The Woman Who Waited Read online

  I noticed that by matching my efforts to the thrust of the swell, I was maneuvering the boat more easily. It still moved heavily, but instead of battling against this massive pitching and tossing, one had to make a swift stroke with the oar at the right moment, give it a brief flick…. Vera remained unmoving and more detached than ever, as if, having noted that I had learned the technique, she could return to her reverie. She was shielding the flowers on the wreath with her hands. I wanted to say to her: “Look, the rain’s going to drench them on the grave, in any case.” But that would have disturbed her repose.

  Well, why not rouse her? Stop sculling, squat down in front of her, clasp her hands, shake them, or better still, kiss her frozen hands. “She’s asleep in a kind of foretaste of death, in that time she put on hold at the age of sixteen, moving like a somnambulist among these old women who remind her of the war and the departure of her soldier…. She’s living in an afterlife. The dead must see what she sees….”

  We grounded gently on the island’s beach. I jumped ashore, pulled the bow up onto the sand, helpedVera disembark. Suddenly, the idea that this woman was living through what it is only given to us to live through after we die made an obscure sense of the life I had judged so absurd. A sense that could be perceived at every step, in every gesture.

  “I’m sorry to have made you work like a galley slave,” she said as we walked up to the churchyard. “I could have hidden this at home, of course, or thrown it away” (she shook the wreath gently). “Zina would never have known. But, you see, all these old women are already living a little beyond this life, and I feel as if I’m reaching out to them across the frontier. Then all of a sudden they hand me this wreath. So maybe it’s not so stupid, after all. …” She looked at me for a long time; her gray eyes seemed bigger than ever as they glistened in the rain, giving the impression that they had read my recent thoughts about her. I had a very physical sense that I, too, was present in this afterlife through which she was moving.

  Once the wreath was placed on the grave mound, the flowers on it were quickly covered in raindrops and, moistened, seemed to come to life again like a delicate and luminous decal. “Next time I’ll bring the cross,” she said very softly, as if to herself. “May I come with you?” I asked, picturing a rainy day, the slow rocking of the boat, and the hand, currently adjusting the wreath, resting, as if forgotten, on the gunwale of the boat.

  We began to walk down toward the shore. Vera s long military greatcoat was soaked through, almost black. At a distance, on this slope with its brown, flattened vegetation, she might have been taken for a nurse in wartime, making her way toward a field covered in the wounded and dead … In other people’s eyes … But all I saw was a woman walking at my side, her face drenched by the rain, intensely alive on this dull autumn day, taking care not to tread on the last clumps of flowers, and as she arrived at the beach, bending down to pick something off the sand and hand it to me: “You dropped this last time.” It was the pencil I had used to set down such phrases in my notebook as: “A suttee burned to a cinder on the pyre of faithfulness,” “a life massacred by a childish vow” …

  In the boat she took one oar, leaving the other for me. The rain fell more steadily, subduing the squalls. Neither the houses of Mirnoe, nor even the willows on that far shore, were visible. Our rhythms were quickly matched. Each effort made by the other felt like a response to one’s own, down to the slightest tensing of the muscles. We touched shoulders, but our real closeness was in this slow, rhythmic action, the care we took to wait for each other, pulling together once more after too powerful a stroke or the skipping of a blade over the crest of a wave.

  In the middle of the crossing, both shores disappeared completely behind the rain. No line, no point of orientation beyond the contours of the boat. The gray air with its swirling pattern of raindrops, the waves, calmer now, that seemed to be coming from nowhere. And our forward motion that no longer seemed to have a goal. We were quite simply there, side by side, amid the somnolent hissing of the rain, in a dusk as cool as fish scales, and when I turned my head a little I saw the glistening face of a woman smiling faintly, as if made happy by the incessant tears the sky sent coursing down her cheeks.

  I understood now that this was the way she lived out her afterlife. A slow progress, with no apparent goal, but marked by a simple and profound meaning.

  The boat grounded blindly at the very spot from which we had set off.

  3

  FROM THE STREET, I saw a child’s hand press flat against the misted windowpane, and wipe it from top to bottom. Through the opening thus cleared a little close-cropped head showed itself, with somewhat pallid, melancholy features that struck me as familiar. I walked up to the building and read the sign above the front steps: “Grammar School.” The school where Vera taught …

  I had come here by chance after making long detours in search of the wooden church Otar and I had failed to find. The church stood at the entrance to the village of Nakhod, about six miles from Mirnoe on the far side of the lake. There were still stirrings of life there: three dozen houses, a dairy, a tractor repair shop (a building with a rusty corrugated iron roof), and this one-room schoolhouse.

  I stole a glance in at the now-clean window Ancient desks made of thick planks, with old-fashioned holes for inkwells, portraits of writers (Pushkin’s flowing locks, Tolstoys beard), and above the blackboard Lenin’s piercing gaze. Several boys and girls were banging down their desk lids, sliding back onto the benches; clearly the first break had just fmished. Vera got up from her chair, an exercise book in her hand.

  I knocked discreetly and asked permission to come in, like a pupil arriving late. Her amazement was a little like the discomposure she had failed to conceal when I sat myself down in her izba at the far end of the bench, facing the window, her own lookout post…. But this time the discomposure was tinged with evident pleasure as well as irony, as she indicated a seat for me, murmuring: “Welcome, Comrade Inspector….” I sat at the back, “the dunces’ row,” I thought, guessing from Vera s look that the same idea had struck her.

  The children’s coats were hung on the wall near a large brick stove with cracked plaster. The black stovepipe separated Chekhov’s romantically myopic countenance from the Promethean gaze of the young Gorky. Prominent on top of a set of bookshelves was a terrestrial globe covered in dust and surrounded by a wire circle: the orbit of the moon, a silvered ball, long since wrenched from its path, which now lay upon a pile of old maps. A light haze arose from the wringing-wet garments, steaming up the windows. I pictured the waterlogged pathways covered in russet leaves that the children had followed to come here from their scattered villages in the depths of the forest. These misted windowpanes provoked thoughts of winter, and the fronds of hoarfrost that would soon be woven across them. “Ill be far away by then,” I said to myself, and the idea of no longer being in these vast expanses of the North, no longer seeing this woman who was now walking from one desk to the next, suddenly seemed very strange to me.

  There were eight pupils, all told. Judging from what they were doing, I quickly gauged the age differences: three boys and a girl were calculating the speed of two boats in pursuit of one another on the Volga—Don Canal. So, ten or eleven. Three younger pupils were taking turns to read out their written homework about a walk through the forest. The final one, sitting facingVera’s desk, was learning to write.

  To begin with, I cocked an ear toward the terms in which the problem of the boats was presented, then confessed myself incapable of solving it, having forgotten everything about tricky arithmetical problems like this one. A ludicrous and tangible indication of the passage of time … And I started listening to the three stories of walks through the forest. The first told of the classic fear of wolves. The second, with poetic but dangerous imprecision, explained how to tell edible mushrooms from their poisonous doubles…. In a few polite words but without flattery Vera praised these fumbling descriptions.

  The third account of a wa
lk was the shortest. As it unfolded, there were no “carpets of beautiful golden leaves” nor “a wolf’s great footprints,” nor even a “deaf cap” (for “death cap”) mushroom…. It was read out by the child I had caught sight of earlier through the cleared window. His face still had the same dreamy expression; one of the elbows of his old pullover was completely unraveled, the other, in a strange contrast, was carefully darned. His voice did not describe, it simply stated, insistently, as if to say: “All I can tell you is what I saw and what happened to me.”

  On the way to school the previous day, he said, he went into the forest to avoid a pathway the rains had transformed into a stream. He passed through a clearing he had never been in before. And there, tramping through the dead leaves, he disturbed a sleeping butterfly that flew away in the cold air. Where would it find shelter now when the snowstorms came?

  The question was put in tones at once distraught and truculent, as if addressing a reproach to us all. The boy sat down, his eyes turned toward the window his hand had wiped clean, now cloudy once more. The other pupils, even the ones at the helm of their boats, looked up. There was a moment of silence. I saw that Vera was searching for words before concluding: “In the spring, Lyosha, you’ll go back to that clearing and you’ll see your butterfly. In fact, we’ll all go together…. Yours is a very good story!”The boy shrugged his shoulders, as if to say: “But it’s not a story It’s what I saw.”

  And then I recognized him. He was one of the sons of the man who had hanged himself by fastening the rope to the door of a shed at the beginning of September, the drunkard of whom I was planning to make a satirical portrait. I recalled the little crowd of his children, with staring eyes, no tears, and this boy’s desperate flight across a piece of wasteland…. Now here he was, talking of a butterfly disturbed under a dead leaf, deprived of winter shelter.

  Vera looked at her watch, announced another break. The children rushed outside; the youngest, the one who was learning to write, produced a bread-and-butter sandwich from his satchel. Lyosha removed his pullover and took it to Vera without a word. The shirt he was wearing underneath was a large man’s shirt, taken in at the sides and with the sleeves shortened. He stayed in the classroom, leaning his back against the warm brick of the stove. Vera drew her chair up to the window, produced a scrap of cloth, a spool of thread, a needle. As she patched in silence, I looked at the books on the shelves, mainly textbooks, selected passages from classic authors, then, a completely ridiculous intrusion, A Typology of Scandinavian Languages. “Another piece of flotsam she’s fished out of some wrecked library,” I thought and went outside. Beneath a sloping roof, a stack of firewood, piled high, supplies for the winter. I took an ax and set about splitting thick ends of timber, stacking up the logs, which gave off a bitter aroma of fog. And once again the thought that this timber would be burning in the big stove in the classroom long after I had departed, the very idea of the fire I would never see, struck me as bizarre.

  We returned home together on foot, walking slowly around the lake. Unfamiliar at first, the track quickly joined the one I had always taken, leading from the old landing stage, by way of the crossroads and the signpost with the mailbox, to the willow groves where I had surprised the woman hauling in her fishing net…. In the middle of the lake, the clear curves of the church stood out in the mist-laden air on the ochreous hump of the island.

  “One should have no illusions,” Vera said, when I talked to her about her pupils. “The only possible future for them is to go away. We’re not even living in the past here. We’re in the pluperfect. These children will go off to towns where their best hope will be work on a construction site, up to their ears in mud, a young workers’ barracks, alcohol, violence. But, you know, I sometimes tell myself that something of these forests will stay with them all the same. And our lessons. A butterfly awakened just before winter. If young Lyosha thought about that, he’ll surely hold on to some trace of it. Despite his drunken father’s death, despite the filth of the towns he’ll soon be immersed in. Despite everything. It’s not much, of course. And yet, I’m sure such things can save people. Often just a little thing can be enough to keep one from going under.”

  As we passed close by the spot she used to fish from, on the shoreline covered by the bare willow groves, I sensed that the memory of our first encounter still lingered within her, for she lost no time in breaking the silence, talking with some embarrassment, looking away and pointing to the island.’One of the Vikings’ routes to the south passed this spot. They would see that island just the same as it is now, minus the church and graveyard. In their language they called it holm, an island. Whereas in Russian holm means a hill. It’s a question for the specialist. Why this shift in meaning?”

  Taken aback, I mumbled: “Oh, some kind of etymological perversity, I guess…. Maybe the Russians drank more than the Scandinavians…. Though they do say the Finns can run rings round us in that department…. Wait a minute … So with us a Viking island turns into a hill? All right. I give up. Tell me about these Norsemen and their holm!’

  “Well, to begin with, we’re talking about Swedes and Norwegians, not Finns. When they came here on their raids, they needed a considerable draw for their heavy dragon ships. So they preferred to come in the spring, during the high tides. Thanks to these, even the villages generally far away from the shore came within their reach. They saw an island and yelled, ‘Holm!’ The natives remembered the word and used it to refer to what this ‘island’ became when the waters retreated. Simply a hill in the middle of the fields, once again laid bare. I’m sorry if all that sounds pedantic. When I was young, I embarked on a thesis about all this etymological humbug. But fortunately I never completed the course—”

  “A thesis? You mean a doctoral thesis?” My astonishment was such that I slowed my pace, almost to a standstill. This obscure schoolteacher, this Vera, forgotten by everyone in this remote neck of the woods…. A doctorate in linguistic studies! It seemed like a joke.

  “So where did you study?” There was ill-concealed skepticism in my voice and also a degree of irritation: here in this northern wilderness, with my university diploma, I believed I was erudition incarnate. Now, mortified, I realized that my own self-esteem had been dented by this upheaval in the intellectual hierarchy

  “In Leningrad, at the university. I had Ivanitsky as my thesis supervisor. You probably didn’t know him. He died at the end of the sixties. He was very upset with me for throwing in the towel just before it came to defending my thesis.

  I listened to her, unable to tune out the conflicting images: a recluse, an inconsolable fiancée-widow, a hermit dedicated to the cult of the dead, and this young research student in the Leningrad of the sixties with all that post-Stalin ferment. I quickly added five years of university studies to three years on the thesis, that is to say at least eight long years spent far from the forests of Mirnoe. A whole lifetime! So I had been completely mistaken about the sense of her life here.…

  I followed her automatically. Without noticing that we had reached the village, I walked straight past the izba where I lodged and into her house, as if this were what always happened, as if we were a couple.

  Once inside the main room, I came to my senses and studied the interior, which now gave evidence of a totally different way of life: books on linguistics, perfectly normal reading for her, of course, reproductions hung on the walls, some of whose subjects needed to be viewed as tongue-in-cheek humor, as in the case of a landscape captioned: ‘On the pack ice: family of polar bears.” A neatness owing more to intellectual discipline than the whims of an old maid. And that spot at the end of the bench, her lookout post, which she had readily abandoned to go to Leningrad or elsewhere. A different woman….

  I remained standing as I spoke, still feeling I had lost my bearings in this transformed space.

  “But why did you come back?” My urgency in asking her gave away the real question: Why, after so many years spent in Leningrad, come and bury yourself her
e among the drunkards and the bears?

  She must have been aware of the implication, but replied without any hint of solemnity, as she continued making the tea: “I had a funny feeling during all those years in Leningrad. I was more or less content with what I was doing there, quite involved in their life—you’ll note I said, ‘their life,’” she smiled.”And yet very divided. As if this interlude at the university was a way of proving to other people that I belonged elsewhere. You see, for me there was something very artificial about those years of the thaw. Something hypocritical. They pilloried Stalin but sanctified Lenin more than ever. It was a fairly understandable sleight of hand. After the collapse of one cult, people were clinging to the last remaining idols. I remember very fashionable poets appearing in stadiums before tens of thousands of people. One of them declaimed:’Take Lenin’s picture off our banknotes. For he is beyond price!’ It was inspiring, new, intoxicating. And false. Most of the people who applauded those lines knew the first concentration camps had been built on Lenin’s orders. And as for barbed wire, by the way, there was never any shortage of that in these parts, around Mirnoe. But the poets preferred to lie. That was why they were showered with honors and dachas in the Crimea. …”

  She poured tea for us, offered me a chair, sat down at the far end of the bench. … I listened to her with the strange sensation of hearing not the story of the democratic hopes of the sixties but that of the following decade, of the seventies, of our dissident youth: poems, rallies, alcohol, and freedom.

  No doubt her remarks about the privileges accorded to the poets struck her as too caustic, for she smiled and added: “It was probably mainly my fault if I didn’t manage to be at ease at that time. I argued, read carbon copies of dissident texts, did my research on the typology of Old Swedish and Russian. But I wasn’t living.”