Such was the apparent explanation for what had happened to him. It seemed to me, however, that there must have been something else—the constant passive resistance of his unquestionable innate culture to that sudden fall, some internal, perhaps almost subconscious, almost organic stoicism, which he himself so stubbornly denied.
Naturally, I couldn’t help but notice that there was a woman living in his apartment, although I had never once set eyes on her, and Pavel Alexandrovich never so much as said a word about it. However, I often spotted evidence of her presence: in the ashtray lay cigarette ends bearing the imprint of encrimsoned lips, and a barely perceptible hint of perfume would linger in the room. But what ultimately could have been more natural? And so one day when I arrived—as usual, towards eight o’clock in the evening—I found not two, but three place settings at the table.
“There will be three of us for dinner this evening,” said Pavel Alexandrovich, “assuming you’ve no objection.”
“On the contrary,” I hastened to say. That very moment I heard footsteps and turned my head—I started with surprise and an unexpected feeling overwhelmed me: before me stood a young woman, in whom I instantly recognized Zina’s daughter, although she was completely transformed since that day I saw her on the street with her mother and the mousey marksman. She was elegantly attired in a navy-blue silk dress, fairly broad with ample pleats; her fair hair was combed in waves, her lips were crimson, and her eyes lightly pencilled. But still there was that same look about her face that I had spotted when I first set eyes on her and which was extremely difficult to define—something both attractive and unpleasant at the same time.
She offered me her hand and excused herself, saying that she often found it difficult to express herself in Russian. She pronounced her “r”s as the French do and continually lapsed into French during the conversation—but there she had nowhere to hide. She spoke much as people did on the streets in the poorer quarters of Paris, and I shuddered to hear these familiar intonations, that itinerant mass of sounds, wretched and somehow genuinely tragic. In any case, she remained mostly silent, occasionally transferring her gaze from Shcherbakov to me and back again, irking me somewhat with her absurd air of self-importance. She was twenty-six years old, although to look at she seemed older, as her complexion had lost the taut freshness of youth, and because there was a slight hoarseness in her voice when she lowered it. But even this held a peculiar allure…
That evening I knew almost nothing about her. I could have learnt everything from Mishka, but he was no longer among the living. I had, however, alternative sources of information, of which I later availed myself: I invited one of the Russian tramps I knew by sight to accompany me to a café, and on the third glass of wine he revealed a lot about her life to me. But this happened five or six days after our dinner for three.
Pavel Alexandrovich, as always, did not touch the wine; I took a few sips. Lida, on the other hand, drank four glasses. After dinner Pavel Alexandrovich asked me whether I liked Gypsy romances. I replied that I did.
“Then let me invite you to a little amateur concert,” he said.
We retired to the other half of the apartment, which until then I had not had the opportunity of seeing. There was a fur rug on the floor, and the walls were decorated in dark-blue wallpaper. In the drawing room there was a piano. Pavel Alexandrovich seated himself at it, lightly stroked the keys and said:
“Shall we, Lida?…”
She began sotto voce, although it was immediately clear that she was musically gifted, that she was incapable of hitting a wrong note or missing a beat. After a minute she seemed to forget about us and began singing as if she were alone in the room—alone, or in front of a full auditorium. I was familiar with almost all her repertoire, as extensive as it was, which included French chansons, Gypsy romances and many other songs of the most varied and random origins. But until this evening I had never imagined that they could sound like this. To her performance, which could in no way be criticized in terms of its artistry or its musical sincerity, she brought a sustained, grave sensitivity, so often lacking in these works. In her voice, now lingering, now brief, now deep, in all its various timbres, there was always that same unrelenting insistency, which ended up overwhelming the piano, the singing, the sequence of rhyming words, until it became simply painful. There was an inexplicable auditory wantonness about it, and as I closed my eyes the white gulf of an imaginary bed appeared before me, and in it was Lida’s naked body with the vague silhouette of a man bending over her. However, the most unpleasant thing about it all was a sort of personal reminder—a reminder that no one in her audience was or could be entirely indifferent to this suffocating sensual world. And so even then, as I listened to her singing, I knew that perhaps all it would take to draw me irresistibly towards her was one random twist of fate, and neither my instinctual contempt for her nor the chronic psychological illness that kept dragging me into that cold abstract space from which there was no escape would be able to fight off this allure. As these thoughts went about in my mind, I suddenly felt infinitely sorry for Pavel Alexandrovich; one could only assume that in that world of which she was an irresistible living reminder he had been assigned the pitiful role of her insipid companion—just as he could only be her accompanist in this auditory union of piano and voice. I paid close attention to Lida—to her red mouth, to her eyes, which occasionally took on a dreamy, misty expression, to the rhythmic swaying of her slender body, which accompanied her singing.
A ray of sunlight passes through the bolted shutter,
Again my head, like yesterday, begins to spin,
I hear your laughter and our recent conversation,
Your words ring out just like the sound of plucking strings.
Suddenly I remembered her mother, Zina, with her aged, clumsily painted face, her toothless mouth and lifeless eyes, and her rheumatic feet in evening slippers. Then I returned my gaze to Lida; her features blurred and receded into the distance, and then, feeling a sudden chill run down my spine, I momentarily glimpsed the vanished similarity between Lida and her mother. Lida, however, had far to go before she would reach this stage—I could but muse how many times over, in the course of the long years ahead, Lida’s body would move in that swaying rhythm and how someone else’s eyes would look at her with the same avid attention with which I was watching her now. By the time she had finished singing I felt drunk; I left almost immediately, alluding to a need to prepare for an exam, and only outside did I once again feel free.
A few days later I sought out a former acquaintance of mine, an old Russian marksman, someone I would have recognized even from afar, because it was impossible to mistake him for anyone else: his facial hair grew in patchy, isolated clumps. Two or three times I had seen him cleanly shaven, and only then did he begin to resemble other people. But when he was unshaven, which was most of the time, there was something almost botanical, something resembling patches of grey moss forcing their way through rock, about this strange growth on his face. I invited him into a small café, ordered him a glass of red wine and a sandwich—he ate very little, like all alcoholics—and asked him whether he knew Zina, her husband and her daughter. At first he answered evasively, but soon enough the wine set to work on him, and he told me everything he knew about what he called “that family”. I had to make a tremendous effort, however, to get him to talk about what interested me, as he would constantly digress onto a never-ending tale of some princess, a former mistress of his, whom he swore he would never forget and who had made such a wonderful career for herself in Paris, which, incidentally, was only to be expected, as she was such an exceptional woman. I couldn’t quite gather what sort of career it was exactly, all the more so as my friend said that it had taken years of patience and careful planning for the princess to achieve her aims. In the event, it all became clear: the princess, it turned out, had worked as a lady’s maid for an old woman who was almost deaf and blind, and whom she had systematically robbed. And when the old woma
n died, leaving her fortune to some distant relatives, the princess found herself in possession of a considerable sum of money. It was then, he said, that she scorned his love and retreated into herself. He was clearly looking to me for sympathy; I nodded and vaguely remarked that these things happen and that fortune is not always the privilege of the worthy. He shook my hand with drunken sincerity and at last began on Zina and Lida. He related to me their story with such details that seemingly no one could have known, yet he mentioned them as if they were plain for all to see. First, he alleged that Zina herself did not know who Lida’s father was, because she had led a rather varied life in those days. Until the age of twelve, Lida had lived in the countryside, and only then did she come to live with her mother. At fourteen, she became the lover of the mousey marksman; when Zina found out about this there was a terrible scandal, she launched herself at her the man and wounded him with a pair of scissors—“In a fit of female jealousy,” said the marksman. Later, however, everything “returned to normal”, particularly after Lida ran away from home and disappeared for four years. Precisely how she spent them, no one, not even my informant, knew. True, one of his friends, Petya Tarasov, said that he had seen Lida in Tunis, selling things along the waterfront, but it was impossible to believe everything that Petya Tarasov said, since he was a drunkard, and the marksman also spoke disapprovingly of him, averring that he was an untrustworthy man. It subsequently came out, however, that Lida had indeed lived in Tunis. Then she returned home; her appearance had given one to suspect that she had been ill for a long time.
“Did they all live on Rue Simon le Franc back then?” I enquired.
No, it turned out that they had never lived there: they had an apartment in Rue de l’Église Saint-Martin.
“An apartment?” I said in astonishment. I knew this street; it didn’t seem at all possible for there to have been any apartments there—there were only wooden huts housing Polish labourers, Arabs and Chinese, and on the corner was Bar Polski, one of the most sinister places I had ever seen. According to the description provided by my friend, however, Zina’s apartment consisted entirely of two rooms, with no running water, gas or even electricity. I felt it would be too much to ask where Zina got the money for her meagre living; I knew that such questions were inappropriate among this sort of people. But the marksman explained to me that Zina and Lida earned decent money going from one building to the next, singing, while the mousey marksman accompanied them on the accordion. This had gone on until Zina somehow managed to ruin her voice for good. The money they earned did not last either, as Zina drank and the marksman gambled at the races—and so he lost what Zina did not manage to drink. It was impossible to rely on Lida, as she stayed at home infrequently and had not long ago married a young Frenchman, whose parents had disowned him and who died soon thereafter, injecting himself with an overdose of morphine, following which Lida was arrested, but released a few days later. Then my acquaintance informed me that Lida was now living with Pasha Shcherbakov, about whom he also spoke in considerable detail, and what he said largely tallied with what I already knew. I could but marvel at how remarkably well informed this man was. He knew the life story of the mousey marksman, too, as well as the unfortunate incident with the motorcycle, which had been fabricated by Chernov, with whom he was also familiar. Regarding the mousey marksman, he said that back in Russia he had been an accountant, in Astrakhan, or maybe it was Arkhangelsk, who since the outbreak of war had served in the commissariat, and later arrived abroad with a certain amount of money, although he was soon ruined, losing most of it at Monte Carlo and the remainder at the races. He had even met Zina at a racecourse, the Auteuil, on that fateful day when he bet practically everything he had on the famous, incomparable Pharaoh III, the finest horse ever to race in France. The jockey, however, had been bribed by a jealous rival and, leading Pharaoh with “the stick”, threw the race at the finish line, so that no one would be any the wiser. As he told me this, my acquaintance showed clear signs of excitement. Moreover, he had displayed such a knowledge of racing terminology as to leave me in no doubt regarding his expertise in this area—and so I fell to thinking that the causes leading people to Rue Simon le Franc were really rather few, and almost never varied. “It was in losing my fortune that I gained Zina,” the mousey marksman was reputed to have said in the days after the incident.
“That was probably another of Chernov’s inventions,” I said without holding back.
Thereupon we parted, and my companion left, expressing the hope that everything he had said would remain between the two of us. The phrase seemed unnecessary and automatic, devoid of all meaning, if for no other reason than the fact that he had said at the beginning of our conversation that the events he described were “known to everyone”. Naturally, I did not number among the ranks of this “everyone”, and there was something illicit and perhaps even vaguely hostile about my interest in this world. In any case, so it may have appeared to him. It was understandable to a degree, and were I in his shoes, I too, most likely, would have marked the brazenness and the impertinence of the fact that a well-heeled young man should suddenly intrude in an area that was divorced from him by this series of irrevocable falls—horses, alcohol, morphine, jail, syphilis, beggary—feeble depravity and filth, illness and physical frailty, the daily prospect of death on the street, and the total absence of hope, or even the slightest illusion of attaining anything better. I think this is what he meant when he uttered that phrase, saying that our conversation would remain between the two of us. But he had no way of knowing, of course, that despite the difference in outward appearances my position was, perhaps, no less pitiful, albeit in a different way, than his.
No one, not a single person in the entire world, apart from Catherine, knew that I was afflicted by this strange mental illness, the presence of which would so invariably depress me. Particularly excruciating was the consciousness of my own inequality and other people’s superiority over me. I knew that at any moment I could lose all grip of reality and be plunged into an excruciating delirium, stripped of my defences for its duration. Luckily, I would usually sense the onset of such an attack, but sometimes it would come on all of a sudden and, terrified, I would ponder what might happen, in the library, on the street or during an exam. I did everything I could to escape it: I played a great deal of sport, every morning I would take a cold shower, and I am able to say that, physically speaking, I was in perfect health. But it was of no use. Perhaps, I thought to myself, if I were to survive an earthquake or being shipwrecked on the open sea or some other unimaginable, almost cosmic catastrophe, perhaps then there would be a turning point, a jolt that would allow me to take that first, most difficult step on the journey back to reality, which I had so vainly sought all this time. But nothing of the sort happened, nor did it seem possible that it would happen, at least in the near future.
I continued to visit Pavel Alexandrovich, and were it not for my ongoing wariness of Lida’s presence—although she seldom joined us—I might have said that it was only there that I found true spiritual repose. There was something pleasantly hypnotic about the serene comfort of the life that Pavel Alexandrovich now led, and this could be felt everywhere, beginning with the warm intonations of his voice and ending with the astonishing softness of his armchairs. Even his meals seemed to contain that very essence: nowhere before had I eaten such velvety soup, such cutlets, such crèmes au chocolat. I was so sincerely well disposed towards him that it pained me to think something bad might happen to him. This thought would probably never have tormented me, had I been able to forget about Lida. Naturally, I never allowed myself to ask Pavel Alexandrovich about this aspect of his life; he in turn never mentioned it. One evening, however, during one of my regular visits, he said to me—this was on a Friday—that the next day, on Saturday, he would be leaving Paris. He wanted to rent a gîte near Fontainebleau for the summer and planned to go there so that he would have ample time to survey the surrounding areas, to go for a stroll in th
e woods and to decide whether it was worth decamping there for the summer months.
“I haven’t been to the woods for years,” he said. “But I’ve never forgotten the feeling I would always get whenever I went there—a sense of the ephemerality of everything. You only have to look at a tree that’s a few hundred years old to grasp the fleetingness of your own existence. I’ll tell you what I think of it once I’m back. Lida will be staying on in Paris by herself. You will invite her to the cinema, won’t you?”
“Yes, certainly, with pleasure,” I said. That instant I began thinking how I would later cite a lack of time and do everything within my power to avoid this.
The following evening, however, I began to feel that it would simply be discourteous on my part to break a promise I had made to Pavel Alexandrovich. I vaguely told myself that this rationalization was as artificial as it was unfounded. Refusing to dwell on the thought, however, I telephoned Lida. She said she would be expecting me. I went to pick her up after dinner; by the time I arrived she was ready, and so we set off for the cinema.
I distinctly remember the film we saw, as well as the name of the actor starring in the lead role and his many adventures. This was all the more surprising, given that only a few minutes after the lights went down I accidentally brushed Lida’s burning arm and everything began to blur. I knew that something irreparable was happening, but I was unable to stop myself. I placed my arm around her right shoulder, which in a soft and pliant motion drew nearer to me, and from that moment on I lost all control of myself. As we exited the cinema and turned down the first street—I was unable to speak from excitement and she, too, uttered not a single word—I held her waist to me, her lips approached my mouth, I felt the touch of her body beneath her light dress and sensed something like a moist burning. Right above my head a signboard for a hotel was illuminated. We went in and followed the maid upstairs, who was for some reason wearing black stockings.
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