The Buddha's Return (12 page)

Just then something twitched inside me—I cannot describe it any other way. My gaze, which had until now been fixed on a single point in the river, slid farther away, and the shimmering reflections of the street lamps floated into my field of vision. I looked up from the river, and then with phenomenal speed the stars in the winter sky appeared before me, cold and distant. Perhaps I am still destined to awaken one day or one evening, to forget these abstract terrors and to begin living as I once did and as I ought to live always, not in the fantasy that surrounded me, but in the immediate reality of existence. Oblivion never entirely forsook me; it merely receded a little into the distance. This almost allowed me to forget all about it, and thus I would begin to perceive everything differently: when
spending the night with a woman I would feel a sense of gratitude towards my poor body, when reading some third-rate novel I would no longer despise the dead man who had written it. In a certain sense, it began to seem as if everything—or almost everything—had a justification of its own and that, surrounded by this scant human warmth, I was living in a world where people cried when a baby died or a husband was killed on the battlefield, where people said, “I’ve never loved anyone but you,” in a world full of children and puppies, in a world beyond which lay only coldness and death.

Suddenly I felt chilled to the bone; I upturned the collar of my overcoat and crossed the bridge. Yet I kept thinking about Pavel Alexandrovich and his ultimately astonishing fate. I recalled his saying to me that he had been saved by this obscure illness, and the more I thought about it, the more I was inclined to believe that his abstinence from wine, all the pain and retching, was perhaps not even an illness, but some mysterious manifestation of man’s instinct for self-preservation, the very thing that his unfortunate comrades had been so lacking in. What would have become of his inheritance had he remained an alcoholic? Again I saw him standing in front of me, just as he had been when I first laid eyes on him—an old beggar in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Those words of his, which had been uncomfortable to hear and which he had uttered long after becoming rich, rang in my ears:

“I shan’t return to you the ten francs you gave me back then; that would be no way to thank you. I was so very grateful to you for it. I know, of course, that you’re more or less indifferent to money, but people seldom give so much to an old beggar.”

Now he would be sitting in his armchair, in his warm, well-appointed apartment, looking at his bookshelves and the golden Buddha, thinking on a peaceful death. Lida would come in the evening and render up her obedient body to him; then she would arise from his bed and return to her flat, and he would sleep until the morning—in those white bedsheets, under the quilted duvet. In the morning he would drink some coffee and read the newspaper, later he would take lunch and then go out, either on foot or by car, for a walk. In the evening he would go sometimes to the theatre, sometimes to a concert, sometimes to the cinema. He had no concerns about tomorrow, money or the future in general; there was everlasting warmth and comfort, a fireplace, divans, armchairs, and soft footsteps across the thick-piled rug in his study. How absurd all of this might have seemed to him even two years ago, as he wandered about Paris during those cold winter days, occasionally ducking into the warm, foul-smelling Métro. If you had said to him then that he would presently be living as he did now… Then again, there had been nothing miraculous or incredible about it. It had come about simply because one day, one and a half or two thousand
kilometres from Paris, the sea had been rather cold, and a cruel, miserly old man who was swimming not even very far from the shore had experienced a fateful cramp, leaving him to sink down to the seabed, his lungs filling with water, and die. There was nothing to it, apart from a most natural series of facts: the water temperature in the North Sea, a tendency towards arthritis in men of a certain age, an inadequate knack for swimming or, perhaps, a sudden stroke.

“Rest in the bosom of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob…” “There’s something quite comforting about it all…” Suddenly it struck me that these words contained an infinitely sad truth. Perhaps it would be better if he were to die right now, just as it would have been better for my commandant to have died back then in Greece, and not much later in a factory town in France. At long last he, Pavel Alexandrovich Shcherbakov, had found true happiness. But who knows what could happen next. He might grow used to such comfort and stop appreciating it; it might seem as if he had always lived like this and what happened to him was dull and commonplace. He would soon be in his sixties, and presently those cruel hardships he had endured would begin taking their toll; there would be ailments, illnesses, doctors, all the burdens that old age brings, and the irreversible awareness that money had come too late: instead of desire there would be pain, instead of appetite an aversion to food, instead
of deep sleep lingering insomnia. Yes, it would be better for him to die right now. He had known everything: youth, the dawning of strength, the spectre of death on the battlefield, passion, wine, poverty, man’s steepest fall and his triumphant return to a world that had long been inaccessible to him, the incredible journey from having recollections to being recollected, from nothingness to life. What was left for him—within the confines of human existence? No rest could ever bring back his former strength, for time had robbed him of the chance to recover it: such miracles did not happen. Perhaps a truly worthy and timely conclusion to this existence would be the journey to the place where there is no “sorrow, nor any sighing, but life everlasting”.

Perhaps that would have been best. Although personally I would have felt sorry for him. I liked his serenity, his genuine benevolence towards me, the intonations of his deep voice, his unaffected elegance—these were all qualities that he had borne through those cruel trials and succeeded in preserving just as they would be when youth and vigour permit a man the luxury of magnanimity. Would I have occasion to witness their gradual dissolution and to see before me not the current Pavel Alexandrovich, but an embittered old man, weary from chronic ailments and hateful of others because their own good health would let them comprehend neither his suffering nor his impotent rage?

I suddenly thought of the frenzied, ecstatic face of the Buddha with its arms raised aloft. Perhaps he saw before him a nirvana to which we were closer than we thought, which we took for granted, which we desired, towards which, in the depths of our consciousness, we even strove.

“Which we desired.” Let us replace the plural with a singular: “Which I desired.” Why, in some purely speculative domain, was I condemning Pavel Alexandrovich Shcherbakov to death, or to the approach of nirvana? Why was I in my imagination—as it could happen nowhere else, and my imagination was after all a distorted reflection of myself—deliberately and actively wishing for his death? Why was I conducting this theoretical assassination? And to what end was I responsible for this crime? For in the world to which my stubborn illness condemned me, the border between reality and abstraction, between deeds and ideas, was neither well defined nor fixed. I had, for instance, to make a phenomenal effort in order to remember whether Lida had in fact been mine—in that room of mirrors. How naive it would have been to think that my whole life, this long and complex journey whose origin was lost in a baffling mist, could perhaps be reduced to a sequence of overt external facts. The remainder, as vague and uncertain as it was, could be termed a departure from reality, delirium or madness. And yet it also contained a strange, undeniable coherence, passing from one fit of
madness to the next—probably until the point where the last remnants of my consciousness would be swallowed up by the approaching darkness, and either I would vanish once and for all, or, after a long interval, like a coma lasting for many years, I would see myself again in some far-flung country, at the roadside, an unknown tramp with no name, no age, no nationality. Then perhaps I would be able to breathe freely and forget the criminal darkness of my imagination, the abstract odiousness of my depravity, and this theoretical assassination.

It had already gone two o’clock by the time I reached my hotel. Mado stopped me at the street corner and asked for a cigarette. Then she glanced at me and said:

“You’ve an odd look about you today. What’s the matter, are you tired?”

“It’s just the way the lamplight is falling on my face,” I said. “No, I’m not tired. I just want to go to bed.”

“Well, good night then.”

“Good night, Mado.”

I went up to my room and pulled the blanket off the divan; in the soft light the sheets and the pillowcases gleamed white. I remember that as I undressed I envisaged falling into a deep sleep and waking up in the morning, having forgotten all this unnecessary, imaginary nonsense.

I awoke, however, with a heavy head. After a cold shower and a shave I left my hotel. To the right of the entrance I was surprised to notice a dark-blue motor car of the type generally used by the police. Scarcely had I taken a few steps when I felt someone’s hand at my shoulder. I turned around. Before me stood a broad man in a suit, with a flat, inexpressive face.

“You’re under arrest,” he said. “Follow me.”

I was so stunned that for the first few seconds I was unable to say a single word. Presently a second man in a suit appeared; we got into the vehicle and set off. Only then did I ask:

“On what charges?”

“You ought to know that better than anyone else.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Then let’s hope there’s been some misunderstanding that we can soon clear up.”

The car stopped at the embankment of the Seine. I sat in a waiting room; one police inspector stayed with me, while the other left. He was gone for a long time. I sensed the weight in my head returning, and I felt a strange detachment from everything that was going on around me; I was struck by the similarity to the long hallucination that had led me to the building where I was remanded in custody in the imaginary Central State.

Eventually I was taken into another room, where an inspector was waiting for me. On both sides of his chair
stood a number of men who all looked very similar to one another. The one who began questioning me had a clean-shaven, doleful face; he was no longer young, and wore a tired expression that he appeared to have assumed once and for all. He asked for my surname, my address, my occupation, my place and date of birth, and I gave him all the relevant answers. He looked me straight in the eye and suddenly asked, with a strange tone of reproach in his voice:

“Why did you kill him?”

That moment the ground seemed to slip away beneath my feet. Like a spectator to the event, I could see myself from a distance, walking along that street the previous night, and I remembered the pattern of my thoughts, which could have nothing to do with anything that was happening now. I shook my head and said:

“I’m sorry, I don’t feel quite well and I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Just what is it that you’re trying to say?”

“I doubt this will come as any surprise to you. This morning Monsieur Shcherbakov was found dead in his apartment.”

Again I felt delirious and devoid of the strength to overcome it. Naturally, I accepted the possibility that he had died; I was even inclined to think that it would have been to some degree timely at that very moment. Through a heavy mist two menacing human eyes stared
threateningly and reproachfully at me; with a great effort I recalled that these belonged to the inspector.

“It was a purely theoretical supposition,” I said. “It wasn’t even a desire, it was just an arbitrary logical construct.”

“Regrettably I fail to see anything theoretical about this. Shcherbakov has been murdered, stabbed in the back of the head. The blow was delivered from behind, while he was sitting in his armchair.”

I stood up without raising my eyes. No, such a coincidence was out of the question. It was just an arbitrary logical construct, and I was ready to repeat it a thousand times over. No one but I could have known about it; my thoughts could not have been broadcast to some unknown assassin. And yet the times matched. No, of course this was impossible.

“But that’s impossible,” I said. And suddenly I realized that there could be no more dangerous a situation than the one I was in now. In the eyes of the inspector my words would take on an entirely different meaning, and if I kept up this dialogue with myself it would be the end of me.

“May I have a glass of water, please?” I asked.

He handed me a glass of water and a cigarette. Then he said:

“Of course, I’d be only too happy if it’s proven that you aren’t the murderer. But for that I need evidence, and so I must rely on you to help me.”

“I’m sincerely grateful to you.”

A policeman then arrived to conduct me to a photographer. I was placed on a revolving metal stool coated in white oil paint; the flashlight punched me in the face, and the stool swung in various directions as the camera clicked away. My fingers were then smeared with some black substance and pressed onto a sheet of white paper, after which I was escorted back.

Although it was fairly bright in the room where I was being questioned, they shone a lamp in my face that was almost as bright as those they had just used to photograph me. I recalled that this was a common method of interrogation.

The original inspector, however, was absent. In his place sat a man who was unknown to me, strikingly like the first, with a dark, sullen expression on his face.

“Well?” he said.

“I’m listening.”

He grimaced from boredom and disgust.

“Let’s get this over with,” he said. “I need to go for lunch and you need a break. If you make a full and frank confession I’ll try to help you. What were the motives for your crime?”

“I’d like to get out of this labyrinth,” I said in response to my own thoughts.

“As would I. But that doesn’t answer my question. I’ll repeat it: what were the motives for your crime?”