But what he said fell on fertile ground in Hanna’s heart: It is only the paltry he favors, it is only the meek who are beloved by him—the knowledge smoldered inside her, who was ash to everything else, like a lit wood chip, growing into a dull, acrid yellow flame of bitter insult: Why should this world belong to Olenka? Because it was about to belong entirely to her—the autumn was quiet and clear as a tear, they had celebrated the betrothal, and the wedding was set for the Feast of Intercession, and Olenka walked around the village inviting bridesmaids—not so much walked as floated, eyes lowered modestly, as if to permit all around her to admire more fully her so suitably rewarded virtues, while she demonstrated her utter lack of involvement or intent, and even conveyed how difficult it was for her, so young and innocent, to bear so much public attention, as good as if she were saying to everyone, Help me, good people, if you would be so kind—and that kindness rained down on her from everywhere: a fine bride, said both young and old, and even those who should have been looking at her askance for snatching up the best lad in the village from right under the other girls’ noses could not resist her, made their peace, forgave her, and prepared to release their zeal by partying to the hilt at the rich wedding—something had to be attended to almost in every house, even the poor girls turned over their trunks to make sure moths hadn’t eaten through their one good dress of fine linen, kept for the great feast days, some sewed new clothes, others mended the old ones, and Hanna fed her wound that flamed hot and yellow inside her, nursed it the way a mother nurses a child that will avenge her, the way her own mother raised her on her own grievance, although not nearly as great—with thoughts of vengeance.
Sunday came—Olenka’s last Sunday as a maiden, the bridesmaids were already invited for next Saturday night for the girls’ last evening. Waking up that morning, Hannusia felt that a change had come over her: her feeling of injury had hardened and sharpened into a long shard that scorched inside her chest so hot she could not breathe freely until she cast it out. In the hutch, she found a sharpened knife—and let out a groan of relief, passing her fingertips over the steel blade as cool as the long-forgotten whiff of underground spring water—she couldn’t help herself and licked it: the taste was vaguely familiar, but weak, all squeezed out—the life was missing from it like salt from a meal. Let us go berry picking, sister—she turned to Olenka—What berries? You must be joking, it’s the middle of September—Why don’t you go, girls, get a breath of fresh air, chimed in their mother, who perked up too: she had dreamed about her father again, and the dream was heavy and evil, different, and on top of that, the neighbor’s boy, feebleminded from birth, had upset her when he called happily over the fence this morning like a young rooster: Auntie, Auntie, a serpent flew into your chimney last night, it looked like a big star with a tail, I saw it!—of course he’s a kid, and missing some marbles to boot, babbling whatever comes into his head, but her heart grew troubled regardless, and since Sunday dreams, as everyone knows, are only true until noon, she was happy for the opportunity to get the girls out of the house until then—See how warm it’s been, the strawberries might have come again, and if not, you’ll get plenty of mushrooms—Olenka agreed, not very willingly, and took the smallest basket, just for appearances’ sake—obviously not intending to crawl under every bush but rather to nap in the shade while Hannusia foraged—ever since she became engaged, she had developed a new sense of propriety and dignity more befitting a married woman than a girl.
Hannusia indeed set to work like a madwoman as soon as they stepped into the forest—she needed to keep moving because of the burning under her heart, the burning of the man’s sash against her body, and the torment of her entire body, which burned like an open wound. There was not an inch of her body on which she did not feel the hot breath of nocturnal lips, and this left her few choices—either scream like a banshee and gnaw at her own hands, to fill that yawning maw inside her body at least with her own flesh, or else race farther and farther ahead like one possessed, pushing through the thickets ferociously, uprooting the shrubs, scratching her bare skin until it bled because each flash of pain that bled as a dark-red spot as juicy as a ripe berry—there were no other kinds of berries for her to see!—seemed to bring momentary relief, and the blinding sulfur-yellow fog lifted around her. There was a crackle in the brush from time to time, like someone was following her, someone determined not to lose her trail and that, of course, was Olenka, who else had dragged behind her her whole life and will continue to hang on her to the end of her days, even after she leaves for her own household—especially then! No way to get rid of her, to tear her, like this chicory, out of your thoughts, out of your heart, she will forever rot inside you, spreading the yellowish miasma of victorious injustice—“And this shall not pass!” she cried aloud, rushing out to the clearing where Olenka lay in the last mild sunshine of the year, covering her face with a burdock leaf, like a lady who needed to avoid a touch of tan—the knife lifted itself from the bottom of the basket and deftly settled into her hand, giving her something to hold on to, and the last thing nailed into her consciousness in the darkening, thickening fog was the look in Olenka’s eyes as she propped herself up to face her sister—as indulgently condescending as always, as imperviously surprised, as if to say, What is it now?—it suddenly broke, splashing Hanna with horror as cold and bracing as well water on her hot body, and it was pure luxury, indeed as acute as in her nighttime ecstasies—to plunge the knife straight into the warmly breathing body, so dense, yet giving way oh so easily to the knife, a body that convulsed along its full length in a short spasm (and this moment of resistance, too, was pure luxury!), and then grew soft, and a wave of rich, hot red washed up into her nostrils, making her sweetly dizzy, a wave she could drink, she could swim in, big like the whole world at once, finally, opened its doors—and flooded Lady Hanna in order to sate her hunger. She wielded the bloody knife above her head, drunk, barely keeping on her feet from this rich—never was there richer!—wedding feast that came pouring down on her and cried up into the noose of the sky that spun, unraveled, above her, ripping with horror, no doubt, crowns of trees—off to him, who sat up there above, never allowing anyone to see his face, and the echo of her victorious laughter rolled through the forest like the rumble of an invisible army: Now you know!
. . . It was dusk already when Hannusia stumbled home—Maria was sick with worry, the neighbor’s foolish boy had come running over again—to assure her that he apparently saw a white bitch by the forest with its mouth all bloody, And she was so scary, Auntie!—she slapped her skirts when her daughter finally appeared before her, all disheveled, her shirt torn, with leaves in her hair, without a drop of color in her face—Where’s Olenka, the father spoke up first—And how am I to know, Hannusia quietly rustled her chapped lips that were as rough as bark—am I her keeper? They rushed for the village healer to clear off her fright, and word swept the village like a whirlwind: someone attacked the father’s and mother’s girls in the forest!—a man was sent from each house, they searched and called out until midnight, with torches, forming a chain among the trees, but found nothing: Olenka was gone as if the ground swallowed her. Around midnight a thunderstorm struck, ferocious even for July, let alone autumn—bolts of fire flashed across the sky, generous as if emptied from a sack, the sky crackled and split open, something groaned under the ground, and in the roar of the storm, in the violent beating of the rain, half the neighborhood heard Hannusia scream—Holy of Holies!—an inhuman, deathly scream of rapture beyond which all that is living ends, and there remains perhaps only a limitless wasteland flooded with the light of the moon—no one had ever heard such a voice, and no one would ever hear Hannusia’s own voice as they had known it after that night: the girl lost her gift of speech and neither the healers, nor the seers, nor the priest with his holy water could point to the cause of it. And soon after, Maria saw that Hannusia was pregnant: it must have happened on that same terrible day.
In the spring, a salt traders’
caravan passed through the village, and a few men asked to be put up for the night at Maria and Vasyl’s, having heard from the people there’d be room for them in the house, seeing how it was just the old man, his old wife, and the gravid mad girl—who wouldn’t, in such circumstance, be glad for some honest company and conversation, with well-traveled and seasoned folk, who could spend the whole night telling of the marvels they’d seen in the far reaches of the world and not tell half of them—“But never, good sir, a wonder such as we encountered right outside your village,” blurted, quite out of turn, a young dark-haired man with barely a furrow of mustache, who would have done well to wait until the elders were done speaking. The elders, however, nodded all as one in agreement, “What’s true is true, show the goodfolk your flute, lad”—“Near your village, good sir, as we drove along the forest, behind the sign at the crossroads, this lad spotted a guelder rosebush, and he carved himself a flute out of it, and that flute—just you think of it!—spoke up with a human voice. Bring it over here!” “God bless us,” Maria uttered in fright, pausing over the eggs she’d been scrambling for dinner—“What wizardry is this, pray do not play it here, there’s been enough grief on this house!”—the griddle just then hissed angrily, the fire shot up sharp tongues, and a waft of sulfur, dense and grey, rolled through the house, but the young musician already held the flute in his long delicate fingers. As soon as he pressed it to his lips, Olenka’s voice, thin and childlike, sang out: “Gently, gently, young carter, play, do not startle my heart today; it is my sister who made me depart, plunged a knife into my heart”—“My child!”—both Father and Mother cried out, it seemed, at once, although in fact everyone was struck so dumb that you could have heard the bells in Kyiv calling for vespers: by the stove, leaning against the chimney like a young maiden about to be betrothed, stood Hannusia—wearing only a thin shirt, stretched taut by her belly, rifled and disheveled, with dark deeply sunken eyes that glowed and crackled like hot embers, she was smiling—for the first time after the long winter, but so eerily it sent shivers down everyone’s spines: hers was no madwoman’s smile, oh no, everyone there would have sworn in that moment this girl was in more than full possession of her faculties because not only did she know perfectly well what was happening, but could clearly see beyond it, things that were invisible to others and of such nature they silenced the flute at once, and made it drop out of the young man’s hands—but Vasyl bent to pick it up, shaking all over like an old man, as indeed he had just aged in a single instant, and tears silently rolled down his cheeks, when Olenka began to cry again: “Gently, gently, my father, play, do not startle my heart today”—while Hannusia smiled more and more broadly, about to speak any second—“Gently, gently, my mother, play”—and finally laughed out loud, slapping her hands together: “It came true!” she cried in a low raspy voice, like a raven had flown into the house—“He made it true, he didn’t lie!”—and she laughed openly, heartily, holding her round swollen belly with both hands as it danced as if a whole nest of babies rebelled in there. “Mother, Mother, here is my song, mine alone, such as no one had heard since the beginning of time, here is my glory in my prince, he pledged to grant my every desire, just do as I say, and he did grant them, he did, he is no liar!”—she sobbed and laughed in fits, unable to stop, unconcerned as she ought to have been that she could well prod labor to start before its due time, repeating, again and again, “He granted my wish, he didn’t lie”—until one of the carters found his bearings, stepped up, and gave her a sound slap on the cheek. She quieted down right away, holding on to her cheek and staring fixedly before her, and then said, in the most lucid voice on earth, pointing her finger at the salt carters: “And they—they will tell the whole untruth, and so it will go out and spread through the world”—and with that, she lay down on the floor, holding her stomach, and never rose again.
They ought to send for a posse—because, be the murderess sane minded or not, a wrongdoing is a wrongdoing, and nobody could any longer claim a good reason to doubt what transpired between the sisters in the forest—so they sent for it, and when the men came to put her in shackles, with all the village folk crowding into the yard, breathing hard and jostling each other to get a good look—they found the house empty, only a long wild trail on the floor—like someone had swept a tarred brush across it. Mother’s daughter had vanished—escaped, perhaps, or vanished, or she still wanders somewhere, lost, on desolate moonlit nights.
II
I, MILENA
TRANSLATED BY MARCO CARYNNYK AND MARTA HORBAN, EDITED WITH ADDITIONAL TRANSLATION BY NINA MURRAY
On the surface everything seemed fine. That is, everything was indeed fine, or so Milena assured herself as she hurried home from the television studio those dark winter evenings (her face still stiff under the stage makeup she hadn’t taken off and the small tender smile at the thought of her husband’s “I couldn’t wait for you to get here” that of its own volition puffed up her lips into the little pipe of a kiss—Ah, Poppet—breaking through the makeup, as if through those wafers of ice on the asphalt you had to watch out for all the time in the dark, even if they weren’t there. Mincing cautiously over the invisible slippery spots, she would approach the building and, before going into the courtyard, would sometimes walk under the chestnuts that separated the building from the street and, head tossed back, seek out her windows with her gaze and find out, by determining which of them was lit, what Poppet (Sugar, Pumpkin) was doing just then, unaware of the joy of her approach. Most often the light was on in the bedroom—a washed-out spot of blue on the lower part of the curtains: Poppet was watching TV. Growing a wedding vegetable, as he often joked: for some reason, he would start to get an erection in front of the screen. And he would also say that he was watching for his sweet Milena.
Everything was fine when Milena worked in the news department, where her job was to appear, twice a day, before the camera with the moist light of oh-what-a-joy-it-is-to-see-you-again in her eyes (because the viewers must be adored, as her director was always saying, and Milena knew how to do this, sometimes she could even do it with casual acquaintances, if she was not too tired) and read the script someone else prepared, but that she occasionally improved upon, if not with words, then at least with her voice: Milena was unsurpassed at this, brilliant, to be perfectly honest, and anyone who had heard her and remembers her would confirm it, so I am not making anything up. With a voice like Milena’s you could topple governments and parliaments in the evening and smoothly restore them to their offices by morning, and all without any opposition from the electorate: her voice sparkled, glittered, and spilled to overflowing in every possible hue and shade, from a warm chocolaty low-pitched intimacy to the metallic hiss, with a snakelike sharp S (assuming that it is not just in fairy tales that snakes hiss like that and that it is true anyone who hears that sound must soon die). It even had a few shades that no one yet knew to be possible: for example, the ozone freshness of dewy lilac at the start of the morning news at half past seven, or an ironic cinnamon-flavored heat (Milena had a particularly rich scale of ironic tones), or the wholesome crunch of toasted bread that was reserved for government announcements, and if anyone considers everything I’ve been saying to be a metaphor, they should try for themselves to pronounce, after a day’s training, “President Kuchma met with the prime minister today” so as to make it sound sincere and even emanate domestic warmth. Then they will surely grasp why Milena, a woman who was on the whole as helpless as a sparrow, was fundamentally feared by her colleagues and her bosses alike and why, even though she never took liberties and always tinged the news with the expected color (Milena had always been an A student, both at school and at university), the sweetly painful richness of her voice stubbornly pressed to the surface, radiating out onto her face in barely discernible, coquettishly secretive little grimaces, which naturally made her especially attractive but which did not always agree with the script she was reading, so that it could possibly appear to someone who’d just gotten
out of bed that she was about to sneak in a snort of laughter in a thoroughly inappropriate spot, or say something utterly stupid she would never dream of doing. In short, Milena was feared and even considered a good journalist, and so someone in some oak-paneled office had taken it into his head to give her her own show. And that’s where it all began.
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