The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  Going to look for these white flowers in the woods in springtime was a promise Olga had been hearing for several years now….

  The round of the readers resumed. The cavalry officer told the story of his best horse, the one that was trained to lie down and stand up in obedience to a prearranged whistle. Then he acted out another saber fight and did his “S-s-shlim!” impression.

  Then there were the readers whom Olga privately called “the climbers.” These were the ones who had managed to leave their much-maligned quarters in the old brewery and had moved into the upper part of Villiers-la-Forêt while dreaming, secretly or openly, of one day going to live in Paris.

  Masha came as well and, leaning on the display shelves, she murmured confidentially, “I won’t be coming again for a couple of weeks now. I’m off to Nice. With him….”

  The significance of “with him” was already clear to Olga: not with the husband.

  Into this intermittent sequence of conversationalists slipped the former pharmacist who lived in forced idleness following the destruction of his premises by Allied bombers. Since that catastrophe he had drawn closer to the emigre community in the lower town, had even begun to learn their language and had gradually assumed the role of the Frenchman par excellence that every Frenchman adopts when living among foreigners. Unconsciously perhaps, he exaggerated certain characteristics that are considered to be typically Gallic and was delighted if the inhabitants of the Caravanserai exclaimed, in response to his racy puns or his gallantry, “Oh, these French—they’re incorrigible!”

  When he had left, Olga said to herself with a smile, “Whatever they may say about him, he was the only one to notice that I’d cut my hair.” And she went over the pharmacist’s words in her mind: “Oh Madame! What a blow you strike at our hearts. Quel coup! ‘Cou,’ of course, without the final ‘?.’ The curve of your neck is exquisite. I hope this is not the last of your treasures you will lay bare for us to see….” She went to put away the books the pharmacist had returned and, recalling the man’s gestures and performance, thought, “You know, they really are incorrigible, these Frenchmen.”

  The tall, peevish nurse who was constantly in mourning came at the end of the morning and asked for a recently published book in which, she said, there should be maps that would enable her to establish the exact location of her British beloved’s final air battle….

  Olga did not notice the day passing. Or rather it passed in the stories of all the readers, drowning her in their words. “They’ve driven me out of my own life,” she said to herself bitterly.

  Only at the end of the day, after closing time, did she feel she was returning into her own life. Generally she left at eight o’clock sharp, otherwise the library turned into a debating chamber: and the readers, particularly those who lived in the Caravanserai building itself, would only leave at midnight, after drinking several cups of tea, reliving all the revolutions and all the wars in the world and telling the stories of their lives for the umpteenth time…. That evening she locked the door and remained sitting there for a while behind the display shelves where the returned books were piled up. The faces of the day still hovered like ghosts in the half-light of the empty room. She saw herself just as all these visitors must see her: a librarian for life, a woman abandoned by her husband who had cut herself off from her own caste, the mother of a doomed child….

  A slight rattling interrupted this silent colloquy. She looked up. The handle of the door was slowly turning down. For no reason the slowness of this movement was alarming. A hand shook the door several times with the same strong, sure force. After a moment of silence, a man’s voice, not speaking to anyone and yet not excluding the possibility that someone might have locked themselves into the library, almost hummed, “And the bird has flown! Forgetting to switch off the light. Strange …” And a moment later the same voice was replying to a tardy reader, “Too late, my dear! Madame Arbyelina is punctuality itself. It is a quarter past eight. Punctuality, as you know, is the politeness of kings … and of princesses …”

  Olga tried to fit this or that face she knew to the voice, then abandoned the attempt. A voice she had never heard before. She took the last book to be put away, the volume that had been covering up that patch of ink on the light wood of her desk. It was unpleasant to look at because it resembled a potbellied man; she always hid it with a sheet of paper or a book. Suddenly, like a moth fluttering out of the folds of a curtain, the three snapshots slithered to the ground. Since that morning, amid the hubbub of words, she had forgotten all about them. The blood rushed to her cheeks. “Suppose a reader had taken this book out tomorrow?” She pictured the scene, the shame, the laughter, the tittle-tattle….

  And when her eyes peered deeply once more into the nocturnal room where a naked woman stood beside a French door in darkness, the mystery of this moment could be approached very simply. Nobody knew the woman was there, in the middle of the night, in the coolness that arose from the river. “Just as nobody knows that I am in this empty library now, lit only by this little table lamp. I have lived a half hour of my life they will never know about.” She told herself the woman in the photograph could have walked out through the French door and taken a few steps across the meadow that sloped down to the river…. The freedom of it was heady. A naked woman walking on the grass, on a moonless night, no longer a librarian, nor an abandoned wife, nor a certain Princess Arbyelina….

  On her way home she stopped from time to time and looked about her: the little houses of the lower town, the trees, the first stars seen through their branches.

  Her most intense amazement was at discovering the very close presence of a life that could remain unknown to other people.

  Two days after that strange evening hidden from the others she received a letter from L.M. (her “Parisian lover,” as she knew the inmates of the Caravanserai called him). It was in such half-page letters that he used to invite her to Paris. The latest one differed from previous ones in its serious and, it appeared, mildly vexed tone. Reading between the lines there was a kind of reproach: I’m just back from Germany where I’ve been given a guided tour of hell and here you are in France, living your little operetta of a life. The tone also meant: yes, I know we haven’t seen one another for several months but you have no right to judge me: my work as a journalist takes precedence over all the tender sentiments in the world.

  That evening she drafted a reply. A letter that put an end to this long sequence of meetings that they had referred to, for a certain time at least, as “love.” In the lines she set down, crossed out, rewrote, this word no longer occurred. And once this linchpin was removed, all that they had lived through became simply a collection of dates, tones of voice, hotel rooms, ends of the street, different silences in the night, pleasures of which only the shell of the memory remained. She tried to tell him all that…. The rhythm of the sentences was transferred to her body and made her walk up and down mechanically in the corridor of her narrow house. In the hall her eye lingered on the old chest of drawers. The corner of the top had been sawed in an irregular curve. It was L.M. who had done that; so that the child should not cut himself when playing, he explained. He was very proud of this service rendered. “Like all men who give practical help to a single mother,” she thought. Each time, as he came in, when he visited her at Villiers, he would finger the sawed-off corner, as if checking his work, and sometimes he would even ask her, “So it’s doing the job? Don’t hesitate to let me know if you need any other sawing done.” Now, as she walked through the hall, she told herself that she should have risked the truth and mentioned that sawed-off corner in her letter—one of the real reasons for breaking with him! But would he have understood? She could just have written about that corner and nothing else. Or perhaps this scenario as well: a man with a pale torso, stretched out in the darkness beside her, talks without stopping, now spurred on by his desire, now deflated by the lack of it…. The whole truth could be summed up in those two fragments.

  H
aving completed the draft she went to the kitchen where the wood stove had gone out and her infusion was cooling. It seemed to her that her letter breaking it off marked the start of a new era. Perhaps it would indeed be one spent “looking forward to old age” as the director had said. Everything that seemed transitory, still capable of changing, would become fixed—this kitchen with the familiar blisters on the tired paintwork of the walls; this long, low brick structure, her house; and her presence in Villiers-la-Forêt, daily less surprising to her amid a cycle of seasons, almost indistinguishable from one another, as they are in France, where the summer lingers long into the fall and where the winter, without snow, is merely a continuation of the fall. Henceforth her life would be rather like this vague slippage…. Before going to bed (that evening the infusion had no effect on her emotional state) she darned her son’s shirt. Spread out on her knees, the fabric was rapidly impregnated with the warmth of her body, of her hands. The shirt with its frayed collar already belonged visibly to this new era in her life, when nothing extraneous would any longer come between her and her child. No visits, no affairs. She would drive away any thought that would take her further from him. But he would not notice this change, any more than next morning he would notice a cluster of stitches of blue thread on the collar of his shirt….

  Scarcely a few days after that evening when the final letter was written and the great decision taken with intense and tender bitterness, Olga was to forget all about it. Her resolutions, her mature collect-edness, her resignation—all this would be swept away by a single gesture.

  In the course of a light, cool evening in the last days of summer, in a moment of great serenity, she would catch her son unawares, standing beside the little copper vessel in which she brewed her infusion of hop flowers. She would spot him poised in the brief moment of tense alertness that follows one of those actions a person is trying to keep secret at all costs. The trancelike immobility that forms a bridge between a dangerous or criminal act and the exaggerated relaxation of movements and words that follows it. What she would think she had guessed at seemed to her such an improbably monstrous action that instinctively she stepped back several paces. As if she desired to turn time backward, already sensing that a return to their old life had at that moment become impossible.

  LATER ON SHE WOULD FIND herself trembling to think that at the moment when she caught sight of him, he could himself have observed her through the slightly parted curtains at the kitchen window….

  The sky had still been light; and the trees stood out against its transparency with the clarity of an etching. The mauve luminosity of the air gave their silhouettes an unreal appearance. From time to time Olga would pick up a dead leaf or a fragment of spar and examine them by this deceptive, translucent light. Even her fingers, as they grasped the handle of a spade, had a supernatural glow in this fluid pink. The cold, pure start to the dusk, she knew, promised a calm and limpid night. A fine night at summer’s end.

  She was working slowly, following the rhythm of lights and colors that grew richer with an ever darkening blue before turning purple. The dry stalks she uprooted from the bed beside the wall came up comfortably, easily, with the resignation of summer flowers that are over. From the dug earth there arose a pungent, heady smell. It was dark now, but she continued the slow ceremony of simple tasks that left the mind at rest….

  It was a Saturday. During the afternoon she had recopied her farewell letter to L.M. for the second time. And to avoid the temptation of starting all over again she had put it in an envelope, deciding to mail it on Monday morning. For two days, now that the deed was done, she had had a sense of living in a soothing ebb of emotions. It was just as if she were walking at low tide on an uncovered seabed, distractedly picking up a pebble here and the fragment of a shell there….

  It was in this blissful, distracted state that she was working now. Bent low over the earth, she finally reached a spot below the kitchen window and stood up.

  Too abruptly! Giddiness overcame her and made the lit window and the curtains sway. Her body was flooded with a dull, hazy weakness. As she leaned her hand against the wall it seemed to yield gently. To check this wavering she fixed her gaze on the bright gap between the curtains. And saw a stranger, a very young man standing beside the stove …

  She saw his gesture. With the clarity that movements and objects have when observed at night from outside a window in cold weather. An almost incredible clarity, on account of her giddiness.

  The young strangers hand hovered rapidly above the little copper saucepan. Then his fingers crumpled up a thin rectangle of paper and slipped it into his pants pocket. He moved away from the kitchen range and glanced anxiously at the door….

  Still reeling, she took a few steps backward. A bush rose up behind her, repelling her with its springy branches. She stopped, hearing only the dull throbbing of the blood in her temples, seeing only the strip of light between the curtains.

  Sensing everything, but as yet understanding nothing, she saw scattered fragments coalescing beneath her eyelids: the fingers hovering over the hop flowers; the three photographs of the naked woman; the open door the night when they were taken; two days spent at Lis; the abortion…. Her eyes, swimming with the thick fog of her giddiness, were already making horrified sense of this scattered mosaic. But her mind, numbed by her blood rising, held its peace.

  Little by little, however, the mists cleared, the mosaic became more and more irremediable. Its colored fragments evoked a great dark red reptile, rapidly swelling in her brain. At that moment the giddiness vanished, clarity returned. Olga had a fraction of a second to understand…. But the reptile swollen with blood exploded, burned the back of her neck, froze her lips in a cry. The mosaic remained shattered: three photos; the open door; herself standing, quite naked; the infusion that occasionally made her sleep for so long. It was like a word at the back of your mind, the letters and sound of which are glimpsed for an instant and disappear immediately, leaving behind only the certainty of its existence.

  True, this slimy reptile, swollen with brown blood, did exist. It was this that her mind, now cleared, retained, like the proof of a moment of madness. And even the voice of the “little bitch” had fallen silent, terrified by what had just been sensed.

  Now her gaze was riveted on the young stranger who was nonchalantly leafing through a notebook open on the table in the brightly lit kitchen. It was her son!

  But before she could grasp how he could have grown up to this extent, the child of seven that, after so many years, he still remained for her, there occurred in her vision a kind of rapid adjustment that hurt her eyes. The face of the young man bent over the notebook and the face of the child that lived within her mind trembled at the same instant, swam toward one another, and melted into intermediate features. Halfway between one thing and the other: those of a fourteen-year-old boy.

  The young man, she now understood, had appeared at the moment of her giddiness, his face and body matured by the horror of the mosaic that had revealed the unthinkable. Yes, this very young man, slim, pale with the transparent, almost invisible shadow of his first mustache, belonged to the world of the mosaic that, once thought about, was transformed into a glistening reptile, with glassy, enigmatic eyes. A world that was horrifying but could neither be thought nor spoken.

  The light between the curtains went out. In the darkness, following the wall with her hand, she made her way toward the door. She caught her foot against clods of earth and uprooted stalks. She felt as if she were returning to the house after several years…. In the hall the patterns on the wallpaper amazed her, as if she were seeing them for the first time. She bent down and automatically performed the action she repeated almost every day. Picking up a pair of dusty shoes she thrust her hand into first one, then the other, feeling the in-sides. To detect the point of any nail lurking in the sole. Suddenly she lost her grip on the shoe and it fell to the ground. Her hand had slipped inside the worn leather quite easily. She realized she was s
till living with the memory of her fingers, that used to have to wriggle painfully into the child’s narrow shoes.

  She stood up and her hand retained the sensation of the shoes growing gradually broader. “Fourteen. He’s fourteen…,” she caught herself murmuring softly. The face of the adolescent whom she had recognized as her son was very deeply embedded in her eyes. She perceived in it the invisible mutation linking the face of the child to that of the young man. Everything in his features was still malleable, everything still had the softness of childhood…. And yet he was a new being. And almost as tall as she! Indeed, in a few weeks he would be the same height…. So a whole period in her son’s life must have passed unnoticed!

  She put the shoes away and went out into the darkness again. “I didn’t notice him growing up … He was an endlessly silent, discreet child…. An absent child. When his father left it froze him at the age he was then. And after that there was the war, those four empty years. And, above all, there was his illness: I paid more attention to a scratch than to him growing three inches. And his shy independence. And his isolation. And this benighted spot, this Villiers-la-Forêt….”

  The words reassured her. She prolonged their exaggeratedly reasonable flow because she did not know what she was going to be able to do when they dried up. She simply did not know. She was walking in the dark on the grassy slope that lay between their house and the river. And whispering these explanations that, she sensed, would never express the essence of the bond between them, her and her child. The branch of a willow tree suddenly checked her. A branch that stroked her cheek with a caress that felt alive. Olga stopped. There was the willow with its silent cascade of branches. In their net a few stars. The reflection of the moon in the hollow of a footprint filled with water. The fresh, nocturnal scent of the reeds, asleep at the water’s edge, the scent of the wet clay …