The expanse of meadowland covered in water was so bleak, the branches of the alders so trembling and tortured that it no longer occurred to anyone in Villiers-la-Forêt to ponder what kind of love or hate had brought two strange Russian summer folk together on this riverbank.

Night has fallen. A moment ago the old keeper stopped talk-

ing. His hand resting on the lock of the gate, he is waiting for the man dressed in a student's jacket to go. But the latter seems not to notice this gesture. His eyes, unmoving, are filled with a torrent of shapes, places, grimacing faces; of cries; of days.

The tale has been told with the simplicity of the previous anecdotes: a man, a woman, an inexplicable pairing, a death or a murder. And oblivion. Nevertheless, this last visitor has managed to glimpse the fine strand of weed clinging to the drowned man's brow. He has sensed the disturbing intensity that the presence of the lifeless body bestowed on the scents of summer, the murmur of insects among the plants on the riverbank. He has heard the remarks whispered by the curious. He has experienced that delicious apprehension with which, later, they would come and thrust their fingers into the breach in the side of the boat.

His eyes dazzled by this imagined world, he stands transfixed, straining to hear the words that he still seems to make out down there: the strangely cadenced voice of the woman, replying to the magistrate. Now he thinks he can even understand the shackled sentences of the stammerer.

The old man takes out a heavy bunch of keys, shakes it. But the other does not hear. His vision isolates him in the night: "To be able to see what others do not see, do not wish to see, do not know how to see, are afraid to see-like all those visitors to the cemetery, who have been filing past this old man from time immemorial. Yes, to guess that the dress of the woman seated on the riverbank, the dress torn during a brief and appalling struggle, was gradually losing its transparency as it dried and beginning to conceal her body more fully To see the increasing opacity of this fabric is already to enter into this woman's life…"

The old man slowly draws the gate to and turns the key in the lock. The two of them remain inside the cemetery.

–  ?

The invitation to drink tea seems to awaken the man in the corduroy jacket from his reverie. He accepts and, as he walks along beside the old man, notices that on the crosses several night-lights in their tiny glass cages are still shining, scattered through the darkness. In the distance the glowing window of the keeper's house also resembles a night-light, gradually growing broader as they approach, and admitting them, as a candle flame does if you stare at it for long enough, thereby entering its flickering, violent life.

Two

She knew that the pain we feel, physical as well as mental, is partly due to our indignation at pain, our astonishment at it, our refusal to accept it. To avoid suffering, she always employed the same trick: making a mental list. What you have to do is take note, as dispassionately as possible, of the presence of things and people brought together by the painful situation. Name them very simply, one after the other, until their total improbability hits you in the eye. And so she was listing them now, first of all noticing the drawn curtains, the edges of which were fastened together by half a dozen clothespins. The dark curtains, the ceiling lit from the side by a lamp placed on a chair. And on the ceiling, as well as on the wall, those two angular shadows, dark and clear cut: the outline, like a capital M, of the legs of a woman lying on her back with her knees up. And another shape, this one moving; a gigantic head with two horns, appearing at intervals between the triangles of the bent legs. Yes, these two women linked by the silent work one of them was carrying out on the other one's body, in a stifling room, late one afternoon in August.

A precise pain, sharp as an injection, made her interrupt her list-making and close her eyes tightly. But she must start again quickly, so as to leave herself no time for indignation. So; the August sun, whose dusty indolence could be sensed, despite the drawn curtains and the closed shutters. Beyond the shutters, on the sidewalk, a few inches away from the insulated interior of the room, an encounter between two passersby, their conversation ("Mark my words, we won't be seeing a lot of meat next year"); then the clatter of a streetcar and the faint answering tinkle of the glasses in the cupboard. Then, like an amplification of that tenuous sound-the rattling of a metallic instrument on a tray.

The head swathed in a large white square with two horns reappeared at the end of the improvised operating table. "I'm not hurting you too much, am I?" And it dived in again between the patient's parted knees.

This silent smile too, must be added to the inventory. In resuming it she must strive for the greatest possible precision in the details. A cramped room, an incredible accumulation of furniture: that cupboard made of dark wood, almost black; a writing desk; a piano with candelabra fixed to it at each end of the keyboard; two armchairs close together like in a cinema auditorium; a pedestal table; sets of shelves-everything piled high with books, statuettes, knickknacks, vases with bunches of dried stems. On the walls a patchwork of pictures: antique portraits with barely visible features and bright, airy landscapes cheek by jowl with abstract geometry. In the corner, almost up against the ceiling, the brown, gilded rectangle of an icon, concealed beneath a long draped fabric… And in the middle of this chaos, straight, clean sheets, the smell of alcohol, a table that looks like an ice floe. Outside the window, some rhythmic chanting, those fleeting echoes that people carry away with them mechanically after a demonstration or a carnival. A snatch of music is woven into it- the joyful sob of an accordion, the sound of which conjures up a vision of the avenue in its August heat…

The nature of the pain altered, becoming harsher, more humiliating in its physiological banality. Olga sensed that the words were already trembling in her mind and that, in an indignant, silent protest they were about to blame her own stupidity ("What an idiot! At my age!"); as well as the vigilant, petty perfidiousness of life ("The moment was well chosen, enough said! Or rather I was the one well chosen, otherwise I might have been able to cling to a few illusions about the best of all possible worlds…"). She hurriedly resumed her game of stocktaking. Yes, the festive shouts outside the window: the second anniversary of the Liberation of Paris… In the morning, on her way to her friend's house, she had noticed the profusion of flags on the fronts of buildings… Yes, this city at once animated and drowsy; this one-story house at the edge of the fifteenth arrondissement; this sun beating against the closed shutters on the ground floor. And, in a room isolated from the world, two women. One of them stretched out on a table, covered by a sheet, the other bent over the first's lower abdomen, her head swollen by an enormous white headdress with horns, engaged in performing a clandestine abortion.

Olga felt her indignation thwarted by the absurdity of the situation. She could have been indignant if the pain had violated some logic, flown in the face of justice. But there was no logic to it. Just scattered fragments; unpleasant pricks that raised goose bumps on her thighs on that stifling afternoon of August 25, 1946; the room crammed with furniture; a woman subjecting another woman to an operation held to be criminal. "A clandestine abortion," Olga repeated mentally, thinking that the improbability of her situation might well have been even more striking. One had only to picture how close her half naked body was to the passersby outside the shutters. Her body that had been surgically amputated from the tiny life enclosed within it, a body now singular but which, from tomorrow onward, would melt back into the crowd of other bodies, indistinguishable from their mass.