The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  SHE DID NOT KNOW that years were passing. Time wound slowly through the bowels of the building she was exploring, feeling her way, day after day. Not the building of the asylum, a banal, rectilinear construction where dwelled all those troubled souls, but the cavernous, changing building that had arisen in her sleep. Distilling the sounds, she learned to identify the music of a grand piano in a remote drawing room. She ran toward it, could already see the clusters of candelabra, caught the aroma of the food for a festive dinner…. But the rooms suddenly grew dark, filled with smoke and the fragments of windowpanes crunched beneath her feet. She made her way into a devastated restaurant where a man with a fur hat pulled down over his brow was playing a triumphal tune, from time to time wiping away the drunken tears from his soot-stained face with a rapid gesture…. She went out through a yard at the back, hoping to protect herself from the machine gun fire that suddenly started to riddle the wall. And found herself in a hotel room whose window opened out onto a hot southern night, onto the rustling of foliage in the humid, perfumed breeze … She wandered from one room to the next, occasionally ran into someone, embarked on a conversation with them and was never surprised if her interlocutor left her in midword, disappearing into a gallery that suddenly opened up at the end of a room….

  * * *

  Among the people who came to see her there was a woman who never vanished unexpectedly and, as if to demonstrate that she was undeniably real, offered her her bony hand, kept warm beneath an angora shawl. She was the nurse from the Caravanserai, the one who used to be in mourning for her English fiance. Strangely, she had preserved the memory of a certain Princess Arbyelina and came each month, despite a journey that took a whole day. She no longer spoke of the English pilot, her mythical beloved. No doubt, as even myths grow old, this unhappy princess was now becoming the new passion in her all-too-colorless life…. She would come on a Sunday, in rain, or in summer sunshine, making her way along the long avenue of lime trees, beneath branches sometimes studded with the first green shoots, sometimes gilded by October days. She explained to the others, gravely and sadly, that Princess Arbyelina had once been her closest friend and indeed her confidant. It was solely thanks to this new legend that Olga Arbyelina still had any existence in the land of the living….

  After the visit, the princess (the staff called her that without really knowing if it was her title or a nom de folié) would remain at the window at the end of the corridor, watching the figure disappearing down the avenue and observing the simple and repetitive life of the outside world. The drops of rain; the sky, blue or white with clouds; the trees, bare or green … Then she would move away from the window, follow a wall, and, as she turned the corner, plunge into a vast shadowy apartment where, in the midst of the sumptuous disorder of a bedroom, her gaze fell upon a great black leather armchair. Empty for the moment …

  The meetings with the nurse from the Caravanserai and the few scraps gleaned from the chatter of the housekeeping staff taught her little of what went on outside the walls. Wars; the hardships of life; the pompous mockery of the commonplace; the banality of dying. Were these things more important than the falling of leaves? More reasonable than her wanderings through that endless mansion?

  One of the housekeepers noticed that the princess filled dozens of sheets of paper with cramped handwriting and hid them in her bedside table. Her curiosity was fruitless: the notes were illegible, either written in an unknown language or, even in French, too muddled. As for the few lines that could be deciphered, they gave the details of a winters day such as occur plentifully in everybody’s lives.

  One day, without having any notion of time, she guessed that the nurse from the Caravanserai would not come. In fact she never came again. Neither beneath the autumn rain nor beneath the branches bespangled with the first leaves….

  Finally after an indistinct cycle of weeks, months, and seasons, an icy morning arrived. At the top of an old wooden staircase, with high treads and a rail polished by many hands, the door opened, behind which there could only be that tiny room with the window looking out over a snow-covered forest.

  SHE HAD TO BEND DOUBLE to creep toward that tiny window, a kind of skylight, dull with dust, covered in a tapestry of spiders’ webs. With a piece of rag drawn from a pile of old clothes she wiped the window. Outside was the same avenue of lime trees but seen from much higher up, and that day veiled in a slow blanket of snowflakes. The ground was all white as well and the world beyond the boundary wall seemed half blotted out by filaments of snow.

  She was not at all surprised to see a man appearing slowly in this swirl of white, in the middle of the avenue. She was astonished neither by his giant stature nor by the poverty of his clothes: you could see at a glance that the fabric of the long greatcoat of military style had been darned and patched. Beneath this worn garment a powerful but abnormally emaciated frame could be discerned. He was not wearing a hat, the snow had mingled with his gray hair.

  His actions did not seem outlandish to her either. He stopped, set an old traveling bag on the ground, and went to scrape up a handful of snow from the seat of a bench. Then he carefully massaged his face, washing it with the ball of ice that was melting in his hands. Took out a handkerchief, wiped his brow, his cheeks. Picked up the bag and walked toward the entrance of the building.

  She made no movement, only let her gaze travel around her, like one who wakes up in a strange place and tries to identify it. It was no longer a secret refuge lost in the labyrinths of that mansion of long ago but simply the top of the building, a narrow loft where she had acquired the habit of coming, prevented at first by the staff, who feared a suicide, then ignored by them. Broken chairs, old newspapers, that pile of yellowed paper from which she extracted the pages for her notes….

  Already a woman’s voice was repeatedly calling her name from the bottom of the staircase….

  She knew in advance what the man who had just washed his face with a fistful of snow was going to tell her. He would begin talking at once, as he walked down the avenue, then sitting on the seat in a railway carriage, in a hotel room, in a café, later in some ephemeral dwelling that, for a time, would give them the illusion of a home of their own…. He would go on talking during all the years that were left to them to live. And the feeling that she knew it all as soon as he started speaking would never leave her. She would listen to him, weep, signal to him to be silent when the grief was unbearable, but all, absolutely all would already be known to her, endured a thousand times in the course of her nocturnal wanderings along the deceptive corridors of life.

  She would know, she knew already, that the émigrés, the moment they returned to Russia, had been stripped of their luggage, screened, loaded into long boxcars. And that it was on the day of the first snowstorm that they had separated father and son. The adults had continued their journey farther eastward, crossed the Urals, traveled up beyond the Arctic Circle as far as the camps of the far North. Young people who had not reached the age of sixteen were considered still capable of purging their “bourgeois past” in reeducation centers. It was at the moment of separation that the father, after a solitary and futile rebellion, had almost died under the heavy rifle butts of the guards….

  She would also learn that Li had followed the same route to the North. And that her painted panels had been thrown into the snow behind the railroad station where they were sorting out the prisoners.

  For a while the vivid colors of these panoramas were to be seen amid the frozen wastes: a pianist in tails accompanying a monumental prima donna; two vacationers beneath a tropical sun…. But little by little the local inhabitants had carried these panels away and burnt them during the great frosts at the end of the winter.

  She understood that not knowing what had befallen her son was for her the only chance of believing that he was still alive. And the more improbable this hope was, the more confident she became. He was somewhere beneath the sky; he saw the trees, the light, heard the wind….

  One day
she finally decided to speak in her turn. She knew that for the man to understand her she must tell everything in a few brief words and speak no more. And then speak again, until her words became fire, darkness, sky … Until that other life, the one they had so clumsily sought together, and that she had so briefly known, was finally made manifest to them in the fragile eternity of human language.

  HE OPENS THE GATE at the moment when the aureole of the streetlamps is beginning to waver and is extinguished. For some moments the darkness seems to have returned. I look back: the door to the keeper’s lodge has been left open; and I can see the lamp that lit up his face all through the night. Our two chairs. Our cups on the table. And all about the little house dark tree trunks, the upright stones of monuments, tombs, crosses …

  He stays beside me for a moment between the two halves of the gate. Then shakes my hand, moves away, and soon disappears among the trees.