heart, pressed against the rusty metal, was making the whole vessel vibrate with its deep, breathless echoes. A new series of little waves shook the boat. The side of the barge became vertical again, and, losing my lizard's agility, I slid toward the first porthole. The woman in the white blouse was nodding her head mechanically while examining her hands. I saw her scratching one nail with another, to remove the layer of varnish…
Their footsteps resounded in reverse order this time: the hammering of the heels on the deck; the tattoo on the planks of the footbridge; the slapping of the wet clay. Without looking at me, Pashka stepped over the side of our boat, bounded onto a half-submerged pontoon, then onto a landing stage. I followed him, jumping limply like a rag doll on strings.
Reaching the bank, he sat down, removed his shoes, rolled up his trousers to the knees, and walked into the water, parting the long stems of the reeds. He thrust aside the duckweed and splashed water over his face for a long time, uttering groans of pleasure, which in the distance could have been taken for cries of distress.
It was a great day in her life. On that June evening she was, for the first time in her life, going to give herself to one of her young friends, to one of those dancers who shuffled on the dance floor at the Mountain of Joy.
She was rather frail. Her face had the neutral features that pass unnoticed in the crowd. The color of her pale russet hair could only be detected by daylight. Under the floodlights of the Mountain or in the bluish glow of the street lamps she appeared simply blond.
I had discovered this erotic custom just a few days ago. In the human swarm at the dance floor I saw groups forming – a swirling knot of adolescents came together, wriggling, getting excited, and as they left, they would scatter to be initiated into what sometimes seemed to me stupidly simple, sometimes fabulously mysterious and profound: love.
She must have been passed over in one of those groups. Like the others, she had been secretly drinking among the bushes that covered the slopes of the Mountain. Then, when their excited little circle had exploded into couples, she was left alone: the accidents of arithmetic did not provide her with a partner. The couples had vanished. Drunkenness was already overtaking her. She was not used to alcohol and had drunk too much, out of eagerness, out of fear of not matching up to the others, and also from the desire to overcome her nervousness on this great day… She had come back onto the floor, not knowing what to do with her body now, every fiber of which was filled with impatient excitement. But already they were beginning to switch off the floodlights.
All this I was to guess later… That night I simply saw a girl pacing up and down in a corner of the park at night, walking round the wan pool of light from a street lamp. Like a moth held prisoner by a ray of light. Her gait surprised me. She moved forward as if on a tightrope, with steps that were at once floating and tense. I could see that in every one of her movements she was struggling against drunkenness. Her face had a fixed expression. Her whole being was mobilized in this single effort – not to fall over, to let nothing be suspected, to continue walking round on this circle of light until the black trees stopped swaying and leaping when she approached them, waving their noisy branches.
I went toward her. I entered the blue circle of the street lamp. Her body (black skirt, light top) suddenly focused all my desire. Yes, she instantly became the woman I had always desired. Despite her breathless frailty, despite her features being blurred with drunkenness, despite everything in her body and her face that should have displeased me but which at that moment I found so beautiful.
Making her rounds, she bumped into me and lifted her eyes. I saw a succession of masks on her face – fear, anger, a smile. It was the smile that triumphed, a vague smile that seemed to be directed at someone other than myself. She took my arm. We descended from the Mountain.
At first she talked without stopping. Her tipsy young voice would not remain steady. She whispered, then almost shouted. Clinging to my arm, she stumbled from time to time and let fly an oath, then put her hand to her lips with affected haste. Or else she suddenly broke away from me with an offended air, only to snuggle against my shoulder a moment later. I guessed that my companion was now acting out a love scene rehearsed long ago – a performance intended to show her partner she was somebody special. But in her intoxication she was confusing the sequence of these little interludes. While I, a bad actor, remained dumb, enthralled by this feminine presence, suddenly so accessible; and above all by the staggering ease with which this body was about to offer itself to me. I had always believed that such an offer would be preceded by a long emotional journey, by a thousand speeches, by subtle flirting. I was silent as I felt a little feminine breast squeezed against my arm. Next my nocturnal companion, jabbering animatedly, rejected the advance of a overly forward phantom and puffed out her cheeks for several seconds to show that she was sulking; then she enveloped her imaginary lover in what she believed was a languorous look, but which was simply blurred with the wine and the excitement.
I led her toward the only place that could accommodate our love – toward that floating island where at the beginning of the summer Pashka and I had spied on the prostitute and the soldiers.
In the darkness I must have taken a wrong turn. After wandering for a long time amid sleeping boats we stopped on a kind of old ferry – its ramp had broken supports and was half sunk in the water.
Abruptly she fell silent. Her drunkenness must have been gradually wearing off. I remained motionless, confronting her tense expectation in the darkness. I did not know what I was supposed to do. Kneeling down, I felt the boards, and threw into the water first a tangle of worn ropes, then a bundle of dried seaweed. It was by accident that, busy with my clearing up, I brushed her leg. My fingers, slipping over her skin, gave her goose bumps…
She remained silent until it was over. Her eyes closed, she seemed absent, abandoning to me her body that quaked with little shivers… I must have hurt her badly with my hasty actions. This act, so dreamed of, blundered into a series of clumsy, thwarted manipulations. Love was apparently like a hasty, nervous excavation. The knees and the elbows stuck out with a strange anatomical stiffness.
The pleasure was like the flame of a match in an icy wind – a fire that has just enough time to burn your fingers before going out, leaving a blinding spot in your eyes.
I tried to kiss her (I believed that one should do so at this moment); beneath my mouth I felt her lip being bitten hard…
And what frightened me the most was that a second later I no longer needed either her lips or her erect breast in her gaping blouse, or her slender thighs, over which she had pulled down her skirt with a rapid movement. Her body was becoming indifferent to me, useless. Sunk in my dull physical contentment, I was self-sufficient. 'Why is she still stretched out like that, half naked?' I wondered, irritated. I felt the uneven boards beneath my back, several splinters burning in my palm. The wind had the heavy taste of stagnant water.
In this nocturnal interval there may well have been a fleeting moment of oblivion, a lightning sleep of several minutes. For I did not see the ship approaching. When we opened our eyes, all its white enormity, glittering with lights, was already looming above us. I had thought that our refuge was located deep in one of the countless bays cluttered up with rusty wrecks. But the opposite had occurred. In the darkness we had reached the tip of a headland that projected almost into the middle of the river… The brightly lit passenger ship, cruising slowly down the Volga, suddenly rose up above our old ferryboat, towering with its three decks. Human silhouettes were outlined against the somber sky. They were dancing on the top deck by the blaze of the lights. The warm flow of a tango spilled over us, enveloped us. The cabin windows, more discreetly lit, seemed to lean over, allowing us to enter their intimacy… The swell caused by the riverboat was so powerful that our raft swung in a half circle, a swirling glissade that made us giddy. The ship with its light and its music seemed to be circling round us… It was at that moment that she squeezed my hand and pressed herself against me. It seemed as if the hot-blooded denseness of her body could be concentrated entirely in my hands, like the trembling body of a bird. Her arms and her waist had the suppleness of that armful of water lilies I had picked one day, embracing several slippery stems in the water…
But already the ship was melting into the darkness. The echo of the tango faded. On its voyage toward Astrakhan, it carried the night with it. The sky around our ferry was filling with a hesitant pallor. I found it strange to see us in the middle of a great river at the timid birth of that day on the damp timbers
