It was another day spent without light. … A Saturday. The week that had preceded it was punctuated with cold showers that glazed the dull air. During the final night this fluid glass had congealed. The earth covered in frozen footprints and ruts as hard as stone made walking painful. The readers hastened to go home while they could still dimly see where they were putting their feet in the courtyard that bristled with sharp little ridges of frozen earth….
As Olga emerged from the Caravanserai, she noticed how few and far between the windows were where candles flickered; she mused on this strange fortress that emptied more and more each year. At length, feeling her way across the unevenness of the earth, she slowly embarked upon her regular journey. First along an alleyway in the lower town, then around the walls of the old brewery … Reaching the corner of her house, she sensed that an indefinable change had just taken place in nature. A timid softening, a dull, silent relaxation. Even the tonality of the air was different—filled with a hazy, mauve luminosity. At midday the wind had still been blinding her with needles of tears: now it had dropped. Beyond the willow branches the river had the consistency of ink. And, with an old familiar joy, Olga recognized that moment of expectation, when nature holds its breath, that in her childhood days would herald the swirling of snow….
She saw it through the little open window below the bathroom ceiling. The snowflakes entered the warm penumbra and vanished in a brief iridescent glitter. The silence was such that you could hear the rustling of the candle placed on the great porous slabs of the floor.
She was drinking tea, her gaze lost in the wavering orange halo around the wick, when someone knocked on the door. Surprised, but not really, by this late visit, she walked down the corridor carrying the candle, her steps keeping time with the flickering of the flame. It was eleven o’clock in the evening. Only a Russian could appear so late with no other reason than a desire to talk. Or a Frenchman, but then with an urgent, serious reason. At the last minute the idea occurred to her that it might be a prowler. She turned the key, calling out an automatic “Who’s there?” and opened the door. The candle blew out. There was nobody…. She went out onto the steps and even took several paces along beside the wall, as if to assuage a slight pang of anxiety. Nobody. The snowflakes were drifting sleepily in the gray air, giving off a spellbinding, ashen light. The earth was already half white. This, more than anything, was what lit up the night. Under snow, the meadow seemed more vast, and at each breath she took this emptiness entered her chest with a chill that was piquant and bitter. And remembered from a very long time ago.
Without abandoning her reverie, she slowly drank the tea that was scarcely warm now, and went into her bedroom. The scent of the bark burning in the stove was intoxicating. She went to draw back the curtains and fill the room with the blue reflection of the snow…. But she moved too abruptly. One of the rings, a heavy bronze ring, fell onto the carpet. The room seemed to be cut into two halves, one bathed in milky whiteness, the other darker than usual. She pulled up a chair. Then thought she must first find the curtain ring. Bent down. Realized that without a candle she could not see clearly enough in this dark half of the room…. Suddenly she felt herself overtaken by a pleasant lassitude that confused her in the sequence of her movements: seek, light, climb on chair, replace. No, first light the candle … or pick up the curtain ring…. Her strength failed her. A rapid drowsiness was already making her eyelids heavy, relaxing her body. The pearly brilliance of the snow bewitched her. She moved away from the window. The edge of the bed rose up behind her, made her knees give way. She sat down. Staying awake was now demanding an increasingly concentrated effort. She still believed it was the snow, the aroma of the burning bark, the intensity of her memories that had plunged her into this fog of tiredness. She lay down, undid the belt of her dressing gown. These actions were carried out more and more slowly, like the final few steps of a figurine on a music box. She teetered on the slippery brink of sleep in the absolute certainty that at all costs she must make these few waking moments last….
He came into the room when she was in the ultimate stage of consciousness. The stage when for the last time the drowning swimmer manages to return to the surface, to see the sun, the sky, his life, still so close …
He stopped at the silvery and black frontier that divided the room. Silvery like the snow outside the window, the bluish transparency on the door, the chair, the carpet. Black like the darkness that hovered around the bed. He took a step. Tricked by the snowy phosphorescence of the night, he put his foot on the hem of the curtain that had just slipped down. Another ring fell. Inaudible at first on the carpet, then suddenly beginning to roll on the bare floorboards with a deafening—paralyzing—clatter.
Several interminable seconds of nonlife went by. The boy frozen in the magnesium brilliance. The woman drawing all the darkness in the room around her body … The curtain ring, following its perfidious trajectory, embarked on a slow, clicking roll. Slowly the circles tightened around a center—around a silence that never seemed to come. In this instant of nonlife cadenced by the turning of the ring in ever decreasing circles, she had time to understand everything. Or rather to be blinded by a blazing connect-the-dots line: the move ment of the young stranger surprised at the beginning of the autumn; the reptile; the oil on the door hinges… And even that ruined bridge, the steel girder with a boy advancing along it like a sleepwalker. … A shout would have made him fall. As now, in crossing this room …
The curtain ring became still. After another endless minute she saw a long, thin shadow detaching itself against the background of the window whitened by snow. The outline of this apparition was lost in the blue twilight. The branches covered in hoarfrost parted as it passed. The crystals swirled slowly, sprinkling their bodies, melting on their skin. She was experiencing all this on the far side of sleep.
THE CURTAINS WERE CAREFULLY DRAWN, the rings rearranged on the curtain rod. It was the first thing she saw on waking and the last thing she was able to note with any kind of calm. “He must have thought the unhooked curtain was his fault and …”
She threw back the blanket, got up, observed her body beneath the open flaps of her dressing gown as if she had never seen it before. Then turned back toward the bed. The blanket! Someone had thrown it over her bare feet…. Someone? She caught herself still hoping for a mistake, a misunderstanding, the mysterious intervention of a “someone.” … The stove door was closed—although it had been left slightly open the night before…. The whole room was booby-trapped with eloquent objects, incriminating evidence of a presence that did not even have to be proved.
Behind the thick velvet of the curtains a sparkling day could be sensed. The folds of material, although dark, were bursting with warm light and were on the brink of yielding to its dazzling torrent from one minute to the next. Isolated in a dark, ominous silence, the bedroom was about to be flooded by the sun, gutted by sounds…. She went to the door and hesitated a long time with her hand on the handle. Beyond the door there could only be a blinding void, vibrant with a shrill, intolerable resonance.
She pushed at the handle. She was struck by the utter banality of the long corridor, its dreary look, the old coatrack, the familiar smell. At the far end the walls were lit up by the shafts of light streaming in from her son’s bedroom…. She walked toward it, vacantly, wide-eyed, with an unthinking faith—that everything would be resolved, by magic, wordlessly, as soon as their eyes met.
There was nobody in this bedroom, all radiant with sunlight. Nobody and yet he was there—in the crayon serving as a bookmark, in the shirt on the back of a chair…. As usual. As yesterday, as in two days’ time. The cheerful permanence of things terrified her. And when the tea began to brew in her cup, as it did every day, she walked rapidly out of the kitchen, seized her coat, and left the house.
For if she had simply continued with the petty ritual of habitual actions she would have been transformed into a monstrous being: the woman to whom that had happened. That was
yesterday evening, last night. She understood it but still managed to avoid naming it: that
Everything around her resonated. The rays of the sun, the glittering of the drops of melted snow trickling off the roof of the Caravanserai, the fragments of ice beneath her feet. And amid all this din a single thought ricocheted ceaselessly back and forth from one side of her brain to the other: to leave! At first this saving solution took her breath away by its simplicity. Yes, to leave! Bordeaux, Marseilles … She already saw herself settled in a train, running away from what had just happened to her. Then suddenly this absurd recollection: “Trains to run faster: Bordeaux … Marseilles….” So it was the paragraph glimpsed in a newspaper that had suggested destinations for her escape. Yet how could she go away? Leaving the child with whom? The child?
The drumming resumed in her temples even more forcefully. Yes, she must go away but go away forestalling yesterday evening, foiling it, before that could be given its definitive name. She had a presentiment of a place where the night she had just lived through would no longer appear like a horror and a monstrosity. A place or rather a time that was simultaneously now and yesterday but also a very distant day yet to come. A time where everything would be reconciled, mended, would find its justification. For a brief moment she believed she was breathing the airy serenity of this prefigured time.
Reality returned with ajolt: a passerby kept asking her a question.
“Are you going away?” this woman repeated, surprised at receiving no reply.
It was one of the readers from the library.
“Are you going to Paris?”
“No, why?”
Olga glanced around her. She had set off up one of the streets the occupants of the Caravanserai used to take when going to the station.
“Oh, I see. I thought …”
“No, no, I was just going for a walk …”
She turned into a different street and at once bumped into a whole group of Russians. Then an old couple who lived on the ground floor of the Caravanserai. A few steps farther on, a resident of the old people’s home. They all stopped, greeted her, studied her with particular interest, it seemed to her. She no longer knew how to avoid this cavalcade of smiling faces, softened by the glorious sunlight, by the festive brilliance of the snow. The next turning was a blind alley. The baker’s was closed. She felt as if she were an animal that could be tracked more easily on the whitened earth. And that their words only seemed to be harmless; their eyes were scrutinizing her. What did they guess? How far could their curiosity reach? Making her way past the whole procession, she finally arrived at its source—the Orthodox chapel. So it was a festival. And their words had indeed been harmless and their eyes had seen through nothing. Plunging into the darkness punctuated with lights, she felt a pleasant relaxation in her body. The chapel was deserted. All she could hear was the invisible presence of an old woman behind a pillar, sighing as she cleaned the floor covered in traces of melted snow and sand. Olga took refuge in the furthermost part and stopped before an icon. She had no prayer to formulate. Simply the desire to curl up in a remote corner away from the light, like an animal that has just been wounded and, not yet feeling pain, is preparing for it to come flooding in. Absently she touched the cracked surface of the icon, stared at the dull, expressionless face of the child, then that of the mother, her astonished eyes with heavy, oriental lids. Suddenly a grotesque detail made her step back a pace: the Virgin in the icon had three arms! Yes, two hands were holding the child and the third, parting the folds of the gown, was poised in a sign of the cross. It was the famous Russian Virgin with three arms….
She spent the afternoon strolling slowly amid the trees that grew behind the Caravanserai. As evening approached the snow stopped melting. The sun became embedded in the branches, turned red. Sounds were distilled in the air with the clarity of isolated notes of music. She was all alone—the only other footmarks on the white surface apart from her own were the arrowhead prints of birds and those of a child, a boy with red hair who was throwing stones onto the sheet of frozen water between the wood and the river. His family had left the Caravanserai the previous spring but with a kind of childish faithfulness the young redhead still returned to his old playground. The little stones he was throwing did not succeed in breaking the ice and sped across the pool from one end to the other with a melodious tinkling.
At times, in obedience to a sudden command, she stopped and tried to feel dread, terror, to shiver, to let herself be blinded by the monstrousness of what had happened. “It’s monstrous, monstrous, monstrous … How? Why? I must die! Run away. Howl, howl, howl!” But this febrile litany rang out inside her as if as a sop to her conscience, without shaking the dull numbness of her mind. She tried to shatter the torpor, to feign, for want of experiencing them, the emotions she should have felt. But there were no emotions! A nameless nothingness …
And alongside this void, an ample and airy silence that reigned all around; the roughness of the bark that her hand touched, leaning against a tree trunk. And the bitter, piquant chill of the snow; and the imperceptibly changing lights on its surface. The pale blue glitter of the snow-clad land; the orange disk of the low sun in the network of the branches. And a woman, herself, who was going to spend these last hours of the day wandering in the snow, stopping from time to time, as now, pressing a hand flat against the bark of a tree, removing one foot from its shoe, her fingers searching for little fragments of ice caught between the leather and the stocking. On the sheet of frozen water the red-haired boy continues with his game. He breaks off when he notices the presence of a stranger—an intruder, an adult. He waits for her to go away. The noisy sliding of the little stones resumes. For a second she believes she can see what the child sees with acute intensity. The dark bottom beneath the ice, with plants and leaves trapped in the crystal of the brown water. Then his gaze is lost for a long time in the branches set on fire by the sunset, and in the sky. A forgetfulness so profound that the stones he has gathered begin to slip from his fingers and fall into the snow one by one….
She held on to the memory of this gaze as she slowly returned home. And it was in a very calm voice that she called out to her son as she opened the door…. He was not there. He had come in for lunch, then gone out again. In his absence she sensed an excessive generosity on the part of fate that she must still be wary of. Her mind was aroused, anxious. And almost at once the shoes caught her eye. The ones she had bought him on the black market some months previously, after selling her wedding ring. Quite fine, elegant shoes, despite their worn leather. He dreamed (she knew he sometimes tried them on) of wearing them next spring.
Now this pair of shoes was transformed in her eyes into something indecent, ambiguous…. They were arranged near the wall in the position of a short, very lively and agile pace. The agility of a young male who senses that his presence is both alarming and exciting. Olga bent down, struggling against the repugnance that made her fingers shake, and picked up one of them. Then thrust her hand inside it. The reflex action of many years, feeling to check if there was a nail with a point that might cause bleeding …
She did not have time to finish her examination. The shoe escaped from her hands and fell. And at the same moment a cry choked in her throat: “He was inside me!”
And other cries, stifled by the murmuring of the blood in her temples, echoed back: “He was inside my body …” Now she understood why that had remained nameless. For to name it she would not have to speak of emotions but to utter those rough, ugly, uncouth words that came pouring in a glutinous flow into her throat: “He violated me. He had me when he wanted to. He undressed me, took me, dressed me again …”
The horror of these words was such that, panic-stricken, she tried to step back into that afternoon of silence and snow spent under the trees. She half opened the front door. A clear blue dusk was already coloring the meadow that sloped down to the river…. No, that afternoon of peace had never existed!
An illusion, a trompe I’oeil
of happiness. Now she saw that in reality it had not been a dreamy stroll but a breathless, stumbling race. A mad round amid the dark tree trunks. She had run in circles, trying to escape. Then she had stopped to remove the snow from her shoes and had thought of the peace that death brings. A woman quite other than herself had been born: one who could spend a long time—an eternity—contemplating the low sun entangled in the branches; the slithering of stones cast onto the crystal of frozen water; the eyes of a child lost in the sky….
Yes, it was in thrall to death that she had been able to glimpse the unspeakable happiness of that late afternoon in winter.
As it fell, the black shoe had positioned itself very nimbly beside the other, this time imitating a very small, mincing step. Olga told herself that of all the solutions that had arisen in her shattered mind since that morning—to run away, to explain herself, to say nothing— death was the most tempting, the easiest to accept, and the least real. For every day she must continue carrying out a myriad preventive actions similar to the search for nails lurking inside shoes.
She picked up the one that had fallen to finish examining it…. At that moment someone knocked on the door.
Without panic, her heart silent, still, she went to open it, already seeing her sons eyes. She walked along the corridor with a very regular, tense step, as if she were mounting the scaffold.
The appearance on the threshold of the boy with red hair, the little thrower of stones, seemed like a hallucination that must be accepted calmly. From the child’s exaggeratedly serious expression it was abundantly clear that he had been sent as a messenger and that he was conscious of the gravity of his mission. He said what he had been asked to say in that mix of Russian phrases and French words common among children born at the Caravanserai. There was a mix-up too, between the seriousness of the circumstance and the nervous smile that stretched his lips. Too overcome, he confused the logical sequence: “Near the bridge … Hospital… Hurt himself… They’re asking for you to come
The Crime of Olga Arbyelina Page 13