The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  Olga drank the infusion in her room. As she put the bowl on her bedside table she heard the voice of the “little bitch” once more: “You’ve got all the quirks of an older woman. Your bowl; soon it’ll be little medicine bottles, a shrine for your declining years….” But the words hurt less than usual. For now she knew the hiding place of the mocking voice: in the great mansion during a party, where a twelve-year-old girl was discovering the cavernous complexity of life. As she ran through the corridors there was, among other things, the servant she caught drinking champagne from the guests’ glasses….

  Now her thoughts were quite confused: “It’s really effective, this infusion,” she had time to say to herself. “I must recommend it to Li. She stuffs herself with sleeping pills and then cries in her nightmares …” Sleep overcame her so quickly that her hand, stretched out toward the lamp, stopped halfway.

  On Monday morning at the library there was a constant procession of readers, as if they were deliberately conferring outside the door and coming in one after the other, each to tell her their story. And indeed for a number of them, solitary and often ashamed of their solitude, the library was the only place where there was someone, she, Olga Arbyelina, to listen to them.

  The first to come was the nurse from the retirement home, the “Russian retreat” located on the ground floor of the former brewery. A tall, dry woman, whose youthfulness had been overlaid by the air of arrogant and peevish mourning she had imposed on herself. She wore mourning for a person who had never existed and who had been born by chance in conversation when, to conceal her loneliness, she had hinted at a distant loved one, an English fighter pilot, about whom she could not say very much in wartime, for obvious reasons. From one admission to the next this phantom had lived his invisible life, blossoming with a multitude of details, in the heart of the woman who had invented him, adding to his exploits, being promoted…. His life had inevitably come to an end at the end of the war. Otherwise she would either have had to admit the lie or else transform him into a lover who was in no hurry to return to his beloved…. None of the Russian émigrés at Villiers-la-Forêt was taken in but in the end they became rather fond of this pilot, shot down in one of the last battles of the war….

  Scarcely had the door closed behind her when it opened again. A man came in looking over his shoulder and continuing his conversation with someone in the corridor. He did not break it off but simply directed his remarks at Olga as she sat behind her display shelf. This made no difference to the sense of his tale because it was always the same story, with no beginning and no end, and could be heard at any given moment. The former cavalry officer was telling the tale of his fights with the Bolsheviks. Single combat; offensives involving several divisions; ambuscades; and the wounding and deaths of horses that grieved him, it seemed, even more than those of his best friends…. From time to time his interminable harangue was interrupted by the hiss of a saber cutting into the flesh of an enemy. His face contracted into a savage grimace and he shouted out a brief

  “s-s-shlim!” and rounded his eyes at the same time, imitating the expression of a decapitated head….

  The readers came in, leaned their elbows on the display shelves, commented on the books they were returning, asked for advice and embarked ineluctably on their own stories…. Not all, however. One of them, for example, was discreet and swift. Olga called him the “doctor-just-between-ourselves” in memory of their first encounter: one day he had treated her son, but as he left he had murmured, “I should like this to remain just between ourselves. You know, practicing illegally in this country …”

  Shortly before closing time Olga had a visit from the pretty young woman, who two years previously had married an elderly art collector, the owner of several galleries. For a woman who had spent her youth in the poverty of the Caravanserai, had worked there as a waitress in the canteen, and had the banal name of Masha, this marriage seemed like the arrival of the handsome prince, even though her husband was neither handsome nor a prince but ugly and morose. The Russians of Villiers-la-Forêt tried to turn a blind eye to that side of things, knowing how rare miracles, even imperfect ones, were in this world…. Mashas tale consisted of a catalog of Parisian personalities whom she had met in her husbands galleries. The all-too-visible effort she had made to memorize all their names, often classy aristocratic names, was as great as the one she was making now to refer to them with worldly indifference. It seemed clear that if she came back to Villiers-la-Forêt and to the Caravanserai from time to time, it was to relish her wonderful deliverance from such places, and from her wretched past; to stroll about among all these people, as if through a bad dream, but one from which she could awaken at any time, by going back to Paris….

  The director of the retirement home was the last one to come that day. She had to wait patiently for Masha to finish her list of celebrities. When the latter had finally left the room, she exhaled a noisy sigh of relief.

  “Phew! And I thought it was people of our generation who couldn’t stop talking. Looking forward to old age when there’s nothing else to do…. But you heard that chatterbox. I’m sure it would take the two of us a week to get through as much gossip as that.”

  The director’s words turned into a whispering inside Olga’s head that nagged at her all evening. “People of our generation … looking forward to old age….” It is in such trivial conversations, thanks to a chance remark, that the truth can be laid bare and wound us mortally. Of those two women, Masha and the director, she naturally felt she was closer to the former, who was thirty-five or thirty-six. Yet here was the latter, who had long since passed fifty, hustling her along, she who was only on the brink of forty-six, toward this “looking forward to old age.”…

  In the bathroom she spent a moment studying the mirror. “In fact it’s very simple,” she told herself. “Hair like mine turns gray quite early. I should explain to everybody: you see, I have hair of this type but I’m not as old as my hair looks….” Then she shook her head to banish the stupid vision of a woman pleading that she had unusual hair.

  As she went into the kitchen she saw her infusion cooling in the little copper saucepan and suddenly experienced a gentle sense of relief that came from resignation. Yes, to resign oneself, to settle down into “looking forward to old age,” with little, slightly eccentric rituals. To grind down one’s former desires into tiny particles, very light, readily accessible—live these evening moments of vagueness in the soul, like the slender trickle of liquid she will shortly pour into the bowl….

  Olga herself did not understand what it was that suddenly rebelled in her. She acted with the zest of the very first, still unconsidered impulse. The infusion was poured down the sink, the sediment of petals gathered into a lump and tossed through the open window. She thought of Li and said to herself that it was thinking of her that had provoked her rebellion: “She’s older than me (again that arithmetic: three years older!) and yet she’s embarking on a crazy project. On a new life!”

  She was seized with the slightly nervous gaiety of someone who would have liked to thumb her nose at sober citizens. “Li really is a hell of a woman! She sure has guts,” she kept repeating, pacing up and down her room. Then she stopped, snatched up an object, rubbed it, as if to remove the dust, adjusted the little cloth on the pedestal table, tugged hard on the corners of the pillow. “That Li!” Suddenly the great leatherbound volume caught her eye. The camera! The spy camera Li had lent her, forgotten since then, had almost been transformed, through the habit of looking at it, into a quite ordinary book in the row of other books. As her fingers manipulated the nickel-plated mechanism of the fake book Olga felt them tingling with gleeful excitement. She switched out the light, put the camera on the shelf, and pressed the smooth catch on the top as her friend had instructed her….

  She only remembered about it three days later when her rebellion, the night she threw away the infusion, already seemed remote and futile, as is often the case with big exalted decisions taken late a
t night about which you feel embarrassed next morning.

  That day she had to go to Paris: someone had promised to introduce her to a leading specialist in diseases of the blood who could probably … Thus it was, going from pillar to post via slight acquaintances, that she continued her search for the miracle doctor that parents of doomed children never despair of finding…. She knew she would be calling on Li and decided to take the opportunity to return her spy camera to her.

  A week later she was extremely surprised to receive a little note that came with three black-and-white snapshots. “The first two didn’t come out; there wasn’t enough light,” Li commented.

  Olga spread them out on the windowsill and saw a vision of her own body that for several seconds took her breath away.

  On the first photograph, in point of fact, she was not seen. The space was lit from the side and in the part that had come out you could see the cat, which generally slept in the kitchen. This time it was awake and seemed to have been caught red-handed in some mysterious nocturnal activity. Its ears were pricked up, on the alert for sounds, its eyes with pupils like razor blades were outlined against the weak light shining on it. Its whole body was tensed in preparation for a velvety, leaping escape…. Olga was forced to utter a little laugh in order to rid herself of the disturbing impression left, for some unknown reason, by the attentive watchfulness of the cat.

  As she examined the other two photos she remembered that on the night of her exuberant rebellion, when she had set the spy camera, she had had to get up to remove her nightgown and open the window, so warm was the September night. At that moment she had completely forgotten the camera hidden on the shelf. And yet the tiny lens had been activated and with perfect discretion had taken five pictures, at three-second intervals.

  On the next photo Olga saw herself from behind, seated on the edge of the bed, her arm raised, her head swathed in the turban of the unwanted nightgown…. On the last she was standing up in front of the French door, her body leaning forward, one hand surrounding her breasts, as if to shield them from onlookers, the other resting on the handle. The features of her face were not clear. Of her eyes the snapshot had only retained a triangle of shadow. But you felt that her gaze was filled with the airy silence of the night and that along the white curve of her arm there flowed almost palpable coolness.

  This naked woman in front of the open door seemed very different from herself, a stranger to her. She could easily perceive the beauty of this body, its youthfulness, even; when she caught sight of the photo, it had taken her breath away. And something else, a singular element she could not define, a secret beyond words, the taste of which, like that of mint, froze her nostrils, made her gorge rise….

  All the while she was examining the photos, the voice of the “little bitch” persisted in pointing out strange inconsistencies. “Why are the first two completely blank and the third one hardly lit while the last two came out?”

  “Shut up. Its probably a defect in the camera.”

  “And why is the door open?”

  “A draft.”

  “And the cat?”

  “Shut up. I don’t want to know anything about it.”

  This altercation did nothing to reduce her amazement at the woman in the photos. It was only late in the evening (she heard a slight sound from the direction of the boy’s room and got up rapidly, ready to come at the slightest call) that the reproaches of the little bitch again reverberated in her mind: “All these photographs are very nice but you’d do better to think about your son once in a while. …”

  Olga did not reply. She went to the door, opened it, listened to the silence along the corridor. Their strange house consisted of this corridor with her room, the kitchen, and the bathroom at one end, and the boy’s room at the other. A storeroom furnished with a tiny window was located halfway along it and served as a library. The boy called it “the book room….”

  Hearing nothing, she went back to bed. What could she reply to the voice hounding her with its reproaches? Tell it that on the top shelf in the “book room,” inaccessible to the boy, there were a good dozen volumes devoted to his illness. And that she knew every paragraph of them by heart, all the treatments described, the tiniest details of every stage in the progress of the illness. Reply that on occasion she had nightmares in which the course of the illness was speeded up and completed in a single day. But that to think about it all the time would not have been living; it would be losing one’s reason and therefore not allowing the child to live. He needed a quite stupidly normal mother, that is to say unique, constant in her affection and her calm, constant in her youthfulness….

  The little bitch was silent. Olga got up again (she was already regretting not having brewed up her infusion), went to the mirror, gathered up her hair in a thick tress, and began to cut it shorter with a large pair of scissors…. She told herself that the photographs, the tales told by readers at the library, the endless arguments with the little bitch, the anxious arithmetic of women’s ages, all this torrent that filled her days, was in fact the only way to avoid spending all her time thinking about the books perched on the top shelf in the book room out of bounds to the boy. To immerse herself in this torrent was her way of letting him see her as a mother like all the others. Of seeming to herself to be a woman like the others, in order better to play the part of that mother.

  Before falling asleep she repeated several times in a silent whisper, trying to sound as natural as possible, “You know, perhaps we could go to Paris tomorrow or the day after, I’d like to show you … No! Look, we’re going to Paris: I’ve been told about a doctor who … No. Someone who’s a really nice man, a leading specialist in your … No. In your problems …” Generally her mind functioned without her being aware of it. Now she became conscious of this almost automatic mental process. “So I’m thinking about him all the time,” she said to herself, as if she had won a bitterly disputed victory over the voice that persecuted her.

  NEXT DAY AT THE LIBRARY she was eager to be over and done with the usual preparations for the start of the day. She could not resist the ludicrous impulse to spread out the three snapshots in secret behind her display shelf and examine them once more before the arrival of the first readers. Actually to examine them here in a neutral setting that ought to allow the photographs to be seen in an impartial light. An element in her desire to do this was that obsessive fascination of particular photos that one longs to keep looking at with the dependency of a morphine addict either to confirm that their mysterious charm has not vanished or, by contrast, in the hope of discovering some new detail in them that will transform their snapshot world.

  She opened two parcels of new publications, but in her impatience decided to enter them later and began to clip the French and Russian newspapers into their rods. She generally took the trouble to leaf through them, though she was sure of learning their contents from the readers’ interminable commentaries. This time she merely looked at the headlines on the first few pages, THEFT OF DUCHESS OF WINDSOR’S JEWELS … JOSEPHINE BAKER, OFFICER IN THE RESISTANCE … ALGERIAN UNREST! FEVER ATTACK OR GROWING PAINS … TRAINS TO RUN FASTER OCTOBER 7: NEW DRIVE BY SNCF, PARIS-BORDEAUX IN 6 HOURS 10 MINUTES; PARIS-MARSEILLES IN 10 HOURS 28 MINUTES.

  At last she was able to examine the three snapshots in peace. The beauty and youthfulness of the woman in the photographs fascinated her yet again. While listening alertly for footsteps outside the door, she studied this body, striving to be pitiless. But the unknown woman casting off her nightgown and in the next photograph standing in front of the window had nothing about her that betrayed a sagging, a decline. The back revealed beneath the nightgown was of an almost juvenile suppleness. And although this instant in her life was captured at random, the camera had recorded what in her own eyes distinguished her body from those of other women she had observed: ankles with very slender Achilles tendons, as if pinched between the thumb and forefinger of a giant sculptor; and also the delicacy of the collarbones, that looked as if
they were too slender to support the opulence of her full, heavy breasts. One never knows, often until ones dying day, whether other people notice such features and appreciate them or judge them to be graceless.

  Yet more intensely than the day before, this woman surprised in front of the dark window gave the impression of trembling on the brink of an amazing revelation. “She is totally … how can I put it? Unrecognizable? Other? The fact is, at that moment I was—other …” She tilted the snapshot to change the angle of lighting, hoping that the words she sought might suddenly emerge from its surface and capture its mystery in a formula…. The first readers of the day were already arriving at the door.

  To begin with, a very elderly boarder from the retirement home came into the room. Generally books were brought to her by the nurse. But that morning she had had the strength to come in person, quite amazed, quite radiant, to have managed to endure the long trek from one floor to the next, and quite dazzled, too, by the brilliance of the autumn sun that was shining through the windows. One could picture the feats this little body, almost transparent in its dressing gown, must have had to perform in order to climb stairs and walk down long corridors, filled with howling drafts that smelled of cooking, the street, and river damp. She had a long struggle with the door: as it closed it almost dragged her with it, almost wrenched her arm off by the force of its spring. In the look she leveled at Olga, along with her amazement, there was a reflection, at once anxious and proud, of all the dangers overcome…. As Olga escorted her back to her room she was addressing her, often breathlessly. “In the springtime … in spring I really must show you those flowers. You see they grow almost at the foot of the trees, coming up through the dead leaves. I’m sure even the French don’t know them. In the spring. We’ll go together. You’ll see. They’re pale white. And quite beautiful!”