Sometimes their father acted oddly, as though he felt guilty and wanted to atone for his guilt: once, for example, he brought Hannusia silk ribbons from the fair, red and blue ones, like for a real maiden, and Olenka only got some nuts and raisins—eat them, and there goes your fun. Hannusia, feeling happily alien to herself—no longer Hannusia, but a real Milady Hanna—gingerly held the delicate bundle as though it were a living thing, and felt another warm and ticklish invisible bundle stir inside her. That day the family didn’t go to bed until late, the house smelled of freshly baked pies, cherry liqueur, and drunken cherries poured out of the jug, and seemed to shudder with the settling dust of the day’s commotion and the as-yet-uncooled excitement of the adults, and she, as was her custom from the time she was little, took her happiness, too large to be fit indoors, outside—to the moonlight. The moon was already high, and glowed steadily with its thin burning-silver light dented with the bluish shadows of the gorges, and as was its custom looked silently into her face in a way that promised someday it would speak—the girl felt her breath knocked out of her, like the cork from the long-kept jar: a strange force emanated from the earth like a steady breeze, and another entered her body and surged upward, raising her hair, and it seemed she was just about to rise into the air and float away, as she did in her dreams, over the orchards flooded with moonlight. In the next moment, a shapeless shadow separated itself from the barn and moved toward her: Father, she realized, and let out her breath at the same time, which felt like thumping down to the ground, only golden shivers ran up and down her body. “What are you doing standing here?” asked Vasyl. “Daddy,” she burst out, giving him a start as if he had tripped over something. “Daddy, what’s that dark spot up there on the moon?”—“Ah,” said Vasyl, “that is the brother who raised his other brother on a pitchfork, two brothers they were, Cain and Abel, and the good Lord put them up there so that people could see them and not forget about their sin, and you go to bed.” Hannusia looked at the dark streaks on the silvery face of the moon more closely—and indeed made out two small shapes that seemed to be standing somewhere far out in a field, one slightly above the other, and both oddly splayed out and between them a thin diagonal strip, like a ditch or a groove—exactly even with the top shape’s chest . . . “Why did he raise him up on a pitchfork?” she asked again, although she really wanted to ask something different; namely, Why would the good Lord keep them up there forever, on the moon, and especially the one on the pitchfork—doesn’t that hurt? Why are they not treated differently—that was the question that vexed her, deep inside: If they are both put up there for punishment, then why were they both punished equally? “Go to bed,” Vasyl replied, hoarsely and sternly, like she was an adult, and she understood, more by instinct than with child’s reason, that he had nothing more to say to her.
It was about that time that she began to grow more beautiful, all of a sudden and keenly (too soon, the womenfolk rustled among themselves, twisting their lips in judgment—unless a decent woman should turn up among them and slap her hands against her skirts: Tut on you, old hags, cawing like rooks before the snow, are you jealous of other people’s children because your own are a bother?)—as if an unseen painter-carver worked his magic on her day by day: her eyebrows grew darker and glistened like velvet, the child’s plumpness melted off her face like snow in spring, and her features acquired the angles of a royal profile fit for minting on a silver coin; her posture changed, her gait became more fluid, as though what the girl carried were not merely her budding breasts that had just began to rise beneath her blouse, but a basket of precious painted Easter eggs to be sold at the market, and the tar-black curl sprouting from the crescent-moon birthmark that burst audaciously from under her red ribbon (“The Jewish lock!”—Olenka teased her) looked like the final stroke of the master’s brush—a signature under the painting. Young lads began to click their tongues as she walked by—Who’s going to be getting you when you grow up?—and in Maria’s heart, along with pride, nestled and grew a certain disquiet, as if she had planted a homely flower and come to find a tree of unknown provenance heaving itself out from under the earth, and who knows what kind of fruit one could expect it to bear. She could guess the child was dreaming queer dreams at night, because Hannusia would wake up with a mysterious, unconscious smile that stayed on her face unhidden until noon, and wherever she went with that smile, all heads would turn in her direction, like sunflowers following the sun, all eyes longed to rest on her face, as though each urgently wanted to find out, then and there, what this mighty strange thing was that the girl held inside her. And so it went, until an old woman pilgrim on her way to Kyiv stopped to stay the night—although god only knows where she really was headed, alone like a stone, and why she chose to knock on their door, which had nothing to distinguish it from the others on the street, but she entered as assuredly as if they had been awaiting her. Tacit, almost a little scary, all in black, she looked up from the bench at Hannusia, who had just brought in a pail of water and made to fire up the stove, and asked out of the blue: “Will you come with me to the convent, girl?”—“Goodmother, she’s much too young for a pilgrimage,” Maria replied, suddenly timid, unnerved for some reason by this old woman with deeply sunken eyes that seemed outlined by charcoal, as if their own deep-well blackness wasn’t enough. “That was not my meaning,” the old woman spoke, resonant, like a heavy church bell, and Maria’s head spun, she thought the old woman suddenly grew taller, her head reaching way up to the icons perched under the ceiling—“Your daughter, goodwife, is better off at the convent. It is not you who’s fated to find joy in her!” Maria drew her shoulders together, in an effort to chase away the sudden cold under her ribs, and spoke peaceably: “Ain’t that the truth, we raise daughters for others’ homes,” and then added, perhaps involuntarily trying to avert an ill prophecy poised like a cleaver over her older daughter, “And I’ve got two of them!” The old pilgrim fell silent, as though giving Maria time to comprehend the folly of her declaration and turn red, and Maria did indeed turn red like an obedient schoolgirl, angry at herself the whole time, and then the old woman said suddenly, gently, like an angel descended upon the house: “The younger one is no cause of grief to you, goodwife, she’ll be looked after even without you, but to this one the Lord has granted a great might, which can lead to great temptation, not in body, but in spirit, so send her to the convent, that is my good counsel.” “I don’t want to enter a convent, goodmother,” spoke up Hannusia from where she stood by the stove, and once again the room spun before Maria’s eyes: in the reddish glow of the oven, where the fire now burned gaily, her daughter’s eyes also seemed to burn like two hot coals, her face emitted a deep cherry-red heat, the ribbon had slipped on her head, and the curly dark lock snaked down her temple like a black rivulet of baked blood: magnificent she was—you wanted to kneel before her—but otherworldly, too, as though it was not her child, as though that great might the old woman named a moment ago now made itself manifest and transformed the girl in its own image. “I’m not a goodmother, I’m a holy mother,” the guest quietly corrected her: a strange, kind sadness came into her voice, the sorrow of old souls who had seen much in their lives and knew full well the futility of human vanities. “If you don’t want to, then don’t go, nobody’s forcing you, dear, it’s just how are you going to protect yourself when anyone who wishes to comes and drinks from your well and you won’t even know it?” “Pray kindly, what is your word against, Holy Mother?” Maria leaned forward, shaking off that momentary, as if spellbound, numbness, ready to shield her child with her own flesh, if need be, from whatever threatened her, but the old woman only shook her head: “What I had to tell you, goodwife, I did, and there’s nothing more I can do, it’s not in my power, except for this last small thing, in thanks for your bread and salt.” She turned to Hannusia and asked, “Fetch me some water, child, if you would be so kind, but watch you don’t spill any.” Hannusia, a good girl, obediently scooped a beaker full from the pail a
nd brought it toward her, with visible trepidation and, it seems, even gasped slightly as their hands touched—and the following instant all three women cried out in one voice: the pilgrim woman’s body, not just her hands, quivered, and she dropped the beaker—it clanged, rolled away, hit the table leg with a dull thud, and a flash of garnet, shimmery in the firelight, spread on the table. Maria, for whom things swayed and lost shape for the third time, could have sworn that what spilled was not water but wine, and on the rag that Hannusia was just wringing out—she had spun around swift as a squirrel to clean up (a heedful girl, the old lady praised her, apologizing for her awkwardness)—she clearly saw dark stains the color of royal crimson. Hannusia, on the other hand, felt them to be sticky and hot to the touch, so she hurriedly tossed the rag into the stove and closed the lid, but when she woke up in the morning (the pilgrim woman was gone: she left long before light), she saw the bedding under her stained the same red. Well, you’re a woman now, said her mother, somewhat embarrassed and thus adding to her daughter’s simultaneous pride and modesty—the guests have come to you now—reasoning, in her mind with some relief, that the old woman’s visit had been a good thing after all and that she probably wasn’t a pilgrim at all. Since that day, Hannusia no longer woke up after a night’s sleep with that mysterious smile everyone would stare at—the one that seemed to suffuse her with the light of some secret knowledge in which she knew no better than to rejoice—and perhaps should have feared—that smile vanished, washed away. The girl became more ordinary—more like common people’s children, lesser to the eye, and people also turned more kindly toward her.
And now Maria found herself intercepted at the footbridge, or by the well, by mothers of growing sons with their intentionally vague talk: the first time it happened, it was all she could do not to burst out laughing in that Maskymykha woman’s ugly face, but, being a good woman, she kept proper, teeth all but clenched, outraged to the core by the fact that any old yokel dared compare their spawn to her Hannusia: A good girl she is, to be sure, but not for your kind, you rubes! The notion that Hannusia could eventually wed one of the simple neighbors’ lads stabbed her with such a blast of anguish over her own wasted years that she nigh lost the will to live. When Vasyl, after quietly clearing his throat to get her attention, began telling her how he was approached (he, too!) by not just anyone singing Hannusia’s praises, but Markian himself, the owner of the large homestead that sat apart from the village, and that homestead, good Lord, it’s pretty as a picture, isn’t it?—she didn’t answer only because at that moment she was overwhelmed to the verge of tears by a sudden, sharp disgust at him, her husband, at his gentle throat clearing, which always seemed furtive, at the sound of him scratching the mottled rough growth on his chin, which was threaded now with silver (how had she not noticed before?), at his faded bushy eyebrows with a few particularly tough hairs like stubs of feathers on a poorly plucked chicken, at the weave of red veins on his nostrils, which made his nose look like last year’s shriveled apple—and once again, as when she was young, right after the wedding, she gagged on the pungent smell of his sweat, which at the time struck her as the smell of rotten onions but then seemed to fade away with the passing of years: she got used to it, and her soul howled like a wolf inside her—Lord, woe is me, what have I done that you punish me so? She turned away, touched her dry eyes with her fingers, waited until it passed and her voice no longer revealed anything, and then said, as good as she’d cleaved a furrow: “You make the match you want for your daughter, and leave mine in peace.” Thus it was first spoken between them, what later, once the girls had grown up, entered the talk about the two of them evermore, neither to be washed over nor scrubbed off: they were Father’s daughter and Mother’s daughter. And there you have it, a woman’s life—before you know it, there’s a daughter ready to be wed, and you’re an old woman, no matter that your brows are still jet black—and lo! What about my own life, what is this ice-hole that swallowed it in the daily grind of house-field-garden-chickens-geese-pigs-cows, infant maladies, sore back at sundown, and you don’t remember when you last looked up at the sky? Shush, old woman, keep quiet, lest you sin . . .
Up ahead of her, however, up ahead Maria could see a straight path running through the hills on a sunbeam, making her dizzy with the tickling inside her head, just like that night with the mysterious wayfaring woman, and along that path went her Hannusia, and the whole world marveled at her beauty and her stately bearing, but who’s that clinging to her?—ah, can’t you see, it is her mother—of course, Maria nods graciously, herself clad in gold and silver, floating ahead like a peacock—then the vision would fade into a glittering rainbow fog, and Maria would again go at her work as keen as if it were a dance, as if accompanied by invisible musicians at her pleasure, and only the knowledge that it was just around the corner—she only had to persevere a wee bit longer, bide her time a little more, good things come to those who wait—this incredible, unheard-of fortune for her child, and only this knowledge made it possible for Maria to endure year after year, so it should be no surprise that every intrusion from the outside, every human interference into that which alone fed her eternally hungry soul, vexed her as much as Vasyl’s touch at night, when he wanted her and she wanted to sleep, and sleep, and nothing more, so she’d kick at him like an unbroken mare. The unease that would steal up on her did not come from people, or from the way that they treated Hannusia, but rather from the intuition that behind that rainbow fog in which her daughter’s future remained hidden thus far, something was beginning to stir, something was being kneaded and shaped in order to soon be irrevocably brought to the table: eat till you burst—something very different from what she could dream up in her head, different if only because it was real, no longer imagined, and thus inevitable. The pilgrim woman was the first warning sign, and not too long after Maria was given the second: the three of them went to the annual fair to sell wheat, leaving Olenka at home, and at the fair, in the midst of the crowd, Hannusia suddenly stood stock-still, unable to take her eyes off the salt traders’ caravan dealing in swift trade in dried roach fish and bream—“God help you, what is it?” Maria tugged at her shoulders, alarmed by her chalk-white face. “Mother,” Hannusia asked in a hoarse, almost bass voice, “why is that lady sitting on that wagon?”—“What lady, where?”—“Over there, can’t you see her”—“There’s no lady there, come to your senses!” Where Hannusia pointed, a not-yet-old, well-built salt trader ran a brisk trade, flashing at his buyers a white-toothed smile bright against his tanned face, and himself looking like a sturdy Gypsy bear in his open shirt, and judging by the merriment around him, he had the wit to go with his haggling, and Maria’s heart skipped a beat: It’s him!—the one she dreamed of marrying, only fifteen years older!—but an instant later she knew she was mistaken and took a deep breath, wiping the sweat off her forehead: “What lady, what is the child on about?”—“She’s sitting right over there, Mother, right beside that man, all in white, and her fillet is white, and her surcoat, must be a yeoman’s wife, if not a sheriff’s”—“Bless you child, are you possessed? Cross yourself and spit over your shoulder”—“Mother, I am telling you, she is right there, let’s go over, you can ask her yourself who she is.” Wrought by unease, Maria did ask someone, just for the sake of asking, which village the salt traders were from and found out it was far away, and that’s where the matter ended and would have been forgotten altogether, if not for the fact that some time later they had word that the village where the salt traders returned from Crimea was beset by the plague: their own community hummed with worry, the most fearful began tarring their gates, and old people counseled that if the pestilence were to move in their direction, the village should, by ancient custom, have a plowing-round, whereby all the able-bodied women, as many as there are, come together at night and harness themselves to plow a furrow around the village that not a pestilence would dare cross as long as no man spies on the doing. Maria went about as if struck by a beam, for she had no dou
bt now that at the fair her Hannusia did indeed see none other than the plague itself on that wagon of fish, and if only she had listened to her child, perhaps it could have been averted—by not letting the caravan go on and burning their cargo, although, Maria justified herself in her heart, who there would have, based on the word of a mere girl, consented to send up in smoke a half year’s income? They’d have been laughed out of town, and done no good. Maria would sigh heavily, rising before the cock’s crow, when sleep is most fragile, for the soul is most tormented by its sins, and kneel and bow her head to the ground before the icons, begging the Lord to forgive her, but at the bottom of all her however fervent prayers lay one stifled plea she didn’t dare give voice to, a hard black stone: Our Lord and Maker, spare my child if you have blessed her with such knowledge! There was much more demand than obedience in that plea, and so the walnut-hued faces on the icons, perhaps tanned up in the eternally ethereal altitudes where they resided, remained unmoved. The Holy Virgin pursed her delicate tight lips in reproach, and the flame of the votive beneath the icon flickered only from Maria’s own breath. Be that as it may, the plague, praise the Lord, passed their village.
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