In the boat she took one oar, leaving the other for me. The rain fell more steadily, subduing the squalls. Neither the houses of Mirnoe, nor even the willows on that far shore, were visible. Our rhythms were quickly matched. Each effort made by the other felt like a response to one’s own, down to the slightest tensing of the muscles. We touched shoulders, but our real closeness was in this slow, rhythmic action, the care we took to wait for each other, pulling together once more after too powerful a stroke or the skipping of a blade over the crest of a wave.
In the middle of the crossing, both shores disappeared completely behind the rain. No line, no point of orientation beyond the contours of the boat. The gray air with its swirling pattern of raindrops, the waves, calmer now, that seemed to be coming from nowhere. And our forward motion that no longer seemed to have a goal. We were quite simply there, side by side, amid the somnolent hissing of the rain, in a dusk as cool as fish scales, and when I turned my head a little I saw the glistening face of a woman smiling faintly, as if made happy by the incessant tears the sky sent coursing down her cheeks.
I understood now that this was the way she lived out her afterlife. A slow progress, with no apparent goal, but marked by a simple and profound meaning.
The boat grounded blindly at the very spot from which we had set off.
3
FROM THE STREET, I saw a child’s hand press flat against the misted windowpane, and wipe it from top to bottom. Through the opening thus cleared a little close-cropped head showed itself, with somewhat pallid, melancholy features that struck me as familiar. I walked up to the building and read the sign above the front steps: “Grammar School.” The school where Vera taught…
I had come here by chance after making long detours in search of the wooden church Otar and I had failed to find. The church stood at the entrance to the village of Nakhod, about six miles from Mirnoe on the far side of the lake. There were still stirrings of life there: three dozen houses, a dairy, a tractor repair shop (a building with a rusty corrugated iron roof), and this one-room schoolhouse.
I stole a glance in at the now-clean window Ancient desks made of thick planks, with old-fashioned holes for inkwells, portraits of writers (Pushkin’s flowing locks, Tolstoys beard), and above the blackboard Lenin’s piercing gaze. Several boys and girls were banging down their desk lids, sliding back onto the benches; clearly the first break had just fmished. Vera got up from her chair, an exercise book in her hand.
I knocked discreetly and asked permission to come in, like a pupil arriving late. Her amazement was a little like the discomposure she had failed to conceal when I sat myself down in her izba at the far end of the bench, facing the window, her own lookout post… But this time the discomposure was tinged with evident pleasure as well as irony, as she indicated a seat for me, murmuring: “Welcome, Comrade Inspector…” I sat at the back, “the dunces’ row,” I thought, guessing from Vera s look that the same idea had struck her.
The children’s coats were hung on the wall near a large brick stove with cracked plaster. The black stovepipe separated Chekhov’s romantically myopic countenance from the Promethean gaze of the young Gorky. Prominent on top of a set of bookshelves was a terrestrial globe covered in dust and surrounded by a wire circle: the orbit of the moon, a silvered ball, long since wrenched from its path, which now lay upon a pile of old maps. A light haze arose from the wringing-wet garments, steaming up the windows. I pictured the waterlogged pathways covered in russet leaves that the children had followed to come here from their scattered villages in the depths of the forest. These misted windowpanes provoked thoughts of winter, and the fronds of hoarfrost that would soon be woven across them. “Ill be far away by then,” I said to myself, and the idea of no longer being in these vast expanses of the North, no longer seeing this woman who was now walking from one desk to the next, suddenly seemed very strange to me.
There were eight pupils, all told. Judging from what they were doing, I quickly gauged the age differences: three boys and a girl were calculating the speed of two boats in pursuit of one another on the Volga-Don Canal. So, ten or eleven. Three younger pupils were taking turns to read out their written homework about a walk through the forest. The final one, sitting facingVera’s desk, was learning to write.
To begin with, I cocked an ear toward the terms in which the problem of the boats was presented, then confessed myself incapable of solving it, having forgotten everything about tricky arithmetical problems like this one. A ludicrous and tangible indication of the passage of time… And I started listening to the three stories of walks through the forest. The first told of the classic fear of wolves. The second, with poetic but dangerous imprecision, explained how to tell edible mushrooms from their poisonous doubles… In a few polite words but without flattery Vera praised these fumbling descriptions.
The third account of a walk was the shortest. As it unfolded, there were no “carpets of beautiful golden leaves” nor “a wolf’s great footprints,” nor even a “deaf cap” (for “death cap”) mushroom… It was read out by the child I had caught sight of earlier through the cleared window. His face still had the same dreamy expression; one of the elbows of his old pullover was completely unraveled, the other, in a strange contrast, was carefully darned. His voice did not describe, it simply stated, insistently, as if to say: “All I can tell you is what I saw and what happened to me.”
On the way to school the previous day, he said, he went into the forest to avoid a pathway the rains had transformed into a stream. He passed through a clearing he had never been in before. And there, tramping through the dead leaves, he disturbed a sleeping butterfly that flew away in the cold air. Where would it find shelter now when the snowstorms came?
The question was put in tones at once distraught and truculent, as if addressing a reproach to us all. The boy sat down, his eyes turned toward the window his hand had wiped clean, now cloudy once more. The other pupils, even the ones at the helm of their boats, looked up. There was a moment of silence. I saw that Vera was searching for words before concluding: “In the spring, Lyosha, you’ll go back to that clearing and you’ll see your butterfly. In fact, we’ll all go together… Yours is a very good story!”The boy shrugged his shoulders, as if to say: “But it’s not a story It’s what I saw.”
And then I recognized him. He was one of the sons of the man who had hanged himself by fastening the rope to the door of a shed at the beginning of September, the drunkard of whom I was planning to make a satirical portrait. I recalled the little crowd of his children, with staring eyes, no tears, and this boy’s desperate flight across a piece of wasteland… Now here he was, talking of a butterfly disturbed under a dead leaf, deprived of winter shelter.
Vera looked at her watch, announced another break. The children rushed outside; the youngest, the one who was learning to write, produced a bread-and-butter sandwich from his satchel. Lyosha removed his pullover and took it to Vera without a word. The shirt he was wearing underneath was a large man’s shirt, taken in at the sides and with the sleeves shortened. He stayed in the classroom, leaning his back against the warm brick of the stove. Vera drew her chair up to the window, produced a scrap of cloth, a spool of thread, a needle. As she patched in silence, I looked at the books on the shelves, mainly textbooks, selected passages from classic authors, then, a completely ridiculous intrusion, A Typology of Scandinavian Languages. “Another piece of flotsam she’s fished out of some wrecked library,” I thought and went outside. Beneath a sloping roof, a stack of firewood, piled high, supplies for the winter. I took an ax and set about splitting thick ends of timber, stacking up the logs, which gave off a bitter aroma of fog. And once again the thought that this timber would be burning in the big stove in the classroom long after I had departed, the very idea of the fire I would never see, struck me as bizarre.