The Woman Who Waited Read online

  She got up, made some more tea, turned over the tape that had just stopped. Sitting there stiffly, emptied of all my prepared speeches, I was thinking of the seventies generation, our own way of making passes. It was a good deal less daring than the revolutionary glass of water. Tremulous mood music, candles, a bottle of imported liquor, and to crown it all, an American journalist as tangible proof of our commitment to dissidence. Apart from that, nothing had changed, bodies seeking to couple, that was all. Which was what Vera had wanted to make me realize by talking about Alexandra Kollontai.

  “And what became of her later?”

  I was genuinely curious to know, even though my question sounded like an attempt to extricate myself from my embarrassment.

  Vera thought for a moment, like someone recalling an episode from her own life. She sat down and seemed less on her guard than at the outset, slightly sleepy, her gaze, as on the previous evening, entranced by the gleam of a candle.

  “Later … later she married. Well, it was a very open marriage, to a man fifteen years her junior, a dashing red commissar, a Cossack who had the gall to countermand orders from Lenin himself. She had all kinds of adventures, military and amorous. She had affairs with women, too, it seems. And then she grew old, and her husband fell in love with another woman. And it wasn’t like a glass of water. It was the real thing this time. She suffered agonies of jealousy. After fighting so hard against that bourgeois prejudice. And then, in a letter, she admitted that such simple and grievous things existed as a woman’s age, exclusive attachment to one person, the unbearable pain of losing that person, faithfulness, yes, faithfulness and … and, even more boringly and simply, love.”

  I sensed that she was in exactly the same relaxed state as during the previous evening. It would have been very easy now to put my arms round her, draw her to me, kiss her. She would have let it happen, I was sure. Very easy and utterly impossible. We could hear the hiss of the fire in the great stone stove, the rustle of a branch against the window. Within her eyes, focused on the dancing flame, shadows were deepening.

  A log exploded, a shower of sparks fanned out onto the floor. She turned her face toward me, spoke in a voice that was suddenly grave.

  “The other day I found a letter from Otar. I expect you brought it…. The first real letter in thirty years. He talks about those very things: exclusive attachment, faithfulness, waiting. He says he’s ready to wait. To change his life completely. Come back to this territory where he was once ordered to reside. Live in Mirnoe. With me. And leave if the other one (‘the man who must return,’ he calls him) did come back …”

  Her lips were half open; she was breathing in little gasps, as if she had been running. That was precisely the impression she gave me, of a race, a headlong flight that would end in a collapse, a long cry of pain, tears.

  In clumsy haste I asked: “And are you going to re-ply?”

  She gave me an astonishingly lucid, almost hard, look: “I already have.”

  “And …”

  “And the answers no. For the one who must return will return. Otherwise love’s nothing but a glass of water gulped down, the way our fair Alexandra used to describe it.

  She smiled, got up, went in search of her coat. Emerging from my torpid state, I held out the long cavalry greatcoat for her. Its folds gave off a cold, wintry breath. With casual warmth she bade me good night, kissed me lightly on the cheek. Only the tiny quivers at the corners of her mouth betrayed what she was managing to control.

  I stayed outside until she had reached the front steps of her izba. She walked slowly, giving the impression of holding in check an impulse to run, to escape. The beam of the flashlight she swung distractedly back and forth across the path sometimes veered upward, and its light collided with the bleak infinity of the sky.

  3

  I ARRIVED BEFORE the start of their concert to witness the rehearsal unobserved. The old marriage ritual was already more or less known to me. What I particularly wanted to see was the tentative emergence of the roles, the haziness of forgotten movements suddenly being reborn in the bodies’ memories. I was curious to hear the ancient voices, blending together little by little, overcoming the silence of some years. … I walked around the izba, formerly the village library, where the performance was due to take place, and crouched down beneath a window. One of the four panes was broken and had been replaced with plywood, so I could clearly hear what was being said inside.

  All Mirnoe’s “regulars” were there, seven women who had put on long dresses from another era, flowered shawls. White, russet with gilt threads, black. Country finery whose worn fabric and faded colors could be made out even through the window. Katerina, tiny and shriveled, wearing a kind of orange sarafan that was too big for her, was conducting the choir with her back to the window. The others, arranged in a semicircle, their arms folded over their chests, were obediently following her instructions. The status of conductor fell to her quite naturally: Katerina was the only one with complete recall of the songs and steps that made up this ritual from days gone by.

  They were preparing to perform it at the request of the great Leningrad scholar that I was in their eyes, an unintended fraud.

  As it happened, the rehearsal was frequently interrupted by brief but vehement arguments on the subject of myself. Or rather my relationship with Vera. There were two opposing opinions: though I was viewed by some, the majority, as a dangerous and unprincipled intruder, in the eyes of my two supporters I became “a good fellow who chops wood better than most.” Katerina, destined by her role to be the mediator, cited my exemplary conduct when I carried her through the forest, but nevertheless agreed that “folks from Leningrad these days have hearts of stone, like that city of theirs.”

  If the truth be told, passing judgment on my worth as a human being was for them no more than a way of alluding to the contradiction that none of them dared face up to: if they learned that a new love affair had just put Vera’s faithfulness toward her soldier at risk, their world, founded on the cult of the victims of the war, would have collapsed. And yet, as women who had suffered so much loneliness, they could only wish for her to be loved, even if it meant succumbing to an untimely, tardy love, with scant regard for tradition, a love that would be both her salvation and her ruin. I noted that the two evenings spent in Vera s company had sufficed to establish me in the minds of the women of Mirnoe as an ardent and persistent lover. At no point did they refer to the age difference between us. Since almost all of them were in their eighties, they perceived us as a couple in which my three months’ beard perfectly complemented the youthful glow that Vera’s features radiated.

  “With love it’s like the spring floods,” declared Katerina. “There’s no help for it. Even if it’s fall now….”

  Several voices objected, but she banished their protests with an elegant rippling movement of her hands, and the choir struck up, already in almost perfect unison. And when, as the soloist, she made her responses to them, in an astonishingly clear and firm voice, their earlier squabbles seemed trifling, just a little warm-up for the vocal chords.

  “He’ll come from beyond the sea, beyond the White Sea, vast and chill,” sang Katerina. And the choir took up the theme: “From beyond the White Sea he’ll come.”

  “He’ll come bringing the dawn. He’ll find it where the sun goes down. He’ll bring it for you, from beyond the sea.” Her voice became increasingly dreamy, and the choir responded in an even more remote echo, marking the distance the traveler had come.

  “Zoya, you’re always a little bit behind. Do try to keep up. Otherwise they’ll think you’ve gone to sleep.” Katerina stopped the choir. The women stirred. “They’ll think …” They was me. I slipped along under the window to approach the building from the front, and before knocking at the door, I made the sound of heavy, noisy footfalls on the front steps. The conductor of the choir came to let me in. Her pale cheeks were colored by the excitement of the dress rehearsal.

  At first, I foun
d the first public performance less moving than that rehearsal. The presence of an audience, in the shape of myself, made the old women more stiff, needlessly solemn. But on the other hand, perhaps by finally losing themselves fully in their performance, they had attained the hieratic ponderousness that this ceremony of bygone days demanded—a heaviness of plowed earth, the rigidity of wooden idols, the pagan totems their ancestors used to nail on the porches of their izbas. Acting out the scenes of the marriage, they moved with the menacing weight of living statues.

  Their voices, in contrast, rang out with a disarming sincerity and sweetness, with an expressiveness that, as always with amateur performers, revealed more of their own personal emotions than those of the characters.

  At one moment this distance between the performance of the ritual and the truth of the voices became painful. The bodies were acting out the fiancé and his chosen one boarding a ship and preparing to cross the White Sea. It was easy to imagine that, in reality, this epic voyage was taking place not at sea but on the lake that bordered Mirnoe, and that the place “where the dawn arises” was the little hill on the island. The old actresses slowly rocked their arms to imitate the movement of the oars. It occurred to me that Vera might at this very moment be on the water, returning to the village in her boat. They were acting out this crossing, too. With touching devotion. But their voices did not deceive.

  “He’ll come despite mists and snows to love you,” they sang. But their lips bore witness to what they had truly lived through themselves: men who went away and disappeared forever in the thick smoke of war, men returning covered in wounds, to die beside the lake.

  “And your house will be filled with joy, as a hive is filled with honey….” Yet the tone of those voices spoke of izbas buried under the snow, where they themselves had come close to ending their days.

  “He’ll come,” caroled Katerina in a stronger voice that marked the approaching end of the ceremony. “He’ll come, his arms weary from the voyage but his heart on fire for you.

  Suddenly we saw Vera.

  She had clearly arrived well before this last part of the performance and had remained unnoticed, leaning against the door frame, not wanting to interrupt the choir.

  It was her flight that gave her away. The door creaked, we looked around, and there she was, her hand on the handle. Her face was tormented into a frozen smile, her eyes growing wider with suppressed tears.

  The choir fell silent. Only Katerina, whose eyesight was very weak, continued singing: “He’ll come despite storms and snows. He’ll come and take you to where the dawn arises.… He’ll come …”

  I ran out, but Vera was already far away. She was making her escape, no longer trying to hide, heading blindly toward the willow groves beside the lake. I tried briefly to catch up with her, then went back to wait for her near her izba. To my great surprise, she was already at home, busily packing a suitcase.

  “I’m going to Archangel for three days tomorrow. It’s the city festival, you know. They’ve invited all the local celebrities. Including me, of course. Mind you, I’m not sure in what capacity. Probably as a heroic teacher with a strong reek of the soil about her. No matter. It’ll be a good chance to buy medicines for the old women. If you’re still here and you notice any of them are unwell, I’ll leave you the doctor’s address just in case. He’s a good dozen miles from Mirnoe, but if you cut around by the lake you can reach him in an hour.

  Then I recalled these festivities: they were due to begin that month and carry on, from one cultural event to the next, through into the following year, with the publication of an illustrated volume for which my contribution on indigenous traditions was awaited. ‘On the marriage ceremony,” I thought, “as sung by old women who lost their husbands or sons over thirty years ago.

  The following morning I saw Vera setting off. She was wearing a pale pink coat, with her hair put up in a chignon. The acrid tang of her perfume, Red Moscow, hung on the clear, frozen air for a moment. Her gait, her whole demeanor, betrayed the fierce determination of a woman ready to try her luck one last time.

  “What rubbish!” I immediately interjected into that train of thought. “Just a woman walking briskly, for fear of missing one of the trucks that pass the crossroads by the empty mailbox….”

  After her departure, I experienced almost relief, a kind of deliverance. I began serenely preparing for my own departure at last, namely by tossing a few books and notebooks into the depths of a suitcase and then roaming far from the village within the somber, luminous cathedral of the forest.

  4

  IN ONE OF THE DESERTED VILLAGES, this half sheet of lined paper, fastened to the door of what had been the grocery store: “Back in an hour.” Faded ink, message almost illegible. A door closed on a house abandoned long years ago. And this promise to come back within the hour.

  “All that remains after the death of an empire,” I would often tell myself when, during those hours of walking, I came upon the traces of the era we had treated so poorly. The era that had sought to transform this northern land into a great collectivist paradise and had now left behind an immense solitude, enlivened by a few unintentionally ironic notices, soon to be indecipherable.

  The deep indigo of the fir forests, the russet of the undergrowth, the intense blue when a dazzling burst of sunshine occurred amid the gray of the sky And from time to time the dark, heavy glint of water in a pond down in the hollow of a thicket. The black, the ocher, the blue. These were what one really discovered after the end of an era…. After our time spent on this earth, I thought as I returned home that evening. My suitcase was almost packed now, the house cleared of the few traces of my stay there. Life in Mirnoe would continue peacefully after my departure. It was amazing, infuriating, obvious.

  At such moments the days I had spent there seemed to me incomplete, ruined by my clumsiness: quite unresolved, this encounter with Vera, with her past, with what had briefly arisen between us. What else? The words to describe it flowed in, pretentious, cumbersome: affection, desire, jealousy … I continued on my way, my gaze lost in the somber gold of the fallen leaves, the white of a cloud captured by the lake. These restlessly recurring sights expressed much better what it was that had brought us so indefinably close.

  Each morning, I determined to follow through with that trip to the White Sea. And each time I shied away from it. On the first day, for the good, vaguely hypocritical reason of not wanting to leave the old women unattended. They really had no need of me. Like model children, they were making every effort not to fall ill while Vera was away (“So as not to die!” I joked cynically). Faithful to her instructions, I replenished their water supplies, chopped wood, went to see them in turn. Even the frailest of them seemed boundlessly full of the joys of spring. I promised myself I would go to the White Sea the next morning.

  I was thwarted by a memory at once benign and threatening.

  Halfway along the road to my objective, I came to a village I did not at once recognize. Deserted izbas, rye-straw roofs in shreds, a pond overgrown with reeds. Gradually it all came back to me, Gostyevo, Katerina’s village … The feeling of entering a forbidden place arose within me, and grew steadily as I approached her house. The little bench on which I had sat while waiting for the outcome of the discussion between her and Vera. The front steps where the boards had groaned under my feet.

  The disagreeable feeling came over me that I was violating a place, desecrating a past. The door yielded readily. By the light of that sunless day the interior of the room seemed blurred, fraught with suspicion. That same miniature edifice stood at the center of the room: the little house-within-a-house. A pair of old felt boots with broken heels stood beside the stove, like sliced-off legs, ready for walking. Overcoming a murky, superstitious fear, I opened the little house’s door. A very small bed, a tiny stool, a narrow table at the bedside. And, lying on the ground, a yellowed envelope. “An old letter she used to reread every evening,” I thought, mindful of the clichés of books and films
.

  No, it was a kind of final message drawn up by this woman who expected to die alone. In large, painstaking handwriting she gave her surname, her first name, her place and date of birth. On the front, she had noted, in a column, the first date of each month, doubtless so that it would be possible to establish the approximate time of her death…. And at the bottom of the page, in the same rather schoolgirlish handwriting, was added this request: “Please, if possible, plant a wild rose on my grave. My husband, Ivan Nekiforovich Glebov, who died for the Fatherland in August 1942, loved these plants.”

  On leaving the miniature izba, I took the path back to Mirnoe, the one we had followed when we brought Katerina to her new house.

  I arrived at nightfall and decided to leave Katerina’s letter at Vera’s house, adding a little note to it. Would it be right to return this sad text to the old woman, now that her situation was so different? In fact I was using this rescued envelope as a pretext for going into Vera’s house for the space of a minute. Doors were never locked in Mirnoe.