Lapvona(11)

‘Bad boy,’ she said. ‘Help me up.’

Marek lifted Ina up off the floor as best he could. They shuffled together toward the bed.

‘Take off my dress,’ Ina said, standing before him. Marek lifted the scratchy brown fabric, revealing the old woman’s small, childlike legs, her swollen knees, her crumpled torso. ‘Tell me, Marek,’ she said. ‘Why did your father beat you this time?’

Marek liked to make a better story than the truth for Ina. ‘I kissed the bandit in the pillory.’

‘And why did you do that?’

‘So that father would beat me.’

‘Child of pain, don’t you know the man is bent on cruelty? He used to suck me dry and then some, my nipples would bleed, and then he’d suck some more.’ This was true. Of all the babes Ina had nursed, Jude had been the greediest.

‘Is my father a good man?’

‘He’s good, yeah,’ Ina said flatly. ‘Why do you always do things to make him angry?’

‘So that I can come to you.’

‘You like my pity?’

‘Yes, Ina.’

‘Lie down on the bed.’

Marek lay down. Ina smiled and did a little dance. She was not without humor. Marek smiled and laughed at the absurdity of her body. It was something like the absurdity of his own. They were both small, Marek disfigured by birth, his spine hinged forward so that his little shoulder blades stuck out from his back like sharp wings. He looked like a bird. Ina was small from age, her spine bent and her chest caved in toward her pelvis. Her loose breasts were more like flaps than breasts. Her nipples hung like little pebbles. She lay down next to Marek, fitting easily into the space left by his body on the bed, her head above his on the hay pillow. Marek curled up, took her breast into his mouth, and sucked. His mouth had stopped bleeding, but the cuts in his gums and tongue were sore, and his jaw ached as he drew the nipple into his throat. But soon the sucking soothed him away from his pain and he was adrift, and so was Ina. They stayed like that, Marek’s saliva dripping from the corners of his mouth like Ina’s milk used to. A bird sang through the open doorway. ‘Someone is coming down the hill,’ it sang, but Ina didn’t move. She was not going to interrupt the moment with alarm. Marek lifted his head.

‘Hush and suck. It means nothing to you, just a pretty song.’

Marek nodded and hushed and sucked. He felt at home. He knew every inch of Ina’s body by heart: her face like a desiccated apple, her large drooping ears, her pale and tender scalp, the billow of white hair fixed stiffly on top. He knew her breasts, of course, and her arms, and her wrinkled belly. Ina’s pubis was covered in thin white hairs as soft as fine grass. She looked like an angel to Marek. He sucked some more, softer with his mouth, and moved his tongue back and forth over the hard little nipple, hoping it would bring Ina some pleasure. If he did it right, Marek knew, her pubis would pulsate and emanate a smell that Marek could only identify as orange blossoms and pine. He had tasted it once, had asked Ina could he suck the milk from there as well, and Ina said yes. But never again. She said it wasn’t good for Marek’s health to suck from there. ‘Maybe when you are older,’ she said. But he had sucked enough then for Ina to lie shivering on the bed, drained in the black light of her blindness. Never again. She cared too much for the boy to so abuse him.

Now she thought of Agata, her woe and petulance. Wordlessly, the girl had begged Ina to rid her of the babe inside her, as if there were some fantastic future for her if only she could stay flat bellied and young. Ina resented Agata’s fear of motherhood. She didn’t have a high opinion of the girl. The birds had told Ina about Agata, tongueless and wandering the woods. The birds thought, perhaps, that Ina would take pity on the girl. They told her the whole story: Agata had found her way to Lapvona from her bandit village in the west after being impregnated by her own bandit brother. When her father had found out, he had cut out her tongue and banished her as a whore. Cruel, yes. And what bad luck later to have been captured by Jude, an insatiable dog if ever there was one. But Ina thought Agata wasn’t very brave to have been so horrified by her expulsion. Ina had survived her expulsion, after all. And she hadn’t fallen into the arms of any man along the way.

It had been Ina’s idea to tell Agata to go up to the nunnery when she showed up in the cold night, bleeding through her skirts. ‘They’ll suck the blood right out of you,’ Ina had said, and pointed up to the hill where the abbey was. And there she went and stayed for all these years. Ina didn’t tell Jude or Marek where Agata had gone.



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*

Marek wandered home now, taking the long route through the valley, his heart beating slow and strong after his time in Ina’s arms. His jaw still ached, but with a sweetness attached to the pain now, and not just the pounding of his father’s fury, which was a different flavor, like hot stone. The afternoon sun was high. The heat in the air made Marek feel dizzy and his vision spotted with white. He paused under an oak tree to cool himself and further delay his return to Jude, who he predicted would be suffering the contradictions of his feelings: disgust and remorse for having beaten Marek so badly. Maybe one day Marek would be big enough to push Jude away. He could imagine toppling him to the ground and pressing a knee on his chest, bashing his head against the ground. That would be something.