Andrei Makine - The Crime Of Olga Arbyelina

The scene that had since then been played out a thousand times in her memory once more embarked on its sequence of actions: a hand knocks the lampshade; an arm tries to stop it falling; that instinctive, blind lunge; his escape; and the reflection in the mirror that shows a woman lying there, more inert than a corpse… She observed this woman and noticed a new expression on her face that appeared to be more and more accentuated: a mixture of tenderness, sensuality, immodesty, and lasciviousness. Her knees remained wide apart, her belly lay exposed between long, supple thighs…

She tapped on the switch, as if swatting an insect that refuses to die. But in the darkness everything became even more real. Now there was the young face buried in the hollow of the naked woman's shoulder, the lips drowning in her breast… And now the woman's body was arching, closing about the other one, guiding it…

She stood at the French door and, without being aware of it, repeated over and over again in a feverish whisper, "No, it was never like that… never… never… never like that…" But to the slow, stubborn flow of memories her mind had just added the woman's arms embracing the fragile form of a boy; a moaning that she no longer concealed; and their newfound courage, for both of them knew that her sleeping was only pretense…

For several hours weariness interrupted the growth of this incurable tumor that was slowly swelling in her memory.

In the morning imagined reality, false, but terrifying in its truth, continued to gain ground, but calmly now, as if in a country definitively conquered… In the afternoon there were a lot of people in the library. At one moment she turned away and began drawing the curtains across the windows. "Too much sun!" she murmured, trying to keep her face hidden in the dusty folds for as long as possible… In a room lit by the flames flickering out of a stove she had just seen a woman slowly combing the thick flow of her hair, standing at a French door open onto a snowy night, out of which an almost warm breath of air was blowing. Her head was tilted, her gaze lost in the reflection in the windowpane, watching the movements of a youth who came into the room, stopped, and gazed at her in silence… She knew, she could not deny that had happened to her. She simply did not want other people to guess it by peering into her eyes.

The evening was light and long. She was in the kitchen, mechanically tearing up a letter (one of the many letters from L.M. that she no longer even read), when the front door banged with unusual haste. She did not stir, her back turned, so as to let him slip by without her seeing him. But he came in and she heard his voice, which, while striving for calm, had a childish ring to it: "Mom, I think I've just done something stupid. Could you call the… what's his name… the doctor-just-between-ourselves?"

She turned. He lifted the hand that he had been pressing against his left temple. A pocket of blood bulged over his left eyebrow; already he could not open the eye.

For the second time running she was up all night in the boy's room. At an uncertain hour, when the sky was still very dark, objects began to break free of the ties that normally held them. This made their presence more and more inexplicable. She had brought the lamp in here to have more light in case of need. Now that explanation no longer sufficed. The lamp stood beside the bed where the boy slept. Switched off and almost frightening in its silent idleness, no longer linked with brightness, but with dark, indecipherable visions… And the doctor-just-between-ourselves? He had stayed, for his help might be needed urgently. But… No, nothing… He had installed himself in the book room, in no way embarrassed about this nocturnal sojourn in their house. He had filled the little cubbyhole with his cigar smoke and was now reading or dozing. And from time to time came to the patient's bedside. Each time she gave a start, his arrival was so silken: for greater comfort he was in his stocking feet. He took visible pleasure in seeing her tremble. He smiled but at once adopted a firm and reassuring air, felt the swelling that by now almost entirely covered the boy's left eye, and went away again… At one moment in the darkness she thought she could see this man in his socks lurking at the end of the corridor, watching. She was very much afraid but then immediately woke up.

Her eyes resting on the boy's deformed face struggled constantly against growing accustomed to it: not to accept this puffy mask, to wipe it clean with the intensity of her look. She turned the compresses on the swollen brow, lifted the blanket and wiped away the trickles of sweat on his chest, in the hollow between his collarbones, on his neck. And each time she touched him, simply and almost without thinking, it woke the seething nocturnal visions within her, drew her toward a winter's night, toward a carnal encounter that was increasingly frenzied, increasingly real… Even the town outside the dark window, shimmering in a beam of light, was also an improbable ghost town, with its gigantic ruin of the wrecked bridge and the station from which, for several days now no trains had departed. "Rail strike," she repeated mentally, and the words murmured above this body on fire betokened a wide-eyed, intelligent madness… She looked at the thermometer (one hundred and four degrees, fever, as an hour earlier), switched off the lamp, closed her eyes.

When he became delirious in a headlong, seething hiss, she failed to wrest herself from sleep immediately. Listening to him, she believed she was still in a painful and confused dream. Little by little his gasping words formed into a confession that only delirium could have brought to the level of his lips. She did not so much hear but- with each painful whisper-saw a place materializing that it took her only a moment to recognize…

… It was a little ground floor apartment crammed with a jumble of furniture. A woman, youthful again, in her long black dress. A boy watching the woman's final preparations. She puts on the earrings that cast iridescent gleams onto her neck and her bare shoulders. The bell rings at the front door, she kisses the boy, who is already bedded down on the armchairs pushed together as a makeshift bed, and goes to open it. Mingling with the warm, piquant perfume she gives off as she passes, he can smell the damp odor of the street and the strong, invasive scent of the intruder's eau de cologne…

The sick boy's voice petered out in a series of brief, sibilant groans. She changed the compresses. The swelling of dark, shining blood had extended toward his temple. The right eye opened for a moment but did not focus on anything, flitted onto the lamp, onto the hand that was applying the icy cloth to his brow. Almost at once the delirium started again. Eventually she could even grasp the words that were being swallowed up in the hissing spasms of the fever.

… It was still the woman in evening dress getting ready to go to the theater and waiting for the man who was supposed to come and fetch her. This time she and her son are sitting at table drinking tea. Half an hour later, as she puts on her earrings in front of a mirror she suddenly feels pleasantly weary. She sits down on the little sofa and even decides to lie down for a few moments while awaiting her companion's arrival. Sleep overtakes her before the end of this thought…

She changed the compresses, already burning hot, shook the thermometer, inserted it with care. The whispering still emanating from his dry lips had become indistinct.

And suddenly he began to cry out in an almost conscious voice. In his cry the woman in the black dress suddenly found herself half naked, laid out in sinister beauty, for she was dead! Dead, dead, dead…

He repeated the word "dead," choking violently, shaking his disfigured head and scratching at the blanket with his fingernails.