“I have no interest in blackmail,” said Lyudmila impatiently. “I know that your wife is my husband’s mistress, that he’s gone away with her—”
“Forgive me for interrupting you,” said Sergey Sergeyevich. “I would suggest that in certain circumstances it’s better to avoid such precise definitions.”
“I’m unaccustomed to such farces. If the interests of your wife mean anything to you, it’s your duty to show some—”
“You see,” Sergey Sergeyevich went on, unable to hold back a smile, “it’s possible, of course, that I’m under some misapprehension, but I believe I know my own duties well enough.”
“Are you listening to me or not?” screamed Lyudmila.
“No, I see no need.”
“In that case,” said Lyudmila abruptly, getting up, “you’ll be hearing from me.”
“What, again?” said Sergey Sergeyevich. “It seems as though I’ve heard quite enough from you already.”
Then he added in a thoughtful voice:
“Incidentally, I had expected you to be less amateurish.”
Lyudmila, who had been about to get out of the chair, suddenly slumped back into it, dropping her handbag, and, covering her face with her hands, began to cry. Her shoulders shook with every sob.
“In French they call this les grands moyens,”* said Sergey Sergeyevich. “But the quickness of your change in tactics is commendable.”
“You’re a monster,” said Lyudmila in a voice choked with tears. “You don’t care that tomorrow I might have to go hungry.”
“I very much like this ‘might’.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“Listen, Lyudmila Nikolayevna,” Sergey Sergeyevich said patiently. “I wouldn’t want you to persist in your delusions on my account. I know everything about you and I know perfectly well on what money you subsist. Don’t misunderstand me.”
“You know everything?” said Lyudmila slowly, raising her eyes to him. “And you don’t pity me?”
It was said with such sincerity, in a voice so far removed from any artifice or farce that Sergey Sergeyevich was transported.
“Bravo,” he said. “Ça, c’est réussi, mes hommages, madame.”†
Lyudmila’s face remained motionless; only in her eyes did there flash a fugitive, almost sincere smile. Sergey Sergeyevich proceeded to dash off a cheque. Lyudmila placed it in her handbag without looking at the sum and said in a faltering voice: “Forgive me, Sergey Sergeyevich. Goodbye.” Sergey Sergeyevich bowed deeply—and she left.
When Sletov entered the study, Sergey Sergeyevich said to him:
“You were right, Fedya, it was a woman of intent.”
“Young, old, beautiful, ugly?”
“Middle-aged, Fedya, not very beautiful, but interesting in any case and with a sharply expressed personality.”
“Specifically?”
“A wh——,” said Sergey Sergeyevich with his joyful smile. “Anyhow, tell me about Lili; I don’t know a thing about her. Is she blonde?”
“Blonde—such a delicate shade that—”
“Yes, I know. Blue eyes?”
“Dark blue, Seryozha.”
“Her mouth just a fraction on the large side, you say?”
“Maybe.”
“Something childlike about her, the rest notwithstanding?”
“Yes, it’s astonishing.”
“Calls you ‘my little boy’?”
“She does, Seryozha.”
“Yes, altogether the same sort of woman as always.”
“It astonishes me, Seryozha,” said Sletov, “how you, with your indisputable intellect, can think that there is a definitive type of woman, among the thousands of them, and that they are all the same, right down to the expressions they use, the size of their mouths and colour of their eyes. Believe me, it isn’t so; there’s something unique in every one of them.”
“I should say: something irreparable.”
“Very well, irreparable. But when it comes to it, and you seize upon that one irreparable trait of hers, when she is, so to speak, defenceless before you, like a child, you’ll see—it will make you cry sometimes.”
“I do understand,” said Sergey Sergeyevich, “but your tears won’t suffice. All the same, tell me the what, where and why of it. Although, I’m aware of the why.”
Sergey Sergeyevich spoke thus—candidly, without pretence or assuming any role—with only very few people. Sletov was one of these, because Sergey Sergeyevich highly valued his astonishing moral purity and his true sense of friendship. Moreover, Sletov’s life, in which Sergey Sergeyevich could not help taking a close part, consisted in a sequence of tragedies, always of the same nature, for which Sergey Sergeyevich would always have to pay—in the literal sense of the word—since Sletov had been living out of his pockets for many years already. These tragedies would involve Sletov falling in love with some woman—in which connection he would find no obstacle too great an impediment to their union; he would achieve his aims, rent an apartment, set himself up for good and live happily for a certain time, the average duration of which was calculated by Sergey Sergeyevich to be approximately six months. Then a drama would stage itself: either Sletov’s sweetheart would prove untrue to him, or Sletov himself would fall in love with another woman. There would be an eruption, sometimes involving the threat of a revolver; then would come the parting, and later everything would begin afresh, with a new beloved. In brief, he resembled Olga Alexandrovna in both his nature and his inexhaustible belief in love with a capital “L”. Love would swallow up all his plans and all his time, to the point where there could be no possible room for anything else.
By training Sletov was an expert in Russian legal practice, but in France, much as he would have liked, he was unable to find work in that field. One day Sergey Sergeyevich, in response to Sletov’s request that he set him up somewhere, sent him to the provinces—to the suburbs of Marseilles—to manage the accounting department in one of his enterprises. Some time thereafter, however, trouble broke out in the office, and when Sergey Sergeyevich went there to investigate the matter, he found that the cause of all this was an affair Sletov had been carrying on with the director’s wife. The director was a shy, young and very sensible man, who had recently married and had been living in perfect bliss until Sletov’s arrival. Sletov had fallen in love with his wife; she had responded with reciprocal passion, and the three of them had held open discussions, accompanied by Sletov’s tirades about free will and the director’s wife’s allusions to fundamental sexual theories about life; these theories, according to her, served as a unique, all-defining principle, something like the “Alpha and Omega” of the Gospels. There was no way out of the situation, although Sletov, foaming at the mouth, tried to convince her to leave her husband for him; things were further complicated by the fact that she was three months pregnant. Consequently, the director—who had become exceedingly attached to Sletov and harboured no ill feeling towards him, although he did continue to love his wife, who, with tears in her eyes, would tell him that she loved him, too, and would not for all the world consent to a divorce—took heavily to drink, and would turn up to work already drunk; figures and letters swam before his bleary eyes with a terrible absence of meaning and utterly incapable of holding his interest. He would sometimes cry in his office, no longer ashamed in the presence of strangers. Throughout all this, Sletov, together with the director’s wife, would read Hamsun aloud and tell her about his life.
Sergey Sergeyevich patiently and benevolently heard out the confessions of each of the three interested parties; his face did not flinch when the director’s wife spoke to him of the sublimation of sexual desire; he sympathized with her, telling her that he quite understood, that he did not number among those narrow-minded individuals who suppose that such maximally sublimated conflicts could be resolved immediately by the crudest, most primitive methods. He promised to do everything within his power, and that very evening he whisked Sletov off to Paris, where t
he latter made ready to shoot himself or throw himself under a train in the Métro.
“It isn’t worth it, Fedya,” Sergey Sergeyevich said to him. “I’m sure you will find something else unique and you’ll see that I was right.”
This was not difficult to envisage; and indeed, two weeks later, Sletov met a most elegant lady, the owner of a considerable fortune that was of a completely unexpected (as far as Sletov was concerned) mould: four major funeral parlours, to be precise. In recounting this to Sergey Sergeyevich, Sletov spoke of the unadulterated, mad (as he put it) thirst for life that this young woman had. “She’s surrounded by mourning,” he said, “but she has only one wish: to live, to live! Do you hear?”
He came close to marrying her, disappearing for several months—and the only thing that prevented him was her infidelity, upon discovering which he returned to Sergey Sergeyevich, as usual, with no money to pay the taxi driver, unshaven, dishevelled and exhausted.
“What happened, Fedya?” Sergey Sergeyevich asked him. “Really, you look deathly pale. Where have you come from?”
Despite all this, the man had never known the meaning of debauchery or a love of convenience. After each of his affairs, he seemed to rise anew, keeping only vague, fleeting memories of what had gone before it. Each time he would fall madly in love, and each time he would be prepared to sacrifice anything for it. He had often absconded with his lovers, and he knew Europe rather well; he spoke several languages poorly and assuredly in equal measure, and had even taught himself a few tender terms of endearment in Hungarian and Dutch, which was to say nothing of his “intimate vocabulary”, as he himself called it in all earnestness, of Yiddish, Armenian and Georgian. In spite of his lined, jaundiced face, the perpetual neglect of his attire, the incipient bald patch and the complete physical incongruity between him and the model of a seducer, he enjoyed great success among women, whom he infected with his ardour and the absence of any doubt whatsoever concerning the happiness that awaited them. Neither his age nor his long, woeful, piteous experience seemed to have the slightest effect on him. Anything that did not directly concern the principal matter in his life, namely love, simply escaped his notice; he lived as though eternally shrouded by a fog, in which, slowly gliding and steadily vanishing, floated all these many Lilis, directors’ wives and owners of funeral parlours.
“It will be interesting to see what happens when you come to your senses,” said Sergey Sergeyevich thoughtfully. “Or can you really stand to go on like this until the day you die?”
“Death is one of the aspects of love,” said Sletov. “You see, Seryozha, that well-known moment in one’s intimacy with a woman is a perfect reflection of death. We are resurrected only to die again. This, of course, is a commonplace truth, but it is true nonetheless, there’s no denying it.”
“And you never grow tired of this?” Sergey Sergeyevich asked with curiosity.
“I see, Seryozha, that you do not know what love is.”
“There is a cruel contradiction here,” said Sergey Sergeyevich. “Just think about it, Fedya. What is value? The value of a feeling in particular. How are we to define it? By its exclusivity, by its singularity, if you will. The ramifications of this extend in all directions, into every nook and cranny of one’s private life. But you have no place left for it in yours.”
“Everything is singular, everything is unique, Seryozha.”
“But you remain just the same each time.”
“No,” said Sletov seriously. “I am continually reborn.”
“You know, Fedya, you ought to be a raconteur.”
However, Sletov never backed down and never abandoned his beliefs. At times he would succumb to Sergey Sergeyevich’s influence: the latter’s ever-present calm assuredness that the question needed to be resolved one way, and not another, could not but impress Sletov. Yet he would refuse to move an inch when it came to his theoretical framework. Or, rather, theories did not exist for him as such; they were useful only insofar as they could, with a greater or lesser persuasive facility, express or complement his own private feelings. Any betrayal was always a catastrophe as far as he was concerned; it would seem as though it were happening to him for the first time in his life. He held an almost unconscious deep conviction that it was none other than he who had been the lifelong object of Lili’s or any other woman’s dreams; and so now, when her dreams had come true, she stood only to betray him if she found someone better than him—but this seemed impossible. This was not how he thought; rather, these thoughts never took on such a form in his mind, but it was how he felt, without even realizing it himself—unmerited insult, sheer gross injustice, a monstrous, unimaginable misapprehension. He was never able to comprehend the prospect of betrayal, and for that reason he suffered truly and greatly every time it happened. He told Sergey Sergeyevich about Lili, an extravagant American woman, even astonishing to a certain degree for her rare transparency and complete lack of inner thoughts or human emotion; she was the perfect blonde, with toned arms and legs, beautiful flawless skin, a healthy appetite and a body whose physiological functions were of the most enviable propriety; however, in all her life she had read barely a dozen books, which, more to the point, she had entirely forgotten. No moral questions played, or indeed could play, any role in her life. Sletov thought of her as a child, one that does not yet understand all the wonders of its budding soul—and by an unfortunate coincidence, in the love letter that left no doubt as to her betrayal, written in English, there was also a mention of a budding soul.
They dined together; Sletov drank five glasses of wine, then cried long and bitterly.
“Have you no shame, Fedya?” Sergey Sergeyevich said to him.
“No. No, I don’t. There’s iron where your heart ought to be; you’ll never understand.”
Sergey Sergeyevich’s eyes suddenly turned pensive, and then he uttered a phrase that shocked Sletov somewhat, so much so that he lifted his head and looked intently at Sergey Sergeyevich.
“Has it never occurred to you, Fedya, that that may not be true?”
Sletov drooped his head, and when he raised it, Sergey Sergeyevich’s face already displayed that old, long-familiar, joyous smile.
“Chaliapin is giving a concert tonight,” said he. “It’s time to get ready. Let’s go, Fyodor Borisovich.”
* Overacting.
† Well played. My congratulations, Madame.
LOLA AÎNÉE RETURNED HOME at around two o’clock in the morning, following an obligatory evening at the Champs-Élysées, which had been put on by a famous Parisian set designer, and which she would not have attended, had she not planned later to call on his services in staging the projected revue in her projected music hall. She had smiled dazzlingly and joked throughout the whole evening, although she drank very little, knowing from experience that if she were to drink a lot, she would, without fail, be taken ill. She left in a taxi, for ever since her recent marriage she had been largely deprived of the use of her own motor car: at the insistence of her husband, the driver had been dismissed, and, in place of her comfortable old Delage, a Bugatti had been acquired, which her husband drove. By and large, the motor was always at his disposal, while Lola was now forced to rely almost exclusively on taxis. Moreover, the Bugatti was forever in the garage for repairs: either because of a routine crash with another vehicle, or because the racing-model Bugatti was unsuited to the relatively slow city traffic and the spark plugs in its engine would get covered in oil. All this cost an awful lot of money, and it was one of the reasons that Lola’s principal dream was now that of the death of her husband. She knew not how to rid herself of him, and she feared him greatly, for when she first mentioned a divorce to him, he suddenly grew pale and said that if she were to start proceedings he would murder her. Lola feared death terribly and took great fright at this threat. She knew that he was capable of it; recently, as a result of the most savage inebriation, his reason had manifestly begun to leave him. She dreamt that he would be dashed to pieces, that the Bug
atti would be run over by a lorry or a train at a crossing. Yet an extraordinary and peculiar run of good luck saw that he escaped almost weekly catastrophes unharmed, which seemed particularly astonishing, since he was forever drunk at the wheel.
He was thirty years of age, starting to plump out, and had thinning fair hair; he had lived a quiet life, full of hardship, until he met Lola. He had worked for an insurance company, earning very little money, and lived in a miserable pension near the Grands Boulevards. Everything had begun with several gushing letters that he wrote to Lola—about her beauty, about her talent, about the fact that these letters had no selfish aim, since he dared not even hope for an acquaintance with her. The only thing he wanted was for Lola to know that somewhere in the world there was a heart beating just for her. Lola had always been painfully susceptible to any praise of her talent and beauty, although one might have been given to suppose that she ought to know the value of such words. It ended with their meeting, and, on that very first night, she became his lover. She then decided to marry him and thus rest safely in the knowledge that there was a loving man who owed her everything and would feel something of an inextinguishable sense of gratitude towards her. She had borrowed this idea from the third-rate literature she very occasionally read. And so she married.
Nothing at all turned out as she had expected. For a start, he very soon developed a physical revulsion towards her. Whenever she would try to kiss him on the lips, he would always turn away, since he could not bear the constant foul smell emanating from her, which could be ascribed to her slow, ill-functioning stomach. She soon found herself in possession of other, wholly irrefutable evidence of this revulsion. It also turned out that he, this quiet and respectable Pierre, drank and, being drunk, would begin speaking in a common vernacular, which contained nothing shocking to Lola’s ears, since this was her own native tongue, too; however, vulgarities that she had never heard from anyone would pass his lips. Furthermore, he had a string of mistresses, some of whom he brought back with him at night to the apartment, and Lola, through the light sleep of an old woman, would hear their voices, squeals and all the rest. He also allowed himself to make the most unflattering remarks in the presence of the maid, which was entirely improper.
The Flight Page 6
