What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(57)

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DORNI?KA was one of twelve caterers who made meals for the town’s coal miners. Al?běta and Klaudie helped her deliver her carloads of appetizing nutrition; they were well-beloved at the mine and there was much laughter and chatter as they stacked lunchboxes on the break room counter for later. Several fathers had Klaudie in mind for a daughter-in-law and sang their sons’ praises, but most of the others warned her against chaining herself to a local: “Travel the world if you can, Klaudie—go over and under and in between, and if there happens to be a man or three on the way, that’s well and good, but afterward just leave him where you found him!”

Klaudie listened to both sides; these were people who felt the movement of the earth far better than she, and when she visited Dorni?ka she thought of them often as they moved miles beneath her feet. Tremors that merely rumbled through her soles broke the miners’ bodies. They knew risk, and when they encouraged her in one direction or another they had already looked ahead and taken many of her possible losses into account. There was one among them who kept his mouth shut around her, as he was a coarse young man who didn’t want to say the wrong thing. When Klaudie spoke to him he answered “Eh,” and “Mmm,” with unmistakable nervousness, and she liked him the best. Dorni?ka favored candlelight over electric light, and as Klaudie went about Dorni?ka’s living room lighting candles in the evening the wavering passage of light across her eyelids felt just like the silence of that boy at the coal mine. Dorni?ka invited the boy to dinner but the invitation agitated him and he refused it. Al?běta, whose snobbery was actually outrageous, said that the boy knew some things just aren’t meant to be.

“. . . . OR these things just happen in their own time,” Dorni?ka told her, partly to annoy her and partly because it was true.

—

ALL SOULS’ DAY came and the three women went to the churchyard where so many who shared their family names were buried. They tidied the autumn leaves into garland-like arrangements around the graves, had friendly little chats with each family member, focusing on each one’s known areas of interest, and all in all it was a comfortable afternoon. There was a little sadness, but no feelings of desolation on either side, as far as the women could tell, anyway. In a private moment with Tadeá?, Dorni?ka told him about the “wolf” that had punched her and the lump that had grown and been buried, and she told him about Klaudie going on and on about a delicious smell and then suddenly shutting up about the smell, and she told him she’d found telltale signs of interrupted digging beneath her ash tree.

Tadeá?’s disapproval came through to her quite clearly: You shouldn’t have promised that creature anything.

But she couldn’t regret her promise when it had been a choice between that or the “wolf” waiting for the next one.

But how are you going to keep this promise, my Dorni?ka?

Don’t know, don’t know . . .

Tadeá? relented, and it came to her that the very least she could do was dig the lump up herself and put the new wooden chest to use. That night Al?běta took Klaudie to visit old school friends of hers and Dorni?ka did her digging and held the lump up to her face, looking for nibble marks or other indicators of consumption. A dead earthworm had filled the hole she’d poked into the lump, but apart from that the meat was still fresh and whole. In fact it was pinker than before. Klaudie had described the smell as that of yeast and honey, like some sort of bun, so Dorni?ka did her best to think of it as a bun, locked it up in the chest and put the locked chest on the top shelf of the wardrobe beside the hat box that contained her wedding hat. In the days that followed she would often find Klaudie in her bedroom “borrowing” spritzes of perfume and the like. A couple of times she even caught Klaudie trying on her red cape; each time brought Dorni?ka closer to a heart attack than she’d ever been before. But the key never left her person, so all she needed was a chance to build a little bonfire and put the lump out of reach for good.

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THAT YEAR it was Klaudie who chose the St. Martin’s Day goose. The three women went to market and Klaudie asked Pankrác the goose farmer which of his flock was the greediest—“We want one that’ll eat from morning ’til night . . .” All Pankrác’s customers wanted the same characteristics in their St. Martin’s Day goose, but Pankrác had his reasons for wishing to be in Dorni?ka’s good graces, so when her goddaughter’s daughter asked which goose was the greediest he was honest and handed over the goose in question. The goose allowed Klaudie to hand-feed her some scraps of lettuce and a few pieces of apple, but seemed baffled by this turn of events. She honked a few times, and Al?běta interpreted: “Me? Me . . . ? Surely there must be some mistake . . .”

“Thanks, Pankrác . . . I’ll save you the neck . . .” Dorni?ka spread newspaper all along the backseat of her car and placed the caged goose on top of the newspaper. The goose honked all the way home; they’d got a noisy one, but Dorni?ka didn’t mind. When Klaudie said she felt sorry for the goose and wished they’d just gone to a supermarket and picked a packaged one, Dorni?ka rolled her eyes. “This city child of yours,” she said to Al?běta, and to Klaudie: “You won’t be saying that once you’ve tasted its liver.”

The goose quieted down a bit once she’d been installed in Dorni?ka’s back garden. She would only eat from Klaudie’s hand, so it became Klaudie’s job to feed her. It’s well-known that geese don’t like people, so the companionship that arose between Klaudie and the goose was something of an oddity. Klaudie spoke to the goose as she pecked at her feed, and stroked the goose’s feathers so that they were sleek. Dorni?ka harbored a mistrust of the goose, since she pecked hard at the ground in a particular patch of the garden—the patch where Dorni?ka’s infernal lump had been buried. No wonder Klaudie and the goose got along; maybe they had long chats about all the things they could smell. The goose was extraordinarily greedy too, Dorni?ka’s greediest yet: “Eating us out of house and home,” Dorni?ka grumbled when Klaudie knocked on the kitchen door to ask if there were any more scraps.