The Buddha's Return

by Gaito Gazdanov

  Even on the face of it he had been of absolutely no interest whatsoever until the moment he uttered that it was he who had killed Shcherbakov. In the wake of this admission a vacuum formed around him, and in this vacuum was death. Even the advocate defending him looked upon him only as a convenient pretext to practise his judicial rhetoric—because what ultimately did it matter to him, to this maître who lived in a comfortable apartment, to this young man who earned very well indeed, who took a bath daily, who had a loving and attentive wife, who read books by contemporary authors, who loved Giraudoux’s plays and Bergson’s philosophy—what did the fate of some dirty, consumptive Arab murderer mean to this distinguished gentleman, far removed from any such reality?

  Now it was all over: he had been condemned to death and was awaiting the day when the sentence would be carried out. I recalled his terrible, dark face at the hearing, his black, dead eyes. Naturally he had been unable to follow what the prosecutor was saying, and so too with the defence; he understood only that he had been condemned to death. Listening first to the prosecutor’s words, then to those of the defence, I was ready to shrug my shoulders and be done with it, so blatant was the artifice of their arguments. Yet it was, of course, inevitable—because in a judicial interpretation every element of a man’s life is inevitably subjected to a fundamental distortion. The prosecutor said:

  “We are not here to attack: we have come to defend ourselves. In passing sentence on the accused, we are defending those great principles upon which the existence of modern society and each and every human collective is based. I refer first and foremost to man’s right to life. I should like this to be clear, and for there to be no doubt on this point.

  “I reject outright the possibility of there being mitigating circumstances. I deeply regret their absence, for it will mean the death sentence, and if my conscience had permitted me not to insist on such a ruling I would have proceeded without hesitation to an analysis of these mitigating circumstances. Unfortunately, as I have just stated, there are none. It would be a dereliction of my duties if I failed to remind you that we are now judging a man who is culpable of two counts of murder. His first crime regrettably is irreversible. However, the man who would have been the accused’s second victim escaped Shcherbakov’s fate thanks only to the impeccable functioning of the judiciary, that same judiciary in whose name I am now addressing you. The accused’s plan was constructed in such a way that suspicion was meant to fall on an innocent man, the deceased’s closest friend, a young student who has his whole life ahead of him. If the accused’s plan had been carried out as he intended, there would be in the dock right now a man whose death would be on your conscience. Thankfully that isn’t the case. Although this man in no way owes his life and freedom to the magnanimity of the accused. With that same ruthless villainy he used to dispatch his first victim, he would have sent a second to the guillotine. It is for this reason that I stress this is a double murder. And so if his plight has stirred any pity in you, then just remember that you are perhaps saving several more lives with your good and impartial judgement.

  “Let me now direct your attention to yet another point. In both these murders—one executed, the other meditated—never, not even for an instant, was there anything other than cold calculation. I’m the first to admit that not every instance of killing should automatically warrant the death sentence for the guilty party. There is manslaughter as the result of self-defence. There is revenge for outraged honour or insult. Before us lies a whole spectrum of human emotions, each one of which may lead to a tragic end. We would seek vainly to establish any such romantic motives in the murder committed by the man who appears before you. There is no way that this crime could have resulted from the relationship between the actors in this brief tragedy that you have been summoned to unravel. The accused did not know his victim personally, he had never seen him, nor could he have harboured any ill feeling towards him whatsoever. Any justification or explanation for this crime on grounds of personal or emotional motives—if one allows that personal motives may be a justification for such a crime—is altogether absent here. I shall not labour the heinousness of this crime: the facts are so articulate and persuasive as to render any commentary unnecessary. But I shall permit myself to point out the following: if in the first instance the murderer, a dull-witted and dubious character, was guided by interests of the basest and most material order, then in the second he was prepared to send to the scaffold or to hard labour a man whose disappearance would profit him not a single franc.

  “It is not difficult to anticipate the defence’s argument that the accusation of the second, attempted crime has no basis in fact. However, I repeat: that it did not take place should in no way be attributed to any sudden doubt or hesitation on the part of the accused. In returning repeatedly to this second crime, it is my intent to point out to you that the accused is no casual murderer. I beseech you: put an end to this series of murders. Stop it—for if you do not, and if in several years’ time the accused is released, the death of his next victim will be on your conscience.”

  This was more or less what the prosecutor said; such was the basic argument of his case. I paid less attention to the part where he described exactly how the murder had been committed, unsparing of any detail and underscoring in every possible way the beastly, as he phrased it, savageness with which it had been carried out. When it came to Amar’s life, he limited himself to noting that he had been tried several times in Tunis for theft and was, essentially, a professional pimp. The insistency with which he spoke of the second crime struck me as somewhat odd, and I was disposed to think that, while it was possible from a strictly legal perspective to accuse Amar of intending to obstruct the course of justice, he could not be accused of a murder that he had not premeditated, and ultimately had not committed. In any event, it was clear from the prosecutor’s speech that the defendant himself was of no particular interest to him; he examined the case and established a psychological theorem, oversimplifying it to the extreme and reducing its solution to the briefest of formulas.

  I doubt whether Amar would have been in any state to listen to this man who was sending him to the guillotine. But that was of no consequence, as even if he had caught every word he would still have been unable to understand. He understood only one thing, that he was being sent to his death, and this for him was the essential part—which came in contrast to the others, for whom what was important was exactly how and with what degree of oratorical persuasiveness, with which metaphors and expressions it would be done. The prosecutor mentioned Lida and her family only in passing: no formal accusations were brought against them, and he cautioned the court not to make the mistake of ascribing any exaggerated significance to the influence that the family had held over the defendant.

  The real attack on Lida and her family, however, came from Amar’s advocate. The prosecutor was a thin, sallow man, who looked as though he had been saturated with tobacco smoke and spoke in a high and surprisingly pathetic voice. He was extremely withered and resembled some ascetic image, temporarily and haphazardly personified in this emaciated human body. It seemed unimaginable that he could be capable of delivering a lyric monologue or of being naked with a woman in his embrace. The advocate had a naive, rosy face, a voice that was at once deep and sonorous, and to listen to him was less tedious that it was to listen to the prosecutor. His speech differed from the prosecutor’s in that it was intended to work on a purely emotive level.

  “Your Honour, gentlemen of the court,” he said. “It seems to me that we must first try to avoid the temptation of crediting this simplistic interpretation of events, which, wittingly or unwittingly, the prosecution has drawn for us. I must immediately forewarn you that I am not in the possession of a single material argument that is capable of making my task any easier. I have at my disposal only the same material that was available to the prosecution, and there is not a single piece of evidence about which I would know and the opposing side would not. As you can see, I
come unarmed. However, I should like to caution you against jumping to any premature conclusions that may seem logically sound but might lack the element of compassion and mercy that is also the very foundation of justice. And it is to uphold these basic tenets of justice that I now beseech you. But let us turn to the defendant and his two murders, about which the prosecutor so vehemently spoke. ‘A dull-witted and dubious character,’ the prosecutor called him. Yes, it was a dull-witted and dubious character who killed Shcherbakov and in so doing implicated another man, thus jeopardizing his life. You will agree that this second crime, in contrast to the first, was never actually committed, and, as we have been summoned here to examine only established facts, there can be nothing more incumbent upon us than to dismiss this accusation outright. However, I would go further still: the first crime, the first murder, also merits closer scrutiny. Was Amar the real murderer, or was he merely executing a criminal plan hatched by others—a plan that was never his own? Herein lies the most vital question.

  “Compare the life story of this man with those of the others surrounding him. Amar was born and raised in poverty, he received no education, worked in the slaughterhouses of Tunis and led a poor and wretched life—that of the unfortunate natives of our African départements. Who stirred in him the desire for another life, who had a taste for expensive restaurants, cabarets, the avenues of the Champs Élysées, night-time Paris, debauchery and extravagance, the transition from riches to poverty and from poverty to riches? Who advised Lida to urge for a will to be drawn up? Who discussed the various possibilities—not of killing, of course, but of getting rid of Shcherbakov? Who had need of his money? Compare Amar’s testimony with Lida’s and Zina’s. He conceals nothing, he is incapable even of lying. You won’t find a single tactical error in what either Lida or Zina has said. They knew nothing of the murder, they were devoted to Shcherbakov, they had only the most benevolent of feelings for him. Can you not see the scandalous, brazen duplicity in all this? To love a man—and to press for a will; to love a man—and to sleep in other men’s beds; to love a man—and to spend whole evenings discussing in cold blood how most safely and conveniently to do away with him.

  “There are other factors in this case, the exact significance of which remains unclear; however, their existence cannot be denied, and they cast doubt on the probability of that most simple and categorical interpretation advocated by the prosecution. In particular, the role of the young man on whom suspicion first fell and to whom Shcherbakov, for reasons completely unknown to us, left his entire fortune—the role of this student is murkier than it might at first seem. He had a fair idea of Lida and her mother’s moral composition, and he knew of Amar’s existence. Why then, as the deceased’s closest friend, did he not warn him of the danger in such an association? What exactly did he mean by the mysterious answer he gave under questioning, when, denying that he was the murderer, he uttered the following mysterious words: ‘It was just an arbitrary logical construct’? I do not contest his factual non-participation in the murder; to do so would be pointless after Amar’s confession. Yet the fact alone that he considered it somehow logically permissible and, consequently, practicable seems most odd, and this, perhaps, warrants further investigation.”

  The entire defence was built around his original assertion, namely that Amar was only the instrument of someone else’s criminal will, and that he ought to be judged as such. He laid all the blame on Zina and Lida, whose biographies he described in such rich detail, which attested to his extraordinary concern for the case. Evidently he approached his role of defence advocate exceedingly conscientiously, but it did not change the fact that Amar’s fate interested him only insofar as it was linked to his success in the courtroom. He challenged every one of the prosecutor’s arguments—with varying degrees of persuasiveness—but, in contrast to his opponent, he failed to devote enough attention to purely logical considerations, and this seemed to me to be his gravest error. He closed his speech with an appeal to the court, which turned out to be no less pathetic than the prosecutor’s:

  “The prosecution has called upon you to put an end to a series of murders, which, if we are to believe him, will inevitably follow on. If I may be so bold, I should like to state that cruel fate anticipated this eventuality well before the intervention of justice. You may rest assured: Amar will never pose a danger to anyone ever again. He is suffering from an acute form of tuberculosis, his lungs are haemorrhaging, and it would seem to me equally senseless and cruel if justice were to take on the woeful task that his illness has already resolved itself to do. By all accounts Amar has little time left to live: his days are numbered. And I appeal to you for mercy: allow him to die a natural death. The difference in time will be nominal, the difference in result will be nil. He is nevertheless condemned to death; do not take it upon yourselves to alter his inexorable fate. As I have just said, the result will be the same in any case. If you do not pass this sentence on him, you will have one fewer death on your conscience, and this man will die in a prison hospital, carrying with him the grateful memory that, although betrayed by his friends and the woman for whom he risked his own wretched life, he was shown mercy by those who saw him first in the dock, who were ultimately able to understand this dubious, poor Arab who paid for the crimes of others inciting him to kill.”

  The verdict was read after an hour’s recess: Amar was sentenced to death. As I watched him, his lips quivered, he incoherently tried to say something, and a heavy shadow fell across his dark face. He saw that it was all over—and I thought then that the ghostly existence of those dead black eyes, that thin swarthy body with the tattoo on its chest, would continue for a short while, but only as an extended formality, and that this man was now essentially no different from those who had been killed on the battlefield, who had died from chronic illness, from the man who had been stabbed by a triple-edged blade and whose spectre had exacted such cruel revenge.

  * * *

  Returning home after several weeks’ imprisonment, I was struck by the imperturbable constancy of everything I had lost on the day of my arrest and which I now regained. Those same people walked down that same street, those same acquaintances dined in those same restaurants; it was the same city and human landscape I had always known. Then with full force I perceived the sinister immutability of existence that was so typical of the people living in my street and that I had pondered that evening, which now seemed so infinitely distant, when I had stood by the window thinking about Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. After I had restored order to the room and taken a shower, I began to shave and looked at myself in the mirror; I was met again by that same, somehow inimical expression on my face. Those former thoughts returned to me with renewed strength, like a chronic headache, this constant searching, as persistent as it was fruitless, for some illusive and harmonious justification of life. I simply had to seek it out, because in contrast to those who held an almost rational belief in some divine beginning, I was inclined towards the notion that this insatiable desire to obtain something intangible could probably be attributed to some imperfection in my sensory organs; it seemed as indisputable to me as the laws of gravity or the Earth’s spherical form. But although I had already been long aware of this, yet I could not stop thinking about it. When taking certain university courses and reading certain books directly relating to them I would subconsciously envy that professor or author to whom practically everything was clear and for whom the history of man represented an elegant series of events whose sole, incontrovertible purpose was to support the basic premises and conclusions of their political or social theories. There was something reassuring and idyllic about this, some metaphysical comfort that forever remained inaccessible to me.

  It was a cold March evening; I donned my overcoat, left the apartment and went on a long walk through the streets, trying as best I could not to think about anything, apart from the approach of the capricious Parisian spring that was already in the air, the bright street lights and motor cars passing by,
the absence now of prison, murder accusations and finally, for the first time in my life, the lack of material concerns for the future. I tried to instil in myself in as far as possible a consciousness of this undeniable good fortune of mine, and I kept listing, one after the other, the advantages of my current situation: freedom, health, money, the unimpeded ability to do whatever I wanted and go wherever I pleased. These were utterly indisputable; however, they were unfortunately just as indisputable as they were unreal. And again it began to seem as if I were gradually succumbing to that heavy, inexplicable sorrow, whose attacks could render me defenceless.

  I was walking along one of the little quiet streets that lead onto Boulevard Raspail. On the ground floor of the building I was passing a window suddenly shot open and a phrase of music rang out amid the cold air, stopping me in my tracks—someone inside was playing the piano. I recognized the melody at once: the piece was called ‘Souvenir’, and I had first heard it several years ago, at a concert given by Kreisler. I had attended this concert at the Pleyel with Catherine; as she sat next to me, her misty tenderness had seemed to accentuate the sense of the melody, heightening the theme of memory in Kreisler’s playing. Attempting to translate the movement of sounds into my poverty of words, the meaning was approximately thus: that the feeling of happy plenitude is short-lived and illusory, it will leave only regret and as such it is a sorrowful yet alluring warning. Because of this I knew that the moment could never be repeated, and I keenly sensed, perhaps because it too could never be repeated, the magic of the violin. This was the year that Catherine had arrived in Paris, to study; I had met her in a little restaurant in the Latin Quarter, where we ate every day and where a huge stove stood in the dining room among all the tables. There were gleaming red pots, a great many sauces spluttering away in their covered pans; it smelt of roasted meats and rich bouillon, and, over all this decorative brilliance of food and cuisine, as if transported here by some miracle from a Dutch painting, reigned an enormous, jolly proprietress, with saucy, gay eyes, raven hair, a high bosom, plump, shapely legs and an unforgettable contralto voice, which seemed almost to echo her Rubens-like power. “Do you remember her, Catherine?” I said aloud, immediately looking around, fearing that someone might have heard me. But there was no one. I continued on, thinking about what I would say to her if I were to meet her.