She had no recollection of inviting him to take tea with her. And yet there he was, seated opposite her in the kitchen that still glowed with the sunset; and he was talking, only breaking off to take a little sip for form's sake. She got up from time to time, chased a bee, set about pretending to listen to him but in reality was noticing, despite herself, fresh, absurd, and mysteriously important details: his square, yellowish fingernails; his forehead that filled with wrinkles when he gave a theatrical sigh, wrinkles that went right up to his bald pate and made it less shiny… It was one of those odd moments when you sense the imminent approach of some gesture, drawing inexorably closer.
As he was leaving he stopped in the hall and kissed her hand. Or rather, without bowing, he raised her hand and pressed it for a long time to his lips. When she made a movement of impatience he caught her by the waist with unexpected agility. She drew back to avoid his face. But to her surprise he did not go for her mouth. He remained still for a moment, forcing her into this precariously off-center posture, and supporting the weight of her body arched against his palm. Clumsily she pulled herself free from him and collided with the door frame. And her shout of "Go away!" was mingled with a brief cry of pain and her hand rubbing her bruised elbow. Facing her, he smiled, massive, sure of himself. But the voice that emerged from this mass was strangely shrill, stammering, like those sentences that have been long prepared but which, when the time comes, emerge quite convoluted and breathless: "I'll come again tomorrow… Maybe we could first… Well, I know a little restaurant…"
That night her focus switched restlessly between several very different personages. The elderly gentleman who had come out from the Caravanserai several times, often at nightfall in the snow, to care for an ailing boy… The man in the brown suit who came walking toward her without noticing her and suddenly uttered a cry of joy… The man who took little sips of tea and spoke of the solitude "we must confront together"… And that other man, again, who confessed that for years he had wanted to speak to her. And as he said it, his cuff links and his hairy wrists seemed to belong to someone else. She found it impossible to reassemble all these men into one, this aging male with his smooth, tanned, bald head, who had seized her waist, already taking delight in her submissive body.
On her return from Paris the next day she studied with concern the trees at the edge of the station square. Nobody. On the door of her house there was a little rectangle of paper. "I called for tea, I will be back for dinner." It was in deciphering the signature that she recognized the element that was common to all the men who had troubled her in the night. As if this commonplace, mildly ridiculous name, that she had known but forgotten-yes, as if simply seeing it written down, "Sergei Golets," had created a generic term for all these characters.
He was the man who had fathomed her secret (she did not know how, nor to what extent). The madness of her secret. Her madness… Yes, he was someone who treated her as he would have treated a simpleminded person who can be exploited.
It was already almost nine o'clock in the evening. She walked along beside the house with hurried steps, plunged in under the trees of the wood. You could cross it in five minutes, but the maze of footpaths created the illusion of a refuge. The ground was dappled with long copper rays, slowly turning pale. Darkness was gradually spilling into the shady corners. The moonlight turned the glades into lakes, into streams of a somnolent blue. The repeated cry of a bird rang out with the sound of icicles snapping. She had the sudden idea that it might be possible to stay there, not to leave these moments in time, to travel back through them… Then, remembering the madness a man had just detected in her, she hastened to return.
As she pressed the switch she thought that Golets might notice the light and come… At the same moment she heard the steady, almost nonchalant rapping at the door. She switched off the light, then at once switched it on again, annoyed by her own cowardice, went to the hall but decided not to open up and to say nothing. He knocked again and remarked without raising his voice, sensing that she was close at hand, "I know you're there. Open the door… I have a message for you." There was a jarring note of barely disguised mockery in his voice. "Yes, he talks as if to a feebleminded woman," she thought again. She went back into the kitchen and suddenly heard the snapping of a stem: he was walking along beside the wall, treading on the flowers in the darkness. She remembered that the French door in her bedroom had been left ajar. Hardly had the thought occurred when it became reality: at the end of the corridor the ancient hinges emitted a long musical creak. She rushed to the other end of the apartment, switched on the light, just had time to focus her eyes on the familiar and woeful interior: the lamp with the patched-up china base, the stove, the bed, the wardrobe with a mirror…
And amid all these objects, with their patina of familiarity, a man putting his head through the gap where the French door was ajar, just like one of those volatile interiors in a bad dream.
"Just two words… Yesterday I forgot to tell you…" He smiled, hypnotizing her with his fixed stare, and made his way into the room with brief, swift advances, while seeming to be motionless every time she was on the point of rebuking him.
She felt desperately distant from this scene. The words that rang out in her head and then burst forth from her lips seemed to emanate from somebody else: "Go away! Get out! Quickly!" Ineffectual commands that had not affected the distracted look on her own face nor produced any effect on the man who did not move and yet kept coming closer. She, too, was absent from her body and the man knew it: infancy, drunkenness, and madness all disarm the body in this way and it becomes an easy prey.
"I didn't tell you yesterday," he began, with the excitement of one who sees his strategy coming to fruition. "I love you. I have loved you for years… No, let me…"
She swung her hand clumsily. He intercepted her slap and kissed her hand passionately, then grasped her waist, caught her dispossessed body off balance and thrust it toward the bed. She saw a round face, gleaming with sweat, and heard herself shouting out a completely illogical remark: "Let me go! Your neck is hideous!"
It was these absurd, half-choking words that stopped him in his tracks. The man straightened up, let her go, and felt his neck. "What did you say? What's the matter with my neck?"
His skin was shaved too close, red, and covered in tiny swellings. He took a step toward the mirror, realized that this movement was ridiculous, lost countenance.
"Go away!" she said in a weary voice. "I beg you…"
She went to the French door, drew back the curtain, and flung it open. He obeyed her, murmuring with a vexed sneer, "All right, all right… But all the same you won't refuse me the pleasure of an excursion with you? Tomorrow afternoon…" He went out, turned, and waited for her reply. She shook her head and tugged at the handle. The cuff link glittered-he was quick enough to block the door.
"One last word," he called, his lips unable to achieve a reconciliation between smiling and twitching with rage. "The very last, I assure you. Now this glass door you are crushing my arm with"-she let go of the handle-"this French door, which is somewhat too wide for these curtains, or rather the curtains are too narrow, if you prefer…"
She was seized by a profound internal shuddering that rose rapidly in her stomach and up to her chest and constricted the muscles of her throat. The man was about to blurt out something irreparable, she had a precise, blinding intuition of it. She had sensed it unconsciously, ever since his maneuvering began, and it was this presentiment that had left her disarmed in confronting him.