The Snow Song

by Sally Gardner

  ‘Is Misha back?’ Lena asked.

  Edith shook her head and wondered why her friend seemed so worried. Perhaps she too had asked Misha to bring something from the town.

  ‘It will be dark soon,’ Lena said. ‘Do you think something’s happened?’ She came into the kitchen and stood by the stove. ‘It’s cold. I think this is going to be a brutal winter…’

  Her words tumbled out of her, too fast. In all she had to say there was nothing of any interest. In an attempt to stop Lena talking, Edith put her finger to her lips.

  ‘What is it? Do you hear his sleigh?’ asked Lena, now agitated.

  Edith shook her head and took her friend’s hand. Lena, thrown by such kindness, began to weep.

  ‘I have no one to tell,’ she said.

  Edith made tea and listened to the silence, to the gaps in the words, then she began to understand that Lena had come to her because her heart was broken.

  ‘After I married, all my friends boasted of their pregnancies,’ said Lena. ‘Maria was having her second, and I wanted a baby so badly. I wanted a child more than I wanted a husband.’ Lena twisted her handkerchief in her fingers. ‘I used to think you could get pregnant from kissing. Stupid, I know. But no one told me. My mother said I would find out soon enough. You have to bear it and from it comes children. When we were first married, we kissed a lot, and nothing happened. Then Maria told me what she and her husband did to make babies. But when we tried it…’ She stopped, put her handkerchief to her mouth.

  ‘He couldn’t…it would go limp. He said it was enough, and it was unpleasant. He would get out of bed and wash. I didn’t know what to do. I thought there must be something wrong with me. My mother kept saying to me, “Lena, when will you do your duty and give me a grandchild?” Then my husband began to go more and more to the town, he would never say why, except it was to do with his father’s business. When he told me he would be gone for a week, I asked if I could go with him. He said no. I asked why not, and he grew angry, said my duty was to have a baby and look after the house. Nothing more.

  ‘When he left, I thought, this is my life, and I will never have a child. I will just have this dull man. He had been gone for three days. I’d had no visitors – our house, as you know, is out of the village. I felt so alone. Then one evening, as the sun was setting, I saw him, Misha, all golden, and an idea came to me. I thought even if he spoke about it, no one would believe him – after all, he is the village idiot. I took him up the stairs, I told him what he had to do. I lay down on the bed, pulled up my skirts. I lay still just like my husband said I had to and I didn’t move.

  ‘Misha laughed. He said, “No one can make a baby that way, not one that is full of life.” I told him my husband said it was unpleasant to see me… down below. He said, far from it, and undressed me then kissed every part of me until I didn’t know what to do and I let out a cry. I couldn’t help it, never had I felt such pleasure. Then he did it all again and more. Four nights and four days, we made love, and it was love in its purest form… There now, tell me I will burn in hell for my sins.’

  Edith put her arms around Lena and rocked her.

  ‘Everyone thinks Misha is an idiot. Even his family. He isn’t, he’s intelligent. He told me, “If you do have a child, may he not be like me.” I told him he was a kind, loving man. I hardly see him now, since the harvest supper when your shepherd didn’t come. I know like my husband, Misha loves you, not me. It doesn’t matter. Winter has come too soon. And all I do is think about the nights we spent together, and I yearn for him.

  ‘I’m pregnant. My husband thinks it’s his, that his fumblings are enough, that what he does is enough. He said that now it has happened we don’t have to do it again, and we can live better lives without it. I thought I just wanted a baby and I do want the baby. But more or all of it is I want to be with Misha. I haven’t yet told him about the child.’ She blew her nose.

  Edith cooked a meal for them both. After they had eaten, Lena stood up and said, ‘I feel better. Some things are too heavy to bear alone.’

  She was getting ready to leave when they heard the gate open.

  ‘Misha’s back,’ said Lena, her cheeks flushed, and she ran to the door only to see her husband and Edith’s father, arm in arm, zig-zagging across the yard.

  ‘Time to go home, Lena,’ said her husband. ‘A lady with a baby needs to rest.’ He laughed. ‘See?’ he said to Edith. ‘See what you could have had?’

  He leaned heavily on Lena as she walked him home.

  Like heartbeats, Edith thought, we cannot know how many words there are in us. What she knew was that in stillness, she heard every word said to her in a way she hadn’t before. There was an art to listening. She, unlike the priest, had no god to judge people by. Her gift lay in the power to hear and hold safe all that was said to her. She supposed that her silence was similar to the strongbox she’d seen in the mayor’s office. A place for a woman to leave her secrets, confident that what was said to Edith would not be repeated.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ said the cabinet maker. Only as an afterthought, he asked, ‘Has Misha come back?’

  Chapter Fourteen

  A Roomful of Hens

  Edith was up early the following morning. There still was no news of Misha. The day was bone cold, snow fluttered in an icy wind as she wrapped her shawl about her.

  ‘Please may Misha be safe,’ she prayed, though she didn’t know who to.

  It wasn’t the god that lived in the village church, he was too mean to warrant prayers. It wasn’t to the wooden Madonna. Who then?

  She saw her grandmother. Yes, perhaps it’s you, she thought as she opened the door to Grandmother’s old room. There was hardly anything in it now; a bedframe, a chest and, perched on the beams, the hens that Edith had brought in last night. She gathered up the eggs and shooed them out into the yard. She was in the henhouse when she heard the latch on the gate. Hoping it might be Misha, she went to see but there were the butcher’s two daughters.

  She’d never liked them. As a child they had frightened her, especially Vanda, the taller sister, Misha’s mother. Whenever Edith had gone to Misha’s house in the summer, there had been jars on the windowsill with a spoonful of jam in the bottom to attract the wasps. Lena said Vanda was a witch and she ate the wasps and that’s where she got the sting in her tail.

  Una was the smaller, rounder sister. She knew everything about everyone else’s business and little about herself. Her daughter Sorina looked nothing like her; she was taller and striking in her appearance. It was, thought Edith, the most ridiculous notion that she would be a stepmother to these two crows. The idea made her feel sick. She watched them looking around the yard, eyeing up the house.

  ‘A cabinet maker,’ said Una. ‘He should be ashamed of himself. Look at the state of this verandah – and the girl hasn’t even swept the snow off it.’

  ‘Lazy like her father,’ said Vanda. ‘What did I tell you?’

  Edith had been dreading their arrival. It was a tradition that every bride should be tested by her mother-in-law or other family members to see if her housework was fair or indifferent.

  What does it matter, she told herself. You have nothing to prove. Neither of them wants this any more than you. Perhaps if she failed this test, they might persuade their father not to go through with the marriage. She took a deep breath and went to meet them.

  ‘There you are,’ said Una. ‘I could have slipped on these steps. Why aren’t they swept? Answer me.’

  Edith was growing into her silence. There was nothing she could say even if she wanted to. The sisters knew that, as did the whole village. Uninvited, they walked up the steps, helping each other into the house. They hesitated on the threshold. She could see they were impressed for Edith had an eye for making even a fallen-down house feel homely.

  ‘Did you do the decorating yourself?’ asked Una.

  The main room had been painted with small scenes from the mountain and the village life. Edith nodd
ed.

  The two women reminded her of figures from a child’s Noah’s Ark, their wooden noses poking into cupboards and chests. Una’s nose turned up, Vanda’s turned down.

  Edith went about her tasks, ignoring them as much as possible.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ said Vanda, as she opened the door to Grandmother’s room. A hen waddled into the kitchen and Vanda shooed it into the yard. ‘You’ll have to run our father’s house better than this. Hens in a bedroom? That will never do.’

  The sight of these two women, two spiders spinning a web from which Edith could not escape, made the wedding feel inevitable.

  They talked. Oh how these sisters talked. They sounded to Edith as her hens did in the morning, full of pecking complaints.

  ‘Girl,’ shouted Vanda. ‘Girl, did you hear me or are you deaf like my idiot son?’

  There was no excuse for her silence, Una said. It was time she spoke. The sisters agreed that no woman could remain silent so long; it was against her very nature. Not talking was an impossibility.

  Una took hold of the broom and made a movement to startle Edith. Edith laughed.

  ‘There. You see, she can laugh. Therefore, she can talk.’ Edith stood her ground as Una made another lunge at her. ‘A proper hiding,’ said Una. ‘That’s what she needs. That’s what she’ll get when she’s married our father, and no mistake. A proper hiding.’

  The problem facing the sisters, Edith could see all too well, was that this slip of a girl would soon be their stepmother. What could they do?

  ‘Goodness knows why our father should decide to marry again,’ said Una. ‘And why choose her?’

  ‘No,’ said Vanda. ‘Did you see the way she kneads the dough?’

  ‘And did you see the embroidery in her hope box?’ said Una. ‘With needlework like that she needs hope.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Sister, that’s funny,’ said Vanda.

  ‘I can only think she’s bewitched our father,’ said Una.

  They leaned together, these two inseparable sisters.

  ‘What if she never speaks again?’ said Una.

  ‘Leave her. It’s no use. And why should it concern us?’ said Vanda.

  ‘It does,’ said Una. ‘What if she has a son?’

  ‘Her hips are too narrow,’ said Vanda. ‘And anyway, she might well collapse altogether under the weight of our father.’ The sisters laughed. ‘He’ll make mincemeat of you, my girl.’

  And the morning dragged on, longer than many mornings before. Edith spent the time wondering how she could escape the marriage. Her father, like most of their neighbours, found himself indebted to the butcher. Before she was born, her grandfather had had a thriving business and a wastrel of a son. In less time than it took to raise a child they had become the most impoverished family in the village, not even owning a horse or a sleigh.

  She would need a sleigh to escape and whoever she borrowed it from would be in trouble with the butcher. She couldn’t do that. It would have to be on her own without any help.

  By midday, the sisters agreed there was not much to be done without the fish.

  ‘We will be here tomorrow,’ said Una. ‘Early to start cooking for the betrothal supper. And I want to see this house tidy.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ they said together, picking up their baskets.

  It was late afternoon when Lena came again into the yard to ask, ‘Has Misha come back? I don’t know what I’d do if…’ She stopped. ‘Oh, Edith—’ She took her friend’s hand and kissed it. ‘This is how you feel – I’m so sorry.’

  No one knows how I feel, thought Edith. Everyone’s loss is different. Misha will be back. She took Lena inside, made tea and they waited.

  ‘I’ll have to go soon,’ said Lena, her eyes filled with tears. ‘The miller’s son expects his tea to be on the table on time.’

  The women looked up as they heard the latch on the gate and footsteps on the verandah.

  ‘Your father?’ said Lena.

  Edith shook her head. She knew too well the sound of her father’s swaying steps. She went to the door where Misha was smiling, holding a fish wrapped in a cloth. Before he could say what had delayed him, Lena ran to him. Misha was surprised that she should have been concerned.

  ‘I stayed at a farm. I thought it best to travel in daylight.’ He stopped, seeing the tears in Lena’s eyes. ‘Were you worried about me?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ said Lena.

  ‘You are?’

  She nodded.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘It’s what you wanted.’

  He looked at Edith and realised that she understood the implication of what Lena was saying. Of course she did. Lena would have told her.

  Lena moved away from Misha as they heard the sound of the gate. They waited, hardly daring to breathe, as if just by being seen together, it would be enough for their secret to be known.

  The snow muffled the cabinet maker’s footsteps. They heard him cursing and then silence. Edith opened the door and saw her father flat on his back in the snow. Misha helped Edith get him to his feet.

  ‘Have you got the fish?’ asked the cabinet maker. Misha gestured at the cloth parcel on the table. ‘He’s got the fish, bring the man a drink! I tell you, Misha, the sooner this bitch is off my hands, the better.’ He went to the cupboard.

  ‘Look at me, Edith. I’m taking another bottle of wine. Because it doesn’t matter. The more I drink, the more your bridegroom brings me. You and your silence can go to hell.’ He wheeled round the room. ‘Oh, here’s little Lena,’ he said as she moved out of his way. ‘Now, she’s a sensible girl, she got married.’

  Misha said, ‘That’s as good as saying the vixen was sensible to be caught in a trap.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘No,’ said Misha.

  The cabinet maker sat down at the table. ‘Sit, young man, sit and have a drink with me.’ He poured the wine into an invisible glass. It ran onto the table and through the cracks. Edith mopped it up.

  ‘I think I’ve pissed myself,’ her father said, laughing. He stood, his trousers wet, and an acrid smell of wine and urine filled the room.

  Misha helped him to bed.

  ‘I have to go,’ said Lena when Misha returned.

  Edith watched him walk Lena to the gate.

  ‘Thank you for your silence,’ he said as he came back into the kitchen. ‘You heard what I thought would never find a voice. One day, Edith, things will be better.’

  She put her head to one side and with her arm played an imaginary violin.

  ‘I will find him,’ Misha said. ‘I made a silent promise to you that I would. Did you hear it?’

  Edith nodded. And realised she couldn’t leave the village until she knew what had happened to Demetrius.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Between Her Words

  Good as their word, Vanda and Una arrived early to help prepare for the betrothal supper. Edith heard them in the yard arguing about Una’s daughter, Sorina.

  ‘You made her go there on her own to clean our father’s house?’ said Vanda.

  ‘Sister, I’m too busy to do it,’ said Una. ‘And it will teach her not to go talking rubbish.’

  ‘She came to me, no one else, me, and told me what happened at the inn. You should take better care of your daughter.’

  ‘Well, that’s rich, coming from someone who has so little love for their own son. Don’t tell me how to bring up my daughter.’

  Edith opened the door and went out onto the verandah.

  ‘You still haven’t swept the snow from the steps,’ said Una and, without so much as a good morning, bristled uninvited into the house and put her basket on the kitchen table. ‘Is the parlour aired?’ Receiving no reply, she snapped, ‘I’m not going through another day of your childish silence. You’d better find your tongue or how can the rings be exchanged?’

  ‘Enough,’ said Vanda. ‘Enough.’

  ‘What?’ said Una.

 
‘You heard me.’

  ‘What’s got into you?’ She sniffed. ‘I see that Misha’s back. I told you there was no need to worry. And still you bite off my head over nothing.’

  Vanda patted down her skirt. ‘Let’s just get on with this.’

  ‘There’s certainly plenty to do. And this mute, stubborn girl to deal with. Is the dough rising? No. Is the table laid? No.’

  ‘Quiet,’ said Vanda. ‘Leave it be. I’ve brought the bread. And cakes and biscuits.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before we set off? Anyway, that isn’t the point. The betrothal supper is a test to see how Edith is going to run our father’s house. I would have thought…’

  ‘Would you want to run our father’s house and live under his roof again?’ asked Vanda. Una didn’t reply. ‘As Edith has no voice I will say it for her: neither you nor I want to go near that pigsty.’

  An awkward silence fell between the two sisters. Una went into the parlour and came back with the log basket.

  ‘Here,’ she said to Edith. ‘Logs. Go and fill it now, girl.’

  Edith didn’t move. She didn’t care if this meal was never cooked. If nothing was done she would consider it to be too much.

  ‘Logs,’ repeated Una.

  To Edith’s surprise Vanda said, ‘Leave her.’

  ‘Are you quite well, sister?’ said Una. ‘What’s come over you? Why are you angry with me? Surely it’s…’

  ‘I’m angry at what we put up with,’ said Vanda.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This. This betrothal.’