There had been several women in Arkady Alexandrovich’s life. Lyudmila was his third wife. Still, he never felt capable of sacrificing anything for a woman’s love, while this was precisely what they demanded, even in those instances where it was entirely unnecessary. He would leave them without any regrets. But even he needed a romance of sorts—and so he created one; he would say that he had been happy with his wife, who… And at this point he would go on to deliver an entire monologue, himself deriving a certain sad satisfaction from it. This woman had been his first wife, and her portrait hung above the divan at home: it depicted a slender brunette of the monastic variety, and the stylization lay, broadly speaking, somewhere between charm and chastity. Beside his wife’s portrait was a photograph of similar proportions, in which Arkady Alexandrovich figured, dressed in a white suit and holding a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a panama hat in the other—at a cemetery, by his wife’s grave. According to Arkady Alexandrovich’s tale, which he had repeated so often that even he had begun to believe it in all earnestness, everything had been romantic and impossibly wonderful. They had met at a concert, talked at length about music, literature and art in general; she had known nothing of the baseness of life surrounding her, just as she had no conception of money; she had been made for art and for this one unique love. However, the people around her had been incapable of apprehending her charm. One day she came to Arkady Alexandrovich’s apartment, with flowers, and looked so fragile and delicate in her spring attire. She then told Arkady Alexandrovich that her whole life belonged to him. And he replied: “My child, if I considered myself capable of making you happy…”
“You’re the only one who can,” she quickly replied.
Yet he took her hands, kissed them and said that she was too young—he himself was five years her senior—and that she ought to think carefully before resolving on such a step. It seemed to him that her delicate charm was incommensurate with the reality of a marriage that would entail the inescapable prose of everyday life with a man who was, perhaps, unworthy of her. But in the end he told himself that happiness was the rarest thing on earth, and that one ought to have the courage not to walk away from it. And so he married. Her pale face, white dress and ethereal veil in that tall church—he could picture it as though it were happening right now. For three years their life passed by—he would apologize for the trivial comparison—like a protean, shifting dream. He knew that this happiness could not last for ever; she contracted diphtheria and died a few days later. After her death, he went to his study, took out his Browning, placed it to his temple and pulled the trigger. A dry click rang out, but no shot followed. He then realized that she had removed the cartridges from the magazine; she must have wanted him to live, perhaps so that on this earth the sorrow, which was the only vestige of her short sojourn here, and that blinding happiness she had given him should not die. He would speak of the sad rustle of the trees in the cemetery and how he would never forget the melody of this sound, a final melody to accompany her into the hereafter, in which he was ready to believe with all his strength of conviction, if only for the sake of her memory. Then he would pause for a moment and add:
“But don’t let’s talk about this. It’s too distressing for me, and I wouldn’t want to burden you with another’s sorrow.”
Such was Arkady Alexandrovich’s tale of his first wife, or rather the romance he had created, which bore no resemblance at all to the actual history of his marriage. The romance, for example, entirely omitted any reference to her dowry; and, moreover, it was precisely this unmentioned dowry that served at once as both the reason for Arkady Alexandrovich’s courting her and the deciding factor in it all. Arkady Alexandrovich had not attended the concert, since the tickets had been too expensive; he met his first wife at the house of some mutual acquaintances. There had indeed been some hesitation before the marriage, but this had come about for reasons entirely other than those featuring in the tale, which cast Arkady Alexandrovich’s magnanimity and sacrifice in such a favourable light; the hesitation could be ascribed, firstly, to the young lady’s thorough uncertainty about her love for the man and, secondly, and principally, to the fact that she had yet to come of age and was not in control of her capital—almost a hundred thousand roubles, which belonged to her and constituted her dowry. However, she would come of age in a few months, and then nothing could impede the marriage. Arkady Alexandrovich indeed, for the first time in his life, displayed true perseverance in achieving his aim. His future mother-in-law, a formidable, miserly old woman who did everything in her power to see to it that her daughter married a rich man, hated Arkady Alexandrovich with every fibre of her being. He patiently bore it all, and in order to rationalize his indulgence, he constructed a theorem that excused the old woman’s behaviour and her nerves, because she had suffered a great deal—which was incorrect: the old woman had known no suffering and lived the most untroubled of lives. Only, she found the prospect of losing one hundred thousand roubles to her daughter unbearable. The daughter, exposed on the one hand to the tempestuous exhortations of the old woman, and on the other to the quiet persuasions of Arkady Alexandrovich, hesitated for a long time, until finally Arkady Alexandrovich prevailed—and only then did the wedding take place. The only thing to hold any degree of verisimilitude in Arkady Alexandrovich’s romance was that his wife had no conception of the value of money, which Arkady Alexandrovich now found entirely at his disposal—and so the now powerless old woman vanished like a phantom. Yet, Arkady Alexandrovich’s wife never did love him; there were many indications of this, and each one constituted a world of its own. Nevertheless, since they were both of them possessed of calm temperaments, their life together was plain sailing, although perhaps a little dull. She died following an unsuccessful operation, which had been registered officially as an appendectomy. What was more, she had not removed the cartridges from the revolver, because Arkady Alexandrovich had never owned any such thing—and, lastly, the trees had not rustled on the day of her funeral, because it was the beginning of March and there were no leaves yet on any of the trees.
As strange as it may at first seem, Arkady Alexandrovich’s tale enjoyed unfailing success among his female admirers. After laying a certain dialectical groundwork, the conclusion would readily suggest itself: in Arkady Alexandrovich’s life there was an irreparable (in a certain sense) emptiness, and of course this emptiness could only be filled by another woman, one who bore a striking resemblance to the first wife—a little otherworldly, romantic, blind to any financial considerations—which is how every woman without exception views herself. It was only Lyudmila to whom Arkady Alexandrovich never told this romance. Naturally, however, he did tell Olga Alexandrovna, recounting even the programme of the concert.
For Olga Alexandrovna, Arkady Alexandrovich was an entirely new sort of man—she had never until now known such people. For a start, he was less primitive than his predecessors had been; secondly, she liked his gentle nature and that particular defencelessness about him: this man was unable to make demands, he could not contrive, he lacked the courage to tell his adoring wife that he no longer loved her, since he knew that she would never survive the blow.
“Tell her. Really, sooner or later she ought to know…”
“You don’t know her,” Arkady Alexandrovich replied. “Poor Lyudmila!”
It was, of course, Olga Alexandrovna who had devised the trip to Italy. She was to meet Arkady Alexandrovich in Nice, at a hotel on avenue Victor Hugo. From there, they would travel via Menton, Bordighera, San Remo and Genoa into the hinterlands of Italy. Naturally, it would have been simpler to travel from Paris together, but Olga Alexandrovna wanted to imbue the trip with her scripted sense of the unexpected and happy coincidence. She would travel to Nice alone; on the other side of the carriage window the sea would swell, the kilometres would fly by—and then the station, a motor car, avenue Victor Hugo—and in the lobby of her hotel, at long last, an unhurrying figure, so warm, soft and familiar. Olga Alexandrovna coul
d no longer fathom how it was possible to love a man with broad shoulders, firm hands and muscles that moved monstrously beneath swarthy skin; the shoulders ought to be a little sloping, the skin touchingly white, the hands tender and soft. However, at first Arkady Alexandrovich had declined to accompany her on the trip, explaining to Olga Alexandrovna that, unfortunately, it would be impossible, since he had no money. “Silly boy,” she said, patting him on the cheek, which twitched beneath her hand. “Silly little boy!” And although he continued to protest and object, it ended in his departing the Gare de Lyon in a first-class carriage two days before Olga Alexandrovna, having left a note for Lyudmila to the effect that he was going away for a couple of months and would write to her. Lyudmila, however, had been gone for two days already.
It was the month of June; along the way, Arkady Alexandrovich and Olga Alexandrovna stopped in Menton, and everything there seemed so wonderful to them that they saw no point in travelling farther. Besides, there was plenty of time—a whole life ahead of them. Despite the fact that Arkady Alexandrovich was stout, ill and no longer in the prime of life, despite the fact that he had long ceased to believe in anything at all, aside from comfort and a good apartment, despite the fact that love usually exhausted him and long conversations about the same things irritated him—despite all this, for the first time in his life he felt ready to sacrifice everything, even the nice apartment, for the chance to be with Olga Alexandrovna. Sometimes, after lunch, he would sit down to write his book, titled The Spring Symphony, in which he recounted in unaccustomed terms the love of two youths; in this book there was no hint of dust, decay or ashes, but rather descriptions of affirmative, lyrical things; and it read awkwardly, just as it is awkward to look at a fat old woman made up in a light gauze dress, prancing about a stage in the role of a young sylph. Arkady Alexandrovich was much too weary a man for an outward rebirth to appear decent. However, what mattered was that only now had he grasped the meaning of happiness, and only now did he sense how he ought to write, and Olga Alexandrovna, to whom he read all his curiously inept pages, was in complete agreement with him.
In the mornings, they would go for a swim together; however, the disadvantage of this lay in the fact that while Olga Alexandrovna was an excellent swimmer, Arkady Alexandrovich could not swim at all. Standing up to his neck in the water, he would spread his arms, exhale and move about on the spot, as if gathering the strength to set off, but he would never move and just kept standing there, bobbing up and down. When Olga Alexandrovna appeared next to him, he would say:
“It’s such a pity that Nature has bypassed man without giving him the means to fly or swim! Right now I’d swim far, far away!”
And Olga Alexandrovna, who would have laughed if any other man had said this, just as she would have laughed at his clumsy movements and lack of confidence in the water, would be touched by his manner, and lamented with him that Nature had wronged man.
* A decent man.
FOLLOWING LIZA AND SERYOZHA’S departure, Sergey Sergeyevich was left in Paris alone. Olga Alexandrovna ought to be in Italy by now. There had been no letters from her, and Sergey Sergeyevich did not expect her return any sooner than a fortnight hence.
It was one of those rare periods in his life when he found himself almost entirely at liberty: there were no trips, no urgent commitments, no one asking for money or favours, and all this ceaseless movement around him ground to a halt for a time. He changed none of his habitual routine: as always, he would rise early; as always, he would make himself clean and presentable; and as always, he looked as though he had come fresh from the bath. However, on days such as these, he would read a lot, and it was chiefly on this pursuit that he spent his free time. It was an exceedingly rare occurrence, however, that he would read a book from cover to cover; most often, he would stop after the opening pages. Occasionally he would pick up novels that Olga Alexandrovna had praised, but after reading a few lines he would carefully replace them on their shelves. Liza’s books were more interesting, but her favourite author was Dostoevsky, whom Sergey Sergeyevich had never been able to read without stifled indignation and a wry smile. But then, Seryozha’s reading would always bring a smile to his face: it would always be Plato, or Kant, or Schopenhauer. All this would usually culminate in Sergey Sergeyevich’s extracting a volume of Dickens or Galsworthy from the shelf and beginning Oliver Twist or The Forsyte Saga for the dozenth time.
On the second day of his holiday, once news had spread that he was in London—despite his almost never having left the house—he received a telephone call from an old friend from his days in Moscow, a certain Sletov, who said that he needed to see Sergey Sergeyevich on a very important matter, and, although Sergey Sergeyevich knew perfectly well what this matter was, he replied that he would be glad to see him. Half an hour later Sletov appeared.
“Hello, Fyodor Borisovich,” said Sergey Sergeyevich. “Have you paid the taxi driver?”
Fyodor Borisovich Sletov was a tall man, very carelessly dressed, with a jaundiced, lined face, on which his rapturous blue eyes seemed astonishing.
“Just imagine, Seryozha, I was a little short, you see…” he began very quickly. “Yes, of course, you don’t know yet. Everything’s over. Everything, you hear?” He made a decisive gesture with his hand, as though chopping something invisible. He was speaking very fast, almost panting from the speed and agitation. “I haven’t slept for the past three nights. Everything, you hear, everything. And who would have thought,” he said, abruptly slowing his monologue and beginning to speak calmly, with embittered restraint, “that she, Lili, was nothing but a…”
He did not finish the phrase and shook his head.
“…a woman who didn’t deserve your love?” queried Sergey Sergeyevich.
“There can be no doubt about it,” quietly replied Sletov. “The letters, the evidence…”
“You’re incorrigible, Fedya.”
“Yes, yes, I know. I know what you’re going to say… But no one, you included, understands a thing.”
“That’s a poor sort of wisdom, Fedya.”
“But it isn’t!” cried Sletov. “To you they’re all fast women; you think there’s something strange in believing that Lili, or Zhenya, or Olya could actually turn out to be an angel of virtue, don’t you? Well, my friend, believe me: there are no two women on earth who are the same, do you hear? They’re all different, every one of them.”
“Possibly. However, they all act more or less the same.”
“No, differently.”
“That is to say, certain details, possibly, are dissimilar,” said Sergey Sergeyevich, “but all the same, you still wind up here every time, just like today, and even that touching detail—that you haven’t the money for the taxi—remains unaltered. And every time you have evidence and letters.”
“Do you know what I mean by ‘the creative principal in life’?”
“Where does creativity come into it?”
“Permit me to explain. Say I love a woman who…”
“Have you eaten?” asked Sergey Sergeyevich.
It was almost eight o’clock, and Sergey Sergeyevich could hardly expect anyone else at this hour. Suddenly, a sharp and prolonged ringing came from the hallway.
“Well, Fedya, who on earth could this be? What do you think, judging by the bell? A man or a woman?”
“A woman of intent.”
“I’d wager it’s a man, and a brazen one at that.”
The maid handed Sergey Sergeyevich a card inscribed: “Lyudmila Nikolayevna Kuznetsova”—and, added by hand, with a well-sharpened pencil: “On a most important personal matter.”
“You know, Fedya,” said Sergey Sergeyevich, “you should go and take a bath, shave, freshen yourself up a bit; meanwhile, I’ll see to this woman.”
“And I was just starting to get an appetite,” said Sletov.
“Go, go, I’ll feed you. Show her in,” he said to the maid.
Lyudmila entered with assured steps, said “Good evening�
� in a businesslike voice, sat down and immediately lit a cigarette.
“Can I help you?” asked Sergey Sergeyevich.
“I believe,” said Lyudmila coldly, “or, at least, I hope so.”
“If you would be so good as to tell me to what I owe the pleasure of your visit…”
“You ought to know that just as well as I do.”
“You see…” said Sergey Sergeyevich, reclining in his chair as though preparing to deliver a speech, “I have the misfortune—or good fortune—to be comparatively well off, and this has a most pernicious effect on the nature of visits paid to me by various people, whose aims are generally distinguished, I should say, by a certain monotony. I should say that ninety-nine per cent of these visits are of the same unambiguous nature. In those cases when it is a woman who pays the visit, that ninety-nine per cent may be replaced with the number one hundred, without the slightest risk of error. In other words, I should like to thank you for the charming attention with which you’ve listened to all this, and to add that from the very outset I had no illusions about the reason for your visit.”
“Do you always talk in this way?”
“No.”
“You are aware that your wife has gone away, but you are not aware with whom.”
“You see…” said Sergey Sergeyevich. He made as if to sink into thought, looked first at the ceiling, then straight at Lyudmila, and slowly said: “I take a dim view of a certain category of blackmailers, or, more precisely, those who invoke my wife’s name. Any attempt by such people is doomed to failure.”
The Flight Page 5