Lapvona(39)

Dibra didn’t like nuns. She didn’t like their modesty. Once she had married Villiam, she refused to wear a cap over her head. Her long blond hair was wild and curly and bristly, and she liked to feel it swing as she walked. Modesty was boring, Dibra thought. Perhaps this was something she had absorbed from her husband—an irritation with anything too fussy in its purity. Marek was guilty of that fussiness. Dibra disliked him for so many reasons. Everything about him was a needy, arrogant demand for pity. He always looked up at Dibra with big, sad eyes, expecting what—a warm embrace? Forgiveness? She had nothing to return but cold disgust. He was scared of her, and she was glad. He had grown a bit since he’d arrived, but he was still so stiff, so stupefied by the food and drink every time they sat together at the table, his hands trembling to pick up his cup, as though he weren’t strong enough to lift it. Dibra could hear the fears in his head: ‘God, forgive me for this indulgence.’ The idiot. She was an atheist herself. She had once felt that there was a power in the way things happened, a kind of fatedness that she depended on, an order to life. After Jacob’s death, she lost that faith completely. Life was chaos. There were no rewards. Best to make the time tolerable, at least. It never occurred to her that her philandering might have inspired God’s wrath. How could a little love cause such a horrendous tragedy?

Although Dibra got irritated by Villiam’s gregariousness, she didn’t mind the entertainment he demanded. She especially liked the singer from Krisk. His lullabies were the best. She hadn’t been sleeping well lately either, and wouldn’t sleep at all now, not until Luka was back home safe and the singer was with him.

‘Let’s eat,’ Villiam said, sauntering feebly into the room. The priest put down his drumstick. The nun lifted her head. ‘Come, come,’ Villiam said, as Clod pulled the lord’s chair away from the long table. Villiam made a great fuss because the pillow wasn’t plumped enough. ‘Clod? How is it possible?’ Clod beat the pillow until it was puffed up, then Villiam sat on it, like a dying king on his throne, but he wasn’t dying. He was simply an insect. That was how he’d been since Dibra had married him. He moved like a spider walking on its hind legs. Perhaps this was why he preferred Marek to Jacob, she thought. Marek was also feeble. Stunted, his eyes hollow, his body always perched as though he were shirking away from a fist swinging toward him. And Villiam liked Marek for his ugliness. Just a look at the boy’s face elicited a response. Jacob had been too handsome, too staid. Marek trembled, vulnerable, spittle at the corners of his lips, a scar on his chin, his red hair so terrifically red, like it had been dyed a thousand times in madder. Maybe Marek’s real father used to beat him, Dibra thought, but she felt no pity or compassion for the boy. No pity or compassion would she ever feel. Not for Marek, or for anyone.

Villiam sat and immediately reached for a leg of lamb. ‘Sit there, sister,’ he said to the nun, pointing with the meat to the chair across from the priest. Father Barnabas was licking his fingers—he never waited for Villiam to sit before he started eating. The servants brought the capon roast and twisted bread.

Dibra sat silently at the other end of the table, trying to block out Villiam’s face with the candelabra so she would not have to watch him eat. Villiam was fine with that. Dibra wasn’t looking her best. She was underdressed for the occasion, and she didn’t care. It was still too hot to wear the customary dining gown, so she wore a simple yellow kirtle of thin linen. Her armpits were wet and clammy, the fabric tight around her bosom, which seemed to swell unusually on the left, as though her heart had become enlarged. Ironically, she felt her heart had gotten weaker and smaller recently. She was not self-pitying, however. ‘Women have lost children since the dawn of time,’ she told herself. She imagined women everywhere, all the stories she’d heard of children going missing, or children dying of fever or pox, babies dying in their cradles, strangled by their own lungs. If those women could go on, so could she. But only barely. She had nothing to distract her from her grief, nothing of any consequence—no needs or habits or work or interests. There was Luka, but his loyalty made him boring, actually. Until this moment. He was never late.

‘Is the singer not joining us?’ Dibra asked, masking her worry as mild curiosity.

‘He must be lagging on his journey back from Krisk,’ the priest answered.

‘It has never taken so long to fetch the singer before,’ Dibra said.

‘Well, today it has.’

‘The horseman left at dawn as usual?’

‘Who cares, Dibra?’ the priest said. He was deflecting in order to spare Villiam her distress about this other man, not knowing that Luka was good as dead. ‘And anyway, we have a nun instead.’

‘Yes, thank God for the nun,’ Villiam said and raised his cup.

‘Give me a nun any day,’ the priest said and raised his cup, too.

‘Of course,’ Dibra said and raised her cup.

Agata seemed to blush and lifted her cup. They all drank.

‘What is your name, sister?’ Dibra asked.

Agata opened her mouth, pointed inside, then waved her finger back and forth. The nun’s tongue had been cut out, they all saw.

‘Is that what they’re doing to girls now, Father? Cutting out their tongues?’ Dibra asked.

‘I don’t think so, no. She is not typical.’