At the end of the month she took her son to Paris. The doctor (“the French doctor” they called him, so as not to confuse him with the doctor-just-between-ourselves) examined the boy, arranged for him to be admitted to his ward, and told them the date of the operation. “The crooked leg will be straightened out under general anesthesia,” she read again that same evening in the pages she could recite by heart; their technical language reassured her. She could already picture her son walking normally in a life that had become ordinary again….
After the operation, the date of which, so much dreaded in advance, arrived with surprising ease, the boy was to remain in the hospital for a number of days. And even her almost daily trips to Paris became a real apprenticeship for her in the blissful triviality of life.
Always in a hurry to get back to the Caravanserai, to the library, she had no time to see Li. It was only on July 14, thanks to the public holiday, that she could visit the photographers little apartment…. The evening was unbearably oppressive with the smell that dusty streets have just before a storm, with a hazy, purple sky and the turmoil of leaves in brief gusts of wind. Li was still in her studio in the cellar, busy with the last clients of the day. And indeed it was only the studio that retained an air of habitability. In the main rooms the furniture had been replaced by pyramids of cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes. On the bare walls there were countless dark punctures—left by the hooks on which pictures, photos, and icons had hung….
She waited for a moment in the miniature courtyard, surrounded by windows on several floors. They were all open, to capture every tiniest breath of cool air on that stifling evening. You could hear the sizzling of oil in a frying pan, the gurgling of water running away, the clatter of crockery, scraps of conversation, snatches of music. An aroma, compounded of roofs cooling after the heat of the day, laundry, and burned fat, hung in the darkness above the paved square of ground. She was just about to go down into the studio when suddenly she noticed, in the shadiest corner of the yard, the shrub that was struggling to grow against the wall, beneath the drainpipe. And to flower invisibly, out of sight of all those noisy windows. She went up to it and buried her face in the clusters of flowers with which it was studded. The scent was subtle. A freshness of snow … The feeling that she could enter, linger, and merge into this cold breath made her giddy. For a moment she thought she was walking through a snow-covered forest in winter, on a morning barely silvered by the dawn, in the midst of trees, sleeping but secretly aware of her presence. She was not alone. She had a companion on this slow stroll. An infinite peace filled the space that lay between their two souls …
Li called her from the studio doorway. She was leaving for Russia in ten days. All she had left to do was to pack up the last of her panels: a sailor with incredibly broad shoulders presenting a bunch of flowers to a wasp-waisted young thing and, on the other one, a naked man and woman squeezed in among a crowd in tuxedos and evening gowns.
* * *
Two days later, coming back from Paris, she ran into the doctor-just-between-ourselves. He behaved as if he just happened to be in the road that led out into the square in front of the station. She would have believed him if she had not glanced through the window of the coach a few seconds before the train stopped. She recognized this man in a brown suit. The speed with which he moved as he left the shade of a plane tree, where he had been sheltering from the sun, gave him away. The train was slowing down and through the win-dowpane she saw him watching the station exit then slightly adjusting his shirt collar….
They walked back together. Listening to him she thought that, had she not glanced through that coach window, his words would have had quite another meaning. And that he himself, the man walking beside her, chatting, animated and jovial, would have been somebody else. Yes, he would still have been the “doctor-just-between-ourselves,” self-effacing and obliging. Now she was aware of the suppressed energy in him, with which he had emerged out of the shadows. And also the easy smoothness that had colored his feigned surprise: “My goodness, it’s you! What fair wind has brought you my way?” Now she was seeing things she had never noticed before: his heavy and strangely unpleasant-looking cuff links, the backs of his very broad hands, covered in hairs on which little drops of sweat glistened…. But, in particular, his brown, oily eyes, with which he gave her swift sidelong glances that seemed, as they slid away, to hold her prisoner in their reflection. Yes, he walked without looking at her but she felt she was held, snared beneath his eyelids.
She had no recollection of inviting him to take tea with her. And yet there he was, seated opposite her in the kitchen that still glowed with the sunset; and he was talking, only breaking off to take a little sip for form’s sake. She got up from time to time, chased a bee, set about pretending to listen to him but in reality was noticing, despite herself, fresh, absurd, and mysteriously important details: his square, yellowish fingernails; his forehead that filled with wrinkles when he gave a theatrical sigh, wrinkles that went right up to his bald pate and made it less shiny…. It was one of those odd moments when you sense the imminent approach of some gesture, drawing inexorably closer.
As he was leaving he stopped in the hall and kissed her hand. Or rather, without bowing, he raised her hand and pressed it for a long time to his lips. When she made a movement of impatience he caught her by the waist with unexpected agility. She drew back to avoid his face. But to her surprise he did not go for her mouth. He remained still for a moment, forcing her into this precariously off-center posture, and supporting the weight of her body arched against his palm. Clumsily she pulled herself free from him and collided with the door frame. And her shout of “Go away!” was mingled with a brief cry of pain and her hand rubbing her bruised elbow. Facing her, he smiled, massive, sure of himself. But the voice that emerged from this mass was strangely shrill, stammering, like those sentences that have been long prepared but which, when the time comes, emerge quite convoluted and breathless: “I’ll come again tomorrow … Maybe we could first… Well, I know a little restaurant …”
That night her focus switched restlessly between several very different personages. The elderly gentleman who had come out from the Caravanserai several times, often at nightfall in the snow, to care for an ailing boy … The man in the brown suit who came walking toward her without noticing her and suddenly uttered a cry of joy … The man who took little sips of tea and spoke of the solitude “we must confront together”… And that other man, again, who confessed that for years he had wanted to speak to her. And as he said it, his cuff links and his hairy wrists seemed to belong to someone else. She found it impossible to reassemble all these men into one, this aging male with his smooth, tanned, bald head, who had seized her waist, already taking delight in her submissive body.
On her return from Paris the next day she studied with concern the trees at the edge of the station square. Nobody. On the door of her house there was a little rectangle of paper. “I called for tea, I will be back for dinner.” It was in deciphering the signature that she recognized the element that was common to all the men who had troubled her in the night. As if this commonplace, mildly ridiculous name, that she had known but forgotten—yes, as if simply seeing it written down, “Sergei Golets,” had created a generic term for all these characters.
He was the man who had fathomed her secret (she did not know how, nor to what extent). The madness of her secret. Her madness… Yes, he was someone who treated her as he would have treated a simpleminded person who can be exploited.
It was already almost nine o’clock in the evening. She walked along beside the house with hurried steps, plunged in under the trees of the wood. You could cross it in five minutes, but the maze of footpaths created the illusion of a refuge. The ground was dappled with long copper rays, slowly turning pale. Darkness was gradually spilling into the shady corners. The moonlight turned the glades into lakes, into streams of a somnolent blue. The repeated cry of a bird rang out with the sound of icicles snapping. S
he had the sudden idea that it might be possible to stay there, not to leave these moments in time, to travel back through them…. Then, remembering the madness a man had just detected in her, she hastened to return.
As she pressed the switch she thought that Golets might notice the light and come…. At the same moment she heard the steady, almost nonchalant rapping at the door. She switched off the light, then at once switched it on again, annoyed by her own cowardice, went to the hall but decided not to open up and to say nothing. He knocked again and remarked without raising his voice, sensing that she was close at hand, “I know you’re there. Open the door. … I have a message for you.” There was a jarring note of barely disguised mockery in his voice. “Yes, he talks as if to a feebleminded woman,” she thought again. She went back into the kitchen and suddenly heard the snapping of a stem: he was walking along beside the wall, treading on the flowers in the darkness. She remembered that the French door in her bedroom had been left ajar. Hardly had the thought occurred when it became reality: at the end of the corridor the ancient hinges emitted a long musical creak. She rushed to the other end of the apartment, switched on the light, just had time to focus her eyes on the familiar and woeful interior: the lamp with the patched-up china base, the stove, the bed, the wardrobe with a mirror….
And amid all these objects, with their patina of familiarity, a man putting his head through the gap where the French door was ajar, just like one of those volatile interiors in a bad dream.
“Just two words… Yesterday I forgot to tell you….” He smiled, hypnotizing her with his fixed stare, and made his way into the room with brief, swift advances, while seeming to be motionless every time she was on the point of rebuking him.
She felt desperately distant from this scene. The words that rang out in her head and then burst forth from her lips seemed to emanate from somebody else: “Go away! Get out! Quickly!” Ineffectual commands that had not affected the distracted look on her own face nor produced any effect on the man who did not move and yet kept coming closer. She, too, was absent from her body and the man knew it: infancy, drunkenness, and madness all disarm the body in this way and it becomes an easy prey.
“I didn’t tell you yesterday,” he began, with the excitement of one who sees his strategy coming to fruition. “I love you. I have loved you for years…. No, let me …”
She swung her hand clumsily. He intercepted her slap and kissed her hand passionately, then grasped her waist, caught her dispossessed body off balance and thrust it toward the bed. She saw a round face, gleaming with sweat, and heard herself shouting out a completely illogical remark: “Let me go! Your neck is hideous!”
It was these absurd, half-choking words that stopped him in his tracks. The man straightened up, let her go, and felt his neck. “What did you say? What’s the matter with my neck?”
His skin was shaved too close, red, and covered in tiny swellings. He took a step toward the mirror, realized that this movement was ridiculous, lost countenance.
“Go away!” she said in a weary voice. “I beg you …”
She went to the French door, drew back the curtain, and flung it open. He obeyed her, murmuring with a vexed sneer, “All right, all right… But all the same you won’t refuse me the pleasure of an excursion with you? Tomorrow afternoon …” He went out, turned, and waited for her reply. She shook her head and tugged at the handle. The cuff link glittered—he was quick enough to block the door.
‘One last word,” he called, his lips unable to achieve a reconciliation between smiling and twitching with rage. “The very last, I assure you. Now this glass door you are crushing my arm with”—she let go of the handle—”this French door, which is somewhat too wide for these curtains, or rather the curtains are too narrow, if you prefer …”
She was seized by a profound internal shuddering that rose rapidly in her stomach and up to her chest and constricted the muscles of her throat. The man was about to blurt out something irreparable, she had a precise, blinding intuition of it. She had sensed it unconsciously, ever since his maneuvering began, and it was this presentiment that had left her disarmed in confronting him.
“… These curtains, that really are too narrow you see, are not wholly unknown to me. I have this strange habit, you see: I like to go for a walk late in the evening before going to bed. You know how it is, when you live alone…. And then, I’m very observant …”
She should have interrupted him, stopped him on the brink of the next sentence…. She should have let him have his way just now, accepted his kisses, given herself to him, for what he was about to say was a thousand times more monstrous. But the air was becoming heavy, like damp cotton wool, hindering gestures, stifling the voice.
“Especially with the frosts last winter, I was often worried: you have a … mm … sick child in this shack; one never knows. One evening when I was passing very close by, almost beneath your windows, I glanced your way; the curtains were drawn but they are, as I’ve said, too narrow…. So I looked in and …
“… And I saw you, you and your son, naked, in an act of love.”
No! He did not say it. She thought he was going to and the sentence immediately became real, inseparable from what had gone before. Perhaps he did then speak of their nakedness as well, of the carnal strangeness of the couple they made…. She no longer knew.
“So at all events, no doubt you will understand my astonishment… I’ve seen worse things in my time … I’m no choirboy myself, far from it. But even so! Fortunately I’m not a gossip, otherwise, you know what the wagging tongues are like at the Caravanserai and elsewhere….
“… And when I offered you my … friendship, it was so as to be able to talk to you more freely about all this, you understand, in intimacy. And to give you the possibility of living a normal life as a woman, with a man who would enable you to enjoy …”
No! He did not speak those last words, but even so, they were real, and inescapable, for she had imagined them.
In fact, he was no longer there. She was alone, sitting on the bed, facing the mirror. He had gone, bidding her a good night and proposing that they should take a trip in a boat the next day. She had agreed, nodding several times.
That night she found herself wandering for some time in an endless, shadowy apartment, exploring its labyrinthine passages before going to lie down on a bed. Her son came in, just as she had seen him on the afternoon when he was diving—naked, his body wet, making the sheets damp and cooling them deliciously. She felt this coolness against her breast, in her thighs. He kissed her; his lips tasted of the stems and leaves of water plants. Their freedom was such that their bodies moved as if underwater, their gestures marvelously weightless. It was when she found herself on her knees, dominated by him, that she noticed that the armchair turned toward the wall in the corner of this unknown room had someone in it…. She could only see the arm on the armrest—a heavy cuff link glittered in the half-darkness. And the more violent their sensual enjoyment became, the more the profile of the seated man detached itself from the back of the chair. She was on the brink of recognizing him when at last, with a cry, still choked with pleasure, she wrested herself from sleep. An object was digging into her shoulder. She switched on the light and from within the folds of the tangled sheets she plucked out a cuff link.
With a final effort at sane reasoning she formulated this eerie and incongruous thought and rejoiced in its absurdity: “There was no dragon!” That was it, she needed to speak of improbable things that had no chance of becoming real. No dragon! An unknown apartment, that man in the armchair, perhaps. But no dragon. Like that she would finally manage to distinguish the true from the false….
This exercise seemed to calm her. A respite of several minutes during which she got up, went into the book room, took down a fat encyclopedic volume, leafed through it with a clumsy, nervous hand. And quickly hit upon the engraving: “A boa constrictor attacking an antelope.” The glistening body, covered in arabesques, was strangling its victim.
“The dragon …” she whispered and recalled that, in the vast apartment she had just left, she had forgotten to switch off the lamp on the bedside table.
THE SOUNDS COMING THROUGH the heat haze were blurred, liquid. The cries of children paddling at the edge of the river, the lowing of a herd…. And the lazy plashing of oars. To push the boat clear from the low, muddy bank just now he had had to take off his shoes, roll up his pants, and step into the water. Now she could see the broad, hardened soles of his feet. And on his forehead the smear of clay he had left when wiping away drops of sweat. For her this brown streak was a particularly odd source of distress in this world of sunlight and apathy. She could not say to him, “You’ve made a mark on your face,” still less could she dip her fingers into the water and wash his brow for him….
That would have been quite unthinkable. The man sitting facing her, his bare heels wedged against the timbers of the boat, was an utterly strange being: a man who desired her and who was taking her out in a boat on a stifling July day, fulfilling a ritual that was a prelude to the night, when he would violate her as much as he desired, as of right, without any resistance on her part. Before their boat trip, as they walked through the upper town, he had invited her into the shooting gallery. He had not missed a single target; as he walked out he had looked at her with the air of a child expecting praise…. This was the very man who had materialized in a labyrinthine apartment in the armchair facing the wall, the man spying on them with a smile of connivance. She recalled the great bed, the sheets with their scent of the river, yes, precisely the same smell as this tepid water rippling beneath the low sides of the dinghy. Under this watchful gaze she and the boy, whose body was still wet, had tried to mask their love. Yes, they were searching in all innocence for some object lost among the folds of the devastated bed. But while going through the motions of this search they were embracing, exchanging kisses, giving themselves to each other….
The Crime of Olga Arbyelina Page 22