The Spectre of Alexander Wolf

by Gaito Gazdanov

  “No.”

  “A gardener comes to the Shah one day, in extreme agitation, and says to him: ‘Lend me your swiftest steed; I needs must go as far as I can, to Isfahan. Just now, while working in the garden, I saw my own death.’ The Shah gives him a horse, and the gardener gallops off to Isfahan. The Shah goes into the garden; Death is standing there. The Shah says to Death: ‘Why did you frighten my gardener, appearing before him like that?’ Death answers the Shah: ‘I didn’t mean to. Indeed I was surprised to see your gardener here, for in my book it’s written that I’m to meet him this evening, far away, in Isfahan.’”

  Then he added:

  “I know many instances where the meaning of such a path is particularly clear. I told you about the tailor. Here’s another example for you: a Russian officer, a participant in the Great War, and later the Civil War in Russia. He spent six years on the front line. Nearly all his comrades perished. He was wounded a few times and once crawled four kilometres under fire, with two bullets in his body. Many times nothing short of a miracle saved him from death. Still, he remained alive. Then the war ended, and he came to peaceful Greece, where nothing seemed able to threaten him. The day after his arrival, he was taking an evening stroll around the outskirts of a small Asiatic village; he fell into a well and drowned. Just think then whether it was worth making such a terrific effort to crawl all that distance under fire, passing out from weakness. Was it worth wasting such unwavering bravery and heroism only to drown one night in a well, having left all that danger behind?”

  “So you think the idea behind everything in existence can be reduced to this deadly fatalism?”

  “It isn’t fatalism, it’s the direction of life. It’s the sense of every action. Or, rather, not even the sense, but the meaning.”

  “Evidently you’ve devoted much time to reflecting on this question. You’ve probably had occasion to think to what degree your own life…”

  He suddenly grew much paler. The violins played a piercing shriek.

  “Many years ago,” he said, “I met my death; I saw it as clearly as the Persian gardener. However, by an unusual twist of fate, it passed by me. Elle m’a raté. I don’t know how to say it any differently. I was very young; I was racing towards it at breakneck speed, but this twist of fate I mention saved me. Now I’m travelling towards it slowly; I essentially ought to be grateful that it seems to have skipped a page, since it’s given me the good fortune of gazing into your eyes and expounding upon these semi-philosophical snatches.”

  “It seemed to me then that everything was against me,” said Yelena Nikolayevna; “the night, the music, that face with those sparkling eyes. But still I had enough strength to resist this. It didn’t hold out for long, though.”

  She would meet him around once a week. After their initial meeting in the restaurant, there was a period when he shed what she termed his philosophical manner—he spoke of horse racing, films, books, and the more she learnt of him, the more apparent it became to her that he was by far superior to all those whom she had encountered before. Nevertheless, despite all these clever, true things, despite the fact that a whole world, previously unknown to her, was opening before her very eyes, a film of cold, quiet despair shrouded everything. She never stopped resisting this internally. She couldn’t counter his reasoning with anything else; it would have been too unequal an argument, and the outcome would have been inevitable. However, all her being protested against this; she knew that it was not right, or, if it were right, it was necessary to make some superhuman effort to forget it immediately and never return to him.

  “Every love affair is an attempt to thwart fate; it’s a naive illusion of brief immortality,” he once said. “Nevertheless, it’s probably the best thing that we’re ever given to know. But it’s easy to see the slow work of death even in this. ‘Vouloir nous brûle et pouvoir nous détruit.’ You’ll find that in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin.”

  She asked herself the question: what has given this man the strength to live? That in which others believed didn’t exist for him; even the best, most wonderful things lost their charm as soon as he touched them. And yet his attractiveness was irresistible. Yelena Nikolayevna knew that it was inevitable, and, when she became his lover, it seemed to her as though she were recalling something that had already taken place long ago. Sometime later she came to understand just how this man was able to exist and what had supported him on his long journey towards death: he was a morphine addict. She once asked him how it could be that he, with his intellect and abilities, a man head and shoulders above all the others she had known, could have reached such a hopeless situation.

  “It’s because I missed my own death,” he replied.

  Her affair with him was clouded by yet another tragic event. His former lover, the mistress of the house in which Yelena Nikolayevna had first heard Scriabin’s music, could not come to terms with her new-found status. She wrote menacing letters, threatened to expose them, lay in wait by the entrance to his building for hours on end. She was an absurd woman, who, as he put it, had lived her life forever in thought of some nonsense or other; then she fell in love with him, and in doing so fulfilled her own existence. Had he ever loved her? No, it had been a lengthy misunderstanding. However, it ended in tragedy: she poisoned herself, leaving her husband a detailed letter, in which she divulged the story of her affair and explained that she was depriving herself of life because this man no longer wanted to be with her. With naive cruelty, she added: “You—the man who loved me so dearly—you of all people must understand what this meant.”

  He tried to hook Yelena Nikolayevna on morphine—this was essentially the only thing in which he did not succeed. After her first attempt, she claimed to feel an icy and until then incomprehensible transparency; later on she felt faint, however, and never repeated the endeavour. In all other aspects she felt as if she were growing weaker and would ultimately perish. She gradually began to take for granted all the things she had first thought of as interesting, like the possibility of a new understanding of the world. What she had considered important and fundamental throughout her whole life now seemed uncontrollably to be losing its value once and for all. She was ceasing to love the things she had once loved. It seemed as though everything was withering and now all that occasionally remained was some sort of deathly adulation followed by a void. Whole years of wearisome life seemed to separate her from their first meeting, and she felt as if nothing in her remained of the former Lenochka, the woman she had been not so long ago. Even her character changed; her movements became more sluggish, her reactions to what was going on around her lost their sharpness; in short, it was as if she were suffering from some deep psychological affliction. She felt that it all would end in oblivion or else a plunge into some frozen abyss if it were to go on any longer. Her attempts to change his life—for she undoubtedly did love him—led to nothing. And the warmth inside her gradually grew weaker and disappeared.

  And just as a man, half poisoned by gas and about to lose consciousness, finds the strength to crawl to the window and open it, so, too, waking up one morning, did she find the strength to pack her things and go to the railway station, and thence onwards to Paris. Before this, however, she did everything she could to try to return him to a normal life. She told me of her last conversation with him. It took place one evening, at his apartment. He was sitting in an armchair; his face was tired and his eyes lacklustre. She said to him:

  “Everything in your life is somehow so hideous that I can’t go on any more. You say you love me?”

  He nodded.

  “Have you considered that I might have a child?”

  “No.”

  “I believe I have the right to be a mother just as much as any other woman.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I could have married you. Even then, it’s clearly absurd. Neither one is impossible. Why? You think you’re condemned to death. But we’re all condemned to death.”

  “Not quite.” />
  “Why not?”

  “Because everyone comprehends this only theoretically, whereas I know it for a fact. How? I cannot explain. In some prisons, the prisoners are released into the town for a day or two on their word of honour. They dress like everyone else, they are free to dine in a restaurant or visit a theatre. But they’re still different, aren’t they? I’ve been let out for a certain time, but I can neither think nor live as everyone else does, because I know what awaits me.”

  “This is a form of madness.”

  “Perhaps. But what is madness, anyway?”

  “In any case, you understand that this cannot continue. I cannot live like this.”

  “You’d think any other life uninteresting and dreary now. You’ll never regain what you once were.”

  “Why?”

  “Firstly, because that’s hardly likely.”

  “And secondly?”

  “Secondly, because I won’t allow it.”

  “You mean to say you’ll stop me?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “That’s unimportant. However I wish.”

  Had it not been for this conversation, she would most likely have stayed on with him for a certain period. However, she could not bear the thought that she might be forced into something or held back by some sort of threat.

  Having left him, she became convinced that there had been a significant amount of truth in his words. She had been poisoned by his intimacy, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for ever. It was as if only now, for the first time in all these months and years, she felt that perhaps not all was lost. She literally spoke the words:

  “And only now am I beginning to think that perhaps not all is lost.”

  I stepped away from the window and sat down next to her on the divan.

  “How warm you are,” she said.

  “Of course, he doesn’t know where you are, does he?”

  “No, he only knows that I left. I don’t think he’d be able to find me. May I lie down? Telling you all this has worn me out. Yet I always knew that one day I’d tell someone about my life, because he’d ask me about it and because in those few moments I’d love him. Do you see how long I’ve known about you?”

  “Yes, of course. Just as one day you’ll tell someone about me. And you’ll say: ‘He wrote obituaries, and reports on sports matches, and articles about a women cut up into pieces’—and what else, Lenochka?”

  “What else? That you understood more than you knew how to say, and that the tone of your voice was more expressive than the words you spoke. Though, perhaps I shan’t say this to anyone.”

  Once more I found myself walking home through the empty night-time streets, and, despite my wanting to fall asleep and forget everything, I couldn’t help reflecting on this man whom Yelena Nikolayevna had mentioned. What could have befallen him that brought about this terrible psychological affliction? I knew that searching for the moment of any mental ailment’s inception was always a tortuous process and, more often than not, totally futile. Yet, even if I were to find the correct answer to this question beyond all doubt, I would have no means of verifying it. Then again, what did I have to do with this man in the first place? It only confirmed to me afresh that by recurring chance, or perhaps on account of some other reasons of which I was unaware, every one of my affairs always contained some unnecessarily tragic element, and this was almost without exception through no fault of my own. I would often find myself grudgingly paying the price for one of my predecessors. In some instances, Fate was especially derisive in its dealings with me. I could never forget one woman I was seeing, remarkable in many respects, but outstanding for her unspeakably hellish nature. I spent several years with her; feeling truly sorry for her, I did everything so that she might be less unfortunate, since she herself was the primary victim of her own flaws. A prolonged period of mental calm ultimately had a favourable effect on her—and after this she left me, insisting all the while that she harboured no ill feeling towards me and, with unconscious artlessness, believing that this alone should seem like an almost unmerited happiness to me. After a certain period, her new lover, by all means a rather nice chap, informed me that she had told him a great deal about me, that he was very pleased to make my acquaintance, and that she was a remarkable woman with a perfect disposition—a thing so very rare, as he remarked, in our neurotic age.

  It began to seem as though my role was limited to appearing on the scene after a catastrophe, and that everyone to whom I was destined to have any emotional attachment would have undoubtedly fallen victim to some sort of prior misfortune. In certain cases this took on a more tragic note, in others, less so. It was always difficult, however, and matters would be further complicated by the fact that each time, through an old, unhealthy habit of which I could not rid myself, I would mull everything over and over at great length, rejecting things as they were, and constructing around them a whole system of my own vain notions about how they could be, had circumstances only been otherwise. I always sought to find the reasons for a catastrophe—and so now I thought of my predecessor in London, of this man who had such an inscrutable bent for anything that involved the notion of death. What could account for the development of such a psychological affliction? I had absolutely no facts upon which to base any judgement. But the question interested me mainly from a purely theoretical perspective, as any arbitrary psychological problem might do. Judging by his age—Yelena Nikolayevna once said that he was around ten years older than I—he would have probably fought in the war, so perhaps this had affected him in some way. I knew both from personal experience and by the example of many of my comrades that fighting in a war has an irreparably destructive effect on almost any man. I knew also that the constant proximity of death, the sight of the killed, wounded, dying, hanged and shot, the great red flame in the icy air above blazing villages on a winter’s night, the carcass of a man’s horse and those auditory impressions—the alarm bell, shell explosions, the whistle of bullets, the desperate, unknown cries—none of this ever passes with impunity. I knew that the silent, almost unconscious memory of war haunts the majority of people who have gone through it, leaving something broken in them once and for all. I knew myself that the normal, human ideas regarding the value of life and the necessity for a basic moral code—not to kill, not to steal, not to rape, to show compassion—had been slowly reasserted within me after the war, but they had lost their former persuasiveness and had become merely a system of theoretical morality, with whose correctness and necessity I couldn’t, in principle, disagree. Those feelings that ought to have been inside me and that were a condition of the re-establishment of this code had been razed by war; they no longer existed, and there was nothing to take their place.

  He must, of course, have known everything that I knew about this. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of people had gone through war without going mad. No, of course, it was more natural to suppose that some particular events had occurred in his life, of which even Yelena Nikolayevna was unaware and which predetermined his current situation. What, for example, did he mean by “elle m’a raté”? In any case, Yelena Nikolayevna’s eyes were frozen over with a fixed, unnaturally calm expression, like a forgotten reflection in a mirror—and it bore a direct relation to me, although not in the same way as everything else did, because unfortunately everything else, too, related to me. At the time, and particularly that night, returning home, I felt an unusual irritation at the impossibility of escaping the world of objects, thoughts and memories, the chaotic and silent movement of which accompanied my whole life. Sometimes I felt ready to curse my memory, which retained so many things whose absence would have made my life much easier. It was impossible to change this, however, and only in my life’s rarest moments, ones that demanded of me the greatest mental effort, would all this leave me for a time, merely to return again later.

  I made half the journey on foot, then hailed a passing taxi; soon after arriving home, I was fast asleep.

>   I recall that the weather was splendid the following day: sun and blue skies with white feathery clouds. I was in fine spirits for working, and within a few hours I had managed to write a substantial article, this time not about crime or bankruptcy, but about a few characteristics of Maupassant’s. That evening, when I was at Yelena Nikolayevna’s, she told me that she felt several years younger; she, too, was evidently yielding to that same involuntary motion again, as had happened in the beginning, on the day of my first visit to her and during the week preceding it.

  One day, having worked together into the early afternoon, she informed me that she had been invited to the theatre that evening and that we would see each other only the following morning. “I’ll wake you at daybreak,” she said, leaving. I knew that she was going to the theatre with an old friend of hers, whom she had met by chance in Paris. I saw her two or three times: she was a portly woman, but rather pretty. For some reason, laying eyes on her would never fail to whet my appetite, no matter when it happened. Even after a substantial breakfast, the sight of her would always call to mind the thought of food; if I were to close my eyes, vague apparitions of hams, sturgeon, salmon and lobsters would emerge out of the darkness. This woman unknowingly brought with her a whole world of gastronomic visions, of which she was the sole cause. I could never reach any definitive conclusion when trying to analyse precisely why this happened, and as we had no mutual acquaintances I could not even ascertain whether other people shared this impression or whether it was the result of my personal (and thus all the more incomprehensible) distortion. She had married a Frenchman: a very charming man, though lacking in personality.

  “Come here, if you like. Annie will feed you,” said Yelena Nikolayevna.

  I declined, and at half past nine in the evening I set out for the Russian restaurant. As I approached, I thought of Voznesensky and the Gypsy love songs. I walked in and spotted him at once. He was not alone: at his table, with his back to me, sat a man in a light-grey suit; his fair hair did not quite manage to cover his incipient bald patch. Voznesensky waved to me and stood up from his chair, inviting me over. When I reached the table, he said: