The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘I don’t know what they mean by sins,’ she complains as they sit in the pew in the Lenten church. The statues are swathed in purple. ‘I have nothing to tell. Do you, Sissy?’

  But Sissy has dozens of crimes to choose from, her urgent longings to escape, her greediness to have Papa to herself, her reluctant envy of Walter, her complete lack of innocence. How can she confess to never having been innocent?

  All Saints’ Day 1904 was mild and damp. Sissy loved this day, when they trooped to the graveyard carrying candles and bundles of dried flowers. In the early afternoon the small cemetery behind the church was filled with villagers pulling weeds and sweeping off the headstones. Papa traced around the inscription on the Schanzkowski grave with his fingertips, loosening a year’s worth of grit and dust which had lodged there, while Mother placed bunches of lavender in jars around the plot and Maria lit the dozens of candles they had brought from the house. Sissy was left in charge of Baby – he thought the flickering flames were butterflies that he could catch in his little fist. For the first time Sissy was able to read the carved lettering on the tombstone. There was Grandfather Schanzkowski, old man of distant memory, then Grandmother who had died before Sissy was born, and there, too, was the first Mrs Schanzkowska, Elena, her life etched in stone, 1857–1890. So it was true then, Sissy thought. As daylight faded they gathered round the grave and prayed for the dear departed. Papa left soon afterwards – there would be revelry in the village – and Mother returned to the house. But Sissy wanted to stay and because Baby fretted when Mother tried to take him home, he stayed too. Once distracted from the candles, he played on the swept path near the grave where he counted pebbles seriously. Sissy savoured the vigilant glow in the churchyard where thousands of candles would be left to burn through the night and the shrouded figures of the living moved about with a slow solemnity. Maria spied Wladek Dudowski, a lanky boy she had been mooning over. Sissy could not understand what attraction such boys could have with their gapped grins and dung-covered boots and their sudden outbursts of raucous laughter. When she passed them gathered in the schoolyard or roaming in gangs through the pastures, she would look the other way. Unlike Maria, she did not want to excite their attention. They would nudge one another as she passed, whistling and mocking, and laughing their loud, mysterious guffaws. They did not talk but rather shoved one another and scuffled lazily, or stood broodingly kicking the dust.

  ‘Don’t tell Papa,’ Maria admonished as she and Wladek hurried away into the gloom, leaving Sissy alone with Baby.

  Some of the villagers had brought comets to light their way to the graveyard. These were metal cans filled with the leavings of the stove. They left a faintly charred smell in the air and rusty embers in their wake. Sissy inhaled the perfumed dusk – smoky, leaf-rotted. Surrounded by liquid pools of candlelight and the low murmur of prayer, she felt a palpable vastness as if the familiar churchyard was pitched at the edge of the world and beyond the silhouetted tombstones, the quivering light and the grey autumnal mist there was only a sublime emptiness. She thought of Elena Schanzkowska, imagining her in that space, moving furtively through the crowds, a distraught young woman, robbed of her life, clamouring to come back, to reclaim. Sissy shivered. Martha Borkowska bounced up and broke the mood.

  ‘Let’s go into the village,’ Martha said brightly.

  Suddenly Sissy was keen to go. The candles and the garlands and the uttered prayers were summoning up unhappy ghosts. She looked around for Baby.

  ‘Baby,’ she yelled, panic rising like a gorge in her throat.

  She hunted high and low among the crowd, praying softly to herself, half-admonition, half-threat. Find him, God, please find him. She thought of the river that ran behind the village, the lake not half a mile away, the well, where a little child could slip in and be swallowed by the silent deep.

  ‘Baby!’ she screamed.

  She ran from headstone to headstone, peering between the men’s stout legs and the pious hunch of women for a glimpse of gold, or a flash of fair flesh. But he was nowhere to be seen. She had lost him; he was gone.

  ‘Baby,’ she sobbed.

  She too was lost. Papa would kill her.

  Hours later they found Baby asleep among sacks of flour in a storehouse behind the grocer’s shop. Felix discovered him, doggedly scouring every backyard and craggy alleyway in the village. Sissy had sent Martha back to the house for help, knowing that she could not face Papa, while she tramped through the wet fields down by the river calling Walter’s name out into the night. She did not dare to look at the water, afraid of what she might find. She thought of running away, but the darkness frightened her. When Papa arrived, he strode through the village, raging and howling, catching men and women alike by their lapels and shouting at them, spittle flying, ‘Have you seen my son?’

  He had not killed Sissy, but he had struck her, a sharp blow across the cheek. Her face smarted for days, out of shame, not hurt. She saw in his eyes the contempt he had reserved for Felix. Mother gathered the drowsy child into her arms and nuzzled into his damp hair.

  ‘We have Walter back,’ she said, ‘that’s all that matters.’

  It was as if she had killed Baby, or at least meant him harm. Papa decided that Walter should not sleep in the girls’ room any more. He was put in the settle bed in the kitchen instead, where, Papa said, he would be safe – this accompanied by a darting glare at Sissy. He ruled that she should never be alone with Baby in case she put a spell on him with her evil eye. He ordered Walter to cover his teeth when Sissy was in the room – she was an ill-wisher now. It made Baby nervous of her. He whimpered if she came close, sensing some danger from her. She was not allowed to pick him up or touch him. If he started crying, Mother or Maria would be motioned to quieten him. She missed his touch, the tickling warmth of his breath in the bed beside her.

  ‘Papa will forget’, Mother said to her, ‘in time, but for now we must do what he says.’

  But Sissy knew that while he might forget, he would never forgive.

  In the spring Papa takes Walter out on his Sunday expeditions. They go to the river or gather wild mushrooms.

  ‘A boy must learn to hunt and fish,’ he declares.

  Sissy prepares food for them and watches as they set off through the poppied fields, father and son. The little boy trots after him, carrying a satchel with bread, white cheese and cured ham. Felix is not included in these trips either, although his nature is more suited to the long waiting and the hushed stillness required of the hunter. Felix is, above all, patient. It is his patience that most infuriates Papa, who takes it as a sign of cunning on Felix’s part, an elaborate plotting that might somehow undo him. After years of exclusion Felix does not seem to mind. But Sissy does. She tries desperately to appease. She polishes Papa’s boots. She gathers herbs to bathe his feet in. She runs to greet him when he returns, but he swats her away as if she were a farmyard dog. She waits at night to hear his foot on the threshold and peers through the crack of the open door to the kitchen as he wanders around grumbling to himself. She feels like the first Mrs Schanzkowska, slight and insubstantial.

  ‘Go to bed,’ Papa says wearily, without even looking up, ‘go to bed.’

  She is no longer his Princess.

  THESE ARE THE years of banishment. Sissy, hungry for redemption, turns to God. Daily, after school, she visits the deserted church. She likes the solemnity of its silence, punctured only by the hissing of candles. She does not light one for herself. She knows that what she would ask God for is not worthy; she wants things to be as they were. To undo Walter, to have Papa love her again, her alone. She tries to unravel the spool of time back, back to when Walter wasn’t born, but she finds it hard to imagine such a time, let alone remember it. It is the only time her memory fails her.

  She sits in the front pew and gazes up, as she used to at the sky, and is awed by its lofty height. Used to the low eaves at home, living crushed up against the roof, this airy openness feels like freedom. At first it is not
God who draws her in, but this, the notion of lightness and escape. Of being at one moment, kneeling, small and singular in a dwarfed pew, and in another winging about in the thin, mote-flecked realm of the heavens. It makes her dizzy and appalled; it feels illicit, this solitary, exotic joy. And if she feels a real presence it is the first Mrs Schanzkowska’s. She sees her in the blank eyes of the stone Virgin staring upward, appealing to the heavens. Her baby son rests in the bloodied glow of the sanctuary lamp. Her voice is buried in the susurrus of Sissy’s urgent prayers. She, too, must have come here, uttering imprecations in the cowed silence. Her tentative absence gives Sissy comfort. She draws solace from the mothering silence. She thinks it must be God working in mysterious ways, granting her compensation. And she repays him with her prayers, dogged entreaties to keep Baby safe and well, to spare Mother and Papa, to protect Felix. And it soothes her as once the roll-call of siblings did, or the recitation of the kaisers. Memory and repetition, these will save her.

  Mother takes it as a good sign and is relieved. When Mrs Borkowska, mother of Martha, stops her on Slupia Street on a fine blue Sunday in May, it is not to croon over five-year-old Walter, the apple of his father’s eye, it is to commend Sissy’s piety, the long hours spent at the altar. Mother blushes with a quiet pride. She has always thought Sissy strange, a complicated, covert child. Used to Felix’s slow docility, she found her second-born difficult and demanding. Sissy cried for months and would not wean. She clawed at the breast, scrabbling with her fingers as if no amount of milk would satisfy her. Bella blanched at such appetite and felt it somehow unseemly. And later even Sissy’s cleverness seemed less than wholesome. Her eagerness to learn – how she pestered to be taught the time or to learn her alphabet – seemed like more of the same avidity. A girl could be too clever and it mightn’t do her any favours.

  Bella Kurowska had been sent to Countess Zamoyska’s School of Domestic Economy in Zakopane in the hope that it would aid her in being matched quickly, although her fellow pupils assumed that being the daughter of a tailor she was training to go into domestic service. There was no point in telling them that she was related to the Dulskis of Poznan. And though the long hours in the kitchen, dairy and laundry, the cutting out and making of clothes, the courses in practical book-keeping and the Bible-reading classes had prepared her to run a Christian household, they had been no help in securing her a match. No amount of education could wipe out the sins of her mother. In the end it was not her skills in Christian husbandry that had won her hand in marriage at the age of twenty-eight, but cousin Josef’s need for a mother for his orphaned children.

  Secretly, Bella preferred Sissy’s elder sister. She might not be Maria’s mother, but the girl’s capriciousness was, at least, familiar. Bella might fear reckless impulse but she understood it. How could she not, being the fruit of it herself? But Sissy she distrusted. Right from the start. From the moment she fell pregnant with Sissy, she was subject to extraordinary cravings. She did not tell her husband that in the third month she ate fish, expressly forbidden for a woman in hope in case the child would swim in luxury or immorality. She does not hold now with all her husband’s superstitions, but then she was keen to please him. When Josef was away she asked Felix to fetch her some herring she had pickled and hidden in the store. The taste remains with her, salty and tart. It reminds her of Sissy’s temperament.

  Maria and Sissy paint the eggs together for the last time in 1908. Martha Borkowska and her sisters join them. It is Holy Thursday, the weak, pale light of spring draining from the evening sky as they set to in the kitchen. Maria is almost eighteen, fine-boned, slender and pretty, like her mother, Sissy suspects, a living token of the first Mrs Schanzkowska. She still feels the presence of the first mother in the house, perhaps because she has so completely inherited the first Mrs Schanzkowska’s place, ghosting around the farm and the fields, banished and alone. The girls gather the eggs from the henhouse and lay them out on the kitchen table. Sissy coats each egg with wax, then draws a design on its shell with a needle. The parts of the egg not covered with wax will take the colour when they are dipped. Maria has spent all day mixing the colours, boiling up roots and herbs on the stove and pouring them into small dishes. There is orange from the infusion of crocuses, black from a brew of elder bark, light green from moss collected from the shaded underside of stones. Each time an egg is dipped in colour, a fresh design must be traced on the waxy eggshell. Sissy loves the minute care needed to draw the patterns of leaves and flowers on the egg’s surface. It is at such odds with the rest of their lives, this delicate refinement lavished on something as fragile as eggshell. The eggs retreat with each dipping, under the velvety soot of blue and the bold impertinence of corngold, until they are no longer recognisable as the mud-spattered, straw-flecked offerings of the henhouse. They will sit in a bowl on the table all through the penitent fasting of Good Friday and the vigilant worship of Holy Saturday until Easter Sunday, when they will be given away as gifts. Were it left to Sissy, she would never part with them. She would keep them for the rest of the year, sitting in the bowl, little prisms of polished beauty.

  Maria has already decided who will get her favourite.

  ‘This one’, she says, picking one with a dove motif from the pile, ‘is for Wladek.’

  Four years on, Wladek Dudowski is still on Maria’s mind. She meets him secretly when her chores are done. In her solitary rambles, Sissy has seen them necking in the barn, or kissing in a secret spot down by the river they think no one else knows about.

  ‘It certainly is not, my girl,’ Mother interrupts, ‘that would mean that we welcome his attentions. You may, but your father doesn’t.’

  Wladek is a farm labourer, worth only his hire. His father has no land of his own, and has nothing to offer a bride.

  ‘You be careful,’ Mother warns. ‘If Papa gets wind of your carryings-on with Wladek, it’s the high road for you.’

  On Holy Saturday Sissy brings a basket of food to the church to be blessed. This is her job, as the youngest girl in the household. Mother has prepared bread, sausage, salt, vinegar and eggs cooked in onion sauce. On Easter Sunday, Papa eats the first blessed egg, peeling back the orange-stained shell with his fingers. He pops it whole into his mouth. Sissy feels a tremor of connection.

  Sissy returns to the house one evening, barefoot and hot, and finds the place in uproar. After the dense silent heat of the church, the sunsoaked yard seems harsh and glaring. Wladek Dudowski, hands hanging by his side, stands in the centre of the yard. Papa has him by the throat, his shirt knotted in a bunch between whitening knuckles. In his other hand he holds a stick. Mother’s hens scurry heedlessly about, pecking at the dust. Maria is sobbing by the door, her face streaked with dirty tears. Mother is standing in front of her, trying to shield her from Papa’s ire.

  ‘The lad meant no harm,’ she is saying.

  The rain barrel shimmers.

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ Papa bellows.

  He looks old and bruised beside the younger man.

  ‘I came across them in the barn. He has had his way with her, he has disgraced her, and the honour of this family.’

  Sissy sidles in behind the gate, hoping not to be noticed. Papa looks up and is momentarily distracted.

  ‘Ah, Sissy,’ he says softly.

  For a moment she is bathed in his benign gaze. She waits for him to say something more, but it is just absent-mindedness. He turns back to the task in hand.

  ‘Come here,’ he roars at Maria, who is rubbing her streaked face with her apron. Mother prods her forward and she moves out of the shadow of the house into an oblong of hard light. She squints, blinded by the sun. Papa catches her by her hair and yanks her towards him so that she is within spitting distance of Wladek. Big and rough as he is, the boy’s hands are trembling. Papa stands between them for all the world like a priest joining them in holy matrimony, here in the glare of the afternoon sun, with the chickens and the rain barrel and Mother’s heat-wilted geraniums
on the sills as witnesses. To Sissy their pretty pink blooms look too garishly eager; the yard seems to throb with an unseemly fever. At times like these, pregnant with imminence, she imagines it is the anger of the first Mrs Schanzkowska that she senses, railing against the indignities piled upon her lost children. But, Sissy knows, only she recognises such signs.

  There is a crash of skulls, the sickening thud of flesh and bone colliding as Papa smashes Wladek’s and Maria’s heads together.

  ‘Imbeciles!’ he bellows.

  Once, twice, three times. Mother screams at him to stop. Maria falls in a faint and Papa, ignoring her, turns on Wladek with the stick, raining blows across his head and chest with a whistling thwack that draws blood through the stuff of his shirt. Wladek sinks to the dirt, his hands vainly trying to protect his head as he cowers at Papa’s feet. Mother is on all fours, trying to drag the lifeless Maria away. Sissy is rooted to the spot. She is horrified, but she cannot look away. She is mesmerised to see such magnificent violence, Papa standing like an enraged beast in the sunlight while Wladek limps bloodily away. Sissy has never seen such passion. Papa looks at her again and smiles a foolish, drunken kind of smile.

  ‘At least I don’t need to worry about where you’ve been,’ he says, ‘my little holy one.’

  Maria’s love token, the painted dove egg, rolls away into a dusty corner of the yard.

  A position is found for Maria in Poznan. Mother writes a begging letter to Aunt Irena, a Dulski relative. She will help, Mother says with a determined certainty. A helpful Dulski relative seems a contradiction in terms; whatever Mother has got from them has always been by stealth. And this is no different. The letter Mother writes makes no reference to Maria’s unfortunate circumstances.

  Martha Borkowska skips into the yard the following morning, brimming with the news.

  ‘What’s going to happen to her?’ she asks Sissy excitedly.

  Maria is still in bed, nursing a black eye and a gashed forehead. Sissy shrugs. What’s going to happen has already happened, or so she thinks. It is only Martha’s appetite for gossip that alerts her.