Lapvona(9)

One day she found a cave hidden by a willow, and this became her home for decades. During that time, Ina became an expert in survival, listening to the birds who loved her. She lived for years off mushrooms, wild apples, eggs, and rain. Comfortably, almost happily. She built fires, slept curled up with the darkness in heaps of willow leaves, steeling herself from anything outside but the birds, who sang her songs and picked the mites from her hair. She didn’t think about people or her past, only the movement of air and the shadow of sound it carried. Quite often, she heard the bleating cries of babes.



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When she was in her forties, something dripped from her nipple. She didn’t notice it at first. Having abandoned her vanity at such a young age, she had felt her breasts were relics of a past life; she would never need them. The substance weeping from her nipples was such a surprise at first, she thought they were misdirected tears and tasted the secretion. It was not salty, but sweet and creamy, but with the nuttiness of the scent of her own skin. Milk, she understood it to be, had filled her bosoms. Was she a victim of divine conception, she wondered, remembering for the first time in years the story of Jesus Christ the Lord and Savior? She remembered one image in particular, after the Crucifixion: Jesus, bloodied and dead, falls into the arms of Mary. Her nipples hardened thinking of that embrace, and her breasts ached. But she couldn’t remember whether Jesus embraced Mary who was His mother, or Mary who was His lover. Father Vapnick had told the story many times when she was little. She touched her breasts and let the milk squirt out into her cupped hand. She squeezed and squeezed until her palm was full and warm, and she drank it. And then she bent her neck and lifted her breast to her mouth—she was thin enough that her bosoms had no real integrity, were just bags of fluid. She nursed herself. She drank. It was a nourishing sup. She was not at all embarrassed to do it. And then, miraculously, the black light faded. She regained her vision, not perfectly, and only temporarily, but she could see enough to remember the world as it had appeared to her as a child, and to recall her longing for society. It lasted only a few minutes. This was what led her, eventually, to reenter Lapvona, however on the fringe she would stay. Day by day she nursed herself and ventured down bit by bit to the village, wondering all along if she now somehow held in her womb the Christ Child, though it never grew or came.

In the many years she had been away, everyone she’d known in Lapvona had died. New people filled the village and nobody recognized her. They only saw a nude, wiry woman with heavy bosoms, her hair matted and full of leaves and twigs, her skin covered in dirt. They assumed she was a refugee from a village ransacked by bandits.

‘How old are you?’ a young man asked her.

It hurt her throat to answer, she hadn’t talked in so long. ‘I don’t know.’

To Ina’s surprise, the people of Lapvona didn’t reject her. On the contrary, they treated her as an elder, and many villagers volunteered food and clothing. Ina accepted their hospitality and found herself soon well employed as the village wet nurse. She moved into a foxhunter’s cabin in the woods. People saw her arrival as prophetic. There had been a blight on the farms in recent years, and from the resulting malnutrition, the mothers could not produce milk to feed their babes. It was as though Ina’s bosoms had heard their cries. Many babies would have died that year had it not been for her milk. In the years that followed, she was very useful to the women, and in turn, the women became more useful to the men. A child could nurse on Ina while its mother worked in the field. Sometimes Ina resented this turn in her life and missed the freedom of her cave. At other times, she felt that her milk gave her life meaning, made her human again, and she enjoyed the villagers’ dependency on her gift, remembering the past generation that had abandoned her in her grief and suffering. She felt, in some small way, that she had recovered a sense of family. ‘Maybe some of me will get into these babes,’ she thought. ‘And so they will all be mine.’

Ina bounced the babes on her knees, fed two at a time in the gentle light through the trees. Nursing continued to have a miraculous effect: for a few minutes after her milk was drained, she regained her eyesight, and could see beyond shapes and colors to every cobweb and scuff of dirt. She used the minutes of vision to go outside and watch the wind in the trees and the birds fly overhead and the bright green moss and wild lettuce, everything. Sometimes, she would close the babes in the cabin and wander through the woods, looking for glimpses of herself in puddles or on a flat rock that she urinated on, anything to tell her what she looked like on the outside. She did this over and over with the babes, her breasts filling soon after they were emptied—she closed the babes inside; she went out. She picked herbs and listened to the lessons of the birds in how to identify the medicinal qualities of each flower and grass and shrub and fruit. She experimented on babies who had colic or rashes or fever or lameness. She also practiced eating certain plants—calendula and comfrey, catnip, fennel—to see how the infusions into her milk could affect the babes’ moods. She developed a tincture for herself that enhanced her vision. It was Euphrasia and mint. She ate valerian to keep the babes asleep longer.

The mothers brought her food and clothing, spoke kindly, offered her puppies from their litters, kittens, flowers. They thought her milk would be more nutritious if she was happy. Ina could have made friends with these women, but she was only comfortable with the babes. She had been hurt too badly to trust anyone grown up. She didn’t like to go to town. The plot of land on which her family’s house had once stood had been split up and taken over, replotted. The old mulberry tree had burned and died and been cut down to a stump and was now used as a place to ax firewood. The village reminded Ina too much of what she’d lost, and there was no herb that could heal her loneliness. When she asked the birds what to do, they answered that they didn’t know anything about love, that love was a distinctly human defect which God had created to counterbalance the power of human greed.