“He’ll come despite mists and snows to love you,” they sang. But their lips bore witness to what they had truly lived through themselves: men who went away and disappeared forever in the thick smoke of war, men returning covered in wounds, to die beside the lake.
“And your house will be filled with joy, as a hive is filled with honey…” Yet the tone of those voices spoke of izbas buried under the snow, where they themselves had come close to ending their days.
“He’ll come,” caroled Katerina in a stronger voice that marked the approaching end of the ceremony. “He’ll come, his arms weary from the voyage but his heart on fire for you.
Suddenly we saw Vera.
She had clearly arrived well before this last part of the performance and had remained unnoticed, leaning against the door frame, not wanting to interrupt the choir.
It was her flight that gave her away. The door creaked, we looked around, and there she was, her hand on the handle. Her face was tormented into a frozen smile, her eyes growing wider with suppressed tears.
The choir fell silent. Only Katerina, whose eyesight was very weak, continued singing: “He’ll come despite storms and snows. He’ll come and take you to where the dawn arises… He’ll come…”
I ran out, but Vera was already far away. She was making her escape, no longer trying to hide, heading blindly toward the willow groves beside the lake. I tried briefly to catch up with her, then went back to wait for her near her izba. To my great surprise, she was already at home, busily packing a suitcase.
“I’m going to Archangel for three days tomorrow. It’s the city festival, you know. They’ve invited all the local celebrities. Including me, of course. Mind you, I’m not sure in what capacity. Probably as a heroic teacher with a strong reek of the soil about her. No matter. It’ll be a good chance to buy medicines for the old women. If you’re still here and you notice any of them are unwell, I’ll leave you the doctor’s address just in case. He’s a good dozen miles from Mirnoe, but if you cut around by the lake you can reach him in an hour.
Then I recalled these festivities: they were due to begin that month and carry on, from one cultural event to the next, through into the following year, with the publication of an illustrated volume for which my contribution on indigenous traditions was awaited. ‘On the marriage ceremony,” I thought, “as sung by old women who lost their husbands or sons over thirty years ago.
The following morning I saw Vera setting off. She was wearing a pale pink coat, with her hair put up in a chignon. The acrid tang of her perfume, Red Moscow, hung on the clear, frozen air for a moment. Her gait, her whole demeanor, betrayed the fierce determination of a woman ready to try her luck one last time.
“What rubbish!” I immediately interjected into that train of thought. “Just a woman walking briskly, for fear of missing one of the trucks that pass the crossroads by the empty mailbox…”
After her departure, I experienced almost relief, a kind of deliverance. I began serenely preparing for my own departure at last, namely by tossing a few books and notebooks into the depths of a suitcase and then roaming far from the village within the somber, luminous cathedral of the forest.
4
IN ONE OF THE DESERTED VILLAGES, this half sheet of lined paper, fastened to the door of what had been the grocery store: “Back in an hour.” Faded ink, message almost illegible. A door closed on a house abandoned long years ago. And this promise to come back within the hour.
“All that remains after the death of an empire,” I would often tell myself when, during those hours of walking, I came upon the traces of the era we had treated so poorly. The era that had sought to transform this northern land into a great collectivist paradise and had now left behind an immense solitude, enlivened by a few unintentionally ironic notices, soon to be indecipherable.
The deep indigo of the fir forests, the russet of the undergrowth, the intense blue when a dazzling burst of sunshine occurred amid the gray of the sky And from time to time the dark, heavy glint of water in a pond down in the hollow of a thicket. The black, the ocher, the blue. These were what one really discovered after the end of an era… After our time spent on this earth, I thought as I returned home that evening. My suitcase was almost packed now, the house cleared of the few traces of my stay there. Life in Mirnoe would continue peacefully after my departure. It was amazing, infuriating, obvious.
At such moments the days I had spent there seemed to me incomplete, ruined by my clumsiness: quite unresolved, this encounter with Vera, with her past, with what had briefly arisen between us. What else? The words to describe it flowed in, pretentious, cumbersome: affection, desire, jealousy… I continued on my way, my gaze lost in the somber gold of the fallen leaves, the white of a cloud captured by the lake. These restlessly recurring sights expressed much better what it was that had brought us so indefinably close.
Each morning, I determined to follow through with that trip to the White Sea. And each time I shied away from it. On the first day, for the good, vaguely hypocritical reason of not wanting to leave the old women unattended. They really had no need of me. Like model children, they were making every effort not to fall ill while Vera was away (“So as not to die!” I joked cynically). Faithful to her instructions, I replenished their water supplies, chopped wood, went to see them in turn. Even the frailest of them seemed boundlessly full of the joys of spring. I promised myself I would go to the White Sea the next morning.
I was thwarted by a memory at once benign and threatening.
Halfway along the road to my objective, I came to a village I did not at once recognize. Deserted izbas, rye-straw roofs in shreds, a pond overgrown with reeds. Gradually it all came back to me, Gostyevo, Katerina’s village… The feeling of entering a forbidden place arose within me, and grew steadily as I approached her house. The little bench on which I had sat while waiting for the outcome of the discussion between her and Vera. The front steps where the boards had groaned under my feet.
The disagreeable feeling came over me that I was violating a place, desecrating a past. The door yielded readily. By the light of that sunless day the interior of the room seemed blurred, fraught with suspicion. That same miniature edifice stood at the center of the room: the little house-within-a-house. A pair of old felt boots with broken heels stood beside the stove, like sliced-off legs, ready for walking. Overcoming a murky, superstitious fear, I opened the little house’s door. A very small bed, a tiny stool, a narrow table at the bedside. And, lying on the ground, a yellowed envelope. “An old letter she used to reread every evening,” I thought, mindful of the clichés of books and films.
No, it was a kind of final message drawn up by this woman who expected to die alone. In large, painstaking handwriting she gave her surname, her first name, her place and date of birth. On the front, she had noted, in a column, the first date of each month, doubtless so that it would be possible to establish the approximate time of her death… And at the bottom of the page, in the same rather schoolgirlish handwriting, was added this request: “Please, if possible, plant a wild rose on my grave. My husband, Ivan Nekiforovich Glebov, who died for the Fatherland in August 1942, loved these plants.”
On leaving the miniature izba, I took the path back to Mirnoe, the one we had followed when we brought Katerina to her new house.