The Flight E-Book

Gaito Gazdánov

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

While summering on the French Riviera, the young Seryozha secretly becomes the lover of the much older Liza - who is also his father's mistress. As autumn approaches, they reluctantly part: Liza to return to Paris, Seryozha to take up his studies at university in London. When he finds out about their affair, Seryozha's father attempts to convince Liza to leave his son, for the sake of the boy's own happiness. She finally gives in - but a sudden, fatal catastrophe changes everything...Gazdanov's second novel is proof of his wide-ranging talents: originally written before his celebrated noir experiments The Spectre of Alexander Wolf and The Buddha's Return, The Flight blends psychological drama, illicit romance and moments of both comedy and lyricism into a modernist take on the traditional Russian nineteenth-century realist novel epitomised by Tolstoy.

Leseprobe

GAITO GAZDANOV

THE FLIGHT

Translated from the Russian by Bryan Karetnyk

PUSHKINPRESSLONDON

Contents

Title PageThe FlightAbout the PublisherCopyright

THE FLIGHT

EVENTS IN SERYOZHA’S LIFE began on that memorable evening when, for the first time in many months, he saw in his room, above the bed where he slept, his mother—wearing a fur coat, gloves and an unfamiliar black velvet hat. There was a look of alarm on her face, so unlike the one that he had always known. He was unable to account for her unexpected appearance at this late hour, for she had left almost a year ago and he had grown used to her continued absence. Yet now, here she was, standing at his bedside. She sat down quickly and whispered to him not to make a fuss, telling him to get dressed and to come home with her right away.

“But Papa didn’t say anything to me,” Seryozha said.

She offered no explanation, however, and just kept repeating, “Come now, Seryozhenka, quickly.”

She then carried him outside—it was a cold, misty night—where a tall woman in black was waiting for her; a few steps later, around the corner, they got into a motor car that immediately set off at a phenomenal speed, bearing them along unfamiliar streets. Later on, half dreaming, Seryozha glimpsed a train, and when he awoke it turned out that he was in fact on board this train, but something had imperceptibly altered; then, at last, his mother told him that he was going to live with her in France, not with his father in London, that she would buy him an electric train with all sorts of carriages and wagons, and that now they would never again be parted, although Papa would sometimes come to visit.

Seryozha would later recall that evening time and time again: his mother’s unfamiliar, tender face, her hurried whispers, the alarming quiet in his father’s cold house in London, and then the journey by car and by train. Only later did he learn that they had crossed the Channel by steamer, but he did not harbour even the faintest memory of it, for he had been sound asleep and had no idea how he had arrived at his destination. He was seven years old at the time, and this journey marked the beginning of myriad other events. After this, he travelled far and wide with his mother; one summer’s day, however, towards evening, on a terrace overlooking the sea, where he and his mother were taking dinner together, Seryozha’s father calmly strode in, took off his hat, bowed to Seryozha’s mother, kissed Seryozha and said:

“Well, well, Olga Alexandrovna. We’ll consider today the end of this little romantic episode, shall we?” As he stood behind Seryozha’s chair, his great hand tousled the boy’s hair. He glanced at his wife and broke into quick German. Seryozha did not understand a word of it until his father said in Russian: “Really, Olya, aren’t you tired of all this?” Recollecting himself, he immediately switched back into German. A few minutes later, Seryozha managed to catch another phrase that he could understand—this time it was his mother who uttered it: “Darling, you never did understand, and you’re incapable of understanding it. You’re in no position to judge.” Seryozha’s father nodded cynically in agreement. Waves lapped beneath the terrace while a brown-green palm drooped motionlessly over them and the dark-bluish water glittered in the little bay, not far from a narrow road. Amid the silence Seryozha’s mother swung her tanned leg, looking serenely and expectantly at the boy’s father, as though studying him, despite the fact that he was just the same as always—tall, immaculate, broad and clean-shaven.

“German’s such a wretched language,” he said at last.

“Inherently so?”

He laughed and said, “Yes, even independent of the circumstances that…”

Seryozha’s mother sent him to his room.

“Won’t Papa be leaving?” he asked, immediately finding himself high up in the air in front of his father’s smooth face with its large deep-blue eyes.

“No, Seryozha, I’m not leaving. Not again,” he said.

His parents had a long conversation on the terrace. Seryozha managed to read half a book, but still they went on talking. His mother then made a telephone call; Seryozha listened, lying on the floor, as she said:

“Impossible ce soir, mon chéri.” And then, “Si je le regrette? Je le crois bien, chéri.”*

Thus Seryozha understood that chéri would not be coming today, and so he was left feeling very pleased, since he did not like this man, whom, after his mother, he had also called chéri, thinking it to be his name, eliciting laughter from that dark face with its fixed grin, above which hung tight, thick curls of hair, as black as the Devil himself. Chéri never showed up again after that. There was, however, another man, somewhat similar to him, who also spoke with an accent, both in French and in Russian.

Seryozha’s father did not leave that day, but stayed on for a fortnight, only to disappear early one morning without saying goodbye. After that, in Paris, at a railway station, he met his wife and child with flowers, sweets and toys; he carried the flowers in his hand, but the rest of it lay waiting in that same long dark-blue motor car that Seryozha remembered from London. They installed themselves in an enormous new mansion block, where Seryozha was able to ride a bicycle from one room of the apartment to the next; everything was going well until Seryozha’s mother left once again, taking with her only a small nécessaire and showering Seryozha in kisses. She returned, in any case, exactly ten days later, but discovered her husband gone, finding only a laconic note: “I consider a period of absence to be necessary and in our mutual interest. I wish you…” Two days later, in the evening, the telephone rang—Seryozha’s mother was not at home, although she was expected at any moment; Seryozha was called to the telephone and heard from afar his father’s very funny (or at least so it seemed to him) voice, asking him whether he had been bored. Seryozha said no, the day before he and his mother had pretended to be robbers and it had been a lot of fun.

“With your mother?” enquired his father’s odd-sounding voice.

“Yes, with Mama,” said Seryozha and, turning around, he saw her. She had come in without Seryozha’s noticing her light footsteps on the rug. She took the receiver from him and launched into rapid conversation.

“Yes, again,” she said. “No, I don’t think so… Of course… Well, to each his own… Yes… When?… No, just repaying kindness with kindness; remember, you met me with flowers… What, the flowers are for him?… The toys will do just fine… All right.”

“Why are you always going away?” Seryozha asked his mother. “Are you bored here with us?”

“My silly Seryozhenka,” his mother said. “My silly boy, my silly little fair-haired one. When you grow up, you’ll understand.”

Just as Seryozha, from his very first days of consciousness, could remember his mother and father, so too, clearly and abidingly, could he remember his Aunt Liza, her black hair, her red lips and an aroma that mixed the tobacco from the English cigarettes she smoked with her perfume, warm, silky fabrics, and that light acidity of her own. It was a very faint smell, but it was so characteristic of her that it was impossible to forget, just like her peculiar voice, which always sounded distant and strangely pleasant. Yet however much the lives of Seryozha’s mother and father were full of apologies, conversations in that incomprehensible German, departures, journeys, returns and surprises, Liza’s existence was by the same measure devoid of any irregularity. Truly, she was a living reproach to Seryozha’s parents—everything in her life was so clear, perfect and crystalline that Seryozha, lying in his favourite position on the floor in the hallway, once caught his father saying to his mother:

“To look at Liza, one could never think that she might suddenly give birth to a child one day, but then again…”

Seryozha’s mother would always regard Liza with slightly guilty eyes; even his father seemed to shrink in her presence, and everyone would almost apologize to Aunt Liza for their personal imperfections, which were particularly ugly in light of her incontestable moral grandeur. However, an elusive memory dimly surfaced in Seryozha’s mind: when he had been very little, Aunt Liza had taken him out for a walk, and with them had come a man who talked animatedly with his aunt. But this had happened so very long ago, and the memory of it was so indistinct that Seryozha was no longer sure that it had not all been a dream. Aunt Liza’s natural state was one of quiet surprise. She was amazed by everything: the behaviour of Seryozha’s parents, the very possibility of such behaviour, the books and newspapers she read, the crimes they contained; the only things that failed to amaze her were improbable and heroic deeds—for example, when a person laid down his life for someone, rescued a group of people or chose death over ignominy. She was slim, her skin was almost as smooth as Seryozha’s father’s, she was immaculate, and her hands were always cold and rather hard. One day, when all four of them—Seryozha, his parents and Aunt Liza—happened to be driving past a shooting stall in the street, Seryozha’s father suddenly stopped the car and said:

“Well, ladies, shall we relive the good old days and have a shot?”

Seryozha’s mother never once hit the bullseye; his father missed several times, although he generally shot very well, and only Aunt Liza, fixing the cardboard target directly in her sight, put five bullets right through it, knocking down ball after ball on the dancing jets of the fountain.

“Your hand’s as steady as a rock, Liza,” Seryozha’s father then said.

As Seryozha grew older, he began to understand people better, and his instinctive judgements about everything gradually gained perspective; he began to suspect that Aunt Liza was unlike other people, since everything would change over the course of their lives, depending upon circumstances, events and influences; they might find absurd what only a year ago had seemed completely practical, and so often they contradicted themselves and changed on the whole so much that it was difficult to tell who was clever and who a fool, even who was beautiful and who ugly; in other words, the strength of their resistance to the outside influences that defined their lives was negligible, and they exhibited constancy only in very rare and limited respects. Seryozha knew hoards of people, for through his father’s home passed the most varied stream of guests, visitors, petitioners, friends, women and relatives. Aunt Liza differed from them all in that nothing about her ever altered. That complex network of feelings, knowledge and ideas, which for others was shifting and fluid, remained for her just as constant and as static as it had always been—as if the world were some sort of fixed concept. So thought Seryozha about Liza; so, too, thought others about her, and this went on for many years until an event that displayed the manifest fallacy of these notions took place. However, even a few years prior to these events, Seryozha, who knew Liza more intimately than the rest, had begun to doubt the accuracy of the image of her that he had created, when Liza and his father had an argument in front of him about a recently published novel. The novel recounted the story of a man who had dedicated his life to a woman who did not love him, a woman for whom he had left another woman, to whom he had been dearer than anything on earth. Seryozha’s father defended this man. “You have to understand, Liza, the point is that he was drawn to the vilaine, whereas the other woman was almost totally irrelevant. So what if she loved him? That’s all well and good, but really, he wanted something else, you understand?”

“I’m not saying that I don’t understand the reason,” said Liza. “The reason is clear enough. But the matter lies elsewhere: in the idiotic betrayal, in the futility of it. She deserved happiness more than that other woman.”

“Happiness isn’t deserved, Liza,” said Seryozha’s father curtly. “It is either given to you or it isn’t.”

“You’re wrong; it is deserved,” said Liza resolutely.

Seryozha listened. He was surprised by his father’s soft, quiet voice, while Aunt Liza continued implacably to drive home her point, her eyes narrow and wild.

Seryozha asked, “Papa, have you noticed how pretty Aunt Liza is?”

His father became flustered and said that he had noticed it long ago and that everyone knew it to be true. Aunt Liza got up and left, leaving Seryozha’s father looking embarrassed, which might have seemed surprising, for the argument had been an abstract one and could not have borne any relation either to Seryozha’s father or to his aunt. That was the first time Seryozha had ever seen his Aunt Liza toppled from her immutable serenity.

In general, Seryozha would see his mother and father relatively infrequently—Aunt Liza was his constant companion. His father had affairs to attend to, business, trips away; his mother led her own completely separate life. Often for two or three days at a time Seryozha would be deprived of her rapid footsteps, only for them to reappear later; she would come into his room and say: “Hello, Seryozhenka, hello, my darling, I’ve missed you so terribly.” She usually spoke to him in such warm, comforting terms, always latching onto what he was interested in at that very moment, playing with him enthusiastically, showing him kindness and tenderness for hours on end. She knew why some dogs had long tails, why cats were aloof, why horses have eyes on the sides of their heads and what the length of the average crocodile was. Aunt Liza knew all this, too, but her answers somehow never satisfied Seryozha, because they lacked something essential, perhaps this comfort and warmth. But Seryozha was happiest only after everyone had gone, and he was left alone in the care of the housekeeper. Such an event would usually be heralded by the arrival of Sergey Sergeyevich with some particularly intricate toy; Seryozha’s father would give it to him, expressing his hope that Seryozha would behave himself and asking him not to get upset; a few minutes later Seryozha would watch from the window as his father’s long motor car pulled away. Now he could do whatever he liked. He would shoot at a portrait of his grandmother with a bow and arrow, slide down the banisters, ride in the lift until his head hurt—up and down, up and down—spend all his free time lying on the floor, gorge himself on pastries, pour soup down the lavatory, eat handfuls of salt and refuse to wash. In the evening, as he lay on the floor, he would rub his eyes and be delighted to see green stars appear before him.

Later, as he grew older, no one curtailed his freedom, and so he began to appreciate that his parents had essentially nothing to do with him. The constant stream of people that had lodged in his memory not only never halted, but in fact seemed to grow in strength—and he lived apart from this. When he was sixteen, he invited Aunt Liza to the theatre for the first time. By now her authority had somewhat diminished; she would laugh at some of the things he said, and ask for his opinion—and so Seryozha felt himself almost her equal. Both she and Seryozha spoke of his parents as “them”—as though subconsciously setting themselves apart. They read together, listened to the same music, liked the same books. Liza was a whole fifteen years older than Seryozha. He began to see her in his dreams, in blurry, surreal situations; then, one night—it was late spring, sometime after two o’clock in the morning, and Seryozha was reading in his room—light suddenly flooded the whole apartment, and footsteps and voices could be heard; Seryozha’s parents had returned from a ball, bringing with them a few people “to round off the evening” at home; a few minutes later there was a familiar knock at the door and in came Liza, wearing a revealing black dress that exposed her back, with her bare—cold, thought Seryozha—arms and a plunging neckline. Her eyes seemed bigger than usual beneath those erect lashes, and her excited smile was unlike the one that usually adorned her face. At that moment Seryozha was seized by an inexplicable urge, so much so that his voice broke when he began to speak.

“You’ve been reading too much, Seryozha,” she said, sitting beside him and laying her hand on his shoulder. “I just came in to say goodnight.”

And with that she walked out, having failed to notice the strange frame of mind Seryozha seemed to find himself in. After the door had closed behind her, Seryozha just lay there without bothering to undress; he felt slightly nauseous—it was a vague, premonitory and pleasant sensation.

And so, with incredible speed, in the two months that elapsed between that evening and Seryozha’s departure for the coast, a deep and lasting change took place, which began when the entire idyllic world of Seryozha’s lengthy, belated childhood crumbled, disappearing for ever. During this time, however, nothing altered substantially: his mother’s voice would sound just as warm and tender as it had done before, whenever she spoke to someone on the telephone; his father would travel back and forth across the city as he had always done; and by evening, just as before, the enormous rooms of the apartment would throng with various people, and everything would be as it had always been. But all of a sudden Seryozha came to understand a number of things of which he had already been aware, but concerning which he had fostered an entirely incorrect notion. Snatches of conversation between his mother and father now became intelligible to him, as did Liza’s tempered exasperation; he noticed many other things—that money was being thrown in all directions and expended in much vaster quantities than was necessary. He suddenly grasped how his mother lived—it aroused in him pity mixed with tenderness. Sometimes, when present during conversations in the drawing room, he would listen closely to what was being said, watch out for the most curious leaps of intonation and sometimes, wilfully closing himself off to the meaning of the phrases that had been uttered, listen to their musical excursions, as though it were some peculiar concert—with crescendos, diminuendos, monotone baritone notes, high-pitched women’s voices that would gasp and break off, only to rise again afterwards to the deep, tuneless accompaniment of a croaking bass; closing his eyes tight, Seryozha could see distinctly before him a bass drum with a taut, lifelessly impassive skin—right there, where there was no drum, but a venerable old chap, a philosopher and professional advisory specialist in matters of international law.

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, amiable 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.

“Yes,” replied Olga Alexandrovna, but this “yes”, despite her best intentions, sounded flat and unintentionally theatrical.

“Far away?”

“To Italy.”

“A fine country,” said Sergey Sergeyevich dreamily. “But then, you know that just as well as I do; indeed, it isn’t the first time you’ve gone there. You’ve been out of sorts lately; I think it’s an admirable idea, it’s sure to cheer you up. I’m delighted for you. Well, all the best. Do write.”

He kissed her hand and left. She stood for a few seconds, then sighed and began making her way downstairs to the entrance, where a motor car was already waiting for her. Neither Seryozha nor Liza was at home—they had been out since morning.

Sergey Sergeyevich returned to his apartment, where a familiar visitor awaited him—the celebrated actress Lola Aînée, who had come to ask him to finance a music hall she was planning to open. She was a very old woman, of an age with Sergey Sergeyevich’s mother, yet she remained firmly convinced of her irresistibility; she had undergone many surgical operations and spent hours daily on massages, her appearance and her toilette. At first sight, particularly from afar, she really might have looked young. Sergey Sergeyevich glanced momentarily at the motionless skin on her face and those long black eyelashes, starkly curled heavenwards, and recalled that only a year or two ago this woman had married a man more than thirty years her junior.

“Toujours délicieuse, toujours charmante,” said Sergey Sergeyevich, greeting her. “Je suis vraiment heureux de vous voir.”*