even in front of those seven oddities on the Kostanšek farm, who most people, when they see them, turn away from and cross themselves.
‘But it’s not my fault! I was forced to do it!’ And so the daughter begins her tearful narrative.
‘One night, after saying my prayers – the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Angel of God – I fell asleep listening to the breathing of my brothers and sisters sleeping next to me. But then, all of a sudden, I wake up. I open my eyes and look out of the window at the moon; it’s glowing with a strange reddish colour and is so big it’s like it’s trying to break into the room. That’s scary enough. But then I go numb with horror when a shadow darts across the glowing moon and covers it in darkness. A moment later, a hideous crone is standing in front of me, and her twisted fingers are reaching for my face and she’s laughing through her jagged teeth. Her hair is all tangled and she’s laughing and laughing and grabbing at me with her crooked fingers. I try to turn away, I really do, but right beside my bed the hag keeps shifting from one foot to the other with a broom between her legs. I want to cry, but nothing comes out of me. Then she takes the broom in her hands like this’ – the girl demonstrates – ‘and does like this.’ And to make clearer what she’s saying, she slides the invisible broomstick between her legs. ‘The old hag is rubbing it up and down and back and forth and back and forth and … Yuck! I’m so disgusted I cover my face with my hands, only my fingers are open just wide enough to see what she means to do with me. The hag keeps rubbing and rubbing until the stick is dripping wet, as if it’s slathered in hot pig’s fat. Then she grabs me, shoves the broomstick between my thighs and, with one hand clutching my body so I can’t move, let alone wriggle out of her grasp, with the other she grips the greasy, slimy stick, and all at once we’re flying through the closed window, right past the picture of the Virgin Mary, who turns her eyes away in shame. Help me, Mary, help me, I sob, but the Virgin only clasps her hands more tightly and sheds a tear, so I realize that if Mary can’t help me, only God can. And I will need God’s help, because wherever I’m flying on this broom, this wild night, it will very probably be hell. And so it was!
‘We go off to a mountain – that one there’ – the girl points through the window at a hill not very far away. ‘There’s a clearing up there where you have a good view down – you can even see our house and our field – and a cold stream runs through it. From the air I see people in the clearing, a little way from the stream, people I don’t know, men and women staring up at the sky as if they’re waiting for us, and – oh, it’s horrible! – they’re all naked, stark naked, with their arms lifted in the air towards us. When we land on the ground, it starts. No order at all, everyone together, like in our pigsty if not worse, doing things with each other that not even animals do, and meanwhile they take me to the middle of the clearing, where a strange altar has been set up. It’s covered in bearskins, or maybe sheepskins, I don’t remember very well since I was shaking all over with fear, and I was also a little dizzy from the broom ride.
‘There they undressed me and poured something awful into my mouth; then they pushed me down on to those foul-smelling skins just as everything around started glowing red. The earth opens up and out flies someone with big horns on his head and a tail on his backside, which he’s whipping left and right like a dog, and there’s a kind of filthy ooze dripping from his mouth. It’s looking bad for me, as bad as it can get, I think, and I’m terrified. The hornèd one is standing over me stomping his hoofs, like this and like this’ – she reaches her arms out towards her father’s face and beats her fists together. ‘Then he opens his mouth up wide, and a long burning tongue hisses out and licks my naked skin, and it stings something terrible. Next, they bring a man over, and the evil one pushes him on top of me and then, dear God, it happens, and it lasts and lasts until the only thing I want – me, a poor girl forced into sin against her will – is to die right then and there, even without confession, even in that vestibule of hell. But suddenly, a ray of wondrous blue pierces the red glow and turns everything around me green, until finally there’s nothing but a
heavenly blue sky. Then a strong wind blows away all those wicked people, all those bodies, and the hornèd one is swallowed up by the earth, just as earlier it had spat him out. In that heavenly light, I’m the only one left in the clearing when an enormous white bird appears, flapping his wings above me and cooing and cooing. “Birdie, oh birdie, who are you?” I ask, and he flies down right next to me, his wing tenderly brushing against me, and he says, “I am the Holy Spirit, dear sinner, a sinner by no fault of your own.” What happened to me next I don’t know, since I woke up in the morning on my own straw mattress and, miraculously, I didn’t have a single flea bite.’
Her father, for some time now, has been holding in his hand
neither a farm tool nor a weapon, but a nearly empty flask of marc brandy. By the time the girl finishes her story, there’s a whip in his right hand, and with his left he tips the last drops out of the flask and then grabs his daughter and starts thrashing and thrashing her. The girl whimpers softly and waits for it to be over, when she catches sight of her mother in the corner, kneeling beneath Mary’s picture and rigidly moving her lips. When the father, teetering, has finished beating her – the drink is affecting his balance, allowing the daughter to avoid a few blows – he shouts, ‘Now get out of my sight and think again about your story. A name … I want a name! … You will tell me a name! And if you start babbling that rubbish to me again, don’t doubt I will tan your hide all the way to kingdom come and that Holy Spirit of yours!’
Aching with pains she then only vaguely feels – the real pain will come later when she’s lying on the hay – the girl, as she leaves the house to go to the barn, glances over at her mother, whose woebegone face is streaming with tears as she rattles off prayers beneath Mary’s picture, and it dawns on her, fine, none of it was really necessary. But why are you grovelling to Mary? What’s done is done. I hope you’re praying for the baby, your grandchild, that things will be well and it will all work out somehow. That some loser of a man will marry me, if only to get his nuts off on a regular basis. But honestly, she thinks, have I really thrown my life away with that unpleasant little adventure? Maybe, but then again maybe not and all I’ve really done is hurry life along a bit. I’ve had my fill of whoring, which would hardly be the case if I had waited for a suitor to come along and been innocent when I married – which in our cottages is not very likely. Anyway, it wouldn’t be my decision who I married. Papa would put his fist down and shake hands with whoever he thought was the best choice. I’m not the first or the last girl to make this pilgrimage in her rosy years. And as for him marrying me, well, he’s hardly the Holy Spirit, although at times it felt like the gates of heaven opened when I was with him, and the idea that he would leave his wife, children and farm for me and the baby, or even that he’d acknowledge the baby as his – that’s not going to happen, of course.
When I told him two weeks ago how things stood, he just shrugged his shoulders, turned around and tried to walk away.
‘So what are we going to do?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean we? There is no we,’ he said with a shrug. ‘What you do with your bastard child is all down to you.’
‘All down to me? It’s you who were all over me! I didn’t make this baby by myself, you know.’
‘No, not by yourself. But who with, that’s something you’ll have to figure out.’
Oh, I just cried and cried. It’s all over, I thought. My life is finished. My father will kill us, me and my baby. But what’s done is done. I’ll keep it a secret a little while longer. I’ll bind my belly tight, and by the time he discovers the truth, the child inside will be strong enough to grab on to my heart with his little hands, avoid the blows, kick back at them and maybe live.
That part of the story my baby and I have just survived. But – she thinks as she settles herself on the hay and strokes her belly – does it all have to be so predictable? Do I really have to end up just another big-bellied waif? It’ll be hard finding any sort of husband for a girl with a bastard child: she’s good to bed but not to wed – that’s what the men will be spouting to each other – if she started so young, you can be sure that as soon as you turn your back or go away for a while, she’ll jump the first man