Mother, I’ve set my cap at Michael.
He’s not for you. Milena has him.
Mother, I want a husband and a child.
You won’t get either.
Then what should I do?
Die alone.
So back home went Doroteja, weeping, weeping, back to her house whose eaves ran nearly down to the ground.
The daughters died; Doroteja refused to believe any ill. But if only she had given them medallions of Saint Polona! At night she prayed for Milena to return alone beneath the earth.
Harvesting clover, washing beets in the creek and then confessing her sins, Doroteja endured that summer. Even now her love persisted, like some half-rotted scrap of flower-knitted lace. After Michael and Milena’s disappearance, she accompanied her neighbors to burn down their house, singing hymns, with her hair braided up in a cornucopia, and Father Hauser complimented her voice. Outside sat Milena’s mother, who was huge-eyed and pale, with her chin up and her mouth open, her hair tucked decently in her kerchief and her withered hands straining not to claw at one another in the lap of her faded striped skirt. Everyone both expected to make horrible discoveries and hoped to find supernatural treasures. Hans Trollhand, looking fearsome in his black-and-scarlet cloak, now kissed his torch to the thatch. As the flames ascended, people dispersed, and some were hiding objects in their pockets. As for Doroteja, in a recess beneath the straw mattress where the daughters had slept, she found an Easter egg red as sunrise, with yellow grapevines crossing upon it. She had made that for Michael the year before he married Milena. The next year she had made him a black egg painted with a golden castle; Milena must have destroyed that one.
Doroteja joined the quotidian line of men and women bending in the fields, scything hay, sweating, groaning because their backs hurt. So she helped her neighbors in exchange for a mouse’s share of the crop. In the forest she gathered mushrooms and berries. She dried her plums and pears on the kiln. At a rich man’s funeral she got to taste bread with horseradish sauce and small scraps of smoked meat.
Come autumn she set out for the cemetery and called upon her dead father.
What now, Doroteja? Has Christ returned at last?
Father, father, I can’t endure to live and die alone.
She remembered how he used to be in life, hunching forward, turtling down his shaggy head, gripping his spade as he stared furiously into any stranger’s eyes. Now he was not much more than a gust of fireflies. It would have been different had she poured out blood for him.
Father, are you lonely here?
You never knew anything. How do you expect to get a husband?
Help me, father!
Then lower your ear and I’ll sing you a charm…
Dead man’s breath, a tongueless whisper and the crickets singing, that was all she heard.
Through the fall she kept the red Easter egg under her pillow. Sometimes she kissed it, because Michael had touched it and kept it. But it began to haunt her, floating before her eyes even when she was working in the fields. After she had dreamed about it three times, she realized that it was bewitched, so she smashed it, and maggots crawled out of it.
That night Doroteja set out for the cemetery and poured out milk for Michael’s daughters, singing spells to draw them forth by their names. Here they came: Maria, Ludmila and then Markétka, the youngest — sad little girl with the watchful eyes, her dirty dress still too large for her. They rushed up wailing and trembling, with moonlight shining through their bones. They struggled to embrace her, but of course Our Redeemer permits no such perversions. Wriggling and fluttering, they breathed on her the faintest cool breath of earth. Doroteja burst into tears.
Aunt Doroteja, they said, will you be our mother now?
Did your mother murder you?
We promised not to tell—
Aunt Doroteja, may we live with you? We’ll be good; no one will ever see us.
We’ll help you; we’ll count grains of rice—
In much the same way that magic can kindle a shadow upon the sun’s disk, so the loneliness of those three dead girls cooled Doroteja’s sorrow, and so she invited them home. No living soul ever entered that house but her elder sister, and when she came the ghosts hid in the pile of firewood, squeaking more faintly than rats. They never grew up, of course; they loved to ride on her shoulders when she went to the creek to wash her laundry. Maminka they called her. One might say that her home was as haunted as an old Gothic castle, but Doroteja forgot to look at it that way. When she went to confession, she neglected to mention her visitors to Father Hauser, because he was so fond of her that she thought it cruel to disappoint him. In the evenings when she sat eating her barley cooked in milk, they pretended to share with her, but in truth their spoons were too heavy for them to lift, and the iron pot burned them if they hovered too close by it. After dark, Doroteja would go out the back door and spill a few drops of milk into the dirt, whispering their names, very quietly, so that the neighbors would not hear.
They were as helpful as could be when she went to the forest to get mushrooms and berries, for they could fly off in three different directions, then come winging back to whisper in her ear. They could not scare away birds, but they could sit up in the plum tree watching for them, and whenever some bold robins or crows descended in a robber’s band, one of the girls would fly squeaking into Doroteja’s ear, so that she could save her fruit. When Doroteja went to church, attended a witch-burning or set out to sell eggs and garnets, those three darling girls watched over her field, sinking down into the dirt to count her beets, carrots and lovely yellow potatoes.
Just as ancient copper coins go green, so went Doroteja’s life, and by the time she was old, what others imagined to be her desperate solitude had become as insignificant to her as the splash of a crabapple in a deep well.
THE JUDGE’S PROMISE
And finally let the Judge come in and promise he will be merciful, with the mental reservation that he means he will be merciful to himself or the State; for whatever is done for the safety of the State is merciful.
In old Moravia, between the towns of Javicko and Svitavka, you may, if the scale of your map permits, descry the little village of H—, which has few monuments to speak of (not that the patriotic citizens of this locality are entirely conscious of the aforesaid fact); accordingly, its very existence has been passed over in every edition of Baedeker’s guide. I have been told that the schoolmaster once made courageous epistolary efforts to remedy the omission, for he is a man of charity, who readily takes it upon himself to improve the defects of others. As for his neighbors, including even those august fellows in whose name the old lamplighter hangs out red or black flags from the balcony of the town hall, I fear that few could definitively inform you whether Baedeker is some great lord ensconced in a castle down in Lombardy or an item of dairy-tackle of which they need not trouble to learn the use, thanks to the superior methods of milking (not to mention cheesemongering) in their enlightened district of Bohemia.