The Bone Mother by David Demchuk.
Title: The Bone Mother.
Author: David Demchuk.
Genre: Fiction, literature, mythology, horror, fantasy.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2017.
Summary: Three neighbouring villages on the Ukrainian/Romanian border are the final refuge for the last of the mythical creatures of Eastern Europe. Now, on the eve of the war that may eradicate their kind―and with the ruthless Night Police descending upon their sanctuary―they tell their stories and confront their destinies. The Rusalka, the beautiful vengeful water spirit who lives in lakes and ponds and lures men and children to their deaths; The Vovkulaka, who changes from her human form into that of a wolf and hides with her kind deep in the densest forests; The Strigoi, a revenant who feasts on blood and twists the minds of those who love, serve and shelter him; The Dvoynik, an apparition that impersonates its victim and draws him into a web of evil in order to free itself; the Bone Mother, a skeletal crone with iron teeth who lurks in her house in the heart of the woods, and cooks and eats those who fail her vexing challenges, and many more. Eerie and unsettling like the darkest fairy tales, these portraits of ghosts, witches, sirens, and seers―and the mortals who live at their side and in their thrall―chill the marrow and tear at the heart.
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:
♥ My brother Sergyi and I were married in a small ceremony in our village church. Such things were possible then that now are not. This was in the years before the war, during the movchanya, what some call the silence, or the blight. We were farmers, our families too poor for us to be considered by the very few women our age. And we were good companions, and had been intimate since we were children. And so our bond was blessed.
♥ "You may pass slowly through a valley dark and drenched with tears, but you must not rest there," she said. "These things happen."
♥ While the Grazyn Porcelain Factory also produced fine china for homes, hotels, and restaurants, near and far, it was celebrated the world over-as we in the village were frequently told-for the exquisite porcelain thimbles that had been manufactured for centuries using closely guarded techniques developed by the Grazyn family. Every tsaritsa since Anastasia Romanovna had received a priceless Grazyn thimble as part of her wedding trousseau. The factory produced only three hundred and thirty thimbles a year, each painstakingly formed from a special paste, then glazed and fired by hand. The workers lived there, ate there, slept there, for the duration of their contracts, and were then sent home with lifelong pensions-enough to clothe and house and feed their now-estranged families.
..Then, wordlessly, I was taken into the back of the factory. It was filled with boxes and crates and bins of human bones, boiled and scrubbed and gleaming.
Across a room, two men shovelled the bones into a huge metal grinder where giant stone burrs crushed them into a coarse powder. The powder was sent through a series of furnaces, sifted and combed and ground between each, until what emerged at the end was a trickle of fine white ash.
The Grazyn family had provided our livestock and produce, chosen our grains, paid for our doctors and medicine, built and repaired our housing. They had given us our schooling, our training, our church, our cemetery. And not just for our village, but two others besides.
We had all been raised and fed and nurtured to become these bones.
♥ I come from a line of seven mothers who were healers, mudri materi-women who detected and treated illnesses among the healthy, who ministered to the sick and the dying. Running our hands over the body, we could feel minuscule tumours, clots in the bloodstream, swollen or atrophied organs, irregular pregnancies, diseases in the glands and muscles and tissues and nerves and the brain. Some we could heal with touch, others with rough medicines, and a few with precise but painful surgeries. The rest we would recognize and respect as inevitable, inescapable afflictions to which one must gracefully surrender. These are old skills, invested with old knowledge, passed down through the centuries. And they come with a cost.
♥ In a den on the other side of the rise, a white wolf was nestled on a pile of rags, nursing her young: three tiny white pups, and me-the warm wolf milk smeared around my hungry mouth.
My father raised the gun-and my mother stopped him. "No," she said. And as the word spilled from her mouth, three other wolves emerged from among the trees. He lowered the barrel, and he and she moved backward slowly as the animals stared intently. Once out of the forest, my father turned and asked, "What will we do?"
"We will wait," my mother said. "I will wait. They will not harm him, or they would have done so." Then she turned to my father and said, "She saw my face, and I saw hers."
"They are animals," he spat. "Our son, is he also an animal?"
"We are all animals," she answered. "I will wait."
♥ I do not remember. I cannot say what is true. But I do know this: when my mother died many years later, I knelt beside her bed and cried, and the wolves in the woods, they cried with me.
♥ A woman stepped up, Mrs. Derhak from the post office and general store. "I saw the whole thing," she said. "A pale young woman with long red hair, she grabbed your boy by the hand, she was trying to take him away. He was struggling but she had a dark power, she-I think she came from the river."
"A rusalka," said Mr. Malyk, and a shiver ran through the crowd. Many young women from the village had drowned in the river. It could have been someone's long-dead sister, daughter, wife.
♥ Later, my mother and father argued while I held my brother in our room. Father was afraid: apparently some abnormal children in the eastern village had been taken by the authorities, for purposes unknown. For three weeks I was kept from school as my parents circled each other in a sour silence. Then, that last Sunday, as they took my brother to church but left me at home, I gathered my things into the small grey suitcase from under my mother's side of the bed and I started walking west. I had seen handbills from a Turkish circus that was visiting Rakhiv. It would take me all day and into the night to reach it, but I no longer tired easily.
I remained with the circus for nearly two years. We travelled all over Europe. When our tour took us back towards my home, I asked if I could stop and visit. And then I was told, and wouldn't believe, and had to see for myself: in the brief time that I'd been away, my home, and my village, were gone.
♥ The Bone Mother lived in a little house deep in the woods, just like my grandmother's house, where she received visits from lonely young women, children cast out by their heartless parents, and handsome but treacherous men. The Bone mother could be very wicked or very kind, and sometimes both.
♥ Once, as she was telling these stories, a whimpering came from one of the cages in the darkest corner of the kitchen-from one of her little kurchas, or chicks as she called them. Over she flew like a big black crow, pulled a little hand out of the cage and bit off one of its fingers. As the little kurcha screamed and screamed, my grandmother sat back on her stool, a think trickle of blood dribbling down to her chin. "There," she said. "Now you have something to cry about."
I never looked too closely at the cages.
♥ Once I eyed my plate suspiciously-the meat was so much like a tiny leg, with a tiny foot at the end and tiny little toes-and I asked her, "Are you the Bone Mother, Babcia?"
"I might be and I might not," she answered. "But I will tell you this: I am the oldest of our mother's daughters and, of all my children's children, you are the one who will one day take my place. You will live in my house, you will have all my jewels and gold. My cooking pots. My iron teeth. My many visitors. Some will come to you for wisdom, some for strength. Some will come with cakes and wine, asking for help to find true love or to seek revenge. Others will come to cheat and trick you, and even try to kill you. You must protect this house, and our families, and you must protect yourself."
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked. "Is something going to happen? Are you going to die?"
"Everything dies," she said simply, "and I am no different. One cannot be afraid. As you become a woman, my time will come to an nd. And then, when you are very old, another in our line will take her turn."
"But the Bone Mother is a wicked witch who eats naughty children," I cried. Babcia smiled and pushed my plate closer to me, the little leg glistening in a sauce of butter and herbs. Nervously, I picked it up with mf fingers and tore at the meat with my teeth. It was, admittedly, delicious.
"Good children do taste better," she said wistfully, "but there are so few of them. If you can be satisfied with naughty children, you will always have food on the table. They are never in short supply."
"But I don't want to be wicked, I don't want people to be afraid of me. I want to make them happy. I want them to love me."
She seemed hurt by this, and became very still, and the whole house grew quiet around her. "I wanted that too," she said softly. "We all want that at the start. You will see how the world changes you. Your kindness will be met with hate. Your wisdom will be met with fear."
I set the bones back down on the plate, stripped of all their flesh. I took a piece of thick white bread and wiped the juice from my plate, and from my chin. My grandmother's long thick tail, pink and hairless like that of a rat, unfurled from behind her and swept the bones into a bowl to be set aside for roasting.
"I cannot tell you how to be," she said, taking me hand. "You can only be who you are. But to be the Bone Mother is to always be hungry. What you eat, and why, depends on you."
Two full centuries have passed. I am now the oldest one. The little house is gone, as are the jewels and gold. I have outlived my own children and their children. Few from our families have survived, and those who did so fled to escape the enveloping darkness.
Yet among those there is a child, one who will succeed me. She feels the gnawing in her belly and it draws her to my hiding place. For a time, we will dine together. I will tell her my stories, and teach her what she needs to know. Through her, our kind will live anew. I will not be the last.
♥ To catch a ride with someone local from Minnedosa to Sandy Lake, and especially if you now live in the city, you first ask your driver about weather and the crops, who's alive and who's not, if anyone has left in the last few years and where they've gone, and who you might both know in Winnipeg, or Toronto, or out west in B.C. Even with friends or neighbours or family members, the ritual remains the same.
These conversations have different rhythms and rules from those that you have in the city, and settling into them can take some time. Some are just single words battered back and forth across the front seats. ..Others devolve into tangled monologues shot through with odd but telling details that hint at the causes, and the results, of otherwise inscrutable small-town behaviour. Bad debts, family fights, drunken brawls, police visits. After the city, ad its relentless prying about your work, your parents, your home life, your curious singlehood-it's a relief to sit back and talk about other people, people who you know by name but not to speak to, people worse off than you, whose misfortunes are a welcome distraction from your own.
♥ I reached the bend in the road, turned the corner, and as I drew closer I could see something ahead of me, something on the driveway, facing me as if to greet me or as if to warn me: a chair.
An old walnut chair, turned legs, back carved and sanded and softened with age, the seat covered in a threadbare cream and gold brocade, the grey flecked batting peeking through. A chair my grandfather had made, when he and his wife first settled here. A chair from the old house, the first house.
I stopped and stared at it, and it seemed to stare back at me. Confronting me.
Of course it was just a chair but-why was it here, out in the open, exposed to the elements, at the end of the road? How long had it been here? I approached it, put my hand out to touch it-
-and as I reached out to grab the back, my hand passed through a warmth, a tenderness, a knowing. I let my hand linger-
-then pulled it back sharply, as if I had burned myself. The sharp cool country air snapped around it like a glove that had been left out in the snow.
Suddenly my cellphone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and looked at the screen. A message from Rive, just one word:
RUN
♥ In one motion, all of the men reached into their coats, pulled out and cocked their blunt black pistols-and then stopped, interrupted, as one waved to the others, shushing and gesturing downward. He had heard something. Now they all could hear it. And then so faintly, I could hear it, too. Someone, a woman, humming or singing inside of the house, to herself or to a small child. Just a few notes in, I began to whisper along. it was something my mother ha sung to lull me to sleep.
Bayu-bayushki-bayu
Nye lozhisya na krayu
Pridyot serenkiy volchok
I ukhvatit za bochok
On ukhvatit za bochok
I potashchit vo lesok
Por rakitovyi kustok
Baby, baby, rock-a-bye
On the edge you mustn't lie
Or the little grew wolf will come
And he will bite you on the bum
Tug you off into the wood
Underneath the willow root.
As the men listened, they moved off of the driveway, into the yard, onto the steps, through the door and one by one into the house, as if the tune was winding itself around them and drawing them in.
And then I saw her. The tall sheer curtain at the side of the dining room window shivered, and she stepped out from behind it, perfectly framed, looking towards the front hallway, facing the intruders who were just out of sight. It was odd-I could see her, but not quite see her, my eyes unable to focus. And all this time singing, singing. And then all in a moment, her hair, her face, her body, her clothing, they all at once came together and-
-it's me, I thought, oh my God it's me, that's me in the house, in the window, it's me, and the woman raised her hand-
A shot. And a thud.
Again. And again. Six men. Six shots. Six thuds. And then she laughed, a light bell-like laugh that stung my ears, and disappeared from view.
The dining room window shattered. Towards the back for the room, down near the floor, a creamy golden light began to flicker and spread. Within minutes, the house was engulfed in flames.
♥ I look back now and realize: our family lived in fear. My parents, my grandparents, they came to this new land and brought their fears with them, and they underscored everything like the faint, staticky hiss on my grandfather's old Riga radio. At a time when our neighbours thought nothing of leaving their doors unlocked, ours were checked every night and every morning, and the windows, too.
Never walk into a dark room, we were taught. Always look in the car's back seat. Never cross a strange animal's path. Always know where the door is and keep your left eye trained on it. My father's youngest brother died before I was born, just a teenager, he fell down a well. These things happen on farms, farms are dangerous places. Something like this, no one sees or hears you, your life slips away while parents, brothers, neighbours scour the property calling for you. Your name being shouted far above your head by ever more frantic voices, your name formed out of cries and sobs, this becomes the last sound you hear.
The second youngest, handsome and studious and possibly gay, died in a one-person car accident when I was ten, just lost control of his car and flew off through a guardrail and down a fifty-foot drop. Cool clear night, starlit sky, not another vehicle for miles. "Untimely accidental demise," said the obituary, unconvincingly.
And as I sat in the old wooden chair watching the new house succumb to the flames, I wondered what had really happened, to both of them, if there was something more.
When I was a little girl, we would drive back from my aunt's in Elphinstone well after dark. There was one shot stretch where the road dipped and rose like a roller coaster, and my dad would turn off the headlights and we rolled rolled rolled in the pitch-darkness and my mother would cry, "Don't do that, you're scaring the children!" when, of course, we loved it and she was the one who was scared. But after Uncle Ted died, we always drove that stretch slowly with the lights on full so we could see the road ahead and everything on it.
♥ Here is a story we tell our children. Perhaps you were told this, too. Two sisters, twins, were born to a woodsman and his wife-but the woodsman had chopped down the oldest tree in the forest, a sacred tree, and so a witch of the wood cursed his daughters. Hana was made of fire and could burn you if you touched her. Gerda was made of ice and could freeze away your fingers. And of course, Hana and Gerda could never touch each other or they would both die.
The wood witch had a kind of powerful sister who heard the cries of the woodsman and his wife. She could not lift the curse, but she took the ice-child Gerda to raise as her own and keep her apart from Hana the fire-child. As she grew older, the wood witch befriended Hana the fire-girl and persuaded her that a more powerful and terrifying witch was holding her long lost sister captive. Because she didn't entirely trust her new friend, Hana began to drop secret notes in the woods for Gerda to find, and one day Gerda answered them with a note of her own, telling the truth.
Furious, Hana burned the wood witch's house to the ground, killing her-but also ensuring the curse could never be broken. Gerda saw the smoke above the trees and went running for her sister, but before the kindly witch could stop her, she rushed into Hana's arms, embracing her. The fire-sister Hana melted the ice-sister Gerda, and the water as Gerda melted turned Hana into ash. At the last moment, the kindly witch turned them both into flowers-the small red and white flowers known as Snot of the Mountain and Fire of the Valley that you find tangled together in the forests of the Old Country. In this way the sisters live on as the flowers live on, and through the story we tell.
♥ I realized I had heard one word from my mother's diatribe, and that word was "twin."
When I was twelve, just a few days after my birthday, I fell ill with a terrible fever. I was drenched with sweat, yet chilled to the bone. Overnight, the welt had returned, as large and round as a boil. Dr. Pavel had retired from his practice the year before, but he came at my mother's urging and he brought a woman from the next village, a mudri materi. While my mother cried in the other room, Dr. Pavel turned me on my chest, took out a scalpel and sliced into the boil. With a pair of forceps he carefully nudged around and pulled out four, five, six tiny bones and a little skull. After that, the mudri stopped him.
"Enough," she said. "She is not an infection. She is not a parasite. The boy holds the blood and flesh of two people in one body. She is changing him, and we must not fight that change." She took my hand, and held it. "She will not let him die. He is her way into the world." The mudri watched as Dr. Pavel cleaned the wound and sewed it shut. And then he left so she could speak to me alone.
"You are very brave, and very strong," she said. "And so, too, is your sister. She is with us now. She is hurt and afraid. But she means you no harm. Do you see her sometimes?" I nodded. "Does she frighten you?" I shook my head. "Good. When you see her, you must welcome her, even if her appearance disturbs you. You will come to love her in time." And then she placed her hand on my forehead, and I felt the fever melt away.
I am twenty now, at school in Kolomyya, far away from home. Luda is with me always, like a deeply held secret, as close as my breath. Freed from her bones, she is soft and round, her arms and legs coiled around her head, a wreath of flesh framing and cradling her face. Her mouth open, her eyes wide, her tongue, her toes, her fingers, her breasts, her belly, her kiska, her eyes, her beautiful eyes. I feel her in every part of me. I look in the mirror and she is all I see.
♥ Elderly Mrs. Borowycz was still alive back then, but whatever else lived there was no longer under her control. She would not be able to help anyone who fell prey to it, in the house or on the grounds. My brother pretended to laugh off his childish trespassing but it was clear to me that he had seen something that had frightened him. He did not need a warning not to return.
♥ Many things died in the village that year, and in the farms around it. Small animals, birds, beheaded and gutted. A dog, a sheep, throats slashed. Two chickens, a foal. A baby went missing, just six weeks old, stolen out of its crib. Then a four-year-old girl, flung in a ditch, struck from behind and then smashed with a stone until her face caved in.
My brother saw me that one morning, saw me creep up naked and bloodied in the early light, watched me wash myself clean with the rainwater gathered near the back door, stared as I slipped into the house, into my bed, held my finger to my lips. Shhhh. He wouldn't walk with me that day, ran away from me as soon as he could. I walked along the road towards the school alone. As I reached the lane, I heard the whisper once again in my ear, and I knew the girl had been found.
I walked up to the house, I opened the door, I closed it behind me. I climbed the stairs, entered the room where the boy had shown me so many things. I lifted the board in the floor where I kept all our treasures. I slipped underneath and pulled it down over me, and I lay there and waited.
I'm waiting there still. I'm waiting for you.
Come.
♥ Some stories need to be told time and again. Every generation forgets. Every child learns anew. These borderlands are contested ground, and have been for centuries. The lines between countries move north, the south, then north, then disappear for decades only to return again. Sometimes the war is at our doorstep. Other times, we do not hear of our new ruler until an army comes demanding payments or shelter or recruits. They take our food, our horses, our strongest boys, leave rubbish and bastards in their wake. Before this land even had a name. It has always been this way.
From time to time, they come to torture and to kill, to drive some of us out or march us away. Soldiers, militias, secret police. The uniforms change but the intent is the same. Ochistka grantis, the cleansing of the borders. The Lemkos, the Rusnaks, the Poles. The Yevrei, of course, forced to hide and flee and renounce and convert, and even then still facing death. For many, these lands, these villages are the last refuge.
♥ A few seconds passed and then she spoke, softly and deliberately. "I hear the sound of my home in your voice. It touches your words like smoke."
♥ It is dark down here, I think, down here where my grandmother lives. Thin ribbons of light shine down from the grate, from cracks between the boards. I turn my head and see the shapes of others, slumped against the walls, some alive, some not. She feeds on both. She feeds on me. A finger here, a toe there. Sometimes more.
I'm telling this in circles, I know. Inside-out and wrong-way-round. The words are twisting, tangling. I sleep, I wake, I watch the ribbons of light, I wait. I have the blood of the beast in me. Maybe I do not know how to die. Waiting is all I can do.
But:
We have some time, before she comes. An hour or two perhaps. Tell me a tale, something from your childhood. I do like a good story.
♥ There was a time in the history of our three neighbouring villages when very few children were being born, and almost no girls. Movchanya. This period lasted nearly ten years. Even today, no one know why, though of course there are theories-some to do with the factory, some with the government, some to do with the land on which our villages were built, and a few blaming our own tainted bloodlines.
We do not speak of it now, but at the time it was quite traumatic. Many women struggled to become pregnant but, of the few that succeeded, most of them miscarried within the first two months. Nearly a dozen women carried their babies into the ninth month but the children were either still born or so severely deformed that they could barely take a breath. Some men left the villages for the city, married there and brought their wives back, but it did not matter. The results were the same. In those ten years, among our villages only thirty children lives. Only six of them girls.
I came in the seventh year. I was born a boy but was raised as a girl. Of course I did not understand this at the time, and I do not know now whether I was drawn to girlish things before my parents chose this, or because they chose it. But what's done is done. I was not the only such child-four others were also raised this way, three older than me and one younger-but I was the only one from my village. Our parents ensured, as we grew, that we always wore something green: a dress or skirt, or a ribbon, or a wristlet or stockings, to set us apart from the others. We were known as the Zeleni Divuski, the Green Girls.
There was some teasing, naturally, as we grew up, and there was some fear. We were treated differently, some felt "specially," and that is always difficult for children. In time, though, the girls outside our group, even the older ones, would come and tell us their secrets, and the boys would come and ask us how to make the girls like them.
The boys would often practice with us-not sexually, of course, but with holding hands and talking and kissing. "Too rough, too fast," we might say to one. "Too shy, too quiet," to another. We encouraged boys to ask questions and to listen, to be less boastful, to be more polite and considerate. "Is this how you talk to your mother?" we would ask. Once a boy answered, "I don't have a mother," and one of us too quickly said, "I don't doubt it." We tried not to make the boys cry, but there were times.
And then we would report back to the girls about who was funny and charming, who was strong and shy, who was quick and boisterous. They all wanted to know who kissed best but we would not tell them. "Find out for yourselves!" we would laugh. It was all harmless fun, and some good matches and good families resulted from our encouragements. Though it wasn't till many years later that we found understanding wives, or husbands, for ourselves.
♥ The villages were situated on lands in constant dispute-not only between countries but among landowners, religions, and even species. There were stories of the Drevniye, the beings who came before all of us, and how some lived alongside us in peace and even sheltered with us to disguise their presence. We had heard talk of the shapeshifters but never knew if they lived among us or whom they might be. And there were dark tales of the Naystarsha, who lived deep beneath the ground and who was the source of all the Drevniye power.
♥ If you feel something strike you on the shoulder or leg or on your side, as if someone has slapped or punched you, and no one is near who could have done so, fall down.
I did so. My brother did not. He was hit three more times and died. I stayed on the ground until I heard shouts and shots and men running up, farmers and villagers, neighbours, and only then did I dare stir.
♥ "You who are descendants of the Northern Families, you must go to the forest. Take nothing with you. The woods have paths and protections. You who came to us from the Eastern Edge, you will be safest close to the water. Travel past the lake and along the rivers. Your children know a network of caves that you have never seen. Trust them, and they will lead you. We who are oldest and weakest, we must feed the Naystarsha, so that she may survive in solitude until this darkness passes. The rest must fight, to help to save the others."
"What of the factory?" someone asked from the back of the room.
"The factory is already gone," my mother said. "Everyone there is gone." There were gasps in the room, and murmurs, and sobs. But it was as if we already knew.
"What you describe is hopeless," Yuri said. "We must stay together, we must band together and fight!"
"Yuri," she said kindly, "you are a good man and a strong man, but you are not the one to lead us. Take my hand."
Confused, he took her hand and she held him gently. His eyes began to cloud over, he grew pale and frightened. "What is happening?" he whispered. "Why can't I see? Why can't I speak?"
"Shhhh," she said calmly, "you are having a dream, that is all, an odd, confusing dream." She gestured to me to pull the altar grate from the floor. I did so, and felt the coarse bristly tongues of the Naystarsha brush against my fingers. "You will wake up soon, and the world will be bright and new and full of joy," and she led him to the drain and dropped him in. The tongues whirled around him like razors. He didn't even scream.
♥ "Is it true? Will we wake up in a world that's bright and new and full of joy?"
"No," she said. "Our heaven, such as it was, was here. We lived, we loved, we saw beautiful and terrible things, and now it ends." She stepped forward, clutching me. "You will feel no pain," she whispered-and together we fell into the abyss.
♥ I paused at a column carved with the visage of Medusa, knelt down and tucked the leather bag into the water beneath it. "We are the children of monsters and of gods," we were always told in the village. It was a comfort to find one here. I kissed her-I do not know why-and then curled up and slept on the floor beneath her unblinking gaze.
♥ "I thought I was all alone," I told her. "I thought I missed my chance. Hundreds died, in the factory, but I'm the only one I've seen. Except for now, for you. Have the others moved on, to another place? Is that what was meant for us?"
She paused for a moment. "I'm new myself but-I think what happens is you float up and up and, if you don't stop yourself, then you disperse like a mist. You just cease to be. But if you will yourself down, back down to the ground, then this is where you'll stay. I don't know if it's true for everyone, but I'm here and I think that's why."
♥ They could not have children themselves, so my early life in many ways was like a fairy story-filled with love and riches and luxury, and loneliness. A feeling that nothing I had belonged to me, and that I in turns belonged to nothing and to no one.
♥ It was then, as I turned nineteen, that my father revealed the factory's many secrets, those of the Grazyns and of the villages around us. His trust in me was implicit, and his calm persistence in the face of my disbelief was itself a powerful demonstration of his faith in me. Yet my image of him, of our family, of our world together was deeply shaken. I wanted to be the good daughter, the capable heir, but I also wanted to run, to escape the ghoulish prison that my fairy-tale palace had suddenly become. And the tiniest part of me, like a shard of ice in my heart, wanted to kill him.
He was a vivisectionist, performing horrific experiments on the living. He was a murderer, a killer even of children. He was a resurrectionist, a body-snatcher. Our wealth, our renown, were founded on decades of his unspeakable acts, and on two hundred years of unspeakable acts by Grazyns before.
And yet, he was my father.
And then a thought, a fine thin blade of dread, ran from the crown of my head down the back of my skull and all the way down my spine. "What of my mother?" I asked. "Was she one of your victims?"
"You are in fact my child," he said softly, "and I am your father. Your mother is Miss Irina."
He leaned closer. "And you are my greatest gift. For while I am human, Irina has the Drevniye blood, a sister to the Naystarsha. This is why we have kept you from other children, from other people. You are not like them." He reached behind me, under my capalet, unbuckled the leather flap that concealed my other mouths, that held my myriad knife-sharp tongues all snug against my back. He caressed them gently. "You are the last great hope of Irina's kind, and the crowning achievement of mine. You are the one that lived."
♥ "I mean," he continued, "thousands of people die every day. Terrible deaths, some of them, murders and worse. So what I want to know is," and with this he turned and looked at me, "why aren't we overrun with ghosts? And why are they all from the last few hundred years?"
"There's a ghost in the Bible, in the first book of Samuel. England has a Roman soldier haunting the Essex coast. And Pausanius wrote about one in Ancient Greece, at the site of the Battle of Marathon. I'm sure there's a phantom caveman somewhere."
"What's that, three? Four?" he said, glancing over at me again. "Where are all the others?"
♥ I heard, then felt, a very faint hum that seemed to emanate from within the walls: residual spirits-the most common kind. Remnants of souls, frozen in time, gradually fading over the passing decades. In a warm inviting home they loved in life, their gentle presence can help to create an atmosphere of quiet contentment. Here, there was an edge of despair, confusion, even fear. A chord struck from clashing notes. Not dire enough to cause Stefan any trouble, though, or alarm his future customers. It might even be helpful, encouraging patrons to eat quickly, drink more and leave sooner. I turned in to the dissonance, filtering out the noise and focusing on the essence. I reached out, touched the wall to my immediate right. A little ripple, like a droplet of ice water, ran from my fingertips up my arm and through my shoulders and chest. Again, not enough to be concerned about, but startling all the same.
♥ "It is the factory," she said as she passed a bowl of borscht to my father. "It has to be." Among the shreds of beets and potatoes and cabbage, chunks of meat nestled like little treasures. Bubbles and swirls of fat glistened on the surface.
"Why does it matter where the food comes from?" my father asked. He plunged his spoon into the bowl, drew out a knot of bone and gristle, set it on a nearby plate.
"I do not want to owe them anything," she replied, setting a steaming bowl down in front of me.
I watched my father move his spoon through the soup in figure-eights, releasing the steam, and I did the same, taking care not to spill.
"What more could we owe than our lives?" he asked, though it wasn't really a question.
♥ She held me tight against her and told my mother that in Kyiv there were handbills pasted to the sides of buildings: «Ïсти власних дiтей - це варварство» they read. "Eating your children - it is barbarism."
I asked Aunt Mimi what barbarism was, but my mother answered instead. "It is worse than what animals do, that is what it is." And she gave us both sharp looks. Still, we ate our stew that night, food from the trucks, and I thought as we ate that it was exactly like what animals did, it was only worse because it was us.
And I can tell you one more thing. The boy Adel was three months younger than me, nine years and four months when he was killed-and the time in our villages when so few were born, the time we call Movchanya, it lasted just over nine years. It might be a coincidence. Or I might be misremembering. All this, as I said, was many years ago. And cannibalism is everywhere now, everywhere you look, you can scarcely walk a block. Decent people, out in the open. I fear for what will come next.
♥ She had been born in a small farming town where Ukraine borders Romania. Both of her parents were dead. This was as much as I knew of her past, or at least it is what she had claimed. Her childhood, her family, her friends, her journey that brought her to Poland, every question I asked was met with icy silence. But in every other way she was open and joyful, bright eyes and full mouth, flaxen hair and satin skin. Everywhere we went, the colours seemed to shimmer and dance like music for the eyes, the sounds of the city sparkled in our ears, and we were bundled together in a love that wrapped us and warmed us against a world growing colder. It was as if the whole city was under her spell, and we were all seeing the world and each other with new eyes.
I do not know why I killed her. One moment she was alive in my arms, laughing, my hand on the back of her neck, laughing, my other on her throat, laughing louder, and then I was squeezing, tighter and tighter, and her laughter rang out all around us even after she was dead on the floor. Her eyes wide and empty. Her darling mouth twisted into a rictus. Had she been laughing, or crying? Or screaming? Where had we been-at dinner, a nightclub, out on the street? It was as if everything before this moment had been a dream, and now, for the first time in years, with her crumpled body before me, now I was fully awake.
"Do it," I remember her saying as she laughed in my face. "You'll never be rid of me. Do it and I'll be yours forever." I could see her daring me, mocking me-but I could also see her pleading with me. Do it, she gasped, tears streaming down her cheeks. Which was real? Which was the dream? It mattered little. I was a murderer now, a monster, and I had to conceal my crime. I waited till well after midnight, then bundled her in blankets and carried her to the car, laying her gently across the back seat. I drove north along the river until it was nearly light, and then I placed her at the water's edge, face down, so that she was just barely submerged. It felt like a thousand eyes were trained on me, that at any moment someone would come and stop me, but no one saw me and no one came. And no one ever found her.
This was the odd thing. No one ever found her.
..The first time we made love, my hands slid down her back, my fingers moved along her spine and found a series of indentations, on either side, like tiny mouths. My finger slipped into one, and something uncoiled inside. "Careful," she murmured and kissed my forehead, and the memory slipped away. A week later, I think, I came home from work early to find her in the kitchen on the floor eating a child, just four or five years old, gutting it, devouring it, the still-breathing body twitching and shuddering. Did this happen? I don't know. What do I remember? So many fragments jagged and broken-as if a beautifully painted glass had smashed and when the pieces had fallen away, a vile and monstrous image was revealed.
As I drove in the rain, the mirror facing away from me, one image after another sprang from the depths of my mind to confront me. What day was it when she tore at herself, screaming "Why am I alive?" and pushed me away when I tried to hold her? What night was it when I woke to find her curled up in the corner staring blankly, blood caked down the front of her face? When was it that we came home from a night out to find the windows smashed and the floors all covered with dead birds, bloodied, their necks all broken? Were these even my memories? Or was the dream of our life together now turning, curdling in my guilt-wracked brain?
Suddenly I felt smooth soft hands slide over mine to grab the wheel, felt a lithe and dainty foot press onto mine to push the accelerator, watched helplessly as we approached the chiming train crossing, saw the crossing gate start its downward swing, rushed towards the tracks to meet the charging engine, her warmth so close, her voice so close, Do it, almost a kiss, a precious kiss, the whistle screech, the blinding lights, Do it do it and you'll be mine, you'll be mine forever.
♥ Knitting is a good way to pass the time when you're waiting for something to die.
♥ I am quite old now, perhaps too old. I have outlived all the sisters I met when I first came here. It is my own death that I wait for, if death can ever come for me, and I knit to pass the time. We have a cook that we've taken in, a young woman from a nearby town who bore a daughter out of wedlock. The girl is ten years old. I spend the mornings helping her with her studies, then in the afternoons we play together in the courtyard, and in the evenings I teach her how to knit. With her, I am a child again, with still so much to learn.
♥ As we were leaving the building I asked Larysa if I could see the drawing. She unfolded it and handed it to me. It was a woman, tall and handsome with a waist like a wasp, a long black skirt, black jacket, black gloves and a smart black hat. She was surrounded by small shadows. At first I thought they were tombstones but then realized they were the silhouettes of many small children. "Who is this?" I asked. "Is this your new nanny?"
"Yes," she answered. "She lives in the mirror with all of the other children and she visits me every night." Once again I felt that there was something familiar about this, something smouldering in the back of my mind, something just out of reach. However, I knew that children her age often created imaginary friends and playmates for themselves, especially after a loss. I forced a smile and looked at the picture once more.
"Well, she seems very pleasant," I ventured. "Does your nanny have a name?"
"Her name is Miss Skovanka, and she wants to watch over me always."
♥ I heard a faint chuckle, like the rustle of dry leaves. Hide and Seek! I thought to myself. All just a game! "Larysa, where are you?" I ran back to the bedroom-that chuckle again-then a scattering of giggles, high and sharp and biting. I glanced in the mirror, without even meaning to, and I glimpsed, just a flash: All of them, the little shadows, and centred among then, with one hand on Larysa's shoulder and the other over her mouth, was Miss Skovanka, tall and thin and pale with hard cold eyes and a crimson slash for a mouth. She smiled at me, an impossible smile, and stepped back into the darkness, pulling Larysa in with her.
♥ "This goes back many years for us, decades, even centuries.
"As you know, our land has suffered many invasions and annexations. It was not uncommon for husbands to be killed, wives and children to be taken and enslaved. There are tales of women who resisted and fled, who hid in the dense Carpathian woods and made their own lives there as thieves, prostitutes, anchorites, healers, and seers. One was known for gathering orphans, concealing them and protecting them from predacious, murderous soldiers. She was known as Dama Shkovanka, or 'Miss Hiding Place.'
"Of course, as these stories too often unfold, she was observed and followed by a clutch of hussars back to her home, and when she refused to release the children into their custody, the soldiers slaughtered them in front of her, and then tortured and killed her as well. Forever after, it is said, she will torment their descendants, taking some of their children for her own. How she chooses, when and why, we do not know. But her eyes are always on us, from within mirrors, from behind picture-glass, and in the reflections on polished silver and tin. She watches and she waits. She calls to our young ones in a voice that only they can hear, she gains their trust and pulls them in-for her loneliness is insatiable, and she craves their company. I would have dismissed this as a fantasy if I had not seen the effects myself. And, too late, I tell you now what I thought you already knew."
♥ "You must leave, before nightfall if at all possible. You can come back to the borderlands with me, if you wish. This is a stolen house, as is every chair and table and bed and bucket within its walls, stolen and now cursed. It belongs to the Yevrei, and the creature downstairs is a Golem-formed of clay by a master of the Kabbalah to protect the wife and child who lived here before you. The husband was taken by soldiers and executed; it is his soul which inhabits the monstrosity, and it is his heart that breaks with grief. For his wife and child were taken before he could possess the statue, and now they, too, are dead. He is trapped here, filled with rage and despair. You are in peril if you stay."
"You say this house is stolen," said my mother, "but my sister Polina bought this house, she bought it for us to live in together."
"You sister bought it from a thief, and she knew she was doing so. She knew the house, she came to see it while the family still lived here. She was the first victim of the Golem, and the thief who arranged the sale was the next. The Golem bears you no ill will, but he cannot let you stay."
"But you must be able to undo this," my mother said. "Release his spirit, send him away."
"I cannot," the old woman answered. "This is not our work, and it is not ours to undo. You would need to find the Kabbalist who conjured him. That of course is impossible now. Millions of the Yevrei are dead, and those that are not have escaped to other lands. He is condemned to live here forever, alone. ..It is a monster with the soul of a man. Or, if you prefer, a man with the capabilities of a monster."
♥ Many times my aunt Maryan told me a story from the old country about a young girl whose sailor brother was taken by a sea witch and hidden in a twisting winding tangle of caves under an island of barren rock. Unlike the slender pale lake spirits in her other tales from the first land, the sea witch was a voluptuous woman with the lush full tentacles of a giant squid, and she would search the ocean for shipwrecked sailors to take back to her lair, where she would mate with them-somehow-and then eat them alive. The witch was beautiful and regal and solitary and voracious. I had always wanted to be her.
♥ Like many mothers and daughters, she and I would fight our way around the real problems between us. She had raised me to become the person I was meant to be, and now that person confused and angered her, and sometimes frightened her.
♥ I put the knife in the sink, turned and looked down at where it had stabbed the floor. Knelt down, smoothed the scar with my fingers. Trouble, I whispered. Whenever a knife dropped, trouble comes from wherever it points. And if the knife had been pointing down to the basement, that meant the trouble was coming from me, or to me, or from somewhere below me.
♥ She put her arm around me, carefully, as if she thought I might push her away. "I just want you to know that whatever you have, I'm good with it. Whatever it is, we have it together." This seemed like an impossible thing to say, but maybe that's how it works. Maybe that's when we can accept the most from each other, at the very beginning-before we can imagine what we have agreed to accept.
♥ I remember I was surprised to see them here, in the new land, but I now know that no matter how far or how fast we run, our ghosts and demons run with us, and are always close at hand.
♥ I had been thinking of the sea witch, stabbed by the young girl rescuing her sailor brother. She had clutched her heart and fallen backward into the tide pool below, had floated out and expelled her cache of eggs into the ocean as she died. And then the embryos had bobbed aimlessly in the darkness of their shells, orphaned, alone, until they burst through into the water, the light, the new unknown. Some swallowed by fish, other scooped up by birds, until only a very few survived.
♥ "How did he die?"
"He was hit by a car," she replied. "Nothing special, and I guess that's the sad thing. People die every day."
♥ I felt a tugging, a disentangling behind me, and then suddenly I was so tired, I could barely keep my eyes open. The oldest man stepped forward with something in his hands-the malen'kiy sprut, the "little sprout" that I had carried within me since I was a child, and that my not-mother had carried within her. It was not, in truth, an actual sprut but one of its distant cousins, a long thin gelatinous creature with one large bright eye, another smaller dark eye, and dozens of fine glassy tendrils studded with tiny shards of bone. Little teeth. The oldest man swiftly moved behind Alice, held the creature down behind her. She cried out, let out a half-dozen sharp breaths, and then relaxed as he proceeded to stitch the wound and dress it.
♥ There are tales, where I come from, about a girl who walks. You may have heard them, you may have told them yourself. A girl, sometimes very young, sometimes older, fourteen or fifteen, sometimes sixteen, who walks along a lonely stretch of road. A road where something happened. Hundreds have seen her over the years. She never ages, never changes. At first you can't see her face. You think maybe she's lost, or hurt in some way. She stops, and when you approach her, she turns to look at you. And then she vanishes. So many stories, I am certain you've heard them.
..The story depends not on the truth but the teller. What he leaves in, what he takes out. But still, dead. On the road or pushed into a ditch. This is an old story, you hear it everywhere. However, I can assure you, this girl had no suitor, not even in secret. These towns rarely had dances or weddings, and there is no ditch along that road. It is even and dry and edged on either side by farmers' fences and waving wild grasses.
..What there was, is this: a girl, a road, the late summer sun. The grasses are just starting to brown, the leaves on distant trees just lightly touched with red and gold. She has walked this road, between the towns, so many times since childhood, first with her father or mother, then with neighbouring friends, or alone, and she has always felt safe.
Today is different. The road is different, though of course it is the same road. It may be the heat, or the way the sunlight falls, the road seems very long today, strangely so. She tops and looks back and wonders if she has turned herself around somehow, if she is walking the wrong way, is somehow heading back from where she came. Neither town is in sight. There is only the road.
The girl has done nothing wrong. She is not injured, not in pain, not in any obvious danger. But somehow the road she is on is no longer the road she was on, she is somewhere else now. The road has no beginning, and now it has no end. The heat, the light, the late summer sun. And now this road can be any road, can be the road you walk along tonight. Your mind wanders as you walk and you find yourself by yourself, looking forward, looking back-you don't remember when the world fell away, but here you are. And ahead, the figure, the girl from all the stories. Perhaps she is lost, or confused in some way. She slows, she stops, and when you approach her, she turns to look at you. And then she is gone.
And this road, this road is your road now. And you, now you are the girl, the story, and you are waiting to be told.