Her eyelids batted slowly; she looked up at me with a fond, dreamy gaze that did not see me, would only see me when the shadows flitting across it had passed. I sensed that during this blindness I could have taken any liberty. I could have seized her hand. I was already touching this hand; my fingers moved lightly along her forearm. We were sitting side by side, and the sensation of having this woman in my possession was infinitely powerful and infinitely touching. Almost in a whisper I asked: “And when you saw no one was there, did you come straight home?”
I felt I had found the rhythm and the timbre that did not risk arousing her from her waking sleep. My hand gently enfolded her shoulder; the movement, if she had abruptly come to herself, could still have been taken for one of friendly familiarity occasioned by the festive evening and the wine.
“Yes, I came home… But maybe for the first time in my life, I wanted to… To forget myself. To forget everything. To let my hair down like a teenager. You know, let it all hang out. Like now, with this kind of silly music and the wine
Her shoulder was gently pressing into my chest, and when she spoke, the physical vibrations from the sound of her voice reverberated within me. Nothing came between our bodies now, apart from her white silk blouse, chaste and old-fashioned in style, and the shadows slowly slipping away from her gaze. My arm eased gently along her shoulder, slid around her waist. Her hair smelled of birch leaves soaked in hot water…
For several seconds we contrived by tacit agreement not to notice the noise. To take it for the insistent tapping of a branch of the sorb apple tree against the window-pane, stirred by the breeze from the White Sea. But there was no wind that night. We moved apart, looked toward the window. Half of a face, stained yellow by the candlelight, was observing us from outside. A little fist, tightly clenched, vibrated against the pane. In the rapid look that passed between us could be sensed our alarm and, above all, the absurdity of this alarm, this dread of a ghost. Vera adjusted her blouse; I went to the door while she felt for her shoes under the table. On the front steps stood Maria, a little bent old woman who lived in the izba next door to the bathhouse.
“Katerina’s sick. Very sick. You need to go see her…”
She said it without looking at me, as if Vera were the only person in the room. Rustic good manners, I thought, backing toward the wall. Accompanied by the old woman, Vera went out, slipping on her raincoat in the street, as country doctors do when awakened in the middle of the night. While putting away the remains of our supper, I told myself with mocking resentment that this intervention by fate (no, Fate!) would doubtless give rise to a thousand interpretations and reflections during Vera’s long nocturnal soliloquies that winter. And I had a fierce desire to challenge this much-vaunted fate, to out-maneuver the guardian angel who had appeared in the guise of a shriveled little old woman.
2
I DID SO THE NEXT DAY by inviting Vera to visit me again, just to show her somewhat playfully that we could easily thwart fortune’s dirty tricks and that time was still on our side. I felt myself all the more within my rights in doing so, since at noon I had seen the local doctor emerging from Katerina’s house. With a sigh of irritation directed at Vera, who was just behind him, he said: “Well, at her age, you know…”What his tone implied was: There you go, gathering up all these ancient ruins with one foot in the grave and I’m supposed to bruise my backside over thirty miles of potholes… I remembered that the priest who came to visit Anna, when she was dying, had displayed exactly the same sullen face.
For a moment, I was afraid Vera might refuse to come. She readily accepted and came bearing a bottle of wine and a dish of salted mushrooms: “You remember. We picked them when we went to fetch Katerina.”
Strangely enough, it was her directness that held me back. Everything began to happen as it had the night before, but this time I knew that at any minute now this woman with her mature, statuesque body would be naked in my arms. Yet the body was a minor consideration. The woman naked in my arms would be the woman who for thirty years now… It seemed absolutely inconceivable. My behavior became self-conscious. I roared with laughter while feeling my features frozen… Now ribbing her with absurd familiarity, now inhibited, almost tongue-tied.
Very quickly, she became the one leading the conversation, serving us, transforming my clumsy advances into harmless little blunders. Over dessert, just after salvaging one of these inept maneuvers by making a joke of it (when my hand settled on her forearm, it instantly seemed more out of place than a hammer would have been among our teacups), she began to talk about Alexandra Kollontai.
“Each generation has its own way of making passes. When I was in Leningrad in the sixties, the men who accosted you, and were anxious to cut to the chase, could only talk of one thing: Kollontai’s ‘glass of water theory’ Amid the ferment of the revolution, Alexandra Kollontai, a great beauty and a great friend of Lenin, came up with this proposition: satisfying your carnal instinct is as straightforward as drinking a glass of water. It seemed such a vital issue that during the early years following 1917, they were quite seriously planning to erect cabins in the streets of Moscow where the citizens could satisfy their physical desire. The best way of making passes is not to make a pass at all. To get straight to the point. You meet in the street. You find the nearest cabin. You drink your ‘glass of water.’ You go your separate ways. One in the eye for bourgeois propriety. But Lenin quickly condemned this theory as the product of left-wing deviation. And with a telling argument the young would do well to heed. ‘However thirsty you are,’ he said, ‘you’re still not going to drink from a murky pond…’ Have a little discernment, for goodness sake! So when in the sixties, a young man invited me to share that glass of water with him under the halo of Alexandra’s moral authority, I had a ready-made and very Leninist reply: ‘Take a look, young man. This aged crone you see in front of you. Doesn’t she remind you of a stagnant pond?’ It worked pretty well…”
She got up, made some more tea, turned over the tape that had just stopped. Sitting there stiffly, emptied of all my prepared speeches, I was thinking of the seventies generation, our own way of making passes. It was a good deal less daring than the revolutionary glass of water. Tremulous mood music, candles, a bottle of imported liquor, and to crown it all, an American journalist as tangible proof of our commitment to dissidence. Apart from that, nothing had changed, bodies seeking to couple, that was all. Which was what Vera had wanted to make me realize by talking about Alexandra Kollontai.
“And what became of her later?”
I was genuinely curious to know, even though my question sounded like an attempt to extricate myself from my embarrassment.
Vera thought for a moment, like someone recalling an episode from her own life. She sat down and seemed less on her guard than at the outset, slightly sleepy, her gaze, as on the previous evening, entranced by the gleam of a candle.
“Later… later she married. Well, it was a very open marriage, to a man fifteen years her junior, a dashing red commissar, a Cossack who had the gall to countermand orders from Lenin himself. She had all kinds of adventures, military and amorous. She had affairs with women, too, it seems. And then she grew old, and her husband fell in love with another woman. And it wasn’t like a glass of water. It was the real thing this time. She suffered agonies of jealousy. After fighting so hard against that bourgeois prejudice. And then, in a letter, she admitted that such simple and grievous things existed as a woman’s age, exclusive attachment to one person, the unbearable pain of losing that person, faithfulness, yes, faithfulness and… and, even more boringly and simply, love.”