And the next time it happened, she was no longer by Hannusia’s side—the girl’s power ventured out into the world more and more, and the mother inexorably was left somewhere in the background. Maria was feeding her chickens in the yard, cluck-cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck-cluck, dearies, when suddenly a breathless flock of kids rushed in—Auntie, Auntie, they dug a well outside of Markian’s homestead, Hannusia showed them where to dig! Until then the village didn’t have a dowser of its own, they had to hire one from two villages over—a pockmark-faced fellow would come over, lean as a whippet, and wander around with his divining rod, taking no food, until all the children, Olenka among them, roamed around with sticks like him, and only when he finally indicated the spot, after they lowered him in a large barrel into the shaft so he could dig the last spadeful of dirt and release the water, would he take a drink and break his fast: a well is a serious matter, even those with the gift of drawing the water must mind themselves properly so as not to lose it, and here you have it!—casual, simple as a good morning, the girl turned to Markian’s wife and said: “What do you need that pond for, when you’ve got a spring out there past the poplars, no more than a man and a half deep?” They went to dig, and sure enough, found the spring, and the water clear as a tear and cold as ice on the teeth, so good—you drink and feel like you’ve been born anew. “Hey, girl, would you work your magic on my plot too?” someone blurted out just to say something, obviously jealous of Markian’s good fortune—the good Lord does look out for the rich! Hannusia, proud to be treated almost as an adult, did work her magic—walked over and said: Dig over here, and so another well appeared in the village, except “over here” fell not on the jealous man’s land, but, as if to drive him mad, right over the boundary fence, in his neighbor’s yard. Maria and Vasyl got money and gifts from all that, and Hannusia, in addition to the quiet pique of yet another person (because that unfortunate who led her to his neighbor’s yard blamed her for all his dashed hopes, as was to be expected), earned glory that was known across the whole district: word they had a girl who could sense water underground spread like a straw fire, and it was now Hannusia rather than the old dowsers who was invited to more distant villages, and the family, not to jinx it, made a little money from it. Vasyl was even thinking about perhaps buying another horse, but Maria insisted they had to invest in a dowry for Hannusia, fit for a princess, so that nobody would later dare make a peep that he took her in naked and barefoot. Maria would gladly work herself to death for this—this was a purpose exalted enough to fill her life to the brim. Vasyl, who didn’t say anything about this for a while, then set his own terms: the dowry was to be collected for both girls equally, and even that, he thought, was maybe not entirely fair, because the younger one might need it more, while the elder was more than enough herself. This was perhaps the first time that he signaled how highly he valued the older girl, the one that was not-his, and much less fawned upon by him, and it must have been this implicit praise that moved Maria to give in and acquiesce to his terms. Thus Hannusia was to earn money with her unexpected ability both for herself and for her sister. Olenka, in the meantime, spun yarn—of all domestic chores this was her favorite: mainly because you didn’t have to get up and go anywhere, just keep your eyes on the yarn as it was twisted. A steady child, Vasyl would say of her, with restrained tenderness.
It’s true that as an adolescent Olenka had not only grown taller, but also more attractive—bit by bit she came into her own beauty that was more her father’s than her mother’s: she had Vasyl’s muted, subtle coloring (in contrast to the blinding brilliance of her sister), the same large pale eyes with a slow, somewhat surprised gaze—she certainly was a steady, persevering child, neither especially quick, nor efficient in a way that made things spin and hum in her hands to the delight of all around (as people repeatedly said about Hannusia), and how could she have been otherwise, growing up in her sister’s unrelenting shadow—no one could have guessed, but she herself resolved once and for all not to waste her effort, thus bowing out of any competition with the elder sister long before she could lose it, and went on quietly spinning her dreams, like a thread on a spindle—like she too was waiting for her time to shine. Quarrels, not to speak of fistfights, flared up between the sisters only seldom now—one winter day, for example, Hannusia was all set to go skating and couldn’t find her boots, she looked everywhere: in the house, in the larder, she even climbed up to the attic—the boots were gone! vanished into thin air. Flushed red, on the verge of tears, Hannusia turned on her sister—“What did you do with my boots? Mother, do not defend her, I know she did it!”—the boots were discovered the following day standing neatly under the bench, side by side, spun similarly out of thin air. “I knew it was her,” Hannusia exploded—Olenka curled her lips into a contemptuous smile, but hid her eyes nonetheless: As if I have nothing better to do than hide your boots!—such scars remained, festered from both sides simultaneously because Hannusia, having the more fiery nature, was determined each time to get the better of her sister, so she’d know—so that, for instance, she would admit before their father that she did hide those miserable boots, blast them (definitely not worth the storm they’d roused)—so that, in her words, there would be justice, and it could be no one but Vasyl who was expected to dispense it between the two of them. Olenka, on the other hand, precisely in the way that she intentionally, deliberately eluded any attempts at reaching an understanding, like it was now her turn to say to her sister, Leave me alone, and to say it with her entire demeanor, her taunting smile, her turned back impenetrable as a tall fence, hop all you want, you’ll never climb over it—hit her mark without fail, wounding her sister where it hurt the most, and then it seemed the air itself inside the house, scratched into boils, churned to madness by mutual blows, would swell to the point of ejecting one of them—Hannusia—way, way outside, outdoors, anywhere, just to get out of sight, where she could take a deep breath and fill her lungs with fresh, living air.
And Olenka would remain to spin.
Not long afterward Hannusia observed something else: right after those domestic calamities she would lose her ability to find water—in fact, she seemed to lose all her sense in herself, as if she were replaced, for a time, by a heavy, faceless cloud of grievance; the cloud was an opaque yellowish color and something dripped from it—pus rather than rain. One time she obliged to head out in this precise circumstance, because they had already sent the horses for her, somewhere almost out by the wild woods, to the bluffs, where they urgently needed a new well after they found blood in the old one—folks called the priest, and he blessed it, and they cleaned it, but a week later they found a hired hand drowned in this freshly blessed well, so now they had to bring water from the river miles away. Halfway there, Hannusia jumped off the wagon and told the driver in no uncertain terms that she couldn’t go on, excusing herself as unwell—what actually happened was that she saw the drowned man, whom she’d never laid eyes on while he was living, suddenly right before her: first his cold stiff feet sticking out of the well, and then the rest of him, stretching out to full stature with vicious satisfaction and glad to stretch his numb extremities—he was blue all over, netted in wet strands of his own hair, and he was about to turn his eyes, cloudy as the last bit of milk left at the bottom of a cup, and look straight at her. At that very moment, scalded to the bone by an otherworldly, icy chill—not the cool moist breath of earth that helped her feel the presence of water so clearly she could only marvel how others couldn’t, but precisely ice cold—that came from something immovable, also seemingly underwater, but lifeless—she was simultaneously cut through by the penetrating knowledge that she would not find living water today for any treasure in the world: that he would be waiting for her, this terrifying self-murderer, and walk her around in circles for sport, and she could not free herself of him because he was drawn to her like a fly to carrion—to the pus of her soul she dripped and dripped without end, unseen by the living, but apparently visible to the dead, so
she leaped from the wagon as if running for her life—straight into a roadside pit filled with dust, almost twisting her ankle. That girl’s off her rocker, the driver must have thought, tugging on the reins: Whoa, the horses stopped, snorting angrily so that a strand of foam came flying at her—the horses, too, must have been thinking something very uncomplimentary about her.
That fall the first matchmakers came to the house, sudden as a thunderclap—Hannusia had just turned fifteen, no one expected them, and everyone lost their composure, Vasyl among them, not to mention Hannusia, who bolted out of the house into the anteroom and from there, hidden behind the door with her suddenly dry mouth wide open, listened to the grown-ups’ customary talk of the hunters and the sable, disbelieving her ears: Could this really be about her? She had not a single thought for the young man she was being matched with, as if they’d come not to ask her hand in marriage to a flesh-and-blood person, but stopped by to testify to the arrival of a momentous and ominous change in the way the world saw her. Sure enough, lads whistled in her wake when she walked down the street, and she got used to that, accepting it as her due, but when those who were bolder (she always thought them more stupid, because she learned well from her mother that she was not meant for the village lads, and those who didn’t understand that impressed her by their unheard-of obtuseness alone) would try to woo her with their crude attempts at flirting—say, rush her on a solstice night in a senseless tussle, the only purpose of which was to throw a girl on the ground and feel her up, or else ambush her and squeeze her in a throng of similarly captive girls that burst in all directions with happy screams—she would douse him with a glare full of such bone-chilling contempt that all the huffing, snorting, eager-eyed fervor went flying out of the prospective suitor like a witch out of a chimney—but now something new has arrived, something at once mysterious and dirty, like those greedy hands that wanted to feel her breasts, yet in a strange measure raising her up—to the height of a princess in a tower that the best knights try to reach by riding their most mettlesome chargers, something that was remotely akin to her father’s lonely longing song that one night for the girl he loved and would never have, and, swept up in the frightful whirl of these two different and yet somehow intersecting currents of feeling, Hannusia took a good long while to come around, long after the matchmakers were refused and left—of course they were refused, how not, she was too young to be wed, let her have some fun first, we, good people, don’t have fields of daughters to spare. But if you ask me—Olenka said very solemnly, with emphasis, amusing her father (who could never resist when she affected maturity, as she knew perfectly well)—if you ask me, she should have accepted, if good people are asking, why be so choosy? Hannusia had a good laugh herself—Have our matchmaker here, do we, she’s barely got ribbons in her braids, but is ready to wed—having, at the same time, no doubt that Olenka was dead serious and she wished her older sister out of the house as soon as possible, so as to become herself first in line. It’s just that Father, as always when it came to his baby, failed to notice this.
About the ribbons—of course, that was spoken in haste, because although Maria did not allow Olenka to go out yet, neither did she permit her to cuddle up to her father, as had been her custom since she was little, reprimanding them both with such force that Vasyl shied away and went outside to roll a cigarette: back when she was still small and sickly, Olenka learned to crawl up onto his lap in the evenings, putting her arms around his neck, and pressing her ear against his chest to ask, Father, what do you have thumping there?—Vasyl would become tender, carefully stroking his daughter’s warm braids with his awkward, stiff, and calloused hand, so unaccustomed to delicate movements, and this touch would stir up from the depths of his memory, from its silt and mud, the memory of Maria as a newlywed: her braids had smelled the same, and the same tenderness welled inside of him—like a gentle wind that slowly fills the body from the inside, only this time very slowly, and Vasyl knew that it would never fill him to the brim again, he had grown far too numb, ossified for that. Olenka gave him back if not that youthful melodic lightness, then the memory of it, but this was the dearest thing that he had ever had—the child was his pet, no denying it, and even though he had been taught, heard it a hundred times, that you can pet a dog, but not a child, he could not resist her hugs—except for her, he got them from no one. Hannusia was different, very different from the moment she was born, more mysterious or something—if truth be known, he was a little afraid of Hannusia. As he was of Maria, indeed.
He wished very much to have more children—a whole houseful of children, full of hubbub and squeals, like a sieve overflowing with spring chicks—as a boy he always had an irresistible urge to stick his face and whole head into their warm mass—a house with ten such warm curly heads under the quilt on top of the large warm stove, ah my little chickees!—but what could he do when after the second girl they were as good as done: Maria miscarried one after another, lost them, and he’d be angry with her not least because at some level he felt himself at fault, as though each time he lacked exactly enough manly vigor to give the just-conceived child enough strength to reach this world, as though in some decisive moment, of which he had no idea, each time something within him sputtered and faltered—something elusive, something that could not be defined by simple, tangible things like spilling too soon or some such thing, but rather something he lacked to have the power to command a woman’s womb completely and definitively, leaving room for nothing else, while he could sense that for his every issue something impenetrable and immovable inside her would rise up to meet it, like a dark mountain from which he would slide back down. Afterward Maria would lie in silence, her head turned away, so that even her breathing could not be heard: at first, when they were newlyweds, he thought it was because of her modesty, and this warmed him with even greater tenderness toward her, but now he thought no such thing: she lay there, and he lay beside her, and soon—more by that marital instinct that develops over the years than by her breathing—he would know that she was fast asleep. And that’s how it was between them, and when it came to the future, Vasyl only very rarely allowed himself to dream that when the girls came of age—there wasn’t long to wait—they would see Hannusia well married, and take in Olenka’s husband-to-be to take over the household, and he, Vasyl, would have grandchildren to look after, a whole garland of babies, light- and curly-haired little dandelion heads, like Olenka’s when she was little.
Because Olenka was not little anymore, and he missed her—sometimes he even felt like he detected in her that impenetrable and immovable quality that he knew in Maria, except that their daughter was incomparably kinder and knew, with her astute female instinct, to hide this new quality, and got her bees with honey: Daddy, why won’t Mother let me go out, all the other girls are going, what about Odarka next door, she’s younger than me, she’s not even fourteen until after the Feast of the Transfiguration—and in the end she got her way, and started going out almost at the same time as Hannusia—which was a good thing, Vasyl told himself, they’ll be together, one will watch out for the other lest they get into the kind of trouble girls find, although, of course, he and Maria had to purchase a goodly selection of new clothes and haberdashery much sooner than they had planned, fine red leather boots with upturned toes, wraparound skirts brocaded with gold, full-length sheepskin coats trimmed with Persian lamb, and all kinds of other finery, almost a full trunk, if you must know—you can lose your mind with how much the womenfolk blow on their harness!—and since money was tight because they could not sell the heifer until the fall, the family had to spend a large chunk of Hannusia’s earnings on this affair. Hannusia, bless her heart, didn’t utter a word in protest, to Vasyl’s great relief: he feared the girls would start warring again, and suffered great anxiety in anticipation thereof—she seemed to treat what she called “the water money” as if she’d found it, easy come, easy go, and maybe that’s why that money stuck to her—not excessively but, praise the Lord, fairly tig
htly. It only aggravated her that the younger one had the nerve to behave as if they were equals: after all, she had the same fine red leather boots (“I want the same as Hannusia!”) and began putting on airs as though there really wasn’t any difference between them—Father’s girl and Mother’s girl, and that’s it—she even occasionally allowed herself to utter something patronizing, as in, You, sister, shouldn’t put red edging on this bustle, it comes out too much of the same thing—a joke, what can you say! And it also bothered Hannusia a little how easily Olenka accepted her money, calmly, as though it was due her—You could thank your sister, at least, Maria would admonish, and in reply the younger girl would look at her mother with that languid, somewhat surprised look that had the effect of ending the conversation: Well, your father sure spoiled you, girl, didn’t he, whoever marries you will have his hands full! Olenka only shrugged her shoulders slowly, and the shadow of a satisfied smile fleeted across her face—as though she was pleased with the idea of that unknown unsuspecting someone having his hands thusly occupied.
As time passed, Hannusia felt more and more acutely as if her parental home were pushing her out of itself—and not only by virtue of her father and sister’s mutually agreed-upon waiting, to the point that she sometimes couldn’t help but feel like they secretly exchanged conspiratorial glances behind her back, so she got into the habit of turning abruptly—from the oven, from the well, or whatever she happened to be working on—to try to catch them, which she never succeeded in doing, except that Olenka asked her mockingly: What are these spasms you’re having?—which definitively confirmed her suspicion, not even a suspicion, but rather an instinct, like in a young wild animal that knows nothing yet about the hunt but still braces itself, catching the scent of hounds on the wind—although it wasn’t only this that weighed upon her, giving their home the feel of a dark cellar that she now entered mainly only to sleep, and even then it felt like going to a dungeon—but the sovereignty her sister exercised in it, which had grown beyond any reason, with their father’s tacit backing. Olenka behaved like the mistress of the house and not at all like the second in line to be married, and her ubiquitous, ineradicable, and incredibly self-assured presence poisoned the air for Hannusia. As soon as she began going out, Olenka acquired a clutch of girlfriends, and they walked together like a laughing and giggling resplendent cluster of ripe grapes, which was yet to be picked apart, one by one, by young men’s greedy hands—Hannusia, on the other hand, was considered to be haughty and treated respectfully, but from a distance: her beauty alone set her apart in any group. Whenever, for example, they went caroling at Christmastime, and a garrulous host would utter a light-minded, Come on, girls, step up with your big sack, which of you has it, oh, I thought it would be this one, the prettiest!—Hannusia, cleaved from the group with that one word, immediately felt herself alone in a dark wood, surrounded by the instantly raised thorny brush of tacit dislike, as if her friends joined hands to make a circle in which there was no place for her—much the way she ended up at every celebration: the Maypole and Easter dances always circled around her, they chose her as the one to be crowned at Solstice, to carry, inevitably, the first-cut sheaf of the year, and the wreath at the end of harvest; in other words, she seemed to have been chosen to be put forward for show at every occasion, displayed for admiration and praise—the most striking among the girls, but because of it also not one of them: not for naught was she marked with a crescent moon on her forehead, she would think to herself when alone, when the alienation weighed heavily on her heart, and, coming home from the winter parties or street gatherings, she would walk up to the looking glass mortared into the wall to examine that crescent moon looking out from under her hair, and it would give her consolation with its unbreakable promise of some great and imminent reward.
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