From Ivan's inn
Quiet stories about what passes close by in the evening light: strange guests, omens, a whisper in the chimney, an unfamiliar bench in the corner.
77 stories
Have you ever woken up in a coffin? When your nose presses against the board and the dark never turns grey, no matter how you blink. I know what the lid smells like from the inside. I am still there.
At seventy-three I paid the witch Marta for youth. The next morning I woke in a locked storeroom, and a familiar young voice outside the door was asking how much longer they'd have to feed me.
Before she died, my grandmother asked me to take her away from a wedding - one held forty years before I was born. She gave me a key, a sealed envelope, and one warning: "I won't know you yet. If I fight you, don't be angry."
They paid me twice for the burial of Yavdokha the witch, and the second payment I took while she was still scratching the coffin from the inside. Twenty-seven years later she stood before me and asked me to walk her home.
Since I was seven I have dreamed the same river: a boat with no oars that moves by itself, and voices calling from the limestone caves. Yesterday my daughter asked if I had called her from a cave at night.
I lied to my husband for ten days over a cupboard handle. I'm good at hinting - sighing by a heavy bag, leaving broken things in plain sight. If a person loves you, I thought, they'll see it themselves.
"I wish you'd never been born," Mariia said to her daughter, and left the apology for morning. By two o'clock the blanket was folded, the pillow stained black, and bare footprints the length of her forearm led behind the wardrobe.
For forty years he carried the workshop key in his right pocket, until the pocket wore through. Tomorrow I must hand it to a stranger - but first, about the piano, the cherries, and the coffee tin I found behind the shelves.
They say he gives every woman the best sex of her life. I went to find out what he takes in return - up one flight of stairs, to a floor that isn't on the elevator panel.
A year after the crash, the station called about an unclaimed bag in my husband's name. Inside were two tickets to a city by the sea - and the whole life we never got to live.
Roman has an hour before the exchange. The prisoner across from him is the drone operator who may have killed his wife. I am Dalenial, and I return memories - slowly, one death at a time.
Olesia the herb-woman tells of a night when the bog lights cried like children and begged to be carried across a furrow - and of what she found in her own house afterwards, if she ever woke at all.
One summer night fires danced a perfect circle over the steppe, and by morning the earth inside it was black, cold and cut off from the living. Even the ants would not cross that line.
A salt miner from near Solotvyno tells of the deepest gallery, where the salt is dark crimson and remembers what falls into it. And of a knocking that comes from inside the stone itself.
An old deacon from near Pereiaslav once told me of a church register kept in a locked chest behind the altar - a book that wrote the names of children before they were born, with the dates of their deaths set down years in advance.
An old wild-hive beekeeper finds an oak hollow with no honey in it - only hundreds of wax figurines of the living. The pale bees do not gather nectar. They mould those whose time has run out.
There are dreams better left unremembered, especially out loud. But sometimes the night comes back: a voice under the window drawing out a name, wet, along the very glass, and the whole village gone silent - even the dogs.
Old shepherd Zhdan came down from the mountains with a tale about the healer Vedyslav, a book written in knots, and a word one must never speak after sunset. If something touches your head in the night - do not move.
Death asked Father Vasyl for a single night's lodging. He showed her the door - and for forty years went on opening other people's doors for her instead. A night tale about the price of one borrowed year.
For twelve years my wife's hand steered clear of the old break in my rib, the way you walk around a fresh grave. On Thursday it didn't. And the wooden spoon from the old orphanage began turning handle down on its own.
Orysia is fading in her bed, and every night Levko meets her in a blooming orchard where a man with grey wings waits under the farthest apple tree. A night tale about the one question love cannot answer - and the one promise it can keep.
Twenty years ago I wrote two sentences and could write no more. A bargain at the old water mill, three bowls, a down payment - and a price the water names only after it has been paid.
Before the frosts Odarka had to pay off her dead husband's debt. At the market an old man with a cold, damp palm agreed to her price at once - and took far more than the coat.
Myron told his wife he would write no more - and at two in the morning the old typewriter began to clatter. At it sat himself, twenty years old, still writing everything the older one had renounced.
On the third night Hanna saw water beading straight out of Semen's skin, and bare footprints on the floor led only to the bed. Then something in the pond began learning to wear the faces of the drowned.
That summer a light burned in the empty house beyond the village, and a woman in a wet shirt asked every man who came a single question: what is it you won't miss? A night tale about a succubus, a dark-framed mirror, and the things a village should never learn about itself.
The shelling ended twenty minutes ago, and his hands still aren't his. Before moving out, Taras records for Mariia everything he never said - and asks her to close the window, it's cold there.
From the ruins of a burnt house, at the height of a window that no longer exists, a small light flashes three times: short, short, long. Only one person in the world ever called Maksym like that.
They tied the witch to the wheel, and for the first time the devil begged the angel for mercy. I stood five metres away, said nothing, and now I want to ease my soul by telling the truth.
Through the mud of Vyshenka stretches a single string of a child's footprints - right foot, right foot, right. Beside the bare heel rolls a black stone, and behind every door the boy is refused a place by the fire. Until morning, when the village counts what it has lost.
You are seven, it is August, and the table far below smells of kutia no one has cooked since Christmas. The guests eat without a sound, and the twelfth spoon bears your scratch. A night tale about why you must never count spoons after sundown.
After the encephalitis his body froze but his mind did not. The doctors call him a dead man when they think he cannot hear. At night the ward becomes a concert hall, and from the music stands one word rustles: more... more... more...
Lada was killed, and the kettle in Marko's kitchen began to boil on a cold stove. Behind the sideboard, where there should have been only street, something started ticking - and every night a new evening opened in the wall.
Once a month Yavdokha circled the village with black thread, and her one rule was simple: never touch it with a bare hand, never cross the ford after sundown. Kuzma broke both - and something at the ford began learning his mother's words.
Five winters after the pitchforks and the torches, Hnat came back for the sack he'd buried in the old barn. The pale mushrooms around the pit leaned inward, and a boy stepped out of the fog to ask what he'd come for.
For thirty years the door of my cell has stood open - and that is the worst torture of all. Down below a honeyed light waits, and the price of stepping into it is the one whose dreams have kept your face the longest.
The earth strikes the coffin lid twice, and Marta claws her way out again - into a life she does not remember living. Eleven crosses bear her face, and her mother waits at home with milk, honey and the left nail.
Twelve years after her death, Marko hears his mother's voice from a cemetery stone. But what waits behind it is not her soul - only the waiting she left behind, and it has long since stopped caring whom it waits for.
Six hours before the end of the world, a faceless creature in a black shroud unrolls a scroll of human skin: name your filthiest desire, and a kinsman's name burns off the list of salvation. Orysia looks at the scroll - only two lines are left.
I cut my hands, and with every new wound a dead voice wakes through my mouth. Thirty-three names hold the Nameless One - and the village of Vyshenka has begun to forget its dead.
Six windows burn in a forest where no inn should stand. The host knows every guest by name, and in every bowl waits a piece of tomorrow's dead. Ivan remembers the supper he never finished.
Every night I see myself old. Tonight he was already sitting on the edge of my bed, weeping so quietly I could hear the tears fall on the blanket. Don't let me touch you, he said. And the clock had stopped at 3:17.
Every night Mama bolted my door from the outside and warned me: the hallway is hungry. She knew why the floor chewed in the dark - and still she put my bed right over the spot where the house opened its mouth.
Oryna asked the thing under the blankets to take her daughter away. But the Syrotnyk keeps count of everything - every "Mama" answered and unanswered - and he does not come for orphans.
Under Maria's bed lies black water, and it speaks in her own voice. It asks her to die - pretty please - and promises to take her place among the living, so that no one will ever again ask her to live.
A one-armed guest at Ivan's Inn tells how he carved a puppet for a lord's theatre - a puppet too perfect to be dead wood. His severed hand crawls across the counter, and somewhere above the roof a thin white thread pulls taut.
The bell struck at midnight, though its rope had been cut ten years before. And by morning another name was fading from the parish book - and from the world, so cleanly that not even a mother remembered.
They had barely laid Maryna behind the white linen when a spoon banged angrily against a pot by the stove. Everyone knew that knock. The dead woman was cooking supper for her own wake - and no one dared tell her the truth.
Beyond the graveyard fence a swing hangs from a willow over black water. By night the board grows heavy with a weight no one can see - and woe to the mother who answers when the wet wood whispers the one word she has kept behind her teeth.
Semen always seemed a righteous man - until the night his feet carried him to the old bathhouse by the pond, where the water washes away not dirt but shame. And that water is always waiting.
Domakha's needle sews a child's fever into a faceless motanka doll - but along with the pain, something else drains out of people. And from the old healer's oak chest, Maryna hears her daughter's voice.
The carpenter swore he had not drilled the second hole, and its edges were pressed inward - as if someone had entered Melania. When the village asked who had told them to open the coffin lid, all eyes slowly turned to Ostap the sexton.
The widow Hanna was the first to see Oles in a dream - a house without doors, an ice-cold stove, and a gentle, alien voice asking to sleep inside hers. After her, the dreams went through the village like a plague.
At noon the rye does not rustle - it listens. Orysia went past the boundary to find her son, and the white field answered with his voice from four different sides. Every answer she gives feeds the thing that asks.
At midnight every clock in Sava's house stopped - except the one ticking under his ribs. A clock with no hands struck thirteen, and behind the dial waited everything Sava had spent a lifetime signing away from himself.
For three nights another infant cried behind Marfa's stove, thin and hungry, as if waiting its turn to be held. She hung an old cloth between the cradle and the dark corner - and the crying broke off at once. Then the cloth began to move.
When the witch Melania died, they sealed her mouth with wax, poured poppy seed into the coffin and bored a hole in the lid so the soul could leave. But not every hole lets a soul out. Some leave the dead a road back.
First a woman spoke through his mouth, then a child, then a dead lord. Ostap the cantor came to the inn clutching his throat - and told how a sealed confession in the manor's lower storeroom made his mouth a window for other people's voices.
On St Elijah's Day an old herdsman saw Yavdokha's dappled cow walking home - and behind her trailed a stranger's shadow, long-legged and sharp-nosed. A night tale of a witch who steals not the milk, but the very essence.
Once every seven years the wind holds a wedding, and the bride does not come back. On the shore a musician of a free band beats the black drum - and every blow steals from him the very thing he is still alive for.
Under a bench at the inn I found a goat-leather glove. It wasn't lying there - it was waiting. And inside it, a damp little notebook: a scribe's record of how his own hand found itself another master.
At night the lords' castles do not sleep - they only pretend. An old man smelling of lime and raw stone sits by the fire at Ivan's Inn and confesses: he was the one who led her down, the last thread by which she still held on to this world.
A young mother in Vyshenka learns that not everything that rocks a cradle has a mother's hands - and that a child's name, spoken after midnight, is a key that should never be turned.
A winter tale from an inn at the crossroads, where the line between the living and those who have breathed their last is thinner than ice on a puddle. One blizzard night, a barefoot woman came asking about a boy in a blue coat.
A dying man is told that death only needs to be shown another door. Three nights, a child's shirt under the threshold, stove ash, and a name whispered with dry lips. The bargain begins not on the floor - it begins in the heart.
Never rock an empty cradle, and never name the unborn. A night tale from Ivan's Inn about a mavka who steals not bodies but names, and about a mother who forgot she was waiting for her own child.
A hemp rope brought in dry from the shed is already weeping icy water and smelling of deep silt. In one village in Podillia, the well rope always knew the truth - even after the evening bell had rung.
A fiery star falls in the field, and something warm begins knocking at the widows' windows at night, wearing the faces of the dead. It never breaks a door. It waits for you to open it yourself. And in the morning there is always the smell of burnt grain.
A plough catches on rusty iron by the old burial mound - a staple from a coffin lid, scratched from the inside. And whoever picks up what the earth has already taken as payment will hear it at night: scrape... scrape...
Last winter, lost in a blizzard near Vyshenka, Ivan found a house where the threshold smelled of soured milk - and something was scratching from inside. A night tale about a red ribbon, an empty cradle, and what the old people bury under new thresholds.
Old Overko came to the inn dripping river water that would not puddle, and whispered that the river by Chornyi Yar had stopped. For three days it had stood black and thick. And the mill under the willows had begun to breathe.
In a hungry year, when the earth stopped bearing, children began to vanish near the bog - and one evening a mother heard her missing daughter's voice calling from the reeds. An old chumak told this tale to Ivan the innkeeper, and he trembled telling it.
An old miller from the Buh once told me of a mill in a silent backwater, where the millstones turned by themselves at night - and what they ground was not grain. Sit where the shadow is thickest, and listen.
A charcoal burner from the Horhany hears his wife's voice calling from the deepest part of the ravine - though his wife is ten versts away. What calls him next is far worse. A night tale from Ivan's Inn.
A ferryman on the Dniester takes a silent woman across in a fog so thick the river goes still as glass - and under the glass, pale faces are watching. A night tale told over hot herbs at Ivan's Inn.
One night a one-eyed kobzar sat down by the stove in the inn and told of a man without a shadow - and of the lad who followed him into the tall grass. Since that night, his bandura still rings softly by itself in the dark.
A glassblower from Bohemia got snowed in at Ivan's Inn for three days and left behind a story about a master whose mirrors were too clean - and a small mirror wrapped in three kerchiefs that must never be unwrapped.
Come into the inn - the door is open, and there will be more stories.
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