THE GIRL FROM MALESH
I even told them there. I don't
remember, I said. Would you be able to recognize him? No, I wouldn't. Then
that's too bad, go away, they said to me. We made a report. Just in case,
they said... Why don't you take it, eat it, eat, please.
And you, why don't you eat?
Leave me alone. I just want to look at you. If only there
were somebody to come to me... It was dark, how could I recognize
him? And besides, he disappeared quickly.
He didn't tell you anything? He didn't say anything tender to
you?
Oh, come on. Something tender! I just saw his shadow as he
was leaving...
The girl started crying. She covered her ugly face with her
tears and moaned. Here, she said then, I'm burning inside. She caught hold
of my arm and wouldn't let me go. The pupils of her eyes dilated from the
fear of being left alone now, when she had most hoped that she could talk
as much as she wanted. But now, heaven help us, nobody could stop her.
Anna, you should come, you should come sometimes, she says...
I'm like that when I'm alone, I cry sometimes... It smells of mold, here
it's not something you can clear away, mold is mold, it stinks... Thank God
you're here... Eat, if only for my sake... My father died, didn't you know?
I bathed him alone with my own two hands as if he were just born and I put
him in the grave...
She wipes her tears and sniffles. She has become very ugly,
uglier than she used to be. Only you, she says to me, were good to me. And
your father was a good man, your mother was... Then she stops talking.
I see her in front of me, she sniffles and shudders. In a way
she still looks as she did several years ago, and in a way she doesn't. I
remember when she came to our home for the first time. She sits in one
corner of the kitchen, she doesn't show that she's tired; she's quiet and
she looks at her bowed legs. Sometimes she dares not actually to look at
us, but just to look away secretly to the extent that she can see part of
the floor and our feet swinging under the kitchen table. She was clutching
a small bundle in her lap. Empty, we saw later – there was nothing in it.
It was a piece of cloth she carried with her from the mountains to the
town, maybe instead of a bag, or something similar in her imagination.
At one time we tried to free ourselves from the helplessness
which had come over us and which had been transferred to us from the girl.
My mother tried hard to start a conversation with the girl. She asked her
whether she had any family, a mother and a father, a brother and a sister,
whether she knew how to do housework. She, our future help in the house,
just kept quiet. At one moment my mother got up, she was slightly angry,
she said she was going to make some coffee. Then I saw the girl shrink and
bristle like a small animal ready to defend itself against attack. We all
saw that. My mother had rather delicate nerves, she couldn't control
herself. She began to make a noise with the dishes and to arrange cups on
the table.
The girl's body was wrapped in a cheap dress that didn't
cover her knees, and her feet had been put into rubber shoes. Her face,
like everything else, was ugly. It was exhausted, but not pale. Her lower
jaw was small and drawn in, and her upper teeth fell onto her lower cracked
lip like a rake. My mother used to say later: she looks like a little boar.
Suddenly the girl moved slightly on the chair and sniffed. We
all looked at each other and, honestly, that cheered us up. This was the
first sign of freedom our future help showed. I offered her some coffee. We
looked to see if she would warm up and start moving. But she refused. She
made a little noise between her teeth, which meant she didn't want any. My
mother let out a sigh. Then she took the girl with her to show her where
she was going to sleep, how to turn the tap on and off, how to pull the
chain in the lavatory... when the help got up, we saw that her right leg
was crooked. Her foot was turned out at the joint under the ankle, and when
she walked it was flung right out to the right. I ought to say, too, that
then we noticed that the girl was also a little hunchbacked. Several days
passed, but we never heard her talk.
And now I look at her, and she can’t stop talking. Such an
extreme, such torture. She has a thin line of froth on her lips, she wipes
it away constantly, but it appears again. The mold from this cellar has
also spread to her face, and it has become even moldier and even grayer.
Stay, dear Anna, the girl says to me, stay, she says to me,
let me kiss you. She leans toward me and I get goose bumps; it seemed to me
that her damnation, all her misfortune, will stick to me and my face like a
contagious disease. I want to move away, but I already feel her dry lips on
me like embers. Is it true, she says to me then, that you're going to buy
me a present...? So, she says, let all my enemies know what a friend I
have... You're going to stay, aren't you? Please, stay... What magpie can
live without a tail, and what woman without a man! That's what they say,
and I'm without a tail... Slavka has one, she got married, now she avoids
me like the plague. You remember – what made her better than me? She was
also a maid and ugly. But, no, the girl says, I don't marry, that is my
fate. Oh, it's burning me up. Touch me here, it burns and pricks...
I remember, one morning we had all gathered for breakfast,
and the girl stands bent over in a corner of the kitchen. My father, who
had been away during those first days when the girl came, met her for the
first time that morning. He didn't know about her quiet temperament. He was
a lively man, or, to be exact, other people knew him as such, while my
mother accused him of inconstancy and tyranny. Now my father turned to the
girl and said to her: Where do you come from, girl, he says.
From Malesh, she answered quickly.
How surprised we were then! We felt joy and relief as if
after a victory long fought for. She said the words clearly and loudly, but
rather quickly, as if she had been preparing this answer for a long time.
We admired my father. This came as a confirmation of his reputation for
knowing how to win people over. While we were all in a state of excitement,
my father remained impassive. He addressed her again: Is this the first
town you've been to? – he asks her.
The girl didn't answer. That would be too much after all. She
lifted one of her legs and rubbed the other one under the knee with the top
of her rubber shoe. Is this the first time you've been in town? My father
didn't give up. Not from obstinacy, but simply because he wanted to talk to
her. I've been to Palanka, the girl said, and I saw several dark red lines
deepening on her face. We had nothing more to expect of her, our joy was
complete. We had breakfast as usual, because "the conversation" was
flowing. So, she had been in Palanka at some time, but why that particular
little town far from the mountains where she had lived up to then? That we
couldn't make out.
So that breakfast passed. We had hoped that when we had help
we would all have an easier life. And indeed, there were some signs that
our expectations might be fulfilled. She began to move about the house,
though rather slowly, dragging her crooked leg. Her first task with us was
to look and learn. And we couldn't be sure how she was getting on with this
task. She was always standing somehow at an angle toward whatever object
she ought to be turned toward, and she was anxious to conceal her
curiosity. Nevertheless, that curiosity existed, but it could be discovered
only with great patience. And why did she not turn all of herself, her eyes
and her body, toward what was shown her? Perhaps so as not to give way too
quickly and too easily. Her resistance came somehow instinctively. She
didn't yet know what might happen to her if she turned her face to life. My
mother must have suffered from our coming across this girl, this creature
shrunk in on her misery. She was not sorry that the domestic help was
slightly hunchbacked and had a crooked leg. In fact, my mother would have
forgiven her that, but she could not forgive the fact that the girl did not
distinguish among the various degrees of height on the scale on which
people are arranged. For this girl you could be whoever you wanted, you
could stand low or high, she couldn't see that. My mother wanted to have
her height noticed, and when she would see the indifference on the girl's
face, she took it to heart.
Autumn that year came very late. The summer did not want to
give way at all, so our help would experience some of the warmest days in
our town, which suffered from heat in the summer months like some people
suffer from rheumatism when the rainy season comes. But autumn did arrive,
though after some delay, and husks started to fall from our little walnut
tree in the garden, and the leaves soon followed. The birch, the branches
of which touch one of the western windows of the house, went orange, and
the tops of the little boughs began to drop their leaves, and finally only
bare twigs remained. Then in those days we noticed that the girl was
collecting the leaves fallen on the stairs and balcony and that she often
went down toward the grass in the garden. That was the first thing she
started doing independently. In a short time we had the cleanest yard in
the neighborhood. She did not feel comfortable among the many delicate and
fragile objects in the house, but she did in the garden, which only Andro,
the man who looked after it, had cared about up till that time. Other than
feeling satisfied that we had a garden, we didn't really have anything to
do with it.
At almost the same time, we saw that some other changes were
taking place with our help. That burned-out and darkened look that she had
on her face before was disappearing. Those red veins on her cheeks were
still there, but now they were more expressive on her cleaner face. Her
eyes became larger and brighter. Indeed she was still ugly, but in some
milder way. Her movements also became freer, and when she was by herself,
she relaxed completely. Then she started going to the bathroom more often,
looking at herself in the mirror. Obviously, she herself noticed the
changes and was pleased.
But then again, she lost that freshness. The mold in the room
seems to have gotten into her contorted bones. The tranquillity she started
to show at home disappeared. She looked undernourished, quite worn out.
Why don't you eat? I say. If you haven't got any money you
should ask for some, I can manage to help you. Come to see us sometimes, I
say.
My heart cries to be at your home, she says. What have I
done, leaving you like that. Your father, she says, looked after me when I
was ill. I don't know, she continues, whether I left or your mother turned
me out; I can't say, I can't swear to it.
She put a crust in her mouth and chewed on it for some time.
She had bits stuck on her teeth. She was talking and nervously putting her
finger into her mouth to scratch off the doughy bread, which was also
clinging to her palate.
You don't eat anything, I say to her, you must eat. You think
I don't want to eat, she says. Let someone come for me, eh? No one visits
me, she says. They brought my father and left him in the hospital… they
left him to me... I bathed him as if he were my baby and I put him in his
grave. I've been to the hospital twice. Once I burnt my leg at the factory,
once I had something on my breasts... I saw everybody getting visitors...
They talked. Visitors beside all the beds, but nobody with me... Why do I
go on living... an old maid. You think that's it? I didn't get married? No
that's all over; my soul used to weep before, I had some hope, that's why
it was so easy to leave you, I thought people liked workers more than
maids, but nothing came of it. Am I guilty before God? Then she puts her
hand to her stomach and lets out sporadic moans. She jumps up again in a
moment, catches my hand and presses herself against me, or breaks into
broken and nervous laughter.
While she was with us I often saw her in such changeable
moods. She has been having these changes since then, but now they are more
painful. When she was happy at our home, she laughed awfully loud, almost
screaming. Once I met her in the garden, we talked a little and then she
went away leaping and screaming. In those moments she felt movements in her
shrunken chest, she felt it being filled with air, which was driven out of
her in the form of hilarious yelps. After these attacks of joy I used to
find her bent over in an armchair crying bitterly. I looked at her and
usually said nothing to her, because I knew I would not get a reply. In the
end I wasn't even sure whether she was in pain or not. I know that often
when your heart swells with great excitement, you can burst into tears
immediately afterwards, so as to free yourself of the heavy burden of joy.
And it was difficult to find a visible reason for those cries and that
leaping around at such moments, a reason for the girl's tears. If I asked
her then why she was sad, she usually didn't answer, or only said: ah, why
am I sad! And she had already been doing all the work in the house. She was
not only cleaning, but also cooking. What impressed you particularly was
her fresh mind. She very quickly learned and mastered the words we used in
the house, or those she heard on television. In the evening, when we
gathered around the television set she would also come; she was also
attracted by that world, which is a kind of sadness.
You know, she says to me now, when I should have married? But
you don't know... or you know? I know, I say, you told me. No, she says,
let me finish... They lied to me... Listen, I was going to get married. I
even took my landlady, the old woman, with me to the registry office...
this one, this old woman, the one whose cellar it is, I took her then
instead of my mother. And when we reached the park, he says to me, leave
this old woman, let's go for a walk. No, I say, what walk, are you crazy?
We took a few more steps, getting nearer the registry, he keeps stopping...
He was as ugly as I am, rough, dark, somehow uncultured... Suddenly he
says, I'm going to buy some cigarettes... what a wedding... I was just
lying to myself... he ran away from me. Oh, how I cried... and now it
doesn't matter any more, I don't want to get married, I don't want to, so
there. That's not what's the matter... I'd just like someone to talk to, my
heart's been burning for someone to talk to, to refresh my mind, and nobody
comes here. I don't go to work, I'm out on sick leave, I get sixty
thousand, what do I need it for…?
She began to have difficulty breathing. Her shrunken chest
did not hold much air, and it took a lot of effort for her to inhale air
deeply. She put her hand somewhere on her stomach and kept saying that she
was burning inside, and she didn't stop talking, talking in spurts. At one
time she said she was hot, I'm burning up, she says, I feel that my head is
baking under my hair. I’ll burn up, she says. I got up to open a small
window, a little rectangular hole, just on ground level. I opened it but no
air came in. There was nowhere for it to come from, and outside it was a
heavy, stuffy summer. Why don't you go back to the village, I say, you have
brothers. She didn't answer, she stood for a long time, looking somewhere
absently. Then she said in a low voice, as if talking to herself: they
don't like me. Yes, it does in fact seem that they were indifferent to her.
They never made any inquiries, never wrote her a letter. At our house,
father, when he came back from his journeys, would bring her presents, he
even looked after her when she fell ill. And she felt like giving way to
that tenderness, yet at the same time she knew she did not belong in our
home. My mother did not approve of my father's casual attention toward the
girl, though it was mostly for her sake. And there was conflict. There were
big quarrels in our home. But the real reason for the quarrels was not the
girl. The real reason was that my mother thought she had not succeeded in
life because of my father, who succeeded thanks to her support. We, the
children, my brother and I, were involved in those quarrels too, and the
girl was a witness. My mother, who looked down on creatures such as our
domestic help, could not forgive her having witnessed them. Gradually the
girl seemed to have become a witness to her unsuccessful life, something to
keep reminding her there was something she could not free herself from. It
was a strange connection born in my mother's confused head. She began to
complain constantly about the girl and to torment her with this and that.
She tormented her concerning bills too. She was obsessed by the thought
that she might be stealing from her, that she would take some money for
herself when she sent her to the market. Therefore she kept her by her side
for hours, going over accounts. And the girl did not steal at all, did not
even feel like doing so.
There was at that time something more that drove my mother
crazy. That was the freedom the girl started to display more openly. Now
she wanted to go out, and she looked after her appearance. My mother could
not stand that, she considered it impertinent in such a person as our help.
And just then, when the girl began to pay the greatest attention to her own
wishes, she experienced her greatest disappointments. She, who had been
able to defend herself so far, got confused now. Ah, what sufferings they
were! It happened when she herself had to choose what she wanted. And it
happened that she did not know what to take from those modest things life
offered her. There were men who sometimes followed her up to the entrance
of the house. But she refused them rudely and immediately, as creatures
unworthy of her honesty, and then she gave herself up to futile dreams. The
years passed, and her big dream of finding a husband burned inside her,
constantly melting her heart. She left us, she was our help no more, but a
worker in a factory. Yet her expectations were futile and empty.
At some time during those days before she left, we made a
discovery about her, which still upsets me to remember. In the room where
she slept, in the small sideboard at the head of the bed, we found two or
three bottles, one of them not yet empty. The half-empty one had brandy in
it, and there was a bottle of wine, too. So, it meant the girl had started
drinking and had not stopped to that point.
While she speaks, breathlessly and greedily, I can feel her
breath smelling of alcohol. Why do you drink, I ask her, give up that evil.
Ah, she says, you think I want to drink…? You know how it started? First
only when I felt sad, then because of loneliness. I move around in this
mold, and it's hard to talk to yourself... Then I get drunk and happy, I
talk, I tell myself stories and retell them... If I had somebody, no, not a
man, if I had a friend, a person, anyone, to listen to me, do you think,
you really think, I’d want to drink? She cries out all of a sudden, don't
stand up, she says. But no, I'm not standing up, I don't intend to stand
up, I say. I thought you were getting up, she says. Look, she says, touch
me here, my heart will burst... you see how it's beating?
I really did want to get up, to run away. Damn it, I said to
myself, why did I stop by this creature. I wanted to break away, I even
said something, that I'd had enough, but it was not good enough to get me
out of the trouble coming.
It seems to me that my heart has gone on beating hard since
then, she continued... since the barracks that evening... Who knows, it
could even have been the driver... Oh, if only I had a child to call me
Mommy... I'm burning, touch me, I'm burning under my hair, like live
coals... I told them, I don't remember, I don't know him... I only saw his
shadow when he was leaving. He was big and rough... he caught me and
pressed me against the fence...
She had been coming back from work on the second shift. She
had been passing by the barracks by the shoe factory. A big, rough man had
put his hand over her mouth and pulled her into the dark. Now, she says,
look, touch me here, my heart is beating, my head is boiling. I'll burn up.
If you leave me alone I'll die, she says. There is nowhere to go from here,
this is a grave, and I’m buried... Oh, I've been buried a long time. They
threw soil over me, it happened, but now it's over... You see, get out, go
on, get out if you can! Listen, she says, this didn't even happen, look, if
I were pregnant you could see it... you see my stomach, there is nothing in
it...
Even when I was passing by her cellar, I said to myself:
should I go in or not? It was as if her misfortune was luring me down
there, and it was now sticking to me like a scab. Couldn't I escape all
this? Now I wanted to shake her off, to get rid of her as if she were
something evil. But I felt that it was becoming impossible, more and more
impossible; I found myself enslaved in the horror of her ruined heart.
Sometimes I get drunk, she says, and I feel relieved, but
shadows still come... As soon as I get drunk, here they come, shadows...
all over the walls, like corpses... Sometimes I can hear them making noises
with their mouths. But listen, you haven't come here to deceive me, have
you, you are not his matchmaker, are you?
She pointed her finger at me. It seemed to me that her whole
face and her eyes were distorted. Her lips had long been dry, burning like
a naked flame. She was trying to moisten them with her tongue, but it was
also red-hot. She was not sitting down anymore. She was walking all round
the room, stopping, putting the fingers of both hands into her mouth with a
look of horror, pressing against them with her teeth. Again and again she
kept feverishly telling her terrible story: several illnesses, insults, the
bathing of her dead father, the husband who ran away from the wedding, the
rape, the hunger, and the drinking. But the story would never be completed.
It was becoming incomprehensible. Delirious, broken, and painful. And those
horror-stricken wide eyes that escape the terrible hands of her pursuers...
Translated from Macedonian by Lidia
Arsova-Nikolich
