I was at a loss to answer her, as I had wondered the same thing myself, so I just stroked her hand and said nothing. She soon continued her anguished meditation. “Nothing would destroy Damek . . . not even me. But could I live with that? I am not that strong — I hunger for gentleness . . . It is like being loved by a wolf, who only knows love as a devouring . . . and yet, what am I without him? I need him. It isn’t love — it’s worse than that. What could I do? What could I do . . . ?”
She trailed off and was silent for so long that I thought she had fallen asleep. Then she struggled against her pillows and sat up. “Where is Damek?” she demanded in a voice that was suddenly preternaturally clear. “Is he dead too? Why have I not seen him for so long? If he’s dead, you must tell me, you mustn’t lie, I must know at once!”
I assured her that he was as alive as I was and was only kept away by the snowfalls, but nothing I could say would calm her fears. She became more and more agitated over the next half hour, and I saw the hectic flush heightening in her cheeks and became afraid. She clutched my hand and wept and called out for Damek and swore that if she did not die, she would kill herself so that she might join him in hell. I tried to make her lie down, but in her delirium she was too strong for me and succeeded in hauling herself out of bed and stumbling to the window. Little enough was visible outside, but she pointed and cried out that she saw Damek’s ghost walking through the snow, and then she fell to the floor. She was so weak that she could not pull herself up. I called for help, and Irli and I had just succeeded in placing her back in her bed when the cook came running into the room, out of breath, to tell me that Damek was downstairs in the kitchen and wished to speak to me.
I was astonished by the news — it was still snowing too heavily to walk safely anywhere. But I had no time to answer, for Lina overheard the whispered communication. She turned on me like a wild thing. “Damek? Here? Bring him here at once!”
“Hush now, Lina. You are too ill to see anyone!” I said.
Her nostrils whitened with rage. Fury brought back her strength, and she had swept off the bedclothes and was making for the door before I could stop her. She refused point-blank to lie down again until I had promised to fetch Damek, and such was the extremity of her agitation that I was thrown into a panic. A visit from Damek could only worsen her condition, but denying his presence was equally dangerous. And if I did admit Damek, what should I say to Tibor?
I was still hesitating when Damek himself entered the room, closely followed by the cook, who was wringing her hands helplessly, having failed to stop him from coming upstairs. He had thrown off his coat, but his hair was starred with snow, which was melting in the heat of the house, and his trousers were wet to his thighs. When he saw Lina, all the color fled from his face; then he attempted a smile, but it was more a grotesque grimace than any expression of joy. He was clearly struck forcibly by her condition. It was as if his perception wakened my own and I observed her afresh through his eyes; I saw, with a clutch of the heart, that she was a shadow of the shining termagant who had thrown Damek out of the house only a few days before. She stood holding onto the bedpost, a frail, tiny figure, her hair sadly tangled, her nightdress disordered. Her face was absolutely white except for her lips, which had a bluish tinge. When she saw Damek, she froze, and her eyes grew luminous and blurred with unshed tears.
“Lina,” he whispered, and he grasped her hand and kissed it. “What have you done to yourself? What have you done?”
Lina leaned her head on his shoulder and clasped his neck, and her shoulders shook with sobbing. I turned and hissed for the others to leave — I did not want strangers in the room, even if Damek and Lina were oblivious to their presence. I did not dare to leave myself, and yet I felt all the discomfort of staying.
“I was sure you were dead,” said Lina at last. “Did I dream it? It was too cruel, for you to die a second time! Surely I have grieved for you enough?”
“Not enough, Lina! I swear, I would wish you a lifetime of grieving, if it meant you were alive.”
“You know that I am dying.” Lina said it with indifference. “I think I do not care anymore. What good was I to anyone? But I am still afraid . . .”
Damek groaned and buried his face in her hair. “You are so cruel, Lina. You can’t die and leave me all alone. I swear, I do not pity you. You chose this, and you have killed me as surely as you killed yourself. I will never forgive you, not as long as I draw breath in this world . . .”
Lina gasped as if she were in pain, and I sprang up with a cry. Damek turned and gave me a look that set me straight back in my chair.
“You’re strong, Damek. You don’t understand what it is not to be strong enough,” said Lina. “How could you understand? And now I will die; it is too late anyway. Death came for me this morning, and Anna chased him away, but I can see him waiting in the corner . . .”
She began to cough violently, and Damek patted her back until she recovered and then lifted her up in his arms and wildly kissed her face. He was now weeping openly, and he held her so roughly that I saw his fingers imprinting bruises on her white arms, but she made no protest and simply tightened her arms about his neck.
“Death hurts so much less than birth,” she said. “Why is that so, Damek? Why does living hurt so much? Come, you must not cry like a little boy. Come, Damek, I do not think it is sad. Remember how I said I would be part of the sky and the earth, and every flower will be my face?”
“I don’t want any flowers,” said Damek brokenly. “I only want you, Lina. Only you.”
I saw with alarm that she was drooping as if she had fallen into a faint, but Damek grasped her to his breast and snarled at me when I dared to come close. I thought in truth he was a wild beast then; he was bereft of human speech, and his eyes rolled in his head as if he were in a death agony himself. Then he sat on the bed, still holding her close to him, and I feared at that moment she was dead. Damek wouldn’t listen to anything I said or permit me near her, and so violent were his responses that I became frightened and left the room.
I sat downstairs for some minutes, trying to gather my wits, but I was so worried I soon went upstairs again. Damek sat on the bed with Lina in his arms as before, but the fit of fury had passed. He looked deathly tired.
“She has fainted,” he said. It seemed a struggle even for him to speak. “Look, she still breathes . . .”
“Aye,” said I, attempting to hold in my anger. “And no thanks to you, Mr. Damek. She needs sleep and care and none of this fuss and talk of dying, if she is to see another day. I think you must go now.”
He sighed heavily and then placed Lina in her bed and tucked the blankets around her as tenderly as if she were a child. I rushed to her and checked her forehead: the skin was dry and burning, and her body was limp.
“What have you done?” I so forgot myself that I shouted. “You have killed her, you selfish fool!”
At this Damek flinched with such an expression of anguish that I was taken aback and wished I had not said those words.
“Selfish, Anna?” he said, and was silent for a time, watching me lave her brow. “She was dying already,” he said at last. “I saw it the moment I walked in this room . . . I’ve seen many people die. I know the signs.”
I shut my ears to him, although the blue shadows gathering on Lina’s face made me fear that he was right. I took her hand and felt for her pulse, which was barely perceptible, and the tears started in my eyes.
Damek touched my arm with a shyness that made me turn around in astonishment, and I looked up straight into his face. For a moment I saw there the stoic boy I once had known, who concealed beneath his impassivity unknown sufferings, and part of me relented. He was neither a beast nor a demon, only a man whose entire being was a wound. A wound may be monstrous, but that doesn’t make him who bears it inhuman.
“I’m sorry, Damek,” I said softly, and his hand tightened convulsively.
“You are not selfish,” he said. “You have the righ
t to judge me, which I give no one else. You have a heart, and you have eyes to see. They are precious rare in this world, Anna, and you mind what I say, because I know. Most people might be made of stone, for all they see and feel. If I am selfish, I am not alone.”
There was a raw justice in what Damek said that I couldn’t but acknowledge, even after everything he had done. He leaned forward and stroked Lina’s hair, and then he kissed her forehead.
“I told her I was nothing without her,” he said. “She never believed me, but I only told her the truth. I was not strong; she was all my strength. If I have killed her, you can be sure I’ll be punished for it every day that I walk on the face of the earth. I am a dead man now, Anna.”
I couldn’t speak, so I merely nodded. He lightly kissed the top of my head and quietly left the room. I didn’t see him again for a very long time.
Tibor never knew of Damek’s visit; for better or worse, we were all of us too afraid to tell him something that would only add to his distress. Lina never recovered consciousness, and she died at midnight, with Tibor weeping at her side.
Afterward I threw open the shutters to let in the fresh air, as the room was stifling and full of sour vapors. The night sky was still and clear: the snow had stopped falling at last, and the whitened Plateau swept away before me to the mountains, a long, glimmering slope under the dark sky. The moonlight shafted in through the casement and silvered Lina’s face with an unearthly beauty. For a wild moment I was sure that she was only sleeping, that the past few days had been but a nightmare from which I had now woken, and that the next day I would be scolding her as usual and making her breakfast. But it passed, as every moment does, and I saw how still she was, how her eyelashes no longer fluttered on her cheek nor her breath lifted the tendrils of her loose hair. It was only then that I understood she was dead.
That was a bleak winter, with the household in mourning and Lina’s body kept frozen in the preserving shed, for the ground was hard as iron and she could not be buried until the spring thaw. I washed her and arrayed her in her favorite dress and crossed her arms on her breast and placed her father’s crucifix around her neck so she might be buried with it. Despite the bitter cold, which preserved her body in the icy air, Tibor spent many hours in the shed. I also suspect that Damek made his own visits; although none of us saw him come or go, the snow betrayed that someone from the village visited the shed.
The events of the previous months left me exhausted and sad and without hope for myself or anyone else. I went through that winter like one of those automata you can see in the southern cities. I performed my duties as required, but I thought I would never smile again; I could only see a black spring before me, with no expectation of renewal.
I missed Lina more than I can say. The house seemed strangely pregnant with her absence; it was as if she had merely stepped out for a walk and might return at any moment. I couldn’t rid myself of the expectation that I would hear her voice summoning me the next minute, or that I might see her rounding a corner on some mundane errand. Sometimes I even saw her, a slight form standing under the cypress outside, or vanishing from a room that I had entered. In this I wasn’t alone: Irli claimed that she saw her in the bedroom where she died, as clear as day, and Tibor came downstairs one morning white with shock and said that he had woken to find Lina leaning over him, her hair brushing his face.
I was not surprised that Lina, so unquiet in life, should be a restless spirit. Unlike the others in the manse, I didn’t fear these hauntings — perhaps by then I was beyond fear — but they made me sadder than ever. It seemed to me a further injustice that even death could not bring Lina peace.
The thaw came with all its attendant inconveniences, and I found myself busier than ever, which in its own way was a comfort. The first task was Lina’s burial. The priest initially refused to accept her into the church cemetery, saying that she was a damned soul and ought to be buried at a crossroads like a suicide, but Tibor railed against him with such uncharacteristic fury that he was forced to relent. Her grave may still be found in the Kadar family plot, next to her father’s. Her married name has been obliterated from the headstone, which merely proclaims the name LINA and the dates of her birth and death. Surely only Damek could be so offended by that name as to take the trouble to chip it out, but the true source of the desecration remains a mystery, as the gravestone was defaced when Damek was far away in the South. Master Tibor replaced the headstone a few times, but at last this silent battle over a name seemed pointless to him, and he left it as it was.
Damek himself left Elbasa for the South as soon as travel was possible. After his departure, we saw no more apparitions in the manse, and life began to settle into a domestic routine. Although Damek was in regular contact with the employees on his estate, as until recently he was always strict about the care of his properties, he continued as an absentee lord for many years.
We heard nothing at all from either the wizards or the king. Lina’s death contented their desire for revenge, I supposed, and they preferred to forget about her altogether. With the death of the Wizard Ezra, there also came the end of the vendetta. Perhaps the wizards judged that Elbasa had suffered enough, or perhaps they were alarmed by their colleague’s death, or perhaps the cycle of revenge had run its length; in any case, once a new wizard was appointed, the proper restorations were made, and representatives from Skip and Elbasa met at the border and formally declared peace. With this shadow removed, it was as if the village were reborn: a new life seemed possible.
So the days widened and the early flowers bloomed, and slowly I began to feel less desolate. On one of the first warm days, I decided to beat the carpets, which had become musty and close over the winter months, and with Irli’s help I had carried them out and hung them on the washing lines. I remember that I was stretching my back after the labor of carrying the heavy rolls when I saw Zef standing by the gate. He bore in his arms an enormous bunch of spring flowers that he had gathered for me.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I blinked and looked again, but there he was, as real as the gatepost next to him. He was a handsome man in those days: his hair was as brown as coffee and his eyes as blue and mild as the skies of high summer. As he stood strong and sturdy in the pale sunlight and laughed at my astonishment, I am sure no angel could have looked more beautiful to my eyes. I stood still as a stone, unable to speak: I had been all ice, and that minute my soul broke open, as if my feelings were a river in flood. I found I was not so numb after all, and that I could do more than smile: I laughed for sheer joy, even through my tears.
Our courtship was brief: we had already spent too much time apart and were each impatient, as all young people are, to reach our bliss. He spoke and I consented; the rest was a matter of practical decision. I was reluctant to leave the manse, and I approached Tibor and asked him to employ Zef as a groom, to which he gladly assented. We were married in the autumn, once the time of mourning was over.
I can’t pretend that my happiness was unalloyed; the events of the previous year had left their mark, and I still mourned Lina’s death. I felt older than my years, as if I had lost forever an innocence that until then I hadn’t known I possessed. Sometimes I wished fiercely that Lina could have had the peace that I had found, although at other times I wondered whether her restlessness meant that, even should she have lived, she would never have found content. How do we measure such things? My love for Zef was neither star-crossed nor tragic, and our marriage concerned no one but ourselves. Perhaps I never suffered the ecstasies that possessed Lina, but I believe that, in my own way, I felt no less deeply, and I have certainly been happier in my life.
It seems wrong that there is so little of interest to say about happiness. The next fifteen years were the most content of my life, and yet are soon told. There were sorrows: my mother died a few years after Young Lina’s birth, which caused me much grief. At around the same time, Zef and I accepted that we were fated to be childless. After an initial sadness, I found th
at I was very content as I was: I liked my work, and I was loved by a good man, and that seemed to me to be very sufficient. If I had married another man, things would have been very different: I knew of women who had been sent from their husbands for not bearing a son. As with all things, Zef followed his own mind. He said that if God had decided not to send us children, who was he to argue? In any case, he said, it meant that he had me all to himself.
This wasn’t entirely true, as the chief care of Young Lina fell to us, and in truth we loved her as if she were our own. By winter the baby was old enough to be weaned and she was brought to the manse. Of course we wondered — not without anxiety — if she would inherit her mother’s violet eyes, but in a few months we could lay our fears aside: her eyes were like her father’s, brown and soft as a milch cow’s. I supervised her growth through her childish maladies and mishaps with all a mother’s pride and anxiety and watched her grow into a sweet, biddable girl. She had none of her mother’s willfulness and almost all of her beauty: it was as if she united the best features of both her parents.
Tibor was never the same after Lina’s death. Ever after there was a delicacy in his constitution which expressed itself in periods of melancholy. After an initial period of indifference, Young Lina became the darling and consolation of her father’s heart, and her innocent play could rouse him out of all but the worst of his dejections. He ran the manse with a farmer’s sense and, barring the ups and downs of normal life, we all prospered. Young Lina’s sunny nature seemed to make up for the evils that had afflicted her mother, and we all believed that the curse of the Kadars had at last burned itself out.
I was, of course, reckoning without Damek. When Lina was fifteen, Damek returned to live in the Red House. As ever, he told no one of what he had been doing for the past fifteen years, although from scraps of gossip that came my way over the years I understood that he had worked himself into the highest affairs of the country.