The Woman Who Waited Read online

  The next day I set out to walk to the White Sea coast. One of the old women who lived in the village pointed out the path to me, partly overgrown by the forest, assuring me that in her youth it used to take her half a day to reach it, and that for me, with my long legs …Very near to the shoreline, I lost my way. Hoping to skirt a hill, I landed in a dank peat bog, floundered about among creeks from which a strong marshy smell arose. The ocean was very close at hand; from time to time the sour surface of the stagnant water was ruffled by a sea breeze … But the sun was already beginning to set; I had to resign myself to going home.

  My return was like the retreat following a rout. No longer a known path, wild changes of direction, the ridiculous fear of being really lost, and the spiderwebs I had to keep wiping from my face, along with the salt sweat.

  At the moment when I was least hoping for it, the village and the lake suddenly materialized, as if from a dream. A tranquil dream, aglow with the sunset’s pale transparency. I sat down on a thick slab of granite, which must once have marked the boundary of an estate. In a few seconds, weariness flooded in, even banishing my irritation at having failed to reach my goal. I felt drained, absent, as if all that was left of me was this slow stare, sliding weightlessly across the world.

  At the place where the path leading to the village met the road to the district capital, I saw Vera. At this crossroads, there was a small sign fixed to a post bearing the name of the village, Mirnoe. A little below this a mailbox had been nailed to it, empty for most of the time but occasionally harboring a local newspaper. Vera went up to the post, lifted the mailbox’s tin flap, thrust her hand inside. Even from a long way off, I sensed that the gesture was not automatic, that it had still not become automatic….

  I recalled our first, abrupt encounter at the end of August. The huge fishing net, the glance from an unknown woman, her body hot from the exertion. My conviction that between us anything might have happened. My sense of having missed an opportunity. I had recorded it all in my notebook. Now those notes seemed utterly incongruous. The woman looking for a letter in a rusty mailbox lived on another planet.

  It was from this planet that she greeted me as she approached, smiled, made her way toward her house. I thought about this wait of hers, and for the first time her fate seemed neither strange nor unusual to me.

  “In fact, all women wait like her,” I formulated clumsily, “throughout their lives. All women, in every country, in every age. They wait for a man to appear, there at the end of the road, in this clear light of sunset. A man with a firm, serious look, returning from somewhere beyond death, to a woman who never gave up hope in spite of everything. And the ones who don’t wait are mere smoked-herring eaters.”

  The aggressiveness of this conclusion made me feel better, for I had come to that village partly because of one of those women who were incapable of waiting.

  2

  I HAD COME TO ESCAPE from people who found our times too slow. But what I was really fleeing was myself, since I differed very little from them. I came to this conclusion one night in March, in the studio we used to call the Wigwam. A face there, sketched on a thinly painted canvas, bore a curious resemblance to my own.

  At a certain moment, the tempo of the recitation coincided with the rhythmic panting of two lovers. Everyone tried to keep a straight face. Especially the poet himself, for the content of his verses demanded it. In them, our country was compared to a terrifying planet, whose vast bulk prevented anyone from breaking free from its gravitational pull. The word planet was rhymed with nyet, several times over, hammered out in an incantation. At the height of the declamation, this reiterated rhyme began to be echoed by masculine grunts, and, in a higher register, the moans of a woman: the couple separated from us only by a few canvases stacked on easels. Including the barely colored-in portrait of a man who looked like me.

  The situation was farcical. And yet that night, though one of celebration like so many others spent in that studio, was a sad one.

  As always, of course, there was plenty of alcohol, plenty of music (a jazz singer on the verge of whispering secrets into the ears of all and sundry but who continued to postpone his revelations), plenty of bodies, most of them young, ready to make love without constraint, or rather to make love in order to defy all constraints.

  Six or seven years late, May ‘68 had finally made it to Russia, had made it to this long loft converted into a semi-clandestine studio in a remote suburb of Leningrad.

  “Planét—Nyet!” declaimed the author of the poem and was answered from behind the unfinished paintings by the clamor of an imminent orgasm. Nyet was what stifled the maturing of talent, freedom of expression, unfettered love, foreign travel, everything, in fact. This loft alone was airborne, challenging the laws of gravity.

  It was a typical setting for such gatherings of more or less dissident artists. From Kiev to Vladivostok, from Leningrad to Tiflis, everyone was saying, fearing, hoping for approximately the same thing. It all usually took place amid the glee generated by secrecy and subversion, especially when one is young. And what could not be said in a poem or with a paintbrush, we expressed through these erratic orgasms. “Planet Nyet,” and the moans now starting up again behind the canvases, louder than ever.

  But on this occasion there was something forced about the gaiety. Even the presence of an American jour-nalist made no difference. Having him there was a great event for us all: he sat in the middle, ensconced in an armchair; given the throng that surrounded him, he might have been taken for the president of the United States. But the chemistry was all wrong.

  It would have been easy to ascribe the melancholy I felt to jealousy.

  Hardly more than a week earlier, the woman now moaning behind the canvases had been sleeping with me. I knew the sound of her voice in lovemaking, and I could recognize her part in the current duet. Without flinching. Without the right to be jealous. Sexual ownership was the height of petty bourgeois absurdity. One drank, smoked with screwed up eyes (as in Godard’s films), approved the reading of a poem, and, when the woman finally emerged from among the canvases, one winked at her, offered her a drink…. I recalled how she sometimes used to raise her eyebrows in her sleep, as if asking herself: “What’s it all for?”Then her face would become vulnerable, childlike…. Best not to remember!

  That evening, if the truth be told, we all felt our hearts were not in it. Perhaps just because of the American journalist. Too big a fish for this shabby studio, a visitor too eagerly desired. He was there like the supreme incarnation of the Western world we dreamed of, he listened and watched, and we all felt as if we were being transported to the far side of the iron curtain. Thanks to him, the lines of verse recited already seemed as if they had been published in London or New York, an unfinished painting was on the verge of being hung in a Parisian art gallery. We were acting out a scenario of artistic dissidence for him. And even the moans of pleasure from behind the easels were addressed to him personally.

  He had, in fact, quite simply upstaged us all. I had come intending to talk about my trip to Tallin. At that time, the Baltic states were looked upon as the antechamber to the West. Arkady Gorin, the little dark-haired man sitting on the ground on an old paintbox, would have talked about his imminent departure for Israel, after six years of being refused a visa. But there was this American, and the mere grinding of his jaw, as he pronounced names like Philadelphia, Boston, Greenwich Village, made our own stories seem pretty thin….

  Even the poem in which Brezhnevs Kremlin was portrayed as a zoo full of prehistoric animals did not go down as well as expected. Mediocre actors, we were putting on a performance of the Western world, and he, as the director (a veritable Stanislavsky!), was sizing us up, ready to deliver the famous and terrible verdict: “I don’t believe you.” And it would have been fair: we were not very convincing westerners that night.

  Too impatient. The iron curtain looked as if it would last forever. Our country’s dislocation from the rest of the world had the se
mblance of some inviolable natural law. In the face of this thousand-year empire, our own youth was but a second, a speck of dust. We could no longer bear to wait.

  All the more because every element of the Western world was available to us: irreverent poems, innovative abstract painting, uninhibited sexual gratification, the banned Western authors we purchased on the black market, the European and other languages we spoke, the Western thought we did our utmost to get to know. Like alchemists in a hurry, we tossed all these ingredients into the melting pot during our nights of boozing and declamation. The quintessence of the Western world would materialize, the philosopher’s stone that would transform “The Kremlin Zoo” into a world masterpiece, its author into a living classic, acclaimed from New York to Sydney, and transfer that canvas covered in orange squares to the walls of the Guggenheim….

  A very drunk young woman collapsed onto the shabby mattress beside me. With a broad, wet smile, she was trying to whisper something in my ear, but her speech had become slurred. Two men’s names kept recurring in her babble. I guessed, rather than understood, that two men were making love in the next room, and she found this “a scream,” because at the same time we could hear the moaning of the couple behind the paintings. I pretended to chuckle in response to her laughter, but suddenly her face froze, she lowered her eyelids, and very tiny, swift tears began coursing down her cheeks. The jazz singer’s grating whisper continued to promise great revelations without which life could not go on.

  The woman stopped crying, gave me a challenging look, and made her way over toward where the American was sitting. “He’s a very big gallery owner,” the latter was saying. A painter listening to him nodded his head incessantly. His glass shook violently in his hand. The drunken young woman clambered up onto one arm of the chair with the persistence of an insect.

  An evening that never quite took off…

  Curiously enough, this copy of the Western world we were acting out was in some respects more authentic than the original. Above all, more fraught with drama. For the liberties taken on those evenings did not always go unpunished. Many years later, I would learn that the author of “The Kremlin Zoo” paid for his poem with five years in a camp and that one of the homosexuals, sent to prison (for this vice was punishable by law), was battered to death by his cellmates. I would think about that unfortunate lover fifteen years later in the streets of the Marais district of Paris; the multitude of bronzed, muscular men on the café terraces, their contented air, for all the world like chubby, male inflatable dolls, showing off their biceps and their new-won normality. I recalled that the homosexual from Leningrad had been finished off by being impaled on a stovepipe, from anus to throat….

  All things considered, our masquerade of the Western world did have its own weight of truth.

  My girlfriend emerged from behind the canvases, made her way across the room strewn with bodies, fragments of food and bottles, and seated herself on a crate filled with books. Despite a mixture of disgust and jealousy, I could not repress a burst of admiration. What a great performance, much better than the women in Godard’s films! A sensual body, a mouth with blurred makeup, and an impeccably indifferent look that slid right over me. And already she was flirting, accepting a drink, reveling in that quite special attentiveness men give to women who are….”in heat,” I thought maliciously. “No jealousy. No jealousy. You’re being ridiculous, you great Siberian bear,” a placatory voice kept repeating inside my head. I saw she had taken off her stockings. Her pale, bare legs suddenly seemed surprisingly youthful and touching, with their fair skin all unprotected, and the beauty spots whose pattern I knew well. A feeling of deep pity overcame me, I had an urge to go and cover those legs with my coat….

  That was when we noticed the American journalist was fast asleep. He had dozed off a moment before, his head slightly cocked to one side, and we had continued talking to him, taking his sleep for a posture of profound contemplation. We were addressing him in anticipation either of his approval or his Stanislavskian:”! don’t believe you!” If he had snored, we would have burst out laughing and teased him. But he was sleeping like a baby, his eyes quietly closed, breathing through lips formed into a little oval. There was an embarrassed pause. I got up, went to the kitchen. As I made my way behind the canvases, I saw the man (he was a painter) who had just been making love with my late girlfriend. He was busy wiping his genitals with a cloth that smelled of turpentine…. The American journalist finally woke up, and from the kitchen I could hear his: “So …,” followed by a massive yawn and relieved guffaws from the others….

  The kitchen (in reality a continuation of the same loft, containing a sink with chipped enamel) had only one window, or rather a narrow skylight, with foodstuffs wrapped in sheets of newspaper piled up against it. The glass, which had a diagonal break in it, let through a fine dusting of snow, the last cold weather of winter.

  At that moment, I felt I was living through precisely what I had been wanting to write about for a long time: the piquant acidity of the snow, an old building in a city at night on the shores of the Baltic, this loft, the utter isolation of the young man that I was, the proximity of voices so familiar, so alien, the swift fading, in this cold, of what had been my love for a woman who was at this very moment inviting another’s caresses, the utter meaning-lessness and irremediable seriousness of this fusion of bodies, the ridiculous transience of our time spent in cities, in other people s lives, in the void.

  Something prevented me expressing it as I would have liked.”The regime!” we used to say during our clandestine evenings. Planet Nyet. Listening to the others, I had ended up convincing myself of this. The Kremlin Zoo blunted the sculptors chisel, drained canvases of color, shackled rhymes. Censorship, we said. Conformist thinking. Ideological dictatorship. And it was true.

  Yet, standing in front of the skylight with its broken panes that night, I began to have doubts. For no censorship stood in the way of my telling about this fine dusting of snow, loneliness, three o’clock in the morning in the darkness of a sleeping city on the Baltic coast. Planet Nyet seemed to me a somewhat facile argument now. To complain about the regime and not write, or to write purely to complain about it—here, I sensed, was the vicious circle of dissident literature.

  I could not conceive (none of the guests at the Wigwam could) that ten years later cracks would start appearing in Planet Nyet, that fifteen years later it would shatter, losing its allies, its vassals, its frontiers, and even its name. And that one would then be able to write whatever one wanted without fear of censorship. One could linger beneath the broken skylight in a loft, at night in a sleeping city, feel powdery snow on one’s face flushed with wine, reflect on the fleeting nature of our passage through the lives of other people….

  But in this future, exactly as it was in the past, it would be just as difficult for a poet to speak of these simple things: love for a woman who has ceased to love, snow on a March night, the condensation from a breath as it vanishes in the cold air and makes us think: “That’s my life,” that tenuous haze of anxiety and hope.

  In fifteen years’ time, the regime would no longer exist, but stanzas would not have an easier birth because of it, nor would poems be read more. No American journalists now to listen to the lines of verse being declaimed by tipsy poets, no danger now for the bold. And even the moaning behind the unfinished canvases would lose its shrill, provocative savor.

  During that night of the last great frosts, I believed I had understood the aggravating paradox of art under a totalitarian regime: “Dictatorship is often conducive to the tragic creation of masterpieces.…”

  “You know, when there’s no watchtower or gallows in prospect, poets become bourgeois.” It was Arkady Gorin who said this. A bottle of alcohol in his hand, he came to join me in the kitchen, and, as happens to men who are tipsy, we felt as if we were speaking with one voice, reading one another’s thoughts, transmitting them through the telepathy that is such a distinctive feature of the glazed drun
kenness of the small hours. “Once in the West, I’ll be stricken with poetic impotence, you’ll see …” he added with a tragicomic sigh.

  “So what are they up to over there?” I asked, interrupting him.

  He might have understood me to mean: over there in the West. But, thanks to the alcohol, he knew I meant the people we had just walked away from.

  ‘Over there, Chutov is reading the second part of his ‘Kremlin Zoo.’ But no one’s listening, because your girlfriend’s having another fuck behind the abstract art. With the American. He’s using a pretty pale blue condom. They say that in the West they have rubbers that smell of fruit as well. Even taste of fruit. I wonder if the American … Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to … Would you like me to go and smash this bottle over the fat imperialist shark’s head? Fine…. Well, let’s go!”

  And, when we were out in the street, he added: “The day after tomorrow I’ll be in Vienna. But, you know, what I’m going to miss is the snow swirling around the lampposts. And the dirty streets. And the hallways in apartment blocks that smell of cat piss.”

  Suddenly he began shouting, waving his arms about and throwing his head back: “Oh happy day! I’m getting the hell out of here! I’m leaving this shitty country I’m going to live in the West! I’ll have dollar bills crackling in my sensitive intellectual’s fingers! Bills greener than the tree of life…. I’m free! To hell with all the slaves who live around here!”

  In fact, our two voices chimed as one, hurling abuse into the night. Mocking the dark windows in the apartment blocks, the sleep of all those “slaves” of the regime, cowards who did not dare to shout like us, giving full throat to their disgust. And who, by their resignation, reinforced the prison society in which we lived. They were our enemies. Drunk as we were that night in March, we believed this. It enabled us to forget our failures: in his case, a botched farewell to the Wigwam; in mine, the pattern of beauty spots on the legs of the woman I loved and had just lost.