The Flight Read online

  Seryozha’s father ranked among the few people who had acquired significant wealth through inheritance and who not only had resisted squandering it, but had in fact increased it. This was made possible by the fact that he was—generous, rash and magnanimous—in business astute and essentially cautious, and also primarily because he had been attended all his life by blind luck. He had enterprises in several countries, thousands of people worked for him, and his status could be credited to an acquaintance with every celebrity, as well as to the fact that his house was frequented by musicians, writers, singers, engineers, industrialists, actors and representatives of that particular sort of people who are always elegantly and becomingly dressed, yet the sources of whose income—if one were to trace them, which, in the majority of cases, would have required either chance or the unceremoniousness of a police investigation—are apparently almost always of the kind that can never be owned to. While Liza would regard these people with disgust, Seryozha’s father would pat them on the back, and generally exude that broad, false candour and sincerity, the true value of which was known only by those close to him. When Seryozha told his father that he was being robbed, his father laughed.

  “You don’t say.”

  Then, still laughing and looking at Seryozha with his lively eyes, he said, “Shall I tell you who’s robbing me and by how much?”

  He explained to Seryozha that that was just the way of things, that people would carry on stealing, regardless. This conviction, however, aroused in him neither distress nor surprise; he took it as a matter of course and sometimes amused himself by making fools of his household staff—as he did, for example, with his driver, who had robbed him of oil, petrol and a thousand other things, and invariably presented him with “bogus” invoices. He told the owner of the garage where everything was usually bought that it was setting him back too much money and that he felt compelled to change his suppliers—as proof he presented the invoices, the sight of which horrified the owner of the garage, who just repeated in a feeble voice, “Oh, non, monsieur, jamais, monsieur,”† and immediately brought the books, which showed entirely disparate sums of money; the difference was almost half. However, he said nothing about this to the driver, to whom the catastrophe only became apparent later at the garage, where they explained everything. He was already preparing to pack his bags, when that very day the car was ordered; Sergey Sergeyevich mentioned only in passing that the price of petrol seemed to have come down, while patting the driver on the shoulder and remarking, “Ah, sacré Joseph,”‡ laughing to himself the whole journey. The driver, on the other hand, after some time, and following much hesitation and a clash of conflicting emotions, left, for the daily awareness that he was now unable to steal, and was instead forced to make do with his salary, reduced him to a nervous wreck. He was a simple man, of Auvergne peasant stock, insensible to physical fatigue, but mentally and spiritually defenceless against unforeseen and, in particular, unlawful predicaments. He was later caught stealing rather large sums of money and was on the verge of prison—from which Sergey Sergeyevich saved him—but it was too late, and the result was that instead of prison he was placed in a mental asylum, which he left a completely broken man.

  Other such instances yielded less tragic results, but one way or another Sergey Sergeyevich did indeed know by how much he was being robbed and only limited it by including these sums of money as independent and naturally occurring items in his budgetary calculations, which contained, anyway, a great many items. He subsidized theatres, supported young performers whose talents he himself doubted, paid mostly everywhere and for everyone, as was necessitated by his position of great wealth, and performed his duty in exactly the same manner as he did everything else—with pleasure, with a smile, and with seemingly indiscriminate approval. He would say, for example, to the editor of a large tabloid newspaper that was going to carry some articles promoting one of his enterprises—having just donated a vast sum of money to the charitable aims of some implausible, fantastical organization that had lodged itself in the mind of the editor only half an hour previously, blossoming there like some romantic mirage, the illusoriness of which was patently clear to any ordinary person—“I know, my dear chap, that your incorruptible integrity…” And the editor would leave feeling a complex mix of gratitude and pity for this naive millionaire, as well as the vague suspicion that if the naive millionaire was only making out that he believed, while in actual fact knew everything, then this endowment and these heartfelt words about integrity were just far too humiliating to endure. With a similarly selfless belief in the future he took on a singer of uncertain nationality, although clearly of the southern variety—hair as black as boot polish, the whites of his eyes a dirty yellow, and hands of dubious hygiene. In all this he never gave more than was expected of him by the complex system of values he had built up over long years of experience and according to which, for example, subsidies given to people of southern extraction were always significantly less than those given to representatives of the northern races, for whom he entertained a sort of ethnic predilection. A never-ending army of cadgers passed through his life, an astonishing variety of petitioners, ranging from respectable people with caressing baritones and complicated personal histories—never failing to include a few moments of pathos, most often inspired by reading not quite third- but second-rate novels—to those rasping, blurred figures, infinitely removed from any abstract notions and focusing exclusively on matters of primary importance, the cost of which wavered between two and five francs. A great many people wrote him letters with various propositions, from the laconically self-assured “not bad-looking” to the “strange allure” and even the “indomitable cruelty” of some of the more uncompromising female candidates for conjugal bliss, the very concept of which likewise ranged an appalling variety. His life, however, was not all letters and requests for money: twice had there been attempts on his life, and both times he had been saved by sheer chance, by that same blind luck that never failed him and led him out of even the most hopeless of situations, like the death sentence he received from a Revolutionary tribunal in the Crimea, in which not one man had been sober; the sentry of that poorly secured hangar where he was being held was killed by a stray bullet from a sailor who shot wide of the mark, allowing Sergey Sergeyevich to make a run for it and reach the quayside in Sebastopol, where not a single ship had been in sight—and only at dusk did their silhouettes loom darkly in the roadstead. Casting aside his jacket and boots, he jumped from the quay into the icy autumn water, and amid the cold, stormy evening he swam out to a British destroyer, to whose captain he recounted his story half an hour later, laughing at particularly inappropriate moments—for example, when he told him about the hearing at the Revolutionary tribunal. Two days later, at a cabaret in Constantinople, he paid for champagne for almost half the crew and sang Irish shanties that he did not understand, which did not matter in any case; he committed them to memory with the same ease as he did everything else. This sense of ease was by and large characteristic of his whole impetuous, lucky life. He never sat pondering important decisions; from the very outset the solution would appear clear and preclusive of any error, which would simply have been an obvious blunder. He grasped everything so quickly that he acquired a habit of not finishing his sentences. Just as a well-educated person, when reading a book, does not waste time on the gradual, sequential combination of letters and does not repeat the words to himself, but skims over the familiar image of printed lines with his eyes, everything passing by quickly and obediently, so too Sergey Sergeyevich found his way about business, the outcomes and the scope of any enterprise or initiative or trust, which, on the face of it, seemed to necessitate lengthy study. At any rate, he never demanded that others try to keep up with him in the conclusions he would draw, as if he anticipated dealing with cretins; and whenever one of his directors displayed a quick grasp of something, it would always pleasantly surprise him. Since, however, in both cases he would say the same complimentary, ami
able things, those who did not know him sufficiently well would suppose that he was unable to distinguish a good worker from a bad one, and that it was just by sheer luck that he was surrounded almost everywhere by able staff.

  For all that, however, he had never truly loved ( just as he had never been totally candid), and both Olga Alexandrovna and Liza knew this. He was always good to his wife, as one would be to a best friend, but here—for the first time in his life—she had expected of him something else, the very thing she had read about in the novels he continued to deride, because it was clear to him that these books had been written by clumsy, not particularly cultured and, more often than not, primitive people; yet he knew without doubt that the finest pages of various literatures had been written on these very same subjects—and he understood and even loved these things, but here his impeccable sense of ease and his infallibility crumbled, and he recognized his guilt before Olga Alexandrovna, whom he had once, at the beginning of their marriage, been unable to answer, when, lifting her dark, tender eyes to him, she had said:

  “You’re talking about good relations. I, Seryozha, am talking about love.”

  Love truly was the most important thing in Olga Alexandrovna’s life and the only thing that really interested and captivated her. Everything else had, as it were, only a provisional value, and was positioned as if functionally dependent on what really mattered. She had to leave, to go somewhere or other—because an assignation awaited her there; she had to read such-and-such a book—so that she could talk about it with the only person whose conversation she found stimulating; she had to have a pretty dress—so that she would be adored; she had, in general—any otherwise would have been impossible—to love and to suffer. She had married aged eighteen, but even before the marriage she had known three failed love affairs. She had fallen in love with Sergey Sergeyevich the moment she set eyes on him; it was at a ball, in Moscow, and then she told her mother that she would marry this man, which did indeed happen a few months later. She had never been good-looking, but was possessed of such a mighty force of attraction that was difficult and ultimately futile to resist. Everybody loved her—her parents, who would forgive her everything, her maid, her brothers and sisters; she obtained everything she wanted with a strange ease; children and animals loved her too. Even Sergey Sergeyevich, who held a condescending view of women, immediately felt such an attraction to her that he himself would laugh and joke about it, although resist it he could not. After their first kiss, she confessed that she loved him dearly and wanted to marry him. She was of diminutive stature; her hair was black; above her dark eyes were short little eyelashes that made her eyes seem larger than they really were: the first impression she made was one of rare youth and health—and indeed the blood coursing through her veins was abundant and unwearying; she knew neither fatigue nor illness, nor even minor ailments. She was unfaithful to her husband four months after they married, but it happened by chance and was insignificant. Following the birth of her son she stopped paying attention to her appearance for a whole year, spent all her time with the child, looking on avidly as he learnt to walk, and was wholly captivated by him. Later, one evening, having put him to bed, she paused in front of a mirror, carefully looked herself over, sighed and went into her husband’s room to ask him how on earth he could still love her. He was writing at the time and, tearing himself away from the sheet of paper for a moment, said, “Despite it all, Lyolya,” and continued writing, until she came right up to him and sat on his lap. Then the routine argument about love reared its head; it was always Olga Alexandrovna, for whom Sergey Sergeyevich no longer felt that irresistible attraction that had brought him to marry her, who began these arguments; the airy, almost transparent mist that had suffused the first months of their intimacy now seemed inexplicable to him. And so began the period of his negative love, as Olga Alexandrovna called it; he readily forgave her everything, never became angry with her and satisfied her every wish, but in no way could he say that without her his life would lose its meaning.

  “Well then, what do you think about adultery?”

  “It’s all a matter of temperament and, to a certain degree, ethics,” he said.

  “They’re counterfeit, meaningless words,” she said. “What is temperament? What are ethics?”

  He extracted two volumes of Brockhaus and Efron from the shelves, handed them to her and said: “Read these and try to think. I know you’re unaccustomed to it. But it is possible, Lyolya.”

  As she was leaving, he called after her: “And chance, too.”

  Later on, abroad, he was presented with a multitude of opportunities to test these theories on the causes of adultery, also because after a while he noticed that Olga Alexandrovna’s outgoings had increased significantly. He quickly calculated how much she ought to be spending, not allowing for exceptional and unforeseeable expenditures, and saw that the amount of money disappearing was more than twice that sum. Then he spoke, casually, as always, of blackmail and of the general imprudence of writing letters. And since Olga Alexandrovna made a show of not understanding, he told her that he nevertheless knew everything and that she should not fear exposure. After a while, a man in a black overcoat, a black bowler hat, a pair of black shoes and a black tie turned up, whom Sergey Sergeyevich welcomed with his usual cordiality, while announcing that he had precisely five minutes at his disposal. When this man explained to him the purpose of his visit, Sergey Sergeyevich advised him to look elsewhere, since the matter would surely bring him nothing but misery. The man, undismayed, began mentioning newspapers. Sergey Sergeyevich stood up in order to stress that the meeting was running over, and said:

  “You would do best not to try that—and believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

  As the man was making his exit, Sergey Sergeyevich asked him with an inquisitive smile: “Would you like fifty francs for your trouble?…”

  Never again did he receive this man or his successors, nor did he reply to the many letters that arrived, and so the matter was settled, when he said to his wife—fragmentarily, as always, and without explanation:

  “I do wish you would choose more respectable ones, Lyolya.”

  He articulated this phrase, wanting to give his wife some friendly advice, though knowing in advance that she would fail to glean his meaning. He had long known that her choice could in no way be guided by any rational considerations, and that she selected men not according to their merits, but based on some obscure combination of physical attraction and an intuitive presentiment of their own moral constitution, in which these same ethical considerations more often than not played no role whatsoever. Sergey Sergeyevich also understood why he himself was unsuited to his wife. The reason was partly that he found talking about his own feelings tedious—he would listen to her for a few minutes out of delicacy, and then say: “Yes, Lyolya, I know,” and indeed he would know everything that she had planned to say. These people—these others—were so often emotionally primitive: they could never fathom their emotions, and every one of Olga Alexandrovna’s affairs was like a new and illuminating excursion into sentimental lands, where she played the role of the guide—as Sergey Sergeyevich had once said of her during a conversation with Liza. Generally speaking, not all was well at home, but the only one not to notice this was Olga Alexandrovna, and although Sergey Sergeyevich pretended not to notice, he in fact knew everything right down to the smallest detail; Liza was aware of this, and with good reason, and now Seryozha sensed it as well.

  * Impossible tonight, darling… If I regret it? I believe so, darling.

  † Oh, no, Monsieur, never, Monsieur.

  ‡ You’re quite a man, Joseph.

  SERGEY SERGEYEVICH’S family rarely spent the summer together. That year, almost like clockwork, everything came about at the very last moment. Olga Alexandrovna, after several days of especial anxiety and having resolved many agonizing questions about whether or not she was within her right to act as her desires dictated, suddenly left, indefinitely—for
Italy. Prior to her departure, with beating heart and burning cheeks, she had gone to Sergey Sergeyevich. Despite the fact that Olga Alexandrovna’s entire life had been made up of these departures and betrayals, and one might have thought by now she would have accustomed herself to them, each time she experienced them just as forcefully, as though in the first flush of youth, and wracked herself as always, for she was doing something depraved and illicit, and through her actions she was doing wrong by her husband and Seryozha. However, her object in sacrificing all these fruitless emotions seemed to her so wonderful that there could be no doubt as to her final decision. And just as she had a profound understanding of her duty as a wife and mother, so too were her delusions about an imminent departure fresh and unfading. Each time she would leave for good, for a world of uncertainty, condemning herself, perhaps, to a semi-impoverished existence. If it turned out otherwise, it would not be on her account.

  Yet as she set off for the apartment, she suddenly remembered that it was Thursday, Sergey Sergeyevich’s day for receiving visitors. So she telephoned him and immediately heard his flat voice reply: “I’m very busy, Lyolya… Yes… I need at least an hour… You can’t?… Very well, I’ll be with you shortly.”

  He walked into the room. She had already donned her hat and gloves, and was wearing a travelling dress; in her hands she carried a nécessaire. In her eyes Sergey Sergeyevich once again saw that troubled look that he knew so well. Yet because he saw it, his face did not at all alter, just as his smile and his voice did not alter either.

  “Going somewhere, are we, Lyolya?” he said.