I go in, light the fire but prefer to stay in the dark. All the little stove door lets through is a glowing strip of pink. If someone (someone!) comes, I shall pretend to have gone to bed already.
In reality, it all happened differently The minute-by-minute reconstruction, the timed storyline of that night of cowardice was put together much later, in those moments of painful honesty when we meet our own gaze, one more pitiless than either the scorn of others or the judgement of heaven. This gaze aims straight and shoots to kill, for it sees the hand (mine) cautiously lowering the latch on the door, the fingers cradling the metal to avoid any kind of click, the door locked-in this village where bolts are never shot. The electric flashlight beam once more sweeps through the darkness, traveling up the street. I withdraw, cock my ear. Nothing. The one whose fate I dread sharing disappears into the darkness.
In reality, that is all there was: fear, the icy logs against my chest, the endless wait a few steps away from the shaft of light as it sliced up the muddy pathway, then the vigil in the izba, the anxiously muffled actions, the latch lowered slowly, as if in the hypnotic slowness of a nightmare. No, objectively, there was nothing else. The fear of seeing a woman come to me, her face ravaged by sobbing, of being contaminated by her tears, by her fate, by the inhuman and henceforth irremediably absurd seriousness of her life. A life as pointless as the hammer blows that had just now rung out in the distance. What was it that was so urgent and necessary to construct in total darkness?
One more detail that crops up close to midnight when the likelihood of her coming begins to diminish. (“Although in the state she’s in, even at midnight…”) I cover the shade of my table lamp with a towel. I switch it on and notice the book she lent me a month before. A book on linguistics by Saussure that I have not even opened. A book-as-pretext: that was still the time when I was seeking by every means possible to win the friendship, affection indeed, of this woman. I was enamored of her, in love, I desired her. All these words now seem incongruous, impossible to utter. The fear recedes. I manage to reflect, to ponder the bizarre features of our lives. This borrowed Saussure proves that, even in situations as strange as ours, the stages in a relationship are always the same: at the beginning a talismanic object, a message in a bottle, the feverish hope of what it may lead to; at the end, this useless volume one no longer knows how to get rid of…
Again I study the Archangel newspaper Zoya left on the table. The photo of Koptev, the art of being both a grandfather and a good Party man. It suddenly strikes me that, if there is any logic to existence, his flat, round physiognomy ought to be associated with Vera’s face. For they could have (should have?) formed a couple… Impossible to fit them together. “She’s much younger,” I tell myself, feeling confused. “No, she’s not, there’s scarcely three years between them.” I get in a muddle, trying to grasp what it is that makes these two beings absolutely incompatible. The only way to picture them together is to turn Vera into a formidable Muscovite matron, with heavy features, a satisfied look, the holder of a university chair, a Party member… Just the contrary of what she is. “She’s not part of that world,” I conclude lamely in the end, feeling that I am much closer to the world of the Koptevs myself. This affinity reassures me, liberates me, distances me from Mirnoe.
At about two in the morning, a great sense of relief. I know I must get up very early, steal out of the village, make my way rapidly to the crossroads, hop onto a truck and, once at the station in the district capital, take the first train to Leningrad, to civilization, to oblivion. Which is what I shall do. I feel resolute, energetic. I switch on the lights in the room, no longer hiding, and within five minutes I have closed my suitcase, which for weeks now I have not managed to pack. No further question of racking my brains: this part of the world has made me ill, its past, the woman who has preserved its spirit. Now my cure is at hand. At the first whiff of the sharp air on the Nevsky Prospekt… For a minute I wonder if it would not be more elegant to leave a note. Less inelegant, let us say. Then I decide to just slip away.
During the few hours of sleep left to me, I wake up often. It is very cold. The darkness outside the windows has the sheen of ink, that of the great frosts. In one of my waking moments, I think I have gone deaf. Not a breath of wind, the fire in the stove dead, the silence of the interstellar spaces, icy, absolute. I lack the courage to go out and bring in some wood. In the hall, I snatch up the old military cape. I lay the canvas over the top of my blanket. The fabric is all worn, scorched here and there by fire, but, oddly enough, the thin layer of it warms me better than a fleece-lined quilt would have. A dream comes to me. The story one of the old women of Mirnoe told me: her husband, killed in the snows of Karelia in cold of forty below, the obsessive urge she has since then to heat up a bath for him. In my dream, a soldier lies naked in the middle of a white plain. He opens his eyes, I wake up; on my frozen cheeks I feel burning tears.
7
THE FIRST GLANCE OUTSIDE, well before sunrise, is a plunge into an unknown world. All is pale and blue with hoarfrost; its suede has petrified the trees, the walls are encrusted with its crystals. The road, bristling with muddy ridges only yesterday, is today a long, smooth white track. The dry stems of nettles beside the old front steps rear up like silver candelabras. I open the door long enough to take a deep breath, trying to hold onto the icy intoxication of this beauty to the point of giddiness. This air, I sense, could drug me all over again, make me forget my departure… I must leave as quickly as possible.
Suitcase in hand, I reach the lakeshore while the sun, still invisible, can be sensed behind the forest. The earth, blue-tinged, is still of the night. But the whitened crowns of the tallest firs are overlaid with a fine, transparent gilding.
I quicken my pace to break the spell of this imminent luminescence that holds me back. The first trucks will soon be driving past the crossroads. But the magic of the moment is everywhere. Every step produces a distinctive resonance of shattered ice. One could stop, melt into this time where there are no hours. I look back: a faint hint of smoke hovers above the chimney of the house I have just left. Poignant gratitude, fear of not being able to tear oneself away from this beauty.
Now my course will move away from Mirnoe, cast off the enchantment of its last stages: the little bathhouse izba, the undergrowth amid the willow groves…
Suddenly, in the perfect stillness of white and blue, a dark movement. But there is nothing abrupt about its appearance. A long greatcoat, a woman’s face. I recognize her, there she is, her presence at that spot is entirely unremarkable, I could have encountered her there yesterday, and the day before. Leaning forward, she is trying to push out the boat trapped in the ice, in the frozen clay of the shore. She seems totally preoccupied by the attempt.
I keep walking, through sheer muscular inertia, sunk in a hypnotic numbness, already picturing the scene that is bound to take place: she will hear my footsteps, straighten up, come toward me, with a look increasingly impossible to bear…
She hears my footsteps, stands up, greets me with a brief inclination of her head. Her eyes have an expression I know well. They do not really identify me; it will take them time to admit me to what she sees. She repeats her greeting, a simple replica of the first, returns to her task.
I am free to leave. But I step off the road, walk down toward the shore.
The boat is hardly moving. The ice around its hull has been crushed by the woman’s boots. The clay is very red; footmarks print themselves on the white like traces of blood. I look for somewhere to set down my suitcase in this mixture of ice and mud, then I put it on the seat in the boat. And take hold of the gunwale. The woman presses down on the opposite side, I respond to her action, the vessel starts to rock, embarks on a jerky, barely perceptible forward motion.