Andreï Makine - The Woman Who Waited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the sound resumes, faint, unwavering.