E-Book, Englisch, 187 Seiten
Gazdanov The Spectre of Alexander Wolf
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-78227-036-2
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
(Pushkin Classics)
E-Book, Englisch, 187 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-036-2
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
GAITO GAZDANOV (1903-1971) joined the White Army aged just sixteen and fought in the Russian Civil War. Exiled in Paris from the 1920s onwards, he eventually became a nocturnal taxi-driver and gained prominence on the literary scene as a novelist, essayist, critic and short-story writer. The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, The Beggar and Other Stories, The Buddha's Return and The Flight are also published by Pushkin Press.
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“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,...
