The Spectre of Alexander Wolf Read online

  “You’re closing your eyes,” said her distant voice. “Perhaps you’d care for a rest after your meal?”

  “No, it’s just that a certain saying came to mind.”

  “Which?”

  “Something King Solomon said.”

  “You and I seem to be straying off topic.”

  This “you and I” was her second move.

  “Which saying is it then?”

  “It’s of note for a certain metaphorical lavishness,” I said, “which might now seem somewhat questionable to our ears, in a stylistic sense, of course. But I hope you’ll bear in mind that it was written a long time ago.”

  “God, how you go on! What’s the saying?”

  “King Solomon said that there were three things he didn’t know.”

  “Which?”

  “The path of a serpent on a rock.”

  “All right.”

  “The path of an eagle in the sky.”

  “Fine, as well.”

  “The path of a woman’s heart to the heart of a man.”

  “No one knows this, it would seem,” she said with an unexpectedly thoughtful tone in her voice. “And you think he got it wrong? Why?”

  “No, perhaps it’s a poor translation. In any case, the last part of the saying doesn’t sound right. ‘The path of a woman’s heart to the heart of a man.’ There’s something of the grammar book about it.”

  “I shouldn’t delve too far into stylistic analysis. Are you a fan of King Solomon?”

  “Not without reservations. Much of what he wrote seems to lack a certain persuasiveness.”

  It was a gloomy winter’s evening, but inside the apartment it was very warm. Yelena Nikolayevna was sitting opposite me, in the armchair, legs crossed; I could see her knees, and every time I looked at them I began to feel suffocated and wretched. I felt that all this—on my part—was beginning to get rather unseemly. I tried to evoke those mental images that I always resorted to for help, as others might resort to mnemonic tricks. Whenever I was gripped violently by a feeling that, for whatever reason, I considered importune or, as I did now, premature, I would imagine a great snowy field or the rippling surface of the sea, and it would almost always help me. I tried now to visualize a snowy plain before me—there, where Yelena Nikolayevna was sitting. However, that motionless face with its red lips shone all the more glaringly and starkly through the imaginary whiteness.

  Finally I rose, thanked her for her hospitality and prepared to take my leave. When she extended her warm hand to me, however, and I felt her touch against my fingers, I instantly forgot any intention of leaving, just as that night, when saying goodbye to her, I had forgotten my decision not to ask her where she lived and not to seek another meeting with her. I drew her close to me—she winced from the pain I unintentionally inflicted, squeezing her hand too tightly. As I embraced her, I could feel the whole surface of her body. Only later, recalling this episode, did I realize that my sensation at that precise moment must have been illusory: she had been wearing a rather thick velvet dress.

  I knew that any other woman in her place would have said only one thing:

  “You’re mad.”

  But she did not utter those words. I seemed to be approaching her face as if through some fatal dream. She made not a single movement to resist, but at the last second turned her head to the left, offering up her neck to me. Her dress was fastened at the back by a long row of tightly fitted velvet buttons. When I undid the top two buttons, she said to me with that same calm, though somewhat muted, voice:

  “No, not here. Wait a minute. Let me go.”

  I released her. She went into another room, and I followed her. We had only taken a few steps, but still I had time to reflect on the unexpectedness of it all and the essentially unnatural speed with which all this had happened. Only eight days separated me from the night when I first met her—but this was a vast distance. I knew that my feelings, despite their inherently primitive force—my principal shortcoming—usually developed with an arduous sluggishness; these past eight days, however, I had found myself at the mercy of their progression, and I was nevertheless unable to imagine until that final moment how deeply and irreversibly I had been possessed by them. I think that, as with any inexplicable simultaneous attraction of the senses, Yelena Nikolayevna must have felt the same as I did; her feelings were like mine, just as concave glass resembles convex—the same curves, the same double movement. Here was that same incomprehensible impetuosity, which seemed less characteristic of her than it did of me. These thoughts were vague and deceptive, as was everything I felt back then; I remembered them only much later, and in my imagination they assumed a near-crystallized form, which they could not have had during those few brief seconds. In any case, they had seemed of no consequence to me whatsoever at the time.

  She let me go on ahead, then shut the door and turned the key in the lock. We found ourselves in a modest room, which I hadn’t the time to examine; I noted only a large divan, above which was lit a sconce with a small navy-blue lampshade, a table and, on the table, an ashtray and a telephone. She sat down on the divan; I stopped in front of her for a second, and she managed to say:

  “Well, now…”

  Through the stormy, sensual murk, I finally glimpsed her body with its tense muscles beneath the shining skin of her arms. She was lying supine, her arms behind her head, without the slightest hint of modesty, gazing at my face with her impossibly serene eyes—it seemed almost incredible. Even when I felt (and not for the first time in my life) that inexplicable synthesis of pure emotion and physical sensation filling not only my entire consciousness, but everything, everything without exception, even the farthest muscles in my body; even then, when she said, “You’re hurting me,” with so languorous an intonation that it seemed entirely misplaced, betraying neither complaint nor protest; and even then, when she gave a spasmodic shudder—her eyes remained just the same: deathly still. Only in the final moments did her eyes seem distant, like some intonations in her voice.

  She could never be called—at least as far as I’m concerned—an excellent lover; her physical reactions were sluggish, and the final seconds of embrace frequently caused her to experience some sort of internal pain; next her eyes would close and her face would involuntarily grimace. However, what set her apart from other women consisted in her making an extreme and exhausting all-out effort, mentally and physically; her irresistible magnetism lay, I think, in the vague sense that close relations with her required some sort of irrevocably destructive effort, and in the infallibility of this presentiment. After experiencing her physical intimacy for the first time, I knew with complete certitude that I would never forget it, and that it might even be the last thing I remembered when I died. I had known this already, and I also knew that no matter what life threw in my path nothing could save me from the severe and terminal regret that all this would vanish nonetheless, swallowed up whether by death, time or distance, and that the inwardly blinding power of this memory would occupy too great an emotional space in my life and leave no room for other things, which may also have been destined for me.

  It was already late at night, and Yelena Nikolayevna was unable to hide her fatigue. It felt as though I were in a fever; my eyes were inflamed and I thought I could feel some kind of invisible burning sensation. I left sometime after three o’clock in the morning. It was a cold, starry night. I felt like taking a stroll, and so I walked along the empty streets. Then, for the first time in my life, I found myself in a state of unadulterated happiness, and even the thought that it could be illusory didn’t inhibit me. Even now I can remember the buildings I walked past, the taste of the cold winter air, and the gentle breeze at the street corners—these were all linked to the feeling. This sensation of sheer happiness seemed particularly unexpected after having gazed into those motionless eyes for several hours; there had been something humiliating about their expression, precisely because I’d been unable to alter it.

  When I awoke the
following day, my surroundings and all that to which I was accustomed—the world of people and objects among which my life moved—seemed altered and different, like a forest after the rain.

  That night, I parted with her just before daybreak: the next day, by one o’clock in the afternoon, I once again found myself approaching the entrance to her building. I couldn’t explain exactly what had changed that night, but it was clear to me that I had never seen rue Octave Feuillet, or avenue Henri Martin, or the building in which she lived in the same light before. The stone walls, the bare trees, the shutters on the building and the steps on the staircase—everything I had known so well and for so long—now acquired a new meaning, which hadn’t existed before. It was as if everything were the scenery for the only (and of course finest) play that human imagination could conceive of. It might have been a theatre set. It might also have been a visual overture to a melody (also of course the finest) that was about to begin, a melody that I alone among millions of people could hear, and that was ready to start up the moment that door on the first floor opened to me—a door just like thousands of others, but nevertheless the only one in the world. My wealth of experience, everything I knew, saw and understood, all the tales of betrayal, misfortune and drama, and the tragic infidelity of everything in existence, were powerless to interrupt this; it appeared that what I had so vainly waited for my entire life was finally happening, and that no man other than I would be able to understand this, for the sole reason that no one had lived as I had, and no one knew the combination of things that epitomized my existence. It seemed that if the story of my life were to have lacked a single detail, this feeling of happiness and my understanding of it could never have been so complete. Everything felt at once completely unquestionable, yet so incredible. As I walked along avenue Victor Hugo, it suddenly occurred to me that none of this could be real, and I began to experience a sort of emotional vertigo—as though all this were a page from a children’s book about vanishing acts.

  Annie told me that madame would be out presently and conducted me into the dining room. The modest table was already laid for two, complete with wine glasses—in one of them a thin shaft of light played, as if filling it with an invisible, spectral liquid; I remembered then that the weather was wintry but sunny. I sat down in an armchair and lit a cigarette. I became conscious that I was smoking only when the ash, falling from the cigarette, burned my hand and landed on my sleeve.

  Yelena Nikolayevna came into the room a few seconds before Annie began serving breakfast. She had just taken a bath and hadn’t bothered to dress. She was wearing a dressing gown; her hair was combed back, and this imparted a particular clarity to her features, while simultaneously affording her an air of mental and physical comfort, both pleasant and unexpected. She asked me with ironic tenderness in her voice whether I had slept well and whether I had any appetite. Looking straight at her, I replied in the affirmative. She too had changed, as with everything else I saw around me; the expression of estrangement that I had felt until now had vanished from her face. As she leant over the table I spotted the large birthmark under her right collarbone; a warm wave of gratitude and tenderness towards her flowed over me, and then I caught her still gaze.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  “About how you and I have known each other for such a short period of time, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who has been closer to me than you are now.”

  Then she added:

  “I shan’t always say such things, so don’t get used to it.”

  She poured the wine. It was an unusual, fragrant, strong wine, and however little I might know about wines even I could not fail to notice that it was, very probably, a particularly fine one. Then she asked:

  “What shall we drink to?”

  “To not getting used to it,” I said.

  She nodded indulgently, and we drank in silence. The words had sounded almost solemn, like those said perhaps once in a lifetime, when going off to war or leaving for good—despite this being essentially a breakfast like any other, with a woman whom I had met a week ago and who the previous night had become my lover. And just as she was neither the first nor the only one in my life, so too I was neither her first nor her only lover.

  After breakfast, we sat together for a long time over coffee. Wisps of cigarette smoke curled and vanished in the sunlight that came beating through the window. She was still wearing her dressing gown, and when I mentioned this to her, she answered with a smile:

  “I’m not expecting anyone; I have no one to dress for. As far as you’re concerned, I’d even wager that you’d prefer me without the dressing gown, and just imagine what would happen then. No, wait,” she said, seeing me move as though to get up from my armchair. “Wait. I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, and I have no desire to leave you. I just wanted to chat with you. Tell me what your life was like before now. Whom did you love and what made you happy?”

  “I hardly know where to begin,” I said. “It’s all so complicated, long and contradictory. When I wake up every morning, I think to myself, Today my life will begin in earnest. I’ll feel as though I’m not much older than sixteen again, and that man who has known so much tragedy and sadness, he who fell asleep in my bed the previous night, will seem alien and distant, and I’ll comprehend neither his inner weariness nor his frustration. Then, as I go to sleep every night, I feel as though I’ve lived a long life, and yet all I’ve taken from it is the loathing and burden of lingering years. And so the day passes. As it nears its end, the poison of inner weariness pierces me deeper still. But this, of course, isn’t the story of my life. What I’m telling you is how I used to feel, until that evening when you, by some stroke of good fortune, couldn’t get a ticket for the match.”

  “You’re relatively young and, as far as I can see, the picture of health,” she said. “And whatever you say, I don’t believe in your inner weariness. If you could only take the time to look at yourself, you’d understand why your words of fatigue sound so unconvincing.”

  “I never said that I felt this inner weariness with regard to you. And when I see you…”

  “It’s as though it were morning?”

  “It’s as though it were morning.”

  “Be that as it may, we’re veering away from the main issue here,” she said. “Where were you born, where did you grow up, where did you go and why did you leave? And what is your surname, seeing as I still only know your Christian name? Where did you study, or didn’t you study at all?”

  “Yes, I studied,” I said. “Probably to no avail, but I studied for a long time, and quite a variety of subjects.”

  I began telling her about myself. Never before had my own fate seemed as clear to me as it did now. Among my memories, I encountered many things I had failed to spot before, some of them almost lyrical; I was struck by the vague sensation (without having to break my narrative) that, were it not for Yelena Nikolayevna, I would probably never have been able to uncover the potency and freshness of these recollections that had appeared so suddenly. Perhaps they didn’t even exist beyond the very presence and thought of this woman sitting next to me in her dressing gown, her hair smoothly brushed and the far-off gaze of eyes sunk in thought.

  “You’ll have to forgive me if my story doesn’t conform to any strict chronological order,” I said.

  She nodded. I told her of many things that day: of war, Russia, travels, my childhood. An assortment of people I had once known appeared to me: teachers, officers, soldiers, officials, classmates—whole countries passed before my eyes. My memory evoked images of subtropical landscapes, regular patches of brown earth, narrow white roads, and the creak of a poor wooden cart that could be heard from afar in the hot still air; the sad eyes of a small, half-starved cow, harnessed alongside a donkey to a plough, which a Greek peasant in a dark-grey burnous and a white felt hat was using to till the hard earth; I recalled also that in Turkey distance is measured by time—it isn’t however many kilometre
s to such-and-such a place, but rather however many hours on foot; I recalled the icy winds of central Russia and the springy crunch of snow under foot, then the seas, the rivers, the wild ducks on the Danube and the steamships and trains—everything through which the inexplicable movements of my life had passed. Then I returned once more to the war and to those thousands of bodies that I had seen—and suddenly I recalled the speech my Russian teacher had given during his final address to us:

  “You are beginning to live. Taking part in what is called the struggle for life lies ahead of you. Roughly speaking, there are three types: the struggle for victory, the struggle for annihilation, and the struggle for consensus. You are all young and full of vigour, and so, naturally, you are drawn to the first type. But always remember that the most humane and most advantageous is the struggle for consensus. If you make of this a principle throughout your life, it will mean that the culture we have tried to bestow on you will not have been for nothing, that you have become true citizens of the world, and, consequently, we shall not have lived in this world in vain. Because, if it be otherwise, it will mean that we have merely wasted our time. We are old, we have no more strength to build a new life. We have one hope left, and that is you.”

  “I think he was right,” I said. “Unfortunately, however, we didn’t always have the occasion to choose the type of struggle we thought best.”

  “Do you have fond memories of your teachers?”

  She and I were sitting on the divan. I had my right arm around her, and I could feel the warmth of her body through the towel dressing gown.

  “No, not of all of them. Far from it,” I said, smiling. I was thinking of one of the priests who taught us Scripture in the upper forms; he was a tall, absent-minded man, who wore a lilac silk cassock. His voice betrayed an inherent boredom: