One Crow Alone (2 page)

But when Mama has gone, Babula leans close and whispers:
I lift these potatoes because I have been hungry before and the potatoes kept me alive then. Remember that. But you
—she puts her hand out, bent like an old root and pale.
But you, little Magda—why do you stay? Go. Do not stay here with the old ones. Keep learning to speak your English. One day I will be gone.

And if you cry, and tell her that you do not really know your mother—that you will never leave the village, Babula will tell you a story.

These are real stories, Magda,
she says.
Because the television is no good when you have no electricity. And we've had no power all winter. No power, no television, no telephone.

The old stories that Babula tells with her soft hand on your face. They are good; they do not need electricity to hear them.

The story of Crow is coming right out of the sacks of potatoes.

“OPEN UP!”

The men outside are shouting and bashing.

Thump. Thump.
Walls rattling.

*   *   *

I'll tell you the story of Girl and Crow,
Babula begins with a warning look.
Oh, the girl was poor—but she was good. And the crow was a beast of a crow. It had dark eyes, Magda,
Babula whispers
. Dark eyes. In its dark head.

*   *   *

“Open up, I tell you!” come the voices, loud and impatient.

*   *   *

It was winter. And the girl went to the forest for firewood—as she must. Her feet were cold and her hands were cold. And when she had gone some way she found Crow in the thicket.

*   *   *

“Goddamn this cold. Open up!”

*   *   *

Crow was eating
—Babula will make an ugly face—
like this … with its dirty claws bent over a dead wolf. Ripping the bloody entrails with its strong beak. The girl saw that it was just hungry, and she felt sorry and held out the last piece of cake from her pocket. It was a good cake—

*   *   *

“Open up!”

There was a splintering of wood.

And the footsteps were inside the house. Right above Magda's head.

She heard the striking of a match. Something fell on the floor.

“Use the bloody torch.”

The footsteps moved across the room. Light fell between the floorboards above her.

“Tomasz! Here.”

They had found the coffin.

Magda felt the beating of the blood in her throat. She clamped her fingers into her hand so hard it hurt.
Please, God, make the men go away.

“They're dropping like flies out here,” said the voice.

“No wonder in this cold.”

“Look at the old woman. These village people. Their old ways. They should be left out here to die in peace. What good will it do taking them away?”

“Come on. I'm not carrying out a stiff.”

There was a shuffling on the boards. The strangers tramped about the cottage, heavy footfalls in the small room beside the kitchen.

“Nothing here.”

Magda heard the broken door scraping on the floor overhead.

And then she was alone.

But she didn't move from the corner of the cellar. Just drew up her feet and pulled the old sacks over her body.

You prayed to God,
she thought.

And He made the men go away.

 

3

Lifting the hatch, barely able to feel her fingers, Magda stuck her head up into the kitchen. An icy wind gusted through the broken door. A thin drift of snow had blown in across the floor.

She heard a cockerel crowing. It was far off—muffled by the shuttered windows. Morning had come. There was no sound except that cockerel.

You'd think the villagers would be out in a gaggle on the street after marauders had been stealing around in the night.

But there was nothing. Just a great silence.

The coffin lay untouched. Babula's face staring at the ceiling with closed, sunken eyes.

Magda went to the bedroom. Everything was untouched: the blankets thrown back as she had left them in the middle of the night.

She took her sweater from the chair. Pulled it over her frozen arms, rolled on thick woolen tights, stuck her legs fast into her trousers.

The oven was growing cold. Just a few smoldering embers left. She lit a candle and took the pot of kasha from the bottom oven where it had been sitting all night. She sat on the stool and gulped it down. It warmed her guts.

You have to be strong. You have to get out there and see what has happened.

She took a pair of gloves, stiff and dry, from the peg above the stove. The broken front door scraped noisily as she wrenched it over the floorboards. The Stopko dog heard the noise. It began to bark. Loudly. Insistently.

Magda looked down the street. The snow was falling thick and heavy. An occasional gust of wind blew it up in clouds around the house, with the smell of cold spiking the blustery air and the drifts growing deeper.

But there was nothing. No one. No sound coming from any of the houses.

The dog continued barking.

You have to go and see what has happened.

Magda came down the steps from the porch, her boots creaking on the newly fallen snow. The wind stung her cheeks and she pulled her hat low and made her way along the track toward the Dudeks' house.

There was no smoke coming from the chimney. She climbed the steps of the long wooden veranda under the frozen eaves.

She knocked on the door.

She knocked again.

A crow cawed and flapped from the top of a tree, dislodging a clump of snow. It swept down behind Stopko's barn far off on the other side of the street.

On a clear day, you could have seen the mountains, and the dark trees of the forest on the slopes not far behind the village. Now everything was made hazy by the blizzard. The dog barked again.

She felt a sweat under her clothing. Turned the handle of the Dudeks' door. Pushed it open.

“Hello? Brunon? Aleksy?”

The kitchen held the remains of warmth.

“Brunon? Aleksy? It is only me, Magda.”

But there was no answer.

*   *   *

She made her way to the next cottage, up to Kowalski's porch. Opened the door. Nothing.

Her pace quickened.

Magda left Stopko's door until the last. It was a hope. If Stopko had disappeared, then there was trouble that wasn't going to go away: You don't just turn up and drag Bogdan Stopko out of his warm bed in the middle of the night without a fight.

But she knew as she turned the handle.

His kitchen would be as empty as the others.

*   *   *

The village was deserted.

*   *   *

Just that dog.

“Stop your barking, Azor!” And when she rounded the side of the house to his kennel the dog did stop barking. He wagged his tail and grimaced with his teeth at the same time.

He was a big white sheepdog, tied on a chain all winter. But he didn't try to bite, seemed pleased to see her, so she untied his collar and set him loose.

The dog shook himself hard. Then came leaping and jumping at her as she made her way to the long barn back behind the sticks of the hazel copse. He cocked his leg against a tree, yellowing a hole in the snow.

“Azor!”

The dog bounded over, up to his chest in the drifts. Magda pulled open the doors of the barn. The smell of hay and animal came rich from inside.

There in the stall was Stopko's pony, picking at forgotten wisps of hay on the ground. It whinnied when she came in. She threw a bundle of hay into the rack, then went outside and hauled a bucket of water from the well. Leaning over the bitten wooden rail of the stall, she filled the stone trough and the pony drank, long and grateful.

Magda sat down on the log pile. Her head sank onto her hands.
You are alone. And you have no idea why. Or how.

A startled cat hissed from the top of a haystack, its back arched like a briar. The dog barked loudly, throwing himself back on his haunches. The pony started at the commotion, flinging its head up from the hay. Dog gave up, sniffed along the haystack. Came over and stuck his cold nose under Magda's hair. Sparrows flitted in the beams.
Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow, or reap, or gather into barns.

She pushed the dog away.

You must get back and light the stove.

*   *   *

There was worse at home. Babula in her coffin. Heavy as lead. No Dudek brothers to help carry her out now. There was just a cellar full of potatoes, a pony—and Stopko's dog.

In some ways it was better that Babula wasn't alive to witness such a morning.

The stove slowly broke into life. Magda regarded the flames with an unfocused gaze and fed sticks through the heavy iron door.

The dog curled up underneath the porch, biting at his tail. Then thought better of such wasted freedom and snuffled off along the drifts.

Magda managed to fix up the broken door so that it closed, and the stove slowly seeped a sort of warmth into the room. She lit a candle and sat beside the coffin.

They have all gone, Babula. Men came in the night. I heard them. They broke the door.

But Babula could not help her.

And Magda pulled the sheet over the old woman's face and turned back to the fire.

Why had they taken the villagers?
All of them.

Trouble
had happened in the village of Zborov last winter. The shepherds told Stopko: “Strangers have been. They came and stole our food, Pan Stopko. What should we do?” Old guns were brought out and hidden under beds by even older men. But in Zborov the strangers had only taken chickens and cheese. They had been hungry marauders from the town, desperate during the long cold winter. Only a few men standing firm over their cellars were hurt. No one taken away. Not like this.

And you heard other news when Bogdan Stopko came back from the market, counting out a wad of zloty with his big, hard hands. “It is snowing in Rome. In Paris. In London. Snowing everywhere! Everyone is hungry. But our mutton and honey are fetching high prices! Keep singing, boys!”

Stopko had even bought a radio.

“Made in China, my friends!”

The men listened to the music crackling out of it. Brunon Dudek, kicking his heels up in the sawdust, a bottle of vodka splashing in his hand, singing badly: “But if you will not drink up, whoever sticks two to it, lupu cupu, cupu lupu, whoever sticks two to it!”

And Babula tutting over a stirred pot. “Our luck is another's misfortune, Magda.”

But she had been happy enough with their share of the money.

*   *   *

Outside, that wretched dog was barking again. Magda got up from her chair beside the coffin. Peered out into the blizzard. The bad day was slipping away. But the dog was only chasing a whirlwind of snow.

You must put Babula in the ground.

Magda took the narrow wooden lid leaning against the wall and placed it on the coffin. She hammered the nails in with a shoe.

Where are you all? Where have you gone?

Soon the dark would fall.

And, like wolves, the spirits of the unburied dead would creep out of the forest, crawl along the frozen river, up the banks to the house, slither through cracks in the door and come creaking over the boards.

Maybe the candle will gutter. And blow out. And it will be the dead of night.

In the dark you will be alone.

And the spirits will
tap tap tap
to wake dead Babula. And her old bent hands will scratch at the coffin lid.
You nailed me in with your shoe, wicked girl!
And the dirty long fingernails of the spirits from the forest will prise the lid open, laughing.
You didn't bury her! You didn't bury her!
They will scratch and rattle, and you will be lying in your bed shaking. In the dark. Because there is no weight of earth covering her. No. You must get her in the ground before nightfall.

*   *   *

Magda lifted the foot of the coffin, she kicked the chair to one side and rested it heavily on the floor—then did the same with the other end.

Grasping the coffin with both hands, she pulled it across the floor. The rails grated, catching on nail heads and gouging tracks in the floorboards. She kicked the front door open with her foot. It was snowing heavily outside. The wind battered like a shovel, slapping the hair across her face. Then she had it through the door. Out on the porch, the coffin hanging over the step with the full weight of the body inside it weighing on her arms.

The dog appeared at the gate.

She hauled the coffin down the steps.
Cadunk
. She felt the boards sag. She stepped back. The path was icy. She squared her feet and pulled again.

Down came the coffin.
Bump
,
bump
,
bump
. Thumping to the bottom of the steps. The body inside it slumping toward her as she fell.

The dog barked.

“Go away!” she shouted.

He slunk backward.

She untangled herself, kneeling in the maelstrom of snowflakes, rubbing her bruised knee. She put out a hand, turning her mouth from the freezing drafts of wind. “Azor—I didn't mean it. Come. I won't hurt.”

Her head sank down onto the rough boards. “Babula,” she whispered into them. “Babula, give me strength. I am alone. Try not to be so heavy.”

The dog sat a little way off, and Magda put her hands under the coffin once more and began dragging it across the snow. She stopped to catch her breath and looked up at the deserted houses, the rim of trees dark on the hill behind the village. Hadn't she heard Kowalski say that wolves had been seen at the forest edge?

The dog pricked his ears. If she let herself, Magda might have thought he was listening for them. But Kowalski was a worrier: his chickens always egg-bound, his potatoes blighted, his cellar damper than anyone else's. Wolves indeed. Had anyone even heard them?