The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  Among the adults who speak to her next day she senses a slight hint of embarrassment both in their voices and in their eyes, that sometimes avoid her own, sometimes seem to be questioning her. For the first time in her life she enjoys their weakness. She grasps that their world is much less secure than it appears and that one can play on these insecurities. An unknown voice rings out inside her head: a mocking, aggressive voice that from now on takes it upon itself to seek out the shameful hidden corners of every thought, of every action; to stir the thick sediment of people’s hearts…. When one of her cousins begins to play a melancholy polonaise in the evening this little voice pipes up: “And what if I told her that yesterday, in a room not ten yards from here, a woman dressed as a bat was writhing like one possessed astride the very man my poor cousin is hopelessly in love with

  So the world is this exciting, cruel game. A game with inexhaustible permutations, with rules that one can change oneself during the course of play.

  Three weeks later another celebration begins, as so often, with fireworks. Li officiates in her magicians cape, delighted with the applause and shouts that accompany each salvo. The merriment reaches its peak when a purple rocket fails to take off properly and propels a violent shower of sparks across the lawn, right up to the roots of the apple trees. Li joins in the general jubilation, her voice drowned in the guests’ raucous chorus. It takes them several minutes to realize that her laughter is in fact a terrible sob of pain. The white gash that has ripped open her cheek, from chin to temple, is already filling with blood…. That night in the house, heavy with the silence of an aborted celebration, Olga ponders once more the uncertain and changing rules of the game they call life. Li is what the others call “a daughter of poor parents.” According to all the storybooks, to common sense, and to the noble sentiments their childhood was reared on, Li deserved a wonderful compensation as a reward for her goodness and her modesty. And there she was atrociously wounded for life … So had they been right to turn the grandmother’s portrait upside down? No doubt this wound is a nod and a wink addressed to them by life, by this real, complicated, hidden, provocative, pitiless, mocking life, that delights in thumbing its nose at decent sentiments.

  Olga thinks she is getting to the heart of this life’s logic: “If I hadn’t dropped Li’s magic wand in the doorway of the room where the peasant and the bat were embracing, the man wouldn’t have sneered at her in front of everyone at the fireworks; he wouldn’t have said, ‘That magician sticks his nose in where he has no business and listens at doors.’ Li wouldn’t have heard that hurtful and unfair remark. Her hands would not have trembled. And the rocket would have gone up into the sky. … So everything depended on the caprice of that little stick of wood rolling on the floor!”

  “Li wouldn’t have been disfigured if that counterfeit peasant and the bat hadn’t been yoked together by desire….” Four years later in the spring of 1916 she says it again. Like the century, she is sixteen. Meanwhile her uncle has committed suicide, the estate has been sold, the old mansion razed to the ground, the garden destroyed. Where the house once stood all that is left is the rectangle of the foundations, covered in weeds. Little red beetles run along the worm-eaten timbers and across the granite flagstones colored with yellow lichen. And above it all in the springtime void of the sky the eye cannot help seeing again, as in a mirage, the vanished house, the windows that look so alive, the four columns of the facade, the wooden walls, blackened with time. Perplexed, she thinks she can recognize the arrangement of the rooms and the direction of the corridors in this transparent house. This great cube of air contains an unimaginable density of lives from long ago, a long sequence of generations: the chamber where her grandmother’s coffin rests for three days; the noise of the parties, and that whole avalanche of words that were ephemeral but could inspire happiness or break hearts; all the nights of love; all the births; even that room, lost in the intersection of galleries and corridors—the one where a man in peasant costume gazes blearily at a woman whose panting gasps keep time with the rhythm of pleasure. And the bed on which a young girl lies, from whose face they will shortly remove the dressings already loosened by her impatient hand….

  The sight of this ethereal house crammed with so many existences makes her giddy. The walls are already melting into the sky, the windows fading into the blue—she has just time to see the tiny attic room where her grandparents’ old servant lived, a cubbyhole that smelled of the resin from burnt wood, lit by a night-light flickering in front of the icon, where, whatever the weather, the narrow window always seemed to be looking out onto a snowy night….

  A young man of around twenty, her cousin, whose life used to be protected with the help of pillows tied to the trees, is already calling to her from the carriage, straightening up on his saddle, holding the reins. They are going back to St. Petersburg.

  This cousin is one of the last remaining ghosts from those parties of long ago. Olga bumps into him occasionally at poetry evenings, in the restaurants where the artistic bohemia of the capital gather. In his poems he talks of the “the curse of princes” that affects him and gnaws at him. Only a small circle of initiates knows it is a reference to hemophilia. Those not in the know find his verses ridiculously overinflated and lachrymose. A different kind of verse is in fashion; Olga often declaims it like a stimulant before nights filled with rhythmic words, wine, sensuality, and cocaine:

  Pineapples in champagne! Pineapples in champagne!

  An unwonted savor, with sparkle and sting.

  I have donned a disguise: a Norwegian in Spain!

  For my pen is drunk and my hearts on the wing!

  Indeed, she often has the impression that the costume balls have not come to an end at all and that currently the whole of Russia has succumbed to this craze for dressing up. You no longer know who is who. The great wind of liberty intoxicates them. You can kill a minister and find yourself acquitted. You can insult a policeman, spit in his face, and he will not stir. Apparently that poet rising to his feet at the back of the hall, a champagne flute in his hand, is a well-known revolutionary. And the man over there with his arm around the waist of a woman whose breasts are almost bare is a police informer. The singer just making a sign to the pianist is a conspirator in the plot against the Tsarinas monstrous favorite. And this very young woman here, with a strangely pale face, her eyes ringed with black, is the daughter of one of the most celebrated families in Russia. She has broken with her background, she is the muse of several poets, but has given herself to none of them on account of a mystical vow….

  Olga looks at herself in the long mirror that reflects both the room in the restaurant and the pale face with black rings around the eyes—her own….

  The ball goes on. The Tsarinas favorite is killed. The Tsar is overthrown. Assisted by his children, he cuts wood. At last the country seems to be responding to the dreams formulated in the old days at her uncle’s house. Its onward march accelerates: outmoded traditions are smashed to smithereens, the head of the new government has to wear his arm in a sling after shaking hands with tens of thousands of enthusiastic fellow citizens. But soon the country’s breathing becomes spasmodic: menacing groans can be heard….

  She joins in the ball with all the impatience of youth. She samples everything: decadence, futurism, workingmen’s Sunday schools; she studies to be original in a world that is no longer surprised at anything. All around her debauchery is humdrum, insipid. One of the poets, before possessing his mistress, attaches bear’s claws to his fingers. This will soon seem banal…. She explains to the men in love with her that she will only give herself to the one who will kill her and take her dead. This is more surprising than the bear’s claws, because of her youth, perhaps, or her livid face with a look that is meant to be hellish; or else because of the seriousness with which she utters these idiocies…. Secretly she still thinks about that young horseman five years ago—galloping in the night through the white foam of the apple trees. She forbids herself to hope, bu
t hopes all the same that her first love will have this freshness of snow. And the mocking and aggressive little voice lurking inside her never tires of sneering at this last island of sensibility in her heart….

  One day, vexed by the dullness of a landscape on her easel, she paints stripes across it savagely with a brush and a painter friend of hers speaks jokingly of “Stripeism.” For several weeks she finds herself at the head of a new artistic movement. Until the same joker covers a portrait with curves and, in his turn, launches “Curvism.”…

  She thinks she has learned all the rules of the game called “life.” Two years earlier Li was just starting at medical school. “So that’s her compensation as a daughter of poor parents,” Olga had thought with a smile and, knowing the rules of the game, began to wait for some ludicrous twist. It came with the war: Li abandoned her studies and, with a nurses satchel on her shoulder, plunged into the mud of the trenches.

  As for the young horseman all covered in petals from the apple trees, one autumn day she will learn of his death and will try to gauge whether her own indifference is real or simulated. So often all their emotions had been a fraud…. Irresolute, she will then start singing a German song, which, if there were any justice in heaven, should have brought the sky down on her head. The sky does not fall. Only a shower of freshly printed tracts thrown by someone from the roof. She will pick one up as she goes out. “Seizure of power. Peace Declared. Revolution,” she will read distractedly. And she will heave a sigh: “Another one …” She will even smile: to learn that the war is over on the same day as learning of the death of that horseman of long ago will seem to her to conform perfectly to the pitiless mischief of life. The mocking voice within her will be roused and whisper, “It’ll make a good masque for this evening—a dance before an open coffin!”

  And she will weep all the same, for long hours, amazed herself at the abundance of her tears and the depth of feeling in them. But it will be too late.

  Too late; for suddenly History seems to have had enough of their disguises and their pretensions to changing its course, accelerating its onward march. History or, quite simply, life lumbers into action like a great wild beast roused from a deep sleep and, in a monstrous pendulum swing of its mighty forces, begins to crush all these capricious, neurotic manikins embroiled in their sterile reflections. The People, whose name they had a habit of invoking between two glasses of champagne, between two stanzas, suddenly reveal themselves in the guise of a huge sailor from the Baltic, who breaks down their doors with the butt of his rifle; plunges his bayonet into their guts; rapes their wives; stifles the squeals of their children beneath his hobnailed boots. And walks out satisfied, enriched, smiling and proud, for he sniffs the wind of History. It is difficult not to fall under the spell of its elemental power….

  There are some who are beguiled and disguise themselves yet again, imitating the wind of History in their costume. Others flee, also in disguise. The head of the government removes his “Peoples friend” cap, slips into a nurse’s dress, and escapes from the palace that has very nearly become his tomb. And the masquerade continues. Those who used to dress up as beggars at costume balls in the old days now beg, swathed in rags. Those who played at being ghosts or bats now hide in lofts, listening for the sound of hobnailed boots. Those who wore the executioner’s hood now become executioners, or, more often, victims…. Later on, at the time of the exodus, Olga will learn that one of their footmen, now an important personage, has tortured and shot hundreds. “No doubt the very man,” she conjectures, “who helped himself to a drink from a guest’s glass. He wouldn’t be able to pardon his masters for that….” And the man she surprised coupling with a bat woman, the one who was so fond of talking about the People, will escape by disguising himself as a peasant and growing a long beard….

  History will far exceed their dreams. Its onward march will change from fast to furious. The mortal poisons of existence once evoked in their poems will now have the humdrum and bitter taste of hunger and continual petty terror, sticky with sweat. As for that equality, whose name was so often invoked on the terrace of the house at Ostrov, they will now taste it complete—in the endless tide of refugees, streaming from town to town, toward the south, toward the void of exile.

  At one of these staging posts in a little unknown town, its streets riddled with chaotic rifle fire, she takes refuge in a great izba that astonishes her with the cleanliness and calm of its rooms, where one can hear the sleepy ticking of a clock and the quiet creak of footsteps on floorboards. Suddenly the door, held fast by a heavy hook, begins to rattle beneath violent jolting. The hook gives way. The figure that appears in the doorway looks like a woman of gigantic stature. On account of all the disparate garments it is wearing, in particular the fur coat, a woman’s coat, unbuttoned, because too narrow across the shoulders. Beneath the coat several layers of blouses, one of them trimmed with lace. It is one of the soldiers who were shooting in the street a few minutes ago…. He catches her at the back of the house. His drunken eyes focus on a medallion under the collar he has just ripped with his hand. He tears it off with its little chain, stuffs it into his pocket, and freezes for a moment, as if undecided, looking at her with an offended air. She is astonished at the dull feebleness of the cry that her lungs manage to squeeze out. In a second her body is overwhelmed, split in two, pinned to the floor by a heavily writhing mass. For months she has heard the threats of the victorious soldiers. “We’ll rip your guts out and hang you in them!” The picture conjured up by this one haunted her especially…. Now the burning pain in her loins seems almost derisory compared with the tortures she had feared. She suffers more from the acid stench of the copper cross that swings out from her violator’s ginger chest hair and which she can feel dangling on her lips. And also from the bitter stench of the great dirty body. Despite this breath suffocating her she is suddenly aware of a rapid footstep and out of the corner of her eye she has time to glimpse a knee touching the ground. A revolver shot fills her head with muffled deafness, makes her screw up her eyes. The only sensation she is still aware of is the slow softening of the hardened flesh thrust into her belly…. And the thick trickle that begins to ooze onto her cheek from the soldier’s temple. The enormous body becomes heavier still and finally releases her as it slips sideways, an inert mass. She takes refuge in another room. The sensation of a tensed member growing slack deep down within her imprints itself on her flesh…. As she passes back through the house she sees her blood-soaked footprints. Out in the yard a man, a real giant with the dark eyes of an Oriental, signals to her to wait. The shooting slowly becomes more distant. The man’s clothes are little different from the trappings of the soldier he has just killed. He stares at her and almost smiles. “Prince Arbyelin,” he murmurs, inclining his head before disappearing in the direction of the gunshots. She does not know if she has heard him. Her body is still reliving the death of the other mans flesh inside her. “That was your first love!” whispers a mocking voice in her thoughts. “That little bitch!” She suddenly finds this name for it and all at once feels aged…. Her pain is quickly dissipated by other pains….

  At Kiev, where she spends several weeks hidden in a basement filled with water up to her ankles, she learns of her cousin’s death. After the reds have been driven out of the city, but only for a time, the relatives of the victims make their way to the place of execution. It is the courtyard of the former school. Up to the height of a man the walls are covered in a thick layer of dried blood, fragments of brain, shreds of skin with tufts of hair. Blood, black, stagnates in the gutter…. Later, when she is capable of thought again, the memory comes back to her of the poems that spoke of the “curse of princes.” Now the hemophiliac’s blood, the source of so many sorrowful verses, is mingled with the pulp of all these anonymous bloods in a gutter blocked with scraps of flesh.

  At one moment she believes she has lost all feeling…. She passes through a succession of towns ravaged by fires, houses gutted by pillage, lampposts overloaded
with hanged bodies (one day one of these corpses, already ancient, no doubt, falls and brushes her with the shreds of its arms). To be able still to hurt her, pain must now be particularly sharp—the fabric of her dress sticking to a wound and having to be ripped off. Or quite squalid—the maddening itch from fleas. Or quite stupid—waiting, among other women, for some torture to be devised by this puny man, dressed in a leather coat and hence a “commissar,” who is suffering from toothache and examines the female prisoners with extra hatred until the moment when one of them offers him a little bottle of perfume (her last talisman of femininity) that eases the pain and affords them an unhoped-for reprieve.