The Buddha's Return

by Gaito Gazdanov

  “Well, what would you have done with it?”

  “I’d have taken an apartment opposite hers. In the evening I would have gone to her window and said, ‘Well then, my little princess, hmm?’ I can just imagine her face.”

  He drank glass after glass and started rambling; his every word now concerned only the princess. I finally managed to escape, my ultimate thought being that his earlier ruminations had nevertheless contained a paradoxical, though undeniable, grain of truth. Then I purchased a few books and returned home.

  It was strange to think that I was living in an apartment where a murder had been committed, although I did not dwell on it and was rather disposed to forget it. After a while the apartment began to seem no different from any other, and what prevailed was its peculiar, almost austere comfort, which neither the spectre of the victim nor that of the murderer could disturb. It somehow invited a degree of regularity, a slow meditative life. I soon found myself living there as if I had stepped into someone else’s life, as if I were fifty years old and my relocation had been preceded by a long and wearying existence. In effect, this impression coincided to a certain degree with reality, as the mental exhaustion I suffered was beyond doubt. For instance, I could no longer read a book that demanded any degree of focus, and every time my mind reached a crucial point requiring concentration I would suddenly, in broad daylight, start to feel very drowsy and doze off in the armchair. This state of mental torpor was further intensified by the fact that the material conditions of my life had altered drastically and I no longer had to worry about anything: the money in my possession was deposited in several European banks and I had a current account in Paris; what I had so often dreamt of when I lacked the money to pay for dinner in a restaurant or even a pack of cigarettes had now come true. Back then I had wanted to travel, dreaming at night of cabins on board transatlantic liners, of game and lobster, of wagon-lit compartments, of Italy, California and far-away islands, of moonlight dancing on the ocean, of the gentle lapping of nocturnal waves and the vague charm of an unfamiliar melody in my ears. But now, when all I had to do in order to realize any one of these plans was to pick up the telephone, make a couple of enquiries and purchase a ticket, I found that I hadn’t the slightest inclination to do it.

  I rarely thought about all this, but when I did I could never quite escape the idea that again, completely by chance, as so often happened with me, I was living the life of another man, the reality of which seemed as little convincing to me as did the cheques I signed, the money in my accounts, and this trove of enormous, valuable objects that surrounded me in my apartment on Rue Molitor.

  I would go to bed late and I would rise late; I would take a warm bath, which further weakened me, drink a leisurely cup of coffee, get dressed, read the newspaper—for which I had little patience—and think that I had not been to university in some time, and that the course, not a single lecture of which I had attended, would soon be over. But university, too, now seemed entirely unnecessary to me. Then I would sit at the table with its starched linen tablecloth and take lunch, served by Marie, that same woman who worked for Pavel Alexandrovich, who tries to tell me for the hundredth time how she turned the key in the lock, opened the door, went in and immediately spotted blood on the rug and thought that there must have been some sort of disaster.

  “I soon knew it! It didn’t take me long to realize. My God, I thought, something awful has happened to poor Monsieur Tcherliakoff.”

  She had a habit of butchering his difficult Slavic surname, but always in the same way, so that it came out something like Tcherliakoff.

  After lunch I would go into the study, where she would bring me another cup of coffee; I would go over to the shelves, take the first book I came across and begin to read it, although I would presently close it and sit down in the armchair, my mind blank. Only on the rarest of occasions, once every two or three weeks, always unexpectedly, at night or during the day, would I suddenly hear someone’s distant voice:

  But come you back when all the flow’rs are dying,

  If I am dead—as dead I well may be—

  You’ll come and find the place where I am lying…

  and then I would hurriedly open the book and with rapt attention read every word and every line aloud.

  Sometimes I would go to the cinema, but even that drained me. I continued to live mostly in that same quiet torpor, and no matter what occupied my thoughts nothing seemed to merit any effort on my part. Never before had I been so strangely and completely aware of my loneliness. During the course of several months I received three letters: one was an invitation to dinner from some acquaintances whose daughter I had instructed in French for a short while; the two others were from friends. I did not reply to any of them, however, and stopped receiving post entirely. A few times I visited the Latin Quarter, where I had lived for four years and knew each and every building, but it seemed somehow foreign and distant to me—as if the man who had lived there had imparted all his many optical impressions to me, haphazardly detaching them from their emotional reverberations, without which they had lost all meaning and significance. From time to time I began to think that Shcherbakov’s inheritance had perhaps never really been meant for me, although I now knew why he had made out a will in my favour—but that, too, had been the result of a misunderstanding. Before they came from the furniture shop to bring the new writing desk and to remove the old one, I found several sheets of paper that had been mislaid in the right-hand drawer. Among them was a thick envelope that had been torn in half, on which was written in pencil: “Mk. wl. in fav. of stud. in grat. for 10 fr.”—“Make will in favour of the student, in gratitude for the ten francs”, those ten francs that I had given him in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He never knew that I had simply been unable to act otherwise, I had no choice but to do so. There was one more week until the end of the month, when I was to receive my stipend, and I had only two bank notes in my wallet: one hundred-franc note and another for ten francs. That was all the money I had; I couldn’t have given him the hundred francs, but nor did I have the option to give him less than ten. It was a minor financial misunderstanding that had given him a false impression of my supposed munificence: what he had taken for generosity was simply a consequence of my poverty. And so I was indebted to this glaring error of judgement for everything I now possessed; Kostya Voronov had been right to say, “But you’re still a complete nobody who’s turned up from God only knows where.” This off-hand remark, uttered by a drunken beggar, was a very succinct and totally accurate description, although naturally the Gentleman had in no way desired to express in the most precise terms possible what it was that comprised the pitiful singularity of my existence.

  Winter returned with its piercing cold and winds; its dry, frozen dust swept along the street and with a light rustle came to rest in the road and on the pavement. One day, having managed to shake off that persistent mental inertia to which I had become so accustomed, I stepped out into the street and headed for the Bois de Boulogne. It was peaceful and deserted there; its alleys were strewn with fallen leaves, the air bore the faint smell of frozen earth and the wind was chasing ripples across the surface of the cold, empty lakes. For two hours I slowly wandered around the park; then, long after it had grown dark and the hazy light of the street lamps had appeared, I returned home. Dinner was ready and there was red wine on the table, which Marie persisted in serving with every meal, although I never touched a drop. That evening, however, after the long walk, I poured myself a glass for the first time and drank it up there and then; the wine was strong and quite sweet, and it tasted rather pleasant.

  After dinner the table was cleared, and Marie bade me good night and left. Now alone, I moved into the study, where I sat down in the armchair, unsure of what do with myself, my mind blank. Quite by chance my eyes came to rest on the desk calendar, which Marie religiously changed each day. It was 11 February. I had a vague recollection that this date was in some way significant. Perhaps it was linked to so
me historical event that had at some point and for some reason drawn my attention.

  All of a sudden it hit me—and I felt ashamed that it had taken me so long to remember. On this evening exactly one year ago, in this study where I was now sitting, Pavel Alexandrovich had been murdered.

  I stood up from the armchair, selected a book from the shelf and opened it.

  Et ces mêmes fureurs que vous me dépeignez,

  Ces bras que dans le sang vous avez vus baignés…††††

  No, I was in no mood for Iphigénie. I extracted a second book, again at random; it was the famous Diary of Samuel Pepys.

  To the King’s Theatre, where we saw Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.

  I replaced the book on its shelf. Despite my efforts, I was thinking about that date in February, about what had immediately preceded it and what had followed. Then I raised my eyes to the bookshelf above me. Everything was just as it had been a year ago: the same order, the same spines, and in front of them, in the middle of the bookshelf, the golden Buddha with its forever still, ecstatic face. As I looked at it, I recalled the words of the investigator:

  “If we can find the statuette, you’ll be free to return home…”

  I picked up the Buddha and examined it with a complex feeling that was difficult to describe. Still, it was impossible to forget that its return had brought about my freedom. It was the very same Buddha that Amar’s swarthy hands had gripped, that later would stand in the prostitute’s room, surrounded by cloudlets of cheap scent, that had travelled in the investigator’s leather briefcase, and whose appearance or disappearance had meant many other things, and in particular that none of the events connected with its return, none of the shifting emotions, none of the attempts to understand it, would ever explain the true meaning of its mysterious exaltation, just as no number of years in the Louvre could explain the composition of the soul of the long-dead artist who had painted the ecstasy of St Jerome.

  The lamplight was falling on the statuette, as I just stood there staring at it. Outside, the window was covered in evening frost. Only the desk lamp in the study was lit, and the walls and furniture loomed dimly out of the dark shadows. A still silence reigned all around.

  I kept looking at the Buddha, and suddenly I saw its face blur and disappear in a fraction of a second, leaving a yellow spot where it had only just been, which was imperceptibly growing larger and taking up more and more space. Then it outgrew the room, its features vanished, and in that same instant I realized that a musical motif, strangely combining a guitar and a violin, had been ringing in my ears all this time. I recognized it, but was unable to remember how it went, and I kept trying to recall, fitfully and in vain, where I had heard it and when. At the end of the long yellow vista that had imperceptibly appeared before me, at an extraordinary and improbable distance, several rounded steps led up to a stage, atop which, gleaming tragically, there was a grand piano with an elderly man in tails sitting at it. To my right, a man walked past, taking very slow steps, noiselessly, as in a dream; the lapels of his smoking jacket looked as if they had been moulded onto his starched chest. His face was so familiar to me that at any other time there could have been no mistaking it, but now it seemed as if my memory was barely able to register these visual impressions; I made a phenomenal effort and it suddenly dawned on me that the face was that of the Gentleman. A ruddy young man in glasses passed me on my left, leading an elderly woman by the arm; around her wrinkled neck were several loops of an enormous pearl necklace. I seemed to recognize her too; I had seen that dancing, youthful gait—surprising in a woman of her advanced years—somewhere before. The hall was gradually and just as silently filling with people in evening dress, and I seemed to recognize acquaintances in every one of them, by their forgotten gestures or facial expressions. I then looked up at the wall, above the heads of the crowd, and suddenly a chill ran through me. I had no idea how it had got there, but it was the same mountain landscape, the memory of which I had borne through that far-away death. I recognized the sheer cliff face with its ledges and little bushes; the broken branch of a dead tree was clearly visible. More cliffs rose up on both sides, forming an enormous pit. Below, with his left arm off to one side and his right bent under him, on the stony bank of the rapid, narrow river lay the corpse of a man in brown mountaineering attire.

  I took a step backward, but behind me there was a soft velvet wall. I looked about, then cast my eyes towards the source of all these people, where by all accounts there ought to have been a door. However, there was no door; in its place, rising up almost the entire height of the wall, hung an enormous wood-block portrait of a man with a low forehead, dressed in a semi-military jacket that was decorated with various medals.

  Just then—the hall was nearly full now—there was an almighty crash and a thunderous din. Male and female voices merged into one booming mass, among which it was possible at times to make out individual phrases in several different languages. Then a hush descended over everything, and in the unexpected pause there was a heavy cracking sound immediately followed by a death rattle. Someone fell over in the middle of the hall and a crowd immediately gathered; however, at that moment the pianist, who had until now been sitting at the piano with strange, unflinching stillness, began playing some peculiarly raucous dance motif, which was presently taken up by a violin and a guitar. Then the amorphous racket began to abate, and the piano, too, began to sound more and more distant; after a few seconds there was silence once again. Next, slowly distancing itself from me in this expansive vista, the silhouette of a tall man in a navy-blue suit passed by, moving about the murky air with none of the hesitation that is natural for anyone walking about in the dark. He went up onto the stage, vanished and immediately reappeared, whereupon I seemed to catch his cold, limpid gaze. His inexpressive voice reached over to me, uttering a short fragment that I couldn’t make out. He spoke these words and disappeared. Shortly thereafter, I became doubly and blindly aware of what was going on, and I was momentarily struck by a sense that there was no escape or any means of combating this—other than with some brief combination of magic words, which I did not know and which perhaps did not exist at all. I looked about myself in despair, and amid the yellowish twilight of the hall, through the misty shadows, I distinctly spotted a face with a typical Arabian profile, dead, black eyes and trembling lips. The sound of the piano came again from the stage. I looked over; beside the pianist, in a white ball gown that fitted her waist tightly at the middle, stood a woman with heavy eyes. A moment later I heard her deep voice, but the stage suddenly retreated into the distance so that the sound grew weak and I was unable to make out either the melody or the words of her song. A minute passed by, then another—and finally the voice started to draw nearer again, carrying with it its own melodic power. I caught only the last verse, and I felt a familiar pain in the left side of my chest as I remembered another voice, light, pure and crystalline—Catherine’s voice, which had so often sung those very words:

  And I shall hear though soft you tread above me,

  And all my grave shall warmer, sweeter be,

  For you shall bend and tell me that you love me

  And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.

  Instantly my breathing became laboured, and again all the muscles in my body contracted to the point of pain; I was vaguely aware that my entire future and all its potential rested on surviving this final, inconceivable onslaught. And so, with astounding slowness, the view of the hall gradually became narrower, the yellowish light grew darker by degrees and, after several minutes of this agonizing torment, before me appeared the murky features of my study, the Buddha’s golden face and the pale fingers of my hand, clutching the statuette so tightly that they were in pain. My forehead was damp with perspiration and I felt a weight in my head, but this seemed entirely immaterial and inconsequential in comparison with the wild sen
se of freedom I felt, as for the first time ever I was indebted for my victory over this illusory world not to some external jolt or fortuitous awakening, but to the strength of my own will.

  From the next day onward I began a new life, completely different from the one I had been leading until now. In the mornings I would take cold showers instead of warm baths, and then I would head off to university. I would sometimes go to the cinema or to a cabaret, from which I would return on foot in the cold February night, taking in the frosty air. On returning home I would always sleep soundly.

  * * *

  One morning I received a letter—in a thick blue envelope bearing an Australian postage stamp.

  “Why did you take so long to come and see me in Paris? I waited for you so. You now know everything that happened in the wake of your needless disappearance. The man I married left me to go to England, and I have sent the divorce papers to him. I cannot return to Europe because of my financial situation, and I know that you too have no money for the journey to Melbourne. But perhaps we shall meet again one day, and now I am prepared to wait for you my whole life.

  “Do you remember that sentimental song I taught you? ‘Oh, Danny Boy!’ Every time I remember the melody I think of you and feel like crying.”

  Several days later I left for Australia. And as I watched the receding shores of France from the ship’s deck, I thought that among the mass of equally arbitrary speculations as to what this journey and the Buddha’s return had meant for me, as well as what the true meaning of my own fate had been in these last few years, it was perhaps worth allowing for the possibility that it had been just the gruelling wait for this long sea voyage—a wait whose significance I had been unable to fathom until the last minute.