The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  “Suppose I stayed here? Not to return, not to go back into the life of that house…. To walk endlessly on this silvery grass….” But her footsteps were already leading her back toward the door. As she climbed the little wooden steps she pictured again the strip of freshly dug earth along the wall where she had been gardening scarcely an hour earlier. That time now seemed remote to her and filled with a paradisiacal happiness and simplicity.

  In the hall, hooked onto the coatrack, hung her son’s jacket, one of its sleeves screwed up comically short. Olga gave it a rapid tug, as if discreetly to correct a blunder. No gesture could have been more innocent….

  She pressed the switch and put her hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp, so reduced in size did the interior of the kitchen seem to her. The figure of the young man, even when invisible, imposed itself on the walls and the furniture, shrinking them, as in those bad dreams where you are propelled into a familiar apartment, which contracts as you watch and ends up like a little house for the figures on a music box…. Indeed, halting in the middle of the kitchen she felt as if she were examining the inside of a dolls’ house, whose smallness, at once enchanting and unnatural, was obscurely menacing. Even the little saucepan on the range looked smaller than before and at last revealed its true shape—slightly bell-shaped, potbellied.

  Olga knew that she would shortly strain off the infusion’s brownish liquid and throw away the sediment of the flowers. She turned on the tap, preparing to wash her hands, but at that moment her eye lit upon the orange crayon that had been slipped as a bookmark into the notebook left on the table by mistake. She took it out, and studied the color. “No action could be more innocent,” she repeated in a whispered echo. And swiftly, without her being able to offer the least resistance, the fragments of the mosaic, seen when she had her attack of giddiness, began to come together: a nervous hand hovering over the range; the cat in the first snapshot watching a woman asleep; the open door through which the animal had slipped in; the young man who from now on would be living under the same roof as she…. She felt a great mass of slimy, lumpy skin swelling in her head. The reptile … The mosaic coalesced more and more quickly: the hand above the infusion; her deathlike sleep on certain days; the child who was as tall as she was; the orange crayon…. One more round and these fragments were going to become fixed in an inescapable certainty.

  She glanced at the range. The flowers that had been steeped for too long, had turned brown: under a shallow layer of liquid they resembled the damp skin of a hunched beast, the same one that, grotesquely bloated, was tearing at her brain. The mosaic began its round again: the hand; the young man near the range; the sleep….

  Olga seized the little vessel and with a febrile gesture poured the infusion into the big bowl and gulped it down…. The mosaic vanished. The reptile in her brain died noiselessly, thrusting a multitude of red needles under her eyelids. The kitchen resumed its normal dimensions. She felt pathetically relieved, as if she had just convinced a skeptical interlocutor.

  Walking along the corridor, she noticed a light inside the book room. A lamp on a narrow table squeezed between the sets of shelves had been left switched on. Her eye was caught by an engraving on the page of a large old book that had been left open. It was one of the volumes of the zoological encyclopedia her son liked to leaf through. She leaned over the engraving and read the caption: “A boa constrictor attacking an antelope.” The engraving, punctilious in its realism, had an unexpected effect, like all excesses of zeal. For even though the smallest tufts of hair on the antelope’s spotted hide were visible, its whole aspect was evocative of a vaguely human form: the expression of the eyes, the position of the body surrounded by the coils of the gigantic snake. As for the boa constrictor: its muscular body, covered in arabesques and prodigiously thick, resembled the broad thigh of a woman, a rounded leg, indecently plump and clad in a stocking ornamented with patterns….

  She sat down to study it better. The engraving amused her: the boy certainly did not suspect this double vision of boa-woman. It was reassuring. So she was wrong to have been so alarmed just now. As long as all he saw was this huge, gaudy snake…

  As she looked at it the picture began to sway slowly. The tiredness was pleasant, soft, as it touched her eyes. She wanted to lower her lids, to go on enjoying these peaceful moments. Her eyes were already closing of their own accord. Still believing it was no more than the lassitude of evening, she tried to shake herself but only succeeded in provoking this last thought: “I must get up; my hands are still covered in earth, I shall make the book dirty….”

  Sleep rapidly overcame her with calm, irresistible violence, mingling with the pleasant, delicate aroma of the old pages. Pages you smell with closed eyes, inhaling deeply.

  IT WAS THE LAST FEW KNOCKS on the front door that woke her. That type of insistent hammering into which people annoyed by waiting weave a kind of drumming melody, in the hope that the variations in the rhythm will attract attention.

  She leaped up from the chair, trying to make sense of her immediate surroundings: the dazzling sun at the tiny window; the clock with its hands in an odd position, showing almost eleven o’clock; and above all, herself, this woman in a crumpled dress, her hands covered in streaks of earth, a woman turning around in a tiny storeroom, knocking books over and unable to find a mirror….

  The hammering rose to a climax with the measures of a military drum roll and fell silent. Olga went out into the corridor then came back and, without really knowing why, closed the volume of the encyclopedia.

  “What if they’ve guessed?” she asked herself in perplexity. “But guessed what?” The absurd notion occurred to her that the others might discover she had concealed her son’s age from them. The senseless fear crossed her still drowsy mind that they would suddenly notice the boy was no longer a child, but an adolescent, almost as tall as she….

  In front of the mirror in the hall she quickly straightened her dress, tidied her hair, and seemed to recover the use of her features. Nevertheless, as she opened the door she was expecting, in spite of herself, to see a whole cluster of faces animated by malevolent and mocking curiosity.

  The door opened on the luminous void of the sky. There was nobody on the steps; the meadow that sloped down to the river sparkled with drops of melted frost, and was also deserted. The sunny freshness of the air cleansed the lungs, penetrated the body. If only it could be possible! To have this morning as it was, but free of all the rest: the voices in her head contradicting one another from one moment to the next; other peoples stares emptying her out of herself; numberless fears, above all, those of the previous evening….

  Her hope did not last longer than the deep breath she took, inhaling the scent of the frozen grass…. Then her gaze slipped along the wall and she saw a woman leaning on the windowsill, trying to look inside. Fear returned to her so abruptly that it gave rise to an improbable idea: “But that’s me! Yesterday….” In a veritable flash of madness, Olga saw the woman leaning toward the window as herself. But at once another thought, less fantastic and still more distressing, banished the resemblance: “She’s spying on me!”

  The woman began tapping on the window with a bent forefinger, shading her eyes with the other hand to avoid the reflection….

  Olga called to her. The woman straightened up: it was the nurse from the retirement home. “Something’s happened to the child.” This panic, like a squall of wind, raised a maelstrom of further anxious reflexes: “If something’s happened to him it’s my fault, it’s because of that moment of bliss there on the steps …” They were not even thoughts but a sequence of images—the flow of blood that would have to be stanched on the child’s body; and the blame she would have to take upon herself in order to pacify fate.

  The nurse came up to her and greeted her mournfully and coldly. “No, it’s something else, otherwise she would have spoken straight away,” thought Olga. She had seen these bringers of bad tidings arriving so many times….

  At that moment sh
e sensed an inquisitive stare on the part of the nurse. The latter must have noticed the residue of sleep on her face, the traces of earth on her hands. Olga clenched her fists, hid them behind her back, and with a nod invited the nurse to come in. In the corridor her anxiety increased. The nurse stopped, her hand resting on the chest of drawers, precisely at the spot where the dangerous corner had been sawed off. “She has guessed something,” Olga thought again, and shook herself immediately: “Idiot! What is there to guess in this hovel?”

  “I hope you’ll have a cup of tea with me?”

  Olgas voice sounded like a line from a role too well learned.

  In the kitchen she saw the little copper saucepan and on the table the orange crayon. The nurse followed her look. She felt the visitor had not taken her eyes off her once and experienced an improper desire to call her to order: “All this is none of your business!”

  “No tea, thank you, I don’t have time. I’ve come to tell you … to tell you that last night… Xenia Yefimovna …”

  Xenia, the elderly boarder who for years had been promising Olga to show her the famous “white flowers” that nobody knew about, had just died…. And now someone must go to Paris, the nurse said, to see her son and her daughter-in-law and let them know. In her role as the Princess Arbyelina, Olga had already carried out such delicate missions on several occasions.

  “I know it’s Sunday today,” apologized the young woman. “It will spoil your whole day. I know … But no one but you could find the right words

  Listening to her, Olga tasted the delicious simplicity of life. The wholesome, robust common sense of life, in which death, too, has its place.

  In the train it was the memory of the white flowers beneath the trees in a fantasy woodland that saved her from the thought that suddenly assailed her: “Supposing I had waked up of my own accord this morning after that abnormally long sleep.”

  She understood that with all her strength she must hang on to the clear, dull appearances of life.

  In Paris she carried out her mission with a kind of fervor. On this occasion the solemn murmuring of condolences, the son’s contrite expression, his wife’s sighs had the value of a proof. Yes, the interlude they were all three of them applying themselves to acting out demonstrated that in other people’s eyes she remained uniquely the “Princess Arbyelina.” And that no one had any inkling of the existence within her of the woman who, only the previous evening, rooted to the spot under the window of her own house, had been observing the actions of an adolescent boy….

  Another proof was the street. Olga walked through the crowd scrutinizing the expressions on people’s faces, like someone on her first outing after an operation, trying to guess from the looks of the passersby if the aftereffects are visible or not.

  She also called on Li. That Sunday her friend was painting. The features of a pair of characters were already emerging on a plywood panel: a woman in a white dress, with bare shoulders, and a man slightly shorter than she, with curly hair framing the round hole for his face….

  “By the way, I meant to ask you.” Olga’s voice was tinged with careful nonchalance. “That infusion I recommended to you, does it have any effect on your insomnia?”

  “Oh yes! It certainly does….”

  Li replied in the same absentminded tone without lifting her brush from the surface of the painting….

  During the return journey, it seemed to Olga as if all the passengers had their newspapers open at the same page. She glanced at the one her neighbor was reading. It was the same twelve portraits that fascinated them all. NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL: THE VERDICT ran the headline above the photos. The condemned men had their eyes shut: their portraits were there as evidence of their deaths. At the bottom of the page an American soldier could be seen demonstrating the noose that was used in the executions. The thickness of the rope, very white, even beautiful, seemed out of proportion. It looked like the rigging of a ship or a long roll of dough for some gigantic pretzel…. Olga’s neighbor got off the train, leaving his newspaper on the seat. She glanced at the article. Two columns of figures in a box indicated the precise time at which the hanging of each of the condemned men had started and the time death had occurred. “In other words, the amount of time they were struggling in that pretzel,” thought Olga.

  The numbers reminded her of the boring, enigmatic figures showing stock market prices.

  Trap Opened At: Pronounced Dead At:

  Ribbentrop 1:14 P.M. 1:32 P.M.

  Keitel 1:20 P.M. 1:34 P.M.

  Rosenberg 1:49 P.M. 1:59 P.M.

  She looked up. The passengers were discussing the story as they read it, calling out comments to one another from one seat to the next, pointing their fingers at this or that part of the report. “No, not the stock market prices,” Olga said to herself, watching this animation. “More like the results of a game.” On her right a man reminiscent of a poorly acted father in a character comedy was leaning toward the person across from him, undoubtedly his wife, and reading the report of the trial aloud to her. For her part the woman seemed visibly embarrassed by her husband’s overexcited declamation. She sat very upright, her handbag on her knees, looking down onto the bowed head of the man as he read, raising her eyebrows from time to time, sighing and lifting her eyes heavenward. Her husband failed to notice these condescending little grimaces, and kept wagging his finger to lend emphasis to his reading:

  “‘They all died with dignity’—Dignity! Who are they kidding?—’apart from Streicher, who shouted abuse at those present…. Only Hermann Goering succeeded in escaping the shame of the gallows…. Emmy Sonnemann, Frau Goering, kissed her husband through the mesh of the grill and transferred the vial of potassium cyanide from her mouth to his …’ Look, there’s a picture of the vial….”

  The little station at Villiers-la-Forêt was deserted. The arrival and departure times on the timetable board reminded her with cruel grotesqueness of the figures in the box about the hangings. She crossed the square, which was surrounded by plane trees, and turned toward the lower town. The vibration of the rails hung for a moment in the silence of the evening….

  The day she had just lived through was overflowing with complete madness. A madness that was nevertheless reassuring because everyone accepted it as life. You had to do as they did. To be happy, as she had been that morning, playing the role of the Princess Arbyelina offering her condolences. To tolerate those passengers who got a thrill from the vial passing through the mesh in a prison visiting room during a long, wet kiss. For months they had been learning in their newspapers about the countless millions of people killed, burned alive, gassed. And now all History had boiled down to a woman pushing a tiny vial between a man’s lips with her tongue….

  She went home almost serene. As she climbed up the little wooden steps she managed to look at the flower bed beside the wall with no special emotion….

  That same evening, however, an apparently inoffensive detail upset her equilibrium…. She was combing her hair in front of the mirror in her room. The smooth action of the comb was pleasantly emptying her mind. And as she gazed, lulled by her own reflection, she saw the door shudder softly and stop halfway. This silent half-opening caused by a gust of air from an open window created a strange expectation. Olga remembered that night when a draft had awoken her as it made her bedroom door creak, yes, it was the night of the three snapshots taken by the book-camera. For as long as she could recall, that door had always creaked slightly (in any house there is always one knife that cuts better than the others and one chair that you avoid giving to guests). But this time the door had opened noiselessly…. Olga put down the comb and, with a keen sense of wantonly committing a dangerous act, she went out into the corridor, pulled the handle toward her, then pushed the door open again. It swung through its arc and came to rest against the little doorstop nailed to the floor. In silence. Without emitting the slightest creak. Olga became aware of an icy tension in her temples, as if her hair were stuffed with snow. She repeated the a
ction. The door swung, opened wide. Without a murmur. Olga had the feeling that all this was happening outside her normal life. In one of life’s strange back rooms. She bent down and touched the lower hinge, then the hinge at the top. In the glow of the lamp her fingers glistened. The oil was clear, almost without any trace of grease. Recent… The snow in her hair seemed to melt into a ferment of little burning sparks. She pushed against the door one more time with a slow, sleepwalker’s action. Her eyes fixed on the hinges, holding her breath, she waited for an interminable second. The door swung smoothly, neatly shrinking its shadow on the wall, like a hand reducing its angle on a clock face…. Just before it touched the doorstop it emitted a brief groan. Olga leaned her hand against the wall and sat down on a little low stool in the corridor. She was breathing jerkily. Her bedroom beyond the open door had an unfamiliar look. It was like a hotel room, whose interior can be pictured in advance, but which, despite this, seems alien. The bed, the lamp on a shelf, the wardrobe with a mirror … She herself, seated outside the threshold, seemed on the point of leaving again. It took a muscular effort to banish the tense smile from her face—the delight at having rejected, or at least delayed, the final conclusion….

  That evening she did not dare touch the door handle again and slept with the door wide open.

  SHE SPENT THE DAYS that followed belatedly entering books in the catalog. And this mechanical work matched the tidying up that was gradually taking place in her mind. Even the daily routine of clipping together the newspapers, which had always been a burden to her, helped in coming to terms with life. She now found herself quickly reading through complete passages from one article or another. She enjoyed the sheer absurdity of them, which seemed to her the best possible proof that nothing could upset the common sense of human routine….