The Flight

by Gaito Gazdanov

  Lyudmila felt so marvellous now that little by little she was ridding herself entirely of her perpetual state of suspicion, of the fear of saying or doing the wrong thing—a single false move, a single misplaced remark… Not only did she fill her role, but it began to seem as though she had never lived otherwise, and that things had always been thus. She even wept several times without its having been prompted by so much as a request to defer a note of credit or the tale of the imaginary death of her imaginary daughter—she wept from sheer delight and from the fact that, at long last, her toilsome labours had met with deserved success. MacFarlane would call her “my little girl” and stroke her head. Every provision had been made, everything had been decided: three months later Lyudmila would obtain her divorce, by which time MacFarlane would already be in England, and they would be separated for a fortnight—only for a fortnight—and then Lyudmila, with the divorce in the bag, would go to the aerodrome at le Bourget, board an aeroplane and arrive in London two hours later, and the following day they would be married. Lyudmila was thoroughly happy.

  LYUDMILA’S LETTER, which was perfectly unexpected and ostensibly ought to have cut straight to the point, did not bring Arkady Alexandrovich, however, the joy and relief that one might have expected. This was on account of the fact that through Arkady Alexandrovich’s own actions Lyudmila had now shattered the image of his wife that he had spent so long constructing and cultivating for Olga Alexandrovna, an image that showed Lyudmila to be in no state to tolerate any idea of a definitive separation from her husband—so strong yet submissive was the quiet love she bore for him. It was, of course, possible that Lyudmila had sent this letter in the midst of a severe nervous attack, which, perhaps, betokened madness or suicide. However, for all that Arkady Alexandrovich knew well the theoretical improbability of such a supposition, it would have meant further the necessity of going to Paris to try to save her—this woman was, after all, willing to sacrifice everything for him, and if until now she had not done so, then it was only on account of his magnanimity. Moreover, Arkady Alexandrovich found the prospect of this journey thoroughly disagreeable. He spent some time mulling over the variety of ways in which he could explain Lyudmila’s letter to Olga Alexandrovna, and so he decided to present it as an attempt by Lyudmila thus to cause something of an explosion—a mark of desperation, naturally, and, it could be said, a base act, although to a certain degree an understandable one. In actual fact, Arkady Alexandrovich could imagine rather accurately what had occasioned this letter from Lyudmila, who had never concealed from him that if she were to find a worthy man, as she put it, she would be especially curious to see under which bridge her former husband would end up. Arkady Alexandrovich even felt a certain slight and fleeting alarm—he was like a man who, while a train is in motion, crosses from one carriage to the next, over two platforms separated by half a step’s distance, while beneath the quick air whistles, the passing rails flash and the gravel inaudibly scatters in all directions. However, when Olga Alexandrovna asked, “Aren’t you going to tell me, Arkasha, whom your letter is from?”, he immediately went to pieces and handed it to her, albeit apprehending that in so doing he was acting foolishly. Yet Olga Alexandrovna’s reaction turned out to be entirely different from what he had expected; in her life, matters of an analytical and explanatory order played a role only when their outcome would grant her pleasure. For example: so-and-so was melancholic. What explained his melancholy? He was in love with Olga Alexandrovna. Wherever the explanation bore the slightest hint of abstraction or unpleasantness, Olga Alexandrovna could not kindle even the most abstract interest in it. She read the letter, handed it back to Arkady Alexandrovich and said:

  “Nunc dimittis… Thank God. It’s all for the best.”

  “Yes,” said Arkady Alexandrovich pensively. “Maybe it is for the best. Sometimes it seems to me… that it’s perhaps better not to overanalyse positive turns of event. Analysis is like an alkali: a poisonous, corroding spot on the wonderful tapestry of life.”

  “You ought to write about that, you know. It’s really very good.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not so sure about it. The fact of the matter is that prose, owing to its elementary laws, ought not to indulge in excessive metaphor.”

  “But it’s so beautiful and true, Arkasha.”

  “It’s a curious thing,” continued Arkady Alexandrovich with the same pensive air, “that certain seemingly obvious hypotheses don’t hold up in practice. How should I put it? They need to be transformed, often almost irrationally, in order to be reborn, like a phoenix from the ashes. Incidentally, I haven’t read to you what I wrote yesterday. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  Arkady Alexandrovich extracted from a drawer several loose sheets of paper, sat down in an armchair and began to read:

  He got up noisily from the table. The maid looked at him with terrified eyes. Without turning around, the minister scurried through to his study. He glanced at the portrait of his wife hanging above his desk and laughed bitterly. Then he took several steps, sat down in the leather armchair with the semicircular back and with a sharp tug pulled open the drawer of his writing desk. The burnished steel of his revolver almost glistened in the brilliant light of the spring day.”

  “Does he shoot himself, Arkasha?”

  “Wait and see. I’m just getting to that.”

  Then he slowly pushed the drawer shut. To die? the thought flashed through his mind. For what? Yes, of course, youth, the right to live, and so on—he knew it all. But a few years hence it would be as poor Don Carlos said to his fickle, charming Laura on that unforgettable night in Madrid:

  …when thine eyes

  Are sunken and thy wrinkled eyelids darken,

  And hairs of grey appear amid thy tresses…

  But they did not understand this—perhaps it was better that way. The thought, however, brought little comfort.

  “Well, that’s all I’ve written so far. To be continued, as they say.”

  Arkady Alexandrovich, having begun his Spring Symphony, conceiving it as “a hymn to youth and modernity” (he had said so to Olga Alexandrovna), soon noted that positive descriptions were uncommonly difficult to execute, and in order to save himself from these for a certain time, he had introduced a character who was ambiguous to begin with, the minister of a great country, a fifty-year-old man who was married to a young beauty and knew of her infidelity, in whose connection he would experience these dark thoughts. Moreover, he had been introduced into the novel purely because Arkady Alexandrovich felt a peace of mind in describing elderly people who had experienced misfortune; the minister, however, played no pivotal role and would have the good sense to end his life by suicide. The novel was to conclude in the most glittering apotheosis, without a single minor note. Then he intended to publish the book with a modest print run, on good paper. The novel would be preceded by the longest dedication to a woman identified only by three letters: O.A.K. The minister’s appearance was so lacking in motivation that, despite the author’s intent, he acquired a semi-fantastical aspect. Later, upon reading over what he had written, Arkady Alexandrovich mused with a certain annoyance that ministers who quote Pushkin, even when occasioned by their wives’ infidelity, did not exist in real life. “Say some catastrophe were to befall me,” he thought. “I shouldn’t suddenly start speaking Spanish because of it.” To Olga Alexandrovna, however, the minister seemed, yes, unfortunate, but charming nevertheless, and completely admissible as an incidental character.

  Thus the conversation about Lyudmila’s letter, which Arkady Alexandrovich so feared, did not take place immediately upon receipt of it, but was replaced for a time by the sad minister. The conversation resumed after lunch. Arkady Alexandrovich and Olga Alexandrovna were sitting overlooking the sea; a light breeze was blowing, the water sparkled under the sun.

  “Now, Arkasha,” said Olga Alexandrovna, “we need to talk. Essentially, everything has been said, and even more than that”—she st
roked his hand—“it’s been done.” Her dark eyes smiled. “Now for the matter of the judicial process.”

  “I don’t care about that,” said Arkady Alexandrovich. “I say this at the risk of disappointing you, but isn’t it all the same how the formalities are concluded? Or even whether they’re done at all? What’s important is that I’ve been waiting for this my whole life and now no one can take it away from me.”

  “Of course,” said Olga Alexandrovna, smiling, “but, really, you’re such a child, Arkasha. We’re adults, we have to reckon with these tedious formalities.”

  “I’m in your hands.”

  “First, we need to send a telegram to Lyudmila Nikolayevna. Then the paperwork with your consent to a divorce.”

  “Very well.”

  “Then I’ll write to Sergey Sergeyevich; naturally, he’ll grant me a divorce immediately. And then, once everything is in place…”

  “The church, the choir, the old priest…” said Arkady Alexandrovich dreamily. “And this time round a truly new life and real unimagined happiness. What angel was it that flew over Paris that evening—do you recall?…”

  Arkady Alexandrovich almost unconsciously reduced most practical conversations with Olga Alexandrovna to lyrical digressions; as a result, it was she who took care of the practicalities, while he devoted all of his time to what he called “the only thing worthwhile”.

  In his own way, he was no less happy than Lyudmila, and this could be put down, in part, to the very same reasons: the silent battle he had hitherto been forced to fight. There had been endless worries about money, endless homecomings where a hostile, scornful wife awaited him, conversations in which she asserted that the only justification for his position as a gigolo was his tawdry graphomania (in contrast to Olga Alexandrovna, Lyudmila had an excellent knowledge of literature, and her husband’s failure as an author was all too apparent to her); and then there was the necessity of borrowing one hundred francs from a friendly manufacturer, a fat Jewish engineer in spectacles, who considered himself a patron of the arts and publicly supported serious literature (although he secretly preferred Artsybashev to other authors) and, moreover, had long given up reading, citing a lack of time, though he did have one undeniable quality in the eyes of his friends: that he would readily hand out sums of up to one hundred francs. Then there was the slow and arduous accumulation of money, in tens or twenties, acquired through sudden, unforeseen loans from various people, for a suit, a shirt, underwear, neckties—in brief, all that which Arkady Alexandrovich, with a weary tone in his voice, would call “the prose of life”, and regarding which Lyudmila, in response to his complaints, once said: “This isn’t the prose of life, Arkady. This is just boorishness and cadging. I can’t understand how you can have such scant respect for my name, acting like this.” Arkady Alexandrovich had nearly choked with rage, but ultimately kept his peace.

  All this was now at an end. In its stead, he had Olga Alexandrovna, who truly knew nothing of the value of money and spent it with her customary extravagance, and who was further moved by the fact that in contrast to her previous lovers Arkady Alexandrovich never borrowed from her or asked anything of her, being content with what she gave him. Moreover, he had already got it into his head that life with Olga Alexandrovna was in fact an unprecedented romantic symphony; truly, he had never tasted life’s sweetness as he did now, unless one counted those distant times during his first marriage to the damsel of his romance. It was, however, not love in the pure sense of the word, but rather love as a function of his unconscious gratitude towards Olga Alexandrovna—gratitude for his lack of cares, for her fiery body, for the fact that she spoke to him seriously about his “lonely calling in art”, for the fact that for the first time in his life he had found a woman who truly and unconditionally believed in absolutely everything, believed, above all, in the real life of Arkady Alexandrovich Kuznetsov—such as he had always been in his peaceful dreams but had never succeeded in being in actuality.

  Arkady Alexandrovich’s error was, however, understandable and based in part on the fact that, as it turned out, he had hitherto underestimated his physical qualities, which afforded him much pride and satisfaction. He told this to Olga Alexandrovna; it was not that he had previously supposed his life to be essentially at an end, but now… Having lost a little weight, he acquired a certain boldness in his stride, and his bronze face with its pale eyes seemed to have become slightly firmer. He even taught himself to swim a little (two or three metres) and this also granted him enormous pleasure. In addition to all these changes, which from afar were almost imperceptible, there was, nevertheless, a certain dangerous instability: that fragile world of whose vanity he had written all his life began to disappear, losing its former verisimilitude, and in its place arose a gaping void, which was only very gradually replaced by new things that would not have merited even a footnote in Arkady Alexandrovich’s past life. Yet this unease was almost abstract and, naturally, could not obstruct the overall symphony.

  It was Olga Alexandrovna’s habit never to reflect on anything; to all appearances she had forgotten everything that had come before Arkady Alexandrovich. Together they would recall their brief shared past: their encounter at the literary evening, then meeting each other at a cafe, where they could not stop talking; then one day, as though in a dream, they had made their way to a modest hotel, for some reason near place de la République, where they were met by an obliging garçon, whose face they did not even notice (although, as Arkady Alexandrovich said, this person had really been the gatekeeper to their tender paradise), and finally they were together in this room with closed shutters and a cloudy mirror, in the twilight. Leaving Olga Alexandrovna after this, Arkady Alexandrovich had thought, without the slightest hint of chagrin, that of the money he had intended to use to purchase a suit a month previously, there were only ninety francs left—the rest had gone on the cafe. They recalled further how Arkady Alexandrovich had caught cold, waiting for Olga Alexandrovna at the place Saint-Sulpice (she had been held up because her taxi had collided with an omnibus); how another time he had been experiencing liver pain but still, despite the inhuman suffering, made it to their rendezvous. In the accounts of both Arkady Alexandrovich and Olga Alexandrovna, all this took on a decidedly heroic and triumphant aspect.

  Next Arkady Alexandrovich began to quote various books he had read—he had an excellent memory—and Olga Alexandrovna’s delight at his wit and erudition, which combined wonderfully with his singular personal charm and crystal-pure, almost childlike soul, grew and grew, so that one day she said to him, explaining this:

  “You know, Arkasha, it’s so marvellous that, well, I simply can’t find anything to compare it with… I’m happy, I’m so pleased with everything. Only I must write, to find out how my little boy, my Seryozha, is getting on.”

  Then, for a fraction of a second, something like a fleeting regret flashed in her eyes, which neither Arkady Alexandrovich nor even Olga Alexandrovna herself noticed.

  THROUGHOUT THAT SULTRY SUMMER, Seryozha hardly ever left Liza’s side; he would fall asleep and wake up next to her, they would go bathing together, go for walks together, and they lived together, almost oblivious to their surroundings. One day, however, as they returned for dinner, they found Yegorkin in the dining room. He had turned up without considering that it might be inopportune, and ingenuously described how his situation would at times become unbearable, as he put it, because of the constant, inescapable loneliness. Seryozha studied his thin, sinewy neck with its prominent Adam’s apple, his gnarled hands, his trousers which hung on him like a sack, and, in spite of his usual pity for the man, this evening he felt something akin to loathing for him. Liza said nothing at the dinner table; two or three times she said something to Seryozha in English, then immediately apologized offhandedly to Yegorkin, attributing it to an involuntary habit. As naive and ingenuous as Yegorkin was, never for one moment having suspected that he could in any way inconvenience someone ( just as no one’s presence could
ever inconvenience him)—even he noticed by and by that the situation was painful and awkward for everyone. He stood up and, wishing in some way to smooth over the unpleasant atmosphere, said that he had in fact come to find out whether Sergey Sergeyevich would be arriving soon. Liza’s face turned to stone. Seryozha replied that he knew nothing.

  “I’d imagine you must at times get bored without him,” said Yegorkin, as ever with his broad, artless smile. “Well, I must be going.”

  Liza nodded. Seryozha got up to see Yegorkin out, avoiding Liza’s gaze.

  “You know, Seryozha,” said Yegorkin, “I’m looking forward to Sergey Sergeyevich’s coming. I have some sketches, you see, and, well, I’d like to offer them to him.”

  It suddenly struck Seryozha that Yegorkin was probably in dire straits. He recalled how the artist had eaten at dinner—with deliberate slowness, but consuming everything down to the very last morsel of bread he used to wipe his plate. Liza had averted her eyes, while Seryozha had very much wanted to say that it was not the done thing. It occurred to him that today was perhaps the first day in a long while that Yegorkin had eaten a square meal, and he suddenly felt sorry for the man, almost to the point of tears.

  “You’re probably in need of some money, Leonid Semyonovich?” he said, overcoming his restraint.