Your Ad Could Go Here

by Oksana Zabuzhko

  At the same time, her mother (and no need to even mention her father: he walked around all puffed up as though the wedding were just around the corner, even began humming to himself) seemed to stop bolstering Hannusia, withdrew invisibly from her daughter, as if to say, Do what you think is best, child—whether she’d lost her nerve in the face of the fact that the girl, after all, had turned seventeen and couldn’t stay a maiden forever, waiting for her prince, or whether she’d judged that a homestead was one’s own kind of fiefdom, albeit small, the two of them never spoke about it—they never spoke about Dmytro at all, avoiding the issue as carefully as a sinkhole in a swamp, and Hannusia couldn’t have known that Maria was weathered and frayed for a reason altogether different: she began to dream of her dead father again—this time, he appeared to her laid out on a bench in their old home, with a lit candle that was for some reason placed at his feet, and there was no one beside him except for her alone, and she fretted she wouldn’t be able to properly read the Akathist Hymn over him because he had only sent her to school for one winter, and so every night, in her dream, she would shut the housedoor with the dead man inside and head out blindly to look for help. Exhausted by that dream—for she had been to church, given alms, and had the priest serve a special liturgy for the repose of her father’s soul, and yet each night her trial returned—Maria turned to the village healer, who read prayers over her and poured off wax, but the wax showed the same thing—a coffin, a church—“You have an old sin in your house, Maria, and you don’t know how to carry it out, and it’s high time you did,” was all the healer could tell her.

  So did each of them wage her own war, Maria—with the dead, Hannusia—with the living: because to her reckoning, the collision with Dmytro looked less and less like courtship, and more like he was simply taking her by siege, not a visible one—you couldn’t quite put your finger on it—but one she felt acutely, along with his growing determination, like an impenetrable wall going up where love should have been. “You should know, girl,” he once said when he appeared from nowhere in her path and seemed to drink all of her up with his eyes, “I don’t like it when I don’t get my way”—and another time he jumped out of the bushes where he’d been waiting to ambush her with a racket like a bear, giving Hannusia a fright, and blocked her way as solidly as he blocked the light of day itself: “They say you know witchcraft? Maybe you are a witch—let’s see if you have a tail!” And the next instant, before she had a chance to cry out, his thick hand clamped tightly over her mouth, both of them were rolling about on the ground already when another paw—how many does he have?—ripped at her skirt, raising it over her clenched knees, as she flailed like a fish pulled out of the water because this was no innocent boy-prank—a fierce merciless force was about to overwhelm her, a force that was utterly indifferent to her and knew only its own thrust, its own violence, moist and terrifying, truly a wild beast that had attacked her, pinned her to the ground so that she couldn’t even move her hand, growled and tore at her with claws and teeth: A werewolf! flashed through Hannusia’s mind, and before she herself realized what she was doing, she went limp, stopped resisting, and produced a choked, and thus oddly lusty, deep and raspy witch’s voice, “Dmytro, you silly, you’re going about it all wrong, it hurts.” The beast, too, froze in surprise, snorted in confusion, something along the lines of That’s more like it—sensing this instant of weakness clearly, as if her entire body were studded with sharp, all-seeing eyes, Hannusia twisted and sank her teeth deep into the flesh of this neck, right above that collarbone she had recently rammed her chin into at the dance—Dmytro howled like a werewolf, jumped up, pressing his fingers over the bite as a stream of red seeped through, “You fucking whore!”—but she’d already lit it down the path, kicking up a trail of dust, her lips burning with a queer, salty taste—like an iron latch she once licked as a child, except that latch was cold and this was warm and alive, and made her want to suck on it more, gulp it, slurp it, more, more: unlike water, this only parched the more you drank it.

  Not long after that incident, folks fixed to dig a well at the other end of the village and Hannusia, of course, was called for—and there again that smell hit her nostrils, sudden, salty, and sharp like the iron latch, it made her mouth water—so thick and rich it was, coming off the earth like lather, overpowering the measured, even breath of fresh underground water: Right here, she gasped from deep in her chest as if from a well, and her voice, again, was not her own—she didn’t point, she commanded, and from the way everyone became quiet after her cry, she got a strange feeling, as if reliving what happened in her encounter with Dmytro: once again her body tensed up in predatory anticipation and was no longer under her control, it knew what to do without her—“Dig here!”—and, a moment later: “Catch him!”—pointing to an unremarkable little man in the crowd, who went visibly grey, glanced furtively about, and made to run. This all happened very quickly and if not for her (or perhaps it was no longer hers?) charged thousand-eyeness that could see everything—the crowd, the light of the sky, the old willow tree with its forked branches, the suffocating greasy fountain of red bursting at her from below—that man would have gotten away, but they caught him and bound him; he trembled, dotted all over by quivering beads of sweat, and then wailed, high pitched, like a wounded dog, and went limp, hanging in the arms that held him like a sack, because the pickaxes, whose scraping was the only sound heard in that heaviest of silences, revealed a long shape, dusted with earth, and people jumped back covering their noses because of the stench, someone started to cough, another threw up, the men digging were the first to take off their hats and cross themselves: “It’s Ivan! By god, it’s Tekla’s Ivan! And they said that he went off to look for wage work.” Hannusia took one last look at the now violently sobbing little man, who no longer tried to break free, and it was as clear as if he’d spoken: this was his doing, and only then she inhaled the stench—sickly sweet, strong enough to scoop your guts out, it came not from the pit but from the murderer, and strangely, rather than be disgusted like the people around her, she greedily, lustily snorted it, her nostrils flaring, taking in the reek that was, somehow, a continuation of the earlier steamy foul smell of spilled blood, and her heart stopped beating for a moment, squeezed by a mighty sorrowful torment, a premonition of doom—she remembered the drowned man she saw after she’d quarreled with her sister, she remembered the white-robed lady she saw on the salt traders’ wagon at the fair, and thought for the first time she should have listened to that pilgrim woman and gone with her to the convent, if only on a pilgrimage if not for good. But she calmed herself with the remainder of the strength within her, it was not too late to go on a pilgrimage even now, she’ll get herself together and go, she really should: it was not right—to start digging up dead bodies instead of wells.

  There was never time to be found, however, for a pilgrimage—the harvest began, and in the daily work, from dawn to dusk so help us god, all senses and aspirations became wooden and dull—and the misadventure with Dmytro also began to recede into the past: there was no time to keep it alive by thinking about it, and it is only that which we feed with our soul that has power over us, this Hannusia took to mind firmly that summer, never mind that no one had ever taught her. With Dmytro, however much everyone considered them a couple, she was joined only by a double-edged fear: the threat of the beast he had set free, and Hannusia’s terror of herself, that evil power he had awakened inside her, a match to the beast, and likely stronger than him—of course it was, and Hannusia, despite everything, found in that advantage a wicked consolation—the way she did in her secret devotional contemplation of her own physical beauty. Preoccupied with her own trials, she failed to take note, at first, how unexpectedly and lushly Olenka blossomed that summer—the girl turned outright beautiful, radiating youth like light, reaching out, it seemed, with every vein and sinew—and with such new grace and elegance!—toward both sunshine and people, bearing in the curved corners of her budded lips a smile meant fo
r someone unknown. “Sister, dear, are you, by chance, in love?” Hannusia asked her in jest and was even more surprised when Olenka, rather than brush her off as usual, burst into laughter and threw her arms around her neck, hugging and kissing her, burying her face in her chest, pressing against her as fervently as a child looking for a mother’s nipple—Stop it, you crazy girl, you’ll choke me to death, Hannusia laughed—while Olenka, unable to contain herself, pretended to be a puppy and yelped, hopping and trying to lick her sister’s nose, infecting her with her unbridled playfulness, and in the whirlwind of that happy moment, Hannusia managed to catch another surprise at a thing thereuntil unnoticed: how much her sister, with whom she had grown into one entity as one does with an unrelenting burden—an extra weight, an invisible thumb pressed on the scales of her life—was, in and of herself, lighter than her, not in body but rather—more transparent, somehow luminous, whether because she was without secret thought or simply less grieved overall—like a clear pond: there may not be much for the eye to see, but swimming in it is pure pleasure on a fine day. She’ll make a fine wife, Hannusia thought, seeing her sister as if from outside, through the eyes of that yet-unknown lad she was now sure was courting Olenka—with the Lord’s good mercy, she’ll grow into one of those capable, quiet women who somehow, willy-nilly, manage to turn anything to their advantage and keep all things in good order.

  She had no idea how close she was to the truth. And the truth did not wait long—it struck like a thunderbolt from the blue that same autumn, when the sky was indeed clear as if just bathed, its western edge afire with blazing jewel colors that would put the humblest soul astir, the eye traveled unencumbered all the way to the horizon, and over the fields, which lay naked and spent like tired children, flitted only the thin spider silk of Indian summer, when matchmakers began their rounds, and the very first ones who knocked on their doors came on behalf—nobody else would have dared!—of Markian’s son, Dmytro. In spite of the fact that Hannusia determined in advance to refuse him, she—What a strange thing a girl’s heart is, she marveled—still expected something from that proposal, as if the point was not whether she would choose to cast her lot with him or reject him but instead that she would receive from Dmytro’s envoys an answer about her own fate that would definitively resolve her confusion, so at first she did not grasp why Olenka presented herself in the great room, and all dressed up—when did she even have time to fix flowers in her hair and put on her beads?—and for what reason she hovered around the stove, eyes lowered. Hannusia was all set to speak, to step forward with her hand over her heart, bowing deeply, when something in the tangled speech of the head matchmaker began to edge its way into her mind—then came the baffled mumbling of her father that it really shouldn’t be done this way, goodfolk, to jump over someone’s head, and that, as they know, he has an older daughter first in line, and the younger one would do well to enjoy her carefree years, a maiden’s time is short indeed—and they prattled on among themselves, negotiating, but Hannusia no longer heard it, falling deaf and blind, because all her blood rushed to her head: Dmytro was proposing to Olenka! He finally found a way to get her—why no, not simply to get her—to kill her: before her internal sight, walls began to fall one after another in a house of many rooms, each opening up a new vision, one more frightening than the next—if Olenka becomes engaged, she, Hannusia, is relegated, by one fell swoop, at her age of eighteen, to the old maids, the ones passed over, beggars and not choosers who can forget all about love, lucky if they can find a widower to take them!—well, young lady, so much for your regal airs, there go all your dreams like morning dew, lordy-lord, just think of the gossip, how keenly they will yap, the women and the available men: Serves her well! Perhaps for the first time she could clearly see, as the next wall tumbled, and everything inside her turned to ice, how many people she had vexed, like a blight in their eye: the suitors she dismissed, the mothers of other grown-up daughters, her girlfriends—and all of it without meaning to—and once you added everyone who bore a grudge against her, because she didn’t get the well dug in their yard, well, she might as well go drown herself!—not just the village, the whole world will jeer at her, they’ll band together and tar her gates! Oh Dmytro, you must have stayed up many a night before you figured out how to bring me to heel: well, you came out on top, didn’t you, because it’s your law that rules, and all I can do is bring out a pumpkin on a platter and that only if someone comes asking first—as her thoughts raced, afire, like a witch astride a broomstick through all that, Hannusia came up short against a new wall, with a hiss: Olenka! Olenka, you viper, sister dearest, fox’s snot, you plotted with Dmytro behind my back to knock the ground from under my feet! And knock it she did, and all that yawed from there was cold emptiness where Hannusia could only tumble, headfirst, for she had no more purchase on solid ground—Olenka stood there, flushed and pretty, shyly picking at the chimney mortar with her finger, May something come pick at your heart!—their eyes met, and her sister’s look confirmed every detail of Hannusia’s suspicion, blazing, as it did, with the triumph of a person who has just attained the most important victory of her life.

  Olenka was betrothed. Although this was not what was meant to happen, Vasyl didn’t miss the opportunity to point out as they sealed the deal with a toast (it did not sit well with him that Olenka would be moving out to the homestead and Hannusia would remain home unmarried), but let us nonetheless thank the merciful Lord, as long as it’s all for the good—most definitely, the matchmakers nodded solemnly, clothed, it seemed, in all the wisdom of the world at once—man plans and God laughs, tactfully letting Vasyl’s not entirely gracious reproach slip past their ears and understanding perfectly well there was no one who could let the prospect of Markian’s homestead slip out of his hands! Maria, in contrast, was as good as crucified, rushing up to the icons to cry, accosting her younger daughter—Does he at least love you? I’m not asking after you, you little fool, you’ll run after any pair of pants, you tell me what’s in his heart?—and finally, not getting a comprehensible answer (because what kind of an answer could there be), swallowed her pride and went over to Markian’s to speak to Dmytro directly—while the whole village was abuzz with the news, like someone had rung the church bells, and Hannusia dared not show herself outside the house. “You’re not doing right, Dmytro dear, disgracing my child this way”—“What disgrace, Mother?”—she was unpleasantly struck by that premature Mother, it felt like mockery, as he stood before her, eyes dancing, handsome and as immune to judgment as a rock before the sun, practically snorting with pleasure at all that happened, just like a stallion being brushed—“What disgrace, I did nothing to your Hannusia.” Then Maria told him something she had never told anyone in her life: “It’s my sin, my boy, but you will be the one to atone for it—I wed my Vasyl in spite because I didn’t get my way, and I would not wish such a fate for either my child or for anyone else’s, don’t you now walk this road after me”—that seemed to make an impression, hearing something like this from an older woman, moreover a future mother-in-law, but Dmytro quickly regained his balance as he obviously wasn’t used to losing it for long: Olenka loves me, he asserted with the kind of confidence that under other circumstances may have even engendered respect, and added, anticipating the question already on Maria’s lips, in a sincere, boyish way: “She’ll be happy with me, Mother.” There Maria’s resolve collapsed, as she realized, all at once and with her entire being, that indeed, that’s how things would be, that her younger daughter was already happy, and would only get happier with time; ruling self-same over Markian’s estate, surrounded by her children, she’ll be like a fish in water and will spend her life as cozily as at God’s bosom, not troubling herself for an instant with the thought that her whole happiness, like it or not, was granted her at her sister’s cost, and she would never have had any such luck had Hannusia not crossed Dmytro—but there will be no sin upon her, only blessings, the pilgrim woman was right when she said, You have no need to worry ab
out the younger one, she’ll be taken care of—in some way she, Father’s daughter, was as indifferent as Dmytro, the apple of his father’s eye, and at least in this way these two lovebirds were well matched, and would need or know nothing more in their lovebird lives—so Maria threw up her hands, Lord, where is your justice? Why was that crescent moon on her forehead, and was her beloved child granted gifts beyond all human measure solely so that her younger one could find herself a good match? She returned home in a fog (Hey, Maria, were you visiting with your in-laws? the rabble oozed its poison from behind the fences), while the words of a song spun around in her head, like she had jumped into a whirlpool: the tallest tree dries out at the crown, to the fairest child the Lord denies good fortune—is this the way it’s always been since the beginning of time? But why, Lord—don’t you yourself know the measure of your own power?