The Flight

by Gaito Gazdanov

  Yet in her memoirs she had to seem different, and with a certain enthusiasm Dupont depicted this woman who had never existed, and her cardboard charm brought him a degree of satisfaction; she acquired the features of a chocolate-box beauty, appearing now in a field, now in a forest, now in the salons of Paris, now on the stage—with her permanently pained and, essentially, dead face; only this was a happy corpse—in contradistinction to the real Lola, who instead of a soul had a cold void. Several times Dupont, in spite of the fact that he had worked as a professional counterfeiter for many years and had written the most varied things, ranging from political speeches of opposing content, to articles on archaeology, ballet, theatre, painting and music, all of which passed under the most diverse and predominantly illustrious of names; in spite of the fact that he, Dupont, had penned two thick political tomes and fifteen hundred leaders, not counting all the many speeches—in short, taking upon himself the political career of a certain wealthy individual who was no more literate or intelligent than Lola, and who could never have strung together a more or less coherent phrase and had not even the faintest notion of social doctrines, but published a newspaper and engaged in rather stormy public activity, until one fine day he died of a heart attack—in spite of all his experience, there were several points where Dupont had wanted to refuse to continue with Lola’s memoirs. He would have refused, but his circumstances did not permit it: he was penniless, as ever. Sometimes he maliciously thought that in terms of intellectual worth he alone comprised one-fifth of celebrities—he was sure of this—while they, nonetheless, lived happily, enjoying the fruits of his labour: “Your last article, dear maître, despite the fact that we have seemingly become accustomed to the inexhaustible magnanimity of your genius…” This genius and the author of the article in question was Dupont, with whom they would scarcely have deigned to shake hands—while he, to whom they owed everything, was forced practically to steal out of his apartment in order to avoid an unpleasant conversation with the concierge, for it had already been five months since he last paid his rent. Sitting in a cafe and watching the people around him with bitter abstraction, he dreamt of writing a book some day—in which he would exact revenge on all these people who were now exploiting him, by revealing everything he knew; then the reader would be convinced of the frailty and infidelity of all flattering epithets and so-called general notoriety. Of all his many clients, the only one he was truly well disposed towards was his senator, who was in fact a sweet old man. The rest he despised. Sometimes in his articles he permitted himself a few caustic remarks and lunges at them—that is, at himself—but the only people to notice these were colleagues among his profession, such intelligent proletarians like himself; for these people there existed no celebrity, no incorruptible people, none of the stuff that elicited such impassioned reactions in so-called social opinion, which these wretched and embittered people considered a manifestation of collective idiocy.

  Lola insisted that Dupont immediately, irrespective of any chronological order, include her romance with Pierre in her memoirs. He was to begin with her performances where she would invariably see Pierre’s pale face and those fiery eyes fixed on her: Pierre was very pale; with the last of his money he would buy tickets in the back rows, but never missed a single performance of hers, and so she could not help noticing these fiery eyes.

  “Forgive me,” said Dupont. “If he was sitting in the back rows, then how were you able to make out his face in a half-dark auditorium?”

  “Very well,” said Lola, “let’s sit him nearer to the front. ‘He was poor, but with the last of his money…’”

  “No, that’s impossible,” said Dupont, losing patience. “How much money did he have, then, in order to be able to sit in the front row every night? It follows that he couldn’t have been poor.”

  “But he really was poor,” said Lola guilelessly.

  “Yes, of course, I understand. But then we must do it differently.”

  “Very well,” Lola consented. “Then we’ll simply write that I noticed his fiery eyes and that every day he came to the theatre—we’ll get to his poverty later.”

  Dupont was barely able to contain himself: never had he encountered such a stubborn lack of understanding for basic things; even the deceased government minister, legendary for his stupidity, had been sharper than this. He sighed and started to explain to Lola at some length why it was impossible to write this. However, Lola suddenly took umbrage and began saying over and over that it was just a caprice of his and that ultimately he could do as he pleased. Dupont supposed that for a long time already, perhaps for several weeks, she had been dreaming of this part of her memoirs—the wretched pageantry of that “pale face” and those “fiery eyes”—and that she was at pains to part with it. Yet here he was mistaken.

  After an hour of heated unbroken debate, they agreed on a situation, equally dubious, whereby Pierre was to receive a small inheritance—a pittance, some ten or twenty thousand francs—and that he, at the time when Lola noticed his fiery eyes, had spent it all in order not to miss a single one of her appearances. Lola was very satisfied with Dupont and paid him several compliments with regard to his intellect and knowledge of a woman’s heart.

  Lola, however, was living on the memory of Pierre more and more. It was not by chance that she was so keen to include him in her memoirs. Had she been capable of analysing and in any way dissecting her feelings, she would have realized that her memory was carefully avoiding all the unpleasant aspects of her life with Pierre. Having said that, almost all of it had been unpleasant: the little pleasantness there had been was minimal, and yet it was this that she remembered. One night, unexpectedly even for Lola, tears welled in her eyes as she thought of him. After a while, even Dupont noticed a marked change in the expression of her eyes and face, the reason for which he could not fathom, although he spared little thought for it, for it was of no interest to him; it was with a sense of great relief that he observed Lola becoming more readily agreeable. She herself was unaware of this, and herein she suddenly came to resemble other women who stubbornly resist admitting that a new emotion can force them to see everything in ways they had not done previously—they have the impression that there is something humiliating about this, something that belittles their exceptional nature, and however plain it may be, they go on denying it.

  Lola had nothing to deny; no one ever mentioned this transformation to her. Nevertheless, it was beyond doubt that, owing to some extraordinary, absurd fortuity, a love of Pierre, which had never existed during his lifetime, now welled up inside her with seemingly perfect improbability. It was born of a deep, unconscious gratitude to this man for having died and, in so doing, returning to her the freedom and repose that she had forfeited for so long. Since he could in no way hinder her now and, having ceased to number among the living, had become an embellishment to this touching romance in her memoirs, she seemed to realize, perhaps for the first time, that it had been real. “If only you knew how much I loved this man!” she said to Dupont, and, moreover, she truly was being sincere. Then she said with conviction: “He had a few minor shortcomings, of course, but then who doesn’t?” For the hundredth time Dupont noted with some irritation that nine-tenths of what Lola said was made up of commonplaces. “But how he loved me!”

  Now, for the first time in many, many years, Lola began to live out this posthumous romance, so monstrous in its artificiality. “Le pauvre petit!”¶ she would invariably say when the conversation turned to Pierre. Little by little, Pierre altered completely in her memories and her anecdotes about him: he stopped drinking, ceased his revelry, became well bred, sweet and tender; and so his sepulchral allure only increased. “Sometimes I think,” Lola would say, “that I am one of those rare individuals who only love once in their lives. Yes, of course, I had liaisons, but who hasn’t? Pierre was my only true love—and I cannot accustom myself to the thought that he is no longer alive. Le pauvre petit!”

  Despite her extreme avarice, which had r
evealed itself in her, however, only in the last few years, as though it were a sign of old age, like grey hair or atherosclerosis—before this she had been extravagant and careless with money, which could be put down to her comparatively modest means—she commissioned a magnificent monument to Pierre with the inscription: “To my dear husband, from the simple and sincere heart of Lola Aînée.”

  And just as a man’s face and the expression in his eyes change when it becomes apparent to those around him that he is going to die, so too was there undoubtedly a deep and lasting rebirth in Lola, which was particularly striking at her age. Dupont, who visited her every day, noted with astonishment that his former irritation had disappeared without trace, and he stopped viewing his routine visit to her as an unpleasant obligation. One day, as she was pouring him some coffee—he was writing in his notebook at the time—and stirring the sugar in for him, a thought, which before would have seemed utterly wild, suddenly flashed through his mind: this woman, in fact, could have been his mother. There was a sense that human traits had suddenly begun to show through her deathly face. In any case, not everyone who happened to meet her noticed the change that had taken place in her—for that they were much too unobservant and, as with the vast majority of people, thought too little and infrequently—but still they sensed it. When they would later say among themselves that each of them had found Lola charming, there was something more sincere in this, something that corresponded better to their real impressions than usual.

  What had happened to Lola was the same as what would have happened to any other very elderly person who, in the final stage of life, during the long hours of senility, had recalled and re-evaluated his life, drawing certain conclusions, the only ones possible: that it was necessary, above all else, to forgive people for their involuntary misdemeanours, that one should not hate anyone, that everything was fragile and uncertain, except for this peaceful and pleasant reconciliation, this undemanding love and tenderness for those dearest to us, irrespective, even, of whether they deserve it or not. Lola now acted as though she had understood these things, but the difference was that she had given no thought to it; much as she had done throughout her entire life, she spoke and acted without thinking, deferring to some internal necessity, in essence never knowing why she was doing one thing and not another, but generally the right thing to reach her goal, which became clear to her only retrospectively, for at that time no thoughts had preceded this change in her mode of life or her relations with others.

  This was Lola’s final, belated blossoming. Anyone who wanted to get the measure of her and studied her entire life without knowing anything of these final months of her existence would have received an erroneous, single-sided impression of her. For this to have taken place, it was necessary for the many years of her interminably long life to pass by, for not a single one of them to leave any mark on her existence and, finally, for death, that most terrible and incomprehensible event, to draw abreast of her and, having delivered her from the presence of that odious man who had entered her life essentially by chance, at the same time suddenly to liberate the humane in her and what she would never have known, were it not for that death. It was like opening a window that had been closed for years, at night, in an ancient, remote building in a forest, on the seashore—only for a great many things that had been hitherto unseen and unheard suddenly to pierce the deathly silence: the dark-blue starry sky, the eternal rush of ocean waves, the call of an unknown bird, the rustle of leaves in the wind, the headlong flight of a bat.

  This could not but entail a drastic and total reversal in her mode of life, and an involuntary and painless renunciation of all her former opinions. She continued to receive guests and go out of town, but these events became less and less frequent. As before, she would read the reviews of shows, premieres and concerts, but these opinions, which even a few months ago would have aroused her indignation, now left her ambivalent—as did any mention of her own name, which in former times she would have so eagerly anticipated. When someone once asked her about the fate of her music hall, she replied that matters were still up in the air, but then, on a sudden, she realized that she would never open any music hall, because the futility of it was now entirely apparent to her, although she had never before considered this.

  Work on her memoirs, however, continued apace; Dupont, having succumbed to her current disposition, began to write in rather a different manner from that which he had until now been employing; and Lola—that same wooden Lola, who thus far had been so totally unreliable as a collaborator or an assistant—now dictated entire pages to him; naturally, a few finishing touches were necessary, but these final chapters were written predominantly by her. Their unexpected naivety surprised Dupont, and he often mused on the strange fate of this woman. At any mention of Pierre, her eyes would fill with tears, and the power of this total transformation, from scorn and hatred for him into compassion and love, was so great that if anyone were to have said to Lola that she was afraid and had not loved this man, she would never have believed him. As ever, for anyone in suchlike circumstances, when dealing with memories and finding himself at the mercy of a sudden rebirth, brought about by the manifestation of some powerful emotion, it was entirely clear to Lola that, despite facts, evidence, everything, it was impossible to refute: there had been no unpleasantness, no hatred—just love and sudden, merciless death.

  Meanwhile, Lola’s health—which on the whole had been fine until now, her maladies being entirely natural for a woman of her age—began to decline. Broadly speaking, there were no catastrophic alterations; everything seemed to be just as it was before, but she began to tire easily, and things that would not ordinarily have wearied her now occasioned momentary weakness. During her daily strolls in the Bois de Boulogne she would walk half of her regular distance; one day the driver, alarmed by her unusually long absence, set out to look for her and found her not far off, on a bench: she was asleep, with her head on her chest, her bag having fallen out of her hand, and her face so still that he was seized by the involuntary fear that she might have died. He stood there for several seconds, motionless, watching her closely, her chest rising and falling evenly. He coughed, but Lola did not stir. Finally, he decided to wake her; he called her name loudly several times and she opened her eyes and with a smile said: “It would seem we fell asleep?” Sighing, she slowly got to her feet and walked back to her motor car.

  Time passed and it became quite clear that Lola, for all her most ardent desire, was no longer fit to appear on stage. She did not dwell on this, because, imperceptibly for her, and unconsciously, as with everything else that had happened to her, the stage had receded into the distant past, and she no longer recalled it. It was clear that she would have to leave her enormous apartment and live more modestly than before. All that remained was to put her financial affairs in order and calculate how much money had been spent and how much, in the final analysis, was left. She might have possessed a significant fortune, but she had spent much too lavishly, putting an end to it only in the last few years. After lengthy computations, she learnt that she was left with astonishingly little money—less than two hundred thousand francs. She had one last resort, which long ago she had decided to use only in case of extreme necessity, the source of which was rather unusual.

  It had happened more than thirty years ago, during a brief affair with one of the most illustrious London bankers of the time, who, even then, was no longer in the first flush of youth but was nevertheless very much in love with Lola. He offered everything to her: his name, his life, his fortune, everything she could have wanted. Laughing, she replied that her name was better than any other, that she had no need of his life, and that the money he could offer did not tempt her either—she was rich enough.

  “Very well,” he said, “but have you thought what might happen to you later, when your name is forgotten and all you have left is old age and poverty?”

  “I shall die young,” she said, “and isn’t it all the same what happens w
hen I’m dead?”

  However, his readiness to do all he could for her was touching; she became his lover—despite having no love for him—only in order to bring him pleasure. Two weeks later, as he was leaving, he told her that he knew she did not love him and he was powerless to do anything about it. “But you’re better than you know,” he added, “and I don’t want you to think me ungrateful.”