The Woman Who Waited

1

“SHE IS A WOMAN SO intensely destined for happiness (if only purely physical happiness, mere bodily well-being), and yet she has chosen, almost casually, it seems, solitude, loyalty to an absent one, a refusal to love.

This is the sentence I wrote down at that crucial moment when we believe we have sized up another person (this woman, Vera). Up to that point, all is curiosity, guesswork, a hankering after confessions. Hunger for the other person, the lure of her hidden depths. But once their secret has been decoded, along come these words, often pretentious and dogmatic, dissecting, pinpointing, categorizing. It all becomes comprehensible, reassuring. Now the routine of a relationship, or of indifference, can take over. The other ones mystery has been tamed. Her body reduced to a flesh-and-blood mechanism, desirable or not. Her heart to a set of predictable responses.

At this stage, in fact, a kind of murder occurs, for we kill this being of infinite and inexhaustible potential we have encountered. We would rather deal with a verbal construct than a living person…

It must have been during those September days, in a village among forests stretching all the way to the White Sea, that I noted down observations of this type: “a being of inexhaustible potential,” “murder,” “a woman stripped naked by words.” At the time (I was twenty-six), such conclusions struck me as wonderfully perceptive. I took great pride in having gained insight into the secret life of a woman old enough to be my mother, in having summed up her destiny in a few well-turned phrases. I thought about her smile, the wave she greeted me with when she caught sight of me in the distance on the shore of the lake, the love she could have given so many men but gave no one. “A woman so intensely destined for happiness…” Yes, I was pretty pleased with my analysis. I even recalled a nineteenth-century critic referring to a “dialectic of the soul” to describe the art with which writers probe the contradictions of the human psyche: “A woman destined for happiness, but

That September evening I closed my notebook, glanced at the handful of cold, mottled cranberries Vera had deposited on my table in my absence. Outside the window, above the dark treetops of the forest, the sky still had a milky pallor suggestive of the somnolent presence, a few hours’ walk away of the White Sea, where winter already loomed. Vera’s house was located at the start of a path that led to the coast by way of thickets and hills. Reflecting on this woman’s isolation, her tranquillity, her body (very physically, I imagined a tapered sheath of soft warmth surrounding that female body beneath the covers on a clear night of hoarfrost), I suddenly grasped that no “dialectic of the soul” was capable of telling the secret of this life. A life all too plain and woefully simple compared to these intellectual analyses of mine.

The life of a woman waiting for the one she loved. No other mystery.

The only puzzling but rather trivial element was the mistake I made: following our first encounter at the end of August, which lasted only a few seconds, I had encountered Vera again at the beginning of September. And I had failed to recognize her. I was convinced these were two different women.

Yet both of them struck me as “so intensely destined for happiness…”

Later, I would get to know the ups and downs of the pathways, the trees’ vivid attire, new at every twist in the road, the fleeting curves of the lake, whose shoreline I was soon able to follow with my eyes closed. But on that end-of-summer day, I was only beginning to know the area, taking random walks, happily if uneasily, aware that I might end up discovering an abandoned village within this larch forest, or crossing some half-rotten wooden footbridge like a tightrope walker. In fact, it was at the entrance to an apparently uninhabited village that I saw her.

At first I thought I had surprised a couple making love. Amid the undergrowth covering the shores of the lake, I glimpsed the intense white gleam of a thigh, the curve of a torso straining with effort, I heard breathless panting. The evening was still light, but the sun was low and its raw red streaked the scene with shadow and fire, setting the willow leaves ablaze. At the heart of all this turmoil, a woman’s face was suddenly visible, almost grazing the clay soil with her chin, then all at once catapulted backward, amid a wild surge of hair tossed aside… The air was hot, sticky. The last heat of the season, an Indian summer, borne there these past few days by the south wind.

I was about to continue on my way when suddenly the branches shook and the woman appeared, inclined her head in a vague greeting, and rapidly straightened up her dress, which had ridden up above her knees. I greeted her awkwardly in turn, unable to form a clear view of her face, on which the glow from the setting sun alternated with stripes of shadow. At her feet, forming a heap like the body of a drowned man, lay the coils of a large fishing net she had just hauled in.

For several seconds we remained rooted to the spot, bound by an ambiguous complicity, like that of a hurried sexual encounter in a risky location or a criminal act. I stared at her bare feet, reddened by the clay, and at the twitching bulk of the net: the greenish bodies of several pike were thrashing about heavily, and at the top, tangled among the floaters, extended the long, almost black curve of what I at first took to be a snake (probably an eel or a young catfish). This mass of cords and fish was slowly draining, water mingled with russet slime flowing toward the lake like a fine trickle of blood. The atmosphere was heavy, as before a storm. The still air imprisoned us in fixed postures, the paralysis of a nightmare. And there was a shared perception, tacit and instinctive, that between this man and this woman, at this red and violent nightfall, anything could happen. Absolutely anything. And there was nothing and no one to prevent it. Their bodies could lie down beside the tangle of the net, melt into one another, take their pleasure, even as the lives trapped in the fishnet breathed their last…

I retreated swiftly, with a feeling that, out of cowardice, I had sidestepped the moment when destiny manifests itself at a particular spot, in a particular face. The moment when fate allows us a glimpse of its hidden tissue of cause and consequence.

A week later, retribution: a northeast wind brought the first snow, as if in revenge for those few days of paradise. A mild retribution, however, in the form of luminous white flurries that induced vertigo, blurring the views of road and field, making people smile, dazzled by endlessly swirling snowflakes. The bitter, tangy air tasted of new hope, the promise of happiness. The squalls hurled volleys of crystals onto the dark surface of the lake, which relentlessly swallowed their fragile whiteness into its depths. But already the shorelines were gleaming with snow, and the muddy scars left on the road by our truck were swiftly bandaged over.

The driver with whom I often traveled from one village to the next used to declare himself, ironically, to be “the first swallow of capitalism.” Otar, a Georgian of about forty, had set up a clandestine fur business, been denounced, done time in prison. Now out on parole, he had been given charge of this old truck with worm-eaten side panels here in this northern territory. We were in the mid-seventies, and this “first swallow of capitalism” sincerely believed he had come out of things pretty well. “And what’s more,” he would often repeat, with shining eyes and a greedy smile, “for every guy up here there are nine chicks.”

He talked about women incessantly, lived for women, and I conjectured that even his fur business had had as its object the chance to dress and undress women. Intelligent in fact, and even sensitive, he naturally exaggerated his vocation as a philanderer, knowing that such was the image of Georgians in Russia: lovers obsessed with conquests, monomaniacal about sex, rich, unsophisticated. He acted out this caricature, as foreigners often do when they end up mimicking the tourist clichés of their country of origin. He played to the gallery.

Despite this roleplaying, for him the female body was, naturally, logically, the only thing that made life worthwhile. And it would have been the worst form of torture not to be able to talk about it to a well-disposed confidant. Willy-nilly I had assumed this role. In gratitude, Otar was ready to take me to the North Pole.

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

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

“Smoked herring? Why?”

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

“So?”

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

“I don’t follow.”

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

“Yes. And so?”

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

“Well, all right, but…”

“And if she has a twat, she fucks!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had, in fact, quite simply upstaged us all. I had come intending to talk about my trip to Tallin. At that time, the Baltic states were looked upon as the antechamber to the West. Arkady Gorin, the little dark-haired man sitting on the ground on an old paintbox, would have talked about his imminent departure for Israel, after six years of being refused a visa. But there was this American, and the mere grinding of his jaw, as he pronounced names like Philadelphia, Boston, Greenwich Village, made our own stories seem pretty thin…

Even the poem in which Brezhnevs Kremlin was portrayed as a zoo full of prehistoric animals did not go down as well as expected. Mediocre actors, we were putting on a performance of the Western world, and he, as the director (a veritable Stanislavsky!), was sizing us up, ready to deliver the famous and terrible verdict: “I don’t believe you.” And it would have been fair: we were not very convincing westerners that night.

Too impatient. The iron curtain looked as if it would last forever. Our country’s dislocation from the rest of the world had the semblance of some inviolable natural law. In the face of this thousand-year empire, our own youth was but a second, a speck of dust. We could no longer bear to wait.

All the more because every element of the Western world was available to us: irreverent poems, innovative abstract painting, uninhibited sexual gratification, the banned Western authors we purchased on the black market, the European and other languages we spoke, the Western thought we did our utmost to get to know. Like alchemists in a hurry, we tossed all these ingredients into the melting pot during our nights of boozing and declamation. The quintessence of the Western world would materialize, the philosopher’s stone that would transform “The Kremlin Zoo” into a world masterpiece, its author into a living classic, acclaimed from New York to Sydney, and transfer that canvas covered in orange squares to the walls of the Guggenheim…

A very drunk young woman collapsed onto the shabby mattress beside me. With a broad, wet smile, she was trying to whisper something in my ear, but her speech had become slurred. Two men’s names kept recurring in her babble. I guessed, rather than understood, that two men were making love in the next room, and she found this “a scream,” because at the same time we could hear the moaning of the couple behind the paintings. I pretended to chuckle in response to her laughter, but suddenly her face froze, she lowered her eyelids, and very tiny, swift tears began coursing down her cheeks. The jazz singer’s grating whisper continued to promise great revelations without which life could not go on.

The woman stopped crying, gave me a challenging look, and made her way over toward where the American was sitting. “He’s a very big gallery owner,” the latter was saying. A painter listening to him nodded his head incessantly. His glass shook violently in his hand. The drunken young woman clambered up onto one arm of the chair with the persistence of an insect.

An evening that never quite took off…

Curiously enough, this copy of the Western world we were acting out was in some respects more authentic than the original. Above all, more fraught with drama. For the liberties taken on those evenings did not always go unpunished. Many years later, I would learn that the author of “The Kremlin Zoo” paid for his poem with five years in a camp and that one of the homosexuals, sent to prison (for this vice was punishable by law), was battered to death by his cellmates. I would think about that unfortunate lover fifteen years later in the streets of the Marais district of Paris; the multitude of bronzed, muscular men on the café terraces, their contented air, for all the world like chubby, male inflatable dolls, showing off their biceps and their new-won normality. I recalled that the homosexual from Leningrad had been finished off by being impaled on a stovepipe, from anus to throat…

All things considered, our masquerade of the Western world did have its own weight of truth.

My girlfriend emerged from behind the canvases, made her way across the room strewn with bodies, fragments of food and bottles, and seated herself on a crate filled with books. Despite a mixture of disgust and jealousy, I could not repress a burst of admiration. What a great performance, much better than the women in Godard’s films! A sensual body, a mouth with blurred makeup, and an impeccably indifferent look that slid right over me. And already she was flirting, accepting a drink, reveling in that quite special attentiveness men give to women who are…”in heat,” I thought maliciously. “No jealousy. No jealousy. You’re being ridiculous, you great Siberian bear,” a placatory voice kept repeating inside my head. I saw she had taken off her stockings. Her pale, bare legs suddenly seemed surprisingly youthful and touching, with their fair skin all unprotected, and the beauty spots whose pattern I knew well. A feeling of deep pity overcame me, I had an urge to go and cover those legs with my coat…

That was when we noticed the American journalist was fast asleep. He had dozed off a moment before, his head slightly cocked to one side, and we had continued talking to him, taking his sleep for a posture of profound contemplation. We were addressing him in anticipation either of his approval or his Stanislavskian:”! don’t believe you!” If he had snored, we would have burst out laughing and teased him. But he was sleeping like a baby, his eyes quietly closed, breathing through lips formed into a little oval. There was an embarrassed pause. I got up, went to the kitchen. As I made my way behind the canvases, I saw the man (he was a painter) who had just been making love with my late girlfriend. He was busy wiping his genitals with a cloth that smelled of turpentine… The American journalist finally woke up, and from the kitchen I could hear his: “So…,” followed by a massive yawn and relieved guffaws from the others…

The kitchen (in reality a continuation of the same loft, containing a sink with chipped enamel) had only one window, or rather a narrow skylight, with foodstuffs wrapped in sheets of newspaper piled up against it. The glass, which had a diagonal break in it, let through a fine dusting of snow, the last cold weather of winter.

At that moment, I felt I was living through precisely what I had been wanting to write about for a long time: the piquant acidity of the snow, an old building in a city at night on the shores of the Baltic, this loft, the utter isolation of the young man that I was, the proximity of voices so familiar, so alien, the swift fading, in this cold, of what had been my love for a woman who was at this very moment inviting another’s caresses, the utter meaning-lessness and irremediable seriousness of this fusion of bodies, the ridiculous transience of our time spent in cities, in other people s lives, in the void.

Something prevented me expressing it as I would have liked.”The regime!” we used to say during our clandestine evenings. Planet Nyet. Listening to the others, I had ended up convincing myself of this. The Kremlin Zoo blunted the sculptors chisel, drained canvases of color, shackled rhymes. Censorship, we said. Conformist thinking. Ideological dictatorship. And it was true.

Yet, standing in front of the skylight with its broken panes that night, I began to have doubts. For no censorship stood in the way of my telling about this fine dusting of snow, loneliness, three o’clock in the morning in the darkness of a sleeping city on the Baltic coast. Planet Nyet seemed to me a somewhat facile argument now. To complain about the regime and not write, or to write purely to complain about it-here, I sensed, was the vicious circle of dissident literature.

I could not conceive (none of the guests at the Wigwam could) that ten years later cracks would start appearing in Planet Nyet, that fifteen years later it would shatter, losing its allies, its vassals, its frontiers, and even its name. And that one would then be able to write whatever one wanted without fear of censorship. One could linger beneath the broken skylight in a loft, at night in a sleeping city, feel powdery snow on one’s face flushed with wine, reflect on the fleeting nature of our passage through the lives of other people…

But in this future, exactly as it was in the past, it would be just as difficult for a poet to speak of these simple things: love for a woman who has ceased to love, snow on a March night, the condensation from a breath as it vanishes in the cold air and makes us think: “That’s my life,” that tenuous haze of anxiety and hope.

In fifteen years’ time, the regime would no longer exist, but stanzas would not have an easier birth because of it, nor would poems be read more. No American journalists now to listen to the lines of verse being declaimed by tipsy poets, no danger now for the bold. And even the moaning behind the unfinished canvases would lose its shrill, provocative savor.

During that night of the last great frosts, I believed I had understood the aggravating paradox of art under a totalitarian regime: “Dictatorship is often conducive to the tragic creation of masterpieces…”

“You know, when there’s no watchtower or gallows in prospect, poets become bourgeois.” It was Arkady Gorin who said this. A bottle of alcohol in his hand, he came to join me in the kitchen, and, as happens to men who are tipsy, we felt as if we were speaking with one voice, reading one another’s thoughts, transmitting them through the telepathy that is such a distinctive feature of the glazed drunkenness of the small hours. “Once in the West, I’ll be stricken with poetic impotence, you’ll see…” he added with a tragicomic sigh.

“So what are they up to over there?” I asked, interrupting him.

He might have understood me to mean: over there in the West. But, thanks to the alcohol, he knew I meant the people we had just walked away from.

‘Over there, Chutov is reading the second part of his ‘Kremlin Zoo.’ But no one’s listening, because your girlfriend’s having another fuck behind the abstract art. With the American. He’s using a pretty pale blue condom. They say that in the West they have rubbers that smell of fruit as well. Even taste of fruit. I wonder if the American… Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… Would you like me to go and smash this bottle over the fat imperialist shark’s head? Fine… Well, let’s go!”

And, when we were out in the street, he added: “The day after tomorrow I’ll be in Vienna. But, you know, what I’m going to miss is the snow swirling around the lampposts. And the dirty streets. And the hallways in apartment blocks that smell of cat piss.”

Suddenly he began shouting, waving his arms about and throwing his head back: “Oh happy day! I’m getting the hell out of here! I’m leaving this shitty country I’m going to live in the West! I’ll have dollar bills crackling in my sensitive intellectual’s fingers! Bills greener than the tree of life… I’m free! To hell with all the slaves who live around here!”

In fact, our two voices chimed as one, hurling abuse into the night. Mocking the dark windows in the apartment blocks, the sleep of all those “slaves” of the regime, cowards who did not dare to shout like us, giving full throat to their disgust. And who, by their resignation, reinforced the prison society in which we lived. They were our enemies. Drunk as we were that night in March, we believed this. It enabled us to forget our failures: in his case, a botched farewell to the Wigwam; in mine, the pattern of beauty spots on the legs of the woman I loved and had just lost.

We ran into these enemies of ours in the first local train heading for Leningrad. There they all were, a tightly packed crowd of them, undifferentiated, a sluggish mass of blank faces, bodies numb with lethargy, crudely dressed, with no scrap of imagination. These were not even the proletarians glorified by ideology, the “toiling masses” portrayed at every street corner on enormous propaganda posters. No, this was an underclass of humble cogs in the system: elderly women on their way to scrape up filth in smoke-filled factories with metal brooms, men on their way to load industrial trucks with rusty scrap or to trudge around concrete factory enclosures at thirty below, with ancient rifles on their shoulders. Creatures invisible in daylight hours who could only be observed in the still nocturnal darkness of a winter morning on this very first train of the day.

We remained standing, the better to observe them. Our aggressive bawling of a moment ago modulated into malevolent whispers. There before us, packed together on the benches, they formed a tableau vivant of what the regime could do to human beings: depriving them of all individuality, drilling them to the point where, of their own free will, they read Pravda (there were several papers open here and there), but, above all, cramming into their skulls the notion of their own contentment. For who among these somnolent cogs would have failed to perceive himself as happy?

“Just look at how drab they all look,” snorted Arkady. “If the Germans invaded again, you could send them straight out to dig trenches. Or into the camps. They wouldn’t even have to adjust.”

“Into the camps?” I added, taking my tone from him. “They look as if they’ve just come out of them.”

“And do you know what? If, instead of taking us to Leningrad, this terrible snail of a train turned and headed off toward Siberia, not one of them would dare ask why”

Suddenly we noticed this man’s hands.

He was holding open a copy of Pravda by gripping it firmly between his thumbs and what was left of his hands, stumps from which all four fingers were missing.

I heard Arkady give a discreet cough and remark in a low, somewhat tremulous voice:”A machine-gunner… In the war, you know, they had those great machine guns, with shields that protected the head from shell splinters. But the grip left the hands totally exposed. The steel only covered the thumb. So when there was a burst of shrapnel…”

The man turned the page very nimbly with his stumps.

We looked at the passengers’ hands. They greatly resembled one another. Men’s hands, women’s hands, almost the same; heavy, the joints swollen from work, dark in hue from wrinkles stained with grease. Some of these hands clutched a book or newspaper, others, resting palm upward on knees, seemed, by their stillness, to be making a grave, simple statement. The faces, sometimes with closed eyes, also reflected this calm gravity.

The man with Pravda folded up his paper and, like a handicapped magician, stuffed it into his coat pocket. The train stopped, he got off.

“In the end, you know,” murmured Arkady, “it’s thanks to these people we can read out our rah-rah-rah-revolutionary poems and get laid using exotic fruit-flavored rubbers. Thanks to their wars. The fingers they lost…”

I made no reply, reflecting that among these elderly passengers there were doubtless some who in their youth had defended Leningrad during the siege. People under bombardment for more than two years, in freezing cold apartments, in streets dotted with corpses. And very likely working in the same factories they were still traveling to now. Accusing no one. Uncomplaining. I had always taken this resignation for a servility skillfully imposed by the regime. For the first time, in this suburban train, I thought I could discern something else in it.

The coach doors opened, the people went out into the snow-swept blackness, vanished into the shadow of long, dark brown brick walls.

As Leningrad drew nearer, the appearance of the passengers changed. Better dressed, younger, more talkative. Our contemporaries. The only person resembling those early travelers on the train was an old woman down in the subway looking lost, who quickly vanished at an intersection of the tunnels.

“You and I are going to get out,” said Arkady “To Boston or London. And in the end, you know, they’ll be making perfumed rubbers here, too. But the old men with their fingers missing will have gone. And so much the better for them. I’m off tomorrow. If you’ve got any masterpieces that need shipping to the West…”

I received three letters from him, roughly five years apart, all from Israel; then, nine years later, a postcard from New York. The first letter announced the birth of his daughter. The second told me the child was learning the piano. The third (but his handwriting had greatly changed) said the girl had been injured in a bomb attack and had lost three fingers from her left hand. Learning of this, I would be reminded of the machine-gunner reading Pravda. Such is the stupid way with coincidences, always timed to demonstrate the inhuman absurdity of man’s activities. I would also reflect on the monstrous mixture of happiness and heartbreak that must be experienced by parents when everyone regarded their child as having been spared.

The card from New York said: “If, fifteen years ago, I could have imagined what I’ve become today, I’d have hanged myself from the big pipe on the tank in the Wigwam shithouse. Do you remember that pipe where the rust had made a picture of Mephisto’s head on the wall?”

In my own case, what that trickle of rust used to remind me of was a sailing ship with an incredibly tall mast.

When he left me in the subway at Leningrad, Arkady also proposed this job to me, a commitment he could no longer fulfill because of his departure: to go into the Archangel region, and write a series of reports on local habits and customs. “In the provinces, you know, they always want a graduate from Moscow or Leningrad. It’s for their commemorative album. Some town anniversary or a folk festival. Whatever. You should go. Go and jot down a few fibs about the gnomes in their forests. But the main thing is, there’ll be lots of material for your anti-Soviet satire… I’ll be off at the crack of dawn. Don’t bother to come to the airport.”

In August of that same year, I found myself in the village of Mirnoe, a few steps away from a woman who had just hauled in a fishing net. A woman waiting for the man she loved.

3

THAT DAY I RAN INTO HER AGAIN in the same place as the first time, in the willow plantation at the edge of the lake. The branches had already lost their leaves, the red clay along the shoreline was all streaked with this muted gold. Dressed in her old cavalry greatcoat and shod in heavy boots, she was pushing a boat silted up among the columns of rushes. A vessel too broad and heavy for rowing, designed no doubt for sailing. But perhaps the only one left in these parts that was still able to float.

“Can I help you?”

She stood up, smiled at me distractedly, as if through a glass dulled by memories, acquiesced.

After a few heaves, our bodies keeping time with one another, the boat slid into the water, at once becoming light, dancing. I held onto the gunwale to let Vera step on board, climbed in after her, tried to take an oar.

“I’ll do it,” she said softly. “There’s too much wind. You need to know the ins and outs of it. Take her instead…”

Her? Laid across the planks of the seat in the stern, I saw a long bundle in a thick cocoon of homespun cloth. Its shape indicated no particular contents but nevertheless gave rise to an obscure anxiety. I picked it up, astonished at its weight, looked at Vera, who was already propelling the boat far from the shore, against the wind.

“It’s Anna,” she explained to me. “She died three days ago. You’d gone to the district capital…”

Anna, the old woman I had seen leaving the little izba bathhouse in Veras company at the beginning of September.

I settled down, balanced the dead woman’s body on my knees, clasping it clumsily, the way childless men do when someone hands them a baby.

The ultra-swift scudding of the clouds turned that day into a syncopated alternation of twilight and sunshine, springlike brilliance and autumnal relapse. When the sky grew leaden, I would become aware that I was hugging a corpse; then, amid the dazzle of the sunbeams, an irrational surge of hope would grip me: “No. What I hold in my arms is still of our world. Still inseparable from this sunlight, from the raw chill of the waves…”

Toward the center of the lake the swell became severe, the boat pitched, the foam began to whiten the exposed shoreline. I was clutching my burden tightly now, as I would have done with any other load. Vera pulled strongly on the oars, thrusting aside the gray water, which parted with the ponderousness of jelly. I watched this woman’s body leaning forward, then flinging itself backward with legs stretched, chest and stomach to the fore, in a powerful physical thrust. Beneath the coarse fabric of her greatcoat, I glimpsed the delicate lace collar of a white blouse… A wave struck the side with extra fury, and I was obliged to lift up the woman I held in my arms, hoist her close to my face, just as if, stricken with grief, I could not bear to be separated from a loved one.

It was during this crossing, which in the end lasted scarcely half an hour, that I began to have my first doubts about the real reason for my attachment to this northern village.

Within a few weeks I had realized that my quest for local customs and legends could just as well have been pursued in the libraries of Archangel. All the folklore of wedding and funeral rituals had long since been documented in books. Whereas on the spot, in these almost deserted villages, the memory of traditions was being lost, for want of any means of passing them on.

This forgetting of the past was all the more marked at Mirnoe, where the inhabitants were, so to speak, expatriates, elderly women driven from their homes by solitude, illness, the indifference of their families. Responding to my questions, they told touching tales of their own misfortunes. And of the war. For it was this that had erased all other legends from the popular memory To these elderly inhabitants of Mirnoe, it was becoming the one remaining myth, a vivid and personal one, and one in which the immortals, both good and evil, were their own husbands and sons, the Germans, the Russian soldiers, Stalin, Hitler. And more specifically, the soldier Vera was waiting for.

As in all newly created myths, the roles of gods and devils were not yet set in stone. The Germans, the subject of visceral, passionate hatred, suddenly put in an appearance in the person of a sad-faced cook named Kurt. Zoya, a tall old woman who had the features of an icon darkened with age, had come across him in an occupied village near Leningrad, where she lived during the war. This German secretly brought remnants of food to the children of the village… The place he had in local mythology was equal to that of a Hitler or a Zhukov.

In the end, I despaired of being able to record wedding choruses, songs in celebration of birth or death. The only ditty I heard on those old lips told of the departure of the local soldiers who had, it seemed, prevented the Nazi troops joining forces with Marshal Mannerheim’s Finnish army Thus the blockade of Leningrad had not become total. Provisions reached the besieged city via a corridor the men of this region had paved with their corpses. Were they all from this region? And Mirnoe? I doubted it. But when I looked at the old women of the village, I realized that this slim consolation was all they had left: the belief that, thanks to their husbands, brothers, or sons, Leningrad had not fallen.

Before coming to Mirnoe, I used to call such things “official propaganda.” Such a description, I saw now, was a little on the terse side.

My idea of writing a satire also turned out to be easier said than done. I had envisaged portraying the grotesque system of kolkhozes, widespread drunkenness to the sound of loudspeakers broadcasting uplifting slogans. But these villages were quite simply abandoned or dying, reduced to a mode of survival not very different from the Stone Age. I managed to find a highly typical alcoholic, a character who would have lent himself very well to the humor of dissident prose. A house stripped bare by his drunken expenditure, his wife, still young, who looked twenty years older than she was and whose face bore a perpetual grimace of bitterness, his four silent children, resigned to living with this man who got down on all fours, vomiting and sobbing, and whom they had to call “Daddy”

I had almost completed the first page of my story when I learned that the drunkard had hanged himself. I had just arrived with Otar in the village where the suicides family lived. The militia and the investigating magistrate were already there. The man had ended his life in a shed by fastening the rope to the door handle. He was almost squatting, his head thrown back, as if in a burst of coarse laughter. His children, whom nobody had thought of taking away, stared at him fixedly, without crying. His wife’s face even seemed relaxed. The walls of the shed were hung with solid, old-fashioned tools, which inspired confidence despite the rust. Great tongs, heavy braces, iron contraptions whose names and functions had long been forgotten… One of the children suddenly backed away and began running across a broad fallow field bristling with yellowed plants.

No, this was not really material for a satirical story.

In this remote corner of the Russian North, I had expected to discover a microcosm of the Soviet age, a caricature of that simultaneously messianic and stagnant time. But time was completely absent from these villages, which seemed as if they were living on after the disappearance of the regime, after the collapse of the empire. What I was passing through was, in effect, a kind of premonition of the future. All trace of history had been eradicated. What remained were the gilded slivers of the willow leaves on the dark surface of the lake, the first snows that generally came at night, the silence of the White Sea, looming beyond the forests. What remained was this woman in a long military greatcoat, following the shoreline, stopping at the mailbox where the roads met. What remained was the essence of things.

During the first weeks of my life at Mirnoe, I did not dare to acknowledge it.

Then on a September afternoon crisscrossed with bursts of sunlight and brief spells of dusk, I found myself in a heavy craft, blackened with age, clasping a dead old woman in my arms, warming her with my body.

As the island drew near, the wind subsided and we landed on a sunlit beach, like summer but for the grass burned by the cold.

“In the old days they came here on foot. It wasn’t an island, just a hill,” Vera explained as she and I carried Anna’s body “But with no one to maintain the dikes anymore, the lake has doubled in size. They say that one day the sea will come right up to here…”

Her voice struck me. A voice infinitely alone amid the watery expanse.

The sun, already low, its rays horizontal, made our presence seem unreal, as if echoing some secret objective. Our shadows stretched far across the churchyard studded with mounds, slanted up the flaking roughcast walls of the little church. Vera opened the door, disappeared, returned carrying a coffin… The sides of the grave displayed a multitude of truncated roots. “Like so many lives cut short.”

I said this to myself, for want of being able to make sense of what was taking place in front of me. A simple burial, of course. But also our silence, the great wind impaling itself on the church’s cross, the utterly banal banging of the hammer. I was afraid Vera was going to ask me to nail down the coffin, the pathetic fear of missing, of knocking a nail in crooked… And as we lowered the coffin into the earth with the aid of ropes, this thought occurred: that dead woman, whom I warmed as I clasped her in my arms, is carrying a part of me away with her, but to where?

The return, with the wind behind us, was easy. A few strokes of the oars, which Vera repeated slowly, as if ab-sentmindedly. Her body was in repose, and this repose reminded me, at one moment, of the relaxation of a body that has just given itself up to the act of love.

For a few weeks more, I would manage to convince myself that I was remaining in this northern land solely to gather some fragments of folklore. “Besides, at Mirnoe, I’m onto a good thing,” I told myself. “No rent to pay Half the houses are unoccupied. You move in. You make yourself at home. This is real communism!”

Mirnoe time, that floating, suspended time, gradually absorbed me. I melted into the imperceptible flow of autumn light, a duration with no other objective than the tarnished gold of the leaves, the fragile lace of early morning hoarfrost on the rim of a well, the fall of an apple from a bare branch in a silence so limpid you could hear the rustle of the grass beneath the fallen fruit.

In this life forgotten by time, all was simultaneously weighty and light. Anna’s burial. This day, funereal and yet marked by an airy luminosity, a new serenity. Beside her grave that other cross, the name of a certain Vassily Drozd and the uneven inscription, cut with a knife: “A good man.” Around this “good man” a dotted line of chamomile flowers, sheltered from the wind by the earth of the grave. And Vera’s voice, saying very simply: “Next time I’ll bring her cross for her.”

Often, when I saw her leaving Mirnoe or returning, I would repeat: “There goes a woman who has waited thirty years…” But the tones of tragedy and despair with which I invested these words failed to make them conclusive. Almost every morning, Vera went off to the school where she taught on the other side of the lake. She generally walked around along the shore, but when the floods cut off the paths, I sometimes saw her getting into the old boat. Following her with my eyes, I would say to myself: “A woman who has turned her life into an infinity of waiting…” I would feel a moment of inner vertigo for a time, but not the alarm I anticipated.

Besides, nothing unusual about Vera gave any sign of this appalling wait. “There are a great many single women, here or elsewhere, when all is said and done,” was the only argument I could find to justify the commonplace way it was possible to think about this whole life being sacrificed. “Lots of single women who, out of courage or modesty, make no display of their grief. Women very much like Vera, give or take a few years of waiting

Even the mailbox at the crossroads gradually lost its significance in my eyes as a killer of hope. Zoya, the doughtiest of the old women, was the one who most often went to collect the mail. The others readied themselves for her trips there and back, as for long pilgrimages, waiting for her as if every one of them were bound to receive a letter. Generally, nothing. Occasionally a card addressed to the one who was no longer there…When I met Zoya on one of her postal excursions, I would ask her to bring me back a nice love letter. She would give me a mischievous smile and proclaim: “It’ll be coming soon. They’re cutting down the tree to make paper for your letter. You’ll just have to be patient!” She would continue on her way and return an hour later with the local newspaper folded under her arm. Occasionally I read it: even this news, geographically so close to Mirnoe, seemed as if it came from another world, from an era where time existed.

4

THE NEAREST TOWN where time did still follow its course was the district capital. I made the acquaintance of a group of the local intelligentsia there: the deputy director of the cultural center, the young librarian in charge of the municipal library, the surgeon from the hospital, a nurse, two teachers (art and history), the reporter from the newspaper Lenin’s Path, and some others.

I was both surprised and not to discover that they had their own “Wigwam,” their dissident group that met in the deputy directors big izba. The same rejection of the regime animated their discussions. But if our targets in Leningrad had mainly been the Kremlin Zoo and its dinosaurs, here the monsters to be slain were the secretary of the local Party committee and the editor-in-chief of Lenin’s Path. In their well-lubricated late-night debates the latter used to be compared to G o ebb els…

The standing accorded to me was enviable in the extreme: I came from the country’s intellectual capital, the only truly European city in the empire, and was thus a virtual westerner. My role at their soirées resembled that of the American journalist at our Leningrad Wigwam. Here what all their displays of dissidence and amorousness sought was my approval. Once, when the reporter was busily comparing his editor-in-chief to Goebbels, the mischievous thought occurred to me that it was a real shame I had no condoms with exotic fruit flavors to offer them.

I was a westerner of straw.

During the last days of September, I would prepare each evening to leave Mirnoe the following morning. But I stayed. I convinced myself I must definitely witness a certain marriage ritual the old women had promised to enact one day. “It’s a shame Anna’s no longer with us,” they said. “She was our soloist. We only know the choruses.” The ritual, strictly local to the region according to them, was simple. The bridegroom carried his chosen one up to the hill where the church stood, in a light cart if the causeway to the island was fordable, in a boat if the meadows were flooded. Sole master of the reins or the oars on the way out, on the way back he invited his young bride to share his task. “I can’t leave until I’ve heard the song that goes with this.” Such was the excuse I frequently gave myself.

Right up to that day, perhaps. A day of thick fog, the dull silhouette of a woman, upright in a boat. Vera, returning to the village. I grasped the end of the long oar she held out to me, helped her to heave the bows onto the clay of the shore. And noticed that, amid the freezing mist enveloping us, the wood of the oar had retained the warmth of her hands. I had never yet felt so close to this woman.

The next day, still in the cotton-wool blindness of the fog, Otar, from whom I had hitched a ride on the road out of the district capital, lost his way. He was trying to show me an abandoned village with a wooden church, and once we left the main road we found ourselves in dense, ragged whiteness, from which a branch shot out at intervals to lash the windshield. The wheels of the truck skidded and spun, digging deeper and deeper ruts from which the mud spurted. We turned, backed, advanced tentatively, but everywhere the ground seemed to consist of the same peat, sodden with water. The trees loomed up in front of us with the stubbornness of ghosts in a dream.

In the end Otar switched off the engine, got out, disappeared, returned after a minute: “No good. In a pea-soup fog like this it’s best to stay put. I was only a couple of yards away, and I couldn’t even see the truck. Let’s have a drink instead. And wait. This evening there’ll be a wind…”

To begin with we drank half a bottle of vodka he kept under his seat, then a bottle of Georgian wine. “Only because you’re a good listener,” he explained. Dusk tinted the fog blue, and the growing darkness harmonized pleasantly with our drunken state. As was his wont, Otar talked about women, but was interrupted by the cautious, snuffling appearance of four wild boars: a mother and her three little ones. Also lost, no doubt, in this freezing whiteness. They sniffed at the wheels of the truck, then scuttled away, pursued by roars of laughter from us.

“On the subject of pigs,” remarked Otar, “I know a good one. A real pig of a story! There’s a Russian, a Georgian, and an Azerbaijani going back to their village in the morning after a hell of a night on the town. And suddenly a big fat sow crosses the road in front of them and runs off. It tries to get through a hole in the fence, but its great ass gets stuck there. It wriggles and squeals, and twirls its tail. The Russian looks at this fat rear end and says: Oh my! If only it was Sophia LorenPThen the Georgian sighs: Oh my! If only it was my neighbor’s wife!’ And the Azerbaijani licks his lips and groans: Oh my. If only it was dark out!’ Ha! Ha! Ha!”

We laughed loudly enough to frighten all the wild boars in the forest, then, when calm had returned, Otar maintained silence for a long while, with the insight of a drunken man suddenly sensing that something in his merriment does not ring true, turning melancholy, brooding on a lifetime’s sorrows laid bare.

The fog cleared. A hundred yards from the thickets where we had allowed ourselves to get trapped, the crossroads came into view, the post with the mailbox, and above it the little sign with the name: Mirnoe. By the light of the setting sun, still made hazy by strands of mist, the inscription seemed to be emerging from nothingness, like a signpost amid the debris of an abandoned planet.

I was just about to climb down when Otar began speaking in a low, sad voice that was quite unlike him: “I want to give you a piece of advice. You’re young. It may be of use to you. When it comes to love, you want to act like that fat pig of an Azerbaijani. That’s right. So as not to get hurt, you need to be a filthy swine. You see a female, you fuck her, you move on to the next one. Whatever you do, steer clear of love! I tried it, and it got me six years in a camp. She was the one, my goddamned sweetheart, may she rot in hell, who squealed on me. She was the one who reported my skins and furs business. Six years in a camp and four years’ probation up here in this dump. Ten years of my life wiped out. I’ve had enough. With women, I’m a pig because they’re all sows. You get to stick it in, you screw her, and: next!”

He fell silent, then smiled bitterly. “You’re an artist. You need beauty and tenderness. But never forget this: all women are sows stuck in a hole in a fence. And the ones who aren’t are the ones that suffer. Like her… like Vera.”

He drove off in a flurry; the water stirred in the ruts, then came to rest, reflecting the blaze of the sunset.

In the distance, beneath the tall pivotal beam of a well, I saw Vera. Long trails of fog, the scarlet rays of the low sun, deep stillness, and this woman, such a stranger to all the words that had just been spoken.

So perhaps what kept me in Mirnoe was this feeling of strangeness I had never before experienced as intensely In this aftertime where the village lived, it was as if things and people were liberated from their uses and were starting to be loved simply for their presence beneath the northern sky.

What was the use of that wild-mushroom-gathering trip we embarked on one day, Vera and I? Without conferring or planning, the way everything happened here. We knew the harvest would not amount to more than a few boleti pockmarked by the frosts, a dozen or so russulas, fragile as glass. In this forest, already half stripped of its leaves, we walked beside one another, speaking little, often forgetting how to search properly. And when we remembered that you have to part the bracken, turn over the dead leaves, we did it overzealously, like two lazybones caught red-handed. During these frenzied bouts we lost sight of each other, and I would be intensely aware of this woman getting farther away and then, after the snapping of a twig, of our drawing closer again. Sometimes Vera appeared soundlessly, catching me off guard, immersed as I was in the slow filtering of rustlings and silences. Occasionally, it was I who surprised her, all alone amid the trees. Then I felt like a wild animal coolly observing a defenseless prey She would turn and for a moment seem not to see me, or to be seeing someone other than me. And we would resume our wandering with a sense of not having dared an exchange of confidences.

If the truth be told, the point of this meandering stroll was seeing the long cavalry greatcoat that Vera wore, its coarse fabric patterned with tiny red and yellow leaves. Seeing her eyes, after a moment of forgetfulness, beginning to respond to my look. Hearing her voice: “That path would take you all the way to the sea. Possibly five or six hours’ march. If we left now, we’d reach the coast close to midnight…”

The point of this life apart from time was picturing our arrival on the shores of the White Sea in the middle of the night.

Or that evening, too, after my return with Otar, on the day he had talked about “pigs” and “sows.” A very thin layer of ice had formed at the bottom of the well. (I had just caught up with Vera, who was drawing water.) As the ice broke, it sounded like a harpsichord. We looked at one another. We were each about to remark on the beauty of this tinkling sound, then thought better of it. The resonance of the harpsichord had faded into the radiance of the air, it blended with the wistfully repeated notes of an oriole, with the scent of a wood fire coming from the nearby izba. The beauty of that moment was quite simply becoming our life.

There was that alder tree as well, the last to keep its immense helmet of bronze foliage intact. It overhung the shore at the place where Vera generally landed. As we moved across the water we would see it from afar, this swaying pyramid freighted with gold, and kept an eye on it as the last island of summer, holding out against the bareness of autumn.

And then one morning two clouds of misty breath from our double “Oh!” faded upon the air. Every leaf, down to the last tiny bronze roundel, had fallen during the night. The black branches, stripped bare, carved into the stinging blue of the sky like fissures. We drew close to one another, contriving to hold back obvious remarks (“It was too lovely to last”). And then, as we walked down to the shore, saw, reproduced in the copper-colored glory of the leaves on the water, the inlaid pattern that had tumbled out of the sky The dark, smooth water, this red-and-gold incrustation. An even broader mosaic, one slowly spreading beneath the breeze, becoming an upturned canopy, ready to cover the whole lake. The eye was swept along by its endless expansion. Another beauty was being re-created, new and strange, richer than before, even more alive after its autumnal death.

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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