Vyhľadávanie
The pleasant spring days have given way to a hot summer. The grass on the treeless hill above Mikula’s cottage has turned yellow under the burning heat of the sun and the hill looks even more barren. But the past two months have brought no change to the house below it: the walls are as shabby as in spring, and the roof just as tattered. Only the houseleek growing in the thatch has flourished. After all, no one has thought to repair the cottage; Mikula wouldn’t care if it collapsed there and then. His wife is sometimes moved to tears at the sight of the cottage, but she is the only one. “We’ve neglected it. It’s a shame we’ve let it get into this state. If we looked after it, it would be somewhere for Zuzka to live. As it is, when we old people die, the poor girl will have nowhere to lay her head.”
“Huh, why do you keep on worrying?” Mikula usually declares. “Who are we working for, if not for her? Zuzka’ll have two or three hundred and for that she can buy a better house than this hovel.”
But these words can’t put Mikulová’s mind at rest. She’d rather see her daughter settled in a permanent home than roaming through the world without a roof of her own over her head. She’s already getting on for twenty-two and it’s time she got married. But this thought hasn’t so much as crossed Zuzka’s mind. It’s true that at first she seemed to welcome Samko’s love, as if she’d have liked to be his wife, but now his visits seem to irk her and she deliberately avoids him. Her parents, knowing what the village folk think about them, suspect it would be difficult for Samko to persuade his mother to accept a daughter-in-law she despises. So they haven’t tried to talk Zuzka into making an effort to become part of the Melans’ household, even though it is the fervent secret wish of both of them. And, after all, Zuzka herself has been behaving so strangely – at first she’d been glad to see Samko, but now she coldly rebuffs his attentions.
The Mikulas’ living room has been transformed into workshop. There are wooden spoons and beaters piled up on the stove, on the bench and under the bed. A worktable stands in the middle of the room and knives and chisels lie scattered on the floor among the wood chips and shavings. Of course, it would be better to work in a shed, but the cottage stands alone, with no outbuildings and there is not a patch of ground sheltered by the roof. Anyway, they don’t mind the mess in their cottage; they sleep on the ground in hallway and usually eat on the doorstep. They are not used to comfort and though they’ve now been at home for eight weeks, their abode resembles a barn even from the inside. Mikula doesn’t hold with keeping an orderly household. Of what use would all that paraphernalia be to them? One day they’re here and the next they are three villages away.
Zuzka sits alone on the doorstep, gazing into the distance. It’s approaching noon and the sun’s hot rays are burning down on the cottage. Only the little patch where she is sitting is still in the shade, making her face look even gloomier. She is holding her head in her hands and staring in front of her, but her mind is no doubt far from the romantic beauty of her surroundings. Gazing like this, lost in wistful thought, has recently become her everyday occupation. In the time she has been at home she has grown to look serious; she is pretty, you could even say her lovely face has been softened by this trace of melancholy, lending her regular features a beauty of their own. A shadow seems to have settled on her eyebrows and her eyes, once twinkling and smiling, have become deep and musing. When sitting like this, her hand propping up her chin, her gaze resting on the blue chain of hills in the distance, she looks quite the embodiment of yearning.
The house is quiet; her parents have gone to town to buy food, so she is all alone. It is noon and a dead silence hangs over the fields, caused by the heat of the summer. People have returned from the stubble fields and are resting in their homes. The heat makes everything seem sad – just down on the road that winds along the foot of the hill, twittering sparrows are bathing in the dust, while the tireless crickets among the stubble on the other side of the brook endlessly chirp their monotonous, melancholic songs. The shade disappears even from the doorstep and the sun shines down on Zuzka’s bare arms.
A young lad is just approaching along the road from the village. He has a short, slightly stooping figure and his face is burned by the sun. Catching sight of Zuzka, he comes towards her along the narrow path leading up to the cottage and stops in front of her. She starts, but does not get up; she just rests her gaze him.
“What are you doing, Zuzka?” asks the young man in an uncertain voice.
“Nothing,” the girl retorts, looking down into the village. “What do you want, Samko? Why’ve you come here again? I’ve already told you not to, but you take no notice! You should have some sense by now – you know very well our parents are against it,” she says coldly, almost severely, to the lad, who looks abashed. He stands before her disconsolately, his eyes lowered, playing with an ear of corn he is holding in his hand.
“Yes, well I wouldn’t have come, but I couldn’t stop myself,” he sighs sadly. “But if you only knew how I feel when I hear you talk like that! After all, you weren’t so strange before. You were quite different when you first came back and I – I thought you liked me at least a little bit…”
“Well, you see, Samko, there’s nothing else I can do,” she speaks a little gentler, moved by the pain in the young man’s voice. “You see, your mother’s sent me another message and yet I’ve never done her any harm. She’s even declared I’m a witch, that I’ve cast some spell over you… I won’t even be going to the music – everyone avoids me like the plague. They’d never let you marry me, so we must part once and for all. You just marry Dora and all will be well.”
A bitter smile briefly lights up Samko’s face.
“It’s easy for you to talk like that. But I just can’t bear the thought of you not being my wife. Look, Zuzka, if you knew how much I love you, you wouldn’t talk like that…”
Zuzka shades her eyes with her hand and stares into the distance. Not long ago Samko’s words would have filled her heart with happiness, and now – now they are spoken without arousing any response at all. It is as much as she can do not to feel bored by them. His loving gaze gives her no pleasure, nor his tender, simple declaration of love – all this is overridden, drowned, by a kind of vague longing that is not clear even to her. She is missing “the wide world” and all that is associated in her mind with these words. She has already got used to an unsettled, adventurous life, just as her father has, and to some extent her mother too. Her longing for the world is growing every day and it doesn’t even occur to her to resist it; for ever since her stay in Mrázovce she has been inclined to believe that roaming through the world is their fate, their lot! And wonder of wonders! While she was out in the world, she didn’t even think about Štefan, and now she can’t get him out of her mind. In the time she has not seen him, he has become so dear to her, so interesting, that she’d be a hundred times more willing to follow him, even into the wide world, than tie herself to comfort with Samko – soft, unpretentious, indulgent Samko. While she was out in the world, Štefan’s name never even entered her mind, but now she keeps whispering it to herself with painful yearning…
A little white cloud is silently moving across the deep blue sky, like a thought floating in the pure depths of her soul. Zuzka lifts her eyes and musingly follows its lovely flight.
“Look, Samko, if I had wings like that little cloud up there, I wouldn’t be sitting here now,” she says to him, not taking her eyes off the cloud. He looks up, too, but his gaze immediately falls back to the girl’s face and rests there in wonder. It seems strange to him that she should notice something that has never caught his attention.
“And where would you be, Zuzka?”
“I’d fly away from here and go wherever I wanted. Maybe I’d fly to the end of the world…”
“And wouldn’t you think of me – wouldn’t you be sorry to leave me behind?” says the young man sadly.
“Of course not. You’re used to living here and you’ll be happy with Dorka, but I – I wouldn’t want to be here. I’d feel sad.”
“Not even if you were with me, Zuzka? Goodness, and I’d been so looking forward to setting up house with you… and that’s not what you want? You have no heart…” Tears appear in the sincere lad’s eyes and roll down his cheeks to fall like two drops of dew at Zuzka’s feet. She looks up in amazement and bursts into the merry laughter Samko has always found so captivating.
“Oh, dear, you’re a man - aren’t you ashamed to cry? You’re just like a little boy who can’t make a whistle out of a willow cane. Surely you’re not going to grieve over something that just can’t be? After all, you know,” she goes on, a shadow of seriousness coming into her face that suits her as much as those two little dimples that appear in her cheeks when she smiles, “you know it’s not just your mother – none of your family would allow us to marry, because I’m poor and – well, because we’re such wanderers. We’d both suffer – you’ve put up with enough already on my account…”
“Oh, I’d suffer anything for you,” he declares joyfully, straightening up, “just tell me, dear – if Mother agreed, would you be fond of me again, would you marry me?”
The girl is overcome by embarrassment; she hasn’t the courage to disappoint his faithful love. She lowers her eyes, shuffles her bare feet on the hot ground, but Samko reads sweet hope into her disconcerted face.
“Don’t worry, Zuzka, everything can still turn out all right,” he comforts her and catching her hand, looks at her so sincerely that a strange feeling comes over her – as if with that look he has touched the most sensitive spot in her heart. She is overcome with remorse, true remorse. “Oh, Lord Jesus! He loves me so much and I – I can’t love him! And yet I enticed him away from Dora, and just to amuse myself! Oh, now he’ll be miserable because of me and he’ll leave Dora.”
“You see, Zuzka, you should have told me ages ago that you’re only keeping your distance from me because my mother doesn’t want you. What a fool I am, I thought you didn’t love me! Just wait, we won’t lose each other after all.”
“How, when my folks are already about to leave – for Pest, and I must go with them. Daddy is feeling restless, and poor Mummy, too.”
“Well, they can go – but after the wedding, when we’re together…”
Down on the road a heavy wagon pulled by a pair of grey oxen comes rumbling into sight. It is the Melan’s herdsman hurrying after Samko, who is dressed up to go to the “Stores” for rye. Samko, overcome by joy at his imagined good luck, runs down to the road, jumps into the wagon and merrily cracks his whip.
Once he has gone, Zuzka can breathe more freely and that strange feeling of remorse gradually disappears from her mind. She gets up, takes a pan and goes to the ditch for water. These thoughts have made her forget her work; the pots and pans have been lying around unwashed since the morning. She pours the water into a bowl and begins to wash the pots with a pea-stalk scourer. Thus occupied, she quite gets over the strange mood Samko’s words aroused in her. She recalls how ridiculous he looked when he began to cry. “No doubt that’s why I can’t love him; he’s so odd. He’d let me wind him around my little finger!” – She begins to hum a little ditty she heard from Štefan and her face lights up, banishing all trace of sorrow.
************
The day following his conversation with Zuzka, Samko is all jokes and laughter and particularly attentive towards his mother. He spends the whole day carrying rye into the barn and every now and then he pops in to see his mother. He is so tender towards her, so obliging, that Melanová feels much younger. “May the Lord put things right,” she thinks cheerfully, casting a loving eye in Samko’s direction, “that tramp, that witch, hasn’t completely spoiled him yet. And the poor thing, it’s not his fault if she cast a spell over him!”
************
He himself does not know why he has fallen in love with a girl whose nature is quite the opposite of his own. She attracts him with a kind of strange magic power, in which, of course, the main role is played by her unusual beauty, which strikes everyone immediately at first glance. Mostly on account of this, Melanová would not be so against Zuzka, if her parents, though poor, lived like other people in the village. But how could she bear her son’s name to be read out from the pulpit along with that of the daughter of those vagrants – the Mikulas?! After all, no one is friends with them – no one knows where they are from and why they have settled here. And God knows where they go when they go “out into the world” – whether they don’t travel around with roving artists? Anything and everything can be expected of such people, who are segregated from others even by where they live. That they know some witches and witchcraft is the gospel truth – Samko’s love is undeniable proof of that…
In the evening Samko doesn’t go to join “the lads”, but he brings the yoke into the cottage and begins to repair something on it. His mother, pleased to see this change, sits down at the table and, folding her hands in her lap, watches his every move. He hasn’t stayed at home in the evening, apart from Fridays, for a long time. He usually goes to join his mates or to hang around under Mikula’s windows. But today nothing lures him away; for some time Zuzka herself has forbidden him to waste his time coming and he himself has noticed that his visits give her no pleasure. But that is only because she does not want his mother to tell him off on her account… Well, that won’t last long now. Very soon he’ll explain nicely to his mother how fond he is of Zuzka, that he just can’t live without her and then she will surely not stand in the way of his love, but will accept her as a daughter-in-law and love her as much as she loves him…
“You see, my dear, how nice it would be if you were at home every evening, like today,” Melanová can’t help saying. “And it really isn’t the thing for you to be wandering about the village with the lads, now you’re a farmer.”
“”Well,” smiles Samko, torn out of his reverie about a happy future by his mother’s words, “well, I shall always be sitting around here as soon as I get married!”
“Thank goodness for that!” Melanová sighs. “It seems he’s coming to his senses again – and Dorka, poor girl, she’s been terribly anxious.”
“Dear Samko, I am glad you’re thinking like me again. I’m already worn out and it really is time a daughter-in-law took my place. We can prepare the wedding before autumn comes. Why put it off? Dorka has had all she needs ready for a long time.”
Samko’s heart begins to thud and the knife he was using to whittle down the pin for the yoke falls out of his hand onto the floor. He reaches down for it, but seems unable to pick it up; he just remains bent over for a good while.
“But if she’s angry with me – she probably won’t want to marry me,” he forces these words out in a strangled voice. “The other day she hid from me when I went past their house and she always pretends she hasn’t seen me.”
“That’s just your fault. Why have you been acting so foolishly recently? You’ve known each other since you were little; it’s several years now since you were promised to each other. Dorka is a handsome, hardworking girl and all will be well if you just get along together in a god-fearing way.”
“I don’t know why, but it seems to me I’d never be happy with her,” he whispers timidly, hanging his head and feverishly turning the knife and pin over and over in his trembling hands. “It seems to me that we two are not made for one another and it’d be better if we didn’t stand in each other’s way. She’s sure to find enough suitors – and better ones than I am.”
Melanová suddenly clenches her hands on the table. She turns pale and there is a frightened look on the face that stares out from the lace fringe of her bonnet. She looks anxiously at her son and tries to smile.
“What are you saying, dear? That you’re not made for each other? On the contrary, there’s no one else suitable for us. I don’t know how you could say such a thing – as if it was already all over between you!”
“I think it is, Mum,” Samko sighs. “It’s no use, I can’t marry her – rather someone else, even if they’re poor. After all, there are poor girls who are good and hardworking, too, and I think I’d be far, far happier.”
Translated by Heather Trebatická
