Lapvona Read online

  When the sun came up, he went to Ina’s cabin with a lamb to pay her to nurse the baby. She refused the animal but said she’d take care of Marek whenever Jude needed.

  ‘Why does he look so strange?’ Jude asked.

  ‘Your girl tried to kill it, that’s why,’ Ina said. ‘She came to me many times for herbs to get it out of her.’

  And that was it. Agata was dead to Jude.

  * * *

  * * *

  Jude petted the newborn lambs now in the afternoon shade and tried not to think about Agata. ‘The poor creature,’ he told himself, fingering the ear of the runt of the last litter. He had sixteen babes and five ewes and one ram. The ram lived apart from the rest in a small pen at the southern end of the pasture, under an awning of pines. Jude didn’t care for him the way he cared for the females and the babes. When he fed the ram, he simply threw some hay over the fencing. Water was dumped once a day into a leaking trough. The ram seemed indestructible. And he was strangely complicit in his own imprisonment. He never tried to break through the fencing, although it was made of weathered branches and old wooden boards and was very near ready to collapse on its own. Marek wasn’t allowed to go inside the ram’s pen.

  ‘He will think you’re a sheep and try to fuck you or kill you,’ Jude said. ‘That’s all he knows how to do.’

  ‘Why does he not kill the ewes then?’ Marek asked.

  ‘What a stupid question,’ Jude said, sincerely appalled. ‘A man doesn’t kill his lady. How else will he live on but in his children?’

  ‘Will you live on in me?’

  ‘I hope I will. And you’d better have a son of your own someday soon.’

  ‘Soon?’

  ‘You’re thirteen years old. You’ve got hair on your pubis. You could be a father any time you like.’

  ‘But I want to be a son, not a father.’

  ‘Well then.’

  Marek and Jude always watched the mating rituals. Jude liked to guess which of the ewes was in heat first. After so many years, he had grown sensitive to their smells. He was usually correct, which made him all the more upset when he’d watch the ram mount and fuck the ewe. She did not like the feeling. Jude knew that. It was an invasion and a penalty for her sex to be so brutalized, and then so burdened. Jude felt sorry for the ewes and fed them extra wheat when they were with child. But he hadn’t felt so sorry for Agata. He had felt proud of her swollen belly. He had loved her, had infused himself into her, unloaded so much into her womb, which was built for him by God. When he ejaculated, he groaned, and felt in that moment that this was the language of God Himself, the groan of creation. He remembered how Agata turned her head as he released his grip on her neck and moved her face to look back at him from where it had been pushed into the hay pillow. She was crying. And Jude thought, Good girl. That’s my good little girl. You are mine now. The white that dripped from his greasy penis smelled like a summer rain, iron in it, tangy. ‘I love you,’ Jude said, and sat back against the wall. Agata had cried—she was still a child, after all—and Jude took her by the arm so she could wash herself outside with water from the lambs’ trough. Later she fell asleep inside by the hearth, her feet bound by rope to the round rock that would later mark her false grave. This had been their nightly ritual. He discovered, not long into their love affair, that she was with child.

  * * *

  * * *

  When Marek returned from the stream, bruised and bleeding, toddling through the door with the broken pieces of bucket, Jude put down his work of darning a sock and picked up a shovel and threw it at the boy’s head. Marek felt the blow to his right ear, and his vision went white. He heard the singing of angels. The wooden pieces of the bucket silently clattered to the floor, and Marek lifted his hand to his ear, which was numb and hot to the touch, and then Jude started punching. Marek fell to his knees and bent his head low to protect his face while Jude hit. And then he took his hand away from his ear to allow Jude to deliver a few more blows. And then he lifted his face to Jude, and Jude hit him across the nose and again on each cheek, like a king with a sword on a knight’s shoulders, and then Jude kicked Marek’s left knee so that he fell to the side, and then Marek stretched his legs and rolled on his back so that Jude could kick him or stomp him wherever he liked. If my father kills me, Marek thought, I am sure to go to heaven. Another blow to his head made him turn and gag. A tooth skipped out of his mouth and landed in a little shard of light coming through the doorway, the last of the sun between the trees. He watched the light play on his glistening tooth. He’d seen a lot of blood today. That was all right. Blood was the wine of the spirit, was it not? He licked his lips and sucked the blood back into his mouth, comforted with the knowledge that the damage Jude had done to him would warrant a whole night of praying, repenting, that his father would cry and beg God to forgive him, and Marek would become hypnotized by his father’s remorse.

  And so it was. Once he had caught his breath and taken a sip of water, Jude calmed, then cried. He wiped the blood from his son’s face and held him in his arms, kissed his strange, swollen face, and told him the story of Agata’s sacrifice again. ‘She died for you,’ he said. ‘You see the blood?’

  Marek was happy.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ina had lost her vision when she was only seventeen. She suffered a high fever due to a malady that had torn through the fiefdom. The entire family fell ill very quickly, one by one, mother, father, and her two little sisters. Ina fell asleep, shivering and sweating, and when she awoke, she came to nothing but the black light of her blindness and the stench of her family’s dead bodies in the bed around her. Such stories were not unusual at the time—illness spread very easily in the region, as it was only a day and night away on horseback from the coast, where all the pestilence came in on ships crossing the sea. They said it was the rats to blame. When Ina was little, before Villiam’s grandfather installed guards around the bounds of his province in an effort to keep out the bandits, traders and pilgrims passed through the village on their way to Iskria and Bordijn, bringing with them rashes and pneumonic contagions. Travelers often stopped in Lapvona to trade work for food and shelter, or simply to see how other people lived. Lapvona was a special place, known for its good soil and fine weather. And the villagers were kind and generous people, often taking in visitors and giving freely of their stores of food. They could afford to do so as their lord was fair and God-fearing. Taxes were low. There were only a few dozen families in Lapvona when Ina was a child, and they all worked and lived together peacefully until the plague took half of them to heaven. That changed everything. The houses were burned down with the dead inside for fear that burying the bodies would infect the ground. The survivors became infected with fear and greed. Guilt was extinct in Lapvona thereafter. Perhaps this was what allowed the village to move on after so much loss. Even their dear lord, Villiam’s great-grandfather, had perished, leaving his twelve-year-old son, Villiam’s grandfather, to manage the village.

  Ina was the only sick person to recover from the plague. When she staggered out of her home, the villagers were about to strike the flint. ‘God rest their souls,’ they said, then gasped at the sight of the sick teenager, her dress dark with sweat, her face bleached of color, roving blindly and calling out:

  ‘Where am I?’

  A woman screamed. The men backed away, afraid of infection.

  Ina spoke to the voices in the darkness. ‘Am I alive or dead?’

  This question made the people of Lapvona very suspicious. Nobody would answer. They weren’t sure what to say, anyway. If she was alive, how had she miraculously survived the illness? Had she seen death? What devilish germ might she have brought back with her? Why did God spare her, only to leave her orphaned and blind? Wouldn’t death have been more merciful? Maybe blindness was penalty for some profane ill within her soul. And if she was dead, was she a ghost now, there to taunt and torture t
hem? Was she an angel of evil? Only Jesus could rise, the priest, Father Vapnik, had told them. The people were perturbed. They told Ina to sit still on the dirt, then made a circle around her with small stones and proceeded to set the cottage on fire. The rest of the villagers came out to stare from a distance. In her weakness, Ina begged for water and food. ‘Should we give it to her?’ Nobody dared. They wordlessly agreed that it would be better for everyone if she were to succumb to her illness safely, within the circle of stones. They were afraid. A few people turned away, coughing in the smoke, not wanting to watch her die. But she wouldn’t die. She only begged for food more passionately.

  ‘She sounds like a howling sheep,’ someone said.

  ‘Yes, the kind with horns,’ another said.

  It wasn’t until Father Vapnik heard of her situation that she was offered a cooked potato. A neighbor threw it at her, and she ate it. Eventually Father Vapnik directed the village carpenter to fashion a long pole by which Ina could be prodded this way and that, to get her safely away from the others. Nobody wanted to take her in. She was thought to have some kind of hex on her.

  They closed her in the anteroom of the church, used in the past to incarcerate madmen when they were throwing fits. Nobody in Lapvona had gone mad in a century, but the room still held the charge of dread and insanity. Ina could feel it. Villiam’s grandfather, traumatized by the death of his father, took the priest’s advice and ordered Ina to be sent to the nunnery. No man would ever marry her anyway. She had been betrothed, but the boy and his family were ashes now. Father Vapnik arranged for a horse to take her up to the convent once she had recovered enough. She slept and ate, stuck in the anteroom, and touched her body with her hands to remind herself that she was real, she was alive. Emboldened by the church’s charity toward the blind girl, a few people left food and jugs of water for her, and eventually she regained her strength, but not her eyesight. Ina understood that nobody wanted to hear of her sorrow or her fear or loss or anything to indicate her passion or dispassion for life. And she knew that the nuns would make her do some menial work, the kind that a blind girl could do without mistake—probably scrubbing laundry or grinding wheat. She didn’t want to spend her life gripping dirty rags and plunging her arms into cold lye water or turning the handle of a crank for hours each day. She had indeed seen death and she was not afraid of it. What scared her were other people and their immovable selfishness.

  The night before she was to make her journey to the convent, Ina couldn’t sleep. She stayed up eavesdropping on Father Vapnik discussing things with the vicar in the chapel.

  ‘We’ll need to bring in new families to offset the deaths,’ the priest said. ‘Maybe this is a blessing. The new lord is so young and pliable, he’ll do whatever I say. And we can build a more robust village. The northerners are good-looking, aren’t they?’

  The vicar agreed, adding that northerners were more compliant in their disposition as well. ‘They are good farmers,’ the vicar said. ‘They don’t waste time praying and singing like ours do. Northerners are reasonable people. Sturdy.’

  ‘We could become quite rich in due time,’ the priest said. ‘There are churchmen in Kaprov with jewels in their crowns.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  Ina coughed and they hushed. Then Father Vapnik said, ‘What do we have to hush for? She’s only a blind nun, if that.’

  When the men had left and the church was quiet, Ina felt around for the door. They had not locked it, so low was their esteem of her will. So she ran out into the night. Better to live wild in the woods than to be enslaved by the nuns, she believed. A few people taking their midnight constitutionals saw her stumbling and feeling her way through the village, but they didn’t bother her. They simply got out of her way as she staggered with her arms out toward the woods. Nobody knew where she went. Or rather, nobody wanted to find her. Father Vapnik lied to his congregants the next Sunday, said that the horse had taken Ina up the mountain and left her safe and sound at the nunnery. Those who had seen Ina escape into the woods said nothing. They never gossiped about the priest. To do so was blasphemous. So Ina was soon forgotten.

  After some time in the woods, crawling through the wet leaves and cold spring rain, attuning her ears to the slightest twitch in the air, the scattering of pollen, every noise and smell, young Ina began to develop an uncanny fluency in birdsong. She could interpret every peep and warble. It was this language that guided her toward shallow puddles of dew when she was thirsty or a slug when she needed food. Eventually, she understood the world through sounds and echoes, relying on the birds to tell her whether a man or animal was coming her way, where to hide, where to find berries, where to dig for truffles or wild carrots or potatoes, where to find shelter from a storm. It didn’t take long for her to forget what things looked like. In a way, the forgetting eased her grief. She forgot her parents’ faces. They became, in her mind, lost ideas. Her dead sisters, faded dreams. Thus, the darkness was a benefit to Ina’s heart.

  One day she found a cave hidden by a willow, and this became her home for decades. During that time, Ina became an expert in survival, listening to the birds who loved her. She lived for years off mushrooms, wild apples, eggs, and rain. Comfortably, almost happily. She built fires, slept curled up with the darkness in heaps of willow leaves, steeling herself from anything outside but the birds, who sang her songs and picked the mites from her hair. She didn’t think about people or her past, only the movement of air and the shadow of sound it carried. Quite often, she heard the bleating cries of babes.

  * * *

  * * *

  When she was in her forties, something dripped from her nipple. She didn’t notice it at first. Having abandoned her vanity at such a young age, she had felt her breasts were relics of a past life; she would never need them. The substance weeping from her nipples was such a surprise at first, she thought they were misdirected tears and tasted the secretion. It was not salty, but sweet and creamy, but with the nuttiness of the scent of her own skin. Milk, she understood it to be, had filled her bosoms. Was she a victim of divine conception, she wondered, remembering for the first time in years the story of Jesus Christ the Lord and Savior? She remembered one image in particular, after the Crucifixion: Jesus, bloodied and dead, falls into the arms of Mary. Her nipples hardened thinking of that embrace, and her breasts ached. But she couldn’t remember whether Jesus embraced Mary who was His mother, or Mary who was His lover. Father Vapnick had told the story many times when she was little. She touched her breasts and let the milk squirt out into her cupped hand. She squeezed and squeezed until her palm was full and warm, and she drank it. And then she bent her neck and lifted her breast to her mouth—she was thin enough that her bosoms had no real integrity, were just bags of fluid. She nursed herself. She drank. It was a nourishing sup. She was not at all embarrassed to do it. And then, miraculously, the black light faded. She regained her vision, not perfectly, and only temporarily, but she could see enough to remember the world as it had appeared to her as a child, and to recall her longing for society. It lasted only a few minutes. This was what led her, eventually, to reenter Lapvona, however on the fringe she would stay. Day by day she nursed herself and ventured down bit by bit to the village, wondering all along if she now somehow held in her womb the Christ Child, though it never grew or came.

  In the many years she had been away, everyone she’d known in Lapvona had died. New people filled the village and nobody recognized her. They only saw a nude, wiry woman with heavy bosoms, her hair matted and full of leaves and twigs, her skin covered in dirt. They assumed she was a refugee from a village ransacked by bandits.

  ‘How old are you?’ a young man asked her.

  It hurt her throat to answer, she hadn’t talked in so long. ‘I don’t know.’

  To Ina’s surprise, the people of Lapvona didn’t reject her. On the contrary, they treated her as an elder, and many villagers volunteered food and clothing. Ina ac
cepted their hospitality and found herself soon well employed as the village wet nurse. She moved into a foxhunter’s cabin in the woods. People saw her arrival as prophetic. There had been a blight on the farms in recent years, and from the resulting malnutrition, the mothers could not produce milk to feed their babes. It was as though Ina’s bosoms had heard their cries. Many babies would have died that year had it not been for her milk. In the years that followed, she was very useful to the women, and in turn, the women became more useful to the men. A child could nurse on Ina while its mother worked in the field. Sometimes Ina resented this turn in her life and missed the freedom of her cave. At other times, she felt that her milk gave her life meaning, made her human again, and she enjoyed the villagers’ dependency on her gift, remembering the past generation that had abandoned her in her grief and suffering. She felt, in some small way, that she had recovered a sense of family. ‘Maybe some of me will get into these babes,’ she thought. ‘And so they will all be mine.’