Andrei Makine - The Crime Of Olga Arbyelina

On her return from Paris the next day she studied with concern the trees at the edge of the station square. Nobody. On the door of her house there was a little rectangle of paper. "I called for tea, I will be back for dinner." It was in deciphering the signature that she recognized the element that was common to all the men who had troubled her in the night. As if this commonplace, mildly ridiculous name, that she had known but forgotten-yes, as if simply seeing it written down, "Sergei Golets," had created a generic term for all these characters.

He was the man who had fathomed her secret (she did not know how, nor to what extent). The madness of her secret. Her madness… Yes, he was someone who treated her as he would have treated a simpleminded person who can be exploited.

It was already almost nine o'clock in the evening. She walked along beside the house with hurried steps, plunged in under the trees of the wood. You could cross it in five minutes, but the maze of footpaths created the illusion of a refuge. The ground was dappled with long copper rays, slowly turning pale. Darkness was gradually spilling into the shady corners. The moonlight turned the glades into lakes, into streams of a somnolent blue. The repeated cry of a bird rang out with the sound of icicles snapping. She had the sudden idea that it might be possible to stay there, not to leave these moments in time, to travel back through them… Then, remembering the madness a man had just detected in her, she hastened to return.

As she pressed the switch she thought that Golets might notice the light and come… At the same moment she heard the steady, almost nonchalant rapping at the door. She switched off the light, then at once switched it on again, annoyed by her own cowardice, went to the hall but decided not to open up and to say nothing. He knocked again and remarked without raising his voice, sensing that she was close at hand, "I know you're there. Open the door… I have a message for you." There was a jarring note of barely disguised mockery in his voice. "Yes, he talks as if to a feebleminded woman," she thought again. She went back into the kitchen and suddenly heard the snapping of a stem: he was walking along beside the wall, treading on the flowers in the darkness. She remembered that the French door in her bedroom had been left ajar. Hardly had the thought occurred when it became reality: at the end of the corridor the ancient hinges emitted a long musical creak. She rushed to the other end of the apartment, switched on the light, just had time to focus her eyes on the familiar and woeful interior: the lamp with the patched-up china base, the stove, the bed, the wardrobe with a mirror…

And amid all these objects, with their patina of familiarity, a man putting his head through the gap where the French door was ajar, just like one of those volatile interiors in a bad dream.

"Just two words… Yesterday I forgot to tell you…" He smiled, hypnotizing her with his fixed stare, and made his way into the room with brief, swift advances, while seeming to be motionless every time she was on the point of rebuking him.

She felt desperately distant from this scene. The words that rang out in her head and then burst forth from her lips seemed to emanate from somebody else: "Go away! Get out! Quickly!" Ineffectual commands that had not affected the distracted look on her own face nor produced any effect on the man who did not move and yet kept coming closer. She, too, was absent from her body and the man knew it: infancy, drunkenness, and madness all disarm the body in this way and it becomes an easy prey.

"I didn't tell you yesterday," he began, with the excitement of one who sees his strategy coming to fruition. "I love you. I have loved you for years… No, let me…"

She swung her hand clumsily. He intercepted her slap and kissed her hand passionately, then grasped her waist, caught her dispossessed body off balance and thrust it toward the bed. She saw a round face, gleaming with sweat, and heard herself shouting out a completely illogical remark: "Let me go! Your neck is hideous!"

It was these absurd, half-choking words that stopped him in his tracks. The man straightened up, let her go, and felt his neck. "What did you say? What's the matter with my neck?"

His skin was shaved too close, red, and covered in tiny swellings. He took a step toward the mirror, realized that this movement was ridiculous, lost countenance.

"Go away!" she said in a weary voice. "I beg you…"

She went to the French door, drew back the curtain, and flung it open. He obeyed her, murmuring with a vexed sneer, "All right, all right… But all the same you won't refuse me the pleasure of an excursion with you? Tomorrow afternoon…" He went out, turned, and waited for her reply. She shook her head and tugged at the handle. The cuff link glittered-he was quick enough to block the door.

"One last word," he called, his lips unable to achieve a reconciliation between smiling and twitching with rage. "The very last, I assure you. Now this glass door you are crushing my arm with"-she let go of the handle-"this French door, which is somewhat too wide for these curtains, or rather the curtains are too narrow, if you prefer…"

She was seized by a profound internal shuddering that rose rapidly in her stomach and up to her chest and constricted the muscles of her throat. The man was about to blurt out something irreparable, she had a precise, blinding intuition of it. She had sensed it unconsciously, ever since his maneuvering began, and it was this presentiment that had left her disarmed in confronting him.

"… These curtains, that really are too narrow you see, are not wholly unknown to me. I have this strange habit, you see: I like to go for a walk late in the evening before going to bed. You know how it is, when you live alone… And then, I'm very observant…"

She should have interrupted him, stopped him on the brink of the next sentence… She should have let him have his way just now, accepted his kisses, given herself to him, for what he was about to say was a thousand times more monstrous. But the air was becoming heavy, like damp cotton wool, hindering gestures, stifling the voice.

"Especially with the frosts last winter, I was often worried: you have a… mm… sick child in this shack; one never knows. One evening when I was passing very close by, almost beneath your windows, I glanced your way; the curtains were drawn but they are, as I've said, too narrow… So I looked in and…

"… And I saw you, you and your son, naked, in an act of love."

No! He did not say it. She thought he was going to and the sentence immediately became real, inseparable from what had gone before. Perhaps he did then speak of their nakedness as well, of the carnal strangeness of the couple they made… She no longer knew.

"So at all events, no doubt you will understand my astonishment… I've seen worse things in my time… I'm no choirboy myself, far from it. But even so! Fortunately I'm not a gossip, otherwise, you know what the wagging tongues are like at the Caravanserai and elsewhere…

"… And when I offered you my… friendship, it was so as to be able to talk to you more freely about all this, you understand, in intimacy. And to give you the possibility of living a normal life as a woman, with a man who would enable you to enjoy…"

No! He did not speak those last words, but even so, they were real, and inescapable, for she had imagined them.

In fact, he was no longer there. She was alone, sitting on the bed, facing the mirror. He had gone, bidding her a good night and proposing that they should take a trip in a boat the next day. She had agreed, nodding several times.

That night she found herself wandering for some time in an endless, shadowy apartment, exploring its labyrinthine passages before going to lie down on a bed. Her son came in, just as she had seen him on the afternoon when he was diving-naked, his body wet, making the sheets damp and cooling them deliriously. She felt this coolness against her breast, in her thighs. He kissed her; his lips tasted of the stems and leaves of water plants. Their freedom was such that their bodies moved as if underwater, their gestures marvelously weightless. It was when she found herself on her knees, dominated by him, that she noticed that the armchair turned toward the wall in the corner of this unknown room had someone in it… She could only see the arm on the armrest-a heavy cuff link glittered in the half-darkness. And the more violent their sensual enjoyment became, the more the profile of the seated man detached itself from the back of the chair. She was on the brink of recognizing him when at last, with a cry, still choked with pleasure, she wrested herself from sleep. An object was digging into her shoulder. She switched on the light and from within the folds of the tangled sheets she plucked out a cuff link.