The Woman Who Waited by Andreï Makine Page B

sentimentality of a provincial old maid, the evident delight taken in a “candlelit supper,” a “sophisticated” evening, with a background of languid mood music, and the lazy strains of: “When the dawn flames in the sky, I love you….”
    Yes, life, the real thing, that perpetual mixture of genres.
    Proud of this wisdom, new found for me, I was playing the hypnotist, pouring the wine, changing the tapes, asking questions in a scarcely audible murmur so that the sleeper should not awaken.
    “The other day I saw you going off in the evening, where did you go?”
    “Yesterday, no, the day before yesterday, I went to the station … I waited for the Moscow train … I find myself doing it from time to time. The dream’s nearly always the same. It’s night, the platform, he’s getting off the train, coming toward me … This time it was, if anything, more real than ever. I was certain he’d come. I went there. I waited. None of it makes any sense, I know. But if I hadn’t gone, a link would have been broken … And there’d be no point in waiting anymore. …”
    Her eyelids batted slowly; she looked up at me with a fond, dreamy gaze that did not see me, would only see me when the shadows flitting across it had passed. I sensed that during this blindness I could have taken any liberty. I could have seized her hand. I was already touching this hand; my fingers moved lightly along her forearm. We were sitting side by side, and the sensation of having this woman in my possession was infinitely powerful and infinitely touching. Almost in a whisper I asked: “And when you saw no one was there, did you come straight home?”
    I felt I had found the rhythm and the timbre that did not risk arousing her from her waking sleep. My hand gently enfolded her shoulder; the movement, if she had abruptly come to herself, could still have been taken for one of friendly familiarity occasioned by the festive evening and the wine.
    “Yes, I came home…. But maybe for the first time in my life, I wanted to … To forget myself. To forget everything. To let my hair down like a teenager. You know, let it all hang out. Like now, with this kind of silly music and the wine
    Her shoulder was gently pressing into my chest, and when she spoke, the physical vibrations from the sound of her voice reverberated within me. Nothing came between our bodies now, apart from her white silk blouse, chaste and old-fashioned in style, and the shadows slowly slipping away from her gaze. My arm eased gently along her shoulder, slid around her waist. Her hair smelled of birch leaves soaked in hot water….
    For several seconds we contrived by tacit agreement not to notice the noise. To take it for the insistent tapping of a branch of the sorb apple tree against the window-pane, stirred by the breeze from the White Sea. But there was no wind that night. We moved apart, looked toward the window. Half of a face, stained yellow by the candlelight, was observing us from outside. A little fist, tightly clenched, vibrated against the pane. In the rapid look that passed between us could be sensed our alarm and, above all, the absurdity of this alarm, this dread of a ghost. Vera adjusted her blouse; I went to the door while she felt for her shoes under the table. On the front steps stood Maria, a little bent old woman who lived in the
izba
next door to the bathhouse.
    “Katerina’s sick. Very sick. You need to go see her….”
    She said it without looking at me, as if Vera were the only person in the room. Rustic good manners, I thought, backing toward the wall. Accompanied by the old woman, Vera went out, slipping on her raincoat in the street, as country doctors do when awakened in the middle of the night. While putting away the remains of our supper, I told myself with mocking resentment that this intervention by fate (no, Fate!) would doubtless give rise to a thousand interpretations and reflections during Vera’s long nocturnal soliloquies that winter. And