Read Online The Woman Who Waited by Andreï Makine - Free Book Online

Very remotely in our confrontation there was the tension of a sexual encounter.
    Or rather that of a physical assault, for my presence distorted the interior of this room, prepared for another’s return. The cleanliness of the floor, half a dozen reproductions on the walls and these books she had certainly never read (a pretentiousness that struck me as truly provincial and touching). Fat books lined up on a set of shelves, chosen to create “an intellectual ambience”: a
General Theory of Linguistics
, an
Etymological Dictionary
in four volumes, Humboldt’s
Complete Works
…They were clearly relics she had salvaged from some abandoned library, having no need of them for her own modest work as a teacher…. I settled myself down on the seat I had annexed, observing with curiosity this haven created for another: the order, the comfort, the bookish decor.
    On the last of these games-playing evenings I interrupted my psychological experiment for a moment, glanced out of the window. And through the pallor of the fog I thought I could make out the tall figure of a man emerging at the crossroads. A traveler slowing his pace … No, nothing. A tree. A streak on the windowpane. But, viewed from this end of the bench, such an apparition seemed far from impossible, nurtured to the point of hallucination by years of waiting, by all those glances (it made me giddy to think of them) day after day, conjuring up a human shape suddenly visible at the corner of the forest….
    When I got home, I decided to leave Mirnoe the following morning.
    Instead of leaving that morning, I went to the island with Vera.

2
    S HE WAS DUE TO GO TO THE ISLAND to lay a wreath of dried flowers on Anna’s grave—a pale ring, bristling with plant stems and ears of corn, which it had taken one of the old women of Mirnoe several weeks to fashion.
    For me, crossing the lake in the rain perfectly expressed the absurdity of the existence Vera was leading. Absurd, too, was my own impulse to go with her, which took me by surprise: I was busy packing my bags, saw her passing in the street, opened the window, called out to her, asking, I did not know why, if I could join her. And to crown my folly, with ridiculous male conceit, I insisted on sculling with a single oar, standing upright, like an operatic gondolier. Vera began by objecting (the wind, the wayward heaviness of the old rowing boat …), then let me go ahead.
    The wind kept shifting, the nose of the boat swung to the right, to the left, then came to a standstill, impossible to drive forward through the dense water, in which the oar became embedded, as if in wet cotton wool. So as not to lose face, I made light of it, concealed the effort, my arms soon numb, my brow furrowed, my eyes clouded with sweat. The woman seated in front of me, with the ugly, dry little wreath in her lap, was intolerable to behold—idiotically resigned, indifferent to the rain, to the wind, to her ruined life, to this day wasted on an expedition prompted by the funereal whim of some half-mad old woman. I contemplated her bowed face, brooding on dreams, faded, one supposed, by dint of recurring every day for thirty years, a reverie, or perhaps just a void, gray monotonous as this water and these shores, blurred in the raindrop-laden air. “A woman they have turned into a walking monument to the dead. A fiancee immolated on the pyre of faithfulness. A rustic Andromache As my efforts became more painful, so the epithets became more venomous. At one point, it seemed to me as if the boat, mired in the glutinous ponderousness of the waves, were making no progress at all. Vera gently raised her face, smiled at me, seemed about to speak, changed her mind. “A village idiot! That’s it! A wooden idol these yokels have nailed up at the entrance to their settlement to ward off fate’s thunderbolts. A propitiatory victim offered to History. An icon in whose shadow the good old kolkhozniks could fornicate, indulge in denouncing people,