The Woman Behind The Waterfall

by Meriel,Leonora

  “Mama,” I whisper, tiptoeing up. She smiles and opens her light brown eyes and holds out her hand.

  “Darling, dorohenka.”

  She catches me in her arms and pulls me onto her lap. I love to be so close to her. I smell her soft, grassy scent and her hair and her flowered dress. I smell the skin of her face and neck when I lay my head against her shoulder.

  “Milenka, dorohenka.”

  She wraps her arms around me and holds me to her.

  Across the river, I can see Grandmother sitting, the arms of the willow tree wrapped around her. She is watching her daughter, and remembering.

  “If she had listened,” Grandmother whispers to me, “then we wouldn’t have you. Little Angela. Little swallow. Lastivka.”

  They both look lovingly at me, Grandmother and Mother, and I am smiling because I am in the safest place in the world and the willow is dancing sunlight over my eyes, in Mother’s arms.

  T

  I am winding water from the well into the metal bucket. The handle squeaks as I twist it round, using two hands to pull it up the dark shaft. In the winter, the handle gets stiff and I have to wear woollen gloves and struggle to pull it up, but now it is easier, just the squeaking and the weight, and I reach out and unhook the bucket, water spilling out from the top onto the ground, and onto my sandals and my feet.

  I carry the bucket down the slope to the garden and push open the gate with my shoulder. I have left it unlatched. I swing the pail from side to side so that the water tips out over the top and it is a little less heavy. I put the pail down on the step and cover it with the chipped plate. The kitchen door is ajar.

  I stand at the open door and imagine myself stepping up into the room, my feet dusty and sprinkled with well water. I imagine seeing Mama at the window, her face lit with happiness. She is wearing a new white dress and her hair is combed and falling around her shoulders in a golden waterfall.

  “Angela!” she will say. “We are going to the café! We are going to Chernivtsi! We are going on an adventure!”

  “Yes, Mama!” I will say. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”

  T

  A cat is sitting beneath the wooden bench, watching the garden with narrowed eyes. I am high up on a branch and I have a clear view of it between the lilac leaves. I fly down to the ground and then quickly up, pecking for an insect in the soil, which scuttles away.

  I am distracted. The cat has noticed me. The cat’s ears twitch – a touch of pink, eyes yellow – and it remains still, waiting to see what I will do.

  I land on a branch above the bench and start to call out in a harsh, high voice. The cat twitches its whiskers in anger, raises its ears slightly, but still it does not move. I cry out again and another bird answers my call in short repetitive screeches. I continue to call out until the cat creeps from under the bench, pads to the door of the house and slinks into the kitchen. I give a single last rasping call, and then dive down into the garden for another insect. I snatch it in my beak and land on the ground to swallow it.

  The cat, from the kitchen window, pounces.

  T

  I slip inside the bird just in time.

  I was watching them from around the wall. The white and tabby cat, which comes to our garden for scraps and the bird – my bird! – which Mama leaves crumbs for on the windowsill. My bird, the body I love to fly in, the body in which I feel the springtime world touching my feathers. To be part of an unspoken flock, to carry pure desires, certainty of what to do in every moment. But my bird was not quick enough.

  I feel that death is close, and I have a great desire to understand it. I sense that dying is merely the flow of spirit from one place to another, just as when as I flow from one body to another, but I have an urge to know what it is, to feel it, to understand the movement, the coming and the leaving.

  I see the bird. It is almost too late.

  Blink!

  I am inside the familiar body. The heart is beating so fast and so high, I don’t know if this tiny form can stand it. I know immediately that there is no time to look to the left or the right, but that I must fly up, up, up! The insect falls from my beak and I push into the air with a wild flapping. I sense the cat pulling back onto its haunches and pouncing towards me. Claws and narrowed eyes coming straight at me. I cannot see it, I am flying too hard, but I can sense the trajectory of the cat’s body through the air, approaching me, and something in my own body tells me that I am not fast enough, that this is my death.

  An intense calm comes over me, even as I am frantically flapping my wings in escape, and I enter a quiet tunnel which is this one moment, and here in this tunnel I feel the cat taking my life as it is about to, and I feel myself leaving, as I am about to, and I feel as if it couldn’t possibly be any other way. The wild perfection of this makes me dizzy, and I feel a strange, deep gratitude to the cat for playing its part in this, for simply being itself in the long, miraculous moment of my death.

  This tunnel which is my final second feels almost endless and yet I know that I can control it; that until I choose to release it and allow the next moment to go forwards then I can stay here, suspended, between this lunging cat with its jaws open, and my body which has prepared itself for death.

  I have never known anything so quiet.

  At last, it is time.

  I slip out of the bird’s body and back into my own. The bird releases the inevitable second, and the cat’s claws enter its flesh, jaws moving to meet each other around the bird’s body and together they complete the curve of the arc, which the cat began, returning together to the waiting soil. Victorious, dying, infinite.

  T

  I lean back against the wall while the bird dies. I am still in the power of that long, breathtaking moment. I know that the bird has gone and that the cat has caused no harm as it slinks away with its prey. I will find another bird to carry me up into the high white flowers. A fork-tailed swallow, a wide-winged stork, there is no difference for me. In each, I can feel the sunlight on my feathers as I dive from high through the morning air. The flock of birds I always feel close by, moving in one continuous thought, which I can enter and leave at any time. They fly as I fly in a constant movement with one another, a single movement with the world. Soaring, beating wings along the length of the springtime moments.

  T

  Mother is in the kitchen rolling out dough for cherry dumplings. Her face is tight, but as she moves the rolling pin, her eyes soften and harden, soften then harden. Next to her is a bowl of sour cherries.

  “Angela, come here,” she calls to me. “Come and take the kistochki out of these cherries.”

  I go to the corner and wipe the dirt from my fingers on a towel. I look at my hands, thinking for a moment that they might have blood on them. I look up at my reflection in the speckled mirror. My face has a strange smile.

  “I died today,” I mouth to my dark eyes. “I died with the bird. I moved with its spirit.”

  The thought fills me with a strange elation. I know now that death is the same as everything else. It is the flow of self. The flow of will. The movement of spirit to spirit. The constant changing and opening of everything around me.

  I put the towel down and I go over to Mother and pick up the bowl of cherries. Kistochki. Little bones. Take out the bones. Are these cherries dying or are they already dead? I look up at Mother’s face and it is hard again.

  “Take them to the table,” she says. “And hurry! I’m almost finished with the dough.”

  One by one, I open the cherries, take out the bones, and lay them in a little pile on the table.

  That long moment. The tunnel. It is still here, inside of me. Happening. Transforming. Shifting.

  “Angela!” Mama is staring at me. “Hurry up!”

  She takes the few cherries that are ready and sprinkles them with grainy yellow sugar on a tin spoon. Then she scoops them into the middle of a small circle of dough and squeezes the edges together into a neat parcel. Vareniki, pirohi, cherry dumplings. I
slip my hand into the pocket of my dress and pull out a little brown feather and put it on the table.

  I glance at Mother, and then I push aside the long, dreaming death inside me, and I concentrate on the bones.

  T

  My Nightspirit comes to me.

  I lie on the bottom of the river, which is clear like a sheet of glass. Below me, pale spirits from that other river – the river below this river – rise up and bring me flowers. Women in ragged white with long trailing hair made from the riverbed strands. I hold out my hands.

  Take them, my Nightspirit says.

  I take the flowers and the women sink back into the depths.

  The riverbed clouds over into silt and weeds and stones.

  I rise to the surface.

  8

  Mother, dreaming, is walking along the willowbank. It is a hot spring day in the village and her feet are bare. A bird is singing in the branches of the tree, and Mother sits on the grass and leans her back into the curve of the trunk. Her golden-brown hair falls around her face. Her eyes are soft and scared and full of tears.

  The river flows slowly, drawing the tendrils of the willows into its steady current.

  She has come here to talk to her mother, on the other side of the river, and to me, floating on my back, covered in flowers.

  “Why were you weeping?” Mother asks her mother. “I saw you in the kitchen when I gave you a red tulip and you took it from my hand. I was a little girl. Was it because of me?”

  A slender coil of guilt weaves up through an invisible rope. The bird changes its song ever so slightly.

  “No,” says her mother. “It was my fault. I felt trapped. I was angry. I made so many mistakes.”

  “I thought I had done something wrong. I thought it was because of me.”

  “Nothing was because of you. The choices I made were wrong. Grisha was wrong. I was wrong. My life was wrong.”

  “But I was a part of that.”

  “They were my mistakes. They were my tears.”

  “I brought you a flower. I was dancing in the garden.”

  “I’m sorry, Lyuda. I’m sorry.”

  Mother’s wide, pale face crumples a little. Her eyes are guilty and scared. For a moment, she is a girl again, one who does not know that the flower she has picked will forever be held in time, a small brown arm outstretched towards an open window.

  She turns to me, lying on my back on the river’s surface.

  “All my mistakes are my own,” she says.

  A twist of sadness weaves deep into the coils of the rope. The bird ceases to sing. It rises in the air and flies from the tree.

  I stretch out my arms in the water, covered in flowers. I wave them on each side of me, pushing the water away. The flowers are starting to rot on my body. I begin to sink beneath the surface.

  “Mama!” I call out, but she is not there. I sink into the calm depths, down and down. There is no current in the river and as I descend, the rotted flowers float up to the top and lie still. Grandmother gets up from the grass and stands above me on the riverbank. She sees me lying in the perfectly clear water.

  “It is all your fault,” she says, and turns away.

  Mother drops the jar of sour cream.

  I lie in a pool of my grandmother’s tears and look upwards. I see the sky through rotted flowers and somewhere, a bird is flying.

  T

  When I awake, it is night-time. I am looking up at the surface of the water and it is like a clear skin stretched across the top of the river. I wave my arms a little, and the water ripples all the way to the top. There are plants here on the bottom of the river and I am lying on smooth flat stones. It is dark, but the water is translucent and I can see everything. I like it here. It is peaceful. I am wide awake and aware of everything around me. A fish swims past. The water is moving steadily over me. It pulls at me, but my body rests calmly on the stones. I am unsure of my weight in this current. Perhaps it could carry me away, but for now I am still.

  I sit up slowly, and find that the river is not so very deep. My head almost touches the surface. I push myself upwards out of the water and I stand. My white dress is clinging to me, so I pull it over my head and off my body. I lay it on the surface of the river and it floats away. My body is brown from the sunshine. The night is serene and the water is warm. It is wonderful, standing here alone in this night air. Flowers fall from somewhere onto my body. White and yellow daisies, red tulips, blue cornflowers, scarlet poppies. They drift into my hair and onto my arms and then into the clear water of the river.

  The shadowy ropes of a willow tree are hanging nearby over the green bank. I climb up one of them, balancing on the slender oval leaves. I climb easily to the top of the strand, and then with a little jump I climb to a higher one. Soon, I am at the top of the tree, and I perch, and look down at the river flowing beneath me. It is so calm in the moonlight, like a stream of breath being exhaled across the sleeping land.

  I exhale, and my dreams float out into the night air.

  I jump, and my wings are flapping and I fly down to the surface of the river and dip my beak quickly into the water. It tastes of flowers and spring heat. I dip again, and then rise up over the river. It is a long way back to my nest. The girl will be sleeping in her bed. The woman will be sitting under the lilac tree. I am full of moonlight and flowers and spring night-time river. I fly across the fields towards the village, leaving the soft hiss of the flowing water behind me. If there is an owl watching then I may die. I fly. I reach my nest. I am safe. I dip my beak into soft feathers. Around me, the river closes.

  T

  Mother comes into the kitchen, smiling, and kisses me on the top of my head.

  “You have brought the water from the well,” she says. “What a good girl.”

  She picks up the jug of cold water and she pours some into the saucepan and strikes a match to light the stove.

  I am filled with happiness at her words. She has been so sad lately. I push the chair back and come to her and I wrap my arms around her warm waist.

  “Mamochka,” I say. “Don’t be sad, don’t ever be sad.”

  She holds me tightly to her body and then she crouches down and looks into my eyes. Her own eyes are filled with a strange light, and after a few moments it seems as if we are not looking at each other, but the light is getting stronger, and then it feels as if her eyes are somehow exploding into me, splintering into flecks and flecks of an indescribable feeling; an incredible love beyond sadness, beyond desire, beyond memory. She looks into my eyes and her mother’s heart explodes into me. She holds my hands tight to keep me steady. I do not fall.

  She blinks, and smiles gently. “My sweet little girl,” she says.

  I fall.

  T

  I am a girl filled with dreams. I sometimes imagine that I am in a dream right now, that there is another girl with tangled hair lying beneath a silver lilac, dreaming of me; dreaming that I am lying here now, creating worlds with my silver thoughts. I like to see how far back I can go without getting lost. I am a girl, dreaming of other girls, but I am the dream that another girl is dreaming, but she is also a dream, which someone else is dreaming. And she, and she, and she...

  And if this was my dream, here and now, then I would keep the lilac tree just as it is. But I would make the bench a little wider. It isn’t comfortable for Mama to sit on. And I would have more birds. I would have birds in all the trees. And it would always be springtime or summer, just like now. The flowers wouldn’t fade and the snow wouldn’t come to cover everything. I wouldn’t have to go out in the cold to get water from the well in the mornings when I am half asleep. It would be like it is now.

  But what about Mama? If this is my dream, then why is she so sad? I would not have made her so sad. Even when she smiles she seems to be crying. I bring her flowers from the garden, but I don’t seem to be able to bring her happiness any more. We don’t play together like we used to. When she makes soup it tastes of tears.

  I wish
I could go back to the dreamer and ask her to make Mama happy. Ask her to dream that something wonderful will happen to her, that Tato will come back, or that she will suddenly see how beautiful everything is, or that she will be happy when I am happy. I would ask the dreamer to do this.

  The wind blows, and a few of the fading lilac flowers are carried across the garden and land on me. I love this. I try to guess where they are going to fall. I see them floating in the air and twirling down and I guess that this one will alight in my hair, and this one on my arm and this one next to me on the black earth.

  Mother comes out of the house wearing her housedress and a dirty apron. Her hair is loose around her face and she looks so beautiful to me, so soft and gentle. She smiles down at me in my white dress and my long brown arms and legs.

  “My little flower,” she says. “My little swallow.”

  T

  The river flows wide and slow. It is high spring. It is carrying the fallen flowers; some rotted, some still fresh. The river sighs. Too many tears, it thinks. Too many tears. It carries the flowers lovingly. They float back to the dreamer, who is lying on her back, a peaceful smile on her face. She sits up languorously and catches the flowers as they float past. She holds them in her hands, dripping green stalks and hanging petals. She holds her hands out in front of her, the flowers laid across them. She closes her eyes, and blows gently, and the flowers rise in the air for just a moment, and then disappear.

  9

  Mother stands at the sideboard below the window with a bowl of pale potatoes, which she is cleaning with a small knife. The strands of peel curl into the bowl as she releases them, and one or two are clinging to the skin of her hands. She looks down as she works, her eyes narrowed against the sunlight pouring through the window.

  On the kitchen table is a heap of dried poppy husks and an empty bowl. I am to open them, one by one, and pour out the poppy seed, the mak. I sit at the table and take the first dry stem in my hands. I break the top from the curved pod and carefully pour out the tiny black seeds. I pick a piece of broken husk from the bowl and then tip it to the left and to the right, so that the seeds flow from one side to the other. I think of the new scarlet poppies growing in the garden, and how each of them started from one of these tiny black dots. Black into red. Red from black. My hair is black. My lips are red.