‘Mother?’ he called again.
Agata was silent. Marek went to her bed and lifted the curtain of gauze. A strong perfume struck his face. The bed was covered with tansy, piles of flowers in different states of decay.
‘Mother,’ he said again, and reached for her shoulder under the flowers. He swiped at the drying blooms and shook her. But she would not wake. He cleared the tansy from her face. It was hollow and gray, her eyes black holes. A maggot crawled out of her bony nose. Marek let go of the gauze. If she’d never died before, perhaps he would have been sad that she was no longer living. But instead, what dismayed him was her rotting corpse. God had not come to take her to heaven. The Devil had left her to rot.
He picked the baby up and hid it in the inside of his jacket. It nestled in the space above his jutting belly, held securely against Marek’s chest by his tight spring jacket. Then he went out, creeping along the halls. He saw Petra coming up the stairs.
‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ Marek said as she passed.
‘Do you want me to follow you like last time?’
‘No, Petra. I want to visit Villiam’s grave and pray for his soul.’
‘Oh, all right.’ Marek knew Petra would not want to come near Villiam’s grave. It stank and teemed with flies.
He walked out and was surprised that nobody stopped him, nobody cared to know where he was going. He clutched at the wee thing in his jacket, peeking down to see its face—so pure, its fine red hair like a ray of light across its crown and eyebrows. He followed the sun down the hill toward his old pasture, and then up the mountain, where he hadn’t been since he’d thrown the rock at Jacob. If this baby was the savior, Marek thought, maybe he could pray to it and turn back time.
* * *
*
Without the church bells, the days had a wistful magic to them in the village. Lapvonians stopped waking up before dawn to pray and slept until the roosters crowed, and then even still, some of them liked to sleep later into the morning, rising only when their bodies had rested enough and their bones were getting sore against their beds. They rose and stretched and looked at the sun to align themselves, and then they ate and drank and went out to greet their happy new blond-headed neighbors. There were no bells to signal when it was time to rest or return home for lunch from the fields. People came and went as they pleased. Grigor explained this to Ina as they smoked in the sunshine by the garden. Ina squinted and covered her eyes with her hand.
‘You can’t believe the difference in my sleep,’ he said, ‘now that I know what time is to me, and not what it meant to the church.’
‘That’s good, Grigor,’ Ina said, inhaling. Grigor had brought a pipe he had carved from a branch of rosewood.
‘You can keep the pipe,’ he said.
‘Thank you. I like it. I know the birds who live in this rosewood tree. Are they back now that spring is here?’
‘Yes, they’re back.’
‘Are they singing?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Ina,’ Grigor began. He didn’t know how to speak to her now that her appearance had changed so drastically. To Grigor, it did seem that the Christ Child had turned back the hands of time. How was it possible? He figured it would be best to speak directly. ‘You seem very different, Ina,’ he said.
‘I am different,’ she said. ‘I’m a mother now.’ Grigor could see her eyes fill with tears. ‘I finally have a babe of my own,’ she said.
Grigor felt a nerve of fear throb in his jaw. What of the mother? He couldn’t ask. He sucked the smoke and let it pass and tried to be reasonable.
‘I thought the church was rotten,’ he said. ‘But you say there is a real Christ?’
‘Forget that church.’
‘I try to. You know that Ivan’s men tore it down.’
Ina didn’t care. She wiped her tears away and sat back against the stone wall of the manor, her hands resting across her full belly. Bees and dragonflies and butterflies seemed to dance for her in the garden, buzzing in a harmonious song of spring. Grigor saw that there was wet at her nipples. Her bosoms were swollen.
‘I do all the milk and I hold the Christ and sing to it. I do all of it,’ she said.
‘My, my,’ said Grigor. ‘You must be so happy.’ And he saw that it was true. He wanted to speak with Ina more about how Ivan’s men had dismantled the church stone by stone, how they’d used the stones to build a large well in the village square, with a fountain. He had been hoping to declare his own happiness to Ina, to tell her that he had discovered real freedom of spirit. He wanted to tell her that he felt like a new man. But he realized as she sat beside him that his hope to declare it all was actually a way to stave off the emptiness left by what was now gone. Lapvona was a lonely place. There was no church, and there was no God to speak of. Nobody prayed. Everyone just talked about themselves and each other. If it weren’t for Grigor mentioning it, they would have forgotten about the Christ Child. Nobody believed it was a true messiah, as nobody believed in the meaning of a messiah anymore. Grigor had not given up completely. There was something sacred still. He recognized now that the sacred thing had been Ina herself.