the wind. And I was soon contriving to imitate these word jugglers with ease…
The only person who did not appreciate my turnabout was Pashka, the dunce, whose fishing expeditions I once used to share in. From time to time he would approach our group and listen to us, and when I embarked on telling my French stories he would stare at me with a suspicious air.
One day the gathering round me was more numerous than usual. My story must have been particularly interesting. I was talking (summarizing the novel by that poor Spivalski, who was accused of all the mortal sins and killed in Paris) about the two lovers who had spent a long night in an almost empty train, fleeing across the dying empire of the tsars. The next day they parted forever…
On this occasion my listeners belonged to all three castes – sons of proletarians, future engineers, and intelligentsia. I described the passionate embraces in the depths of a sleeping compartment as the train hurtled through dead villages and over burned bridges. They listened to me avidly. It was certainly easier for them to picture this pair of lovers in a train than a president of the Republic with his beloved in a palace… And to satisfy the aficionados of wordplay I described the train stopping in a provincial town: the hero lowered the window and asked the few people who were walking alongside the track what the name of the place was. But no one could tell him. It was a town without a name! A town peopled with strangers. A sigh of satisfaction arose from the group of aesthetes. And then in a cunning flashback, I returned to the compartment, to talk again of the restless love of my crazy travelers…
It was at that moment that above the crowd I saw Pashka's tousled head appearing. Pashka listened for several minutes, then growled, easily drowning my voice with his rough bass. 'You've got these fools with their tongues hanging out over your pack of fibs!'
No one would have dared to contradict Pashka in a solo confrontation. But the crowd has a courage of its own. Snorts of indignation came in response.
In order to cool tempers I said in a conciliatory tone, 'They're not fibs, Pashka! It's an autobiographical novel. This guy really did escape from Russia with his mistress after the Revolution, and then in Paris he was murdered…'
'Right. So why don't you tell them what happened at the station?'
I was left openmouthed. Now I remembered having already told this story to my friend, the dunce. In the morning the two lovers had found themselves beside the Black Sea, in a deserted cafe, in a town buried in snow. They drank scalding tea by a window covered with hoarfrost… Several years later when they met again in Paris they admitted to one another that those few hours that morning were more dear to them than all the transports of love in their lives. Yes, that dull, gray morning; the muffled sounds of the foghorns; and their complicit presence at the height of the murderous storm of history…
It was that station cafe that Pashka was speaking of… The school bell rescued me from my embarrassment. My listeners stubbed out their cigarettes and streamed into the classroom. While I, abashed, told myself that none of my styles – not the one I adopted when speaking to the
As I went home from school I remembered that when telling my comrades the story of the French president in love, I had never yet spoken of his silent vigil beside the black window at the Elysee. He alone, facing the autumn night, and – somewhere out there in that world of darkness and rain – a woman with her face hidden beneath a veil that sparkled with mist. But who would have listened to me if I had ventured to speak of that moist veil in the autumn night?
Pashka tried again two or three times, and always clumsily, to tear me away from my new friends. To no avail. One day he invited me to go fishing on the Volga. I refused in the presence of everybody, with a vaguely scornful air. He remained for several seconds in front of our group-alone, hesitant, strangely frail despite his broad shoulders… On another occasion he caught up with me on the journey home and asked me to bring him Spivalski's book. I promised I would. The next day I had forgotten all about it…
I was too absorbed in a new collective pleasure: the Mountain of Joy. That was the name given in our city to an enormous open-air dance floor situated on the summit of a hill high above the Volga. We scarcely knew how to dance. But it was clear that our rhythmic gyrations had only one objective: to hold a girl's body in our arms, to touch it, to tame it. On our evening excursions to the Mountain, castes and coteries no longer existed. In the feverishness of our desire we were all equal. Only the young soldiers on leave formed a group apart. I observed them jealously.
One evening I heard someone calling me. The voice seemed to come from the foliage on the trees. I looked up and there was Pashka! The square dance floor was surrounded by a high wooden fence. Outside, wild vegetation grew thickets somewhere between a park run to seed and a forest. It was on a broad branch of a maple tree, above the fence, that I saw him…
I had just left the dance floor after having clumsily bumped against my partner's breasts… It was the first time I had danced with such a buxom girl. My palms, resting on her back, were all moist. Caught out by an unexpected flourish from the band, I made a false move, and my chest pressed against hers. The effect was more powerful than an electric shock! The soft elasticity of a female breast overwhelmed me. I continued to shuffle without hearing the music: instead of the dancing girl's fair face, all I saw was a shining oval.
When the band stopped playing, she walked away without saying a word, visibly piqued. I crossed the floor, sliding between couples, as if I were walking on ice, and went out.
I needed to be alone, to recover my spirits. I walked along the path that ran beside the dance floor. The wind coming from the Volga cooled my burning brow. 'But suppose it was her, my partner herself,' I thought suddenly, 'who chose to bump into me on purpose?' Yes, perhaps she had wanted me to feel her bosom and was sending me a signal that in my naivete and my timidity I had failed to decode. Had I missed the chance of a lifetime?
Like a child that has just broken a cup and closes its eyes, hoping that this momentary darkness will put everything back together again, I screwed up my eyes: why couldn't the band play the same number again and I find my partner again and repeat all the same movements? I had never felt and would never again feel so intensely the intimate proximity and at the same time, the most irretrievable remoteness of a female body…
It was in the midst of this emotional disarray that I heard the voice of Pashka, hidden in the foliage. I looked up. He was smiling at me, half stretched out along a thick branch: 'Climb up! I'll make room for you,' he said, folding up his legs.
Clumsy and heavy in the city, as soon as he was in the wild Pashka was transfigured. On that branch he looked like a big cat, resting before its nightly prowl…
In any other circumstances I would have ignored his invitation. But his position was too unusual, and in addition I felt I had been caught in flagrante delicto. I felt as if he had intercepted my feverish thoughts from his branch! He held his hand out to me, and I hauled myself up beside him. The tree was a veritable observation post.
Seen from above, the swaying of hundreds of entwined bodies had quite a different look to it. It seemed at one and the same time absurd (all these creatures pawing the ground!) and endowed with a certain logic. Bodies circulated, coalesced for the space of a dance, separated, sometimes remained glued to one another during several numbers. From our tree, at a single glance, I could take in all the little emotional games unfolding on the dance floor. Rivalries, challenges, betrayals, loves at first sight, breakups, explanations, potential brawls quickly brought under control by the vigilant keepers of order. But above all, it was desire that was visible through the veil of the music and the ritual of the dance. Within that human tide I located the girl whose breasts I had brushed against. For a moment I followed her trajectory from one partner to another…
In short, I felt all this whirling about reminded me insidiously of something. 'Life!' a silent voice suddenly suggested to me, and my lips repeated silently, 'Life…' The same mingling of bodies driven by desire and hiding it under innumerable pretences. Life… 'And where am I, myself, at this moment?' I asked
