The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  “The Fuhrer pretended to have a fit of hysterics every time anyone opposed him …” Interrupted by a visitor, she did not immediately find her place again in the text where she had broken off. Her eyes strayed over the neighboring columns. The complaint of the Parisian woman who in “Letters to the Editor” expressed indignation that “the plaques indicating street names are hidden by café awnings.” Then a feature about a young actress: “Educated at the Des Oiseaux convent, she is currently appearing in Antoine and Antoinette. …” Locating the earlier article again, she discovered that it was the last confessions of Ribbentrop: “I cannot understand it. Hitler was a vegetarian. He could not bear to eat the flesh of a dead animal. He called us Leichefresser, ‘corpse eaters.’ When I went hunting I even had to do it in secret because he disapproved of the sport. So how could such a man have ordered mass murders?”… The following page was devoted to a big diagram of a “plutonium bomb,” with almost lip-smacking explanations of its murderous power. Before the next reader arrived Olga also had time to notice the photo of a young musician with a gleaming permanent wave. The caption read: “Romano Mussolini is a fine guitar player. The Duce’s son is a young man who has forgotten all about the past and would like the whole world to do the same.”…

  The readers came in and deposited their books on the display shelves: this action served as a pretext for embarking on conversations. The former cavalry officer blamed the Americans for “letting Goering get away.” Masha gave a whispered account of her secret trip to Nice, glancing repeatedly toward the door with exaggerated alarm. They all took the librarian’s smile to be a sign of interest, but Olga was unaware that she was smiling as she responded inwardly to the deep echoes of her own thoughts. “I always thought wisdom consisted of pointing a finger at all the madness that escaped other people’s attention. And it turns out that quite the opposite is true. You are wise if in some way you can turn a blind eye. If you don’t eat your heart out tilting at this daily folly. If you can live with the reassuring falseness of words: war; criminals; triumph of justice; this innocent young guitarist who has forgotten the past; oh, and Masha, who doesn’t care a hoot for the past because she has a beautiful body that gives and takes pleasure. …”

  Abruptly she surfaced from her thoughts. In front of the display shelves the director of the old people’s home was talking about Xe-nia’s funeral the next morning. “Well you know, Olga my dear, at our age (you’re much younger than me, of course) one can’t help wondering: Will I be the next to go?”…

  During these days of tidying up she also managed to explain how her son’s sudden maturing had passed her by unnoticed. The excuse of the war took on an arithmetical simplicity: ‘39—’45, six years. Six years of strange survival when everything that could protect her child had disappeared. Medicines, food, the increasingly grudging sympathy of other people … One particular memory came back insistently: returning from the market one bleak day chilled with rain. A dreary market, deserted, where a hunter had sold her—at an unbelievably high price, like all food at that time—a bird with speckled plumage and a beak stained with dried blood. Wrapped in a piece of paper, the bird seemed still warm, despite the fall wind. Its body was supple, almost fluid, on account of the very smooth feathers and the paucity of the flesh that lay beneath them…. At one moment on the road Olga had to scramble onto the roadside to avoid the mud splashing up from the wheels of a convoy of army trucks. The strident laughter of a harmonica lashed her ears. She continued on her way under the low sky, in the rain. The body of the bird that had grown warm in the hollow of her hand was the only particle of life surviving in this universe of mud and cold…. She had enough time to prepare the meal before the child, lying with his leg in a plaster cast, should ask her to show him the bird….

  Yes, the whole of the war came down to that return from the market, to her fear lest the child should see the beautiful bird transformed into a piece of food…. He had been seven years old when they left Paris and came to Villiers-la-Forêt in the spring of 1939. Seven years plus six more, lost in the war. Plus this year, ‘46, that would soon be finished. Fourteen.

  In any case, the emigres, especially those living at the Caravanserai, inhabited a very singular time. A time made up of their Russian past, from which they emerged sometimes, into the midst of French life, distraught, clumsy, and continuing, as soliloquies, conversations begun in their former lives. They were all stuck at the age of their last years in Russia. And nobody was surprised to see a man with gray hair leaping about like a little boy as he acted out saber fights, fiery cavalry charges, and decapitations….

  Thinking one day about the child who had not changed in her mind over so many years, she pictured him dressed up as a young sentry…. Some time before their separation her husband had taught the child to stand guard in the hall of their apartment in Paris. The child put on a tunic she had made for him out of her husband’s old uniform, took his wooden rifle, and stood solemnly at attention, rooted to the spot, listening for the sound of footsteps on the staircase. After their split and his father’s departure, he had continued to mount guard for several weeks. She would see his little silhouette, motionless in the dark hall, and longed to explain everything to him, but her courage failed her: his father had supposedly gone away on a long trip, a very long one. The child had guessed for himself and had abandoned his guard duties. As if he had perceived his mother’s unease and wanted to protect her from any further pain …

  For her, since then, he had always been that silent child on secret and desperate sentry duty.

  On the day of Xenia’s funeral everyone in the little Russian church at Villiers-la-Forêt made a surprising discovery, apparently banal, but all the more striking for that: people at the Caravanserai died just like everywhere else, they grew up and became old there—and a whole generation of Russians had been born on this foreign soil, all these young people who had never seen Russia. Like Princess Arbyelina’s son, for example, standing there behind a pillar, staring curiously at an icon turned brown by the candle flames….

  Olga listened, without really hearing, to the voice of the priest and the vibrant resonance of the choir and was amazed at the triviality of the thoughts that such a solemn moment could not banish. Again she recalled Xenia’s dream: of going to pick the mysterious white flowers in the woods behind the Caravanserai in springtime. “But what is left of that dream now?” The question seemed stupid. And yet Olga sensed that by replying “Nothing!” she would have betrayed someone who was listening to her thoughts. She saw the outline of Xenia’s pale face in the midst of the white ornamentation of the coffin. And this question whose naïveté had irritated her— “What will be left of the woods in spring?”—suddenly touched the very essence of her life; of the lives of all these people, who were so different, packed together beneath the low vault of the church; of the life of this blue fall day, whose sky could be glimpsed when a latecomer timidly opened the door….

  At that moment she saw her son half hidden by a pillar. The sight of this young adolescent mingling with the others, detached from her, independent and lost in his own thoughts, caused such radiant and poignant tenderness to well up in her that she had to close her eyes.

  That same evening, as night was falling, Olga noticed underneath the kitchen sideboard an orange crayon that had rolled into a narrow and dusty corner, out of reach of the coming and going of the dust-mop….

  The infusion of hop flowers was cooling in its little copper saucepan. As before … The hour was striking in the distance, but the trees around the Caravanserai, now bare, had lost their musical resonance. While she was waiting Olga was cleaning the floor: coming into a spruce kitchen in the morning would make it easier to begin her day, she thought. However, she was also angry with herself over all these little weaknesses that were destined to fill her days from now on.

  She saw the crayon without immediately noticing its color. Her hand patted the dust a couple of inches away from its hiding place but could not reac
h it. She crouched down even lower, her face almost on the ground, her arm outstretched, her shoulder pressed against the corner of the sideboard. Some kind of superstitious whim impelled her on this quest…. Several broad swings of the floor cloth finally swept out the crayon. It rolled across the floor with a thin rattling sound. It was the crayon she had seen slipped into her sons notebook. An orange crayon. She removed the dust from it, washed her hands. And suddenly the gleaming color blinded her. “But it’s the same as …,” she murmured, and in a trice she was walking down the corridor and pushing open the door into the book room.

  She climbed onto a chair and took down several volumes at random from the farthest corner of the bookshelf. Opened one, then another. Here a paragraph was marked with a vertical line, there a sentence with a horizontal line, almost on every page. They were medical books dealing with diseases of the blood. Her son’s illness in particular.

  She had always thought the lines on it, drawn with heavy pressure, were the result of her husband’s readings. She had often pictured him thus: a man with his brow furrowed by grief, his eyes raw, scanning these paragraphs for reasons to hope. She had forgiven him a good deal, almost everything, because of those pages marked with orange…. The last two books on that shelf had been purchased after they split up. Standing on tiptoe she managed to grasp them. The pages fluttered in a hasty fan beneath her hands. They, too, carried the marks of the orange crayon.

  The contents of these two books were well known to her, down to the very chapter divisions, and in one of them down to the transparent mark on page 42, which looked like melted candle grease. She was not reading but hearing the intonation of her own voice that had silently pronounced every one of these words so many times, hoping to come upon an encouraging prognosis, a new treatment…. And now she could feel her son’s eyes resting on these pages. She looked up, still incredulous, and murmured: “So he knows all this …” Then looked again at the sentences he had underlined.

  “A hemophiliac should work in an office and should not undertake heavy manual work….”

  “Ninety per cent of hemophiliacs do not reach the age of twenty….”

  “Transmission can skip one or two generations….”

  “One of the hemophiliacs followed up by Professor Lacombe had developed ankylosis of all four knee and elbow joints, to the extent of being effectively incapacitated….”

  “Without repeated transfusions these losses of blood would have caused death….”

  “He attended a different department where he was not transfused and died of a hemorrhage….”

  “Injection of calcium chloride causes no problems whatever in man, though intravenous injection of as little as 50 cg of this salt may be enough to kill off a large dog within a few seconds….”

  “Following the taking of an ordinary blood sample a hematoma developed, extending from the shoulder to the middle of the forearm….”

  “Sufferers must be forbidden to marry….”

  “According to Carrière, 45 percent of hemophiliacs die before reaching the age of four, and only 11 percent reach the age of twenty….”

  “In the night the patient several times vomited black blood….”

  On one of the pages a big mark had been made, still in orange crayon, against a strange genealogical tree: the hereditary and familial antecedents of a hemophiliac. Olga knew this anonymous family like her own, with which she had often compared it.

  Her eyes took in at a glance the lines of relationship which resembled vessels that transmitted the diseased blood:

  She looked up above the lamp and felt as if she were meeting a young, calm gaze with no illusions. “So he knew everything. He knows everything,” she repeated. The eyes seemed to signify acquiescence with a slight flutter of the eyelids.

  If she had not guessed the secret of these markings with the orange crayon, she would certainly have passed a remark the following evening when she once again surprised this delicate and very young man, who moved like a dancer, wheeling about near the kitchen range.

  The stranger’s actions repeated the scene she had observed before as precisely as a hallucination: a rapid quivering of his hand above the copper vessel; an about-turn toward the table, toward the notebook, his alibi; a moment of stillness, the exaggerated nonchalance with which his fingers turned the pages….

  Yes, when she noticed these fluttering movements through the half open bathroom door she would have interrupted him with a cry of reproach, a remonstration…. Or rather with some trivial comment to spare him the shame.

  But now she remained silent. And yet the similarity with that September evening, the evening when she was gardening, was total. Save for one nuance, perhaps: this time it took her only a second to recognize the young stranger as her son. No more than a second, the time it took to suppress the cry that rose to her lips, to transform it into anodyne words and then, finally, into silence. But this time, above all, there was no longer any doubt.

  LATER ON SHE WOULD REALIZE that the cry had stuck in her throat because of one memory in particular….

  It was two years ago. The last spring under the Occupation. Through the open kitchen window she sees her son running toward the house. All that she sees is his hand pressed to his chest. He has been swimming and has collided with one of the timbers of the old landing stage…. He bolts into his room. She goes in, makes him show her what he was trying to hide. “It’s nothing serious, honestly.” His childish voice is desperately calm. But he lifts his hand. On his chest, above his heart, there is a bruise, turning into a purple swelling, then a whole pouch of blood, almost before her eyes. This hematoma is reminiscent of a woman’s breast, smooth, black. She senses that in a confused way the boy is embarrassed by this similarity…. During the healing process she recalls the advice given by one of the books that sit on the top shelf in the book room. The parents of a hemophiliac child must, says the author, “win his trust,” let him understand that he is “no different from his schoolmates”; they must know how to “disarm fear” with a friendly tone of voice…. She tries talking to her son in these borrowed tones that have always been alien to them both. Politely, he remains silent, avoids her eye. With each fresh word she feels she is floundering deeper into a lie it will be difficult to put behind them. In order to break away from the falseness of this dialogue invented for an abstract parent and child, she wills herself to a more confident tone. “So, were you scared? I’ve written to your father, you know …” He leaps up and rushes out. Ten minutes later a resident of the Caravanserai arrives all out of breath to alert her. They run toward the ruined bridge. Her son, a slim elongated figure, is stepping out, like a tightrope walker, along a steel girder that overhangs the river. A heterogeneous little crowd is following his shaky progress. Olga stops, her gaze hypnotized by the swaying of this body as it makes its way above the void. The cry freezes on her lips. He is a sleepwalker whose tread is supported by the held breaths of everyone else…. Reaching the end of the girder he turns round, teeters, waves his arms, clinging at the air that solidifies beneath the petrified gaze of the onlookers, stands up straight again, returns to his starting point, comes down…. They return home without exchanging a word. It is only when the door has closed behind them that he says very softly, “I’m not scared of anything.” She does not listen to him. She is watching the tiny red trickle snaking between the beauty spots on his forearm, slender and speckled with rust. A quite fresh little scratch that she will compress, recognizing beneath her fingers the unique consistency of his blood.

  It was seeing that sleepwalker above the void, in a flash of memory, that made her repress her cry….

  That evening she could not help understanding. It was all too evident: the copper vessel; a hand hovering over it with the tingling precision of a criminal act, shaking a little rectangle of paper over the brown liquid; his shadow, already moving away from the range, pivoting and taking refuge in a deliberately neutral pose.

  She closed the bathroom door. A second lat
er rapid footsteps went along the corridor. She caught sight of her own face in the slightly misted mirror. What struck her about this oval framed with wet braids was the unrecognizable expression of frightened youthful-ness. But it was the ease of her whole body that was particularly distressing; the fine tone of each of her muscles beneath the fabric of the dressing gown. It was almost with terror that she sensed the supple weight of her breasts, the moist warmth of her skin….

  In the kitchen she drank the infusion in a few drafts, pausing only to remove the petals that stuck to her tongue…. Then, settled in the book room, she began to wait, like one condemned, for sleep to come flooding over her. The tension only lasted for a few minutes, in fact. A very natural thought, but natural to insanity, made her tremble. “But… before going to sleep, I absolutely must… if not…” She saw her hands clenched on the table in an unaccustomed rigidity, as if they did not belong to her. In the middle of that narrow space her glance hovered against the tight rows of books, against the window layered with opaque darkness. Yes, before she gave way she must at all costs understand how what was happening to her had become possible. The young man with black hair, his features refined by long, secret suffering; the hands that hovered over the kitchen range … Her mind gave way without her being able to put a name to what that action signified for her and for him. Again she saw the plump reptile swollen with blood. She urgently needed to understand how this creature could have invaded her life, their lives. Already she felt the first waves of sleep clouding her vision. She must understand. Otherwise waking up again would be unthinkable. Waking up to what life? How could it be lived? How could she live alongside this mysterious being who had just walked down the corridor with furtive steps? During these last minutes of wakefulness she must find the guilty party. Identify the person, the action, the day that had warped the normal course of things.