The Wine of Solitude (15 page)

‘Come on, we have to go now,’ Fred Reuss said with regret. ‘Whatever will my wife say? It’s nearly midnight, come quickly now …’

They left; outside, the horses were waiting, sniffing the
frozen earth, every now and again shaking the snow from their heads; the little bells they wore round their necks would swing, and a sweet, mysterious ringing sound swept through the forest and over the river in its icy shell. Hélène and Reuss, half asleep, swayed gently to the rhythm of the horses’ gait as they climbed the hill. Hélène felt her cheeks burning as if they were on fire; the long day, her tiredness and the smoke made her eyelids feel heavy; she looked lazily up at the pink moon as it slowly rose in the winter sky.

Hélène whistled for the dogs, silently opened the gate and went out into the garden. The sky was pale and bright; not a single bird could be heard singing in the countryside; between the sparse pine trees, tracks in the shape of stars marked the thick snow where animals had passed by; the dogs sniffed the ground; then they ran off towards the woods where, every day for more than a week, Hélène and Reuss had been meeting.

At first he had come with his sons, then alone. At the edge of the woods stood an abandoned house; it was a former dacha, a holiday home made of wood, painted eau-de-nil, with entrance steps guarded by two stone griffons; it looked as if it had been set on fire, but then the fire had been put out: one entire section of wall was blackened by smoke. Stones thrown at the windows had shattered them: standing on tiptoe, you could see into a dark sitting room full of furniture. One day Reuss had reached in through one of the windows and pulled out a photograph in a frame that had been hanging on the wall. The picture was all crinkly and
yellow beneath the glass, probably because of the dampness of the long autumn and winter with no fire lit. It was a photograph of a woman. They studied it for a long time, feeling uneasy; the features of the mysterious woman evoked a vague, sombre sense of the poetic. Then they buried the photograph in the snow, beneath a fir tree. The doors of the house had come loose and swayed on their half-broken hinges.

On that day, while waiting for Hélène, Reuss had gone into the barn and taken a few lightweight Finnish sledges from among the heap of things there. They were made of simple garden chairs set on to blades. The backs of the chairs still bore children’s names carved into the wood with a penknife in large, clumsy letters. Whenever anyone asked the farmers in the area what had happened to the people who’d lived in the house, they suddenly seemed not to understand Russian, or any other language. They would screw up their cruel narrow eyes and turn away without replying.

As Hélène wandered through the house, drawn to it by its overwhelming sense of abandonment and sadness, Fred Reuss came up to her and pulled her hair. ‘Leave it be!’ He laughed. ‘It smells old, miserable and dead. Come with me, young lady.’ He pointed towards the icy road that went down a little incline on to a plain. ‘Let’s go!’

The Finnish sledges were steered by skaters who stood behind the chair in which the other person sat. But this was too slow for Hélène’s and Reuss’s liking; they both climbed on to the back and launched the sledge into the snow. It went rushing down the hill, faster and faster; the wind blew into their ears, burning them harshly.

‘Be careful, be careful!’ cried Fred and his joyous laughter
rang out in the clear icy air. ‘Careful! The tree! The rock! We’re falling! We’re going to die! Hold on tight, Hélène. Stamp your foot against the ground. Like this. Again. Again! Faster … Oh, this is so wonderful.’

Gasping for breath, they slid silently along with the dizzying speed you feel in a dream, down the long hill, along the icy white path on to the plain. They kept on going until the sledge hit a tree stump and threw its passengers into the snow. Ten times, a hundred times, they started over again, never tiring, hauling the sledge up to the top, then sliding down the long, icy hill.

Hélène could feel the young man’s hot breath against her neck; the biting cold made tears run down her face but she couldn’t wipe them away: as they sped along, the wind dried them on her cheeks. They both shouted out with joy as they stamped on the frozen ground, shrieking like children, without even realising it. The little sledge shot forward, hurtling down the hill like an arrow.

‘Listen,’ Fred said after a while, ‘it’s not going fast enough. What we need is a real sledge.’

‘How can we get one?’ asked Hélène. ‘The last time we smashed it up and ever since the driver is careful to lock up the shed. But I saw one there in the barn …’

They ran back to the barn and took the most beautiful sledge they could find; it was lined in red, with a little row of bells hanging from its sides. They had some difficulty getting it going, but once it started picking up speed, nothing in the world could go as fast; the snow flew into their faces, into their panting, half-open mouths, blinding them, whipping their cheeks. Hélène couldn’t see a thing. The brilliant whiteness of the plain was dazzling beneath the sharp reddish
winter sun that cast a scarlet glow on to the snow. Little by little, though, it grew paler, turned pink.

‘This is so thrilling,’ thought Hélène.

They stopped counting how many times they flew down the hill. Finally, after they were thrown into a ravine and barely made it out, their cheeks scratched by the icy pine needles, Reuss, who laughed until he cried, said, ‘We’re going to crack our heads open, that’s for sure! Let’s go back to the calm little Finnish sledge.’

‘Never! Rolling around in the snow is the best part.’

‘Ah, really? So that’s what you like the most?’ murmured Reuss. He pulled her towards him and held her tightly against him for a moment. He seemed to hesitate; she stood pressed against him, looking at him with her joyful eyes that had rediscovered all their innocence.

‘Well then, if you like rolling around in the snow,’ he said suddenly, ‘climb on to my shoulders.’

He grabbed her round the waist, helped her perch on his shoulders, then threw her into the deep snow two feet in front of him. She shouted with pleasure and fear; she plunged into the snow as if it were a feathered nest; snow ran down her neck through a gap in her sweater; it got inside her gloves, filled her mouth with the icy sweet taste of sorbet. Hélène’s heart pounded with happiness. She looked with anguish at the early dusk sweeping across the sky.

‘We’re not going home yet, are we? We can stay a while longer, can’t we?’ she begged. ‘It’s not dark yet …’

‘We do have to go home,’ said Fred with regret.

She stood up, shook herself off and they walked back up the road. In the field of snow, only a single band of light remained and darkness fell strangely quickly; it was a soft,
lilac colour; in the luminous sky the pale winter moon rose slowly above a frozen little lake. They didn’t speak. Their footsteps echoed over the frozen earth. Far, far away in the distance, they heard the muted sound of a cannon. They only half listened to it. For months now the low rumbling was so constant that they had stopped hearing it. But where was it coming from? Who was firing? Whom were they firing at? When faced with a certain level of horror the human mind becomes saturated and reacts with indifference and egotism. They walked side by side, tired and happy. Hélène could feel Reuss staring at her. Suddenly he stopped and took her face in his hands. He brought her cheek closer to his, seemed to look in astonishment for a moment at its smoothness, at the hint of red, so warm and passionate rising up to her skin, and breathed in her face as if it were a rose; the kiss was hesitant, settling in the middle of her half-open lips, a swift, gentle kiss as passionate as fire. Her first kiss, the first time a man’s lips had ever touched hers this way.

Her initial reaction was one of fear and anger. ‘What are you doing?’ she cried. ‘Are you mad?’

She picked up a handful of snow and threw it into the young man’s face; he jumped aside and avoided being hit. She heard him laugh.

‘I forbid you to touch me,’ she shouted in a rage. ‘Do you hear me?’ And she ran along the dark frozen path in the direction of the house; she could feel the taste of eager young teeth on her lips, but she refused to allow her thoughts to linger there, to savour this new, passionate joy.

‘Kissing me as if I were some chambermaid,’ she thought, and she didn’t stop running until she’d reached her mother’s room. With only a cursory knock she burst in.

Bella and Max were sitting on the settee in silence. Hélène had seen, walked in on, many other couples. But what troubled her this time was something strange, something new, something tender about the intimacy of these two people, the aura of love that surrounded them, not vice or passion, but the most human, the most ordinary kind of love.

Bella slowly turned her head. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ said Hélène, her heart aching, ‘nothing … I thought … I …’ She fell silent.

‘Go outside, then,’ said her mother. ‘It isn’t dark yet. I saw Fred Reuss; he was looking for you. Go out with him and the children …’

‘Do you want me to go and find him?’ asked Hélène, a melancholy, sarcastic little smile hovering on her lips. ‘I’ll go if you want me to …’

‘Yes,’ said Bella, ‘off you go.’

The next day was a Sunday. Hélène walked into the little sitting room and breathed on the frozen windows to see the sky. Everything seemed extraordinarily joyous, clear and peaceful; children dressed in white played in the snow-covered garden; the sun was shining; the house smelled of warm cakes and cream, mixed with the scent of newly cleaned wooden floors. You could breathe in the day with all its freedom and innocence.

Hélène smiled as she stood in front of the old mirror; it reflected the sun as a distant, hazy, bluish form, like when you lean over water on a summer’s day; she looked at her starched white linen dress; she saw Fred Reuss come in and, without turning round, nodded at him in the mirror.

They were alone. He pulled her against him less harshly than the day before, but with a kind of mocking tenderness that was unfamiliar to her. She let him kiss her, even leaned in towards him, offering her face, her hands, her lips, savouring waves of delight, aching waves of bliss that pierced straight through her body.

She felt he was younger than she was, with a persistent, eternal kind of youthfulness, which, in her eyes, was undoubtedly his most attractive feature. He was as tender, giving, trusting, mischievous, hot-blooded and happy as a child. When they played together in the snow with his two boys, she sensed that he didn’t go endlessly up and down the little hill in order to be with them, nor even to be able secretly to kiss her, but rather because, like her, he loved more than anything the pure air, the sun, shouting and falling into the soft, damp snow. From that moment on they spent nearly all their time together. Hélène felt the most delicious, the most indulgent tenderness towards him, a tenderness that continued to grow, ever intensifying the exciting taste of his kisses. But what she liked most was the feeling of pride he gave her, her awareness of her power as a woman. She so enjoyed seeing Fred choose her over the young women who looked down on her because they were twenty! Sometimes she deliberately distanced herself from him, enjoying his silent fury when, instead of meeting him in the garden where he was waiting for her, she would go and sit beside his wife, eyes lowered, and sew. Then he would grab her by the hair as she ran down the stairs on to the terrace and whisper angrily, ‘So young and already as horrible as a real woman!’

Then he would laugh, and Hélène never tired of seeing the little grimace at the corner of his mouth, the flash of desire that turned his face pale. Nevertheless, he knew what kind of power he held over her.

‘When you’re older, you’ll think of me with gratitude, because if I’d wanted to … First of all, I could have made you suffer so much that it would haunt you for the rest of your life and you would never again have such absolute confidence
about love. And also … you’ll understand what I mean later on and you’ll feel a great deal of friendship for me. You’ll say: “He was a good-for-nothing, a womaniser, but with me he did the right thing.” Either that, or: “What a fool he was.” It will depend a lot on what kind of husband you end up with …’

It was nearly spring; the shiny tree trunks, damp and dark, seemed to be coming alive through some secret force. Beneath the thick layer of snow you could hear the first rush of trapped water breaking free; the ditches, no longer covered in fresh snow, were black with dried mud. Every day the sound of the cannons grew clearer: the White Army, the ordinary troops that would later become the army of the new republic, was making its way down from the north.

Everyone had lost their calm and arrogance: in their rooms at night they feverishly sewed shares and foreign money into their belts and the linings of their clothing. Amid this turmoil no one gave a thought to Hélène or Fred Reuss. They sat in the sitting room, where the windows glowed red as soon as night fell, for the fires were getting closer, a moving, pulsating circle that surrounded the village; and when the wind blew in from the east, it brought with it the faint smell of smoke and gunpowder. Hélène and Fred were alone; they exchanged long, silent kisses on the hard little bamboo settee that swayed and creaked in the darkness. The door was open and they could hear the sound of footsteps and voices in the hall. There was a shortage of oil, so the lamp gave off an intermittent reddish glow. Hélène forgot everything else in the world; she was sitting on Fred’s lap; she could feel his heart beneath her cheek; it was pounding, missing a beat; she loved his dark, smiling eyes that closed so sensuously.

‘Your wife … Be careful!’ she would sometimes say, without moving.

But he didn’t hear her; he was slowly drinking in the breath from her parted lips.

‘Ah, leave me in peace, it’s so dark, no one will see us. And besides, I don’t care,’ he murmured, ‘I don’t care about anything …’

‘How quiet the house is tonight,’ she said at last, pulling away from him.

He lit a cigarette and sat down on the window ledge. The night was impenetrable, heavy, without even a trace of light; ice in the shape of teardrops sparkled on the windows. The old pine trees gently creaked; their branches swished with a stifled sound, like someone sighing. Between the trees the light of a lantern suddenly appeared.