The Crime Of Olga Arbyelina

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Those that come first lie in wait for his words like mere eavesdroppers. Those that follow seem to appreciate something more in them. And they can easily be identified: they are much rarer than the merely inquisitive ones and come alone. They dare to draw a little closer to the tall old man as he slowly patrols the labyrinth of avenues and they leave later than the first comers.

The words the old man murmurs are swiftly dispersed by the wind in the icy light of a late afternoon in winter. He stops beside a slab, stoops to lift a heavy branch that lies like a fissure across the inscription carved in the porous stone. The inquisitive visitors cock their heads slightly toward his voice, while pretending to examine monuments nearby… They have just overheard an account of the last hours of a writer who was well-known in his day but is now forgotten. He died at night. His wife, her fingers wet with tears, closed his eyelids and then lay down in bed beside him to wait for morning… Now from the parallel avenue, where the dates on the gravestones are more recent, comes another tale: of a ballet dancer dead well before the onset of old age, who met his end repeating over and over, like a sacred formula, the Christian name of the young man, his lover, who had infected him… Next they steal some words spoken beside a squat pedestal surmounted with a cross: the story of a couple in the early nineteen twenties whose lives were tortured by the impossible hope of getting a visa to go abroad. He, a famous poet who no longer had a single line in print, she, an actress, long since banned from the stage. Living reclusively in their flat in St. Petersburg, they could already picture themselves being condemned, imprisoned, perhaps executed.

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