The Spectre of Alexander Wolf

by Gaito Gazdanov

  “I’m truly glad to see you, my dear chap. Here, permit me to introduce you: Sasha Wolf, in the flesh, or, if you will, Alexander Andreyevich, just in from London. Another decanter please, my beauty,” he said, turning to the waitress who had arrived at the table at the same time as I, “and do be liberal, my dear.”

  Alexander Wolf turned his head, allowing me to see his face. He was still handsome; to look at, one might have guessed he was around forty. Perhaps, had I not known that it was him, I might not have paid him any particular attention. However, I knew beyond all doubt that here, right in front of me, I was looking at that long-familiar face, whose memory had haunted me for so many years. He had very fair skin and still, grey eyes.

  “I’ve been telling him about you,” said Voznesensky. “Were it not for him, Sasha, I’d never have found out what it was you wrote in that book of yours. Sit down, dear fellow, let’s have a glass; we are Orthodox, after all.”

  I couldn’t find the words to strike up a conversation with Wolf. I had imagined this meeting for such a long time; I wanted to say so many things that I scarcely knew where to begin. Besides, Voznesensky’s presence, the restaurant’s surroundings and all those glasses of vodka did not befit the conversation I had envisaged. Alexander Wolf spoke little and limited himself to making brief remarks. Voznesensky, on the other hand, would not stop. As soon as I sat down at the table, he drank another glass and began staring drunkenly at Wolf.

  “Sasha, my friend,” he said with uncommon expressiveness in his voice, “just think who you are to me. I have no better friend. We were really about to cart you off dead, you son of a bitch, but the doctor patched you up in hospital. Now, is that true or not? And if it is, then who did Marina leave me for, eh? What a girl she was, Sasha! Did you ever know a better one?”

  “I did,” said Wolf with unexpected certainty.

  “You’re lying. That cannot be, Sasha. I haven’t and never will. Why don’t you write about her, even if it is in English? She’s good in every language. Write, Sasha, be a good chap.”

  Wolf looked plainly at him, then shifted his gaze onto me.

  “I was interested in your story ‘The Adventure in the Steppe’,” I said, “for several reasons, which I’ll relate to you, if I might, in more suitable surroundings. In any case, I’d like to speak to you on a number of matters that are important, at least, from my perspective.”

  “At your service,” he replied. “If you’d like, we can meet here the day after tomorrow, at around five o’clock. Vladimir Petrovich has told me all about his conversations with you.”

  “Very well,” I said. “Here, the day after tomorrow, at five o’clock.”

  I didn’t leave at once. Whenever I had the chance, I would look at Wolf with that typical avid, fixed intensity, which had only recently diminished, as other, stronger feelings had taken hold of me. I made efforts to visualize him as he might have appeared, had I known nothing at all about him; I tried to detach myself from those fixed ideas that had for too long haunted my imagination and were interfering with me at that very moment. However, I could not say with certainty to what degree I was successful in my attempt. There was something in Wolf’s face, I thought, that distinguished it from the other faces I saw. It was an obscure expression, some sort of deathly significance—a look that seemed entirely impossible on the face of any living man. To anyone who had read his book as closely as I had, it seemed especially peculiar that this man, with his fixed gaze and indescribable expression, could have written such quick-paced, taut prose and seen so many things through those motionless eyes.

  “Beneath me lay my corpse, with the arrow in my temple”—I suddenly remembered the epigraph to “The Adventure in the Steppe”. That was just it: he really did look like a spectre. How could I have failed to realize this right from the very start? Suddenly, a cold chill passed through me. And again the voice of the gramophone sang out Voznesensky’s favourite romance:

  There’s no need for anything,

  Not even late regrets…

  I remembered envisaging this very scene long ago: the restaurant, the music and (through the drunken Gypsy sorrow) the lifeless face belonging to the unknown author of I’ll Come Tomorrow. I closed my eyes; before me swirled an incredible assemblage of thoughts, memories and emotions, and everything filtered through those motifs and imaginary melodies I had thought of when I pictured Marina singing to Sasha Wolf’s accompaniment. Then, as if in a dream, I saw the black foresight of a revolver swaying in front of my right eye with extraordinary clarity. I felt a chill; delirium appeared to be setting in.

  I finally got up and left, in spite of Voznesensky’s loud protestations. He reached out towards me, holding up a glass of vodka, trying to persuade me to sit back down awhile before heading somewhere else. I hinted at some pressing work; otherwise I might have found difficulty in refusing his persistent invitations. Anything pertaining to literature or journalism assumed an almost sacred meaning for him, and no state of intoxication could alter this.

  “In that case, dear fellow, I wouldn’t dare detain you any further,” he said. “Best of luck with your endeavours.”

  I left the restaurant, but felt disinclined to go home straight away. I walked along rue de la Convention, heading towards the Seine. It was around half past eleven in the evening and still quite warm; there was a rattle from the trees, recently having come into leaf and not yet having managed to acquire that languid, dusty look they take on in summer. I was left with a feeling of unease after my encounter with Wolf, and for the hundredth time I called to mind everything that was connected with him—from the moment he had fallen to the road, to the book he had written and my meeting with the publisher in London who hated him so vehemently. I thought about how Wolf had become—and not so much Wolf personally as the very thought of him—the involuntary personification of everything dead and sad that existed in my life. This was supplemented by an awareness of my own guilt: I felt like a murderer standing beside the body of his victim, shocked by the crime he has just committed. And although I was no murderer and Wolf was no corpse, I couldn’t distance myself from this notion. What am I really guilty of? I asked myself. Despite supposing that any court would acquit me—a military court, because killing is the law and purpose of war; a civil court, because I’d acted in self-defence—something eternally onerous remained in all this. I never meant to kill him; I saw him for the first time only a moment before I fired. Why, then, did the very thought of him comprise such unshakable regret, such insurmountable sorrow?

  The reason I had grown aware of this non-existent guilt now became clear to me: it was that thought of murder that had occupied my imagination so many times with such a commanding greed. It hit me with the same unexpectedness that had caused me only half an hour ago in the restaurant to realize what made Wolf so unlike others: his unexpected appearance coinciding with the idea of his spectrality. Perhaps it was like the final glimmer of a dying flame, a fleeting return to ancient instinct; perhaps again it was some curious manifestation of the laws of heredity. I knew that murder and revenge had been a constant, obligatory tradition for countless generations of my forebears. This combination of allure and aversion, this unshakable bent towards criminality, had seemingly always resided within me; realizing this, of course, was the reason for the bitter regret I now felt. The thought of Wolf was the strongest reminder of this trait, a theoretically criminal detail in my psychological portrait. Had Wolf never existed, it would have remained in the realms of my imagination, and I could have sustained the comforting illusion that all this was simply the result of fantasy and that, if it were to happen in reality, I would find sufficient inner strength to refrain from that final, irreversible act. Wolf’s existence deprived me of this vain illusion. Anyway, if this one shot had cost me so much, its consequences must have affected Wolf’s entire life, too. Once again, comparing my vision of the author of I’ll Come Tomorrow with everything that Voznesensky had told me, I thought that perhaps, were it not for this
unfinished murder, a happy life might have awaited Sasha Wolf, and those dismal things described in Alexander Wolf’s book would have remained unknown. I mulled things over—how many times had I done so?—and recalled the words uttered by Yelena Nikolayevna’s lover in London:

  “The chain of events in each human life is miraculous.”

  Yes, of course, and if I were to introduce the Law of Causality as an explanatory element into this complex aggregate of varied and simultaneous occurrences, the wonder of what happened would appear even more evident, and it would seem as though a whole world had sprung into existence from a single action of mine. Assuming that the origin of this long chain of events was my outstretched hand holding a revolver and the bullet that pierced Wolf’s chest, then in this brief space of time, as quick as a flash, a complex process was born, which could be neither foreseen nor accounted for by any human mind possessed of even the most powerful, grotesque imagination. Who could have known that the bullet’s spinning, instantaneous flight actually contained that town on the Dnieper, Marina’s inexpressible charm, her bracelets, her singing, her betrayal, her disappearance, Voznesensky’s life, the ship’s hold, Constantinople, London, Paris, the book I’ll Come Tomorrow and the epigraph about the corpse with the arrow in its temple?

  Leaving Yelena Nikolayevna’s apartment the following night, I said to her:

  “I don’t know when I’ll come tomorrow, or even whether I’ll come at all. I’ll telephone.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “No, but I have an important engagement.”

  “With a man or a woman?”

  “With a spectre,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  When I entered, there was no one in the restaurant other than a drunken taxi driver, who was ceaselessly kissing the waitress’s proffered hand and telling her about his exploits. I arrived at ten to five. Wolf was not there yet, and so I managed to catch exactly what the driver was saying. He was a gallant man—gallant really was the word—a former cavalryman, exceedingly amiable (at least in his drunken state) and, in his own countrified way, disarmingly high society.

  As I sat drinking coffee, I head him say:

  “So then I wrote her a letter. I wrote: ‘What’s to be done, my dearest? Our paths have gone in different directions.’ But I added a phrase that she’s never likely to forget.”

  “Which was that?” asked the waitress.

  “I wrote precisely this: ‘I placed you on such a high pedestal; you came down from it yourself.’”

  Just then, Wolf entered the restaurant. He was wearing a different suit, one of navy blue. I shook his hand. He ordered some coffee for himself and looked at me calmly and expectantly. Despite having debated at length how best to begin the conversation and what to say afterwards, nothing came out as I’d imagined it would. But that, of course, was of no import.

  “A few months ago,” I said, “at this very table, Vladimir Petrovich told me of his acquaintance with you. This came after my first attempt to find something out about you—I’ll mention that later, if I may—met with a most unexpected failure.”

  “What exactly brought about, on your part, such an interest in my person?” he enquired. Again, I couldn’t help noticing his voice, very flat and inexpressive, without any sharp changes of intonation.

  I extracted his book from my briefcase, opened it at the page where “The Adventure in the Steppe” began, and said:

  “As you’ll recall, your story begins with a reference to a white stallion of Apocalyptic beauty, which the protagonist is riding towards death. After the events described next, the protagonist asks himself what might have happened to the man who shot him, the man who continued galloping towards death on that same horse, while he, the protagonist, lay dying across the road with a bullet just above his heart. Isn’t that so?”

  Wolf gazed at me intently, slightly narrowing his unmoving eyes.

  “Yes. What of it?”

  “I can answer that question for you,” I said.

  His face didn’t change; only his eyes became narrower still.

  “You can answer that question?”

  My breathing became laboured, and I felt a strange tightening in my chest.

  “I remember it as if it were yesterday,” I said. “It was I who shot you.”

  Wolf suddenly got up from his chair and remained standing for a second, as if intending to do something significant. Straight away, he seemed to have grown taller by a whole head. And then I caught sight of his eyes, so wide and still; something truly terrible flashed in them. It hit me instantly that lurking within the author of I’ll Come Tomorrow there was still a trace of something almost forgotten, almost dead, but precisely what Voznesensky had once known so well, something that I had halted back then only because I had a revolver, and only because I had been capable of becoming a murderer. But Wolf sat down straight away, saying:

  “Please, do excuse me. I’m listening.”

  “It was my face that you saw after you fell from your horse. You weren’t mistaken in your description of me: I was sixteen years old at the time. I must have looked so tired; I hadn’t slept for thirty hours. It was I who rode off on your white stallion—you’d killed my black mare with your first shot. I was the one who stood there, leaning over you. And I was in a rush to leave because I’d caught the distant sound of hooves on the wind. More recently, I learnt from Vladimir Petrovich that the sound had come from the horses that he and two of his comrades were riding, in search of you.”

  Wolf remained silent. The driver, completely drunk, was telling the story of his letter again, but now to a different waitress.

  “…such a high pedestal; you came down from it yourself…”

  “So, it’s you,” said Wolf in an assertive tone of voice.

  “I’m afraid so,” I replied. “All these years the memory has never left me. I paid very dearly for that shot. Even my happiest moments were clouded by some sort of dark, empty space where I could always find that same mortal regret for having killed you. I’m sure you’ll understand how happy it made me to read your story and realize that in fact you hadn’t died. So, I hope you’ll forgive me now for my rashness in seeking out the author of I’ll Come Tomorrow.”

  I was waiting for him to respond. He said nothing. When he took a deep breath, I noticed that he was evidently as excited as I was. He said:

  “It’s so unexpected; I’d imagined you so differently, and I’d grown so used to the thought that you were long dead…”

  Voznesensky appeared in the doorway. Wolf said to me quickly:

  “We’ll talk about this tomorrow, here, at the same time. All right?”

  I nodded.

  Voznesensky was in particularly high spirits that day. He slapped Wolf on the back, shook my hand and sat down. When the waitress set down a decanter of vodka and began to lay the table, he poured three glasses, saying:

  “Well, Sasha, here’s to you. And you, dear friend: who knows what the future holds for us?”

  Wolf was preoccupied and said nothing.

  “England, or no England,” said Voznesensky after his fourth glass; “they say the people there really know how to drink. I’ll readily accept that. But here I am, a simple Russian man, and you won’t frighten me with any England. Sit me down to drink with any Englishman, and then we’ll see.”

  He then shot me a look of reproach.

  “Whereas our friend here is more of the snacking sort. Of course, one needn’t starve to death in a restaurant—God forbid!—but drinking is what counts.”

  When the gramophone began to play, Voznesensky, who knew all the romances, sang along in his deep voice. After the fifth record, Wolf said:

  “You’re tireless, Volodya; you ought to take a break.”

  “My good man,” said Voznesensky, shrugging his shoulders, “what is there to take a break from? I, Sasha, haven’t forgotten my roots; so many of my ancestors sang till their throats were hoarse that all this is a mere trifle for me.”r />
  After we finished eating, I realized that my head was spinning, even though I hadn’t drunk that much. Voznesensky suggested taking a stroll (as he put it), but no sooner had we stepped out onto the street than he hailed the first taxi that came along, and we set off for Montmartre. There we began making our way round all the various spots, and little by little everything became jumbled in my mind. I remembered afterwards how there had been some nude mulatto women—their guttural chatter faintly reaching my ears—and other girls in varying states of undress. Swarthy youths of a southern sort had been playing guitars, and at one point there was Negro singing and a deafening jazz band. An enormous Negress had performed a belly dance with unusual artistry; as I watched her, she seemed to be made up of separate pieces of elastic black flesh moving independently of one another, as though the spectacle were taking place in some monstrous dissecting room that had suddenly sprung to life. Then came more music: the strumming of ukuleles. Holding a tumbler containing a whitish-green liquid, Voznesensky said:

  “He who has been to Tahiti will surely return there to die.”

  His rich baritone voice joined in the singing, and he added:

  “What is a northern woman? The sun’s reflection on ice.”

  His inebriation was of a benign and erotic nature; he drank to the health of all his short-run companionesses and was, it seemed, completely happy.

  Later, all these exotic scenes were replaced by more European entertainments—Hungarian Gypsies sang, French artistes performed. When we left a cabaret somewhere near boulevard Rochechouart, there was a street fight going on between some shady individuals; women were taking part and shouting in their fierce, shrill voices. I stood next to Wolf; the street lamp cast a harsh light on his pale face, which seemed to bear an expression of quiet despair. I felt as if I were gazing at this wild, strange crowd with distant eyes, as though from some far-off vantage point; I even imagined that I was hearing incoherent cries in an unknown tongue, although, naturally, I was familiar with all the words and nuances of the argot used by these pimps and prostitutes. I felt an agonizing disgust, which combined mysteriously with an intensified interest in this scuffle. It was, however, brought swiftly to an end by a whole array of policemen, who placed a score of bloodied men and women into three huge trucks and quickly drove off. On the pavement there remained a few half-trampled caps and—quite how it was lost by one of the participants in the fight is unclear—a pink brassiere. And while these details did seem to impart a certain convincingness to everything I had witnessed that night, I was still unable to rid myself of the impression that this evening stroll had been a patent fantasy, as though in the habitual quiet of my imagination I had been walking around a strange, unfamiliar city, alongside the spectre haunting this long, uninterrupted dream.