6
Mother stands on the kitchen step. I swing my brown legs on the whitewashed bench. Up down, forward back.
“Let’s go to the river,” she says.
Mother packs food and towels into a basket. She wraps rye bread in a cloth and puts in a knife with a silver blade. Sour pickles in a jar filled with brine and wet strands of dill. A jar of pickled apricots. Slices of salo, cloves of garlic and the last of the honey cake.
We walk together down the main street of the village, past the green well with its pointed wooden roof and past the houses, which look like ours with bright blue painted eaves and fat white geese waddling on the grass in front. Many of the gardens have cherry and apple trees in bloom, purple and white lilacs, vines growing over trellises and rows and rows of potato plants, cabbages, herbs.
Mother holds the basket of food and I hold her other hand. Her skin is dry and I can feel its cracked surface against my warm fingers. We pass Sveta’s house, and I look over the fence into the garden of growing sunflowers, but she isn’t there. I would like to ask something but I glance at Mother’s face and it is closed. She is looking straight ahead and I have to run and skip to keep up with her.
A thought comes to me.
“Mama,” I say. “If we’re going to the river, can we go to where the willows are? You remember you told me how Grandmother used to take you there when you were little?”
Mother looks down at me, smiling. Her face has opened again. Like the flowers, I think. Their petals opening and closing with the sunshine.
“That’s where we’re going,” she says.
A narrow path leads off into the woods from the dusty street and we walk down it. The air smells different here, and I brush my hand against the trunk of an oak tree as we pass, pink fingers across dark ridges. The path leads further into a glade of silver birch trees, and Mama stops.
“Look, Angela!”
One of the birch trunks has a funnel of thin metal protruding from near the base, and a glass jar below with some liquid in it. Mama goes to the tree, picks up the jar and dips her finger into the cloudy grey. She puts it into her mouth and then holds the jar out to me. I suck the droplets from my finger. They taste sweet and bitter, like sugared bark. I like it.
“We should do this next year,” Mama says. “Before the end of the snow, we’ll come and collect the sap. We can drink it for months. I can show you how to do it. Would you like that?”
“Yes, yes. I would!”
I stroke the slender trunk of the tree, smooth silver and rough crevices, and then I reach out my hand to the little bright leaves and touch them with my fingertips. I blow a kiss to the tree and take Mama’s hand again, and we go on down the path.
We emerge from the glade and the ground is softer as we approach the water. I can see the willow trees from here, lining the riverbank on each side, and the river flowing calm and high between them.
“Where shall we sit?” asks Mother.
“Where did you sit with Grandmother? The place you told me about?”
Mother looks up and down the bank and then she points to one of the trees.
“I think it was over there. The trunk is curved. She’d sit under it and watch me swim.”
I slip off my sandals and carry them in my hand as we walk through the thick grass to the tree.
“This is the place,” she says.
She lays down the basket of food and sinks onto the grass. She leans back against the trunk.
“Can I swim, Mama?”
“If it’s not too cold.” She smiles at me, and it seems that her face is just a little softer here, as if something had made her happy inside.
I pull my dress over my head and drop it onto the grass. My body is brown like the bark of a tree, like the feathers of a bird; not pale like Mama, with skin like sour cream. My hair hangs down my back, almost to my waist, black, curled, brushed with rainwater.
Naked, tangled, full of dreams, I lift my arms high into the air and rise onto my tiptoes, stretching my body into the springtime sky. My wings flutter lightly. I breathe out.
I feel the strength of the river when I step into it, pulling me this way and that. My body so light and small in the mass of moving water. I could be carried away – down, down, below – but I go carefully forward until the water is up to my waist and I wait for one long moment and then I push myself out into the current with a little gasp at the coldness.
I am swimming, using all of my force, struggling against the current, and then I suddenly feel that it is easier, that something is helping me. I look up, and there is a flash of bright blue, a movement in the trees, and I look closer and see that my grandmother is standing on the riverbank. She is waiting for me.
“Come, Angela. Come, my little one. Up onto the grass.”
I reach the far shore and I stand, balancing on the smooth stones and look up into blue eyes. Then I reach out my hand and put my fingers into hers, green-veined and ridged like ancient bark. A bright star touching gnarled wood.
She helps me up the bank and I glance back at Mother, who is biting into a dripping apricot; juice and sugar running down her chin to her stained dress.
“Sit down, my harnenka, my dorohenka, my beautiful, dear girl,” says Grandmother.
Her voice is cracked, as if she hasn’t spoken for a long time. Gnarled and ridged. She sits with her back against the willow tree and holds open her branches. I lie down on the warm grass so that the willow strands are hanging above me, and I lay my head in her lap.
“Little Angela, little lastivka,” she says. “Let me tell you how it was.”
The sun dances through the willow strands and a warm breeze blows the slender leaves and ripples the waters of the river and disturbs the soft hair around Mother’s face, sitting in a dream on the far riverbank, remembering her own mother.
If only she were here with me, she thinks. Nothing bad would have happened. I wouldn’t be alone. There would be nothing wrong.
She closes her eyes. She imagines her mother’s voice speaking to her now, calm and sure. A flock of wild geese flies overhead, shifting in and out of a fluid arrow formation, like the movement of trembling water.
“Listen,” my grandmother tells us.
T
“The moon hung low and golden over our village the night I was born,” says Grandmother, her creaking voice rising over the soothing hiss of the river.
“Our house was there, just the same, two rooms filled with our generations. My mother, my grandmother. My mother gave birth to me in the bedroom in the middle of summer with a midwife. Hot water and blood, grey towels and screams, and a new baby girl that was me. They called me Zoryana, the star. And outside the house, in the garden, my father and his friends were drunk on samohon and singing Ochi Chorni, Black Eyes, until my grandmother had to chase them from the garden with a stick, and he came back three days later, still drunk, to find that my eyes were bright blue.”
Grandmother strokes my head with her veined hand. Her skin scrapes dry against my damp face. “Close your eyes, little one,” she whispers. “Listen to the story.”
“I lived my whole life in that house,” she continues. “I played in the garden, just like you. We had chickens and white geese and rabbits and I looked after them. My babulya, my grandmother, kept a goat for milk.” She smiles. “Then I got married, and we all lived together in the same house. There wasn’t much room, but it was what we had. Sometimes I felt like running away. Sometimes I cried. Little Lyuda saw me crying sometimes. I wish she hadn’t.”
She gazes across the river to Mother, golden-brown hair curling softly around a sleeping face. The sun touches a streak of apricot juice around her mouth.
“Your Nightspirit has called me here to protect you,” says Grandmother. “You are too open to your mother’s tears. We need to find a way to bring her out of her sadness. Will you help me do that, little Angela?”
“Why is Mama sad?”
“She is trapped in her memories. All around her ar
e shadows, and she cannot find her way out of them. Look.”
Grandmother leans forward and takes a loose strand of my hair and wraps it around her fingers.
“There is a rope,” she says. She holds out the strand of hair to me. “Just like this. It holds us all together. You, me, your mother, my mother. It is made up of feelings and thoughts. It is made up of all the love we have for one another.”
She takes a strand of her own hair, tinged with green like the willow branches above, and she winds it around her fingers so that our hair is woven together.
“Your mother has forgotten this. When she is in her darkness, she thinks she is alone. But wherever she goes, she carries us with her. The footsteps of her life have been marked out by the shadows of ours.”
Grandmother has stopped talking. I open my eyes to the sunlit willow above and Grandmother’s tired face. She releases the strands of hair from her fingers.
“This is what I wanted to tell your mother,” she says. “My sweet dochenka, my daughter. My little Lyuda.”
“Why can’t you tell her these things, Grandmother?”
“I cannot cross the river,” she replies. “It is only you, my little one. I know what you can do. I know what you can be.”
I feel a quick rush of excitement. A flash of the bird comes to me. I look into her eyes.
“Could you do it, too, Grandmother? When you were a girl?”
Grandmother nods, and puts a crooked finger to her lips. It is time to leave. I lift my head out of her lap and smile at my grandmother, and her blue eyes smile back at me.
“See you soon,” I say, and I clamber down the riverbank, and into the water.
T
Mother wakes from her deep sleep, a half-eaten apricot in the skirt of her dress making a dark stain. She smiles, rubs her eyes with the back of her hand, and puts the apricot into her mouth.
“Your grandmother Zoryana once danced under these willows,” she says, as I dry my feet on the long grass. “With your grandfather. On the night of Ivan Kupala, when the fires were burning in the village, and they could hear the music in the distance. She loved to tell me that story. She wore a blue dress and her feet were bare.”
I rub myself with the towel from the basket and then I pull the dress over my damp body and start to dance around the tree. “Like this?” I ask, throwing the green tendrils up in the air, dancing through them with light feet.
Mother gets up heavily from the ground and wipes her apricot hands on the front of her dress.
“Just like that,” she says, smiling. “Just like that.”
T
In the evening, Lyuda stands above Angela, watching her sleep, the little face smiling and the black hair brushed with rainwater spread out over a white pillow.
How like her father she looks, she thinks. She has Volodiya’s skin and dark hair. Not like me or Mama. And yet he doesn’t even know what she looks like. He doesn’t know that he has this reflection, this child like a hidden river flowing beneath his life.
She thinks about the willow trees this morning and remembers Angela dancing in the sunshine, throwing the green strands in the air, a white star dancing in sunlight. She reaches out her hand and strokes Angela’s soft cheek, and her heart lifts. I have her, she thinks. I have this white star.
T
Grandmother, on the willowbank, hears the voice of the Nightspirit, and then she sees it; a soft grey shadow before her. It must be soon, the Nightspirit says. The girl is too open.
“Is she strong enough?” Grandmother asks. “Can she help my daughter?”
I do not know, the Nightspirit replies. There is not much time. Soon the tears will be woven too deep into the rope.
“Then we must hurry,” says Grandmother.
The Nightspirit fades into the shadows, and in the nearby forests of the Carpathian Mountains a wolf passes silently through the trees; silver fur and eyes blazing yellow.
Grandmother watches her daughter sitting with a glass of vodka, the white lilac tree above her a great lantern in the darkness, and she feels the heaviness of her failure moving through her roots.
In the house, Angela turns in her sleep, pushing the patched sheet off her springtime body. She is dreaming of her grandmother Zoryana, swimming in the river as a young girl, in love and full of desires filled and filled and filled. And her grandfather Grisha, pushing Zoryana’s wet hair back from her face and kissing her, the river water flowing around their bodies under the summer willows.
T
Grandmother moves her spirit through the forest of stars above her. She weaves her way between shafts of starlight, trailing a faint shadow of willow leaves. The blackness between the stars is absolute, and it is difficult not to release herself into it. A quick sigh of relief, and rest.
“Not now, not yet,” she murmurs, and moves on, weaving and twisting.
As she comes to each new star, she speaks to it, opening herself into its light and whispering her words into its being.
“Shine here,” she says. “Shine here, onto this place. This is my daughter. This is my child, this is my own.”
To the stars, she shows the river and the house. She shows them Lyuda in a blast of light, weeping. She shows them Angela, the star-flower, dancing. “I need you,” she says to them. “I ask you for this favour.”
The stars are moved by the tears, and one by one they bow to her, acquiescent. She weaves back through them, strands of silver in her wake. The blackness between the stars calls to her, but she resists. “Soon, soon, soon,” she whispers. “You can wait for me,” she says. “I will not be long.”
7
Mother Lyuda is sitting on one side of the river and Grandmother Zoryana on the other.
Between them, the past flows, dancing light on silver water. Together they remember. Together they try to find shapes of a memory they can merge into one.
Lyuda pushes open the door of the kitchen and walks past her mother, her seventeen-year-old body aching from the touch of Volodiya. Zoryana stands at the window. She draws her eyes away from the garden where she was watching the shadow of Grisha, not long dead, hammering nails into a new white-painted bench. Her body feels cold and strange from the loss of his closeness.
She brings her gaze back to her daughter, forcing herself to return to the moment. She sees Lyuda’s shining eyes and the flush in her cheeks, her body tense and close.
Zoryana snaps at her. “Where have you been?”
Her daughter turns towards her, one shoulder rising, her eyes clear in challenge.
“I’ve been with Volodiya.”
Zoryana sniffs.
“Have you been drinking?”
“Of course I haven’t.”
Zoryana feels a twinge of anger and draws it around herself. She breathes in and feels it gathering inside her.
“I’ve told you not to see him outside the house.”
“He met me after school.”
Lyuda raises her chin. She feels her mother’s anger and her body responds to it naturally.
“Then you should have brought him to the house.”
“He walked me home.”
“You should have brought him in.”
“He didn’t want to come in.”
“Are you only doing what he wants?”
“I didn’t want him to come in, either.”
Zoryana wishes that Grisha was here with her. She wishes that Lyuda had not met Volodiya. She wishes there was something she could say that would make a difference to what was going to happen. She feels a wave of sadness and helplessness and she grasps on to the feeling, pushing it harder, working it up into anger. Working it into the strength to resist her daughter’s force.
“Lyuda, darling, he’s too old for you.”
“He’s not that old.”
“He’s too old for you. You’re only seventeen.”
“What difference does that make?”
“You should find a boy your age.”
“I don’t want a boy my age. I w
ant Volodiya.”
“Why do you think Volodiya wants to be with a schoolgirl?”
“I’m not a schoolgirl, I’m a beautiful woman.”
Zoryana snorts. “You’re seventeen. You’re a schoolgirl.”
“You don’t understand anything, Mother. He loves me. He wants to marry me.”
“Did he say that?”
Lyuda touches the ring on her finger. “Of course he said that.”
“Lyuda darling, listen to me. Please listen to me. What’s going to happen if you get pregnant and then he doesn’t want to be with you? Doesn’t want to marry you? What would you do?”
“That’s not going to happen. I’m not going to get pregnant, and if I did, then he’d stay with me.”
“Ask him.”
“What?”
“Ask him. Next time he’s kissing you. Ask him what he’d do if you got pregnant. If he’d stay with you and marry you and support you.”
“I can’t ask him that.”
“Lyuda darling, lastivka, please think about it. If you got pregnant you’d spend the next ten years of your life right here with the baby. You’d have a part-time job at the post office and you’d probably lose your figure. How are you going to get a husband like that? And with a child? Lyudichka, I’ve seen it so many times. Please understand.”
“I understand everything.”
“That’s fine. Of course you do. But please listen to what I have to say.”
“All you do is lecture me. I don’t know why you don’t want me to be happy.”
“I want you to finish school and get a job and find someone who will give you a good life. You’re so pretty. You can move to Ivano-Frankivsk or Lviv. You don’t need to live here forever. You could sell the house.”
“You think I’m such a stupid girl. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“Lyuda, darling, everything could change so quickly. You must be careful.”
“This is all just words. You’re saying words that don’t make any sense. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I love Volodiya and he loves me. I know what I’m doing.”
“But Lyuda, listen...”
T
The wind blows through the trees and I come walking lightly through the silver birch grove and along the riverbank, to Mother. She is sitting under the willow tree, the sunlight playing on her golden hair. Her eyes are closed.
The Woman Behind The Waterfall Page 4