When Olya emerged from Room 27 an hour later, she felt as if, with a kick of her heels, she could have taken flight. How ridiculous he seemed to her now, chat Komsomol official with his glistening pate!
She had just had fleeting contact with the mechanism of real power in the country. Filled with wonder, she found a way to spell out to herself in naive but accurate enough terms all that had happened: "The KGB can do anything."
That evening, however, she was seized by an impression quite different from that of the morning. She recalled a sentence she had written in Room 27. Describing that first evening with Jean-Claude she had written: "Finding myself in the bedroom of the French athlete, Berthet, Jean-Claude… I engaged in intimate relations with him." It was that sentence that jarred. "Intimate relations," she thought. "What an odd turn of phrase! And yet, basically, why odd? That's all it was. Certainly not love, in any event…"
She only saw Jean-Claude one more time and, as the polite man in Room 27 had advised, said a few friendly words to him and slipped away.
On the day before the athletes left she came across him in the company of a friend. The two men passed quite close by without noticing her. The friend was patting Jean-Claude on the shoulder and he was smiling with a contented air. Olya heard Jean-Claude remarking somewhat languidly, drawing out the syllables:
"You know, I think I'm going ahead with that property in the Vendée. They simply hand the house over to you, with the keys: no problem."