The Woman Who Waited Read Online Free PDF

from this sunlight, from the raw chill of the waves …”
    Toward the center of the lake the swell became severe, the boat pitched, the foam began to whiten the exposed shoreline. I was clutching my burden tightly now, as I would have done with any other load. Vera pulled strongly on the oars, thrusting aside the gray water, which parted with the ponderousness of jelly. I watched this woman’s body leaning forward, then flinging itself backward with legs stretched, chest and stomach to the fore, in a powerful physical thrust. Beneath the coarse fabric of her greatcoat, I glimpsed the delicate lace collar of a white blouse. … A wave struck the side with extra fury, and I was obliged to lift up the woman I held in my arms, hoist her close to my face, just as if, stricken with grief, I could not bear to be separated from a loved one.
    It was during this crossing, which in the end lasted scarcely half an hour, that I began to have my first doubts about the real reason for my attachment to this northern village.
    Within a few weeks I had realized that my quest for local customs and legends could just as well have been pursued in the libraries of Archangel. All the folklore of wedding and funeral rituals had long since been documented in books. Whereas on the spot, in these almost deserted villages, the memory of traditions was being lost, for want of any means of passing them on.
    This forgetting of the past was all the more marked at Mirnoe, where the inhabitants were, so to speak, expatriates, elderly women driven from their homes by solitude, illness, the indifference of their families. Responding to my questions, they told touching tales of their own misfortunes. And of the war. For it was this that had erased all other legends from the popular memory To these elderly inhabitants of Mirnoe, it was becoming the one remaining myth, a vivid and personal one, and one in which the immortals, both good and evil, were their own husbands and sons, the Germans, the Russian soldiers, Stalin, Hitler. And more specifically, the soldier Vera was waiting for.
    As in all newly created myths, the roles of gods and devils were not yet set in stone. The Germans, the subject of visceral, passionate hatred, suddenly put in an appearance in the person of a sad-faced cook named Kurt. Zoya, a tall old woman who had the features of an icon darkened with age, had come across him in an occupied village near Leningrad, where she lived during the war. This German secretly brought remnants of food to the children of the village…. The place he had in local mythology was equal to that of a Hitler or a Zhukov.
    In the end, I despaired of being able to record wedding choruses, songs in celebration of birth or death. The only ditty I heard on those old lips told of the departure of the local soldiers who had, it seemed, prevented the Nazi troops joining forces with Marshal Mannerheim’s Finnish army Thus the blockade of Leningrad had not become total. Provisions reached the besieged city via a corridor the men of this region had paved with their corpses. Were they all from this region? And Mirnoe? I doubted it. But when I looked at the old women of the village, I realized that this slim consolation was all they had left: the belief that, thanks to their husbands, brothers, or sons, Leningrad had not fallen.
    Before coming to Mirnoe, I used to call such things “official propaganda.” Such a description, I saw now, was a little on the terse side.
    My idea of writing a satire also turned out to be easier said than done. I had envisaged portraying the grotesque system of kolkhozes, widespread drunkenness to the sound of loudspeakers broadcasting uplifting slogans. But these villages were quite simply abandoned or dying, reduced to a mode of survival not very different from the Stone Age. I managed to find a highly typical alcoholic, a character who would have lent himself very well to the humor of dissident prose. A house stripped bare by his drunken