The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  No, their cars have already driven off a moment ago, edging their way rapidly into the hissing stream of the freeway. It is only as he drives along, musing, that the man goes over in his mind the scene that never took place. He walks up to her, smiles: “You know, this is the first time I’ve come here and …” Lost amid the hurtling thrusts of the headlights, on routes that diverge farther and farther, each of them recalls the account that brought them to such a remote spot, on this freezing day: “You’ll see, it’s a real garden, well, more like virgin forest, there are so many trees, plants, and flowers. And each cross has a kind of tiny window with a night-light in it.” They are telling themselves they should have come in summer or autumn to see the garden; now is too late. Should I go back there one day? the man ponders. Next Sunday? Take another look at those deserted avenues, those dark branches against the evening sky, that woman who … He shakes himself. Too late. The city swallows him into its dark, shifting complexity, streaked with red and yellow. Before racking his brains for a pretext to justify his escapade in the eyes of his loved ones, he thinks about the woman who, at this very moment, is herself somewhere being sucked down into the mighty flood of streets and lights. “To see her again would be as impossible as resurrecting the dead invoked by that old madman,” he tells himself, summoning a grain of melancholy cynicism so as to regain a firm foothold in reality….

  The old man accompanies them with his stare as far as the gate, then looks down at the name shown on the tombstone where the engraved letters stand out in the almost horizontal rays of sunlight. In the distance the sound of an engine dwindles and fades, like the trickle of sand in an hourglass.

  Apart from the keeper only a tall figure remains; he seems to be vainly searching for a way out of the maze of intersecting paths and avenues. He is the very last of the visitors, quite a young man who has been coming here daily for the past three or four days. Despite the cold he is wearing a simple corduroy jacket which, with its narrow, elongated cut, recalls the dress of students in the old days. A white muffler, coarsely knitted, forms a kind of frilly ruff on his chest. He has the pale face of someone who, though chilled to the marrow, no longer feels any pain, his body having become as cold as the icy air.

  He was the one just now, as he watched the visitors, who imagined their feelings, pictured their lives. First, the gawking group, then the two solitary ones who were on the brink of talking to one another and now will never meet again. He spends his own life guessing at other peoples lives. … A moment ago he noticed that this birch tree with two trunks had been split by yesterday’s storm just at the point of the fork and that there was a risk that at any minute now the wind might enlarge the deep gash and bring down the twin trunk in a rending crash of timber. He tells himself that all the silence of the day hangs upon that mute cry. Taking a notebook out of a big satchel like a postman’s, he writes in it: “The silence whose depths are plumbed by this suspended crash.”

  The man in the student’s jacket is one of those invisible Russian exiles, increasingly isolated and shy with advancing years, who pursue a fantasy of writing and end their days in attics piled high with books, almost buried beneath the pyramids of pages that no one will have the courage to decipher. He has known several like this but tells himself that such a fate only befalls other people. In his own pyramids there will be the story of the reckless count who sold his childhood home, and that of the dancer who, as he died, called out the name of his lover, his murderer….

  The old keeper lights the little night-light in the cross surmounting the grave where his evening round always concludes. It is the ‘ grave of the condemned man who wrenched himself free of “the hydra of counterrevolution.” The man in the corduroy jacket heard this story yesterday, alone face to face with the old man. One detail intrigued him: the name marked on the tombstone is that of a woman. He has not dared to ask for an explanation…. Now he sees a match flame shielded in the hollow of the keeper’s hands, lighting them up from inside, then flaring on the wick of the night-light at the heart of the cross. The tiny glazed door closes, the sinuous flame flickers, steadies itself. The light and the sheltered warmth remind the young man so much of a long remembered room that he shivers. He is only a few steps away from the old man.

  “Could you tell me about this woman?”

  The old man’s gaze seems to travel across long stretches of darkness, nocturnal towns long since peopled by ghosts. He is clearly trying to size up who he is dealing with: one of the inquisitive ones who come to collect two or three anecdotes? A fugitive who has escaped a family lunch and taken refuge here to gain a breathing space? Or perhaps the one whose coming he had given up hoping for?

  He begins talking as he makes his way slowly toward the entrance gate that should have been locked at least an hour ago. His words are permeated by great weariness.

  “Everyone would have it they were lovers. And that the death or that dubious character was murder.”

  It is the usual style of his stories: blunt, clear-cut, flat. All the man in the student’s jacket expects is just one more anecdote. He is longing to get away, to drink a glass of warm wine, to go to bed…. Suddenly the old man, as if he had sensed this desire to escape, cries out in urgent tones that can be heard almost as a plea and an apology for not knowing how to tell stories in any other way, “You’re the first person I have ever told about her!”

  EVERYONE IN VILLIERS-LA-FORÊT (the men perhaps more openly than the women) wanted it to be a murder. This theory corresponded to some inescapable cliché of the imagination on the part of people who had very little, to the classic scenario of a crime of passion. Or, much more simply, to a desire to picture two naked bodies, first of all joined in love and then separated by the violence of a brief struggle and death.

  Fascinated, abnormally perceptive, the townspeople held forth about the crime, invented new theories about it, and were critical of the inquiry that was making no headway. But it was really the bodies that fascinated them. For all at once their appearance amid the sleepy rural calm of Villiers-la-Forêt had to be accepted; and their nakedness, whether erotic or criminal, had to be written into the record of those idle July days that smelled of dust baked in the sun and the warm mud of the river. For such was the soft, slow landscape they burst in on: the man, his clothes drenched, stretched out on the bank, his skull smashed in. And the woman with disordered, streaming hair, her breasts bare, a woman seated beside the dying man, as still as carved stone.

  It was thus that the scene had been reported by a breathless witness—the man with a stammer whom the people of Villiers called “Loo-loo,” on account of his everlasting “loo-loo-look,” the introductory phrase that enabled him to embark on a conversation. This time he was so overwhelmed that his stuttering lasted longer than usual. The men on the little terrace of the Café Royal eyed him with indulgent smiles, the younger men began to parody him. His efforts and their mockery brought tears to his eyes. The combination of this frailty and his defective speech caused him to be taken for a simpleton. He managed to overcome the strangulation of his “loo-loos” sufficiently to alert the men to the presence of the two bodies beside the river. It was his tortured expression that convinced them. They got up and followed him, as you follow the barking of a dog that despairs of conveying the urgency of its summons.

  For several minutes on the bank they were blinded. Everything around them was so radiant on this fine summer’s afternoon. A heat haze enveloped the willow thickets in a soft, milky light. The water with flat glittering patches rippled under the tiny promontories of plants that overhung its flow here and there. The soft and dreamy sound of it made you want to stretch out in the grass and listen distractedly to the sparse notes of the birds, to the distant crowing of the cocks that carried all the way to this spot, as if better to measure its whole summery expanse. A hundred yards away a fisherman was casting his line. Even farther away along the bank you could see the old brewery building, all garlanded in strands of hops. And more distant still,
toward the horizon, the first houses of the lower town clustered together; then, climbing above them, the familiar roofs of the upper town—with the dark point of the steeple, the green mass of plane trees above the station and the place where the road turned off to Paris.

  People were arriving, alerted who knows how, greeting one another with furtive little nods; and the whole crowd, composed of neighbors, acquaintances, and relations, froze before this inconceivable sight: a man lying there with a broad brown mark on his bald head, his mouth open, his eyes glassy; and a woman seated on a great worm-eaten tree stump, washed up by the river, a woman whose beauty and lack of modesty hurt your eyes.

  And this was the sensation experienced by everyone on that bank. An ocular discomfiture, as if an eyelash had slipped under your eyelid and blurred your vision. This dead man whom no one dared to touch before the police arrived, this woman with her breasts scarcely hidden by a few shreds of cloth—two extraterrestrials landed on this day in the summer of 1947, the summer which all the newspapers had proclaimed to be that of “the first real vacation of peacetime.”

  Amid this uneasy stasis a movement was finally made that broke the spell. An old lady bent forward and removed a long, fine strand of waterweed that clung to the dead mans brow. Releasing all its pent-up energy, the crowd erupted into an angry hissing: nothing must move before the police got there! And at last it became clear to them that the whole scene really was happening. In a book, as several people remarked, everything would have been resolved much more quickly. But in the reality of that banal July day there was this long wait, extending absurdly beyond any acceptable limit. There was the strand of weed and the shirt that finally dried on the victims body. Groups formed; words even more pointless than usual were uttered; “Loo-loo” wept; the men directed increasingly bold stares at the half naked breasts of the unmoving woman. And when they managed to tear their eyes away from the drowned man, with his face covered in duckweed, to which they were attracted, as if magnetically, it was the figure of the postman on his bike that could be seen in the distance. Such was the nauseating equanimity of real life, that has no concern with plot development and often actually ruins it with its glutinous slowness.

  This ponderousness of reality also extended as far as the identification of the couple. “But that woman,” many were to murmur. “I’ve seen her hundreds of times! You know, she works in the library at that Russian old folks’ home…. That’s it. She’s the one who came to Villiers later than the others, just before the war …”

  As for the man, they recognized him as the elderly Russian who could sometimes be seen bent over a little vegetable garden that sloped down to the river. A man of few words who lived unobtrusively. His mouth, currently wide open, seemed like life’s last joke at the expense of his taciturn character.

  A few Russians among the crowd were also eager to contribute to the identification of the two individuals. So it was that in the whispering that passed from one group to another, the name of Olga Arbyelina came to be disclosed. Then that of Sergei Golets. With these titles: Princess Arbyelina; Golets, former officer in the White Army. For the French townspeople such minutiae had the old-fashioned ring of titles like “Marquis” and “Vicomtesse” in a forgotten play of the romantic era. They paid much more attention to the young fisherman. He came running up holding a shoe that was missing from Goletss left foot. Nobody knew what to do with the shoe…. As before, they could hear the rippling of the warm water, the distant crowing of cocks. And, without knowing how to formulate it, some of them were struck by this disconcerting thought: So, if it were me stretched out on the ground there, with my mouth open, instead of this poor Russian, yes, if like him I had just died, it would have had no effect on the sunshine, the grass, the lives of all these people, their Sunday-afternoon walk. This warm, sunny posthumous world, smelling of reeds and waterweed, seemed more terrifying than any hell. But there were very few to pursue this line of thought to its logical conclusion. In any case, the police were arriving at last.

  The disquiet provoked in the people of Villiers by the excessive radiance of the day that had greeted the tragedy on the riverbank faded away with the first stages of the inquiry. Now they all turned to reconstructing the facts, but setting off in the opposite direction from that chosen by the investigating magistrate. He was seeking to discover if there had been a crime or not. For them, the murder was not in doubt. Thus all they had to do was to yoke together as a pair of lovers the man and woman they had come upon one Sunday in July thanks to Loo-loo. And it was the challenge of this emotional and physical pairing that set all their brains in a ferment at Villiers-la-Forêt. For, as with those married couples who provoke the question: “What on earth brought them together?” it was impossible to imagine a conjunction between two more dissimilar natures.

  Even their faces, their complexions, the expressions in their eyes, were opposed, like fragments of a mosaic that do not fit and, if forced together, disrupt the whole picture. A woman of forty-six, tall and beautiful, her abundant hair tinged slightly with gray, with features whose regularity, cool and detached, matched those of cameo portraits. A man of sixty-four with a broad face, animated by complacent joviality, a bald pate, sunburned and glistening, and a look full of self-assurance: a stocky man, with short, broad forearms and square yellow fingernails.

  But what is more, you had to picture them together (this was a fact the inquiry would subsequently establish) in a rowboat out on the sunlit river. You had to bring them together on this improbable amorous excursion, see them land and settle in the grass behind the willow thickets. See the man set down on the ground a large bottle of wine he had been shading from the heat under the seat of the boat in the water stagnating on the old timbers. An hour later they had climbed back into the boat and, with the oars abandoned, were drifting toward the fateful spot, level with the ruined bridge, where the tragedy was to occur: the spot where the woman, according to her own muddled confession, had caused the death of her companion; or where the latter, according to the theory favored by the inquiry, had drowned, the victim of his own clumsiness, the drink, and an unfortunate collision with a pillar.

  For uninvolved spectators every crime of passion acquires a covertly theatrical interest. The townspeople of Villiers-la-Foret, once the shock of the first minutes had passed, discovered this diverting aspect, although its attractions had to be concealed behind a grave exterior. They applied themselves to the game with a will. The tedium of their daily lives encouraged this but so did the progress of the inquiry itself. Examinations of witnesses, confrontations, searches, seizures— the mere use of these terms in breathless discussions offered each of them a new and unexpected role, uprooting them from their stations in life as baker, schoolteacher, or pharmacist. Indeed the pharmacist (who had remained idle since his pharmacy was destroyed by mistake in an Allied bombing raid) no longer spoke anything but this language, halfway between case law and a detective novel, as if it satisfied his taste for Latin terminology.

  The fact of having to take the oath before giving evidence also had considerable importance. To the point where the youth who had been fishing at the moment of the tragedy emphatically insisted on repeating before the investigating magistrate the formula “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” although his age exempted him from this.

  The drowning of Golets, through accident or foul play, had quickly become an inexhaustible subject of conversation for the people of Villiers, since the progress of the inquiry always kept it fresh. In particular, it was a topic for all occasions, one that abolished the invisible frontier between upper town and lower town, between groups that hitherto had no contact with one another, and worked wonders in bringing strangers together. This whole verbal ferment was, in truth, based on few material facts. Thanks to the “no secrets” of small towns it was learned that the search of Golets s home had only brought to light a pistol with a single cartridge in the magazine, a collection of bow ties (some people mistakenly reported this
as a collection of bows and arrows), and brief notes written on scraps of paper recording someone’s visits to Paris. As for the Princess Arbyelina, no one had ever seen her in the company of this man. One witness, it is true, had seen them going together into the long shooting gallery, a kind of fairground booth in the big park in the upper town. But this visit, objected others, had only taken place shortly before the boat trip. Suddenly, within the space of a few hours, their adventure had become possible. What action, what word (coming from the man? from the woman?) had made it so?

  The alleged rendezvous at the shooting gallery; the collection of bow ties that was so out of keeping with the image of a senior citizen tending his garden; the few rare visits made by a mysterious “Parisian friend” to the heroine of the tragedy: these meager details proved sufficient to unleash an endless avalanche of theories, hypotheses, and conjectures, to which were added some scraps that the preliminary investigation had apparently allowed to filter through. An excited, unquenchable chorus of voices combined in a wild round of truths, fabrications, and absurdities such as can only be trotted out in the course of the verbal orgy that follows a sensational crime in a provincial town.