myself, sensing that the answer to this question would shed light on an extraordinary truth, which would explain everything once and for all.
Shouts rang out beside the path. I recognized my classmates returning to the city. I seized the branch, ready to jump. Pashka's voice, tinged with embittered resignation, rang out uncertainly: 'Wait! Look, they're going to switch off the floodlights. There'll be masses of stars! If we climb higher we'll see Sagittarius…'
I was not listening to him. I jumped to the ground. The earth, ribbed with thick roots, bruised the soles of my feet violently. I ran to catch up with my classmates, who were moving off, gesticulating. I wanted to tell them, as quickly as possible, about my partner with the beautiful bosom, to hear their remarks, to deafen myself with words. I was in a hurry to get back to life. And with cruel glee I parodied the strange question that had formed inside my head a moment before: 'Where am I? Where was I? On a branch beside that idiot, Pashka, obviously. On the edge of real life!'
By a freakish coincidence (I already knew that reality is made up of implausible repetitions of the kind that novelists hound down as serious faults) we met again the next day, with that unease experienced by two companions who at night have exchanged grave, exalted, and emotional confidences, have revealed themselves to the very intimate core of their souls, and who meet again in the morning by the mundane and skeptical light of day.
I wandered around outside the still-closed dance floor. I wanted to be the first partner for the dancer of the night before. I wanted time to go into reverse and glue my broken cup back together again.
Pashka appeared in the scrub of the park, saw me, hesitated for a second, then walked toward me. He was laden with his fishing gear. Under his arm he carried a big loaf of black bread from which he tore off and ate pieces, chewing them with relish. Once more I felt I had been caught in flagrante delicto. He inspected me, scrutinizing my light-colored shirt wide open at the neck, my fashionable trousers, very flared at the bottom. Then, tossing his head as a sign of good-bye, he moved off. I heaved a sigh of relief. But suddenly Pashka turned and called out to me in a slightly coarse voice, 'Here, come with me, I'll show you something! Come on, you won't be sorry…'
I followed him with a hesitant tread.
We went down toward the Volga, walked beside the port with its enormous cranes, its workshops, its corrugated iron warehouses. Farther downstream we made our way into a broad wasteland littered with old barges; with misty metallic constructions; with pyramids of lengthy, rotten tree trunks. Pashka hid his lines and nets under one of these worm-eaten boles and began to jump from one boat to another. There was also an abandoned landing stage, and several pontoon bridges that yielded buoyantly beneath our feet. In following Pashka, I had not in fact noticed the moment when we left dry land to find ourselves on this floating island of abandoned craft. I held on to a broken handrail, leaped into a kind of junk, stepped over its side, slipped on the wet timbers of a raft…
We finally found ourselves in a channel that had steep banks all covered in flowering elder trees. Its surface, from one shore to the other, was hidden under the hulks of ancient vessels packed close together, side by side, in fantastic disorder.
We settled ourselves on the thwart of a little boat. Above it arose the side of a barge that bore traces of fire. Craning my neck, I noticed up there, on the deck of the barge, a rope strung out near the cabin: several fragments of faded cloth undulated gently – washing that had been hanging out to dry for years…
The evening was warm, misty. The smell of the water mingled with the insipid emanations from the elder trees. From time to time a vessel that we could see passing in the distance in the middle of the Volga sent a series of lazy waves into our channel. Our boat began to pitch up and down, rubbing against the black side of the barge. The whole half-submerged graveyard came to life. One could hear the grating of a cable, the lapping of the water under a pontoon, the lisping of the reeds.
'They are great, all these bulwarks!' I exclaimed, using a word whose maritime application was only vaguely known to me.
Pashka gave me a rather confused glance. I got up, in a hurry to return to the Mountain of Joy… But my friend tugged me forcefully by the sleeve to make me sit down and announced in a nervous whisper, 'Hang on! They're coming!'
I heard the sound of footsteps, the click of heels on the wet clay of the bank, then a tattoo on the wood of a footbridge. Finally a metallic hammering right above us on the deck of the barge… And already muffled voices reaching to us from its bowels.
Pashka stood up straight and pressed himself against the side of the barge. It was only then that I noticed the three portholes. Their panes were broken and blocked up from the inside with pieces of plywood. The surfaces of these were covered in fine holes made by a knife blade. Without leaving his porthole, my friend gestured with his hand, inviting me to imitate him. Clinging onto a steel projection that ran the length of the side, I glued myself to the left-hand porthole. The one in the center remained unoccupied.
What I saw through the crack was at the same time banal and extraordinary. A woman, of whom I could only see her head in profile and the upper part of her body, seemed to be leaning with her elbows on a table, her arms parallel, her hands motionless. Her face appeared calm and even drowsy. Only her presence here, on this barge, seemed surprising. Although after all… She kept gently nodding her head, which had fair, curly hair, as if she were continually agreeing with an invisible speaker.
I moved away from my porthole and glanced at Pashka. I was perplexed. 'But after all, what's there to see?' But he had his palms stuck to the flaking surface of the barge, and his forehead against the plywood.
Then I moved to the neighboring porthole, peering into one of the cracks that perforated the wood that blocked it.
It was as if our boat were sinking, going to the bottom of that cluttered canal, and the side of the barge, on the other hand, were hurtling up toward the sky. Feverishly I let myself be magnetized by its rough metal, while trying to keep within my sight the vision that had just blinded me.
It was a woman's buttocks, white, nude, massive. Yes, the haunches of a kneeling woman, still seen in profile, her legs, her thighs, the breadth of which terrified me; and the start of her back, cut off by the field of vision allowed by the crack. Behind that enormous backside there was a soldier, also on his knees, his trousers unbuttoned, his tunic in disorder. He was grasping the hips of the woman and drawing them toward him, as if he wanted to be swallowed up into that mass of flesh, which at the same time he kept thrusting away from him with violent shudders of his whole body.
Our boat began to slip away beneath my feet. A vessel sailing up the Volga had sent its waves into our channel. One of them managed to unbalance me. In saving myself from falling I took a step to the left and found myself by the first porthole. I pressed my forehead against its steel frame. In the crack appeared the woman with curly hair and an indifferent and somnolent face, the one I had seen at first; leaning on what resembled a tablecloth, dressed in a white blouse, she continued acquiescing with little nods of her head and was distractedly examining her fingers…
This first porthole. And the second. The woman whose eyelids were heavy with sleep, her dress and her hairstyle very ordinary. And the other. This naked, erect backside; this white flesh into which there plunged a man who seemed slender beside her; those broad thighs; that heavy movement of the hips. In my shocked young head no link could associate these two images. Impossible to join this upper half of a woman's body to that lower half!
My excitement was such that the side of the barge suddenly seemed to me to be stretched out horizontally Lying flat on the surface like a lizard, I moved toward the porthole with the naked woman. She was still there, but the powerful curve of her flesh was now motionless. The soldier, now facing me, was buttoning himself up with limp and clumsy movements. And another one, smaller than the first, was kneeling down beside the white backside. His movements, on the other hand, were of a nervous and fearful rapidity. But as soon as he began wrestling, pushing the heavy white hemispheres with his belly, you could not have told him apart from the first one. There was no difference in their actions.
My eyes were already filling with black needles. My legs were giving way And my
