* * *
*
‘I was thinking today we could play a little game,’ Villiam said, already bored and tired of Marek’s story. Marek had barely gotten through the preamble: ‘Once upon a time, there was a man whose name was Villiam, and he was the greatest man in the land, and among his servants was a fine girl named Lispeth, and one day Villiam was sitting eating grapes, and his son Marek came in . . . ’ It was very dull.
‘Never mind the story, Marek. Let’s have a battle,’ Villiam said. ‘Who can eat the most sausages while Lispeth holds her breath?’
‘All right.’
‘Clod?’ Villiam called for his man. ‘Get us some sausages. Enough to feed a hundred people.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘In the meantime, Lispeth, sing us a song.’
Lispeth curtsied and sang while Marek and Villiam waited for the sausage. She sang very quietly, so that Marek had to strain to hear the words. Villiam picked at his cuticles, only vaguely aware of the song, just enough so that he would not have to endure the silence as he waited for his food.
To sing I must, of that I would rather not
so bitter I am toward he who stole my love
for I loved him more than anyone;
my kindness and courtesy make no impression on him
nor my beauty, my virtue or intelligence;
so I am deceived and betrayed,
as I should be if I were ugly . . .
One thing consoles me: I never wronged him,
And if love could bring him back
It would, so much I have to give.
I am glad that my love is greater than your vanity.
‘Sing it again,’ Villiam said, yawning. ‘A little louder this time. Clod! Hurry up with those sausages!’
Marek wished he could be more like Villiam, dumb and numb to other people’s sorrow.
* * *
*
Lapvonians had not taken kindly to Klim while he’d been alive. They thought he was a jinx. He had lived alone in a hovel in the corner of the village and came out once in a while to pick through the trash on the road for scraps of food. He had looked sickly even before the famine. His dead hands flapped like fish against Jude’s back as he plodded through the woods.
Jude knew that his hunger had driven him to madness, otherwise he would never have picked the blind man up in the first place. He would have just shouted at the villagers to respect the dead. But his reasoning had left him. Klim’s body felt like an effigy, something that could be put down and looked at, a sculpture of a man, like Jesus on the Cross. Maybe Jude could take Klim as his own personal Jesus. Jude had never been inside the church in Lapvona. He had only smelled the burning myrrh on the rare Sunday morning he passed by during Mass. He never wanted to join, never felt that he would be welcome there. Ina had said that there was a cross on the wall with a wooden Jesus nailed to it.
Without intending to, Jude now found himself on his way through the trees toward her cabin. But now the shadows under the summer sun were not of swaying, lush branches but the stark, still stalks of dying cottonwoods. There were no grapes hanging from the vines that trellised across the boughs, not even a shriveled raisin. The dirt clouded up like smoke with each step through the woods. The last time Jude had visited Ina was shortly after Marek’s departure. Ina had understood what had happened, of course, and was sorry for Jude that he would have to live without his boy. But there was something strange in the way she had pulled her bosom out from her dress that day, something resentful about it. And although she had long since ceased her production of milk, there was a miserliness with which she held her nipple out for Jude to suck, as though she were doing it begrudgingly, sacrificially. Jude had held it against her. Now she owed him some actual generosity—a sympathetic ear, a nipple, and a place to rest. Maybe Ina would even have something for Jude to eat. It didn’t occur to Jude that the old woman might be struggling in the drought like everybody else. She had always seemed without needs. He had never watched her eat food, although each time he’d come he’d brought her a basket of vegetables and a bucket of lamb’s milk, unless the babes were still nursing. He had no idea how old Ina might be. Maybe a hundred years old, he would guess.
He found a bit of shade where Klim’s body could lie while he went in to see her. He knocked on her cabin door and pushed it open, expecting to see the old woman as she usually was, squatting on the floor examining herbs or mushrooms or picking mites out of a tiny grouse. But now Jude gasped at the sight of her as he looked inside. Ina was still alive but had been reduced to a crumpling of skin and bones in the corner of her bed. Her body had flattened, deflated. Only her skull had any volume. Her face hung on it like an old rag from a nail. Her blind eyes opened, spreading the wrinkles. Her mouth spoke.