The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  She forced herself to listen. Golets had just spoken to her. Doubtless it was his “We really must make hay while the sun shines: because you never know,” that he kept repeating every five minutes. The smear of clay on his forehead was drawing out into a long, sinuous trickle. “If only I could ask him: that apartment, that simulated search in a disordered bed—were they real?” said a hopeless voice within her. It was the “little bitch,” she recognized it almost joyfully, for these words were the only ones that still linked her to this day, to this man’s conversation, to life…. She leaned forward, thrust her hand into the water. She was going to wash away the muddy mark on his forehead….

  At that moment they touched land. Golets jumped onto the bank and drew the bow of the vessel into a little gap between the willows in the middle of the tangle of weeds. Then he helped her to step ashore and settled her in a little clearing surrounded by bushes. He did it with the care you would have for an important patient; or for a vase filled with water with a bunch of flowers in it, that you dread breaking just at the last moment. Or perhaps (the voice of the “little bitch” pierced the silence that enveloped her) yes, especially, for a person whose social standing made this riverside picnic somewhat inappropriate. “The Princess Arbyelina,” the voice whispered. “That is what you still are to him. He is still susceptible to your body’s added value.”

  Golets spread out a tablecloth and set down the bottle. From his bag he took two glasses, some bread, and a packet covered in grease stains. “Princess Arbyelina,” she thought, picturing the life where the word had a meaning, where the people lived who knew her. The Caravanserai, Villiers, Paris… This world now seemed to her nonexistent, beheld in a dream long since dissipated. Now there was only the damp sauna of this July afternoon, the sweetish smell of the tepid, muddy water; this woman half reclining in the grass, with a glass in her hand that she raised to her lips from time to time, yielding to the pleas of a man who talked incessantly. A man who, when night came, would crush her breasts, penetrate her, fall asleep beside her. He already had all these actions imprinted in him, in his forearms, blue with their thick veins, in his fingers with broad, yellow nails….

  “And to think that last winter all this was under the snow!”

  He was stretched out, his elbow planted in the earth, his legs crossed, and, without letting go of his glass, he extended his arm, indicating the fields beyond the river. She closed her eyes and signaled to him to say nothing more. A fragile night was forming within her in which she walked along, recognizing, with mournful felicity, a branch crystallized in the hoarfrost; a little frozen pond; but, above all, a floral tapestry of ice on a dark windowpane….

  It was Golets who roused her from her reverie. He must have thought her closed eyes—she had covered them with her hand to shut out the light more completely—were a sign of drunkenness. Without getting up he executed a rapid crawl and got behind her. He took her by the shoulders, tilted her toward him, slipped a hand beneath her back. When he met her suddenly opened eyes he froze: a glassy stare that expressed nothing, did not see him, saw nothing…. Detaching himself from her, he emitted, in spite of himself, a sort of moan of thwarted pleasure, almost a meowing. She got up, stared at the man crouching at her feet, then lifted her eyes toward the roofs of the upper town where they climbed up the hill, toward the flat curve of the river…. So after all, there was nothing in the warm, soft stuff of life but this whine of desire; this flesh forever hungering for fusion.

  He picked up the remains of the meal, folded the tablecloth. And it was then that there was this moment of hesitation: should he throw away the almost empty bottle or take it with him? Already visibly drunk, he was brought up short by this ridiculous indecision. He stuffed the bottle into his bag, took it out again, examined it, perplexed…. These few seconds of uncertainty (she later felt it that way but no one chose to believe her) marked the start of that ticking away of minutes that preceded the end. If he had not delayed, turning the bottle over and over, if they had left a little sooner, or if he had ended up keeping the bottle, everything would have turned out differently. But he swung his arm, essaying a jocular war whoop, and threw the bottle into the water.

  But with the intuition of drunken men, he must have felt as if there were a taut cord linking him to something invisible. His mood changed. He tried to joke. Now they were drifting downstream. Several yards farther on they caught up with the bottle that had not sunk; he gave it a poke with an oar, the neck disappeared, releasing a brief gurgling of air bubbles. He roared with laughter. And at once became somber again.

  It was no doubt in order to cast off this obscure uneasiness that he suddenly abandoned the oars, stretched himself, raising his face toward the sky, and declared in a voice slurred by drunkenness, “Man is made for pleasure as birds are made for flight.”

  He half stood up and, shaken by the instability of the boat, lurched headlong toward the stern where she was sitting. She moved aside so as not to be crushed by this unbalanced mass, braying with laughter. He reached her all the same, hung over her, and tugged roughly at her dress.

  At this moment she saw a twisted, rusty steel structure rising up out of the water and growing rapidly larger. It seemed to her that the boat overturned almost gently….

  She would never know if the violence with which Golets hurled himself at her and clung to her body was due to his drunkenness, his desire to save her, or his inability to swim. Perhaps he, in his turn, was trying to push away the woman who threatened to drown him. Or was it already the death throes? Nor would she ever know whether he had been wounded at the very moment when he fell or afterward, when he sank and resurfaced, already lifeless.

  Whatever the reason for his brutality, by a macabre coincidence, Goletss gestures parodied the carnal act of which he had dreamed. He clasped the body he desired, did violence to it, tore off the upper part of her clothes, laying bare her shoulders and her breasts, lacerating the skin with his nails.

  This savage struggle lasted scarcely a few seconds. He disappeared beneath the water and surfaced a little farther off, closer to the bank, at a spot sheltered from the force of the current. His body came to rest between a block of concrete, a narrow spit of sand, and the stems of reeds on which green and blue dragonflies continued to settle.

  She swam, or rather allowed herself to be carried, surrounded by the tatters of her dress, as far as this sheltered spot. Just a few yards from the place of their shipwreck her foot touched the bottom. It all seemed like a game. And yet a few feet away from her floated this fully dressed body and the water around his head was turning brown.

  On the bank two men could be seen running along, led by a boy who still had his fishing rod in his hand.

  IT SEEMED TO HER as if she remained for weeks on that sunny river-bank, on the ancient tree stump where the first witnesses had found her sitting. There were no nights anymore, nothing but that interminable day, the muggy effluvia arising from the water, the smell of the plants and the mud; and the hot, slightly hazy light, more dazzling to the eye than glaring sunlight.

  Interminably, people came and went, surrounded her; dispersed; timidly approached the corpse of the drowned man; made their comments. She recognized almost all of them: the Russified pharmacist, the director of the retirement home, the old swordsman, the nurse, the woman from the station ticket office…. She noticed that they all of them, even in these exceptional circumstances, remained true to their roles, to their masks. The nurse, with her bitter expression, did not fail to let it be understood that the mourning she wore was a good deal more worthy of respect than this stupid accident. The ticket office woman was constantly consulting her watch. The director managed the tragedy. The pharmacist moved from one group to another, happily taking part in discussions both in French and Russian without distinction. And beside the willow trees, mingling with the buzz of conversations, there rang out the merry “s-s-shlim!”…

  She felt herself to be the focus of dozens of inquiring—or quite simply cu
rious—looks. These excited spectators were attempting, as they might have done in adjusting binoculars, to bring together into a single focus the Princess Arbyelina and this woman clad in water-soaked rags, a woman who made no effort to cover up her breast that was streaked with scratches. Some of them, those who felt they knew her better, addressed her in hushed voices—as if sounding out the silence of a bedroom to see if the person in there is asleep…. She remained motionless, seemed blind, inaccessible to words. Yet her eyes were alive, noting the new faces in the parade of gawkers, observing that the smear of clay on the mans forehead had disappeared, washed away, no doubt, at the moment of drowning….

  But what could she say to those who, like the director, leaned toward her and murmured questions that were unbelievable in their human triviality, supposedly intended to bring her out of her state of shock? Shock … shock … shock, the voices kept repeating in all the litde groups. She should have told them about that smear of clay, about the impossibility of wiping it away that she had experienced in the boat, yes, her inability to wet her fingers, to touch that brow. Told them, too, about that unique fragment of beauty that had, by chance, sprung from that hopelessly ugly man—the phrase he had uttered a quarter of an hour before his death: “And to think that these water meadows were all covered in snow….” But would they have understood? Perhaps only the old lady from the retirement home who suddenly went up to the corpse and removed a long strand of waterweed from its face. Whispered reproaches arose on all sides—nothing must move.

  And nothing moved. The humid, stifling afternoon went on forever. The police arrived, the crowd regrouped itself. The days passed, but there were no nights. Always the same sun, the same lukewarm river, the same people, the corpse. The clothes it was dressed in gradually dried. And the scratches on the woman’s breast (“On my breast,” she said, but while recognizing herself less and less) closed up, faded….

  The investigating magistrate questioned her in his office—and yet she was still that woman sitting on the riverbank where nothing had changed: the drowned man, the gawkers, and, from now on, this magistrate bending over the corpse, feeling the sides of the boat, going from one spectator to another and then stopping face to face with the half-undressed woman. He called this woman “Madame Ar-bélina”; she became it and, at least initially, even felt relieved to be it. It was thus easier for her to admit that she had detested Golets, that the idea of killing him had often occurred to her. And that she had in fact killed him, even killed him twice over, for first of all she had not wiped his mud-spotted forehead (and that gesture could have changed everything!); and later on, when he did not know what to do with the empty bottle and the moment of his death was approaching, she had remained absolutely passive, an accomplice as the minutes fatally drained away.

  One day she felt she could finally relate the essence of the case to this man who listened to her with such interest. Visibly the investigating magistrate was beginning to realize that he had in front of him not a certain “Madame Arbélina” but a woman who carried within her strange winter nights and terrible fissures that an ordinary object, an innocent word, could cause to erupt at any given moment. Encouraged by his understanding, she talked about the inexpressible beauty of the winter she had just lived through; about the tiny pond with the trapped fish; about the branch forever letting its hoarfrost crystals fall…. She lived again through those moments of silence and marveled to discover that her listener, too, went along with it more each day. She was certain now that she could confide her secret to him….

  So why did the stammerer suddenly appear, claiming to be Golets’s best friend? Was she confronted by him, or did she learn of his existence thanks to the more and more numerous theories about the crime that had the Caravanserai, and indeed the whole town, in turmoil? She no longer remembered. In any event this Loo-loo s evidence turned everything upside down. Struggling painfully against his diction he testified: Golets knew that before the war Prince Arbyelin had engaged in a dubious traffic in properties in Russia owned by emigres and so … The magistrate considered this new theory to be fanciful. Golets scarcely knew the prince and would never have been able to prove in what way these sales were illicit….

  It was she who saw in this testimony the destruction of everything she had built up, word by word, in her conversations with the magistrate. So Golets knew nothing about her winter nights. The threats he had made came down to that old secret of the estates sold by the prince. That was his ridiculous blackmail! While she, in her confusion, in her madness, had imagined this man lying in wait beneath their windows…. No, he had seen nothing. But in that case his death that she had so desired, the murder she had confessed to the magistrate, was totally gratuitous. She had killed him for nothing….

  Strangely, the magistrate listened to her this time with ill concealed impatience, frequently looking at his watch, acquiescing with a distracted air. And the clerk was absent. She insisted that she should be accompanied to the scene of the crime but met with a refusal, repeated her demand in categorical tones, explaining that they would be gathering crucial evidence for the truth, and finally she had her wish granted. Despite the late hour she went to the riverbank, found the exact spot where they had landed, indicated the position of their bodies on the grass, described the end of their meal…. And suddenly noticed that she was alone on the bank, that the sun had long since set and that her explanations were being addressed to no one…. In fact, they were being heard by several young ruffians who chased her, throwing lumps of clay at her and shouting obscenities.

  It was probably on that evening, on the homeward path, that she met the stammerer. He told her they did not want his testimony either. And yet he had explained to the magistrate that Golets had kept himself to himself because he had a past to hide: as an army doctor he had been captured by the reds and had served in their army for two years…. Thirty years ago.

  They were standing facing each other in a street in the lower town that was already almost in darkness. She, her hair disheveled from running, her dress smeared with the mud thrown by her pursuers. He, small, frail, his face distorted by the impossibility of speech. Both of them felt intolerably mute. Finally he was able to gain control of the air stuck in his throat and exhaled in a painful groan, “Y-you-you k-k-killed him!”

  AFTER THIS ENCOUNTER she did not go back home. It even seemed to her as if she never again saw the house tacked on to the wall of the Caravanserai. Inexplicably she had become this woman lying on a narrow, white bed in a small room where there was a smell of medicines in the air. Someone woke her, forcing her to abandon the comfortable absence of unconsciousness. She opened her eyes: she felt no surprise at seeing a man of about fifty, an inaccurate portrait, aged and tired, of her husband, and a grave, tense young man— the future portrait of her son.

  Their appearance transported her into a distant life, a forgotten city, and, above all, into another body. They seemed not to notice that she had gone and continued to address this pale, immobile woman, deprived of speech. It was her husband who did the talking. She heard him from the depths of her fog, smiled at him, understood nothing…. She had to sign a sheet of paper—the man guided her hand. When they took their leave her maternal instinct must have roused her from her unconsciousness. She heard her husband replying to her, “It’s better like this. For him …” She understood that he was going to Russia and taking their son with him. “For a month or two,” he said.

  When the door closed behind them the memory of the previous days returned, or at least that of the cold, of the fragment of glass that had gone into the vein in her wrist so easily—a fragment of ice, it seemed to her, that put an end to the pain, to the stifling afternoon on the riverbank where the drowned man lay, to the clamor of the voices talking about her, forever talking about her….

  One night she was able to get up, went out into the corridor, and, advancing in a rapid ethereal glissade, passed through the echoing, nocturnal building. Despite the darkness the rooms in it we
re full of animation. She heard cries of joy, sad conversations, secret meetings, sighs. After she turned one corner the corridor took on a new aspect; she saw old portraits on the walls in their faded gilt frames. Through a half open door waves of operatic music spilled out. A woman dressed in an ample party dress walked ahead of her. A motley, laughing group suddenly appeared in a brief shaft of light and vanished at once at the end of a passage…. She already knew what there would be in the room whose door she slowly pushed open. The wood fire, the branches covered in melted snow, the big mirror, the bed that held the imprint of a body. She undressed and molded herself into the hollow, feigned sleep. A moment later a long, endless caress enveloped her, filled her body, began to dilate it…. She interrupted it suddenly. Within an armchair pushed against the wall a heavy profile stood out in which there glinted an eye that was at once malevolent and obliging….

  It was to escape this look that she hurtled along the corridors that had once more become monotonous. Hurried footsteps, sure of their strength, rang out behind her. The only refuge, she now remembered, was in that tiny room under the rooftops, the one whose narrow window looked out over a snow-covered forest…. She could already make out the little, low door, seized the handle, shook it desperately. Expert hands, almost nonchalant in their calm brutality, stopped her, twisting her arms….

  Her own cry woke her. So it had all simply been a long dream, tortuous and painful. The winter nights, that unspeakable love, the man hounding them from his armchair… She lifted her left arm—the scar was still red. Why had she done it, when everything was only a slow parade of ghosts? For she had learned, she did not know how (from the nurses’ conversations, no doubt), that her son would not be coming back on the appointed date. Or perhaps he would not come back because she had opened her veins? Or perhaps she had wanted to die to escape the building from which there was no escape? For she was no longer in the hospital where her husband and her son had come to see her…. Or perhaps, precisely, they had gone away because they knew she was going to end up here? The cut vein, the building, their departure. Or rather: their departure; the cut wrist; the building one cannot leave. No, in yet another order: building; desire to die; their departure … How simple and insoluble it all is. And yet if I went to the window and if I saw it snowing, perhaps I could … Wait, first there was that fragment of glass, the blood, but there was no ice to stop it….