A single pointed glance, a single gesture out of place, would have been enough to transform this tête-à-tête into an insane charade. Its end was known: we were going to spend the night together. It was the whole point of the scenario, but it was looking increasingly improbable. Increasingly expected and impossible. This woman smiling at me, laying her head on one side to squeeze my hand between her cheek and her shoulder. Impossible. Like the sugary taste of the lipstick she had just left on my mouth.
We were afraid one of us might stand up and murmur, with a yawn: “Fine. That was all just a joke, wasn’t it?”
From time to time, this fear showed through briefly in a tone of voice, a gesture, and we hastened to skirt around it. We had a choice between two clichés: sometimes this dinner took on the air of a well-lubricated peasant-style meal, with noisy mirth and the natural familiarity of close neighbors, sometimes the atmosphere was reminiscent of a student celebration. We felt in league with one another. We had to transform this old izba, the wind rattling the windowpanes, the tenuous warmth of this room, the warmth of our two bodies, into an amorous encounter, to blend this precarious mixture into a fleshly alloy Our hands, our bodies, went through the motions; our words quickly overcame each onset of silent embarrassment. Only our eyes occasionally exchanged a chilling admission: Why are we doing this? What’s the point of it all?
This play-acting remained resistant to reality until the moment when we found ourselves standing, face to face, on the threshold of the bedroom. There was a silence, swiftly broken by the wind’s wild moanings, the crackle of the logs in the fire and, more deafening than these sounds, our disarray. Despite the dullness of intoxication, one very clear notion struck me: This woman doesn’t know what to do next, she no longer knows her part. The memory of a very youthful affair surfaced within me, the shade of a first lover, and of this same ignorance in the face of desire.
She overcame her hesitation almost immediately. Became a mature woman again, a woman who knows, passed off her hesitation as the voluptuous slowness of a body influenced by drink. She even gave a little snort of laughter when I tried to help her undress. Naked, she drew me to her, swept me into that high double bed I had so often imagined. There was even the scent of male eau de cologne I had imagined. My own. And the fragrance of her hair, her skin, dried birch leaves steeped in the steam of the bathhouse.
At the first embrace, this self-possessed woman vanished. In the act of love she did not know who she was. Statuesque feminine body with a young girl’s inexperience. Then a muscular, combative passion, imposing its own rhythm on pleasure. And again, blankness almost, the resignation of one asleep, her head thrown back, her eyes closed, biting her lip hard. A remoteness so complete, as if of a dead woman, that at one moment, drawing away from her, I grasped her shoulders and shook her, deceived by her stillness. She half opened her tear-stained eyes, smiled at me, and, respecting our game, her smile was transmuted into a drunken woman’s hazy grin. Her body stirred. She gave herself with the frenzy of one who seeks either to win a man’s forgiveness or to mock him. Several times, the ecstasy twisted my features into grimaces of male gratification. At these moments, I met her look, one of astonishing compassion, such as only mothers and the simpleminded can bestow.
Right up to the end, I managed to forget who this woman was. And when I remembered, the pleasure became unbearable in its sacrilegious novelty, its terrible carnal banality.
The end came with the slamming of a door or a window, at first we did not know which. Vera got up quickly, crossed the bedroom, went into the hall. When, half dressed, I caught up with her, she was sitting on the far end of the bench, her bare body covered by her long cavalry greatcoat. She was staring out of the window and seemed totally disconnected from what had just passed between us. “But nothing at all happened,” the thought even came to me, in a momentary hallucination. This woman had spent her whole life glued to this bench, waiting for a man to return… I mumbled an ambiguous greeting somewhere between an attempt to stay and a farewell. She murmured, “Good night,” without stirring, without taking her eyes off the window.
6
OUTSIDE, HIGH IN THE SKY, the wind is feverishly chopping the yellow of the moon and the greenish flocks of clouds into pieces. The air has a sobering effect, and with sardonic clarity, I find myself comparing this flickering landscape to a romantic film with a lush moonlit setting, sped up by a mad projectionist to the pace of an animated cartoon. When I get home I cram the stove with large logs; the fire burns easily, merrily. And happiness, earlier clouded by the improbability of what I have just lived through, finally wells up without restraint. I have just made love with such a woman! And already there is a casual and obscene echo: ‘Tve slept with a woman who spent thirty years waiting for another man!” With an effort I manage to feel ashamed of this.
I am twenty-six, an extenuating circumstance. An age when one still takes pride in the number of women one has possessed. With the return of postcoital cynicism, it is more or less this notion of keeping a tally that occurs to me. But I do manage to avoid the crassness of counting this woman alongside the others. Such a woman! Again I reflect on the absence of any man in her life. With self-satisfaction, I note my status as the lucky one.
I fall asleep in a state of perfect mental and physical contentment, the epitome of what a woman can give to a man prepared to ask nothing more of her.
My satisfaction is so serene that on waking and recalling Otar’s words, I cheerfully accept his definition of man-as-swine. This facile joy lasts barely an hour. The memory of a day returns: a boat caught between the sky and the heaving water of the lake, a woman pulling firmly, rhythmically on the oars, the body of a dead person in my arms… Projected onto a different scale of things, I suddenly feel very small, petty, clinging to a pleasure that is already beginning to fade. Compared with that long crossing of the lake, I am nothing more than a minor mishap. This notion upsets and alarms me: I should not have ventured into a dimension that is so far beyond me. I am saved by the physical memory. The supple, dense warmth of a breast, the welcoming spread of a smooth groin… Throughout the morning, I contrive not to stray beyond the refuge of these bodily sensations.
A gray wall of rain comes down. Unfaltering, not a moments respite. I picture Vera on the way to her school. “A woman who gave herself to me.” A hot surge of male pride, in the lungs, in the stomach. An urge to smoke a cigarette, gazing out into the street, an urge to be blasé and melancholy, despite the joyful turmoil stirred up by the thought of this conquest. At about three in the afternoon, after hundreds of different imaginary scenes, this other: her return home along flooded roads, she in her izba, in her kitchen, preparing to cook this evenings meal, a dinner for the two of us… The pleasant routine of a relationship beginning.
At about four, the notion of her solitude after my departure. The rain stops, the sky is polished steel, pitiless. She will walk along this street, soon to be covered in snow. Her footprints, the only ones in the morning, the only ones on the way back from school. She will remember me. She will often think of me. All the time, perhaps.