The Woman Behind The Waterfall

by Meriel,Leonora

  THE WOMAN BEHIND THE WATERFALL

  Leonora Meriel is the author of The Woman Behind the

  Waterfall and The Unity Game. She lives in Barcelona,

  London and Kyiv. She has two children. Read more

  about Leonora Meriel and her work at:

  www.leonorameriel.com.

  ALSO BY LEONORA MERIEL

  The Unity Game

  The Woman Behind the Waterfall

  LEONORA MERIEL

  Published by Granite Cloud 2016

  Copyright @ Leonora Meriel 2011

  The right of Leonora Meriel to be identified as the Author of this Work has

  been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the

  author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is

  entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,

  by way of trade or otherwise, be circulated in any form

  or by any means, electronic or otherwise,

  without the publisher’s prior consent.

  ISBN 978-1-911079-24-8

  Cover design by Anna Green

  To my mother Diana

  The Woman Behind the Waterfall

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part Three

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  PART ONE

  1

  I open my eyes to see falling white flowers.

  I am lying on my back, a young girl dreaming in the springtime of Ukraine, and the branches of the lilac tree above me are moving from side to side in a warm wind. Syringa, buzok, lilac in a trembling morning light.

  The sunshine touches my face as it tumbles between the bright leaves. It moves from side to side with the wind and brushes gently over my skin, painting it golden, shadow, golden, shadow. A girl in a white dress, painted gold and warm and springlight. I open my eyes and close them. This spring, the nights and days are stretching themselves out in a half-heat sleep, the garden is full of high grass and early poppies, and the fragrance of the lilac draws out the sunshine hours in a heavy flowered dream. Barely open, barely closed.

  There is another scent here, quite distinct from the white star lilac. The smell of the black earth. I turn my head to the side, so that the sunshine is brushing just one cheek golden, and my skin is close down, touching the soil. Above me, the wind moves the leaves before my eyes between spectrums of light. White to gold, gold to white. I slowly turn my springtime head. Golden to black. I close my eyes. The smell of the dark earth enters my senses and I breathe deeply.

  It is Ukraina. It is home.

  T

  I live in Bukovina, in a village that lies between the black and golden flats of farmland and the wolved forest peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. I am seven years old. The house where Mama and I live is a faded brick red, and our windows are painted in a cracked white and bright turquoise blue. There is a wooden gate with a broken latch that opens onto the dusty village street, and a path through our garden leading to a narrow white-painted bench next to the kitchen door. Our land stretches in layers of high grass and scattered flowers down to the woods below.

  I am sitting now on the wooden bench, the lavochka, and I swing my warm legs up and down. Next to me, the kitchen door is open. Across the garden is the lilac tree and I watch as tiny flowers are carried down in the breeze, drifting to the ground below, to the pressed dark earth where I love to lie, daydreaming, gazing up into a panoply of lilac stars.

  This garden, this spring, this dazzling sunlight, the sound of a solitary bird singing, feels like a dream shimmering around me. The white lilac, my thin dress, the constant deep smell of Ukrainian earth; it could all be a dream were it not for a streak of dirt on my skin and the touch of cold water when I wash it off. Cold water splashed from a silver bucket on a spring day. A dog barking in the distance. A faint smudge of dirt and my skin rising against the droplets. I look up into the light. Streaks of memory now forming against a background of falling gold.

  T

  Sometimes I prefer to sit in the tree above. A bird. A leaf. A single star from a cluster of lilac. I catch a thread of song across the garden and release myself into it, shift the girl into a quiet background and enter the breath of music, which carries me into the bird.

  And for a moment I am that music, shimmering against the air, and then I am creating the music. It is I who am singing. I am within the spirit of the bird. And I look around me at the springtime garden and I know why I am singing. The insistent green that is everywhere! The birds that are returning to familiar gardens! The flowers exploding into bloom with every new instant of sunshine!

  I look down and see that the lilac cups are filled to the brim with night-time dewdrops and I stop singing and urgently dip my head down and push my beak into the yellow centre to drink the delicious liquid. The scent and the taste are sunshine flowers and I dip again and again and splash my wings into the dew so that my feathers are sprayed with the droplets.

  The rush of so many sensations makes me suddenly dizzy and I clasp the branch with my claw feet and open my wings, letting the warm wind calm me, blow my feathers dry.

  I jerk my head from side to side, dark eyes darting around, and below I glimpse the outline of a girl, a star in a black-earth sky. I see her, a flower from the tree, a gleam of sunlight, me – a bird! And then I look up from the middle of the branch of bright leaves into the whiteness all around me. The wind touches my damp feathers. The river is not far. I turn my head, checking the air above and the girl below turns her cheek to one side. I open my wings and rise up out of the tree, flapping hard, a song gathering itself inside me. I fly towards the river.

  T

  A voice calls out to me in the garden.

  I am swinging my legs out high from the narrow bench, my hands holding the edge of the wooden plank. Swing leg, swing leg. My head is warm with golden light. I put my hand up and touch my hair. Tangled curls. Black like the soil, as Mama says. A smell all around of heavy sunshine.

  “An-ge-la!”

  My mother’s voice is calling. Tiny flowers fall around my shoulders as the three sounds move slowly towards me from the kitchen window, where Mama stands looking out at me. The lilac drifts like snow as the droplets of her voice push through the morning’s heat, and I swing my legs up and down on the bench, which is covered in cracked paint, whitewashed, nails banged unevenly into rough planks. I imagine the reverberation of each nail. Bang! A blow, a shudder of wood changed forever. Bang, bang, bang. Swing the other brown leg. Every time I swing my leg, the bench is changed forever. The motion of my swing, my drifting thoughts on
this flaking seat, the lilac that has fallen and touched my skin.

  Mother’s face is framed in the window, her golden-brown hair gathered on top of her head and pinned loosely. Her face is round and wide and flat, pale and winter. My own face – spring lilac, brushed with sunshine. The window is painted in whitewash like the bench, faint cracks and flakes coming loose from the wood, fading, deteriorating, every moment, I think, our lives passing by and through, opening and closing, and all the while they are quietly falling apart, disappearing into the dust around us.

  Mother, deteriorating, calls, “An-ge-la!”

  I stand up from the bench with the droplets of her voice covering me, and skip to the kitchen door. I stand halfway in the doorway so that she can see me through the window frame into the garden, and at the same time, in the kitchen. She laughs, her eyes creasing, hair tumbling from its pins, and she holds out her hand to me.

  “I’m making a cake,” she says.

  Mama, Mamochka, Mamusya, Matenka moiya!

  Mother’s face, pale and winter, flat and wide and the most beautiful thing in the world to me. Mother’s warm body like bread from the oven. Like a blanket around me on a dark, snowy morning, the cold well water in the midsummer dust. Mama, you are every comfort to every sorrow! I want to disappear into the dough of your body, pushing myself back in, you would roll and knead me into yourself and I would be safe forever.

  The spring breeze lifts my hair in the doorway. I want to fly!

  Mother hands me a jar of dark honey. On the kitchen table is a chipped bowl and I take a spoon from the drawer and stand over it. The honey is hard and grainy, almost black, and it smells alive, like the earth. Alive with growth, with work, with buckwheat, feelers, pollen, the weight of petals, the beating of wings, and now this dark, solid sweetness. The spoon bends as I dig it into the mass, and when I pull it out it is misshapen. I taste the honey with the tip of my tongue. It is alive, black, soil.

  Mother’s hands are sprinkled with flour, which she is pouring through a sieve. On the windowsill is a glass jar of sour cream. She passes it to me and I spoon the cream into the bowl on top of the honey and Mother comes to the table and checks the bowl and pours in the flour and a cup of chopped walnuts.

  “Mix it, Angela,” says Mother, and she lights the stove and I push the wooden spoon down to the bottom of the bowl and carefully fold in the cream and flour and the thick honey, and the kitchen will be growing hotter, and the inside heat will soon fill the room, moving all around and towards the window to meet the golden heat outside. An infinitesimal pause between them, trembling in their separateness before they merge, the scent of the baking cake and the scent of the lilac; rising dark honey and fallen white petals. I move the spoon around the bowl.

  Mother opens the window.

  T

  “Angela, bring the rainwater.”

  The cake is rising in the oven, and I run outside to fetch the shallow metal bucket, which is balanced on top of an old rabbit hutch next to the outhouse shed. I carry it carefully into the kitchen and put it down on the wooden table. Mother is waiting for me, holding the comb that we share from the bedroom next door. I peer into the water to check for leaves and insects, and I dip my finger into it to catch a floating petal and a few flecks of dirt.

  “It is time to brush your hair,” says Mother. She pulls the loose strands out of the comb and drops them into the bucket of potato skins and scraps of purple beetroot. Three of its teeth are missing. She dips her hand into the rainwater and sprinkles it onto my hair and then she dips the broken comb into it and starts to run it through the wispy ends.

  “There,” she says as she combs, drawing out the curls, easing the tangles with her fingers. “Now your hair will always be beautiful.” She sprinkles the water again over my head and she bends down and kisses my hair and the rainwater touches her lips and I shiver, because a drop of water has fallen onto my neck, and because her touch on me is the closest, safest feeling in the world.

  “Mama,” I say. “Just like you, Mama.” And she touches her own hair quickly with her left hand, and then bends down to me again.

  T

  When she has finished with the rainwater, my hair woven into a long black rope, I take the bucket back to the shed and put it carefully on top of the hutch. I dip my fingertips into the water and taste it. Warmish and like old leaves. I can smell the honey cake rising in the oven, and my damp hair in the sunshine makes my head and neck tingle as I walk back to the kitchen. Mother is bent over, peering through the dark glass at the cake. She turns her head around to me.

  “Go and play,” she says. “I’ll call you when it’s ready. Pick some flowers to put on the table.”

  “Which flowers would you like?”

  She stares at me for a moment, and then shakes her head.

  “Any,” she says, and then she straightens up from the stove and picks up the comb from the table and turns away from me into the bedroom, her printed housedress hanging loosely around her.

  I go out of the kitchen and back into the garden and I walk slowly down the path, the tall grass on each side of me. The flowers call out to me and I answer them. I blink, and I am inside them. Blink! And I am an intricate construction of fibres held together by the pull of beauty, a strange gravity suspending colours and filaments and cambia through long, sunshine moments.

  And who are you? The flowers ask, as I move through them, into them, beside them.

  A soul, a spirit, I answer. A flash of light moving through this body, burning through this single human life. I am time. I am myself. I am the river.

  And to my answer, they bow their heads, and the wind blows, and we sway, petals quivering, stems bristling in the wind. We, here, alive.

  2

  In the night-time, the stars and the moon shine down on our garden. The moon traces the curve of my body where I was lying on the grass, recognising the white star that was there. It pours its light down into the mould of my body, and I, asleep in a springtime bed, fill with moonlight.

  The stars are more careful. They dance around the lilac flowers, touching each one, turning it and filling it with light. The white transforms to moonlit grey, the tiny flowers shiver with excitement.

  Starlight from the will of stars long dead plays with the nighttime flowers in the garden, while I sleep filled with moonlight, and while a bird closes its black eyes, head tucked under its wing. The tulips have folded up their heavy petals for what may be their last sleep. In the morning, the red fibres will release to the pull of the earth and fall to join the dark soil.

  In the house, my body and Mother’s body are sleeping. We, two women, different only by dreams and by choice. A choice to be separate, and a choice to be together, here, beneath a starlit sky, in this ancient black-earthed land.

  T

  In my sleep, my Nightspirit comes to me. She is my protector and my guide. She has been with me since the beginning of this dream, since the beginning of remembrance. She is with me in the night-time, shaping the images I see, and her shadow is with me in the day, helping me to transform, to drift into the notes of a passing song, to feel the pulse of the opening garden, to be carried – a star of white lilac – on the spring wind.

  She touches me and I arise from my body in the sleeping bedroom, and we dance, our spirits weaving in and out of one another, our similar energies plaiting and unplaiting. We dance. Parting and joining, parting and joining. Up to the ceiling and down. Up to the ceiling and then up, up into the deepest night over the grey, ridged roof where a late bird is perched, watching our moving shadows, held in the vision of this rope of twisting light.

  My Nightspirit wants to protect me. I am open now, a young girl, my spirit catches the joy and the sadness of every moment, and she wants to surround me only with joy. There is darkness close, she tells me. I must find a way to protect you.

  There is happiness all around, I tell her. It is in every flower. It is in every breath.

  The moonlight shimmers through the dim shadow
of our house, and I urge her back down to the bedroom, carefully unweaving our silver rope.

  I will find a way, she says.

  T

  From the rooftop, I can see the patterns of the sleeping village. My twig feet lightly clasp the curves of the iron roof. The final song has been sung and the night is quiet. Soon the owls will begin to fly, but for a last long moment I can perch up here in the night-time heat, feeling the pulse of my flock around me.

  I see a rope of shadow rising from the house. It is like the other shadows but brighter, burning in a pale light. The strands weave around each other, in and out of one another, distinct, separate, and yet when they touch, it is as if there is only one. The feathers of my wings quiver with excitement. I would like to fly into them and become a part of this exchange, or fly straight through them and let the sway capture me for a moment, hold me for a moment, change me forever.

  I try to move my feathers but I cannot. Something prevents me from approaching this night-time dance. It will be enough to bear witness. I already will be changed forever. Just as when I drank today from the lilac tree and watched the white star through the star-white flowers. Changed forever, and forever and forever, a forever that lasts always and only until the very next long and unbearably beautiful moment. The rope of light sinks back into the house, a single twisting movement of a single shadow.

  For a time I cannot stir, held by what I have seen, but at last I am able to fly back to my nest. I settle, and turn my head round to rest and tuck my beak down into the softness of my back, surrounded by twigs, feathers, moss. I close my eyes. The night passes around me, merging my sleeping heart into its quiet pattern. Beat, beat, beat. Fast-beating heart slowing with sleep. Beat... beat... beat... The warm night calms the rhythm and I merge into the other sleeping hearts, until there is only one long beat. Freed from division, the love released flows clearly for a few precious dark and shadowy minutes. It is never long enough before the morning comes again.