The Woman Who Waited

by Andrei Makine

  When in the distance the locomotive’s headlamp pierced the fog, the crowd stirred, pressed closer to the tracks, and to my alarm, I saw that Vera was only a couple of steps away from me, her eyes following the coaches as they streamed past. I moved away, clambered over the first of the suitcases that were being set down on the ground, deafened by noisy hugs and kisses, jostled by coalescing families. I looked back but did not see her again. Slowly the platform emptied; the only ones left now were those who had been let down and the most daring of the smokers, poised to leap back on board the train as soon as the whistle blew. She was no longer there. “A man with a slight nick on his chin from shaving in a swaying railroad car, pungent eau de cologne, a dinner over which he’ll recount the latest news from the capital, a high double bed, their sleep together.

  As I left the station, I told myself that sleeping in a man’s arms might well be the most natural, even the most honorable, solution for Vera, a way of life she was deprived of when others’ eyes were focused on her, banal, to be sure, but one to which she had truly earned the right. I almost convinced myself. Then suddenly I realized I was filled with contempt both for such a way of life and for such a woman.

  The party was already in full swing at the deputy director’s. The room, blue with tobacco smoke, was very unevenly lit by candles. Voices were getting louder, men laughing, women shrieking, from which it was easy to deduce their levels of intoxication. I sat down beside one of the women guests and, beneath her garish makeup, recognized the features of the history teacher. I was given wine. (Georgian wine, I noted. Otar must have cleared out his cellar.) Someone yelled out a toast in welcome. I drank hastily, eager to catch up with them in their boisterous merriment. They were already chorusing yet another toast in celebration of O tar’s freedom regained.

  I did not notice the moment when our bickering and chaotic conversation touched on Mirnoe. Had I provoked this myself? Unlikely. I was only half listening and did not realize they were talking about Vera until the history teacher exclaimed: “Oh, yes. A hermit, a nun. You could have fooled me! She fucks left, right, and center. What do you mean: ‘Who with?’With the stationmaster, for heaven’s sake. And I’ll tell you another thing….” Her voice was drowned by other voices and other remarks.

  The pain of what I had just heard sobered me instantly. I found myself sitting on the ground on a rolled-up sheepskin, my arm tightly clasping the woman as she continued yelling, my right hand kneading her breast, her skintight sweater sticky under the armpit.

  So life was nothing more than this carnal stickiness, men’s and women’s desire, pawing one another, possessing one another, moving on. “First they’re on fire. After, they tire …” Everything else was lies told by poets. Slipping out of her skirt, the history teacher leaned forward and, with rounded lips, as if for a caricature of a kiss, blew out a candle. In the dim light other bodies were tightening their knots of arms, necks, and legs. I heard Otar’s sad laugh. The art teacher angrily explaining that for children to be taught painting properly, they needed to begin with Malevich’s Black Square on a White Field. She had not found a man to make love with that evening. Someone made a joke about the whole of Russia being electrified, and I realized that the candles were not there to create an atmosphere but were needed because of a power failure. Their light was sufficient for me to make out the pattern on the fabric of the undergarments my partner was in the process of discarding: something green and flowery. And as always in such hasty couplings, only half desired by the participants, a glimmer of wry pity crept in, for this alien body, so touching in its zeal to simulate love. All at once indifference took over, then the simple desire to crush those warm, bare breasts …

  The shout that went up was excessive in relation to the extent of the catastrophe, as we quickly realized. A candle had fallen off a windowsill and rolled under a curtain; the blaze was spectacular. The hysterical yell of “Fire!” came in response to this first impression of an inferno. Panic contributed to it. Orders issued and countermanded, half-naked bodies rushing this way and that, smoke. But already the guilty curtain lay upon the ground, furiously trampled on by several pairs of feet. Finally, sighs of relief all around, a moment of stasis after extreme frenzy, then astonishment: the electricity had come back on again!

  We stood there, blinking, staring at one another upon this amorous battlefield, over which filaments of soot floated. Smeared makeup, pale masculine chests, but one thing, above all!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  THREE

  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.”

&
nbsp; 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….”