The Woman Who Waited Read online

  Zoya has already been gone a moment. Her story is still unfolding in my mind, a sequence of facts easy to imagine, familiar from so many other eyewitness accounts, embodied by so many men and women I have encountered since childhood. A soldiers return. The era I was born in was entirely devoted to this dream, the joy of it, its ruination.

  Did he ever chance to think of Mirnoe, of the love he had left behind amid the soft and weary snows of April? Very rarely, in all likelihood. Such was the shock of discovering Europe, for one who had never before seen a city and multistoried houses. And then Moscow, a powerful drug of novelties, a fabulous stimulant of temptations. It was not that he forgot, no, he quite simply no longer had time to remember.

  As she was leaving, Zoya paused on the threshold, looked me straight in the eye, and declared: “So that’s how it’s been, our history,” adding, in almost severe tones: “Our history, for us here….” Her tone excluded me, calmly but definitively, from this history. Only the previous day, such a rejection would have pained me, I was feeling well and truly rooted in Mirnoe. Now I am relieved by it. Incautious rambler that I am, I have strayed into the rear of an ancient war.

  After Zoya has left, I embark several more times on reconstructing Koptev’s life, picturing the thirty years that have turned him into this tranquil grandfather and worthy Party functionary. Then comes the moment when I realize I am thinking about him so as not to think about Vera. And I realize I have neither the courage nor the powers of reasoning now needed to imagine the feelings of this woman who has spent her whole life waiting for a man. Emptiness, pained amazement, timid fury, nothing more.

  It is very cold. I go outside in search of logs piled up beside a shed. The sky is an icy purple; the mud beneath ones feet resonates, a harbinger of frost. The wood rings out too, like the notes on a keyboard. I prepare to go inside, but suddenly at the end of the street I see the beam of a flashlight slowly zigzagging over the ruts in the road. Vera … I step back, squeeze into the shadow against the timbers of the izba.

  It seems I need this humiliating fear to make me understand what this woman is now. A voice, the same sordid little voice that was congratulating itself over my having “slept with” such a woman, cries out within me: “Now she’s going to cling to you!” Taking the moral high ground, we consign this voice to the outer periphery of our consciousness, amid the slime of our instincts. Doubtful, this. For often it is the first to make itself heard, and is very like us.

  The flashlight beam sways gently, drawing inexorably closer to my hiding place. Obviously she is coming to see me, she wants to talk to me, unburden herself, share her grief, weep, be comforted by the man who … All at once, I realize that for this woman I am now the person I have become since last night. I am possibly the only man she has known since the departure of the soldier. She no longer has anyone in her life. Her footprints in winter, in this street. In her izba the window from which you can see the crossroads, the mailbox. She no longer has anything or anybody to wait for. So, me!

  The spray of light spills over the front steps to my house, passes within a yard of my feet. She is going to knock on the door, sit down, settle in for an interminable conversation interrupted by sobs, embraces I shall not have the courage to resist, the extortion of promises. It will all be hideously false and perfectly real, brimming with harsh, pure truths about her ruined life. She needs help a thousand times more than the old women she looks after.

  The advancing beam does not slow down, passes my house, moves away She must be going to prepare wood and water for a bath, so one of the old women can take it tomorrow. This domestic observation gives me a breathing space but only at the surface of my fear. Deep down, the obscene little voice is on the alert: “She’ll call and see you on the way back. She’ll settle down, probably keep quiet, play the part of the woman who has complete faith in your honor. You’re cornered. She’ll come and see you in Leningrad. She’ll cling to you like a leech. The love of older women. Especially a woman like that. In her eyes, you’ll take the place of the other one. You already are the other one she thought she was waiting for….”

  I go in, light the fire but prefer to stay in the dark. All the little stove door lets through is a glowing strip of pink. If someone (someone!) comes, I shall pretend to have gone to bed already.

  In reality, it all happened differently The minute-by-minute reconstruction, the timed storyline of that night of cowardice was put together much later, in those moments of painful honesty when we meet our own gaze, one more pitiless than either the scorn of others or the judgement of heaven. This gaze aims straight and shoots to kill, for it sees the hand (mine) cautiously lowering the latch on the door, the fingers cradling the metal to avoid any kind of click, the door locked—in this village where bolts are never shot. The electric flashlight beam once more sweeps through the darkness, traveling up the street. I withdraw, cock my ear. Nothing. The one whose fate I dread sharing disappears into the darkness.

  In reality, that is all there was: fear, the icy logs against my chest, the endless wait a few steps away from the shaft of light as it sliced up the muddy pathway, then the vigil in the izba, the anxiously muffled actions, the latch lowered slowly, as if in the hypnotic slowness of a nightmare. No, objectively, there was nothing else. The fear of seeing a woman come to me, her face ravaged by sobbing, of being contaminated by her tears, by her fate, by the inhuman and henceforth irremediably absurd seriousness of her life. A life as pointless as the hammer blows that had just now rung out in the distance. What was it that was so urgent and necessary to construct in total darkness?

  One more detail that crops up close to midnight when the likelihood of her coming begins to diminish. (“Although in the state she’s in, even at midnight …”) I cover the shade of my table lamp with a towel. I switch it on and notice the book she lent me a month before. A book on linguistics by Saussure that I have not even opened. A book-as-pretext: that was still the time when I was seeking by every means possible to win the friendship, affection indeed, of this woman. I was enamored of her, in love, I desired her. All these words now seem incongruous, impossible to utter. The fear recedes. I manage to reflect, to ponder the bizarre features of our lives. This borrowed Saussure proves that, even in situations as strange as ours, the stages in a relationship are always the same: at the beginning a talismanic object, a message in a bottle, the feverish hope of what it may lead to; at the end, this useless volume one no longer knows how to get rid of….

  Again I study the Archangel newspaper Zoya left on the table. The photo of Koptev, the art of being both a grandfather and a good Party man. It suddenly strikes me that, if there is any logic to existence, his flat, round physiognomy ought to be associated with Vera’s face. For they could have (should have?) formed a couple…. Impossible to fit them together. “She’s much younger,” I tell myself, feeling confused. “No, she’s not, there’s scarcely three years between them.” I get in a muddle, trying to grasp what it is that makes these two beings absolutely incompatible. The only way to picture them together is to turn Vera into a formidable Muscovite matron, with heavy features, a satisfied look, the holder of a university chair, a Party member…. Just the contrary of what she is. “She’s not part of that world,” I conclude lamely in the end, feeling that I am much closer to the world of the Koptevs myself. This affinity reassures me, liberates me, distances me from Mirnoe.

  At about two in the morning, a great sense of relief. I know I must get up very early, steal out of the village, make my way rapidly to the crossroads, hop onto a truck and, once at the station in the district capital, take the first train to Leningrad, to civilization, to oblivion. Which is what I shall do. I feel resolute, energetic. I switch on the lights in the room, no longer hiding, and within five minutes I have closed my suitcase, which for weeks now I have not managed to pack. No further question of racking my brains: this part of the world has made me ill, its past, the woman who has preserved its spirit. Now my cure is at hand. At the first whiff of th
e sharp air on the Nevsky Prospekt … For a minute I wonder if it would not be more elegant to leave a note. Less inelegant, let us say. Then I decide to just slip away.

  During the few hours of sleep left to me, I wake up often. It is very cold. The darkness outside the windows has the sheen of ink, that of the great frosts. In one of my waking moments, I think I have gone deaf. Not a breath of wind, the fire in the stove dead, the silence of the interstellar spaces, icy, absolute. I lack the courage to go out and bring in some wood. In the hall, I snatch up the old military cape. I lay the canvas over the top of my blanket. The fabric is all worn, scorched here and there by fire, but, oddly enough, the thin layer of it warms me better than a fleece-lined quilt would have. A dream comes to me. The story one of the old women of Mirnoe told me: her husband, killed in the snows of Karelia in cold of forty below, the obsessive urge she has since then to heat up a bath for him. In my dream, a soldier lies naked in the middle of a white plain. He opens his eyes, I wake up; on my frozen cheeks I feel burning tears.

  7

  THE FIRST GLANCE OUTSIDE, well before sunrise, is a plunge into an unknown world. All is pale and blue with hoarfrost; its suede has petrified the trees, the walls are encrusted with its crystals. The road, bristling with muddy ridges only yesterday, is today a long, smooth white track. The dry stems of nettles beside the old front steps rear up like silver candelabras. I open the door long enough to take a deep breath, trying to hold onto the icy intoxication of this beauty to the point of giddiness. This air, I sense, could drug me all over again, make me forget my departure…. I must leave as quickly as possible.

  Suitcase in hand, I reach the lakeshore while the sun, still invisible, can be sensed behind the forest. The earth, blue-tinged, is still of the night. But the whitened crowns of the tallest firs are overlaid with a fine, transparent gilding.

  I quicken my pace to break the spell of this imminent luminescence that holds me back. The first trucks will soon be driving past the crossroads. But the magic of the moment is everywhere. Every step produces a distinctive resonance of shattered ice. One could stop, melt into this time where there are no hours. I look back: a faint hint of smoke hovers above the chimney of the house I have just left. Poignant gratitude, fear of not being able to tear oneself away from this beauty.

  Now my course will move away from Mirnoe, cast off the enchantment of its last stages: the little bathhouse izba, the undergrowth amid the willow groves …

  Suddenly, in the perfect stillness of white and blue, a dark movement. But there is nothing abrupt about its appearance. A long greatcoat, a woman’s face. I recognize her, there she is, her presence at that spot is entirely unremarkable, I could have encountered her there yesterday, and the day before. Leaning forward, she is trying to push out the boat trapped in the ice, in the frozen clay of the shore. She seems totally preoccupied by the attempt.

  I keep walking, through sheer muscular inertia, sunk in a hypnotic numbness, already picturing the scene that is bound to take place: she will hear my footsteps, straighten up, come toward me, with a look increasingly impossible to bear …

  She hears my footsteps, stands up, greets me with a brief inclination of her head. Her eyes have an expression I know well. They do not really identify me; it will take them time to admit me to what she sees. She repeats her greeting, a simple replica of the first, returns to her task.

  I am free to leave. But I step off the road, walk down toward the shore.

  The boat is hardly moving. The ice around its hull has been crushed by the woman’s boots. The clay is very red; footmarks print themselves on the white like traces of blood. I look for somewhere to set down my suitcase in this mixture of ice and mud, then I put it on the seat in the boat. And take hold of the gunwale. The woman presses down on the opposite side, I respond to her action, the vessel starts to rock, embarks on a jerky, barely perceptible forward motion.

  Next, this supple sliding, the sound of the thin layer of ice being broken by the hull as it is propelled into the water. The woman is already on board, she stands upright in the stern, a long oar in her hands. I climb in too, not knowing whether it is to retrieve my suitcase or to …

  I am seated in the bow, with my back to the goal of our crossing. As though I did not know, as though I did not need to know where we are heading. Facing me, she does not look at me, or when occasionally our eyes meet, she seems to be observing me across immensely long years. The ice breaks under the oar, the clattering of the drops has a metallic sharpness.

  “A fine trap,” I say to myself, realizing that it was inevitable. A sly, do-as-you-would-be-done-by logic decreed that a reckoning between us should take place. This will happen: tears, reproaches, my clumsy attempts to console her, to wriggle out of it. But first the woman will do what she has to do on the island, then we will return to Mirnoe and I’ll fulfill my duty as her unique friend, the only man she has known in thirty years.

  The notion is as far-fetched and as obvious as this whole white world that surrounds us. A bridal white, immaculate, terrifying in its purity. Even the lengths of pine that form the cross are swathed in crystals.

  She is going to the island because of this cross laid over the thwarts of the boat. I remember her words: “Next time I’ll take the cross….” So next time is today. A cross for Anna’s grave. Anna, whose body traveled there in my arms. And last night’s hammering was the wooden arms being nailed on. And the flashlight beam marked the cross being carried down to the boat. Why take it at dusk? Why not this morning? I suddenly grasp what kind of woman it was who yesterday turned carpenter. A woman who could only hold on to life by fashioning this symbol of death. She will thrust it into the earth and then begin talking to me, weeping, trying to keep me in her life, where there are more crosses than living people. The main post strikes me as disproportionately long, then I realize that this is the base that will be buried in the earth.

  The island is white. The church, all frosted over, seems translucent, ethereal. The earth surrounding the cross, now bedded in, is the only dark patch in this universe of white.

  We walk down to the shore, resume our places in the boat without a word. At one moment, I think of speaking, defusing the serious reckoning that lies ahead with a few neutral words. But the silence, too all-embracing like the nave of a vast cathedral, restrains my voice, diverts it inward toward the feverish thought tormenting my mind: how to tell this woman that in order to share her fate even for a short while, one would have to learn how to live in this afterlife that is not the life the rest of us live, one would have to rethink everything: time, death, the fleeting immortality of a love affair. One would have to…. The sky above the lake is unbearably vivid, the purity of the air swells the lungs so much that one can scarcely breathe anymore. I long to get away from this white wilderness, to find myself once more within the smoky confines of our Wigwam studio, amid the hubbub of drunken voices, the press of bodies, of frivolously trivial ideas, of swift couplings with no promises made.

  We circumnavigate the island. Soon the red clay of the shore, the willow groves … She will step ashore, look long into my eyes, begin to talk. What shall I be able to say to her: death, time, fate? She is a single woman who, quite simply and humanly, no longer wants to be so. But this white infinity she carries within her will never fit into the snug shell of a Wigwam.

  The cold makes me feel the stillness of my body. I sit huddled on my seat with my suitcase between my legs. The idea comes to me suddenly of escaping as we land. Leap ashore, pull up the boat, seize my bag, shout out a good-bye, go. The movements she makes with the oar are spaced further and further apart, as if, guessing my intent, she wanted to delay our arrival. I know that in any case I would not be capable of flight. A most inconvenient lack of cynicism!

  At this moment the bow of the boat gently encounters an obstacle. I turn, open my eyes wide. No willows, no trampled red mud. We are landing at the old jetty on the far side of the lake. Before I can grasp what has just happened, Vera steps out onto
the boards that sag gently on top of the old piles. I follow her automatically, my suitcase in my hand, onto the narrow landing stage.

  She looks me in the eye, smiles at me, then kisses me on the cheek and returns to the boat. And she is already moving her oar as she says: “Like this you’re quite close to the town. You can catch the eleven o’clock train…. May God keep you.”

  Her face seems older to me; a lock of silver hair slips down over her brow. And yet she is utterly brimming with a fresh, vibrant youthfulness that is in the process of being born, in the movement of her lips, the fluttering of her eyelashes, in the lightness of her body as the boat begins to bear her away….

  I wave my arm in a pointless farewell; her back is turned, and the distance is growing rapidly. I step forward to the end of the jetty and with sorrowful intensity say to myself that my voice could still carry, and I absolutely must tell her…. The silence is such that I can hear the soft lapping of the waves set off by the boat’s departure, coming to rest amid the wooden piles.

  I have never before made my way to the town starting from this spot. The footpath from the landing stage climbs upward, and when I glance behind me, I can see the entire lake. The island with the pale smudge of the church and several trees above the churchyard, the blue-gray undulations of the forest, the roofs of Mirnoe, which have lost their dazzling whiteness. Soon the hoarfrost will begin to melt, and they will look like the roofs of one village among many, waiting for winter.

  In the distance, the boat on the icy surface already appears unmoving, and yet it is traveling forward. The trace of clear water spreading behind it grows longer, extending toward the infinity of the snow-white plains, toward the dull glow of the sun. And farther off, amid the icy fogs of the horizon, suddenly a space lights up, beyond the fields and the treetops of the forests. The White Sea …