The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  But if she was silent, it was not at all out of resentment. It was almost with admiration that she noted the solidity of this world of routine. The “practitioner,” this phantom who materialized every time during the first few minutes of their meetings, like an obligatory form of politeness. This nervousness that she could banish by brushing her hand against his at the wheel. The aggressive nervousness that was instantly transformed into voluble, apologetic affection…. In the morning this solidity made her smile. “I could come back with you, you know …” he said, leaving that slight hesitation at the end of his sentence, where she hastened to insert her habitual refusal.

  As she left the hotel she thought that for him the obligation to take her back would have been as painful as it is for a man to have to offer caresses in the aftermath of lovemaking…. Out in the street she took a couple of turnings at random, went into a café, sat down by the window, and hardly a minute later saw him walking past on the sidewalk. The man who had just kissed her and spoken a few words of farewell… He passed the café, almost brushing against the corner, but did not notice her. She saw him consulting his watch and pulling a face in mild irritation. A little farther on he stopped; before getting into the car he scraped the soles of his shoes, which were covered in dirty snow, against the edge of the sidewalk.

  “A man came yesterday to a muddy and mournful little town,” she noted, observing his actions, “and brought a woman to Paris, whose body he hugged, whose breasts he squeezed, whose belly he crushed for several hours. And now he is carefully cleaning his shoes while this woman watches him in a cold street, with houses that look as if they were patched together from gray and black. A man who, during the night, while he was waiting for the next upsurge of desire, kept talking about thousands of corpses dug up in mass graves in Germany. He said he wanted to write a collection of poems on this theme but that ‘the subject matter’ was ‘resistant.’ He spoke with anxious excitement, clearly in order to compensate with words for the slow return of his desire

  She broke off, already feeling herself drawn toward a descent into madness that was all too close. No, it was better to remain in … she almost thought “their world.” The world in which they called “love” what had just passed between the man scraping his shoes and the woman watching him through a café window….

  She did not go to see Li, precisely because she was afraid that the latter, convinced of the intensity of this “love,” might question her about the man who had just left.

  In spite of everything, that night in Paris was a great comfort to her. Their meeting was just like the previous ones, so there was nothing about her that gave away to other people what she was living through in her house in Villiers-la-Forêt….

  It was only on the day after her return that she dared to admit to herself the real reason for the secretly beneficial effect of that night in Paris: at no time had any gesture, any caress, any pleasure received or given reminded her of what it was that henceforth bound them to each other, herself and her son.

  Four

  BUT FOR HER FEAR of appearing ridiculous in her own eyes she would have schooled herself before Christmas Eve to be more natural in the gestures, smiles, and words she would need during their meal together. But her lips trembled slightly when repeating the words she had just addressed to her son, asking him to go and find some branches in the wood behind the Caravanserai. She had spoken with such artificial casualness it seemed to her that he had acquiesced and gone out before she had even finished her sentence. And now, over and over, she was silently reshaping the words that, by their self-conscious tone, must have given away what was inadmissible…. From time to time she got up, readjusted the tablecloth on the kitchen table, made slight changes to the place settings, the plates, the little basket with very thin slices of bread. Then, going out into the corridor, she looked at herself in the mirror between the front door and the chest of drawers. Her black dress, the one she used to wear to go to the theater, struck her as too tight-fitting, the neckline too plunging. She removed the belt, put it on again, removed it again. Then covered her shoulders with a shawl. Going back into the kitchen she felt the lid of the pan on the range. “Everything’s going to be cold now. What on earth’s keeping you?” She was relieved to hear herself addressing this question to her son. Her words seemed to be rediscovering their innocence….

  The end of the year had arrived too suddenly. She had almost forgotten about the winter festive season. Generally, several families at the Caravanserai gathered in the refectory at the retirement home for a joint celebration, children and elderly residents together. But since last winter more families, like the red-haired boy’s, had moved out; and two of the old people, including Xenia, had died. That evening all that could be heard along the bare corridors of the unlit building was the discreet clicking of locks, as one resident or another half opened the door and listened for a long time, hoping to recognize the sounds of people at dinner….

  Several times she had to trim the wicks of the two candles that were beginning to flicker and throw out little strands of soot. The lid of the pan was scarcely warm. “What on earth’s keeping you? I’ll have to reheat everything now,” she repeated, but her voice seemed tense again and already tinged with anxiety. The cold was rapidly invading the kitchen now that the fire had gone out. She gathered up some wood shavings, then a handful of black dust, from the coal that was long since used up, and threw it all into the depths of the range. She washed her hands and, unable to bear it any longer, went into the hall, opened the door. The clear, icy night took her breath away. She wanted to call out, changed her mind, closed the door. And, walking back along the corridor, stopped, undecided, in her bedroom. The reflection of her black dress in the mirror slyly awakened a tender and obscure memory….

  The front door banged, footsteps rang out on the floor, and from the kitchen there came the hollow rattle of a bucket. A shout, quite unaccustomed in the boy’s mouth, a shout that was simultaneously joyful and commanding, seemed to seek her out through the house: “Mom, can you help me? It’s very urgent! Otherwise they’re going to die …”

  She ran along the corridor, took her coat off the hook, and, without asking for explanations, followed her son, who was already leaping down off the front steps.

  He led her in the darkness to the bottom of a great snow-covered meadow at the edge of the wood. He ran in among the first of the trees, from time to time disappearing behind a trunk, turning to see if she was coming after him. She followed close on his heels, as if in a strange dream, blinded by the moon every now and then when it pierced through the network of branches.

  They found themselves beside a broad sheet of water, the pool that sometimes formed a small loop in the river, sometimes, when it rained less, shrank into a tiny pond, filled with weed. The pool the red-haired boy was playing beside, she remembered, on the day of the first snow …

  “Look!” Her son’s voice was muted now, speaking like one afraid to cause an echo in some terrible or holy place. “Another night of frost and they would all be dead….”

  The surface of the pond was covered in ice; a single breach, smaller than a footprint, gave a glimpse of the black, open water. And the dark, glazed surface was streaked with incessant movements, a brief, frenetic shuddering, followed by a slow, drowsy rotation. Sometimes, in the watery reflection of the moon, there was a glint of scales; one could make out the shape of fins, the silvery patches of gills They began the rescue with excessive haste, as if these few fish trapped by the cold had only minutes to live. She watched her son plunging his hand into the icy water up to the elbow, and lifting out the slippery bodies, numbed by the lack of air and hardly struggling anymore. He released them into the bucket she held out to him and, lying down on the snow again, resumed his fishing. To ease his task she cleared the water of slivers of ice, pulled out skeins of weed, and occasionally helped him roll up the soaking sleeves of his jacket. Their hurried efforts merged everything into a feverish whole, the gestures, the c
runch of snow under their feet, the glittering of the moon broken up on the black surface of the open water, the creak- ing of the ice, the trickle of the dripping water, their terse ex- changes, like orders given on board ship in the midst of a storm. In this flurry their eyes met from time to time for a fraction of a sec- ond—and they were surprised at how much the silence of these ex- changed looks was detached from their haste…. She noticed that her son’s right hand had several grazes on the knuckles. But there was so much ice and so much cold water around that the blood had scarcely made the skin pink and had stopped flowing. Perhaps for the first time since the boy’s birth, she could contemplate his bleeding without anxiety and said nothing to him….

  He released the fish, one by one, coming as close as possible to the icy river bank. Their bodies shuddered for a moment in his hand, then their quivering lives blended with the dark current, the cold, dense weight of which was palpable. After that he emptied the bucket, pouring out the rest of the water with several tufts of weed and lumps of ice. The tinkling of the last drops had a rare resonance, a purity that etched the outlines of the trees and rekindled the reflection of the moon in a frozen puddle. They looked at one another mutely: two ghosts with their faces silvered by the moon, their clothes in disarray; two motionless figures in the night on the bank of a smooth, impenetrable stream. … A scrap of wind suddenly brought with it an imperceptible whisper of life, a faint mixture of shouts and music. She turned her gaze in the direction of the upper town.

  “They’re having a party down there,” he said, as if in a daydream and without taking his eyes off the water that glittered at his feet.

  “Down there,” she repeated to herself as she walked beside him. “Down there …” So he, too, was conscious of living somewhere else.

  In the course of that night on the riverbank he must have cut his knee without being aware of it in the flurry of the rescue. Next day a blood-filled swelling formed and grew rapidly larger. In the evening his temperature went up abruptly. On several previous occasions the doctor who was based in the upper town had refused to come. There was no longer a proper road between Villiers-la-Forêt and the Caravanserai, now swathed in darkness. She herself took a good quarter of an hour simply to make her way around the building and reach the main gateway. The footpath that followed the wall had disappeared; in certain places the squalls had sculpted long snowdrifts that barred the way.

  She knocked at the house of the “doctor-just-between-ourselves.” He opened it at once, although it was past midnight, as if he were expecting her visit. As he walked along with her, he kept up a conversation with professional sagacity about “the harshest winter for a hundred years.” All the time he was operating, as on previous occasions, he gave vent to little whispering laughs. It was as if he did not believe what he was being told and had his own opinion on the boy’s illness. “It’s nothing at all, really nothing at all,” he repeated, without interrupting his chuckles. And, just as before, he accompanied his actions with patter, like a fairground magician. “Now then. First of all, all nice and neat, we dra-a-a-in off all the fluid, like so-o-o-o! And now a mag-ni-fi-cent saline dressing….” Before leaving he leaned his face toward the boy and, still in the style of an illusionist, proclaimed, “And tomorrow you’ll be back on your feet, all right? Like a real trooper.” As he went out he said again, but this time in his normal voice, “Naturally, all this is just between ourselves.”

  Next day the boy got up…. She noticed that it was only at these moments of unexpected and unhoped-for recovery that she prayed. The rest of the time her inner vows took the form of a continuous babble of words that she was scarcely aware of anymore. Her rare conscious prayers, on the other hand, included violent threats to the one they were addressed to and demanded a complete turnaround in her son’s life, an impossible rehabilitation that must be possible because it was her son. And so that evening, with her face pressed into her hands, her lips dry with the whispering of silent words, she implored, insisted on a miracle…. Later on, during the night, now calmer, she realized with bitter sadness that this miracle was linked to that strange personage, the “doctor-just-between-ourselves” who had opened his door to her, wearing an old, neatly pressed tuxedo, with a bow tie beneath his Adam’s apple, just as if at midnight, in the dark and icy fortress of the Caravanserai, he were preparing to go to a party. “A poor madman, like all the rest of us here,” she thought. The words of her feverish prayer came back to her now as a weary echo. Listening to them, she reluctantly admitted to herself that her secret hope was at least to delay the arrival of the next relapse, the next hemorrhage. Just to win a few days’ respite, during which she could live with the illusion of a successful miracle, without feeling too ashamed of her weakness.

  It was during those days, one evening, that he appeared in her room again….

  The last week of the year was always a very singular time in the lives of the inhabitants of the Caravanserai. The days that came after Christmas and New Year’s Day seemed suddenly to backtrack, for the Russian Christmas and New Year came two weeks later than the French celebrations and created the illusion of a fresh end to the year. This delay gave rise to an astonishing confusion in time; to a parenthesis that could not be found in any calendar; to a delight, often unconscious, at not being a part of the life that resumed its sad rhythm in January.

  In that winter of 1947 those two lost weeks between the holidays, in the last days of the Russian December, seemed to the emigres even more empty, even more detached from the ordinary life of Villiers-la-Forêt, than usual. On the ground floor occupied by the retirement home, in a small hall next to the refectory, they had brought in a Christmas tree, as they did every year. But this time there was nothing festive about the presence of the tree in this bleak, cold building: it felt more as if the forest were invading an abandoned house. One evening as she was leaving the library, Olga came upon a man twirling softly in front of the tree in the darkness. Hearing her footsteps, he fled. She realized that he had been waltzing all alone by the light of a candle fixed lopsidedly to one of the branches. She had an impulse to blow it out but did nothing, thinking that the man might perhaps be waiting for her to go before resuming his solitary twirling….

  One day, on a particularly cold morning, she went into the lower town in search of bread. As she left the Caravanserai she noticed that her own footprints on the smooth surface of the snow were the very first of the day. The bakery was closed; she had to go all the way up to the one located in the upper town, next to the church. She tried several times to button up the collar of her coat, but her numb fingers no longer obeyed her, and the wind came streaming in at her unbuttoned collar, up her sleeves. Speaking to the baker’s wife, she suddenly felt dumb, her frozen lips articulating with great difficulty. The woman listened to her with the exaggerated and scornful patience people have for stammerers, then held out a round loaf to her. Olga did not dare to say that she had asked for something else. And all through the day at the corners of her mouth she retained that painful sensation of congealed words.

  That night, for several eternal seconds, he slept pressed against the inert woman’s body—against herself.

  This, too, was one of those days lost between two calendars, a day of pale colors, hazy in the cold and the wind, a long twilight that lasted from dawn until dusk…. As the night began she saw him appearing once more on the threshold of her room. She molded herself almost effortlessly into the temporary death that made her body limp. He lifted her arm carefully, to rearrange it, and it fell back with the soft heaviness of sleep. This death only required one thing of her: to feel totally removed from the stealthy rearrangement imposed on her body; from the caresses, barely perceptible and always seemingly amazed at themselves; from the whole slow and timid enchantment of gestures and held breaths. Yes, to distance herself from her body, to be intensely dead within it…

  An infinitely remote sound, the chimes of a clock lost in the night, reached her in her death, woke her. Her eyelashe
s quivered, creating a fine, iridescent chink. She saw. A candle placed on the floor in a narrow china mug, the fierce flickering of the flames behind the stove door… And these two naked beings that she contemplated with a gaze still removed, external, like someone observing them from outside, through the window. The body of a woman lying on her back, tall, beautiful, in perfect repose. And, like a bowstring suddenly slackened, the body of a youth, fragile and very pale, stretched out on its side, the head tilted back, the mouth half open. He was asleep….

  During the few moments that this sleep lasted, she had the time to grasp everything. Or rather all that she would sense next morning and reflect on in the course of the days that followed, all already foreseen, was condensed in her eyes, still dazzled by their ability to remain wide open. She understood the tiredness beyond human endurance of this young body, the exhaustion accumulated over weeks, months. This brief, trancelike swoon after countless nights of wakefulness. Thanks to this momentary collapse, she believed she could plumb the abyss he bore within himself, without ever letting anything show. He had fallen asleep as children do, in midgesture, in midword…. The distant striking of the hours fell silent. Now there was just the tinkling of crystals against the window, gusts of invisible air coming warm from the fire and cold from the window, and the subtle scent of burning wood. And these two naked bodies. Located beyond words, outside all judgment. The mind could brush against them, situate their whiteness in the shadows, in the silence, in the penetrating aroma from the fire; but shattered against the threshold beyond which it could articulate nothing more.