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  And only now does Darka realize that she doesn’t have it in her to tell him to get out. At least, not right away. She can’t turn on anyone the terrible megaton blast of the unmediated, naked—nothing could be more naked—and merciless because indifferent to the human essence of life, the blast that goes clear through you and wipes out anything from your adolescence, your childhood, any scrap of warmth you’ve managed to collect around yourself over the course of your life, leaving you face to face with things as they are. And no human can be left there like that, alone, with things as they are. Nobody deserves that.

  This she owes to Effie. At least this.

  “Get up,” Darka says to Vovka Lasota, in the most casual voice on earth. “Let’s get some breakfast.”

  THE TALE OF THE GUELDER ROSE FLUTE

  TRANSLATED BY HALYNA HRYN AND NINA MURRAY

  She was born with a crescent moon on the crown of her head. That’s what her mother told her later, that’s what her mother remembered of that first moment, the first cry of the child raised from her body all the way to the roof beam by someone’s strong arms as she looked up at her from below, unable to blink away her tears—on the round, smoothly protruding forehead that was a touch too high for a girl there glowed, a little off center, a finely chiseled crimson sickle, like a waning moon. Except that mother stubbornly repeated that it was a new moon, until she came to believe it herself, for everyone knows that a new crescent is for good fortune, while an old crescent—well, that’s why it’s called old, it brings on ill dreams, best not to let your thoughts stray there, all the more because with time the mark grew hidden by hair, a thick crop that stole away from the unseemly broad dome of the girl’s forehead, better suited for a studious oblate, and no one, even had they wished to, could now discern which way those crescent tips pointed. Only when her mother washed the girl’s hair could she still feel under her fingers a springy curve, where the hair grew particularly generous, black as tar and stiff as wire, and as unruly and curly as if it belonged not on the girl’s head, but, Lord forgive, on her sinful flesh, on parts where the child was still blessedly smooth, and at times the mother’s fingers would hesitate on that curve for a moment—with the needle-prick of the memory of the old midwife sneaking in a sign of the cross over herself and spitting over her shoulder at the sight of that crescent, because she thought it a brand of the heathen, or, not to speak it under the holy icons, a mark of the serpent’s tooth, which all comes out the same: everyone knows whom the heathens worship!—it took a good while for the midwife to mellow, long enough for the baby to prove herself, knock on wood, quiet and docile as the bedeviled never can be, not to mention the changelings that the she-devils slip into mothers’ cribs as soon as the midwife turns away (and the old woman must have turned away once or twice, and knew her sin!)—those scream without cease as though scalded. The mark, therefore, required a different explanation—like all true signs, those visited upon us by powers beyond our comprehension, whether in broad daylight or in our dreams, it spoke in its own language, potent and dark, forbidden to a common soul, and when like this presents itself to you unbidden, your choices are few: either haste to glean some wisdom from the local seer (only borrowed wisdom won’t take you too far, and the overly curious oft got themselves into a heap of trouble by following this path, and then didn’t know how to rid themselves of it), or have the sense to pray to the good Lord and wait for the force that had reached out to you to manifest itself of its own accord. And so it was that the mother waited, nurturing a secret notion that her firstborn was destined to become a princess or queen, because obviously she wasn’t meant for a common peasant—a fate like that wouldn’t merit marking the girl with a moon like that—while a certainty was taking hold within her, slow and inscrutable, that her child was chosen for a truly extraordinary fortune, one that common people’s children dare not even dream of—only hear, spellbound, in tales passed down from grandmother to girl from time immemorial.

  On winter nights, when the wind in the chimney howled and sobbed, as though pleading to pray for all travelers caught without cover in the open, and the swollen wedges of grainy snow brushed down from the roof past the windowpanes one after the other like someone’s heavy steps, and everyone in the house would start and turn toward the noise, craning to hear if something had knocked at the door, the mother, nestling her daughter’s head in her lap, told all the tales known to her, one by one, steady and clear, as she combed the girl’s fair locks, gentle as silk, one hundred times in one direction, another hundred in the other—of the golden-haired maiden that the prince spied by the river where she bathed, and then asked to take in marriage, of Milady Hanna who came to the king’s banquet hall three times—first by a four-in-hand, and then by a six, and then by an eight of steeds all black as serpents, who burst from the willow tree in her yard, and all the gentlefolk and the nobles marveled at whether she was a duchess, a princess, or a bright star that lit up the palace—and as she told these stories, she combed her daughter’s hair so smoothly, braided it into tiny braids so tightly, that the girl’s head began to glow in the firelight like a freshly glazed pitcher, but no matter how many times she licked her fingers to slick back the unruly forelock, it always sprang back with a defiant twist that would neither be cut (it grew even thicker!), nor braided in—and why should it be? Let everyone see, mused the mother not without pride, perhaps this will be the very sign that will make her known to the one she is meant for. And the child learned to hold her head high when going out (like Milady Hanna!), and the village folk, as always, saw everything because they have such good eyes to see, except that they did not see the most important thing, that which only your good Lord knows of you and which, in the end, like it or not, you take to your grave, and that is why, do what you will, you’ll be judged crooked while still alive—because no one knows what truly impelled you to act, and what folks do not understand they deem evil, and this in fact is the original sin that has hobbled us all since our forefather Adam. Thus when neighbors asked the moon-marked girl, “And whose are you, that you put on such airs?” it was not because they wished to hear her simplehearted “My mama Maria’s”—also an odd and inappropriate answer, if truth be told, befitting the girl if Maria had been a widow, or unwed, or at least a Cossack’s wife whose children hadn’t seen their living father in who knows how many years, but not when she was a proper goodwife to a common tiller, who was a father, and not an uncle to that strange girl-child that she wouldn’t even mention him, except only when a particularly coy and inquisitive housewife would keep pressing her, hardly hiding her pleasure in mulling over a poisonous implication, “And where’s your daddy?”—to which the child would retort, “At home,” and flash her dark-cherry eyes from under her brow in such a manner that her interlocutor instantly lost her desire to give the child the proper lecture she really ought to have had—after all, that was the purpose of beginning the conversation, to school the child (since nobody seems to have taught her properly at home!) that it is improper, unseemly to act so grand: you have to cut them down to size while you can, when they are still little, lest it be too late, for who sows a habit reaps a heart, and who sows a heart reaps a fate, but let it be as it may, Lord knows, all of us common souls have our own children and our own troubles, so live the best you know how, only do not say afterward you were not warned . . .

  Of course, had there been someone on hand to tell all those goodwives what kind of burning ache had been carving away at Maria’s heart for years and years, turning it into a festering, hungry void that even sleep could not tame, they wouldn’t hesitate to sympathize, even sincerely, and similarly might have been a little kinder to the child—but there was no such person. Maria herself carried her still-pretty lips tightly pursed, which, with time, made them grow thinner, and her house and her garden were always in good order beyond reproach, so who in the world would ever conceive the notion that Maria wed her Vasyl out of anger—from pure spite, and nothing else, just stunned her father like a thund
erbolt, while the matchmakers were still shaking the first snow off in the entryway—winter that year came early, exactly on the Feast of Intercession, and the men’s newly cleated boots stepped on the floor loudly, gaily, and frighteningly in the chorus of boisterous voices, and at the sound of this special and oh-so-memorable bustle Maria felt everything inside her seize up in a single scalding knot, never again to be loosened, because rather than burst out in tears, Maria spoke, from the depths of the deep injustice visited upon her by her father, sharp like a crack of the whip, “Will you not let this one have me either?” This was the first time she had spoken to him since they received those other, earlier matchmakers, so eagerly awaited and dreamed about, listened for while another living sound boomed in her ears—the loud, gay, and frightening pounding of her own heart, and he replied to their opening of “Our prey—we followed its trail from the road to your yard, from the yard to your stoop, and here it roosts,” after sitting silently for a while, that these folks are not from around here and have come from afar, so perhaps they’ll have a drink—and that’s when she did howl, clear like a beast, somebody’s hands (later she realized these were her own) clamped over her mouth, and the world around her and inside her came crashing down, like the rafters of a house going down in flames, and this was the only thing that could, and did, survive that blaze—her scorched and defiant, Will you not let this one have me either?—her challenge thrown down in blind pain: if it can’t be him, her one and only (“You stupid girl, you’d have cried your eyes out with that rabble-rouser, you’ll thank me one day when you come to your senses!”—while all she heard ringing in her ears was a song, drowning out all this supposed good counsel, for she had no words left of her own: “I’ll go by the meadow, not the riverside, and I’ll meet with the soul mate ne’er to be mine” and they did meet, once only, after that matchmaking night, secretly, and the next day he vanished from the village, headed off for parts unknown, leaving behind him a chill that would stay forever . . . “Farewell, my soul mate, ne’er to be mine, we loved each other to the end of time”—you are stupid, girl, oh, how stupid you are . . .)—If you won’t let me have him, then here, take my life—she dropped like a bowl, If it breaks, to hell with it, and if it keeps whole, it’s all the same to me. The old man shrugged his shoulders, not making much sense, like all men, of women’s warring, which is governed by discrete, complicated, and unfathomable ways of risking one’s life, so it is best to let the challenge fly past: “You want to wed this one, go ahead.” “And so I will,” Maria shot back: there was no turning back for her, only the blind, desperate chase to make known to her father the grave injustice he had caused her—That’ll show you! was all that spun around in her head, an echo of the vow she had just uttered and could not take back, and that is how Vasyl came to be a hostage in a duel of which he, poor heart, had no inkling, and their firstborn, Milady Hanna (that is what we shall call her henceforth, no matter what they christened her), the wonder of wonders with a crescent moon on her forehead, came to grow up as her mother’s daughter, whose else could she be, loose bulls may roam, but the calf is ours, is it not, and the father matters only when the mother lets him, and mother was raising not only a daughter for herself, but a carefully tended, second-generation desire to be avenged, like a family treasure secretly accumulated and grown far beyond the limits of common imagination, as though everything that fate had denied her, Maria, was taken as a credit toward the second life, her daughter’s, and was to be returned, like in an honorable transaction, with generous interest. Maria’s father died shortly after her first child was born, but he sometimes came to her in her sleep—always angry and red faced like a vampire, and each time she rushed to remind him of something, to prove something to him, to show him, to finish the conversation between them that never did take place, but each time something got in her way—the old man disappeared, and she was left to sleep with the feeling she held a precious ring between her lips and was afraid to part them lest she swallow or lose it.

  And so it came to be that the second daughter—for it seems Maria was destined to bring forth girls alone, as if an angel stood vigil over her marital bed to make sure the couple issued no boy by way of whom Maria’s father could return to haunt her for the rest of her days—the second girl, the little Olenka, was not in any way marked by any heavenly bodies, and besides was frail, beset by maladies, and a crybaby. A meager child, Maria would sometimes think with regret that was partly maternal and partly, may the Lord forgive her, from her wounded pride, especially if she were to compare Olenka to the older girl, who had the makings of a beauty already in the cradle, and turned into one very quickly—the second daughter was her father’s girl, as good as cast over to Vasyl as a consolation prize. He doted on her beyond measure, like he would have over a son—he even took her with him into the fields, and made her dolls with chewed-up bread as though he wished to feed all his vigor into her through his spit, making up for what she was denied at birth. And were Maria to, for example, rap the little one’s knuckles for reaching her hand for food out of turn, he admonished her on the spot, with authority that did, indeed, make her shy for a second: “Leave the child be, she needs to grow!” Whenever Olenka was sick, she would raise a sorrowful meowing by night, not in a demanding manner babies have when something needles them, but a slow, grown-up, inconsolable wail, steady as autumn sleet, which drove Maria to distraction as though it revealed an inconsolable truth about her life that she would have never, ever admitted to herself—Will there be no end to this plague?—then Vasyl would get up, silently take the little one into his arms, and, likely a bit embarrassed by such an unmanly task, take her outside, where he cradled her, rocking gently, until everyone in the house fell asleep again. One time the elder girl woke to his voice by the window: sitting with Olenka on the porch, her father was singing, in a quiet but pure tenor, a voice unfamiliarly young, flowing like wellspring water, as if indeed a wandering stranger paused by the window to confess his grief to the trees and stars because he had no one else to confess it to: Loved I a maiden for nigh a year, until my foes made me pay too dear. The house was close with warm, greasy breath, and pitch-black darkness, only once in a while did the pale thin blade of the moonlight glisten through the shutters, and Maria moaned into the pillows in her sleep, and that lonely voice by the window confessed its grief—like a soul seeking redemption. The girl lay shock-still in her bed as if she had overheard something shameful about her father, which prompted in her a swell of vivid, teary-hot sorrow, but at the same time awakened in her a different, crueler insult—the voice was not singing to her, that voice, that seemed to no longer be her father’s, so unreachable in its high masculine loneliness, had no idea she even existed in this world, and had she not been too young to understand what she was feeling, she would have whispered to herself a sacred wish: to be the girl in the song—I want it to be me that someone loves that way when I grow up! . . . Instead—especially inasmuch as growing up was a very long way off indeed—the next morning for some completely frivolous reason she gave Olenka a good beating: the little one cried ferociously, smearing snot all over her face; Mother, irritated by this spectacle, gave Little Hanna—Hannusia—a robust if not very sincere spanking, and Hannusia walked around for the rest of the day in frowns with her bum burning: everything had turned out nothing like what she wanted, but what she wanted, she didn’t exactly know.

  The two of them, in fact, did not much relish each other, and the more they grew, the more the secret tension embodied in them came to the fore. Barely had she begun to walk when Olenka discovered how easy it was to drive her sister to distraction, and she embraced the habit of doing so the way other children, for example, take up playing with matches: strike it, throw it down, strike it, throw it down. Whenever there were no adults in sight, she would get under her sister’s feet, intent on causing trouble—small, to her size: trip up her spindle, perhaps, as she was learning to spin, or tug at a ball of yarn so that it unraveled all over the floor, or else si
mply, for pure sport (and this was her favorite), settle in at her feet, and looking slyly upward to know when the game began to grate, make loud noises by vibrating her lower lip with her fingers like a jaw harp: “Brrn-brrn-brrn-brrn!” And again, “Brrn-brrn . . .” “Will you stop before I drum on your ribs!”—“Brrn-brrn-brrn-brrn!”—“Leave me alone, you leech!”—“Brrn-brrn-brrn-brrn!”—“You’re a pest!” and with this last desperate cry, the older girl would finally throw herself at the younger, who only made as if to try to escape—and how could she, she hadn’t learned to run yet!—and would begin pummeling her in earnest, without a thought for her strength, with all her rage, which thus only grew in intensity, rising and burbling like dough in a kneading bowl, threatening to spill, and always, at the decisive moment, fogging her sight with a dark, unleashed wave, Take this, and this, and this!—she’d knock the little head against the floor, feel the tiny, soft body spasm from either the blows or from the thrusts of weeping that rose inside it, and would go on until suddenly, as if with a wave of a magic wand, her rage would recede and she’d see herself from the outside—eyes hollow and empty, standing over a sobbing little girl on the floor: What am I, mad? “Will you promise not to do it again?” Hannusia would ask uncertainly, hoping to end it in a more or less dignified manner, but the voice from the floor would trumpet—and where did it fit in that morsel of a girl?—through coughs and sobs, “Nooo!”—and the next day it would begin all over again. Neither their mother’s spanking nor her constantly speckled knees from having to kneel on millet in the corner, nor even their father’s belt, the only thing that actually vexed her—and not so much the pain as the humiliation of it: Olenka, the snake, would be given an apple, whereas she was thrown over the knee with determined huffing and puffing, with her skirt thrown over her head and so, not having a way to explain to her father what a great injustice he was about to visit upon her, she would resort to ungodly screaming and carry on until she almost choked, and only then would she catch, not without some satisfaction, through the salty mist in her eye, the familiar hollow, confused look on her father’s face, as though he, too, was asking himself, as he brought the belt down upon her, What am I, mad? Nothing, nothing was as deeply grinding for Hanna as that exhausting daily combat with that little viper, fox’s snot, little tick (“Quit teasing the baby!” Father would yell), who, despite being a baby, found a way to win against her, the older and smarter one, every time (“Why can’t you be the wiser one!” Mother would scold), and drive her straight into the dark and blinding wave of un-self-possession, thus provoking each time herself to be beaten, and Hannusia beaten as a consequence. Later, in moments of clarity, Hannusia would realize with the insight that desperation sometimes gives our thoughts that the only thing Olenka truly wanted was to see Hannusia’s rage come to the surface—only that and nothing more, as if that rage were a goose Olenka was given to mind (a huge, fierce, hissing goose, with a long snakelike neck and an ugly black maw, edged, if you squinted and looked closely, with fine sharp teeth like a pike’s), and so Olenka minded it good and well, grazed it on rich green grass, and the goose roamed and ate to her heart’s content. And grew fatter.