mild but still distinctly rebellious protest. In a studio called Wigwam, for example, in a town near Leningrad, he participates in a wild party of young people, mostly opponents of the regime. They read antiregime poems like “The Kremlin Zoo,” play forbidden music, dance Western style, and carry on sexual orgies openly, to defy all constraints. An American journalist is also present who participates in sex acts and eventually falls asleep. The narrator is accompanied by Arkady Gorin, a dissident poet waiting to immigrate to Israel. Gorin thinks that dictatorship inspires the creation of artistic masterpieces and is afraid that, once in the West, he will suffer poetic impotence. In a train for Leningrad the narrator and Gorin comment on the people around them, a sluggish mass of blank faces, crushed by lethargy, without any imagination, representing a live picture of the regime depriving them of all individuality and limiting them to readingPravda. Gorin is disgusted because it is people like these about whom they write revolutionary poems, and they do not seem to deserve it. In this brief reference, Andreï Makine sums up the frustration of the narrator’s and Gorin’s generation.

It is not surprising that the narrator finds Vera’s behavior refreshing and attractive, albeit unusual. Her sacrifice of almost all of her mature life, the best part of it at that, her willingness to help people in need, and, above all, her faithfulness to the only man she has ever loved make her stand out in the narrator’s eyes as a human being. At the same time, his rational conclusions about Vera do not help him stifle an increasing desire to possess her. This becomes clear after he sees her naked taking a bath in a bathhouse. When he finds her ring, which she has forgotten in the bathhouse, he sees this as an omen of her change of heart, perhaps without her realizing it. This unexpected encounter reinforces his hope that her beautiful body will eventually revolt and start acting naturally.

Vera was a graduate student in linguistics in Leningrad but did not get her doctorate because she disagreed with official stances on the subject and on political issues. In conversations with the narrator she reveals that, while studying, she felt she did not belong to “them.” She also makes an astute observation, often ignored even among the rebels, that while they are protesting against and demanding the removal of Stalin, they seldom mention Lenin, yet he was even guiltier of crimes against his own people than Stalin. Upon returning to Mirnoe from her unfinished studies, she felt like living again. She also felt that all those debates in Leningrad, for or against the regime, meant nothing to the people of Mirnoe. This also explains her decision to lead a secluded life and to avoid intimacy with men while waiting “for him.”

The narrator has an inkling of Vera’s secret realization that her lover will never come back. This is reinforced in his mind by her increasing willingness to talk with him. She knows that he is one of those Leningrad liberals from whom she fled back to Mirnoe in search of peace (the meaning of its name is “peaceful”) many years ago. Yet she feels that he avoids discussions about political topics, talking instead about real life in the village and about dying old women and, above all, showing ever increasing curiosity about her personal attitudes, as if believing that it is of great significance to him. By intuition, she senses the real motive for his interest in her.

The denouement of this drama comes suddenly. In a brilliant tour de force by Makine, Vera goes to Archangel for a city festival. She returns a changed woman. She finally gives herself to the narrator, having broken with her thirty-year-old vow of faithfulness to “him.” From a newspaper account of the celebration, left by Vera’s female acquaintance on his table for him to read, he learns that the person celebrated in Archangel was none other than Boris Koptev, who is now a party committee secretary in a large Moscow factory. There is no indication in the novel how Vera reacts to this knowledge except for her passionate surrender to the narrator, to be sure helped by alcohol, before he finds out about the “resurrected” Boris. Strangely enough, the narrator decides to slip out of Mirnoe, afraid that she will now cling to him; after all, she is twenty years older than he. The separation is amicable and peaceful, though. The narrator returns to Leningrad, Vera continues to row her boat to the school on the island, and Mirnoe sinks into the deadly peace of a forgotten backwater.

Even though this is clearly a love story, Makine refuses to make it a typical, tear-jerking affair. Interestingly, the lovers harbor their feelings of love at great distancesVera and Boris as well as Vera and the narrator. After the first, prewar flame Vera and Boris are cruelly separated, without seeing each other again for thirty years. Vera and the narrator, though physically near each other, for the most part are quite distanced from each othershe because she is faithful to her love for Boris and the narrator because he really does not know what he wants in this liaison until he is swept into it toward the end to be suddenly separated when the happy solution is potentially at hand. Makine conveys a notion that life is indifferent to human emotions and desires and that one cannot know how it will turn out. The reader is impressed by the warmth of the love story and by the poetic presentation of it but is somewhat disappointed at the end. Such is life, Makine seems to say.

Makine leaves the readers in the dark concerning several points. Is it possible that Vera did not know of Boris’s survival? After all, his family had been informed of it and Vera must have known the family. How plausible is it for a beautiful, healthy woman to remain celibate for thirty years? What happened after her surrender to the narrator? He simply returns to Leningrad, still madly in love with Vera. Does she continue her celibate ways? After all, she has no reason to remain faithful to her “ghost” lover after he has turned out to be just thata ghost. Makine’s lack of answers to these questions, however, remains an author’s prerogative. It seems more likely that he intended to retain an aura of unlikelihood and a gossamer of things past that permeates the entire novel. Note the omission of the narrator’s name and Vera’s surname. Be that as it may, The Woman Who Waited, a brief but complex and poetically tinged novel, or novella, by a Russian expatriate in France indicates a strong figurative tug on the part of the country of his birth, clad in a beautiful artistic garment.