Milena and I will never allow you to marry him, he whistled.
So, said Doroteja. She’s now become a friend of yours?
We all know each other here.
Then where’s my baby?
Well, the unformed souls, you see—
Michael and I were meant to live together. You’re the one being selfish.
His eyes narrowed, and a vertical crease came into his forehead as he cocked his head at her in the way he always used to when they were about to argue. Then, with a screech, he swooped in on her, hoping to bite her face. Knowing his moods, Doroteja was ready, and flicked a silver bullet into his mouth. Choking and retching, he shot back down into his grave.
2
Doroteja fed the geese, and then strung garnet crystals to sell. She washed her Sunday dress. She peddled eggs in front of the church, and turned them all into copper coins. When she got home she locked the door. She hid her profits beneath the fireplace, in the hole where she kept her magic treasures: two candles made by a virgin, four nails from a child’s coffin. Then she filled a basket of plums and went to see Michael’s daughters. So adorable in their white-rimmed ruffled caps, they ran into her arms, crying out: Aunt Doroteja!
How’s your mother?
Father made us promise not to tell.
Never mind. Here are some plums for you. When I go I’ll take my basket.
Thank you, Aunt Doroteja; you’re always good to us. We love you more than—
Where’s your father?
Here he comes now.
Long ago, before he married, he had felt something for her; now he was a wormy ball of equivocations. You may be sure that Doroteja did her best. When he greeted her, she rolled her eyes, smiled and adorably shook her head, all at once. But he was curt, even wary. That made her all the more jealous of Milena, whose postmortem existence resembled the idleness of some rich girl whose only work is to string beads. When she said farewell, he replied with relief. The daughters brought her basket. They begged permission to help Doroteja bundle up the wheat.— Never mind, girls, she said. Your father needs you.— Looking back over her shoulder, she saw Michael staring cautiously out at her, his forehead higher and paler than before. Then he closed the shutters.
So she returned to her dark house, where she kept weeping, weeping, like some dead woman whose every attribute but sorrow has rotted away. She would have cooked him mushroom soup with barley for Christmas. Because she so truly loved, her story is chased with flowers and diamonds, like the leather cover of an ancient book.
3
Doroteja was having one of those nightmares we all know, in which the wind becomes the rustling of a dead lady’s dress as she ascends the stairs. When she awoke, she sought to persuade herself that the dream was good, and signified treasure from beyond the grave.
She milked her cow, fed the geese and collected the hens’ eggs. She gathered firewood from the forest. She weeded her field, rescued plums from the birds, milked the cow again, and then life was as beautiful as a Bohemian sunset with a raven hovering over the mountains, or was it merely a fly on the windowpane? She ate supper: barley in milk. She prayed to Saint Polona, Saint Vitus, Saint Adelbert, Saint Wenceslaus, Saint Procopius and of course Saint Doroteja, her own patron saint. As soon as it got dark, off she went to the churchyard, where the memory-stones resemble sheaves of wheat leaning against each other. Singing the spell that her mother had taught her, she knelt at her mother’s headstone, anxious lest some evil thing might come upon her from behind. She poured out a little milk. And up rose her mother, spinning thread as she came, clenching between her knees the grooved distaff as tall as a scepter.
Mother, I’ve set my cap at Michael.
He’s not for you. Milena has him.
Mother, I want a husband and a child.
You won’t get either.
Then what should I do?
Die alone.
So back home went Doroteja, weeping, weeping, back to her house whose eaves ran nearly down to the ground.
4
The daughters died; Doroteja refused to believe any ill. But if only she had given them medallions of Saint Polona! At night she prayed for Milena to return alone beneath the earth.
Harvesting clover, washing beets in the creek and then confessing her sins, Doroteja endured that summer. Even now her love persisted, like some half-rotted scrap of flower-knitted lace. After Michael and Milena’s disappearance, she accompanied her neighbors to burn down their house, singing hymns, with her hair braided up in a cornucopia, and Father Hauser complimented her voice. Outside sat Milena’s mother, who was huge-eyed and pale, with her chin up and her mouth open, her hair tucked decently in her kerchief and her withered hands straining not to claw at one another in the lap of her faded striped skirt. Everyone both expected to make horrible discoveries and hoped to find supernatural treasures. Hans Trollhand, looking fearsome in his black-and-scarlet cloak, now kissed his torch to the thatch. As the flames ascended, people dispersed, and some were hiding objects in their pockets. As for Doroteja, in a recess beneath the straw mattress where the daughters had slept, she found an Easter egg red as sunrise, with yellow grapevines crossing upon it. She had made that for Michael the year before he married Milena. The next year she had made him a black egg painted with a golden castle; Milena must have destroyed that one.
Doroteja joined the quotidian line of men and women bending in the fields, scything hay, sweating, groaning because their backs hurt. So she helped her neighbors in exchange for a mouse’s share of the crop. In the forest she gathered mushrooms and berries. She dried her plums and pears on the kiln. At a rich man’s funeral she got to taste bread with horseradish sauce and small scraps of smoked meat.
Come autumn she set out for the cemetery and called upon her dead father.
What now, Doroteja? Has Christ returned at last?
Father, father, I can’t endure to live and die alone.
She remembered how he used to be in life, hunching forward, turtling down his shaggy head, gripping his spade as he stared furiously into any stranger’s eyes. Now he was not much more than a gust of fireflies. It would have been different had she poured out blood for him.
Father, are you lonely here?
You never knew anything. How do you expect to get a husband?
Help me, father!
Then lower your ear and I’ll sing you a charm . . .
Dead man’s breath, a tongueless whisper and the crickets singing, that was all she heard.
5
Through the fall she kept the red Easter egg under her pillow. Sometimes she kissed it, because Michael had touched it and kept it. But it began to haunt her, floating before her eyes even when she was working in the fields. After she had dreamed about it three times, she realized that it was bewitched, so she smashed it, and maggots crawled out of it.
That night Doroteja set out for the cemetery and poured out milk for Michael’s daughters, singing spells to draw them forth by their names. Here they came: Maria, Ludmila and then Markétka, the youngest—sad little girl with the watchful eyes, her dirty dress still too large for her. They rushed up wailing and trembling, with moonlight shining through their bones. They struggled to embrace her, but of course Our Redeemer permits no such perversions. Wriggling and fluttering, they breathed on her the faintest cool breath of earth. Doroteja burst into tears.
Aunt Doroteja, they said, will you be our mother now?
Did your mother murder you?
We promised not to tell—
Aunt Doroteja, may we live with you? We’ll be good; no one will ever see us.
We’ll help you; we’ll count grains of rice—
In much the same way that magic can kindle a shadow upon the sun’s disk, so the loneliness of those three dead girls cooled Doroteja’s sorrow, and so she invited them home. No living soul ever entered that house but
her elder sister, and when she came the ghosts hid in the pile of firewood, squeaking more faintly than rats. They never grew up, of course; they loved to ride on her shoulders when she went to the creek to wash her laundry. Maminka they called her. One might say that her home was as haunted as an old Gothic castle, but Doroteja forgot to look at it that way. When she went to confession, she neglected to mention her visitors to Father Hauser, because he was so fond of her that she thought it cruel to disappoint him. In the evenings when she sat eating her barley cooked in milk, they pretended to share with her, but in truth their spoons were too heavy for them to lift, and the iron pot burned them if they hovered too close by it. After dark, Doroteja would go out the back door and spill a few drops of milk into the dirt, whispering their names, very quietly, so that the neighbors would not hear.
They were as helpful as could be when she went to the forest to get mushrooms and berries, for they could fly off in three different directions, then come winging back to whisper in her ear. They could not scare away birds, but they could sit up in the plum tree watching for them, and whenever some bold robins or crows descended in a robber’s band, one of the girls would fly squeaking into Doroteja’s ear, so that she could save her fruit. When Doroteja went to church, attended a witch-burning or set out to sell eggs and garnets, those three darling girls watched over her field, sinking down into the dirt to count her beets, carrots and lovely yellow potatoes.
Just as ancient copper coins go green, so went Doroteja’s life, and by the time she was old, what others imagined to be her desperate solitude had become as insignificant to her as the splash of a crabapple in a deep well.
THE JUDGE’S PROMISE
And finally let the Judge come in and promise he will be merciful, with the mental reservation that he means he will be merciful to himself or the State; for whatever is done for the safety of the State is merciful.
The Malleus Maleficarum, ca. 1484
1
In old Moravia, between the towns of Javicko and Svitavka, you may, if the scale of your map permits, descry the little village of H——, which has few monuments to speak of (not that the patriotic citizens of this locality are entirely conscious of the aforesaid fact); accordingly, its very existence has been passed over in every edition of Baedeker’s guide. I have been told that the schoolmaster once made courageous epistolary efforts to remedy the omission, for he is a man of charity, who readily takes it upon himself to improve the defects of others. As for his neighbors, including even those august fellows in whose name the old lamplighter hangs out red or black flags from the balcony of the town hall, I fear that few could definitively inform you whether Baedeker is some great lord ensconced in a castle down in Lombardy or an item of dairy-tackle of which they need not trouble to learn the use, thanks to the superior methods of milking (not to mention cheesemongering) in their enlightened district of Bohemia.
Now, the burghers of H—— are known above all else for their devotion to duty, and the schoolmaster even promised to show me a citation which some Margrave or possibly even an Emperor once bestowed upon the Mayor; unfortunately, his good wife kept topping off our tankards with empyrean beer until we both forgot about it. But should you have any doubts about this matter, I advise you to observe the police force in action; sometimes there are as many as two officers in uniform protecting the village from evil, and the schoolmaster claims to have seen even more. At the time of this story, which takes place in 1673, although it could have been 1752, there was, unfortunately, only one man on the force, but you may rest assured that he was a full inspector, with all the powers and dignities of that office.
He was a veteran, of course, and childless—still hale but with a greying moustache. I believe he had been decorated and commended in a small war in Swabia not long before 1361. His eyes were that lovely blue-grey which comes when a silver thaler is polished. He knew which townsmen were bad, and who was merely weak, and how to torture a recalcitrant prisoner with the strappado—which he did only when ordered or when necessity struck. No good citizen had anything against him, and he greeted the neighbors with a slightly distant but in no way deficient courtesy. Had he been a Prussian, he would have bowed and clicked his heels. In Bohemia people rarely go so far as that, but in the moderately informal venue of H—— it could be seen that this inspector of ours desired to please, even if that desire must be moderated by official duty. A few ancient men who tremblingly grasp hold of life even yet remember how they used to watch him whittle toys for them when they were children, and I think I have seen the moustached oval of his face peering from a dark high window in the town hall. Nobody ever asked him what he wanted out of life, which was as well, since in those days life was parsimonious. He aspired to promotion, of course, and perhaps even to marriage if he could afford it. Well warned by the famous tale of the hero who is lured into the arms of a lovely girl who then turns into a corpse, he kept away from love. No great career awaited him; he had nothing in particular to which he could attach himself, except for life itself.
There are epochs when we manage to convince ourselves that death is merely an inconvenience visited upon other people; but then come other periods. H—— was presently in one of those latter phases. According to Father Hauser, who gave Sunday reports on just this subject, evil had been waxing in those parts for a considerable while, doubtless because our judges weren’t burning enough witches. In the adjacent village of Neinstade, a corpse chewed and grunted so horribly in its grave that they had to disinter it, at which point it opened its teeth and exhaled a stench, from which cause several people were infected with the plague. Immediately afterward, every churchyard in old Germany became perilous. Sextons no longer dared to dig coffin-wells after nightfall, for fear that some skeleton-hand might pull them down. Vampires rose up throughout what Fleischmann has named the ill-fated Bohemian rectangle. God’s army reacted. In the neighborhood of H——, several beautiful and intelligent women had to be destroyed, just in case they might be witches. Antisocial or intellectual persons of any stripe were burned alive. Strange to say, the monsters grew worse.
No one blamed the inspector for not keeping up with the threat, but the next time the Mayor came to church, he stayed late and lent Father Hauser an edition of last year’s newspaper, which had just arrived in H——, where we kindly give others the opportunity to verify our news before we read it. It seemed that Frederick the Great had just dispatched one of his most trusted martinets to Paris, to be instructed by the Lieutenant of Police in Paris for one year. In Berlin, the Police President of Berlin now commanded a hundred-odd truncheon-smacking Exekutivepolizei, most of them former soldiers who had every quality it took to break any lawbreaker’s teeth. Why couldn’t we be equally au courant in H——?
Of course nobody could offer the inspector any additional help, not even a truncheon. But those who mattered agreed that he should set an example to all the policemen of Bohemia, for honor’s sake.
They gave him a temporary squad of beggars, and he opened many a grave, but most had to be closed up again for lack of proof! And several were empty, and practically every vault contained a tunnel going down, down, down! The inspector wrote a report. He explained that unless these enemies of heaven were taken in the act, nothing could be accomplished. So they took away his squad.
The inspector and Father Hauser locked themselves into the church at high noon, with candles burning all around. They rubbed every keyhole with garlic. The High Honorable Richter* Bernd von Lochner knocked at the back door, and they let him in, looking both ways. Since dawn the executioner, Hans Trollhand, had been stationed in the crypt, his huge mushroom-shaped ear turning blue with cold as he pressed it to the floor, listening for any subterranean stirrings, because it would be disastrous if the enemy overheard their counsels. The three who mattered agreed on trying something new, daring, perhaps even shocking, should word get out, but since they controlled the town’s opinion, they had high hopes that it wouldn’t.
Richter von Lochner had by far the greatest authority at that conclave, for he had travelled as far as Prague, where the clay corpse of the Golem still lies in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue. Of all his generation, he, perhaps, had done the most for the human race. I would need a flock of obsequious clerks were I to retail to you all his accomplishments. He had burned dozens of Jews and Freemasons in his time, and even interrogated the Devil, catching him off guard within the house in Charles Square where Doctor Faustus once lived. It was his pride that he had never let a guilty soul escape.
Inspector, he began, I’ve been watching your efforts. No one can reproach you for anything. You’re a brave and steady hunter. I suppose you carried out many a night reconnaissance as a soldier.
Oh, yes, said the inspector.
Tonight we expect to find you in position underground. Modern police methods demand new modes of observation. Do you understand me?
I know how to do as I’m told, replied the inspector, who might have doubted this or that, but never said so.
At any rate, Father Hauser sprinkled him with holy water and summoned the sexton. Secreting a twice-blessed medallion of Saint Polona against his heart, the inspector set out to expose the guilty.
On that occasion (it was Goblin’s Day), he essayed to disguise himself by coloring himself brown with a decoction of oak bark and puffing out his cheeks like a vrykolakas. Acting upon an advance hint from above, the carpenter had prepared him a coffin with a little hole in it, through which for an hour he diligently practiced sipping by means of a straw. Father Hauser gave him Communion. Laying by his pike which once parted a Turk’s ribs—for what good would that do against the undead, except in daytime?—he took up the greater weapon of the sacred Host—which, alas, dissolved away beneath his tongue. They lowered him into position while he lay staring upward, wondering how it would end. Richter von Lochner had already drawn up a list of inspector-successors and replacements, which the mayor signed, saying: Good men, Your Honor, and ready to go down to their utmost!— Of course the sexton left his grave unfilled, so the inspector breathed full comfortably. He thought he might catch one or two dead rascals, oh, yes; no one would be disappointed in him! But on that very first churchyard midnight, when he heard the mausoleum doors creak open, and accordingly popped out of his coffin (whose nailheads were merely painted on), stood up in that six-foot hole and threw back his own gravestone (which was on hinges), crying, fellows, where’s the party?, they saw through him at once, and made a rush! I am sorry to say that poor Saint Polona excited their chuckles; he barely saved himself by firing off all his garlic-rubbed silver bullets. Not one of them managed to bite him, thank goodness, and thanks to his excellent shooting he managed, just as he had hoped, to destroy three notorious vampires: a roasted Protestant, an infanticidal mother whom the authorities had convicted and buried alive last winter, and a woman taken in adultery whom they had mercifully and legally drowned.— Justice, concluded the inspector, is not justice, until a stake goes through the heart!
Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) Page 29