The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  She was no longer capable of thinking or remembering. The past assaulted her eyes, her face, with brief clusters of lights and sounds….

  A man, handsome, and with a giant’s frame, getting into a taxi. The guilty one. Her husband … Before slipping into the vehicle he turned and, guessing with ruthless accuracy the window from which she was secretly watching his departure, gave her a military salute as a clownish gesture of good-bye. And in the days that followed, a child dressed up as a soldier stood at attention in the hall of that Parisian apartment, listening for the familiar footsteps on the stairs….

  She did not even have time to grasp how the departure of this man and his mocking salute were connected with the terrifying night she was living through. Already another fragment from an even more distant past was surging up. A man who thought he was dying struggled to master the trembling of his cracked lips and confess his crime to her; he had escaped execution (the hydra of the counterrevolution, he whispered) by thrusting a comrade to his death…. Yet this deathbed penitent was the same character as the one who only months after that confession would be directing his ironic military salute at the woman hidden behind the curtains. And the same who in earlier times leaned with all his weight on a roulette table in a room where the smell of cigars mingled with that of the sea at night. The same, only a little younger, who wore an officers uniform, four St. George’s Crosses on his heart, and listened with a solemn and bitter air to the singing at the Russian church in Paris, clutching a candle too slender for his powerful fingers. The same who …

  Other masks slipped onto the face of the officer listening to the funeral service. They came around again more and more rapidly. The man saluted the woman behind the curtains, settled onto the seat in the taxi, and closed his eyes, letting his head tilt gently backward, following the motion of the vehicle…. No, it is no longer he but the dying man, his head tilting back as he slumps onto the pillows with a mournful groan…. No, it is the man at the casino, emitting a guttural laugh, his head flung back, his fingers clutching the last bill left to him…. These same fingers knead the wax of a candle, for it is now the officer, tilting his head back to contain the tears in his eyes that are like two brimming lakes….

  Olga tore herself violently away from these memories; the sequence of these metamorphoses was already becoming lost in sleep. “Both of us are guilty,” she heard herself whispering. Once again, no thought could explain when, how, or by what error she had ended up surprising that young adolescent as he pranced nervously beside the kitchen range. And then, quite simply, those words, “both of us,” suddenly brought back to her the sour smell that lingered on the ground floor of an apartment building in Paris and floated heavily upward as far as their apartment on the third floor: a pungent smell, suggestive of pieces of fish vitrified in the fierce hissing of rancid oil…. They are returning from the hospital. The child has finally been able to get up and take several steps, with outstretched arms to give him better balance. They have promised to go back the next day…. On the staircase there is this smell. “It’s always going to be like this,” they each tell themselves inwardly. Each suspects the other of thinking the same. The apartment door has hardly closed before the argument erupts.”A wasted life,” “cowardice,” “patience,” “after so many years,” melodramatic,’’ “for the sake of the child,” “you’re free,” “death.” The words, too familiar to wound, are marked this time by their tone of finality. If only their weary fury could be interrupted by a single second of truth they would have to tell one another: we are at each other’s throats because of the foul smell of frying on the staircase….

  So everything had been prefigured in that greasy stench. A week later her husband would become that man giving her a farcical salute before plunging into the taxi.

  “We are both guilty.”… The proof had been found. With an instinct as deeply rooted as the instinct for survival, she grasped that she must leave it at that. Not seek anything else. And already the reek of burned fat that still lingered in her nostrils was fading, becoming distilled, taking on the perfume of fine cigar smoke, swirling in nacreous spirals in the vast hotel room with windows open onto the Mediterranean night, onto a eucalyptus tree whose foliage rustles in a warm wind glutted with rain…. He has laid his cigar down on the marble of the fireplace, he laughs. His whole giant’s body is shaking with very youthful laughter. Youthful with drunkenness, with carelessness, with his desire for her. He pulls wads of bills out of his pockets, they litter the carpet at his feet, slip under the bed, whirl in the breeze that stirs the air in the room that is lit by a great glass chandelier. “Did you win?” she asks him, also infected by his merriment. “At first I won; then I lost everything and was ready to hang myself— or at any rate to drown myself, that would be a better joke! And suddenly that brigand Khodorsky arrives, bringing all this! A month ago we sold a house near Moscow to an Englishman, do you remember?

  Ha ha ha! And what kept me from going straight back to the tables was that I was too hungry for you….”

  She is only half dressed, as she often is when awaiting his return, not knowing if he will come back with the hangdog expression of a bankrupt or drunk with gambling and laughter, like today, unloading from his pockets the booty that will grant them a lease of another week or two of the airy and frivolous merrymaking that is their life…. She keeps some garments on her to the end, others—like the corset with snaps that click as they open—are hurled away, and land on the carpet of crumpled bills. Lifted into the air by this giant, she, who looks tall, suddenly feels weightless, fragile, and totally engulfed by him. Standing there he appears to be pounding his own belly with this woman’s body and it now seems slight and compact in his enormous arms. A pump dangles, suspended at the end of her foot, and falls, turning over several times. That evening, like so many others, will only remain in her memory because of a thought that suddenly rips into the pulp of her pleasure: “All this will have to be paid for one day. …” She utters an even more vibrant moan to drive the specter away. The man lets her fall back onto him in the frenzy of a climax reaching its peak….

  “Both guilty”… The long eucalyptus leaves rustle as the wind gets up again. The smell of the cigar grows lighter, refines its substance, changes into the smell of incense. The candle he is holding drips wax on his fingers. He tilts his head back, his eyes brimming with tears. She watches him out of the corner of her eye and cannot forestall that mocking young voice that rings out inside her head: “Are you sure he’s not acting?”… A year later he throws back his head, collapses onto the bed, dragging her with him, still bound to him by pleasure. On top of this great male body, still tumultuous with love, she surfaces, slowly draws away from him, observes his fearsomely powerful hands, abandoned in the folds of the sheets. One of them comes to life, gropes toward her, finds her breast, squeezes it with blind and loving violence…. The fingers knead the wax of the burnt-out candle. Then they gather to slap her and lash her cheek. Still later they mime a military salute. And make a rapid sign of the cross over a child stretched out on his hospital bed. And …

  All she could see now was this flotsam of gestures, bodies, lights. Everything grew fluid as she looked at it. Herself? In her rambling she now latched on to this ultimately certain, indisputable point. “I am the only guilty one.” She and the youth caught in his criminal act; there was nothing else, no intermediary. She was guilty of rejecting the apologies of the man on his knees who had just struck her. And before that guilty of not saying, “It’s the smell of frying fish that’s making us get mad at each other: let’s drop this pointless argument.” Guilty at the hospital of not saying to herself, “I could forgive this man a great deal for that sign of the cross coming from a nonbeliever like him.” And before that, guilty of enjoying the warm evening breeze that stirred the noisy eucalyptus leaves, and guessing that the blind hand was approaching to bring erotic torment to her breast. And a few minutes earlier when she heard a voice within her saying, “This will have to be pa
id for one day,” guilty of thinking, “I don’t care,” in reply to somebody who seemed to be waiting for her reply. Guilty of not believing in those eyes uplifted toward the roof of the church. Guilty of being herself, as she was.

  But who was she? The woman hiding behind the curtains to watch a man leaving her. She, who later walked along that muddy road clutching the supple body of a slain bird in her hand. She, who felt as if she had spent long years rooted to the spot as she compressed the blood of an everlastingly fresh wound with paralyzed fingers. A woman who, years before this interminable vigil began, used to enjoy watching the movements of her companion’s hands in restaurants, as they grasped a glass, prepared a cigar—hands that had just now been lifting her own body. A woman who when she saw the man in his officer’s uniform tilting back his head could not prevent herself saying, “What little devil lurks within me? I have this mad urge to burst out laughing and hear the echo and see their shocked faces!” A woman in rags, covered in filth and lice, barefoot, swaying on an unstable gangway, staring at the water crammed with dead fish and rotten timbers, unable to understand that she is leaving Russia forever….

  She felt as if she were running from one woman to the next; recognizing them; running straight through a day, a room, a compartment in a railroad car.

  It was as she continued running that she realized she was still not asleep….

  Then she pushed open the little window between the bookshelves. The freshness of the night made her nostrils tingle. The yellow light of the lampshade sealed off the darkness, made it gleam. There was just this bare branch reaching toward the window that emerged from the night, surprised her with its living, watching presence. And from this branch, from this breathing of the night air she derived a timid but intense happiness, like the end of an illness. The clock read: five past midnight. She was still not asleep. She had not fallen asleep. She was not sleepy. The young man whirling about by the kitchen range, the infusion, the reptile—so all that was no more than a delirium. Born in the head of a woman who would not accept her used-up life. A woman who still hoped. A woman who refused to look forward to old age and die before death came. It was a madness that had lasted for less than an hour and had taken her to the frontier of a deformed world from which there is no return. The bizarre and suspicious movement of the boy in the kitchen? No more than one of those eccentric, often crazy gestures people make when they think they are alone in a room. “The potbellied man on my desk, that ink blot I always hide under a book, is a little whim of the same kind. Our solitary hours are made up of such routines….”

  She closed the window and sat down at the narrow table once more. The night spread out before her and seemed endless. An ample amount of unoccupied time, that was offered to her personally. Her thoughts now had the limpidity of extreme insomnia. It remained for her to understand how she could have imagined what she had imagined behind that harmless gesture of an adolescent boy. To understand her own life at last.

  * * *

  A very few days after this sleepless night that seemed to have dissipated her oppressive doubts for good, Olga was to guess why the sleeping draft had not taken effect on that November evening. She realized that the powder the boy emptied into her infusion had not had time to dissolve and that, in her haste to give the lie to her horrible intuition, she had swallowed the liquid without stirring it…. She realized everything.

  But such were the intensity and richness of her passion already, the immensity and purity of her grief, that the unveiling of this little secret merely surprised her by its materialistic futility. A ridiculous chemical curiosity, a superfluous piece of evidence. A petty detail that was now quite meaningless within the wholly fresh surge of days and nights—that she no longer even dared to call “my life.”

  Three

  A GREAT ARISTOCRATIC MANSION on two floors, a facade with four white columns and, most remarkable of all, the strange garden where they fasten pillows to the trunks of the trees. Yes, apple trees in blossom and white pillows bound with thick ropes … She is six; she already knows that the pillows are there to protect not the trees but this pale, capricious ten-year-old boy, her cousin. She has already noticed that the scratches and bruises she inflicts on herself when playing attract much less attention than a simple mosquito bite on the boy’s arm. These oddities do not prevent her relishing the great sweetness of days that pass without seeming to. Every evening, at the moment when the sun lingers in the branches of the apple trees, the aroma of tea spreads over the terrace. An old servant strolls slowly from one tree to the next, collecting the pillows….

  The other joys of her early life she notices too late, when only the memory of them remains. She grows up…. And through overhearing the conversations of adults, discovers three astonishing things at almost the same time. The first: her mother will never get over the death of her husband, for “she loves him,” they say, “even more than when he was alive.” The second: she comes to grasp, very vaguely for the moment, the nature of her cousin’s condition and senses that she herself is an unconscious participant in a mystery that is both disturbing and rare. And finally the third: she learns that her grandmother, whom they bury one fine day in spring, has always been “conservative and reactionary,” words that her adolescent’s tongue finds it hard to articulate but which she likes the sound of…. The changes that ensue almost immediately after the funeral draw her attention to the simple pleasures now vanished: they no longer tie pillows to the trees; her cousin is fifteen; there is less fear for his health, and in the evening she no longer experiences that blissful moment when the old servant wandered slowly about in the garden untying the ropes, the moment when the smell of tea and the first coolness of the forest hung in the air….

  But the new life has its advantages. Nobody pays attention anymore to this adolescent girl spending the summer here at Ostrov, on the estate inherited by her uncle. She is free to go to the village where the peasants no longer raise their caps when they encounter their former masters. The grown-ups congratulate themselves on this; in the days of the grandmother, the old reactionary, they say, the villagers used to bow down to the ground when they greeted her…. They often talk about “the People” whom “all decent men” should enlighten, assist, and serve. This is a novelty too. Grandmother would speak of Zakhar, the shoemaker; the blacksmith, Vassily; or Stiopka the drunkard, who stole chickens. She also knew the Christian names of all their children. But she never spoke of “the People.” Ostrov was one of the rare estates not to be set fire to during the uprising of the previous year. The adults see this as a consequence of the grandmother’s despotism….

  But the principal novelty is that they are living their lives in nervous, stimulating anticipation of novelty itself. It is the start of the new century, the “new era,” as some of her uncle’s friends call it. They rack their brains about how to accelerate the onward march— too slow for their taste—of a country that is itself too ponderous.

  No doubt it is thanks to this impatience, this desire for transformations, that the idea of costume balls comes to them. Her uncle’s best friend, the one who talks about the People more often than the others, generally dresses as a peasant. Moreover, Olga notices that they all talk about them with the greatest fervor on the eve of the celebrations that bring together the owners of the neighboring estates and city folk from the capital. It is really as if by indulging in this worthy talk they are seeking to excuse themselves in advance for the excesses of the ball….

  She is twelve years old when, during the course of one of these balls, she comes upon an unusual couple in the little room that was once the lodging of the old servant, long since dead, whose allotted task was fastening the pillows to the trees. The man disguised as a peasant, the woman in a cloud of muslin, as a bat…. The house feels as if it is rocking under waves of music, exploding with firecrackers, ringing with shouts of laughter. It is the first time she has passed unnoticed—her height, she is already tall, plus a simple black mask offer her an invisibil
ity that intoxicates her. She encounters a knight raising the visor of his helmet to down a draft of champagne, a woman dressed as a toreador—Olga guesses that she is a woman from the contours of her body (“I’m grown up if I can guess that” she thinks, proudly)…. In a drawing room there is a man stretched out on a divan, his shirt wide open, with a pale face that women are dabbing at with wet towels. In the room next door a table strewn with the ruins of dinner and one solitary guest, who has removed his wig and his mask and is eating, as if to say, “I don’t care what anyone says. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’m eating!” Suddenly a motley group invades the room; there is an explosion of laughter, several hands pour different wines into his glass, pile his plate high with a mixture of foods. He objects, but his growls are stifled in his full mouth. The pranksters vanish, carrying off his wig…. This theft makes her jealous; she, too, would like to make a little mischief. Coming upon a young magician asleep, Li, she carries off her magic wand. A few minutes later the wand slips from her grasp and the sound of it falling interrupts the counterfeit peasant and the woman in muslin in their wild and tender wrestling match. The man lying back in the armchair opens his eyes wide, the upper part of his body rears up. The woman straddling his belly twists and turns so as not to topple over…. At the end of the corridor, in the hall with the dinner table: a servant takes a furtive swig from the glass of the man whose wig was stolen…. On the staircase the grandmother’s portrait has been hung upside down, head downwards … the favorite trick of guests at these celebrations. She unhooks the portrait and turns it the right way up. At that moment the counterfeit peasant appears at the other end of the corridor. She rushes toward the din of a piano, hoping to melt into a crowd of dancers. But the pianist is alone. It is an outrageously Moorish, drunken Othello, swamping the room with a flood of bravura music and despair. The white keys are all stained with black…. Tiredness, the darkness, and the two glasses of champagne they gave her, without recognizing her face beneath the mask, make the ground in the garden unstable. The pearly foam of the apple trees invades the pathways, confusing her with the scented whiteness of their branches. Suddenly in the depths of these nocturnal thickets the galloping of a horse is heard. It draws closer, turning toward her, invisible, more and more threatening, seems to be pursuing her, ready to burst forth with the crash of broken branches. She presses herself against a tree trunk and at the same moment the horseman appears. It is an officer cadet who has come to the party with no thought of fancy dress; having quickly wearied of the wine-soaked merriment of the others, he has escaped and is now skimming through the garden and the sleeping fields. His black uniform sparkles with white petals. She realizes that he is the one she has been unconsciously searching for through all the rooms….