“Soon Mirnoe will look exactly like this,” I thought, making my way back to the old survivor’s izba. “Just as empty of people. More fossilized than the rules of grammar.”
The two women had already reemerged and were bustling around the little cart with bicycle wheels. I could readily imagine the course their private negotiations had followed. At first, the old woman’s refusal to leave, a refusal made for form’s sake but necessary to justify her long years of solitude, to avoid acknowledging that she had been abandoned. Next, Vera making her case, weighing every word, for the hermit must not be robbed of her only remaining pride, that of being capable of dying alone… Then, from one phrase to the next, an imperceptible rapprochement, the convergence of their life histories as women, empathy and finally the admissions each made, this one above alclass="underline" the fear of dying alone.
I went over to them, offered my help. I saw they both had slightly reddened eyes. I reflected on my ironic reaction just now when reading that sentence about Stalin ordering the defense of Leningrad. Such had been the sarcastic tone prevalent in our dissident intellectual circle. A humor that provided real mental comfort, for it placed us above the fray. Now, observing these two women who had just shed a few tears as they reached their decision, I sensed that our irony was in collision with something that went beyond it. “Rustic sentimentality,” would have been our sneering comment at the Wigwam. “Les misérables, Soviet-style…” Such mockery would have been wide of the mark, I now knew. What was essential was these women’s hands loading the totality of a human being’s material existence onto the little cart.
The totality! The notion staggered me. Everything the old woman needed was there, on the three short planks of our cart. She went into the izba, came back with the icon wrapped in a piece of cotton fabric.
“Katerina Ivanovna’s coming with us,” saidVera, as if referring to a brief visit or an excursion. “But she doesn’t want to ride in our taxi. She prefers to walk. We’ll see…
She drew me a little ahead to let the old woman say her farewells to the house. Katerina went up to the front steps, crossed herself, bowing very low, crossed herself again, came to join us. Her cat followed her at a distance.
As we entered the forest, I thought about the first night that village was going to spend without a living soul. Katerina’s izba-withm-zn-izba, the bench where in summer she used to await the appearance of a favorite star, that notebook with the grammar exercise from Stalin’s time. “When a certain degree of depletion is reached,” I thought, “life ceases to be about things. Then, and only then, may be the moment when the need to recount it in a book becomes overwhelming…”
About two o’clock in the afternoon, the footpaths began to thaw. In some places I had to carry Katerina, striding over chasms in the mud. Her body had the ethereal lightness of old clothes.
By evening, the new arrival was completely settled in. Above the izba Vera had chosen for her a bluish wisp of smoke hung in the air, with the scent of birch logs burning in the stove. The line of the roof and the dark crenel-lations of the forest stood out against the purple sky with the sharpness of a silverpoint drawing, then, blurred by a transparent puff of smoke, they began to sway gently. As did that star in the north, which was growing similarly restless and coming closer.
I saw Vera slowly crossing the street, her arms weighed down with full pails. She stopped for a moment, setting her load down on the ground, remained motionless, her gaze directed toward the broad expanse of the lake that was still light.
Goodness, altruism, sharing… All this struck me now as much too cerebral, too bookish. Our day had had no other objective than the beauty of this haze of smoke with its scent of burning birch bark, the lively dancing of the star, the silence of this woman in the middle of the road, her silhouette etched against the opal of the lake.
“When a certain degree of depletion is reached,” I recalled, “reality ceases to be about things and becomes the word. When a certain degree of suffering is reached, the pain allows us to perceive fully the immediate beauty of each moment…”
The absence of sound was such that at a distance, I heard a faint sigh… Vera lifted up her pails once more, made her way toward Katerinas house. It occurred to me that the old woman was experiencing all that happened to her now-the wood fire scent, the lake outside the window of her new house-as the start of an afterlife, given that she had long since accepted the idea of dying alone, given that for other people dead was what she already was.
In Leningrad, at the Wigwam, we were forever making clear-cut distinctions between good and evil in the world. I knew the evil that had laid waste to these villages in the North was boundless. And yet never had the world appeared so beautiful to me as that night, seen through the eyes of a tired old woman. Beautiful and worthy of being protected by words against the swift erasure of our deeds.
I spent several days in the solemn, serene conviction that I had achieved full insight into the mystery of Veras life.
And then one Saturday evening, a week after our expedition, I saw her setting off toward the crossroads where, at the end of the day, one could wait for a truck going to the district capital. She was not wearing her old cavalry greatcoat but a beige raincoat of an elegant cut, which I was seeing for the first time. She had put up her hair into a full chignon on the nape of her neck. She was walking briskly and looked very much like a woman on her way to meet a man-which I found quite incredible.
5
AS I DRESSED HURRIEDLY, ran out into the street, cut through the undergrowth, and headed for the crossroads, the echo of one of Otar’s mocking remarks rang in my ears: “You’re an artist. You need beauty and tenderness…”
Nothing wounds more bitterly than conventional sexuality in a woman one has idealized. The existence I had dreamed up for Vera was a beautiful lie. The truth lay hidden in this woman’s body, a woman who, very healthily, once a week (or more often?) slept with a man, her lover (a married man? a widower?), came back to Mirnoe, went on looking after the old women…
I ran, stumbling over roots hidden under leaves, then stopped, out of breath, one hand leaning against a tree trunk. It was as if the mist from my breath in the frozen air endowed the scenes I imagined with a physical authenticity. A house, a door opening in a fence, a kiss, the warmth of a room, a dinner with rich country cooking, drinks, a very high double bed beneath an ancient clock, the woman’s body, with thighs parted wide, moans of pleasure… The devastating and wholly natural obviousness of this coupling, its complete human legitimacy. And the utter impossibility of conceiving of it, given that only yesterday evening one could still hallucinate the appearance of a soldier returning home at this very crossroads.
I reached the meeting of the ways at the moment when the two rear lights of a truck that had just passed were fading into the dusk. My quarry must have boarded it. She would climb down, knock at a gate, kiss the man who opened it. There would be the dinner, the high double bed, the body offered with mature, generous, feminine savoir faire…
So this love affair, long ago embedded in her daily routine, had always coexisted comfortably with everything else: retrieving elderly survivors, the lake’s nocturnal beauty…