The Woman Who Waited Read online

  I noticed that certain of the old women of Mirnoe, as they walked past the great abandoned mirror, would sometimes stop, take a handkerchief, and wipe the rain-streaked glass.

  It was after our encounter beside the broken mirror that I found myself tempted to try to understand how it was to spend one’s whole life waiting for someone.

  TWO

  1

  ONLY TWO MOMENTS IN THAT LIFE were known to me, and yet they encompassed it in its entirety.

  The first: a dull, mild April day, a girl of sixteen shuffling in wet snow. Her eyes follow a convoy of four broad sleighs sliding over the slushy, gray potholes of the thaw like flat-bottomed boats. Amid the throng of young conscripts’ laughing faces, this sad pair of eyes she is trying not to lose sight of. She quickens her pace, slips, the eyes disappear behind someone’s shoulder, then reappear, glimpsing her amid the great emptiness of the snow-covered fields.

  It is the beginning of April 1945, the very last contingent to be sent to the front and, on the last sleigh, this young soldier, the man she loves, the man to whom, as they said good-bye, she swore something like eternal love, something childish, I tell myself, yes, swore to be utterly true to him or to wait until death. I have no idea what a woman in love for the first time may promise a man, I have never received such a promise, I have never believed a woman capable of keeping it…. The convoy turns off behind the forest, the girl continues walking. The air has the wild smell of spring, of horses, of freedom. She stops, looks. Everything is familiar. This crossroads, the lake, the darkness of the forest where the bark is swollen with water. Everything is unrecognizable. And filled with life. A new life. Suddenly, from a very long way off, a cry goes up, holds, for an instant, in the dusk over the plain, fades. The girl listens: “… I’11 be back,” yelled at the top of his lungs, becomes first an echo, then silence, then an inner resonance that will never leave her.

  That first moment I pictured thanks to the stories told by the old women of Mirnoe. The second I witnessed for myself: a woman of forty-seven walking beside the lake on a clear, cold September evening, the same path taken for thirty years, the same serene look directed at a passerby, and in her reverie that voice still resounds with unaltered power:”… I’ll be back!”

  Between those two moments in her life, between her promise made in youth and the future annihilated by this vow, I tried to conjure up the day when the balance had tilted, when a few hasty words, whispered amid the tears of parting, had become her fate.

  The tragedy of her life, I told myself, had come into being almost by chance. The random sequence effect of the tiny facts of daily life, apparently harmless coincidences, the overlapping of dates that, to begin with, presaged nothing irremediable. The subtle mechanism that sets all the real dramas of our lives in motion.

  In April 1945, when the man she loved went to the front, she was sixteen.

  So this was her first love, no capacity there for seeing things in perspective, making of this love one of the loves of her life. If the man had been killed at the start of the war, if she had been older, if she had been in love before, it would all have turned out differently But on the day he went away, Berlin was about to fall, and this young mans death at the age of eighteen seemed brutally gratuitous and quite easily avoidable. Give or take a few days and one less battle he would have returned, life would have resumed its course in May: marriage, children, the smell of resin on fresh pine planks, clean linen flapping in the wind that blew from the White Sea. If only …

  I knew that writers had long since used up all of these “if onlys” in books, in film scenarios. In Russia, in Germany. During the postwar years, the two countries, the one victorious, the other defeated, had been hell-bent on writing and rewriting the same scene: a soldier returns to the town of his birth and discovers his wife or his beloved happy as a lark in the arms of another. The age-old Colonel Chabert triangle … In some versions, the soldier would return disfigured and therefore be rejected. In some, he would learn of a betrayal and forgive. In some, he would not forgive. In some, she would wait, then could wait no longer, and he would appear just as she was about to remarry. Every one of these moral quandaries went hand in hand with agonizing “if onlys,” which was, after all, not inappropriate, given the number of couples rent asunder and loves left to wither on the vine in both countries, thanks to the war.

  It was via literature of this kind that I had sought to understand Vera’s life, to weigh the “if onlys” that might have changed everything. But this unbelievable wait of thirty years (I was a mere twenty-six myself) struck me as too monstrous, too unarguable, to give rise to any moral debate. And, above all, much too improbable to feature in a book. A period of waiting far too long, too grievously real, for any work of fiction.

  The bald reality of it was clear to me, too, in the obscenely simple manner of this life’s devastation, the unspeakable banality of the years that had gone to make up that thirty-year monolith. For to begin with, when peace returned, there was nothing to distinguish Vera from the millions of other women who had lost their men. Like her they waited, young widows, forsaken lovers. No particular merit in that. Such waiting was very common then, and their distress was equally current.

  Indeed, to probe the depths of her misfortune I had to face up to a still more brutal, almost indecent statement of fact: during those first few years without war, women remained faithful to their men who had been killed because there was a shortage of men left alive. It was as crass and prosaic as that. Ten million males slaughtered, as many again disabled. A fiance became a rare commodity.

  A hideous logic, but fearsomely accurate, I knew. The only one that enabled me to picture the village of Mirnoe as it had been thirty years before. A strange population made up of women, children, and old men. A few men sporting military medals on their soldiers’ tunics, embittered men with arms missing, drink-sodden men with no legs, the heroic flotsam and jetsam of the victory. And this girl, this Vera, whose faithfulness at first passed unnoticed, later prompted respectful and sympathetic approval, then, as time went by, a mixture of weariness and irritation, the shrugging of shoulders reserved for village idiots; then, later still, indifference, sometimes giving way to the pride local people take in one of the curiosities of the region, a holy relic, a notably picturesque rock.

  One day, in the end, nothing remained of all that. Just the beautiful emptiness of the clear September sky, this same faithful woman, thirty years older, steering a boat across the sun-drenched mirror of the lake. The way I had seen and known her. The pointlessness of all judgments, admiring or critical. Only this thought, hazy amid the air’s radiance: “That’s how it is.”

  It was more from a desire for the truth than youthful cynicism that I sought to strip her life of all will to sacrifice, all grand gestures. Vera had never really had a choice. The pressure of events, which is the destiny of the poor, had decided for her. At first the lack of men to marry, and then, when marriages began to be celebrated once more in the resurgent village, she was already perceived as a kind of young old maid. There was a new generation of truly young people, careless of the ghosts of the war, eager to seize their portion of happiness, wary of this solitary woman, half-widow, half-fiancée, dressed in a long cavalry greatcoat. Their zest for life had thrust her back toward old age as the draft from a train thrusts aside someone who has just missed it.

  Impossible, too, for her to leave Mirnoe, a place in the back of beyond! In those days, kolkhozniks had no identity documents and needed to request authorization to travel. It was not the echo of a voice from beyond the forest that kept her there, but this bureaucratic slavery. And when, at the start of the sixties, Stalin’s serfs, freed at last, were beginning to leave their warrens, Vera was already surrounded by a colony of moribund old women she could no longer abandon.

  No, she had not chosen to wait, she had been cruelly caught by an era, by the postwar years, which had closed in on her like a mousetrap.

  But this meant she was perfectl
y free! And her pledge was null and void.

  Free to leave the village, as she did one day of high winds at the beginning of October. I noticed she was carrying not her leather bookbag crammed with textbooks and pupils’ homework but a broad portfolio of thick cardboard, which the squalls were trying to snatch from her. There was a vagabond lightness in her step, the panache of an itinerant artist or an adventuress. As she passed the mailbox where the roads met, she did not pause. For the space of a second, the notion came to me that she was departing for good on an arrogant impulse. Off to take the train to Leningrad, or at least, to Archangel …

  She was free. And her mater dolorosa persona was other people’s invention. We were the ones who imposed this absurd waiting on her, very noble, of course, even heroic, but she would have shaken it off long ago had not our sympathetic and admiring gaze been fixed on her. This gaze had turned her into a pillar of salt, an elegant funeral monument, at the foot of which one could say a little prayer, sighing: “Praise be! Faithful women still exist! “The lovesick babbling of a sixteen-year-old girl had been turned into an irrevocable vow. And a woman brimming with vitality turned into a suttee burned to a cinder on the pyre of loneliness.

  These judgments were exaggerated and too intellectual, but, in a confused way, I sensed that they should be made known to Vera at any cost. She ought to know it was possible to think in this way, that there was still time for such thoughts.

  She came home that evening, with the same portfolio under her arm. “Leningrad, Archangel … hmm …,” I kept repeating bitterly. And yet, despite that false start, amid the wind’s bluster, the sense of freedom that emanated from here appearance was still there. Even more intensely. And my indignation became still sharper over this cult of undying love that had been assigned to her, as to an idol. Here was a woman, her face flushed by the wind, walking along in the sunset’s radiance. Everything else should be wiped from the slate, the youthful promises, the faded icons of past heroism, the pitying glances of kindly souls. Look no further than this free flesh-and-blood presence. As I watched her walking away, I recalled the body of a woman hauling in her nets on the warm clay of the lakeshore, and that naked body at night, in front of the door to the little bathhouse izba. … I sensed that the recovery of her freedom must start from the revolt of that body enclosed in a long military greatcoat.

  I called on her that same evening, without being invited, simply knocking on her door on the pretext that I had run out of bread. I had been into her house before on several occasions, but always after meeting her in the street and exchanging a few words with her. This unannounced arrival did not surprise her, however; she was accustomed to life in a community and to the visits, always unexpected, of her elderly protégées.

  We went into the main room, and while she was taking out a round loaf and cutting a generous quarter off it for me, I quickly seated myself in the place that was the secret goal of my visit. Alongside the old table of thick, cracked planks stood this bench, the far end of which, close to the door, was the spot Vera generally occupied when one went to see her. She talked, served her guests, walked over to the stove, but always returned to that station close to the door. At the least creak of the treads on the front steps, she would tense instinctively, ready to stand up, and go to meet the visitor who was surely bound to arrive at that very moment. And outside the window, she could see the crossroads, the corner of the forest that anyone coming to Mirnoe had to skirt.…

  So I sat down at this end of the bench, leaning my elbows heavily on the table. Vera had wrapped my share of the loaf in a square of linen, then offered me tea and apple jam. She moved away, and I had a distinct feeling that the room’s familiar disposition was eluding her. There were brief tremors of anxiety in her eyes and a slight uncertainty in the movements of her body, the alarm of a sleepwalker who has been diverted from her path. She poured tea for us, then, after some hesitation, settled herself on a chair facing me, stood up almost at once, crossed over to the window. I perceived that an unacknowledged, pleasurably cruel game was developing between us…. More or less honestly, I still believed it was for her own good.

  I went back to her house three evenings in a row, always unexpectedly, each time settling myself down without permission on the very end of the bench close to the door. Her thwarted sleepwalkers body seemed to be accepting my intrusion better and better. Very remotely in our confrontation there was the tension of a sexual encounter.

  Or rather that of a physical assault, for my presence distorted the interior of this room, prepared for another’s return. The cleanliness of the floor, half a dozen reproductions on the walls and these books she had certainly never read (a pretentiousness that struck me as truly provincial and touching). Fat books lined up on a set of shelves, chosen to create “an intellectual ambience”: a General Theory of Linguistics, an Etymological Dictionary in four volumes, Humboldt’s Complete Works …They were clearly relics she had salvaged from some abandoned library, having no need of them for her own modest work as a teacher…. I settled myself down on the seat I had annexed, observing with curiosity this haven created for another: the order, the comfort, the bookish decor.

  On the last of these games-playing evenings I interrupted my psychological experiment for a moment, glanced out of the window. And through the pallor of the fog I thought I could make out the tall figure of a man emerging at the crossroads. A traveler slowing his pace … No, nothing. A tree. A streak on the windowpane. But, viewed from this end of the bench, such an apparition seemed far from impossible, nurtured to the point of hallucination by years of waiting, by all those glances (it made me giddy to think of them) day after day, conjuring up a human shape suddenly visible at the corner of the forest….

  When I got home, I decided to leave Mirnoe the following morning.

  Instead of leaving that morning, I went to the island with Vera.

  2

  SHE WAS DUE TO GO TO THE ISLAND to lay a wreath of dried flowers on Anna’s grave—a pale ring, bristling with plant stems and ears of corn, which it had taken one of the old women of Mirnoe several weeks to fashion.

  For me, crossing the lake in the rain perfectly expressed the absurdity of the existence Vera was leading. Absurd, too, was my own impulse to go with her, which took me by surprise: I was busy packing my bags, saw her passing in the street, opened the window, called out to her, asking, I did not know why, if I could join her. And to crown my folly, with ridiculous male conceit, I insisted on sculling with a single oar, standing upright, like an operatic gondolier. Vera began by objecting (the wind, the wayward heaviness of the old rowing boat …), then let me go ahead.

  The wind kept shifting, the nose of the boat swung to the right, to the left, then came to a standstill, impossible to drive forward through the dense water, in which the oar became embedded, as if in wet cotton wool. So as not to lose face, I made light of it, concealed the effort, my arms soon numb, my brow furrowed, my eyes clouded with sweat. The woman seated in front of me, with the ugly, dry little wreath in her lap, was intolerable to behold—idiotically resigned, indifferent to the rain, to the wind, to her ruined life, to this day wasted on an expedition prompted by the funereal whim of some half-mad old woman. I contemplated her bowed face, brooding on dreams, faded, one supposed, by dint of recurring every day for thirty years, a reverie, or perhaps just a void, gray monotonous as this water and these shores, blurred in the raindrop-laden air. “A woman they have turned into a walking monument to the dead. A fiancee immolated on the pyre of faithfulness. A rustic Andromache As my efforts became more painful, so the epithets became more venomous. At one point, it seemed to me as if the boat, mired in the glutinous ponderousness of the waves, were making no progress at all. Vera gently raised her face, smiled at me, seemed about to speak, changed her mind. “A village idiot! That’s it! A wooden idol these yokels have nailed up at the entrance to their settlement to ward off fate’s thunderbolts. A propitiatory victim offered to History. An icon in whose shadow the good old k
olkhozniks could fornicate, indulge in denouncing people, steal, get drunk….”

  Exhausted by struggling against the wind, I ended up heaving on the oar more or less mechanically, merely going through the motions, for form’s sake. The squat outline of the church on the island hillock continued to appear as distant as ever. “Mind you, they still had to let her leave the village, poor Vera, for as long as it took for her to get her teaching diploma in some little town in the area. Doubtless the one great journey in her life. Her view into the world. And then, presto, back into the fold, her vigil on the bench by the front door, forever pricking up her ears. What if that’s the sound of a soldier’s boots? Oh yes, a little withered wreath for Anna’s grave. Very pretty, my dear, but who’s going to put flowers on your grave? The old women will die, and there won’t be another Vera to take care of you….”