The Woman Who Waited Read online

  Even the mailbox at the crossroads gradually lost its significance in my eyes as a killer of hope. Zoya, the doughtiest of the old women, was the one who most often went to collect the mail. The others readied themselves for her trips there and back, as for long pilgrimages, waiting for her as if every one of them were bound to receive a letter. Generally, nothing. Occasionally a card addressed to the one who was no longer there …When I met Zoya on one of her postal excursions, I would ask her to bring me back a nice love letter. She would give me a mischievous smile and proclaim: “It’ll be coming soon. They’re cutting down the tree to make paper for your letter. You’ll just have to be patient!” She would continue on her way and return an hour later with the local newspaper folded under her arm. Occasionally I read it: even this news, geographically so close to Mirnoe, seemed as if it came from another world, from an era where time existed.

  4

  THE NEAREST TOWN where time did still follow its course was the district capital. I made the acquaintance of a group of the local intelligentsia there: the deputy director of the cultural center, the young librarian in charge of the municipal library, the surgeon from the hospital, a nurse, two teachers (art and history), the reporter from the newspaper Lenin’s Path, and some others.

  I was both surprised and not to discover that they had their own “Wigwam,” their dissident group that met in the deputy directors big izba. The same rejection of the regime animated their discussions. But if our targets in Leningrad had mainly been the Kremlin Zoo and its dinosaurs, here the monsters to be slain were the secretary of the local Party committee and the editor-in-chief of Lenin’s Path. In their well-lubricated late-night debates the latter used to be compared to G o ebb els….

  The standing accorded to me was enviable in the extreme: I came from the country’s intellectual capital, the only truly European city in the empire, and was thus a virtual westerner. My role at their soirées resembled that of the American journalist at our Leningrad Wigwam. Here what all their displays of dissidence and amorousness sought was my approval. Once, when the reporter was busily comparing his editor-in-chief to Goebbels, the mischievous thought occurred to me that it was a real shame I had no condoms with exotic fruit flavors to offer them.

  I was a westerner of straw.

  During the last days of September, I would prepare each evening to leave Mirnoe the following morning. But I stayed. I convinced myself I must definitely witness a certain marriage ritual the old women had promised to enact one day. “It’s a shame Anna’s no longer with us,” they said. “She was our soloist. We only know the choruses.” The ritual, strictly local to the region according to them, was simple. The bridegroom carried his chosen one up to the hill where the church stood, in a light cart if the causeway to the island was fordable, in a boat if the meadows were flooded. Sole master of the reins or the oars on the way out, on the way back he invited his young bride to share his task. “I can’t leave until I’ve heard the song that goes with this.” Such was the excuse I frequently gave myself.

  Right up to that day, perhaps. A day of thick fog, the dull silhouette of a woman, upright in a boat. Vera, returning to the village. I grasped the end of the long oar she held out to me, helped her to heave the bows onto the clay of the shore. And noticed that, amid the freezing mist enveloping us, the wood of the oar had retained the warmth of her hands. I had never yet felt so close to this woman.

  The next day, still in the cotton-wool blindness of the fog, Otar, from whom I had hitched a ride on the road out of the district capital, lost his way. He was trying to show me an abandoned village with a wooden church, and once we left the main road we found ourselves in dense, ragged whiteness, from which a branch shot out at intervals to lash the windshield. The wheels of the truck skidded and spun, digging deeper and deeper ruts from which the mud spurted. We turned, backed, advanced tentatively, but everywhere the ground seemed to consist of the same peat, sodden with water. The trees loomed up in front of us with the stubbornness of ghosts in a dream.

  In the end Otar switched off the engine, got out, disappeared, returned after a minute: “No good. In a pea-soup fog like this it’s best to stay put. I was only a couple of yards away, and I couldn’t even see the truck. Let’s have a drink instead. And wait. This evening there’ll be a wind….”

  To begin with we drank half a bottle of vodka he kept under his seat, then a bottle of Georgian wine. “Only because you’re a good listener,” he explained. Dusk tinted the fog blue, and the growing darkness harmonized pleasantly with our drunken state. As was his wont, Otar talked about women, but was interrupted by the cautious, snuffling appearance of four wild boars: a mother and her three little ones. Also lost, no doubt, in this freezing whiteness. They sniffed at the wheels of the truck, then scuttled away, pursued by roars of laughter from us.

  “On the subject of pigs,” remarked Otar, “I know a good one. A real pig of a story! There’s a Russian, a Georgian, and an Azerbaijani going back to their village in the morning after a hell of a night on the town. And suddenly a big fat sow crosses the road in front of them and runs off. It tries to get through a hole in the fence, but its great ass gets stuck there. It wriggles and squeals, and twirls its tail. The Russian looks at this fat rear end and says: Oh my! If only it was Sophia LorenPThen the Georgian sighs: Oh my! If only it was my neighbor’s wife!’ And the Azerbaijani licks his lips and groans: Oh my. If only it was dark out!’ Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  We laughed loudly enough to frighten all the wild boars in the forest, then, when calm had returned, Otar maintained silence for a long while, with the insight of a drunken man suddenly sensing that something in his merriment does not ring true, turning melancholy, brooding on a lifetime’s sorrows laid bare.

  The fog cleared. A hundred yards from the thickets where we had allowed ourselves to get trapped, the crossroads came into view, the post with the mailbox, and above it the little sign with the name: Mirnoe. By the light of the setting sun, still made hazy by strands of mist, the inscription seemed to be emerging from nothingness, like a signpost amid the debris of an abandoned planet.

  I was just about to climb down when Otar began speaking in a low, sad voice that was quite unlike him: “I want to give you a piece of advice. You’re young. It may be of use to you. When it comes to love, you want to act like that fat pig of an Azerbaijani. That’s right. So as not to get hurt, you need to be a filthy swine. You see a female, you fuck her, you move on to the next one. Whatever you do, steer clear of love! I tried it, and it got me six years in a camp. She was the one, my goddamned sweetheart, may she rot in hell, who squealed on me. She was the one who reported my skins and furs business. Six years in a camp and four years’ probation up here in this dump. Ten years of my life wiped out. I’ve had enough. With women, I’m a pig because they’re all sows. You get to stick it in, you screw her, and: next!”

  He fell silent, then smiled bitterly. “You’re an artist. You need beauty and tenderness. But never forget this: all women are sows stuck in a hole in a fence. And the ones who aren’t are the ones that suffer. Like her … like Vera.”

  He drove off in a flurry; the water stirred in the ruts, then came to rest, reflecting the blaze of the sunset.

  In the distance, beneath the tall pivotal beam of a well, I saw Vera. Long trails of fog, the scarlet rays of the low sun, deep stillness, and this woman, such a stranger to all the words that had just been spoken.

  So perhaps what kept me in Mirnoe was this feeling of strangeness I had never before experienced as intensely In this aftertime where the village lived, it was as if things and people were liberated from their uses and were starting to be loved simply for their presence beneath the northern sky.

  What was the use of that wild-mushroom-gathering trip we embarked on one day, Vera and I? Without conferring or planning, the way everything happened here. We knew the harvest would not amount to more than a few boleti pockmarked by the frosts, a dozen or so russulas, fragile as glass. In this forest, already half
stripped of its leaves, we walked beside one another, speaking little, often forgetting how to search properly. And when we remembered that you have to part the bracken, turn over the dead leaves, we did it overzealously, like two lazybones caught red-handed. During these frenzied bouts we lost sight of each other, and I would be intensely aware of this woman getting farther away and then, after the snapping of a twig, of our drawing closer again. Sometimes Vera appeared soundlessly, catching me off guard, immersed as I was in the slow filtering of rustlings and silences. Occasionally, it was I who surprised her, all alone amid the trees. Then I felt like a wild animal coolly observing a defenseless prey She would turn and for a moment seem not to see me, or to be seeing someone other than me. And we would resume our wandering with a sense of not having dared an exchange of confidences.

  If the truth be told, the point of this meandering stroll was seeing the long cavalry greatcoat that Vera wore, its coarse fabric patterned with tiny red and yellow leaves. Seeing her eyes, after a moment of forgetfulness, beginning to respond to my look. Hearing her voice: “That path would take you all the way to the sea. Possibly five or six hours’ march. If we left now, we’d reach the coast close to midnight. …”

  The point of this life apart from time was picturing our arrival on the shores of the White Sea in the middle of the night.

  Or that evening, too, after my return with Otar, on the day he had talked about “pigs” and “sows.” A very thin layer of ice had formed at the bottom of the well. (I had just caught up with Vera, who was drawing water.) As the ice broke, it sounded like a harpsichord. We looked at one another. We were each about to remark on the beauty of this tinkling sound, then thought better of it. The resonance of the harpsichord had faded into the radiance of the air, it blended with the wistfully repeated notes of an oriole, with the scent of a wood fire coming from the nearby izba. The beauty of that moment was quite simply becoming our life.

  There was that alder tree as well, the last to keep its immense helmet of bronze foliage intact. It overhung the shore at the place where Vera generally landed. As we moved across the water we would see it from afar, this swaying pyramid freighted with gold, and kept an eye on it as the last island of summer, holding out against the bareness of autumn.

  And then one morning two clouds of misty breath from our double “Oh!” faded upon the air. Every leaf, down to the last tiny bronze roundel, had fallen during the night. The black branches, stripped bare, carved into the stinging blue of the sky like fissures. We drew close to one another, contriving to hold back obvious remarks (“It was too lovely to last”). And then, as we walked down to the shore, saw, reproduced in the copper-colored glory of the leaves on the water, the inlaid pattern that had tumbled out of the sky The dark, smooth water, this red-and-gold incrustation. An even broader mosaic, one slowly spreading beneath the breeze, becoming an upturned canopy, ready to cover the whole lake. The eye was swept along by its endless expansion. Another beauty was being re-created, new and strange, richer than before, even more alive after its autumnal death.

  Thus it was that in the language I employed in those days, I made a record of such luminous moments rescued from time. I sensed that they were not just harmonious fragments but a complete life apart. The one I had always dreamed of giving expression to. It was this I had had in mind in front of the broken skylight at the Wigwam. Here in Mirnoe, such a life could be lived from day to day with the certainty that it was exactly the life one should always have been living.

  In these notes, jotted down between drafts of satirical prose and the details of rituals and legends, I was trying to hold on to it.

  In the same notebook this fragment, written one evening: “During the night a violent gale drove the boat into the middle of the lake. The roads are impassable, so to get to the school Vera has to wait and hope that the wind coming off the sea will bring the boat in again. The breeze stiffens, we see our skiff drifting slowly toward us. Elsewhere a wait like this would seem intolerable to me, here this piece of floating wood marks out a span of time made up of sunshine, bitter cold, and a woman’s voice, weaving itself into the air in rare words like the stray chords of a melody. And the fragments of ice we break off at the frozen margin of the lake. Intricate rose windows of hoarfrost: we amuse ourselves by looking through them at the sky, the lake, and one another, transformed by these fans of crystal. The ice melts, shatters in our fingers, but the vision of the world transfigured stays in our eyes for a few more seconds. At one moment, a rustling in the willow groves at the water’s edge surprises us: driven by the wind from the White Sea, the boat has just reached the shore. We had not noticed time passing.”

  On occasion I would say to myself, firmly believing it: “She’s a woman who lives by these rare moments of beauty. What more could she offer the one she loves?” In a confused intuition, I then grasped that, for Vera, experiencing them was a way of communicating with the man she was waiting for.

  5

  THAT NIGHT I HAD JUST BEEN RECORDING the episode with the boat in my notebook.

  All at once a dull sound detached itself from the limpid stillness of midnight, the slamming of a door a long way off. I went out and just had time to see briefly illuminated the entrance to the little bathhouse izba, on the slope that led to the lake. The door closed, but the darkness was not total. Under a milky blue, the hazy moon was keeping a wary, phosphorescent watch over the houses and trees. It was strangely mild; not a breath of wind blew down the village street. The dust on the road was silvery and soft underfoot.

  I started to walk, not knowing where I was going. At first it was probably a simple urge to melt into this cloudy, somewhat theatrical luminescence, one that made every enchantment, every evil spell possible. But very soon, with a sleepwalkers persistence, I found myself close to the bathhouse.

  The tiny window, two hands wide, was tinged with a lemon-colored halo, certainly a candle. The smell of burned bark hung on the air, mingling with the pungent chill of the rushes and the wet clay of the lakeshore. A mild night, a respite before the onslaught of winter. A feeling that my presence here was utterly uncalled-for and quite essential for something unknowable. The ideas that came to mind were crude, incongruous: to draw close to the little window, spy on this woman as she soaped her body, or quite simply, to throw open the door, step up to her, embrace her slippery, elusive body, push her down onto the wet floorboards, possess her….

  The recollection of what this woman was interrupted my delirium. I recalled the day when the wind had carried the boat away, the fragments of ice through which we had peered at the skyVera’s face, made iridescent by the cracks in the rime, her faint smile, her gaze returning mine through the ice jewels as they melted between her fingers. This woman was situated beyond all desire. The woman waiting for the man she loved.

  At that moment, the door opened. The woman who emerged was naked: she stepped out of the steam room, stood on the little wooden front steps, and inhaled the cool of the lake. The soft radiance of the moon made of her a statue of bluish glass, revealing even the molding of collarbones, the roundness of breasts, the curve of hips, on which drops of water glistened. She did not see me; a woodpile concealed me in its angular shadow. Besides, her eyes were half closed, as if all she perceived came through the sense of smell, from animal instinct. She breathed in greedily, baring her body to the moon, offering it to the night, to the dark expanse of the lake.

  In the face of this dazzling, naked, physical presence, all I had thought about this woman hitherto, all I had written about her life, seemed trifling. A body capable of giving itself, of taking pleasure, directly, naturally. Nothing stood in the way of this, apart from that ancient, almost mythical vow: the wait for the vanished soldier. A ghost from the past versus a woman ready to love and be loved. Not even to love, no, just to yield to carnal abandon. In the silence of the night I heard her breathing, I sensed the quivering of her nostrils—a she-wolf or a hind, sniffing the scents rising from the waters edge…. She turned her back
, and in the moment before she disappeared inside the door, the moonlight picked out the firm, muscular play of her buttocks.

  Next morning, on a confused impulse of desire, I once more followed the path to the bathhouse. I looked back often, afraid of revealing my intentions, which I could not explain even to myself. The inside of the little building, darkened by smoke over long years, seemed chilly, sad. On the narrow ledge beside the tiny window, the melted lump of a candle. In the corner, close to the stove, dominating the room, a great cast-iron bowl rested in the hollow of a pyramid of sooty stones. A little water at the bottom of a copper scoop. An acid smell of damp wood. Impossible to imagine the heat of the fire, the stifling steam, a burning hot female body, writhing amid this blissful inferno…. Then, suddenly this slender, worn ring. Left behind on a bench beneath the window!

  I slipped away, imagining how by a hideous coincidence, typical of such situations, Vera might come back looking for it and see me here. This ring alone made the nocturnal vision an undeniable reality. Yes, that woman had been here. A woman with a body made for pleasure and love, a woman whose only desire, perhaps, was just this, a sign, a slight pressure from circumstances, to liberate her from her absurd vow. The ring she had taken off was more telling than all the speculations I had set down in my notebook.

  I was certain I should be adding nothing further now to my notes on Vera’s life.

  Two days later, I was writing: “The villagers who long ago abandoned their houses at Mirnoe carried away everything it was possible to carry The seat of the village administration (an izba hardly larger than the others) was emptied as well. They tried to remove a large mirror, a relic of the era before the revolution. Through bad luck or clumsiness, hardly had it been set down on the front steps when it snapped, a long crack that split it in two. Rendered useless, it was left behind, propped against the timbers of the house. Its upper portion reflects the forest treetops and the sky. The face of anyone looking into it is thrust up toward the clouds. The lower part reflects the rutted road, the feet of people walking past, and, if you glance sideways, the line of the lake, now blue, now dark…. That evening I chance upon Vera in front of the mirror. She remains motionless, slightly bowed over the tarnished glass. When she hears my footsteps and looks around, what I see distinctly in her eyes is a day very different from the one we are living in at present, a different sky and, in my place, another person. Refocusing her look, she recognizes me, greets me, we walk away in silence…. All my overheated portrayals of the naked woman on the steps of the bathhouse are absurd. Her life is truly and solely made up of these moments of grievous beauty.”