SHE 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, steal, get drunk….”
Exhausted by struggling against the wind, I ended up heaving on the oar more or less mechanically, merely going through the motions, for form’s sake. The squat outline of the church on the island hillock continued to appear as distant as ever. “Mind you, they still had to let her leave the village, poor Vera, for as long as it took for her to get her teaching diploma in some little town in the area. Doubtless the one great journey in her life. Her view into the world. And then, presto, back into the fold, her vigil on the bench by the front door, forever pricking up her ears. What if that’s the sound of a soldier’s boots? Oh yes, a little withered wreath for Anna’s grave. Very pretty, my dear, but who’s going to put flowers on your grave? The old women will die, and there won’t be another Vera to take care of you….”
I noticed that by matching my efforts to the thrust of the swell, I was maneuvering the boat more easily. It still moved heavily, but instead of battling against this massive pitching and tossing, one had to make a swift stroke with the oar at the right moment, give it a brief flick…. Vera remained unmoving and more detached than ever, as if, having noted that I had learned the technique, she could return to her reverie. She was shielding the flowers on the wreath with her hands. I wanted to say to her: “Look, the rain’s going to drench them on the grave, in any case.” But that would have disturbed her repose.
Well, why not rouse her? Stop sculling, squat down in front of her, clasp her hands, shake them, or better still, kiss her frozen hands. “She’s asleep in a kind of foretaste of death, in that time she put on hold at the age of sixteen, moving like a somnambulist among these old women who remind her of the war and the departure of her soldier…. She’s living in an afterlife. The dead must see what she sees….”
We grounded gently on the island’s beach. I jumped ashore, pulled the bow up onto the sand, helpedVera disembark. Suddenly, the idea that this woman was living through what it is only given to us to live through after we die made an obscure sense of the life I had judged so absurd. A sense that could be perceived at every step, in every gesture.
“I’m sorry to have made you work like a galley slave,” she said as we walked up to the churchyard. “I could have hidden this at home, of course, or thrown it away” (she shook the wreath gently). “Zina would never have known. But, you see, all these old women are already living a little beyond this life, and I feel as if I’m reaching out to them across the frontier. Then all of a sudden they hand me this wreath. So maybe it’s not so stupid, after all. …” She looked at me for a long time; her gray eyes seemed bigger than ever as they glistened in the rain, giving the impression that they had read my recent thoughts about her. I had a very physical sense that I, too, was present in this afterlife through which she was moving.
Once the wreath was placed on the grave mound, the flowers on it were quickly covered in raindrops and, moistened, seemed to come to life again like a delicate and luminous decal. “Next time I’ll bring the cross,” she said very softly, as if to herself. “May I come with you?” I asked, picturing a rainy day, the slow rocking of the boat, and the hand, currently adjusting the wreath, resting, as if forgotten, on the gunwale of the boat.
We began to walk down toward the shore. Vera s long military greatcoat was soaked through, almost black. At a distance, on this slope with its brown, flattened vegetation, she might have been taken for a nurse in wartime, making her way toward a field covered in the wounded and dead … In other people’s eyes … But all I saw was a woman walking at my side, her face drenched by the rain, intensely alive on this dull autumn day, taking care not to tread on the last clumps of flowers, and as she arrived at the beach, bending down to pick something off the sand and hand it to me: “You dropped this last time.” It was the pencil I had used to set down such phrases in my notebook as: “A suttee burned to a cinder on the pyre of faithfulness,” “a life massacred by a childish vow” …
In the boat she took one oar, leaving the other for me. The rain fell more steadily, subduing the squalls. Neither the houses of Mirnoe, nor even the willows on that far shore, were visible. Our rhythms were quickly matched. Each effort made by the other felt like a response to one’s own, down to the slightest tensing of the muscles. We touched shoulders, but our real closeness was in this slow, rhythmic action, the care we took to wait for each other, pulling together once more after too powerful a stroke or the skipping of a blade over the crest of a wave.
In the middle of the crossing, both shores disappeared completely behind the rain. No line, no point of orientation beyond the contours of the boat. The gray air with its swirling pattern of raindrops, the waves, calmer now, that seemed to be coming from nowhere. And our forward motion that no longer seemed to have a goal. We were quite simply there, side by side, amid the somnolent hissing of the rain, in a dusk as cool as fish scales, and when I turned my head a little I saw the glistening face of a woman smiling faintly, as if made happy by the incessant tears the sky sent coursing down her cheeks.
I understood now that this was the way she lived out her afterlife. A slow progress, with no apparent goal, but marked by a simple and profound meaning.
The boat grounded blindly at the very spot from which we had set off.