Lida came to visit me as soon as she learnt of my release. Her face bore the mark of tears and she kept sobbing whenever Pavel Alexandrovich’s name was mentioned. According to her, she had had as little to do with the murder as I did; the very notion of such a monstrous occurrence was unthinkable. She hadn’t the faintest idea about Amar’s schemes; he had evidently acted out of uncontrollable jealousy. Her happiness—the happiness she had earned through the dragging years of that dismal life of hers—hadn’t been long-lived. Why had she sent for Amar? She knew that I held an undeservedly low opinion of her, and she was ready to forgive me, because I, of course, had not had to endure the travails of her life, and was in no position to understand her motives, her desires, her love. She was ready to repent of her unwitting complicity as much was as necessary.
“Here I sit before you,” she said, “completely broken and destroyed. Fate has taken from me what little I had, and now I am left with nothing. I ask you, what am I to do? Tell me, and I promise you I shall heed your every word.”
I listened to her half-heartedly, curious to know who or what had put these words in her mouth. If this was her own initiative, then it proved yet again that she was cleverer than one might have been led to expect.
“I fail to see why you should need my advice,” I said. “You’ve got by without it thus far. You speak as though you and I are bound by some mutual obligation, which has no basis in fact.”
“Are you insinuating that you and I aren’t in any way bound by this? You were Pavel Alexandrovich’s friend and I am the woman he loved. Don’t you think his memory in any way obligates you?”
“Forgive me, but I don’t quite understand what you’re getting at.”
She raised her heavy eyes to meet my gaze.
“You once told me, in answer to what I said about our belonging to different worlds—which you didn’t very much like—that everything in your world was different from mine. In other words, I thought that if in the world to which I have the pleasure of belonging I’m unable to count on anything other than spite, avarice and bestial emotions, then at least I might have been within my right to expect something better from yours: compassion, understanding, some movement of the soul that isn’t dictated by selfish considerations.”
I looked at her in sheer amazement. Who had taught her to speak and to think like this?
“I see now how very little I knew about you,” I said. “In fact, only what you deemed it necessary to reveal to me. But never had I imagined I would hear words like that from Amar’s lover. Wherever did you learn to do it?”
“You weren’t listening very attentively when I told you the story of my life. For several years I worked for an old doctor who had a large library; I read a lot of books.”
“And he died of natural causes?”
She shot me a look of reproach. I said nothing. Then she said:
“Apparently your world has the potential to be even crueller than mine. Yes, he died of natural causes.”
“The very thing that Fate, as you call it, denied to Pavel Alexandrovich.”
“It was a double murder. Because ever since he died I, too, have felt as though I’ve ceased to exist.”
I experienced a complex emotion as I listened to these words of hers—fury, disgust and pity.
“Listen,” I said, trying to remain calm, although it required great effort. “I’ll tell you what I think. You chose to throw your fate in with Amar’s.”
“I loved him,” she said in a listless voice.
“It wasn’t in vain that you went to Africa. You’ll have seen cesspits in the blazing sunlight. You’ll have seen the little white maggots slowly crawling about in the filth beneath them. There’s probably some biological reason for their existence, but I can picture no more revolting a spectacle. Every time I think about Amar I see it, and I have to stop myself retching. You claim your love for him plunged you into this filth, but no power on earth, no readiness to follow anyone’s advice, no water will wash you clean of this. Allow me to be utterly frank. Just as they rent out rooms in hotels, so too did you rent out your body—and you ought to thank me for not using a more accurate phrase—to Pavel Alexandrovich. Even you have to admit that it wasn’t worth the price he paid for it.”
She stared at me unflinchingly with her heavy gaze. I gulped and found it difficult to speak.
“And now you come to me for advice. Though your intentions are too transparent for me to doubt them. The very thought of being touched by you disgusts me.”
“Is that so?” she said, rising to her feet. I stood up from the chair where I was sitting. Her pale and somehow genuinely terrifying face—it was no accident that she was the lover of a murderer—came towards me.
“Get out!” I said almost in a whisper, because my voice cracked. “Get out, or I’ll strangle you.”
She burst into tears, buried her face in her hands and left the room. I felt remorse and pity—too late and in vain—essentially because I knew that nothing could be put right, nothing could be regained. Her behaviour and calculations had been at once both natural and incorrect. With an intellect such as hers, she ought to have understood that in acting like this she was bound to make a false move. Nevertheless, she was the victim of the milieu in which she had spent her life, of the memories that weighed heavily on her, of the combination of black and sorrowful things that made up her existence. No books could alter this. Naturally it would have been unfair to condemn her for failing to resemble the heroine of some virtuous novel, but she was what she was, and this had been the cause of everything, right down to her choice of lover and her devotion to him. I, on the other hand, could never believe that she had known nothing of the murder plan, although I was sure that she would never tell anyone. So, in order to find out, I would have to wait for Amar’s arrest and confession.
When they came for him he had already fled, vanishing seemingly without trace, just as the golden statuette of the Buddha had done not so long before. Prunier fancied he might have returned to Tunis. In any case, days went by and the police were unable not only to find Amar, but even to uncover any trace of him where they looked. Nevertheless, the investigator had known what he was saying when he told me that his arrest was only a matter of time. Sooner or later some friend or acquaintance to whom Amar had given a sharp rejoinder, who envied his prosperity in Paris, or who wanted to indemnify himself with the police, just on the off chance—for whatever the reason, perhaps insignificant at first glance, the relevant person would eventually be informed that Amar was hiding in a certain location or could be found at a particular café. It might be in Paris, Nice, Lyons, or even in Tunis, but it was inevitable nevertheless. He might have made the crossing to South America—but he probably lacked the necessary funds for this, and it was unlikely that he had considered the option. As it turned out, he had stayed awhile in Marseilles, before returning to Paris.
He was discovered in one of the cafés near Place d’Italie, whereupon he made a run for it. Later several newspapers carried descriptions of the circumstances of his arrest, dubbing him a coward. I thought this unfair. Of course he lacked moral fibre, as it emerged under interrogation and later during the trial. But he possessed undoubted physical bravery. He was slow to understand what was happening to him, if indeed he understood it at all; a violent and primitive man, he was barely able to read and write. Neither his spiritual fortitude nor his mental faculties would ever have permitted him to comprehend the necessity or possibility of defending himself, even if it were to have dawned on him that his position was hopeless. He was incapable of understanding that there could be some other reality apart from the one that was defined by the most elementary ratio of physical forces. Yet he had the bravery of a hunted animal that was defending itself. Everything about his behaviour evidenced that he was incapable of understanding the situation: had he been able to comprehend it—which was not a difficult task—he would have surrendered without attempting to resist arrest. He was pursued by two police officers. W
hat could he have hoped to achieve by running? He had a limp, and so it was obvious that he wouldn’t get far. He was ultimately thwarted by a miscalculation in his escape route: he headed down a blind alley, believing it to be a street. When the first policeman caught up, Amar pulled a knife on him—the most dangerous weapon he was carrying, which he handled like a virtuoso. It turned out, however, that this policeman was a more than a match for any adversary armed with a knife, and he managed very quickly to shield himself from the attack with his navy-blue cloak. Had he moved a fraction of a second later, he would have been killed. By now, the second policeman had managed to catch up, and he toppled Amar with a blow to the chin. It was all over in thirty seconds—and so a photograph of the arrested man was splashed across the evening papers.
His resolve not to answer any questions was quickly crushed, and he confessed to everything that had happened without sparing a single detail.
According to him, it had all begun with Zina’s advice to her daughter that she ought to suggest to Pavel Alexandrovich that he make a will. For a while, Shcherbakov avoided discussing the matter, but then one day he announced that the will had been drawn up and was in the care of a notary. Naturally, not Zina, not the mousey marksman, not Amar himself and not even Lida had any doubt at all that Pavel Alexandrovich would leave everything to her: how else could it have been? Then began a series of long and almost daily discussions of how exactly to get rid of him. While awaiting the final decision, Amar, acting on Zina’s advice, began to take driving lessons—upon receipt of his portion of the inheritance he intended to buy himself a motor car. They all cultivated this exaggerated idea of Pavel Alexandrovich’s wealth and were convinced he was a multimillionaire. Zina’s lover suggested that they gradually poison him with arsenic. Zina thought it better to leave the gas tap on while he was asleep. Lida had no suggestions of her own, and while she made no objection to any of these stratagems, she remained very reticent on the subject.
Not one of these methods, however, met with unanimous approval, and so no decision was taken. They would just have to wait. But Amar wanted to own a motor car, he wanted to have at his disposal the money he would receive after Shcherbakov’s death, and so he decided he could wait no longer. This is why he took it upon himself to put his own plan into action. At first glance the conditions seemed favourable. He knew I would be at Pavel Alexandrovich’s that evening, and although he had never seen me, yet he had a fair idea of what I looked like, and Lida had even said to him one day:
“This guy might be dangerous.”
On the face of it Amar’s calculation seemed remarkably simple and seductive, but his imagination extended no farther than the most immediate of considerations. The evidence was stacked against me. It never occurred to him to put himself in my shoes or to imagine what I might have done if I really were to have had the monstrous and senseless intention of murdering Pavel Alexandrovich. He believed his plan to be infallible. At the dance hall, while Lida was dancing with one of her many admirers, he stole the keys to Shcherbakov’s apartment from her handbag and slipped them into his pocket. He told her that he was just going out for a moment and would be back soon; he stepped out into the street, hailed a taxi and took it as far as the corner of Rue Chardon-Lagache and Rue Molitor. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. Then he waited for me to leave.
“A few minutes later,” he told the investigator, “I saw him leave the building. He stood there for a while, looked about and started walking down towards Rue Chardon-Lagache with his hands in his pockets. I waited another quarter of an hour, then I opened the door with the key and went in.”
Pavel Alexandrovich had been asleep in his armchair and had heard nothing. On tiptoes Amar crept up behind him and thrust the knife into the back of his neck. Death was instantaneous. He wiped the blood from the knife with a handkerchief, and it was then that he noticed the golden statuette of the Buddha. He picked it up in order to examine it more closely and, without thinking, slipped it into his pocket. Then he left, locking the door behind him.
Everything was quiet, not a soul was around. On reaching the Seine, he wrapped the knife in the bloody handkerchief, tied a knot around it and cast it into the river. He then crossed over to the other bank and hailed another taxi, which he took almost as far as the corner of the street where the dance hall was located. There he met Gugusse, to whom he gave the statuette, asking him to keep hold of it for a short while. Then he returned to the dance hall. The orchestra was still playing, and Lida, as before, was still dancing.
“It was as if nothing had happened,” he said.
He replaced the key in Lida’s handbag and she, once the dance had finished, walked over to their table and asked Amar where he had been. He replied:
“You can thank me later. It’s done.”
But when he revealed to her a little later exactly how it had been done, she, according to Amar, flew into a rage. She told him that he had acted like an absolute fool, that he would ruin them all, that I would doubtless be able to prove that I had no part in the murder, and that both the inspector and the investigator would not treat me as they would treat him. After this Amar made a fatal error: he concealed from Lida the fact that he had stolen the statuette of the Buddha.
Lida’s testimony fundamentally differed from Amar’s version of events: she had known nothing of the murder until it was officially discovered by the maid who came to Shcherbakov’s every morning, when she opened the door—she had a key to the apartment—to find Pavel Alexandrovich’s corpse, which she immediately reported to the police. Lida and her family had never discussed any murder plans; the conversations that Amar mentioned had obviously been meant in jest: both Lida and her parents were on excellent terms with Shcherbakov and less than anyone would have wanted him dead. Pavel Alexandrovich himself had broached the need to make a will, but only because he had a weak heart and it was prudent to do so. She had been unable to inform the police that Amar was the murderer because he had threatened also to kill her if she breathed so much as a word of it to anyone.
I learnt all these details from various newspaper articles; confronted by the tragic events that had put an end to Pavel Alexandrovich’s life, as well as those that had effected my release and material well-being—which had come about almost as unexpectedly as his—I became ever more convinced that Amar and Lida’s fate, as with Pavel Alexandrovich’s death, had been a part of some complex scheme that was not devoid of a certain ominous logic. After he was stripped, the police doctor noticed on his chest a tattoo which read: “Enfant de Malheur”.§§§ Now he faced the guillotine or a lifetime’s hard labour. That it was he who had committed this murder, which Lida had opposed not on principle but on solely technical grounds, was no accident. This was the final episode in his battle against the world to which he had been denied entry—because he was half-Arab, half-Pole, because he was barely literate, because he was poor, because he was consumptive, because he was a pimp, because there they spoke of things he did not know, in a language he did not understand. In any case, he had wanted to become a part of this world because it contained money, lavish apartments and motor cars—but most importantly, money. He was motivated not only by that, but by some vague understanding that another, better life awaited him there, one that could be accessed merely by stepping over the body of an old, defenceless man. Herein lay the error of his conceit—the desire to escape the living conditions in which he had been born and raised. He had naively supposed that in his hand he held the means by which to achieve his aim: a triple-edged knife. He had imagined that another man’s late-night visit to the victim, much like the one that actually killed him, would mislead the investigator and everyone else. He had failed to grasp that he was as helpless as a child before these people, and that for his desperation and this illicit attempt to change the order of things he would pay with his own life. He was a condemned man even before the trial started, and his fate had long already been sealed, whatever the circumstances of his life. All this, of cours
e, seemed to result from a string of coincidences: Tunis, meeting Lida, her acquaintance with Pavel Alexandrovich in Paris. Yet the inherent sense of these coincidences remained inalterable and would have been exactly the same even if they had been different. It would have changed nothing—or almost nothing.
He was on his own now. No one shared in his fate, and he could count on no help or compassion from any quarter. Lida would never support him, because she was too clever for that, and others—his friends—turned their backs on him, too, because they were essentially indifferent to his lot. Neither the investigator nor the people who tried him felt any hatred towards him, nor were they consumed by a thirst for revenge; he fell under such-and-such an article of the law, whose distant author, naturally, had no particular man in mind when he wrote it. And it seemed entirely inconsequential to everyone who had played a certain role in his fate that he, Amar, would presently cease to exist. Of course at first glance there was some easily demonstrable justice in all this—something of the same order as the peculiar logic that had led him to the guillotine. But this justice was far removed from the classical triumph of good over evil. No one had ever spent time explaining to Amar the difference between right and wrong, or the deepest intricacies of their connotations. If he had gathered anything from what was happening to him, it could only have been one thing: that he had made a mistake in his calculations. But for this, no consciousness of his guilt, nor any remorse for what he had done, would have tormented him. Pavel Alexandrovich’s money would have been spent, and everything would have been just fine—until, that is, new evidence surfaced, leading him more or less back to his current position. However, it was more than likely that he would have died of consumption before this. He had the misfortune of belonging to that great mass of people—beyond his personal affiliation with the criminal world—whose interests every state lawmaker and almost every social and philosophical theory in existence would never fail to invoke; they provided material for statistical comparisons and conclusions, and it was in their name that revolutions had taken place and wars had been waged. But they were just that—material. Until then, while Amar had been working in the slaughterhouses of Tunis, covered in bloody, foul-smelling slime and earning in a month as much as his advocate would spend in Paris during the course of a single evening with his mistress, his existence had been economically and socially justified, although he had no knowledge of this. But since the day he stopped working he had become expendable. What could he say in his defence? In what way and to whom was his life necessary? He was no longer a unit of manpower, he was neither an office worker nor a bricklayer, neither an actor nor a painter, and so that tacit social law, uncodified but implacable, no longer recognized his moral right to live.
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