The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘She’ll never be matched now. No one will have her, not even poor Wladek.’

  Sissy cannot find it in her heart to even pity Wladek. She has got what she has wished for most fervently. She has got her Papa back. Nothing else matters.

  Maria will be accommodated on the lowest rung of household service. She will be a pantry maid, but, Mother says, if she works hard and applies herself, who knows what advancement she could make. She is pretty, after all, Mother says, eyeing her meaningfully.

  The bruise on her face is still yellow when Felix takes the cart out to drive her to Bydgoszcz; from there she will take a train to Poznan, where her new employers will meet her. A sister in the outside world! In Great-Grandma Dulska’s city. Under other circumstances, Sissy would have envied Maria the chance. But watching her drive away into the dusk, bruised, tearful and shamed, Sissy knows there is no cause for celebration. Maria is venturing out into the world without her father’s blessing.

  COME SEPTEMBER THE pig is killed. Sissy is kept home from school. Papa sends her to the gate to look out for Kazek Wolski, the man from the village who will oversee the killing. He is a heavy, rough-looking man, with a red, jowled face crowned by a thin covering of stubble. Sissy has never seen a pig killed – Mother usually hunted the young ones away when Kazek came. But now that Maria has gone, Sissy is not considered young any more.

  Mother has moved the kitchen table out into the yard and has spent the morning sharpening knives. Sissy will never forget that sound, the dry, grating bite of steel on steel, the glinting danger of blades. She loiters in the kitchen, fingering the familiar globes of cups as Kazek and Papa go about their grisly business in the yard. Even before they reach the outhouse, the sound of their shuffling footsteps alerts the chosen pig and it sets up a fearsome squealing. It dashes for the open door and finds itself cornered in the yard. The noise is deafening, the animal’s shrill, panicky shrieks as the men close in on it, weakened by a day’s fasting and its own sweaty fear. Kazek guffaws triumphantly above the squealing din and Sissy covers her ears, not knowing which she finds more upsetting, the pig’s cries or Kazek’s snorting laughter. Even when they finally catch the pig the squealing continues as they lash it to the kitchen table with ropes. Mother, who has been watching the spectacle in the yard, calls out to Sissy. She cowers, hoping that if she cannot be found they will go ahead without her. It is not even that she likes the pigs. They are always hungry, gnawing away at the piggery door, snouting for food. They are the fat, greedy kings of the farmyard and yet, when they are let out, they roll themselves in the muck and live in their own dirt. She has seen animals killed before – Mother’s poor chickens and geese – but this is different. It is the premeditation of it; Kazek Wolski brought from the village and the ritualistic glee he takes in his trade. The pig is fattened up purposely and there is the entrapment, the brute force of its killing. Both Papa and Kazek downed a shot of vodka before taking on the hysterical creature, as if they were preparing for battle.

  ‘Sissy!’ Papa roars. ‘Get yourself out here.’

  She steps gingerly outside. Russet crackle of leaves underfoot and the pungency of smoke. Her eyes smart. A fire smoulders in the centre of the yard, on which a vat of water steams. The smoke swoons softly in the air, drifting over Papa and Kazek as they pore over the pig splayed on the table, its twitching limbs stuck out as it shits hotly. Mother hands Sissy a large basin and orders her to crouch on one side of the table. Kazek lifts the knife and with one deft slice he slashes the pig just below its flabby, cloth-like ear. The sharpened knife slides easily through the pig’s quivering, blubbery flesh. Savage and wounded, the pig screams, its cries rending the air. Sissy shuts her eyes tightly as a great rush of blood, thick and hot, spurts into the basin she holds. But she cannot shut out the noise, the yelping, pleading, ear-splitting screams. Her stomach heaves as the blood leaves a clotted trail on her apron and snags in her hair. For fifteen minutes she sits in the stench of slaughter, her eyes fixed on the spattered dust at her feet until Kazek puts the animal out of its misery and plunges it through the heart. A fresh gorge of blood is released, but at least it is quiet now; the silence so shocking it almost hurts. Even the blink of her eyelids sounds monstrous.

  After that day schooling is over for Sissy. Someone has decided. Mother, Papa? Walter takes her place at the village school. He is tall now, as high as her elbow, and summers in the fields have made him nut-brown and hardy. He is no longer a baby; she has missed his babyhood. He does not like her to fuss over him. She finds it hard to stop herself. But she has to smuggle embraces from him – ruffling his corn-coloured hair in passing, buttoning him into his coat, knotting the laces on his boots, or taking his small rough hand in hers as she walks him as far as the shrine in the mornings.

  ‘Pay attention now, won’t you,’ she urges him. ‘Be a good boy and learn all you can.’

  Walter pulls a face.

  ‘I hate school,’ he says, ‘learning useless things.’

  He is a bright boy, but he has no time for books. Sissy envies him his unwanted schooling. She steals his books when he is in bed; she reads voraciously. Imperial history, the great march of monarchies.

  She cannot understand her love for Walter, accompanied as it is by a dangerous undertow. The feel of him reassures her, the lovely swell of his cheek, the bony bravery of his small, scarred knees, his grey gaze. Touching him will keep her safe. She waves after him fondly. The countryside murmurs about her. Leaves shiver. There is the plangent call of birdsong. Walter hardly gives her a backward glance, turned as he is towards the outside world while she stands fixed. Fixed and filled with a seething tide of something close to hatred, so strong she feels that she could do him harm. She tries to shake the feeling off, but it clings to her. She turns back towards the house. There are sheets to be washed and apples to be collected from the orchard. She retreats into the darkness of the house, her head full of pickling and sewing and jam-making. Useful things.

  She cooks and cleans. She sows potatoes. She sets cabbages and beets and radishes. She soaks the dirty clothes, then boils them in layers sprinkled with wood ash so the lye will percolate. She hawks the laundry to the river and scrubs until her fingers are raw. She helps Mother to cure the ham. They brew kvass from stale bread for the thirsty work of the summer months. She and Mother sweat through several seasons in the dark kitchen with the door and windows tightly shut. Sissy feels she will never remove the grime of earth from underneath her fingernails or the smell of smoke from the tiny roots of her hair. But there are rewards. Papa, returning home to such industry, is mellow. She serves him in the evenings – potatoes and bacon pieces fried in lard, or dumplings in beet soup. She is a good cook. Even Mother notices her light hand with pastry.

  ‘Lovely stuff,’ Papa says as he pushes back his chair from the table and belches approvingly.

  But certain things are forever lost. She can no longer touch him. An attempted embrace would be lethal. A kiss would be an outrage. She is too old for that now. She is twelve years of age and feels already spent.

  Papa gave the house a fresh coat of lime. It was as dazzling as an unexpected snowfall. Sissy saw it as a celebration, a fresh start. But if she had wormed her way back into the heart of the family, Felix still remained stranded outside. He slept now in the store, as if this was where he belonged, amid broken furniture and wood shavings and food saved up for the lean times before harvest. It was warm and evil-smelling in there, like a furry cave. In the summers he took the horse grazing at night and slept wherever the grass was lush, giving the horse a long tether. He would take Papa’s gun and go out hunting in the fields, killing rabbits and birds which he cooked over a brazier in the yard. It made Felix seem like some benign predator who tramped out in the dawn and went about some vital business of survival. Mother worried about him. When he was a child she had known how to care for him, but now that he was grown, she viewed him with a fearful eye. She knew how to deal with Papa, how to humour and appease him, but Felix wa
s a different matter. She was scared now to be alone with him. Sissy was the only one to approach Felix, but she did it cautiously as if he were a wild animal who must not be frightened by sudden movements. She watched him carefully, not because she was afraid of him, but to view his extravagant bereavement. Felix had fallen in love.

  Johanna Grabowska was a girl from the village. Sissy remembered her from the schoolroom, though she was several years older. She had a mane of grape-coloured hair and pale, plump skin. Her hands were like small peaches. Felix had nursed his infatuation with her from afar, following her home from the schoolhouse, haunting the fields near her father’s house. Johanna had been flattered, not by Felix’s attention, but by the attention of anyone. She was a kind-hearted girl and so she greeted him daily with a coy, teasing kind of smile. And Felix, mistaking this for encouragement, had decided to make a declaration. Merely that. When she started to back off he took her roughly in his arms and shook her, to make her see, he insisted afterwards, to make her see. But she had extricated herself from his insistent clutches and ran screaming to her father, saying Felix Schanzkowski had tried to force himself upon her. He was a madman, she said, and should be locked up. Poor Felix, Sissy thought. He had been told often enough that he was a dolt, but no one had warned him that dull-wittedness precluded him from love.

  In the old days Papa would have cornered Felix and thrashed him as he had often done before, as much out of disappointment over what he was not as for anything he might have done. But Felix was a strong fifteen-year-old. He had inherited his father’s build, if not his temperament, and his slowness had schooled him in defending himself with his fists. His mind might be dull, but he was quick on his feet and as alert as the small animals he so efficiently murdered.

  ‘The boy’s touched,’ Papa said to Mr Grabowski, whom he confronted in the yard. ‘If he were normal he would have had his way with her. There’s no damage done, is there? You just tell your Johanna to stay away from him. Egging him on, like that.’

  Mr Grabowski, a small, timid man with a sharp nose and shrewd eyes, had been expecting at least a show of remorse.

  ‘I’m warning you, Schanzkowski,’ he said, wagging a thin finger at Papa, who towered bullishly over him, ‘if anything like this happens again … on your head be it. He’s your son.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Papa agreed wearily, ‘he’s my son.’ He looked accusingly at Mother.

  After Mr Grabowski left, he turned on her.

  ‘You talk to him,’ he ordered, ‘it’s a woman’s job.’

  Mother did not talk to Felix; nobody did. They left him to his solitary grief. In the evenings Sissy would sometimes sit with him in the murky confines of his lair. He wept copiously. He avoided her gaze. Sissy knew why. Everywhere he went now there was taunting, the sly asides if he went into the village, every woman giving him a wide berth. He had acquired danger, though when Sissy saw him thus, the loud sniffling, the large childish tears as he rocked back and forth, she wondered what any woman could possibly fear from him. She was fascinated by his decline. This, she thought, truly was madness. It was as if this was Felix’s destination from the moment he had betrayed himself in front of Papa all those years ago. He could not hide his weakness then; now he seemed to glory in it. He had become what Papa had always suspected he was – a dumb, braying beast who could not control his urges.

  ‘Johanna,’ he would bleat, ‘Johanna, my Johanna.’

  As if he had been reduced to living and breathing her name.

  Sissy tried to tell him how unworthy Johanna was of his stricken passion, but if he heard he took no notice. Johanna, too, was stupid, but in a different way from Felix. She was a silly girl, giddy with the power of her own body, her capacity to madden. Sissy envied her effusive good looks, her startling hair. But what Felix had thought of as a vague dreaminess was simple heedlessness; Johanna did not know what to do with herself. If I had those looks, Sissy thought to herself, I could slay men.

  There is a cry in the middle of the night. Sissy wakes out of a dreamless sleep to a sound like the silvery caw of a gull. It comes from the settle bed close to the hearth, where Walter sleeps. Sissy tiptoes into the kitchen. She does not know why she is being so quiet. From the other room she can hear the sharp growl of Papa’s snores. Walter is sitting up in bed, his face blemished by night shadows.

  ‘What is it,’ she asks him, ‘a bad dream?’

  He nods sadly.

  She sits next to him on the tormented bed. He curls in close to her. Gratefully she puts her arm around his shivering shoulders and draws him in. She presses her lips to the crown of his head. She remembers a time when she could have felt the flutter of his fontanelle there. Now it is covered over by matted hair.

  ‘There, there. Tell Sissy all about it.’

  He is being pursued, by whom he cannot say, through the orchard and down the ferny path to the river. It is dark and he is running, running for his life. Behind him, an older, stronger set of footsteps is gaining on him. There are the sounds of snapping twigs as his pursuer pounds after him. If he makes it to the river he will be all right. The water will kill the smell of his fear, salty and piercing in his own nostrils, and will shake off the pursuer. He reaches the river and wades in, but suddenly he loses his footing and is propelled downwards by some force above. He can see a thrashing on the surface, but it is not of his own making. Something is holding him down, some heavy weight of stone which bears down on his chest. His lungs are bursting; he opens his mouth … and comes to, aghast, swallowing great mouthfuls of air. The sheets are soaked.

  The dream recurs. It is the only secret Sissy shares with Walter. In those midnight hours in the mulberry gloom of the kitchen, she is allowed to baby him, to caress his fingers or brush his temple with her fingertips and croon softly to him. She often sits with him long after he has sunk restlessly back into sleep. Only then can she glimpse the baby that he once was. She has seen his soul; she has counted his milk teeth. Slumber irons out the hardnesses of rough wind on his cheeks and the boyish swagger which marks his waking hours. His gentle, easy breathing obliterates the raucous hollers of war cries, the urgent physicality of boyish play. Only his fists are clenched, as if in readiness for the next schoolyard scrap, or the next night demon.

  A year has gone by and there is no word of Maria. Apart from a short note at the start griping about how hard the work was, how her hands were ruined from the bleach, how cramped their quarters were, there has been no news of her. Sissy is disappointed. She misses Maria, her presence around the house, her gleeful chatter, her knowing air. She was Sissy’s signpost. Where Maria went, Sissy might follow. She feels the solitude of being the only girl in the house now (she does not count Mother; Mother was never a girl). When Maria left she had thought of her as an extension out there in the great world. Maria’s presence in Poznan had given Sissy a foothold there; now she is adrift and Sissy has no way of placing her. Mother’s letters to Maria are returned. She frets. She has always had a soft spot for Maria. A relative dispatched to the house where she worked is told that she has left, under a cloud.

  ‘Surprise, surprise,’ Papa says.

  ‘Maybe she’s found a better position,’ Mother says.

  ‘On her back,’ Papa says, ‘more than likely.’

  Sissy marvels at Papa’s unrelenting absolutism. He has large feelings, she knows. Passion and rage battle within him. But he cannot deal in lesser currencies, the small change of gentleness, the mere coinage of sentiment. These he treats as irritations, trifling, female. When the farmyard cat produces a litter of six kittens he fetches a sack from the store and throws the scraggy bundles of fur into it. Sissy can still hear the furious scrabblings as he lifts the writhing bag and plunges it into the rain barrel. But Papa does not hear their wretched squealing nor even Walter’s pleas to save them. He had stayed up all night to watch them being born. He carried the runt of the litter around in the crook of his arm for days. Sissy will not forget the look on Papa’s face as he drowns the ki
ttens. Flinty, insouciant. He is deaf to all wheedling. He is all power and no mercy.

  HER BLOOD CAME in the spring of her thirteenth year. She woke to find her nightshirt soaked and a stickiness between her legs where the blood had dried, leaving a rusty stain. She thought she was having a baby. She had seen the cow calving, lying ruined and almost dead in the byre as Papa dragged forth a slimy young one, blood to his elbow. She remembered watching as the calf, half-mad it seemed to her, staggered to its spindly legs and fell about in the blood of its own making. Now it was happening to her, the bad fruit of her secret longing. She lay quite still, hoping that she had woken from a dream and when she looked again there would be no blood, no shame. But no, the ruinous blood was everywhere. She must have crushed the baby to death with the weight of her sleep so that all that was left were these clotted remains. She leaped out of bed, pulled off the sheets and bundled them together with her nightshirt. She dressed quickly, the sour, fecund smell of stale blood in her nostrils. Whatever she had done she must hide the evidence. She tiptoed out of the room and through the kitchen, her soiled bundle under her arm. Alarm and guilt came over her in waves, making her skin prickle and her mouth dry. She must not be discovered. She knew what happened to young girls who had babies.

  The year before last Julianna Sikorska, already big with child, had had her head shaved and been led through the village in a halter. She had been made to stand for hours in the blistering heat of a midsummer’s day as young boys and men gathered and taunted her. Some of them spat at her. Sissy had not properly understood then what Julianna’s crime was, and Mother had hurried her on when she had tried to ask. But despite the starkness of Julianna’s public humiliation, she walked proudly down Slupia Street with her fat, healthy, bastard son, and all those selfsame villagers with their switches and spittle could do was to fall back with a kind of awe at her brassiness. She might have been a fallen woman, but she had somehow triumphed. When the child was weaned she had gone to Berlin to work, leaving the infant with her parents. It was unlikely that she would ever return to Borowy Las. But no one would forget the name of Julianna Sikorska.