The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  Sissy opened the latch door into the yard. A glowering dawn greeted her; the frantic clamour of birdsong invaded the sleeping house.

  ‘Sissy?’

  A sleepy murmur from Walter.

  ‘Shush,’ she said, ‘go back to sleep.’

  ‘It’s blood,’ he cried. ‘Mother, Papa, Sissy’s hurt, she’s bleeding.’

  She stood paralysed by the door, willing him to stop.

  ‘Sissy’s hurt.’ He was yelling now.

  A floorboard creaked. Papa trod heavily into the kitchen.

  ‘What is it, Walter? What’s wrong?’ Sleep snagged in his throat.

  He did not even see Sissy. She looked at them, father and son, locked in their bartering, complicit gaze, a look that locked her out. But for once, she was glad of it. It gave her a chance to escape. Papa must never discover her secret. She darted out into the yard and made for the river. She plunged the sheets and nightshirt into the eddying waters. She squeezed and squeezed until she had throttled the lifeblood out of them.

  She set her face against it. She would not let it happen. She feared that once she had started she would bleed continuously and be confined to bed like some delicate, thin-blooded royal. The full moon of her childhood was eclipsed. Mother tried to explain when she discovered Sissy sitting on a sawn stump in the orchard, guardian of her sheets spread to dry on the bushes. This, Mother said, pointing to the ghosts of blood on the sheets, this happened to all women. This would make her a woman.

  ‘I will not,’ Sissy said.

  ‘But, Sissy,’ Mother said, ‘you can’t simply refuse. You have no choice in this.’

  All is changed by the spilling of blood. She has always thought of herself as solid, arms, legs, skin, hair. Now there is a hollow, a blank at her centre. She does not like to think about this newly opened inner chamber. It makes her dizzy – but it is not the pleasant giddiness of contemplating the vastness of the sky or the domed loftiness of the church. This is an unhinged airiness that comes from within. When she goes outside she is afraid she might be picked up by a puff of wind and whisked away. The ground is no longer solid beneath her. And when the pain comes it is as if the earth is tugging at her innards, pulling at the pit of her belly, heavy as stone, draining her power away between her legs. Mother says she has gained her womanhood. Sissy feels as if she is being robbed.

  As soon as she saw the carpet of hair falling on the floor Sissy was sorry. She had caught the thick braid of hair and chopped it with one downward swipe of the kitchen knife. She attacked the rest of it with scissors, gapping the front and sides until she looked like a piebald boy. Some of the hair, which curled now at her feet, had been with her since babyhood. Mother came upon her in the scullery, scissors clenched in her fingers. For a moment she thought the girl had been attacked; her immediate unspoken fear was – Felix. Then she realised the damage was self-inflicted. She approached Sissy as she might a cornered animal.

  ‘Sissy, what have you done?’

  Sissy dropped the scissors on the flagstones, and stared down at the feathery pile at her feet. Mother drew her close. She could not remember the last time her mother had embraced her. It made her feel weak and grateful all at once.

  ‘The neighbours will think we have lice in the house,’ Mother said as she fingered Sissy’s shorn head. ‘You’ll have to wear a cap now like an old married woman.’ She cupped her hand around Sissy’s gapped crown and tried to smooth out the cruel handiwork.

  ‘What possessed you, child, to do such a thing?’

  Sissy shrugged miserably. She did not know, in truth, what had possessed her. A mood had overtaken her, like a shift in the weather, a wind suddenly rising up and tormenting the leaves of the trees, a shiver of birds’ wings, a cloud stealing over the sun. It was a new sensation, quite different to the vague and dreamy longings which had afflicted her before. They had made her lethargic; this gave her a ferocious energy. She had an urge to destroy, to break things. A kind of bile rose up in her throat and she had to act. She had tried to dispel it by applying herself to household tasks. She took over from Mother the job of wringing the necks of the chickens. She crushed beets for the pigs, enough for a week, beating them to a sodden pulp. She took the axe and chopped logs mercilessly in the yard. The flail of the axe and the thwack of stone against wood made her feel powerful and dangerous, but her arms ached from the effort. But nothing satisfied her enough. She wanted to do damage. She fingered the braids of her hair, which hung at her waist like the useless tail of a donkey. This, she thought, I could destroy. What use was her hair to her, or to anybody? And the next moment the knife was in her hand and the braid was lying dead on the floor.

  Felix wept when he saw her. He unwound her severed plait and laid the strands on the table reverently. Kneeling, he gathered up her shorn locks and cupped them in his palm as if they were spilled gold. He pressed his lips to her lost hair, as if grieving for her vanished childhood. Only Felix understood, there on his knees, gaping at her with a dumb, brotherly bewilderment. Papa shoved him aside.

  ‘Who did this to you?’ he demanded.

  ‘She did it herself,’ Mother explained.

  Sissy expected a blow, but instead a shadow of sorrow crossed his features.

  ‘Your hair,’ Papa said, ‘your lovely hair.’

  The tone of lament softened her. She felt the ancient familiar love for him well up in her, the devotion that was as natural to her as breathing. Then she realised she had hurt him, and the thought strangely pleased her.

  ‘She looks as if she’s been punished,’ he said to Mother.

  ‘Punished for what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What has she done?’

  ‘You look ugly,’ Walter said, ‘ugly and mad.’ He tittered and Papa joined in. His own shrill laughter and Papa’s rumbling guffaw egged the child on. ‘They should lock you up. You and Felix. Soft in the head, both of you.’

  Papa spluttered into a fresh bout of laughter.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Sissy said. ‘And who wakes up in the middle of the night crying for his mother like an infant.’

  ‘That’s enough, Sissy,’ Mother said.

  But it wasn’t. Her blood was up now.

  ‘Who’s so afraid of the water that he wets the bed?’

  The laughter halted abruptly. Walter, eyes downward, refused to look at Papa. Sissy trembled with a sense of victory; she savoured the triumph of betrayal. Finally she had outdone the boy child. But Papa merely reached out his hand and placed it on Walter’s head.

  ‘If the boy’s afraid of water,’ he announced, ‘then we must teach him to swim!’

  She watched them, unseen. It tantalised her, father and son in the river, skin on skin. Papa standing naked in waist-high water, holding Walter at arm’s length as he drew him along, the boy kicking and thrashing noisily. Papa urged and remonstrated.

  ‘No, Walter, no … like this!’

  She was familiar with this spot on the river with its apron of shingle. She had scrubbed clothes there and laid sheets out to dry on its smooth platform of rocks. She had paddled in the shallows and once or twice she had immersed herself, fully clothed, on summery days when the meadows sizzled with heat. Papa plunged head down into the water, gliding along with a side stroke which sent out eddying ripples around him. His head, sleek as an otter’s, rose and fell with an elegant ease as if he had found his true element. His work-coarsened body marked by the high tide of seasons – his arms brown to the elbows, his sun-beaten face – looked pale and newborn in the water. Then suddenly he rose out of the water in a fountain of spray and plucked Walter, shivering at the edge, and threw him high into the air. Walter shrieked in delight as Papa caught him deftly and the sun formed an arced halo of glistening light around father and much-beloved son. Sissy retreated into the undergrowth.

  TIME IS RUNNING out for Sissy. A dowry is being saved for her. Mother has put aside two large pots and a pair of sheets which would have gone to Maria had she stayed. The next calf to be born wil
l be given to Sissy’s betrothed. She is fifteen and should be looking around, Mother says. It won’t be long before the matchmaker will arrive at the door. A clever girl like her should have no trouble, she declares brightly. With her own history, Bella does not want her daughter left on the shelf. The memory of the long wait for Josef Schanzkowski still makes her burn with humiliation. She determines that her only daughter will not suffer likewise. She tries not to dwell on Sissy’s strangeness, her quick temper, her haughty indifference to young men, her rage at the playful drenchings with buckets of water that boys indulged in on Easter Monday, her refusal to join in on the St John’s Eve festivities in the village. She would not stand with a gaggle of girls on the water’s edge pushing forth whitethorn wreaths alight with candles out onto the millpond and watch while the village boys rowed out to fetch them. She did not want anyone making a claim on her. Still, Mother counters, it is time to use her charms, the wiles of womanhood. Sissy knows nothing of them and does not want to know. She remembers Maria’s little tricks of flirtation; even Gertie, blessed with a love match, had known how to hold out, when to retreat and when to surrender. But what good was it to know these things when she did not want the reward that would go with them?

  Covertly, Sissy observes her mother. Once, she too had been a young woman, though the girl in her had long since been killed off. Now she was sad, dejected, indomitable in her small rebellions, but defeated by a life of servitude and appeasement. How easy it would be to eclipse her mother, her tired beauty, her cracked skin and her hair faded to the colour of ashes. Sissy might be plain and ungainly, but she was young and untried. Her flesh at least was innocent. It was the only thing she had left to offer Papa.

  She waited up for him one Saturday night, steering Mother towards bed when midnight struck on the wall clock and there was no sign of him.

  ‘You’ll lock the door, won’t you, when he comes in, and don’t let him here with the lamp burning, he’s inclined to nod off.’

  ‘Yes, Mother, I know.’

  Sissy wondered how her mother could forget that she knew the ritual of these late nights. She, too, had spent many years lying vigilantly awake in the darkness, waiting for Papa to come home. Then it was with a mixture of delight and dread she waited: now it was with helpless desire. As a child she had never known what adult drama might ensue in the small hours of the morning – raised voices, often a litany of her mother’s grievances countered by Papa’s grumpy justifications. And there were not always rows. She had watched once behind the half-open door as Papa, creeping up soundlessly behind her mother, had kissed her with a rough passion on her bared neck. An expression flickered across Mother’s face, as if she were in delicate pain. Then she shook him off.

  ‘Hush, Josef, the children,’ she hissed, casting an eye anxiously towards the children’s room as Sissy melted back into the darkness.

  Once her mother had gone to bed, Sissy dressed her hair with a bridal wreath. She had plucked darnel, daisies and white clover, and threaded them through with a red ribbon she had found in her dowry chest. She wore an old nightgown of Mother’s, low in the front for nursing. She wrapped a shawl around the bare knobs of her shoulders where she had pushed back the gown. The sky was still streaked with ebbing brightness, the moon a pale shadow chasing the sun. Walter, in the cot by the stove, unfurled himself into abandoned sleep.

  Sissy heard Papa singing long before he arrived, his voice ragged in the tumult of the sum er’s night – the throaty rumble of toads, the throbbing pulse of crickets. But it reached Sissy like a song of courtship. A field of bristling goose pimples rose on her forearms. Beneath the startling white of her gown, she could feel her nipples harden. She tried to moisten her lips as she willed herself to be still, not to betray herself to him too soon. The door scraped open and Papa stood silhouetted against the smoke-coloured night, stamping his feet noisily on the threshold as if it were the depths of winter and he were shaking snow off his boots.

  ‘Elena?’ he whispered incredulously.

  The sight of his daughter standing barefoot in the half-light, her hands kneading her breasts, her lips parted, her eyes closed, made him think of his first wife. As if the years had suddenly fallen away, or history had been peeled back and he had stepped into an impassioned version of his past. Then he checked himself – drink was making him see things.

  Sissy had not been able to wait. As soon as he had met her gaze, she thought the touch on her breasts was his and the seeping moisture between her thighs had come from his hand. He stepped towards her; she reached out, clinging to him fiercely, her fingernails digging into his fleshy arms, her lips crushed against the craggy skin of his breast bone as she came with a wrenching cry. Suddenly he seemed to wake from her assault, sinking his lips against her mouth, his tongue burrowing in, vainly trying to retrieve the trailing streamers of her ardour. But all that was left was the sharp windfall of her desire.

  Walter stirred and opened a sticky eye. Papa froze, then pushed Sissy aside as he moved quickly to the settle bed. The child had only time to see the silhouettes of father and sister against the dying glow of the fire before sleep clawed him back into its clutches. He smiled drowsily as he fell.

  A fury, hard and despising, gripped Sissy’s heart. Was she never to have what she wanted? Papa turned his back on her.

  For the first and only time in his life, Josef Schanzkowski felt the scalding of shame.

  She was up early. She had slept little; some restless power awoken in her she could not quench. She was stoking the stove when Papa came in from the yard. He avoided her eye.

  ‘Did Sissy look after you last night? We saved pork and dumplings but you didn’t eat,’ Mother said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘she looked after me all right.’

  He turned his back and doused his face in the enamel basin by the door.

  ‘Water,’ he called.

  Sissy heaved one of the pots from the stove and brought it over to where Papa had already begun to shave. She poured the water awkwardly. Hot splashes seared his soiled vest.

  ‘Dammit, girl,’ he shouted, ‘careful!’

  ‘I knew I should have stayed up,’ Mother prattled. ‘Sissy just has no idea …’

  He took out his cut-throat and began to shave.

  ‘I had no appetite,’ he bayed.

  Sissy’s eyes blazed and she almost shouted ‘liar!’ Josef Schanzkowski hid behind a lather of white.

  Walter bounded in. ‘Papa! Papa!’

  ‘Is the house on fire?’ Mother asked petulantly.

  ‘Leave the boy alone,’ Papa said, tamping his wet chin with his discarded shirt.

  ‘Are we going to the river?’ Walter asked excitedly. ‘You promised!’

  ‘Make holy the Sabbath day,’ Mother intoned.

  Papa scowled at her.

  ‘Take Sissy with you,’ Papa said. ‘Wasn’t she a great one for the church?’

  He spoke of her as if she weren’t there.

  ‘Please, Papa, can we go?’ Walter pleaded, wrapping his arms around Papa’s waist and nuzzling into his side. Sissy looked away.

  ‘Yes, son, yes. We’ll leave these women to their idle prayers.’ He shot a look of scorn at Sissy. ‘Ask God to send Sissy a husband. It’s high time she was off our hands.’

  In the afternoon Sissy went out into the fields. The parched stubble spoke of months without rain. The world had a bleached-out look. The blue sky was rinsed and brittle, the half-shorn meadows looked pale and penitent. She wandered through a field of sunflowers. They gathered round her, their black hearts glowering. They eclipsed her, towering at her shoulders. She felt protected by the darkness at their centre. It matched her own. The clammy heat made her lethargic, as if the passion of the previous night had seeped away into her father’s mouth. She blushed to think of it, the spot on her cheek where he had scalded her with his stubble, his rough breath misting at her ear, his smell, sweet and stale. She touched her ear, her cheek, her mouth in a prayerful benediction, to ensu
re that she had not dreamed it up. The whorl of ear, the svelte of cheek, the fleshy cushion of her mouth, these could not lie. Witnesses all, no matter how Papa might try to deny it. To escape from the merciless sun she climbed into the barn and lay among the bales of just gathered hay. Here, purblind and hectic with lust, she fell into a troubled sleep.

  She is three again, lying in the warm rustle of hay. It is the first full, fat year of the century. It is the life before Walter. She is innocent again. If she sleeps on, no harm will come to her. She can roam for ever in the sun-soaked days of childhood, the baby of the family, her father’s little Princess. The ghost of that little girl is already turning away, waving sadly as if from a great distance. She is still waiting. Waiting for her mother to emerge from the house, a woman calling for her last-born in the busy heat of haymaking, waiting for Papa to unravel the straw-flecked nest of her hair while Grandmother’s wall clock ticks in waltz time. It is not too late to go back, Sissy. Open the flimsy door. Turn the hands back … before the spilling of blood, the breaking of eggs. Go back!

  I am woken by the drumbeat of rain, the curdled sleep of years in my mouth. I float in the murky, louring sky, surveying what was once my kingdom. I see the sodden track, the dreeping house, the spattered yard. I ruled here once, this man my husband, my children ran among the dogweed, supplanted now by impostors and their ragged mother, who bears the name that I once had.

  I am Elena Schanzkowska. Wronged woman. Sensed only by the middle child, the strange, bewitched one. She it was who felt my presence in the kitchen, my hand on the oven door, my spirit in the throbbing summer light of the yard and in the cemetery on the day of the dead. She who made hymns of my children’s names to join these worlds together, hers and mine. But what’s mine is mine. Valerian, Gertruda and Maria, and the unnamed one who stole my life from me before I was ready to go. All mine. Now that they are scattered, who is there to honour me? Not Josef, certainly. He banished me before I was even cold. He struck Valerian for weeping at the sight of me stretched out upon my birth bed, deathbed, a pfennig on each eyelid. My first-born, my roguish, playful son. Usurped, disowned. Gone to a distant place where I hold no sway. Does he even remember me? Perhaps only as a faint image, a tender, melancholy icon. Gertruda did, but she was scolded for it. Scolded too when she burned the bread or scorched the sheets or couldn’t quell the little one’s cries. Maria, poor motherless mite. I saw myself in her, her fancies, her hunting out of love, but she too was driven off.