The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  At that moment Li’s face appeared in the next cutout, breathing life into a lady holding a white Pomeranian on a leash. The man who accompanied her had a pince-nez fixed in the empty oval of the face by means of a very fine wire. “Cunning, no?” exclaimed the photographer with a laugh, and … leaving the lady with her lapdog, she thrust her head into the hole with the pince-nez. When Olga went and placed herself behind the panel with the nymph laughter overcame them. They looked at each other from the two ends of the cellar—Li as the writer with his pince-nez and Olga as the satyr leaping out of the reeds. Then the satyr confronted the lady with the lapdog; after that it was Psyche and the huge vacationer in his striped bathing suit…. Laughing, they stuck their heads into different panels and improvised conversations between the characters. “The satyr is walking by on the opposite bank … Cross over,” cried Li between two outbursts of laughter.

  A client arrived for a simple passport photo. And, without admitting it to themselves, they both became aware that the presence of this man, motionless in his dark suit, with his serious expression in front of the lens, was in reality no less strange, in his anonymous personal mystery, than all the nymphs, satyrs, and musketeers….

  When the day drew to a close, and the sun’s rays steadily lengthened, a feeling stole over them that their interlude of unreflecting laughter was coming to an end. Time was turned upside down, no longer flowing from its morning source but toward that moment when they would have to get up and say their good-byes, while trying to maintain a lighthearted, cheerful tone. It was that brief moment when solitudes are revealed; when one feels disarmed, incapable of checking the flight of the impalpable, gossamer stuff of happiness. Perhaps in an effort to hold onto the gaiety of the afternoon a little longer, Li gave a demonstration of a special camera. Its mechanism was concealed in a big book, a very clever simulation, with a thick binding and a gilded top. You could hardly see the reflection of the tiny lens….

  “I bought it from an American officer,” explained Li. “You put it on a shelf. It reacts automatically to a change of light. It takes five pictures at three-second intervals. …”

  Olga was hardly listening to her. When Li stopped talking and they could not let the silence continue any longer, they both spoke at the same time, in a swift collision of words, looks, and gestures:

  “You know, I’m leaving L.M. for good.”

  “You know, I’m going back to live in Russia.”

  Their expressions of surprise, their comments, also clashed in a disorganized exchange of questions and answers.

  “In Russia? Do you really think your fantastic photos will appeal to them over there? All those satyrs …”

  “Olga, I’m sure he still loves you. Read his last book again, it’s you he’s talking about… Why rush to break it off like that?”

  “But, of course they will. It’ll be a breeze. You know, Olga, under that regime they’ve become too serious. They need to learn to laugh again.”

  “But you see, when there are some little things you can’t stand any longer, it feels as if it’s all over. We always see each other in hotel rooms. Every time he brings me a pair of embroidered slippers, a kind of pumps made of fabric. When we part in the morning he takes them back until the next time. It’s his talisman. I suppose the pumps stay hidden in a drawer in his desk … Do you know what I mean?”

  It was only in the street, on her way to the station, that Olga had this thought: for months each of them had been preparing to announce her break with the past. The man, this L.M., that she was going to leave. The Russia that Li was going to rediscover. And when the moment had come they had announced it as one, in a confused, breathless, false exchange. As they said their good-byes they were each in a hurry to return to solitude to explore the others sudden future—the “tragedy” pictured by Li; Russia, that white gulf that had suddenly become a possible destination. They parted and the real conversation began, in their minds, the endless discussion with the other’s ghost. “That exchange of words in which we spend half our lives,” Olga said to herself as she left Li’s house.

  The street did not liberate her as she had hoped. The two days spent in Paris were concentrated into a dull weariness, filling her head with a buzz of obsessions, ones she had returned to a thousand times during the operation. Obsessions not easily brushed aside, massive as tablets of stone, that constantly tormented her mind: her age; this hollow sham of an exhausted love, very probably her last love; the need to consider this life as the only possible one … And now the vertiginous nothingness of Russia, which took her breath away; she did not even know what to think of it.

  In a passageway in the Metro, when changing trains, she noticed a little gathering, their heads raised toward a commemorative plaque fixed to the wall. She went up to it, read the inscription: “At this spot on August 23, 1941, Colonel Fabien shot and killed the first German….” The newspaper she unfolded in the train contained an account of the second anniversary of the Liberation of Paris. One of the photos showed Molotov with a sour expression on his face, leaving the official platform as a mark of protest. “That was yesterday,” she thought, “while Li was operating on me….” She felt she had her finger on the very essence of life: its chaotic improbability, the farcical absurdity of all this intermingling of destinies, dates, chances….

  She opened her bag and took out a thick leatherbound volume, the concealed camera that, with childish curiosity, she had asked Li to lend her as they said their good-byes. The leather smelled good and the object itself was alluring; it had the compact efficiency of an intelligent machine. Above all, it reminded her of the panels in

  Li’s studio. The marvelous simplicity of their subjects. “One should live like those characters on the plywood,” thought Olga, suddenly happy. “I make everything complicated, I can’t leave well enough alone. All that rubbish about embroidered slippers! No, Li’s right: two characters, one situation. She ought to paint me: a woman leaving her lover. On plywood, with broad brushstrokes, without psychology: because that’s where all the trouble starts!”

  This brief explosion of cheerful indignation gave her the energy to climb the staircase at the exit, to cross the square without collapsing onto the seat her eye had spotted. And even to silence the poisonous little voice that was hissing inside her head. “You’re a tired old woman: you’re putting up a brave front and breaking it off first so your lover doesn’t kick you out.” She managed to resist this voice and even to answer it back. “You bitch!” It was a young voice, coming from another period of her life, one of her former selves, that had not grown old and often irritated her with these cynical remarks. They were always woundingly accurate. “Little bitch, I’m going to have to take her apart one day …” she repeated, and these words kept at bay the tears of weariness that were already burning her eyelids.

  In the train with its almost empty coaches the two days spent in Paris seemed to her very remote, experienced by someone other than herself. Days filled with feverish, excessive words and thoughts. A kind of flight forward, a spiral of errors that then had to be corrected by making further mistaken gestures.

  Outside the window a drowsy dusk was slowly spreading. On the platforms of the little stations the sky high above was reflected in the puddles of water, mauveish gray, a wintry sky, you might have said, despite the warmth of that August evening and the dark, heavy profusion of the greenery.

  The names of the villages followed one another in the agreeable procession she knew by heart: Cléanty, Saint-Albin, Buissières. From time to time the smell of a fire of fallen branches, burning at the end of a kitchen garden, came in at the lowered window, evoking a gentle life, tempting in its imagined simplicity.

  It was in the midst of this deep tranquillity that her child, her son, returned to her thoughts. During those two days in Paris he had been in her at every moment, in every stirring of her soul, but protected, separated from what she was living through. Now he was there and it was he who brought this calm, in which she
was slowly catching her breath as if after a long escape…. She pictured him already returning next day at noon: with other children of Russian emigres, from their holiday camp. More than a specific being, she felt him within herself rather like a very physical atmosphere, made up of a myriad delicate elements, a constant vibration of these delicate elements; a throbbing of the blood that must be listened to with a deep instinctive ear, on the alert for the slightest vacillation in this equilibrium. She heard his body; his blood; his life; the silent music, one false note of which could break the rhythm. She heard it, just as, on this return journey she heard the calm of the sky, the silence of the fields…. She forgot Paris.

  And she remembered how one day in the spring she had been cleaning the windows and he had almost broken one of them, heaving himself up onto the sill of a window that he thought was open because of its new transparency. The glass had resounded vibrantly but resisted. With a rapid movement she had pushed open the two halves of the window, and recognized in the frightened eyes of the child the reflection of her own alarm. It was as if they could hear the shattering of the glass, see a shower of sharp fragments. They knew what that meant for a child like him. “I only wanted to give you a hug …” he said softly and sheepishly climbed down from the window….

  As she walked along the platform at Villiers-la-Forêt, where night had already fallen, Olga once more heard in her temples and in her throat (she never knew where it would be hiding) that mocking, aggressive voice she called the “little bitch.” The voice told her this calm would be short lived, that new, petty, persistent worries would swiftly erode the serenity of the evening, and that… Olga managed to shake it off by tossing her hair back, as if all the better to feel the coolness of the rain on her brow.

  IT WAS ONE EVENING in September (she was preparing her infusion of hop flowers) that Olga finally realized what memory it was that the painted characters in Lis studio had called up for her. The memory of that masked ball…

  During the war this infusion that helped her to sleep also gave her the illusion of an evening meal or, at any rate, was a substitute for tea. Later on, preparing it was transformed into an evening ritual that, through the repetition of actions that had become routine, put her troubled thoughts to rest, let her live in silent intimacy with herself. She loved this vague hour, outside the measure of time, this floating in repose. The flowers looked like tiny pinecones, their petals swelled up in the boiling water, then cooled down and sank one by one to the bottom of the little copper saucepan. Her gaze was lost in the imperceptible transmutation of the golden liquid, becoming clear again after it was decanted….

  That evening the voice of the “little bitch” managed to disrupt the pleasant vacuity of her thoughts. At first Olga was almost pleased to hear the latest reproaches of her persecutrix, so anodyne were the comments. “You aren’t consistent even in this stupid ritual. Sometimes you drink your infusion every evening, sometimes a week passes without you remembering. You drink it when you’re upset. It’s just another trick, a device for banishing unhappiness….” Olga offered no retort, hoping that the reproaches would stop there. But, sensing this hope, the voice started again: “Given the life you’ve led, and the child that you have, you ought to have become marble long ago, invulnerable to all the little hurts of existence. You ought to be a mater dolorosa … smiling, yes a faint smile of disdain, in defiance of destiny But look at you, mere words wound you; a remark made by some old madman at the library haunts you for weeks. You mentioned the embroidered slippers to Li and now you picture them each time you put on your own slippers…. Mater dolorosa in embroidered slippers. You’ve missed your vocation!”

  This time Olga retorted, “But my life is almost entirely behind me.” She knew that this argument silenced the voice of the little bitch when all other reasoning proved fruitless. “Yes. I’m approaching the age when nothing really new can happen to me before my death. No miracles. A highly improbable very last fling? The kind you embark on mainly to prove you still can. Yes, I’m a mater dolorosa in embroidered slippers….”

  The little bitch fell silent and in that innermost recess of her mind Olga experienced something of the quiet satisfaction of a person whose superiority has perforce been recognized. At least she could now resume her long drift through the evening. Distractedly she stirred the flowers in the infusion, made ready the drinking bowl and a little strainer. “And now it has to cool…” she thought, relishing the delicious idleness of those minutes.

  The boy was already asleep in his room. And the calm and the purity of this sleep seemed to be deepened by the distant chiming of the clock on the church tower in Villiers-la-Forêt. She ended up by matching her thoughts to this nocturnal rhythm. All that remained in these weary thoughts was resignation. Acceptance of this two-pronged house tacked on to the length of the wall of the former brewery where the other emigres lived, which was known as the Caravanserai. The acceptance of her life here in this little town with no special charm; a completely random place and yet predestined; the only one that would take her in after her flight from Paris, her break with Parisian émigré society, and the departure of her husband.

  The only place under heaven. This house between the wall of the Caravanserai and the riverbank. She smiled: her place here below.

  Holding back the gilded sediment of the flowers with a spoon, she began to pour the infusion into the bowl. She was still smiling, thinking that Li might very well paint her as an old witch mixing her magic potion….

  Suddenly her mind made a rapid connection: the characters on those panels, Li and … that masked ball! How had she failed to notice the resemblance earlier?

  A good many of the guests in costume were destined to crop up thirty years later on panels created by a whimsical photographer installed in the basement of an old house in Paris. In the feverish gyrations of that carnival long ago Olga had indeed glimpsed an operatic musketeer, a queen with her tall medieval headdress, a ghost making its white garb ripple. And even, in one of the little empty rooms in that mansion, an Othello, a fat man outrageously daubed with black, and drunk, no doubt, thundering out a desperate bravura melody on a piano, while smearing the white keys with muddy fingerprints …

  … The twelve-year-old girl threading her way secretly across the great estate filled with music and laughter is herself, a distant reflection of herself. The adults are too busy with their masquerade to notice her shadow slipping along the walls, avoiding the costumed whirlpools. It is with a disturbing sharpness that the girl, who has just stolen out without permission from the little estate cottage where she was supposed to spend this festive night, experiences her autonomy, her liberty, her strangeness in a world clothed in merry madness. Above all, she is aware of the singularity of these, her childhood years: her father was killed in the Russo-Japanese War; her mother has “buried herself alive” (so say the grown-ups) in a fervent isolation made up of prayers, long hours spent upon her husband’s grave, and nocturnal séances with a famous spiritualist, who gives her glimpses of the features of the dear departed and is ruining her. The girl lives in her uncle’s family, a man who “will sell his last shirt to throw a party.” This masked ball one fine June evening marks the start of a long series of festivities, hunting parties, amateur theatricals on a stage by the entrance to the garden…. The girl senses that the freedom she enjoys proves something is out of control in this great mansion. She knows that in her grandmother’s time they would never have allowed a child to join in a grown-up party. This casual attitude disturbs her and at the same time excites her…. In a drawing room she comes upon a strange figure: an adolescent girl, dressed as a magician, sitting in the angle of a little sofa, fast asleep. Her tall headdress covered in stars sits beside her; her magic wand has slipped onto the floor. The girl picks up this instrument of magic and, not knowing what to do with it, touches the magician’s forehead lightly with the end of it. The magician murmurs something in a whisper but does not wake up. The magician is “a daughter of poor parents
” whom they put in charge of the fireworks and magic tricks at parties…. The girl steals the wand and goes off to continue her exploration. In the corridors she is jostled by groups of people in costume suddenly spilling out in an explosion of shouting, a fiery rustling of silks, a clattering of heels…. Exhausted at last, almost sleepwalking, she comes to a kind of small drawing room with no window, a remote corner: she has never known what it was for. It is lit by one candle, around which the melted wax is already forming a little glistening pool on the varnished surface of the table. The girl stops on the threshold. Her first impression fascinates her: she sees a man, a veritable colossus, dressed like a peasant in the folktales, half lying in a broad armchair and using his hands to manipulate a big puppet he has mounted on his stomach. But the puppet begins to speak with a woman’s voice, musical, strangely musical and somehow tearful…. Yes, it is a woman straddling the huge body of the man, who has his arms stretched out along the armrests. From time to time the woman interrupts her murmuring and her face is transformed into that of a bird of prey: she peppers the somnolent face of the man with swift, insistent, stabbing kisses…. All of this is quite bizarre, especially in this room where it feels as if the coughing of the grandparents’ old servant can still be heard. The girl would like to touch the woman’s body, a very slender, nervous body swathed in a froth of muslin. This restless body seems to grow directly out of the man’s stomach. It appears as if she has no legs, just this gauze of muslin that looks as if it covered the hollow trunk of a puppet. And the fine, long cigarette she holds in one hand extended far away from their bodies gives the impression of fluttering about on its own in the darkness…. Suddenly the man’s face lights up, he utters a noisy gasp. His hands grip the armrests. And the girl realizes that they are not armrests but the woman’s legs, her long thighs clad in gleaming black stockings. The man half stretched out in the chair moves heavily, plunges his hands into the muslin, and shakes the woman with such violence that the long cigarette rolls upon the ground. His huge hands plunge into the woman’s flimsy dress as if it were a puppet’s empty costume. The idea of this missing body is alarming. The girl prepares to run away, takes two steps backward, and suddenly, with a noise that seems to her deafening, drops the magician’s wand. The woman turns, pivoting on the man’s body….