The Buddha's Return (8 page)

“That was probably another of Chernov’s inventions,” I said without holding back.

Thereupon we parted, and my companion left, expressing the hope that everything he had said would remain between the two of us. The phrase seemed unnecessary and automatic, devoid of all meaning, if for no other reason than the fact that he had said at the beginning of our conversation that the events he described were “known to everyone”. Naturally, I did not number among the ranks of this “everyone”, and there was something illicit and perhaps even vaguely hostile about my interest in this world. In any case, so it may have appeared to him. It was understandable to a degree, and were I in his shoes, I too, most likely, would have marked the brazenness and the impertinence of the fact that a well-heeled young man should suddenly intrude in an area that was divorced from him by this series of irrevocable falls—horses, alcohol, morphine, jail, syphilis, beggary—feeble depravity and filth, illness and physical frailty, the daily prospect of death
on the street, and the total absence of hope, or even the slightest illusion of attaining anything better. I think this is what he meant when he uttered that phrase, saying that our conversation would remain between the two of us. But he had no way of knowing, of course, that despite the difference in outward appearances my position was, perhaps, no less pitiful, albeit in a different way, than his.

No one, not a single person in the entire world, apart from Catherine, knew that I was afflicted by this strange mental illness, the presence of which would so invariably depress me. Particularly excruciating was the consciousness of my own inequality and other people’s superiority over me. I knew that at any moment I could lose all grip of reality and be plunged into an excruciating delirium, stripped of my defences for its duration. Luckily, I would usually sense the onset of such an attack, but sometimes it would come on all of a sudden and, terrified, I would ponder what might happen, in the library, on the street or during an exam. I did everything I could to escape it: I played a great deal of sport, every morning I would take a cold shower, and I am able to say that, physically speaking, I was in perfect health. But it was of no use. Perhaps, I thought to myself, if I were to survive an earthquake or being shipwrecked on the open sea or some other unimaginable, almost cosmic catastrophe, perhaps then there would be a turning point, a jolt that would allow me to take that first, most difficult step on the journey back to reality,
which I had so vainly sought all this time. But nothing of the sort happened, nor did it seem possible that it would happen, at least in the near future.

I continued to visit Pavel Alexandrovich, and were it not for my ongoing wariness of Lida’s presence—although she seldom joined us—I might have said that it was only there that I found true spiritual repose. There was something pleasantly hypnotic about the serene comfort of the life that Pavel Alexandrovich now led, and this could be felt everywhere, beginning with the warm intonations of his voice and ending with the astonishing softness of his armchairs. Even his meals seemed to contain that very essence: nowhere before had I eaten such velvety soup, such cutlets, such crèmes au chocolat. I was so sincerely well disposed towards him that it pained me to think something bad might happen to him. This thought would probably never have tormented me, had I been able to forget about Lida. Naturally, I never allowed myself to ask Pavel Alexandrovich about this aspect of his life; he in turn never mentioned it. One evening, however, during one of my regular visits, he said to me—this was on a Friday—that the next day, on Saturday, he would be leaving Paris. He wanted to rent a gîte near Fontainebleau for the summer and planned to go there so that he would have ample time to survey the surrounding areas, to go for a stroll in the woods and to decide whether it was worth decamping there for the summer months.

“I haven’t been to the woods for years,” he said. “But I’ve never forgotten the feeling I would always get whenever I went there—a sense of the ephemerality of everything. You only have to look at a tree that’s a few hundred years old to grasp the fleetingness of your own existence. I’ll tell you what I think of it once I’m back. Lida will be staying on in Paris by herself. You will invite her to the cinema, won’t you?”

“Yes, certainly, with pleasure,” I said. That instant I began thinking how I would later cite a lack of time and do everything within my power to avoid this.

The following evening, however, I began to feel that it would simply be discourteous on my part to break a promise I had made to Pavel Alexandrovich. I vaguely told myself that this rationalization was as artificial as it was unfounded. Refusing to dwell on the thought, however, I telephoned Lida. She said she would be expecting me. I went to pick her up after dinner; by the time I arrived she was ready, and so we set off for the cinema.

I distinctly remember the film we saw, as well as the name of the actor starring in the lead role and his many adventures. This was all the more surprising, given that only a few minutes after the lights went down I accidentally brushed Lida’s burning arm and everything began to blur. I knew that something irreparable was happening, but I was unable to stop myself. I placed my arm around her right shoulder, which in a soft and pliant motion drew
nearer to me, and from that moment on I lost all control of myself. As we exited the cinema and turned down the first street—I was unable to speak from excitement and she, too, uttered not a single word—I held her waist to me, her lips approached my mouth, I felt the touch of her body beneath her light dress and sensed something like a moist burning. Right above my head a signboard for a hotel was illuminated. We went in and followed the maid upstairs, who was for some reason wearing black stockings.

“Number nine,” a man’s voice called from below.

Above the bed a large rectangular mirror was fixed to the wall, opposite the bed stood a mirrored screen and farther on there was a mirrored wardrobe; a few moments later, all these glaring surfaces began reflecting our bodies. There was something apocalyptic and blasphemous in this fantastical multiplicity of reflections, and I started to think about the Book of Revelation.

“
On dirait de la partouze
,”
||
said Lida.

She had a hot, dry body, and the burning sensation never left me. I knew I would never forget these hours. I began to lose myself in the unexpected richness of physical sensations, and there was something almost merciless about the perpetual allure of her body. The words she uttered through those firmly clenched teeth seemed remarkably strange—as if there were no space for them amid the torrid heat of the room, they sounded like
a futile reminder of something that no longer existed. I now found myself in another world, which, naturally, I had never known before, in all its feminine irresistibility. This was what she had sung of that evening as I had listened to her! How faintly now the accompaniment of the piano sounded in my memory—a scarcely audible musical prattling. Fragments of thought flashed through my mind. No, I had never imagined that I could find myself wholly consumed by physical passion, so utterly that it left almost no room for anything else. I stared fixedly beneath me, at Lida’s ecstatic face, at her wide, half-open lips that somehow reminded me of the cruel lines at the mouth of some stone goddess I had once seen—but had forgotten where and when. As before, a great many hands, shoulders, hips and legs were writhing about in the mirrors, and I began to suffocate from this impression of multiplicity.

“My darling,” Lida began in a monotone voice. It seemed as if these sounds were having difficulty forcing their way through the thick sensual mist. “I’ve never loved anyone as I love you.”

She was now lying next to me, exhausted and spent from the sustained exertion. But gradually her voice became deeper and clearer.

“
Je n’ai pas eu de chance dans ma vie
,”
**
she went on. “I lost my innocence at fourteen.”

She continually switched from French to Russian and from Russian back to French.

“Haven’t you seen my mother’s lover? He was old even then. He’s limp, like a rag; he’s no man. It hurt me and it was so dull, I wanted to cry because of how disgusting it all was.
Est-ce que tu me comprends? Dis-moi que tu me comprends
.”
††

I nodded. She lay there naked—beside me, above me, beneath me—reflected in the still lustre of the mirrors. Again I had the impression—as so often happened—that a pair of eyes was staring at me fixedly from those terrible glass depths, and with cold despair I recognized the gaze as my own.

It required an extraordinary effort to overcome the sense of revulsion I now felt towards Lida and myself. I was, however, less inclined to blame her than I was to blame myself. In my conduct there had been an element of such flagrant baseness, of which I had until now not believed myself capable. Henceforth, who could tell what I might do and what other degradation awaited me? Everything inside me that I considered vaguely positive had been swept away by one chance encounter, but at what cost? I was consumed by other, more immediate considerations. I thought that if the matter had concerned only me, no one—least of all Pavel Alexandrovich—would have found out about this evening with Lida. But I couldn’t be sure of her. She might tell the story to her next lover; she
might ultimately confess to Pavel Alexandrovich, and that would place me in a hopeless position. How could I make this disappear, and what wouldn’t I give for the chance to regain what there had been at the beginning of the evening? I thought about this as I lay next to her. I closed my eyes so as not to see her, and in front of me appeared that gentle mist, the same one that I had emerged from and returned to so often before, crossing from one world into another and finding myself once again in this noiseless abyss, after every psychological catastrophe. I sank into the familiar silence, so empty and dead that even the echo of this current misfortune was muted, because nothing mattered any more. Still, however, growing ever more dim, a light flickered before me; somewhere in the distance the last muffled sounds to reach me were dying away. And next to me, in this silent arena, lay Lida’s naked body, as still as a corpse.

“
Monsieur, la séance est terminée
,”
‡‡
said a far-off woman’s voice.

Then it drew closer and repeated:

“
La séance est terminée, monsieur.
”

I opened my eyes. I was sitting in an empty cinema theatre; the curtain had already been drawn across the canvas of the lifeless screen. The usherette who had pronounced these words was looking at me with a mixture of surprise and sympathy.

“
Excusez-moi
,” I said. “
Merci de m’avoir réveillé, mademoiselle
.”
§§

I left the cinema. There were stars in the sky, and the night was warm and peaceful. I could see stone buildings with their bolted iron shutters, tranquil street corners, the brightly illuminated windows of the cafés. And for the first time ever, my return to reality appeared to lack the sad numbness that usually accompanied it; instead there was something almost buoyant about it. I imagined that willpower would triumph one day over my illness and everything that had haunted me so relentlessly would disappear not for a period of time, but for ever. Then, of course, my real life would begin. Later, whenever those visions returned to me—those to do with the imaginary meeting with Lida, the hotel and the mirrors—I would try to think about something else at once, although I knew I could never deceive myself: what I found disgusting had, in effect, really happened, and if it were not vested in the concrete form of accomplished fact, then this was merely an arbitrary, meaningless detail. It was precisely this absence of fact, however, that offered me an unassailable argument, an indisputable justification—and on that evening this deceptive piece of evidence seemed like a happy solution to the problem.

Some time after this episode I turned once again to my informant, who was not difficult to track down: by day he could be found in a café near Place Maubert, where the fag-end men congregated; by night one would have to journey to Montparnasse. In his endless pilgrimages across Paris there were places where this man would always go, much as others would go to their clubs. After a second glass of wine, he was ready to tell me everything I required—what he knew, what he had heard, and even what he did not know but was the object of his speculation. Of course, whatever we spoke of, he would always begin with one and the same thing—his princess, whose betrayal he could never forgive.

“While we’re sitting here talking,” he said, wiping his lips with the little finger of his right hand, not without a certain degree of coquettishness, “that bitch is lounging about in satin sheets in her apartment. But she doesn’t realize that I’ve got her right where I want her.”

“How so?”

“My good man, all I need to do is to go to the right place and say to the relevant person:
‘Monsieur, vous savez l’origine d’sa richesse?
’”
¶¶

His French was fluent, although he overemphasized all his nasals and pronounced the French “o” like a Russian “a”.

His faded, drunken eyes stared right at me.

“Only she suspects, of course, that Kostya Voronov has always been a
gentleman
”—this word he pronounced
entirely after his own fashion—“and that he would be entirely incapable of doing such a thing. Do you know what my nickname is?”

I replied that I hadn’t the faintest idea.

“‘The Gentleman’,” he said. “That’s what they call me. Here he is, standing before you—Kostya Voronov, gentleman, lieutenant of the Imperial Army. As I recall, the dispatch read: ‘Distinguished himself through unflinching bravery, setting an example to his commanding officers and subordinates alike…’ That’s the sort of man she’s betrayed. And why? Because, my dear fellow, Kostya Voronov had no intention of compromising himself, that’s why.”