The Woman Who Waited Read Free Page A

portrait of a man who looked like me.
    The situation was farcical. And yet that night, though one of celebration like so many others spent in that studio, was a sad one.
    As always, of course, there was plenty of alcohol, plenty of music (a jazz singer on the verge of whispering secrets into the ears of all and sundry but who continued to postpone his revelations), plenty of bodies, most of them young, ready to make love without constraint, or rather to make love in order to defy all constraints.
    Six or seven years late, May ‘68 had finally made it to Russia, had made it to this long loft converted into a semi-clandestine studio in a remote suburb of Leningrad.
    “Planét—Nyet!” declaimed the author of the poem and was answered from behind the unfinished paintings by the clamor of an imminent orgasm.
Nyet
was what stifled the maturing of talent, freedom of expression, unfettered love, foreign travel, everything, in fact. This loft alone was airborne, challenging the laws of gravity.
    It was a typical setting for such gatherings of more or less dissident artists. From Kiev to Vladivostok, from Leningrad to Tiflis, everyone was saying, fearing, hoping for approximately the same thing. It all usually took place amid the glee generated by secrecy and subversion, especially when one is young. And what could not be said in a poem or with a paintbrush, we expressed through these erratic orgasms. “Planet Nyet,” and the moans now starting up again behind the canvases, louder than ever.
    But on this occasion there was something forced about the gaiety. Even the presence of an American jour-nalist made no difference. Having him there was a great event for us all: he sat in the middle, ensconced in an armchair; given the throng that surrounded him, he might have been taken for the president of the United States. But the chemistry was all wrong.
    It would have been easy to ascribe the melancholy I felt to jealousy.
    Hardly more than a week earlier, the woman now moaning behind the canvases had been sleeping with me. I knew the sound of her voice in lovemaking, and I could recognize her part in the current duet. Without flinching. Without the right to be jealous. Sexual ownership was the height of petty bourgeois absurdity. One drank, smoked with screwed up eyes (as in Godard’s films), approved the reading of a poem, and, when the woman finally emerged from among the canvases, one winked at her, offered her a drink…. I recalled how she sometimes used to raise her eyebrows in her sleep, as if asking herself: “What’s it all for?”Then her face would become vulnerable, childlike…. Best not to remember!
    That evening, if the truth be told, we all felt our hearts were not in it. Perhaps just because of the American journalist. Too big a fish for this shabby studio, a visitor too eagerly desired. He was there like the supreme incarnation of the Western world we dreamed of, he listened and watched, and we all felt as if we were being transported to the far side of the iron curtain. Thanks to him, the lines of verse recited already seemed as if they had been published in London or New York, an unfinished painting was on the verge of being hung in a Parisian art gallery. We were acting out a scenario of artistic dissidence for him. And even the moans of pleasure from behind the easels were addressed to him personally.
    He had, in fact, quite simply upstaged us all. I had come intending to talk about my trip to Tallin. At that time, the Baltic states were looked upon as the antechamber to the West. Arkady Gorin, the little dark-haired man sitting on the ground on an old paintbox, would have talked about his imminent departure for Israel, after six years of being refused a visa. But there was this American, and the mere grinding of his jaw, as he pronounced names like Philadelphia, Boston, Greenwich Village, made our own stories seem pretty thin….
    Even the poem in which Brezhnevs Kremlin was portrayed as a zoo full of