The Gobi Desert Read online

  ‘Where did you say that was? Near the Soja factory? The lad from the Myako will find it somehow. I want him to take a souvenir for you to remember our meeting today, my friend. Don’t worry, it’s not about money, since it’s impossible to make you see reason when it comes to money. In heaven’s name, what a strange fellow you are! If ever you come across anyone else like you, you must send him to me.’

  When he said this he gave me one of his great slaps on the back strong enough to break your shoulder blade. Then he ordered another bottle, this time the last one, and this time it really was the last.

  ‘If you promise something you must keep that promise, for God’s sake. I shall give your few dollars, and even a bit more, to the first monastery I come across, or to the first old harridan in the Salvation Army. And good luck if we don’t see each other again, you and me. That would be a pity, there was something about you which I liked. In any case, remember this occasion, and the rest of you as well. Today is Monday. The Bendigo weighs anchor at eleven o’clock on Thursday, right? My own ship, the Sakaki-Maru, sets sail for Tien-Tsin on the same day at about four. Between now and then, dear friends, there is nothing to stop you from knocking back a glass with Jack Sanders. No need to tell him in advance. You have plenty of opportunity to meet him here every day, at lunch time and at dinner time.’

  At a pinch I could have claimed that Alzire came from a refined background, and in addition that she exercised a good influence on me. But in any event that was definitely not the opinion of the government official from the military council at Vladivostok, when he had called for a prison sentence of three years for her, and of six years hard labour, preceded by dishonourable discharge, for me. As far as I was concerned, I confess I didn’t have a definite opinion on the subject. All I knew was that Alzire was beautiful, and that I loved her.

  Whether it was for better or worse, I had met her getting on for five years ago, at Khabarovsk, where she worked as an usherette in the Chemin de Fer casino, which was the most fashionable restaurant in that important town. You only had to see Alzire, and chat with her for a moment, to realise that she hadn’t always found herself in such a modest situation. Alas! Her destiny had been that of many women from the best of our society, who deserve respect for the courage with which they have faced up to so many tragic setbacks.

  On the subject of the life which Alzire might have led before she met me, and on the subject of the life which she had been called to lead afterwards, what right would I have to change things for the better? When you love someone as I loved her, is the best way of showing it to constantly try to catch them red-handed as a fraud? And besides, if you have the impression that this someone is fond of you, if only just a bit, isn’t it much better for your own peace of mind that they should be constrained to lie, so as not to cause you any needless pain? These are things which happen much more often than one might think, and they do not in any way prove that one is dealing with a monster. That’s what I think deep down.

  *

  When the evening moon rises over the valley, and everywhere is lit up by bluish electric lamps, there is nowhere more beautiful than the terrace of the casino at Khabarovsk – or rather as it was at the time I’m talking about, since I have never once been back there. Would I have wanted, or would I still want today, that this should be such a risky adventure . . . As for Alzire . . But as for her, all in all I think it’s best not to get ahead of ourselves!

  Alzire, that was her first name, her real name. Her surname I only discovered later, and only when she was indicted, since I had never asked her - for the good reason that when you love each other, why should you bother? On the other hand, Rodianko, Michel Rodianko, that’s my name all right. A count? No, of course not, I’ve never been a count. Then why did I tell Sanders that I was? What was the point of such a ridiculous boast? To annoy him perhaps? He had begun by behaving in a very rude manner towards me. And since it doesn’t cause any harm to anyone, why shouldn’t poor people, very poor people, give themselves a little comforting illusion from time to time?

  A lieutenant? Yes, that was true. I would have to have been a lieutenant to have been condemned to hard labour, something which has always been one of the rare and unquestionable privileges of being an officer. An ordinary lieutenant was nothing special, obviously not someone from the Cadet School or from the Empress’s page corps. But good God, what can that matter, since when you parade in front of her you feel yourself tensing up in the same way as a sentry in his sentry-box! What pride you have in the first salute, right from the tip of your fingers, when as casually as possible, you make your very first salute!

  I had a quiet posting, and I was always smartly dressed, but you could, as they say, make some savings. When I think back to what I did during those first six months! I’m still laughing at it now. It was so long ago but time has just flown by! I’ll say this for Alzire: thanks to her I knew what it was to live, and that’s something which is not given to everyone to understand. No, I have never seen nor shall I ever see anything more beautiful than the terrace, under its bluish lamps, at the casino in Khabarovsk, at the confluence of the Ussuri and the Amur, on those summer nights . . . . !

  *

  If I live to be a hundred, I shall never forget those long and melancholy nights, and those women who came, even without us daring to ask them, to sit with us, leaving the tables of the rich Japanese or Manchurian businessmen, where the champagne was always flowing. They would hum the local songs along with the orchestra, first the romance of the Baikal, then the old Cherkessian hymn which brought tears to our eyes so that we hardly dared turn towards our more reserved friends at the same table:

  If a boy falls passionately in love

  He can never break free

  He is forever searching

  In the snow, in the snow, in the snow! . . . .

  They responded to us with the same sad smile, red lipstick on their lips, and with a shrug of their shoulders they pulled up over their beautiful but somewhat low breasts, their dark-red dresses glittering with gold. They were our sisters, these poor, abject people. One evening, one of them, pushing aside her plate of iced fruit, asked us:

  ‘Where’s Alzire? Why isn’t she serving us? We haven’t seen her all evening. She’s not ill, I hope? . . . .

  I was expecting this question. I can still hear the tone of false indifference in my voice when I said:

  ‘Alzire? She asked me to excuse her for being a bit late. She’ll be here any minute. She promised me she would come and have a drop of champagne with us.’

  Just at that moment, the inexpressible moment when I experienced the greatest happiness in my life, proudly and assuredly, beautiful, really more beautiful than one could say, making her way with a slight smile through the crowded tables and chairs, Alzire entered the room.

  *

  I don’t regret such a time, despite what it cost me. Certainly, Sakhalin Island, in the midst of the freezing fogs of the Sea of Tartary, is one of the most awful places in the world. And the part of this island which in its deathly horror exceeds everywhere else is the tiny port of Doui, situated on the western coast, and where the Russian penal colony is located. In the one and a half years I lived there, I hardly caught a glimpse of the sun, just two or three times, and what a sun it was! A sort of yellowy disc which disappeared as soon as it appeared, eaten into by the pallid, snow-coloured mists. And nothing but the sound of the north wind in the night, the raucous call of the native geese, and the continual coming and going of the sentry between the lines of barbed wire.

  The extreme misfortune into which I had fallen gives nobody the right to be severe towards Alzire! Who could be the best judge in this matter, I ask you, if not me? And this was what I said to the tribunal, on the only occasion when I agreed to break my silence, when the government official and Lieutenant Nevelsky were uniting to undermine my friend. You should have seen the smile of disdain when she looked at them, at that moment, Nevelsky in particular, a smile whose meaning wo
uld only be revealed to me later. Ah no! Really, not everything in life is beautiful!

  This Nevelsky, he was in fact one of my closest comrades in Khabarovsk. I don’t deny that up until then he had shown me the most brotherly type of friendship. But nothing in that friendship gave him permission to prove it to me in such a manner. That was what I told him, as calm as ever, while he, his voice full of sobs, made his statement.

  A jumble of idle gossip to make you blush, when you think about it, in which there were however, a few accurate details. Yes, it was true that Nevelsky had thought it was for the best – and perhaps he was sincere, although what was it to do with him? – to warn me of the dangers that an affair with Alzire would cause me. The arguments which he – as pale as a corpse, even more pale than me! – was now busy expounding and trotting out before the court martial, I couldn’t deny them, he had told me about them two years before, as soon as he became aware of my intentions. He was with us, on that famous evening when the regulars at the Khabarovsk casino discovered that Alzire, from that day onwards, was no longer a member of the staff. Not for one moment that evening, carried away by happiness as I was, did I notice her peculiar sullenness. I had to wait three years before I learnt the real reason.

  The next day he felt a need to come and explain himself to me. I began by listening to him with a smile. But in the end I couldn’t stand it any longer. There was a scene of terrible violence during which we were on the point of grabbing each other by the throat. To listen to Nevelsky, Alzire was of the lowest type that there could possibly be in the world, a real devil hiding under the face of an angel. In Uliassoutai, in Irkutsk, and in Chita, places where she had used to live, she had left a cruel and shameful trail of her passage. He gave me a list of the names of rich businessmen, government officials, army officers, who she had ruined or disgraced, including two who she had driven to suicide. It’s never a nice thing to do, to have to talk about a woman in such a way, whoever she might be. If he had held back at all, it was because at first he had thought it was only a casual whim on my part. But since from that night the whole town knew, he considered it to be his duty . . . .

  It was because of these slanders, because of this rubbish, that two years later he came to Khabarovsk especially to give a different version to the hearing. Alas! The events which had unfolded in the meantime only seemed to give him all the more reason to do so. I found myself in the position of having to give my word of honour as a soldier, which I still had the right to do, and swear to the judges that Alzire was never aware of the true situation concerning my financial position. It wasn’t her fault if the expenses which I had revealed to her from the beginning had led her to believe that my resources were far greater than what they were in reality. If a childish self-esteem had not prevented me from admitting to her the truth, she would have been the first to keep me from the path down which the envy and malice of others were claiming that she had taken me.

  One can see that this could have been a trial in which one of the two accused showed such stubbornness in accepting all the wrongs to himself. Confronted with my determination to take responsibility for myself, the desperate efforts of Nevelsky were futile. In the end, dissolving into tears, and reaching out to the court, he tried in vain to talk about me, and about my past, in terms which caused a shudder to run through the audience and the severe, expressionless faces of the members of the jury to wince. My own expression did not flicker. I no longer belonged to this world. It was someone else, it seemed to me, who everyone was making a fuss about. As for me, I had only existed from the moment when I met Alzire, when I had held her dear adorable body in my arms.

  Such a night, a wonderful night, the last we spent together! Completely by chance I heard as a result of some indiscreet remark, of the presence in Khabarovsk, the same evening he arrived, of the military inspector who was responsible for checking the cash box which I was guarding. Perhaps I might have had the time to try and run for it, but what good would that have done? I had fallen prey to the deepest sort of fatalism. I remember it now, the scene which took place the next morning, as it really happened: the inspector coming in, the handing over of the keys to the safe, the weighing, then the opening of the bags which instead of two hundred and ten thousand roubles, contained no more than eighty thousand . . . And then what, you may ask? What did it matter to me? Before then we still had a good ten hours or so together and in the meantime I didn’t want to think any more about it. Such a wonderful night! I held Alzire against me, and glimpsed, thrown haphazard on the chairs and on the carpet, her stockings, her underwear, her dress. The faint glow from the coal fire, which was dying in the hearth, showed the outline of her knees, her hips, her shoulders . . . That was what I was thinking about, and nothing else, I can assure you, when she and I were made to stand to hear the verdict.

  For how many years would we not see each other? When we were led away, each to our own side, the last look we gave each other was the equivalent of a promise that we would find each other again, in spite of everything. I was sent for five years to the penal colony at Doui, on the island of Sakhalin. Against Alzire, the presumption of complicity was dismissed, and only the charge of receiving stolen goods was upheld. She was sentenced to two years imprisonment in the main prison in Vladivostok. After I had spent more than a year without hearing anything about her, you can imagine how I felt when I learnt that my penalty had been reduced by half. According to the most recent news I had, she was living in Vladivostok, and who do you think she was living with? With that same lieutenant Nevelsky who, having exploited her for his own benefit in the way we remember, did everything he could, it seems, to hasten her release. The joy that I felt was so strong that it stopped me from dwelling for a single minute on the treachery of my ex-friend. Besides, what was that treachery, compared to the release of Alzire? From that moment on I thought only of escape and then running to find her again. Within less than three months I was able to put this plan into operation . . .

  There would be two years before we met again, and you could say that a lot of water passed under the bridge during those two years. You could also say without being unfair, that Alzire had the right not to feel unduly pleased with the way of life which I had led her to during that time.

  IV

  ‘You’re late, Mr Michel! Miss Alzire is not going to be happy.’

  I nearly fell over in astonishment. It was Mme Domestici who was calling out to me like that. She was smiling, simpering, and wagging her finger.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘She’s been waiting for you for more than an hour. Go on, run and see her, you bad boy!’

  For three months this formidable woman had not said a word to me, except to threaten to put us out on the street, Alzire and me. I used every possible strategy to avoid meeting her, leaving the house before dawn and only returning home late at night. I must say she was a bit less overwhelming towards Alzire, whom she declared she felt sorry for, and she reproached me for preventing her from earning an honest living.

  What should I make of this sudden friendliness? I didn’t know. I only knew that instead of feeling happy about it, I began to tremble. A childish terror took hold of me. Something must have happened during my absence, something which was impossible for me to foresee, but which must have been serious, something more serious than anything I could have feared until then.

  Mme Domestici, however, was smiling her most beautiful smile, and held out a bag for me.

  ‘Do me a favour please and take these two bottles upstairs. It was Miss Alzire who asked me to get them for her before you came home. And tell her that you can look everywhere in Fouzan and you won’t find anything of better quality.’

  She added, in an engaging little whisper, ‘In a moment I’ll come up and have a glass with you. That’s a promise.’

  I stumbled several times on the damp and mouldy staircase as I tried to half-open the bag and see what was inside. What an irony! And what a surprise. I discovered that the two bottles of
champagne were the same as the champagne which Jack Sanders had just been plying us with so freely. How long it had been since I had tasted a drop of champagne! And now in less than one hour! . . . . What a strange day this was, really strange!

  My heart beating, and with an awkward smile I went into our room. Alzire was there alone. So that she could be by herself I had installed myself from the first day in a store room next door, which was much bigger and was well ventilated by a window in the ceiling. Alzire liked her creature comforts, the poor thing, and when I think of how little I had managed to provide for her!

  She also smiled, and putting a finger to her lips she motioned me to sit down on the settee next to the dressing table where she was sitting. I obeyed with the commotion in my heart of someone who, each time he sees her, always has the impression of seeing her for the first time.

  It would be wrong to imagine that, in the year or more since we had been reunited, our life had been one long round of pleasure. First of all it had been essential to get rid of Nevelsky. This foolhardy individual, who had allowed himself, in the middle of the trial, to condemn us both, Alzire with his hatred and me with his commiseration, here he was again in Vladivostok, living with Alzire, in that same town where his own testimony had succeeded in getting her convicted! One must agree that it was a rather unusual situation. And I didn’t have too much trouble in putting an end to it.

  When I arrived in Vladivostok Nevelsky’s days were numbered, and Alzire had pleaded with all her heart and soul not to be separated from him again. But it was not a man, just a wet blanket who I tried to deal with. He could not have been more astonished than when, four days earlier, I had rudely interrupted their intimacy and he had cried, kissing my hands, and begging me not to do anything to prevent Alzire leaving with him to the little garrison where he had just been posted. But she and I were leaving Vladivostok the next morning, without fanfare, me because as you have noticed, I had no special interest in prolonging my stay in a town swarming with police, and she because, as if by chance, once again the poor child had suffered as a result of someone else’s thoughtlessness and irresponsibility. It was she who suffered when, all of a sudden and without rhyme or reason, Nevelsky began to do stupid things. And one week earlier, the local authorities had brought up against Alzire a ridiculous piece of legislation, dating from the reign of Nicholas I, under which those who have been brought before a military council and sentenced to more than one year in prison are refused permission to stay in the town where they have been sentenced.