The Woman Who Waited by Andreï Makine Page A

clay, churned up by tracked vehicles, was reminiscent of a road in wartime. I rounded the corner of the forest, turned off onto the track leading to Mirnoe. The village soon came into view through the gray mist and looked to me more barren than the deserted villages I had been visiting during the past two months of my wanderings.
    And the most uninhabited house of all was this one, this
izba
with pretty lace curtains at the windows. The woman who lived there must at that very moment be asleep in the arms of a man, somewhere in the town. A double bed warmed by their bodies heavy with love, the masculine eau de cologne mingling with the bitter, sugary tang of Red Moscow perfume …
    When I was twenty yards away from the front steps, the door opened. I saw Vera’s silhouette, watched her recoil abruptly, disappear. An empty pail fell down the steps, rolled onto the ground with a metallic clatter. I drew closer, the door was shut, and the house again looked abandoned. I hesitated to knock, picked up the pail, set it back on the steps. After several seconds of pacing up and down beneath the windows, I continued on my way without having really understood what had just happened.
    In my head, clouded with alcohol and the futile words uttered during our sleepless night, I put two and two together: if she had come home so early in the morning, Vera could not have spent that night with a lover, unless she had returned in the dark, by roads barely fit for motor vehicles even in broad daylight. Or else it was a brief coupling, that simulation of love I had almost engaged in with the history teacher. “Life is nothing more than the sticky warmth of a woman’s armpit,” I recalled, with nausea. Suddenly an impulsive, wild joy, too wild for the quite simple conclusion that had provoked it: the woman who had just let that pail drop had met no one and had come home all alone, as she always did.
    I looked around me. The chill pewter of the lake, the dark timbers of the facade of the former administrative center…. And this mirror broken in half, abandoned beside the worm-eaten front steps. I stopped, glanced into its murky surface, streaked with raindrops. And, as Vera had done, I recoiled momentarily …
    A soldier, clad in a long cape, dark with rain, his boots heavy with mud from the pathways, had his calm, grave stare fixed upon me.

T HREE

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    A S SHE TALKED , she seemed both focused and distracted. Underneath the table, which, in anticipation of her visit, I had covered with a square of cloth, I saw she had kicked off her shoes. Red slippers of a type that must have been in fashion a dozen years before lay on their sides in the manner of a woman’s shoes carelessly discarded below a bed of love. Shoes possibly too tight for her now. Their heels were coated with earth, from the mass of clay on the hundred yards that lay between our two
izbas
. As she talked, her eyes were mesmerized by the dazzle of a candle flame reflected in a glass. Candles, the husky sweetness of a jazz singer … It was my attempt to create a mood.
    “Why lie? I sometimes really dread it. Him coming back … My life’s behind me now…. But even in the early days, I was afraid of his return…. When I saw you wearing that military cape yesterday, it gave me the fright of my life. What to say first, what to do first … I’ve spent thirty years rehearsing it all, and suddenly I was at a complete loss.”
    I let her talk, as one does with a person under hypnosis, trying not to interrupt as they unburden themselves. My curiosity was mingled with a powerful sense that we were getting close to the truth. More than her words, it was her body, the relaxed posture of her body, that revealed the ultimate truth about her life. A woman like her, an impassive idol, unyielding in the face of the weather, indifferent to fate, could also be this: a woman mellowed by two glasses of sweet liqueur, her cheeks rosy like a young girl’s, artless confidences tinged with the