Vyhľadávanie
Alena SABUCHOVÁ: The Whisperers
(Excerpt from the novel Šeptuchy, Artforum, Bratislava 2019)
In addition to Jesus Christ on the cross, the blue church had a white veil and the icons were heaped with white flowers. Agata and the women’s choir were practising, and candles had been placed ready in front of the icon of Saint Onuphrius. One-eyed Roza stood on a small stool by the windows, attempting to polish the mirrors with a spray. Jan, her husband, stood beside her and held the rocky stool steady.
Years ago Roza had gone blind in one eye. Diabetes, apparently, but there were some who said that someone deliberately caused her blindness because Roza had an illegitimate son. Nobody knew who the father was. Jan had married her and taken little Piotr with her. They didn’t have any children together. That too was part of the curse of a furious wife from one of the neighbouring villages. Apparently.
Roza sold mushrooms and bilberries. She would sit beside the road, surrounded by baskets, and read paperback novels of the sort sold at news-stands in Hajnowka. When Piotr was born, she took him along with her. She lined one of her baskets – a little stained by the bilberries – with a checked shawl and laid the boy in it.
She always took him with her, as well as the other baskets, and maybe she was tempted to sell him with the boletus mushrooms, to place a blank sheet of paper into his hands on which anyone who found him could write any random name. Like an application form for a better life. The Nile was not available and Pharaoh’s daughters bathed elsewhere.
Cars with different registration numbers drove past them. Sometimes one or other would stop and, if the boy didn’t cry, they often didn’t even notice him. In heatwaves she would put him under the nearest tree and sit alone at the roadside.
Once a man who resembled the one on the cover of the book she was currently reading got out of his car. She wanted to look and see whether it really was him, whether the good Lord had actually finally had mercy on her, but she was afraid that the man would go out of her life while she was looking for it.
“Madam, you can’t sit here in this heat!”
Piotr gurgled from the tree. Terrified, but also tender, the man looked at the child with the overheated face, picked up the basket, helped her to stand up and opened the door to his gleaming Volvo.
“Come with me.”
Roza adjusted her skirt and smiled. He carefully put down the baby-basket onto the back seat.
She woke up to find the Orthodox priest bending over her, his ancient Ford blinking beside the road.
“What do you think you’re doing, woman?! Your child will burn in the sun!”
Under the tree, Piotr was shrieking. His face was red and he was roaring as if to drown out all the car engines disappearing into the distance. He wanted someone to come back for him.
Jan the sexton lifted the child from the basket and held him up to the sunlight.
“He’s probably too hot and needs a wash.”
Roza woke up and got sharply to her feet. Her head spun, so she had to sit down again.
The cars passing them slowed curiously, but when they spotted the priest, nobody stopped. They believed that the good Lord was firmly in control of whatever was going on.
Roza and Piotr were taken to the parish house.
At that time the priest’s wife was still alive. She dipped the baby into cold water and wiped his little body with olive oil and myrrh. Roza fed him and Piotr slept like the only righteous child fished from the River Nile, as if he hadn’t got heatstroke beside the Podlasie road.
Roza and Jan sat opposite each other, and the priest’s wife sliced sausage, cheese and bread for them. They washed it down with home-distilled bison-grass vodka and Roza, embarrassed, lowered her eyes, although she could already barely see from the left.
“Now we will pray to the blessed Piotr and Fevronia,” said the priest.
His wife smiled conspiratorially and lit some candles.
Dusk fell on Podlasie and with it, the first fog. Piotr slept contentedly in the lady’s quilt.
The priest’s wife sliced cheese with nigella seeds, which vanished as fast as the vodka. Jan, who could identify all the keys to the church door, secret passageways, cupboards and staircases blindfolded, who could repair any locks, restore the church floor tiles, obtain proper frames for destroyed icons and had never touched any woman, decided at that moment that he would marry Roza, even with her son.
At least, it was said that it happened like that, that it was arranged between the Orthodox priest, his wife, the Holy Spirit, and Prince Piotr and Fevronia that evening, over sausage and vodka. Piotr was given the blessed Piotr’s name. Roza’s son had been called something else before then, but now nobody remembers what. He’s been Piotr since that night.
The priest often told this story at weddings. About the prince and his wife, but also about Roza and Jan. I remember it from the liturgy I heard when I was still a child.
“When Piotr and Fevronia sailed away in their boat, severe trials awaited them.”
The priest would fall dramatically silent at that point and looked around the church, as if wanting to see how much interest there was. Over the years, however, curiosity was transformed into a polite, sympathetic smile, because everybody already knew the story.
“He, a married man, initially wanted to commit adultery with Fevronia...” the priest again looked around the church and waited for at least a minimal indication that his listeners were scandalised. “Although by then he had committed adultery many times.
“But she, with the clear sight of the saints, understood his bad intentions before he expressed them. She urged him to drink river water from one side of the boat, then the other. When he had done so, she asked him from which side the water had tasted best. He was unable to say, because it had tasted just as good from both sides. Fevronia told him that it was the same with women: he must not forget his wife in the naive assumption that another woman would be better. The man understood, fearfully, that he was dealing with a pure, holy soul and had no more thoughts about adultery.”
The only people who were regularly made happy by this story were Roza and Jan. I don’t know if it was some type of love that they had both decided not to underestimate, not to seek magnificence, like in the clearance sales in the Hajnowka supermarket beside the shelves of cheap hazelnut rolls.
They were a living example that anything is possible in life, although many people would have lost hope. Whenever I saw them cleaning the church together, or weeding the former Orthodox priest’s garden, whenever he helped her distribute leaflets around scattered dwellings..., I always said to myself that some things are only as complex as we make them.
For us, at that time, relationships were colour photo-stories of people from Bravo Magazine and badly dubbed Argentinian telenovelas. But Roza and Jan didn’t quite fit that picture.
“Give me the newspaper,” said Roza, standing on tiptoe on the stool.
Jan looked around him and handed her the Hajnowka monthly paper about news and events in the church. It is still published today. Of the editorial board, I think only Stefan has died; he wrote about miracles, occasional reviews and recipes for festive food. Mostly pierogi in different ways, but in recent years there’s been an attempt to provide more healthy options too, using rye or spelt flour.
Daria still does the lives of the saints even today.
“I can’t polish the windows with that,” said Roza, looking at the newspaper with one eye.
“Why not?”
“It would be desecration.”
“We don’t have any other paper here,” said Jan.
“But I can’t clean the windows with Saint Panteleimon!”
“So find something else.”
Roza flicked through the magazine, and sometimes her eye was caught by an interesting photo. “Aha, this is our priest at the Warsaw-Biela Orthodox Conference, have you seen?”
The black-and-white photo was tiny, showing the Orthodox clergy in black vestments standing in two rows.
They both squinted at the photo, proudly looking at the millimetre-sized faces, although our priest was not distinguishable even by chance.
“Here, pull the church music section out of Days of Hajnowka.” She straightened the little curtain around Jesus on the cross and apologetically crossed herself.
In one hand, she held the window-cleaning spray and soulfully squirted it, in case she might be stopped for an ordeal because the window was smudged.
Ordeals are like customs offices at which we must answer for our sins after death. We will understand very quickly which way is prepared for us, because we will start to be ashamed of our lives. That’s what we were told in the Orthodox church, but my classmates from Hajnowka who went to the Catholic church would explain it differently.
Once, when we were already in high school, Magda told us that souls go to Purgatory. Neither God nor the devil will be there yet, there will only be giant candles, and when the candles burn out, a decision will be made. We put candles into the hands of the seriously ill when the last rites were administered. That is, I don’t know if anyone actually admits that it’s the last rites. Extreme unction was officially known as unction of the sick, but everybody called it extreme unction.
They didn’t even manage to call the priest to Pawlina’s husband. They called one for Jolantina’s husband, but in the end he arrived too late. You don’t get a choice. If the candle burns for a long time, that means that you committed a lot of sins and your soul must be purified.
Once, when I was scrubbing the bathroom one Saturday morning, I poured bleach into the toilet and wondered if Purgatory would look exactly like this. We will wait on our knees, our heads in the toilet bowl as we breathe in the stink of bleach, until someone comes to us and says: “You can go now.” And we’ll strip off our rubber gloves and wait to see where they will take us. Which direction. Maybe to the next bleach-filled bathroom and we will have to scrub the wall tiles until the process is repeated again.
Magda always went to confession, because she had sex with her boyfriend and was afraid of God’s judgement. That’s what she heard her entire life.
“Do you think I’ll go to hell because of it? But we don’t do everything,” she once told us, before Geography class, and we didn’t know what to respond, because we didn’t want to look stupid when we knew nothing, either about sex or about life after death, that is, only what we’d been told in church or in school, or in what we’d read in Bravo Magazine.
We didn’t ask what everything was, or what they didn’t do, although we were enormously interested. Much more so than in industry in Poland, on which we were doing a multiple-choice test. Multiple-choice tests were the first major fuck-up we’d had in our lives. Sometimes you’re simply lucky: even those who’ve never learned about any industry in their lives could circle the answers better than people who felt they could work as the spokesperson for any Polish factory.
Sometimes it was enough to trust yourself, and actually, not even yourself, just to trust that it would happen somehow. And it always happened, somehow. Andrzej Kozlowski always got at least seventy percent. He didn’t have a textbook, he hadn’t made any notes, he sometimes came and just sat there, but in other respects all of us girls wanted him. We were willing to advise him, let him copy our work, and once Dorota even said to me: “I’d like to lick his ear.”
I wondered if she’d got the idea from Bravo Magazine, or if she’d heard about it from Magda, and I found it terribly interesting. Since then I’d stared at his ears a lot more.
The need to hold another body is somehow deep-rooted within us. Almost like the plague in Podlasie. Dorota wanted to be the first to hold Andrzej Kozlowski, and she wanted to be the first person he held too. She was clear about some things and wasn’t ashamed of this. She answered sixty percent of the questions in the test, and passed. The holidays could start. We were sixteen.
Stalls with balloons, water pistols and sweets sprang up in front of the church in Dubicza, along with cars with various Polish and foreign registration numbers. Helium balloons bobbed in the occasional July wind. That summer wasn’t particularly warm, but for that matter it wasn’t often hot in Podlasie. We only knew summers in concrete cities later on. Masha and the bear towered over the river, ‘I love you’ was written in bad English on little hearts – it was very popular then. Men bought gingerbread hearts and candyfloss for their wives, as they had done for decades.
It tasted like raspberry syrup, like childhood that someone had left by the river and always came back for in July. Every year new children enjoyed the Podlasie feast day and believed in whatever they wanted to. Just like us.
The gingerbread hearts with sentimental declarations and the Disney princess helium balloons were, on that day, almost an eternal declaration of love. Until they deflated and their delighted expressions on the ceiling began to point towards the ground. Or until the gingerbread went rock-hard and at best ended up as a souvenir in a writing desk.
My father gave me money and said that I could buy whatever I liked at the stalls. Mum added: “Just nothing silly.” I bought myself a helium balloon of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. She wore a flowing veil and her eyes were closed. She was the most inessential thing I could have wasted my parents’ money on, but her arms, outstretched in song, directly tempted you to let her sit on the ceiling, just for a moment. I imagined that one day someone would buy her for me for love, or would win me a rose in the shooting at his first attempt. We only reckon on second attempts later. Someone who would like Tim Burton.
I tied the Bride to my wrist, but when I went to the toilet, I was afraid that she would get dirty in the portaloo, so I asked Dorota to look after her.
When I came out, she wasn’t there. I thought she’d be at the jewellery stall, or the zapiekanka stall, but I couldn’t find her anywhere.
My parents ran a refreshments stall. We dipped potato spirals into oil and fried them. I remember the smell of burned oil even today. We had three flavourings that we sprinkled over the potato spirals. Salt, chicken spice and paprika. Grilled chicken was the most popular, even though it was ordinary grilling spices for meat. People queued for it, and for our bison-grass vodka and mead too. While there is something to eat and drink, and no war, everything is fine, Elżbieta always said. She served alcohol in the local inn and at home she sold wine and kropka, which was strong. She had a stall in Dubicza too. A few years later she would buy a machine for frying doughnuts which she and her son sold, but at the time neither we nor she knew that yet.
“Have you seen Dorota?”
Elżbieta didn’t have the time to pay attention to anything, she was so busy with the bar.
Jacek, Elżbieta’s son, beckoned me back, looking mysterious as he did so.
“I know where Dorota is,” he whispered. “He came for her, dragging a pitchfork behind him.”
I didn’t understand.
Jacek wasn’t entirely normal, but we’d been taught to be friends with him anyway, and not laugh at him.
“I’ll go and look for her,” I replied.
“I can’t, because he pulled her away by the hand,” Jacek smiled.
I’ll never forget Kupala Night, in mid-June, or its specific scent, or the cool ground. It could easily have happened then.
Every year we sat down on the grass together, holding our breaths as the procession of girls wearing embroidered Belarusian traditional blouses, with lights in their hands, marched into the water. The water was cold, but they didn’t care. We all wanted to walk into the water with wreaths on our heads at least once. We never considered why this seemed like such an honour to us, why we so wanted this type of attention bought at the price of a bladder infection.
It was an event. The women and girls wore small wreaths of flowers and threw them into the lake. The men and boys then jumped in after them. The man who fished out your wreath was supposed to marry you, love you to the end of your life, or at least stay with you. Or it could be a fellow student from the neighbouring class who would no longer remember your name a week later.
You always learn something when you choose between loneliness and compromise, but at the time we knew next to nothing about this.
It’s strange how people see exceptionality and what they remember. Bands from Podlasie played on the podium. There was a new one every year, and every year we could fall in love while we waited and, when the first polyphonic mobiles arrived, we could exchange numbers with the guitarist or drummer, who would then never get in touch again. Punk and gospel, brass bands, new versions of Belarusian, Polish and Ukrainian folk songs performed by women with long hair; their local traditional blouses had low necklines and their nails were artificial.
Mr Karol from Hajnowka had a Star Wars ice-cream machine. He’d once run a casino somewhere in Białystok, and was a huge fan of George Lucas. He returned to Podlasie when his wife left him, and brought with him a spaceship that made ice-cream as it emitted the sounds of touching down.
It was ordinary white ice-cream from powder, of uncertain flavour. However, it fell through a small opening in the handle when a red light was shining, and you needed to want at least three scoops of ice-cream, one after another, to go through this process. We always got shivers down our spines when Darth Vader made us space ice-cream from the space machine for two złotys. It tasted that good only one night in the year. At other times, the spaceship stood in the cellar and yearned for Kupala Night to come round as much as we did. Strange things had their place in Podlasie, just as ordinary things did.
With our eyes wide open, or the opposite, closed, we ran along the hillside between the stalls. The music from the amphitheatre pulsed in our temples and we waited for the procession that would appear in the water after dusk.
Everything seemed real to us back then, even Jacek, who sold zapiekanka with cheese and mushrooms to go with the vodka at his stall. He was nice, and he smiled at all the girls, as if he could choose any one of them tonight.
It was like spring after a long winter. We all carry our own spring, and indeed winter, within us. Sometimes winter lasts disproportionately long and we think it will never end. I can’t describe it very well, but it was as if borders did not exist. Whatever you wished for that night was meant to come true, and we never doubted this before the morning. In the morning, we picked up litter and the women picked up their husbands, worse for wear after cocktails of bison-grass vodka, mead and kropka (which was even stronger than vodka).
Entire families, entire generations, met here, old people were thrust into wheelchairs, children into prams where they slept contentedly through loud music and, in the more secluded parts of the forest, lovers made love on blankets and drank cheap wine from the bottle.
Even Emma, our neighbours’ daughter, came. She worked in childcare in London and believed she could make a career there. She didn’t know as what, exactly, but once she’d moved on from “I’m happy” to “I’m not going to wipe the bottoms and noses of other people’s children forever”, ten years had passed. Sometimes she seemed to have forgotten her Polish.
“It was terrible, the... how do you say it?... traffic from the airport. And then the train from Warsaw was delayed.” Or: “I don’t know if it’s entirely, how do you say it, trustworthy, but you know what I think.”
Once, one evening, she came across me and Dorota when we we’d been for the milk and said that we were so extraordinary that we didn’t entirely belong here, and that we should find some scholarship as soon as possible, so we could leave.
She was kind of right, but it was also kind of ludicrous, as we were carrying pails overflowing with still-warm cow’s milk that made me gag, though nobody could explain this. We didn’t know what to say. Our need to run away from everything and everyone wasn’t yet fully developed, but then Dorota admired her handbag.
“I got it on Oxford Street. You can get anything there, girls.”
Whenever she came home, she would act as if she had enormous experience, because the big wide world had taught her so much.
Once, Elżbieta made an acid comment on where Emma lived: “The geese flew over the sea, they flew and flew, but didn’t become swans.”
“You have to make the change abroad,” said Michal, proudly, to his daughter. Sometimes it really was enough just to leave, in order to experience something of local heroism. And when you came home for the year’s great festivals, it was enough to act as if your home would always be here, despite everything, among the storks and the marshes.
She bought her parents a mobile home, because she had a business plan. It was transported to Święta on a gigantic trailer. A tin caravan with a rose-coloured bathroom and a fuchsia-coloured bedroom, with a roofed wooden veranda attached so that you couldn’t tell at first glance that it was a caravan. You would only find out that the tin was on wheels when something fell into the cracks on the veranda and you started to walk round the house so you could remove it.
They were the first to offer tourist accommodation in Święta; Emma’s then boyfriend created a website for them, with moving images, and wrote that they also spoke English. Of course, for a long time nobody who would speak English actually came, but Emma’s mum Luba had once learned German, so she said she’d cope if by any chance anyone did.
We really, really liked that doll’s house. There was a hammock on the veranda, and a fireplace inside that you couldn’t actually make a fire in, because Emma’s parents were worried that the tourist dwelling with crocheted blankets might go up in flames. They always rented it out until autumn, because it couldn’t be heated inside in the winter. Probably nobody would go to the woods in winter anyway, and by the end of autumn the nights were already really cold.
The tin house by the woods with the colourful curtains and cuddly toys soon became a curiosity. And a much sought-after one, by Podlasie standards. Inside were pictures from the calendar. Luba loved children and dogs in different floral variations, so she cut out portraits of toddlers with roses from magazines and stuck them to the walls. She added Emma’s childhood cuddly toys as decorations. She had ancestors from Belarus, which was on the other side of the forest – we said that her taste had been blown here by the wind, and when it was stronger, the number of decorations increased.
She used a Belarusian dialect, but spoke Polish with guests and stammered a little when she did. It was strange: she never faltered in Belarusian, until she switched into the standard language, when it happened a lot.
There were never hundreds of guests, but from one year to the next, more guests came and some came back. They usually came because of Białowieża National Park. Passionate cyclists circled Białowieża and bought postcards of storks and wolves.
One summer, a wedding and landscapes-for-calendars photographer from Kraków came to Święta. He believed that he would one day no longer need to photograph landscapes and weddings, like many who believe they will one day stop being something that for some reason they do not wish to be.
Every evening he went running, enthusiastically, with his camera, in case he saw something that nobody had ever noticed on hundreds of cheesy images of the setting sun, storks with their wings outstretched or picturesque little houses squatting at the forest’s edge. The path wound directly into the forest from right behind the caravan. His head pulsed with feelings of remoteness from the human world and of liberating solitude, as if he had to see and experience everything, breathe and stop among the crazy kilometres for something that nobody before him had ever seen. An image. The glimmer of something real and unreal at the same time. Something that would pay the bills and also bring him recognition. Something was there, squatting between the birch trees; something that sometimes looked at people from behind their backs when they were picking mushrooms. It looked in at their windows when they were putting the children to bed at night, or making their tea and warming their socks in the morning. Something that loitered near the images of saints on trees when people went in secret to ask for the saints’ help with all the world’s impossibilities. And it drove the deer away from churches to retain their own faith in feeding places and life after winter. Something that sat under the little bridges by the marshes and whispered to people to keep their feet high above the stagnant water. This was always worth doing, even if there was nothing there. Stagnant water, however many times we stand in it to find out if it has moved, has yet to carry anyone away from the banks.
The photographer got into the habit of taking a head-torch, in case for any reason he didn’t return by dusk.
“I’ll see how long I can stay. I can work from here too,” he said to Luba, each time he extended his stay in the cold tin shack. Translation: he didn’t have any work at home, and those few dozen wedding photos that paid his rent could be processed under the trees in Święta too. At that time there was an internet café in Hajnowka, called Cyber Café. He could upload the images and email them in three hours.
That evening, too, he set off for a run. He headed out before sunset, because of the light, as if the magical horizons with the rosy sky were luring him.
He was running across some clearing towards Opaka when a pack of wolves crossed his path. He wasn’t entirely sure of what exactly he’d seen, because he’d run faster than them with fright, but he swore they were wolves. He clambered up the nearest tree in case they came back, and sat there in the tree for more than two hours. When he finally decided to climb down, in the hope that the wolves would be afraid of the light, he switched on his head-torch and sprinted back to Święta. He got lost, of course. There is nothing easier than getting lost in Podlasie’s forests. But the forests won’t hurt you and, actually, nor will the wolves.
Fortunately, in Podlasie’s forests you’re never as alone as you might think.
After alternating between confused walking and desperate running for half an hour, he heard voices. He thought he’d come across a couple who didn’t have space for their personal lives at home, but it was a group of women. They were standing around a bonfire and reciting something in Church Slavonic.
He had to decide whether or not to interrupt them but, as he didn’t want to stay in the forest any longer, he called to them from a distance.
“I’m sorry, excuse me... Good evening.”
The women stopped praying for a moment.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, but is this the right way to Święta?”
One of the women shone a torch at him, so he needed to cover his eyes.
“I’ve got a bit lost... I went for a run.”
The woman holding the torch deflected the beam and indicated the direction.
“Go a little way up from here and then you will see a steep slope. Run down it.”
A second woman looked at him in the dark for a while.
“Or you can wait for us. We’ll take you there when we finish.”
“That isn’t necessary, if I can get there from here.”
“You can, just run down and turn off by the cemetery. You’ll see the main road.”
He thanked them.
In fact, he didn’t have so great an interest in getting to know real Podlasie – the landscapes and the bison happily chewing the grass in the national park were enough for him. On safari in a miniature train with a guide, we are all adventurers.
Two days later he packed his things.
“So, I hope you have some nice pictures?” said Luba, when she and Michal came to collect the keys.
“Are there wolves in the forest here?”
She pointed at the magnet on the fridge.
“Of course. We’ve never seen them, but we hear them sometimes.”
“They don’t attack, though,” added Michal, confidently.
We’d never heard of wolves attacking anyone in Podlasie, but the landscape photographer asked everyone about them until it seemed that he was sorry that they hadn’t devoured him; sorry, in brief, that he hadn’t vanished without trace and then not come back to testify to the strange things ascribed to this region.
“They really won’t hurt you. Wolves are afraid of people. They run away when they scent us.”
When he had gone, Luba adjusted the fringes on the carpet in the living room of his temporary tin accommodation. In farewell, she pressed into his hand her business card with her number, in case he wanted to order some of the lacy blankets she made, as well as a bed for the night. He didn’t. He never showed himself here again. She didn’t manage to tell him about Emma in the big wide world, who hates her job a little, but would never openly admit that, even more than the career she wasn’t having, she’d like to find someone who’d take care of her. Really.
In addition to wolves and bison, tourists often asked Luba about whisperers.
“We... have them here,” she always began, cautiously.
“And have you ever visited them?”
“Yes, indeed, we used to go to Orla to see a lady there. With the children. Often.”
“And did she help?”
Luba expected that question every time, and she always answered it proudly.
“Immediately.”
But here Michal would curb her enthusiasm. He was somewhat less credulous and wanted to retain the character of a border guard, who had already seen and experienced many things, although there was room for doubt about that. Sometimes legends are attached to events with only a very small number of direct participants. However, it could not be denied that Mrs M. in Orla had been the most sought-after whisperer in Podlasie for many decades. If any of the locals were to send you to a whisperer, then it was almost certain that they’d send you to Orla.
Queues of cars stood there almost as long as for the Kupala Night festival. People waited in front of the low house with the yellow shutters, having heard that this was their chance. Or their hope. Or their last hope, their last whatever – only usually the very last is actually the next to last. We can always find something that we are capable of believing in right to the very end. That’s why people go to see whisperers. When all else fails, as they say. It was some sort of apology to ourselves and a defence of our basic right to miracles that we could put into our supermarket shopping baskets.
In a nutshell, we call every hope an attempt. It doesn’t matter what number we give it. Luba swore by Mrs M. from Orla. She treated us with water, touch, glances, whatever she wanted. The Orla whisperer was the subject of gratitude and will be for many years. If the Podlasie whisperers had a notional hierarchy, Mrs M. from Orla was at the top, the best of the best. Everyone trusted her. Just ask the children, old people, young people, border guards and men smoking outside the pub or waiting for their wives in their cars.
In short, Mrs M. from Orla was good at what she did. We didn’t know exactly what it was, or what it was called, but everybody said that she was good. I went to see her as a child, when my cheeks were red with ringworm and the fish oil or stinking spirits forced on them weren’t working. I looked as if I’d reacted to something. Today we’d put it down to lactose intolerance, but back then you went to the whisperer about it. We stood in a long line, with a woman and a crying little boy wrapped in a sweater in front of us. Mrs M. looked out of the window and indicated that the boy should come in first. Those were the unwritten rules: priority to crying children.
She reminded me of the Snow Queen, who watched mortals from her palace until her severe, searching gaze caused frost to form. People weren’t afraid of her, but they showed respect and kept their distance. They knew that she was “on the right side”, that she didn’t do bad things, and for that reason they didn’t go to her with bad things. Apparently the whisperer in Pogrzeby was the expert there. If you were to ask one hundred adults from the Podlasie border region if they’d ever been to see a whisperer, even today at least eighty of them would definitely tell you that they had, at least once. It would be a quantitative statistic, although only of use to dissertations on social-religious phenomena, and approximately as many would tell you that some whisperer had genuinely helped them. A dissertation stating that would be somewhat harder to defend.
I don’t know if, as a child, everything is somehow simpler, if faith is purer; maybe faith then is not sullied by experience. And it doesn’t matter if you believe in a higher power or just believe. Believe in people. It isn’t dangerous, but granny said that there’s nothing like it any more. She was used to burning plastic bottles in the garden and obviously knew something about it.
© Translated from the Slovak by Isabel Stainsby, 2023
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or used in any form or in any way.
