The Woman Who Waited Read online

  She fell silent, her gaze lost in the gray light of the dusk outside the window. I thought I could detect in her eyes the reflection of the fields with their dead vegetation, the crossroads, the dark terracing of the forest.

  “Besides, the way it all happened was much simpler than that. I came back to Mirnoe to … bury my mother. I planned to stay for nine days, as tradition seems to demand. Then for forty. And one thing led to another…. To crown it all, there were several old women here already, hardly more robust than my mother had been. No, there were no regrets. No conflict. I simply realized my place was here. Or, at least, I didn’t even think about it. I started living again.”

  She stood up to put the kettle back on the fire. I turned my head, glanced quickly out the window: with growing, dreamlike clarity, the shadowy figure of a man on foot detached itself from the forest.

  Vera returned, set down some toast, refilled our cups. What she said now sounded mainly like an inner rumination, a rehearsal of old arguments, perfectly convincing to her, only spoken out loud because I was there. “I also realized that up here in Mirnoe all those debates we had in Leningrad, whether anti-Soviet or pro-Soviet, meant nothing. Coming here, I found half a dozen very old women who’d lost their families in the war and were going to die. As simple as that. Human beings getting ready to die alone, not complaining, not seeking someone to blame. Before I got to know them, I had never thought about God, truly, profoundly….”

  She broke off, noticing my gaze sidling along the bookshelf (in fact, I was suddenly finding it hard to look her in the eye). She smiled, indicating the row of volumes with a little jerk of her chin. “At any rate, I was already too old for the university. I looked like a hearty kolk-hoznik among all those young students in miniskirts.”

  The light faded, Vera reached for the switch, then changed her mind, struck a match. The flame of a candle placed on the windowsill glowed, plunging the fields and pathways outside the glass into darkness. She sat down in her usual spot, we listened to the silence punctuated by the wind, and all at once a slight creak, the sigh of an old beam, a door frame feeling its age.

  Her eyes remained calm, but her eyelashes fluttered rapidly. As if I were no longer there, she murmured: “Besides, how can I leave? I’m still waiting for him.”

  4

  DURING THAT TEN-MILE EXPEDITION on an icy, luminous October day, I became quite certain I was sharing the reality of Vera’s life. Once more we followed the track she used to take to go to her school. The willow plantations beside the lake, the crossroads with the mailbox, the old landing stage … There, a footpath veered off northward into the depths of the forest.

  Some days earlier, one of her pupils had told her about a hamlet lost amid the undergrowth where only one inhabitant remained, a deaf, almost blind old woman, according to him, whose name he had not been able to discover, not even her Christian name. Vera had gone to see the head of the neighboring kolkhoz, hoping to obtain a truck. She had been told that for these overgrown paths a tank was what she really needed…. So that Saturday she knocked on my door and we set off, dragging behind us a comic vehicle perched on odd bicycle wheels: a little cart that had belonged to a soldier from Mirnoe, who had returned legless from the front and died shortly after the war.

  The cold eased our journey through the forest, where the muddy tracks were frozen solid, even making it possible to walk across peat bogs. From time to time we stopped to catch our breath, and also to pick a handful of cranberries, for all the world like tiny scoops of sorbet that melted slowly in the mouth, sharp and icy

  It was possibly the first time since we met that our actions, words, and silences came so naturally. I felt as if there were nothing more for me to guess at, nothing more to understand. To me her life had the clarity of these stained-glass windows of sky inlaid between the dark crowns of the fir trees.

  “Self-denial, altruism;” subconsciously, this woman’s character still provoked phrases in my mind that were attempts to define it. But they all failed in the face of the impulsive simplicity with which Vera acted. This led me to the conclusion that good (Good!) is a complex thing and conducive to pompous language as soon as one makes a moral issue of it, a debating topic. But it becomes humble and clear from the first real step in its direction: this walk through the forest, this prosaically muscular effort that dispersed the edifying fantasies of the good conscience. Besides, what looked to others like a good deed was for Vera nothing more than a habit of long standing. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea if we picked a few mushrooms on the way back,” she said, during a halt. “I could cook them for the old woman tomorrow.”

  The hamlet, hemmed in by the increasingly invasive forest, suddenly opened up before us and seemed uninhabited. Trees grew in the middle of the street, and some of the roofs had collapsed, revealing the spindly framework of beams beneath the layers of thatch. We went into twelve houses in turn, trying to spot the likeliest signs of human habitation. Ragged washing on a line in a yard? We went in: the floor was rotten, gave way easily underfoot…. No, well, how about this izba? On the wooden front steps, a rusty bicycle, balanced upside down on its seat and handlebars, looked as if it were waiting for the repairman to appear in the doorway, tools in hand. The house was empty; at the windows with their broken panes dried plant stems quivered in the draft….

  There was one house whose door we almost failed to try. The roof beams pointed skyward like the broken ribs of a carcass. The windows had lost their carved-wood frames. The front steps were almost hidden by dense undergrowth. We were about to go on our way…. Suddenly this voice. It came from a very low bench that ran the length of the wall and was hidden by the bushes. An old woman sat there, with half closed eyes, a cat curled up on her lap, to which she was reciting a litany of soothing words. She saw us, stood up, depositing the cat on the bench, and, in ringing tones, astonishingly forceful for her frail body, invited us to come in. There, an even greater surprise awaited us.

  The sky was visible through the partly collapsed roof, and this space open to the four winds had been rearranged in a way one would never have dreamed of: another, much smaller house had been built in the middle of the room, a miniature izba, fashioned out of the planks from some shed or fence. A real roof, a low, narrow door, doubtless salvaged from a barn, a window. The ruin that surrounded it already belonged to the outside world, its stormy weather, its wild nights. Nature held sway there. But the new edifice offered a replica, in condensed form, of the lost comforts. Bent double, we went in and discovered the austerity of a primitive life and astonishing neatness. A kind of vital minimum, I noted in my mind, the final frontier between human existence and the cosmos. A very small bed, a table, a stool, two plates, a cup, and on the wall, the dark rectangle of an icon, surrounded by several yellowed letters.

  Especially clever was the way this dwelling had been annexed onto the brickwork of the great stove that occupied half of the ruined house. As she showed us around her dolls house, the old woman explained that in winter she would go out into the main room invaded by snow, light the fire in the stove, then take refuge in her tiny izba…. Contrary to what we had been told about her, she was not deaf, just a little hard of hearing, but her sight was going, her vision was shrinking, just as the size of her world-within-a-world was growing smaller.

  At one moment during the visit, Vera signaled to me discreetly that she wanted to be left alone with the old woman.

  I walked over to the pond, at the center of which the outline of a sunken boat could just be made out. In the house next door, I came upon a pile of school textbooks, a notebook filled with grammar exercises. I was struck by a sentence, copied out to illustrate some rule of syntax that must be observed: “The defenders of Leningrad obeyed Stalin’s order to resist to the last drop of their blood.” No, not syntax. It was more the gradation of sounds. I had need of these ironic little insights in order to bear the weight of time stagnating in a thick pool of absurdity in every one of these houses, in the empty street.

>   “Soon Mirnoe will look exactly like this,” I thought, making my way back to the old survivor’s izba. “Just as empty of people. More fossilized than the rules of grammar.”

  The two women had already reemerged and were bustling around the little cart with bicycle wheels. I could readily imagine the course their private negotiations had followed. At first, the old woman’s refusal to leave, a refusal made for form’s sake but necessary to justify her long years of solitude, to avoid acknowledging that she had been abandoned. Next, Vera making her case, weighing every word, for the hermit must not be robbed of her only remaining pride, that of being capable of dying alone…. Then, from one phrase to the next, an imperceptible rapprochement, the convergence of their life histories as women, empathy and finally the admissions each made, this one above all: the fear of dying alone.

  I went over to them, offered my help. I saw they both had slightly reddened eyes. I reflected on my ironic reaction just now when reading that sentence about Stalin ordering the defense of Leningrad. Such had been the sarcastic tone prevalent in our dissident intellectual circle. A humor that provided real mental comfort, for it placed us above the fray. Now, observing these two women who had just shed a few tears as they reached their decision, I sensed that our irony was in collision with something that went beyond it. “Rustic sentimentality,” would have been our sneering comment at the Wigwam. “Les misérables, Soviet-style …” Such mockery would have been wide of the mark, I now knew. What was essential was these women’s hands loading the totality of a human being’s material existence onto the little cart.

  The totality! The notion staggered me. Everything the old woman needed was there, on the three short planks of our cart. She went into the izba, came back with the icon wrapped in a piece of cotton fabric.

  “Katerina Ivanovna’s coming with us,” saidVera, as if referring to a brief visit or an excursion. “But she doesn’t want to ride in our taxi. She prefers to walk. We’ll see….

  She drew me a little ahead to let the old woman say her farewells to the house. Katerina went up to the front steps, crossed herself, bowing very low, crossed herself again, came to join us. Her cat followed her at a distance.

  As we entered the forest, I thought about the first night that village was going to spend without a living soul. Katerina’s izba-withm-zn-izba, the bench where in summer she used to await the appearance of a favorite star, that notebook with the grammar exercise from Stalin’s time. “When a certain degree of depletion is reached,” I thought, “life ceases to be about things. Then, and only then, may be the moment when the need to recount it in a book becomes overwhelming….”

  About two o’clock in the afternoon, the footpaths began to thaw. In some places I had to carry Katerina, striding over chasms in the mud. Her body had the ethereal lightness of old clothes.

  By evening, the new arrival was completely settled in. Above the izba Vera had chosen for her a bluish wisp of smoke hung in the air, with the scent of birch logs burning in the stove. The line of the roof and the dark crenel-lations of the forest stood out against the purple sky with the sharpness of a silverpoint drawing, then, blurred by a transparent puff of smoke, they began to sway gently. As did that star in the north, which was growing similarly restless and coming closer.

  I saw Vera slowly crossing the street, her arms weighed down with full pails. She stopped for a moment, setting her load down on the ground, remained motionless, her gaze directed toward the broad expanse of the lake that was still light.

  Goodness, altruism, sharing … All this struck me now as much too cerebral, too bookish. Our day had had no other objective than the beauty of this haze of smoke with its scent of burning birch bark, the lively dancing of the star, the silence of this woman in the middle of the road, her silhouette etched against the opal of the lake.

  “When a certain degree of depletion is reached,” I recalled, “reality ceases to be about things and becomes the word. When a certain degree of suffering is reached, the pain allows us to perceive fully the immediate beauty of each moment….”

  The absence of sound was such that at a distance, I heard a faint sigh … Vera lifted up her pails once more, made her way toward Katerinas house. It occurred to me that the old woman was experiencing all that happened to her now—the wood fire scent, the lake outside the window of her new house—as the start of an afterlife, given that she had long since accepted the idea of dying alone, given that for other people dead was what she already was.

  In Leningrad, at the Wigwam, we were forever making clear-cut distinctions between good and evil in the world. I knew the evil that had laid waste to these villages in the North was boundless. And yet never had the world appeared so beautiful to me as that night, seen through the eyes of a tired old woman. Beautiful and worthy of being protected by words against the swift erasure of our deeds.

  I spent several days in the solemn, serene conviction that I had achieved full insight into the mystery of Veras life.

  And then one Saturday evening, a week after our expedition, I saw her setting off toward the crossroads where, at the end of the day, one could wait for a truck going to the district capital. She was not wearing her old cavalry greatcoat but a beige raincoat of an elegant cut, which I was seeing for the first time. She had put up her hair into a full chignon on the nape of her neck. She was walking briskly and looked very much like a woman on her way to meet a man—which I found quite incredible.

  5

  AS I DRESSED HURRIEDLY, ran out into the street, cut through the undergrowth, and headed for the crossroads, the echo of one of Otar’s mocking remarks rang in my ears: “You’re an artist. You need beauty and tenderness….”

  Nothing wounds more bitterly than conventional sexuality in a woman one has idealized. The existence I had dreamed up for Vera was a beautiful lie. The truth lay hidden in this woman’s body, a woman who, very healthily, once a week (or more often?) slept with a man, her lover (a married man? a widower?), came back to Mirnoe, went on looking after the old women …

  I ran, stumbling over roots hidden under leaves, then stopped, out of breath, one hand leaning against a tree trunk. It was as if the mist from my breath in the frozen air endowed the scenes I imagined with a physical authenticity. A house, a door opening in a fence, a kiss, the warmth of a room, a dinner with rich country cooking, drinks, a very high double bed beneath an ancient clock, the woman’s body, with thighs parted wide, moans of pleasure…. The devastating and wholly natural obviousness of this coupling, its complete human legitimacy. And the utter impossibility of conceiving of it, given that only yesterday evening one could still hallucinate the appearance of a soldier returning home at this very crossroads.

  I reached the meeting of the ways at the moment when the two rear lights of a truck that had just passed were fading into the dusk. My quarry must have boarded it. She would climb down, knock at a gate, kiss the man who opened it. There would be the dinner, the high double bed, the body offered with mature, generous, feminine savoir faire….

  So this love affair, long ago embedded in her daily routine, had always coexisted comfortably with everything else: retrieving elderly survivors, the lake’s nocturnal beauty …

  And even her wait for the soldier! For she knew very well he would never come back. On the one hand, the peace she brought to lonely old women, her own solitude, the radiance of those autumn moments we had lived through together on the island. And on the other … this pleasure taken in the depths of a double bed. Only in my fantasies did such a mixture seem impossible. But life, easygoing life, caring little for elegance, is nothing more than a constant mixture of genres.

  Another truck might come in five minutes, or in five hours. In all likelihood, I would have to beat a retreat, and in any case, I thought, with a brief dawning of lucidity, how would I find her in the town? And above all, why should I find her? A perfectly grotesque scene enacted itself inside my head: I am in front of a great wooden gate, barring the way to a woman, this woman who has c
ome to make love with a man: I thrust her back, reminding her indignantly that the soldier may return….

  A beam of light drew me out of this delirium. A motorcycle pulled up. I recognized the deputy director of the cultural center. The motorcycle was the key feature of the role he affected: dark and brooding, hard but romantic, misunderstood by his time. His powerful machine would have needed good asphalt roads for the performance to carry conviction, but we began jolting painfully along, bouncing from one rut to the next, sometimes raising our legs to protect them from spurts of mud. Around a corner, red reflectors gleamed at us; the deputy director let fly an oath. We were now compelled to crawl along for mile after mile amid the noise and stink of the truck.

  I asked to get down at the edge of the town, where the truck came to a halt. Before he drove off, the biker called out through the noise of his backfiring machine: “Come to my house this evening! It’s a farewell party for Otar….” And in an abrupt, aggressive maneuver, he over-took the truck. Vera was already walking away down a street lit by a pallid neon tube attached to the façade of a store.

  It was not hard for me to follow her in the darkness. She turned off into a wider street (Marx Avenue, I noted distractedly), cut through a square, seemed to linger in front of a store window (the town’s only department store), quickened her pace. A minute later, we found ourselves on the platform at the railroad station, separated by an impatient and visibly excited crowd. Everyone was waiting for the Moscow train to pass through, the most important daily event in the life of the town.

  She hung back, close to a pile of old railroad ties at one end of the platform. From time to time, edged out by people who moved in close to her, she moved away furtively and was then obliged to slip into the crowd, to sidle into a fresh hiding place without being recognized. Amid this gathering, all in their Sunday best, the two of us were both hunter and hunted, for as she drew near, I would back away, ready to cut and run, making myself scarce like a thief taking fright. And even though I might lose sight of her for several seconds, I felt I could sense her presence, like the warm pulsing of a vein, in among all these overcoats covered in frozen mist.