The Woman Who Waited

by Andrei Makine

  Also by Andreï Makine

  A Hero’s Daughter

  Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

  Once Upon the River Love

  Dreams of My Russian Summers

  The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

  Requiem for a Lost Empire

  Music of a Life

  The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

  Copyright © 2004, 2011 by Editions du Seuil

  English-language translation copyright © 2006, 2011 by Geoffrey Strachan

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  First published in French as La Femme qui attendait by Editions du Seuil

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-454-3

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  ANDREÏ MAKINE WAS BORN AND BROUGHT UP in Russia, but The Woman Who Waited, like his other novels, was written in French. The book is set in Russia, and the author uses some Russian words in the French text, which I have kept in this English translation. These include nyet (no), izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs), dacha (a country house or cottage, typically used as a second or holiday home), and sarafan (a traditional sleeveless tunic dress).

  There are also a number of references to well-known Russian place names, including the Nevsky Prospekt, the street in St. Petersburg (Leningrad under the Soviet Union), and to institutions from the Communist era in Russia. A kolkhoz was a collective farm, a kolkhoznik a member of the farm collective. An apparatchik was a member of the party administration, or apparat. References from French cultural life include those to Jean-Luc Godard, the influential NewWave film director of the 1960s, the events of May 1968, when student protests in France led to a crisis that shook the government, and Colonel Chabert, the eponymous hero of Balzac’s 1834 novel, who returns from the war in which he was reported killed to find his wife has remarried and refuses to recognize him.

  G.S.

  ONE

  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 hur
ried 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.”