Black Spring (31 page)

Tibor never knew of Damek’s visit; for better or worse, we were all of us too afraid to tell him something that would only add to his distress. Lina never recovered consciousness, and she died at midnight, with Tibor weeping at her side.

Afterward I threw open the shutters to let in the fresh air, as the room was stifling and full of sour vapors. The night sky was still and clear: the snow had stopped falling at last, and the whitened Plateau swept away before me to the mountains, a long, glimmering slope under the dark sky. The moonlight shafted in through the casement and silvered Lina’s face with an unearthly beauty. For a wild moment I was sure that she was only sleeping, that the past few days had been but a nightmare from which I had now woken, and that the next day I would be scolding her as usual and making her breakfast. But it passed, as every moment does, and I saw how still she was, how her eyelashes no longer fluttered on her cheek nor her breath lifted the tendrils of her loose hair. It was only then that I understood she was dead.

T
hat was a bleak winter, with the household in mourning and Lina’s body kept frozen in the preserving shed, for the ground was hard as iron and she could not be buried until the spring thaw. I washed her and arrayed her in her favorite dress and crossed her arms on her breast and placed her father’s crucifix around her neck so she might be buried with it. Despite the bitter cold, which preserved her body in the icy air, Tibor spent many hours in the shed. I also suspect that Damek made his own visits; although none of us saw him come or go, the snow betrayed that someone from the village visited the shed.

The events of the previous months left me exhausted and sad and without hope for myself or anyone else. I went through that winter like one of those automata you can see in the southern cities. I performed my duties as required, but I thought I would never smile again; I could only see a black spring before me, with no expectation of renewal.

I missed Lina more than I can say. The house seemed strangely pregnant with her absence; it was as if she had merely stepped out for a walk and might return at any moment. I couldn’t rid myself of the expectation that I would hear her voice summoning me the next minute, or that I might see her rounding a corner on some mundane errand. Sometimes I even saw her, a slight form standing under the cypress outside, or vanishing from a room that I had entered. In this I wasn’t alone: Irli claimed that she saw her in the bedroom where she died, as clear as day, and Tibor came downstairs one morning white with shock and said that he had woken to find Lina leaning over him, her hair brushing his face.

I was not surprised that Lina, so unquiet in life, should be a restless spirit. Unlike the others in the manse, I didn’t fear these hauntings — perhaps by then I was beyond fear — but they made me sadder than ever. It seemed to me a further injustice that even death could not bring Lina peace.

The thaw came with all its attendant inconveniences, and I found myself busier than ever, which in its own way was a comfort. The first task was Lina’s burial. The priest initially refused to accept her into the church cemetery, saying that she was a damned soul and ought to be buried at a crossroads like a suicide, but Tibor railed against him with such uncharacteristic fury that he was forced to relent. Her grave may still be found in the Kadar family plot, next to her father’s. Her married name has been obliterated from the headstone, which merely proclaims the name LINA and the dates of her birth and death. Surely only Damek could be so offended by that name as to take the trouble to chip it out, but the true source of the desecration remains a mystery, as the gravestone was defaced when Damek was far away in the South. Master Tibor replaced the headstone a few times, but at last this silent battle over a name seemed pointless to him, and he left it as it was.

Damek himself left Elbasa for the South as soon as travel was possible. After his departure, we saw no more apparitions in the manse, and life began to settle into a domestic routine. Although Damek was in regular contact with the employees on his estate, as until recently he was always strict about the care of his properties, he continued as an absentee lord for many years.

We heard nothing at all from either the wizards or the king. Lina’s death contented their desire for revenge, I supposed, and they preferred to forget about her altogether. With the death of the Wizard Ezra, there also came the end of the vendetta. Perhaps the wizards judged that Elbasa had suffered enough, or perhaps they were alarmed by their colleague’s death, or perhaps the cycle of revenge had run its length; in any case, once a new wizard was appointed, the proper restorations were made, and representatives from Skip and Elbasa met at the border and formally declared peace. With this shadow removed, it was as if the village were reborn: a new life seemed possible.

So the days widened and the early flowers bloomed, and slowly I began to feel less desolate. On one of the first warm days, I decided to beat the carpets, which had become musty and close over the winter months, and with Irli’s help I had carried them out and hung them on the washing lines. I remember that I was stretching my back after the labor of carrying the heavy rolls when I saw Zef standing by the gate. He bore in his arms an enormous bunch of spring flowers that he had gathered for me.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I blinked and looked again, but there he was, as real as the gatepost next to him. He was a handsome man in those days: his hair was as brown as coffee and his eyes as blue and mild as the skies of high summer. As he stood strong and sturdy in the pale sunlight and laughed at my astonishment, I am sure no angel could have looked more beautiful to my eyes. I stood still as a stone, unable to speak: I had been all ice, and that minute my soul broke open, as if my feelings were a river in flood. I found I was not so numb after all, and that I could do more than smile: I laughed for sheer joy, even through my tears.

Our courtship was brief: we had already spent too much time apart and were each impatient, as all young people are, to reach our bliss. He spoke and I consented; the rest was a matter of practical decision. I was reluctant to leave the manse, and I approached Tibor and asked him to employ Zef as a groom, to which he gladly assented. We were married in the autumn, once the time of mourning was over.

I can’t pretend that my happiness was unalloyed; the events of the previous year had left their mark, and I still mourned Lina’s death. I felt older than my years, as if I had lost forever an innocence that until then I hadn’t known I possessed. Sometimes I wished fiercely that Lina could have had the peace that I had found, although at other times I wondered whether her restlessness meant that, even should she have lived, she would never have found content. How do we measure such things? My love for Zef was neither star-crossed nor tragic, and our marriage concerned no one but ourselves. Perhaps I never suffered the ecstasies that possessed Lina, but I believe that, in my own way, I felt no less deeply, and I have certainly been happier in my life.

It seems wrong that there is so little of interest to say about happiness. The next fifteen years were the most content of my life, and yet are soon told. There were sorrows: my mother died a few years after Young Lina’s birth, which caused me much grief. At around the same time, Zef and I accepted that we were fated to be childless. After an initial sadness, I found that I was very content as I was: I liked my work, and I was loved by a good man, and that seemed to me to be very sufficient. If I had married another man, things would have been very different: I knew of women who had been sent from their husbands for not bearing a son. As with all things, Zef followed his own mind. He said that if God had decided not to send us children, who was he to argue? In any case, he said, it meant that he had me all to himself.

This wasn’t entirely true, as the chief care of Young Lina fell to us, and in truth we loved her as if she were our own. By winter the baby was old enough to be weaned and she was brought to the manse. Of course we wondered — not without anxiety — if she would inherit her mother’s violet eyes, but in a few months we could lay our fears aside: her eyes were like her father’s, brown and soft as a milch cow’s. I supervised her growth through her childish maladies and mishaps with all a mother’s pride and anxiety and watched her grow into a sweet, biddable girl. She had none of her mother’s willfulness and almost all of her beauty: it was as if she united the best features of both her parents.

Tibor was never the same after Lina’s death. Ever after there was a delicacy in his constitution which expressed itself in periods of melancholy. After an initial period of indifference, Young Lina became the darling and consolation of her father’s heart, and her innocent play could rouse him out of all but the worst of his dejections. He ran the manse with a farmer’s sense and, barring the ups and downs of normal life, we all prospered. Young Lina’s sunny nature seemed to make up for the evils that had afflicted her mother, and we all believed that the curse of the Kadars had at last burned itself out.

I
was, of course, reckoning without Damek. When Lina was fifteen, Damek returned to live in the Red House. As ever, he told no one of what he had been doing for the past fifteen years, although from scraps of gossip that came my way over the years I understood that he had worked himself into the highest affairs of the country.

I couldn’t regard his return without trepidation and was relieved when it seemed that he was, if anything, disposed to avoid the manse. His presence stirred old scandals that had long lain dormant, and some reached Lina’s ears. I was forced to tell her some of her mother’s story, which up to then I had kept secret. I carefully culled what I told her, but she listened wide-eyed, excited that she had such a romantic history. I’m sure that she supplemented the little I related with accounts from her friends in the village, which were no doubt exaggerated and highly colored. She was of an age to fill her mind with penny novels that her indulgent father purchased for her from the South, and her imagination was set afire to think that she was the daughter of a witch who had been cursed by the king himself. I couldn’t approve her nonsense, but at the time it seemed harmless enough.

It wasn’t long before I met Damek in the village. He greeted me with neither enthusiasm nor dislike, seeming rather indifferent to my salutation, and showed none of the intimacy that had marked our relationship many years before. I studied him curiously: somehow he was changed, although outwardly he seemed little different from the last time we met. His eyes were hard and calculating, and there was that in his manner — a coldness that seemed like the obverse of the fierce passion I had once seen in him — which made me keen to go no further in our relations than common civility. I was puzzled why a man of affairs as he had reportedly become should consider living in an isolated village, and prompted by curiosity, I asked him why he had moved here. His reply was at first no more than I expected.

“What business is it of yours?” he said. “Surely a man can live in a house he owns without exciting impertinent speculation?”

“Of course he may,” I said, feeling the rebuke. “But you must own that there is little here to interest a man of your tastes.”

“What would you know of my tastes?” said he, and I thought that was that and prepared to take my leave. But he had not finished: he gave me a narrow look which made me feel very uncomfortable and then asked me why I had remained in this place, when I was so clearly not cut of the same cloth as my neighbors. I was taken aback by his question and answered confusedly, saying that I had ties of blood and habit that made it dear to me.

“I too have ties of blood,” he said then with sudden intensity. “If not habit, blood. Everything that ever happened to me, happened to me here. There are ties that call, whether a man likes it or not . . .”

I shuddered: for a moment I saw beneath his mask of indifference, as if I had glimpsed a monstrous creature at the bottom of a dark pond. I remembered with a vivid clarity our last meetings, when I had been sure he was out of his mind. But Damek swiftly recollected himself, and the mask was resumed; he gave me a mocking look, nodded, and passed on.