King Stakh's Wild Hunt (17 page)

Wanderers will not pray for you, Roman the Old. Every man shall spit on your fallen cross. And may God give me strength to save the last one of your kin, she who is innocent of any crime against the inexorable truth of our stepmother, our Belarus.

Is my people really such a forgotten, such a dead nation?

I spent about forty minutes making my way through the damp forest behind the Giant’s Gap and reached the narrow path covered with brushwood. Indulging the season, aspens along both sides of the road were already losing their leaves. Birches stood out in the midst of this crimson mass. Birches had already turned yellow, while oaks were yet quite green. A small path led down into a ravine with a murmuring brook, its water the colour of strong tea. Sinking in soft green moss, the banks of the brook were connected by green bridges made of the trees that had been broken down by storms. Along these tree trunks – on some of which the moss was stripped off – people used to cross the brook.

It was silent and solitary. Not a living soul around. A tiny bird was chirping somewhere inside a tree crown, and hanging down from the cobwebs among the trees were lonely leaves that had gotten caught falling down from the branches. Floating about in the brook were tiny red and yellow, sad leaf boats, but in one place there was a small pool in which they whirled about as if they were being cooked there by a water sprite for its supper. In order to cross the brook I had to break down a rather thick, but quite dry aspen to support me, and I broke it down with one kick of my foot.

Behind the ravine the forest became dense. The path disappeared in an impassable thicket, literally jungles of raspberry canes, dry stinging nettle, wild blackberries and other weeds. Hops climbed the trees like green flames, twined about them, hung down from them in sheaves that caught onto my head. There soon appeared the first signs of human life. Bushes of wild lilac, squares of fertilized soil where flower beds once used to sit, and man’s fellow companion – tall burdock. The lilac thickets were so dense that I could hardly get out of them and onto a small clearing in which a house stood safely hidden. It was built on a high stone foundation with a wing made of bricks. The wooden columns there had most likely been painted white in the lifetime of their grandfathers; the building leaned over on one side, as if a fatally wounded man about to fall. Twisted plat bands, torn down boarding and glass, grown opalescent with age. Burdock, marigold, oleander in between the steps of the front wing almost blocking the way to the door. And on the way to the back door a puddle filled with bricks. The roof green, and thick with fat, fluffy moss. I sneak-peeked into the house through a little grey window. The inside of the house seemed gloomier and even more neglected. In a word it was a cottage standing on its last legs. Only the witch Baba Yaga was missing, she who should have been lying on the ninth brick, saying, “Fie! I smell the blood of a man!”

Speaking of the devil – through the window a woman’s face was looking at me, a face so dry it was merely a skull tightly enveloped in thin yellow parchment. Grey plaits fell on her shoulders. Then a hand, resembling a hen’s claw, beckoned me with a wrinkled finger.

I stood in the yard not knowing whom this gesture was meant for.

The door opened a little and that very same hand pushed itself through the slit.

“Here, come in, kind sir, Mr. Hryhor,” the head pronounced, “You came to the right address - here unfortunate victims get murdered.”

I cannot say that after such a consoling piece of information I had a great desire to enter the house, but the old woman walked down to the last step of the porch and reached out her hand to me across the puddle.

“I’ve long been awaiting you, our courageous deliverer. The thing is that my slave Ryhor has turned out to be a man who stifles people as did Bluebeard. You remember our reading together about Zhila the Bluebeard, such a gallant cavalier? I’d have forgiven Ryhor everything if he’d done his murdering just as gallantly, but he’s a serf. So what can one do?”

I followed after her. In the anteroom was a sheepskin coat on the floor, next to it a saddle, on the wall a whip and a few hardened fox-skins. Besides that, a three-legged stool and the portrait of a man lying on its side, a portrait dirty and torn through and through. The room itself was in such a mess as if a branch of the Grunwald Battle had been located there 400 years ago, and since that time nothing in the room had ever been dusted, nor had the windows been washed. A crooked table with legs the shape of antique hermae and next to it an armchair resembling war veterans without legs and hardly breathing. At the wall a closet leaning over and threatening to fall down on the first person who would come up to it. On the floor near the door stood a large bust of Voltaire bearing a resemblance to the mistress of the house. He looked at me coquettishly from under the rags which crowned his head instead of laurels. A cheval glass was squeezed into one corner and something resembling bird droppings covered its surface. Its upper half was covered with a thick layer of dust. To make up for that, its lower half was carefully wiped clean. Fragments of dishes, bread crumbs, fish bones were scattered just about everywhere, just like in a kingfisher’s nest, where the bottom is covered with fish scales. And the mistress herself reminded one of a kingfisher, that gloomy and strange bird that prefers solitude.

She turned towards me, and again I saw her face, saw a nose hanging down to her very chin, and enormous teeth.

“My Knight, wouldn’t it be nice if you wiped off the dust from the upper half of the cheval glass? I’d like to see myself in my full height... In all my beauty...”

I shifted from one foot to the other, hesitating, not knowing how to fulfill her request, but she said suddenly:

“You see, you greatly resemble my deceased husband. What a man he was! He was taken alive into heaven, the first among men after the prophet Elijah. But Roman fell alive into the nether regions. All due to the evil genius of the Yanovsky region – King Stakh’s Wild Hunt. From the day my husband died, I stopped cleaning the house as a sign of mourning. Beautiful, isn’t it? And so romantic!”

She smiled a coquettish smile and began making eyes at me according to the unwritten rules at aristocratic girls’ boarding schools: “Keep your eyes on the person talking with you, then to the side with a slight bending of the head, again at the person you are talking to, then at the upper corner of the room and down at the ground.”

This was a malicious parody on human feelings. It was all the same as if a monkey had unexpectedly begun performing Ophelia’s song in its English original.

“It is beautiful here. Only frightening. Oh! How frightening!”

Suddenly she threw herself on the floor away from me and buried her head in a pile of some old rags.

“Away! Away with you! You are King Stakh!”

The woman beat herself hysterically and shouted loudly. Horrified, I thought that such a fate probably awaited all the people in this region if the black wing of incomprehensible fear were to remain hanging over this land.

I was standing at a loss, when somebody’s hand was laid on my shoulder and a man’s rough voice said:

“Why are you here? Don’t you see that she is a bit – not in her right mind? A wonder, isn’t she?”

The fellow went to the anteroom, brought a portrait full of holes from there, and put it on the table. A middle aged man was depicted in the portrait in a dress coat and with the Order of St. Vladimir in a button hole.

Then he dragged the woman out from among the rags, seated her in front of the portrait.

“Mrs. Kulsha, this is not King Stakh, not at all. Mr. Fieldmarshal has come to take a look at our well known local beauty. And King Stakh – this one here in the portrait – is dead and cannot kill anybody.”

The woman looked at the portrait and fell silent. The man took out a piece of bread from his bosom, bread as black as earth. The old woman started laughing happily. She began to pinch off bits of bread and put them in her mouth, but kept her eyes on the portrait.

“King Stakh! My dear husband. Why are you turning your face away?”

She either scratched the portrait or happily whispered something to him, continuing to eat her bread. I had a good view of the unknown man and used the occasion to examine him. He was about thirty years old, in a peasant’s cloth coat and in leather sandals. Tall as he was, well built, his chest powerful and bulging. Whiskers made his face look severe and somewhat harsh. This impression was strengthened by two little wrinkles between the eyebrows and widely set burning eyes. A white felt hat was lowered down on his forehead. Something about him breathed of freedom, of the forest.

“You are Ryhor, aren’t you? Kulsha’s watchman?”

“Yes,” He answered with a hint of irony in his voice. “And you, apparently, are Miss Yanovsky’s guest. You’re a well known bird around here now, seems you sing well.”

“And are you always like that with her?” I showed at the old woman who was spitting on the portrait with great concentration.

“Always. She’s been this way for two years already.”

“But why don’t you take her to the district centre for treatment?”

“I pity her. Guests would come when she was in good health, but now not a single dog. The gentry! Our young ladies, to the devil with them...”

“But isn’t it difficult for you?”

“No, not at all. Zosya looks after her when I am hunting. She’s no trouble most of the time, has scarce needs. Only eats a lot of bread, lots of it. She wants nothing else.”

He took out an apple from his pocket and offered it to the old woman.

“Highly respected lady, take this.”

“Don’t want it,” eating her bread with gusto. “Poison, everything is poison, bread alone is pure, godly.”

“You see,” Ryhor said gloomily. “Once a day we force her to eat a hot meal. Sometimes she bites my fingers. When we give her food – she always tries to grab me... But she wasn’t bad when young. Even if she were bad, we couldn’t leave her to herself, the God’s child as she is now.”

And he smiled such a guilty, childish smile that I was surprised.

“But why is she like that?”

“Got frightened after Roman’s death. They all live in fear, and I can tell you, for most of them it’s what they deserve.”

“Yanovsky as well?”

“It would be evil to speak badly about her. A kind woman. I’m sorry for her.”

I became bolder now, for I understood – this man was not a traitor.

“Listen, Ryhor, I came here to ask you about something.”

“Ask away,” he said, changing the tone of his voice and sounding more fraternal now, which I liked.

“I have decided to unravel this Wild Hunt of King Stakh’s. You know? I’ve never seen a ghost, want to feel it with my own hands.”

“Ghosts... spooks,” he grumbled. “Fine ghosts they are, if their horses leave very real excrement along the road! However, sir, why do you want to do that? What reasons have you?”

Now I did not like the way he addressed me.

“Don’t call me ‘sir!’ I’m no more a ‘sir’ than you. While as to my reason why... well... it is interesting, that’s all. And I feel sorry for the lady and many other people.”

“We understand such things. Like Zosya is for me... But why don’t you say that you are angry with them, that you want to take revenge? You see, I know how you escaped from the Wild Hunt near the river.” I was astonished.

“You know about that, do you? How?”

“Every person has eyes, and every person leaves footprints in the Earth. You ran away like a sensible man. What’s bad is that I always lose their footprints. And they begin and end on the highway.”

I told him about everything from the very beginning. Ryhor listened, sitting motionless, his large rough hands on his knees.

“I’ve listened attentively,” he said, when I had finished. “I like you, sir. From the peasantry, aren’t you? From muzhyks, I think; yes, and if not from muzhyks, you’re not far from them. I, too, have long wanted to get at these spooks, crush them, burn their wings, but I’ve had no comrade. If you’re not joking, then let’s get together. However, I see that this idea to tum to me has only just now come to you. So, why now, so suddenly? And what did you have in mind before?”

“I don’t know, why I decided to. People speak well of you. When Miss Yanovsky became an orphan, you took pity on her. She told me that you even wanted to come to Marsh Firs to work as watchman, but something interfered. Well, and then I like your being independent, and that you take care of the sick woman, and pity her. But previously I simply wanted to ask you how it had come about that Yanovsky was delayed at the Kulsha’s that evening when Roman was killed.”

“Why she was delayed I, myself, don’t know. That day a number of girls had gathered from neighbouring estates at the house of my mistress. They were having a good time there. And why Miss Yanovsky was invited – that, too, I don’t know. She hadn’t been there, you see, many years before that event. And you see for yourself what this woman is like now, she won’t tell…”

“Why won’t she tell?” the old woman suddenly smiled almost quite sensibly. “I will tell. I’m not mad, it’s simply more convenient this way and safer. It was Haraburda who asked that poor Nadzeya should be invited. And his niece was in my house then. You are such a gentleman, Mr. Fieldmarshal, that I shall tell you everything. Yes, yes, it was Haraburda who advised us then to take the child. Our people are all very kind. Mr. Dubatowk had our promissory notes – he didn’t begin proceedings against us for their recovery. That’s so to speak, a guarantee that you will come to visit me more often and drink wine. Now I can force you to drink even vodka. Yes, everybody invited Nadzeya. Haraburda, and Fieldmarshal Kamiensky, and Dubatowk, and Roman... and King Stakh, this one here. But your poor little head, Nadzeya, and your golden braids, lie together with your father’s bones!”

These lamentations for a living person were distasteful to me and made me wince.

“You see, you’ve learned something,” Ryhor said gloomily.

When we left, the old woman’s wailing quieted down.

“Well then,” Ryhor said, “all right, let’s look for them together. I want to see this surprising marvel. I’ll try to find out something among the common people, while you’ll look among papers and ask the gentry. And maybe we’ll learn something...”