The Woman Who Waited (2 page)

In his stories, he somehow or other contrived to avoid repetition. And yet they invariably dealt with women, desired, seduced, possessed. He took them lying down, standing up, hunched up in the cab of his truck, spread-eagled against a cowshed wall as the drowsy beasts chewed their cuds, in a forest glade at the base of an anthill (“We both had our backsides bitten to death by those buggers!”), in steam baths…. His language was both coarse and ornate: he made “that great ass split open like a watermelon,” and in the baths “breasts swell up, you know, they really do, like dough rising;” “I shoved her up against a cherry tree. I penetrated her, shook her so hard a whole shitload of cherries showered down on top of us. We were all red with juice….” At heart he was a veritable poet of the flesh, and the sincerity of his passion for the female body rescued his stories from coital monotony.

One day, I was foolish enough to ask him how I could tell whether a woman was ready to accept my advances or not. “If she fucks?” he exclaimed, giving a twist to the steering wheel. “No problem. Just ask her one simple question….” Like a good actor, he let the pause linger, visibly content to be instructing a young simpleton. “All you need to know is this. Does she eat smoked herring?”

“Smoked herring? Why?”

“Here’s why: if she eats smoked herring, she gets thirsty

“So?”

“And if she’s thirsty, she drinks a lot of water.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Well, if she drinks water, she pisses. Right?”

“Yes. And so?”

“So if she pisses, she must have a twat.”

“Well, all right, but …”

“And if she has a twat, she fucks!”

He went into a long laugh that drowned out the noise of the engine, thumped me several times on the shoulder, oblivious of the flurry of flakes sweeping across the road. This all happened on that same day of that first snow in early September. We had just arrived at an apparently deserted village, which I failed to recognize—neither the
izbas
transfigured by their snowy coating nor the shores of the lake all carpeted in white.

Otar braked, seized a bucket, went over to a well. His antediluvian truck bizarrely consumed as much water as gas. “Like that chick who eats smoked herring,” he joked, winking at me knowingly.

We were about to continue on our way when they appeared. Two female figures, one tall and quite youthful, the other a tiny old woman, were climbing up the slope that led from the lake to the road. They had just been taking a bath in the minuscule
izba
from whose chimney a haze of smoke still filtered. The old woman walked with difficulty, struggling against the gusts of wind, turning her face aside from the volleys of snow. Her companion looked almost as if she were carrying her. She was dressed in a long military greatcoat of the type once worn in the cavalry. She was bareheaded (perhaps, surprised by the snow, she had given her shawl to the old woman), and against the heavy fabric of the coat collar, her neck looked almost childishly slender. Reaching the road, they turned toward the village; we could see them full face now. At that moment, a gust of wind more violent than the rest blew back one of the sides of the long cavalry greatcoat, and for the space of a second we saw the whiteness of a breast, swiftly covered up by the woman as she tugged irritably at her coat lapels.

Without starting the engine, Otar stared fixedly through the open door. I was waiting for his observation. I remembered his “breasts swell up, you know, at the baths …” I was sure I was going to have to listen to a hilarious, racy monologue along those lines. And for the first time I foresaw that such talk, albeit jocular and good-natured, would be painful to me.

But he did not stir, his hands on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the two female shapes as they were gradually blotted out by the snow flurry. …

His voice rang out just as he eased the clutch and the mud spurted from beneath the spinning wheels. “That blessed Vera! She’s still waiting! Still waiting! She’ll wait forever…. She’s screwed up her whole life with her waiting! He was killed or was reported missing in action, same difference. You cry your heart out, okay. You down a few vodkas, okay. You wear black, fine, it’s the custom. But after that you start to live again. Life goes on, goddamn it! She was sixteen when he went to the front in ‘forty-five, and she’s been waiting ever since. Because they never got a reliable bit of paper about the guy’s death. She’s dug herself a grave here. Along with all these old women that no one gives a damn about, but she goes around picking up half-dead people in the middle of the forest. And she goes on waiting…. It’s thirty years now, for fuck’s sake! And you’ve seen what a beauty she is, even now….”

He fell silent, then gave me a fierce look and cried out in a scathing voice: “Well, this isn’t one of your smoked-herring stories, you stupid prick!” I almost responded in the same vein, thinking the oath was addressed to me, but held my peace. His despairing way of hitting the wheel with the flat of his hands showed it was himself he was angry with. His face lost its ruddy glow and turned gray. I sensed that, violent as he was in his refusal to understand this woman, at the same time, since he was a true mountain dweller, her waiting inspired in him the almost holy respect that is due to a vow, a solemn oath….

We didn’t exchange another word all the way to town, the district capital, where I climbed down. On the central square, covered in muddy snow, a young married couple, surrounded by their nearest and dearest, were just leaving the front steps of an administrative building to take their places in the leading car of a beribboned motorcade. In the sky, above the flat roof, above a faded red flag, a live triangle of wild geese flew past.

“You know, maybe she’s right, after all, that Vera,” Otar said to me, as I shook his hand. “In any case, it’s not for me, or you for that matter, to judge her.”

I did not attempt to “judge” her. I simply saw her from a great distance several days after that encounter in the snow, walking along the shore.

The day was limpid and icy: after the last spasms of a summer that had swung wildly from midsummer heat to snow squalls, autumn reigned. The snow had melted, the ground was dry and hard, the willow leaves glittered, slivers of gold in the blue air. I felt accepted by these sundrenched meadows, the shadowy mass of the forest, the windows of a few
izbas
, which seemed to be staring at me with melancholy benevolence.

On the far shore of the lake I recognized her: a dark upright amid the chilly, gilded blaze. I followed her with my eyes for a long time, struck by a simple notion that made all other thoughts about her destiny pointless: “There goes a woman,” I said to myself, “about whom I know everything. Her whole life is there before me, concentrated in that distant figure walking beside the lake. She’s a woman who’s been waiting for the man she loves for thirty years, that is, from time immemorial.”

The next day I set out to walk to the White Sea coast. One of the old women who lived in the village pointed out the path to me, partly overgrown by the forest, assuring me that in her youth it used to take her half a day to reach it, and that for me, with my long legs …Very near to the shoreline, I lost my way. Hoping to skirt a hill, I landed in a dank peat bog, floundered about among creeks from which a strong marshy smell arose. The ocean was very close at hand; from time to time the sour surface of the stagnant water was ruffled by a sea breeze … But the sun was already beginning to set; I had to resign myself to going home.

My return was like the retreat following a rout. No longer a known path, wild changes of direction, the ridiculous fear of being really lost, and the spiderwebs I had to keep wiping from my face, along with the salt sweat.

At the moment when I was least hoping for it, the village and the lake suddenly materialized, as if from a dream. A tranquil dream, aglow with the sunset’s pale transparency. I sat down on a thick slab of granite, which must once have marked the boundary of an estate. In a few seconds, weariness flooded in, even banishing my irritation at having failed to reach my goal. I felt drained, absent, as if all that was left of me was this slow stare, sliding weightlessly across the world.

At the place where the path leading to the village met the road to the district capital, I saw Vera. At this crossroads, there was a small sign fixed to a post bearing the name of the village, Mirnoe. A little below this a mailbox had been nailed to it, empty for most of the time but occasionally harboring a local newspaper. Vera went up to the post, lifted the mailbox’s tin flap, thrust her hand inside. Even from a long way off, I sensed that the gesture was not automatic, that it had still not become automatic….

I recalled our first, abrupt encounter at the end of August. The huge fishing net, the glance from an unknown woman, her body hot from the exertion. My conviction that between us anything might have happened. My sense of having missed an opportunity. I had recorded it all in my notebook. Now those notes seemed utterly incongruous. The woman looking for a letter in a rusty mailbox lived on another planet.

It was from this planet that she greeted me as she approached, smiled, made her way toward her house. I thought about this wait of hers, and for the first time her fate seemed neither strange nor unusual to me.

“In fact, all women wait like her,” I formulated clumsily, “throughout their lives. All women, in every country, in every age. They wait for a man to appear, there at the end of the road, in this clear light of sunset. A man with a firm, serious look, returning from somewhere beyond death, to a woman who never gave up hope in spite of everything. And the ones who don’t wait are mere smoked-herring eaters.”

The aggressiveness of this conclusion made me feel better, for I had come to that village partly because of one of those women who were incapable of waiting.

I
HAD COME TO ESCAPE
from people who found our times too slow. But what I was really fleeing was myself, since I differed very little from them. I came to this conclusion one night in March, in the studio we used to call the Wigwam. A face there, sketched on a thinly painted canvas, bore a curious resemblance to my own.

At a certain moment, the tempo of the recitation coincided with the rhythmic panting of two lovers. Everyone tried to keep a straight face. Especially the poet himself, for the content of his verses demanded it. In them, our country was compared to a terrifying planet, whose vast bulk prevented anyone from breaking free from its gravitational pull. The word
planet
was rhymed with
nyet
, several times over, hammered out in an incantation. At the height of the declamation, this reiterated rhyme began to be echoed by masculine grunts, and, in a higher register, the moans of a woman: the couple separated from us only by a few canvases stacked on easels. Including the barely colored-in portrait of a man who looked like me.

The situation was farcical. And yet that night, though one of celebration like so many others spent in that studio, was a sad one.

As always, of course, there was plenty of alcohol, plenty of music (a jazz singer on the verge of whispering secrets into the ears of all and sundry but who continued to postpone his revelations), plenty of bodies, most of them young, ready to make love without constraint, or rather to make love in order to defy all constraints.

Six or seven years late, May ‘68 had finally made it to Russia, had made it to this long loft converted into a semi-clandestine studio in a remote suburb of Leningrad.

“Planét—Nyet!” declaimed the author of the poem and was answered from behind the unfinished paintings by the clamor of an imminent orgasm.
Nyet
was what stifled the maturing of talent, freedom of expression, unfettered love, foreign travel, everything, in fact. This loft alone was airborne, challenging the laws of gravity.

It was a typical setting for such gatherings of more or less dissident artists. From Kiev to Vladivostok, from Leningrad to Tiflis, everyone was saying, fearing, hoping for approximately the same thing. It all usually took place amid the glee generated by secrecy and subversion, especially when one is young. And what could not be said in a poem or with a paintbrush, we expressed through these erratic orgasms. “Planet Nyet,” and the moans now starting up again behind the canvases, louder than ever.

But on this occasion there was something forced about the gaiety. Even the presence of an American jour-nalist made no difference. Having him there was a great event for us all: he sat in the middle, ensconced in an armchair; given the throng that surrounded him, he might have been taken for the president of the United States. But the chemistry was all wrong.

It would have been easy to ascribe the melancholy I felt to jealousy.

Hardly more than a week earlier, the woman now moaning behind the canvases had been sleeping with me. I knew the sound of her voice in lovemaking, and I could recognize her part in the current duet. Without flinching. Without the right to be jealous. Sexual ownership was the height of petty bourgeois absurdity. One drank, smoked with screwed up eyes (as in Godard’s films), approved the reading of a poem, and, when the woman finally emerged from among the canvases, one winked at her, offered her a drink…. I recalled how she sometimes used to raise her eyebrows in her sleep, as if asking herself: “What’s it all for?”Then her face would become vulnerable, childlike…. Best not to remember!

That evening, if the truth be told, we all felt our hearts were not in it. Perhaps just because of the American journalist. Too big a fish for this shabby studio, a visitor too eagerly desired. He was there like the supreme incarnation of the Western world we dreamed of, he listened and watched, and we all felt as if we were being transported to the far side of the iron curtain. Thanks to him, the lines of verse recited already seemed as if they had been published in London or New York, an unfinished painting was on the verge of being hung in a Parisian art gallery. We were acting out a scenario of artistic dissidence for him. And even the moans of pleasure from behind the easels were addressed to him personally.