Time had dropped the mauve veil of heedlessness on the polar night lighted by the aurora borealis of opium, and Betka felt herself barely living, crouching in the royal eskimo hut of her new vice, in the heart of the twilight of her winter, without light and without cold. She smoked, vomited, swallowed orange juice, vomited again, and this curious activity, far from appearing exotic to her, seemed to her on the contrary the most natural thing in the world. How was it that she had never thought of it before? Thus she lived three days and three nights consecutively in an almost complete absence of the notion of time. She had vaguely the idea that Cécile Goudreau during all this time went in and out of the house several times, but she did not know when or how.

  Now Betka had just awakened; she stretched herself for a long time and her outspread hands rubbed back and forth across the chinchilla fur on which she was lying, as if discovering for the first time the sumptuous luxury in which she was living, yet barely perceiving it. After a few moments during which she was astonished not to feel even the slightest trace of the feeling of guilt which gripped her at each of her anguished awakenings, Betka lazily lifted herself up and leaned her back, a little stiff from having remained too long in the same position, against a heavy cushion swathed in tiny silver beads that pleasantly pricked her spine. Then she had the sensation of feeling the emptiness of her stomach close to her back, overrun with little ants circling in all directions.

  ‘I’m hungry as a bear,’ she said to herself, yawning, and imitating, as was her habit, the feline jaw-stretching of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ‘emblem lion’.

  It must have been towards the end of the day, judging by an orange ray from the setting sun which pierced through a crack between the high closed curtains and drew a diagonal purple line on the garnet of the carpet, climbed the adjoining divan and somewhat timidly followed the yellow-satin-draped wall. Lying on her side on this divan, Countess Mihakowska was peacefully sleeping, her mouth half open, and the fine line of sunlight that ran over her cheek made the gold of one of her teeth glitter with a sinister deep cadmium fire. From the silence that reigned in the house, Betka knew that Cécile Goudreau must certainly have gone out. Without changing the position of her body she stretched her foot so as to open the curtain slightly and get a better view of the Countess’s face which now became progressively lighted until the whole was suffused by that wan tinge, which seemed at moments to turn purple. She did not wake up, but brought her hand to the breast which had not been amputated. Then Betka again cautiously shut the curtain, leaving it open just enough to be able to look outside, through the glass panes, at the sun – large, of a deep opaque red and slightly irregular roundness, like the clumsy contours and the thickly applied colour of the profaned and bleeding hosts painted with such awe by the minor masters of the school of Sienna. The rays of this fateful sun shed a light so materially scarlet and so dense that instead of light it seemed like a thick liquid soaking into and spreading over everything with a majestic and fascinating malaise. Her stiffened leg emerging from her dressing-gown, Betka watched the serene flow of light rise to the upper end of her thigh which thus seemed soaked in red blood, to which the lingering beat of the sun still communicated that moist, somewhat sticky warmth, so characteristic…. She touched it with her finger: it was blood.

  ‘That’s all I needed!’ she said to herself, lying down again and drawing the curtain completely with her foot. ‘In five minutes I’ll fix myself and go out.’

  She wanted to enjoy a few more minutes of darkness. Before her closed eyes the empurpled Seine disappeared beneath the distant bridge of the Invalides. Then she saw the crowd filling the Boulevard Montmartre, in that first warm twilight of early summer, then again a river, this time the one in her village; her mother beating Volodya, her little brother, to punish him for having gone swimming, and each time the latter tried to climb up on the bank, wanting to get out, she would push him back with a black oar, beating him in the chest, in the face, and making him fall back into the water. Finally Volodya remained motionless, his tousled pussywillow-coloured head tilted on the running water… and suddenly one saw streaking away, a whirl of white foam, so white!, slightly rose-tinged, as if someone had spat out a mouthful of toothpaste. To Betka this cruel memory was charged with so much freshness, with so much of the incipient fragility of the countryside with those pale May evening skies, that as she deeply inhaled the rarefied atmosphere of the room, fragrant with the sweet and insipid smell of the opium, she thought she was filling her lungs with the pure air of the springtime of her awakened desire.

  Betka found herself seated before the dressing-table in the bathroom, but she no longer remembered how she had come here. This bathroom was uniformly covered, floor and ceiling included, with immense squares of black marble. All the objects, even to the smallest accessory, were of gold. On the dressing-table everything was arranged with a perfect order and symmetry, in which one sensed the hovering presence of Countess Mihakowska’s assiduous, scrupulous and maniacal attentions. Elongated flasks, all of the same pattern, were placed at regular intervals in rows parallel to the mirror in the order of their sizes; from the giant ones containing bath salts, passing gradually through the whole scale of perfume-shades, one reached the tiny vials for rare salves, to the last one, no bigger than a die, fixed and alert like the last piece in a game of Russian dolls. These series of flasks were arranged in several superimposed rows, all according to the same criterion of diminishing size. Betka, her face all pale, held herself motionless, her head slightly thrown back, her two hands aimlessly stroking the black marble in which the precious metal of each object was continued in the long, somewhat duller tubes of their reflections. A faint music was softly wafted from the Countess’s room, and one could easily have imagined that instead of a girl at her toilet Betka had become a Saint Cecilia playing her golden organ, seated on a cloud, so weakened did she feel, so disembodied and as if helped up by the absence of weight which the almost absolute unconsciousness of her own movements imparted to her. She had the curious sensation, which she had never yet experienced, of perceiving the effect of her own movements only a few seconds after she had made them. Suddenly Betka felt a snowlike coldness invade her brow which but a moment ago was so warm; she lifted her hand to it, where it encountered her other hand which was already mopping her temples with an ether-soaked handkerchief. She further noticed, without understanding it, a mesh of cut hair in her hand – her own hair; then seeing the gold scissors she was holding in her other hand she said, with a feeble laugh. ‘How silly I am!’ After which she threw the scissors into the air. They described a broad arc in space and fell into the filled bath-tub. Betka got up and with fascination watched the scissors glitter at the bottom of the limpid water in which stirred constantly changing shadows from the iridescent streaks of pine-essence in suspension, slowly dissolving into capricious forms.

  ‘Come now,’ said Betka to herself, ‘I’m not going to stand and look at that all my life! Let’s proceed systematically. The Meyer method! The Meyer method!’§ she exclaimed, imitating with her pale voice her mother’s pitiless tone, which suddenly seemed infinitely remote.

  Then she went back into the smoking-room, took several hundred francs in bills from the Prince of Orminy’s polo ‘trophy box’, went and sat down before a large Venetian desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl which adorned the main wall in the hall, and wrote on an envelope, ‘Mademoiselle Veronica Stevens, Hotel Ritz’. Then on a card of a thick, smooth whiteness like that of gardenias, ‘Chère amie, I was very sorry not to have met you at Solange de Cléda’s the other evening. It is going to be difficult for me to see you for some time. I have found unhoped-for happiness. I shall not let it go. Thank you again.

  Your devoted

  betka.’

  She reread it, added little quotation marks to frame the word ‘happiness’. She slipped the card into the envelope, including the receipt for the telegram which amounted to forty-five francs, a fifty-franc bill and finally a part of her mesh of hair. Lastly she wet the gummed edge of the flap with her tongue and, her finger having encountered the roughness of an embossed inscription, she looked at it before shutting it, as if for verification. ‘Yes, Cartier!’ she said, definitely sealing her envelope. Having finished this first letter, Betka took a second envelope, hesitated a moment in embarrassment, for she did not remember his name-in fact, she had probably never known it. ‘I’ll deliver it myself.’ And with this she wrote, in a telegraphic style, with capital letters and without signing, ‘ASSUMING AT LAST THE RIGHT TO DO ANYTHING I PLEASE SHALL WAIT FOR YOU TONIGHT AT THE COUPOLE BAR AT MIDNIGHT’; adding the rest of the mesh of her hair, she sealed this envelope in turn.

  ‘And now, let’s be off!’ she said to herself, ready to go out, but as she was about to open the door she saw rising from the depth of the reflections of the door-handle the flash memory of the gold scissors at the bottom of the bath-tub, and immediately thought, ‘Cécile might hurt herself when she steps into the water.’ She went back to remove them, but when she reached the bathroom she found Countess Mihakowska bending over the tub with her hand reaching into the water for them. Caught by surprise the Countess remained for a moment with the scissors in her hand, as if frightened. Betka could not resist the desire to embrace her, and going over to her she kissed her. The poor darling, in spite of everything she was still so beautiful! Mihakowska hurriedly went and sat down in front of the dressing-table, and as she was leaving Betka thought she guessed that the Countess was trying to conceal the involuntary weakness of a tear as, with lips compressed, she applied powder to her face.

  Betka walked a few steps down the street and abruptly stopped. ‘I’ve forgotten the main thing!’ She raised her hand to her heart, where it encountered a hard object. ‘No, I’ve got it!’ she said reassured, and from the pocket of her fine linen blouse, of an almost masculine cut, like the ones Cécile always wore, she pulled out a little enamelled box wrought by Fabergé, wrapped in a silk handkerchief. Cécile had made her a present of it. ‘When things look really bad, you just sniff a little of this,’ she had advised her. It was nothing less than heroin. She smiled at this word. ‘It’s well named,’ she thought.

  Betka put her precious box back into the same pocket, shutting the snap with such force that she broke a nail; with the sharp pincers of her teeth she evened it, cutting with furious little bites a half crescent, perfectly regular and slender, that she spat up toward the very pale and sickly sky in which the last shreds of bloody clouds still lingered. After which she began to walk fast, straining all her movements, enjoying the sound of her joints cracking, so as to feel the pain of the pleasure of walking thus, the tips of her shoes striking the smallest stone that lay in her path with a vigorous and childlike thrust of her stockingless legs; she took deep breaths, imagining the distant hay of the countryside, and felt the moist and slightly choking breath of the recently sprinkled sidewalk rising up to her. She regretted not having been in the street earlier, while the sun was setting, so that she could have felt its blood-warmth and the coppery light of her hair set fire to her brain. ‘Quick! Quick!’ She wanted first of all to get rid of, to deliver, her two envelopes that itched in her hand; and after having finished with that, to be at last for the first time in her life without constraint and free to do whatever she pleased, whatever she felt like doing.

  Reaching the Quai des Orfèvres, and the house where she lived, Betka ran up the stairs all out of breath, without stopping to pick up her mail at the concierge’s where, for that matter, there was no one, and this gave her such a vivid pleasure that she quivered; yet she could not be cold; without stopping before the door to her apartment, she continued to climb up to the last storey but one. He was there. A streak of electric light along the bottom of the door indicated his presence. Betka hurriedly slipped in her envelope and ran downstairs again. By a stroke of luck there was still no one at the concierge’s. For nothing would have been more painful to her at this time than to run into a person she knew and be obliged to ‘pass the time of day’.

  She started to run toward the Ritz but was soon so out of breath that she had to take a taxi. Her physical fatigue then combined with an atrocious fear of meeting Veronica, even if it should be merely by chance, just at the moment when she entered the hotel to leave the message for her; but she accomplished this with such lightning speed that the clerk, seeing the envelope drop on the desk, must have wondered if it had not been brought by a phantom.

  Betka left the Ritz on foot, picking her course at random in the direction of the quays. As she followed the Seine, Betka met a tiny little old lady no bigger than a seal holding its head up; her outline was so sharp and determined that she had the personality of a salt-shaker, while the tip of her nose and her cheeks, set in a pale, taut-skinned face, were so red that they looked like three shiny cherries. She was selling cherries, and Betka bought two cornucopias of them from her and went and sat down on a nearby bench with such lightness and grace that none of the sparrows that were pecking on the ground were frightened. She felt exhausted, and to keep her head from reeling shut her eyes, squeezing them together very tight, and immediately saw springing from the depths of her orbits cherries of fire, that turned yellow, then black against a red setting and finally vanished.

  Betka felt like laughing, her mouth consented to smile peacefully while her little bevelled nose stirred: in imagination she was savouring the effect which the two letters she had just delivered would produce, and for a moment she visualized Veronica’s round forehead bowed over her letter, her two large locks of blond hair falling heavily on either side of her head, almost completely hiding her face. Then she saw the aviator reading his, probably laughing in silence over his easy and unexpected conquest. She still did not know this aviator’s name, but she just now remembered his nickname – his ‘bar surname’, so to speak – Baba, by which he was known, acclaimed and toasted in the Champs Elysées bars. Aside from this she knew nothing about him except the fact that he had fought in the Spanish civil war, that he was tall, that he was attractive to her… and that he lived in the same house as she did, just two floors above her studio.

  Baba lived there because of Madame Ménard d’Orient who sumptuously occupied the first two floors where she lived alone, surrounded by three or four servants and an old maid, a chambermaid, whom she had managed to get out of a convent. Madame Ménard d’Orient was young and fresh for her age, which was close to sixty, and she was always dressed in a foam of black and white lace. Cultivated and even erudite, she professed a real cult for everything that closely or remotely verged on the revolutionary pseudo-philosophies of the last years. The crystal and the fine silver ornaments of her table were often surrounded by the prestige of political émigrés who had sought refuge in Paris or who merely happened to be passing through, and the starched and embroidered whiteness of her napkins habitually served as cushions for hands which were too large or too small and which, by the dubious colour of their nails, revealed the somewhat verdigris moral patina of direct action and illegality.

  Thus Madame Ménard d’Orient’s apartment had witnessed the passing of a procession of semi-legendary beings, like the ‘red priestess with the white hair’ of Germany, Clara Zetkin, the ‘comet without a visa’, Leon Trotsky, and the Catalonian anarchist, Durruti, called by his followers ‘the lion-hearted’. Now, since the beginning of the Spanish civil war, her house was even richer than usual in gatherings of weird specimens of men talking very loud, well shaved but with a blue cast to their chins, wearing highly polished white-and-yellow shoes with complicated tooling and ornamentations, ambling up and down the Boulevard Saint Germain as though it were the very ramblos of Barcelona, not forgetting a yellow tooth-pick nailed to their saffron-coloured teeth.

  In the midst of all these oily, tortuous, rather base and excessively bilious Latins, what more startling contrast than that of Baba’s nordic beauty! Of American descent, he was barely twenty-two. He was the youngest of the protégés of Madame Ménard d’Orient, who with a wholly maternal solicitude had fixed up for him a little apartment on the sixth floor where he stayed during his brief appearances in Paris. Baba had refined manners and loved luxury. His slightest gestures bore the mark of a somewhat pretentious dandyism that had clung to him as an inheritance from the period of his adolescence spent continually in London among the half-literary, half-crapulous circles of the capital. The day he decided to go and fight in Spain on the side of the Loyalists, his sceptical acquaintances were flabbergasted and his most intimate friends accused him of snobbery. Nevertheless, contrary to all appearances, nothing had been able to rob Baba of the granitic virginity of the fundamental virtues of his character. Blond and calm, he had the invisibility peculiar to heroes; his studied silence caused people to remark. ‘How many fine things he doesn’t say.’ His presence was little noticed, but whenever he left a spot one felt oppressed by the emptiness which his absence had left in all hearts. It was then that each one understood that elementary, mineral force, fragile though it was and camouflaged with elegance, which constituted the irresistibly subjugating attraction of his personality; already reacting against the wave of opportunism which was rotting the foundation of most of the revolutionary movements. He had adopted for his own the motto of King Louis XIII, ‘I can be broken, but not bent.’

  How had Betka met Baba?

  First on the stairs, where they frequently met and exchanged greetings, then….

  On reaching this point in her reverie, Betka began to visualize in the slightest details what the scene of their first and only tryst would be like. During all this time her half-closed eyes had done nothing but observe the continual movements of the numerous sparrows that were pecking at her feet. This monotonous and ever-changing spectacle took on the character of the capricious play of shadows and lights appearing and disappearing on the cinema screen when, watching a film half asleep, the mind cannot grasp whether the white spot that has just appeared represents a car brought to a stop or a white door being shut. Thus there was established between Betka’s more and more vague and nebulous outer vision and the inner cinema of her more and more precise memories, a kind of synchronic correlation which helped her, so to speak, to visualize better all that she was thinking-for instance, a crowd of sparrows suddenly grouped together formed the door, limited by its frame, of her apartment which the concierge came and opened. Then Betka saw the coal-man enter, carrying a sack of coal on his head, stoop and deposit it by the stove near the entrance. It was at this precise moment that she had discovered the presence of Baba who had slipped into the room taking advantage of the presence of the coalman who almost immediately left without waiting for his tip.