Black Spring

by Alison Croggon

  So the days widened and the early flowers bloomed, and slowly I began to feel less desolate. On one of the first warm days I decided to beat the carpets, which had become musty and close over the winter months, and with Irli’s help I had carried them out and hung them on the washing lines. I remember that I was stretching my back after the labour of carrying the heavy rolls when I saw Zef standing by the gate. He bore in his arms an enormous bunch of spring flowers that he had gathered for me.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. I blinked and looked again, but there he was, as real as the gatepost next to him. He was a handsome man in those days: his hair was as brown as coffee and his eyes as blue and mild as the skies of high summer. As he stood strong and sturdy in the pale sunlight and laughed at my astonishment, I am sure no angel could have looked more beautiful to my eyes. I stood still as a stone, unable to speak: I had been all ice, and that minute my soul broke open, as if my feelings were a river in flood. I found I was not so numb after all, and that I could do more than smile: I laughed for sheer joy, even through my tears.

  Our courtship was brief: we had already spent too much time apart, and were each impatient, as all young people are, to reach our bliss. He spoke and I consented; the rest was a matter of practical decision. I was reluctant to leave the manse, and I approached Tibor and asked him to employ Zef as a groom, to which he gladly assented. We were married in the autumn, once the time of mourning was over.

  I can’t pretend that my happiness was unalloyed; the events of the previous year had left their mark, and I still mourned Lina’s death. I felt older than my years, as if I had lost for ever an innocence that until then I hadn’t known I possessed. Sometimes I wished fiercely that Lina could have had the peace that I had found, although at other times I wondered whether her restlessness meant that, even should she have lived, she would never have found content. How do we measure such things? My love for Zef was neither star-crossed nor tragic, and our marriage concerned no one but ourselves. Perhaps I never suffered the ecstasies that possessed Lina; but I believe that, in my own way, I felt no less deeply; and I have certainly been happier in my life.

  It seems wrong that there is so little of interest to say about happiness. The next fifteen years were the most content of my life, and yet are soon told. There were sorrows: my mother died a few years after Young Lina’s birth, which caused me much grief. At around the same time, Zef and I accepted that we were fated to be childless. After an initial sadness, I found that I was very content as I was: I liked my work, and I was loved by a good man, and that seemed to me to be very sufficient. If I had married another man things would have been very different: I knew of women who had been sent from their husbands for not bearing a son. As with all things, Zef followed his own mind. He said that if God had decided not to send us children, who was he to argue? In any case, he said, it meant that he had me all to himself.

  This wasn’t entirely true, as the chief care of Young Lina fell to us and in truth we loved her as if she were our own. By winter the baby was old enough to be weaned and she was brought to the manse. Of course we wondered – not without anxiety – if she would inherit her mother’s violet eyes, but in a few months we could lay our fears aside: her eyes were like her father’s, brown and soft as a milch cow’s. I supervised her growth through her childish maladies and mishaps with all a mother’s pride and anxiety, and watched her grow into a sweet, biddable girl. She had none of her mother’s wilfulness and almost all of her beauty: it was as if she united the best features of both her parents.

  Tibor was never the same after Lina’s death. Ever after there was a delicacy in his constitution which expressed itself in periods of melancholy. After an initial period of indifference, Young Lina became the darling and consolation of her father’s heart, and her innocent play could rouse him out of all but the worst of his dejections. He ran the manse with a farmer’s sense and, barring the ups and downs of normal life, we all prospered. Young Lina’s sunny nature seemed to make up for the evils that had afflicted her mother, and we all believed that the curse of the Kadars had at last burned itself out.

  XLII

  I was, of course, reckoning without Damek. When Lina was fifteen, Damek returned to live in the Red House. As ever, he told no one of what he had been doing for the past fifteen years, although from scraps of gossip that came my way over the years I understood that he had worked himself into the highest affairs of the country.

  I couldn’t regard his return without trepidation and was relieved when it seemed that he was, if anything, disposed to avoid the manse. His presence stirred old scandals that had long lain dormant, and some reached Lina’s ears. I was forced to tell her some of her mother’s story, which up to then I had kept secret. I carefully culled what I told her, but she listened wide-eyed, excited that she had such a romantic history. I’m sure that she supplemented the little I related with accounts from her friends in the village, which were no doubt exaggerated and highly coloured. She was of an age to fill her mind with penny novels that her indulgent father purchased for her from the south, and her imagination was set afire to think that she was the daughter of a witch who had been cursed by the king himself. I couldn’t approve her nonsense, but at the time it seemed harmless enough.

  It wasn’t long before I met Damek in the village. He greeted me with neither enthusiasm nor dislike, seeming rather indifferent to my salutation, and showed none of the intimacy that had marked our relationship many years before. I studied him curiously: somehow he was changed, although outwardly he seemed little different from the last time we met. His eyes were hard and calculating, and there was that in his manner – a coldness that seemed like the obverse of the fierce passion I had once seen in him – which made me keen to go no further in our relations than common civility. I was puzzled why a man of affairs as he had reportedly become should consider living in an isolated village and, prompted by curiosity, I asked him why he had moved here. His reply was at first no more than I expected.

  “What business is it of yours?” he said. “Surely a man can live in a house he owns without exciting impertinent speculation?”

  “Of course he may,” I said, feeling the rebuke. “But you must own that there is little here to interest a man of your tastes.”

  “What would you know of my tastes?” said he, and I thought that was that, and prepared to take my leave. But he had not finished: he gave me a narrow look which made me feel very uncomfortable, and then asked me why I had remained in this place, when I was so clearly not cut of the same cloth as my neighbours. I was taken aback by his question and answered confusedly, saying that I had ties of blood and habit that made it dear to me.

  “I too have ties of blood,” he said then, with sudden intensity. “If not habit, blood. Every thing that ever happened to me, happened to me here. There are ties that call, whether a man likes it or not…”

  I shuddered: for a moment I saw beneath his mask of indifference, as if I had glimpsed a monstrous creature at the bottom of a dark pond. I remembered with a vivid clarity our last meetings, when I had been sure he was out of his mind. But Damek swiftly recollected himself, and the mask was resumed; he gave me a mocking look, nodded and passed on.

  I was discomforted enough by this conversation to be grateful that our paths seldom crossed. He never attended church, and at most we would pass each other in the street, where neither of us did more than acknowledge the other.

  So events rumbled along unexceptionally for a year, and my charge turned sixteen and became of marriageable age. Her beauty and her father’s property made her the object of several courtships, which caused the usual flutterings and excitement. I did not for a moment fear that she deceived me, and so allowed her more laxity in her movements than was wise, a circumstance I now rue bitterly. To be short, Damek covertly presented himself as one of her suitors, flattering and charming her as only he knew how. Citing the ancient enmity between her father and himself, Damek swore Lina to secrecy, and her mind was so full o
f romantic nonsense that she fell in gladly with his schemes, believing everything he said about his role in the matter. Don’t get me wrong: she loved her father dearly, and had no desire to hurt him. But in her innocence, she thought what had transpired between her father and Damek was no more than a tragic misunderstanding, which time and love would eventually heal.

  I have no doubt that Damek had been nourishing this plan for many years, perhaps ever since he left Elbasa, and had been waiting patiently for the time to ripen. From his point of view, marrying Lina was the perfect revenge. He knew it would destroy Tibor and, since he also blamed Lina unequivocally for her mother’s death, he could punish the child as well. Since she was her father’s heir she would inherit the manse and its properties on his death, which appealed also to his grasping nature, since all the property would pass to him.

  Suspicion was so far from any of our minds that Lina was able to keep the affair to herself right up to the moment that she ran away with him. She left a letter full of foolishness and prattle: she was in love, and she was away to be married, and would return after her honeymoon as mistress of the Red House. She begged our forgiveness for her secrecy, but had feared her marriage would be forbidden since her father had such an unjust dislike for Damek, but she was the happiest woman on the face of the earth.

  My whole world fell apart. My master collapsed with the shock, and was bedridden for a week. When he rose from his bed, he was a different man; he oscillated between towering rage at his daughter’s betrayal and a dangerous lassitude brought on by large amounts of laudanum. It was a medication he used to combat his melancholy, but after Lina’s flight he resorted to taking it every day. Not anything I could say would make him think of his daughter with compassion, and if he had not been so ill he would have disinherited her at once. He certainly claimed the intention. For myself, I could not imagine that Damek felt any real love for my nurseling; yet I nourished some hope that he could not be too cruel to a young girl who was, after all, the flesh and blood of the woman he had loved so passionately. That hope was dashed in less than a month, when I received a desperate letter saying that her marriage had been a terrible mistake and begging to be allowed home. This, despite all my representations, was refused by her father.

  Damek and Lina returned in three months, no doubt so Damek could flaunt his revenge in Tibor’s face. As soon as I heard, I hurried to the Red House to see her. You might imagine how my heart broke when I saw what had happened to my innocent girl. All the happy light in her had been quenched: she was cowed and frightened, and I saw evidence of her husband’s cruel treatment in the bruises she showed me on her arms. She told me she had tried to run away to escape his constant abuses, but Damek had always followed her and brought her back. Such was my anger that I later confronted Damek, and ordered him to treat his wife with respect and consideration. He laughed in my face.

  “What, and lose the sweet revenge I have planned for so long? There is little enough pleasure in my life, but knowing how Tibor squirms and suffers in the vice has given me a reason to live. How can you deny me that? What do you take me for?”

  “A human being,” I said. “I once thought you were at least that. But I see that I was wrong, and those who say you are the Devil must surely be right. How could you treat such an innocent so, and she Lina’s own flesh and blood? Do you not know that you are breaking my heart also? And I’m sure her mother would weep, if she could know what you are doing…”

  “Don’t you speak of her mother to me!” he said. “What she said was all too right: she is with me every day. She has cursed me. I was cursed from the moment we first met. And yet I never see her! A glimpse in the corner of my eye, a snatch of laughter in another room – oh, she is clever enough to give me enough hope to keep me in constant torment, but never to satisfy me. Don’t mention her in the same breath as that puling brat! She doesn’t deserve to bear her mother’s name; she is all her father.”

  I had no reply to this, because it was clear to me that Damek was no longer a rational human being and, in truth, I feared that he might strike me. I shuddered and asked then, without any hope that it might be granted, that he permit Lina to come and live with me, even if we went to the south. He laughed again, saying she was his property to do with as he wished, and dismissed me.

  Damek had all the joy he desired, for Tibor sickened and died before the year was out. Tibor had never found the spirit to change his will, and all his property passed into Damek’s hands. He called for his daughter on his deathbed, but Damek refused to let her attend; indeed, he seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in forbidding Lina to attend the funeral or even to wear mourning, although Damek himself was seen at the edge of the cemetery, no doubt gloating over his vanquished foe. He moved his household to the manse, where my poor girl had spent her happiest years, appointing Zef and myself to look after the Red House, as you find us, since he is now our master. If it were not for Young Lina, I would have long left his employ. I visit the manse when I can, and bring such comfort as is possible. There is this at least, that Damek does not forbid my visits. And so it has been these past two years.

  I can find it within me to forgive, if not excuse, Damek’s previous actions, despite the terrible harm he caused; but even a saint could not forgive the injury he has done to Young Lina, who did nothing to excite his hatred except to be born. I pray that some justice will be dealt him, but I cannot see how, as he has the king’s favour; and even should he decide to blow out his unhappy brains with a rifle tomorrow, the damage he has inflicted will never be undone. If I can be said to hate another human being, I hate him. After Lina’s death, he was nothing, as he had told me, and he built a fortress on that emptiness that even now stares blackly over us all, forbidding all joy and gentleness. I had not known a human being was capable of such barren savagery.

  Since he removed to the manse, Damek has lost even his former regard for his property. He remains as miserly as ever, but what was once carefully maintained is now left to decay. That is partly because villagers refuse to work there because they say the house is haunted: the only servant who remains is Kush. The main reason is Damek himself. He doesn’t care any more to conceal his nature, and he is widely feared. Myself, I think that each month Damek’s insanity grips him more deeply.

  There are many stories circulating in the village – some say they have seen Damek speaking with the Devil, and others claim that he is the Devil himself. I do not credit all of them, since gossip gives wings to flights of fancy, but I think even the wildest rumours contain a seed of truth. A few weeks ago, for instance, Father Cantor found Lina’s grave disturbed, with all the earth dug up. Poor man, he crossed himself in panic, believing that Lina must have clawed her way out of her coffin and was now stalking the cemetery. I think it more likely that Damek, in one of his fits, sought to look on the face of his dead love, even in her bodily decay. I confess, the thought of such perverse passion fills me with greater horror than the thought of Lina walking abroad.

  And again, early this spring a young herder who was out past sunset searching for a stray goat stumbled across Damek by the river. Damek, he said, was scrabbling in the mud, begging and pleading like one in torment. The boy thought he was ill and, overcoming his fear, sought to help him, and Damek turned on him like a wild animal, snarling and cursing. The boy swore his eyes were rimmed with demonic flames. Whether it’s true about the flames or not, it is certain that the boy ran all the way home in terror for his mortal soul, and ever since won’t leave the house after nightfall.

  Rumours of demons aside, the manse is a wretched household! Nothing can mitigate the atmosphere of misery, although I do what I can to lighten it. Young Lina, who is trapped in this noisome hell, is becoming as disturbed as the rest of them. Although she says she has never seen any ghost, she believes that her mother is punishing Damek for his ill-treatment of her. So deep is her hatred of Damek now that I think that this faith in her mother’s infernal love and her joy in the thought of Damek’s agony
are the only things that are keeping her alive. He has in truth driven her half mad.

  Even so, I still see inside this unhappy woman the young girl I love, however wounded and tormented, and my only hope is that I can tend her until such time as healing is possible. In short, the only way out I can see is Damek’s early death. Yet, for all the stories of his mad behaviour, he continues as strong as an ox, and mostly appears to be as rational as you or I. Sometimes I believe the real answer to our distress would be if I picked up a gun and shot him myself. I quail at the thought of committing a mortal sin: yet is it not true that we shoot rabid dogs for their own sake as much as for our own, as no creature deserves to suffer so?

  For all that, I can’t but feel it is for God to make such judgements, not mortals such as ourselves. I cannot rid myself of the thought that redemption may be possible even for a soul as ruined as his, although I find it nigh impossible to imagine. Like the rest of us, I cannot know the truth of another’s heart.

  I confess that recently, in my disquiet, I have begun to visit Lina’s grave and speak to her. Perhaps this only confirms that these events have finally disordered my wits, although I can report in my defence that she has never answered me. I went there yesterday: it comforts me to sit alone, disturbed by nothing more than the distant cries of rooks and the sleepy buzz of bees at work in the wild crocuses that star the grass. In such peace I can believe that my love for Lina, my sister, my other soul, is not wholly without meaning, and that one day at last her unquiet spirit will find healing in this quiet earth.

  EPILOGUE: HAMMEL

  It’s some weeks since I last wrote in this journal, and now I find my return to civilization is imminent. To be sure, until yesterday there was little enough to record: the dramatic beginning of my visit to this unremarkable village by no means signalled the tenor of its life. Existence here is almost unrelievedly dull. I can’t say that I am entirely sorry for the lack of excitement: I still flinch at the memory of that hellish night spent at the manse, and I will bear the marks of that filthy cur’s teeth to the end of my days.