The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  A precise pain, sharp as an injection, made her interrupt her list-making and close her eyes tightly. But she must start again quickly, so as to leave herself no time for indignation. So; the August sun, whose dusty indolence could be sensed, despite the drawn curtains and the closed shutters. Beyond the shutters, on the sidewalk, a few inches away from the insulated interior of the room, an encounter between two passersby, their conversation (“Mark my words, we won’t be seeing a lot of meat next year”); then the clatter of a streetcar and the faint answering tinkle of the glasses in the cupboard. Then, like an amplification of that tenuous sound—the rattling of a metallic instrument on a tray.

  The head swathed in a large white square with two horns reappeared at the end of the improvised operating table. “I’m not hurting you too much, am I?” And it dived in again between the patient’s parted knees.

  This silent smile too, must be added to the inventory. In resuming it she must strive for the greatest possible precision in the details. A cramped room, an incredible accumulation of furniture: that cupboard made of dark wood, almost black; a writing desk; a piano with candelabra fixed to it at each end of the keyboard; two armchairs close together like in a cinema auditorium; a pedestal table; sets of shelves—everything piled high with books, statuettes, knickknacks, vases with bunches of dried stems. On the walls a patchwork of pictures: antique portraits with barely visible features and bright, airy landscapes cheek by jowl with abstract geometry. In the corner, almost up against the ceiling, the brown, gilded rectangle of an icon, concealed beneath a long draped fabric … And in the middle of this chaos, straight, clean sheets, the smell of alcohol, a table that looks like an ice floe. Outside the window, some rhythmic chanting, those fleeting echoes that people carry away with them mechanically after a demonstration or a carnival. A snatch of music is woven into it— the joyful sob of an accordion, the sound of which conjures up a vision of the avenue in its August heat….

  The nature of the pain altered, becoming harsher, more humiliating in its physiological banality. Olga sensed that the words were already trembling in her mind and that, in an indignant, silent protest they were about to blame her own stupidity (“What an idiot! At my age!”); as well as the vigilant, petty perfidiousness of life (“The moment was well chosen, enough said! Or rather I was the one well chosen, otherwise I might have been able to cling to a few illusions about the best of all possible worlds…”). She hurriedly resumed her game of stocktaking. Yes, the festive shouts outside the window: the second anniversary of the Liberation of Paris … In the morning, on her way to her friends house, she had noticed the profusion of flags on the fronts of buildings…. Yes, this city at once animated and drowsy; this one-story house at the edge of the fifteenth arrondissement; this sun beating against the closed shutters on the ground floor. And, in a room isolated from the world, two women. One of them stretched out on a table, covered by a sheet, the other bent over the first’s lower abdomen, her head swollen by an enormous white headdress with horns, engaged in performing a clandestine abortion.

  Olga felt her indignation thwarted by the absurdity of the situation. She could have been indignant if the pain had violated some logic, flown in the face of justice. But there was no logic to it. Just scattered fragments; unpleasant pricks that raised goose bumps on her thighs on that stifling afternoon of August 25, 1946; the room crammed with furniture; a woman subjecting another woman to an operation held to be criminal. “A clandestine abortion,” Olga repeated mentally, thinking that the improbability of her situation might well have been even more striking. One had only to picture how close her half naked body was to the passersby outside the shutters. Her body that had been surgically amputated from the tiny life enclosed within it, a body now singular but which, from tomorrow onward, would melt back into the crowd of other bodies, indistinguishable from their mass.

  She heard another click of metal on the tray. Her friend’s horned head bobbed up at the end of the table.

  “That’s it?!” They spoke with one voice, one asking, one stating, in unintended unison, as often happens with people who have known one another for a very long time and end up unconsciously following the course of one another’s thoughts….

  “And yet,” thought Olga, “we’ll never breathe a word about the most important things. I’ll never even tell her how I make lists to help me forget the pain. The second anniversary of the Liberation; this tiny death in my womb; the portrait on the wall looking at me. How could I explain? I’d have to be able to ask her if she has thoughts of this kind; if trivia like this fill her mind, too, and seem important to her …” Those accordion notes just now; they brought on that sudden longing for an easy happiness, spine-tingling, very French, or at least what people imagine as French. The fleeting but burning desire to be without past, without thoughts, without weight; to be merry, intoxicated with being alive here and now. And all at once the shame at having had this longing. The vigilant censorship that watches over our happiness, a pitiless voice, always on the alert. A voice that reproaches her with the little life destroyed in her womb—as an immediate punishment for this longing to be happy. So many fragments of joy and fear we are made up of and never speak of.

  But there had been no mention of any of this in their conversation at noon before the operation. They recalled the Parisian midwife who had been guillotined some years previously, for having practiced clandestine abortions. They chattered jokingly, making faces and feigning theatrical terror: “The French will guillotine us!” The anecdote allowed them to remain silent about what was on the tips of their tongues, in their eyes, their real lives, made up of little nothings that were serious, essential, inadmissible.

  “I’m putting away my instruments of torture. You can get up. I’ve put your dressing gown here on the armchair.”

  Her friend touched her shoulder, smiling, then went out, taking with her the tray covered in a crumpled napkin. “That smile, I’ve already added it to my painkilling inventory.” August 25, 1946. A room transformed into a used furniture store filled with Russian curios. The smiling face of a woman—a scarred face that since adolescence had borne a deep gash cut into her left cheek, like a pink butterfly with torn wings. Her smile made the butterfly move; the most childlike, the most vulnerable smile in the world, one from which strangers turned away, so as not to let their revulsion be seen…. The face of Li. Li, lily … At a party in the days of their childhood in Russia long ago a ten-year-old child weeps: the others are in fancy dress as flowers; her own costume, a lily-dress, has gone astray. People hear her lamenting: “Li-li-lia!” They laugh. They make up a nickname. The child becomes Li. She is consoled with a replacement costume—that of a magician: she has a turban with a peacocks feather, a star-spangled cape, a magic wand. She falls in love with the role. At every party from now on it is she who takes charge of the magic; she learns conjuring, knows how to set off fireworks. People have almost forgotten her real name, Alexandra…. One festive evening a many-colored rocket hits her in the face before falling into the grass and exploding in a shower of stars that makes the children shout with glee. Her own cry is lost amid the tumult of laughter and applause. She is fifteen….

  In her inventory just now Olga included that child. A child disfigured because someone had once found her a magicians costume. A child who would survive wars, famines, indifference, and disgust in the eyes of others and end up in a stifling room, lost in the midst of the Parisian ant-heap, on August 25, 1946, causing pain, while she tended it, to the bared body of a woman.

  Along with the cool from the windows, opened at last, the evening also brought the marvelous sensation of the pain fading. Lying on a sofa squeezed between the piano and the armchairs, Olga heard her friend busying herself in the kitchen. The clatter of crockery, the swish of the water. Li … pleasantly distracted, as a woman can feel in the evening, soothed by the routine sequence of tasks. Li… so close, a friend for so long and at the same time unknowable. Other people are made up of questions that o
ne dare not put to them….

  Li stuck her head through the half open door: “You’re not bored?”

  “So she was thinking about me. It’s one of those questions you can never ask: What do you think of me? And yet we spend our days picturing how other people see us, picturing ourselves living in their minds. And I certainly have a life in hers. But what a strange creature that must be!”

  She tried to picture Olga as imagined by Li, an Olga in love and very much loved, in the midst of a passionate affair with her lover. (“She doubtless calls him my lover.”) For this imaginary Olga, pregnancy is a real disaster. The lover, a married man, is too prominent in the Russian colony in Paris to recognize an illegitimate child. Hence an abortion. The heroine of a pretty romantic tale …

  She pricked up her ears. A little hummed tune was now mingled with the sound of the dishes being washed. “My dear old Li,” thought Olga. “I must be something like that in her thoughts—a lover, passion, palpitations. If she only knew that the thing that really upset me in this business is that I can’t remember when this lover’ of mine last came to see me. That I’m almost sure he didn’t come in June, nor more recently. So this pregnancy strongly resembles an immaculate conception. No, he must have come in June, the proof of it is… But I simply don’t recall, I have no memory of it. And so where Li pictures a tragedy there is just this infuriating confrontation with forgotten dates, meetings that have slipped the memory … Other people make us live in surprising worlds. And we live in them; they go and see us down there; they talk to these doubles, who are their own invention. And in reality we do not meet at all in this life.”

  Li’s laughter woke her in the night. Sleeping in two armchairs arranged face to face for the occasion, her friend gave a rather shrill, childish little laugh. It took Olga several seconds to realize that Li was weeping softly in her sleep. The moon was melting on the lid of the piano; the furniture and objects seemed to be in suspense, interrupting the existence they had been leading a moment before. And her friend’s wail rang out both close at hand and in the infinite remoteness of the life that enfolded her dreams…. Olga remained awake for quite some time, listening as Li’s breathing gradually calmed down.

  In the morning, finding her friend neither in the room nor in the kitchen, Olga went out into the little yard at the back of the house. She sat down on an old stool in the soft, transparent sunlight and did not stir, her gaze fixed on a little stunted tree that persisted in growing in a crack under the gutter. It was important to her not to disturb the simple happiness, the absence of thoughts, the slow drifting of the air that still had the freshness of cold paving stones, of the night, but already carried the smell of grilled onions. Olga leaned the back of her neck against the rough surface of the wall. She suddenly felt she could live solely by following the permeation of these smells, live in this light, in the immediate physical sensation of happiness. On the wall facing her, several narrow windows, cut through at random, spoke of unknown lives that seemed touching to her in their simplicity….

  This happiness lasted for the time she needed to take stock of her own reality. It was still there, but yesterdays thoughts, the thoughts of every day, in the guise they had had yesterday, were already flooding in: that “lover,” certainly the last man in her life; the tiny lethal operation in her body. During the coming days all of that would give rise to a long, futile inner debate, arguments that excused her and those that damned her. She could already hear words forming in her head, that vigilant voice that kept watch over her moments of happiness: “So, you’ve had your instant of bliss thanks to a little murder. Bliss in a backyard that smells of onions. Well done!”

  She got up, went closer to the tree, inhaled the bright little blossoms scattered over its branches…. Her friend’s words could be heard at the other end of the yard, coming from the cellar—Li’s studio. Olga went down the steps: she could not yet imagine who might be on the receiving end of these cheerful and encouraging remarks.

  “No no, my dear man, don’t forget you’re a satyr! Come on, give me a lewd grimace. Yes, very good, that’s right, a look inflamed with desire, licking your lips with lust. Perfect! Hold it there…. And you, Madame, look alarmed, tremble! A nymph already feeling this lubricious monster’s breath on her neck…. Good! Don’t move …”

  The cellar was lit with a sharp, theatrical light. Li, motionless behind a tripod, her eye glued to her camera, was pointing it at a huge plywood panel. Against an exuberant painted background of plants and leaves, it portrayed a beautiful nymph with a white, shapely body being embraced by a satyr surging up out of the rushes. The nymph blinked her eyes a little nervously. The satyr coughed.

  “And-now-quite-still-everyone! “ repeated Li in a magician’s voice, and there was a click.

  The faces of the satyr and the nymph detached themselves from the plywood and left two dark, empty circles in their place.

  Li stood up, noticed Olga, and gave her a wink. A man and woman came out from behind the panel. It was comical to see their heads detach themselves from the painted figures and come down to earth on very correctly dressed bodies: a summer dress, a light shirt with a tie. They themselves seemed a little disconcerted by this sudden transformation.

  “The photos will be ready the day after tomorrow, about noon,” Li explained as she led them out.

  They had lunch in this cellar where there were several painted panels arranged along the walls. On one of them Olga made out a castle in flames with a musketeer escaping out the window, clasping a swooning beauty in his arms. A little farther on a couple of suntanned bathers were basking at the edge of an expanse of blue, beneath the palm trees. The holes for their faces stood out oddly against the background of the tropical sky. In the foreground Olga was surprised to detect a streak of real sand, and a large seashell…. Li followed her gaze.

  “Oh that’s quite an old one. From the days when I was going all out for the illusion of depth, trompe l’oeil. I noticed that people very much enjoyed the realism.

  Olga listened to her, amazed and touched, thinking: “This is Li. Elusive. Who is she? Conjurer. Painter. Photographer. Nurse. Three years at the front during the First World War. Imprisoned and tortured under the Occupation, yes, those hands covered in burns…. Last night she cried in her sleep. What was she dreaming about?”

  Li got up, forgetting the meal, and took out one panel after another, placing them all on the stands. It was not the first time she had shown her collection to Olga, but, as with all great enthusiasts, her passion was rekindled each time and gave spectators the impression of experiencing anew things they had seen before.

  “I just had to keep inventing,” she explained, putting her head through a cutout circle. “This is my mythological period. Recognize it?”

  A girl clad in a transparent tunic was approaching a bed, by the light of a candle. A winged cupid lay there asleep in voluptuous abandon. Li’s face appeared now in the aura of the candle, now on the pillow.

  “And after that, one day, a flash of inspiration. And my literary period begins. Look!”

  This time it was a man with a bushy beard, wearing a long peasant blouse, a giant standing beside an izba and leaning on the handle of a swing plow. The character posed beside him seemed, in his city clothes, to be the very epitome of the average man.

  “You see,” exclaimed the photographer, thrusting her face into the cutout, “a certain Mr. N calling on Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. And you can’t imagine how many Mr. Ns have already succeeded in convincing people they were on intimate terms with the writer. And not only the French: even the Russians allow themselves to be taken in.”

  Olga was beginning to feel slightly drunk. It was not the taste, now forgotten, of the wine Li had served, but intoxication at the nonchalance with which her friend conducted her life.

  “I’ve even concocted my little theory on the subject of all these fantasies. This Mr. N who wants (mainly as a joke, but not only as a joke) to have himself photographed in the company
of Tolstoy. What stopped him from shaking hands with him in real life? Minor hazards of existence. Not even his modest origins. Tolstoy used to walk about on foot just like him and lived in Moscow in the next street. It was not even his age: this Mr. N was twenty when Tolstoy died. In short, what kept them apart was the most trivial bad luck. The same that causes one passerby to slip on a banana peel and break his leg, while the one before just misses it.”

  “So you decided to give fate a little helping hand?”

  “No. I simply wanted people who come here to learn to defy chance. To liberate themselves. Not to assume their own lives are the only possible existence. You know, I’ve even found a motto: Listen to this! ‘Tolstoy is walking by on the opposite side of the street…. Cross over!’ They send one another these photos for April Fools’ Day. But I want them to change their lives. I want to make them live waiting for the unexpected, miracles. I want

  Olga nearly asked: “But Cupid and Psyche? Isn’t it rather unlikely that your clients will meet them, even if they do cross the road? …” She held her peace. Despite Li’s playful tone, she had sensed a vibrant, tense intonation in her voice. Which is how one presents one’s credo to a friend, behind a smokescreen of jokes.