The Fifth Doll(7)

Leaving him be, she strode into the barn to finish churning the butter she had started that morning, before her mother had called her in to visit with Roksana and sort through the wedding chest. She pulled up a three-legged stool and began pumping the churn’s handle, her arms and shoulders well acquainted with the exercise. Her thoughts danced over the wedding dress she would wear and its matching headdress. The memory of Esfir’s forgotten rag doll surfaced, and her mind easily slid back to Slava’s dolls.

She very much wanted to ask the tradesman about the figures, but how could she broach the subject? The window in that strange room was too high set for her to pretend she’d seen through in passing.

More than anything, she wanted to return to that room and see the faces of the other dolls. To find her own, her mother’s, Feodor’s. To open them and see what treasures lay inside, if any. How long would it take a man to carve and paint such figures? How long had Slava spent crafting them?

Her arms strained, but Matrona churned steadily, pushing past the ache, letting her thoughts settle into the quiet between beats. Never again, she thought with a frown. That was the most likely outcome. She’d never get a chance to study the dolls, not unless she could figure out a way to persuade Slava to display them without revealing her secret. She would have to think on it more.

The butter was stubborn, and by the time it was ready to salt, her back promised soreness in the morning. She stretched out her limbs in the privacy of the barn, then set about milking the cows. By the time she’d finished the evening milking—usually her father’s job—prepared cream for tomorrow’s butter, and set the rest of the milk in barrels, her mother had produced cabbage and potatoes on the table. There was also pork butt, courtesy of Feodor.

As Matrona washed her hands in a pail, her mother asked, “Is your father not with you?”

Matrona shook water from her fingers and wiped them on her skirt as she peered outside. “He wasn’t in the pasture . . .” She hadn’t seen him since that afternoon, she realized.

A knock on the door called their attention. Her mother sniffed. “Now who could that be?”

Slava’s name passed through Matrona’s mind, quickening her pulse. Wringing her hands, she followed her mother back to the front room, only to discover it was not a knock on the door they’d heard, but a knock on the wall beside the brick oven. By her father’s forehead.

“Papa?” Matrona asked, gawking at her father’s body. His hands were pressed against the wall, and he was banging his head repeatedly against it, none too gently.

“Good heavens, Marlen!” her mother exclaimed, rushing up to him. She took his elbow, and Matrona’s father stopped the banging at once, pulling away from the wall, his expression dazed. Matrona hurried to him and pressed a palm to his red forehead, then to the side of his neck. No fever.

“What’s wrong?” Matrona asked.

Her father shook his head, his beard brushing across his chest. “I just . . . I just can’t think my words.”

“What are you rambling about?” her mother asked. “Think your words? You’re sounding like Mad Olia Maysak, you are!”

“Don’t contrary me to that woman!” he shouted with a raised finger, which caused Matrona’s mother to drop her hand from his arm. Matrona’s pulse sped quicker. Her father so seldom raised his voice, and never to his wife.

“Papa, please,” Matrona tried. “You mean, don’t compare you . . . ?”

Her father scratched his ears and shook his head. “Let’s eat. Eat. Let’s eat, and I’ll feel wall again.”

“Well again,” Matrona whispered, and her mother turned to her with lips cinched tight as a barley bag. Sighing, Matrona quieted and led the way to the table, feeling powerless.

Dinner passed in general silence, minus a few grunts from Matrona’s father, who held his fork in a fisted hand almost like a babe would and seemed to have a hard time swallowing. Throughout the meal, Matrona’s mother kept shooting pointed glares at her, silent warnings not to speak. In return, Matrona mouthed, Doctor? but her mother simply shook her head. After her father retired early, leaving them to the dishes, her mother said, “He’ll be fine in the morning.”

He was not.





Chapter 3


Matrona watched her father as villagers came to the house to retrieve milk for their breakfasts. He seemed . . . itchy, the way he twitched and scratched or occasionally rubbed himself against the wall. Because he refused to stay abed, her mother tried to keep him to the back of the house where he wouldn’t be seen. His hands lost their dexterity, leaving him unable to complete the evening milking, which settled the bulk of the work on Matrona. He spoke little, and when he did talk, his words were garbled. At lunch, he refused to eat, instead choosing to stand at the fence on the far edge of the pasture, staring off into the wood like an injured stag that knew a hunter lurked just beyond those trees.

It was then, standing at the back of the house while wringing a cheesecloth, that Matrona thought of it. Slava.

It was an absurd notion, she knew, but the memory of the tradesman’s house nagged at her. Had her father not been well yesterday morning? Had he not spoken to Feodor with perfect intelligence? Feodor had noticed his erratic behavior first, had told Matrona of it as soon as she returned from her uninvited visit to Slava’s blue-and-yellow home. After she’d seen the dolls. After she’d tried to open her father’s.