The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov

Author:Gaito Gazdanov
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781782270362
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2013-09-27T23:00:00+00:00

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 entered 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.

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