or acid tastes of the branches, with the perfumed warmth of the fire, with the silence. And what she was living through became so full then, so painfully close to the revelation of a mystery, that she opened the French door, filled her hands with snow, and buried her face in it, as if in an ether mask.

This elation was broken some nights later when once again he remained in her for long, still minutes. It was at that moment that the dilated suspense at the base of her belly trapped her. For a fraction of a second she felt it like a caress and for a moment lost the regularity of breathing she had taught herself. On previous nights this suspense had represented an ordeal that must be passed through in a transient death of all her senses, skimming silently over the void. This time it was a caress, a dense, titillating gust that snaked upward toward her chest and exploded in her throat… Two other nights the same spasm was repeated, the same flaring up of the air she was breathing. Her surprise diminished and during the third night it became a kind of inadmissible anticipation that prepared her breathing and shaped her body… She no longer had to die in order to give herself to him.

By midday the broad halo around the pale sun was already visible-a sign of great frosts. The air rang out with sharp, dry rustling. At nightfall the windows were covered with hoarfrost patterns… That evening she examined the infusion, threw it away, went to her room and stopped for a moment, holding the candle, to contemplate the fragile beauty of the curlicues of ice: chiseled stems, crystalline corollas… That night he got up in such haste that she stiffened, believing she must have unconsciously given herself away. A little light filtered between her lashes. She saw him standing between the door and the window, his body tensely arched, his head and shoulders thrown back, his eyes tightly shut… No longer hiding in sleep, she watched him, her breath held in pity, in distress. He was pounding the base of his belly with his hands; which were closed, as if over a prey, and shook with rapid tremors. Now his uplifted face, with the same grimace of brutal pain, expressed a kind of prayer, a supplication addressed to someone whom only his own closed eyes could see. His mouth, gasping, swallowed air with a rictus that laid bare his teeth. His hands, crossing over one another, tensed more violently, a convulsion and then another ran through his body-he looked like a butterfly beating against a windowpane… But already, slowly, the muscles were relaxing. A clarity of repose softened his features, then, very quickly gave way to bitterness, weariness. With a clumsy gait, as if he needed to learn how to walk all over again, he went to pick up his long overcoat, took out a handkerchief, applied it to his stomach, crumpled it, put it away…