Widows

by Ariel Dorfman

  Just then the door opened and the sergeant came in.

  “Ready, sir. At your command.”

  Before the captain could answer, the reporter spoke. He could sense the cool but mounting fury caught in her throat. He could hear her agitated breathing.

  “I must go today, Captain. And no one can change my mind. I hope you understand that.”

  The captain began to sweep his gaze across the faces of the women, pausing easily to rest on every one, ending again on the old Angelos woman, lingering on her worn black dress. She kept her eyes fixed on some empty, nonexistent spot on the wall.

  “That’s how things are, Madam Sofia,” the captain suddenly boomed out. “One can’t always carry out all one’s plans. That’s life.”

  The old woman didn’t acknowledge the reference.

  The captain reached out his hand and picked up the pencil the reporter had set temporarily on the table. The captain used it to signal to the sergeant.

  “Captain!”

  “Bring in the prisoner.”

  For about two seconds there was absolute stillness, as if everyone were waiting for all the traces of the captain’s words to disappear. Then the women jumped to their feet and turned toward the door. They began rustling, buzzing.

  “Quiet!” shouted the lieutenant. “Nobody in here moves without permission.”

  The captain kept his eyes on the old one. She was the only one who hadn’t moved. Very carefully and with great dignity, now she rose and turned her back on him to look, with the rest of the women, at the door of the hall through which the man called “the prisoner” would enter.

  The photographer extravagantly shot off his flash.

  Then the captain shoved back his chair and fixed his eyes on the reporter.

  “No,” the captain said, handing her pencil back and smiling slightly. “Tomorrow. You’ll leave tomorrow.”

  chapter five

  viii

  Grandma didn’t want anyone else to go and wait for Serguei, nobody else, not even his twin sister Cristina. Only Yanina and the baby, and he should be prettied up to meet his papa, these things happen only once in a lifetime. We didn’t protest. It was right that the two of them, the three of them, should be alone before meeting with the whole family.

  Grandma had gone directly up to Yanina when she returned, not responding to our greetings or questions. “Take off those widow’s clothes, child, and dress up the baby nicely.”

  Yanina was next to me. I could feel the trembling passing through my own body, a shaking that started in her hips and rose to her eyes. They seemed to shine, a light flaring up in her, and we saw her get up, we saw her go over to Grandma and take her hand.

  “Serguei? Is it Serguei, Mama?”

  Grandma smiled and said yes, yes indeed, girl. Her husband was fully alive, in good health. She’d wanted to bring him to her right away, as soon as he’d come in through the door of the school, but the captain had said he was still the one giving the orders and first the reporter had to do an interview with him and only then would he be set free. Conditionally free, the lieutenant had added, looking at each woman and at her especially.

  “Cristina,” Yanina said, “it’s Serguei, Serguei’s coming, you told me so, you told me he was alive, you told me so, bless you.”

  And the captain had also advised Grandma that it was likely the same reporter would want to ask her a few questions, so would she and the rest please be kind enough to remain where they were until the prisoner returned. But she had answered that her family did not discuss their problems in public and did not give interviews, much less to strangers, and as far as she was concerned she was going, in order to let her daughter-in-law and grandchild know, in the light of the fact that the army hadn’t had the decency to tell them that her son was on the way and preferred to put on a big spectacle instead of granting them a relieved and peaceful night. Then Grandma had approached Serguei. We imagined her drawing closer to him step by step to hug him or kiss him or caress him or simply touch him to prove he was real, and the captain had barked an order, and they took him away. So Yanina should hurry. They were letting him go any minute, the interview was taking place in the captain’s office.

  Yanina went right into the house and we heard her speaking in a shaky voice to the sleeping baby, waking him up gently. I followed her to the door and saw her beside his crib, singing to him with that beautiful voice of hers, something like wake up my little walnut, my little almond, wake up my ripe little fruit, your daddy lives, your daddy’s coming, listen to the poplars, your papa’s coming, Papa’s alive. Then she lifted him in her arms and, seeing me, passed him to me to be washed and dressed.

  Mama and Grandma stayed outside. I listened to them while I cleaned up the baby, who had begun to cry with his eyes wide open and surprised and still sleepy.

  “So you didn’t speak to him, Grandma?” Mama asked. “Neither of you could say a thing.”

  And I didn’t want to think about it. We didn’t want to pay any attention because water had to be fetched for Yanina and we had to help her dig out her green dress, the one she’d never worn, with the flamboyant orange trim, the one that Serguei had given her when he found out she was expecting a baby after so many years of wanting one without any luck, telling her it was for after the baby’s arrival, that he bought it now so she would remember the shape her body would be after the birth, so neither of them would forget that as she got bigger. A few months later they’d come to take Serguei and Dimitriou away, and no, Fidelia didn’t want to think about what her mama was really asking. Because what she was asking and what I was asking and my brother when he got there and didn’t want to let filter into our heads now since we had to relish that little bit of pine-scented soap reserved for special occasions and Yanina who looked at the green dress somewhere between bewitchment and disbelief, as if it simply wasn’t real and the black cloth she was wearing had already turned to a swirl of ashes. What had to be asked was something else, which Grandma had left out, but it was impossible. We imagined the captain and the lieutenant and the sergeant and that idiot photographer blinding them with his flashbulbs and on top of that the orderly who’d go tell Sarakis and that whore Cecilia everything and that strange woman up on the platform who maybe was even the captain’s wife, and Grandma hadn’t been able to ask and Alexandra didn’t ask her either. They couldn’t say anything, she had said that much. She hadn’t asked if he was all right since he seemed all there and healthy enough, although too skinny and awfully pale. He looked at the floor without returning her glance as if he were still a prisoner, and hadn’t even asked the other kinds of questions that one thinks of in those situations, like how had the trip been or had he missed the family, things that Yanina would surely be asking as they walked back from town. So you didn’t speak to him, Grandma, Alexandra had said with that sense of, I would have asked him, would have asked him even though all the women in town were present, all the women in the universe. What shame could there be in asking what we all had on the tip of our tongue? We don’t air family matters in public. She didn’t want to give the captain satisfaction, although in reality the victory was ours. What sense was there in thinking we’d been defeated, that the captain had managed to bend us? It was they who’d been forced to do it, let go of at least one of our men and now perhaps they were also going to have to … but that was precisely the question that Grandma hadn’t asked. Perhaps Yanina would pose it to him before we did, perhaps she was wondering about it right now while I without knowing what to do with my knees and heels and these pigeons of joy and dread trapped in our chests, that question that at some point along the road even Yanina would have to bring up in our name, after talking about the dress and showing him each funny trick of little Serguei, the same question she’d have put to any other man in the family who’d come back alone, hands tied, head bowed, paler and more elusive than the moon, that question, the same one, the one that Grandma hadn’t asked, that Alexandra couldn’t ask, that all of us turned back
on our tongues like a chewed pit whose juice was gone and we didn’t know where to spit it, that question, that one.

  Then Yanina, with a clumsy decisive gesture, undid the black, letting it fall at her feet like a wrinkled, dead, smelly dog, and her body appeared in the shadows, and from where I was I could see Mama’s eyes as she watched Yanina naked, Mama and Grandma and I all seeing her out of mourning, revealing her white, sinewy body, all these months under the same cloth every one of us wore except Fidelia, her breasts standing out, and we didn’t know which of us remembered the herbs, it must have been Rosa, who’d never had a sweetheart, it must have been Rosa who remembered the herbs that Yanina had gathered in the evenings, the herbs she’d crushed to create the incomparable scents her mother had taught her, when you’re grown, Fidelia, when you’ve grown all that you must, when you’re ready to marry, when you love a sturdy man, I’m going to give you this and even hand over the secret of how to mix it, and she let me smell it and its perfume carried me off beyond the fields, the cherry blossoms, every evening she went out looking, went with Cristina to reaffirm her faith that Serguei would come back, and Cristina who was thinking about Serguei and also about her own boyfriend Aristos, and who was now perhaps also remembering Aristos as she brought the water for Yanina, and she had to have felt the weight of our eyes like a kind of soap or water running over her body shining in that half-light, must have felt the sleek skin of her body too exposed, stood there an instant without looking back, permitting our eyes on her skin, on the dead pile of clothes at her feet, her feet sticking out like two hot flowers. It must have been like waking up to another reality, falling into the question Grandma hadn’t, off that cliff, and she said to Cristina that she didn’t need any more water and would Maria hand her the cloth to dry herself, and she turned around and I noticed that Grandma had already gone outside, and Mama and I kept looking at that powerful back, the haunches rippling under that gorgeous waist, as she quickly put on the dress and went to the mirror. Then she came over to Fidelia and in a deep, clear voice thanked her for taking care of the baby, and took him from me. I’d almost forgotten I was holding him, I scarcely knew how my hands had automatically soothed him and cleaned him and dressed him, how he had just hung there all that time while his mother was getting ready.

  “You can brush your hair on the way,” Cristina said, pushing her, if she didn’t hurry she’d be late. Yanina took the brush as if she couldn’t remember what it was, as if she didn’t spend an hour every night brushing her hair, now a black cascade falling softly and intensely, accented by the green with the orange trim. Sometimes she let Fidelia brush it while she spoke to her of when she’d be grown and have a sweetheart, that I had to promise her I’d never let him go away, not to war nor to look for work in the city, that you had to take care of a young man like your very own body. But now we no longer went over the candidates. For years the sweetheart had been somebody far away, nonexistent. Perhaps he’d come from the other side of the hill, I’d have to care for him like my own body. “On the way,” Cristina repeated.

  Yanina looked herself over in the mirror one last time and walked out to the patio. We followed. She stopped there for a minute, perhaps expecting us to give her a message or additional advice, that we’d send Serguei something through her or maybe she just wanted to talk something over with us, explain something.

  Nobody tried or knew what to say.

  “I hope it goes well,” Alexandra whispered at last, because Mama couldn’t leave her like that, so quiet and alone. I hope it goes well.

  She waited long enough to get the baby settled and nobody said anything else and another second and then she turned with a shake of her shining hair.

  “Just a minute,” said Grandma. Yanina stopped. “Just a minute,” Grandma repeated and went running into the house, coming back out at once with a bag. She showed her what was in it. Bread, some cold cuts, goat cheese, grapes, tomatoes.

  Yanina nodded her head. Of course, he’d be hungry. And then we watched her walk off, relieved, grateful, with the bag under her arm and the brush in the same hand and the little one looking back at us over his mother’s shoulder.

  Then Grandma sat down and after that we all sat down and didn’t look at each other except for a sidelong glance. Nobody wanted to add another word, like in one of those games where whoever speaks first loses, all of us stricken with the same plague of silence. Until then it had been Yanina we were busy with. We’d let her invade and saturate our thoughts and feelings, bustling about after hairbrushes and clothes and water and bread and tripping over each other even when there wasn’t that much to do, since there wasn’t room for anything more than she getting herself ready to go to Serguei alive. Even Grandma hadn’t wanted to fracture that little happiness Yanina had a right to, come what might, even if so many unanswered questions hung there dying in the air like shadows in search of their bodies. It was the way when a tragedy happens the first thing one thinks of is how to keep the children from finding out, how to explain it to the children.

  But Yanina was gone and we were left, pieces of a wheel which had suddenly lost their axle or the pretext to make them turn and move ahead, still terribly anxious to go on wherever, all of us here with nobody else to talk to, while darkness slowly fell, not able to stop thinking about that question, and the farther away Yanina got, the more room there was for what we’d been thinking, like when the children are finally in bed and you can let go and cry, be a grown-up and let out your pain. So we stayed there, stunned by our own immobility and nobody would even look up when one of us suddenly made a move to get up or say something. We knew we wouldn’t move, we wouldn’t speak until Yanina came back.

  And she took a long time, she’d be hours and hours, not only because she’d be anxious to be alone with Serguei as long as possible or because we imagined Serguei taking a long and circuitous route, but because the other women would be guarding the exit, crowded around the captain’s office, not to answer the stupid questions of some reporter who didn’t have any man missing in her family, but to ask questions themselves, to ask Serguei precisely the ones neither Grandma nor Alexandra nor I nor any of us, questions to which they had the right as much as Yanina had the right to a few hours of peace, the same right the baby had to know his father. They wouldn’t keep silent and proud like Grandma, because Serguei wasn’t just the only man in our family to return in a year, but the only man in the town and the whole region and for who knows how many miles around, so pretty soon, maybe tomorrow, other women would begin arriving, ones who hadn’t been at the school, they’d begin arriving at our house, a few at a time at first, and more in a few days from farther away, from small farms and villages and hills and ravines, they’d come for who knows how many months, to ask the questions Grandma hadn’t asked at the school, sisters and wives would come and grandmothers too, aunts and cousins and sweethearts and widows and even lovers. We didn’t like to imagine the faces they would come with, their bruised looks, it was like our own image wandering over the roads, if news had come to us that in some worthless little settlement a hundred or two hundred or five hundred miles away a prisoner had appeared, any of us would have set out on foot, by mule, however, selling everything we had to find out something, they’d start arriving tomorrow.

  So we just let it get dark. Not one of us wanted to get up and fix something to eat, devoured by the fear that we’d say something else, do something else with our hands and our legs and our teeth. The sky was turning a clear violet. Not even the perfect, pink, innocent clouds up there, nor later the stars so fiercely clean could ease our solitude.

  When each of us could scarcely see the others, we began to relax, loosen our neck muscles. Without other eyes on our faces, we all perceived the change in Grandma, understood it better than if we’d been watching in broad daylight. Like milk going sour, the joy that bathed us for a minute was dimming out. A burnt black liquid was rising to the surface, all the more persistent for having been hidden or ignored. Any minute, soon
, as Serguei’s and Yanina’s steps approached by whatever detours they’d taken, soon, Grandma would have to do it, wouldn’t have the excuse of the captain or the reporter or the orderly or whoever, nor could she give Yanina all the time Yanina would have given Alexandra if Dimitriou had been the one, Grandma getting harder and more severe and bitter in her seat there next to us. A part of her was dying as if she were a stone slowly crumbling under the ground, more than worried by the inevitable question, more than exhausted by not knowing how she would ask it, how and where it would break from her throat, more than that, what Grandma didn’t know, perhaps didn’t want to know, was what her reaction would be once Serguei answered, Grandma, who could sense my look of a wounded swallow and the distant, now suffocating desperation of Alexandra.

  That’s how we remained, these feelings passing around among ourselves like some contagious bottle in which you spit instead of drink, everything that would happen as soon as Serguei arrived, with no time to rest, however much we’d dreamed of nothing but his return, the return of one of our men, finally a man in the house and not just Alexis trying to be. It had to happen before tomorrow morning, before the other women would start arriving. If Alexandra, if Fidelia, if any of us would have walked hundreds of miles to ask a total stranger, someone just like Serguei, how could we not do it with him in our own house, hugging him, crying with grief and relief, his sisters and aunt and sister-in-law and wife and niece, walking with Yanina in the direction of the question boiling on Grandma’s lips, about to arrive.

  There we were, dead still, for hours and hours it must have been. We were holding vigil over a, but nobody wanted to think it. Was it possible that we weren’t expecting the return of someone alive, but Yanina bringing home a corpse she’d dragged from town, knowing as time stretched out that we would never have to hear Serguei’s answer? Why would they have let him go and not the others, why him and not the rest, and where had he been, the certainty of his evasion, his silence growing so big no question could be asked. I tried to stop the thought that condemned him from filtering through before he could even defend himself, tried to summon the image of my uncle, tried to rescue moments when he’d taken me and Alexis fishing in the river, the river where now, and always I came back to the same thing, Grandpa facedown on the sand, that hawk-faced lieutenant asking my name and looking at my legs, with Grandpa’s face like the moon hidden and torn by some weak yellow clouds. I tried to count the stars, wanting again to be the girl discovering faces and nighttime mysteries in the arms of her uncle Serguei, but the only face I could trace was my father’s out there somewhere, the only mystery his absence. Then I looked at my hands and conjured up a doll, the one Serguei had made me. It took him hours with those quiet craftsman’s hands to make it for Fidelia, and Yanina had sewn it a rough little dress, and I couldn’t avoid remembering that I had run to show it to Papa. Dimitriou picked it up, admired his brother’s skill, praised his talent. He was wasting his time as a farmer; with those hands he could earn a living in the city, every memory ending up mixed with Dimitriou or the other men, as if Serguei were the only one of them dead, the only one who could never come back. We felt all the women who’d been at the school were watching with us in the darkness, we had the sensation that the one coming down the road was Papa, Grandpa, Aristos, any other man than Serguei.