Without abandoning her reverie, she slowly drank the tea that was scarcely warm now, and went into her bedroom. The scent of the bark burning in the stove was intoxicating. She went to draw back the curtains and fill the room with the blue reflection of the snow… But she moved too abruptly. One of the rings, a heavy bronze ring, fell onto the carpet. The room seemed to be cut into two halves, one bathed in milky whiteness, the other darker than usual. She pulled up a chair. Then thought she must first find the curtain ring. Bent down. Realized that without a candle she could not see clearly enough in this dark half of the room… Suddenly she felt herself overtaken by a pleasant lassitude that confused her in the sequence of her movements: seek, light, climb on chair, replace. No, first light the candle… or pick up the curtain ring… Her strength failed her. A rapid drowsiness was already making her eyelids heavy, relaxing her body. The pearly brilliance of the snow bewitched her. She moved away from the window. The edge of the bed rose up behind her, made her knees give way. She sat down. Staying awake was now demanding an increasingly concentrated effort. She still believed it was the snow, the aroma of the burning bark, the intensity of her memories that had plunged her into this fog of tiredness. She lay down, undid the belt of her dressing gown. These actions were carried out more and more slowly, like the final few steps of a figurine on a music box. She teetered on the slippery brink of sleep in the absolute certainty that at all costs she must make these few waking moments last…
He came into the room when she was in the ultimate stage of consciousness. The stage when for the last time the drowning swimmer manages to return to the surface, to see the sun, the sky, his life, still so close…
He stopped at the silvery and black frontier that divided the room. Silvery like the snow outside the window, the bluish transparency on the door, the chair, the carpet. Black like the darkness that hovered around the bed. He took a step. Tricked by the snowy phosphorescence of the night, he put his foot on the hem of the curtain that had just slipped down. Another ring fell. Inaudible at first on the carpet, then suddenly beginning to roll on the bare floorboards with a deafening-paralyzing-clatter.
Several interminable seconds of nonlife went by. The boy frozen in the magnesium brilliance. The woman drawing all the darkness in the room around her body… The curtain ring, following its perfidious trajectory, embarked on a slow, clicking roll. Slowly the circles tightened around a center-around a silence that never seemed to come. In this instant of nonlife cadenced by the turning of the ring in ever decreasing circles, she had time to understand everything. Or rather to be blinded by a blazing connect-the-dots line: the movement of the young stranger surprised at the beginning of the autumn; the reptile; the oil on the door hinges… And even that ruined bridge, the steel girder with a boy advancing along it like a sleepwalker… A shout would have made him fall. As now, in crossing this room…
The curtain ring became still. After another endless minute she saw a long, thin shadow detaching itself against the background of the window whitened by snow. The outline of this apparition was lost in the blue twilight. The branches covered in hoarfrost parted as it passed. The crystals swirled slowly, sprinkling their bodies, melting on their skin. She was experiencing all this on the far side of sleep.
The curtains were carefully drawn, the rings rearranged on the curtain rod. It was the first thing she saw on waking and the last thing she was able to note with any kind of calm. "He must have thought the unhooked curtain was his fault and…"
She threw back the blanket, got up, observed her body beneath the open flaps of her dressing gown as if she had never seen it before. Then turned back toward the bed. The blanket! Someone had thrown it over her bare feet… Someone? She caught herself still hoping for a mistake, a misunderstanding, the mysterious intervention of a "someone."… The stove door was closed-although it had been left slightly open the night before… The whole room was booby-trapped with eloquent objects, incriminating evidence of a presence that did not even have to be proved.
Behind the thick velvet of the curtains a sparkling day could be sensed. The folds of material, although dark, were bursting with warm light and were on the brink of yielding to its dazzling torrent from one minute to the next. Isolated in a dark, ominous silence, the bedroom was about to be flooded by the sun, gutted by sounds… She went to the door and hesitated a long time with her hand on the handle. Beyond the door there could only be a blinding void, vibrant with a shrill, intolerable resonance.
She pushed at the handle. She was struck by the utter banality of the long corridor, its dreary look, the old coatrack, the familiar smell. At the far end the walls were lit up by the shafts of light streaming in from her son's bedroom… She walked toward it, vacantly, wide-eyed, with an unthinking faith-that everything would be resolved, by magic, wordlessly, as soon as their eyes met.
There was nobody in this bedroom, all radiant with sunlight. Nobody and yet he was there-in the crayon serving as a bookmark, in the shirt on the back of a chair… As usual. As yesterday, as in two days' time. The cheerful permanence of things terrified her. And when the tea began to brew in her cup, as it did every day, she walked rapidly out of the kitchen, seized her coat, and left the house.
For if she had simply continued with the petty ritual of habitual actions she would have been transformed into a monstrous being: the woman to whom that had happened. That was yesterday evening, last night. She understood it but still managed to avoid naming it: that.
Everything around her resonated. The rays of the sun, the glittering of the drops of melted snow trickling off the roof of the Caravanserai, the fragments of ice beneath her feet. And amid all this din a single thought ricocheted ceaselessly back and forth from one side of her brain to the other: to leave! At first this saving solution took her breath away by its simplicity. Yes, to leave! Bordeaux, Marseilles… She already saw herself settled in a train, running away from what had just happened to her. Then suddenly this absurd recollection: "Trains to run faster: Bordeaux… Marseilles…" So it was the paragraph glimpsed in a newspaper that had suggested destinations for her escape. Yet how could she go away? Leaving the child with whom? The child?
The drumming resumed in her temples even more forcefully. Yes, she must go away but go away forestalling yesterday evening, foiling it, before that could be given its definitive name. She had a presentiment of a place where the night she had just lived through would no longer appear like a horror and a monstrosity. A place or rather a time that was simultaneously now and yesterday but also a very distant day yet to come. A time where everything would be reconciled, mended, would find its justification. For a brief moment she believed she was breathing the airy serenity of this prefigured time.
Reality returned with a jolt: a passerby kept asking her a question.
"Are you going away?" this woman repeated, surprised at receiving no reply.
It was one of the readers from the library.
"Are you going to Paris?"
"No, why?"
Olga glanced around her. She had set off up one of the streets the occupants of the Caravanserai used to take when going to the station.