The Woman Who Waited Read online

  We ran into these enemies of ours in the first local train heading for Leningrad. There they all were, a tightly packed crowd of them, undifferentiated, a sluggish mass of blank faces, bodies numb with lethargy, crudely dressed, with no scrap of imagination. These were not even the proletarians glorified by ideology, the “toiling masses” portrayed at every street corner on enormous propaganda posters. No, this was an underclass of humble cogs in the system: elderly women on their way to scrape up filth in smoke-filled factories with metal brooms, men on their way to load industrial trucks with rusty scrap or to trudge around concrete factory enclosures at thirty below, with ancient rifles on their shoulders. Creatures invisible in daylight hours who could only be observed in the still nocturnal darkness of a winter morning on this very first train of the day.

  We remained standing, the better to observe them. Our aggressive bawling of a moment ago modulated into malevolent whispers. There before us, packed together on the benches, they formed a tableau vivant of what the regime could do to human beings: depriving them of all individuality, drilling them to the point where, of their own free will, they read Pravda (there were several papers open here and there), but, above all, cramming into their skulls the notion of their own contentment. For who among these somnolent cogs would have failed to perceive himself as happy?

  “Just look at how drab they all look,” snorted Arkady. “If the Germans invaded again, you could send them straight out to dig trenches. Or into the camps. They wouldn’t even have to adjust.”

  “Into the camps?” I added, taking my tone from him. “They look as if they’ve just come out of them.”

  “And do you know what? If, instead of taking us to Leningrad, this terrible snail of a train turned and headed off toward Siberia, not one of them would dare ask why”

  Suddenly we noticed this man’s hands.

  He was holding open a copy of Pravda by gripping it firmly between his thumbs and what was left of his hands, stumps from which all four fingers were missing.

  I heard Arkady give a discreet cough and remark in a low, somewhat tremulous voice:”A machine-gunner … In the war, you know, they had those great machine guns, with shields that protected the head from shell splinters. But the grip left the hands totally exposed. The steel only covered the thumb. So when there was a burst of shrapnel …”

  The man turned the page very nimbly with his stumps.

  We looked at the passengers’ hands. They greatly resembled one another. Men’s hands, women’s hands, almost the same; heavy, the joints swollen from work, dark in hue from wrinkles stained with grease. Some of these hands clutched a book or newspaper, others, resting palm upward on knees, seemed, by their stillness, to be making a grave, simple statement. The faces, sometimes with closed eyes, also reflected this calm gravity.

  The man with Pravda folded up his paper and, like a handicapped magician, stuffed it into his coat pocket. The train stopped, he got off.

  “In the end, you know,” murmured Arkady, “it’s thanks to these people we can read out our rah-rah-rah-revolutionary poems and get laid using exotic fruit-flavored rubbers. Thanks to their wars. The fingers they lost …”

  I made no reply, reflecting that among these elderly passengers there were doubtless some who in their youth had defended Leningrad during the siege. People under bombardment for more than two years, in freezing cold apartments, in streets dotted with corpses. And very likely working in the same factories they were still traveling to now. Accusing no one. Uncomplaining. I had always taken this resignation for a servility skillfully imposed by the regime. For the first time, in this suburban train, I thought I could discern something else in it.

  The coach doors opened, the people went out into the snow-swept blackness, vanished into the shadow of long, dark brown brick walls.

  As Leningrad drew nearer, the appearance of the passengers changed. Better dressed, younger, more talkative. Our contemporaries. The only person resembling those early travelers on the train was an old woman down in the subway looking lost, who quickly vanished at an intersection of the tunnels.

  “You and I are going to get out,” said Arkady “To Boston or London. And in the end, you know, they’ll be making perfumed rubbers here, too. But the old men with their fingers missing will have gone. And so much the better for them. I’m off tomorrow. If you’ve got any masterpieces that need shipping to the West …”

  I received three letters from him, roughly five years apart, all from Israel; then, nine years later, a postcard from New York. The first letter announced the birth of his daughter. The second told me the child was learning the piano. The third (but his handwriting had greatly changed) said the girl had been injured in a bomb attack and had lost three fingers from her left hand. Learning of this, I would be reminded of the machine-gunner reading Pravda. Such is the stupid way with coincidences, always timed to demonstrate the inhuman absurdity of man’s activities. I would also reflect on the monstrous mixture of happiness and heartbreak that must be experienced by parents when everyone regarded their child as having been spared.

  The card from New York said: “If, fifteen years ago, I could have imagined what I’ve become today, I’d have hanged myself from the big pipe on the tank in the Wigwam shithouse. Do you remember that pipe where the rust had made a picture of Mephisto’s head on the wall?”

  In my own case, what that trickle of rust used to remind me of was a sailing ship with an incredibly tall mast.

  When he left me in the subway at Leningrad, Arkady also proposed this job to me, a commitment he could no longer fulfill because of his departure: to go into the Archangel region, and write a series of reports on local habits and customs. “In the provinces, you know, they always want a graduate from Moscow or Leningrad. It’s for their commemorative album. Some town anniversary or a folk festival. Whatever. You should go. Go and jot down a few fibs about the gnomes in their forests. But the main thing is, there’ll be lots of material for your anti-Soviet satire…. I’ll be off at the crack of dawn. Don’t bother to come to the airport.”

  In August of that same year, I found myself in the village of Mirnoe, a few steps away from a woman who had just hauled in a fishing net. A woman waiting for the man she loved.

  3

  THAT DAY I RAN INTO HER AGAIN in the same place as the first time, in the willow plantation at the edge of the lake. The branches had already lost their leaves, the red clay along the shoreline was all streaked with this muted gold. Dressed in her old cavalry greatcoat and shod in heavy boots, she was pushing a boat silted up among the columns of rushes. A vessel too broad and heavy for rowing, designed no doubt for sailing. But perhaps the only one left in these parts that was still able to float.

  “Can I help you?”

  She stood up, smiled at me distractedly, as if through a glass dulled by memories, acquiesced.

  After a few heaves, our bodies keeping time with one another, the boat slid into the water, at once becoming light, dancing. I held onto the gunwale to let Vera step on board, climbed in after her, tried to take an oar.

  “I’ll do it,” she said softly. “There’s too much wind. You need to know the ins and outs of it. Take her instead. …”

  Her? Laid across the planks of the seat in the stern, I saw a long bundle in a thick cocoon of homespun cloth. Its shape indicated no particular contents but nevertheless gave rise to an obscure anxiety. I picked it up, astonished at its weight, looked at Vera, who was already propelling the boat far from the shore, against the wind.

  “It’s Anna,” she explained to me. “She died three days ago. You’d gone to the district capital….”

  Anna, the old woman I had seen leaving the little izba bathhouse in Veras company at the beginning of September.

  I settled down, balanced the dead woman’s body on my knees, clasping it clumsily, the way childless men do when someone hands them a baby.

  The ultra-swift scudding of the clouds turned that day into a syncopated alternation of twilight and su
nshine, springlike brilliance and autumnal relapse. When the sky grew leaden, I would become aware that I was hugging a corpse; then, amid the dazzle of the sunbeams, an irrational surge of hope would grip me: “No. What I hold in my arms is still of our world. Still inseparable from this sunlight, from the raw chill of the waves …”

  Toward the center of the lake the swell became severe, the boat pitched, the foam began to whiten the exposed shoreline. I was clutching my burden tightly now, as I would have done with any other load. Vera pulled strongly on the oars, thrusting aside the gray water, which parted with the ponderousness of jelly. I watched this woman’s body leaning forward, then flinging itself backward with legs stretched, chest and stomach to the fore, in a powerful physical thrust. Beneath the coarse fabric of her greatcoat, I glimpsed the delicate lace collar of a white blouse. … A wave struck the side with extra fury, and I was obliged to lift up the woman I held in my arms, hoist her close to my face, just as if, stricken with grief, I could not bear to be separated from a loved one.

  It was during this crossing, which in the end lasted scarcely half an hour, that I began to have my first doubts about the real reason for my attachment to this northern village.

  Within a few weeks I had realized that my quest for local customs and legends could just as well have been pursued in the libraries of Archangel. All the folklore of wedding and funeral rituals had long since been documented in books. Whereas on the spot, in these almost deserted villages, the memory of traditions was being lost, for want of any means of passing them on.

  This forgetting of the past was all the more marked at Mirnoe, where the inhabitants were, so to speak, expatriates, elderly women driven from their homes by solitude, illness, the indifference of their families. Responding to my questions, they told touching tales of their own misfortunes. And of the war. For it was this that had erased all other legends from the popular memory To these elderly inhabitants of Mirnoe, it was becoming the one remaining myth, a vivid and personal one, and one in which the immortals, both good and evil, were their own husbands and sons, the Germans, the Russian soldiers, Stalin, Hitler. And more specifically, the soldier Vera was waiting for.

  As in all newly created myths, the roles of gods and devils were not yet set in stone. The Germans, the subject of visceral, passionate hatred, suddenly put in an appearance in the person of a sad-faced cook named Kurt. Zoya, a tall old woman who had the features of an icon darkened with age, had come across him in an occupied village near Leningrad, where she lived during the war. This German secretly brought remnants of food to the children of the village…. The place he had in local mythology was equal to that of a Hitler or a Zhukov.

  In the end, I despaired of being able to record wedding choruses, songs in celebration of birth or death. The only ditty I heard on those old lips told of the departure of the local soldiers who had, it seemed, prevented the Nazi troops joining forces with Marshal Mannerheim’s Finnish army Thus the blockade of Leningrad had not become total. Provisions reached the besieged city via a corridor the men of this region had paved with their corpses. Were they all from this region? And Mirnoe? I doubted it. But when I looked at the old women of the village, I realized that this slim consolation was all they had left: the belief that, thanks to their husbands, brothers, or sons, Leningrad had not fallen.

  Before coming to Mirnoe, I used to call such things “official propaganda.” Such a description, I saw now, was a little on the terse side.

  My idea of writing a satire also turned out to be easier said than done. I had envisaged portraying the grotesque system of kolkhozes, widespread drunkenness to the sound of loudspeakers broadcasting uplifting slogans. But these villages were quite simply abandoned or dying, reduced to a mode of survival not very different from the Stone Age. I managed to find a highly typical alcoholic, a character who would have lent himself very well to the humor of dissident prose. A house stripped bare by his drunken expenditure, his wife, still young, who looked twenty years older than she was and whose face bore a perpetual grimace of bitterness, his four silent children, resigned to living with this man who got down on all fours, vomiting and sobbing, and whom they had to call “Daddy”

  I had almost completed the first page of my story when I learned that the drunkard had hanged himself. I had just arrived with Otar in the village where the suicides family lived. The militia and the investigating magistrate were already there. The man had ended his life in a shed by fastening the rope to the door handle. He was almost squatting, his head thrown back, as if in a burst of coarse laughter. His children, whom nobody had thought of taking away, stared at him fixedly, without crying. His wife’s face even seemed relaxed. The walls of the shed were hung with solid, old-fashioned tools, which inspired confidence despite the rust. Great tongs, heavy braces, iron contraptions whose names and functions had long been forgotten … One of the children suddenly backed away and began running across a broad fallow field bristling with yellowed plants.

  No, this was not really material for a satirical story.

  In this remote corner of the Russian North, I had expected to discover a microcosm of the Soviet age, a caricature of that simultaneously messianic and stagnant time. But time was completely absent from these villages, which seemed as if they were living on after the disappearance of the regime, after the collapse of the empire. What I was passing through was, in effect, a kind of premonition of the future. All trace of history had been eradicated. What remained were the gilded slivers of the willow leaves on the dark surface of the lake, the first snows that generally came at night, the silence of the White Sea, looming beyond the forests. What remained was this woman in a long military greatcoat, following the shoreline, stopping at the mailbox where the roads met. What remained was the essence of things.

  During the first weeks of my life at Mirnoe, I did not dare to acknowledge it.

  Then on a September afternoon crisscrossed with bursts of sunlight and brief spells of dusk, I found myself in a heavy craft, blackened with age, clasping a dead old woman in my arms, warming her with my body.

  As the island drew near, the wind subsided and we landed on a sunlit beach, like summer but for the grass burned by the cold.

  “In the old days they came here on foot. It wasn’t an island, just a hill,” Vera explained as she and I carried Anna’s body “But with no one to maintain the dikes anymore, the lake has doubled in size. They say that one day the sea will come right up to here….”

  Her voice struck me. A voice infinitely alone amid the watery expanse.

  The sun, already low, its rays horizontal, made our presence seem unreal, as if echoing some secret objective. Our shadows stretched far across the churchyard studded with mounds, slanted up the flaking roughcast walls of the little church. Vera opened the door, disappeared, returned carrying a coffin…. The sides of the grave displayed a multitude of truncated roots. “Like so many lives cut short.”

  I said this to myself, for want of being able to make sense of what was taking place in front of me. A simple burial, of course. But also our silence, the great wind impaling itself on the church’s cross, the utterly banal banging of the hammer. I was afraid Vera was going to ask me to nail down the coffin, the pathetic fear of missing, of knocking a nail in crooked…. And as we lowered the coffin into the earth with the aid of ropes, this thought occurred: that dead woman, whom I warmed as I clasped her in my arms, is carrying a part of me away with her, but to where?

  The return, with the wind behind us, was easy. A few strokes of the oars, which Vera repeated slowly, as if ab-sentmindedly. Her body was in repose, and this repose reminded me, at one moment, of the relaxation of a body that has just given itself up to the act of love.

  For a few weeks more, I would manage to convince myself that I was remaining in this northern land solely to gather some fragments of folklore. “Besides, at Mirnoe, I’m onto a good thing,” I told myself. “No rent to pay Half the houses are unoccupied. You move in. You make yourself at home. This is r
eal communism!”

  Mirnoe time, that floating, suspended time, gradually absorbed me. I melted into the imperceptible flow of autumn light, a duration with no other objective than the tarnished gold of the leaves, the fragile lace of early morning hoarfrost on the rim of a well, the fall of an apple from a bare branch in a silence so limpid you could hear the rustle of the grass beneath the fallen fruit.

  In this life forgotten by time, all was simultaneously weighty and light. Anna’s burial. This day, funereal and yet marked by an airy luminosity, a new serenity. Beside her grave that other cross, the name of a certain Vassily Drozd and the uneven inscription, cut with a knife: “A good man.” Around this “good man” a dotted line of chamomile flowers, sheltered from the wind by the earth of the grave. And Vera’s voice, saying very simply: “Next time I’ll bring her cross for her.”

  Often, when I saw her leaving Mirnoe or returning, I would repeat: “There goes a woman who has waited thirty years…” But the tones of tragedy and despair with which I invested these words failed to make them conclusive. Almost every morning, Vera went off to the school where she taught on the other side of the lake. She generally walked around along the shore, but when the floods cut off the paths, I sometimes saw her getting into the old boat. Following her with my eyes, I would say to myself: “A woman who has turned her life into an infinity of waiting. …” I would feel a moment of inner vertigo for a time, but not the alarm I anticipated.

  Besides, nothing unusual about Vera gave any sign of this appalling wait. “There are a great many single women, here or elsewhere, when all is said and done,” was the only argument I could find to justify the commonplace way it was possible to think about this whole life being sacrificed. “Lots of single women who, out of courage or modesty, make no display of their grief. Women very much like Vera, give or take a few years of waiting