The Woman Who Waited (10 page)

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.

A
S
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 come 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.

When in the distance the locomotive’s headlamp pierced the fog, the crowd stirred, pressed closer to the tracks, and to my alarm, I saw that Vera was only a couple of steps away from me, her eyes following the coaches as they streamed past. I moved away, clambered over the first of the suitcases that were being set down on the ground, deafened by noisy hugs and kisses, jostled by coalescing families. I looked back but did not see her again. Slowly the platform emptied; the only ones left now were those who had been let down and the most daring of the smokers, poised to leap back on board the train as soon as the whistle blew. She was no longer there. “A man with a slight nick on his chin from shaving in a swaying railroad car, pungent eau de cologne, a dinner over which he’ll recount the latest news from the capital, a high double bed, their sleep together.

As I left the station, I told myself that sleeping in a man’s arms might well be the most natural, even the most honorable, solution for Vera, a way of life she was deprived of when others’ eyes were focused on her, banal, to be sure, but one to which she had truly earned the right. I almost convinced myself. Then suddenly I realized I was filled with contempt both for such a way of life and for such a woman.

The party was already in full swing at the deputy director’s. The room, blue with tobacco smoke, was very unevenly lit by candles. Voices were getting louder, men laughing, women shrieking, from which it was easy to deduce their levels of intoxication. I sat down beside one of the women guests and, beneath her garish makeup, recognized the features of the history teacher. I was given wine. (Georgian wine, I noted. Otar must have cleared out his cellar.) Someone yelled out a toast in welcome. I drank hastily, eager to catch up with them in their boisterous merriment. They were already chorusing yet another toast in celebration of O tar’s freedom regained.

I did not notice the moment when our bickering and chaotic conversation touched on Mirnoe. Had I provoked this myself? Unlikely. I was only half listening and did not realize they were talking about Vera until the history teacher exclaimed: “Oh, yes. A hermit, a nun. You could have fooled me! She fucks left, right, and center. What do you mean: ‘Who with?’With the stationmaster, for heaven’s sake. And I’ll tell you another thing….” Her voice was drowned by other voices and other remarks.

The pain of what I had just heard sobered me instantly. I found myself sitting on the ground on a rolled-up sheepskin, my arm tightly clasping the woman as she continued yelling, my right hand kneading her breast, her skintight sweater sticky under the armpit.

So life was nothing more than this carnal stickiness, men’s and women’s desire, pawing one another, possessing one another, moving on. “First they’re on fire. After, they tire …” Everything else was lies told by poets. Slipping out of her skirt, the history teacher leaned forward and, with rounded lips, as if for a caricature of a kiss, blew out a candle. In the dim light other bodies were tightening their knots of arms, necks, and legs. I heard Otar’s sad laugh. The art teacher angrily explaining that for children to be taught painting properly, they needed to begin with Malevich’s
Black Square on a White Field
. She had not found a man to make love with that evening. Someone made a joke about the whole of Russia being electrified, and I realized that the candles were not there to create an atmosphere but were needed because of a power failure. Their light was sufficient for me to make out the pattern on the fabric of the undergarments my partner was in the process of discarding: something green and flowery. And as always in such hasty couplings, only half desired by the participants, a glimmer of wry pity crept in, for this alien body, so touching in its zeal to simulate love. All at once indifference took over, then the simple desire to crush those warm, bare breasts …

The shout that went up was excessive in relation to the extent of the catastrophe, as we quickly realized. A candle had fallen off a windowsill and rolled under a curtain; the blaze was spectacular. The hysterical yell of “Fire!” came in response to this first impression of an inferno. Panic contributed to it. Orders issued and countermanded, half-naked bodies rushing this way and that, smoke. But already the guilty curtain lay upon the ground, furiously trampled on by several pairs of feet. Finally, sighs of relief all around, a moment of stasis after extreme frenzy, then astonishment: the electricity had come back on again!

We stood there, blinking, staring at one another upon this amorous battlefield, over which filaments of soot floated. Smeared makeup, pale masculine chests, but one thing, above all!