Katerina

29

I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO, and I walked out. I was at peace. Green meadows stood before me. The years in prison made my heart forget many people, but not the meadows. A few abandoned animals grazed in ditches. By the look of the animals, I knew that the year had been rainy, the crops had come along nicely and in season, and the harvest had been on time too. At harvest, my mother had been like a gale wind. She preferred hired workers to my father. My father knew nothing of devotion in his work. The older he grew, the lazier he became. My mother, in contrast, never rested. She used to work from morning to late at night. At the end of the harvest we would bring the sacks of grain to the flour mill, where the people squabbled and insulted each other. Once, I remember, a man was stabbed in the chest.

I turned and saw that the prison still stood in its place. From there it looked wretched. Seen together, the buildings seemed like the shelters peasants put up at harvest time. My fears had been unnecessary. The entire fortress looked precarious, and even the fences were very carelessly made.

I wanted, for some reason, to see what was left to me after all those confined years, and I could only see heaps of beets in the frost. All the people who had surrounded me, and there were years when I hadn’t been isolated, had not even left the look of their faces in me, nor their smell.

Not far away, the women prisoners wandered off together, raising columns of dust with their steps. For a moment it seemed to me that everything would remain this way forever. I would look at them from a distance, and they would whisper to each other, and even if we moved apart, the distance between us would not be shortened. That thought made me tremble with an old kind of fear.

I walked toward the ditches. The cows lifted their heads, and I drew close and touched their skin. For years I hadn’t touched an animal, not, in fact, since I had left the village. I fell to my knees and plucked handfuls of grass.

Contact with the fresh grass moved me, and I turned toward the hilltops. The hilltops reminded me of my aunt Fanka’s house. Aunt Fanka, my mother’s sister, was a very special woman. She lived outside the village, on a bare hilltop, and she didn’t need people. I saw her just once, but her thin face remained stamped upon me. It had the kind of spirituality you don’t find among Ruthenians. For years, her face hadn’t reappeared to me, and suddenly, as though from the thickness of the dark, it rose up again.

At the foot of the hill stood a pond full to the brim. Ponds like that are found at the edges of every village. Here they water the animals, and here boys come to bathe. Once Waska had also drawn me to the pond. He was bashful and didn’t stroke my breasts.

A few haystacks stood abandoned next to an oak. I approached them and said, “I’ll rest awhile.” The dry straw made me sink into a deep doze, a slumber without visions. At first it skimmed and floated, but it became heavy during the night, pulling me downward. Had it not been for a thirst that roused me from time to time, I doubt whether I would have awakened.

Sudden rain forced me from the haystack, and I stood under a tree. No one was within sight, just fields of yellowish stubble with glowing hues like darkened amber. For many years I had not seen a yellow like that. The fear of God fell upon me, and I knelt.

The rain turned out to be a passing summer shower. The clouds scattered, and the sun stood high in the heavens again, a large, round sun of the kind that had shone upon me in the meadows when I was a girl. Here too it grew steadily lower, as though it were about to fall at my feet. Suddenly, I knew that everything I saw was merely a fragment of a vision whose beginning was far from me, whose middle was within me, and what was revealed before me now was merely an illuminated passage leading to a broad tunnel. The light was strong and spilled out at my feet. It seemed that I had stood in this place years ago but that life had busded about then, faces had surrounded me, and I had examined them.

Toward evening a wagon drew up beside me. A peasant woman, wrapped in a rustic blue kerchief, drove her horses indolently. When she was close by, I asked, “Where is the city?” I was immediately thunderstruck by the word I had uttered.

“There’s no city around here. You’re in the heart of the country, mother.” She spoke to me in the old-fashioned way, just the way we used to talk at home, in the heart of the country.

“And where are the Jews?” I asked, and immediately knew the question was out of place.

“Why do you ask, mother?” she answered me, and her face, a young woman’s face, appeared to me from inside the kerchief.

“I don’t know,” I said.

After a moment of surprise, she said, “They took them away.”

“Where did they take them?” I asked again, not in my own voice.

“To their fate, they took them, mother. To their fate. Don’t you know?” There was ingenuousness in her face.

“Aren’t you afraid?” The words left my mouth.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, mother. God took them. And where are you from, mother?”

“From the prison.” I didn’t hesitate.

“Thank God,” she said, and crossed herself. “Praised be God who frees the prisoners. Were you in for a long time?”

“More than forty years.”

“God preserve us! Take a few of this season’s fruits,” she said, offering me a handful of plums.

“Thank you, my child.”

From the time I entered prison, I hadn’t seen plums. Sometimes a few withered apples would make their way into the shed, and they would be gobbled down swiftly, core and all. The sight of the plums moved me, as though it were a gift from heaven.

“Thanks, my child, for this lovely gift. I shall never forget it. May the good Lord reward you for the kindness with all the good and lovely things He possesses.”

“Thank you for the blessing,” she said, and bowed as they do in the country.

“What’s your name, mother?”

“Katerina.”

“God almighty!” she said, opening her eyes wide. “You’re Katerina the murderess!” Without a moment’s delay, like someone who has met the devil himself on his way, she raised the whip and lashed the backs of the horses. The horses, startled by that sudden whipping, reared up on their hind legs and drew the wagon away with a rush.