The Spectre of Alexander Wolf Read online

  “What are you going to do with all this?”

  “My dear,” she said in a tender voice, entirely unlike her normal one and from which I could discern that she was quite drunk—this had not been apparent until now. “I’ll kiss you, I’ll do whatever you want, only just grant me my one little request.”

  “Oh, here it comes,” I said, thinking aloud.

  “But it’s this small,” she continued, pointing to the nail on her little finger. “You must know—I’m sure you do—the districts where I can find the little ten- to fifteen-year-old prostitutes.”

  “No, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Do you want me to ask the driver? You’ll look a complete fool.”

  “But what do you want these girls for?”

  “I want to hand out the sweets, you see. It’ll be nice for them.”

  Only with great effort did I manage to dissuade her from executing this plan. Sometimes, however, she insisted so much that I had no choice other than to restrain her by force or give in. Thus we went almost anywhere she wanted, but I noticed that none of these places, in fact, held much interest for her. She was simply giving free rein to some sudden caprice of hers, but as soon as it became easily achieved, it lost a significant portion of its allure for her. She was ready to do anything for the sake of powerful sensations. But there were none to be had. There were just pimps in light-grey caps, displaying a deferential fear towards the policemen guarding the entrance to the bal musette, plump naked women with drooping bodies and deadly animal stupidity in their eyes, and made-up youths with unsteady gaits and an inexplicable hint of spiritual syphilis on their faces. And she said:

  “You’re right, it is boring.”

  She loved going for a spin in a motor car. When she asked me one day to hire a car without a driver, we journeyed out of town and I credulously let her take the wheel; she drove at breakneck speed, and I was not wholly convinced that we would ever return from this jaunt without first ending up in hospital. She was an exceptionally able driver, but whenever we came to a turn or a crossroads I still found myself wanting to close my eyes and forget where I was. After miraculously escaping our third collision, I finally said to her:

  “We could have crashed three times already.”

  Without reducing speed, she took her left hand from the steering wheel, raised her index finger and replied:

  “Once.”

  “How so?”

  “Because after the first crash we couldn’t have driven any farther; the opportunity for further crashes wouldn’t have presented itself.”

  On the way back, however, I categorically refused to allow her behind the wheel. While we were driving, she said to me:

  “I can’t understand you. You drive just as quickly as I do. What are you afraid of? Do you think you’re a better driver than I am?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not so sure about that. But I do know the road; I know which crossroads are dangerous and which aren’t, whereas you’re driving blind.”

  She looked at me with a strange expression in her eyes and said:

  “Blind? I think it’s all the more interesting that way. Everything is, generally.”

  It was around this time that I received a commission to write a series of articles on literature, allowing me at long last to rid myself of all the erratic, uninteresting jobs. One day, Yelena Nikolayevna paid me a visit—it was her first and came without any forewarning, and so, after the unexpected ring, I was very surprised to see her upon opening the door.

  “Hello,” she said, looking round the room where I was working. “I wanted to catch you unawares and, perhaps, in another woman’s embrace.”

  She stood by the bookshelves, rapidly extracting one volume after the next and then setting them back in their place. Suddenly her gaze fell on me; her eyes bore a shade of expression that I had never before seen in them.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. One of your books just caught my interest. I’ve always wanted to read it, but I could never find it anywhere.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Golden Ass,” she said hastily. “May I borrow it?”

  It surprised me that this book could have created such an impression on her.

  “Of course,” I said, “but it’s nothing earth-shattering.”

  “My husband gave me a copy on our honeymoon; I began reading it, but accidentally dropped it into the sea. Later I asked for another copy everywhere, but I couldn’t find one. True, what I had was an English translation, whereas this one is in Russian… Anyway, what are you working on at the moment?”

  I showed her what I was writing; she asked whether she might help me.

  “Yes, of course, but I’m afraid you might find it a bore trawling through books and copying out quotes.”

  “No, on the contrary, I’d find it interesting.”

  She insisted so much that I consented. Her task consisted in copying and translating the passages I underlined, which were to be included in the article as illustrations of whatever literary point I was developing. She did this so quickly and with such ease that it seemed almost second nature to her. Moreover, she displayed a degree of learning that I would never have suspected of her: English literature was certainly her forte.

  “Where did this come from?” I asked. “You said it had all been travelling and love affairs—where did you find the time for all this reading?”

  “If writing articles about political villains, people who punch each other in the face and women who are cut into pieces didn’t stop you, then why should my love affairs prevent me from reading books? They don’t take long: one-two and you’re done.”

  Glancing up from the book in her hands, she gazed at me with mocking eyes.

  She began to visit me almost every day. Once I took her in my arms, but she pushed me aside, saying:

  “We can kiss this evening: right now it’s time for work.”

  She brought such seriousness to it all that it would sometimes cause me to laugh inadvertently. However, I could not but value her help; my work was going twice as quickly. Occasionally she would wake me up with her arrival in the morning; this was due to a long-standing force of habit, whereby I would go to bed late at night and rise late the following day. By the end of May, the weather had already turned hot. I would work with her by day, and we would dine together in the evening; later on, we would go out, and I would accompany her home afterwards, usually staying with her while she performed her evening toilet. When she came out of the bathroom with a white face and pale lips (the lipstick removed), I would take off her dressing gown, tuck her into bed and ask:

  “Now, do you need a lullaby?”

  Leaving her in the dead of night, I would step out into the street and set off homeward. Life began to seem incredible to me; I still could not accustom myself to the idea that, at last, my life lacked any tragedy, that I was doing work that interested me, that there was a woman whom I loved as I had never loved anyone before—she was neither mad nor hysterical, and I did not have to be on guard every moment, waiting for an outburst of unexpected passion, an attack of incomprehensible malice, or those pointless, uncontrollable tears. Everything that my existence had comprised until now—regrets, dissatisfaction and a sense of the manifest futility of everything I did—began to seem very distant and alien to me, as though I were thinking of something that had taken place long ago. Among these disappearing objects and fading recollections was the memory of Alexander Wolf and his story “The Adventure in the Steppe”. His book stood, as before, on my shelf, but much time had passed since I last opened it.

  Entering Yelena Nikolayevna’s apartment one day (I had my own key), I was greeted by her singing. I paused. She was humming some Spanish love song. It was one of those tunes that could have been composed only in the south, one whose origins could not be conceived of without sunlight. In some inscrutable way the melody contained light, just as others might contain snow, or impart a sense of the night. When I e
ntered the room she smiled and said to me:

  “The funny thing is that I never suspected for a moment that I’d actually remember this song. I heard it around four years ago at a concert, then once later on a gramophone—and suddenly it’s all come back to me.”

  “Perhaps, really,” I said, believing I was responding to her thought, “everything isn’t quite so tragic after all, and everything that’s positive is not always and necessarily illusory.”

  “You’re always so warm and fuzzy,” she said without any reference to the start of the conversation, “and, when you’re not being sarcastic, your thoughts are warm and fuzzy, too. Your gift for thinking interferes with you: without it, of course, you’d be happy.”

  I was utterly rapt in my earlier desire to find out what had happened to her before her arrival in Paris. What was it exactly? Which feeling had become so lastingly frozen in her eyes? And what was the source of this inner coldness in her? I knew from long experience, however, that the charm and appeal of a woman exists for me only so long as there remains something uncertain about her—some unknown dimension that affords me the possibility (or the illusion) of reconstructing an image of her again and again, imagining her as I would like her to be and, probably, not as she is in reality. It never reached the stage whereby I would prefer a lie or a falsehood to the too simple truth; however, a thoroughgoing knowledge carried with it a certain danger: you did not want to return to this, much as to a book, previously read and understood. And yet, the desire to know was always inseparable from the emotion, and no amount of reasoning could alter this. Without this palpable psychological danger, life would probably have seemed too dull to me. I was convinced that some shadow was cast over a certain period in Yelena Nikolayevna’s life, and I wanted to know whose eyes had found their permanent reflection in hers, whose chill had penetrated her body so deeply—more importantly, how and why this had happened.

  However strong my desire was to find out, I didn’t rush; I hoped that I would still have sufficient time. I first sensed the possibility of Yelena Nikolayevna’s emotional trust in me when one day, sitting next to me on the divan, she suddenly placed her hands on my shoulder in an uncertain and quite unfamiliar move. This gesture, entirely atypical of her, was more revealing than any words could be. I watched her face; her eyes could not keep up with her body and still retained their expression of calmness. I perceived that she was no longer the woman she had been only a little while ago. Perhaps she would never be that woman again. Sometimes, in telling me a few insignificant details from one or another period in her life, she would say to me “my lover at the time” or “he was one of my lovers”. Each time, hearing these words on her lips and in relation to her, I would experience an unpleasant sensation, despite knowing that it could not be otherwise and that it was impossible to exclude even a single event from her life without her ceasing to exist for me thereafter, because I would never have met her had she had a single lover more or fewer. Besides, she would utter the word in such a tone, as if she were talking about some unimportant, ephemeral servant.

  Time and again I observed (with unfailing wonderment) that women in general were remarkably frank with me and particularly keen to tell me their life stories. I’d heard a multitude of confessions, occasionally even those of a nature that made me feel uncomfortable. Seemingly most inexplicable was that in fact I had very little to do with the majority of these women; I was linked to them through mere acquaintance. Many times I asked myself the question: what, strictly speaking, could account for such outpourings, entirely unwarranted from any perspective? Since it ultimately interested me very little, however, I never spent too much time considering the reasons behind it. I knew only that women were frank with me, and this was more than sufficient, because from time to time it landed me in awkward situations. Yelena Nikolayevna was, in this sense, exceptional. True, a few times she had been capable of saying “my former lover” or “my lover at the time”, all in the same tone of voice with which she might say “my laundress” or “my cook”, but that was where it ended. Very rarely would she have these brief moments of candour: she would tell me something, and then all of a sudden she would be cruel to me, with her crudeness of expression and references to certain too realistic details. I pitied her. However, what she had hitherto never spoken of—under any circumstances—was her inner life.

  I was sitting next to her one evening; through the half-drawn curtains came a dull glow from the round street lamps. Above the divan the sconce was lit. I stood up and walked over to the window. The sky was starry and clear.

  “Sometimes I feel sorry for you,” I said. “I get the impression that you’ve been deceived over and over again, and every time you’ve said something that might have been better left unsaid you’ve subsequently had to repent of it. I’m afraid that among your admirers there will have been those who cannot be called gentlemen—and now it’s a case of once bitten, twice shy.”

  I turned around. She said nothing; her face wore a distant, vacant expression.

  “Or perhaps,” I continued, “you have a sort of emotional pneumothorax. But what doctor would have had the cruelty to do that.”

  “Two years ago in London,” she said in her calm, languid voice, “I met a man.”

  Some almost imperceptible intonation of hers forced me to put up my guard at once. I remained standing by the window. I thought that if I were to go up to her or sit in the armchair next to the divan, or even if I were to take a few steps about the room, my initial movement would suddenly disturb her frame of mind, and I would never find out what she had wanted to tell me. I dared not even turn my head. Thus, in this tense state of immobility, I began listening to her tale. Now she spoke with full and unguarded candour: what I had waited for so long and so patiently was finally happening.

  It began with a party held by an acquaintance of hers. The host was a man of fifty; his wife was twenty years his junior.

  I wanted to ask what significance the detail about the respective ages of the hosts held for later events, but I held my peace.

  The rather substantial meal was followed by some improvised entertainment. One of the guests sang fairly well, another read poetry, and one lady danced very pleasingly. The last to perform was a tall man who played some pieces by Scriabin on the piano. The music left a tremendously painful impression on Yelena Nikolayevna, which she unwittingly associated with the player. When, in the middle of the evening, he invited her to dance, it took a great effort from her not to refuse him. However, he danced wonderfully and proved, according to her, to be the most engaging dance partner she had ever come across. His face was pale, and his eyes glittered. What he said was clever and true, and his words somehow always fell in time with the music that accompanied their dancing. This man was a friend of the host’s and the lover of his wife: Yelena Nikolayevna saw the intent look of the hostess’s dark-blue eyes, never leaving him for a second as they danced.

  They spoke of America, Hollywood, Italy and Paris; he had a thorough knowledge of them all, as though he had lived everywhere for many years. He had read all the latest books—in this he was exceptionally erudite; he knew music well, yet understood nothing of painting. When the evening reached its end and he came up to her to take his leave, she noticed for the first time, with surprise, that he was not overly young; in these few minutes it seemed as if there had been some strange transformation in his face. However, she recalled this impression only much later.

  A week passed. He telephoned, and she met him in a restaurant where they dined. He was exactly as he had been on the evening of their first meeting. A band of Hungarian Gypsies was playing; there was the wailing sound of violins and their usual, painfully seductive stretching of the melody, which would suddenly break off in favour of a brisk rhythm, like an aural depiction of horses galloping along some vast imaginary plain. He listened attentively and then said:

  “In Europe there’s only one country where it’s truly possible to understand what space means—that’s R
ussia. But perhaps you don’t care for geography, least of all in a restaurant. Everything that happens is truly miraculous, don’t you think?”

  “I’ve heard those exact words said so many times that they’ve lost all standing with me.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s just so, and your poor friends were right.”

  “Sometimes there’s nothing duller than being right.”

  “Naturally. But if you were to trouble yourself to imagine the chain of events in the life of a single human being, you’d have to agree that it’s almost always miraculous.”

  “More often than not they’re simply uninteresting. And in many cases it’s unclear precisely why a person has lived so pointlessly and unnecessarily.”

  “I’ll tell you a story,” he said, “the life of a poor Jewish boy from Poland, who was born into a grocer’s family, but dreamt of being a tailor. He fought in the war, was captured, fought again, was wounded, and after many trials he wound up in England, where he succeeded in becoming a tailor, as he had always hoped he would. He dreamt of this in the sodden trenches, amid the roar of gunfire, in hospital and in captivity. After receiving his first order, he fell ill with pneumonia and died ten days later. Just think, what an exceptional chain of events, what a magnificent end!”

  “And you see the manifestation of some higher meaning in all this?”

  His face took on a serious air; his sparkling eyes bore into her.

  “Surely it’s obvious to you? It was a race towards death. He dreamt of becoming a tailor, as others dream of riches or glory. Fate seemingly preserved him so that he could achieve this aim. He wasn’t killed on the front, he didn’t perish in captivity, and he didn’t die of gangrene or blood poisoning in hospital. Finally, when his dream comes true, it turns out that its very realization heralds his own death, towards which he’s been striving all this time. Every life becomes clear—that is to say, its path, its twists and turns—only in its final moments. Do you know the Persian legend about the gardener and Death?”