“Besides, the way it all happened was much simpler than that. I came back to Mirnoe to… bury my mother. I planned to stay for nine days, as tradition seems to demand. Then for forty. And one thing led to another… To crown it all, there were several old women here already, hardly more robust than my mother had been. No, there were no regrets. No conflict. I simply realized my place was here. Or, at least, I didn’t even think about it. I started living again.”
She stood up to put the kettle back on the fire. I turned my head, glanced quickly out the window: with growing, dreamlike clarity, the shadowy figure of a man on foot detached itself from the forest.
Vera returned, set down some toast, refilled our cups. What she said now sounded mainly like an inner rumination, a rehearsal of old arguments, perfectly convincing to her, only spoken out loud because I was there. “I also realized that up here in Mirnoe all those debates we had in Leningrad, whether anti-Soviet or pro-Soviet, meant nothing. Coming here, I found half a dozen very old women who’d lost their families in the war and were going to die. As simple as that. Human beings getting ready to die alone, not complaining, not seeking someone to blame. Before I got to know them, I had never thought about God, truly, profoundly…”
She broke off, noticing my gaze sidling along the bookshelf (in fact, I was suddenly finding it hard to look her in the eye). She smiled, indicating the row of volumes with a little jerk of her chin. “At any rate, I was already too old for the university. I looked like a hearty kolk-hoznik among all those young students in miniskirts.”
The light faded, Vera reached for the switch, then changed her mind, struck a match. The flame of a candle placed on the windowsill glowed, plunging the fields and pathways outside the glass into darkness. She sat down in her usual spot, we listened to the silence punctuated by the wind, and all at once a slight creak, the sigh of an old beam, a door frame feeling its age.
Her eyes remained calm, but her eyelashes fluttered rapidly. As if I were no longer there, she murmured: “Besides, how can I leave? I’m still waiting for him.”
4
DURING THAT TEN-MILE EXPEDITION on an icy, luminous October day, I became quite certain I was sharing the reality of Vera’s life. Once more we followed the track she used to take to go to her school. The willow plantations beside the lake, the crossroads with the mailbox, the old landing stage… There, a footpath veered off northward into the depths of the forest.
Some days earlier, one of her pupils had told her about a hamlet lost amid the undergrowth where only one inhabitant remained, a deaf, almost blind old woman, according to him, whose name he had not been able to discover, not even her Christian name. Vera had gone to see the head of the neighboring kolkhoz, hoping to obtain a truck. She had been told that for these overgrown paths a tank was what she really needed… So that Saturday she knocked on my door and we set off, dragging behind us a comic vehicle perched on odd bicycle wheels: a little cart that had belonged to a soldier from Mirnoe, who had returned legless from the front and died shortly after the war.
The cold eased our journey through the forest, where the muddy tracks were frozen solid, even making it possible to walk across peat bogs. From time to time we stopped to catch our breath, and also to pick a handful of cranberries, for all the world like tiny scoops of sorbet that melted slowly in the mouth, sharp and icy
It was possibly the first time since we met that our actions, words, and silences came so naturally. I felt as if there were nothing more for me to guess at, nothing more to understand. To me her life had the clarity of these stained-glass windows of sky inlaid between the dark crowns of the fir trees.
“Self-denial, altruism;” subconsciously, this woman’s character still provoked phrases in my mind that were attempts to define it. But they all failed in the face of the impulsive simplicity with which Vera acted. This led me to the conclusion that good (Good!) is a complex thing and conducive to pompous language as soon as one makes a moral issue of it, a debating topic. But it becomes humble and clear from the first real step in its direction: this walk through the forest, this prosaically muscular effort that dispersed the edifying fantasies of the good conscience. Besides, what looked to others like a good deed was for Vera nothing more than a habit of long standing. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea if we picked a few mushrooms on the way back,” she said, during a halt. “I could cook them for the old woman tomorrow.”
The hamlet, hemmed in by the increasingly invasive forest, suddenly opened up before us and seemed uninhabited. Trees grew in the middle of the street, and some of the roofs had collapsed, revealing the spindly framework of beams beneath the layers of thatch. We went into twelve houses in turn, trying to spot the likeliest signs of human habitation. Ragged washing on a line in a yard? We went in: the floor was rotten, gave way easily underfoot… No, well, how about this izba? On the wooden front steps, a rusty bicycle, balanced upside down on its seat and handlebars, looked as if it were waiting for the repairman to appear in the doorway, tools in hand. The house was empty; at the windows with their broken panes dried plant stems quivered in the draft…
There was one house whose door we almost failed to try. The roof beams pointed skyward like the broken ribs of a carcass. The windows had lost their carved-wood frames. The front steps were almost hidden by dense undergrowth. We were about to go on our way… Suddenly this voice. It came from a very low bench that ran the length of the wall and was hidden by the bushes. An old woman sat there, with half closed eyes, a cat curled up on her lap, to which she was reciting a litany of soothing words. She saw us, stood up, depositing the cat on the bench, and, in ringing tones, astonishingly forceful for her frail body, invited us to come in. There, an even greater surprise awaited us.
The sky was visible through the partly collapsed roof, and this space open to the four winds had been rearranged in a way one would never have dreamed of: another, much smaller house had been built in the middle of the room, a miniature izba, fashioned out of the planks from some shed or fence. A real roof, a low, narrow door, doubtless salvaged from a barn, a window. The ruin that surrounded it already belonged to the outside world, its stormy weather, its wild nights. Nature held sway there. But the new edifice offered a replica, in condensed form, of the lost comforts. Bent double, we went in and discovered the austerity of a primitive life and astonishing neatness. A kind of vital minimum, I noted in my mind, the final frontier between human existence and the cosmos. A very small bed, a table, a stool, two plates, a cup, and on the wall, the dark rectangle of an icon, surrounded by several yellowed letters.
Especially clever was the way this dwelling had been annexed onto the brickwork of the great stove that occupied half of the ruined house. As she showed us around her dolls house, the old woman explained that in winter she would go out into the main room invaded by snow, light the fire in the stove, then take refuge in her tiny izba…. Contrary to what we had been told about her, she was not deaf, just a little hard of hearing, but her sight was going, her vision was shrinking, just as the size of her world-within-a-world was growing smaller.
At one moment during the visit, Vera signaled to me discreetly that she wanted to be left alone with the old woman.
I walked over to the pond, at the center of which the outline of a sunken boat could just be made out. In the house next door, I came upon a pile of school textbooks, a notebook filled with grammar exercises. I was struck by a sentence, copied out to illustrate some rule of syntax that must be observed: “The defenders of Leningrad obeyed Stalin’s order to resist to the last drop of their blood.” No, not syntax. It was more the gradation of sounds. I had need of these ironic little insights in order to bear the weight of time stagnating in a thick pool of absurdity in every one of these houses, in the empty street.