by Sakiv Koch
His head tossed up with the jerk of the watchman’s club as it came free from under his chin. His forehead banged against the tiles of the terrace.
I stood staring at the first dead man I had ever seen. I gaped at the body which had turned into merely a thing from the living being it had been less than a minute ago. And my hands were directly involved in this transformation. I hugged my savior—the night watchman’s well-oiled lathi—to my chest. I was the living boy and he was the dead man only because of that club.
I looked at the corpse more closely. A black cloth masked its face so that the body appeared headless in the darkness. The ivory sheath of a knife was clasped around its waist. The dagger itself was clasped in its fisted right hand, the serrated blade glinting faintly in the washed-out starlight that reached the valley.
Slowly, as though it had already rested enough, the air began to move lazily. The trees started murmuring. I became aware that something was happening at the verge of my consciousness, at the periphery of my capacity to hear.
A ball of dissonant sound came clattering up to me—the smack of flesh striking wood, snatches of distant cries, the calling of a name to which no answer came. And then I heard a scream in my mind.
A thought composed of pure, piercing noise filled my head and jolted me into action – something even an actual cry of my mother could not have.
An actual cry would have paralyzed me, but the conception of its possibility spurred me to act. I flew to the parapet. The club went sailing into the air and landed in the grass below. I took the same way down to the ground that the dead man had taken up to the terrace a short time ago.
The club lay swathed in blades of grass that had curled around the wood, as though embracing it. As I watched the simple weapon, it looked to me like a second spine, with the grass dividing it into several vertebrae, each a source of courage and strength that I had not had before.
I picked up the club and hugged it like the protector it had become, a protector not only against outer, physical danger but also against the inner, overwhelming urge to abandon what I had decided to do and lie whimpering in some hollow far away from my home.
I went around the house as fast as I could without making too much noise and crouched behind the hedge that bordered our small front lawn. A man stood leaning against our front door, striking it lustily with a rock.
The man snarled in fury and groaned in pain alternately, raising one hand to his head every now and then. Curses and moans went hurtling past my ears as I bore down on him. The beat of my heart rose steadily in magnitude till I shook with a rhythmic tremor.
I stopped behind the black-clad monster and, suddenly, without any emotional precursor, my terror boiled over into a blind rage. Hitting him, hurting him, was no longer a dire compulsion fueled by the instinct of self-defense. It was a now full-blown desire driven by depthless anger. I lifted the club in the air and let out a cry of hatred.
The steeled ring of the lathi descended upon his head. The man turned with a howl of pure fright and tried to evade the blow with a jerk of his body. His rock slipped from his hands and dropped on his right foot. My club caught him above the right temple. It hit and widened a deep gash that already lay open in his scalp before sliding down and hitting his right shoulder blade.
The man shrieked in agony and grabbed his head with his hands. He swayed and toppled with a loud sob. He fell in the grass and tore at his mask, making wet sounds with his hands and mouth. A numbness was beginning to envelop me, but I didn't stop to look at what I had done.
The man had smashed our padlock and mangled the bolt plate. It would probably have taken him another ten minutes to force the door open.
"It's all right now," I knocked and called out gently. "Open the door, Ma."
Only silence seeped out from the pores of the scarred and chipped wood to greet my knocks and my words. "Ma," I called louder, my voice shrill with panic.
A string of sounds fell on my ears. Mother spoke so rapidly, breathlessly, and in such disbelief that her words overlapped and jumbled together. "Neel is that you Neel but how can it be you outside the door when I left you under the divan inside and asked you not to come out under any circumstances?" she cried.
The door flew open and I saw my mother's face – drawn, drained of blood, and frightened – in the starlight. I saw the scythe in her hand, the tremble of her lower lip, the dried-up course of water that had flowed from her eyes. The knot of guilt that had begun to tighten around my throat loosened and transformed into a pillar of pride.
Ma gaped at me as though I had just grown a second head or a third eye. I smiled at her, stepped forward, took her hand in mine, and pointed at the man I'd struck down. We gasped as we saw him rise to his knees shakily and then fall flat again.
"How-, what-," She was too dazed to think, speak, or move. I had to pull at her hand to take her back inside the house with me. I shut and bolted the front door. We made our way to the drawing-room in total darkness and complete silence.
Ma began to emerge out of her shock-encrusted speechlessness by the time we reached the spot where the watchman lay between the dying flames of two gutted candles. His body formed a wave of frozen agony. The strip of cloth that had covered his face lay on the floor beside his head. A fly buzzed in and out of his gaping mouth. His eyes—the injured one and the unharmed one, both now equally useless—stared sightlessly into space.
Only a stiffening of her body expressed the enormity of Ma's reaction. The small amount of relaxation she had achieved in the past minute drained out of her with the suddenness of a jolt of lightning.
Something soft and tender was hardening inside me. I had lost several years' worth of the elasticity of a child's soul in one hour.
I ran a finger over the blotched grain of the lathi where the watchman's blood had mixed with that of his killers and dried into a dark crust. It felt like an embryo of the limitless darkness outside.
I looked at the corpse of the night watchman again, at the rigidity of the unanswered plea engraved in his face, and sank to my knees in pure exhaustion of both mind and body. But my father had still not returned. I had to go look for him.
The night was only just beginning.
Chapter 6: Hope is Born
When I was a child, Ma bathed me as often in the fountain of her life-philosophy as in the stream that flowed through our valley. She told me that all people were hybrid flowers, all of us growing on a thorny and leafy stalk of life.
Some of us gave out more fragrance and were more colorful while some of us found greater satisfaction in piercing and hurting others. She said I was quarter-part lotus (Father's imprint) and quarter-part rose (Ma's influence), with one half waiting to bloom into whatever way I chose to grow up. She claimed she was herself a half-part rose, quarter-part cactus, and a quarter-part touch-me-not.
"You are a strange mix, Ma," I would say to her, using words I had often heard Father utter in response to her self-description, "but the best person God ever made in any of the many worlds in the universe."
I would then shrug and spread out my hands the way he shrugged and spread out his hands at such times. The truth was, I neither cared for nor understood abstractions of that kind.
I was interested only in the stories she told me. But listening and responding to her splashes appropriately was a rite of passage to get to the point where the far-away look in her eye would leap back from the horizon to my face. She would smile with the understanding of my eagerness before beginning a tale.
The only story she wouldn't tell me before the day we returned from Rachna's birthday party was her own. I knew many things before that day, too, and there were still many things that I didn't learn that night.
Things that I learned, episodically, over many years. For example, I knew that my paternal grandfather was a schoolmaster who had died in an accident involving a ceiling fan, but I never knew who or what my maternal grandfather was.
Ma's story, as well as her existence, began wi
th a beautiful young girl from Russia. The beautiful young girl from Russia was Ma's mother. Mother said her early life was like the summit of a high mountain, enshrouded in mist, with little visible or known about her childhood to anyone.
And though my mother had never set foot outside of India, she journeyed to her mother's birthplace in the infinite landscapes of her imagination very often, marrying facts with fancy to get a feel of what her life must have been like.
She would occasionally take me along to the outskirts of that realm through snippets of disjointed tales. But on that night, as we rode and walked back to our house from Rachna's crushed party, Mother took me farther along into her past than she had ever before.
"I don't want you to keep puzzling over what happened tonight," she said, her voice tight and her posture still stiff. "I wanted to wait for you to get a bit older before telling you everything about your grandmother and myself, but remaining silent will do more harm now."
"You're going to tell me grandma's story yet again?" I asked dejectedly. I had heard what little she had to say a dozen times already, and I was experiencing a new emotion, a state of mind I had never felt before: sadness.
"I am going to tell it to you for the first time," she said. "And I'll still not tell all of it to you tonight. You just need to know that I never intended to hide anything from you, that I shall not hide anything from you."
And then she began telling me about the woman whom I'd never seen, but without whom she (directly) and I (indirectly) wouldn't exist. Without whom, by extension, this book wouldn't exist, and you would be spared the great pain (and deprived of the little bit of joy) contained in these pages.
"Let me tell you again," Mother said in her foreword manner, "that I am filling all the gaps in my knowledge of her earliest days with my own spices here."
I nodded and listened. Mother once again made me see my grandmother through her words. She had shown me her pictures and had even taught me to speak and write her name in Russian. It had been a tough, gradual task, progressing from the complex to the simple.
Надежда
Nadezhda
Nadya
Hope. That's what Grandma's name meant—hope. Life and the prospect of living are hope. Death and deliverance are hope, too.
◆◆◆
The year was 1890. The river Volga flowed un-spanned by any bridge through Tutayev, a small city west of Yaroslavl. The little, wooly clouds born of Volga's vapor had been growing ambitious since the day before, piling up on each other to turn into an anvil-shaped monster.
The thunder-head pointed proudly to the direction in which the storm moved. A man rowed a small boat into the teeth of the storm, fighting, in equal measures, the turbulent sheet of the water underneath, the gale force of the hysterical wind, and the frightened frenzy of the one passenger he carried in his boat.
Rain boiled down like clumps of lances from the skies. Lightning struck so frequently that it stood like pale veins in the dark skin of the night.
"Fifteen minutes, just fifteen more minutes," the boatman shouted over the sound of the storm, somehow still managing to make his tone soothing.
"You have been saying that for the last half an hour," whined the old woman huddled on one of the boat’s bench seats. Her head was buried under an oilskin like a turtle's in its shell. "Oh, to know that I’ll die tonight, and you, a mere ferryman, will be my murderer."
The woman continued to prattle on, punctuating her blabbing with screams at every rumble of the clouds and every toss of the boat. She hurled curses at nature and the boatman every time she dared to draw her head out of the oilskin. On such occasions, she would look at a little light shining on the shore and hurriedly apply a flask to her mouth.
She had a narrow, angular face, with an eagle-nose whose tip hovered over her wide mouth, which always hung open, even when she was not speaking. A blue patch covered sometimes her left eye, sometimes the right, mostly hanging behind one ear, ready to be pressed into service at the whim of its owner.
The boatman, too, fixed his gaze from time to time at the light that burned in a window of his own home. He felt as though each of its feeble rays was a lifeline thrown out to him.
But he never freed his eyes from the strain of scanning the waters rushing by in front of his prow for more than a moment. He had spent his life plying his boat between those two shores, and he knew that the greatest danger came not from the ferocity of the storm itself, but from the uprooted trees rushing downstream tumultuously.
"Who will take care of my poor little Fedot when I am dead and gone?" asked the old woman, lifting her head a little when the boat was in the trough of a wave. She took another pull from her flask and cursed the boatman again.
"Isn't Fedot forty years old?" Dmitry, the boatman, asked her mildly.
"So what?" she demanded with a smack of her lips and a flash of her flask. "Is that a good reason to kill his mother off so cruelly, just because the poor child is now forty years old?"
Dmitry guided the boat alongside an old wharf just then. The hull ground against the landing with enough force to split the keel in the middle. The boat came to a halt with a jolt. The old woman shrieked. She folded herself completely under her oilskin and began to whimper loudly.
Dmitry leaped out of the boat, moored it, and looked at the quivering woman sitting in his boat.
"We're not drowning, Akilina," he said gently. "We’ve reached the shore."
"No thanks to you," Akilina said, uncovering her head and taking a longish sip from her flask. "It's the force of my prayer that got me through. Now don't just stand there, help me get out of your tub!"
Dmitry took Akilina's arm in his hand and assisted her up a winding dirt road. They came to a small cottage that stood on a bluff overlooking the river. The wind buffeted its door like a persistent knocker demanding entry. The moaning of a woman could be heard distinctly above the rattle of the windows in their frames.
Dmitry opened the door and let Akilina precede him inside. The moment she put her foot across the threshold, she metamorphosed from the hunched, nagging hag Dmitry had picked up from the village across the river into a calm, erect woman who knew her business and cared deeply for every aspect of it.
Dmitry followed her to the source of the cries—a room at the back of the house—that rang against the stone walls and caused his skin to quiver. He lifted his hands to the sides of his head, as though he would block the sound out, and dragged his feet as though reluctant to see what lay inside the room.
The fire Dmitry had left burning in a grate had deteriorated down to smoking embers. Akilina clucked disapprovingly as she entered the room. "Leaving the poor soul in darkness and cold like that. Get that fire roaring again!"
While Dmitry set about doing her bidding, Akilina lit an oil lantern and bent to look at a frail peasant woman lying in a cot. The woman looked back at her with eyes grown big with fear and pain.
She bit her underlip and turned her head from side to side to contain the sounds of her agony. She lifted a thin hand toward Dmitry, who caught it between both of his and sank to his knees by her bedside. "Irina," he said, "oh, Irina, it's my fault, my darling."
Akilina was lighting a wood stove in a corner. She raised her head and glared at him. "Your fault, young man? Propagation of life, through your lawfully wedded wife, is a fault? Where do you think the world would be without this fault of hearty lads like you, huh?"
She put a pot of water on the stove and stood up, grunting with the effort. "At least you know by now what things to prepare in advance for a midwife."
Dmitry's face blanched and he bowed his head. Irina let out a piteous moan. Akilina's brow scrunched with sudden thought and she shook her head. "Three misfortunes earlier don't mean that the baby wouldn’t survive this time, too. You know how premature my Fedot was, huh?"
The midwife brought out her flask from a capacious pocket and took a swig from it. She started to sing a ditty as soon as her mouth and the mouth of the flask p
arted ways, bustling about in making preparations for the inter-worldly transaction about to take place by her hand.
She appeared to give no mind to the writhing and moaning of Irina. Dmitry sat with his cheek pressed against Irina's hand, his body shuddering with the rapidity of his breathing.
"Why, you're still here!" Akilina said as her gaze accidentally fell upon Dmitry on the forward motion of her head after another little sip. "Go sit outside and pray for the storm to subside so that I can go back and sing my Fedot to sleep. Poor child never quite knows what to do without his mama."
Dmitry reluctantly left Irina's hand and rose to his feet. "The worst of the storm has already passed us. But I’d rather take you back in the morning. I don't want to leave Irina alone after the delivery," he said, moving toward the door.
"Gladly will I stay," returned Akilina, chuckling, "for five more rubles in addition to my fee."
"Five more?" Dmitry stopped at the door of the room for a moment and his broad shoulders sagged. He had only three roubles left after paying Akilina an exorbitant fee of eight for coming out on a night like this.
He walked toward the window in which his lantern shone like a miniature beacon visible from the black waters of the Volga. A swath of light cut across his handsome face, illuminating the battle of despair and hope raging in the muscles of his jaws, which relaxed and tightened in turns.
The howl of the wind fell outside just as the pitch of his wife's groans rose inside. He stood rigid beside the window, fighting against the pressure of heart-rending memories of infants who didn't live long enough to let him see if their eye color would remain blue like his or change to an intense green like his wife's, infants who didn't move their limbs in cyclical spasms to fill his soul with the inexpressible joy that he had anticipated for years. Boy, girl, boy. Wisps of brief visions, gone before they had had a chance to form, leaving behind voids that nothing else was able to fill.
