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like a writer: to live at arm’s length from the situation so as not to suffer from it and one day to be able to describe it. But the posture of the detached observer is a delusion. He suffered, despised his own suffering, lapsed into mocking cynicism, reemerged to clear his beloved of all suspicion, behaved, in fact, precisely like the hero of one of those psychological novels whose authors meticulously flaunt their knowledge of the human psyche, just the type of book he detested.
    What he succeeded best at was turning a blind eye. He had already noticed that, with increasing age, this exercise became easier.
    That evening, too, he would have forced himself to see nothing, had Léa not decided to present him with an illusion of love regained.
    It was a bleak dusk in early February; reflected in the tarmac was a whole subterranean world into which you could have hurled yourself and disappeared. Shutov was on his way back from a meeting (a publisher had been explaining to him just why the subject of his novel was unsaleable). Unable to brave the crowd in the metro, he had climbed all the way up to Ménilmontant on foot. Just a little more pain might make his life unbearable and what then?… Cut his own throat? String himself up? Such things are fine in a novel, but in real life the final straw took the form of an overturned trash can below their apartment building, a cornucopia spilling out its household garbage. Not something to slit your carotid artery over, my good scribblers!
    As he mounted the narrow spiral staircase he could already smell the aroma of a wood fire. Behind the door of the dovecote there was a ripple of silky music but in the time it took to locate the keyhole Shutov experienced conflicting sensations: within his attic a party was in full swing yet he, a man clad in a rain-soaked overcoat, no longer possessed the right key to enter into this convivial life.
    Léa had prepared a dinner, lit the fire and candles, the illusion was complete. Right down to the simulation of their readings in the old days. At the end of the meal she declared in somewhat exaggerated tones: “I’ve just been reading Chekhov’s ‘Vanka.’ You know, it’s heartbreaking. I wept… No, I really cried my eyes out!”
    Shutov studied her. An attractive young woman smoking nonchalantly, curled up in a feline pose (“a hackneyed image,” he quibbled). And two years earlier that girl rather strapped for cash in a telephone booth at the Gare de l’Est. A striking but natural change: the swift adaptability of youth, the vigor of a life taking wing. Journalism classes, which, in France, lead to everything, a group of friends her own age. And this still useful, aging man, whom it would be easy to get rid of. A man she feels like cheering up, one winter’s evening, by lighting up his garret with a scattering of sparks from her youthful, free, intense existence…
    “You know, Léa, I’ve never been crazy about Chekhov.”
    In Shutov’s voice there was the hint of an overtaut string stretched too far, despite the banality of his observation. Drowsy as she was, she must have noticed it.
    “I see. I thought you… Look, remember you used to swear by him! His sentences like lancet stabs. You were the one who used to say that…”
    His elbows on the table, he massaged his brow, then looked at Léa and realized that what she saw was this face creased by a whole evening of pulling forced expressions.
    “No, I’m not talking about his style,” he replied. “He’s a storyteller without equal. Concision, the art of detail, humor. It’s all there. I bow to him! What goes against the grain is all that compassion of Chekhov’s. Granted, he’s a humanist. He takes pity on an aristocrat who’s blown all her money in Paris and returns to Russia to bemoan her lot in her beloved cherry orchard. He feels sorry for three provincial women who can’t manage to leave their own backyard and go to Moscow. He laments the fate of a whole crowd of