The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  There was nothing new to her either in what she was hearing or in the trains of thought unfolding in her mind. She could not stop herself following through these prognoses to the limit; first picturing the worst case, then the cure; the two extremes, despair and a miracle. All parents of sick children, she already knew, came to terms with their distress in this way.

  The lamp on the desk flickered. In a brief moment of darkness she saw the pale ghost, her son, still half undressed, tugging at the inside-out sleeve of his shirt. And outside the window waves of drifting snow clung to the panes…. The light returned, the doctor finished writing and, in his voice that always sounded as if he were irritated by incomprehension, reached his conclusion: they would have to think of an operation. “This summer, so as not to make him miss his academic year,” he added in a less dry tone, turning toward the boy…. The lamp went out again, they spent several moments in silence, gradually growing accustomed to the soporific blue of the night-light above the door. In the corridor cries could be heard and the drumming of footsteps.

  This wait in the darkness was salutary. All morning Paris had assaulted them with too many words, too many objects, too much gesticulation. And even in this office she had suffered from the same excess: sheets of paper, files; pens, the paper knife; the doctors voice that had to be decoded; his apparently indifferent glances, in which, nevertheless, she saw herself perceived as a woman obliged to please…. The minutes they spent in the half light eradicated the brutal superabundance of sensations. They could hear flurries of snow being hurled against the windowpanes, and somewhere in the depths of the city the muffled hoot of a siren…. The doctor grumbled and struck a match. The light of an oil lamp shone. They said good-bye but he chose to accompany them to the exit; that wait in the darkness had brought them closer together…. As he walked beside her in the ill-lit corridor, he felt obliged to speak and uttered a sentence that was clearly meaningless but which crucified her. It was one of those very French turns of phrase that mislead foreigners with their disconcerting thoughtlessness. “At this stage in the game, you know,” he sighed, “its best to take each day as it comes.” There was a note of melancholy, almost of tenderness in his voice. He abandoned the caution reflected in his customary tone, dry and feigning irritation. “In which case,” he added, in an already neutral voice, as he opened the door for them, “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” He must have sensed himself that his remark was double-edged.

  The whole of Paris was plunged in darkness. Only the car headlights cut through the whirling clouds of snow. They crossed the Seine on a ghostly bridge, whose gigantic steel curves seemed to sway in time with the surging of the snow squalls. In one street, hemmed in between blind houses, a small gathering was gesticulating around a woman who lay on the trodden snow. A little farther on, a bus was unable to get started, the acid air flayed the nostrils and blocked the throat; then a fresh gust of wind swept them clean. It was at this point, trying to escape the asphyxiating cacophony of the cars, that she mistook the road. Instead of emerging onto the avenue that would have led them straight to Li’s house, they came upon a monotonous, endless wall. Should they go right? Left? What she wanted most of all was to turn her back on the squalls. From the other side of the enclosure repulsive, sickly sweet effluvia wafted over; in calmer weather, no doubt, these stagnated within the walls of the abattoir…. They walked along, often slipping, catching hold of each other’s arms. She raised her brow into the snow, as if to drive out the sentence that was absurdly matching the rhythm of her footsteps: “At-this-stage-in-the-game-at-this-stage-in-the-game….”

  Suddenly in the darkness lashed with squalls a cry arose quite inhuman in its power, a bellow torn from the entrails of an animal, a maddened and tragic call. She shivered, quickened her step, stumbled. He grasped her elbow, supported her as she almost fell. Their faces came so close that she could see the slight trembling of his lips and heard his voice despite the wind’s fury: “Don’t be afraid …”

  She gazed into his eyes and asked, in total unawareness, simply echoing his voice, “Afraid of what…?”

  “Of anything,” he replied and they continued walking.

  Li went off to sleep in her studio, leaving them in the tiny sitting room crammed not only with furniture but also, a recent addition, cardboard boxes and cases, in preparation for her departure.

  They were alone: she, bedded down on the little sofa, whose curve she had to mold herself to in order to sleep; he on the armchairs pushed together, squeezed between the piano and the table…. They could not sleep and both sensed this, sensed the discreet wakefulness of the other in the darkness…. Finally she recognized breathing that was no longer careful of the other’s presence, the inimitable syncopated, touching music of a sleepers respiration. She turned over onto her back, prepared for long sleepless hours, happy, even, with the strangeness of this place, where conjuring up the impressions that had assailed her could pass for an insomniacs game…. By reaching out her arm she could have touched the armchairs in which her son was asleep. This dark apartment in a great dark, deserted city; the two of them, so near to each other, with this unique, unspeakable, monstrous bond between them … The night began to ring in her ears. She moved, reached out with her hand, grasped a box of matches, held the flame close to her watch. It was half past four in the morning. She got up and put on her clothes; this action already felt like a welcome prelude to their escape. The water in the tiny bathroom was icy, like in an abandoned house; the minor domestic disorder in the kitchen also heralded preparations for departure. She opened the door at the back that looked onto the little yard. The snowstorm had abated. The last flakes drifted down slowly, attracted by the light of the candle. The snow was smooth, virgin, even the birds had not yet had time to star it with their footprints. In their garments of white the walls, cornices, and chimney pots had a fluid, downy beauty….

  She sensed that someone was coming, then heard his footsteps. She turned, and met his gaze; they understood it was pointless to exchange ritual questions. He stood beside her and watched the spinning of the snowflakes, detaching themselves from the gray sky and falling slowly toward the candle flame…. They were already in flight as they drank a cup of quickly cooled tea, nibbled some bread, and wrote a note of thanks to Li. They both sensed, without putting it into words, that they had to be gone from the city in advance of the light, in advance of the crowds in the streets, in advance of the trampled snow…. And when they collapsed, breathless, onto the seat of an empty car, in the first train of the morning; when she saw the young face opposite her in the twilight, his eyes closing, already weighed down with sleep, she understood, without wanting to understand, that this escape, this empty train, swaying as it clattered drowsily along, these windows blinded with snowflakes, the two of them with their deep abyss and even his still childlike hands, quivering slightly as he started to dream—all this was another life, the very first moments of which she was just discovering.

  From now on it seemed to her that other people could understand her, though not because of the words she spoke. An object, she felt, a gesture, a scent would suffice. Back in January, during that lost time between the old and the new calendars, she had given the nurse at the retirement home a gray angora openwork shawl. The young woman had come to the library looking for accounts of the war, hoping, she said, to find in them some information about the place where her lover had died. Beneath the worn fabric of her woolen dress the shivering of her thin body was perceptible; and on her lips and in her eyes the fierce struggle between pride at having lived through such a beautiful and tragic love affair and humiliating fear at being suspected of lying…. She had gone away, with the shawl around her shoulders, quite perplexed, not knowing what to make of this gift; and at that moment Olga had had a dizzying insight into this woman’s life: the evenings in a poorly heated room, the tiny scrap of comfort the gray wool might bring to her body….

  One day, after their return from Paris, she interrupted the
old swordsman who had launched into his usual tale of fighting. She spoke very softly, as if to herself, of a carnival night long ago, in a great mansion at the edge of a forest; of a garden, all foaming with apple blossom. And of the young horseman who had suddenly appeared before a girl overcome with giddiness. It seemed to her that this man who for years had tirelessly been waving his arm about in imitation of saber fighting, this cutter-off of heads, was no different from that young horseman long ago in the midst of the garden at night. And that she needed to say to him very simply, “Forget the wars and the blood. I know you are haunted by the look of a man you killed. The eyes of a man who can already feel the blade cutting into his neck. And that to escape him you are forever calling out your ‘s-s-shlim’ and laughing and frightening other people with your laughter. Forget. For in your own youth there must have been a night, meadows with cool grass, a garden white with flowers that you rode through on your horse….” The only words she actually uttered were: “night,” “apple blossom,” “white petals in the horses mane …” It seemed to her that the face of the man listening to her was freed of its grimaces, became simple and serious. He never performed his swordsman act in front of her again.

  From now on she perceived herself as being much closer to other people. Closer to the fields, to the nights, the trees, the clouds, the skies these people carried within them, that formed a silent language in which they could understand her without words. One day, with a joy that stung her brow as if peppered with grapeshot, she had this crazy hope: perhaps even what she was living through could one day be admitted?

  Among the new messages, whose increasingly clear resonance she was now receiving, there was a night when all one could hear was the drowsy rhythm of rare, heavy drops trickling down from the mass of soft snow on the roof, splashing in a melodious cascade, close to the steps and under the windows. Her body, for several nights past, had learned to give itself, while seeming still, to avoid the brutal break, to preserve the slow settling of bodies that have taken pleasure…. That night she found the rhythm of that silent separation. When his body was exhausted she felt his temple laid, for a moment, against her lips. A vein was throbbing, crazily. As she gave this involuntary kiss she sensed the pulsations gradually calming down….

  Another occasion for her to speak to the being whose understanding she already hoped for came on that evening of the thaw. She made a mistake when examining the infusion, no doubt confusing the pollen of the macerated flowers with traces of the powder. He did not come…. She waited for a long time, beyond what was already an unlikely hour, then, to break the spell of this waiting and to find sleep again, she got up, dressed, went out onto the steps.

  The night was clear. The air was softer; scents, long imprisoned by the cold, were flowing readily, like the slightly bitter aroma of damp bark. The snow had been undermined by a multitude of in visible tricklings, still covert, that filled the night with an incessant peal of water drops. She felt she was moving forward across an endless musical instrument, snapping several strings at each sacrilegious step….

  She stopped halfway between the house and the river, no longer wanting to disturb the melodious trembling of the slowly subsiding snows. Tilting her head back, she plunged in among the stars for a long time. A silent, unflagging wind descended from these nocturnal depths. She staggered, suddenly exalted, her eyes looked around for support. The shadow of the wood, the dark reflection of the water, the dim fields on the opposite bank. The sky from which spilled the powerful and constant wind. All this lived, breathed, and seemed to see her, to be focusing some kind of infinite gaze upon her. A gaze that understood everything but did not judge. It was there, facing her, about her, within her. Everything was said by this immense wordless, motionless presence…. The wind was still blowing from the summit of the sky, from its dark reaches scarcely marked with the buoys of stars. She was responding to the eyes staring at her, impassive eyes, but whose absolute compassion she sensed….

  She went home with the feeling of descending slowly from a very great height. Moving forward, she sought unconsciously to tread in the footprints left from her outward journey, so as not to snap any more strings. Up on the steps she cast a glance behind her: on the stretch of snow a string of footprints led out into the night with no return. And when she looked up a powerful gust of wind, falling vertically, struck her eyelids.

  ONE EVENING SHE NOTICED that the great pile of snow that had accumulated behind the wall of their house had shrunk into a grayish sponge around which the glistening, naked clay of the earth lay uncovered. Confused feelings gripped her: this exhaustion of the cold was quite natural, quite expected, but at the same time heavy with hidden menace. Was the winter (their winter!) now going to be woven imperceptibly back into the indifferent round of the seasons? This very normality seemed at once salutary and fraught with vague dangers. … A few days later when she was clipping together the newspapers that the postman had once more started delivering to the Caravanserai after several months of eclipse, she came upon this headline: RHINE ICE DYNAMITED TO OPEN WAY FOR SHIPPING DELAYED BY UNPRECEDENTED FROSTS. Strangely, her heart missed a beat and she heard a little silent cry: “But why all this hurry?”

  Then there was the night of all-enveloping fog, smelling of the sea…. With closed eyes she gave herself, happy, unthinking, liberated even by her blindness, by the uselessness of words, by the abandon she no longer had to feign…. It was this forgetfulness that must have given her away. She sighed, or rather took a breath like a child about to cry. He detached himself from her body and fled. She went through a long moment of nonlife before understanding the real reason for his flight.

  It was a continuous sound, growing louder, more fluid. It was gradually permeating the muffled heaviness of the fog…. At the first light of dawn, when she opened the window, she saw the meadow flooded, the willows standing in the middle of a lake, the water rippling gently a few yards away from the front steps….

  By evening the entire Caravanserai had become an island and their house a little promontory above the calm, misty expanse of the waters.

  It was the “doctor-just-between-ourselves,” wearing long rubber boots, who brought them bread on the second day of the flood. Then the water rose several inches more and even this equipment became inadequate. People forgot them as they waited for the sun to return and the waters to fall.

  The days were misty and mild, seeming not so much to exist now as to be a return to a far distant past when even pain was obliterated. At night all one could hear was the soothing lapping of the water on the front steps. And that night, when he came into her room, the cries of a flock of birds—no doubt migrants exhausted by their flight that had found no place to land and were alighting on the roof of the Caravanserai… It was beneath the rising tide of these innumerable cries that she surrendered her body to him again, her body which imperceptibly, from one night to the next, had won a secret freedom, inaccessible in aroused love. Her body that, in a death that was profoundly alive, responded to caresses and fashioned desire. A sleeping lovers body. Born in the depths of a dream that the boy could relive indefinitely.

  When she opened the door in the morning she alarmed a dozen birds that had settled on the roof. They emitted indignant cries and began to circle over the dull mirror of the waters. Over the inverted sky that began at the top of the front steps, in which their silent, white wings could be seen slipping along …

  Several days and nights were swamped in this misty calm, the drowsy idleness of the waters. Finally, one evening when it was still light, she noticed that the reflections of the clouds on the flooded meadow had moved farther from the house. A strip of bruised land emerged, bristling with stalks and clumps of grass, like the dorsal fin of an immense fish. This terra firma saturated with moisture surrounded the house and ran along the wall of the Caravanserai…. Through the window she saw her son, a shopping bag on his shoulder, walking away slowly, sounding out with his feet the uncertain dotted line of this first footpath. An ho
ur later he returned, laden. His shape was reflected in the waters now ablaze with the sunset. She hesitated, then went to greet him on the steps. They stayed there for a time, both of them, without looking at each other, motionless before the now tranquil expanse.

  That evening, or perhaps it was the next, a thought struck her with the painfulness and beauty of its truth. If what they were living through could be called love, then it was an absolute love, for it was fashioned from a prohibition inviolable yet violated, a love visible only in the sight of God, because monstrously inconceivable to mankind, a love experienced as the everlasting first moment of another life….

  For months her thoughts had spilled into the unthinkable and had become meaningless. Their return now disturbed her. She would have liked to go on living in the transparent and silent simplicity of the senses. Yes, to go back to the scent of the fire, to the powdery hoarfrost tumbling through the air from a snowy branch … But already a new link of chain was latching on to her mind: “For the boy this may be his first and last love. And for me? It is also my first and last love; for no one has ever loved me like this, with such a passionate fear of causing me harm. No one will ever love me like this again …” The truth of these words was born of lightness but, once uttered, became disturbing.

  That night anxiety returned in the guise of a strange noise: it was as if someone were walking along in the water beside the house with careful steps, attempting, through the somnambulistic slowness of their pace, to minimize the little telltale splashes.