The Spectre of Alexander Wolf Read online

  I looked at him in astonishment. He wore a very forced smile, which seemed to me entirely misplaced.

  “It’s true, you were much too young, and the conditions excuse the inaccuracy of your aim. Then again, it’s all, as far as Mr Wolf is concerned, merely a product of the imagination, which has by chance coincided with your reality. I wish you all the best. If I hear any news, I’ll be sure to convey it to you. Permit me to add one more thing; I’m a dash sight older than you, and it seems to me that I have a certain right to do so. I can assure you that an acquaintance with Mr Wolf, were it to come about, would bring you nothing other than disappointment and would surely want for the interest you vainly ascribe to it.”

  This conversation could not but make an exceedingly strange impression on me. It was evident that the director of the publishing house had some personal score to settle with Wolf and genuine—or indeed imaginary—reasons to hate him. His words of near reproach directed towards me on account of my inadequate marksmanship came unexpectedly from the lips of this stout, mild-mannered man. As the book had been published some two years previously, one had to suppose that the events causing the director to change his attitude towards Wolf had taken place in this space of time. All this, however, could scarcely impart to me the slightest impression of the author of the collection I’ll Come Tomorrow; all I’d learnt was the director’s negative opinion of him, an evidently biased one at that. I carefully read the book through once more; my impression didn’t change: that same impetuous, taut rhythm, the precision of detail, that same unfaltering and seemingly everlasting unison of plot with very short, expressive authorial commentaries.

  I cannot say that I reconciled myself to the impossibility of finding out what interested me about Wolf, but I simply didn’t see how it could be done. A whole month had already passed since that strange conversation in London, and I hardly doubted that I ought not to count on a reply from Wolf—perhaps not ever, and in any case not in the near future. I very nearly stopped thinking about it entirely.

  I was living completely alone at the time. Among the restaurants where I dined or breakfasted—there were four of them, in different parts of the city—was a small Russian restaurant, the closest to my apartment, and in which I could be found a several times a week. I went there on Christmas Eve, at around ten o’clock. All the tables were taken, and there was only one space free—in the farthest corner, where alone sat a festively dressed elderly man, whom I knew well by sight, as he dined there frequently. He would always show up with different women; they were difficult to categorize in a few words, but, more often than not, their lives seemed to be characterized by some sort of hiatus in their vocation: if she were an actress, she was a former actress; if a singer, she had recently lost her voice; if a simple waitress, she was sure to have married a short while ago. He had a reputation for being something of a Don Juan, and I imagine that he probably did enjoy a certain degree of success among this circle of women. This was why I was particularly surprised to see him alone on such a day. One way or another, however, I was offered the empty seat at his table; I sat down opposite him and greeted him with a handshake, which I had never before had the opportunity of doing.

  He was rather sombre; his eyes were beginning to grow dim. Once I’d seated myself, he drank three shots of vodka in quick succession and suddenly livened up. All around people were chatting loudly, and the restaurant’s gramophone played one record after another. Just as he poured himself a fourth shot, the gramophone started playing a melancholy little French number:

  Il pleut sur la route,

  Le coeur en déroute.

  He listened closely, tilting his head to one side. When the record reached the words:

  Malgré le vent, la pluie,

  Vraiment si tu m’aimes…

  his eyes actually welled with tears. Only then did I realize that he was awfully drunk already.

  “This song,” he began in an unexpectedly loud voice, turning to me, “brings back a few memories.”

  I noticed that next to him, on the little divan where he was sitting, lay a book wrapped in paper, which he kept moving from place to place, obviously taking care not to crease it.

  “I’d imagine you have a good few ‘memories’.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You have that air about you, I think.”

  He laughed and admitted that he did indeed have quite a few “memories”; he had been seized by a fit of candour and a need to talk, a characteristic particularly common to inebriates of his sprawling sort. He began relating to me his amorous adventures, although in many cases it seemed clear that they had been either dreamt up or exaggerated. I was, however, pleasantly surprised that he did not speak ill of a single one of his many victims; each of his recollections contained something like a mix of debauchery and tenderness. It was a very particular nuance of feeling, a trait of his; indeed there was an undoubted and inadvertent attractiveness in him, and so I came to realize just how this man, in fact, could have enjoyed success with many women. Despite the avid attention I paid to his story, I couldn’t commit faithfully to memory the random and disorderly string of women’s names he cited. Then he sighed, interrupting himself mid-flow, and said:

  “But never in my life was there anyone better than my little Gypsy, Marina.”

  When speaking of women, he would frequently employ diminutive terms—“the little Gypsy”, “the little blonde”, “the little brunette”, “the little quick one”—so much so that, as an outsider to the conversation, one gained the distinct impression that he was talking about a group of minors.

  He described Marina to me at length. According to him, she was possessed of absolutely all those virtues that in themselves are exceedingly rare; what seemed most astonishing of all, however, was that she rode better than any jockey and fired a gun without ever missing a shot.

  “Why then did you decide to part company with her?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t I who decided, my friend,” he said. “My little swarthy one left me, but she didn’t go far—only next door, to my neighbour. Here you go”—he showed me the book in its wrapping—“she left me for him, would you believe?”

  “For the author of this book?”

  “Whom else?”

  “May I?” I said, reaching out a hand.

  “Be my guest.”

  I removed the wrapping—and my eyes were suddenly struck by a familiar combination of letters: I’ll Come Tomorrow, by Alexander Wolf.

  It was as unexpected as it was astonishing. I was dumbstruck for a good few seconds, just staring at the title. Then I asked:

  “Are you sure that the shop assistant hasn’t made a mistake and handed you something else by accident?”

  “My good man,” he said, “whatever mistake can there be here? I may not read English, but rest assured there’s no mistake.”

  “I know this book, but I was recently told that its author was an Englishman.”

  He again began to laugh.

  “Sasha Wolf, an Englishman! Damn it, you might as well tell me he’s Japanese.”

  “Sasha Wolf, you say?”

  “Yes, Sasha Wolf. Alexander Andreyevich, if you will. As English as you and I.”

  “Do you know him well?”

  “I’ll say!”

  “Has it been long since you last saw him?”

  “Last year,” he said, helping himself to some vodka. “Your good health. Last year, around this very time. We really cut loose in Montmartre then and spent two whole days there. I can’t even remember what happened or how I got home. It’s the same every time he comes to Paris. I, as you know, have no aversion to drinking or—how should I say?—enjoying myself, but he’s something else. I’ll say to him, ‘Steady on, Sasha,’ but he always gives the same response. ‘We’ve only got one shot at life,’ he says, ‘and it’s a bad one at that, so what the hell?’ What can you say to that? You can only agree with him.”

  By now he was utterly drunk; he was beginning t
o slur his speech.

  “So you mean to say that he doesn’t live in Paris?”

  “Yes, he’s mostly in England, although he does get around. I ask him, ‘Why don’t you write in Russian, damn it? We’d give it a read.’ He says there’s no point: it’s more profitable to do it in English, it’s better paid.”

  “So what happened with Marina?”

  “Do you have the time?”

  “In abundance.”

  He then began to relate to me, in every detail, the story of Marina, of Alexander Wolf, of when and how it all happened. It was a chaotic if rather colourful narrative, which was broken every now and then by his drinking now to Wolf’s health, now to Marina’s. He spoke a great deal and at length, and, despite it lacking any semblance of chronological order, I was able to construct a more or less coherent idea of it.

  Alexander Wolf was younger than this man—whose name was Vladimir Petrovich Voznesensky, a person of ecclesiastical extraction—by five or six years. He was from Moscow, or possibly from somewhere else, but from the north of Russia in any case. Voznesensky had met him in a cavalry regiment under the command of Comrade Ofitserov, a leftist revolutionary with a penchant for anarchism. The regiment was waging a partisan war in southern Russia.

  “Against whom?” I asked.

  “Against any forces that were trying to seize illegitimate power,” said Voznesensky with unexpected resolve.

  Insofar as I understood, Comrade Ofitserov had not been pursuing any definite political goal. He was one of those archetypal adventurers, renowned in the annals of every revolution and every civil war. His regiment’s numbers now increased, now decreased, depending upon circumstances, the degree of difficulties they were facing, the time of year and a multitude of other, often chance, reasons. But the core of his group always remained the same, and Alexander Wolf was Ofitserov’s right-hand man. He was, according to Voznesensky, distinguished for a number of qualities, typical in such fables: unerring bravery, tirelessness, the ability to drink vast quantities of alcohol, as well as being, of course, a good comrade. He spent over a year in Ofitserov’s regiment. During this time they had to live in the most varied conditions: in peasant huts and manor houses, in fields and in the forest; sometimes they went hungry for days at a time, sometimes they gorged themselves; they suffered from the cold in winter and from the heat in summer—in short, they experienced what is known to almost anyone who participates in a war of whatever length. Wolf in particular was always smartly turned out and well presented; “To this day I don’t know where he found the time to shave every day,” said Voznesensky. He could play the piano and drink pure spirits; he loved women and never played cards. He also knew German, as became apparent one day when he and Voznesensky came upon some German settlers. An old woman, the mistress of the farm, who spoke no Russian, planned to send her daughter by cart to the next town, three kilometres away, to inform the headquarters of the Soviet division there that there were two armed partisans in the village. She said all this to her daughter in German, in the presence of Voznesensky and Wolf.

  “What happened next?”

  “He didn’t say anything at that point; we just detained the girl, tied her up and took her to the attic. Then we gathered up the provisions and left.”

  According to Voznesensky, Wolf, when leaving, shook his head and said, “What an old crone, eh?” “Why didn’t you shoot her?” asked Voznesensky later, when Wolf was explaining to him what had happened. “Damn her to hell,” said Wolf. “She doesn’t have that much longer left to live; God will deal with her without any help from you or me.”

  Wolf had been very lucky during the war; he managed to walk away completely unharmed from even the most dangerous of situations.

  “He wasn’t ever wounded?” I asked.

  “Only once,” said Voznesensky. “But so seriously that I began making preparations for the funeral. It isn’t a façon de parler, as the French say; the doctor announced that Sasha had only a few hours to live.”

  The doctor, however, was mistaken; Voznesensky put it down to his having underestimated Wolf’s resilience. Voznesensky added that Wolf had been wounded in completely mysterious circumstances, about which he was never disposed to say anything, alleging that he did not remember how it had happened. At the time there had been bitter fighting between elements of the Red Army and the retreating Whites; Ofitserov’s division would hide in the forests and steer clear of this entirely. Almost an hour after the firing fell silent, Wolf announced that he was going on a reconnaissance mission and rode off alone. Around an hour and a half passed without his return. Voznesensky and two of his comrades set off in search of him. A little while before, they had heard three shots: the third had been farther off and weaker than the first two. They covered almost three kilometres of empty road; all was quiet, with no one in sight. The heat was searing. Voznesensky was the first to see Wolf: he was lying immobile across the road and “coughing up blood and foam”, as Voznesensky described it. Wolf’s horse was missing, which was also surprising; it usually followed him around like a dog and would never have gone off of its own free will.

  “Do you remember what the horse was like, what colour it was?”

  Voznesensky sank into thought, and then said:

  “No, I don’t recall. God knows, it was a long time ago. So much has happened since then.”

  “But you say the horse followed him around like a dog?”

  “He had a knack for it,” said Voznesensky; “all his horses were like that. You know, there are those whom even the most vicious dogs won’t touch. He had that same gift with horses.”

  The circumstances in which Wolf was so gravely wounded seemed particularly odd to both Voznesensky and his comrades. The doctor said later that the injury was the result of a bullet wound from a revolver, and that the shot had been made in such close quarters that Wolf must have seen the man who shot him. Most of all, it was strange that there had been no struggle, nor had there been anyone else around; only, not far from the spot where they found Wolf lay a dead black mare, still with its saddle on. Voznesensky concluded that it must have been the mare’s owner who had shot Wolf, and that he had ridden off on Wolf’s horse. He added that if they—Voznesensky and his companions—had arrived in time, they wouldn’t have begrudged the bullet to avenge their comrade. I recalled the rush of warm air that had carried the clatter of horses’ hooves to me—that same sound that had caused me to leave immediately.

  “But perhaps, ultimately,” Voznesensky said unexpectedly, “the fellow was just defending his own life and isn’t to blame. I propose, therefore, a toast to his health. You need another drink; you’ve got a very pensive look about you.”

  I silently nodded my head. A deep female voice came singing from the gramophone:

  There’s no need for anything,

  Not even late regrets…

  It was already past midnight, and the air hung with the cool scent of champagne, little cloudlets of perfume; there was also a smell of roast goose and baked apples. The noise of muffled automobile horns drifted in from the street; on the other side of the restaurant window, separated from us by glass alone, a winter’s night was beginning, with the washed-out, cold light from the street lamps reflected on the wet Parisian road. With an inexplicably dismal clarity, I saw before me that hot summer’s day, the cracked black-grey road, lazily, as if in a dream, winding through the little groves, and Wolf’s motionless body, lying on the hot earth after that mortal fall.

  Voznesensky took Wolf to a little white-and-green town on the Dnieper—white from the colour of the houses, green from the trees—and brought him to the hospital. The doctor told Voznesensky that Wolf had a matter of hours to live. After three weeks, however, Wolf walked out of the hospital with sunken cheeks and a thick bristle on his face, making him quite unrecognizable. Voznesensky had come to collect him with Marina, a girl whom he’d met the day after his arrival in the town. She wore an airy white dress, and there were bracelets jangling about her s
warthy arms. She had fled her family around two years prior to this, and since then had been travelling all over southern Russia, earning a living by fortune-telling and singing. Voznesensky staunchly believed that she lived solely on those two sources of income; judging by his description of her, however, I doubt she would have had much cause to worry about her daily subsistence. She was seventeen or eighteen at the time. There was a noticeable change in Voznesensky’s voice whenever he spoke of her, and I’d wager that had he not been quite so drunk he wouldn’t have divulged to me certain completely unrepeatable yet truly rare qualities of Marina’s, about which, of course, only those who had often experienced the irresistible, burning charm of her intimacy could know. Voznesensky lived with Marina in a modest villa; Wolf, who was still too weak to take up his former partisan life again, installed himself two doors down from them. Voznesensky’s house had a piano. The following day, dressed in civilian clothes, neat and shaved as always, Wolf paid a visit to his comrade; they dined together, and later Wolf sat down at the piano and began to accompany Marina, who had been singing.

  Some time afterwards, Voznesensky left to visit Ofitserov for a few days, and, when he returned, Marina was gone. He went to Wolf’s, and she opened the door to him. Wolf was not at home that day. She looked at Voznesensky without any embarrassment whatsoever, and with a savage and direct ease told him that she no longer loved him, but loved Sasha instead. Voznesensky said that at that moment she had been just like Carmen.

  “I was a hardened man,” he said; “I’d seen my comrades killed before my very eyes, I myself had often risked my life, and everything had washed over me like water off a duck’s back. But that day I went home, lay down on my bed and cried like a little boy.”

  What he then told me was both astounding and naive. He tried to convince Marina that Wolf was still too weak, that she ought to have taken pity on him and left him in peace.