We returned home together on foot, walking slowly around the lake. Unfamiliar at first, the track quickly joined the one I had always taken, leading from the old landing stage, by way of the crossroads and the signpost with the mailbox, to the willow groves where I had surprised the woman hauling in her fishing net… In the middle of the lake, the clear curves of the church stood out in the mist-laden air on the ochreous hump of the island.
“One should have no illusions,” Vera said, when I talked to her about her pupils. “The only possible future for them is to go away. We’re not even living in the past here. We’re in the pluperfect. These children will go off to towns where their best hope will be work on a construction site, up to their ears in mud, a young workers’ barracks, alcohol, violence. But, you know, I sometimes tell myself that something of these forests will stay with them all the same. And our lessons. A butterfly awakened just before winter. If young Lyosha thought about that, he’ll surely hold on to some trace of it. Despite his drunken father’s death, despite the filth of the towns he’ll soon be immersed in. Despite everything. It’s not much, of course. And yet, I’m sure such things can save people. Often just a little thing can be enough to keep one from going under.”
As we passed close by the spot she used to fish from, on the shoreline covered by the bare willow groves, I sensed that the memory of our first encounter still lingered within her, for she lost no time in breaking the silence, talking with some embarrassment, looking away and pointing to the island.’One of the Vikings’ routes to the south passed this spot. They would see that island just the same as it is now, minus the church and graveyard. In their language they called it holm, an island. Whereas in Russian holm means a hill. It’s a question for the specialist. Why this shift in meaning?”
Taken aback, I mumbled: “Oh, some kind of etymological perversity, I guess… Maybe the Russians drank more than the Scandinavians… Though they do say the Finns can run rings round us in that department… Wait a minute… So with us a Viking island turns into a hill? All right. I give up. Tell me about these Norsemen and their holm!’
“Well, to begin with, we’re talking about Swedes and Norwegians, not Finns. When they came here on their raids, they needed a considerable draw for their heavy dragon ships. So they preferred to come in the spring, during the high tides. Thanks to these, even the villages generally far away from the shore came within their reach. They saw an island and yelled, ‘Holm!’ The natives remembered the word and used it to refer to what this ‘island’ became when the waters retreated. Simply a hill in the middle of the fields, once again laid bare. I’m sorry if all that sounds pedantic. When I was young, I embarked on a thesis about all this etymological humbug. But fortunately I never completed the course-”
“A thesis? You mean a doctoral thesis?” My astonishment was such that I slowed my pace, almost to a standstill. This obscure schoolteacher, this Vera, forgotten by everyone in this remote neck of the woods… A doctorate in linguistic studies! It seemed like a joke.
“So where did you study?” There was ill-concealed skepticism in my voice and also a degree of irritation: here in this northern wilderness, with my university diploma, I believed I was erudition incarnate. Now, mortified, I realized that my own self-esteem had been dented by this upheaval in the intellectual hierarchy
“In Leningrad, at the university. I had Ivanitsky as my thesis supervisor. You probably didn’t know him. He died at the end of the sixties. He was very upset with me for throwing in the towel just before it came to defending my thesis.
I listened to her, unable to tune out the conflicting images: a recluse, an inconsolable fiancée-widow, a hermit dedicated to the cult of the dead, and this young research student in the Leningrad of the sixties with all that post-Stalin ferment. I quickly added five years of university studies to three years on the thesis, that is to say at least eight long years spent far from the forests of Mirnoe. A whole lifetime! So I had been completely mistaken about the sense of her life here…
I followed her automatically. Without noticing that we had reached the village, I walked straight past the izba where I lodged and into her house, as if this were what always happened, as if we were a couple.
Once inside the main room, I came to my senses and studied the interior, which now gave evidence of a totally different way of life: books on linguistics, perfectly normal reading for her, of course, reproductions hung on the walls, some of whose subjects needed to be viewed as tongue-in-cheek humor, as in the case of a landscape captioned: ‘On the pack ice: family of polar bears.” A neatness owing more to intellectual discipline than the whims of an old maid. And that spot at the end of the bench, her lookout post, which she had readily abandoned to go to Leningrad or elsewhere. A different woman…
I remained standing as I spoke, still feeling I had lost my bearings in this transformed space.
“But why did you come back?” My urgency in asking her gave away the real question: Why, after so many years spent in Leningrad, come and bury yourself here among the drunkards and the bears?
She must have been aware of the implication, but replied without any hint of solemnity, as she continued making the tea: “I had a funny feeling during all those years in Leningrad. I was more or less content with what I was doing there, quite involved in their life-you’ll note I said, ‘their life,’” she smiled.”And yet very divided. As if this interlude at the university was a way of proving to other people that I belonged elsewhere. You see, for me there was something very artificial about those years of the thaw. Something hypocritical. They pilloried Stalin but sanctified Lenin more than ever. It was a fairly understandable sleight of hand. After the collapse of one cult, people were clinging to the last remaining idols. I remember very fashionable poets appearing in stadiums before tens of thousands of people. One of them declaimed:’Take Lenin’s picture off our banknotes. For he is beyond price!’ It was inspiring, new, intoxicating. And false. Most of the people who applauded those lines knew the first concentration camps had been built on Lenin’s orders. And as for barbed wire, by the way, there was never any shortage of that in these parts, around Mirnoe. But the poets preferred to lie. That was why they were showered with honors and dachas in the Crimea…”
She poured tea for us, offered me a chair, sat down at the far end of the bench… I listened to her with the strange sensation of hearing not the story of the democratic hopes of the sixties but that of the following decade, of the seventies, of our dissident youth: poems, rallies, alcohol, and freedom.
No doubt her remarks about the privileges accorded to the poets struck her as too caustic, for she smiled and added: “It was probably mainly my fault if I didn’t manage to be at ease at that time. I argued, read carbon copies of dissident texts, did my research on the typology of Old Swedish and Russian. But I wasn’t living.”
She fell silent, her gaze lost in the gray light of the dusk outside the window. I thought I could detect in her eyes the reflection of the fields with their dead vegetation, the crossroads, the dark terracing of the forest.