I would ask her whether she remembered the Kreisler concert. I would ask her whether she still remembered that warm April night as we walked through the streets of Paris and she told me, switching from English to French and from French back to English, about Melbourne, where she was born and raised, about Australia, about her first girlish love—a tenor in the opera, who before long had married a rich American—about the ships that came into dock, about the thunder of the anchor chains, about the golden-red lustre of the copper on the cruisers and torpedo boats in the sunlight. I would ask her whether she had forgotten the words she spoke to me back then. I would ask her whether she remembered the promise she made. I could hear every intonation in her voice:
“No matter where you are and when it happens, never forget: as soon as you feel strong enough, as soon as the clarity of your mind is no longer obscured, let me know. I’ll drop everything and come to you.”
I would tell her that I had thought of these words in prison, during those first days of my incarceration, when I still had no idea whether I would ever see freedom again.
I would tell her that her face had been distorted and unrecognizable as she had told me that she was with child, that it meant the end for her, that she could not allow it to happen, that there would be time later, that she was only twenty years old, with her whole life ahead of her. This, I am sure, she will never forget: the clinic walls daubed in white oil paint, the little female doctor of indeterminate nationality, her shifting eyes, the agonizing operation that was carried out without anaesthetic and the jolting of the taxi in which I had taken her home to the hotel room, her fainting fits during the journey and how I carried her from the taxi to her bed, how she had put her arms around my neck and how the vein at the back of her knee had quivered and pulsated. For two months after this I deprived myself of breakfast and lunch, living solely on bread and milk, while I paid off my debts to friends, as she and I had both lacked the money for the operation. That very evening, on the ground floor of the building opposite her hotel, there had been a wedding reception for the concierge’s daughter, who had married some pimply youth in a dark suit, a junior clerk at a funeral parlour. The windows were wide open, and we could see a table decked with a wedding feast, the wooden face of the bride, frozen in an expression of joy, and the deep-crimson pimples of the bridegroom under the electric light. A motley group of relatives was sitting around the table, at times launching in unison into some offensively off-key musical trash. Their voices, however, grew ever more hoarse, diminishing and eventually dying away. Catherine fell asleep, and I spent the whole night sitting in an armchair at her bedside. In the morning, when she opened her eyes and saw me, she said:
“It’s over now, it doesn’t matter any more. You look very funny when you haven’t shaved.”
Later that day, as I succumbed to that strange illness I was powerless to resist, I told her about it and she looked at me, eyes wide with disbelief. I said that I had no right to tie her down with any sense of obligation, that I was ill and that if things had been different…
After that, whenever my mind journeyed back to her, I would force myself to think about something else. She moved out of the Latin Quarter, but I knew her new address: she was living on Rue de Courcelles, in a flat that belonged to an aunt of hers, who would come and go periodically but all the while kept the apartment on in perpetuity. Many times I had accompanied Catherine there, and many times I had waited for her in the street below.
I knew nothing of her new life, what she thought about and whether she recalled as well as I did that period of our existence. I had no idea whether her voice would tremble as she replied to my first words after all this time; I did not even know whether she would still be that same woman she had been at the Kreisler concert and in her hotel room—or whether in all that time she had spared a single thought for me. She would be twenty-three now, and of course it was unlikely that she had been awaiting my possible return all this time. Her promise belonged just as much to the past as did the life she had led three years ago, and I had no right to blame her if it were to turn out that she had been unable to keep it. This was obvious from the moment it crossed my mind. Yet it did not stop me, and the urge to make this desperate attempt to return to Catherine was much too overpowering to be hampered by such considerations. It seemed as if nothing could ever replace the great many feelings that welled within me whenever I thought about her or sensed her presence next to me. I essentially had nothing with which to counter this chaotic world, for everything I knew seemed limp and unpersuasive, or else incredibly distant, yet it was in this world that her existence came to me, like a unique embodiment of a mirage. Even her appearance reminded me occasionally, particularly in the evening or at dusk, of an ethereal spectre walking by my side. The light shone through her blonde hair, she had a pale face and pale lips, lustreless deep-blue eyes and the body of a fifteen-year-old girl. Her life, however, which so occupied my imagination, would outgrow this spectre and appear there, where everything seemed foreign and hostile to me.
Now, having acquired this double freedom—that of the body, leaving prison, and that of the soul, because the shock of it seemed to have cured me, perhaps once and for all—I felt surrounded by emptiness, and no one apart from Catherine seemed able to shelter me from this. I sought sanctuary in her; solitude and despair had made me weary, and I thought that now, for some reason at this very moment, I had earned the right to a different life. And so, as I walked home I resolved to go to Rue de Courcelles the very next day.
By ten o’clock the following morning I was there. I liked this part of Paris—the quiet streets and the tall dark buildings with their large windows, behind which trickled the steady flow of a measured life, where people thought in terms of incomes and shares in stocks, of suitors and inheritances; this was the stubborn nineteenth century, archaic and naive, whose slow death had already been dragging on for decades. In the building where Catherine’s aunt lived there was an ancient lift operated by belts, and as I ascended to the third floor there was a slight hint of smoke, and I even had the impression that I saw a few sparks flying about in the smoke itself. I rang the bell; a plump woman with grey hair opened the door to me and asked what I wanted. Her French was fluent, although she spoke with an accent. I said that I had come to see Catherine.
“Catherine?” she repeated. “Catherine left for Australia a year ago.”
“Ah yes, Australia…” I said automatically.
“She left just after her wedding.”
“She got married?”
My voice must have betrayed a note of informality, although it was quite out of place in the presence of this woman whom I had never before met, for she said:
“Do come in and take a seat. I’m sorry, your name is…”
I introduced myself.
“Yes, yes. Catherine told me about you. Had you come a year ago you would have found her unattached.”
“Yes, I understand,” I said. “Alas, I’ve come a year too late.”
She had a most peculiar and engaging smile—and I felt as if I had known this elderly woman for a long time. She looked me straight in the eyes and asked:
“Are you the lunatic?”
“Yes,” I said, lost in my own thoughts. “That is to say, not quite. I’m not mad…”
“Forgive me,” she said. “I’m a good deal older than you and, you know, I have a suspicion that you just dreamt the whole thing up. It’s all because you read too much, eat too little and spare hardly any thought for the most important thing at your age: love.”
I gathered from this that Catherine had told her a lot about me. I replied:
“I don’t wish to appear rude, but that isn’t a very scientific diagnosis.”
“It may not be scientific, but I’m convinced of it nonetheless.”
I momentarily fell silent. Then I asked:
“Whom did she marry?”
“An English painter. He painted this portrait,” she said, raising her eyes
to the wall. “His first wife, I believe.”
The painting showed an improbable woman with a chocolate-box sort of beauty, wearing a red velvet dress; it looked like a bad oleograph. How had Catherine failed to see this?
I stood up and began to make my exit. She offered me her hand and asked me to leave my address, just in case.
The staircase was broad, with a heavy carpet laid over it; it looked nothing like the one in Catherine’s hotel in the Latin Quarter. Yet all I could think of was this silent descent from the world she had once inhabited, back into the spectral abyss I had so struggled to escape.
* * *
Days, weeks and months went by. I left the Latin Quarter some while ago; throughout the streets of Paris, the trees had turned green, blossomed and then been covered in the dust of summer; then they shed their leaves and awaited the arrival of October. Amar was executed at dawn one cold morning. I read about it in the papers, where it was reported that he had downed a glass of rum and smoked a cigarette before mounting the scaffold. Once there he surveyed the people around him.
“Du courage!”¶¶¶ his advocate had said to him. Amar had wanted to say something, but couldn’t get it out; only at the last second, during that briefest of moments while he still theoretically continued to exist, had he cried out in a high-pitched voice: “Pitié!”|||||| It was the word that he had been searching for all this time, the word he had probably wanted to say for some while. But of course it was now devoid of all meaning—just as any other word would have been. “C’est ainsi qu’il a payé sa dette à la société.”**** Thus ended the article on his execution. And for the last time I thought about what society had given him: a fortuitous birth into poverty and drunkenness, a hungry childhood, work in the slaughterhouses, tuberculosis, the withered bodies of several prostitutes, then Lida and the wretched temptation of wealth, then a murder so inextricably linked to the terrible poverty of his own imagination, and then, finally, after months of imprisonment, a cold breeze one autumn morning, the walkway to the guillotine, a little rum and one last cigarette before dying. Such as he was, he would have been incapable of living any other life, and this life had now reached its logical conclusion. Had he not committed the murder he would have died of consumption, and on this point his advocate, naturally, had been correct. One thing was clear: that there was no longer any room for him in this world, as if the huge expanse of the Earth’s surface had suddenly closed in on him.
I read about his execution in the morning papers the following day. For some time now I had been living in Rue Molitor, in the apartment where Pavel Alexandrovich had been killed, the deeds to which, as it became clear when putting his affairs in order, he had bought shortly before his death. I had rearranged the furniture and replaced the wallpaper and the rugs; where the piano previously stood there was now a large radio set; I had also got rid of the writing desk and replaced it with another, much bigger, one with sliding drawers. Only the armchair and the bookshelves remained exactly as they were before, in the very same spots. I had carefully examined the entire library at leisure and found it to be comprised almost exclusively of the classics—in this sense Pavel Alexandrovich had been a man of his time, and there were very few books by contemporary authors. What seemed even more astonishing to me was that he had almost no personal documents, aside from several letters sent to him many years ago bearing the address of a hotel on Rue de Buci, where he must have been living in those days. One letter was written in a woman’s hand, and when I saw it, my eyes were immediately drawn to the words: “You haven’t forgotten, I hope, those moments…” I felt pained and uncomfortable, so I put the letter away without reading it. Then there was the single letter he received from his brother, the one who had drowned, leaving to Pavel Alexandrovich his entire fortune; of this one I read every word. It was, however, very brief and almost unprecedented in its bluntness. It ended thus:
“Thank God you know me well and know that I have always preferred to speak the truth than to linger on sentimental nonsense. That you are my brother is an accident of birth, for which I am by no means responsible. The life you have led or are leading is of no interest to me; that is your own affair. I do not know you, nor do I wish to. In the coming days I shall be leaving here for another country, so please do not take it upon yourself to search for me or to write to me. I wish you every kindness, but you must not expect anything of me. That much you already know, I am certain.”
These words, the idiotic severity of which seemed utterly inconceivable, were followed by the unexpected signature: “Your loving brother Nikolai”. This man had a peculiar understanding of certain words, and I wondered whether he had recollected anyone’s love as it dawned on him that he was drowning and that everything was at an end.
There were no photographs, no documents other than a passport issued in Constantinople in 191—, containing a French visa, and a Parisian carte d’identité inscribed with the words: bachelor, no occupation. I learnt that Pavel Alexandrovich had been born in Smolensk, but the intervening years between the date of his birth and the date stamped in his passport were a total blank—no papers, no photographs, no mention at all of what he had been doing or where he had been. Then came a second interval, also very lengthy—his whole life in Paris, equally as empty and unknown as the one that had preceded it—for, as the Gentleman had told me, Pavel Alexandrovich had turned up on Rue Simon le Franc only two years before I first met him in the Jardin du Luxembourg. And so I mused on the fact that I knew practically nothing about the man to whom fate had bound me in such a strange and unexpected manner; those images fixed in my memory—first the picturesque beggar, then the dapper, self-assured elderly man—began to seem to me at times almost arbitrary, like the false, phantom shadows of the world that had torn my own life in half, the world I was now trying to forget. Ever since the day I stepped out of that prison, not once had I sensed its vague approach; it was as if it had vanished.
However, as it so happened I was not the only one to wonder about Pavel Alexandrovich’s fate. One day, completely by chance, I ran into the Gentleman, who extended his dark hand with its blackened nails and shook my own for such for a long time, looking at me so expressly that I had no alternative but to invite him to a café. This was near Boulevard Saint-Michel. I asked him what he wanted to drink, and he replied that he never drank anything other than red wine. He then began telling me how the course of my life reminded him, albeit in a different way, of the princess’s, who naturally… But there I stopped him, and he proceeded to talk about Shcherbakov. It was astonishing how the latter’s tragic demise inspired in the Gentleman a sort of posthumous veneration of his memory, as he no longer referred to him as “Pashka Shcherbakov” but rather “the late Pavel Alexandrovich”. On that day he seemed drawn for some reason to reflecting on a number of abstract themes.
“Now see here,” he said. “What a strange affair all this has been: Pavel Alexandrovich dies, and you receive the inheritance. But who are you? I’ve the greatest respect for you, but you’re still a complete nobody who’s turned up from God only knows where.”
“Yes, that’s quite true.”
“But,” he went on, “where did the late Pavel Alexandrovich get his fortune before that? From his late brother who drowned in the sea. To think, what a tragedy it must have been for him.”
“Yes, I know.”
“No, no. You see, the point is this: it wouldn’t have mattered if one of us had drowned.”
“Well, I don’t know about that…”
“No, I mean that drowning in itself is no great pity. If you drown, you drown, and that’s that. But what does the brother think of as he drowns? My God, he thinks, all that money! Yet he drowns all the same. Very well, so be it. But where did he get that fortune of his? From his parents, no doubt. And whatever became of them? No one remembers their deaths. So just look how it all turns out: some people who died long ago once had a fortune, which was inherited by their eldest son—he drowned. It then passed to their youngest�
��he was murdered. Correct? And so the deceased parents’ money goes to you—and when they died you probably hadn’t even been born. That, as they say, is the face of capitalism for you.”
“Are you against the capitalist system?”
“Who? Me?” he exclaimed. “Me? Kostya Voronov? I defended it with a gun in my hands. The dispatch read: ‘Distinguished himself through unflinching bravery, setting an example to his commanding officers and subordinates alike…’ That’s how I fought for capitalism. And if the need arises again, then again I’ll go into battle, you may rest assured. No, I meant only that it was you who got the inheritance. By His grace it fell to you, though more’s the pity it wasn’t to me.”
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