Andreï Makine - The Woman Who Waited

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.