She heard another click of metal on the tray. Her friend's horned head bobbed up at the end of the table.
"That's it?!" They spoke with one voice, one asking, one stating, in unintended unison, as often happens with people who have known one another for a very long time and end up unconsciously following the course of one another's thoughts…
"And yet," thought Olga, "we'll never breathe a word about the most important things. I'll never even tell her how I make lists to help me forget the pain. The second anniversary of the Liberation; this tiny death in my womb; the portrait on the wall looking at me. How could I explain? I'd have to be able to ask her if she has thoughts of this kind; if trivia like this fill her mind, too, and seem important to her…" Those accordion notes just now; they brought on that sudden longing for an easy happiness, spine-tingling, very French, or at least what people imagine as French. The fleeting but burning desire to be without past, without thoughts, without weight; to be merry, intoxicated with being alive here and now. And all at once the shame at having had this longing. The vigilant censorship that watches over our happiness, a pitiless voice, always on the alert. A voice that reproaches her with the little life destroyed in her womb-as an immediate punishment for this longing to be happy. So many fragments of joy and fear we are made up of and never speak of.
But there had been no mention of any of this in their conversation at noon before the operation. They recalled the Parisian midwife who had been guillotined some years previously, for having practiced clandestine abortions. They chattered jokingly, making faces and feigning theatrical terror: "The French will guillotine us!" The anecdote allowed them to remain silent about what was on the tips of their tongues, in their eyes, their real lives, made up of little nothings that were serious, essential, inadmissible.
"I'm putting away my instruments of torture. You can get up. I've put your dressing gown here on the armchair."
Her friend touched her shoulder, smiling, then went out, taking with her the tray covered in a crumpled napkin. "That smile, I've already added it to my painkilling inventory" August 25, 1946. A room transformed into a used furniture store filled with Russian curios. The smiling face of a woman-a scarred face that since adolescence had borne a deep gash cut into her left cheek, like a pink butterfly with torn wings. Her smile made the butterfly move; the most childlike, the most vulnerable smile in the world, one from which strangers turned away, so as not to let their revulsion be seen… The face of Li. Li, lily… At a party in the days of their childhood in Russia long ago a ten-year-old child weeps: the others are in fancy dress as flowers; her own costume, a lily-dress, has gone astray. People hear her lamenting: "Li-li-lia!" They laugh. They make up a nickname. The child becomes Li. She is consoled with a replacement costume-that of a magician: she has a turban with a peacock's feather, a star-spangled cape, a magic wand. She falls in love with the role. At every party from now on it is she who takes charge of the magic; she learns conjuring, knows how to set off fireworks. People have almost forgotten her real name, Alexandra… One festive evening a many-colored rocket hits her in the face before falling into the grass and exploding in a shower of stars that makes the children shout with glee. Her own cry is lost amid the tumult of laughter and applause. She is fifteen…
In her inventory just now Olga included that child. A child disfigured because someone had once found her a magician's costume. A child who would survive wars, famines, indifference, and disgust in the eyes of others and end up in a stifling room, lost in the midst of the Parisian ant-heap, on August 25, 1946, causing pain, while she tended it, to the bared body of a woman.
Along with the cool from the windows, opened at last, the evening also brought the marvelous sensation of the pain fading. Lying on a sofa squeezed between the piano and the armchairs, Olga heard her friend busying herself in the kitchen. The clatter of crockery, the swish of the water. Li… pleasantly distracted, as a woman can feel in the evening, soothed by the routine sequence of tasks. Li… so close, a friend for so long and at the same time unknowable. Other people are made up of questions that one dare not put to them…
Li stuck her head through the half open door: "You're not bored?"
"So she was thinking about me. It's one of those questions you can never ask: What do you think of me? And yet we spend our days picturing how other people see us, picturing ourselves living in their minds. And I certainly have a life in hers. But what a strange creature that must be!"
She tried to picture Olga as imagined by Li, an Olga in love and very much loved, in the midst of a passionate affair with her lover. ("She doubtless calls him my 'lover.' ") For this imaginary Olga, pregnancy is a real disaster. The lover, a married man, is too prominent in the Russian colony in Paris to recognize an illegitimate child. Hence an abortion. The heroine of a pretty romantic tale…
She pricked up her ears. A little hummed tune was now mingled with the sound of the dishes being washed. "My dear old Li," thought Olga. "I must be something like that in her thoughts-a lover, passion, palpitations. If she only knew that the thing that really upset me in this business is that I can't remember when this 'lover' of mine last came to see me. That I'm almost sure he didn't come in June, nor more recently. So this pregnancy strongly resembles an immaculate conception. No, he must have come in June, the proof of it is… But I simply don't recall, I have no memory of it. And so where Li pictures a tragedy there is just this infuriating confrontation with forgotten dates, meetings that have slipped the memory… Other people make us live in surprising worlds. And we live in them; they go and see us down there; they talk to these doubles, who are their own invention. And in reality we do not meet at all in this life."
Li's laughter woke her in the night. Sleeping in two armchairs arranged face to face for the occasion, her friend gave a rather shrill, childish little laugh. It took Olga several seconds to realize that Li was weeping softly in her sleep. The moon was melting on the lid of the piano; the furniture and objects seemed to be in suspense, interrupting the existence they had been leading a moment before. And her friend's wail rang out both close at hand and in the infinite remoteness of the life that enfolded her dreams… Olga remained awake for quite some time, listening as Li's breathing gradually calmed down.
In the morning, finding her friend neither in the room nor in the kitchen, Olga went out into the little yard at the back of the house. She sat down on an old stool in the soft, transparent sunlight and did not stir, her gaze fixed on a little stunted tree that persisted in growing in a crack under the gutter. It was important to her not to disturb the simple happiness, the absence of thoughts, the slow drifting of the air that still had the freshness of cold paving stones, of the night, but already carried the smell of grilled onions. Olga leaned the back of her neck against the rough surface of the wall. She suddenly felt she could live solely by following the permeation of these smells, live in this light, in the immediate physical sensation of happiness. On the wall facing her, several narrow windows, cut through at random, spoke of unknown lives that seemed touching to her in their simplicity…
This happiness lasted for the time she needed to take stock of her own reality. It was still there, but yesterday's thoughts, the thoughts of every day, in the guise they had had yesterday, were already flooding in: that "lover," certainly the last man in her life; the tiny lethal operation in her body. During the coming days all of that would give rise to a long, futile inner debate, arguments that excused her and those that damned her. She could already hear words forming in her head, that vigilant voice that kept watch over her moments of happiness: "So, you've had your instant of bliss thanks to a little murder. Bliss in a backyard that smells of onions. Well done!"