The Spectre of Alexander Wolf

by Gaito Gazdanov

  “Well, I’ll leave him when he starts coughing and wheezing,” she answered with that same characteristic ease.

  Nevertheless, Marina’s betrayal did not affect relations between Voznesensky and Wolf. Voznesensky even found it within himself to remain on good terms with Marina. She lived with Wolf for a number of months, accompanied the regiment everywhere, and only then did they see her skill in the saddle and with a gun.

  Then terrible times befell them. A cavalry division was sent in pursuit of the regiment, whose numbers had dwindled to two hundred men. They spent weeks hiding in the forests. This was in the Crimea. Ofitserov was killed. On one of their last days there they came upon some recently abandoned, well-equipped dugouts in the forest. For the first time in a week and a half they passed a peaceful night, in relative warmth and with a handful of comforts. They slept for hours on end. When they awoke late the next morning Marina was gone.

  “We never found out what happened to her,” said Voznesensky, “or where she wound up.”

  However, there was neither the time nor the opportunity to search for her. They reached the coast on foot, and left Russia in the hold of a Turkish coal steamer. After a fortnight they parted ways in Constantinople, only to meet again twelve years later in Paris, in a Métro carriage, when Wolf, not for the first time, had come over to France from England, where he was residing.

  Thus Voznesensky never learnt anything of Marina’s fate. She had appeared unexpectedly one summer’s morning, on the market square of this little town on the Dnieper, and disappeared just as unexpectedly, at the dawn of an autumn day, in the Crimea. “She came, burned and vanished,” he said. “But we never forgot her, neither Sasha nor I.”

  I looked at him and thought about the unlikely set of circumstances that tied my own life to everything he’d said. Fifteen years ago this man, who was now sitting opposite me in a Parisian restaurant, celebrating Christmas Eve with some vodka, goose and reminiscences, while in the friendliest of dispositions towards me, had in fact ridden alongside his two comrades in search of Alexander Wolf, and were it not for a gentle breeze I wouldn’t have heard their approach, and they might have caught up with me, and then, of course, my revolver wouldn’t have saved me. True, I think that Wolf’s white stallion would have been swifter than their horses, but it, too, could have been wounded or killed, like my black mare. This, however, did not occupy my thoughts for long. It was a random occurrence that was now affecting my fate, and if I were to be asked what would have been better, to be killed then or to be spared for the life that awaited me, I’m not entirely convinced that it would have been worth opting for the latter. Voznesensky and I finally parted; he walked off with an unsteady gait, and I was left alone, my mind laden with everything I’d learnt over the past, while stirring inside me a whole score of discordant and contradictory notions. Of course, there might have been a certain degree of fantasy in Voznesensky’s tale, as is almost inevitable for any such oral memoir, but that did not alter the crux of the story. What I’d gleaned from the director of the publishing house came in sharp contrast to what I learnt from the conversation in the restaurant that evening; true, I was far less inclined to believe the director than my Christmas companion. But why then had he felt the need to convince me that Wolf never left England for long, and why had he lamented that I hadn’t killed him? These, however, were incidental considerations. Most surprising of all was something else entirely: just how could this Sasha Wolf—friend of Voznesensky’s, adventurer, drunkard, philanderer, Marina’s seducer—write I’ll Come Tomorrow? The book’s author couldn’t be that man. I knew that it had to be an undoubtedly clever, exceedingly cultivated man, for whom culture was a thing of no little import; moreover, he had to be innately different to such a dear and reckless old soak like Voznesensky, and everyone of this sort in general. For example, I could scarcely imagine someone who felt so confident in those psychological transitions and nuances upon whose successful execution Wolf’s prose was built as being the same man who tied up a German settler girl. That said, there was nothing entirely beyond the realms of possibility in all this, and besides, it had taken place many years ago. Yet it was patently obvious that this didn’t tally with any rational impression of the author of I’ll Come Tomorrow. As far as I was concerned, his nationality was inconsequential. What I wanted to know most of all, if we were to suppose that Voznesensky’s story was on the whole true—something of which I had little doubt—was how Sasha Wolf, adventurer and partisan, had turned into the Alexander Wolf who wrote this book. It was difficult to square this in my mind: the rider astride a white stallion, racing towards his death, that death—a bullet from a revolver, at full gallop—and the author of this book, who selected a quotation from a work by Edgar Allan Poe for the epigraph. Sooner or later, I thought, I’ll find out, and perhaps I’ll be able to retrace from start to finish what has interested me so much: the history of this life in its double aspect. It might happen, or it might not. In any case, it was only worth speaking of in the future tense, and I couldn’t imagine the circumstances under which I’d discover it, if indeed I was fated to discover it. I was unconsciously drawn to this man; aside from those reasons that seemed the most obvious and satisfactory in accounting for my interest in him, there was one other, no less important or less connected to my own fate. When I first thought of it, it seemed absurd. It was like a thirst for self-justification or a search for compassion, and I began to remind myself of a man who, having been sentenced to a certain punishment, naturally seeks out a group of others serving the same sentence. In other words, the fate of Alexander Wolf also interested me because I, too, had suffered my whole life from an extraordinarily persistent and indomitable case of split personality, one that I had tried to fight and that had poisoned my happiest hours. Perhaps, though, Alexander Wolf’s supposed split personality was only imaginary and all those things that seemed contradictory in my impression of him were merely the various elements of an inherent spiritual harmony. But if this were so, I needed to understand how he’d managed to achieve such a favourable outcome and succeed where I for so long had consistently failed.

  I remembered my record of failures well, even dating back to a time when the matter of my split personality was entirely benign and in no way seemed to foreshadow those catastrophic consequences it bore later on. It began with my being attracted to two opposing things in equal measure: on the one hand there was history of art and culture, reading, to which I devoted much time, and a predilection for abstract problems; on the other, so excessive a love of sport and everything to do with the purely physical, muscular, animal world. I very nearly strained my heart lifting weights that were far too heavy for me; I spent almost half my life in sports grounds, I participated in many competitions, and until recently I preferred a football to any theatre production. I still harbour painful memories of the savage fights that were so typical of my youth, utterly devoid of any resemblance to sport. All this came to an end long ago, of course, although I still have two scars on my head. I recalled, as if in a dream, my classmates bringing me home caked in blood, my school uniform torn to pieces. This, however—much like the fact that I frequented the company of thieves and those generally enjoying a brief period of liberty between one prison and the next—didn’t seem to hold any particular significance, although even then one may infer something odd about an equal, unfaltering love for such differing things as Baudelaire’s poetry and a brutal punch-up with some thug. Later on, all this acquired rather different forms; far from seeing any improvement, however, the discrepancy and sharp contradiction so characteristic of my life became all the more glaring as it continued. It was to be found between what I felt inwardly drawn towards and what I so vainly struggled against—the tumultuous and sensual root of my existence. It interfered with everything, it obscured those meditative faculties I valued above all else, it wouldn’t allow me to see things as I ought to have seen them, distorting them in its crude yet indomitable refractions, and it compelled me to perform
a number of deeds that I invariably came to regret later on. It induced me to like things whose aesthetic insignificance I knew full well, things clearly in poor taste, yet the strength of my attraction to them could only compare with the simultaneous disgust I inexplicably felt towards them.

  The most lamentable result of this split personality, however, was my psychological relation to women. For a long time I caught myself watching—with greedy, almost foreign, eyes—the harsh, crude feminine face, in which even the most perceptive and unbiased of observers would vainly strive to find any form of inspiration. I couldn’t help noticing how a woman would dress with provocative, invariable tastelessness, so much so that I’d be unable to imagine there being anything other than purely animal reflexes within her; nevertheless, her body’s movement and her swaying hips would never fail to make an inconceivably strong impression on me. True, I never had anything in common with women of that sort; quite the opposite—when approaching them, my principal feeling would always be one of disgust. The other women who passed through my life belonged to an entirely different category; they comprised part of a world in which I was always supposed to live, but from which I was so continually dragged down. They brought out my finest feelings, I believe, but it was all tinged with a sort of listless delight, leaving me each time with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. It had always been so, and I knew no otherwise. I suppose it was something like an instinct for self-preservation that prevented me from taking that final step, an unconscious understanding that if it were to happen, it would end in inner catastrophe. I often sensed, however, that this was close at hand, and I thought Fate, which had until now so fortuitously led me out of many difficult and often dangerous situations, had favoured me, creating, for a few short hours in my life, the semblance of a peaceful and almost abstract happiness, which afforded no room to this uncontrollable downward pull. It was as if a man, forever drawn towards an abyss, had lived his life in a country where there were neither mountains nor cliffs, and only the flat expanse of level planes.

  Time went on and my life trudged slowly alongside it; I became accustomed to the reality of my existence as people grow used to, say, the pain of an incurable illness. But I could never entirely reconcile myself with the knowledge that my savage and sensual perception of the world would deprive me of so many spiritual possibilities, and that there were things I might comprehend theoretically, yet that would for ever remain inaccessible to me—the world of lofty emotions, for example, which I had known and loved my whole life. This knowledge was reflected in everything I did and embarked on; I always knew that the inner strength I ought to have been capable of in principle, and that others were within their rights to expect of me, would prove beyond me; it was for this reason that I did not ascribe much significance to practical matters, and why my life generally had been so accidental and inherently disordered. This even predetermined my choice of profession: instead of devoting my time to literary endeavours—as I was disposed to do, but which required a significant investment of time and selfless effort—I took up journalism, sporadic at best and renowned for its arduous variety. Subject to requirements, I wrote about everything under the sun, from political articles to film reviews and sporting commentary. It required neither any particular effort nor any specialist knowledge, and besides, I would use a pseudonym or my initials, thus shirking any responsibility for what I wrote. It did, however, teach me a valuable lesson: practically none of those who bore the brunt of my criticism could ever bring themselves to agree with my review, and they all would feel a pressing need to explain my error to me personally. Sometimes I was faced with writing about things that fell far beyond the realms of my competency; this would happen when I stood in for a correspondent who had taken ill or left. Once, for example, all the obituaries were assigned to me; I wrote around half a dozen of them over a period of two weeks, because Bossuet, my colleague who usually dealt with them (with an uncommon zeal and a rare professional integrity), was laid up in bed with bilateral pneumonia. When I went to visit him, he gave me a wry smile, saying:

  “I hope, my dear colleague, that you won’t wind up writing my obituary. It would be the greatest act of sacrifice that we could rightly expect of you.”

  “My dear Bossuet,” I said, “I promise you categorically that I won’t write your obituary. I don’t think anyone could do it better than you…”

  The most astonishing thing was the Bossuet had indeed prepared his own obituary, which he showed to me. This document contained everything that had become so natural to me, all the genre’s fine classical idioms: there we saw selfless toil and death in the line of duty, “pareil à un soldat, il est mort au combat”, an irreproachable past, the family’s grief, “que vont devenir ses enfants?”, and so on.

  My period of obituary-writing was particularly memorable on account of my sixth and final article being returned to me from the editorial office with the demand that I give greater prominence to the positive attributes of the deceased. It was all the more tricky as it concerned a politician who had died from progressive paralysis. His entire life had been remarkable for a striking consistency: a succession of shady dealings, spurious bank transactions and party betrayals; then there were the banquets, visits to the most notorious cabarets and the costliest brothels, and ultimately death resulting from some venereal disease. The piece had to be rushed; I sat working on it for a whole evening, unable to eat at my usual time. Having just composed the final line and dispatched the article off to compositing, I decided to stop by the Russian restaurant where I’d celebrated Christmas Eve. There, after the long hiatus, I encountered Voznesensky once again, sitting alone and sincerely glad to see me, as one would an old acquaintance. He addressed me in a relaxed, intimate manner, as if we had known one another for many years; coming from Voznesensky, there was, of course, nothing shocking about this. He asked me where I had been and whether he would have to wait for another of the Twelve Great Feasts to see me again. Then he took an interest in what I had been doing generally. When I told him that I was a journalist, he became particularly excited.

  “That’s a great blessing,” he said. “God wasn’t quite so benevolent to me.”

  “Why a great blessing?”

  “My dear chap, if I were a journalist I’d write the sort of stuff that would leave the world astounded.”

  “I don’t think it’s necessary to be a journalist for that. You might try it sometime.”

  “I did,” he replied; “nothing came of it.”

  And so he told me how he once sat down to write his memoirs, wrote late into the night and was in raptures over how wonderfully everything was coming out.

  “So clever, you know—such brilliant imagery, such a richness of style. It was simply staggering.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Why didn’t you continue?”

  “I lay down to sleep,” he said; “morning was already nigh. I was utterly blinded by this gift of mine, which had so suddenly revealed itself.”

  Then he sighed and added:

  “But when I awoke and read everything over, I felt very disheartened, you know. Such was the nonsense, so idiotically was everything written, that I just washed my hands of the whole thing. I’ll never write again.”

  He sat looking thoughtfully ahead; his face wore an expression of sincere disappointment. Then, as if remembering something, he asked me:

  “Oh, yes, that’s what I was meaning to talk to you about. Tell me, what did you make of Sasha’s book? Does he write well, or just so-so? You remember, Sasha Wolf, whom we spoke about?”

  I voiced my thoughts on the matter. He shook his head.

  “And he doesn’t mention Marina in the book?”

  “No.”

  “A pity, she would have been worth it. So, what does he write about? You must forgive me for interrogating you like this. I don’t know any English, so Sasha’s book just lies there at home like a manuscript in some mysterious tongue.”

  I gave him an abridged account of the book�
��s contents. He was, of course, particularly interested in “The Adventure in the Steppe”. Nevertheless, he could not reconcile himself to the idea that Sasha Wolf—that same Sasha whom he knew so well, “a man just like any other”—had turned out to be a writer, and an English one at that.

  “Where did all this spring from? It’s beyond me,” he said. “That’s talent for you. No more or less a man than I, and yet I’ve wasted my whole life on trifles, whereas they’ll write articles and even, maybe, books about Sasha. Perhaps we’ll be remembered if he mentions us in his writing; in fifty years’ time pupils in England will read about us, and so everything that has happened won’t have been in vain.”

  He looked straight ahead, with an unseeing gaze.

  “And so everything will live on,” he continued, thinking aloud: “how the bracelets jangled around Marina’s arms, what the Dnieper was like that summer, how scorching the heat was, and how Sasha had lain across the road. So he did see who shot him, then? From the description, it was a young lad, you say? What exactly did he say about him?”

  I retold that part of the story in greater detail.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Voznesensky. “That sounds about right. He took fright, perhaps, the boy. Can you imagine? His horse was killed right under him—he’s standing, the poor chap, alone in a field, while some bandit with a rifle comes racing towards him.”

  He sank back into thought.

  “We’ll never find out anything about him, then. Was he a schoolboy who not so long ago had sat at home, reading his mother’s books and being more terrified of his teacher than a machine gun? Or was he a ruffian, a waif? And did he shoot from fear or with the cold calculation of a murderer? In any case,” he added unexpectedly, “if I, by some miracle, were to meet him, I’d say to him: ‘Thank you, my boy, for shooting wide of the mark; because of that, we’re all still alive: Marina, Sasha and even, perhaps, I.’”