I turn back to Grandmother and stand tall, rising on my tiptoes. My brown wings flutter.
“I will break the rope.”
T
Grandmother watches the bird rising and dipping over the surface of the water, and she breathes out deeply.
“She has agreed,” she whispers to the Nightspirit, who is close by. “Now you must protect her.”
Yes, the Nightspirit replies. She sees Grandmother struggling beneath the willows, caught in the darkness of her daughter’s memories. She sees her eyes flashing in angry blue and then filling with tears.
I will always protect her, she says, and she leaves, a quiet drift of grey smoke.
Grandmother stands up from the willowbank and stares into the fast-flowing river. It looks cold and deep to her, as if it might wash away her anger. She gathers her memories around her and climbs down to the very edge of the water. She rises on her toes and dives into it.
T
In the garden, I am picking flowers. A flower for Mother, a flower for Grandmother, a flower for me. I hold them in my hands; white, red, white, red. I feel a pull of darkness through my body.
Grandmother is moving through the water. She is moving ancient tears. She is drawing memories into the wrong places. I can hear my Nightspirit calling to me and I see the flowers in my hands shriveling in the sunlight. White red white red.
T
Zoryana rises from the river into a summer garden. She is wearing a blue cotton dress with a wide belt and her fair hair is plaited down her back. There is a smell of fresh paint and Grisha is here, a hammer in his hands and a box of silver nails beside him on the ground. He winks at her and she smiles.
She goes into the kitchen. There is a bowl of soup on the stove and chopped vegetables and herbs spread out over the table. Beetroot, carrot, potato, parsley, dill, coriander, sorrel. She starts to pick them up in handfuls, dropping them into the soup. The broth changes colour as the vegetables touch the water; purple, orange, green. The smell of sorrel rises to her from the pot and she breathes in deeply, and then another smell drifts over to her – the tang of wet paint. She looks towards the window, gleaming with whitewash. Grisha has just finished working on it. She can hear him hammering outside, building the bench, which she has been asking him for, the bench just across from the lilac tree where she has dreamed of sitting on a summer evening.
Something in the tang of the paint starts to distress her, and she breathes heavily in and out, in and out, and the smell of the green sorrel, and a drop of soup bubbles up and splashes onto her dress. Why wasn’t she wearing an apron? Why was she wearing her best dress in the house? She looks down at the wet droplet of soup and rubs at it. She doesn’t have another dress like this; she only has housedresses. Why was she even wearing it? She goes to the window and looks out at Grisha who is on his knees, banging nails into a plank with the hammer. And the white paint on the window. She feels a wave of panic coming up around her. What if all this is a mistake? What if she doesn’t want a life where all her dresses are housedresses? What if this is it? The painted window, the new bench, the blue dress. She puts her hands out and leans against the sink. She feels overwhelmingly sick, as if she wants to vomit out her life and her choices. Vomit them out and start again.
Run away! she thinks. I could run away and marry someone else! Run away and have an affair! Live in another city. Have beautiful things. Never have children. Play music and dance, dance, dance!
Her tears are falling onto the sink, and onto the paving stones of the kitchen floor. She feels dizzy and the stench of the paint is filling her mind as if someone is taking a great wet paintbrush and sweeping it back and forth inside her head, blocking out her self, her dreams, her desires, her wants, her everything, everything, everything!
“Mama?”
It is Lyuda at the kitchen window. Zoryana sees her from far away, from through white painted walls and tears and sickness. The child is holding out a flower to her through the window. She is standing on tiptoe, and she reaches her little pale hand up to her mother with eyes of sunlight, and she sees the tears falling from her mother’s eyes, and the little girl feels a strange emotion surging through her.
“Mama, look! I’ve brought you a flower,” she says, and Zoryana struggles to come back to her, to meet her. Through the whiteness, the dizziness, the wall of falling water. She reaches out her hand.
11
The coils of rope appear out of the darkness and twist upward between the night-time leaves of the willow trees. The rope is made of innumerable silver strings; individual strands of thought woven together into a single silver cord. This is the rope that holds together my grandmother, my mother, myself. These coils are the generations of women and the pain we share with one another, pouring up and down the fibres; through darkness, through death, through tears, through pain, blame, love, hurt and most of all, through a constant and constant repetition of the hours, the minutes, the passage of silver time. This is the rope with which we validate our womanhood. The rope we use as a guide to measure out our journeys. The cord that we wind around our bodies, binding our hearts inside and our choices outside, lashing them to the faults of our generations.
My Nightspirit comes to me.
It is time, she says. Your grandmother is not able to help you. Your mother is lost in her darkness.
“I am ready,” I say.
In the silence of the night-time bedroom we dance, weaving in and out of each another, plaiting and unplaiting the threads of memory, passing between us knowledge, remembrance, a quiet, tender light.
I will break the rope. I do not know how I will do this but I know it is what I must do. The river is flooding with the tears of my generations.
“I will call down the stars,” I say. “They are shining on me and they will help me now.”
My Nightspirit draws herself around me in an embrace.
I will come if you need me, she says.
We unwind, like twisting smoke, and she leaves. My body, covered with a patched sheet, sleeps quietly.
T
It is night-time.
I awake from my sleep. Mother is lying in the bed beside me, her lips parted, breathing in and out her quiet sorrow. I rise from the bed in my nightgown, which hangs to my knees. My feet are bare. I push open the door of the bedroom and walk through the kitchen. The air in the house is heavy and the stones of the kitchen floor are cool beneath my feet. I draw back the bolt of the front door and pull it open, just wide enough for me to slip through into the garden.
On the step, the metal of the water bucket is gleaming in the moonlight. I lift the plate from the top and look down into its dark mirror. I dip my fingers into the water and send ripples across its surface. I touch my neck and my face with my fingertips and then cup my hand into the water and drink.
The night-time earth is dry; the lilac tree is a gentle grey. The garden is absolutely silent. Beneath the lilac, I lower myself into the mould of my body, pressed down from my hours of daylight dreaming. Beneath me, the soil pushes through thin cotton to my skin. I lay my arms out on each side of me, stretched into the form of a star.
I look up into the wild explosion of stars.
“I am ready,” I say.
T
My spirit rises gently upwards into the sky. As it passes through the lilac tree, the grey flowers awaken and turn towards the starlight, growing brighter. The tree silently transforms itself into a burning white lantern in the garden, each of its flowers open and receptive to me, to my desires, to the mystery of its own expression. The starlight pours down through it and catches my rising spirit, bearing me up on a beam of silver light.
I close my eyes, and my body disappears into the light.
I speak to the stars.
“I am here to break the rope,” I say.
“We are waiting for you,” they reply, through the darkness.
Around me are stars, and the breath of the lilac that I carry within me, and a night-time universe.
&nbs
p; I open my spirit and I concentrate on the star shape my body has created in the black soil below, and around this shape I draw a circle. Into the circle I pour silver lilac blossoms, which fill with light. I am now a silver star in a white circle. I merge my spirit into this form and then I start to draw the stars into me, into this glowing ring. One by one they come; at first carefully, and then suddenly, pouring their light into my form, filling me with themselves, the universe opening up its darkness to channel all the shafts of starlight into the single point of my body.
I summon before me the silver rope with which we are bound; Mother, Grandmother and myself. I picture vividly every separate thread woven from tears, pain and hurt. I see how it is wound around us three; invisible, pulsing, snaking. And with the starlight lifting me up, lifting me together with the vision of this silver rope, I create with my spirit a great sword with a silver shining blade and I lift this blade high above my head and I bring it down upon the rope. The rope shudders, and the outer threads writhe strangely in the deep night, cut off from the minds which created them, from the hearts which fed them. I lift the sword again, and cut again, and the sword goes deeper, slicing closer to the centre. The rope weaves itself tighter, creating new strength from the close-bound threads. I raise my arms one final time, and I ask once again for the stars to guide my stroke, to guide my will, and then I bring it down onto the last, writhing tendrils; those which would have held my mother in her grief, and my Grandmother, that would have wound their way around my heart for all my days, and the tendrils break apart, twisting madly, dancing wildly into the darkness with the last energy of their pain.
I watch, and they drift away, strand by strand, and are gone.
I release the sword, and the stars reach out and claim it back to themselves.
It is done. Before me I see my mother and my grandmother. The separate silver threads are unwinding, one by one, from around their limbs and hearts, shrivelling into a faint dust and falling to the ground at their feet. I hear a shout and I start to fade through the starlight.
It is done, I hear, falling. It is done.
I return to my body as the white circle disappears. I am dazed and profoundly calm. I sit up, and the black soil clings to the skin of my shoulders and arms. It is in my hair. I lean back against the trunk of the tree, and listen.
Mother awakes, her eyes flashing open and gasping, inexplicably desperate to touch her daughter. She reaches over and sees that the bed is empty. She calls out in a wild panic and runs into the kitchen calling my name. The garden door is open.
“Angela!”
I take a long, deep breath, and then I stand. My nightdress is covered with soil. Black earth falls from my hair.
Mother is standing in the doorway staring at me. Her eyes are wide open. Her head is pounding from vodka and her heart from panic. She can’t seem to understand what she is seeing.
“Angela! Come in, quickly! What are you doing out there in the garden? Come in!”
I walk towards her slowly, the earth dry beneath my feet. I feel the deepest exhaustion, as if I could collapse right here on the ground. I am not sure that I can even make it to the kitchen door.
“Mama?”
I reach out my hand to her and she runs forward and picks me up in her arms. I start to cry as she carries me into the house and straight through the kitchen into the bedroom. I have never been so tired in my life. Mama lays me down on the bed and pulls the covers up over me. She wipes my eyes with the corner of the sheet.
“Angela, milenka, my darling,” she is saying. “It must have been a dream. You must have been sleepwalking. Darling, stop crying. Close your eyes. Everything is alright. Go back to sleep. I’ll sit here with you.”
She is stroking my head and she leans down and holds me to her. I feel her body is different. Lighter, calmer, freer. I have done my task. I close my eyes.
My Nightspirit watches me.
She called down the stars, she whispers to herself. She became a blade of silver starlight.
Yes, I reply, my eyes shining.
T
Grandmother is on the willowbank when the rope is cut. She is pacing on the grass, caught in the sway of long-gone moments and half-forgotten anger. As the threads fall apart, Grandmother feels a coldness going through her, an emptiness, and the memories fall away, leaving her alone on the riverbank.
She looks around her, and sees no one. She feels for a thread of emotion and finds nothing to hold on to. She starts to panic, and she runs among the willow trees, thinking she has lost us, reaching out wildly to her daughter and granddaughter. She casts a strand of flame into the branches, and the tendrils light up, burning with the intensity of her fear.
“Lyuda!” she calls out. “Angela!” but getting no response, she grasps the burning strands of willow and holds them to her body, trying to create a new pain that will bring us back to her.
T
In the branches of the smouldering willow, my burned feathers shrivel and smoke. I must find a place to heal. I look around and my eyes rest upon the river. I open my wings and flap them a few quick times to see if I can fly. I rise up just a little from the burned branch and I am held in the air. It is possible. I focus my attention onto each of my feathers, pouring the remaining energy of my body into them, concentrating whatever life force I have left into the cells, the fibres, the barbs.
I am ready, and I rise, flapping my wings as fast as I can. I lift up from the branch and fly down over the blackened tree. The river is just there. My body is excruciatingly painful, searing pain through my feathers with every upward downward flap, and now I am falling. Let it be the water, let it be the river. Let it please.
T
I catch her.
Tumbling down towards me, burned and spent, a creature small and in pain, I catch her in my waters and I take her in. Her life force flows at once into mine and I gather the most generous powers within me and I pour them into her. Within me, she transforms, releases her pain and opens her broken cells to mine, which carry all the healing of the world. She gives herself to me entirely, frail pain and gentle song.
All healing is here in me.
T
I come to Grandmother, walking lightly, and I stand in front of her. A girl in white. Tangled, dark hair. She is sitting with the willow against her back on the green grass. Grey ash from the burned branches drifts around her.
“Grandmother.”
She raises her head and looks at me. Through her eyes I can reach her. I open a tunnel of light.
“Grandmother, it is Angela. I am here.” My words travel down the tunnel and she receives them, and tries to understand them.
I kneel in front of her and look up into her blue eyes. “I love you,” I say to her, and a strand of silver winds its way towards her. “I love you,” I say again, and another strand entwines itself with the first.
Grandmother looks at the silver wisps weaving together in a thin cord, and then she looks up into my face in wonder. New threads wrap around one another in winding coils.
“You have broken the rope,” she says.
T
Grandmother swims in the river. She is naked, and her old body looks strange under the flowing water, almost insect-like, shrinking bones under flabbed skin. She swims from one side to the other, but she knows that she cannot emerge onto our bank, her time here is long gone.
I have broken the rope and all pain has disappeared. Grandmother remembers now that every moment of her life was a quiet perfection. She would like to go back to her youth, when she lay laughing under the sweeping branches, she green, they black in her eyes looking up into the sunshine. She danced in the arms of Grisha here under these willow branches. He held her around the waist, she in her blue cotton dress, and he whirled her around the willow trunk. And they lay laughing and flushed under the leaves and held each other.
“We swam,” says Grandmother, swimming. “We swam, naked, in this river. Birds were singing. I dived underwater and all I could hear was the r
ush of the current flowing. When I came up, everything seemed so still after the rushing of the water, and the song of the birds came to me quite suddenly. The branches of the willows themselves seemed to be singing.”
Grandmother turns around in the water. She has reached the far bank, where we all sit, listening, watching, waiting. Her granddaughters and great-granddaughters and great-great-granddaughters. Watching and listening, hands clasped in one another’s. She smiles at us, knowing that we have always been here, and that she has always been here, and then she turns in the water and starts swimming back to the other side, where she must wait for now, for her daughter to make a choice.
“And then he came up behind me,” she whispers to the river. “He held me while I listened to the birds singing, and he held my breasts under the water, and he stroked my green body, and we disappeared into the water,” she whispers, disappearing into the water.
T
Lyuda sits at the kitchen table and looks straight through the glass jar of wild flowers. Through the white and yellow daisies, golden dandelions, tumbling poppies. She looks through them to the memory beyond and she breathes slowly. The spring air shifts when she breathes out. The air is heavy, and it sinks onto the petals of the cut flowers, resting on the ragged explosion of yellow, on the chapped petals of the daisy. Pollen rises from the gold, from the black of the poppy, weaves in time as it is held with an outward breath.
Lyuda breathes, and time hears her heart. It shifts. The flowers shift. In the garden, her daughter sits up with a start, her heart beating wildly.
Her mother has gone.
PART TWO
12
In Volodiya’s house, the baby was always screaming.
And there was always a new baby.
Sometimes there was a respite, if his mother could organise the older girls to carry the children out to the yard, or down the lane to the fields. But apart from these brief moments, there was a constant noise of suffering or complaint or pain.
The Woman Behind The Waterfall Page 7