Rapture

by Iliazd

  But the ferocity and tension had disappeared from his face, and his pupils clouded over. It was evident that his spirit, roused at the price of a sleepless night, had grown once more decrepit and fallen asleep. Besides, they had drunk too much wine. And Laurence, done with fooling around, proceeded to swagger. He was grateful to the old man for the pointers. But he couldn’t, unfortunately, jump out of his flatlander’s skin. The mountains only corrupted him, Laurence, they’d never be able to catechize him. Old age isn’t at all enticing. It’s good to die young

  “Enough talk,” Laurence suddenly shouted, quaffing his horn and hurling it onto the table, “We’re not in church. Worldviews are all well and good, but here’s something more amusing than the mind’s mind. I’m staying here. Give me some land or one of your outbuildings. Besides, they say your kids obey you like dogs. Magnificent. Let me put them to work. I’ll make them useful and rich”

  The wenny agreed, no questions asked. He was prepared to assign Laurence an allotment, but only when spring came, and he could live right here in the meantime. The incident with the monk really was silly, since monks were pretenders and didn’t have a clue when it came to the mountains. As for his children, although they were nonentities corrupted by traveling on the plains and sometimes sighed after the life there, they’d been gloriously schooled

  “They wouldn’t challenge me,” Laurence interjected

  “Be at ease, they won’t betray you. Once I’ve given them into your power, there won’t be any faintheartedness”

  Only then did he call his toiling children, whom he tyrannized, and announce that he was handing them over to Laurence for instruction and that their earnings would be excellent; that although Laurence was much younger than they were, he was smart; and so on. The unfortunates didn’t dare object; they weren’t even curious about what they, with their beards, would learn from this young man. But after witnessing the previous evening’s expedition to the cretins, they had already determined they should expect a shake-up

  Others in the hamlet likewise needed no informants at all to understand: Laurence’s presence had nothing to do with hunting. Everyone knew about Laurence spending the night with the cretins and had seen him washing off in the stream, and that was enough to conclude, when the wenny met with Laurence behind closed doors, that the hamlet was on the verge of great events in its history. And when it came to light that Laurence hadn’t quit the hamlet, but was even staying on to live with the wenny, their opinion was confirmed, and they figured only that events were postponed until the snows melted

  Laurence’s advent had even been remarked from the former forester’s balcony, and it coincided with the first snow. A joyful Ivlita peeked out in the morning and saw that the white scene was violated this time by a commotion near the creek, where a long-awaited man was being baptized in the frenzied waters. That a bridegroom might appear to her in the mountains—this was something Ivlita had never before entertained. But now she perceived him, and an unhoped-for possibility drew the young woman thenceforth along new days past finding out

  The wenny children who frequently came to see her no longer seemed alien and she no longer teased them. Only then, while they were conversing about Laurence and she was interrogating them about his life (although they couldn’t impart any sensible reasons why he had come), did Ivlita notice that the world was being transfigured from day to day, that her sight and hearing and sense of smell were changing; she was beginning to detect and fathom phenomena the wennies had long been expounding to her, phenomena whose existence she had denied because of her coarseness

  It started when Ivlita began to discern in the forest at night not only leaves whispering, trees creaking, and eagle owls groaning, but also voices—vague, garbled, seemingly not at all human—that were nevertheless completely comprehensible, and you could say with no mistake what the source of one or another of them was experiencing. Then she started hearing how the snow fell, the snowflakes’ barely perceptible sough became clear, and all at once she realized that it wasn’t just a sough, but a peculiar form of speech. So that proverbial voice of nature Ivlita had heard of so many times was gradually made intelligible. Evidently, all things had a language, and this language didn’t exist, like human language, for exchanging opinions and thoughts, but emanated, mirroring the mind of things, the way a song bereft of words streams out. Ivlita would throw open the window and look at the snow that had ceased oppressing her, listen closely, and begin warbling. At the other end of the hamlet, the cretins would creep out and sing. And Ivlita understood surpassingly now why the wenny’s daughter imitated them. In their senseless speech was as much weighty content, far removed from life’s trivial worries, as in the forest idiom…

  Once Ivlita began to hear, her eyes were opened, too. She already saw that trees were not trees, but souls who had passed their earthly way in human form and were passing it now in the guise of trees. It turns out that trees advance, cliffs migrate, the snowy veil undulates. Ivlita also saw: the souls of snow leopards, wolves, and fallow deer coming out of the woods, strolling peacefully together and dropping in on the cretins, and angels flying down from the snow-covered summits; and, paying no heed to people, they all go on living, not their own life, but their death, their freedom from the empty human way of life that had possessed Ivlita up to that time. And Ivlita felt like living, once she was dead, her own death, too…

  Laurence stayed on for a long time in the hamlet not knowing a thing about Ivlita. The snow and the fact that the wennies continued treating Laurence like an outsider and didn’t breathe a word about her even once while enumerating their native land’s noteworthy features caused some fairly ordinary events to be postponed. True, the former forester’s house attracted attention because of its fanciful construction, and the young woman’s voice enveloped the dale in the evenings. But Laurence was too preoccupied to get carried away with lacy woodwork or feminine song. He had to head off first into the mountain deeps and then, on the contrary, delve secretly into the valleys, visiting villages, scouting things out, and getting to know the place. Sometimes he had to be absent for weeks, and Ivlita, never leaving her window, languished with boredom and anticipation. Some strangers usually came back with Laurence: his gang swelled. In the villages, adherents, disciples, and vassals appeared. Laurence’s influence grew strong. To recover his citizen’s rights and acquire still more new, exclusive prerogatives that would render to Laurence’s authority soul and body not just the wennies, but also the entire country, he lacked just one thing—a word. He need only proclaim himself sovereign, that was all, and then he would be able to show up at the lumber mill—and at the taverns—where no one would dare tail, betray, or oppose him

  This is the marvelous word: bandit. And when Laurence donned the yellow woolen shirt worn under a felt cape proper to his new vocation and, festooned with arms both of cold steel and fire, showed up one fine Sunday at the village hall where the stonecutter Luke had made his complaint to the investigator, he was met—although, it seemed, no one was expecting Laurence and the winter didn’t promote transportation—by a multitude bearing gifts of broadcloth remnants, cartridges, and refreshments for the archon and his wenny retinue. The populace stood in the large hall. Each held a purse in plain sight. Laurence entered, accompanied by the headman and the village elders. The headman presented each of those gathered (although Laurence knew them all thoroughly), announcing how much money he’d brought and the extent of his property and plowland, so it would be clear how fair the amount of tribute was. Several times, due to fudged accounts, Laurence had to interrupt the headman and point out the actual state of affairs. But Laurence was in a fit of magnanimity, and when the tribute didn’t seem sufficient, instead of taking the perpetrator hostage, as one might expect, he ordered the balance to be ready by this or that deadline. The justice of his resolutions provoked, every time, an ecstatic clamor. The new bandit’s father and brothers also brought tribute, taking advantage of a substantial discount based on family ties />
  The reception ended with a superb dinner. The village hall was crowded, so they opened up the idle sawmill and had soon rigged up a table that ran its entire length. Since bandits avoid getting drunk, everyone drank in moderation. The anxious mood gave way first to levity, and then to sincere pleasure. Many sang, even more danced, right on the table. Standing, likewise, on the table after demonstrating his marvelous adroitness, tirelessly bowing in response to the accolades, Laurence engaged the gathering with a speech for the better part of an hour, during which he summed up the accord with his native village, swore fidelity to the obligation he’d assumed not to kill or rob its inhabitants from that time forth, announced, beating his breast and sobbing (everyone copying his behavior), that he would donate the means necessary to adorn the graves of the stonecutter Luke and Brother Mocius in an unprecedented fashion, and finally began scattering fistfuls of the money that had just been brought to him, admiring the free-for-all and fisticuffs raised on account of the silver

  A few days later, the post was robbed on the highway, its convoy shot dead

  As long as the populace beat and slashed its own, the administration couldn’t care less. If one of its functionaries fell victim, a certain annoyance would arise, but the annoyance would quickly pass and the functionary would be forgotten. But whenever the plebs dared to rob the treasury, violating the administration’s own inalienable right to pick the treasury clean, intervention aimed at capturing those responsible and stifling such boldness became unavoidable

  An incalculable number of sundry military and civilian folk, most repulsive in mien and base in soul, would converge on the villages lying in the vicinity of the crime scene. Since the populace never knew anything, they would arrest all the elected officials and lead them away God knows where, impose a tithe on the populace and, finally, conduct a wholesale search, since the tithe always seemed insufficient and they would be forced to resort to confiscation and payments in kind. But while rending and throttling, they would hardly have imagined even for a moment that they would get at the bandits using these methods. They believed in one measure only—purchase, and that’s why they would post a reward for capturing the bandit chief equal to the tithe taken from the populace. The bandits, however, if danger threatened for any reason, had only to renounce the tribute due them, and equilibrium would be restored. The actual outcome of the comedy was this: The populace, aggrieved by the deportation of its best people, would beg the bandits to carry out their exploits elsewhere in future, so that everyone would suffer equally, and the gang, with utmost courtesy, would honor the request. It’s true that some bandits would, nevertheless, end up in jail whenever the gendarmes managed to wound anyone at a crime scene or overtake them. All this happened extremely rarely, and the administration’s saving grace was the fact that bandits themselves were rare; they were born, not made. This moderation in nature even allowed the lowly who captured anyone to boast before the lofty of the measures they’d taken and to receive rewards and distinctions for what they’d done. And so, if you don’t count several functionaries and rich men who paid with their heads, everyone was, at bottom, satisfied with this state of affairs; it nourished them, and the gang became a source of economic flourishing in a country that had, until that time, dragged along in a pitiful condition

  That’s why the news that the village with the sawmill had sworn fealty to Laurence, and also about the robbery of the post, broadcast around the region, provoked extraordinary excitement. Never had life seethed so in the dumb days of January. Just as though spring were already approaching now, not months later, and as if there were neither impassable snow nor loathsome frosts

  Laurence, accompanied by the wennies, returned to the hamlet. He knew that as long as the authorities were fooling around beyond the mountains (as though it were not already generally known that the word “authorities” was a synonym for “fools,” and some further proof was required), he could calmly feed on the remnant of winter and the majesty of the backwoods. The title bandit freed him of all misgivings regarding the highlanders, and there was no need to seek refuge with the cretins

  The loot was ample; Laurence gave generously not only to his comrades in arms, but to the whole hamlet. Each of them now had enough money to make needed spring purchases, and since the flatlanders were obliged to provide services equal in value to the tithe, what was bought would also be delivered. One of the wennies even proposed blazing a real trail to the hamlet, if not a cart lane, in order to crown the beneficent turn of events, but Laurence, who saw in this suggestion the basest lack of gratitude, flew into such a rage that the wenny son had to retract his own words and add that if the opinion he’d expressed was incorrect, it would, perhaps, be better to make the hamlet completely inaccessible, immuring it once and for all. But when Laurence rejected this idea and proclaimed that his work was just beginning and that he would maintain an open channel to the outside world, although in a new spirit, the shared radiant mood gave way to evil premonitions

  The former forester was first to inform his daughter about Laurence’s activities. He subjoined no evaluation whatsoever, whether because he was wary of speaking ill or simply because it didn’t concern him in the slightest, and that was reason enough; and Ivlita, forced once again to make up her own mind, unexpectedly found herself facing difficulties. It didn’t matter that Laurence was a bandit, but killing, what about that? Was it good? Of course, it was good, when…But when, precisely? So, from superhuman spheres she had to sink to judging humans, good or bad—a distinction she didn’t recognize; and she found the need for evaluating deeds burdensome. After her eyes had been opened this winter and she had seen to the bottom of nature, Ivlita supposed she had crossed the final frontier, and there was nothing left beyond penetrating mortal secrets. Once she recognized the objective reality of spirits, she had herself become one of them, and impoverished human life had very nearly turned into an insignificant detail. And now this life was taking unforeseen revenge, mocking Ivlita, revealing to her a world of evaluations and excuses, a human world she, as it happened, did not know, and its presence embarrassed her

  Ivlita tried to avoid complications, replying neither “yes” nor “no,” that there was, she said, no evaluating, any murder at all was permitted, one must defend oneself and attack, that the world of people was no more exalted than the animal world and wolf law no worse than human. But her peace was shattered, and even if Ivlita had never again bumped up against human affairs, she could not now but know they existed. The young woman had never before been curious to find out what was going on beyond the mountains. Now she thought with alarm about the hostile world that surrounded her and perceived that she could not break through her surroundings

  Laurence. He had bestowed sight on her, he had dissolved her in nature, had elevated Ivlita, and he had likewise debased her, snatching from her the rapture she had nearly attained, casting her down, robbing her, too, killing her, too. In place of magnanimous snow, pines, mountains, and a river—a blizzard, danger, not a wink of sleep. The wind tears through so that the house shakes, ready to topple over, and there’s no shelter from the cold. Avalanches break the woods all around, the dale moans at night, and when it’s day’s turn, it’s not much brighter than night. If you cower under hides so you can’t hear a thing, can’t see, thoughts assail your mind even more insistently. Ivlita grew timid, indecisive. She lay ill, complaining of a headache; she was feverish, but not dying. She listened in horror: the hurricane blew incessantly beyond her window, she hoped her malady’s duration depended on the foul weather

  Finally, Ivlita felt better, and everything really had quieted down in the yard. Again, the same trembling whiteness and the snowflakes falling imperceptibly, as though they did not even exist. The hamlet was bustling, cleaning up, people were clearing paths, fixing damage. But what a change to this familiar scene! As though its soul had flown, its colors faded. As though everything had turned away from Ivlita. Not that nature stood before her once more inanimate. But it
had backed away, withdrawn far off, and it occurred to Ivlita: there was no recovering this loss. She no longer felt like singing or laughing. She sat for hours, unmoving, distractedly gazing all around, failing to notice her weeping father, leaving her food untouched

  Then Ivlita started going out into the yard to stroll between the walls of snow that led down to the stream. The wennies, when they learned that Ivlita was ill, came particularly often, bringing her gifts in the form of dolls molded from bread or clay or made from empty spools impaled on sticks. This was a new world, miserable, no substitute for unloved nature. At home, lying on the floor in front of the stove, Ivlita arranged the dolls, named them, played with them; in short, it was just like her childhood. But the dolls acted differently, they did nothing but beat one another in spite, kill one another, and Ivlita saw that this way, too, had been choked off. One day, she hurled them into the stove

  The wennies stubbornly avoided revealing to Laurence the reason for their frequent trips to the former forester’s. Uneasy, the young man decided to go with them and see for himself. Along the way, one of the sons blurted out that the forester’s daughter was, you might say, sick. What’s the big fuss? Aren’t women always getting sick? Why would a stranger get involved, it’s just not done

  While they were cutting across the hamlet, Laurence was curiously scrutinizing the only two-story house, which rose up from a hummock, surrounded by hawthorn, preposterous with its curves, and as though perforated throughout by carvings on its shutters, balconies, and doors. What weird woman lay ill in that castle?

  The forester, when he caught sight of his guest, ran out, inviting him to come into the dining room. He bustled around, bowing, taking pains to settle his new arrival there in the carved armchair, his favorite piece of furniture. The purpose of the visit wasn’t clear to the old man, so after several minutes’ silence, he inquired, made anxious mostly by the usual ploys of bandit politeness. Laurence, with a refined courtesy that compelled the forester to reminisce about the city, replied that he simply thought it necessary to call on him, since he saw no obstacle to their acquaintance. “Not a single obstacle, you understand.” To conclude, the master of the house, in polite fashion, offered his guest some brandy: “Rye, apple, or grape?” “Apple, please”