The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  She recognizes herself less and less as this starving creature covered in rags, with inflamed eyes. Seeing her own reflection in a broken shop window near the harbor, she greets it and asks the way to the embarkation quay. She walks barefoot, she no longer has anything to carry. This city on the coast of the Black Sea is the last outpost of freedom. They are already fighting in the suburbs. From time to time she has to walk around a dead body or hide behind a wall to avoid a hail of bullets. Standing in front of the shop window, and realizing her mistake, she experiences a brief stirring of consciousness, feels a strange twitching of her lips—a smile!—and tells herself that in this city at war the freedom they dreamed of for so long has been achieved. Totally. She could pick up the gun from that dead soldier lying beside the wall and kill the first person who came along. Or even rally the besieging army: her rags make her look like one of them. Or she could take shelter in an empty house and resist absurdly until the last cartridge. Or just walk into that theater, settle down in a plush-covered seat, and wait. Or finally, kill herself.

  This moment of clear reasoning revives the fear, the suffering. And above all the instinct for survival. Panic-stricken, she loses her way at the intersections of roads, runs, retraces her footsteps, sees the dead soldier again—someone has already taken his rifle. Suddenly she hears notes of music. The ground floor of a deserted restaurant, the windows shattered, the doors torn off. Inside, a man dressed in a fur coat with frayed sleeves, a fur hat on his head, is playing the piano. The mouth of a ceramic stove is belching forth black smoke, covering both the room and the musician in black strands of soot. He is playing a tragic bravura air, from time to time wiping his cheeks, wet with tears. His swollen feet are bare: they slip on the pedals; the man grimaces and crashes his fingers down even more furiously. His face is almost black. “Othello!” a very old memory exclaims within her. She walks out and sees the harbor at the end of the road. She no longer hurries. Indifference and torpor return. As she goes up the gangplank she directs her gaze down into the dirty water between the granite of the quay and the boat. She feels herself to be of the same consistency as this cold, glaucous liquid—foul with oil, with flotsam, with dead fish. There is an immense temptation to lose herself in this substance so close to her, so as to suffer no more, no longer to have to unstick her eyelids with their accretions of dry, yellow crust.

  And when her own shuddering becomes one with the painful heaving of the boat ambushed by a winter storm and she weeps from those tortured eyes, it will be neither because of the pains in her body nor because of the fear that draws prayers and cries from some of the other refugees. She is overwhelmed by the feeling that there is no one in the universe to whom she can address a prayer. Her whole being now is nothing more than her raw wounds and her skin infested with lice. And all her thoughts can only lead to this one conclusion: the world is evil. Evil is always more deceitful than man can imagine. Goodness is simply one of its tricks. “I’m suffering,” she will groan, knowing that there is no one under heaven from whom she can hope for compassion. All she will see of heaven is the rectangle of cold, of salt breakers and howling squalls outside the door that the sailors fling open as they come running through. Her only heaven. As for this world—this is how she wanted it. So it has become.

  And yet she will also weep at the moment when her neighbor, his face emaciated, his look deathly, hesitates for a second, and shares his bread with her….

  Later she will learn that the last ship left Russia a few hours after their sailing, carrying the very last refugees and the very last defenders of the city; among whom, when she gets to Constantinople, she will recognize a woman, armed and dressed as a soldier, with a deep scar across her cheek from chin to temple. Li …

  Having reached Paris, after long detours across Europe lasting for several months, she finds the simplest things painfully affecting: a piece of scented soap that she often secretly inhales, feeling goose bumps on her skin with a tingling she had forgotten; the sweet scalding of the first mouthful of hot coffee in the morning calm of a bistro; language and gestures that are unthreatening; looks you do not have to scrutinize to guess if you are condemned or acquitted. Paris is like the neck of a funnel—into it immense Russia decants its human masses. It is impossible not to bump into people you have already encountered in the old life. She finds Li again. And a little later, the man who killed her violator and who had introduced himself before disappearing (as she thought, forever) as “Prince Arbyelin.”

  This new encounter is too perfect, too much like a storybook to be wasted. They sense that together as a couple, the destitute princess and the brave warrior in exile, they already belong to the dreams of these émigrés, who only survive thanks to dreams and memories. And it is without any hypocrisy that they both live out this dream for the others. She believes quite sincerely that she can never smile again, nor experience joy, nor permit herself to be happy after what she has lived through and seen. Above all, she contrives to convince herself that her life, to its very end (she is twenty-two in this year of 1922), will be a solemn and melancholy wake for the past.

  Why then, one day, does she no longer believe this? They are in church, still in their roles of princess and exiled warrior; he tilts his head to hold back his tears; and she catches herself doubting the sincerity of their roles…. That day, as if he, too, had sensed a change, he eats with the hearty appetite of someone returning to life….

  One evening, some months later, she is surprised by the sight of a long feminine leg, her own, as she pulls on a silk stocking. Or rather by the vortex of petty and futile thoughts that fills her mind at that moment: are these stockings too dark? Will it be too hot in the restaurant where he is taking her, as it was yesterday over in Saint-Raphaël? He must be getting impatient, we’re late, he’s going to knock on the door again…. He knocks, scolds her. To defuse his anger she tells him to come in. He comes in, lifting his arms in theatrical indignation and his expression suddenly changes when he sees the soft, delicate whiteness between the stocking she is fastening and the curve of her stomach…. She feels the prickle of his mustache on this bare island of her body.

  Much later she will try to understand how this new masquerade could have tempted them—and so easily. The contagion of the Roaring Twenties, the gaiety of a people who wanted to forget the war, the reawakening of the émigrés after the shock of exile. The first literary evenings; the revival of fashionable life in this Russian Paris; there are even costumed balls! Yet the real reason, she will admit to herself reluctantly, was quite simply physical. It was the beauty and strength of her own leg, stockinged in gray silk; her body liberating itself from the last traces of suffering and claiming its due. And also this man, angry with himself over his moment of sentimental weakness, his tears in church, who one day casts aside his melancholy warrior’s mask and becomes once more the bon vivant and daredevil he has always been.

  Their life, a new version of the masquerades of the old days, will take its tempo now from the impatient hammering at the door when that silk stocking was being slowly drawn up her leg; from the spinning clatter of the roulette wheel; and from the mighty swaying of an immense eucalyptus tree in the rain, that very night outside their window.

  And then one day there is the suicide: Khodorsky, whose great friend and accomplice Prince Arbyelin is, sells his childhood home and kills himself. “He drank too much … It was his nerves …,” the prince mutters, affecting disdain. But they are aware that this death has banished a whole chapter of their lives into the past. “The end of the Roaring Twenties …” is how she thinks about it later. The truth is that during those frivolous and fugitive years they have simply exhausted their roles. And if they now marry in the very year of Khodorsky’s death, it is to give themselves the illusion of an uninterrupted love. They set up house in Paris in winter in an apartment where the light comes in through the windows as if through bottle glass. “A good day for hanging oneself,” he declaims, in imitation of the hero of a well-known pla
y; later he takes to repeating this phrase, each time with less irony, soon with aggressive bitterness.

  The child is born in 1932, the year in which the Russian émigré Pavel Gorgulov kills the French President, Paul Doumer, with a revolver. The Russians pass on to one another the last words of the condemned man as he is dragged to the scaffold: “All power to the Green Troika!” They say he went mad long before his crime. Yes, the very same year. It is hard not to think about the crashing blade and the spurting blood. She thinks of them when she learns of the child’s hemophilia (a tiny scratch that occurs during the birth gives rise to an interminable trickle of blood). She already knows the ingenious cruelty of life: the sound of the guillotine simply lends an artistic touch to the despair that engulfs her.

  Despair rapidly becomes their way of life. And when, after six and a half years of this harrowing routine, her husband leaves her, she is secretly grateful to him. For some months she lives through a pain that is finally quite pure, undiluted by any words. In her tragic exaltation she even ends up by justifying his departure (“his betrayal,” she had called it earlier): the child’s illness made other people’s happiness a crime. In all innocence, he himself had become their judge, a silent, daunting witness. Later, after settling in Villiers-la-Forêt, she will come to regret having left Paris, and having refused all help….

  Yet it is here, in this sleepy little place, where everyone knows the creak of the door in the only bakery in the lower town, here in the monotony of these long provincial days, that, for the first time since her childhood, she will have the feeling of no longer acting a part; of finally being herself; of returning at last, after a tortuous and futile detour, to the life that was destined for her.

  IN THE EARLY TWENTIES the old brewery building, overgrown with weeds and long strands of hops, was the first haven for the small Russian community that had landed at Villiers-la-Forêt. The structure of redbrick, turned brown by more than a century of sun and rain, bore a distant resemblance to a fortress, with its rectangle of walls surrounding an inner courtyard and narrow windows, half loopholes, half fanlights. The proximity of the river that ran behind the building increased this impression of an isolated fortification.

  The first arrivals embarked on the adaptation of this place—so little intended for human habitation—with the enthusiastic zeal of pioneers, the excessive confidence of colonists. The manufacturing rooms were divided into unusual apartments, all very long. The southern part of the brewery accommodated the residents of the future retirement home. In an area located above the main entrance, which opened onto the lower town, they installed the first sets of shelves for the library. The building rapidly filled up with occupants and during the first months they believed that this spot, set apart from the town, would witness the birth of some new form of human existence—fraternal, just, almost like a family. An old Russian dream …

  As the years went by these first hopes were eroded and the old brewery simply became a dwelling place that was remote and lacking in comfort. People hastened to leave as soon as they had the means and settled either in the narrow streets of the lower town, or, better still, in the town hall district, or, ultimately, in Paris. These different departures charted a kind of hierarchy of personal success, and engendered jealousy and rivalry which were occasionally dispelled by a different kind of departure: death. This would bring everyone together around the coffin of an elderly resident who was about to bid good-bye to the redbrick building. For a time this made all the other removals seem inconsequential and very much the same.

  In the end only one visible trace remained of that first great dream: the strange structure some twenty yards long, an annex running alongside the wall of the brewery that faced the river. In their ignorance of architecture, the emigres hoped they could easily double the number of apartments by surrounding the whole building with a long lean-to that would only need a single wall. But the materials turned out to be too expensive; some of the occupants were poor payers, and in the spring the river rose and flooded the section already built. A kind of little dinghy, borne there by the current, appeared washed up against the door. The base of the building was plastered with mud. Now the emigres understood why the original inhabitants of Villiers-la-Forêt had left unoccupied the broad stretch of waste land between the brewery and the river….

  The lean-to house remained unoccupied until the arrival of the Princess Arbyelina in 1939. It was she who cleaned it and fitted it out, planted flowers under the windows and a service tree beside the front steps. And during the years that followed she was never confronted by the rising of the waters.

  The old brewery was looked down on because of that very tribal aspect which, in the eyes of the first arrivals, should have ensured its renown. It acquired two ironic nicknames, used interchangeably by the emigres, which, in time, even the French adopted: “the Golden Horde” and “the Caravanserai.” Only a few pieces of machinery, overlaid with several layers of plaster and paint, still recalled the building’s original function. The steel bar that ran across the refectory ceiling in the retirement home. The great gear wheel mounted between the windows in one corridor. And, above all, the enormous pulley embedded in the wall of the library. They had not risked removing it from its supports, for fear of seeing a whole story collapse. Moreover, the occupants of the Caravanserai had long since ceased to notice these iron relics here and there thrusting out their useless beams or levers.

  Living in that strange annex, Olga had the feeling of being very remote from the communal life of the Caravanserai. Tacked on to the back of the old brewery, her house had no connection with the inner courtyard that was the nerve center of this home for exiles. To go to the library each morning she was obliged to walk beside the wall parallel with the riverbank, and make her way around two corners of the building; even sometimes to make a detour along one of the winding alleys of the lower town, so as to avoid waterlogged areas and piles of rubble overgrown with nettles left over from the abandoned building works. Thus each time she came in by the main gateway she had the illusion of arriving from a long way off. Furthermore, at the time when she settled there, half the apartments, overcrowded in earlier days, were uninhabited. During the war this scattering of the Horde would increase. The only occupants who remained there were those who would never be wealthy enough to leave, like the old cavalry officer; or those who were not yet wealthy enough—like the young artist whose smock was caked with motley layers of paint. Then there were the residents of the retirement home, who did not leave because they were waiting to die there. And some owners of vegetable patches, who were waiting for the harvest. And finally there were some eccentrics who were waiting for nothing and who made no distinction between the Caravanserai, Paris, or Nice. Occasionally, through the library window Olga would see one of these dreamers stopping in the middle of the courtyard and for a long time studying the movement of the clouds.

  In the late autumn of 1946 her house seemed even more remote than usual from both the Caravanserai and the town; alien to the world. The rains isolated it, transforming the track that led around the wall into a dotted line of tufts of grass. Then came the cold that began to blanket this ephemeral pathway in hoarfrost. The power cuts announced regularly by the newspapers became no more unusual than the flickering of candles at the dark windows of the Caravanserai.

  The thoughts and fears that had so tortured her during the preceding months had now been transmuted into a silent dialogue imagined between herself and Li. She confided to her friend, who was very understanding, as our partners in these imaginary conversations always are, that when young she felt she was living not for the sake of living but to prove to somebody that she was free to change the course of her life on a simple whim. Whim! Yes, her whole youth had been corroded by this restlessness, this posturing frenzy, this lust for defiance, for provocation, for negation. A life mistaken, spoiled, led astray, badly begun … No doubt Li would find the right word for it.

  These silent dialogues were nothing
other than brief interludes within the fabric—at once dense and transparent—through which she viewed everything in this world: the life of her son. She finally accepted him in the guise of the adolescent who had appeared to her one September evening, so composed, so discreet he hardly seemed to be there. Sometimes the tissue of her thoughts, from which the boy was never absent, grew denser and she felt stifled: this was on those occasions, often unexpected, when his illness returned.

  She had had the same feeling of suffocation during the latest consultation with the doctor. This dry and almost disagreeable man pleased her. With him she had no fear that the worst might be hidden from her…. This time there were discordant notes in the tenor of the rather clumsy words of encouragement he addressed to the boy. She thought she could detect the consciously adopted tone designed to restore the confidence of an elderly invalid. A patient, in fact, whose decline is being closely monitored and to whom the physician promises several more years, with the openhandedness of a benefactor.

  Next day there was another power cut. She was delighted: in the dim light at the library the traces of anguish left on her face caused by her conversation with the doctor would be harder to discern. The readers departed. She remained for a long moment at the window, and darkness fell as she watched. In the dusk a little point of light advanced slowly across the vast inner courtyard of the Caravanserai. Some elderly resident, for sure, candle in hand, making a visit to a friend who lived in the opposite wing of the building. In the wind an eddy of dead leaves swirled in broad circles along the walls, drawing with it the whirling pages of a newspaper. In the middle of the courtyard the little light stopped. Another figure could be made out dimly, face to face with the candle carrier. Their heads bent over the flame shielded by a feeble, almost translucent hand…. This meeting in the autumn wind over that fragile flame, Olga told herself, was perhaps a faint echo of the dream cherished by the original occupants of the Caravanserai.