High up near the ceiling the huge gearwheel for the pulley, mounted on girders fixed into the wall, was revolving with a mesmerizing slowness. Had the wind dislodged some locking wedge in the machinery, stopped for long decades? Or had the electrician who came to repair a breakdown in the current the previous day made a mistake over the cable? A cleaner had noticed the wheel moving that morning and alerted the others… Now the gearwheel was continuing to rotate steadily and inexorably in its blind power. The chain that ran around it could be seen traveling down, inch by inch, through a hole in the floor that had been hidden by a square of plywood. And, having disappeared, it rose again from the depths of the cellar… Suddenly, with a brief grinding, the plywood gave way, and there, welded to the chain, a bucket covered in rust and slime could be seen surging up, slowly bringing to the surface what must once have been water from a deep well that supplied the brewery… A bitter, earthy smell, an odor, it seemed, of flesh and death, invaded the room. Another bucket appeared, then another and yet another. The first one was already at the top of the chain and tipped, spilling out its viscous liquid where once, no doubt, there was a large vessel. The odor became more pungent, with its sweetish base of grain rotting in the bowels of the earth, with its disturbing, wild savor of fermentation. The subterranean mud from a fresh bucket was already decanting itself over its tilting rim… As if suddenly roused from sleep, a man rushed into the corridor to switch off the current.

There was an abundance of light, almost too much for eyes accustomed to the fog; an abundance of sparkling sky; an abundance of damp, glistening watercolor tones. The meadow that the river had gradually uncovered as it receded looked like a broad russet-and-yellow pelt, all ruffled, drying in the sun.

She perceived this surge of light with the sensibility of an invalid. Each ray of sun, each new color was simultaneously a joy and a torture. One day she told herself she must dig the ground in the narrow bed beneath the windows and plant the first flowers. Her heart stood still: she had a vision of herself the previous autumn on a fine September evening, pulling up the dead stalks at that same spot… On another occasion, returning late from the Caravanserai, she went down as far as the little expanse of water at the bottom of the meadow. The moon was shining on it and in the distance the tiny pond looked as if it were frozen. She went up to it and touched the surface with the sole of her shoe. Lazy rings rippled across the moon's liquid gold. As on that unimaginable Christmas night when they had broken the ice and rescued the fish…

Each evening was imperceptibly gaining a few more moments of light. And that evening it was particularly noticeable, for a narrow ray of coppery sunlight came streaming in obliquely at the kitchen window; from now on it was going to return, less unexpectedly and a little wider, each day.

It was by this already springlike light that she noticed a fine white film on the brown flowers of the infusion. She emptied it automatically on returning from the bathroom; went into the bedroom and froze, stunned. The bedroom, too, was bathed in light and had nothing nocturnal about it. And yet he could come in from one minute to the next!

She quickly drew the curtains (they were too narrow and always left a gap), threw some fragments of wood into the stove (they had stopped having fires more than a week before), and decided to put a lamp on her bedside table, the heavy lamp with the silk shade that generally stood on the shelves. Once switched on, it reduced the brilliance of the sun that was tangled in the branches of the willows and seemed determined not to set…

It was one of those clumsy and vague gestures that are made in the act of love. A hand suddenly forgetting how to move in the real world. She felt this hand, these cool, gentle fingers, touching her shoulder, folding round her breast…

Then the hand flitted away, describing a hesitant circle, unnecessarily broad (was he trying to move the lampshade that was too big, too close; to switch off the light?). With her eyes closed she sensed the movement and a second later came the noise. The start of the noise…

What happened was so swift and so irremediable that several hours later and even some days later she went on living in that instant just before the noise. She would come to the Caravanserai, meet the residents, and listen to them, but in the innermost part of herself the same scene continued to unfold; it could not end, once it ended life would have become impossible.

… From beneath her closed eyelids she was aware of a hand flitting about, as clumsy as a nocturnal bird obliged to fly in broad daylight. Feeling its way in the void, the hand knocked against the lampshade… The start of the noise came from the grinding of the lamp's china base against the wood of the little bedside table. Through her eyelashes she sensed the beginnings of a fall. Her reflex-china, breakage, cut hand, blood-forestalled all thought. She stretched out her arm. Realized immediately. Froze. The lamp fell. He tore himself away from this woman's body that had suddenly come to life, hurled himself from the room.

An elderly resident was talking to her about how the days were warm now but the nights still chilly. She agreed, echoing the trivial remarks made to her, but her own life was condensed into the vision of those few gestures: a hand reaches out aimlessly into the half light; a lampshade tilts; an arm is flung out; freezes…

And the scene explodes under the violent lighting of horror: a youth mired in a woman's groin. A mother and her son…

Her mind's eye remained imprisoned in that room, in the endless repetition of a suspended gesture. And also in that terrifying reflection in the mirror: a woman lying on her back, her knees apart, her belly offered, one arm outstretched, petrified.

And when she glanced outside, the flood tide of spring blinded her with its headlong joy. Everything in the world was changing before one's eyes-the trees, still bare the day before, became covered with the bluish veil of the first leaves; the tall stem of a wild plant thrust up toward the sun between the planks of the front steps; people emerged from their snug dens at the Caravanserai as if at a prearranged signal. The throng of them oppressed her. They were incredibly numerous and noisy, full of familiarity and a coarse appetite for life. Their remarks (she had the impression that they always shouted when they addressed one another) left her perplexed. In the library hall one day they were commenting enthusiastically on the announcement that the bridge would be rebuilt. They acclaimed the new bridge as if a new era in their lives were promised. "A direct road link with Paris!" bellowed an old army officer who went to Paris once a year. They were also rubbing their hands over the decision of the authorities to "clear the scrub from both banks." She was stunned to realize that by scrub they meant the woodland behind the Caravanserai. She intervened, trying to say that the trees there, even those that were too old or stunted, had a magic on icy mornings, or at night, covered in hoarfrost… But her words made no impact, as if spoken in a totally different conversation.

The days had become so warm that the residents often left their windows open, which was how, one day when she was walking around the building, she involuntarily overheard a remark. Without difficulty she recognized the voice of the nurse; not her usual voice, however, she sounded almost gleeful.

"And this shawl," she was saying. "She presents it to me like a queen giving it to her servant. A lot of use it'll be to me in this hot weather, that's for sure…"

Another voice, that of the director, was acquiescing less distinctly… Olga quickened her step for fear of being seen; dumbfounded and appalled, with an unconscious murmur on her lips: "But it's not true! I gave her that shawl in the depths of winter…" Then she calmed down, recalling the nurse's animated and excited voice, and told herself that, strangely enough, people can readily derive immediate and much more varied satisfaction from malice and evil than from good…