The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  And for a few days each of these caprices, like a drug, offered an intoxicating sense of liberation; but stronger and stronger doses were soon needed, more and more bizarre combinations. They all of them aspired to the ultimate caprice, the one that would have liberated them from the last trappings of this world. She herself had had this feeling one evening in St. Petersburg, returning from a party with a man who pretended to believe what she was telling him in extravagant and funereal tones. She said she was only willing to give herself to a man who would agree to kill her afterward. Or was it before? Obsessed with her playacting she herself forgot the original version. This man, the painter who had just invented “Stripeism,” was confident that this seventeen-year-old girl would soon be his umpteenth mistress. And he had no intention of killing her, either afterward or (especially not) before. But he was playacting and hardly noticing that he was playacting. As for her, by dint of thinking and talking about “the curse that had blighted her blood,” she had ended up believing that it was to her future lover that she would pass it on and not to her child….

  * * *

  After a moment Olga sensed that Li was listening to her with slight apprehension—the fear of someone who already foresees a confession that may well catch them off guard, invest the friend’s familiar face with unknown, disturbing features. And even undermine an old friendship. At intervals she began adding her own comments to the story with a vigor and a passion that each time struck a wrong note. She waxed indignant about the torture that used to be inflicted on pupils straightened out with the plank; mocked the couple surprised in an armchair…. And when Olga talked about the depraved life in the capital of her youth, Li had begun to murmur, as if apologizing/Oh, but you see, I never really saw much of that life. In the trenches what we saw mostly was death….”

  From the kitchen came the whistle of the kettle. Their tentative conversation broke off. Left alone for a few minutes, Olga felt relieved. She had lost hope of any miracle of understanding…. And yet she seemed to sense that Li, also alone for a moment, was timidly preparing the way for an unutterable confession of her own. And when she came in carrying two cups and an old teapot with a chipped spout on a tray, when she set about arranging the tray and pouring the tea with an exaggeratedly concerned air, and fussing unnecessarily about each little detail (“Wait, I’ll get you another spoon …”), Olga understood that behind these words a serious statement, hard to articulate, was already forming.

  “You know what I was saying just now about the trenches and soldiers,” said Li, while her hands continued to hover around the tray. “Well, I lived among them for three years. So I know what I’m talking about. They were mostly young. And I noticed that some of them—but they were very rare—died without believing in death. And at the moment when they died we didn’t believe in it either, at least not right away.

  Her voice faded and, almost in a whisper, turning her eyes away, she breathed, “But for you, it’s not the same. There’s a child. Your child…. I’m sorry, I’m being stupid …”

  And not knowing how to break the spell of silence brought on by her words, she disappeared into the next room and returned with a bundle of newspapers in her arms.

  “You’ll say that I’m not being objective,” she announced in an almost cheerful tone, wanting to make a fresh start after the previous sentence. “But, you see, in the field of science and … medicine” (her voice slid once more toward a fear of being hurtful) “the Russians, well, the Soviets, are very advanced. Listen to what I read yesterday, and it wasn’t in Pravda but in Le Figaro: ‘A Russian scientist, Professor A. A. Isotor, has made the sensational discovery that the radius of the earth measures eight hundred meters more than was previously believed and that the earth itself is apparently not spherical but elliptical….’ I just thought that perhaps with your son, you could …, well, take him there, if only for an examination …, for a week or two …”

  Olga could not help smiling. And to avoid passing over this suggestion yet again in silence she asked, “So when do you think you’ll be leaving?”

  “I think everything will be ready by the end of April. The last snows will have melted in Russia and I’ll be able to go there by road….”

  “The last snows… in Russia …” These words sank into Olga’s memory and resurfaced occasionally during the return journey. Each time the echo of them brought with it a brief moment of daydreaming. Then the hardness of dry and final words shattered its snowy aura. Final was the certainty of never being able to tell even her closest friend what had happened to her. The very worst thing that Li could imagine was the deterioration of the child’s illness. But that! No, for a person with a healthy mind it was inconceivable…. As it was for all these passengers sitting around her in the train. She felt a transparent wall rising up between her and them, a glass dome transforming her, with her desperate desire to confide, into a fish in an aquarium. For an instant it seemed to her that even if she had uttered a long wail of misery none of her neighbors would have turned their heads.

  “The last snows … in Russia.” She tried to hold on to the sound of the words in her mind, to make it last. And to say (to Li, or to someone else) what was out of bounds to words. “You see, I talked to you about my youth to justify myself. Everything was disintegrating, going off the rails, and our lives were a reflection of those sick early years of the century. We strove to resemble them. And so instead of living we played at leading unnatural, capricious lives. We were under the impression that alongside us, the normal life that we despised, because it was too rectilinear, continued in parallel and that we could always come back to it when we had had enough of our games. But one day I saw that my two lives had grown too far apart and that I must now follow to the end the one I had chosen for fun, in the defiance of youth. And I have lived this ill-chosen life, with my eyes fixed on the other one. And what is happening to me today— you’ve guessed, haven’t you, without my explaining it to you, you’ve guessed everything and you haven’t turned away from me—Yes, everything in the life I am leading now that is monstrous, criminal, odious, is in the very nature of this unnatural life … Tell me very simply what I must do. Tell me my face gives nothing away, nor the expression in my eyes, nor my voice. Do you think one day I may be able to look at those trees, those rails, that sky the way I did before?”

  It was dark when she reached Villiers-la-Forêt. As she was removing her shoes in the hall she noticed that the pair of men’s shoes had moved. “He must have tried them on again, looking forward to wearing them in the spring …” She pictured this very young man, slim, with dark hair, a pair of well polished shoes on his feet, preening himself in front of the mirror in her absence….

  “All this is what madness must look like,” she told herself, and went into her bedroom.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, one December evening, everything was repeated with infallible, fanatical precision: the hint of white powder on the surface of the infusion; the slightly mechanical stiffness of her hand as it poured away the liquid and washed the little copper saucepan. And in her bedroom, the familiar clock face reflected in the mirror, telling the time backward….

  A slight tremor almost betrayed her. The response of her flesh— neck, shoulder, breast—to the burning touch of the icy fingers lightly stroking it had been too violent. She felt no connection with this female body. And in the purple void beyond her eyelids there stretched an unknown body. A body with the scent of hoarfrost brought in among the folds of a man’s long overcoat…. Her brief tremor and a repressed “Oh!” had risked revealing that she was not asleep. The fingers paused in their caress, then came to life again. She became yet more absent. Under the touch of the fingers that were slowly growing warmer, she discovered the delicacy of her collarbone and the dense weight of her breast as it held the caress. She lay on one side, her face half buried in the pillow. An ideal pose, she thought, for her pretense of sleeping, and one that allowed her not to be a part of what was happening to this woman’s body as it was c
aressed. But suddenly the fingers pressed more firmly on her shoulder, then her hip, as if to turn her over. She felt feverishly present in this body once more; imprisoned in it. And, once placed on her back, she was too exposed, could no longer lie….

  The fingers squeezing her shoulder relaxed their grip. A dry creak could be heard at the other end of the room. Without opening her eyes she recognized the sound. A burning log, as it collapsed, had pushed against the door of the stove. Between her eyelashes she made out the image in the mirror. A naked youth, crouching beside the stove, was gathering up small sticks, burnt out or still glowing, and tossing them into the embers …

  In the morning when he came into the kitchen she noticed a discreet dressing on one of his fingers. “Have you cut your hand?” she asked him without thinking, as she would have done in the old days.

  “No,” he replied simply. “No …”

  It took her some time to realize that after that morning their paths were crossing less and less often.

  Several nights followed, calm nights, spent with her eyes open, only rarely punctuated with brief oblivious intervals of sleep. Her days, on the other hand, flew past in a state of distraught weariness, which was intruded on by the faces of the residents of the Caravanserai and the readers at the library. Eyes unbearable in their insistence; lips coming too close; words articulated with a slow, wet sucking sound that distracted her attention and left their meaning unclear. She would reel back and turn aside; then start talking to cover up her awkwardness. Her own voice deafened her, as if it were resonating somewhere behind her. And an obsessive thought, like a frayed thread being vainly thrust into the eye of a needle, revolved in her drowsy mind: “What if I made no more infusions in the evening? He would understand everything…. No, I must continue but drink them in my room. No, I can’t. He’ll guess….”

  The following evening she took the little saucepan into her bedroom. And a few minutes later, glancing through a half-open door, glimpsed a shadow flitting down the corridor and slipping into the kitchen. Or perhaps she just thought she glimpsed it? She was no longer entirely sure of what she saw The next morning she did not find the little vessel on her bedside table. “So I didn’t bring it,” she noted, dulled by sleep; but then suddenly realized that the business with the cup went back to the night before, or even the night before that. In her memory the days overlapped, then disintegrated, revealing a glimpse of an opaque matter, without hours, without sounds.

  And when one evening she again saw the fine white dust on the surface of the infusion, this did not seem like a repetition but rather the continuation of the action interrupted several days earlier, the night when the sparks from the firewood had burst out of the stove. And so, the icy fingers continued their pressure on her shoulder, on her hip. Her body tipped slowly onto her back…. And her tiredness, her exhaustion were such that she did not have to feign sleep. For the moment she felt dead. In place of the confused thoughts, the feverish words that for weeks had echoed in her mind day and night, a heavy, regular sound took her over entirely—like the sound of the wind in the tall treetops in a forest in winter….

  All at once this deathly calm was broken. Despite her closed eyes she saw, saw the room, the bed, their two bodies. Her fleeting death was at an end. A movement, a slight stiffening, she did not quite know what, must have betrayed her. She heard the rustling of footsteps, had time to glimpse a candle flame, a long flame spread out horizontally, sucked in by the darkness of the corridor.

  It was this candle that allowed her to keep madness at bay. She would spend the morning explaining to herself in a quite measured way that on account of the power cuts everyone was reduced to using candles and that one must be wary of fires, especially in families with young children and that… She was afraid of deviating for a moment from the protective logic of these trivialities.

  Over several days she would carry on her body the sensation of a supple and timid weight.

  And then there would be a night when, without having drunk the infusion dusted with white crystals, she would fall asleep, no longer able to withstand the mountain of lost sleep weighing down her eye lids. She would fall asleep at the very moment when a candle flame appeared in the slow gliding of the door. And would wake a moment later, alone, in the dark. With a sick person’s alertness she would smell the odor of the wick and the breath of cold, of ice, of night, that the long overcoat carried in its folds. And she would guess that the gaze that had just been resting on her had sensed the torment of her sleeping body and that his nocturnal visit had only lasted for a moment of brief, silent compassion.

  THE DAY AFTER THAT NIGHT she surprised herself in front of the mirror—a face tugged this way and that by grimaces and on her lips a long breathless whisper: “Tarantella, tarantella, tarantula, ta-ra, ta-ra, tarantas….” There was no possibility of stopping, for immediately other words, perfectly reasonable phrases, with all the infallible logic that often characterizes the arguments of the insane, began to hiss within her. Yes, the very same phrases whose good sense had seemed to be her salvation several days earlier. Now their intonation, obtuse and imperturbable, terrified her.

  “He came bringing a candle. It’s dangerous. What’s dangerous? That he came … That coat. He puts it on so he can quickly cover his naked body if I wake suddenly. If I woke up he could say that the French door was open and he came to close it. No doubt he’s already thought of all the possible answers…. He has only touched my body, a woman’s body that intrigues him. Yes, that’s how it must be said. He has caressed a woman’s body. If I could become that nameless woman. Better still faceless. An accident? A face covered in bandages, invisible. And the body asleep, not responsible … When all is said and done what has happened so far is harmless. … I live in hope that it will remain harmless. So I accept it; I’m becoming used to it; I have nothing against what happens next, on condition that it does not go beyond a certain limit. What limit?”

  She began reciting her “tarantula—tarantella,” again, even more feverishly, her eyes half closed, her head animated by little quivers. At all costs she must not let the thought that was forming be born….

  In response to this incoherent prayer there was a sudden knocking at the front door. No, in truth, the knocking had been audible for some time now and it was the noise of it that had sparked off the ‘tarant ella-tarantula.’ ‘For, hearing someone knocking, she had to stifle the inadmissible thought: “What if it were someone who … ta-ra, ta-ra … someone coming to … tarantella, tarantella … coming to say that… shut up … tarantella … tarantula … the child … shut up … tara, tara … that the child has … shut up … the face under the bandages … ta-ra, ta-ra … my face, mine, mine, mine … tarantella-ta-ra-ta … Certainly not he … and if it is he … months in hospital… no … no … You’re hoping for an accident… Shut up … ta-ra, ta-ra

  She opened the door. In the telegram the postman held out to her she read that someone was informing her of their return to Paris. Left alone, she did not immediately succeed in matching to this someone the initials “L.M.” and told herself with stupefaction that to other people these letters signified “her friend” or “her lover.”… She knew that after a long absence L.M. would send telegrams—a way of skipping a few stages in a reunion, limiting the period of reproaches, excuses, coldness, and forgiveness eventually granted. “Mountains of work. Will be in Paris Saturday,” he wrote this time. Behind these words she heard a tone of voice that sought to forestall all objections.

  “How strange it is,” she thought. “So that’s still going on. In their lives. Down there …”

  She understood that from now on “down there” started outside her own front door.

  She knew what was going to happen. He would leave the car beneath the row of plane trees near the station, make his way down into the lower town, taking little deserted streets, and would cheerfully proclaim to her that not a single resident of the Caravanserai had seen him. In the hall, after kissing her, he would run his
fingers over the top of the chest of drawers, over that corner sawed off so many years ago. And he would inquire after the health of her son with a very labored air of involvement. They would go off to Paris. While driving he would talk a lot, but would fail to hide his slight lack of self-assurance, his nervousness—the awkward uncertainty of a man confronting the woman who has to accept the scraps of life that he grants her…. He would talk more copiously still during part of the night, reassured by her affection, by the absence of reproaches, by the constancy of this woman’s body which, after a long separation, would be faultlessly adept at resurrecting the delicate erotic memory of the slightest words and caresses…. In the morning she would be the first to leave the hotel, citing one of her usual pretexts (a visit to a friend, shopping …), and he, while offering to take her back to Villiers-la-Forêt, would not manage to suppress a note of grateful relief in his voice….

  She took a wry pleasure in anticipating how the little scenarios of their reunion would unfold. He came in, kissed her, touched the corner of the chest of drawers, then, lowering his voice, promised to send her the address of “an excellent practitioner, almost a friend, though sadly I’ve rather lost touch with him.” In the car he talked about the camps he had visited in Germany; about the ice on the road that made driving difficult; about their compatriots returning to Russia; about the price of meat. He sensed that he was talking too much, resented the woman’s silence, became irritated and allowed a brittle tone to enter his words, that seemed to be saying, “There’s no point in sulking. I can’t offer you any other way of life. Take it or leave it.”