She liked the calming effect of this brief foretaste of the fall. Since that night of the delirium she knew everything from start to finish about that year of her life. Now, amid the haze of a temporary fall, it seemed as if she had come through, as if she were timidly resuming the interrupted course of her days.
One evening, when walking around the Caravanserai, she noticed that the bushes growing beneath the walls and beside the track were all pearly with white clusters. The dusk air also had this snowy tinge… The night was so chilly she had to light the fire. And did not sleep. Winter nights arose in her mind's eye one after another, beyond words in their hard beauty, with the trembling chasms of their skies, with that same scent of burning bark, a mere detail but which opened up an unfathomable cavalcade of hours. It was the first time she had returned to it. This return still had a bruising intensity. Yet her memory was already initiating her into the mysterious science of entering into that other life.
During these few autumnal days in mid-June, days of her son's convalescence, there flickered within her once more the crazy hope: that someone would listen to her, would understand her, understand, above all, that what she had lived through belonged to a life quite other than her own. So far this someone had no face, only a soul, vast and silent.
THE summer returned with unprecedented storms and a blazing sun that the citizens of Villiers-la-Forêt welcomed as dazzling evidence of the "first real vacation of peacetime" that was the talk of the papers. And even the little community of the Caravanserai sniffed this new air and gathered in the library, animatedly discussing the articles about the Tour de France 47, the first since the war; the new Paris Peace Conference; and especially the headline that proclaimed:
FRANCE FINALLY TURNS THE CORNER…
In spite of herself, or rather with secret complicity, she succumbed to this seasonal excitement. One day she caught herself studying the photos in a newspaper accompanying a long feature, "Where to Spend your Vacation," with envious admiration. A family (the parents and their two children) were cycling along a country road. She could not tear herself away from it. She liked everything about these vacationers: their family togetherness; their provisions well wrapped up on their carriers; the quiet road; and the gentle, orderly countryside. She suddenly longed to lose herself, like them, in the happy banality of these summer days, to have their French common sense, "so wonderfully French," she thought. Then she remembered her hope of finding a soul in whom she could confide, to whom she could speak about the depths of despair she had known. That seemed grotesque to her now. She must forget. Yes, forget! For these much-vaunted depths were in fact nothing more than moments of uneasy tenderness that no mother and no son can escape. Quite simply, they had gone a little further than others had done in this forbidden temptation. Besides, there had only been, all in all, eight or perhaps ten nights when…
She felt strong now, because she had decided not to remember. She must become a bit more stupid, be confident, talk about vacations. And it was as if she wanted to punish, wound, and destroy a being silently present within her that she forced herself to read the text of the article: "This year many foreign visitors-English, Scandinavians, Americans-plan to sample the delights of France. We owe a warm welcome to these visitors when they come to the places where for two years soldiers from their own countries fought for the liberation of Europe…"
This summery and agreeably simple world accepted her. She gave herself over to it, its joys and its gossip, with the fervor of a convert. Each new day seemed to justify her. The readers seemed happy to see her taking part in their discussions, just as in the old days.
At the end of the month she took her son to Paris. The doctor ("the French doctor" they called him, so as not to confuse him with the doctor-just-between-ourselves) examined the boy, arranged for him to be admitted to his ward, and told them the date of the operation. "The crooked leg will be straightened out under general anesthesia," she read again that same evening in the pages she could recite by heart; their technical language reassured her. She could already picture her son walking normally in a life that had become ordinary again…
After the operation, the date of which, so much dreaded in advance, arrived with surprising ease, the boy was to remain in the hospital for a number of days. And even her almost daily trips to Paris became a real apprenticeship for her in the blissful triviality of life.
Always in a hurry to get back to the Caravanserai, to the library, she had no time to see Li. It was only on July 14, thanks to the public holiday, that she could visit the photographer's little apartment…
The evening was unbearably oppressive with the smell that dusty streets have just before a storm, with a hazy, purple sky and the turmoil of leaves in brief gusts of wind. Li was still in her studio in the cellar, busy with the last clients of the day. And indeed it was only the studio that retained an air of habitability. In the main rooms the furniture had been replaced by pyramids of cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes. On the bare walls there were countless dark punctures-left by the hooks on which pictures, photos, and icons had hung…
She waited for a moment in the miniature courtyard, surrounded by windows on several floors. They were all open, to capture every tiniest breath of cool air on that stifling evening. You could hear the sizzling of oil in a frying pan, the gurgling of water running away, the clatter of crockery, scraps of conversation, snatches of music. An aroma, compounded of roofs cooling after the heat of the day, laundry, and burned fat, hung in the darkness above the paved square of ground. She was just about to go down into the studio when suddenly she noticed, in the shadiest corner of the yard, the shrub that was struggling to grow against the wall, beneath the drainpipe. And to flower invisibly, out of sight of all those noisy windows. She went up to it and buried her face in the clusters of flowers with which it was studded. The scent was subtle. A freshness of snow… The feeling that she could enter, linger, and merge into this cold breath made her giddy. For a moment she thought she was walking through a snow-covered forest in winter, on a morning barely silvered by the dawn, in the midst of trees, sleeping but secretly aware of her presence. She was not alone. She had a companion on this slow stroll. An infinite peace filled the space that lay between their two souls…
Li called her from the studio doorway. She was leaving for Russia in ten days. All she had left to do was to pack up the last of her panels: a sailor with incredibly broad shoulders presenting a bunch of flowers to a wasp-waisted young thing and, on the other one, a naked man and woman squeezed in among a crowd in tuxedos and evening gowns.
Two days later, coming back from Paris, she ran into the doctor-just-between-ourselves. He behaved as if he just happened to be in the road that led out into the square in front of the station. She would have believed him if she had not glanced through the window of the coach a few seconds before the train stopped. She recognized this man in a brown suit. The speed with which he moved as he left the shade of a plane tree, where he had been sheltering from the sun, gave him away. The train was slowing down and through the win-dowpane she saw him watching the station exit then slightly adjusting his shirt collar…
They walked back together. Listening to him she thought that, had she not glanced through that coach window, his words would have had quite another meaning. And that he himself, the man walking beside her, chatting, animated andjovial, would have been somebody else. Yes, he would still have been the "doctor-just-between-ourselves," self-effacing and obliging. Now she was aware of the suppressed energy in him, with which he had emerged out of the shadows. And also the easy smoothness that had colored his feigned surprise: "My goodness, it's you! What fair wind has brought you my way?" Now she was seeing things she had never noticed before: his heavy and strangely unpleasant-looking cuff links, the backs of his very broad hands, covered in hairs on which little drops of sweat glistened… But, in particular, his brown, oily eyes, with which he gave her swift sidelong glances that seemed, as they slid away, to hold her prisoner in their reflection. Yes, he walked without looking at her but she felt she was held, snared beneath his eyelids.