The Woman Who Waited by Andreï Makine Read Free Book Online Page B

intentions, which I could not explain even to myself. The inside of the little building, darkened by smoke over long years, seemed chilly, sad. On the narrow ledge beside the tiny window, the melted lump of a candle. In the corner, close to the stove, dominating the room, a great cast-iron bowl rested in the hollow of a pyramid of sooty stones. A little water at the bottom of a copper scoop. An acid smell of damp wood. Impossible to imagine the heat of the fire, the stifling steam, a burning hot female body, writhing amid this blissful inferno…. Then, suddenly this slender, worn ring. Left behind on a bench beneath the window!
    I slipped away, imagining how by a hideous coincidence, typical of such situations, Vera might come back looking for it and see me here. This ring alone made the nocturnal vision an undeniable reality. Yes, that woman had been here. A woman with a body made for pleasure and love, a woman whose only desire, perhaps, was just this, a sign, a slight pressure from circumstances, to liberate her from her absurd vow. The ring she had taken off was more telling than all the speculations I had set down in my notebook.
    I was certain I should be adding nothing further now to my notes on Vera’s life.

    Two days later, I was writing: “The villagers who long ago abandoned their houses at Mirnoe carried away everything it was possible to carry The seat of the village administration (an
izba
hardly larger than the others) was emptied as well. They tried to remove a large mirror, a relic of the era before the revolution. Through bad luck or clumsiness, hardly had it been set down on the front steps when it snapped, a long crack that split it in two. Rendered useless, it was left behind, propped against the timbers of the house. Its upper portion reflects the forest treetops and the sky. The face of anyone looking into it is thrust up toward the clouds. The lower part reflects the rutted road, the feet of people walking past, and, if you glance sideways, the line of the lake, now blue, now dark…. That evening I chance upon Vera in front of the mirror. She remains motionless, slightly bowed over the tarnished glass. When she hears my footsteps and looks around, what I see distinctly in her eyes is a day very different from the one we are living in at present, a different sky and, in my place, another person. Refocusing her look, she recognizes me, greets me, we walk away in silence…. All my overheated portrayals of the naked woman on the steps of the bathhouse are absurd. Her life is truly and solely made up of these moments of grievous beauty.”

    I noticed that certain of the old women of Mirnoe, as they walked past the great abandoned mirror, would sometimes stop, take a handkerchief, and wipe the rain-streaked glass.
    It was after our encounter beside the broken mirror that I found myself tempted to try to understand how it was to spend one’s whole life waiting for someone.

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    O NLY TWO MOMENTS IN THAT LIFE were known to me, and yet they encompassed it in its entirety.
    The first: a dull, mild April day, a girl of sixteen shuffling in wet snow. Her eyes follow a convoy of four broad sleighs sliding over the slushy, gray potholes of the thaw like flat-bottomed boats. Amid the throng of young conscripts’ laughing faces, this sad pair of eyes she is trying not to lose sight of. She quickens her pace, slips, the eyes disappear behind someone’s shoulder, then reappear, glimpsing her amid the great emptiness of the snow-covered fields.
    It is the beginning of April 1945, the very last contingent to be sent to the front and, on the last sleigh, this young soldier, the man she loves, the man to whom, as they said good-bye, she swore something like eternal love, something childish, I tell myself, yes, swore to be utterly true to him or to wait until death. I have no idea what a woman in love for the first time may promise a man, I have never received such a promise, I have never believed a woman