The Spectre of Alexander Wolf

by Gaito Gazdanov

  It was the simple, logical conclusion to that distinctive philosophy, extracts of which Wolf had laid out to me. It was also a manifestation of that same notion of fixity, for me completely inadmissible, but which one could fight only with its own weapons; the use of this means of fighting involuntarily drew me closer to a sinister, dead world whose spectre had haunted me for so long. What else could oppose this philosophy, and why did every one of its words invariably incite an internal protest within me? I, too, understood and sensed the fragility of the so-called positive concepts, and I knew the meaning of death, but I felt neither its pull nor any fear of it. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on held me back in this painful area of understanding the final truths. I thought about it so intently that I even began to think I knew the answer to this and had known it all along, that the answer was so natural and obvious that I could never have any last-minute doubts as to how exactly it ought to go. But now, today, at this very moment, I couldn’t find it.

  I took out a cigarette and struck a match, which sparked and instantly went out, leaving behind the smell of half-burnt phosphorus. Then, plainly before me, I saw the dense trees of a garden in the moon’s copper light, and the grey hair of my schoolteacher who was sitting next to me on a curved wooden bench. It was early autumn. At night. My final exams were to commence the following morning. I’d been working the whole evening, and so I went out into the garden. As I walked along a lengthy school corridor, my classmates told me that an hour earlier one of our teachers, a young woman of twenty-four, had taken her own life. In the garden I saw another teacher sitting on a little bench. I sat down next to him, took out a cigarette and lit a match; then, as now, it immediately went out, and I noticed that same odour.

  I asked him what he made of the death of this woman and of the cruel injustice of her fate—if one may ascribe such hackneyed words as “cruel”, “sad” and “undeserved” to concepts like death and fate. He was a tremendously intelligent man, perhaps the most intelligent of anyone I ever knew, and he was a brilliant conversationalist. Even those who were shy or embittered placed an unusual amount of confidence in him. He never abused, even in the slightest degree, his enormous mental and cultural superiority over others, and so talking with him was always easy.

  Among other things that evening, he said to me:

  “There is, of course, no single commandment whose equity can be proven beyond all doubt, just as there is no moral law that is binding without exception. Ethics exist only in as much as we are prepared to accept them. You’re asking me about death. I’d say, about death and its innumerable manifestations. I perceive death and life conditionally, as two opposing origins encompassing almost everything we see, feel and comprehend. You must understand that the Law of Contrast is something like a categorical imperative: it’s almost impossible for us to think beyond generalizations and contrasts.”

  This was so unlike anything he would tell us in the classroom. I was listening intently, trying to take in his every word.

  “I’m tired,” he said, “and must go to bed. Have you studied for the exam? How I’d like to be in your shoes.”

  He stood up. I, too, got up from the little bench. The leaves were still; a silence hung in the garden.

  “There’s a wonderful line in Dickens somewhere,” he said. “It’s worth your while remembering it. I don’t recall exactly how it goes, but its meaning is this: we are given life with the vital stipulation that we bravely defend it to the last breath. Good night.”

  So I, too, now got up from my armchair, just as I had done from the bench where I’d been sitting with him that night, and I repeated these words that sounded somehow particularly significant then:

  “We are given life with the vital stipulation that we bravely defend it to the last breath.”

  At that moment, the telephone began to ring. I picked up the receiver. Yelena Nikolayevna’s voice asked:

  “Where have you been? I’ve missed you. What are you doing right now?”

  Hearing those first sounds of her voice, distorted as usual by the telephone, I immediately forgot everything I’d only just been thinking about; it was so total and instantaneous, as though the thoughts had never even existed.

  “I’m getting up from my armchair,” I said. “In my left hand I’m holding the receiver. With my right, I’m placing some cigarettes and matches into my coat pocket. Now I’m looking at the clock: it’s five minutes to six. I’ll be with you at a quarter past.”

  We dined early, at around seven o’clock. She wore a light summer dress, and we took tea in her room along with an unusually delicious chocolate cake that Annie had baked; it crumbled and melted in the mouth, and there was a lovely, subtle hint of spice in it.

  “How do you find the cake?”

  “Excellent,” I said. “There is, however, something Negro about it, but pleasantly so. Like the far-off echo of their singing.”

  “You lapse into lyricism in the most particular of circumstances.”

  “Am I to know which?”

  “Oh, it’s very simple. There are two things to which you’re never indifferent: food and women.”

  “Thank you for the flattering opinion. Might I express, in that case, my sympathy with regards to your selection?”

  “I didn’t say that I found these features off-putting.”

  I was intoxicated by her presence; this was probably evident in my eyes, as she remarked to me:

  “How impatient you are, how keen! Must you hold me like that, taking my body in your arms and crushing my ribs?”

  “When I’m sixty, Lenochka, I’ll think on the vanity of all earthly things and the infidelity of emotions. Sometimes I think about it even now.”

  “Probably only in the absence of those circumstances that arouse your bent towards lyricism.”

  I now noticed a new trait in her, one that hadn’t been there at the beginning of our intimacy: she would frequently tease me, but always in a friendly manner and without any intent of saying something truly unpleasant. Perhaps it came about because she’d been infected by my cynical attitude towards a great many things, and now she was involuntarily adopting my tone. At any rate, it seemed beyond doubt that she was acquiring, little by little, the mental freedom and spontaneity whose absence had been so conspicuous before.

  I proposed getting out of town for a few days; she immediately agreed. The following morning we drove out of Paris, and, without any fixed destination in mind, we travelled around over the course of an entire week, staying within a hundred-and-fifty-kilometre radius of the city. One day, after we unexpectedly ran out of petrol, we were forced to spend a night in the forest, inside the car. There was a thunderstorm and a heavy downpour, and in the flashes of lightning I could see through the vehicle’s streaming windows the trees surrounding us on all sides. Yelena Nikolayevna slept huddled up in the seat, with her warm, heavy head resting in my lap. I sat there, smoking. Whenever I lowered the window for a moment to flick the ash off my cigarette, the intense patter of raindrops falling on leaves would bore into my ears; there was a smell of earth and damp tree trunks. Somewhere, not too far off, twigs would snap with a wet crack. The rain would abate for a minute, but there would be a flash of lightning, a rumble of thunder and then torrents of water once more would begin to beat down onto the roof of the car with all their former force. I was afraid to move, lest I wake up Yelena Nikolayevna. I could scarcely keep my eyes open. My head fell back. While drifting in and out of sleep, I thought of a great many things, but first and foremost of how, no matter how complicated my life may become or whatever may befall me in the future, I would always remember that night, this woman’s head in my lap, the rain and the state of drowsy happiness I found myself in. It was an old habit of mine to withhold my feelings and attempt to understand them, and so I kept seeking out the reasons for the deep-rooted, blind knowledge that one day I would experience this happiness and that there wouldn’t even be anything unexpected about it, as though it were a rightful, natur
al thing, for which I was always destined. Right then, I was struck by the thought that if I wanted to comprehend all this and discover in some far-off place the imaginary moment from which all this began, if I wanted to explain fully why this had happened, how it had been possible and how I now came to find myself in the forest on a summer’s night, in the rain, with a woman of whose existence I had known nothing only a few months before (and yet without whom I was now unable to imagine my life), I would have to spend years labouring and taxing my memory. I would probably be able to write a few volumes on it into the bargain. How was it all possible, the steady rhythm of the rain, the feeling of this head resting in my lap—my muscles had already begun to get used to the imprint made by this round, tender weight on them—this face I was looking at in the darkness, as if leaning over my own fate, and this unforgettable feeling of blissful plenitude? Throughout my life I’d seen much that was tragic or detestable; so often had I witnessed deceit, cowardice, desertion, avarice, crime and stupidity, and I was so poisoned by all this that I seemed incapable of feeling anything bearing even a distant echo of fleeting perfection. During these times, I was far removed from the doubts that usually hounded me, far from the constant feeling of sadness, far from mockery—in brief, far from what constituted the substance of my enduring attitude towards everything that happened to me. Were it not for what was going on right now, I thought my life would have been lived in vain and that it would for ever have been so, regardless of what was to come.

  Never before had I felt this with such clarity as I did on that night; I was aware that not once in my life had there been such a particular purity of feeling. Throughout this period, everything had been concentrated on one single idea, and although it encompassed everything I knew and thought, and everything that preceded this point in time, it did contain the element of fixity that Wolf had mentioned. Perhaps he was right, after all: if we didn’t know death, neither would we know happiness. Without knowledge of death, we would be unable to appreciate the true value of our finest feelings, we would be unable to know that some of them are never to be repeated and that we can only understand them in all their richness at the moment they occur. Until that point we weren’t destined to do so, and afterwards it’s too late.

  This was one of the reasons in particular that compelled me not to tell Yelena Nikolayevna the story about Wolf. I had no intention at all of hiding it from her; on the contrary, I often thought of how I should be the one to tell it. At the time, however, I was loath to let something foreign and hostile enter the world in which we lived. I supposed Yelena Nikolayevna to be of the same mind, as over the course of the entire week she never once referred to the “meeting with a spectre” that I had mentioned.

  Numerous times the thought struck me that if I were to commit to paper all the conversations I had with Yelena Nikolayevna over the course of that week it would produce the most incomprehensible rubbish, offensive for its sheer lack of substance. The conversations provided an accompaniment to the play of feelings that epitomized the period, beyond which nothing else existed for us; all our surroundings seemed funny and amusing—wallpaper patterns in the hotels we stayed in, the faces of the maids or proprietresses, the menus, the outfits of the people sitting at our table, or the entirely insignificant things they occupied themselves with—because we, and no one else, were the only people to know which things bore any real significance.

  We returned to Paris a week later. Urgent work awaited me, in which Yelena Nikolayevna, as ever, took an active role. The first day passed as usual. However, when she woke me the following morning I was struck by the look of alarm that flashed a few times in her eyes. Later, something transpired that had never happened before: she gave me an answer that was completely extraneous.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing,” she replied. “Perhaps it’s silly, but I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you really love me?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  “How old are you?”

  “No, really, it’s important to know.”

  We parted as usual, late at night; she complained of being tired and said that she wouldn’t come until four o’clock the following afternoon.

  “Fine,” I said. “A rest would do you good.”

  I immediately fell into a deep sleep, but I awoke soon after. Then I dozed off, and after an hour I opened my eyes again. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me; I even wondered whether I might have been poisoned by something. I was in a state of anxiety, all the more incomprehensible as there really didn’t seem to be any grounds for it at all. Sleep finally deserted me, and I got up sometime after five o’clock in the morning. Nothing like this had happened to me in years.

  Convinced that I wouldn’t get back to sleep, I drank a cup of black coffee, took a bath and began to shave. My face stared out at me from the mirror, and although I saw it every morning of my life I could never quite accustom myself to its severe ugliness, much as I couldn’t get used to the wild, foreign look in my eyes. When I thought of myself, of the feelings I had, of the things I thought I understood so well, I imagined myself somehow abstractly, because that other visual recollection was painful and unpleasant for me. No sooner would I call to mind my physical appearance than the finest, most lyrical, wonderful visions would vanish in an instant—so monstrous was its disparity with the intangible, glittering world that existed in my imagination. It seemed to me that there could be no greater contrast than that between my inner life and my outward appearance; sometimes I even imagined that I was trapped in someone else’s strange, almost hateful body. I calmly endured the sight of my essentially average naked body, whose muscles moved obediently and evenly, and were arranged exactly as they were supposed to be. It was a commonplace, inexpressive body, not overly thin, though devoid of any excess fat. Where the face began, however, it transformed into something so contrary to what ought to have been there that I would always avert the gaze of those foreign eyes and try not to think about it. Thus now, after a sleepless night, this unpleasant feeling was much more intense than usual.

  I had only just finished dressing and was intending to sit down to work when, suddenly, the telephone in my room began to ring. I looked at the clock in astonishment; it was twenty minutes to six. I had no idea who could be calling so early. After some hesitation I picked up the receiver. A drunken voice, in which I did, however, detect some familiar intonations, said:

  “Good morning, dearest.”

  “What’s all this?”

  “Don’t you recognize me?”

  It was a man pretending to be a woman. I recognized the voice; it belonged to a fellow journalist, a rather amiable if wayward man. He would periodically drink himself to the point of stupefaction, and this in most cases would be accompanied by some fantastic exploits: he would resolve to pay a night-time visit to some senator who had allegedly invited him a few days previously, or else he would set out for place de la Bourse to send a telegram to his aunt who lived in Lyons, informing her that he was quite well “despite all the rumours being spread about him”.

  “As you’ll no doubt have guessed,” he continued more or less coherently, “I met a friend who invited me… Odette, stop harassing me. I’m quite sober.”

  Odette was his wife, a very sensible, level-headed woman. A second later I heard her voice (she had evidently taken the receiver from him).

  “Hello,” she said. “This drunken idiot was calling you to discuss some business.”

  “Tell him it’s top-drawer stuff,” a voice said in the background.

  “It’s just that your protégé Curly Pierrot is about to be arrested. Philippe blabbed everything under interrogation. André”—this was her husband—“is too drunk to be able to do anything. The material for the article really is top-drawer. I know you’re no fan of gangster stories and melodramas; you think they’re bad stuff, don’t you? I wouldn�
��t have disturbed you, only it’s about our good friend. Go and see Jean; I’d take a revolver if I were you. Just in case.”

  “Thanks, Odette,” I said. “I owe you for this. I’m on my way.”

  “All right,” she replied, and rang off.

  Jean, the man whom I was supposed to be meeting, was a police inspector; I’d known him for a long time and we were on friendly terms. He had a great gift for reincarnation, or, more likely, was the victim of some peculiar case of split personality. In carrying out his professional duties, for example interrogating any run-of-the-mill suspect, he would always wear his cap tilted back, keep a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and speak curtly, monosyllabically and almost exclusively in argot. However, as soon as he began addressing an investigator or a journalist, he would transform instantaneously and become a man of high pretensions: “If you would be so kind as to take the trouble to analyse some of the facts as a preliminary, so to speak…” One had to suppose that it was he who had interrogated Philippe, Curly Pierrot’s right-hand man. By all accounts, a police car would shortly be leaving for Sèvres, where Pierrot was in hiding, and this time he had little chance of escape. I hesitated for a moment, then picked up the receiver and dialled. I remembered that the telephone was located next to Pierrot’s bed. Presently, an exasperated female voice asked:

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Get Pierrot,” I replied. “Tell him there’s a call from rue la Fayette.”

  This was a code name.

  “He isn’t here, he hasn’t come back yet. And Philippe’s been missing for two days. I don’t know what to think.”

  “Philippe’s given the game away,” I said. “Try to find Pierrot at all costs, wherever he is, and warn him. Tell him not to come home. In an hour it’ll be too late.”