The bald reality of it was clear to me, too, in the obscenely simple manner of this life’s devastation, the unspeakable banality of the years that had gone to make up that thirty-year monolith. For to begin with, when peace returned, there was nothing to distinguish Vera from the millions of other women who had lost their men. Like her they waited, young widows, forsaken lovers. No particular merit in that. Such waiting was very common then, and their distress was equally current.
Indeed, to probe the depths of her misfortune I had to face up to a still more brutal, almost indecent statement of fact: during those first few years without war, women remained faithful to their men who had been killed because there was a shortage of men left alive. It was as crass and prosaic as that. Ten million males slaughtered, as many again disabled. A fiance became a rare commodity.
A hideous logic, but fearsomely accurate, I knew. The only one that enabled me to picture the village of Mirnoe as it had been thirty years before. A strange population made up of women, children, and old men. A few men sporting military medals on their soldiers’ tunics, embittered men with arms missing, drink-sodden men with no legs, the heroic flotsam and jetsam of the victory. And this girl, this Vera, whose faithfulness at first passed unnoticed, later prompted respectful and sympathetic approval, then, as time went by, a mixture of weariness and irritation, the shrugging of shoulders reserved for village idiots; then, later still, indifference, sometimes giving way to the pride local people take in one of the curiosities of the region, a holy relic, a notably picturesque rock.
One day, in the end, nothing remained of all that. Just the beautiful emptiness of the clear September sky, this same faithful woman, thirty years older, steering a boat across the sun-drenched mirror of the lake. The way I had seen and known her. The pointlessness of all judgments, admiring or critical. Only this thought, hazy amid the air’s radiance: “That’s how it is.”
It was more from a desire for the truth than youthful cynicism that I sought to strip her life of all will to sacrifice, all grand gestures. Vera had never really had a choice. The pressure of events, which is the destiny of the poor, had decided for her. At first the lack of men to marry, and then, when marriages began to be celebrated once more in the resurgent village, she was already perceived as a kind of young old maid. There was a new generation of truly young people, careless of the ghosts of the war, eager to seize their portion of happiness, wary of this solitary woman, half-widow, half-fiancée, dressed in a long cavalry greatcoat. Their zest for life had thrust her back toward old age as the draft from a train thrusts aside someone who has just missed it.
Impossible, too, for her to leave Mirnoe, a place in the back of beyond! In those days, kolkhozniks had no identity documents and needed to request authorization to travel. It was not the echo of a voice from beyond the forest that kept her there, but this bureaucratic slavery. And when, at the start of the sixties, Stalin’s serfs, freed at last, were beginning to leave their warrens, Vera was already surrounded by a colony of moribund old women she could no longer abandon.
No, she had not chosen to wait, she had been cruelly caught by an era, by the postwar years, which had closed in on her like a mousetrap.
But this meant she was perfectly free! And her pledge was null and void.
Free to leave the village, as she did one day of high winds at the beginning of October. I noticed she was carrying not her leather bookbag crammed with textbooks and pupils’ homework but a broad portfolio of thick cardboard, which the squalls were trying to snatch from her. There was a vagabond lightness in her step, the panache of an itinerant artist or an adventuress. As she passed the mailbox where the roads met, she did not pause. For the space of a second, the notion came to me that she was departing for good on an arrogant impulse. Off to take the train to Leningrad, or at least, to Archangel…
She was free. And her mater dolorosa persona was other people’s invention. We were the ones who imposed this absurd waiting on her, very noble, of course, even heroic, but she would have shaken it off long ago had not our sympathetic and admiring gaze been fixed on her. This gaze had turned her into a pillar of salt, an elegant funeral monument, at the foot of which one could say a little prayer, sighing: “Praise be! Faithful women still exist! “The lovesick babbling of a sixteen-year-old girl had been turned into an irrevocable vow. And a woman brimming with vitality turned into a suttee burned to a cinder on the pyre of loneliness.
These judgments were exaggerated and too intellectual, but, in a confused way, I sensed that they should be made known to Vera at any cost. She ought to know it was possible to think in this way, that there was still time for such thoughts.
She came home that evening, with the same portfolio under her arm. “Leningrad, Archangel… hmm…,” I kept repeating bitterly. And yet, despite that false start, amid the wind’s bluster, the sense of freedom that emanated from here appearance was still there. Even more intensely. And my indignation became still sharper over this cult of undying love that had been assigned to her, as to an idol. Here was a woman, her face flushed by the wind, walking along in the sunset’s radiance. Everything else should be wiped from the slate, the youthful promises, the faded icons of past heroism, the pitying glances of kindly souls. Look no further than this free flesh-and-blood presence. As I watched her walking away, I recalled the body of a woman hauling in her nets on the warm clay of the lakeshore, and that naked body at night, in front of the door to the little bathhouse izba… I sensed that the recovery of her freedom must start from the revolt of that body enclosed in a long military greatcoat.
I called on her that same evening, without being invited, simply knocking on her door on the pretext that I had run out of bread. I had been into her house before on several occasions, but always after meeting her in the street and exchanging a few words with her. This unannounced arrival did not surprise her, however; she was accustomed to life in a community and to the visits, always unexpected, of her elderly protégées.
We went into the main room, and while she was taking out a round loaf and cutting a generous quarter off it for me, I quickly seated myself in the place that was the secret goal of my visit. Alongside the old table of thick, cracked planks stood this bench, the far end of which, close to the door, was the spot Vera generally occupied when one went to see her. She talked, served her guests, walked over to the stove, but always returned to that station close to the door. At the least creak of the treads on the front steps, she would tense instinctively, ready to stand up, and go to meet the visitor who was surely bound to arrive at that very moment. And outside the window, she could see the crossroads, the corner of the forest that anyone coming to Mirnoe had to skirt…
So I sat down at this end of the bench, leaning my elbows heavily on the table. Vera had wrapped my share of the loaf in a square of linen, then offered me tea and apple jam. She moved away, and I had a distinct feeling that the room’s familiar disposition was eluding her. There were brief tremors of anxiety in her eyes and a slight uncertainty in the movements of her body, the alarm of a sleepwalker who has been diverted from her path. She poured tea for us, then, after some hesitation, settled herself on a chair facing me, stood up almost at once, crossed over to the window. I perceived that an unacknowledged, pleasurably cruel game was developing between us… More or less honestly, I still believed it was for her own good.