The Woman Who Waited

1

AS SHE TALKED, she seemed both focused and distracted. Underneath the table, which, in anticipation of her visit, I had covered with a square of cloth, I saw she had kicked off her shoes. Red slippers of a type that must have been in fashion a dozen years before lay on their sides in the manner of a woman’s shoes carelessly discarded below a bed of love. Shoes possibly too tight for her now. Their heels were coated with earth, from the mass of clay on the hundred yards that lay between our two izbas. As she talked, her eyes were mesmerized by the dazzle of a candle flame reflected in a glass. Candles, the husky sweetness of a jazz singer… It was my attempt to create a mood.

“Why lie? I sometimes really dread it. Him coming back… My life’s behind me now… But even in the early days, I was afraid of his return… When I saw you wearing that military cape yesterday, it gave me the fright of my life. What to say first, what to do first… I’ve spent thirty years rehearsing it all, and suddenly I was at a complete loss.”

I let her talk, as one does with a person under hypnosis, trying not to interrupt as they unburden themselves. My curiosity was mingled with a powerful sense that we were getting close to the truth. More than her words, it was her body, the relaxed posture of her body, that revealed the ultimate truth about her life. A woman like her, an impassive idol, unyielding in the face of the weather, indifferent to fate, could also be this: a woman mellowed by two glasses of sweet liqueur, her cheeks rosy like a young girl’s, artless confidences tinged with the sentimentality of a provincial old maid, the evident delight taken in a “candlelit supper,” a “sophisticated” evening, with a background of languid mood music, and the lazy strains of: “When the dawn flames in the sky, I love you…”

Yes, life, the real thing, that perpetual mixture of genres.

Proud of this wisdom, new found for me, I was playing the hypnotist, pouring the wine, changing the tapes, asking questions in a scarcely audible murmur so that the sleeper should not awaken.

“The other day I saw you going off in the evening, where did you go?”

“Yesterday, no, the day before yesterday, I went to the station… I waited for the Moscow train… I find myself doing it from time to time. The dream’s nearly always the same. It’s night, the platform, he’s getting off the train, coming toward me… This time it was, if anything, more real than ever. I was certain he’d come. I went there. I waited. None of it makes any sense, I know. But if I hadn’t gone, a link would have been broken… And there’d be no point in waiting anymore…”

Her eyelids batted slowly; she looked up at me with a fond, dreamy gaze that did not see me, would only see me when the shadows flitting across it had passed. I sensed that during this blindness I could have taken any liberty. I could have seized her hand. I was already touching this hand; my fingers moved lightly along her forearm. We were sitting side by side, and the sensation of having this woman in my possession was infinitely powerful and infinitely touching. Almost in a whisper I asked: “And when you saw no one was there, did you come straight home?”

I felt I had found the rhythm and the timbre that did not risk arousing her from her waking sleep. My hand gently enfolded her shoulder; the movement, if she had abruptly come to herself, could still have been taken for one of friendly familiarity occasioned by the festive evening and the wine.

“Yes, I came home… But maybe for the first time in my life, I wanted to… To forget myself. To forget everything. To let my hair down like a teenager. You know, let it all hang out. Like now, with this kind of silly music and the wine

Her shoulder was gently pressing into my chest, and when she spoke, the physical vibrations from the sound of her voice reverberated within me. Nothing came between our bodies now, apart from her white silk blouse, chaste and old-fashioned in style, and the shadows slowly slipping away from her gaze. My arm eased gently along her shoulder, slid around her waist. Her hair smelled of birch leaves soaked in hot water…

For several seconds we contrived by tacit agreement not to notice the noise. To take it for the insistent tapping of a branch of the sorb apple tree against the window-pane, stirred by the breeze from the White Sea. But there was no wind that night. We moved apart, looked toward the window. Half of a face, stained yellow by the candlelight, was observing us from outside. A little fist, tightly clenched, vibrated against the pane. In the rapid look that passed between us could be sensed our alarm and, above all, the absurdity of this alarm, this dread of a ghost. Vera adjusted her blouse; I went to the door while she felt for her shoes under the table. On the front steps stood Maria, a little bent old woman who lived in the izba next door to the bathhouse.

“Katerina’s sick. Very sick. You need to go see her…”

She said it without looking at me, as if Vera were the only person in the room. Rustic good manners, I thought, backing toward the wall. Accompanied by the old woman, Vera went out, slipping on her raincoat in the street, as country doctors do when awakened in the middle of the night. While putting away the remains of our supper, I told myself with mocking resentment that this intervention by fate (no, Fate!) would doubtless give rise to a thousand interpretations and reflections during Vera’s long nocturnal soliloquies that winter. And I had a fierce desire to challenge this much-vaunted fate, to out-maneuver the guardian angel who had appeared in the guise of a shriveled little old woman.

2

I DID SO THE NEXT DAY by inviting Vera to visit me again, just to show her somewhat playfully that we could easily thwart fortune’s dirty tricks and that time was still on our side. I felt myself all the more within my rights in doing so, since at noon I had seen the local doctor emerging from Katerina’s house. With a sigh of irritation directed at Vera, who was just behind him, he said: “Well, at her age, you know…”What his tone implied was: There you go, gathering up all these ancient ruins with one foot in the grave and I’m supposed to bruise my backside over thirty miles of potholes… I remembered that the priest who came to visit Anna, when she was dying, had displayed exactly the same sullen face.

For a moment, I was afraid Vera might refuse to come. She readily accepted and came bearing a bottle of wine and a dish of salted mushrooms: “You remember. We picked them when we went to fetch Katerina.”

Strangely enough, it was her directness that held me back. Everything began to happen as it had the night before, but this time I knew that at any minute now this woman with her mature, statuesque body would be naked in my arms. Yet the body was a minor consideration. The woman naked in my arms would be the woman who for thirty years now… It seemed absolutely inconceivable. My behavior became self-conscious. I roared with laughter while feeling my features frozen… Now ribbing her with absurd familiarity, now inhibited, almost tongue-tied.

Very quickly, she became the one leading the conversation, serving us, transforming my clumsy advances into harmless little blunders. Over dessert, just after salvaging one of these inept maneuvers by making a joke of it (when my hand settled on her forearm, it instantly seemed more out of place than a hammer would have been among our teacups), she began to talk about Alexandra Kollontai.

“Each generation has its own way of making passes. When I was in Leningrad in the sixties, the men who accosted you, and were anxious to cut to the chase, could only talk of one thing: Kollontai’s ‘glass of water theory’ Amid the ferment of the revolution, Alexandra Kollontai, a great beauty and a great friend of Lenin, came up with this proposition: satisfying your carnal instinct is as straightforward as drinking a glass of water. It seemed such a vital issue that during the early years following 1917, they were quite seriously planning to erect cabins in the streets of Moscow where the citizens could satisfy their physical desire. The best way of making passes is not to make a pass at all. To get straight to the point. You meet in the street. You find the nearest cabin. You drink your ‘glass of water.’ You go your separate ways. One in the eye for bourgeois propriety. But Lenin quickly condemned this theory as the product of left-wing deviation. And with a telling argument the young would do well to heed. ‘However thirsty you are,’ he said, ‘you’re still not going to drink from a murky pond…’ Have a little discernment, for goodness sake! So when in the sixties, a young man invited me to share that glass of water with him under the halo of Alexandra’s moral authority, I had a ready-made and very Leninist reply: ‘Take a look, young man. This aged crone you see in front of you. Doesn’t she remind you of a stagnant pond?’ It worked pretty well…”

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

“And what became of her later?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And…”

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly we saw Vera.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the main room, nothing had moved since our last meeting. “A nun’s quarters, or an old maid’s,” was the malicious thought I had, sensing that the judgment was accurate as regards the sparseness of the place but essentially wrong. For a dense and troubling feminine presence could be felt here, despite the apparent order. Through the half-open bedroom door, I saw a high bedstead, village style, with iron posts. A blouse hung from a hanger close to the stove… No, in the end, it was not my spying on these intimate details that offered the key to Vera s secret. It was rather the memory of a woman hauling in her nets on the lakeshore by the light of an August sunset. Her body uncovered by the bunching of a wet dress. Another woman, her nakedness gleaming blue in the moonlight outside the bathhouse door one night in September. Another, the one who passed me an oar, whose wood retained the warmth of her hand. Yet another, sitting at the far end of the bench, her eyes fixed on the crossroads. And the one I had tried to hypnotize with my hesitant caresses.

All these women were there. Not in this room, but in me; they had become a part of my life without my being aware of it. Only yesterday Mirnoe had still seemed to me no more than a brief episode, soon ended.

Before leaving, I turned to make a mental note of the silent intimacy of this room. Strangely enough, this final glance reminded me of Katerinas miniature dwelling. I pictured Vera alone here in the depths of winter, trying to see out through the windows coated with ice.

Not giving myself the time to think, I took hold of the edge of the long bench and pushed it farther into the room. Then I moved the big table to match. Furniture of thick planks, colossally heavy. Now when one sat at the very end of the bench, one no longer saw the distant crossroads but the expanse of the lake, already filled with a purple sky.

On the third day, I did not go, misled by the constantly changing light. The west was overcast with low, leaden clouds, promising an onslaught of snow. Then a breeze arose from the south, bringing sunshine; the trunks of the fir trees turned red and warm, oozing resin. Out of the wind, it felt like spring, like the start of an endless day on the brink of a new life. With the carelessness of travelers who give no thought to the return journey, I hurried off along the track that led to the White Sea. An hour later, the sky darkened, the air became permeated with the acid tang of ice, and I retraced my steps. To await the next illusory spring.

Just as I was attempting to ford a watercourse, once again a luminous mirage lit up the forest. I was familiar with this narrow river, which had the transparency of strong tea. We used to cross it when heading for Mirnoe and taking a short cut through the forest. But its level had risen markedly, and the ford I had had occasion to cross in the past was currently hidden beneath a long rippling stretch of water weed. I kneeled down, drank an icy mouthful, as scalding as alcohol, then, with the bad conscience of a giant destroying the fragile beauty of the waters and the delicately ribbed sand, I began to move forward, anxious not to stir up the bottom, where a few dead leaves lay Now the sun had broken through, it was spring again and all this a carefree ramble, with flashes of dazzling bronze shimmering in the depths of the stream.

I was within a few paces of the far bank when the sound of running reached me. The spot where I set my foot down was the river’s deepest point; the water now slid very close to the top of my rubber boots. I froze in an irresolute and farcical posture, unable to advance, not daring to retreat. Then the crashing of broken branches rang out and petrified me even more. I imagined that some wild animal, hunted, hunting, or hunting me, was about to emerge onto the riverbank.

I took a halting step backward and turned toward the footfalls as they drew ever closer. In a quick spasm of fear, all those hunters’ tales flashed through my mind: a wounded elk, in the agony of death, crushes those who stand in its path; a bear disturbed at the start of its hibernation becomes a man-eater; a pack of wolves in pursuit of a stag… Should I run away, filling my boots with water, or take advantage of my terrified paralysis, which, with a bit of luck, might make me invisible? Although my glance was a frenzied one, I had time to notice an ants’ nest on the bank the noise was coming from.

The branches of the young fir trees stirred; a living form emerged, ran headlong toward the water. It was a woman. A moment later I recognized Vera. She knelt down twenty yards upstream from where I was stuck, drank jerkily, stood up, gasping for breath like an animal at bay. Her face, on fire from running, looked incredibly youthful, simultaneously reinvigorated and blinded by an unknown agitation-on the verge of a great shout of wild joy, or of bursting into tears, I could not tell which. I was about to call out to her but felt too ridiculous, grounded as I was in fifteen inches of water, and decided first of all to extricate myself, then to catch up with her on the path. I did not have much time, for as soon as she had caught her breath, she hared off once more, crossed the river at the ford I had failed to find. I saw she was wearing ankle boots with high heels, hardly designed for the forest. The water spurted up beneath her feet, then settled, carried an eddy of sand in my direction. She was already running through the forest; within a few seconds the wind hissing in the tops of the fir trees obliterated the sound of her flight.

Suddenly a trickle of icy water filtered into my left boot, sharp as a razor. I came to my senses, dragged my bogged-down feet along, headed toward the bank with no more thought of the ford. And when, calmed down by walking, I tried to understand Vera s appearance, a notion came into my mind, which showed me the degree of idiocy of which a man is capable when he thinks he is in love. Quite seriously the notion occurred to me that she had left the city for fear of not seeing me again before my departure, that she set great store by having one more meeting with me…

The sight of Mirnoe, of its izbas clustered beneath a sky once more clouded over with gray, made me less sure of my own importance. “Probably one of the old women has fallen ill. Vera heard about it on the return journey and, devoted as she is, hurried home, cutting through the forest. In any event, it wasn’t for the sake of my pretty face…”

An hour after my return, someone knocked at my door. On the front steps I saw Vera. With the light pink coat thrown over her shoulders, she wore a knee-length skirt and the elegant blouse I had seen draped over a hanger beside the stove in her house. Her hair was braided into a broad plait, interwoven with a scarlet ribbon. Her eyes, slightly enlarged by a pencil line, fixed me with a smile that struck me as both aggressive and vulnerable.

“The official celebrations are over,” she said, in rather too theatrical tones. “But maybe we could cele brate the city’s anniversary ourselves now. Come and see me. The dinner’s ready”

She turned on her heel and walked away, apparently unconcerned whether I was following her or not. Far from certain as to the reality of what was happening and, above all, of what might happen, I hurriedly changed, snatched up the great cape of tent canvas, and rushed outside. There was a risk that the figure in the overcoat might vanish at any moment in the already dark street.

5

WE WERE AFRAID of one another. Or rather, afraid/or one another. Afraid of seeing the other one make a false move that would have shown up the whole duplicity of this candlelit dinner. Afraid that the other might suddenly draw back, observe the room, the table with dishes and bottles on it, the body just embraced. Afraid of reading in the other’s now alienated look: “What on earth are we up to here, in this remote house at the end of the world, in this night battered by a wild wind? What are we laughing for? This laughter of ours is such a sham! What is this hand doing fondling the back of my neck? What games are we playing?”

A single pointed glance, a single gesture out of place, would have been enough to transform this tête-à-tête into an insane charade. Its end was known: we were going to spend the night together. It was the whole point of the scenario, but it was looking increasingly improbable. Increasingly expected and impossible. This woman smiling at me, laying her head on one side to squeeze my hand between her cheek and her shoulder. Impossible. Like the sugary taste of the lipstick she had just left on my mouth.

We were afraid one of us might stand up and murmur, with a yawn: “Fine. That was all just a joke, wasn’t it?”

From time to time, this fear showed through briefly in a tone of voice, a gesture, and we hastened to skirt around it. We had a choice between two clichés: sometimes this dinner took on the air of a well-lubricated peasant-style meal, with noisy mirth and the natural familiarity of close neighbors, sometimes the atmosphere was reminiscent of a student celebration. We felt in league with one another. We had to transform this old izba, the wind rattling the windowpanes, the tenuous warmth of this room, the warmth of our two bodies, into an amorous encounter, to blend this precarious mixture into a fleshly alloy Our hands, our bodies, went through the motions; our words quickly overcame each onset of silent embarrassment. Only our eyes occasionally exchanged a chilling admission: Why are we doing this? What’s the point of it all?

This play-acting remained resistant to reality until the moment when we found ourselves standing, face to face, on the threshold of the bedroom. There was a silence, swiftly broken by the wind’s wild moanings, the crackle of the logs in the fire and, more deafening than these sounds, our disarray. Despite the dullness of intoxication, one very clear notion struck me: This woman doesn’t know what to do next, she no longer knows her part. The memory of a very youthful affair surfaced within me, the shade of a first lover, and of this same ignorance in the face of desire.

She overcame her hesitation almost immediately. Became a mature woman again, a woman who knows, passed off her hesitation as the voluptuous slowness of a body influenced by drink. She even gave a little snort of laughter when I tried to help her undress. Naked, she drew me to her, swept me into that high double bed I had so often imagined. There was even the scent of male eau de cologne I had imagined. My own. And the fragrance of her hair, her skin, dried birch leaves steeped in the steam of the bathhouse.

At the first embrace, this self-possessed woman vanished. In the act of love she did not know who she was. Statuesque feminine body with a young girl’s inexperience. Then a muscular, combative passion, imposing its own rhythm on pleasure. And again, blankness almost, the resignation of one asleep, her head thrown back, her eyes closed, biting her lip hard. A remoteness so complete, as if of a dead woman, that at one moment, drawing away from her, I grasped her shoulders and shook her, deceived by her stillness. She half opened her tear-stained eyes, smiled at me, and, respecting our game, her smile was transmuted into a drunken woman’s hazy grin. Her body stirred. She gave herself with the frenzy of one who seeks either to win a man’s forgiveness or to mock him. Several times, the ecstasy twisted my features into grimaces of male gratification. At these moments, I met her look, one of astonishing compassion, such as only mothers and the simpleminded can bestow.

Right up to the end, I managed to forget who this woman was. And when I remembered, the pleasure became unbearable in its sacrilegious novelty, its terrible carnal banality.

The end came with the slamming of a door or a window, at first we did not know which. Vera got up quickly, crossed the bedroom, went into the hall. When, half dressed, I caught up with her, she was sitting on the far end of the bench, her bare body covered by her long cavalry greatcoat. She was staring out of the window and seemed totally disconnected from what had just passed between us. “But nothing at all happened,” the thought even came to me, in a momentary hallucination. This woman had spent her whole life glued to this bench, waiting for a man to return… I mumbled an ambiguous greeting somewhere between an attempt to stay and a farewell. She murmured, “Good night,” without stirring, without taking her eyes off the window.

6

OUTSIDE, HIGH IN THE SKY, the wind is feverishly chopping the yellow of the moon and the greenish flocks of clouds into pieces. The air has a sobering effect, and with sardonic clarity, I find myself comparing this flickering landscape to a romantic film with a lush moonlit setting, sped up by a mad projectionist to the pace of an animated cartoon. When I get home I cram the stove with large logs; the fire burns easily, merrily. And happiness, earlier clouded by the improbability of what I have just lived through, finally wells up without restraint. I have just made love with such a woman! And already there is a casual and obscene echo: ‘Tve slept with a woman who spent thirty years waiting for another man!” With an effort I manage to feel ashamed of this.

I am twenty-six, an extenuating circumstance. An age when one still takes pride in the number of women one has possessed. With the return of postcoital cynicism, it is more or less this notion of keeping a tally that occurs to me. But I do manage to avoid the crassness of counting this woman alongside the others. Such a woman! Again I reflect on the absence of any man in her life. With self-satisfaction, I note my status as the lucky one.

I fall asleep in a state of perfect mental and physical contentment, the epitome of what a woman can give to a man prepared to ask nothing more of her.

My satisfaction is so serene that on waking and recalling Otar’s words, I cheerfully accept his definition of man-as-swine. This facile joy lasts barely an hour. The memory of a day returns: a boat caught between the sky and the heaving water of the lake, a woman pulling firmly, rhythmically on the oars, the body of a dead person in my arms… Projected onto a different scale of things, I suddenly feel very small, petty, clinging to a pleasure that is already beginning to fade. Compared with that long crossing of the lake, I am nothing more than a minor mishap. This notion upsets and alarms me: I should not have ventured into a dimension that is so far beyond me. I am saved by the physical memory. The supple, dense warmth of a breast, the welcoming spread of a smooth groin… Throughout the morning, I contrive not to stray beyond the refuge of these bodily sensations.

A gray wall of rain comes down. Unfaltering, not a moments respite. I picture Vera on the way to her school. “A woman who gave herself to me.” A hot surge of male pride, in the lungs, in the stomach. An urge to smoke a cigarette, gazing out into the street, an urge to be blasé and melancholy, despite the joyful turmoil stirred up by the thought of this conquest. At about three in the afternoon, after hundreds of different imaginary scenes, this other: her return home along flooded roads, she in her izba, in her kitchen, preparing to cook this evenings meal, a dinner for the two of us… The pleasant routine of a relationship beginning.

At about four, the notion of her solitude after my departure. The rain stops, the sky is polished steel, pitiless. She will walk along this street, soon to be covered in snow. Her footprints, the only ones in the morning, the only ones on the way back from school. She will remember me. She will often think of me. All the time, perhaps.

This realization is vaguely daunting, but flattered vanity prevails for the moment: myself as the distant lover, gone without leaving a forwarding address.

At six o’clock, there is a knock on my door. It is Zoya, the tall one. She enters with slow ceremony, only stepping into the room after the third invitation, in accordance with custom. Sits down, accepts the offer of tea. And when the tea is drunk, takes a newspaper out of her pocket, not the local weekly but a daily paper from Archangel, which she unfolds and spreads out carefully on the table. Accounts of the celebrations for the city’s anniversary, photos of well-known personalities born in the area who have distinguished themselves in Moscow, Leningrad, and even, in the case of this bald-headed engineer, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

I leaf through the pages, I express my admiration for the engineer: born in a tiny village on the White Sea, he is now the designer of a space communications system! The insistence of Zoya’s stare makes me uneasy. She glares at me with condescending hostility, as much as to say: All right, stop your idle chatter and let’s cut to the chase. I fall silent, she turns the page, points at one of the photos.

An elderly man, photographed with his two granddaughters, as the caption explains. A round, fleshy face, a fatherly expression. His jacket is weighed down by the broad disks of several decorations. “A typical Soviet apparatchik/’ I say to myself, and the caption tells me that this is a certain Boris Koptev, party committee secretary in a big Moscow factory…

“It’s him.”

Zoya’s voice betrays a sudden breathless weakness. She recovers at once and repeats in the firm tones of a verdict: “Yes, that’s him, all right… The man Vera’s been waiting for all her life…”

Her story is concise, and I feel as if I am listening to it with my whole body. It reverberates like a blow, like a fall, like a shock wave, leaving no space within me, nothing untouched.

The final battles of the war before Berlin’s outer defenses: that day dozens of men fall from a pontoon gutted by an explosion. Soldiers from the corps of engineers engaged in preparing for crossing the Spree River. Among these bodies torn to shreds, drowned, is that of Boris Koptev. News of his death is conveyed to the next of kin in a terse notice, a standard form of which millions of copies were printed: “Reported missing in action… Died a hero’s death.” His only remaining next of kin is his mother, soon to be carried off in the famine of 1946. And also this strange fiancée, who will retain, like a holy relic, that earlier death notice (sent in error, as the military authorities later inform her) in which the soldier was described as “reported missing in action.” And so the waiting can begin.

But what also begins is a new life for Koptev, freshly discharged from the hospital: repatriation, celebrations in Moscow, the heady sensation of being the victorious hero, acclaimed at every step, the host of female faces beaming at him, all those women ready to give themselves to men still whole and free, as he is, to these male survivors, now so rare… Once an obscure young kolkhoznik, he has become a glorious defender of the Fatherland; once a clodhopper directed to remain in his hamlet in the far North like a serf, now he is taken to the capital, where his medals open the doors of the university to him, guarantee him a career, erase his rustic past. It is only this past he dreads. On the road back from Berlin to Moscow he saw villages in Byelorussia in a state of devastation, peopled by starving ghosts, walking wounded, and children with rickets. Anything but that! He wants to stay among the victors.

Zoya has already been gone a moment. Her story is still unfolding in my mind, a sequence of facts easy to imagine, familiar from so many other eyewitness accounts, embodied by so many men and women I have encountered since childhood. A soldiers return. The era I was born in was entirely devoted to this dream, the joy of it, its ruination.

Did he ever chance to think of Mirnoe, of the love he had left behind amid the soft and weary snows of April? Very rarely, in all likelihood. Such was the shock of discovering Europe, for one who had never before seen a city and multistoried houses. And then Moscow, a powerful drug of novelties, a fabulous stimulant of temptations. It was not that he forgot, no, he quite simply no longer had time to remember.

As she was leaving, Zoya paused on the threshold, looked me straight in the eye, and declared: “So that’s how it’s been, our history,” adding, in almost severe tones: “Our history, for us here…” Her tone excluded me, calmly but definitively, from this history. Only the previous day, such a rejection would have pained me, I was feeling well and truly rooted in Mirnoe. Now I am relieved by it. Incautious rambler that I am, I have strayed into the rear of an ancient war.

After Zoya has left, I embark several more times on reconstructing Koptev’s life, picturing the thirty years that have turned him into this tranquil grandfather and worthy Party functionary. Then comes the moment when I realize I am thinking about him so as not to think about Vera. And I realize I have neither the courage nor the powers of reasoning now needed to imagine the feelings of this woman who has spent her whole life waiting for a man. Emptiness, pained amazement, timid fury, nothing more.

It is very cold. I go outside in search of logs piled up beside a shed. The sky is an icy purple; the mud beneath ones feet resonates, a harbinger of frost. The wood rings out too, like the notes on a keyboard. I prepare to go inside, but suddenly at the end of the street I see the beam of a flashlight slowly zigzagging over the ruts in the road. Vera… I step back, squeeze into the shadow against the timbers of the izba.

It seems I need this humiliating fear to make me understand what this woman is now. A voice, the same sordid little voice that was congratulating itself over my having “slept with” such a woman, cries out within me: “Now she’s going to cling to you!” Taking the moral high ground, we consign this voice to the outer periphery of our consciousness, amid the slime of our instincts. Doubtful, this. For often it is the first to make itself heard, and is very like us.

The flashlight beam sways gently, drawing inexorably closer to my hiding place. Obviously she is coming to see me, she wants to talk to me, unburden herself, share her grief, weep, be comforted by the man who… All at once, I realize that for this woman I am now the person I have become since last night. I am possibly the only man she has known since the departure of the soldier. She no longer has anyone in her life. Her footprints in winter, in this street. In her izba the window from which you can see the crossroads, the mailbox. She no longer has anything or anybody to wait for. So, me!

The spray of light spills over the front steps to my house, passes within a yard of my feet. She is going to knock on the door, sit down, settle in for an interminable conversation interrupted by sobs, embraces I shall not have the courage to resist, the extortion of promises. It will all be hideously false and perfectly real, brimming with harsh, pure truths about her ruined life. She needs help a thousand times more than the old women she looks after.

The advancing beam does not slow down, passes my house, moves away She must be going to prepare wood and water for a bath, so one of the old women can take it tomorrow. This domestic observation gives me a breathing space but only at the surface of my fear. Deep down, the obscene little voice is on the alert: “She’ll call and see you on the way back. She’ll settle down, probably keep quiet, play the part of the woman who has complete faith in your honor. You’re cornered. She’ll come and see you in Leningrad. She’ll cling to you like a leech. The love of older women. Especially a woman like that. In her eyes, you’ll take the place of the other one. You already are the other one she thought she was waiting for…”

I go in, light the fire but prefer to stay in the dark. All the little stove door lets through is a glowing strip of pink. If someone (someone!) comes, I shall pretend to have gone to bed already.

In reality, it all happened differently The minute-by-minute reconstruction, the timed storyline of that night of cowardice was put together much later, in those moments of painful honesty when we meet our own gaze, one more pitiless than either the scorn of others or the judgement of heaven. This gaze aims straight and shoots to kill, for it sees the hand (mine) cautiously lowering the latch on the door, the fingers cradling the metal to avoid any kind of click, the door locked-in this village where bolts are never shot. The electric flashlight beam once more sweeps through the darkness, traveling up the street. I withdraw, cock my ear. Nothing. The one whose fate I dread sharing disappears into the darkness.

In reality, that is all there was: fear, the icy logs against my chest, the endless wait a few steps away from the shaft of light as it sliced up the muddy pathway, then the vigil in the izba, the anxiously muffled actions, the latch lowered slowly, as if in the hypnotic slowness of a nightmare. No, objectively, there was nothing else. The fear of seeing a woman come to me, her face ravaged by sobbing, of being contaminated by her tears, by her fate, by the inhuman and henceforth irremediably absurd seriousness of her life. A life as pointless as the hammer blows that had just now rung out in the distance. What was it that was so urgent and necessary to construct in total darkness?

One more detail that crops up close to midnight when the likelihood of her coming begins to diminish. (“Although in the state she’s in, even at midnight…”) I cover the shade of my table lamp with a towel. I switch it on and notice the book she lent me a month before. A book on linguistics by Saussure that I have not even opened. A book-as-pretext: that was still the time when I was seeking by every means possible to win the friendship, affection indeed, of this woman. I was enamored of her, in love, I desired her. All these words now seem incongruous, impossible to utter. The fear recedes. I manage to reflect, to ponder the bizarre features of our lives. This borrowed Saussure proves that, even in situations as strange as ours, the stages in a relationship are always the same: at the beginning a talismanic object, a message in a bottle, the feverish hope of what it may lead to; at the end, this useless volume one no longer knows how to get rid of…

Again I study the Archangel newspaper Zoya left on the table. The photo of Koptev, the art of being both a grandfather and a good Party man. It suddenly strikes me that, if there is any logic to existence, his flat, round physiognomy ought to be associated with Vera’s face. For they could have (should have?) formed a couple… Impossible to fit them together. “She’s much younger,” I tell myself, feeling confused. “No, she’s not, there’s scarcely three years between them.” I get in a muddle, trying to grasp what it is that makes these two beings absolutely incompatible. The only way to picture them together is to turn Vera into a formidable Muscovite matron, with heavy features, a satisfied look, the holder of a university chair, a Party member… Just the contrary of what she is. “She’s not part of that world,” I conclude lamely in the end, feeling that I am much closer to the world of the Koptevs myself. This affinity reassures me, liberates me, distances me from Mirnoe.

At about two in the morning, a great sense of relief. I know I must get up very early, steal out of the village, make my way rapidly to the crossroads, hop onto a truck and, once at the station in the district capital, take the first train to Leningrad, to civilization, to oblivion. Which is what I shall do. I feel resolute, energetic. I switch on the lights in the room, no longer hiding, and within five minutes I have closed my suitcase, which for weeks now I have not managed to pack. No further question of racking my brains: this part of the world has made me ill, its past, the woman who has preserved its spirit. Now my cure is at hand. At the first whiff of the sharp air on the Nevsky Prospekt… For a minute I wonder if it would not be more elegant to leave a note. Less inelegant, let us say. Then I decide to just slip away.

During the few hours of sleep left to me, I wake up often. It is very cold. The darkness outside the windows has the sheen of ink, that of the great frosts. In one of my waking moments, I think I have gone deaf. Not a breath of wind, the fire in the stove dead, the silence of the interstellar spaces, icy, absolute. I lack the courage to go out and bring in some wood. In the hall, I snatch up the old military cape. I lay the canvas over the top of my blanket. The fabric is all worn, scorched here and there by fire, but, oddly enough, the thin layer of it warms me better than a fleece-lined quilt would have. A dream comes to me. The story one of the old women of Mirnoe told me: her husband, killed in the snows of Karelia in cold of forty below, the obsessive urge she has since then to heat up a bath for him. In my dream, a soldier lies naked in the middle of a white plain. He opens his eyes, I wake up; on my frozen cheeks I feel burning tears.

7

THE FIRST GLANCE OUTSIDE, well before sunrise, is a plunge into an unknown world. All is pale and blue with hoarfrost; its suede has petrified the trees, the walls are encrusted with its crystals. The road, bristling with muddy ridges only yesterday, is today a long, smooth white track. The dry stems of nettles beside the old front steps rear up like silver candelabras. I open the door long enough to take a deep breath, trying to hold onto the icy intoxication of this beauty to the point of giddiness. This air, I sense, could drug me all over again, make me forget my departure… I must leave as quickly as possible.

Suitcase in hand, I reach the lakeshore while the sun, still invisible, can be sensed behind the forest. The earth, blue-tinged, is still of the night. But the whitened crowns of the tallest firs are overlaid with a fine, transparent gilding.

I quicken my pace to break the spell of this imminent luminescence that holds me back. The first trucks will soon be driving past the crossroads. But the magic of the moment is everywhere. Every step produces a distinctive resonance of shattered ice. One could stop, melt into this time where there are no hours. I look back: a faint hint of smoke hovers above the chimney of the house I have just left. Poignant gratitude, fear of not being able to tear oneself away from this beauty.

Now my course will move away from Mirnoe, cast off the enchantment of its last stages: the little bathhouse izba, the undergrowth amid the willow groves…

Suddenly, in the perfect stillness of white and blue, a dark movement. But there is nothing abrupt about its appearance. A long greatcoat, a woman’s face. I recognize her, there she is, her presence at that spot is entirely unremarkable, I could have encountered her there yesterday, and the day before. Leaning forward, she is trying to push out the boat trapped in the ice, in the frozen clay of the shore. She seems totally preoccupied by the attempt.

I keep walking, through sheer muscular inertia, sunk in a hypnotic numbness, already picturing the scene that is bound to take place: she will hear my footsteps, straighten up, come toward me, with a look increasingly impossible to bear…

She hears my footsteps, stands up, greets me with a brief inclination of her head. Her eyes have an expression I know well. They do not really identify me; it will take them time to admit me to what she sees. She repeats her greeting, a simple replica of the first, returns to her task.

I am free to leave. But I step off the road, walk down toward the shore.

The boat is hardly moving. The ice around its hull has been crushed by the woman’s boots. The clay is very red; footmarks print themselves on the white like traces of blood. I look for somewhere to set down my suitcase in this mixture of ice and mud, then I put it on the seat in the boat. And take hold of the gunwale. The woman presses down on the opposite side, I respond to her action, the vessel starts to rock, embarks on a jerky, barely perceptible forward motion.

Next, this supple sliding, the sound of the thin layer of ice being broken by the hull as it is propelled into the water. The woman is already on board, she stands upright in the stern, a long oar in her hands. I climb in too, not knowing whether it is to retrieve my suitcase or to…

I am seated in the bow, with my back to the goal of our crossing. As though I did not know, as though I did not need to know where we are heading. Facing me, she does not look at me, or when occasionally our eyes meet, she seems to be observing me across immensely long years. The ice breaks under the oar, the clattering of the drops has a metallic sharpness.

“A fine trap,” I say to myself, realizing that it was inevitable. A sly, do-as-you-would-be-done-by logic decreed that a reckoning between us should take place. This will happen: tears, reproaches, my clumsy attempts to console her, to wriggle out of it. But first the woman will do what she has to do on the island, then we will return to Mirnoe and I’ll fulfill my duty as her unique friend, the only man she has known in thirty years.

The notion is as far-fetched and as obvious as this whole white world that surrounds us. A bridal white, immaculate, terrifying in its purity. Even the lengths of pine that form the cross are swathed in crystals.

She is going to the island because of this cross laid over the thwarts of the boat. I remember her words: “Next time I’ll take the cross…” So next time is today. A cross for Anna’s grave. Anna, whose body traveled there in my arms. And last night’s hammering was the wooden arms being nailed on. And the flashlight beam marked the cross being carried down to the boat. Why take it at dusk? Why not this morning? I suddenly grasp what kind of woman it was who yesterday turned carpenter. A woman who could only hold on to life by fashioning this symbol of death. She will thrust it into the earth and then begin talking to me, weeping, trying to keep me in her life, where there are more crosses than living people. The main post strikes me as disproportionately long, then I realize that this is the base that will be buried in the earth.

The island is white. The church, all frosted over, seems translucent, ethereal. The earth surrounding the cross, now bedded in, is the only dark patch in this universe of white.

We walk down to the shore, resume our places in the boat without a word. At one moment, I think of speaking, defusing the serious reckoning that lies ahead with a few neutral words. But the silence, too all-embracing like the nave of a vast cathedral, restrains my voice, diverts it inward toward the feverish thought tormenting my mind: how to tell this woman that in order to share her fate even for a short while, one would have to learn how to live in this afterlife that is not the life the rest of us live, one would have to rethink everything: time, death, the fleeting immortality of a love affair. One would have to… The sky above the lake is unbearably vivid, the purity of the air swells the lungs so much that one can scarcely breathe anymore. I long to get away from this white wilderness, to find myself once more within the smoky confines of our Wigwam studio, amid the hubbub of drunken voices, the press of bodies, of frivolously trivial ideas, of swift couplings with no promises made.

We circumnavigate the island. Soon the red clay of the shore, the willow groves… She will step ashore, look long into my eyes, begin to talk. What shall I be able to say to her: death, time, fate? She is a single woman who, quite simply and humanly, no longer wants to be so. But this white infinity she carries within her will never fit into the snug shell of a Wigwam.

The cold makes me feel the stillness of my body. I sit huddled on my seat with my suitcase between my legs. The idea comes to me suddenly of escaping as we land. Leap ashore, pull up the boat, seize my bag, shout out a good-bye, go. The movements she makes with the oar are spaced further and further apart, as if, guessing my intent, she wanted to delay our arrival. I know that in any case I would not be capable of flight. A most inconvenient lack of cynicism!

At this moment the bow of the boat gently encounters an obstacle. I turn, open my eyes wide. No willows, no trampled red mud. We are landing at the old jetty on the far side of the lake. Before I can grasp what has just happened, Vera steps out onto the boards that sag gently on top of the old piles. I follow her automatically, my suitcase in my hand, onto the narrow landing stage.

She looks me in the eye, smiles at me, then kisses me on the cheek and returns to the boat. And she is already moving her oar as she says: “Like this you’re quite close to the town. You can catch the eleven o’clock train… May God keep you.”

Her face seems older to me; a lock of silver hair slips down over her brow. And yet she is utterly brimming with a fresh, vibrant youthfulness that is in the process of being born, in the movement of her lips, the fluttering of her eyelashes, in the lightness of her body as the boat begins to bear her away…

I wave my arm in a pointless farewell; her back is turned, and the distance is growing rapidly. I step forward to the end of the jetty and with sorrowful intensity say to myself that my voice could still carry, and I absolutely must tell her… The silence is such that I can hear the soft lapping of the waves set off by the boat’s departure, coming to rest amid the wooden piles.

I have never before made my way to the town starting from this spot. The footpath from the landing stage climbs upward, and when I glance behind me, I can see the entire lake. The island with the pale smudge of the church and several trees above the churchyard, the blue-gray undulations of the forest, the roofs of Mirnoe, which have lost their dazzling whiteness. Soon the hoarfrost will begin to melt, and they will look like the roofs of one village among many, waiting for winter.

In the distance, the boat on the icy surface already appears unmoving, and yet it is traveling forward. The trace of clear water spreading behind it grows longer, extending toward the infinity of the snow-white plains, toward the dull glow of the sun. And farther off, amid the icy fogs of the horizon, suddenly a space lights up, beyond the fields and the treetops of the forests. The White Sea…

Above the dark line of the boat I can still make out the figure in a long cavalry greatcoat. Despite the distance, it seems to me as if I can hear the tinkling of the ice as it breaks. The same ringing sound that fills the glowing expanse of the sky. Now the sound ceases, as it does when the oar suspends its thrusting motion, comes to rest. I believe I can make out the gesture of an arm waving above the boat, yes, I can see it, I hasten to respond…

And the sound resumes, faint, unwavering.