The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  From very far away, a few seconds after the first chimes, came a response: the same twelve strokes, now stilled, now heightened by the wind. She quickly closed her eyes again. He got up so swiftly that he gave the impression of flying as he crossed the room, snatched up the coat and the candle, and pulled open the door….

  His sleep had lasted for as long as the interval between midnight striking and its echo on a New Year’s Eve that existed only in the old calendar.

  ON THE DAY AFTER that phantom New Year’s Eve the morning began for her well before daybreak, still in the confused sleepiness of the night, with its long smoky flame flickering on the stub of a melted candle. Padding about, she came and went in the bedroom, opened boxes filled with letters and old papers, sifted through them, and threw most of them into a plywood chest beside the stove where everything accumulated that could be used to stoke the fire. The empty space that was gradually cleared on top of the closet, hitherto piled high with these cardboard boxes, afforded her a vague but real delight. The feeling you have before an impending journey or moving house …

  She heard her son opening the front door and walking down the wooden steps—some slivers of ice between the planks creaked under his feet. Hidden by the curtain, she watched him all along the footpath as he followed it. Who was he?

  A youth clad in an overcoat too broad and still too long for him. Was he her son who would greet the occupants of the Caravanserai he encountered, as well as some French people he knew in the upper town, receiving their greetings in the most natural way in the world? Or was he that unrecognizable young being in a fleeting moment of sleep spent beside a woman’s body at night in this room, as it flickered and swayed in the light of a candle placed on the ground?

  When her eyes had got used to the rhythm of this figure’s tread as he walked beside the wall, she noticed that at each step his foot, his heel seemed to be stamping on the frozen footpath in anger. She just managed to suppress the thought that was already spreading like acid: “He’s limping …” The words cut off. Now she remembered that in the night, when observing this fragile body stretched out beside her own, she had noticed a blue and yellow mark around the knee, the trace of the last hematoma…. As a gust of wind blew open the panels of his coat his silhouette broadened and disappeared around the corner of the building. Again she imagined all the faces the boys eyes would encounter on the road and in the town. They bore a strange resemblance to the outraged and disdainful ones that she pictured one day condemning the life they led as this odd couple. It was then that she murmured harshly, while intending something other than these half-irrational words, “To hell with them all, with their chimes and their bakeries! They’ll never understand …”

  The next day the postman did not deliver the newspapers subscribed to by the library at the Caravanserai. Some of the rare readers, who were still braving the cold and the snow-covered paths, spoke of a journalists’ strike, or a printers’ strike, nobody knew exactly what. The postman repeated his explanation three or four more times and in the end they stopped noticing the absence of news…. The train that went to Paris every morning suffered several delays as a result of snowfalls and one fine day (it was said that ice had warped the joints on the track) it stayed immobilized all day. Henceforth the capital and the outside world seemed improbable places. Power cuts plunged even the upper town into darkness from six o’clock in the evening. As for the fortress, the old brewery, the people of Villiers took to wondering if it was still inhabited.

  The library often remained deserted. Nor was anyone ever seen in the courtyard that was strewn with the humps of snowdrifts. Entrenched in their homes, the occupants spent these brief twilit days on the alert for the slightest sounds in the corridors, and trying to interpret them, picturing one another shivering as they kept watch under a blanket or with a shoulder pressed against the stone of a meagerly heated stove. And if they did appear in the library it was only to leave again almost at once, without even telling their usual stories, simply embellishing this information, culled from a newspaper a week old: “The coldest winter for eighty years… For a hundred years… For a hundred and twenty years….”

  During these lifeless days her thoughts often returned to that boy clad in a heavy man’s overcoat, stamping with his foot on the frozen earth as he walked, as if in a gesture of childish anger. “He had no childhood,” she said to herself. None of the simple joys the world owes a child. A garden around the family house, visits to grandparents… And more besides… None of all that. Pain. Anxious anticipation of further pain. An uneasy respite that would only last long enough to allow hope to be born and disappear.

  One day she tried to rescue what could still be recovered from that void, insignificant scraps; a smile here, a moment of relief there. There was so little. Almost nothing. This memory perhaps: a cold, sunny day, a recollection from one of those winters lost in the first years of the impoverished childhood that she had not noticed passing … He is five or six and is seeing snow for the first time in his life. He runs toward her, making the dead leaves strewn with crystals crackle under his feet, and he shows her a fragment of ice with several blades of grass and a tiny flower head imprisoned in its moist transparency. She is on the brink of going into raptures, or embarking on scientific explanations. But some intuition holds back her words. They remain side by side, silent, watching the slow melting of the beauty and the release of the stalks, which, once outside the ice, become limp, and lose their magic.

  She was lost so deeply in this moment of time past that it took her an instant for her eyes to focus on the winter dusk and the footpath running beside the wall of the Caravanserai. She was on her way back from the library. In one place she was obliged to press firmly against the wall, almost to flatten herself against its rough surface, in order to scramble over a big pile of snow. She accomplished this sequence of intricate maneuvers slowly and mechanically, already feeling she was somewhere else…. In a long summer’s evening several years before. The light of a hot, hazy sunset. The walls of the Caravanserai are warm and, as they were every summer, garlanded with hops. She is sitting on her wooden front steps, motionless, daydreaming, watching the footsteps of the child, this seven-year-old boy as he walks along the riverbank, stoops, rummages in the sand. Then comes over to her, radiant. “Look at this shape!” It is a fragment of limestone containing the broad, hollow spiral, studded with iridescent spangles, of an ammonite. The hollow is reminiscent of something and the similarity is disturbing. “It looks like a plaster cast for my knee,” murmurs the child. She catches his eye, feels at a loss, and feigns gaiety: “Yes, but you know, your plaster cast…” The child interrupts her. Pressing his ear to the imprint of the shell, he is listening: “You can hear the sound of the sea…. it’s a sea that’s not there anymore….” He holds out his treasure to her. She puts it to her ear, listens. What can be heard is the still of the evening, the cry of a bird, the carefully held in breathing of the child….

  This blossoming of moments from long ago lasted until nightfall. Almost unaware she pushed open the door, took off her coat, went to light the range and make the tea…. But alongside this activity these fragments of the past were unfolding, always quite humble and, it could have been said, useless, allowing her to dwell in their luminous time. She went up to the table, picked up her cup, the teapot. … (A spring day, still in Paris in that dark apartment where the only ray of sunlight that ever comes in is at the end of the afternoon, reflected from the windows of the house across the street. The apartment where there is already a feeling of an imminent departure. The wan sunlight sidles onto the table and irradiates a bouquet of wild cherry blossom. Pausing on the threshold, she comes upon the child, his face buried in the white clusters, whispering in imitation of several voices, first pleading in tone, then passionate. She takes a step backward and the creak of a floorboard gives her away. The child raises his head. For a long time they look at each other in silence….) She came to herself in the middle of the kitchen, unable to
think what to do with the cup and the teapot she was still holding, as if they were objects whose use was unknown….

  Later in the evening she realized she had made an annoying omission, put her coat on again, went out onto the front steps, and cut notches all over the thick layer of ice on them with the help of an old ax. Then she walked back up the little footpath that ran beside the wall and slashed the slippery slope on the incline at the most dangerous spot….

  Before she went to sleep there were several more luminous lapses into the past. And once, as she emerged and saw again in a flash all these images that her memory had secretly retained, she had this thought, which was so obvious it dazzled her: “So, I’ve forgotten nothing, I haven’t missed anything at all…” Sleep was already numbing her mind. All she could grasp was that, without knowing it, she had preserved what was essential in this childhood, the part that was silent, true, unique.

  … Next morning she would remember that the previous evening, lost in her reverie, she had drunk the infusion without examining its surface. She would guess that he had entered her room and come upon her, relaxed in unfeigned sleep.

  IT WAS ON THAT MORNING, a winter morning, violet with cold, that for her time lost its rhythm of hours, days, and weeks.

  She saw the young figure in the long overcoat passing beneath the window, pictured the slippery, frozen footpath he must follow, ran outside and cupped her hands to her mouth. Too late. He was already climbing the little steep, icy section—with that slightly brutal agility adolescents have, as their growing strength affirms itself. Having conquered it, he quickened his pace and turned the corner around the Caravanserai….

  The limpid silence that reigned all about gradually seeped into her. The branch beside the steps was quivering where the boy had brushed against it and shedding a light veil of hoarfrost crystals that made rainbows in the air. Her mind was empty, but with her whole being she felt that she could have stood there on the steps forever, looking out at the snow-covered meadow sloping down toward the river; at this slow powder of crystals falling from a branch stirred by already imperceptible vibrations. Yes, stood there in the sundrenched sleepiness of a morning that belonged to no year, to no era, to no country That did not even belong to her life but to quite another life, in which contemplating glittering snowflakes in silence, in the absence of all thought, was becoming essential…

  She looked at other branches, higher up, reaching toward the pale blue of the sky, then at those of the woodland beyond the walls of the Caravanserai. The sun, still low, softened their black, angular lines with a purple-tinged glow. It seemed to her that she had never felt so mysteriously close to these trees, their bark, their bare branches. Nor so intensely exposed beneath the sky, so intensely herself, facing this immense, patient expectation …

  The glittering specks of the hoarfrost still meandered in the icy air. The calm seemed infinite. And yet within this silent radiance it was as if you could hear a faint, continuous tinkling—sounds beyond hearing echoed one another with faultless purity and precision. The air faintly pink; the dark tracery of the branches; the dancing of the crystals; the fortress of the Caravanserai still in the blue shadow of the night; the sunlight lightly touching the snow among the trees… This ethereal equilibrium of lights and silences was alive, guarded its own transparency, was not going anywhere. Motionless on the little wooden steps, she was a part of it and felt herself to be strangely necessary to all that surrounded her….

  The figure that appeared at the other end of the footpath was that of the postman. He brought a telegram signed “L.M.,” offering a choice of two dates for their next meeting. She went indoors and read the few impersonal words a second time. The dates seemed to her as fantastic as the months of the French revolutionary calendar— all those “nivôses” and “pluviôses” very evocative, but from a completely different era. Paris, a gray morning; a man scraping the soles of his shoes on the edge of the sidewalk before getting into his car… “So all of that is still going on somewhere,” she told herself, feeling as if she were recalling a life she had abandoned ten years before. The man was still walking about in that busy, humid Paris that smelled of the smoky warmth of cafés, the sweatiness of the Metro. He went to his editorial offices, argued, gesticulated, talked on the telephone, and every evening made his typewriter vibrate with the dry and nervous drumming of his fingers. Then he looked in his calendar and chose these two dates that were still free and sent a telegram….

  When she went out again a few minutes later to go to the Caravanserai, the luminosity of the air, the shadows, the branches, the sky, the smell of the cold had imperceptibly reshaped the equilibrium that had linked them a moment ago. She felt this change very intimately. As if she were taking part in the transition from one tonality to another, physically, within her own body.

  In the immobility of that winter weather there was one day when, precisely because of these tonalities, she sensed that her son would come to her….

  That night the wind howled noisily in the chimney, making the fire blaze in the stove. Sometimes the flames died back, cowed; sometimes they swelled and thrust fine blue tongues out through the chink of the cast iron door. Then suddenly the absence of noise would be deafening, as if the house, snatched up by a squall, were already floating through the night, far from the earth in a soundless, black transparency. The flickering of the candle grew still, and fixed the shadows on the walls of the bedroom. The fire was silent. The scent of burning wood gave contours to the darkness that were invisible but could be perceived if you closed your eyes and inhaled deeply.

  Thus it was, her eyes half closed, her breathing intoxicated, that she abandoned herself to this fresh moment of silence. … A minute earlier, seeing the sections of a thick branch stacked beside the stove, she had said to herself that this meager firewood would be just enough to give her the illusion, at the start of the night, of going to sleep in a house that was inhabited. She had shivered, picturing herself waking up, well before dawn, in a room smelling of dead, icy smoke…. But now even this branch and the fragments of mossy bark scattered on the floor gave off an indefinable happiness. There was, she felt, an unknown joy in the roughness of this bark, in the scented acidity of the smoke, in the thunderous rage of the wind, and in this silence as perfect as the shape of the motionless candle flame…. She crouched down, put a part of the branch in the fire, and arranged the rest of the wood carefully beside the stove. A scrap of bark could have cracked beneath the foot of someone walking in the dark….

  She knew he would come that night. Everything proclaimed it.

  In the kitchen she saw a slight trace of white on the brown surface of the infusion, emptied it into the sink, and went out. Coming back into her bedroom she hesitated for a second, then thrust another scrap of the branch into the depths of the stove.

  It was his going, always abrupt, as if running away, that broke the night. The moment was shattered. Taking fright, the body vanished beneath the flaps of the overcoat; the feet, in a ballet of lightning movements, avoided the floorboards booby-trapped with creaks…. He stopped on the threshold of the room, returned toward the stove with the same tightrope walkers nimbleness, seized the last piece of the branch, almost threw it into the embers, then decided not to, put the wood down, glanced at the bed, crossed the room, and vanished behind the door as it cautiously slid to.

  She waited for a long while without any notion of hours or minutes. Then got up, put the rest of the wood in among the barely flickering flames, and got back into bed. Her reverie, that veered between vigil and dream, lasted through the revival, then the dying of the fire. The whole night was condensed into the unique sensation that hasty visit had left her with; the chilled young body, with warmth flooding into it, first the fingers, a little later the lips, the arm that lay for a moment across her shoulder, her breast…. The memory of it, still fresh, could be inhaled, like the scent of the fire, like the gusts of icy air that spilled into the room with each squall.

  She had
to get up again in the dark. The cold was becoming unbearable. It was as if it were lurking in her clothes; they felt stiff and seemed shrunken. The rough sides of the stove no longer retained a spark of life…. Outside the wind had died down, or rather it had risen far above the earth and was driving the clouds along at an unusual height in a rapid, spellbinding flight. From time to time their billowing was swollen with a milky pallor, the moon appeared, then a star, both immediately hidden again. In this shifting gloom she crossed the meadow, a creaking carapace of hardened snow. She found nothing. Everything that could be burned had long since been gathered up by the inhabitants of the Caravanserai…. She went toward the wood and after a long, vain trawl, wrenched a twisted branch out of the snow—derisory when she pictured the flames that would only last a few minutes on these little sticks. She straightened up, her head buzzing, her eyes confused with the effort. The vision forming in her eyes was wholly inward: a house tacked on to the wall of a somber, half inhabited building, a winter night, infinite isolation; and in the very depths of this solitude, a room, the silent life of a fire. And this couple, a woman sunk in a sleep more unshakable than a lethargy and a youth with slow movements and a dazzled look, himself surprised by the magic of his crime … A mother and her son.

  “So I’m mad,” she said to herself with calm resignation, studying the pieces of the branch she had just broken up. Her gaze strayed between the dark trunks around her, into the thickets burdened with snow, and then soared up toward the tops of the trees. She saw that over its whole nocturnal expanse the sky had cleared. The last clouds, in a wispy procession, seemed to be streaming vertically away from the earth, as if attracted by the moon, and disappearing into its faintly iridescent halo.

  It was then, with her gaze focused on that ascending flight, that she pictured the whole earth, the globe, the world peopled by men. Yes, all those men talking, smiling, weeping, embracing one another, praying to their gods, killing millions of their fellows, and, just as if nothing had happened, continuing to love one another, pray, and hope, before crossing through the fine layer of earth that separated all that ferment from the immobility of the dead.