Katerina

19

THAT WAS HALF MY LIFE. From now on the color of my life is red. I too was murdered that evening. What remains of me is a stump. Two men dragged me along the streets the way one drags a long sack. “Murderess, murderess.” I heard the voices slipping over my body like ice. Afterward, I didn’t hear, only echoes that shattered with deafening noise. As they dragged it, my body lost its weight and the pain froze.

For a long time they dragged me, and I was sure that it was my end, but I wasn’t afraid. Relief, the kind one feels after six or seven glasses of vodka, enveloped me. If this is death, it isn’t so dreadful, I told myself. Eventuaily, the men dragging me got tired and left me on the pavement, but they didn’t stop proclaiming, “Murderess, murderess.” People crowded in from all around. In the turmoil I remembered that the Slavo brothers had cried out a similar shout after they had hunted down the wolf that had eaten their younger brother and brought it to the village square.

“Whom did she murder?” asked a man with a young voice.

“She murdered and carved him up.”

“Where are you taking her?”

“To the police.”

The questions and answers were so clear, as though they had passed through a fine sieve. I opened my eyes and saw a mass of people surrounding me in a black circle. The men who’d dragged me stood near me and panted heavily. I knew that if they only gave their assent, the mob would trample me.

The pause didn’t last long. Now they dragged me with renewed strength, as though trying to dislocate my arms. And I felt how my body was borne, pounded and carried up as in a storm, as though they were afraid I might die before it was determined who was the monster in their hands.

The police building turned out to be close by. “A murderess,” they said, and left me.

“Whom did she murder?”

“She carved him into pieces. Everything is lying in the street.”

Apparently, I fainted or fell into a heavy sleep. When I woke I felt that the blood on my hands had coagulated. No memory was within me, like a bucket that has been emptied.

“She won’t talk.” I heard a man’s voice.

“Did you beat her?”

“I beat her”

I felt no pain. The thought that they had beaten me and I didn’t feel the blows roused me from my faint. In the next room, which was lit, voices rustled, but to my ears they sounded as though they came from a distance.

At night I was awake and I pressed myself against the wall. The wall was cold and moldy, and I felt the cold trickling through my pores. My coat was torn, but the lining was intact. I straightened my legs, and then I saw for the first time that my knee was swollen. The swelling was huge and painful. That means, I said to myself, it’s bad swelling. In the next room the voices didn’t cease. First it seemed that they were talking about me, but it soon became clear that they were talking about some old mortgage. One of the voices complained that his mortgage was making a pauper of him. If it weren’t for the mortgage, he’d be a free man.

It was as if my memory plunged deep within me, but I took in the motions and grating noises that happened around me very well. And I also noticed that the bars of the cell were thick but not close together.

I managed to take off my shoes. My ankles also proved to be swollen, but not excessively. I remembered that my mother used to say, “Katerina tears her socks so that they can’t be darned anymore. I’ve already gotten tired of telling her that she’s not allowed to crawl on the floor.” I was three then, my father and mother still talked to each other, and my mother, for some reason, complained about me, a fond complaint, and I was glad that my mother loved me.

Later, a policeman approached and stood at the door of the cell. He seemed gigantic. He looked at me the way one looks at an unruly cow and ordered, “Get up, murderess.” Hearing his voice, I got up on all fours, but it wasn’t in my power to rise. He saw clearly that I was trying to get up, but my efforts seemed insufficient, and he beat me with his club. The blow was strong and knocked me over.

“What do you want from me?” I said.

“Don’t talk to me like a human.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t play the innocent. Talk like a murderess, understand?”

Then two men came and hoisted me up and put me in a lighted room. The sight of my face was, apparently, horrifying. They stood at a distance from me and spoke in Romanian. I didn’t understand a word. One of the policemen addressed me in Ruthenian, asking, “Why did you kill him?” I don’t remember what I answered. They, apparendy, slapped my face and kicked me. I fell, and they kept kicking me. I didn’t scream, and that drove them mad. In the end they brought me back to the cell. I don’t know how many days I was kept away from the light of day. The darkness in the cell was great. All that time I felt that I was being swept away in a broad, deep river. Black waves covered me, but I, with a fish’s gills, overcame the drowning. When I managed to open my eyes, I saw it was the Prut River; its flow heavy and red.