The Spectre of Alexander Wolf Read online

  “There is much evidence of God’s existence. There is juridical evidence, there is logical evidence and there is philosophical evidence.”

  Then he paused for a moment and added:

  “There is even mathematical evidence, but I’ve forgotten it.”

  “Where did you go to university? In Paris?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t quite so simple.”

  I told her how I had needed to collect a piece of paper from the former Russian consul, which only he could issue to me and which replaced my birth certificate. He was a rather short, irate old man with an enormous grey beard, who said to me:

  “I shan’t give you anything of the sort. Why, I don’t know you from Adam. You might be a professional crook for all I know, maybe even a murderer or some bandit. This is the first time I’ve ever seen you in my life. Whom do you know in Paris?”

  “No one,” I said. “A handful of my former classmates are here, but they’re all in the same position as I am; none of them is known to you personally, and there is nothing to stop you supposing that each of them, too, is a professional crook or murderer and also my accomplice.”

  “What do you need this piece of paper for?”

  “I’d like to matriculate at university.”

  “You? University?”

  “Yes, if you’ll permit me to have this piece of paper.”

  “For that, my dear fellow, you need to have a secondary education.”

  “I have a leaving certificate.”

  “And you must know French.”

  “I do.”

  “Where on earth did you have the occasion to study?”

  “Back home, in Russia.”

  “Lord knows,” he said doubtfully. “Perhaps you aren’t a bandit after all. I make no categorical assertion either way; I haven’t the factual information with which to do so. Do show me your certificate.”

  He glanced over it, then suddenly asked:

  “Why only average marks in algebra and trigonometry, eh?”

  “I never did have any aptitude for the so-called exact sciences.”

  “All right, I’ll give you the piece of paper. But see here, it’s on your own responsibility.”

  “Very well,” I said; “if I’m arrested and thrown in jail, I promise not to allude to you.”

  I laughed, remembering the old fellow, and she laughed with me; I could feel her whole body vibrating through the surface of my hand. She then stood up, threw me what seemed to be a look of reproach and drew the blinds; a dark grey filled the room. In the quiet that descended, I could hear music coming from the apartment above, where someone was playing the piano very slowly and deliberately, creating the impression that great drops of sound were falling one after the other into molten glass.

  It was clear to me that the principal distinguishing feature of my relationship with Yelena Nikolayevna was an absence of any single moment during which my senses were not in a heightened state. If not a desire for her intimacy, it was tenderness; if not tenderness, it was a whole succession of other feelings or emotional states, to define which I knew neither the words, nor the means by which to find these words. In any case, I was indebted to her existence for the discovery of a world that I had previously not known. I hadn’t imagined what physical intimacy with a woman could mean, and I found it strange to think that all this could be compared with my previous affairs. I knew that each love was essentially unique, but this was a very simplistic and inexact assertion. Under any degree of scrutiny, similarities can always be found; what is unique consists in the certain chance nuances of certain chance intonations. This time it was different—unlike anything that had gone before it—and among all my emotional experience I could find nothing to remind me of my current situation. I thought that after the destructive exertions of this love I would have no strength left for any other feeling, and that, for me, nothing would ever compare with this unendurable memory. Wherever I was and whatever I was doing, all I had to do was think for a few seconds, and before me would appear her face, with those distant eyes, and that smile of hers that contained such naive shamelessness, as if she were standing there completely naked. And yet, despite the strength of my physical attraction to her, it failed to resemble the wildest passion, because a streak of icy purity and some strange, uncharacteristic altruism always seemed to pervade it. I hadn’t known myself to be capable of such feelings, although I suppose they were feasible only relative to her—and therein ended her true uniqueness and wonder for me.

  As always, whenever confronted by something new in life, I find myself unable to tell what has summoned it out of non-existence. I could find no answer in my attempts to learn what exactly had imbued Yelena Nikolayevna with that irresistible magnetism of hers. I had known women more beautiful than she, I had heard voices more melodious than hers, but her placid face and humiliating, calm eyes apparently held the power to create a rather painful impression on me. She was practically devoid of that warmth of feeling I so valued; there was almost no tenderness in her, or, more accurately, it surfaced only rarely and always as if unintentionally. She had no “charm”; the notion was quite unsuited to her. Yet, she was, as far as I was concerned, unique and wonderful, and nothing could alter this.

  She could never have been called secretive. However, a lengthy acquaintance or genuine intimacy was first required to know what her life had entailed before then, what she liked, what she did not like, what interested her, and what she valued in the people she encountered. It was a long time before she revealed any opinions that could shed light on her character, even though I talked with her on the most diverse of topics; she would usually listen in silence or respond monosyllabically. Over the course of many weeks I learnt little more about her than I had done in those first few days. Yet she had no reason to hide anything from me; it was simply the remnants of her intrinsic sense of reserve, which could only seem strange to me. Whenever I asked about anything, she would be disinclined to answer, and this would never fail to surprise me. She would remark:

  “Isn’t it all the same to you?”

  Or:

  “Of what possible interest could that be?”

  But I was interested in everything about her. I wanted to find out what had happened in her life before we met.

  One of her traits was a peculiar inner sluggishness that did not tally with the swiftness and precision of her movement in general: her quick step, her impeccable, instantaneous physical reflexes. Only amid what constituted an indefinable union of the spiritual and the physical—love, for example—was the ordinarily faultless harmony of her body broken, and, for her, there was always something almost excruciating about this chance dissonance. That impression of a strange, almost anatomical, disharmony that I noted on the evening of our first meeting (that is to say, the combination of her high, well-shaped forehead and that avid smile) was no coincidence. There was an undoubted discordancy between the composition of her body and the progress of her inner life, which lagged slowly behind this robust being. Had it been possible to separate these and forget about this, she would have been completely happy. Loving her demanded constant creative effort. She never did anything for the sake of creating some sort of impression; she never gave any thought to the effect her words had. She existed independently of her surroundings, and her feelings towards others were dictated either by some physical attraction, as real as the desire to sleep or eat, or else by some urge, similar to those of the majority of people, but different in that under no circumstances would she act other than how she wanted. The wishes of others came into play only while they coincided with her own. Almost since the very first days of our acquaintance, I had been astounded by her incautious nature, her indifference to what others might think of what she was saying. Yet, with that cold and obstinate love of hers, she loved dangerous and powerful emotions.

  Such was her nature—to alter this, I think, would have been exceedingly difficult. Nevertheless, as time went on I began to notice some signs of human warmth
in her; little by little she was thawing. I questioned her at length about everything, but she would reply comparatively rarely—and tersely, at that. She told me that she grew up in Siberia, in the back of beyond, where she had lived until the age of fifteen. The first city she ever saw was Murmansk. She was an only child, and her parents had died at sea: during the voyage from Russia to Sweden, their ship had struck a floating mine. She was seventeen at the time and living in Murmansk. Soon after this, she married an American engineer, the very same man of whose sudden death she had been informed via telegram a year ago in London. She explained to me that she had liked him because he had a streak of grey in his hair, and also because he was a deft skier and ice skater, and had many fascinating things to say about America. They left Russia together; it was around the time when, at the other end of that enormous country, amid the exhausting senselessness of the Civil War, I had roamed the scorching southern steppes with their burnt grass, under the high sun. She spoke of a round-the-world sailing: how the transatlantic liner she was travelling aboard had navigated the Bosporus by night, and then the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea; how hot it had been, and how she had danced the foxtrot. I remembered those nights and their particular dark, sultry heat, and how I had sat for hours atop the high bank of the Dardanelles, looking out through the stifling darkness at the lights of these enormous ships passing by so near to me that I could hear the music of their orchestras and see the slowly retreating rows of portholes as the ships sailed off, blending into at first a glittering, then fading, and then finally dim speck of light. Perhaps I might have seen her ship, watching it in that same avid, blind state of tension in which I found myself during all those initial years of my life abroad.

  For many years she had led an interesting life, full of unexpected events, journeys, encounters and a few of what she termed “inescapable” love affairs. She had been to Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France and America, and in each of these countries she had spent a considerable period of time. She arrived in England for the first time two and a half years prior to this.

  “After that, it was all plain sailing,” she said.

  “Plain sailing… meaning Paris, rue Octave Feuillet, the Johnson–Dubois match, and so on? By the way, what were you banking on, turning up without a ticket? Ticket touts?”

  “Ticket touts—or luck. As you can see, I wasn’t wrong to do so.”

  “Have the results of the match exceeded your expectations?”

  “In certain respects, yes.”

  The more I learnt, the more I grew used to the unnatural divide between the inner life and physical life that was so characteristic of her. This divide had probably always existed within her, but now there was something almost unhealthy about it, and numerous times the thought struck me that the current period in her life must have been preceded by some sort of shock, of which I knew nothing and which she, in turn, avoided mentioning. Life with her consisted of two sharply contrasting love affairs: a sensual intimacy, in which everything was, on the whole, natural, and a spiritual affinity, infinitely slower, more complex and which may not have been there at all. An initial assessment of what was happening—by any man who was to become her lover—would inevitably prove erroneous, and these errors would be all the more inescapable precisely because they would be so completely natural. Time and again I imagined the chain of mistakes. The first error would encompass the idea that any development in events could depend on the man. In fact, the decision would always stem from her, and not only the decision, but even that first subtle move marking the beginning of the affair, often encompassing everything that is to follow. However, this particularity of hers, of course, was in no way exceptional: as I had always known, in most cases the beginning and denouement of any affair depends entirely on the woman. The second mistake would consist in the affair being considered in some way definitive. In reality, it meant nothing, or almost nothing, and could be halted at any given moment without the slightest explanation or any chance of reviving it whatsoever. The third and gravest mistake was that, if one were to judge by appearances, one might have thought the affair long already to have been a fait accompli, whereas, in fact, the real affair would begin only after the passage of much time and in the case of some rare and happy coincidence. I searched long and hard for a comparison that could exemplify this, but still I couldn’t find one: it could have been said to resemble the touch of cold lips, which warm slowly and only then regain their lost, burning delight—or else they might never regain it, leaving instead the memory of icy discontent and vain regret for what could have been and never was. Yet the most unchanging aspect of relations with her was the unconscious, inescapable strain on all one’s inner strength, without which an intimacy with her could be only aleatory and episodic. This in no way resulted from her unduly exacting nature, but rather came about of itself and even, it would seem, apart from her own wishes. It was just so, at any rate, and apparently could not have been otherwise. Moreover, it posed no difficulty, judging by a few of her admissions, to draw the conclusion that everyone who knew her intimately probably agreed to a greater or lesser extent.

  Much later, recalling our first meeting and how everything had begun, I found it easier to reconstruct events by closing my eyes and hypothetically omitting the content of our initial conversation in the café, our parting under the rain, and generally those things whose substance can fit into a cohesive narrative. More keenly than ever before in my life I sensed that all this came down to some blind, obscure movement, to a sequence of visual and aural impressions, accompanied by an unconscious, simultaneous muscular gravity that was developing uncontrollably. Johnson’s torso, Dubois on the canvas, the touch of my fingers on her hand when I helped her into the taxi, this whole silent melody of skin and muscles, the counter jolt from her body, of which even she may have been unaware—this was of the greatest importance, and this predetermined what was to come. What did she know about me on that misty February evening, and why had she waited a whole week for my call? When she smiled at me for the first time with that avid smile of hers, I knew then that she would belong to me. However, she knew this even earlier than I did. This was heralded, of course, by the downfall of an abstract world that scorned any primitive and purely physical understanding, a world where a peculiar philosophy of life built upon the prior rejection of the pre-eminence of materialistic factors was incomparably more important than any sensual reactions, a world that vanished instantaneously that evening in this silent muscular action. When I mentioned this once to Yelena Nikolayevna, she replied with a smile:

  “Perhaps it’s because we’d still make do even without any philosophy, whereas humanity would be threatened by extinction, in one form or another, if it weren’t for the other thing you mention.”

  I often felt uncomfortable in her presence, especially at first. I very quickly grew convinced that her reactions bore no similarity to those of the majority of other women. To make her laugh, for example, one couldn’t employ the same techniques that made others laugh; to elicit any feeling in her, one had to seek out an innovative new route, unlike any ordinary one. I had to expend much time and effort fine-tuning myself to the emotional world in which my intimacy with her took place. At last, however, I was leading a real life that was not half composed (as it had been until now) of memories, regrets, forebodings and vague expectations.

  Yelena Nikolayevna and I often went on long walks around Paris. She knew Paris poorly and superficially. I showed her the real city, not the one featured in the illustrated newspapers or the one that remained so inalterable in the imaginations of tourists who came here for a fortnight each year; I showed her the impoverished working-class districts, the backstreets far away from the centre, buildings on the city outskirts, a few of the quays, boulevard de Sébastopol at four o’clock in the morning. I remember how she gazed at rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île with such wonderment. It was truly difficult to imagine how in this city, with its magnificent avenues radiating off from place de l’Étoil
e, there could be such a narrow, dark passageway between two rows of ancient buildings, steeped in age-old must, against which all civilization was powerless. It was already late spring. After the long, steadfast cold of winter, with all its gloomy scenery, we opened our eyes to a different Paris: the limpid nights, the distant red glow over Montmartre, and the solid rows of chestnut trees lining boulevard Arago, where we somehow kept ending up for a period. I walked with my arm around her waist, and, without the slightest hint of protest, she said to me in a lazy, calm voice:

  “My dear, you’re behaving like a complete apache.”

  Before returning home, we would occasionally stop off at an all-night café or a bar, and she would be amazed that I, no matter in which district we found ourselves, would always know the face of every waiter and every woman sitting at the bar, waiting for the next client. Yelena Nikolayevna drank only spirits; she was unusually resilient to the effects of alcohol, a fact explained, I think, by prolonged training and stays in Anglo-Saxon countries. Only having drunk a significant volume of alcohol would she begin to act differently than usual, and she would, without fail, be drawn to places where she ought not to have gone. “Let’s go to the Bastille, to a bal musette; I want to watch the gens du milieu. Let’s go to rue Blondel, to that notorious brothel.”—“Lenochka, it’s such a bore.”—“Well then, where do the queers get together around here? You must know. What sort of journalist are you? Let’s go, I beg you. I do so love the queers.”—“Say we go and somebody takes a knife to me. What would you do then?”—“There’s no need to cast yourself in such a falsely heroic light: no one’s going to hurt you. That would be like something from a bad novel.” Sometimes she would come up with totally wild ideas. I remember how she once asked me where it was possible to buy sweets at night. Without the slightest inkling of her true intentions, I told her. We were in a taxi, and so she ordered the driver to go to the shop; she came out, her arms laden with bags of sweets.