Juniper & Thorn(17)
Men started to come for me. They were freed serfs and the sons of freed serfs, day laborers whose backs were hunched under the weight of their ugly work. They canned beets or washed wool or turned stinking tallow into soap beneath jaundiced factory lights; the happier ones drove trams and carriages or loaded cargo ships in the harbor.
When they came, I hid under my bed or in my wardrobe. I covered myself in the sheet that Papa had thrown over the mirror that never lies. He always found me eventually, and dragged me back down into the sitting room, and held me by the collar of my dress while the men laughed their vodka breath across my face.
Later, in the dark, I blew my shameful secrets through the bars of my mother’s cage as if they were smoke rings, and stroked her soft white feathers. I wondered if she could still think like my mother, or if her mind, too, was a plum that my father’s spell had left out to parch and wrinkle in the sun. I wondered whether her bird-heart still loved me, even if her bird-mind could not. I filled her water dish and cleaned her droppings long after my sisters had lost interest in her, like she was a darling kitten that had grown into an ordinary and ill-tempered cat. I was twelve, and it had been two years since anyone had taken a comb to my hair.
By then, we had no maids or servants left at all. I went up to visit my mother one morning and found her cage empty, the floor of it covered in droppings like banked coals and a layer of white down like new-fallen snow. The door was hanging open.
Despair sank its black teeth into my heart. I cried and cried, so loudly that I woke both my sisters and finally my father, who came lurching up the stairs and told me that my mother had gotten out of her cage and flown away.
“That’s not true,” I said, my nose running. “She wouldn’t have left her mirror or her comb or her bracelet or her daughters.”
“What do you need a bird-mother for? Come downstairs, Marlinchen,” Papa said.
And I did, but first I took the charm bracelet off the boudoir and held it against my chest, cold metal seeping into the valley of my just-budding breasts. A dark red drop on the floor caught my eye; at first I thought it was a button that had come loose from Papa’s coat. But I could see my reflection in it, warped and tiny, a minnow trapped in a dirty gather of rainwater. I felt as if my whole childhood was caught in that drop: my long, matted hair like dust gathering on a bald china doll, my father’s hand around my wrist, my sisters’ beautiful faces, my mother’s shed tail feathers and the seed that her stories had planted in my belly, invisible to everyone but me.
I went downstairs and cooked my father varenyky with a filling that I could not remember making. I was thirteen.
In the days following Sevastyan’s visit, I saw only three clients. Every time I heard someone rattle the gate, my head snapped up to see if Sevas might be standing there, and both despair and relief curled in my belly when he was not. In my mind, I stretched out the short conversation we’d had in Rose’s storeroom into hours, like the last small bit of dough under a rolling pin, until it was so thin that it was translucent when you held it up to the light. I’d committed every single detail to memory: the shadow of his lashes on his cheekbone, his smirk and the arch of his brow, and of course the way he’d said I think it would make me very happy to see your face in the crowd, Marlinchen.
It didn’t matter, of course. I could not leave the house without a bowl of black sand, and Sevas could not enter without being turned into black snakes, like Titka Whiskers. I ate very little those days, and tried to avoid the reaching vines of Papa’s rage.
Three was a lucky number in all the fairy tales, but it was a very bad number in capitalist Oblya when it marked the sum total of the clients I saw in a week. The first was an Ionik dockhand who had an odd rash; Papa feared typhus and sent him on his way without even taking his pestilent rubles, then cast a cleansing spell over the whole house. It was just twenty years since the last pandemic, and if Papa had read the weather omens properly, it meant we were due soon for the next.
The second was a Yehuli skupshchik, a petty buyer, who wanted to know if he would find a wife soon. I did not like to make predictions about matters of the heart; they were too fickle and easily skewed, but he was asking about a wife, not about love. So I told him that his future bride was an enormously tall woman who wore a hat of quail feathers, and he would first be taken by her beauty and her height when he saw her drinking kumys on the boardwalk. I checked his shadow on the wall, but I didn’t see any horns. The Yehuli man left with a spring in his step.
The third was one of my regulars, Fedir Holovaty, a carpenter who survived through odd jobs and a bit of grifting. His palms were always hard and bubbled with yellow calluses, and he was always short a kopek or two, but I liked Fedir so I saw him anyway, and cajoled my father into charging him less than the rest.
In truth, nothing was ever wrong with Fedir, not really. If he had a cough that lingered, he was convinced he had come down with the plague, even though we had not seen a case of it in Oblya or its environs in more than a hundred years; if a gash on his ankle resisted scabbing, he confessed to me in a tight, fearful voice that he thought he might have poisoning of the blood, and that a doctor would have to amputate his leg at the knee. So I did feel a bit guilty about taking any money from Fedir at all, but knowing how much we needed it, I kept letting him come back.
“Thank you very much, Ms. Vashchenko,” said Fedir. This was after I had pinched both of his earlobes and fabricated a vision wherein the pounding of his head was only the result of his flatmate dropping a tankard on him while he slept, and not in fact the portent of a deadly fever, and also wherein he won the next three games of dominoes at his favorite Ionik coffeehouse. “All the other doctors in Oblya charge so much for their work, and most have stopped answering the door when they glimpse me through the letterbox. Dr. Bakay on Nikolayev Street measured my head and told me I had the skull circumference of someone who was a bit simple.”