The Woman Who Waited

1

ONLY 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.

It was via literature of this kind that I had sought to understand Vera’s life, to weigh the “if onlys” that might have changed everything. But this unbelievable wait of thirty years (I was a mere twenty-six myself) struck me as too monstrous, too unarguable, to give rise to any moral debate. And, above all, much too improbable to feature in a book. A period of waiting far too long, too grievously real, for any work of fiction.

The bald reality of it was clear to me, too, in the obscenely simple manner of this life’s devastation, the unspeakable banality of the years that had gone to make up that thirty-year monolith. For to begin with, when peace returned, there was nothing to distinguish Vera from the millions of other women who had lost their men. Like her they waited, young widows, forsaken lovers. No particular merit in that. Such waiting was very common then, and their distress was equally current.

Indeed, to probe the depths of her misfortune I had to face up to a still more brutal, almost indecent statement of fact: during those first few years without war, women remained faithful to their men who had been killed because there was a shortage of men left alive. It was as crass and prosaic as that. Ten million males slaughtered, as many again disabled. A fiance became a rare commodity.

A hideous logic, but fearsomely accurate, I knew. The only one that enabled me to picture the village of Mirnoe as it had been thirty years before. A strange population made up of women, children, and old men. A few men sporting military medals on their soldiers’ tunics, embittered men with arms missing, drink-sodden men with no legs, the heroic flotsam and jetsam of the victory. And this girl, this Vera, whose faithfulness at first passed unnoticed, later prompted respectful and sympathetic approval, then, as time went by, a mixture of weariness and irritation, the shrugging of shoulders reserved for village idiots; then, later still, indifference, sometimes giving way to the pride local people take in one of the curiosities of the region, a holy relic, a notably picturesque rock.

One day, in the end, nothing remained of all that. Just the beautiful emptiness of the clear September sky, this same faithful woman, thirty years older, steering a boat across the sun-drenched mirror of the lake. The way I had seen and known her. The pointlessness of all judgments, admiring or critical. Only this thought, hazy amid the air’s radiance: “That’s how it is.”

It was more from a desire for the truth than youthful cynicism that I sought to strip her life of all will to sacrifice, all grand gestures. Vera had never really had a choice. The pressure of events, which is the destiny of the poor, had decided for her. At first the lack of men to marry, and then, when marriages began to be celebrated once more in the resurgent village, she was already perceived as a kind of young old maid. There was a new generation of truly young people, careless of the ghosts of the war, eager to seize their portion of happiness, wary of this solitary woman, half-widow, half-fiancée, dressed in a long cavalry greatcoat. Their zest for life had thrust her back toward old age as the draft from a train thrusts aside someone who has just missed it.

Impossible, too, for her to leave Mirnoe, a place in the back of beyond! In those days, kolkhozniks had no identity documents and needed to request authorization to travel. It was not the echo of a voice from beyond the forest that kept her there, but this bureaucratic slavery. And when, at the start of the sixties, Stalin’s serfs, freed at last, were beginning to leave their warrens, Vera was already surrounded by a colony of moribund old women she could no longer abandon.

No, she had not chosen to wait, she had been cruelly caught by an era, by the postwar years, which had closed in on her like a mousetrap.

But this meant she was perfectly free! And her pledge was null and void.

Free to leave the village, as she did one day of high winds at the beginning of October. I noticed she was carrying not her leather bookbag crammed with textbooks and pupils’ homework but a broad portfolio of thick cardboard, which the squalls were trying to snatch from her. There was a vagabond lightness in her step, the panache of an itinerant artist or an adventuress. As she passed the mailbox where the roads met, she did not pause. For the space of a second, the notion came to me that she was departing for good on an arrogant impulse. Off to take the train to Leningrad, or at least, to Archangel…

She was free. And her mater dolorosa persona was other people’s invention. We were the ones who imposed this absurd waiting on her, very noble, of course, even heroic, but she would have shaken it off long ago had not our sympathetic and admiring gaze been fixed on her. This gaze had turned her into a pillar of salt, an elegant funeral monument, at the foot of which one could say a little prayer, sighing: “Praise be! Faithful women still exist! “The lovesick babbling of a sixteen-year-old girl had been turned into an irrevocable vow. And a woman brimming with vitality turned into a suttee burned to a cinder on the pyre of loneliness.

These judgments were exaggerated and too intellectual, but, in a confused way, I sensed that they should be made known to Vera at any cost. She ought to know it was possible to think in this way, that there was still time for such thoughts.

She came home that evening, with the same portfolio under her arm. “Leningrad, Archangel… hmm…,” I kept repeating bitterly. And yet, despite that false start, amid the wind’s bluster, the sense of freedom that emanated from here appearance was still there. Even more intensely. And my indignation became still sharper over this cult of undying love that had been assigned to her, as to an idol. Here was a woman, her face flushed by the wind, walking along in the sunset’s radiance. Everything else should be wiped from the slate, the youthful promises, the faded icons of past heroism, the pitying glances of kindly souls. Look no further than this free flesh-and-blood presence. As I watched her walking away, I recalled the body of a woman hauling in her nets on the warm clay of the lakeshore, and that naked body at night, in front of the door to the little bathhouse izba… I sensed that the recovery of her freedom must start from the revolt of that body enclosed in a long military greatcoat.

I called on her that same evening, without being invited, simply knocking on her door on the pretext that I had run out of bread. I had been into her house before on several occasions, but always after meeting her in the street and exchanging a few words with her. This unannounced arrival did not surprise her, however; she was accustomed to life in a community and to the visits, always unexpected, of her elderly protégées.

We went into the main room, and while she was taking out a round loaf and cutting a generous quarter off it for me, I quickly seated myself in the place that was the secret goal of my visit. Alongside the old table of thick, cracked planks stood this bench, the far end of which, close to the door, was the spot Vera generally occupied when one went to see her. She talked, served her guests, walked over to the stove, but always returned to that station close to the door. At the least creak of the treads on the front steps, she would tense instinctively, ready to stand up, and go to meet the visitor who was surely bound to arrive at that very moment. And outside the window, she could see the crossroads, the corner of the forest that anyone coming to Mirnoe had to skirt…

So I sat down at this end of the bench, leaning my elbows heavily on the table. Vera had wrapped my share of the loaf in a square of linen, then offered me tea and apple jam. She moved away, and I had a distinct feeling that the room’s familiar disposition was eluding her. There were brief tremors of anxiety in her eyes and a slight uncertainty in the movements of her body, the alarm of a sleepwalker who has been diverted from her path. She poured tea for us, then, after some hesitation, settled herself on a chair facing me, stood up almost at once, crossed over to the window. I perceived that an unacknowledged, pleasurably cruel game was developing between us… More or less honestly, I still believed it was for her own good.

I went back to her house three evenings in a row, always unexpectedly, each time settling myself down without permission on the very end of the bench close to the door. Her thwarted sleepwalkers body seemed to be accepting my intrusion better and better. Very remotely in our confrontation there was the tension of a sexual encounter.

Or rather that of a physical assault, for my presence distorted the interior of this room, prepared for another’s return. The cleanliness of the floor, half a dozen reproductions on the walls and these books she had certainly never read (a pretentiousness that struck me as truly provincial and touching). Fat books lined up on a set of shelves, chosen to create “an intellectual ambience”: a General Theory of Linguistics, an Etymological Dictionary in four volumes, Humboldt’s Complete Works…They were clearly relics she had salvaged from some abandoned library, having no need of them for her own modest work as a teacher… I settled myself down on the seat I had annexed, observing with curiosity this haven created for another: the order, the comfort, the bookish decor.

On the last of these games-playing evenings I interrupted my psychological experiment for a moment, glanced out of the window. And through the pallor of the fog I thought I could make out the tall figure of a man emerging at the crossroads. A traveler slowing his pace… No, nothing. A tree. A streak on the windowpane. But, viewed from this end of the bench, such an apparition seemed far from impossible, nurtured to the point of hallucination by years of waiting, by all those glances (it made me giddy to think of them) day after day, conjuring up a human shape suddenly visible at the corner of the forest…

When I got home, I decided to leave Mirnoe the following morning.

Instead of leaving that morning, I went to the island with Vera.

2

SHE WAS DUE TO GO TO THE ISLAND to lay a wreath of dried flowers on Anna’s grave-a pale ring, bristling with plant stems and ears of corn, which it had taken one of the old women of Mirnoe several weeks to fashion.

For me, crossing the lake in the rain perfectly expressed the absurdity of the existence Vera was leading. Absurd, too, was my own impulse to go with her, which took me by surprise: I was busy packing my bags, saw her passing in the street, opened the window, called out to her, asking, I did not know why, if I could join her. And to crown my folly, with ridiculous male conceit, I insisted on sculling with a single oar, standing upright, like an operatic gondolier. Vera began by objecting (the wind, the wayward heaviness of the old rowing boat…), then let me go ahead.

The wind kept shifting, the nose of the boat swung to the right, to the left, then came to a standstill, impossible to drive forward through the dense water, in which the oar became embedded, as if in wet cotton wool. So as not to lose face, I made light of it, concealed the effort, my arms soon numb, my brow furrowed, my eyes clouded with sweat. The woman seated in front of me, with the ugly, dry little wreath in her lap, was intolerable to behold-idiotically resigned, indifferent to the rain, to the wind, to her ruined life, to this day wasted on an expedition prompted by the funereal whim of some half-mad old woman. I contemplated her bowed face, brooding on dreams, faded, one supposed, by dint of recurring every day for thirty years, a reverie, or perhaps just a void, gray monotonous as this water and these shores, blurred in the raindrop-laden air. “A woman they have turned into a walking monument to the dead. A fiancee immolated on the pyre of faithfulness. A rustic Andromache As my efforts became more painful, so the epithets became more venomous. At one point, it seemed to me as if the boat, mired in the glutinous ponderousness of the waves, were making no progress at all. Vera gently raised her face, smiled at me, seemed about to speak, changed her mind. “A village idiot! That’s it! A wooden idol these yokels have nailed up at the entrance to their settlement to ward off fate’s thunderbolts. A propitiatory victim offered to History. An icon in whose shadow the good old kolkhozniks could fornicate, indulge in denouncing people, steal, get drunk…”

Exhausted by struggling against the wind, I ended up heaving on the oar more or less mechanically, merely going through the motions, for form’s sake. The squat outline of the church on the island hillock continued to appear as distant as ever. “Mind you, they still had to let her leave the village, poor Vera, for as long as it took for her to get her teaching diploma in some little town in the area. Doubtless the one great journey in her life. Her view into the world. And then, presto, back into the fold, her vigil on the bench by the front door, forever pricking up her ears. What if that’s the sound of a soldier’s boots? Oh yes, a little withered wreath for Anna’s grave. Very pretty, my dear, but who’s going to put flowers on your grave? The old women will die, and there won’t be another Vera to take care of you…”

I noticed that by matching my efforts to the thrust of the swell, I was maneuvering the boat more easily. It still moved heavily, but instead of battling against this massive pitching and tossing, one had to make a swift stroke with the oar at the right moment, give it a brief flick… Vera remained unmoving and more detached than ever, as if, having noted that I had learned the technique, she could return to her reverie. She was shielding the flowers on the wreath with her hands. I wanted to say to her: “Look, the rain’s going to drench them on the grave, in any case.” But that would have disturbed her repose.

Well, why not rouse her? Stop sculling, squat down in front of her, clasp her hands, shake them, or better still, kiss her frozen hands. “She’s asleep in a kind of foretaste of death, in that time she put on hold at the age of sixteen, moving like a somnambulist among these old women who remind her of the war and the departure of her soldier… She’s living in an afterlife. The dead must see what she sees…”

We grounded gently on the island’s beach. I jumped ashore, pulled the bow up onto the sand, helpedVera disembark. Suddenly, the idea that this woman was living through what it is only given to us to live through after we die made an obscure sense of the life I had judged so absurd. A sense that could be perceived at every step, in every gesture.

“I’m sorry to have made you work like a galley slave,” she said as we walked up to the churchyard. “I could have hidden this at home, of course, or thrown it away” (she shook the wreath gently). “Zina would never have known. But, you see, all these old women are already living a little beyond this life, and I feel as if I’m reaching out to them across the frontier. Then all of a sudden they hand me this wreath. So maybe it’s not so stupid, after all…” She looked at me for a long time; her gray eyes seemed bigger than ever as they glistened in the rain, giving the impression that they had read my recent thoughts about her. I had a very physical sense that I, too, was present in this afterlife through which she was moving.

Once the wreath was placed on the grave mound, the flowers on it were quickly covered in raindrops and, moistened, seemed to come to life again like a delicate and luminous decal. “Next time I’ll bring the cross,” she said very softly, as if to herself. “May I come with you?” I asked, picturing a rainy day, the slow rocking of the boat, and the hand, currently adjusting the wreath, resting, as if forgotten, on the gunwale of the boat.

We began to walk down toward the shore. Vera s long military greatcoat was soaked through, almost black. At a distance, on this slope with its brown, flattened vegetation, she might have been taken for a nurse in wartime, making her way toward a field covered in the wounded and dead… In other people’s eyes… But all I saw was a woman walking at my side, her face drenched by the rain, intensely alive on this dull autumn day, taking care not to tread on the last clumps of flowers, and as she arrived at the beach, bending down to pick something off the sand and hand it to me: “You dropped this last time.” It was the pencil I had used to set down such phrases in my notebook as: “A suttee burned to a cinder on the pyre of faithfulness,” “a life massacred by a childish vow”…

In the boat she took one oar, leaving the other for me. The rain fell more steadily, subduing the squalls. Neither the houses of Mirnoe, nor even the willows on that far shore, were visible. Our rhythms were quickly matched. Each effort made by the other felt like a response to one’s own, down to the slightest tensing of the muscles. We touched shoulders, but our real closeness was in this slow, rhythmic action, the care we took to wait for each other, pulling together once more after too powerful a stroke or the skipping of a blade over the crest of a wave.

In the middle of the crossing, both shores disappeared completely behind the rain. No line, no point of orientation beyond the contours of the boat. The gray air with its swirling pattern of raindrops, the waves, calmer now, that seemed to be coming from nowhere. And our forward motion that no longer seemed to have a goal. We were quite simply there, side by side, amid the somnolent hissing of the rain, in a dusk as cool as fish scales, and when I turned my head a little I saw the glistening face of a woman smiling faintly, as if made happy by the incessant tears the sky sent coursing down her cheeks.

I understood now that this was the way she lived out her afterlife. A slow progress, with no apparent goal, but marked by a simple and profound meaning.

The boat grounded blindly at the very spot from which we had set off.

3

FROM THE STREET, I saw a child’s hand press flat against the misted windowpane, and wipe it from top to bottom. Through the opening thus cleared a little close-cropped head showed itself, with somewhat pallid, melancholy features that struck me as familiar. I walked up to the building and read the sign above the front steps: “Grammar School.” The school where Vera taught…

I had come here by chance after making long detours in search of the wooden church Otar and I had failed to find. The church stood at the entrance to the village of Nakhod, about six miles from Mirnoe on the far side of the lake. There were still stirrings of life there: three dozen houses, a dairy, a tractor repair shop (a building with a rusty corrugated iron roof), and this one-room schoolhouse.

I stole a glance in at the now-clean window Ancient desks made of thick planks, with old-fashioned holes for inkwells, portraits of writers (Pushkin’s flowing locks, Tolstoys beard), and above the blackboard Lenin’s piercing gaze. Several boys and girls were banging down their desk lids, sliding back onto the benches; clearly the first break had just fmished. Vera got up from her chair, an exercise book in her hand.

I knocked discreetly and asked permission to come in, like a pupil arriving late. Her amazement was a little like the discomposure she had failed to conceal when I sat myself down in her izba at the far end of the bench, facing the window, her own lookout post… But this time the discomposure was tinged with evident pleasure as well as irony, as she indicated a seat for me, murmuring: “Welcome, Comrade Inspector…” I sat at the back, “the dunces’ row,” I thought, guessing from Vera s look that the same idea had struck her.

The children’s coats were hung on the wall near a large brick stove with cracked plaster. The black stovepipe separated Chekhov’s romantically myopic countenance from the Promethean gaze of the young Gorky. Prominent on top of a set of bookshelves was a terrestrial globe covered in dust and surrounded by a wire circle: the orbit of the moon, a silvered ball, long since wrenched from its path, which now lay upon a pile of old maps. A light haze arose from the wringing-wet garments, steaming up the windows. I pictured the waterlogged pathways covered in russet leaves that the children had followed to come here from their scattered villages in the depths of the forest. These misted windowpanes provoked thoughts of winter, and the fronds of hoarfrost that would soon be woven across them. “Ill be far away by then,” I said to myself, and the idea of no longer being in these vast expanses of the North, no longer seeing this woman who was now walking from one desk to the next, suddenly seemed very strange to me.

There were eight pupils, all told. Judging from what they were doing, I quickly gauged the age differences: three boys and a girl were calculating the speed of two boats in pursuit of one another on the Volga-Don Canal. So, ten or eleven. Three younger pupils were taking turns to read out their written homework about a walk through the forest. The final one, sitting facingVera’s desk, was learning to write.

To begin with, I cocked an ear toward the terms in which the problem of the boats was presented, then confessed myself incapable of solving it, having forgotten everything about tricky arithmetical problems like this one. A ludicrous and tangible indication of the passage of time… And I started listening to the three stories of walks through the forest. The first told of the classic fear of wolves. The second, with poetic but dangerous imprecision, explained how to tell edible mushrooms from their poisonous doubles… In a few polite words but without flattery Vera praised these fumbling descriptions.

The third account of a walk was the shortest. As it unfolded, there were no “carpets of beautiful golden leaves” nor “a wolf’s great footprints,” nor even a “deaf cap” (for “death cap”) mushroom… It was read out by the child I had caught sight of earlier through the cleared window. His face still had the same dreamy expression; one of the elbows of his old pullover was completely unraveled, the other, in a strange contrast, was carefully darned. His voice did not describe, it simply stated, insistently, as if to say: “All I can tell you is what I saw and what happened to me.”

On the way to school the previous day, he said, he went into the forest to avoid a pathway the rains had transformed into a stream. He passed through a clearing he had never been in before. And there, tramping through the dead leaves, he disturbed a sleeping butterfly that flew away in the cold air. Where would it find shelter now when the snowstorms came?

The question was put in tones at once distraught and truculent, as if addressing a reproach to us all. The boy sat down, his eyes turned toward the window his hand had wiped clean, now cloudy once more. The other pupils, even the ones at the helm of their boats, looked up. There was a moment of silence. I saw that Vera was searching for words before concluding: “In the spring, Lyosha, you’ll go back to that clearing and you’ll see your butterfly. In fact, we’ll all go together… Yours is a very good story!”The boy shrugged his shoulders, as if to say: “But it’s not a story It’s what I saw.”

And then I recognized him. He was one of the sons of the man who had hanged himself by fastening the rope to the door of a shed at the beginning of September, the drunkard of whom I was planning to make a satirical portrait. I recalled the little crowd of his children, with staring eyes, no tears, and this boy’s desperate flight across a piece of wasteland… Now here he was, talking of a butterfly disturbed under a dead leaf, deprived of winter shelter.

Vera looked at her watch, announced another break. The children rushed outside; the youngest, the one who was learning to write, produced a bread-and-butter sandwich from his satchel. Lyosha removed his pullover and took it to Vera without a word. The shirt he was wearing underneath was a large man’s shirt, taken in at the sides and with the sleeves shortened. He stayed in the classroom, leaning his back against the warm brick of the stove. Vera drew her chair up to the window, produced a scrap of cloth, a spool of thread, a needle. As she patched in silence, I looked at the books on the shelves, mainly textbooks, selected passages from classic authors, then, a completely ridiculous intrusion, A Typology of Scandinavian Languages. “Another piece of flotsam she’s fished out of some wrecked library,” I thought and went outside. Beneath a sloping roof, a stack of firewood, piled high, supplies for the winter. I took an ax and set about splitting thick ends of timber, stacking up the logs, which gave off a bitter aroma of fog. And once again the thought that this timber would be burning in the big stove in the classroom long after I had departed, the very idea of the fire I would never see, struck me as bizarre.

We returned home together on foot, walking slowly around the lake. Unfamiliar at first, the track quickly joined the one I had always taken, leading from the old landing stage, by way of the crossroads and the signpost with the mailbox, to the willow groves where I had surprised the woman hauling in her fishing net… In the middle of the lake, the clear curves of the church stood out in the mist-laden air on the ochreous hump of the island.

“One should have no illusions,” Vera said, when I talked to her about her pupils. “The only possible future for them is to go away. We’re not even living in the past here. We’re in the pluperfect. These children will go off to towns where their best hope will be work on a construction site, up to their ears in mud, a young workers’ barracks, alcohol, violence. But, you know, I sometimes tell myself that something of these forests will stay with them all the same. And our lessons. A butterfly awakened just before winter. If young Lyosha thought about that, he’ll surely hold on to some trace of it. Despite his drunken father’s death, despite the filth of the towns he’ll soon be immersed in. Despite everything. It’s not much, of course. And yet, I’m sure such things can save people. Often just a little thing can be enough to keep one from going under.”

As we passed close by the spot she used to fish from, on the shoreline covered by the bare willow groves, I sensed that the memory of our first encounter still lingered within her, for she lost no time in breaking the silence, talking with some embarrassment, looking away and pointing to the island.’One of the Vikings’ routes to the south passed this spot. They would see that island just the same as it is now, minus the church and graveyard. In their language they called it holm, an island. Whereas in Russian holm means a hill. It’s a question for the specialist. Why this shift in meaning?”

Taken aback, I mumbled: “Oh, some kind of etymological perversity, I guess… Maybe the Russians drank more than the Scandinavians… Though they do say the Finns can run rings round us in that department… Wait a minute… So with us a Viking island turns into a hill? All right. I give up. Tell me about these Norsemen and their holm!’

“Well, to begin with, we’re talking about Swedes and Norwegians, not Finns. When they came here on their raids, they needed a considerable draw for their heavy dragon ships. So they preferred to come in the spring, during the high tides. Thanks to these, even the villages generally far away from the shore came within their reach. They saw an island and yelled, ‘Holm!’ The natives remembered the word and used it to refer to what this ‘island’ became when the waters retreated. Simply a hill in the middle of the fields, once again laid bare. I’m sorry if all that sounds pedantic. When I was young, I embarked on a thesis about all this etymological humbug. But fortunately I never completed the course-”

“A thesis? You mean a doctoral thesis?” My astonishment was such that I slowed my pace, almost to a standstill. This obscure schoolteacher, this Vera, forgotten by everyone in this remote neck of the woods… A doctorate in linguistic studies! It seemed like a joke.

“So where did you study?” There was ill-concealed skepticism in my voice and also a degree of irritation: here in this northern wilderness, with my university diploma, I believed I was erudition incarnate. Now, mortified, I realized that my own self-esteem had been dented by this upheaval in the intellectual hierarchy

“In Leningrad, at the university. I had Ivanitsky as my thesis supervisor. You probably didn’t know him. He died at the end of the sixties. He was very upset with me for throwing in the towel just before it came to defending my thesis.

I listened to her, unable to tune out the conflicting images: a recluse, an inconsolable fiancée-widow, a hermit dedicated to the cult of the dead, and this young research student in the Leningrad of the sixties with all that post-Stalin ferment. I quickly added five years of university studies to three years on the thesis, that is to say at least eight long years spent far from the forests of Mirnoe. A whole lifetime! So I had been completely mistaken about the sense of her life here…

I followed her automatically. Without noticing that we had reached the village, I walked straight past the izba where I lodged and into her house, as if this were what always happened, as if we were a couple.

Once inside the main room, I came to my senses and studied the interior, which now gave evidence of a totally different way of life: books on linguistics, perfectly normal reading for her, of course, reproductions hung on the walls, some of whose subjects needed to be viewed as tongue-in-cheek humor, as in the case of a landscape captioned: ‘On the pack ice: family of polar bears.” A neatness owing more to intellectual discipline than the whims of an old maid. And that spot at the end of the bench, her lookout post, which she had readily abandoned to go to Leningrad or elsewhere. A different woman…

I remained standing as I spoke, still feeling I had lost my bearings in this transformed space.

“But why did you come back?” My urgency in asking her gave away the real question: Why, after so many years spent in Leningrad, come and bury yourself here among the drunkards and the bears?

She must have been aware of the implication, but replied without any hint of solemnity, as she continued making the tea: “I had a funny feeling during all those years in Leningrad. I was more or less content with what I was doing there, quite involved in their life-you’ll note I said, ‘their life,’” she smiled.”And yet very divided. As if this interlude at the university was a way of proving to other people that I belonged elsewhere. You see, for me there was something very artificial about those years of the thaw. Something hypocritical. They pilloried Stalin but sanctified Lenin more than ever. It was a fairly understandable sleight of hand. After the collapse of one cult, people were clinging to the last remaining idols. I remember very fashionable poets appearing in stadiums before tens of thousands of people. One of them declaimed:’Take Lenin’s picture off our banknotes. For he is beyond price!’ It was inspiring, new, intoxicating. And false. Most of the people who applauded those lines knew the first concentration camps had been built on Lenin’s orders. And as for barbed wire, by the way, there was never any shortage of that in these parts, around Mirnoe. But the poets preferred to lie. That was why they were showered with honors and dachas in the Crimea…”

She poured tea for us, offered me a chair, sat down at the far end of the bench… I listened to her with the strange sensation of hearing not the story of the democratic hopes of the sixties but that of the following decade, of the seventies, of our dissident youth: poems, rallies, alcohol, and freedom.

No doubt her remarks about the privileges accorded to the poets struck her as too caustic, for she smiled and added: “It was probably mainly my fault if I didn’t manage to be at ease at that time. I argued, read carbon copies of dissident texts, did my research on the typology of Old Swedish and Russian. But I wasn’t living.”

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 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!

Laughter suddenly erupted, swelled, and at its peak reached the pitch that brings it close to tears: the history teacher, the librarian, and the nurse were all wearing completely identical underwear, the only type available in the only department store in the district capital, as displayed by the unique female mannequin in the shop window. The art teacher was laughing more than the rest. She still had her clothes on, having been unable to find a partner, and was exacting her revenge for an unrewarding evening. And the cassette player, coming back to life, struck up in hoarse, mellow tones: “… When the birdlings wake and cry, I love you

The laughter continued, in little bursts, increasingly forced. We were trying to postpone the ending of this merriment, aware sadness was imminent. A rude awakening in a cold house in a room that smelled of canned fish, stale bodies, and the bitter reek of a fire nipped in the bud. The day was about to dawn. Then someone noticed Otar’s absence; that saved the situation. There was a flood of jokes about the sexual appetites of Georgians. Real men who refuse to be disturbed in the act, even by a house catching fire! A bottle was uncorked, the lights were turned off, people wandered about indecisively in the hope that the night, and their dampened desires, might gain a new lease on life.

I saw Otar when I went out. Contrary to our malicious gossip, he was perched outside on the handrail to the front steps, smoking. The broad brim of his fedora was dripping with rain. “Shall we go?” he said, as if we had planned to leave together. “The only thing is, I don’t have my truck anymore. I gave it back.” He gave a wry smile and added: “In exchange for my freedom.”

At this moment the door opened, and the master of the house presented me with a long cape of tent canvas and two bottles of liquor. I was still enjoying some privileges thanks to my standing as a Leningrad intellectual.

In two hours’ time, Otar was due to catch the train for Moscow, the one I had waited for the previous evening. He went with me to the edge of the town, to the highway where, early in the morning, one could get a ride on one of the vast trucks carrying pine tree trunks. When we heard the throbbing of the vehicle, he quickly took a brown paper envelope out of his bag, thrust it into my hands, and growled, at once embarrassed and commanding: “There. Put that in the mailbox. You know the one. At the crossroads. Its for her…”Then he clapped me heavily on the shoulder, scratched my cheek with his beard, and went to place himself in the roadway to stop the truck.

From time to time, chatting with the driver in the smoke-filled cab, I fingered the rough thickness of the envelope beneath the canvas of my cape.

The rectangle slid into the box, which reverberated with an empty sound. So many hopes linked to this hollow piece of ironmongery! Ah, those hopes… It all came back to me now: the man getting off the Moscow train yesterday and his eau de cologne, a dinner, a high bed, a woman moaning with pleasure. So Otar was just as gullible as me. “An artist who needs beauty and tenderness

The rain abated; I turned back the hood of my cape and inhaled as if emerging into the open air. The morning resembled a bleak, icy dusk, the clay, churned up by tracked vehicles, was reminiscent of a road in wartime. I rounded the corner of the forest, turned off onto the track leading to Mirnoe. The village soon came into view through the gray mist and looked to me more barren than the deserted villages I had been visiting during the past two months of my wanderings.

And the most uninhabited house of all was this one, this izba with pretty lace curtains at the windows. The woman who lived there must at that very moment be asleep in the arms of a man, somewhere in the town. A double bed warmed by their bodies heavy with love, the masculine eau de cologne mingling with the bitter, sugary tang of Red Moscow perfume…

When I was twenty yards away from the front steps, the door opened. I saw Vera’s silhouette, watched her recoil abruptly, disappear. An empty pail fell down the steps, rolled onto the ground with a metallic clatter. I drew closer, the door was shut, and the house again looked abandoned. I hesitated to knock, picked up the pail, set it back on the steps. After several seconds of pacing up and down beneath the windows, I continued on my way without having really understood what had just happened.

In my head, clouded with alcohol and the futile words uttered during our sleepless night, I put two and two together: if she had come home so early in the morning, Vera could not have spent that night with a lover, unless she had returned in the dark, by roads barely fit for motor vehicles even in broad daylight. Or else it was a brief coupling, that simulation of love I had almost engaged in with the history teacher. “Life is nothing more than the sticky warmth of a woman’s armpit,” I recalled, with nausea. Suddenly an impulsive, wild joy, too wild for the quite simple conclusion that had provoked it: the woman who had just let that pail drop had met no one and had come home all alone, as she always did.

I looked around me. The chill pewter of the lake, the dark timbers of the facade of the former administrative center… And this mirror broken in half, abandoned beside the worm-eaten front steps. I stopped, glanced into its murky surface, streaked with raindrops. And, as Vera had done, I recoiled momentarily…

A soldier, clad in a long cape, dark with rain, his boots heavy with mud from the pathways, had his calm, grave stare fixed upon me.