Black Spring

I sighed and took my bucket and cloth into the kitchen without further argument. I knew it was useless. It wasn’t long, however, before she followed me. She had already forgotten her quarrel with her husband.

  “Anna, do you think Damek will call this afternoon? I think I should visit the Red House, don’t you? If he doesn’t come here, I mean. Why has he not called already?”

  I told her that if she called alone on Damek, it would cause a scandal. I also reminded her that Masko lived in the Red House and that she would be forced to speak to him as well. Only the latter point gave her pause: she still hated Masko with a passion and avoided him entirely. I repeated my assurance that Damek would call soon and bent to my work. After a while, she drifted back to the front room, to hover impatiently by the window. For myself, although I dreaded Damek’s visit, I also prayed that he would make it that day. If he did not, I couldn’t imagine what state Lina would be in by nightfall, but given his anger about her marriage, it was not impossible he would delay his call. In my anxiety, I found myself wishing that Damek had indeed been killed. Lina’s irrationality that morning dismayed me more than I could admit even to myself; when I thought of what Damek had said to me the night before, and of the lunchtime quarrel, I found myself filled with dread. So I didn’t think at all: I attended to my tasks, and then I tried to make my mistress take a rest, which she resisted with increasing irritation.

  She became more tense with every minute. By mid-afternoon, Lina was in such a state that the smallest sound — a dog’s bark, the shutting of a door — would make her start horribly. I was not much better myself, as her restlessness and anxiety had infected me. Also, I was listening for Tibor as well as for Damek; most of all, I dreaded that they might turn up together, an unlucky chance which would do no good for any of us. When I heard hoofbeats nearing the house, I think I jumped as high as Lina. She rushed to the window and confirmed that it was Damek; she lost her color, and for a moment I thought she might faint. I rushed to her, holding her arm so she would not fall, and she turned on me eyes piteous with fright.

  “I can’t see him,” she said. “Anna, tell him to go away!”

  In my exasperation at her perversity, I could have shaken her. There came a rap on the door, and I swear she went even paler.

  “It’s him!” she whispered. “Oh, he is here! What shall I do?”

  I bit back the sharp words that came to my tongue and instead asked her to sit down so I could answer the door.

  She shook her head, so I made no move; when he knocked again, she gripped my hand so tight I felt the bones crunching. She was trembling all over. By now I was half distracted.

  “Please sit down, Mistress Lina. I fear that you will fall,” I said, and to my relief she did. “I shall tell him you’re unwell and can’t see him.”

  “No! No, show him in!”

  I looked at her dubiously, but a little color had returned to her face, and so, lamenting the ill-luck of the day, I left her and hurried to the door.

  “Greetings, Anna,” said the author of all this discomfort. “How is your mistress?”

  After dealing with my mistress all day, his calmness was a severe provocation. “She is not well, Damek,” I answered. “Not well at all. I almost curse your coming home, after the morning I’ve had.”

  He said nothing in reply but entered the hallway and gave me his coat. Lina heard his entrance and called out to me. He stood very still for a moment, his face expressionless, and then turned toward her voice.

  “Well, then, she is in there?” Without further reference to me, he walked toward the sitting room. I followed, wringing my hands; I felt I ought to stop him but knew not how.

  Lina was seated where I had left her, staring toward the doorway. When she saw Damek, her eyes widened, and her lips parted as if she would speak, but no words came. Damek halted at the threshold of the room, and for a long moment they neither of them moved nor spoke. I think he had not really believed until that moment that she was with child: he stared fixedly, almost with horror, at her swollen belly.

  Lina couldn’t but notice this, and she blushed and put her hand protectively on her stomach. Then she seemed to recollect herself, and she stood up, stretching out her hand in formal greeting.

  “Damek!” she said. “How — how wonderful to see you!”

  He strode toward her and, taking her hand, stared earnestly into her face. “And to see you!” he answered.

  A long silence fell between them, but their eyes remained fixed on each other’s face. He kept hold of her hand, and she did not withdraw it. At this point I thought it politic to interrupt, since they seemed to have forgotten altogether that I was present.

  “Mistress, shall I bring some refreshments?”

  Lina turned to me, startled. Her face was radiant, as if a light inside her had been suddenly unveiled. “Refreshments? What for?”

  “For you and your guest,” I said.

  “I think we will not need anything, Anna,” said Damek with a meaning glance. “Except, perhaps, a little privacy.”

  “I think the master would not like his wife to be alone with a man. . . .”

  Here Damek interrupted with a profanity and, to my distress, Lina laughed. Now that Damek at last was present, her anxiety seemed to have vanished all at once; indeed, the mocking glance she turned on me was more like the old Lina than I had seen since my return to Elbasa. She pressed Damek’s hand to her breast as she spoke.

  “Anna, don’t be so ridiculous. Damek is no stranger. He might as well be my brother, and there is nothing improper about my being alone with him. Now, you go and do all those jobs you were complaining about before. We have much to say to each other, and we don’t need a chaperone.”

  “Off you go, Anna,” prompted Damek. “You heard your mistress.”

  I had no choice but to leave the room, if with many misgivings at their folly, and Damek took care to shut the door behind me.

  The pair remained closeted up for nigh on three hours, and all that time I was in a constant alarm, lest Tibor would come home and discover them. I confess too that I was burning with curiosity: I wondered what they were saying, and what they were doing. Lina did little to satisfy this last vulgar hunger; after Damek had left, she simply said that they had been exchanging news, while giving me an ironic look that showed she was perfectly aware of my interest. If Damek revealed to Lina where he had been for the past few years, she never told me.

  It seemed that Tibor was still angry with Lina, as he stayed out late that evening and didn’t come home until well after dark. Damek left carrying a lamp, for Masko was hosting a card party that he wished to attend. And so the meeting I dreaded between Damek and Tibor did not take place, on that day at least. Their encounter was inevitable, but as Saint Matthew says, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” and I was happy to take his advice.

  After Damek’s departure, Lina was strangely calm; she seemed abstracted but biddably ate her dinner and took the foul-tasting tonic the doctor had prescribed her without protest. She retained that radiance, which gave an almost supernatural edge to her beauty; as she sat in her sitting room, a book open but unread on her lap, her chin resting on her hand, she seemed like a figure carved of alabaster, lit from within by a soft but intense flame. When Tibor at last returned, she greeted him languidly but without hostility, and he, no doubt expecting a petulant greeting, was unexpectedly disarmed. He ordered a late supper, and they sat quietly, speaking together without rancor. Anyone who saw them would not have imagined them to be anything but the most content of couples.

  As I prepared myself for bed that night, I wondered if my fears were unfounded. Whenever I thought of Damek’s conversation with me, I felt uneasy: I did not see that he would accept Lina’s marriage with any complacency, and I knew he had little respect for the conventions that ruled the rest of us. On the other hand, I thought, if he truly loved Lina, he would see what was in her best interests and put his own desires aside. After all, he had even forgiven Masko, wi
th whom he seemed now on the most cordial terms, and that suggested that anything was possible.

  That I entertained such thoughts shows the foolishness of wishful thinking. Damek could be patient, more patient than anyone I knew, in pursuit of his desires, putting aside immediate gratification if he needed to, but the thought of relinquishing the passions that drove him never entered his head. I think he was the most single-minded person I ever met. And I had forgotten Lina’s willfulness; I had thought it controlled, when in fact it had simply had no object. Well, I was soon to be disabused of my hopeful fancies.

  Damek arrived at the manse after breakfast the following day, not long after Tibor had left the house; he was then supervising the building of some outsheds which, now the burden of the harvest was over, he hoped to have finished by winter. I was surprised to see Damek, but Lina was not; they spent an hour or so talking alone in her bedchamber, which scandalized me, and then Lina called for her cloak and boots and they left the house, striking out toward the river, even though the air smelled of rain. When Tibor returned for his lunch, they were still out. He asked me where Lina was, and I answered with some confusion that she was out walking with Mr. Damek. He flushed with humiliation and anger but said nothing in response and finished his meal in silence. I felt sorry for him, and annoyed with the pair whose thoughtlessness was causing such pain.

  An hour after lunch, the wind changed and it began to rain. At first it was a light shower, and I thought it would pass, but after a half hour, I saw the bad weather had set in. I watched the veils of rain sweeping over the back courtyard as I worked in the kitchen, and fretted uselessly over Lina’s foolishness. She was exposing herself to a bad chill, at best; at worst, in her delicate condition, she was putting not only her life, but her baby’s, at risk. A little later, Tibor came in the back door, nodded toward me as he divested himself of his wet outer clothes, and went upstairs.

  It seemed an age before I saw any sign of the others, although I think it was perhaps less than an hour, and only my impatience made it feel so long. There was no letup in the weather, and I began to be seriously worried and wondered whether I ought to send out someone to look for them. At last I heard a disturbance at the front of the house and hurried out, wiping my hands, to see Damek and Lina, soaked through from head to foot, standing in a puddle of water in the hallway. Lina was clutching Damek’s arm and laughing; she was panting, as if she had been running — and in her condition!

  “Oh, Anna!” she cried when she saw me. “Look at us! The rain came down in buckets when we were by the river. We tried to shelter under the old willow, but it did not pass, and we were going to be as wet there as here, and so we have run home!”

  I hurried forward, scolding the both of them. Lina’s eyes glittered with a dangerous elation, and when I touched her arms as I stripped off her dripping cloak, the skin felt as cold as a corpse. Aside from a flush high on her cheeks, she was deathly pale, and her teeth were chattering.

  “Mr. Damek, you ought to be ashamed! You must have known better than to make her run in the rain!” I said. “She is not a child anymore, and she has been sick! If she falls ill and dies, then it’s your fault and no one else’s.”

  I saw his eyes flicker toward her face when I said that and knew that what I said had hit home.

  “Don’t be silly, Anna,” cried Lina. “I have never felt so well! How could I die now? Now, when I am more happy than I have ever been?”

  Her voice rang out over the hallway and carried to the ears of Tibor, whom I now saw was standing at the head of the stairs, just about to come down. He halted like a man who had been slapped and then all but ran down the stairs. Ignoring Damek, he grabbed his wife’s arm and swung her round to face him, demanding to know where she had been.

  Lina tore her arm out of his grasp. “How dare you touch me like that!” she said, with all the hauteur of a princess of the blood. Tibor had not seen this mood before, and he stepped back a pace, surprised and abashed, as she continued, “You do not speak to me like that. You should address me with respect.”

  “I’m your husband,” said Tibor, who was shaking with anger. “Or have you forgotten that?”

  “Of course I haven’t,” she said.

  “You’re acting like a whore,” he said. “Not like any wife of mine.”

  Lina gasped, and Damek’s face went black with anger. I think he would have punched Tibor there and then if I had not shouted at both the men to come to their senses and to stop behaving like children. I was out of patience with all of them, but mostly I was concerned that Lina change into some dry clothes, and so, before anything else could be said, I hurried her upstairs to her bedchamber, stripped off her damp dress, and scrubbed her hard with a towel before a warm fire until the color came back into her face. As I did so, the baby began to kick, and she put her hand on her belly to feel its limbs writhing beneath her skin.

  “You’ll kill your baby, and yourself, running about wild like that!” I told her. “And you’ll drive Mr. Tibor to distraction.”

  “Nay, Anna!” She had been standing passively as a small child, not helping me one bit, except to lift an arm or a leg if I asked. “The baby is joyful too! It loves freedom as much as I do!”

  I shook my head at her willfulness. When she was warmly dressed, I studied her closely. She didn’t appear to be feverish, but I didn’t trust the sparkle in her eyes. I told her to stay in front of the fire until her hair was dry and went downstairs to check what had happened to the men. Neither was anywhere to be found. I asked Irli if she had heard anything, and she said that they had both left the house directly after I had taken Mistress Lina upstairs. I wondered briefly if they had gone out to knife each other, but at the time I was too cross to care. Good riddance, I thought, to the both of them.

  To my astonishment and relief, Lina didn’t catch cold. It was as if something had ignited inside her which drove off the possibility of chills. The fragility that so concerned me was still evident, and she was more easily exhausted than I liked, but at the same time she was consumed with a fierce energy that made her seem stronger than she was. She breakfasted sulkily with Tibor the following day, refusing to speak to him at all until he humbly apologized for his insult the previous day, but once he did apologize, she smiled radiantly and reached across the table to stroke his face.

  “Why are you so cross about Damek?” she said. “He is as close to me as my brother, and I’m so happy that he has come home! Don’t spoil it, Tibor, please. Surely you should love him as I do? I have told Damek that he has to love you, and it’s not fair if it is only one way. . . .”

  Looking cornered, Tibor swallowed and spread out his hands in mute protest. I watched as Lina exploited all her charm, hoping in my heart that he would find it in himself to resist, but he could not; a mouse might as well hope to bewitch a snake. As soon as Tibor had been persuaded that his happiness depended upon Lina’s (which, to a certain extent, it did), all was lost. She sat back in her chair and, smiling brilliantly at him, told him that Damek would call in later that morning.

  “He said nothing of any visit to me,” said the poor man, in some confusion. I suspected that the previous night he might have told Damek never to darken his doorstep again.

  “But he did say so to me,” said Lina. “And he never breaks his promises. You mustn’t go out this morning; you must stay and say you’re sorry and make friends, or I shall be so unhappy!”

  I did almost laugh when I showed Damek into the sitting room later that morning, for him to discover Lina and his rival bent over the table, talking over plans for the farm. His brows contracted in a frown, and he looked sharply at me, as if this situation were my fault. I would not be bullied by him and met his gaze sternly. For his part, Tibor looked uncertain and embarrassed. Lina, unconcerned by the moods of both men, smiled in welcome and invited Damek to sit down, and so the three of them sat together making stilted conversation for the next quarter hour, until Tibor suddenly remembered an urgent task and hurried out o
f the house. I saw his face as he left and felt sorry for him; he wore the expression of a trapped animal.

  After that, Damek came every day, always leaving at nightfall to play cards with Masko. Sometimes he and Lina went for long walks, although they heeded my pleas about not repeating their adventure in the rain: Damek had at least that much concern for Lina’s health. A strained civility continued between Damek and Tibor, but Damek’s constant presence at the manse began to spark gossip in the village, and I judged it only a matter of time before it reached Tibor’s ears. In short, although there was a truce, I thought that it would not continue long. I told my fears to Lina, but she laughed at them; she said she didn’t care about the opinions of some silly old women and that everyone concerned was perfectly happy, an observation which did not coincide with mine.

  I began also to hear rumors that Masko was losing hugely to Damek; it was said that Damek had a luck with cards that was diabolical. It was about then, I think, that the stories began about his pact with Satan: he had sold his soul, it was said, in return for the riches of the world. After that, his friendship with Masko was no mystery to me: I didn’t doubt that part of his revenge was to strip from Masko the riches that should have been Lina’s. I’m sure Lina knew of his plan, as she never protested his leaving the house and always waved him off with a smile which held an edge of malice. Unlike Damek, who was as rapacious for wealth as any man I’ve met, Lina never cared a straw for money, but she was as invested in revenge against Masko as he was.

  Things continued in this unease for a fortnight or so. Then it happened that Old Kiron, the latest victim in the vendetta, was shot on the hill above the manse. Tibor found his corpse early in the morning and brought the body home on his horse. It was laid out in the front parlor, where no one sat except on formal occasions, until the family could come to claim it. Kiron’s son arrived a little later, pale and speechless, with his wailing sisters. They were escorted by Damek, who had met them on the pathway. Lina refused to leave her room until the body was gone, as it is bad luck for a pregnant woman to see a corpse, and so Damek stood with the family as they wept over the dead man, and helped Tibor to place him on a rough bier, to be pulled home by the family donkey.