The night before she was to make her journey to the convent, Ina couldn’t sleep. She stayed up eavesdropping on Father Vapnik discussing things with the vicar in the chapel.
‘We’ll need to bring in new families to offset the deaths,’ the priest said. ‘Maybe this is a blessing. The new lord is so young and pliable, he’ll do whatever I say. And we can build a more robust village. The northerners are good-looking, aren’t they?’
The vicar agreed, adding that northerners were more compliant in their disposition as well. ‘They are good farmers,’ the vicar said. ‘They don’t waste time praying and singing like ours do. Northerners are reasonable people. Sturdy.’
‘We could become quite rich in due time,’ the priest said. ‘There are churchmen in Kaprov with jewels in their crowns.’
‘Yes, Father.’
Ina coughed and they hushed. Then Father Vapnik said, ‘What do we have to hush for? She’s only a blind nun, if that.’
When the men had left and the church was quiet, Ina felt around for the door. They had not locked it, so low was their esteem of her will. So she ran out into the night. Better to live wild in the woods than to be enslaved by the nuns, she believed. A few people taking their midnight constitutionals saw her stumbling and feeling her way through the village, but they didn’t bother her. They simply got out of her way as she staggered with her arms out toward the woods. Nobody knew where she went. Or rather, nobody wanted to find her. Father Vapnik lied to his congregants the next Sunday, said that the horse had taken Ina up the mountain and left her safe and sound at the nunnery. Those who had seen Ina escape into the woods said nothing. They never gossiped about the priest. To do so was blasphemous. So Ina was soon forgotten.
After some time in the woods, crawling through the wet leaves and cold spring rain, attuning her ears to the slightest twitch in the air, the scattering of pollen, every noise and smell, young Ina began to develop an uncanny fluency in birdsong. She could interpret every peep and warble. It was this language that guided her toward shallow puddles of dew when she was thirsty or a slug when she needed food. Eventually, she understood the world through sounds and echoes, relying on the birds to tell her whether a man or animal was coming her way, where to hide, where to find berries, where to dig for truffles or wild carrots or potatoes, where to find shelter from a storm. It didn’t take long for her to forget what things looked like. In a way, the forgetting eased her grief. She forgot her parents’ faces. They became, in her mind, lost ideas. Her dead sisters, faded dreams. Thus, the darkness was a benefit to Ina’s heart.
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.
* * *
*
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.