Andrei Makine - The Crime Of Olga Arbyelina

Having completed the draft she went to the kitchen where the wood stove had gone out and her infusion was cooling. It seemed to her that her letter breaking it off marked the start of a new era. Perhaps it would indeed be one spent "looking forward to old age" as the director had said. Everything that seemed transitory, still capable of changing, would become fixed-this kitchen with the familiar blisters on the tired paintwork of the walls; this long, low brick structure, her house; and her presence in Villiers-la-Forêt, daily less surprising to her amid a cycle of seasons, almost indistinguishable from one another, as they are in France, where the summer lingers long into the fall and where the winter, without snow, is merely a continuation of the fall. Henceforth her life would be rather like this vague slippage… Before going to bed (that evening the infusion had no effect on her emotional state) she darned her son's shirt. Spread out on her knees, the fabric was rapidly impregnated with the warmth of her body, of her hands. The shirt with its frayed collar already belonged visibly to this new era in her life, when nothing extraneous would any longer come between her and her child. No visits, no affairs. She would drive away any thought that would take her further from him. But he would not notice this change, any more than next morning he would notice a cluster of stitches of blue thread on the collar of his shirt…

Scarcely a few days after that evening when the final letter was written and the great decision taken with intense and tender bitterness, Olga was to forget all about it. Her resolutions, her mature collect-edness, her resignation-all this would be swept away by a single gesture.

In the course of a light, cool evening in the last days of summer, in a moment of great serenity, she would catch her son unawares, standing beside the little copper vessel in which she brewed her infusion of hop flowers. She would spot him poised in the brief moment of tense alertness that follows one of those actions a person is trying to keep secret at all costs. The trancelike immobility that forms a bridge between a dangerous or criminal act and the exaggerated relaxation of movements and words that follows it. What she would think she had guessed at seemed to her such an improbably monstrous action that instinctively she stepped back several paces. As if she desired to turn time backward, already sensing that a return to their old life had at that moment become impossible.

Later on she would find herself trembling to think that at the moment when she caught sight of him, he could himself have observed her through the slightly parted curtains at the kitchen window…

The sky had still been light; and the trees stood out against its transparency with the clarity of an etching. The mauve luminosity of the air gave their silhouettes an unreal appearance. From time to time Olga would pick up a dead leaf or a fragment of spar and examine them by this deceptive, translucent light. Even her fingers, as they grasped the handle of a spade, had a supernatural glow in this fluid pink. The cold, pure start to the dusk, she knew, promised a calm and limpid night. A fine night at summer's end.

She was working slowly, following the rhythm of lights and colors that grew richer with an ever darkening blue before turning purple. The dry stalks she uprooted from the bed beside the wall came up comfortably, easily, with the resignation of summer flowers that are over. From the dug earth there arose a pungent, heady smell. It was dark now, but she continued the slow ceremony of simple tasks that left the mind at rest…

It was a Saturday. During the afternoon she had recopied her farewell letter to L.M. for the second time. And to avoid the temptation of starting all over again she had put it in an envelope, deciding to mail it on Monday morning. For two days, now that the deed was done, she had had a sense of living in a soothing ebb of emotions. It was just as if she were walking at low tide on an uncovered seabed, distractedly picking up a pebble here and the fragment of a shell there…

It was in this blissful, distracted state that she was working now. Bent low over the earth, she finally reached a spot below the kitchen window and stood up.

Too abruptly! Giddiness overcame her and made the lit window and the curtains sway. Her body was flooded with a dull, hazy weakness. As she leaned her hand against the wall it seemed to yield gently. To check this wavering she fixed her gaze on the bright gap between the curtains. And saw a stranger, a very young man standing beside the stove…

She saw his gesture. With the clarity that movements and objects have when observed at night from outside a window in cold weather. An almost incredible clarity, on account of her giddiness.

The young stranger's hand hovered rapidly above the little copper saucepan. Then his fingers crumpled up a thin rectangle of paper and slipped it into his pants pocket. He moved away from the kitchen range and glanced anxiously at the door…

Still reeling, she took a few steps backward. A bush rose up behind her, repelling her with its springy branches. She stopped, hearing only the dull throbbing of the blood in her temples, seeing only the strip of light between the curtains.

Sensing everything, but as yet understanding nothing, she saw scattered fragments coalescing beneath her eyelids: the fingers hovering over the hop flowers; the three photographs of the naked woman; the open door the night when they were taken; two days spent at Li's; the abortion… Her eyes, swimming with the thick fog of her giddiness, were already making horrified sense of this scattered mosaic. But her mind, numbed by her blood rising, held its peace.

Little by little, however, the mists cleared, the mosaic became more and more irremediable. Its colored fragments evoked a great dark red reptile, rapidly swelling in her brain. At that moment the giddiness vanished, clarity returned. Olga had a fraction of a second to understand… But the reptile swollen with blood exploded, burned the back of her neck, froze her lips in a cry. The mosaic remained shattered: three photos; the open door; herself standing, quite naked; the infusion that occasionally made her sleep for so long. It was like a word at the back of your mind, the letters and sound of which are glimpsed for an instant and disappear immediately, leaving behind only the certainty of its existence.

True, this slimy reptile, swollen with brown blood, did exist. It was this that her mind, now cleared, retained, like the proof of a moment of madness. And even the voice of the "little bitch" had fallen silent, terrified by what had just been sensed.

Now her gaze was riveted on the young stranger who was nonchalantly leafing through a notebook open on the table in the brightly lit kitchen. It was her son!

But before she could grasp how he could have grown up to this extent, the child of seven that, after so many years, he still remained for her, there occurred in her vision a kind of rapid adjustment that hurt her eyes. The face of the young man bent over the notebook and the face of the child that lived within her mind trembled at the same instant, swam toward one another, and melted into intermediate features. Halfway between one thing and the other: those of a fourteen-year-old boy.

The young man, she now understood, had appeared at the moment of her giddiness, his face and body matured by the horror of the mosaic that had revealed the unthinkable. Yes, this very young man, slim, pale with the transparent, almost invisible shadow of his first mustache, belonged to the world of the mosaic that, once thought about, was transformed into a glistening reptile, with glassy, enigmatic eyes. A world that was horrifying but could neither be thought nor spoken.

The light between the curtains went out. In the darkness, following the wall with her hand, she made her way toward the door. She caught her foot against clods of earth and uprooted stalks. She felt as if she were returning to the house after several years… In the hall the patterns on the wallpaper amazed her, as if she were seeing them for the first time. She bent down and automatically performed the action she repeated almost every day. Picking up a pair of dusty shoes she thrust her hand into first one, then the other, feeling the insides. To detect the point of any nail lurking in the sole. Suddenly she lost her grip on the shoe and it fell to the ground. Her hand had slipped inside the worn leather quite easily. She realized she was still living with the memory of her fingers, that used to have to wriggle painfully into the child's narrow shoes.