There was a knock at the door; in came Sletov. Sergey Sergeyevich told him that Seryozha had shot himself. Sletov made the sign of the cross. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “Are you ready?”
“No,” said Sergey Sergeyevich. “I don’t want to tell Olga Alexandrovna what has happened over the telephone. Drive to her apartment: tell her that Seryozha has fallen ill, and bring her to the aerodrome. The aeroplane departs at half-past nine; I’ve reserved a seat for her.”
A moment later Sletov was gone.
“Let’s go, Liza,” said Sergey Sergeyevich. “Here, take your passport.”
ON THE WAY TO le Bourget, Sergey Sergeyevich’s long motor car first overtook the taxi in which, wrapped up in a new fur coat, Lyudmila was travelling, and then Lola Aînée’s Delage, which was speeding along—he had said to the driver: “Allez à toute vitesse!”* When Sergey Sergeyevich and Liza arrived at the aerodrome there were still twenty minutes before the flight. After a while, they watched as Lola Aînée laboriously mounted the narrow metal staircase. A sharp cold wind was blowing. Several minutes later Lyudmila quickly made her way up those same steps and disappeared into the depths of the aeroplane. Meanwhile, Sergey Sergeyevich was looking at his watch: Olga Alexandrovna and Sletov were not there. There were only a few minutes left; the propeller had already been set in motion and the engine roared, warming up. At the last minute, a plump, jolly man ran up to the aeroplane, panting from vigorous exertion, his hat askew. Without addressing himself to anyone in particular, but smiling amiably to Sergey Sergeyevich and Liza as though he had been long acquainted with them, he said gaily, still panting, “Ah, j’ai de la chance!”† and boarded the aeroplane. Olga Alexandrovna was still not there.
“What’s to be done, Liza? Let’s go—she can catch the next one,” said Sergey Sergeyevich.
They went inside. The aeroplane taxied quickly, and smoothly took off into the air. At that moment, Olga Alexandrovna and Sletov ran into the aerodrome: they were just in time to see the aeroplane climb and disappear.
* Drive as fast as you can!
† Ah, I’m in luck!
A SERIES OF FORTUITOUS and vast-ranging circumstances, infinitely removed from one another, united in this autumnal Paris–London flight such different people, all of whom, however, would meet with the same, simultaneous fate. There was nothing at all in common between Lola Aînée, who was travelling to London to receive the money left to her long ago by her deceased lover, and Liza, who was flying to Seryozha, that most precious and dear person, without whom she could not imagine her life; between Lyudmila, who after many long and arduous ordeals and journeys had attained what she had been so vainly searching for her entire life, and Sergey Sergeyevich, who for the first and final time in his life was wholly consumed by a single thought: that Seryozha must be saved at whatever cost. In just the same way, none of these people had the slightest notion about their chance fellow traveller, that plump, jolly man who had said as he boarded the aeroplane: “Ah, j’ai de la chance!” Far below, the earth loomed dark; the aeroplane shuddered and pitched slightly, and the lofty, cold, airy expanse floated infinitely around it.
Lola Aînée sat dozing—this was now an almost permanent state, so long as she was sitting and not walking—waking every now and then, and detecting, as usual, an unpleasant taste in her mouth. From time to time she would feel ever so slightly nauseous, but slumber proved more powerful than mild nausea. Waking for a moment, she began to think how she would return to Paris with her money and walk into a modest, new, just-let apartment on a quiet street in her beloved Auteuil—she would no longer have to go anywhere, unless during the summer she took the motor car and, taking long stops in each village, set out on the smooth road leading from Paris to Nice to spend several weeks there, on the shore of the warm summer sea. All her journeys and tours, all these Rumanias, Hollands, South Americas, Greeces, and the constant strain of work in the theatre, the eternal fear that her legs would suddenly give way, that her rheumatic shoulder would crunch audibly and painfully, or that in the middle of an act fiery circles would suddenly float up before her eyes and the floor would begin to slip away from under her feet—as had happened to her several times recently—all this now receded into the past and vanished with astonishing speed: only this blessed slumber, this almost pleasant weariness lay ahead—right up to the day when it would rise up and leave her breast for the last time, letting out her last breath of air—and there would be no more. However, she could not know that this day was nigh, that this very minute, with monstrous speed, it was swirling and hurtling towards her. She continued to dream.
Liza seemed to be thinking only about Seryozha. After Sergey Sergeyevich said, “The bullet missed his heart,” she felt almost certain that he would live. Yet despite her wishes, this one unrelenting thought was infiltrated by other reflections, other words that were nevertheless connected to it and essentially constituted an extension of it: the scene in her apartment, Sergey Sergeyevich’s appearance and the sense of deathly ennui and hopelessness after Seryozha left. As illogical as it seemed, she no longer had any doubts that her life with Seryozha would begin anew, though he would still be aware of the fact that impeded this, the one of which he had just learnt and which no shot could ever eliminate. However, Liza did not dwell on this; she was unconsciously confident that if Seryozha survived, all would be as it was before. Nevertheless, she fancied that for the first time in his life Sergey Sergeyevich had been exposed to human emotion. Yet she was unable to feel any gratitude towards him, since she had been much hurt by his words: “Come what may—even you.” She could not forgive this “even you”. “Even you”—after so many years of intimacy, in the course of which he had never spoken a harsh word to her. Yes, of course, she ought to have expected it. After what he said to her in her room, after Seryozha’s leaving: this was not the result of anger, this was what he had always thought. But she could not even bring herself to hate him; indeed, she almost forgave him. She saw that the incident with Seryozha had been a terrible blow to him, one that was capable of transforming all his sceptical and derisive theories once and for all, and perhaps it would allow him to comprehend the strength of her love for Seryozha. Several times she glanced at him, continuing to think of Seryozha and uninterruptedly imagining his head on a white pillow, those beloved dark eyes, and his chest bandaged in gauze. Sergey Sergeyevich sat motionlessly in his seat, never once turning his head to her.
He felt a strange weariness; it was as if he wanted to sleep the whole time. Whenever his thoughts returned to Liza, who was the cause of this terrible catastrophe enveloping Seryozha, he experienced a strange aversion towards her: she had borne that blind, egotistical passion, ruthless in regard to its victims, whose blood was on her hands; all the actions and betrayals of her sister paled in comparison with this. If Seryozha survived—and he had almost no doubt that he would—he would explain everything to him, and Liza would leave, going almost as far away as Seryozha had nearly gone. He felt something like gratitude when he thought of Olga Alexandrovna; she was not to blame for having passed on to Seryozha her rapturous, trusting nature, which had ruined him. Since the moment he first felt attracted to Liza—Sergey Sergeyevich had no doubt that it was Liza who had seduced him—his childlike defencelessness had prevented him from putting a halt to these events: how could he have known that Liza would inveigle him into her monstrously cruel world, where there was no place for him, and whose slow poison Sergey Sergeyevich—even Sergey Sergeyevich—would at times feel acutely, despite being armed against it a thousand times better than anyone else.
Lola and Lyudmila sat in front of Sergey Sergeyevich and Liza; both of them at the beginning of the flight turned and bowed to Sergey Sergeyevich, who replied with his unvarying smile, which had lost, however, its usual persuasion, for his eyes did not smile. He thought about them for a moment, and his memory obediently and instantaneously recalled everything: the conversation with Lola at La Marquise de Sévigné, when he had advised her to
go to London by aeroplane, Lyudmila’s letter and his having spotted her in a motor car with her grey companion. He recalled all this and ceased thinking about them.
Lyudmila had parted with MacFarlane only a week previously, but this had provided ample time for her to feel his absence. Just before she set out, she received a telegram from him: “Darling, I’ll be waiting.” This telegram sat in her handbag, along with the divorce papers she had finally received and all the necessary marriage documents. She was certain that MacFarlane’s motor car would already be waiting for her at Croydon. She thought the aeroplane was not going nearly fast enough.
WITHIN THIS SMALL space inside the aeroplane flying over the English Channel, there was concentrated in these final minutes a whole world of diverse and unique things, several long lives, a multitude of correctly and incorrectly understood emotions, regrets, hopes and expectations—it was a complex system of human relations, a vain account of which would perhaps take years of persistent toil. Their convergence, precisely here and now, was in turn the result of a million accidents of chance, the innumerable wealth of which was beyond human comprehension, for, in order to know the exact reason that had led each of these passengers to the aeroplane, it would be necessary to know everything that had come before this flight and to establish thus amid an evolution of sequential circumstances almost the entire history of the world. The reasons that had brought each of these people here perhaps originated from a mistake made long ago, under conditions of which we are ignorant—that is, if the word “mistake” here has any meaning at all. Yet just as we see the sky as a semicircular vault owing to an optical fault of our vision, so too we strive to examine all human life and any exposition of events as a closed circuit, which is all the more astonishing since the most superficial analysis convinces us of the clear futility of these efforts. Thus, just as that visible semicircle of sky hides an infinity beyond our comprehension, so too the external facts of any human existence mask the deepest complexity of things, the sum total of which is too vast for our memory and escapes our understanding. We are fated in this way to the role of impotent contemplators, and those moments when we suddenly seem to grasp the essence of the world can be wonderful in themselves—like the slow race of the sun across the ocean, like waves of rye in the wind, like the bound of a deer from a rock in the red of the evening sunset—but they, too, are fortuitous; and essentially almost always unpersuasive, like everything else. Yet we are inclined to believe them, and we prize them especially, for in every creative or contemplative effort there is a consoling moment of illusive, transient extraction from that single indisputable reality that we know and call death. Its constant presence everywhere and in everything seems to predispose to failure all attempts to imagine the material of life, which alters by the minute, as something bearing a definitive meaning; the futility of these attempts is perhaps equalled only by their allure. But if we allow that the most important event in the history of one or several lives is that last act, which occurs only once in a lifetime, then the flight of this aeroplane carrying Sergey Sergeyevich, Liza, Lola Aînée, Lyudmila and the jolly man whose hat was askew was just such an event, for when it was midway over the Channel, the people in a steamer below saw it come crashing down, enveloped in a black-and-red vertical whirlwind of smoke and fire.
SLETOV HAD DRIVEN Olga Alexandrovna to le Bourget after waiting for almost a whole hour in the reception of her hotel, and they were in time to see the aeroplane only as it was flying away. She passed another torturous hour at the aerodrome, waiting for the next flight and being so insistent to know the truth that Sletov finally told her what had happened. After this she lost her head entirely. Her face stained with incessant tears, she at last boarded the aeroplane and flew off alone. Sletov was unable to accompany her since he had no visa; Olga Alexandrovna, like all the members of Sergey Sergeyevich’s family, held a British passport. When she disembarked from the aeroplane at Croydon, there was an extraordinary commotion. The word “catastrophe” reached her ears, but she was unable to understand it. Johnson, who had set out for Croydon together with the driver to meet Sergey Sergeyevich, was the first to see her.
“Take me to him,” she said without even greeting him, and in such a voice that Johnson was unable not only to ask her anything but even to make any reply. At the clinic she could not wait for the moment when they would let her in to see Seryozha; finally, accompanied by a doctor, she entered his room and leant over him. He opened his eyes.
“Mama!” he said. “Thank God I’ve seen you; now I can die.”
Olga Alexandrovna looked at the doctor in despair. The latter smiled and said that the danger had passed.
In one rapid movement, she fell to her knees in front of his bed and kissed his hand. He made an effort to smile.
“There…” he said with difficulty. “When I came to, I hoped just for this… only for your face, Mama, only for your eyes… I’ve nothing left… And for you to say, ‘My little fair-haired one’.”
In a voice altered and slightly absurd because of the tears, Olga Alexandrovna said:
“My little boy, my Seryozhenka, my little fair-haired one, everything’s going to be fine, you’ll see.”
It was a cold and windy day. At around two o’clock in the afternoon, in Sergey Sergeyevich’s study in Paris, Fyodor Borisovich Sletov, who had just received a telephone call, sat down, dropping his head onto the former’s writing desk, and sobbed uncontrollably, like a child.
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The Flight Page 22
