The Buddha's Return (7 page)

I visited Pavel Alexandrovich almost every week and talked at length with him. I wanted to understand exactly how he had been reduced to the position in which I had found him when we first met, and how, once in this position, he had managed to preserve what had so sharply distinguished him from his comrades in misfortune. I knew that when a man becomes impoverished the road back is almost always
inaccessible, not only in terms of a return to material well-being—many poor people were comparatively wealthy in my experience—but mainly in what is termed social stratification: they did not, as a rule, rise up from their newfound status. Naturally, I never posed this question directly, nor did I even allude to it. However, reading between the lines of a few off-hand remarks made by Pavel Alexandrovich, I was able to construct a plausible narrative. Something had happened during his early years abroad—I never learnt what exactly—a tragedy linked to some woman, it seemed. Thereafter he had taken to drink. Thus his situation had continued for a number of years and probably nothing would have saved him had it not been for the fact that he fell ill. One night he collapsed in the street and lay there for several hours, until he was picked up and taken to a hospital. There he was given a thorough examination, all the necessary tests were carried out, he underwent treatment for several months, and when at last he felt sufficiently recovered the doctor told him that he would survive only on the provision that he completely abstained from alcohol. Pavel Alexandrovich was soon enough convinced of the truth in the doctor’s words: a single glass of wine immediately induced vomiting and excruciating pain. He gave up drinking and after a short while regained the majority of his health. By the time we met in the Jardin du Luxembourg, he had already been teetotal for a year and a half. He had long already
felt the acute shame of his situation, but now he was old, physically frail, and for many years had led the life that his former acquaintances were now leading, and he fancied that if nothing were to change in the near future, there would be only one thing for it—suicide.

Such was the apparent explanation for what had happened to him. It seemed to me, however, that there must have been something else—the constant passive resistance of his unquestionable innate culture to that sudden fall, some internal, perhaps almost subconscious, almost organic stoicism, which he himself so stubbornly denied.

Naturally, I couldn’t help but notice that there was a woman living in his apartment, although I had never once set eyes on her, and Pavel Alexandrovich never so much as said a word about it. However, I often spotted evidence of her presence: in the ashtray lay cigarette ends bearing the imprint of encrimsoned lips, and a barely perceptible hint of perfume would linger in the room. But what ultimately could have been more natural? And so one day when I arrived—as usual, towards eight o’clock in the evening—I found not two, but three place settings at the table.

“There will be three of us for dinner this evening,” said Pavel Alexandrovich, “assuming you’ve no objection.”

“On the contrary,” I hastened to say. That very moment I heard footsteps and turned my head—I started with surprise and an unexpected feeling overwhelmed me: before me stood a young woman, in whom I instantly recognized
Zina’s daughter, although she was completely transformed since that day I saw her on the street with her mother and the mousey marksman. She was elegantly attired in a navy-blue silk dress, fairly broad with ample pleats; her fair hair was combed in waves, her lips were crimson, and her eyes lightly pencilled. But still there was that same look about her face that I had spotted when I first set eyes on her and which was extremely difficult to define—something both attractive and unpleasant at the same time.

She offered me her hand and excused herself, saying that she often found it difficult to express herself in Russian. She pronounced her “r”s as the French do and continually lapsed into French during the conversation—but there she had nowhere to hide. She spoke much as people did on the streets in the poorer quarters of Paris, and I shuddered to hear these familiar intonations, that itinerant mass of sounds, wretched and somehow genuinely tragic. In any case, she remained mostly silent, occasionally transferring her gaze from Shcherbakov to me and back again, irking me somewhat with her absurd air of self-importance. She was twenty-six years old, although to look at she seemed older, as her complexion had lost the taut freshness of youth, and because there was a slight hoarseness in her voice when she lowered it. But even this held a peculiar allure…

That evening I knew almost nothing about her. I could have learnt everything from Mishka, but he was no longer
among the living. I had, however, alternative sources of information, of which I later availed myself: I invited one of the Russian tramps I knew by sight to accompany me to a café, and on the third glass of wine he revealed a lot about her life to me. But this happened five or six days after our dinner for three.

Pavel Alexandrovich, as always, did not touch the wine; I took a few sips. Lida, on the other hand, drank four glasses. After dinner Pavel Alexandrovich asked me whether I liked Gypsy romances. I replied that I did.

“Then let me invite you to a little amateur concert,” he said.

We retired to the other half of the apartment, which until then I had not had the opportunity of seeing. There was a fur rug on the floor, and the walls were decorated in dark-blue wallpaper. In the drawing room there was a piano. Pavel Alexandrovich seated himself at it, lightly stroked the keys and said:

“Shall we, Lida?…”

She began sotto voce, although it was immediately clear that she was musically gifted, that she was incapable of hitting a wrong note or missing a beat. After a minute she seemed to forget about us and began singing as if she were alone in the room—alone, or in front of a full auditorium. I was familiar with almost all her repertoire, as extensive as it was, which included French
chansons,
Gypsy romances and many other songs of the most varied
and random origins. But until this evening I had never imagined that they could sound like this. To her performance, which could in no way be criticized in terms of its artistry or its musical sincerity, she brought a sustained, grave sensitivity, so often lacking in these works. In her voice, now lingering, now brief, now deep, in all its various timbres, there was always that same unrelenting insistency, which ended up overwhelming the piano, the singing, the sequence of rhyming words, until it became simply painful. There was an inexplicable auditory wantonness about it, and as I closed my eyes the white gulf of an imaginary bed appeared before me, and in it was Lida’s naked body with the vague silhouette of a man bending over her. However, the most unpleasant thing about it all was a sort of personal reminder—a reminder that no one in her audience was or could be entirely indifferent to this suffocating sensual world. And so even then, as I listened to her singing, I knew that perhaps all it would take to draw me irresistibly towards her was one random twist of fate, and neither my instinctual contempt for her nor the chronic psychological illness that kept dragging me into that cold abstract space from which there was no escape would be able to fight off this allure. As these thoughts went about in my mind, I suddenly felt infinitely sorry for Pavel Alexandrovich; one could only assume that in that world of which she was an irresistible living reminder he had been assigned the pitiful role of
her insipid companion—just as he could only be her accompanist in this auditory union of piano and voice. I paid close attention to Lida—to her red mouth, to her eyes, which occasionally took on a dreamy, misty expression, to the rhythmic swaying of her slender body, which accompanied her singing.

Suddenly I remembered her mother, Zina, with her aged, clumsily painted face, her toothless mouth and lifeless eyes, and her rheumatic feet in evening slippers. Then I returned my gaze to Lida; her features blurred and receded into the distance, and then, feeling a sudden chill run down my spine, I momentarily glimpsed the vanished similarity between Lida and her mother. Lida, however, had far to go before she would reach this stage—I could but muse how many times over, in the course of the long years ahead, Lida’s body would move in that swaying rhythm and how someone else’s eyes would look at her with the same avid attention with which I was watching her now. By the time she had finished singing I felt drunk; I left almost immediately, alluding to a need to prepare for an exam, and only outside did I once again feel free.

A few days later I sought out a former acquaintance of mine, an old Russian marksman, someone I would have recognized even from afar, because it was impossible to mistake him for anyone else: his facial hair grew in patchy, isolated clumps. Two or three times I had seen him cleanly shaven, and only then did he begin to resemble other people. But when he was unshaven, which was most of the time, there was something almost botanical, something resembling patches of grey moss forcing their way through rock, about this strange growth on his face. I invited him into a small café, ordered him a glass of red wine and a sandwich—he ate very little, like all alcoholics—and asked him whether he knew Zina, her husband and her daughter. At first he answered evasively, but soon enough the wine set to work on him, and he told me everything he knew about what he called “that family”. I had to make a tremendous effort, however, to get him to talk about what interested me, as he would constantly digress onto a never-ending tale of some princess, a former mistress of his, whom he swore he would never forget and who had made such a wonderful career for herself in Paris, which, incidentally, was only to be expected, as she was such an exceptional woman. I couldn’t quite gather what sort of career it was exactly, all the more so as my friend said that it had taken years of patience and careful planning for the princess to achieve her aims. In the event, it all became clear: the princess, it turned out, had worked
as a lady’s maid for an old woman who was almost deaf and blind, and whom she had systematically robbed. And when the old woman died, leaving her fortune to some distant relatives, the princess found herself in possession of a considerable sum of money. It was then, he said, that she scorned his love and retreated into herself. He was clearly looking to me for sympathy; I nodded and vaguely remarked that these things happen and that fortune is not always the privilege of the worthy. He shook my hand with drunken sincerity and at last began on Zina and Lida. He related to me their story with such details that seemingly no one could have known, yet he mentioned them as if they were plain for all to see. First, he alleged that Zina herself did not know who Lida’s father was, because she had led a rather varied life in those days. Until the age of twelve, Lida had lived in the countryside, and only then did she come to live with her mother. At fourteen, she became the lover of the mousey marksman; when Zina found out about this there was a terrible scandal, she launched herself at her the man and wounded him with a pair of scissors—“In a fit of female jealousy,” said the marksman. Later, however, everything “returned to normal”, particularly after Lida ran away from home and disappeared for four years. Precisely how she spent them, no one, not even my informant, knew. True, one of his friends, Petya Tarasov, said that he had seen Lida in Tunis, selling things along the waterfront, but it was impossible to
believe everything that Petya Tarasov said, since he was a drunkard, and the marksman also spoke disapprovingly of him, averring that he was an untrustworthy man. It subsequently came out, however, that Lida had indeed lived in Tunis. Then she returned home; her appearance had given one to suspect that she had been ill for a long time.

“Did they all live on Rue Simon le Franc back then?” I enquired.

No, it turned out that they had never lived there: they had an apartment in Rue de l’Église Saint-Martin.

“An apartment?” I said in astonishment. I knew this street; it didn’t seem at all possible for there to have been any apartments there—there were only wooden huts housing Polish labourers, Arabs and Chinese, and on the corner was Bar Polski, one of the most sinister places I had ever seen. According to the description provided by my friend, however, Zina’s apartment consisted entirely of two rooms, with no running water, gas or even electricity. I felt it would be too much to ask where Zina got the money for her meagre living; I knew that such questions were inappropriate among this sort of people. But the marksman explained to me that Zina and Lida earned decent money going from one building to the next, singing, while the mousey marksman accompanied them on the accordion. This had gone on until Zina somehow managed to ruin her voice for good. The money they earned did not last either, as Zina drank and the marksman gambled at
the races—and so he lost what Zina did not manage to drink. It was impossible to rely on Lida, as she stayed at home infrequently and had not long ago married a young Frenchman, whose parents had disowned him and who died soon thereafter, injecting himself with an overdose of morphine, following which Lida was arrested, but released a few days later. Then my acquaintance informed me that Lida was now living with Pasha Shcherbakov, about whom he also spoke in considerable detail, and what he said largely tallied with what I already knew. I could but marvel at how remarkably well informed this man was. He knew the life story of the mousey marksman, too, as well as the unfortunate incident with the motorcycle, which had been fabricated by Chernov, with whom he was also familiar. Regarding the mousey marksman, he said that back in Russia he had been an accountant, in Astrakhan, or maybe it was Arkhangelsk, who since the outbreak of war had served in the commissariat, and later arrived abroad with a certain amount of money, although he was soon ruined, losing most of it at Monte Carlo and the remainder at the races. He had even met Zina at a racecourse, the Auteuil, on that fateful day when he bet practically everything he had on the famous, incomparable Pharaoh III, the finest horse ever to race in France. The jockey, however, had been bribed by a jealous rival and, leading Pharaoh with “the stick”, threw the race at the finish line, so that no one would be any the wiser. As he
told me this, my acquaintance showed clear signs of excitement. Moreover, he had displayed such a knowledge of racing terminology as to leave me in no doubt regarding his expertise in this area—and so I fell to thinking that the causes leading people to Rue Simon le Franc were really rather few, and almost never varied. “It was in losing my fortune that I gained Zina,” the mousey marksman was reputed to have said in the days after the incident.