Another occasion for her to speak to the being whose understanding she already hoped for came on that evening of the thaw. She made a mistake when examining the infusion, no doubt confusing the pollen of the macerated flowers with traces of the powder. He did not come… She waited for a long time, beyond what was already an unlikely hour, then, to break the spell of this waiting and to find sleep again, she got up, dressed, went out onto the steps.
The night was clear. The air was softer; scents, long imprisoned by the cold, were flowing readily, like the slightly bitter aroma of damp bark. The snow had been undermined by a multitude of invisible tricklings, still covert, that filled the night with an incessant peal of water drops. She felt she was moving forward across an endless musical instrument, snapping several strings at each sacrilegious step…
She stopped halfway between the house and the river, no longer wanting to disturb the melodious trembling of the slowly subsiding snows. Tilting her head back, she plunged in among the stars for a long time. A silent, unflagging wind descended from these nocturnal depths. She staggered, suddenly exalted, her eyes looked around for support. The shadow of the wood, the dark reflection of the water, the dim fields on the opposite bank. The sky from which spilled the powerful and constant wind. All this lived, breathed, and seemed to see her, to be focusing some kind of infinite gaze upon her. A gaze that understood everything but did not judge. It was there, facing her, about her, within her. Everything was said by this immense wordless, motionless presence… The wind was still blowing from the summit of the sky, from its dark reaches scarcely marked with the buoys of stars. She was responding to the eyes staring at her, impassive eyes, but whose absolute compassion she sensed…
She went home with the feeling of descending slowly from a very great height. Moving forward, she sought unconsciously to tread in the footprints left from her outward journey, so as not to snap any more strings. Up on the steps she cast a glance behind her: on the stretch of snow a string of footprints led out into the night with no return. And when she looked up a powerful gust of wind, falling vertically, struck her eyelids.
One evening she noticed that the great pile of snow that had accumulated behind the wall of their house had shrunk into a grayish sponge around which the glistening, naked clay of the earth lay uncovered. Confused feelings gripped her: this exhaustion of the cold was quite natural, quite expected, but at the same time heavy with hidden menace. Was the winter (their winter!) now going to be woven imperceptibly back into the indifferent round of the seasons? This very normality seemed at once salutary and fraught with vague dangers… A few days later when she was clipping together the newspapers that the postman had once more started delivering to the Caravanserai after several months of eclipse, she came upon this headline: rhine ice dynamited to open way for shipping delayed by unprecedented frosts. Strangely, her heart missed a beat and she heard a little silent cry: "But why all this hurry?"
Then there was the night of all-enveloping fog, smelling of the sea… With closed eyes she gave herself, happy, unthinking, liberated even by her blindness, by the uselessness of words, by the abandon she no longer had to feign… It was this forgetfulness that must have given her away She sighed, or rather took a breath like a child about to cry. He detached himself from her body and fled. She went through a long moment of nonlife before understanding the real reason for his flight.
It was a continuous sound, growing louder, more fluid. It was gradually permeating the muffled heaviness of the fog… At the first light of dawn, when she opened the window, she saw the meadow flooded, the willows standing in the middle of a lake, the water rippling gently a few yards away from the front steps…
By evening the entire Caravanserai had become an island and their house a little promontory above the calm, misty expanse of the waters.
It was the "doctor-just-between-ourselves," wearing long rubber boots, who brought them bread on the second day of the flood. Then the water rose several inches more and even this equipment became inadequate. People forgot them as they waited for the sun to return and the waters to fall.
The days were misty and mild, seeming not so much to exist now as to be a return to a far distant past when even pain was obliterated. At night all one could hear was the soothing lapping of the water on the front steps. And that night, when he came into her room, the cries of a flock of birds-no doubt migrants exhausted by their flight that had found no place to land and were alighting on the roof of the Caravanserai… It was beneath the rising tide of these innumerable cries that she surrendered her body to him again, her body which imperceptibly, from one night to the next, had won a secret freedom, inaccessible in aroused love. Her body that, in a death that was profoundly alive, responded to caresses and fashioned desire. A sleeping lover's body. Born in the depths of a dream that the boy could relive indefinitely.
When she opened the door in the morning she alarmed a dozen birds that had settled on the roof. They emitted indignant cries and began to circle over the dull mirror of the waters. Over the inverted sky that began at the top of the front steps, in which their silent, white wings could be seen slipping along…
Several days and nights were swamped in this misty calm, the drowsy idleness of the waters. Finally, one evening when it was still light, she noticed that the reflections of the clouds on the flooded meadow had moved farther from the house. A strip of bruised land emerged, bristling with stalks and clumps of grass, like the dorsal fin of an immense fish. This terra firma saturated with moisture surrounded the house and ran along the wall of the Caravanserai… Through the window she saw her son, a shopping bag on his shoulder, walking away slowly, sounding out with his feet the uncertain dotted line of this first footpath. An hour later he returned, laden. His shape was reflected in the waters now ablaze with the sunset. She hesitated, then went to greet him on the steps. They stayed there for a time, both of them, without looking at each other, motionless before the now tranquil expanse.
That evening, or perhaps it was the next, a thought struck her with the painfulness and beauty of its truth. If what they were living through could be called love, then it was an absolute love, for it was fashioned from a prohibition inviolable yet violated, a love visible only in the sight of God, because monstrously inconceivable to mankind, a love experienced as the everlasting first moment of another life…
For months her thoughts had spilled into the unthinkable and had become meaningless. Their return now disturbed her. She would have liked to go on living in the transparent and silent simplicity of the senses. Yes, to go back to the scent of the fire, to the powdery hoarfrost tumbling through the air from a snowy branch… But already a new link of chain was latching on to her mind: "For the boy this may be his first and last love. And for me? It is also my first and last love; for no one has ever loved me like this, with such a passionate fear of causing me harm. No one will ever love me like this again…" The truth of these words was born of lightness but, once uttered, became disturbing.
That night anxiety returned in the guise of a strange noise: it was as if someone were walking along in the water beside the house with careful steps, attempting, through the somnambulistic slowness of their pace, to minimize the little telltale splashes.
Next morning a bleak wind was blowing with inhuman, menacing power. It tore at a number of long, dry strands of hops on the walls of the Caravanserai, brandishing them in its rainy squalls like a monstrous topknot of snakes. As she went into the building through the porch, she heard the sound of an unusual tumult, the slamming of shutters in one of the empty apartments, but, in particular, a slow, distant, metallic creaking, like the noise of rusty hinges. Along the corridor that led to the main library hall this creaking increased in volume, becoming a ponderous, rhythmical crashing. The sounds of voices, on the other hand, became fainter and fainter, then faded away; and it was amid a crowd of dumbfounded spectators that this scene met her eyes.