The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  “No! He came home alone!” a very precise memory objected within her. But already the vision of the two young people on a path beside the river seemed to her to have been actually, certainly, observed, indelibly fixed in her mind. She was astonished to realize that it was enough to picture a face or a place for them to become quite naturally transformed into things experienced.

  Dazed, she attempted to find some clear, indisputable reality amid the chaos of her thoughts. By an inexplicable caprice of memory this turned out to be the face of the nurse at the retirement home. The unhappy woman who took pleasure in making fun of the gift she had received, the shawl she had accepted one winters evening…. Now her face was tinged with a repentant softness, her lips trembled as she uttered words of apology. And once again this repentance seemed … no! quite simply it was completely authentic. Yes, the encounter had occurred several days previously.

  For a moment she succeeded in thinking of nothing, still sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning forward slightly, her eyes half closed, expressionless. That was how she saw herself in the mirror facing the bed. A naked woman, motionless, in the middle of a spring night. This precise mirror image calmed her. She turned her head toward the window, her double in the glass did the same. Smoothed the blanket. The other one repeated her gesture with precision. It was then that the lamp caught her eye….

  The scene that had since then been played out a thousand times in her memory once more embarked on its sequence of actions: a hand knocks the lampshade; an arm tries to stop it falling; that instinctive, blind lunge; his escape; and the reflection in the mirror that shows a woman lying there, more inert than a corpse…. She observed this woman and noticed a new expression on her face that appeared to be more and more accentuated: a mixture of tenderness, sensuality, immodesty, and lasciviousness. Her knees remained wide apart, her belly lay exposed between long, supple thighs….

  She tapped on the switch, as if swatting an insect that refuses to die. But in the darkness everything became even more real. Now there was the young face buried in the hollow of the naked woman’s shoulder, the lips drowning in her breast…. And now the woman’s body was arching, closing about the other one, guiding it….

  She stood at the French door and, without being aware of it, repeated over and over again in a feverish whisper, “No, it was never like that… never … never … never like that. …” But to the slow, stubborn flow of memories her mind had just added the woman’s arms embracing the fragile form of a boy; a moaning that she no longer concealed; and their newfound courage, for both of them knew that her sleeping was only pretense….

  For several hours weariness interrupted the growth of this incurable tumor that was slowly swelling in her memory.

  In the morning imagined reality, false, but terrifying in its truth, continued to gain ground, but calmly now, as if in a country definitively conquered…. In the afternoon there were a lot of people in the library. At one moment she turned away and began drawing the curtains across the windows. “Too much sun!” she murmured, trying to keep her face hidden in the dusty folds for as long as possible…. In a room lit by the flames flickering out of a stove she had just seen a woman slowly combing the thick flow of her hair, standing at a French door open onto a snowy night, out of which an almost warm breath of air was blowing. Her head was tilted, her gaze lost in the reflection in the windowpane, watching the movements of a youth who came into the room, stopped, and gazed at her in silence…. She knew, she could not deny that had happened to her. She simply did not want other people to guess it by peering into her eyes.

  The evening was light and long. She was in the kitchen, mechanically tearing up a letter (one of the many letters from L.M. that she no longer even read), when the front door banged with unusual haste. She did not stir, her back turned, so as to let him slip by without her seeing him. But he came in and she heard his voice, which, while striving for calm, had a childish ring to it: “Mom, I think I’ve just done something stupid. Could you call the … what’s his name … the doctor-just-between-ourselves?”

  She turned. He lifted the hand that he had been pressing against his left temple. A pocket of blood bulged over his left eyebrow; already he could not open the eye.

  FOR THE SECOND TIME RUNNING she was up all night in the boys room. At an uncertain hour, when the sky was still very dark, objects began to break free of the ties that normally held them. This made their presence more and more inexplicable. She had brought the lamp in here to have more light in case of need. Now that explanation no longer sufficed. The lamp stood beside the bed where the boy slept. Switched off and almost frightening in its silent idleness, no longer linked with brightness, but with dark, indecipherable visions … And the doctor-just-between-ourselves? He had stayed, for his help might be needed urgently. But… No, nothing … He had installed himself in the book room, in no way embarrassed about this nocturnal sojourn in their house. He had filled the little cubbyhole with his cigar smoke and was now reading or dozing. And from time to time came to the patient’s bedside. Each time she gave a start, his arrival was so silken: for greater comfort he was in his stocking feet. He took visible pleasure in seeing her tremble. He smiled but at once adopted a firm and reassuring air, felt the swelling that by now almost entirely covered the boy’s left eye, and went away again…. At one moment in the darkness she thought she could see this man in his socks lurking at the end of the corridor, watching. She was very much afraid but then immediately woke up.

  Her eyes resting on the boy’s deformed face struggled constantly against growing accustomed to it: not to accept this puffy mask, to wipe it clean with the intensity of her look. She turned the compresses on the swollen brow, lifted the blanket and wiped away the trickles of sweat on his chest, in the hollow between his collarbones, on his neck. And each time she touched him, simply and almost without thinking, it woke the seething nocturnal visions within her, drew her toward a winter’s night, toward a carnal encounter that was increasingly frenzied, increasingly real…. Even the town outside the dark window, shimmering in a beam of light, was also an improbable ghost town, with its gigantic ruin of the wrecked bridge and the station from which, for several days now, no trains had departed. “Rail strike,” she repeated mentally, and the words murmured above this body on fire betokened a wide-eyed, intelligent madness…. She looked at the thermometer (one hundred and four degrees, fever, as an hour earlier), switched off the lamp, closed her eyes.

  When he became delirious in a headlong, seething hiss, she failed to wrest herself from sleep immediately. Listening to him, she believed she was still in a painful and confused dream. Little by little his gasping words formed into a confession that only delirium could have brought to the level of his lips. She did not so much hear but— with each painful whisper—saw a place materializing that it took her only a moment to recognize….

  … It was a little ground floor apartment crammed with a jumble of furniture. A woman, youthful again, in her long black dress. A boy watching the woman’s final preparations. She puts on the earrings that cast iridescent gleams onto her neck and her bare shoulders. The bell rings at the front door, she kisses the boy, who is already bedded down on the armchairs pushed together as a makeshift bed, and goes to open it. Mingling with the warm, piquant perfume she gives off as she passes, he can smell the damp odor of the street and the strong, invasive scent of the intruder’s eau de cologne….

  The sick boy’s voice petered out in a series of brief, sibilant groans. She changed the compresses. The swelling of dark, shining blood had extended toward his temple. The right eye opened for a moment but did not focus on anything, flitted onto the lamp, onto the hand that was applying the icy cloth to his brow. Almost at once the delirium started again. Eventually she could even grasp the words that were being swallowed up in the hissing spasms of the fever.

  … It was still the woman in evening dress getting ready to go to the theater and waiting for the man who was supposed to come and fetch her. This t
ime she and her son are sitting at table drinking tea. Half an hour later, as she puts on her earrings in front of a mirror she suddenly feels pleasantly weary. She sits down on the little sofa and even decides to lie down for a few moments while awaiting her companion’s arrival. Sleep overtakes her before the end of this thought….

  She changed the compresses, already burning hot, shook the thermometer, inserted it with care. The whispering still emanating from his dry lips had become indistinct.

  And suddenly he began to cry out in an almost conscious voice. In his cry the woman in the black dress suddenly found herself half naked, laid out in sinister beauty, for she was dead! Dead, dead, dead …

  He repeated the word “dead,” choking violently, shaking his disfigured head and scratching at the blanket with his fingernails.

  Dumbfounded, powerless, she knew she should get up, run to the book room, wake the doctor. But then he would have heard this all too clear delirium! And guessed everything!

  The cries ceased abruptly and a second later the doctor-just-between-ourselves opened the door. “Ah, he’s found his voice, our young man.” He grunted and yawned elaborately.

  An hour later he operated. He had flung back the curtains with energetic abruptness, admitting a still pale dawn, unhoped for in that room that seemed doomed to darkness…. He made incisions, removed blood clots, swabbed. And gave a commentary on his actions in an almost tender voice, all the time using Russian diminutives, even for the scalpel, the swabs, the saline. She felt as if she were watching a game, and participating in it when from time to time she passed him a bottle, a syringe….

  When he left he kissed her hand and promised to come back at noon and even to stay and “browse” (a wink) in the little book room if need be….

  She spent the afternoon sometimes in the boy’s room, sometimes, when he slept, sitting on the front steps that were all overgrown with wild plants. What the night had revealed to her was unfolding now in a clear and definitive sequence of scenes….

  … It had been in the spring of the previous year, possibly exactly a year before. Generally, when she went to Paris with her son, L.M. invited her out to the theater. Or at least, when he invited her, she came to Paris, left the boy at Li’s, and came back to collect him in the morning. On that occasion Li had been away and the boy was to spend the night on his own. It was hard to guess how deeply he detested those theater evenings; those nights (when, in theory, his mother came home after the play); and the man who rang the doorbell…. Li used to take sleeping drafts—the little sachet that made her vague when she woke up.

  “What if you took two of them?” he asked one day.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t wake up till noon.”

  “Three?”

  “I should sleep like a dead woman.”

  That evening he emptied three sachets into the cup of tea that the young woman in her black dress was about to drink…. An hour afterward he lived through long, frightening, and delicious minutes. The doorbell rang impatiently, furiously; he even heard several oaths, then a drumming on the shutters. The woman lay stretched out on the sofa, her impassive and remote beauty untroubled. There was a squeal of tires as they pulled away outside the window, soon lost in the other sounds of cars in the street…. There he was in that little sitting room lit only by a table lamp, a room cluttered with curios, books, and icons … And in the middle of it this woman, this stranger whom he found it impossible to recognize as his mother. Her face was disturbingly youthful; a little capricious crease that he had never noticed before gave a slight upward lift to the corners of her mouth. The curve of her body expressed a strange expectancy. And apart from the fine haze of perfume he detected quite a new, carnal scent about her, more a ghost than a scent, that filled him with wonder and almost hurt his lungs…. He did not yet know how to assess the deepness of her slumber. Ready to take flight at the first flicker of her eyelashes, he stretched out his arm, touched her hand that lay on her stomach, then her shoulder. Then, emboldened, telling himself that, if need be, he would have a good excuse for waking her, he touched the delicate hollow hinted at between her breasts, the beginnings of which were revealed by her décolletage. He had always been fascinated by this spot on a woman’s body She did not stir…. Already uneasy, he brought his ear close to the sleeping woman’s face. And could hear no breathing. He remembered Li’s words: “I should sleep like a dead woman!” Dead! He jumped up in a panic, thought of running to the kitchen to fetch water, then changed his mind. He had seen or read somewhere that doctors put their ear to the patient’s chest and even massage it in order to restore breathing. With trembling fingers he unfastened two hooks on the crossed flaps of the décolletage, laid bare a shoulder, then a breast, pressed his ear to it…. Finally stood up with a singing in his ears, his breathing irregular. And gazed at her endlessly, this woman unrecognizable beneath her light makeup, with her hair piled high, her black velvet dress, and, above all, her nakedness. This woman who should have belonged to another and who now remained with him, so deli-ciously accessible to his eyes, to his caress….

  “It was a year ago,” she thought, calling to mind a dazzling halo of days, of skies seen since then…. On the footpath that led across the meadow from the Caravanserai a man appeared. She recognized the doctor-just-between-ourselves approaching with his bag. For the second night.

  It rained that night. After the heat of the previous weeks the air seemed cold, autumnal. She remained in an armchair beside the bed until morning. The fever had abated. The wound was no longer bleeding. He slept peacefully and only woke once, in the middle of the night. They looked at each other for a long moment without speaking. Then he screwed up his eyes tightly, as if under the effect of a sudden scalding. She saw his eyelashes gleaming with tiny sparks and hastened to switch off the lamp.

  The cool, gray days at the beginning of June marked the habitual lassitude of spring, breathless after a riot of blooming and the heat of May The foliage was already heavy, dense and dark, like the end of summer. The meadow that sloped down to the river was once more covered with tall grasses, tinged with white here and there by the silvery down of dandelions gone to seed. And steady, quiet rainfall interrupted the mists that hung in the air, as on October mornings.

  She liked the calming effect of this brief foretaste of the fall. Since that night of the delirium she knew everything from start to finish about that year of her life. Now, amid the haze of a temporary fall, it seemed as if she had come through, as if she were timidly resuming the interrupted course of her days.

  One evening, when walking around the Caravanserai, she noticed that the bushes growing beneath the walls and beside the track were all pearly with white clusters. The dusk air also had this snowy tinge…. The night was so chilly she had to light the fire. And did not sleep. Winter nights arose in her minds eye one after another, beyond words in their hard beauty, with the trembling chasms of their skies, with that same scent of burning bark, a mere detail but which opened up an unfathomable cavalcade of hours. It was the first time she had returned to it. This return still had a bruising intensity. Yet her memory was already initiating her into the mysterious science of entering into that other life.

  During these few autumnal days in mid-June, days of her sons convalescence, there flickered within her once more the crazy hope: that someone would listen to her, would understand her, understand, above all, that what she had lived through belonged to a life quite other than her own. So far this someone had no face, only a soul, vast and silent.

  THE SUMMER RETURNED with unprecedented storms and a blazing sun that the citizens of Villiers-la-Forêt welcomed as dazzling evidence of the “first real vacation of peacetime” that was the talk of the papers. And even the little community of the Caravanserai sniffed this new air and gathered in the library, animatedly discussing the articles about the Tour de France 47, the first since the war; the new Paris Peace Conference; and especially the headline that proclaimed: FRANCE FINALLY TURNS THE CORNER….

  In
spite of herself, or rather with secret complicity, she succumbed to this seasonal excitement. One day she caught herself studying the photos in a newspaper accompanying a long feature, “Where to Spend your Vacation,” with envious admiration. A family (the parents and their two children) were cycling along a country road. She could not tear herself away from it. She liked everything about these vacationers: their family togetherness; their provisions well wrapped up on their carriers; the quiet road; and the gentle, orderly countryside. She suddenly longed to lose herself, like them, in the happy banality of these summer days, to have their French common sense, “so wonderfully French,” she thought. Then she remembered her hope of finding a soul in whom she could confide, to whom she could speak about the depths of despair she had known. That seemed grotesque to her now. She must forget. Yes, forget! For these much-vaunted depths were in fact nothing more than moments of uneasy tenderness that no mother and no son can escape. Quite simply, they had gone a little further than others had done in this forbidden temptation. Besides, there had only been, all in all, eight or perhaps ten nights when …

  She felt strong now, because she had decided not to remember. She must become a bit more stupid, be confident, talk about vacations. And it was as if she wanted to punish, wound, and destroy a being silently present within her that she forced herself to read the text of the article: “This year many foreign visitors—English, Scandinavians, Americans—plan to sample the delights of France. We owe a warm welcome to these visitors when they come to the places where for two years soldiers from their own countries fought for the liberation of Europe….”

  This summery and agreeably simple world accepted her. She gave herself over to it, its joys and its gossip, with the fervor of a convert. Each new day seemed to justify her. The readers seemed happy to see her taking part in their discussions, just as in the old days.