Андрей Макин - The Woman Who Waited

violent nightfall, anything could happen. Absolutely anything. And there was nothing and no one to prevent it. Their bodies could lie down beside the tangle of the net, melt into one another, take their pleasure, even as the lives trapped in the fishnet breathed their last…

I retreated swiftly, with a feeling that, out of cowardice, I had sidestepped the moment when destiny manifests itself at a particular spot, in a particular face. The moment when fate allows us a glimpse of its hidden tissue of cause and consequence.

A week later, retribution: a northeast wind brought the first snow, as if in revenge for those few days of paradise. A mild retribution, however, in the form of luminous white flurries that induced vertigo, blurring the views of road and field, making people smile, dazzled by endlessly swirling snowflakes. The bitter, tangy air tasted of new hope, the promise of happiness. The squalls hurled volleys of crystals onto the dark surface of the lake, which relentlessly swallowed their fragile whiteness into its depths. But already the shorelines were gleaming with snow, and the muddy scars left on the road by our truck were swiftly bandaged over.

The driver with whom I often traveled from one village to the next used to declare himself, ironically, to be “the first swallow of capitalism.” Otar, a Georgian of about forty, had set up a clandestine fur business, been denounced, done time in prison. Now out on parole, he had been given charge of this old truck with worm-eaten side panels here in this northern territory. We were in the mid-seventies, and this “first swallow of capitalism” sincerely believed he had come out of things pretty well. “And what’s more,” he would often repeat, with shining eyes and a greedy smile, “for every guy up here there are nine chicks.”

He talked about women incessantly, lived for women, and I conjectured that even his fur business had had as its object the chance to dress and undress women. Intelligent in fact, and even sensitive, he naturally exaggerated his vocation as a philanderer, knowing that such was the image of Georgians in Russia: lovers obsessed with conquests, monomaniacal about sex, rich, unsophisticated. He acted out this caricature, as foreigners often do when they end up mimicking the tourist clichés of their country of origin. He played to the gallery.

Despite this roleplaying, for him the female body was, naturally, logically, the only thing that made life worthwhile. And it would have been the worst form of torture not to be able to talk about it to a well-disposed confidant. Willy-nilly I had assumed this role. In gratitude, Otar was ready to take me to the North Pole.

In his stories, he somehow or other contrived to avoid repetition. And yet they invariably dealt with women, desired, seduced, possessed. He took them lying down, standing up, hunched up in the cab of his truck, spread-eagled against a cowshed wall as the drowsy beasts chewed their cuds, in a forest glade at the base of an anthill (“We both had our backsides bitten to death by those buggers!”), in steam baths… His language was both coarse and ornate: he made “that great ass split open like a watermelon,” and in the baths “breasts swell up, you know, they really do, like dough rising;” “I shoved her up against a cherry tree. I penetrated her, shook her so hard a whole shitload of cherries showered down on top of us. We were all red with juice…” At heart he was a veritable poet of the flesh, and the sincerity of his passion for the female body rescued his stories from coital monotony.

One day, I was foolish enough to ask him how I could tell whether a woman was ready to accept my advances or not. “If she fucks?” he exclaimed, giving a twist to the steering wheel. “No problem. Just ask her one simple question…” Like a good actor, he let the pause linger, visibly content to be instructing a young simpleton. “All you need to know is this. Does she eat smoked herring?”

“Smoked herring? Why?”

“Here’s why: if she eats smoked herring, she gets thirsty

“So?”

“And if she’s thirsty, she drinks a lot of water.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Well, if she drinks water, she pisses. Right?”

“Yes. And so?”

“So if she pisses, she must have a twat.”

“Well, all right, but…”

“And if she has a twat, she fucks!”

He went into a long laugh that drowned out the noise of the engine, thumped me several times on the shoulder, oblivious of the flurry of flakes sweeping across the road. This all happened on that same day of that first snow in early September. We had just arrived at an apparently deserted village, which I failed to recognize-neither the izbas transfigured by their snowy coating nor the shores of the lake all carpeted in white.

Otar braked, seized a bucket, went over to a well. His antediluvian truck bizarrely consumed as much water as gas. “Like that chick who eats smoked herring,” he joked, winking at me knowingly.

We were about to continue on our way when they appeared. Two female figures, one tall and quite youthful, the other a tiny old woman, were climbing up the slope that led from the lake to the road. They had just been taking a bath in the minuscule izba from whose chimney a haze of smoke still filtered. The old woman walked with difficulty, struggling against the gusts of wind, turning her face aside from the volleys of snow. Her companion looked almost as if she were carrying her. She was dressed in a long military greatcoat of the type once worn in the cavalry. She was bareheaded (perhaps, surprised by the snow, she had given her shawl to the old woman), and against the heavy fabric of the coat collar, her neck looked almost childishly slender. Reaching the road, they turned toward the village; we could see them full face now. At that moment, a gust of wind more violent than the rest blew back one of the sides of the long cavalry greatcoat, and for the space of a second we saw the whiteness of a breast, swiftly covered up by the woman as she tugged irritably at her coat lapels.

Without starting the engine, Otar stared fixedly through the open door. I was waiting for his observation. I remembered his “breasts swell up, you know, at the baths…” I was sure I was going to have to listen to a hilarious, racy monologue along those lines. And for the first time I foresaw that such talk, albeit jocular and good-natured, would be painful to me.

But he did not stir, his hands on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the two female shapes as they were gradually blotted out by the snow flurry…

His voice rang out just as he eased the clutch and the mud spurted from beneath the spinning wheels. “That blessed Vera! She’s still waiting! Still waiting! She’ll wait forever… She’s screwed up her whole life with her waiting! He was killed or was reported missing in action, same difference. You cry your heart out, okay. You down a few vodkas, okay. You wear black, fine, it’s the custom. But after that you start to live again. Life goes on, goddamn it! She was sixteen when he went to the front in ‘forty-five, and she’s been waiting ever since. Because they never got a reliable bit of paper about the guy’s death. She’s dug herself a grave here. Along with all these old women that no one gives a damn about, but she goes around picking up half-dead people in the middle of the forest. And she goes on waiting… It’s thirty years now, for fuck’s sake! And you’ve seen what a beauty she is, even now…”

He fell silent, then gave me a fierce look and cried out in a scathing voice: “Well, this isn’t one of your smoked-herring stories, you stupid prick!” I almost responded in the same vein, thinking the oath was addressed to me, but held my peace. His despairing way of hitting the wheel with the flat of his hands showed it was --">