Andrei Makine - The Crime Of Olga Arbyelina

At one moment she believes she has lost all feeling… She passes through a succession of towns ravaged by fires, houses gutted by pillage, lampposts overloaded with hanged bodies (one day one of these corpses, already ancient, no doubt, falls and brushes her with the shreds of its arms). To be able still to hurt her, pain must now be particularly sharp-the fabric of her dress sticking to a wound and having to be ripped off. Or quite squalid-the maddening itch from fleas. Or quite stupid-waiting, among other women, for some torture to be devised by this puny man, dressed in a leather coat and hence a "commissar," who is suffering from toothache and examines the female prisoners with extra hatred until the moment when one of them offers him a little bottle of perfume (her last talisman of femininity) that eases the pain and affords them an unhoped-for reprieve.

She recognizes herself less and less as this starving creature covered in rags, with inflamed eyes. Seeing her own reflection in a broken shop window near the harbor, she greets it and asks the way to the embarkation quay. She walks barefoot, she no longer has anything to carry. This city on the coast of the Black Sea is the last outpost of freedom. They are already fighting in the suburbs. From time to time she has to walk around a dead body or hide behind a wall to avoid a hail of bullets. Standing in front of the shop window, and realizing her mistake, she experiences a brief stirring of consciousness, feels a strange twitching of her lips-a smile!-and tells herself that in this city at war the freedom they dreamed of for so long has been achieved. Totally. She could pick up the gun from that dead soldier lying beside the wall and kill the first person who came along. Or even rally the besieging army: her rags make her look like one of them. Or she could take shelter in an empty house and resist absurdly until the last cartridge. Or just walk into that theater, settle down in a plush-covered seat, and wait. Or finally, kill herself.

This moment of clear reasoning revives the fear, the suffering. And above all the instinct for survival. Panic-stricken, she loses her way at the intersections of roads, runs, retraces her footsteps, sees the dead soldier again-someone has already taken his rifle. Suddenly she hears notes of music. The ground floor of a deserted restaurant, the windows shattered, the doors torn off. Inside, a man dressed in a fur coat with frayed sleeves, a fur hat on his head, is playing the piano. The mouth of a ceramic stove is belching forth black smoke, covering both the room and the musician in black strands of soot. He is playing a tragic bravura air, from time to time wiping his cheeks, wet with tears. His swollen feet are bare: they slip on the pedals; the man grimaces and crashes his fingers down even more furiously. His face is almost black. "Othello!" a very old memory exclaims within her. She walks out and sees the harbor at the end of the road. She no longer hurries. Indifference and torpor return. As she goes up the gangplank she directs her gaze down into the dirty water between the granite of the quay and the boat. She feels herself to be of the same consistency as this cold, glaucous liquid-foul with oil, with flotsam, with dead fish. There is an immense temptation to lose herself in this substance so close to her, so as to suffer no more, no longer to have to unstick her eyelids with their accretions of dry, yellow crust.

And when her own shuddering becomes one with the painful heaving of the boat ambushed by a winter storm and she weeps from those tortured eyes, it will be neither because of the pains in her body nor because of the fear that draws prayers and cries from some of the other refugees. She is overwhelmed by the feeling that there is no one in the universe to whom she can address a prayer. Her whole being now is nothing more than her raw wounds and her skin infested with lice. And all her thoughts can only lead to this one conclusion: the world is evil. Evil is always more deceitful than man can imagine. Goodness is simply one of its tricks. "I'm suffering," she will groan, knowing that there is no one under heaven from whom she can hope for compassion. All she will see of heaven is the rectangle of cold, of salt breakers and howling squalls outside the door that the sailors fling open as they come running through. Her only heaven. As for this world-this is how she wanted it. So it has become.

And yet she will also weep at the moment when her neighbor, his face emaciated, his look deathly, hesitates for a second, and shares his bread with her…

Later she will learn that the last ship left Russia a few hours after their sailing, carrying the very last refugees and the very last defenders of the city; among whom, when she gets to Constantinople, she will recognize a woman, armed and dressed as a soldier, with a deep scar across her cheek from chin to temple. Li…

Having reached Paris, after long detours across Europe lasting for several months, she finds the simplest things painfully affecting: a piece of scented soap that she often secretly inhales, feeling goose bumps on her skin with a tingling she had forgotten; the sweet scalding of the first mouthful of hot coffee in the morning calm of a bistro; language and gestures that are unthreatening; looks you do not have to scrutinize to guess if you are condemned or acquitted. Paris is like the neck of a funnel-into it immense Russia decants its human masses. It is impossible not to bump into people you have already encountered in the old life. She finds Li again. And a little later, the man who killed her violator and who had introduced himself before disappearing (as she thought, forever) as "Prince Arbyelin."

This new encounter is too perfect, too much like a storybook to be wasted. They sense that together as a couple, the destitute princess and the brave warrior in exile, they already belong to the dreams of these émigrés, who only survive thanks to dreams and memories. And it is without any hypocrisy that they both live out this dream for the others. She believes quite sincerely that she can never smile again, nor experience joy, nor permit herself to be happy after what she has lived through and seen. Above all, she contrives to convince herself that her life, to its very end (she is twenty-two in this year of 1922), will be a solemn and melancholy wake for the past.

Why then, one day, does she no longer believe this? They are in church, still in their roles of princess and exiled warrior; he tilts his head to hold back his tears; and she catches herself doubting the sincerity of their roles… That day, as if he, too, had sensed a change, he eats with the hearty appetite of someone returning to life…

One evening, some months later, she is surprised by the sight of a long feminine leg, her own, as she pulls on a silk stocking. Or rather by the vortex of petty and futile thoughts that fills her mind at that moment: are these stockings too dark? Will it be too hot in the restaurant where he is taking her, as it was yesterday over in Saint-Raphaël? He must be getting impatient, we're late, he's going to knock on the door again… He knocks, scolds her. To defuse his anger she tells him to come in. He comes in, lifting his arms in theatrical indignation and his expression suddenly changes when he sees the soft, delicate whiteness between the stocking she is fastening and the curve of her stomach… She feels the prickle of his mustache on this bare island of her body.

Much later she will try to understand how this new masquerade could have tempted them-and so easily. The contagion of the Roaring Twenties, the gaiety of a people who wanted to forget the war, the reawakening of the émigrés after the shock of exile. The first literary evenings; the revival of fashionable life in this Russian Paris; there are even costumed balls! Yet the real reason, she will admit to herself reluctantly, was quite simply physical. It was the beauty and strength of her own leg, stockinged in gray silk; her body liberating itself from the last traces of suffering and claiming its due. And also this man, angry with himself over his moment of sentimental weakness, his tears in church, who one day casts aside his melancholy warrior's mask and becomes once more the bon vivant and daredevil he has always been.