by Iliazd
Busy with his chess, his speculations, and his books, the former forester overlooked his daughter growing and maturing beside him. Until she was about ten, it seems, she was under the watch of a nurse whom the father didn’t notice, as though she were invisible. He never set foot in his daughter’s room, never wondered what his child was up to. Then one day, to his surprise, he discovered that the nurse no longer put in an appearance (he had seen her, after all), but a moment later he forgot about her for good. Then the day arrived when his daughter—who had for some time been regularly setting the table, serving each course, and withdrawing—set a place for herself instead of leaving, sat down opposite her father, and ate dinner with him. During the meal, the former forester imagined that today he was seeing his wife anew, although somewhat changed, and he wasn’t sure what to ascribe this change to. Several weeks later, he concluded that this was his wife, only dead, and began to study her new state. Observing was easy because his daughter didn’t conceal herself, but spent her days in the same room with him or on the balcony. Only when, one day, the former forester caught her reading books (she was really reading, not leafing through them), the old man’s heart was roused. He grasped that right beside him, imperceptibly, someone who might be stronger than he was had settled in and, living harmoniously with him until the appointed time, would, sooner or later, challenge him. And although he couldn’t treat the dead woman inhospitably when she gazed, walked, and laughed the way she did, although he couldn’t escape her by locking himself up, and didn’t want to anyway, she was, all the same, his enemy, and the immaterial object deep in the old man watched and waited to see what would happen. And since, from that moment on, anyplace else was more serene than home, the former forester gave up his fifteen-year confinement and, after rummaging through the storeroom for his rifle and borrowing some cartridges from his neighbors, surprised the hamlet by heading out to hunt black grouse
But the old man didn’t notice the most important difference between the live woman and the dead one. Among other things, even in this land where all women were beautiful, Ivlita was an altogether exceptional phenomenon. And not just because her body was ideal—while not, like all perfect things, dead—but also because it roused such vigorous sensations and attuned the observer to such rare harmony. Her movements were intrinsic to fleshly perfection; her eyes and voice signaled that more than her body was divine. And, to be precise, the young woman hadn’t grown up, hadn’t suffered the ponderousness of earthly existence and the tedium of growth, but had emerged all of a sudden from the mist when she appeared once upon a time beyond her father’s yard, unanticipated, her existence unsuspected by any of the hamlet’s inhabitants
But while her father knew nothing of his daughter’s qualities, the highlanders received the young woman into their everyday lives. Whenever anyone had to go out into the neighboring country, each of them, ducking into a tavern or a friend’s place, would blurt out, “We’ve had a supernatural event,” but would immediately fall silent, fearful that others, once they found out, would profane this treasure, and their listeners never managed to catch what exactly the event was and decided: Likely some satyr’s or water sprite’s new mischief, or some such nonsense. Why did Ivlita go on living beyond reachless mountains, unbeknownst to the world and in the company of subhumans? Even the old wenny voiced this concern, with some qualification: We don’t know whether she’s a good or evil incarnation; later on, it goes without saying, we’ll see; in the meantime, there’s no use worrying about it. But no matter how much the old man tried to calm their fears, it was clear that something was evil, since why else would all the villagers do nothing but watch for Ivlita fetching water or calling the goats, and, when they were traveling, pine not so much for their native hamlet as for the young woman’s presence there
So, on account of her useless qualities, because of the mountains, and thanks to the back of beyond, Ivlita’s lot was becoming more complicated and confused, although thus far she herself suspected nothing. And for that reason, the girl’s existence remained just as dull and even as ever, nothing more than a reflection of the seasons
The onset of snow was presaged first by a cobalt sky that exchanged its dark blue hue at night for the same dark blue, only thicker, and after a few days, by winds that blew their gray currents even into this secluded dale and brought the odor of a vile sea. In the mornings, the fog lay too long, smothering the hamlet, dispersed slowly, and the shoots it bedewed shrank back: the dew was bitter and brackish. The lavishness of falling stars constantly lighting up the heavens made sleeping difficult, and the roosters’ crowing was particularly throaty. There were no green leaves, only gold, but more often rose and purple; the needles turned gray until they poured from the surrounding cliffs. Fish were jumping very frequently up out of the river; you couldn’t leave the hamlet without running smack into a bears’ wedding. The forest, anticipating snow, was gripped with fever, and moans and groans burst from the thickets. The population grew: after stamping out the campfires that had been burning in the pastures since spring and collecting every last one of their goats, the sleepy shepherds returned, muttering something under their breath, and locked themselves away. There was no rain. There might have been some drizzle, but it was so fine, like steam, and no one could tell where it was falling from. But one morning, when she awoke, Ivlita noticed right away how especially bright her room was and guessed that beyond her door lay nothing but snow, dry and crumbly. How many new tasks and troubles she faced: getting out the skis, the special clothing, and clearing the roof. But her animation soon drained away, replaced by a stupor, a dormancy full of visions, a daily life rich in emotional turmoil and short on events. A few passages shoveled out from the snow that had now reached the roof, leading to the outbuildings and the unfrozen spring—these were all the space for taking a walk: the skis were for others; others went into the forest, set traps; Ivlita stayed home. The rumble in the woods from the avalanches that had never rolled all the way to the forest-protected hamlet was her sole worry at the moment. And if the snow had gone on for years, she would have felt neither more joyful nor more melancholy
And then, one day, the sky turned from white to azure; no new snow came, the old was melting. First it receded from walls, making way for snowdrops. Their armies, ever increasing in number, efficiently crowded it out until, at last, only a few patches remained here and there in the shade and on the northern sides of buildings. True, the snow was about to counterattack, but it ran out of breath. New needles and buds. Apple trees blossoming. Every creek, so pitiful toward the close of the year, now a whole river, muddy, raging—waterfalls resounding everywhere. The shepherds creep out from their hovels and head off on business to their neighbors and the city. Cattle and swine take possession of the clearing. At home, water is heating up and you can clean away the accumulated grime. Women’s bellies swell. Now there’s singing in the woods, woodpeckers, lilac, panpipes, circle dances, the first festivals—but not for Ivlita. Rains. There’s never any summer. Spring drags on overlong, longer than the winter and more restive. More superfluous variety. And by the time spring with its incessant rains and overly fickle mists becomes tedious to the point of revulsion and women stop giving birth, the herald of snows appears, autumn is coming—for about two weeks, not more, judging by how long the heart’s ease endures. And so it was now, August was ending and, for Ivlita, autumn was blushing in the yard
And yet, no matter how simple this sensitive life and how alien Ivlita was to desires, she was short on rapture. Her cultivated and complex mind’s mind, endowed with inward contemplation at the expense of outward, was conscious of being its own enemy. The wenny children who made up her company saw in life’s phenomena, in nature’s minutiae, the presence of powers she knew did not really exist. Therefore, the annual round was empty and water could not quench her thirst. Beliefs and rituals—she fled them to keep the emptiness from expanding even more. Ivlita didn’t even wonder what people did beyond the passes. And that autumn, after
languishing to her heart’s content during the course of the year, Ivlita was thinking of snow as though it were death
The river carried Brother Mocius a long way. He came to rest just above its confluence with the wennies’ creek, wedged among the logs that float singly up to that point, where they’re caught, lashed together into rafts, and sent in that trim to the sea. The lumberjacks discovered the corpse
The general astonishment knew no bounds. No doubt, the holy fool had fallen victim to a violent crime; no one could entertain the thought of him slipping or being cast down by a reckless stone or block of ice. They knew Brother Mocius too well, were aware that every year, several times, and in the worst weather, even in winter, he crossed the ranges; they believed in his holiness and recounted many stories about his miracles. The mountains could never hurt him
But in that case, who would have dared? The area between the settlement where they found his corpse and the passes to the north was uninhabited, and you wouldn’t run into anyone but woodcutters and shepherds along the river. But even they didn’t hike up to the alpine zones, while the body must have fallen from a fearsome height to be so curled. Who would climb up under the clouds for the love of crime?
In the taverns (there were two) and at the sawmill, conversations on the topic went on with unflagging abandon, inciting a series of bloody brawls; knives as well as fists came into play. There was no dispute as to whether the holy fool had perished violently or naturally—not a single voice was raised to defend the latter possibility; they argued only about which community the murderer could belong to, and on this point the gathered assembly began settling accounts
The monk’s body, in a mahogany coffin (the coffin was tiny, just like a child’s), was carried to the church and displayed for public viewing. This church made a strange impression. Constructed in times long past, when the province had been flourishing, a remarkable example of a remarkable architecture, the church was severely dilapidated now and, left to its fate, on the point of collapse. The coping had given way and had not even been replaced by a tile roof; the frescoes had fallen; there were trees in the windows. One cupola remained intact, blackened at the top by thousands of sheltering bats, and their guano, covering the flagstones in a thick layer, filled the church with an intolerable stench. Since the settlement had no clergy, there were no regular services; once a year, the cassocks gathered for the church’s feast day and vainly attempted to drown out the chiropters’ raving with their prayers
In such splendor, Brother Mocius’s coffin fairly shone. On the first day, only locals came to view the wizened body, undamaged by the water; on the next—their neighbors came, too, and not only to gaze on the body, but also to venerate it; on the third—to tear a small piece from his cassock or pluck a whisker from his beard. And since only about a week remained before the church feast and the fair linked to it, they left the relics lying there until the day when someone would be present to perform a funeral service over them. And as the day approached, the corpse acquired a complexion that made it easy to prove, even to a complete outsider, that Brother Mocius had died violently
Folks started gathering on the eve of the holiday. Another settlement of variously sized and colored tents grew up around the hill where the church rose. The tents were laid out in streets and alleys, with the rich accommodated right around the hill itself, and the outskirts occupied by those who had carts, but no tents, and, last of all, those who had neither one nor the other. Merrymaking included music, dancing, wrestling, and prodigious drunkenness. In the course of two days, every reveler—that is, pilgrim—would consume untold measures of apple and millet brandy. But neither measures of wine nor the profusion of flutes and wrestlers would determine the degree of merriment, but rather the kinds of office the visiting clergy would have to perform on the day of the feast. If only baptisms or a wedding followed the prescribed prayer service, the holiday might be considered a flop. Only death could provoke genuine merriment. Only its presence could compel all assembled to sing, drink, kiss, and dance tirelessly. At weddings, they drank from slop basins; at funerals, they drew drafts from buckets. The musicians would attain such raving that they couldn’t calm down; the dancers, once they had entered the circle, would refuse to cede their places to others; the bonfires would turn into blazes, and the orgy would drag on well beyond any proposed limit. While the people were dispersing, it would turn out that the modest cemetery not far from the church had been treated as a dump; no one, however, cleaned it up, and only the snow would veil this disgrace
But the graveyard deserved to be treated differently. Its headstones, decorated with superb illustrations, the work of the local stonecutter Luke, did more than preserve portraits of the deceased—they even narrated their lives. You didn’t need to know how to read (a difficult and altogether bad business) in order to learn the deceased’s occupation: whether he was a farmer or a tradesman, and in what line; whether he had children and a house; how he died and how old he was; what dishes he preferred and what he distilled his brandy from; how much moveable property and real estate he had left behind; if the widow or widower renewed the marriage bond before the stone was set in place, this was unfailingly mentioned, and in a way most unflattering to the living. Sometimes the sculptor who had enshrined the deceased’s memory would even show up at the grave many years later to append some new pertinent fact. The plot sequence, in its basic outlines, was strictly obligatory, and Luke, faced with the task of preparing the stone for Brother Mocius’s future grave, ranted and raved more than anyone for a murder investigation, since, for now, he lacked the main story line for his series of illustrations
In despair, the master craftsman proposed that his interlocutors—the village headman, the scribe, and the others seated together in one of the taverns—refuse to bury the holy fool there, since they didn’t know the facts, and send him north to find repose within his monastery’s walls. But Brother Mocius’s funeral was too great an enticement for drunkards; second, they could expect, without a doubt, miracles at the monk’s grave; third, while he was carving the stone, the murderer would certainly be found; fourth—and so on—in a word, so many objections were advanced against Luke’s idiotic proposal that everyone present cold-bloodedly bashed his face in and sent him home to sleep it off
The first consideration was legitimate. The funeral of the monk, who was celebrated throughout the region, proved to be especially tasty bait, and the congregation surpassed the most lavish expectations. The attendees unfurled their camp all the way to the river, and the fine weather permitted them not to hide out under carpets and carts. There were so many trumpeters with trained bears that the fair resembled a menagerie. The bagpipes’ moan and the din of drums were accompanied by howling children who could neither sleep nor keep still. At night, when everyone started leaping over fires, gunshots went off more enthusiastically than in battle. But there were always many more wineskins than people, and on the morning of the feast, all who weren’t vomiting their guts out were, in any case, three sheets to the wind
Brother Mocius’s funeral was performed not by parish priests, but by monks who turned up from his own monastery, as well as from the monastery he’d been traveling to. The monks didn’t share lay opinion as to the ascetic’s violent death, since the expression in the dead man’s eyes bore witness that he had seen death, while people who die violently supposedly don’t see it; but since the monks weren’t convinced even of this (to Luke’s distress), they decided, in order to avoid any ambiguity, to accept the locals’ petition and bury the holy fool in the cemetery there. No one showed up for the funeral. But when the brothers carried the coffin from the church, they had to expend much time and extraordinary effort fighting their way through the crowd and scrambling over snorers’ torsos. At the cemetery, the believers pried the corpse from its coffin, filled the coffin with brandy, and, down on all fours, slurped it straight from the coffin. No one tried to prevent this, since it might have led to a lynching, and the monk’s body, completely m
auled by his votaries, was tossed into the hole and covered with earth. And two days later, when Luke the stonecutter had recovered enough to head over to the cemetery and take the measurements he needed, he found the coffin on top of the grave, and in the coffin—a fellow villager stifled in wine
Those who had proclaimed there would be miracles at the holy fool’s grave also turned out to be right. It all started with an unseasonable laving downpour so heavy it washed all the filth away into the river, and the timber floats, backed up because of a labor shortage, were torn from the banks and spewed out into the sea. At the grave, a black tree suddenly burgeoned and blossomed fragrantly. And at night, anyone who dared could see: the silvery moon was shining over the tree. And in a couple more days, a thorny hedge had enclosed the grave, and before the first snow, the grave was proof against glance and hoof. And since miracles, although they are indeed miracles, are rather ordinary phenomena in those parts, people would soon have forgotten all about Brother Mocius’s grave, but for the fact that he had been killed