The Woman Who Waited

The Woman Who Waited Read Free Page B

Book: The Woman Who Waited Read Free
Author: Andreï Makine
Tags: Romance, Historical
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prehistoric animals did not go down as well as expected. Mediocre actors, we were putting on a performance of the Western world, and he, as the director (a veritable Stanislavsky!), was sizing us up, ready to deliver the famous and terrible verdict: “I don’t believe you.” And it would have been fair: we were not very convincing westerners that night.
    Too impatient. The iron curtain looked as if it would last forever. Our country’s dislocation from the rest of the world had the semblance of some inviolable natural law. In the face of this thousand-year empire, our own youth was but a second, a speck of dust. We could no longer bear to wait.
    All the more because every element of the Western world was available to us: irreverent poems, innovative abstract painting, uninhibited sexual gratification, the banned Western authors we purchased on the black market, the European and other languages we spoke, the Western thought we did our utmost to get to know. Like alchemists in a hurry, we tossed all these ingredients into the melting pot during our nights of boozing and declamation. The quintessence of the Western world would materialize, the philosopher’s stone that would transform “The Kremlin Zoo” into a world masterpiece, its author into a living classic, acclaimed from New York to Sydney, and transfer that canvas covered in orange squares to the walls of the Guggenheim….
    A very drunk young woman collapsed onto the shabby mattress beside me. With a broad, wet smile, she was trying to whisper something in my ear, but her speech had become slurred. Two men’s names kept recurring in her babble. I guessed, rather than understood, that two men were making love in the next room, and she found this “a scream,” because at the same time we could hear the moaning of the couple behind the paintings. I pretended to chuckle in response to her laughter, but suddenly her face froze, she lowered her eyelids, and very tiny, swift tears began coursing down her cheeks. The jazz singer’s grating whisper continued to promise great revelations without which life could not go on.
    The woman stopped crying, gave me a challenging look, and made her way over toward where the American was sitting. “He’s a very big gallery owner,” the latter was saying. A painter listening to him nodded his head incessantly. His glass shook violently in his hand. The drunken young woman clambered up onto one arm of the chair with the persistence of an insect.
    An evening that never quite took off…

    Curiously enough, this copy of the Western world we were acting out was in some respects more authentic than the original. Above all, more fraught with drama. For the liberties taken on those evenings did not always go unpunished. Many years later, I would learn that the author of “The Kremlin Zoo” paid for his poem with five years in a camp and that one of the homosexuals, sent to prison (for this vice was punishable by law), was battered to death by his cellmates. I would think about that unfortunate lover fifteen years later in the streets of the Marais district of Paris; the multitude of bronzed, muscular men on the café terraces, their contented air, for all the world like chubby, male inflatable dolls, showing off their biceps and their new-won normality. I recalled that the homosexual from Leningrad had been finished off by being impaled on a stovepipe, from anus to throat….
    All things considered, our masquerade of the Western world did have its own weight of truth.
    My girlfriend emerged from behind the canvases, made her way across the room strewn with bodies, fragments of food and bottles, and seated herself on a crate filled with books. Despite a mixture of disgust and jealousy, I could not repress a burst of admiration. What a great performance, much better than the women in Godard’s films! A sensual body, a mouth with blurred makeup, and an impeccably indifferent look that slid right over me. And already she was flirting,

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