The Woman Who Waited (6 page)

Thus it was that in the language I employed in those days, I made a record of such luminous moments rescued from time. I sensed that they were not just harmonious fragments but a complete life apart. The one I had always dreamed of giving expression to. It was this I had had in mind in front of the broken skylight at the Wigwam. Here in Mirnoe, such a life could be lived from day to day with the certainty that it was exactly the life one should always have been living.

In these notes, jotted down between drafts of satirical prose and the details of rituals and legends, I was trying to hold on to it.

In the same notebook this fragment, written one evening: “During the night a violent gale drove the boat into the middle of the lake. The roads are impassable, so to get to the school Vera has to wait and hope that the wind coming off the sea will bring the boat in again. The breeze stiffens, we see our skiff drifting slowly toward us. Elsewhere a wait like this would seem intolerable to me, here this piece of floating wood marks out a span of time made up of sunshine, bitter cold, and a woman’s voice, weaving itself into the air in rare words like the stray chords of a melody. And the fragments of ice we break off at the frozen margin of the lake. Intricate rose windows of hoarfrost: we amuse ourselves by looking through them at the sky, the lake, and one another, transformed by these fans of crystal. The ice melts, shatters in our fingers, but the vision of the world transfigured stays in our eyes for a few more seconds. At one moment, a rustling in the willow groves at the water’s edge surprises us: driven by the wind from the White Sea, the boat has just reached the shore. We had not noticed time passing.”

On occasion I would say to myself, firmly believing it: “She’s a woman who lives by these rare moments of beauty. What more could she offer the one she loves?” In a confused intuition, I then grasped that, for Vera, experiencing them was a way of communicating with the man she was waiting for.

T
HAT NIGHT
I
HAD JUST BEEN RECORDING
the episode with the boat in my notebook.

All at once a dull sound detached itself from the limpid stillness of midnight, the slamming of a door a long way off. I went out and just had time to see briefly illuminated the entrance to the little bathhouse
izba
, on the slope that led to the lake. The door closed, but the darkness was not total. Under a milky blue, the hazy moon was keeping a wary, phosphorescent watch over the houses and trees. It was strangely mild; not a breath of wind blew down the village street. The dust on the road was silvery and soft underfoot.

I started to walk, not knowing where I was going. At first it was probably a simple urge to melt into this cloudy, somewhat theatrical luminescence, one that made every enchantment, every evil spell possible. But very soon, with a sleepwalkers persistence, I found myself close to the bathhouse.

The tiny window, two hands wide, was tinged with a lemon-colored halo, certainly a candle. The smell of burned bark hung on the air, mingling with the pungent chill of the rushes and the wet clay of the lakeshore. A mild night, a respite before the onslaught of winter. A feeling that my presence here was utterly uncalled-for and quite essential for something unknowable. The ideas that came to mind were crude, incongruous: to draw close to the little window, spy on this woman as she soaped her body, or quite simply, to throw open the door, step up to her, embrace her slippery, elusive body, push her down onto the wet floorboards, possess her….

The recollection of what this woman was interrupted my delirium. I recalled the day when the wind had carried the boat away, the fragments of ice through which we had peered at the skyVera’s face, made iridescent by the cracks in the rime, her faint smile, her gaze returning mine through the ice jewels as they melted between her fingers. This woman was situated beyond all desire. The woman waiting for the man she loved.

At that moment, the door opened. The woman who emerged was naked: she stepped out of the steam room, stood on the little wooden front steps, and inhaled the cool of the lake. The soft radiance of the moon made of her a statue of bluish glass, revealing even the molding of collarbones, the roundness of breasts, the curve of hips, on which drops of water glistened. She did not see me; a woodpile concealed me in its angular shadow. Besides, her eyes were half closed, as if all she perceived came through the sense of smell, from animal instinct. She breathed in greedily, baring her body to the moon, offering it to the night, to the dark expanse of the lake.

In the face of this dazzling, naked, physical presence, all I had thought about this woman hitherto, all I had written about her life, seemed trifling. A body capable of giving itself, of taking pleasure, directly, naturally. Nothing stood in the way of this, apart from that ancient, almost mythical vow: the wait for the vanished soldier. A ghost from the past versus a woman ready to love and be loved. Not even to love, no, just to yield to carnal abandon. In the silence of the night I heard her breathing, I sensed the quivering of her nostrils—a she-wolf or a hind, sniffing the scents rising from the waters edge…. She turned her back, and in the moment before she disappeared inside the door, the moonlight picked out the firm, muscular play of her buttocks.

Next morning, on a confused impulse of desire, I once more followed the path to the bathhouse. I looked back often, afraid of revealing my intentions, which I could not explain even to myself. The inside of the little building, darkened by smoke over long years, seemed chilly, sad. On the narrow ledge beside the tiny window, the melted lump of a candle. In the corner, close to the stove, dominating the room, a great cast-iron bowl rested in the hollow of a pyramid of sooty stones. A little water at the bottom of a copper scoop. An acid smell of damp wood. Impossible to imagine the heat of the fire, the stifling steam, a burning hot female body, writhing amid this blissful inferno…. Then, suddenly this slender, worn ring. Left behind on a bench beneath the window!

I slipped away, imagining how by a hideous coincidence, typical of such situations, Vera might come back looking for it and see me here. This ring alone made the nocturnal vision an undeniable reality. Yes, that woman had been here. A woman with a body made for pleasure and love, a woman whose only desire, perhaps, was just this, a sign, a slight pressure from circumstances, to liberate her from her absurd vow. The ring she had taken off was more telling than all the speculations I had set down in my notebook.

I was certain I should be adding nothing further now to my notes on Vera’s life.

Two days later, I was writing: “The villagers who long ago abandoned their houses at Mirnoe carried away everything it was possible to carry The seat of the village administration (an
izba
hardly larger than the others) was emptied as well. They tried to remove a large mirror, a relic of the era before the revolution. Through bad luck or clumsiness, hardly had it been set down on the front steps when it snapped, a long crack that split it in two. Rendered useless, it was left behind, propped against the timbers of the house. Its upper portion reflects the forest treetops and the sky. The face of anyone looking into it is thrust up toward the clouds. The lower part reflects the rutted road, the feet of people walking past, and, if you glance sideways, the line of the lake, now blue, now dark…. That evening I chance upon Vera in front of the mirror. She remains motionless, slightly bowed over the tarnished glass. When she hears my footsteps and looks around, what I see distinctly in her eyes is a day very different from the one we are living in at present, a different sky and, in my place, another person. Refocusing her look, she recognizes me, greets me, we walk away in silence…. All my overheated portrayals of the naked woman on the steps of the bathhouse are absurd. Her life is truly and solely made up of these moments of grievous beauty.”

I noticed that certain of the old women of Mirnoe, as they walked past the great abandoned mirror, would sometimes stop, take a handkerchief, and wipe the rain-streaked glass.

It was after our encounter beside the broken mirror that I found myself tempted to try to understand how it was to spend one’s whole life waiting for someone.

O
NLY TWO MOMENTS IN THAT LIFE
were known to me, and yet they encompassed it in its entirety.

The first: a dull, mild April day, a girl of sixteen shuffling in wet snow. Her eyes follow a convoy of four broad sleighs sliding over the slushy, gray potholes of the thaw like flat-bottomed boats. Amid the throng of young conscripts’ laughing faces, this sad pair of eyes she is trying not to lose sight of. She quickens her pace, slips, the eyes disappear behind someone’s shoulder, then reappear, glimpsing her amid the great emptiness of the snow-covered fields.

It is the beginning of April 1945, the very last contingent to be sent to the front and, on the last sleigh, this young soldier, the man she loves, the man to whom, as they said good-bye, she swore something like eternal love, something childish, I tell myself, yes, swore to be utterly true to him or to wait until death. I have no idea what a woman in love for the first time may promise a man, I have never received such a promise, I have never believed a woman capable of keeping it…. The convoy turns off behind the forest, the girl continues walking. The air has the wild smell of spring, of horses, of freedom. She stops, looks. Everything is familiar. This crossroads, the lake, the darkness of the forest where the bark is swollen with water. Everything is unrecognizable. And filled with life. A new life. Suddenly, from a very long way off, a cry goes up, holds, for an instant, in the dusk over the plain, fades. The girl listens: “… I’11 be back,” yelled at the top of his lungs, becomes first an echo, then silence, then an inner resonance that will never leave her.

That first moment I pictured thanks to the stories told by the old women of Mirnoe. The second I witnessed for myself: a woman of forty-seven walking beside the lake on a clear, cold September evening, the same path taken for thirty years, the same serene look directed at a passerby, and in her reverie that voice still resounds with unaltered power:”… I’ll be back!”

Between those two moments in her life, between her promise made in youth and the future annihilated by this vow, I tried to conjure up the day when the balance had tilted, when a few hasty words, whispered amid the tears of parting, had become her fate.

The tragedy of her life, I told myself, had come into being almost by chance. The random sequence effect of the tiny facts of daily life, apparently harmless coincidences, the overlapping of dates that, to begin with, presaged nothing irremediable. The subtle mechanism that sets all the real dramas of our lives in motion.

In April 1945, when the man she loved went to the front, she was sixteen.

So this was her first love, no capacity there for seeing things in perspective, making of this love one of the loves of her life. If the man had been killed at the start of the war, if she had been older, if she had been in love before, it would all have turned out differently But on the day he went away, Berlin was about to fall, and this young mans death at the age of eighteen seemed brutally gratuitous and quite easily avoidable. Give or take a few days and one less battle he would have returned, life would have resumed its course in May: marriage, children, the smell of resin on fresh pine planks, clean linen flapping in the wind that blew from the White Sea. If only …

I knew that writers had long since used up all of these “if onlys” in books, in film scenarios. In Russia, in Germany. During the postwar years, the two countries, the one victorious, the other defeated, had been hell-bent on writing and rewriting the same scene: a soldier returns to the town of his birth and discovers his wife or his beloved happy as a lark in the arms of another. The age-old Colonel Chabert triangle … In some versions, the soldier would return disfigured and therefore be rejected. In some, he would learn of a betrayal and forgive. In some, he would not forgive. In some, she would wait, then could wait no longer, and he would appear just as she was about to remarry. Every one of these moral quandaries went hand in hand with agonizing “if onlys,” which was, after all, not inappropriate, given the number of couples rent asunder and loves left to wither on the vine in both countries, thanks to the war.