The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  During those summer months everyone at Villiers-la-Foret tried out the roles of storyteller and sleuth. Every day, thanks to these countless mouths, the ghosts of the man and woman in the boat relived their last afternoon together. The townspeople discussed it standing in line at the baker’s, on the terrace at the Café Royal, on the dusty square where they played boules, in the train during the hour-long journey that lay between them and Paris. They were on the alert for every new scrap of information, every little secret, without which their own picture of the crime might be left less complete than that of their neighbors.

  And then, several days after the event, they discovered an article in a Paris newspaper. Two narrow columns in all, but in a context that took your breath away. The account of the local tragedy was sandwiched between Princess Elizabeth’s engagement and this brief news item: “The plot against the Republic has been foiled. The Comte de Merwels and the Comte de Vulpian have been charged.” Never before had the people of Villiers enjoyed so fully the feeling that they were making world news. The item about the tragedy that had taken place in their town ended with this observation: “It is now the task of the inquiry to establish whether what occurred was a mere accident or a premeditated and cunningly executed murder, a hypothesis that appears already to have won credence among the citizens of Villiers-la-Foret.”

  The boating tragedy even altered certain deeply ingrained habits in the town. People who liked to saunter along the riverbank in the evening now continued their stroll a little farther, until they reached the glade amid the willows where the fatal rendezvous was said to have taken place. Young people, for their part, had abandoned their traditional bathing place and exhausted themselves diving at the spot where Golets had drowned, hoping to find his watch, a heavy gold timepiece with a two-headed eagle on the cover …

  The fever for detection was universal. However, the two populations of Villiers-la-Foret, French and Russian, were in fact piecing together quite distinct stories.

  For the French, what the odd couples adventure marked, above all, was the real start of the postwar era. If you could once more drift down the river in an old boat with your arms around a woman and a bottle of wine under the seat then peacetime had returned for good. The fatal turn of events only confirmed this impression. In one Paris paper a brief account of the drowning had succeeded for the first time in displacing the headline PURGED that recurred in issue after issue, often with news of death sentences…. Furthermore, in the same newspaper they were announcing the start of the Tour de France 47, the first since the war.

  The Russians, too, saw Golets’s death as what might be called a historic event. Those who that July afternoon had feasted their eyes on the man stretched out in the grass and his companion, whose body looked naked beneath the fine, wet fabric, all the Russian inhabitants of the lower part of the town felt, almost physically, that the passage of calm, predictable days had been shattered there on the riverbank. Indeed, they sensed the advent of a new before and after in their personal chronology.

  The start of this chronology went back to the revolution, to the civil war, to the flight across a Russia set ablaze by the Bolsheviks. Next for them had come the period of putting down roots in Paris, in Nice, or, for some, in the sleepy monotony of Villiers-la-Forêt. Later, in 1924, came the terrible decision by the French to recognize the Soviet Union. In 1932, worse still: the Russian émigré Pavel Gorgulov assassinates the President, Paul Doumer! For several weeks the whole Russian part of the town had lived in fear of reprisals…. Then the war had broken out and, paradoxically, had somewhat rehabilitated them in the eyes of the French—thanks to the victory of those same Bolsheviks over Hitler…. And finally this latest event, this incredible coupling of the Princess Arbyelina with the ridiculous Golets.

  This woman had made her mark on the Russian chronology of Villiers-la-Forêt by the simple fact of moving into the town in the spring of 1939. From the first day the emigres had begun to look forward to a marvelous transformation, such as a princess must inevitably give rise to in their lives. They already knew that Olga Arbyelina belonged to one of the most illustrious families in Russia and bore the name of her husband, a certain Georgian prince who had recently abandoned her, leaving her alone, without means, and with a young child on her hands. Making her welcome among them all, people of modest origins, seemed to them like a kind of revenge on the Parisian diaspora, who took such a pride in their titles, arrogant and exclusive. They had a fleeting dream of figuring in a poignant melodrama, The Exiled Princess …. But this princess seemed to be showing a poor grasp of her role. She appeared not to be suffering from her relegation to Villiers, lived as modestly as themselves, and treated them with disappointing simplicity. They would have preferred her haughty; they would have liked to pardon her the pride of her caste; they were ready to share her loathing for the new masters of Russia! But she remained very discreet on the subject and had apparently even observed one day, to the great displeasure of the elderly inmates of the Russian retirement home, “The revolution was conceived not so much in the mud of the workers’ districts as in the filth of the palaces….”

  There was yet more intense disappointment in store for them: her child’s illness. Or rather the calm with which the princess endured it. In the minds of the Russian colony the word “hemophilia” had evoked the shade of the unfortunate Tsarevich. Everyone began to seek out some dynastic mystery; one by one the pensioners reeled off the names of those descendants of Queen Victoria guilty of introducing the scourge into so many noble houses. They expected an almost immediate tragedy: they were already decking out the Princess Arbyelina in the mourning of an inconsolable mother. But when one of them very circumspectly (with that studied circumspection that is worse than any tactlessness) alluded to this British lineage, Olga had replied, almost laughing, “No, no, we didn’t need the Queen to bestow this treasure on us.” Moreover, her child’s case did not seem to be as serious, by a long shot, as the illness that had dogged the Tsar’s son. And to crown it all, the boy showed no particular signs of suffering and spoke so little that he could easily have been taken for mute….

  Thus the miracle they had all been looking forward to went no further than the considerable enhancement of the library, of which the princess was now in charge, and the planting of a service tree by the front steps to the strange house where she alone had agreed to reside, the long redbrick annex, built against the wall of the former brewery in which the emigres had made their home at the start of the twenties, dividing it up into apartments, a retirement home, a reading room, a canteen…. Yes, she had disappointed them cruelly!

  However, none of these frustrations could match the latest one: her farcical assignation with this… someone recalled at that moment that Golets had worked as a horse butcher. With this horse butcher, then, who, no doubt so as to make them a laughingstock, had had the stupidity to get drowned!

  The hypotheses advanced by the people of Villiers clearly erred on the side of unsubtlety. Where death is involved the seething mass of detail is obliterated and only the broad outline of human appearances is preserved. Thus sometimes Golets became “that dreary old Russian,” sometimes “that horse butcher,” and occasionally “the ex-officer.” Princess Arbyelina’s friend (one of his letters was said to have been found, signed “L.M.”) was “a well known poet and journalist but afraid of his wife and of the wagging tongues of the emigres in Paris.” And Olga’s husband “a hell of a fellow, a hero in spite of himself, a Georgian Donjuán.” Death, like a harsh spotlight, picked out these three profiles—simplified but perhaps tolerably accurate, when all’s said and done: the husband, the lover, and the suitor, as the apprentice detectives of Villiers-la-Forêt called them.

  In the course of the inquiry the services of an interpreter, a Russian, had to be called on. And it was probably he who was responsible for several leaks, which the citizens were not slow to weave into their own fabrications. The rumors disclosed in this way seemed credible enough, in any case
, and would be even more so when the affair was closed. One of them was quoted more often than the others. In passing it on they presented it in dialogue form, for greater authenticity: “So you claim you always wished for the death of Monsieur Golets?”

  “Yes, I did not intend to let a man like that remain alive.”

  “Can you tell me at what moment the idea of killing him came to you?”

  “It was when he forced me to take a walk with him in the park.”

  “How could he force you to do it?”

  “He knew that I would obey him….”

  And from this point the theories gushed forth in all directions, suggesting a thousand and one conceivable motives for the mysterious hold Golets had over Olga Arbyelina.

  It also occurred that during the passionate debates at the Café Royal or under the poplar trees on the marketplace, someone would attempt to win credence for a completely far-fetched invention. According to one of these forgers the Russian princess had described her relationship with the horse butcher in these Delphic terms: “This man was an amalgam of all the ugliness in the world, while I was living at one with the beauty of last winter. I still had before my eyes the imprint of a hand on the windowpane, amid the hoarfrost flowers….”

  And what was most surprising was the extent to which this remark, doubtless invented from a lot of scraps, also nourished very reasonable suppositions. So who had left this imprint? The Parisian lover, the shadowy L.M.? Or an unknown person whose existence the investigator had failed to reveal? As for the readers at the Russian library, they interpreted this strange remark as a sign of incipient madness. “Oh, you know,” the elderly inmates of the retirement home would exclaim. “The princess hasn’t been all there for some time now.”

  In these tangled webs of personal interpretation there was, however, one matter that intrigued all the people of Villiers-la-Forêt equally, whether they were French or Russian: the impossibility of picturing the bodies of the two protagonists of the tragedy in carnal union. Their bodies were so physically incompatible. Such an act of love—for many of them almost against nature—led in their conversations, particularly among the men, to this disconcerting question, which subsequently spread through the town: “How could she give herself to him?” Which was, of course, the expurgated version of what they actually said …

  Apart from that, picturing the Princess Arbyelina in the arms of this squat, bold, ungainly Russian allowed the men of Villiers-la-Forêt to have a kind of revenge on the woman. Most of them experienced jealous regret: this creature with her statuesque body must have been an easy catch, after all, given that this moujik had wooed her with such success! The bitterest of them harped on the fact that the woman was forty-six … thrusting her utterly inaccessible body toward old age, toward the unattractiveness of old age. Men can be pitiless toward a woman whose body has eluded them, particularly if this is thanks to their own cowardice.

  Once male pride had been appeased, however, the key question returned: “But at the end of the day, what weird twist of fate brought them together?”

  Be that as it may, by dint of tireless preliminaries, the whole scenario of the tragedy ended up being pinpointed with the conciseness of an epigram. And this was notably done in the observation attributed by rumor to the investigating magistrate: “This is the first time in my life I have had to convince a person that they are not guilty of murder.” Another fragment, with the same aphoristic brevity, reported the riposte made by the magistrate to the interpreter. The latter had remarked in surprise: “But don’t you think that, in accusing herself of one crime, she’s trying to cover up another?” The reply was trenchant.

  “A killer breaks a shop window, admits it, goes to prison, and gets away with a murder. But you don’t accuse yourself of murder in order to cover up a broken window.”

  That is how the affair was pictured during those summer months in Villiers-la-Forêt. The few who went away on vacation discovered new details on their return, strange revelations that their neighbors were eager to impart to them. Their game of a thousand voices resumed more merrily than ever….

  And it was after a great delay, early in the fall, that they learned this mind-boggling news: some time previously the case of the Russian lovers had been formally closed for want of evidence. It was only then that they realized Princess Arbyelina’s house was empty and she and her son were no longer to be seen.

  Yes, the curtain had been rung down just when their scenarios were taking on more and more substance, when they were so close to knowing the truth!

  The people of Villiers found it hard to conceal their disappointment. They had grown so accustomed to the pleasantly fevered climate that the love and death of the horse butcher had caused to reign in their town. What they felt especially nostalgic for, though often without realizing it, was the secret life that the unfortunate passengers on that old boat had revealed to them. It had appeared that in their dull little town quite another life could be simmering away—devastating in its passions, criminal, multifarious. Unexpected. A life in which an obscure retired man was capable, heedless of the cost, of embracing a redoubtable beauty who, for obscure reasons, allowed herself to be seduced. A subterranean life, free, filled with promises and temptations. At least that was how most of the townspeople had perceived the blazing affair between the princess and the horse butcher.

  * * *

  But the most surprising event occurred a little later, when the first mists were beginning to filter through into the lower town in the mornings. One day, as if by magic, everybody forgot the boating tragedy, the woman sitting on the bank, the drowned man stretched out on the grass. As if they had never existed!

  The people of Villiers talked about power cuts, the schedules for which were printed in the newspapers; about the meat shortages just starting, about Princess Elizabeths wedding: about the stars in The Best Years of Our Lives…. And if anyone had taken it into his head to refer to the previous summers inquiry, he would have committed an unpardonable gaffe, like telling an old joke that people no longer find funny.

  Besides, soon the autumn floods covered the site of the ill-fated rendezvous and the bank where the man and woman had frozen in their involuntarily theatrical poses under the eyes of the spectators. The boat, whose side the people of Villiers had liked to poke their fingers into at the spot deeply torn by the collision, ended up among other wrecked vessels, its terrible singularity effaced among the peeling hulls, half hidden in the mist.

  The expanse of meadowland covered in water was so bleak, the branches of the alders so trembling and tortured that it no longer occurred to anyone in Villiers-la-Forêt to ponder what kind of love or hate had brought two strange Russian summer folk together on this riverbank.

  NIGHT HAS FALLEN. A moment ago the old keeper stopped talking. His hand resting on the lock of the gate, he is waiting for the man dressed in a students jacket to go. But the latter seems not to notice this gesture. His eyes, unmoving, are filled with a torrent of shapes, places, grimacing faces; of cries; of days.

  The tale has been told with the simplicity of the previous anecdotes: a man, a woman, an inexplicable pairing, a death or a murder. And oblivion. Nevertheless, this last visitor has managed to glimpse the fine strand of weed clinging to the drowned man’s brow. He has sensed the disturbing intensity that the presence of the lifeless body bestowed on the scents of summer, the murmur of insects among the plants on the riverbank. He has heard the remarks whispered by the curious. He has experienced that delicious apprehension with which, later, they would come and thrust their fingers into the breach in the side of the boat.

  His eyes dazzled by this imagined world, he stands transfixed, straining to hear the words that he still seems to make out down there: the strangely cadenced voice of the woman, replying to the magistrate. Now he thinks he can even understand the shackled sentences of the stammerer.

  The old man takes out a heavy bunch of keys, shakes it. But the other does not hear. His vision isolates him in t
he night: "To be able to see what others do not see, do not wish to see, do not know how to see, are afraid to see—like all those visitors to the cemetery, who have been filing past this old man from time immemorial. Yes, to guess that the dress of the woman seated on the riverbank, the dress torn during a brief and appalling struggle, was gradually losing its transparency as it dried and beginning to conceal her body more fully. To see the increasing opacity of this fabric is already to enter into this woman’s life…."

  The old man slowly draws the gate to and turns the key in the lock. The two of them remain inside the cemetery.

  The invitation to drink tea seems to awaken the man in the corduroy jacket from his reverie. He accepts and, as he walks along beside the old man, notices that on the crosses several night-lights in their tiny glass cages are still shining, scattered through the darkness. In the distance the glowing window of the keeper’s house also resembles a night-light, gradually growing broader as they approach, and admitting them, as a candle flame does if you stare at it for long enough, thereby entering its flickering, violent life.

  Two

  S’HE KNEW THAT THE PAIN we feel, physical as well as mental, is partly due to our indignation at pain, our astonishment at it, our refusal to accept it. To avoid suffering, she always employed the same trick: making a mental list. What you have to do is take note, as dispassionately as possible, of the presence of things and people brought together by the painful situation. Name them very simply, one after the other, until their total improbability hits you in the eye. And so she was listing them now, first of all noticing the drawn curtains, the edges of which were fastened together by half a dozen clothespins. The dark curtains, the ceiling lit from the side by a lamp placed on a chair. And on the ceiling, as well as on the wall, those two angular shadows, dark and clear cut: the outline, like a capital M, of the legs of a woman lying on her back with her knees up. And another shape, this one moving; a gigantic head with two horns, appearing at intervals between the triangles of the bent legs. Yes, these two women linked by the silent work one of them was carrying out on the other ones body, in a stifling room, late one afternoon in August.