Her profile appeared sharply on the wall – black on yellow. So did the glass whose brown contents she poured between her lips, lapping them up avidly. She filled the same glass, held it out to me. I recognized the local brew: alcohol mixed with cranberry jam. It flooded into me, like one of the shadows flitting across the bare wall of the izba. It burned, flayed my palate, filled me with darkness. As before, I could see only fragments. But the candle had remained in the room next door, and these shards were fading, becoming dull. Everything was splitting up. One piece: her torso rearing up before my eyes, strongly, terrifyingly white. (One could never have imagined how broad it would be!) The whiteness tinged with yellow shadow. This bright patch was suddenly drowned in the darkness that erupted, causing an explosion of metallic creaks from the bed. Another fragment: her hand, large and red, pulling the blanket over my bare shoulder. With an absurd solicitude and insistence. And then a china statuette on the shelves by the bed: a slender ballerina with her partner. I saw their smooth faces, their unmoving eyes, very close to me.

And all that happened in the hollow of this bed, with its smell of cold smoke and sugary perfume, was only a series of abrupt, hopeless attempts to join the odd fragments together.

By accident and in my fear of not doing what a man had to do, I caught hold of a breast, heavy and cold. It did not respond to the clasp of my fingers. I let it go, as one lays a dead bird down in the grass. I tried with all my weight to crush the body that spilled off into the shadows, to keep it together in the unity of my desire. I buried my face in the russet curls. And once more I came up against a separate shard – the drops of melted snow in her hair. And an earring, quite simple and worn, sliding toward my lips…

I had expected love to have the intensity of my nocturnal plunge into the snow with Samurai, beneath the frozen sky: that unique moment when the heat of the bath and the cold of the stars produced a searing fusion. I had expected that there would be nothing to touch, to feel, to recognize, for everything would be a single incandescent touching. And that I would be wholly outside and inside, the organ of that indescribable touching…

The red-haired prostitute must have sensed that I was at a loss. She parted her legs heavily to let me slide into her groin. Her body gathered itself up, became taut. Her hand penetrated under my belly, grasped me, thrust me into her. With a precise, deft movement. She seemed to be putting me in tune with her body, plugging me into her flesh… And rearing up slightly, she shook me, pushed me into action.

I writhed between her broad thighs. I clung onto her breasts, which yielded with a soft, lazy resignation. My belly seemed to be stretching a great hot, sticky wound beneath her.

So this was the stuff of love: slippery, glutinous. And lovers were heavy, breathless. It was as if each, laboriously, were hauling the other one's body along… But where to?

All that I understood only later. I lived through it again when, bowed under the snow squalls, I was running to get away from the bed with its slimy depths, and the izba that smelled of cold smoke. My cheek was burning from two terrible blows. The red-haired prostitute had slapped me with a hoarse exclamation and a look filled with hate.

I was running toward the great bridge that spanned the Olyei. I was plunging into the white tide without thinking about what I was going to do. Everything was too clear for it to be thought about. As clear as the white abyss that opened at my feet on the crown of the bridge. It was in this abyss that I must flee the stare of the red-haired woman. Her look and the horrible mess that was love. Climb over the handrail and escape from the vision that was gradually becoming more vivid in my head…

This vision had arisen when, in the midst of my feverish thrashings on her great body, the light shone. Absurdly, the electricity had come on again. The room was frozen by the ghastly, stunning light of a great bulb. The red-haired prostitute screwed up her eyes, her face twisted into a grimace of disgust. I stared at this broad face.

This heavily made-up mask. This tired paint. These shining pores. I sensed that the harsh light made it vulnerable, trapped by the stupid return of the current. But I, too, was caught in the trap. I could not turn my gaze elsewhere. The mask held it. I was thrashing around, my face a couple of inches away from that unhappy grimace. I felt a strange pity for the mask, and it was at that moment that my desire exploded.

I did not know, then, if what I experienced was fear, pity, love, or disgust. There was that face, with its pathetic grimace; the red lips with a sickening breath of alcohol; the dark-red hair spangled with drops of water… And this violent spasm wrenching my stomach – in a warped replica of our nocturnal ecstasy in the snow on the banks of the Olyei.

I caught just a glimpse of the glittering night sky, filled with constellations… Then the red-haired prostitute let her thighs fall back and pushed me away slightly, to free herself. She was unplugging me from her body…

There was none of the humid warmth of the bath for me to get into. None of the intoxicating smell of Samurai's cigar. A pitiless light with a dry and powdery whiteness. I saw the red-haired woman get up and stand in the middle of the room. Her nakedness terrified me. Especially viewed from behind. I hoped she was going to put out the light. But she started to dress. Her body went through the actions with difficulty, balancing clumsily now on one leg, now on the other. From time to time I saw her profile bending over the garments she was buttoning up. Her lips moved slowly, as if she were addressing silent words to herself. Her eyelids were heavy with sleep. The alcohol must be affecting her more and more.

Finally she turned around, probably to urge me to hurry. Her gaze met mine. Her eyes grew wide. She saw me! Her lips trembled. Putting her great hand to her mouth, she repressed a cry. Only a kind of dull choking sound was heard.

Leaving her blouse half unbuttoned, she rushed to a little cupboard, opened it with a violent movement, and took out a bottle. Then, without offering me the slightest explanation, she sat on the edge of the bed beside me and flung back the blanket. I had no time to react. She poured what I took to be water into the hollow of her palm and began to rub my genitals and the lower part of my belly vigorously. Dumbfounded, I allowed this to be done to me. The rubbing burned my skin: the water turned out to be alcohol… Every now and then the woman gave me a look that I could not understand. It was both sorrowful and pitying. Like the one I would observe in Utkin's mother when she saw her son limping across the courtyard.

Besides, there was no longer anything to understand. What I was experiencing simply could not be thought about at all. The burning of the alcohol, equally incomprehensible, was welcome, rather: it corresponded to the intoxication that was slowly invading every corner of my being.

It was this drunkenness that freed me from all amazement. What was happening to me was becoming absurdly natural: both the red-haired woman, who, before putting away the bottle, filled herself a glass right to its lipstick-stained brim; and the light that suddenly went out again; and the packet of old photos she fetched at the same time as the candle…

Everything was natural. This great woman in her unbuttoned blouse sitting beside me, laying out these black-and-white snapshots on the blanket. She wept silently, whispering explanations that I could not hear. I did not see the photos; I lived their tarnished images. There was almost always a young, smiling woman, shading her eyes from the sun. In her arms she held an infant who looked like her. Sometimes a man appeared beside them, dressed in wide trousers and an open-necked shirt such as nobody had worn for a long time now. And I breathed the air of these unknown days that I recognized by the flickering light of the candle. A fragment of river, the shadow of a forest. Their looks, their smiles. Their family complicity. In spite of myself, I experienced the happiness of these unknown people.