The Woman Who Waited by Andreï Makine Read Free Book Online

the long cavalry greatcoat that Vera wore, its coarse fabric patterned with tiny red and yellow leaves. Seeing her eyes, after a moment of forgetfulness, beginning to respond to my look. Hearing her voice: “That path would take you all the way to the sea. Possibly five or six hours’ march. If we left now, we’d reach the coast close to midnight. …”
    The point of this life apart from time was picturing our arrival on the shores of the White Sea in the middle of the night.
    Or that evening, too, after my return with Otar, on the day he had talked about “pigs” and “sows.” A very thin layer of ice had formed at the bottom of the well. (I had just caught up with Vera, who was drawing water.) As the ice broke, it sounded like a harpsichord. We looked at one another. We were each about to remark on the beauty of this tinkling sound, then thought better of it. The resonance of the harpsichord had faded into the radiance of the air, it blended with the wistfully repeated notes of an oriole, with the scent of a wood fire coming from the nearby
izba
. The beauty of that moment was quite simply becoming our life.
    There was that alder tree as well, the last to keep its immense helmet of bronze foliage intact. It overhung the shore at the place where Vera generally landed. As we moved across the water we would see it from afar, this swaying pyramid freighted with gold, and kept an eye on it as the last island of summer, holding out against the bareness of autumn.
    And then one morning two clouds of misty breath from our double “Oh!” faded upon the air. Every leaf, down to the last tiny bronze roundel, had fallen during the night. The black branches, stripped bare, carved into the stinging blue of the sky like fissures. We drew close to one another, contriving to hold back obvious remarks (“It was too lovely to last”). And then, as we walked down to the shore, saw, reproduced in the copper-colored glory of the leaves on the water, the inlaid pattern that had tumbled out of the sky The dark, smooth water, this red-and-gold incrustation. An even broader mosaic, one slowly spreading beneath the breeze, becoming an upturned canopy, ready to cover the whole lake. The eye was swept along by its endless expansion. Another beauty was being re-created, new and strange, richer than before, even more alive after its autumnal death.
    Thus it was that in the language I employed in those days, I made a record of such luminous moments rescued from time. I sensed that they were not just harmonious fragments but a complete life apart. The one I had always dreamed of giving expression to. It was this I had had in mind in front of the broken skylight at the Wigwam. Here in Mirnoe, such a life could be lived from day to day with the certainty that it was exactly the life one should always have been living.
    In these notes, jotted down between drafts of satirical prose and the details of rituals and legends, I was trying to hold on to it.
    In the same notebook this fragment, written one evening: “During the night a violent gale drove the boat into the middle of the lake. The roads are impassable, so to get to the school Vera has to wait and hope that the wind coming off the sea will bring the boat in again. The breeze stiffens, we see our skiff drifting slowly toward us. Elsewhere a wait like this would seem intolerable to me, here this piece of floating wood marks out a span of time made up of sunshine, bitter cold, and a woman’s voice, weaving itself into the air in rare words like the stray chords of a melody. And the fragments of ice we break off at the frozen margin of the lake. Intricate rose windows of hoarfrost: we amuse ourselves by looking through them at the sky, the lake, and one another, transformed by these fans of crystal. The ice melts, shatters in our fingers, but the vision of the world transfigured stays in our eyes for a few more seconds. At one moment, a rustling in the willow groves at the water’s edge