The Crime Of Olga Arbyelina

One

Those that come first lie in wait for his words like mere eavesdroppers. Those that follow seem to appreciate something more in them. And they can easily be identified: they are much rarer than the merely inquisitive ones and come alone. They dare to draw a little closer to the tall old man as he slowly patrols the labyrinth of avenues and they leave later than the first comers.

The words the old man murmurs are swiftly dispersed by the wind in the icy light of a late afternoon in winter. He stops beside a slab, stoops to lift a heavy branch that lies like a fissure across the inscription carved in the porous stone. The inquisitive visitors cock their heads slightly toward his voice, while pretending to examine monuments nearby… They have just overheard an account of the last hours of a writer who was well-known in his day but is now forgotten. He died at night. His wife, her fingers wet with tears, closed his eyelids and then lay down in bed beside him to wait for morning… Now from the parallel avenue, where the dates on the gravestones are more recent, comes another tale: of a ballet dancer dead well before the onset of old age, who met his end repeating over and over, like a sacred formula, the Christian name of the young man, his lover, who had infected him… Next they steal some words spoken beside a squat pedestal surmounted with a cross: the story of a couple in the early nineteen twenties whose lives were tortured by the impossible hope of getting a visa to go abroad. He, a famous poet who no longer had a single line in print, she, an actress, long since banned from the stage. Living reclusively in their flat in St. Petersburg, they could already picture themselves being condemned, imprisoned, perhaps executed. On the day when, miraculously, their authorization to leave the country arrived, the woman went out, while her husband remained behind in a daze of happiness. To do some shopping in preparation for the journey, he thought. She went down, crossed a square (the passengers on a streetcar saw her smiling), emerged onto the quayside, and hurled herself into the sea-green water of a canal…

The visitors who have been listening out of pure curiosity are beginning to leave. A moment ago one of them crunched a fragment of flint beneath his heel. The old man drew himself up to his full gigantic height and fixed them with a somber gaze, as if angered at seeing them all there around him, frozen in their falsely preoccupied poses. Clumsily they make off, in single file at first, dodging between the tombstones; then forming a little group in the avenue that leads to the exit… During those few moments of discomfiture facing the old man they felt the whole disturbing strangeness of their situation. There they were beneath the bare trees at that cold, clear day's end, in the midst of all those Orthodox crosses, a few feet away from this man in his unbelievable greatcoat, black and disproportionately long. A man who, as if talking to himself, summoned up these beings in their very swift, very individual transition from life to death… It all felt pretty weird!

The little group hastens to dilute this feeling with words. Their voices grow steadier with lighthearted bravado; they joke; they suspect that the old man's stories will give rise to a fascinating discussion on the journey home. One of them remembers a surprising detail: the dancer, an obsessive collector, already hugely rich, used to buy up antiques and pictures at prices one malicious tongue called "obscene" and explained, half in earnest, half hamming it up, that he needed "to make provision for my old age." The debate is launched. They speak of the vanity of material things and the little caprices of great minds. Of the weakness of the flesh and of depravity. ("Let's face it, he was a genius killed by that nonentity of a gigolo," exclaims one.) And of how there was no perversion in it because love redeems all. "Love?!" A theatrically indignant voice reminds them that the wife whose fingers caressed the eyelids of the newly dead writer (yes, that faithful wife now at rest beneath the same stone as he) had been forced to tolerate a ménage à trois. The writer, already an old man, had needed the physical presence of a young woman for his inspiration… The arguments come thick and fast: the sense of sacrifice; art justifying everything; men's visceral selfishness…

The car taking them back toward the capital is filled with flashes of wit, laughter, and disillusioned sighs that accompany the occasional sanctimonious observation. They are happy to have succeeded in curbing the dread that recently held them in its grip. Dread has become an anecdote. And the old man, "a kind of enormous half-crazed priest, dressed in a surplice at least a hundred years old." Even the capricious drowned woman of St. Petersburg simply serves to illustrate the irrational nature of her fellow countrymen. Yes, that soul so given to excess, and so often described, with which, thanks to their Sunday outing, they have become better acquainted. They mention the names of various writers and a few long novels in which, if you looked carefully, you might well come across the drowned woman and the dancer, and the old man himself… After experiencing disorientation in a remote spot amid a drab, chilly landscape, it is an almost physical pleasure for them to find themselves once more in the familiar twisting streets, to recognize this café and that crossroads in their very characteristic Parisian look and with all the lights making it seem like night already… And when, a year later, or perhaps more, depending on the rhythm of their busy lives, a dinner party brings them together again, not one of the four visitors will dare to speak of those few moments of dread beneath the wintry sky. And this fear of admitting to it will greatly enhance the pleasure of their evening.

Their retreat has not deflected the old man from his regular round. You can see him now lifting a long tree trunk uprooted by last night's storm. The cross on one of the tombs has been turned into a kind of prop, bowed under the weight of the toppled tree. This task accomplished, the man remains motionless for a moment. Then nods his head several times and pours out his words once more, to melt in the cold transparency of the evening. The visitor now listening to him remains mesmerized by the power and appearance of the hands thrusting out from the sleeves of the greatcoat and grasping the tree's damp bark. Hands that themselves resemble powerful, knotty roots; marked with scars; lined with violet veins. This spectator would like to have been the only one gathering up the words scattered by the wind. To his annoyance a young woman with an indifferent and willful expression stops on the neighboring pathway, attempting to decipher upside down-or pretending to-the inscription on the tombstone that the old man has just liberated; then she begins listening as well… The dead person, whose name she has just mentally spelled out, a certain Count Khodorsky, was a cheerful adventurer. He arrived in Paris after the revolution and spent a terrible year reduced to begging; painting his toenails with India ink to camouflage the holes in his shoes; and a prey at night to the hallucinations of a starving man. His only fortune consisted of the deeds to several estates long since confiscated by the new regime. To his great surprise he found a buyer one day, someone who believed that a return to the old order in Russia was quite likely. So Khodorsky began seeking out from his compatriots deeds that were at once worthless and valuable. The purchasers, impressed by the imperial two-headed eagles and attracted by the derisory prices, easily allowed themselves to be persuaded. The count secured several years of riotous living for himself. But in time as the rich seam became exhausted, one day he had to put up for sale a very modest country house, the family home where he had spent his childhood. The purchaser, suspicious, examined the papers for a long time, asked for more details. Khodorsky, with a painfully forced smile, praised the lands that surrounded the house, the little river with its white sand, the orchard where nightingales sang. He even showed a photograph, the only snapshot left to him from his youth. In it you could see a farm cart near the front steps, and a child holding out a wisp of hay to the horse, while gazing fixedly at the photographer… This snapshot seemed to be the deciding factor. As was his habit, Khodorsky celebrated his temporary enrichment in a restaurant in the Passy district. His guests found him true to himself: brilliant, extravagant, able to take part in several conversations at the same time. The next day toward noon, one of them who called on the count discovered him lying in his best apparel, his head stuck to a pillow heavy with blood…

The two visitors seem to pay little attention to the vicissitudes of these tales of broken lives. As if, without knowing the facts, they have already foreseen their endings, each as logical as it was absurd. Only certain details arouse their interest; it is hard to know why. They have just looked quickly at each other; both were struck by the presence on the suicide's nightstand of the photograph of the wooden house, the horse and cart, and the child-that mysterious being, almost frightening in his ignorance of the future. Yes, their glances almost met, then at once turned away impersonally, seeking no one's eye. They are watching more than listening. The sky is cut in two-to the west the cold crimson of the setting sun and in the other half a low, gray canopy of cloud, gradually spreading and spilling out sparkling hail, whose needle points sting the cheeks and fill the dead leaves with a dry whispering in the paths between the tombstones. And when this dark canopy furls back, the vivid coppery light gilds the brown earth and the tree roots and glints on the puddles-mirrors half buried here and there in the thickets of the shrubbery. A gust of wind, as cutting as a steel wire, assails the eyes with fragments of tears. The old man leans forward, picks up a ceramic urn that holds a long, dry chrysanthemum stem, and puts it back on the gravestone.

His voice begins again, calm and detached; a voice, it seems to the two tardy visitors, that seeks neither to persuade nor to prove. A voice quite different from the incessant hubbub of words that fills their minds; words that, in their daily lives, assault them, solicit them, and demand their allegiance, in an everlasting verbal hash made up of snatches from newspapers and items intoned by newscasters. Words that kill the rare moments of silence within them.

Moreover, the old keeper's tales are barely sketched in. It is in the visitors' minds that the words tell a story, become theater. "A certain adventurer used to sell noble estates," is what he said. "Yes, houses of cards… One day it was the turn of his boyhood home. And in the small hours, he blew his brains out…" Before the next slab exactly the same tone of voice. "You see this mistake here. It withstands time well. 'Cavallry officer'. With two Ts. It's a good thing not everyone can read Cyrillic script. Cavalry officer… Very talkative, always getting carried away. And always the same stories of fighting; decapitating reds with his saber. And the more he told his tales the better he got at imitating that short hiss when the blade slices into the neck and breaks the bones. 'S-s-shlim!' he would hiss. You could really see a head rolling in the grass… When he grew old his face was paralyzed and he couldn't talk anymore. The only thing he could still get out was that 's-s-shlim!' He died in the spring. It was a warm night, they opened the window. Just before the end he pulled himself up on one elbow took a breath with all the strength of his trembling lungs, and whispered, very distincdy, 'Lilac

The young woman listening to the old man could well be one of those women of whom people say, as they approach forty: She's made it. A woman who finds herself one Sunday in winter confronting emptiness and despair so great that death suddenly seems like an invitation secretly longed for… That morning she had begun to leaf through her address book. Her fingers slid over the pages, as if on ice, without being able to get a grip. A whole crowd and at the same time no one. Then finally a name that reminded her of a promise made at least ten years before: "You'll see, it's not like a cemetery at all; it's a real garden, run a little wild; where you get the feeling right away that they have quite a different concept of death from us…" In all of ten years she has not had a single moment free to go there.

The other visitor, the man in a dark blue overcoat with the collar turned up, showing the gleam of his shirt and the knot in his tie, this man, too, has heard of "the garden where you discover a different view of death." He has the look of someone who, half an hour before the family lunch, a gathering of a dozen relatives, gets up, dresses in haste as if he were on the run, and slips out without telling a soul, something he has never done before. The vision he is running away from is of the eyes, the mouths, the faces about to surround him, making the same grimaces, uttering the same remarks as last time, chewing, swallowing. He would have had to reply to them, smile. And, above all, to accept that he was happy because other people considered he had every reason to be happy: the blonde, sleek serenity of his wife; the feline grace of his two daughters, about whom the family banter would be repeated once more-"two beautiful girls, ready to be wed"; and the laden table, facing a bay window, through which, from this sixteenth story, you can study the topography of Paris, as if on a map; and his office located in the same apartment building, which will, by tradition, prompt a gruff observation from one relative ("some people have all the luck; they only have to cross the landing to go to work!")… This man has pictured all the small blessings whose sum total is supposed to make him happy. A great panic has overtaken him. He has seized his coat, closed the door behind him, trying to avoid slamming it, and rushed toward the staircase, dreading that he might encounter the first of the guests outside the elevator…

The old man picks up an armful of dead branches and adds it to a pile of leaves and dry stalks at the foot of a tree. The man and the woman listen to his slow footsteps on the gravel, louder on account of the cold and the silence. So all of this has always been here, they think. This life so different from theirs, a life filled with this calm, with actions that leave them time to notice the imperceptible fading of the light-coppery, pink, now mauve-and to watch it as their own musings ripple past. To let one's gaze roam amid the etched branches against the frozen sky, to sense, without really understanding it, that these moments are mysteriously significant and that even a distracted glance at the little tuft of grass between the stones of the old wall is a necessary part of this day's end, of its light, of its sky, of its unique life. And so intense is the sensation of already belonging to this life that they both resolve, in their own way, to engage in conversation with the keeper at the end of his tale. Indeed his voice seems slightly changed, less impersonal, taking account of their presence before this tombstone.

"The reds called this form of execution 'the hydra of counterrevolution.' They roped ten officers together in a closely packed group. Shoulder to shoulder, back to back. And they pushed them off the deck of a barge or from the top of a jetty. Some would struggle, others went rigid, trying to play dead even before dying. Still others wept, weakened by their wounds… This one here managed to break free underwater, his feet already trapped in the mud. He forced the wire off his wrists and reached the surface hidden behind a block of granite from the jetty. It was only later that the faces of the others began to haunt him. Especially the eyes of the man whose body he pushed down brutally in order to escape from the water."

The old man looks at them as if he were awaiting a question, a response. And his look is no longer that of a strange genius of the place, "a kind of half-crazed priest and at least a hundred years old," but of a fellow human being. His words cut through several periods of history they have never known. So very human is his attitude that their prepared questions stick in their throats. All at once they notice dusk has fallen; only a narrow strip of the setting sun now casts its cloudy red light over this place bristling with crosses. They suddenly feel themselves to be face to face with some dizzying intuition, an insight that cuts into their lives with a blinding thrust… The visitor in the dark blue overcoat notices that the woman has begun to walk down the avenue at a pace that is carefully restrained, so as not to seem hurried. Conversely, she sees him moving away discreetly, escaping by skirting the tombs. They arrive at the exit at the same moment, but avoid looking at each other, as people do who have witnessed an assault taking place but did not intervene… Outside the wall there is still a little light, pink and watery. The man turns, sees the woman looking for her car key, her hand thrust into a little leather rucksack. For a moment he feels as if he were going back into the silent life that brought the two of them together beneath the trees in the cemetery. The woman's face seems intensely familiar to him. He is convinced he knows the timbre of her voice, without ever having heard it; that he has a deep understanding of the atmosphere of every one of her days and of today's unhappiness. As she opens the car door she looks up for a second. The man, some yards from her, smiles, takes a step in her direction. "It's the first time you've come here?" He smiles, draws closer. "It's the first time…" Smiles, takes another step toward her…

No, their cars have already driven off a moment ago, edging their way rapidly into the hissing stream of the freeway. It is only as he drives along, musing, that the man goes over in his mind the scene that never took place. He walks up to her, smiles: "You know, this is the first time I've come here and…" Lost amid the hurtling thrusts of the headlights, on routes that diverge farther and farther, each of them recalls the account that brought them to such a remote spot, on this freezing day: "You'll see, it's a real garden, well, more like virgin forest, there are so many trees, plants, and flowers. And each cross has a kind of tiny window with a night-light in it." They are telling themselves they should have come in summer or autumn to see the garden; now is too late. Should I go back there one day? the man ponders. Next Sunday? Take another look at those deserted avenues, those dark branches against the evening sky, that woman who… He shakes himself. Too late. The city swallows him into its dark, shifting complexity, streaked with red and yellow. Before racking his brains for a pretext to justify his escapade in the eyes of his loved ones, he thinks about the woman who, at this very moment, is herself somewhere being sucked down into the mighty flood of streets and lights. "To see her again would be as impossible as resurrecting the dead invoked by that old madman," he tells himself, summoning a grain of melancholy cynicism so as to regain a firm foothold in reality…

The old man accompanies them with his stare as far as the gate, then looks down at the name shown on the tombstone where the engraved letters stand out in the almost horizontal rays of sunlight. In the distance the sound of an engine dwindles and fades, like the trickle of sand in an hourglass.

Apart from the keeper only a tall figure remains; he seems to be vainly searching for a way out of the maze of intersecting paths and avenues. He is the very last of the visitors, quite a young man who has been coming here daily for the past three or four days. Despite the cold he is wearing a simple corduroy jacket which, with its narrow, elongated cut, recalls the dress of students in the old days. A white muffler, coarsely knitted, forms a kind of frilly ruff on his chest. He has the pale face of someone who, though chilled to the marrow, no longer feels any pain, his body having become as cold as the icy air.

He was the one just now, as he watched the visitors, who imagined their feelings, pictured their lives. First, the gawking group, then the two solitary ones who were on the brink of talking to one another and now will never meet again. He spends his own life guessing at other people's lives… A moment ago he noticed that this birch tree with two trunks had been split by yesterday's storm just at the point of the fork and that there was a risk that at any minute now the wind might enlarge the deep gash and bring down the twin trunk in a rending crash of timber. He tells himself that all the silence of the day hangs upon that mute cry. Taking a notebook out of a big satchel like a postman's, he writes in it: "The silence whose depths are plumbed by this suspended crash."

The man in the student's jacket is one of those invisible Russian exiles, increasingly isolated and shy with advancing years, who pursue a fantasy of writing and end their days in attics piled high with books, almost buried beneath the pyramids of pages that no one will have the courage to decipher. He has known several like this but tells himself that such a fate only befalls other people. In his own pyramids there will be the story of the reckless count who sold his childhood home, and that of the dancer who, as he died, called out the name of his lover, his murderer…

The old keeper lights the little night-light in the cross surmounting the grave where his evening round always concludes. It is the grave of the condemned man who wrenched himself free of "the hydra of counterrevolution." The man in the corduroy jacket heard this story yesterday, alone face to face with the old man. One detail intrigued him: the name marked on the tombstone is that of a woman. He has not dared to ask for an explanation… Now he sees a match flame shielded in the hollow of the keeper's hands, lighting them up from inside, then flaring on the wick of the night-light at the heart of the cross. The tiny glazed door closes, the sinuous flame flickers, steadies itself. The light and the sheltered warmth remind the young man so much of a long remembered room that he shivers. He is only a few steps away from the old man.

"Could you tell me about this woman?"

The old man's gaze seems to travel across long stretches of darkness, nocturnal towns long since peopled by ghosts. He is clearly trying to size up who he is dealing with: one of the inquisitive ones who come to collect two or three anecdotes? A fugitive who has escaped a family lunch and taken refuge here to gain a breathing space? Or perhaps the one whose coming he had given up hoping for?

He begins talking as he makes his way slowly toward the entrance gate that should have been locked at least an hour ago. His words are permeated by great weariness.

"Everyone would have it they were lovers. And that the death of that dubious character was murder."

It is the usual style of his stories: blunt, clear-cut, flat. All the man in the student's jacket expects is just one more anecdote. He is longing to get away, to drink a glass of warm wine, to go to bed… Suddenly the old man, as if he had sensed this desire to escape, cries out in urgent tones that can be heard almost as a plea and an apology for not knowing how to tell stories in any other way, "You're the first person I have ever told about her!"

Everyone in Villiers-la-Forêt (the men perhaps more openly than the women) wanted it to be a murder. This theory corresponded to some inescapable cliché of the imagination on the part of people who had very little, to the classic scenario of a crime of passion. Or, much more simply, to a desire to picture two naked bodies, first of all joined in love and then separated by the violence of a brief struggle and death.

Fascinated, abnormally perceptive, the townspeople held forth about the crime, invented new theories about it, and were critical of the inquiry that was making no headway. But it was really the bodies that fascinated them. For all at once their appearance amid the sleepy rural calm of Villiers-la-Forêt had to be accepted; and their nakedness, whether erotic or criminal, had to be written into the record of those idle July days that smelled of dust baked in the sun and the warm mud of the river. For such was the soft, slow landscape they burst in on: the man, his clothes drenched, stretched out on the bank, his skull smashed in. And the woman with disordered, streaming hair, her breasts bare, a woman seated beside the dying man, as still as carved stone.

It was thus that the scene had been reported by a breathless witness-the man with a stammer whom the people of Villiers called "Loo-loo," on account of his everlasting "loo-loo-look," the introductory phrase that enabled him to embark on a conversation. This rime he was so overwhelmed that his stuttering lasted longer than usual. The men on the little terrace of the Café Royal eyed him with indulgent smiles, the younger men began to parody him. His efforts and their mockery brought tears to his eyes. The combination of this frailty and his defective speech caused him to be taken for a simpleton. He managed to overcome the strangulation of his "loo-loos" sufficiently to alert the men to the presence of the two bodies beside the river. It was his tortured expression that convinced them. They got up and followed him, as you follow the barking of a dog that despairs of conveying the urgency of its summons.

For several minutes on the bank they were blinded. Everything around them was so radiant on this fine summer's afternoon. A heat haze enveloped the willow thickets in a soft, milky light. The water with flat glittering patches rippled under the tiny promontories of plants that overhung its flow here and there. The soft and dreamy sound of it made you want to stretch out in the grass and listen distractedly to the sparse notes of the birds, to the distant crowing of the cocks that carried all the way to this spot, as if better to measure its whole summery expanse. A hundred yards away a fisherman was casting his line. Even farther away along the bank you could see the old brewery building, all garlanded in strands of hops. And more distant still, toward the horizon, the first houses of the lower town clustered together; then, climbing above them, the familiar roofs of the upper town-with the dark point of the steeple, the green mass of plane trees above the station and the place where the road turned off to Paris.

People were arriving, alerted who knows how, greeting one another with furtive little nods; and the whole crowd, composed of neighbors, acquaintances, and relations, froze before this inconceivable sight: a man lying there with a broad brown mark on his bald head, his mouth open, his eyes glassy; and a woman seated on a great worm-eaten tree stump, washed up by the river, a woman whose beauty and lack of modesty hurt your eyes.

And this was the sensation experienced by everyone on that bank. An ocular discomfiture, as if an eyelash had slipped under your eyelid and blurred your vision. This dead man whom no one dared to touch before the police arrived, this woman with her breasts scarcely hidden by a few shreds of cloth-two extraterrestrials landed on this day in the summer of 1947, the summer which all the newspapers had proclaimed to be that of "the first real vacation of peacetime."

Amid this uneasy stasis a movement was finally made that broke the spell. An old lady bent forward and removed a long, fine strand of waterweed that clung to the dead man's brow. Releasing all its pent-up energy, the crowd erupted into an angry hissing: nothing must move before the police got there! And at last it became clear to them that the whole scene really was happening. In a book, as several people remarked, everything would have been resolved much more quickly. But in the reality of that banal July day there was this long wait, extending absurdly beyond any acceptable limit. There was the strand of weed and the shirt that finally dried on the victim's body. Groups formed; words even more pointless than usual were uttered; "Loo-loo" wept; the men directed increasingly bold stares at the half naked breasts of the unmoving woman. And when they managed to tear their eyes away from the drowned man, with his face covered in duckweed, to which they were attracted, as if magnetically, it was the figure of the postman on his bike that could be seen in the distance. Such was the nauseating equanimity of real life, that has no concern with plot development and often actually ruins it with its glutinous slowness.

This ponderousness of reality also extended as far as the identification of the couple. "But that woman," many were to murmur. "I've seen her hundreds of times! You know, she works in the library at that Russian old folks' home… That's it. She's the one who came to Villiers later than the others, just before the war…"

As for the man, they recognized him as the elderly Russian who could sometimes be seen bent over a little vegetable garden that sloped down to the river. A man of few words who lived unobtrusively His mouth, currently wide open, seemed like life's last joke at the expense of his taciturn character.

A few Russians among the crowd were also eager to contribute to the identification of the two individuals. So it was that in the whispering that passed from one group to another, the name of Olga Arbyelina came to be disclosed. Then that of Sergei Golets. With these titles: Princess Arbyelina; Golets, former officer in the White Army. For the French townspeople such minutiae had the old-fashioned ring of titles like "Marquis" and "Vicomtesse" in a forgotten play of the romantic era. They paid much more attention to the young fisherman. He came running up holding a shoe that was missing from Golets's left foot. Nobody knew what to do with the shoe… As before, they could hear the rippling of the warm water, the distant crowing of cocks. And, without knowing how to formulate it, some of them were struck by this disconcerting thought: So, if it were me stretched out on the ground there, with my mouth open, instead of this poor Russian, yes, if like him I had just died, it would have had no effect on the sunshine, the grass, the lives of all these people, their Sunday-afternoon walk. This warm, sunny posthumous world, smelling of reeds and waterweed, seemed more terrifying than any hell. But there were very few to pursue this line of thought to its logical conclusion. In any case, the police were arriving at last.

The disquiet provoked in the people of Villiers by the excessive radiance of the day that had greeted the tragedy on the riverbank faded away with the first stages of the inquiry. Now they all turned to reconstructing the facts, but setting off in the opposite direction from that chosen by the investigating magistrate. He was seeking to discover if there had been a crime or not. For them, the murder was not in doubt. Thus all they had to do was to yoke together as a pair of lovers the man and woman they had come upon one Sunday in July thanks to Loo-loo. And it was the challenge of this emotional and physical pairing that set all their brains in a ferment at Villiers-la-Forêt. For, as with those married couples who provoke the question: "What on earth brought them together?" it was impossible to imagine a conjunction between two more dissimilar natures.

Even their faces, their complexions, the expressions in their eyes, were opposed, like fragments of a mosaic that do not fit and, if forced together, disrupt the whole picture. A woman of forty-six, tall and beautiful, her abundant hair tinged slightly with gray, with features whose regularity, cool and detached, matched those of cameo portraits. A man of sixty-four with a broad face, animated by complacent joviality, a bald pate, sunburned and glistening, and a look full of self-assurance: a stocky man, with short, broad forearms and square yellow fingernails.

But what is more, you had to picture them together (this was a fact the inquiry would subsequently establish) in a rowboat out on the sunlit river. You had to bring them together on this improbable amorous excursion, see them land and settle in the grass behind the willow thickets. See the man set down on the ground a large bottle of wine he had been shading from the heat under the seat of the boat in the water stagnating on the old timbers. An hour later they had climbed back into the boat and, with the oars abandoned, were drifting toward the fateful spot, level with the ruined bridge, where the tragedy was to occur: the spot where the woman, according to her own muddled confession, had caused the death of her companion; or where the latter, according to the theory favored by the inquiry, had drowned, the victim of his own clumsiness, the drink, and an unfortunate collision with a pillar.

For uninvolved spectators every crime of passion acquires a covertly theatrical interest. The townspeople of Villiers-la-Forêt, once the shock of the first minutes had passed, discovered this diverting aspect, although its attractions had to be concealed behind a grave exterior. They applied themselves to the game with a will. The tedium of their daily lives encouraged this but so did the progress of the inquiry itself. Examinations of witnesses, confrontations, searches, seizures- the mere use of these terms in breathless discussions offered each of them a new and unexpected role, uprooting them from their stations in life as baker, schoolteacher, or pharmacist. Indeed the pharmacist (who had remained idle since his pharmacy was destroyed by mistake in an Allied bombing raid) no longer spoke anything but this language, halfway between case law and a detective novel, as if it satisfied his taste for Latin terminology.

The fact of having to take the oath before giving evidence also had considerable importance. To the point where the youth who had been fishing at the moment of the tragedy emphatically insisted on repeating before the investigating magistrate the formula "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," although his age exempted him from this.

The drowning of Golets, through accident or foul play, had quickly become an inexhaustible subject of conversation for the people of Villiers, since the progress of the inquiry always kept it fresh. In particular, it was a topic for all occasions, one that abolished the invisible frontier between upper town and lower town, between groups that hitherto had no contact with one another, and worked wonders in bringing strangers together. This whole verbal ferment was, in truth, based on few material facts. Thanks to the "no secrets" of small towns it was learned that the search of Golets's home had only brought to light a pistol with a single cartridge in the magazine, a collection of bow ties (some people mistakenly reported this as a collection of bows and arrows), and brief notes written on scraps of paper recording someone's visits to Paris. As for the Princess Ar-byelina, no one had ever seen her in the company of this man. One witness, it is true, had seen them going together into the long shooting gallery, a kind of fairground booth in the big park in the upper town. But this visit, objected others, had only taken place shortly before the boat trip. Suddenly, within the space of a few hours, their adventure had become possible. What action, what word (coming from the man? from the woman?) had made it so?

The alleged rendezvous at the shooting gallery; the collection of bow ties that was so out of keeping with the image of a senior citizen tending his garden; the few rare visits made by a mysterious "Parisian friend" to the heroine of the tragedy: these meager details proved sufficient to unleash an endless avalanche of theories, hypotheses, and conjectures, to which were added some scraps that the preliminary investigation had apparently allowed to filter through. An excited, unquenchable chorus of voices combined in a wild round of truths, fabrications, and absurdities such as can only be trotted out in the course of the verbal orgy that follows a sensational crime in a provincial town.

During those summer months everyone at Villiers-la-Forêt tried out the roles of storyteller and sleuth. Every day, thanks to these countless mouths, the ghosts of the man and woman in the boat relived their last afternoon together. The townspeople discussed it standing in line at the baker's, on the terrace at the Café Royal, on the dusty square where they played boules, in the train during the hour-long journey that lay between them and Paris. They were on the alert for every new scrap of information, every little secret, without which their own picture of the crime might be left less complete than that of their neighbors.

And then, several days after the event, they discovered an article in a Paris newspaper. Two narrow columns in all, but in a context that took your breath away. The account of the local tragedy was sandwiched between Princess Elizabeth's engagement and this brief news item: "The plot against the Republic has been foiled. The Comte de Merwels and the Comte de Vulpian have been charged." Never before had the people of Villiers enjoyed so fully the feeling that they were making world news. The item about the tragedy that had taken place in their town ended with this observation: "It is now the task of the inquiry to establish whether what occurred was a mere accident or a premeditated and cunningly executed murder, a hypothesis that appears already to have won credence among the citizens of Villiers-la-Forêt."

The boating tragedy even altered certain deeply ingrained habits in the town. People who liked to saunter along the riverbank in the evening now continued their stroll a little farther, until they reached the glade amid the willows where the fatal rendezvous was said to have taken place. Young people, for their part, had abandoned their traditional bathing place and exhausted themselves diving at the spot where Golets had drowned, hoping to find his watch, a heavy gold timepiece with a two-headed eagle on the cover…

The fever for detection was universal. However, the two populations of Villiers-la-Forêt, French and Russian, were in fact piecing together quite distinct stories.

For the French, what the odd couple's adventure marked, above all, was the real start of the postwar era. If you could once more drift down the river in an old boat with your arms around a woman and a bottle of wine under the seat then peacetime had returned for good. The fatal turn of events only confirmed this impression. In one Paris paper a brief account of the drowning had succeeded for the first time in displacing the headline purged that recurred in issue after issue, often with news of death sentences… Furthermore, in the same newspaper they were announcing the start of the Tour de France 47, the first since the war.

The Russians, too, saw Golets's death as what might be called a historic event. Those who that July afternoon had feasted their eyes on the man stretched out in the grass and his companion, whose body looked naked beneath the fine, wet fabric, all the Russian inhabitants of the lower part of the town felt, almost physically, that the passage of calm, predictable days had been shattered there on the riverbank. Indeed, they sensed the advent of a new before and after in their personal chronology.

The start of this chronology went back to the revolution, to the civil war, to the flight across a Russia set ablaze by the Bolsheviks. Next for them had come the period of putting down roots in Paris, in Nice, or, for some, in the sleepy monotony of Villiers-la-Forêt. Later, in 1924, came the terrible decision by the French to recognize the Soviet Union. In 1932, worse still: the Russian émigré Pavel Gorgulov assassinates the President, Paul Doumer! For several weeks the whole Russian part of the town had lived in fear of reprisals… Then the war had broken out and, paradoxically, had somewhat rehabilitated them in the eyes of the French-thanks to the victory of those same Bolsheviks over Hitler… And finally this latest event, this incredible coupling of the Princess Arbyelina with the ridiculous Golets.

This woman had made her mark on the Russian chronology of Villiers-la-Forêt by the simple fact of moving into the town in the spring of 1939. From the first day the emigres had begun to look forward to a marvelous transformation, such as a princess must inevitably give rise to in their lives. They already knew that Olga Arbyelina belonged to one of the most illustrious families in Russia and bore the name of her husband, a certain Georgian prince who had recently abandoned her, leaving her alone, without means, and with a young child on her hands. Making her welcome among them all, people of modest origins, seemed to them like a kind of revenge on the Parisian diaspora, who took such a pride in their titles, arrogant and exclusive. They had a fleeting dream of figuring in a poignant melodrama, The Exiled Princess … But this princess seemed to be showing a poor grasp of her role. She appeared not to be suffering from her relegation to Villiers, lived as modestly as themselves, and treated them with disappointing simplicity. They would have preferred her haughty; they would have liked to pardon her the pride of her caste; they were ready to share her loathing for the new masters of Russia! But she remained very discreet on the subject and had apparently even observed one day, to the great displeasure of the elderly inmates of the Russian retirement home, "The revolution was conceived not so much in the mud of the workers' districts as in the filth of the palaces…"

There was yet more intense disappointment in store for them: her child's illness. Or rather the calm with which the princess endured it. In the minds of the Russian colony the word "hemophilia" had evoked the shade of the unfortunate Tsarevich. Everyone began to seek out some dynastic mystery; one by one the pensioners reeled off the names of those descendants of Queen Victoria guilty of introducing the scourge into so many noble houses. They expected an almost immediate tragedy: they were already decking out the Princess Arbyelina in the mourning of an inconsolable mother. But when one of them very circumspectly (with that studied circumspection that is worse than any tactlessness) alluded to this British lineage, Olga had replied, almost laughing, "No, no, we didn't need the Queen to bestow this treasure on us." Moreover, her child's case did not seem to be as serious, by a long shot, as the illness that had dogged the Tsar's son. And to crown it all, the boy showed no particular signs of suffering and spoke so little that he could easily have been taken for mute…

Thus the miracle they had all been looking forward to went no further than the considerable enhancement of the library, of which the princess was now in charge, and the planting of a service tree by the front steps to the strange house where she alone had agreed to reside, the long redbrick annex, built against the "wall of the former brewery in which the émigrés had made their home at the start of the twenties, dividing it up into apartments, a retirement home, a reading room, a canteen… Yes, she had disappointed them cruelly!

However, none of these frustrations could match the latest one: her farcical assignation with this… someone recalled at that moment that Golets had worked as a horse butcher. With this horse butcher, then, who, no doubt so as to make them a laughingstock, had had the stupidity to get drowned!

The hypotheses advanced by the people of Villiers clearly erred on the side of unsubtlety. Where death is involved the seething mass of detail is obliterated and only the broad outline of human appearances is preserved. Thus sometimes Golets became "that dreary old Russian," sometimes "that horse butcher," and occasionally "the ex-officer." Princess Arbyelina's friend (one of his letters was said to have been found, signed "L.M.") was "a well known poet and journalist but afraid of his wife and of the wagging tongues of the émigrés in Paris." And Olga's husband "a hell of a fellow, a hero in spite of himself, a Georgian Don Juan." Death, like a harsh spotlight, picked out these three profiles-simplified but perhaps tolerably accurate, when all's said and done: the husband, the lover, and the suitor, as the apprentice detectives of Villiers-la-Forêt called them.

In the course of the inquiry the services of an interpreter, a Russian, had to be called on. And it was probably he who was responsible for several leaks, which the citizens were not slow to weave into their own fabrications. The rumors disclosed in this way seemed credible enough, in any case, and would be even more so when the affair was closed. One of them was quoted more often than the others. In passing it on they presented it in dialogue form, for greater authenticity:

"So you claim you always wished for the death of Monsieur Golets?"

"Yes, I did not intend to let a man like that remain alive."

"Can you tell me at what moment the idea of killing him came to you?"

"It was when he forced me to take a walk with him in the park."

"How could he force you to do it?"

"He knew that I would obey him…"

And from this point the theories gushed forth in all directions, suggesting a thousand and one conceivable motives for the mysterious hold Golets had over Olga Arbyelina.

It also occurred that during the passionate debates at the Café Royal or under the poplar trees on the marketplace, someone would attempt to win credence for a completely far-fetched invention. According to one of these forgers the Russian princess had described her relationship with the horse butcher in these Delphic terms: "This man was an amalgam of all the ugliness in the world, while I was living at one with the beauty of last winter. I still had before my eyes the imprint of a hand on the windowpane, amid the hoarfrost flowers…"

And what was most surprising was the extent to which this remark, doubtless invented from a lot of scraps, also nourished very reasonable suppositions. So who had left this imprint? The Parisian lover, the shadowy L.M.? Or an unknown person whose existence the investigator had failed to reveal? As for the readers at the Russian library, they interpreted this strange remark as a sign of incipient madness. "Oh, you know," the elderly inmates of the retirement home would exclaim. "The princess hasn't been all there for some time now."

In these tangled webs of personal interpretation there was, however, one matter that intrigued all the people of Villiers-la-Forêt equally, whether they were French or Russian: the impossibility of picturing the bodies of the two protagonists of the tragedy in carnal union. Their bodies were so physically incompatible. Such an act of love-for many of them almost against nature-led in their conversations, particularly among the men, to this disconcerting question, which subsequently spread through the town: "How could she give herself to him?" Which was, of course, the expurgated version of what they actually said…

Apart from that, picturing the Princess Arbyelina in the arms of this squat, bold, ungainly Russian allowed the men of Villiers-la-Forêt to have a kind of revenge on the woman. Most of them experienced jealous regret: this creature with her statuesque body must have been an easy catch, after all, given that this moujik had wooed her with such success! The bitterest of them harped on the fact that the woman was forty-six… thrusting her utterly inaccessible body toward old age, toward the unattractiveness of old age. Men can be pitiless toward a woman whose body has eluded them, particularly if this is thanks to their own cowardice.

Once male pride had been appeased, however, the key question returned: "But at the end of the day, what weird twist of fate brought them together?"

Be that as it may, by dint of tireless preliminaries, the whole scenario of the tragedy ended up being pinpointed with the conciseness of an epigram. And this was notably done in the observation attributed by rumor to the investigating magistrate: "This is the first time in my life I have had to convince a person that they are not guilty of murder." Another fragment, with the same aphoristic brevity, reported the riposte made by the magistrate to the interpreter. The latter had remarked in surprise: "But don't you think that, in accusing herself of one crime, she's trying to cover up another?"

The reply was trenchant.

"A killer breaks a shop window, admits it, goes to prison, and gets away with a murder. But you don't accuse yourself of murder in order to cover up a broken window."

That is how the affair was pictured during those summer months in Villiers-la-Forêt. The few who went away on vacation discovered new details on their return, strange revelations that their neighbors were eager to impart to them. Their game of a thousand voices resumed more merrily than ever…

And it was after a great delay, early in the fall, that they learned this mind-boggling news: some time previously the case of the Russian lovers had been formally closed for want of evidence. It was only then that they realized Princess Arbyelina's house was empty and she and her son were no longer to be seen.

Yes, the curtain had been rung down just when their scenarios were taking on more and more substance, when they were so close to knowing the truth!

The people of Villiers found it hard to conceal their disappointment. They had grown so accustomed to the pleasantly fevered climate that the love and death of the horse butcher had caused to reign in their town. What they felt especially nostalgic for, though often without realizing it, was the secret life that the unfortunate passengers on that old boat had revealed to them. It had appeared that in their dull little town quite another life could be simmering away-devastating in its passions, criminal, multifarious. Unexpected. A life in which an obscure retired man was capable, heedless of the cost, of embracing a redoubtable beauty who, for obscure reasons, allowed herself to be seduced. A subterranean life, free, filled with promises and temptations. At least that was how most of the townspeople had perceived the blazing affair between the princess and the horse butcher.

But the most surprising event occurred a little later, when the first mists were beginning to filter through into the lower town in the mornings. One day, as if by magic, everybody forgot the boating tragedy, the woman sitting on the bank, the drowned man stretched out on the grass. As if they had never existed!

The people of Villiers talked about power cuts, the schedules for which were printed in the newspapers; about the meat shortages just starting, about Princess Elizabeth's wedding: about the stars in The Best Years of Our Lives… And if anyone had taken it into his head to refer to the previous summer's inquiry, he would have committed an unpardonable gaffe, like telling an old joke that people no longer find funny.

Besides, soon the autumn floods covered the site of the ill-fated rendezvous and the bank where the man and woman had frozen in their involuntarily theatrical poses under the eyes of the spectators. The boat, whose side the people of Villiers had liked to poke their fingers into at the spot deeply torn by the collision, ended up among other wrecked vessels, its terrible singularity effaced among the peeling hulls, half hidden in the mist.

The expanse of meadowland covered in water was so bleak, the branches of the alders so trembling and tortured that it no longer occurred to anyone in Villiers-la-Forêt to ponder what kind of love or hate had brought two strange Russian summer folk together on this riverbank.

Night has fallen. A moment ago the old keeper stopped talk-

ing. His hand resting on the lock of the gate, he is waiting for the man dressed in a student's jacket to go. But the latter seems not to notice this gesture. His eyes, unmoving, are filled with a torrent of shapes, places, grimacing faces; of cries; of days.

The tale has been told with the simplicity of the previous anecdotes: a man, a woman, an inexplicable pairing, a death or a murder. And oblivion. Nevertheless, this last visitor has managed to glimpse the fine strand of weed clinging to the drowned man's brow. He has sensed the disturbing intensity that the presence of the lifeless body bestowed on the scents of summer, the murmur of insects among the plants on the riverbank. He has heard the remarks whispered by the curious. He has experienced that delicious apprehension with which, later, they would come and thrust their fingers into the breach in the side of the boat.

His eyes dazzled by this imagined world, he stands transfixed, straining to hear the words that he still seems to make out down there: the strangely cadenced voice of the woman, replying to the magistrate. Now he thinks he can even understand the shackled sentences of the stammerer.

The old man takes out a heavy bunch of keys, shakes it. But the other does not hear. His vision isolates him in the night: "To be able to see what others do not see, do not wish to see, do not know how to see, are afraid to see-like all those visitors to the cemetery, who have been filing past this old man from time immemorial. Yes, to guess that the dress of the woman seated on the riverbank, the dress torn during a brief and appalling struggle, was gradually losing its transparency as it dried and beginning to conceal her body more fully To see the increasing opacity of this fabric is already to enter into this woman's life…"

The old man slowly draws the gate to and turns the key in the lock. The two of them remain inside the cemetery.

–  ?

The invitation to drink tea seems to awaken the man in the corduroy jacket from his reverie. He accepts and, as he walks along beside the old man, notices that on the crosses several night-lights in their tiny glass cages are still shining, scattered through the darkness. In the distance the glowing window of the keeper's house also resembles a night-light, gradually growing broader as they approach, and admitting them, as a candle flame does if you stare at it for long enough, thereby entering its flickering, violent life.