The Buddha's Return (9 page)

I failed to understand exactly what he meant by this and how he might have compromised himself with the princess, but I did not press the matter, fearing too involved an explanation. He looked at me, clearly searching for some sympathy, as he always did when the conversation touched upon his personal life. I again uttered some words about the vicissitudes of fate.

“Fate, you know, is nothing but what meets the eye,” he said. “Take, for instance, a man who lives life in the belief that everything is just splendid, whereas in actual fact, you see, he’s living in a fool’s paradise.”

I asked the Gentleman whether this assertion was to be taken as a purely philosophical conceit, or whether it might contain any specific allusion.

“Both,” he replied. “On the one hand, it holds true in general terms; on the other, take Pashka Shcherbakov, for example. I’ve nothing against him. Good God, I’ve known him for such a long time. He’s not a bad sort; he’s a clever chap, one of ours.”

I shot a glance at him. He was standing in front of me, grim and unshaven, wearing a soiled, tattered jacket and an alarmingly narrow pair of trousers full of holes; a yellow cigarette was drooping from his lip, smoking.

“He lives like a lord now—good nosh, of course, an apartment and a girl, just as you’d expect.”

He shook his head and drank up the remainder of his wine. I called the waiter and ordered another glass for him.

“I like it when people take a hint,” said the Gentleman. “We are Russians, after all. But to get back to Pashka. That girl of his can barely stand him, because she’s in love with Amar.”

“Who’s Amar?”

“Her lover. Haven’t you heard?”

“No.”

“Ask her about him sometime. She got involved with him back in Tunis.”

“What, is he an Arab?”

“Worse,” said the Gentleman. “Much worse. His father was an Arab, his mother was a Pole. Got mixed up in some rather shady business in Tunis. Naturally, he wound up in
prison. ‘He had some unpleasantness,’ as Mishka would have said. It was she who bailed him out.”

“Who?”

“Lida, of course. Are you surprised?”

“No, it all seems perfectly plausible.”

“Only this is all strictly between you and me.”

“You may rest assured.”

There was, of course, nothing surprising about anything the Gentleman had told me; on the contrary, it would have been astonishing if there had been. Although I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Pavel Alexandrovich. How was it that he knew so little about Lida? How could it be that, despite having such a clear recollection of the mousey marksman and Zina, he had left out the most important part—Lida’s story? I learnt from the Gentleman that Pavel Alexandrovich had until quite recently only known of Lida from hearsay, but when he met her for the first time in the street he was moved by her unmistakeable poverty and misery—this was where everything had started. She would doubtless have told him about herself, but only what she deemed necessary to tell, concealing the rest from him. Moreover, he was thirty years her senior, and yet his persistent mistrust of people and his own experience in life were powerless in the face of this age gap. Still, was he really capable of deceiving himself so much on her account? Never had I imagined that Zina’s daughter would turn out to be a wistful girl with distant
eyes, but the moment I laid eyes on her and heard her singing, I had no doubt as to her moral character. That Pavel Alexandrovich did not recognize—or at least made out not to recognize—something so obvious could only be put down to his catastrophic, involuntary blindness.

Several weeks passed. Then one evening, completely by chance, I found myself on Place de la Bastille, just as I had done when I came across Zina, the mousey marksman and Lida on Boulevard Garibaldi. It had been a long time since I was last in this quarter of Paris. I was there because a famous Spanish revolutionary was due to give a speech at one of the larger cafés in the area; his views had long been a subject of interest to me because they lacked the naive stupidity one invariably encounters in political orators. His lecture was to be on socialism and the proletariat; he was a brilliant man, and in his analysis these things took on a human dimension. Listening to him, I was struck by the degree to which the true essence of these questions had been corrupted and distorted by ignorant, stupid politicians, who for whatever reason considered themselves representatives of the working class, while presiding over syndicates, parties and governments. The lecture finished just after eleven o’clock in the evening. As I crossed the square, passing the notorious Rue de Lappe with its ubiquitously advertised dens, a red taxi pulled up at the corner; out of it stepped Lida, followed by a man of average height, wearing a grey suit, with
a dark, thin face and a grey hat pulled down almost to his ears. From a distance he reminded me of the owner of Mishka’s hotel, although not because they bore any physical similarity to one another, but because—in as far as I was able to discern in those few seconds—there was something currish and criminal about his face. What served to underscore such an impression was his look of severe stupidity; it was obvious that this man was unaccustomed to and even incapable of thinking. Next to him, Lida’s delicate face seemed almost abstract. My eyes met her gaze, but I pretended not to see or recognize her; she too made as if she hadn’t recognized me. I quickly walked past them, but then stopped to watch where they were headed—towards the illuminated entrance of a dance hall. To my surprise I noticed that Amar—I had no doubt that this was he—walked very slowly, slightly dragging his left leg.

This happened on a Wednesday. The following Saturday evening I was due to dine at Pavel Alexandrovich’s. On Thursday, when he and I arranged everything over the telephone and he asked me how I was getting on, I replied that I had hardly been out, as I had been so busy with work. Indeed this was the case: I had recently been writing a lengthy piece on the Thirty Years War, which a friend of mine had been commissioned to write, but which he in turn had passed on to me. The article was to be published under the name of a very famous columnist and writer,
a man of means, who had earned a considerable fortune from writing books about the dictators and government ministers of various countries. I was not entirely convinced that he himself could have written such an article; however, I was personally unacquainted with him and can only defer to my friend’s categorical assertion that the famous author “was unburdened with knowledge in any quarter, save for the noble sport of horse racing”. However, this was not the crux of the matter; rather it lay in the fact that the famous journalist was having a tempestuous affair with a no less famous actress of the silver screen. He would go with her to all the fashionable late-night cabarets, whisk her off to Italy and the Riviera—in brief, he had no time at all for any articles. Besides, this was not the first time in his life that such a thing had happened. One way or another, the chance for me to earn some money was much too tempting to pass up. I spent several days in the Bibliothèque Nationale, copying out long passages from a variety of books, then I set to work at home. I still had a long way to go before I would reach the closing pages, however, and I was pondering the Peace of Westphalia with no less trepidation than did Richelieu, albeit with one marked difference: I knew its consequences, which the French cardinal along with his contemporaries could not have foreseen and in light of which the whole of early seventeenth-century French politics had acquired a rather different significance than was ascribed to it by either the
cardinal or even Père Joseph, who had been at least on the face of it so terribly unselfish. But the more I thought about the old barefooted Capuchin, the more unquestionable it seemed that only boundless, hidden ambition could have ordained both his politics and his life. The argument of one historian of this period seemed awfully convincing to me; he wrote that the most dangerous people in politics are those who scorn the direct advantages resulting from their positions, who strive towards neither personal wealth nor the satisfaction of traditional passions, whose sense of individuality finds its expression in the defence of some idea or historical concept. Unfortunately I was deprived of the opportunity to express my personal views on the Thirty Years War, and the need to adopt a certain writing style impeded me and hindered my work. The fate of Gustavus Adolphus in particular had to be abandoned without any detailed commentary, as did the part played by Wallenstein, whose grandiose, chaotic plans, however, were in my opinion more deserving of attention than Richelieu’s policies. I was further hindered by the fact that in contrast to the journalist whose name was to appear alongside the article and who was completely indifferent to the fate of any historical figure, just as he was to any historical concept, I was intrigued by the fates of all the political actors and military leaders who had taken part in the war. Despite the three hundred years separating me from them, I came to feel for each of them what any of
their contemporaries might have done—although I was acutely aware that in the various historians’ accounts these figures were no less distorted and stylized than had they been transformed by Schiller’s muse. It seemed impossible to treat Richelieu with anything but scorn, in the same way that it was impossible to write of Père Joseph with anything but respect. I tried to search for some hidden meaning in the fate of Tilly, the suicide of Wallenstein and particularly in the death of Gustavus Adolphus—but of course these notions were entirely misplaced in such a work. When I later had occasion to meet with the dummy author of the article—he turned out to be fat, bald and middle-aged, forever short of breath and with dull eyes—he was truly astonished by what I had come up with. I think that his disagreement with me over my appraisal of certain historical aspects would have been more pointed if he had held the slightest relevant idea about the content of his article. He made a few alterations, but as time was of the essence he was forced to limit himself to the purely superficial: he inserted colons and exclamation marks everywhere he could, imparting a pretentious and didactic aspect to my account and introducing an element of bad taste which, I fancied, had not been there to begin with, but was unerringly characteristic of this ignorant and vulgar man.

But all this happened later; on Friday, however, at around three o’clock in the afternoon, while I was writing
at my desk, there was a knock at the door. This surprised me, as I was not expecting anyone.

“Come in!” I said.

The door opened and there I saw Lida. She was dressed in a grey suit with a white, very low-cut blouse and a grey hat. Her eyes immediately fixed themselves on me, so that I felt fleetingly uncomfortable. I offered her the armchair. Then I asked her to what I owed the pleasure of this visit.

“I’ve come to you because I consider you to be a decent man.”

“I’m flattered,” I said somewhat impatiently. “Nevertheless, your visit no doubt has some more immediate purpose. Surely you haven’t come just to give me your personal appraisal of my moral qualities?”

She continued looking straight at me; this unnerved me.

“We saw each other recently,” she said.

“You are referring to the evening when we dined at Pavel Alexandrovich’s?”

Her eyes contained a mixture of reproach and ennui, and then, for the very first time, it occurred to me that she might in fact not be as stupid as she looked.

“Are you quite sure that you want to speak to me in such a condescending tone, so blatantly giving me to know that you think I’m an idiot?”

She had switched into French; in Russian such a phrase would have been too difficult for her.

“Heaven forbid!”

“You spotted me on Place de la Bastille as I was arriving with my lover.”

“Forgive me, but your personal life is no concern of mine.”

“Yes, indeed,” she said impatiently.

After her words about my having seen her in Place de la Bastille, her motives for coming here seemed clear enough.

“I’m afraid you’re wasting your time,” I said. “You’re hoping that I won’t mention it to anyone, am I correct?”

She grimaced, as though swallowing something unpalatable.

“Yes.”

“Now see here,” I said. “Allow me to be perfectly frank with you. You don’t want Pavel Alexandrovich to know about this because you’re afraid of losing your position. I too don’t want him to learn of this, but for a somewhat different reason: I pity him.”

“But don’t you understand?”

“Let’s not, shall we? Pursuing this would not be to your advantage.”

She then launched into an unexpected and malicious tirade.

“No, of course you don’t understand.
Parce que, voyez-vous, vous êtes un monsieur.
||||
No one’s ever slapped you in the face. No one’s ever called you a whore.”

“
On se tromperait de sexe.
”
***

“Shut up and let me speak. You’ve never had to walk the streets; you’ve never had to live for weeks without knowing where you’ll be spending the night. You’ve never been manhandled by the police. You’ve never had to spend nights with flea-ridden Arabs. You don’t know the meaning of a native quarter; you haven’t breathed in its air. You don’t understand what it means to have to depend on some fat, drooling client.”

Her speech was disjointed, her voice low and hoarse.

“You don’t know what it is to hate your own mother. You don’t know what it is to live your life in poverty. You just go to university, attending lectures, sleeping in a clean bed and sending your washing out to the laundry.
On m’a traînée toute la vie dans la boue, moi.
”
†††

She paused. Her face betrayed an expression of weariness.

“Before, when I was alone, I used to cry. I’d cry from despair, from poverty, from the fact that there was nothing I could do about it. When I was a girl, I cried because my mother’s lover would beat her, and she would cry with me. What do you know about me? Nothing. Yet when you speak to me, your voice is full of contempt; do you think I can’t hear it? Yes, I understand: we belong to two different worlds—
nous appartenons à deux mondes différents.
”