The Woman Who Waited Read Online Free PDF Page B

expenditure, his wife, still young, who looked twenty years older than she was and whose face bore a perpetual grimace of bitterness, his four silent children, resigned to living with this man who got down on all fours, vomiting and sobbing, and whom they had to call “Daddy”
    I had almost completed the first page of my story when I learned that the drunkard had hanged himself. I had just arrived with Otar in the village where the suicides family lived. The militia and the investigating magistrate were already there. The man had ended his life in a shed by fastening the rope to the door handle. He was almost squatting, his head thrown back, as if in a burst of coarse laughter. His children, whom nobody had thought of taking away, stared at him fixedly, without crying. His wife’s face even seemed relaxed. The walls of the shed were hung with solid, old-fashioned tools, which inspired confidence despite the rust. Great tongs, heavy braces, iron contraptions whose names and functions had long been forgotten … One of the children suddenly backed away and began running across a broad fallow field bristling with yellowed plants.
    No, this was not really material for a satirical story.
    In this remote corner of the Russian North, I had expected to discover a microcosm of the Soviet age, a caricature of that simultaneously messianic and stagnant time. But time was completely absent from these villages, which seemed as if they were living on after the disappearance of the regime, after the collapse of the empire. What I was passing through was, in effect, a kind of premonition of the future. All trace of history had been eradicated. What remained were the gilded slivers of the willow leaves on the dark surface of the lake, the first snows that generally came at night, the silence of the White Sea, looming beyond the forests. What remained was this woman in a long military greatcoat, following the shoreline, stopping at the mailbox where the roads met. What remained was the essence of things.
    During the first weeks of my life at Mirnoe, I did not dare to acknowledge it.
    Then on a September afternoon crisscrossed with bursts of sunlight and brief spells of dusk, I found myself in a heavy craft, blackened with age, clasping a dead old woman in my arms, warming her with my body.
    As the island drew near, the wind subsided and we landed on a sunlit beach, like summer but for the grass burned by the cold.
    “In the old days they came here on foot. It wasn’t an island, just a hill,” Vera explained as she and I carried Anna’s body “But with no one to maintain the dikes anymore, the lake has doubled in size. They say that one day the sea will come right up to here….”
    Her voice struck me. A voice infinitely alone amid the watery expanse.
    The sun, already low, its rays horizontal, made our presence seem unreal, as if echoing some secret objective. Our shadows stretched far across the churchyard studded with mounds, slanted up the flaking roughcast walls of the little church. Vera opened the door, disappeared, returned carrying a coffin…. The sides of the grave displayed a multitude of truncated roots. “Like so many lives cut short.”
    I said this to myself, for want of being able to make sense of what was taking place in front of me. A simple burial, of course. But also our silence, the great wind impaling itself on the church’s cross, the utterly banal banging of the hammer. I was afraid Vera was going to ask me to nail down the coffin, the pathetic fear of missing, of knocking a nail in crooked…. And as we lowered the coffin into the earth with the aid of ropes, this thought occurred: that dead woman, whom I warmed as I clasped her in my arms, is carrying a part of me away with her, but to where?
    The return, with the wind behind us, was easy. A few strokes of the oars, which Vera repeated slowly, as if ab-sentmindedly. Her body was in repose, and this repose reminded me, at one moment, of the relaxation of a