33 Names

I cut my hands. I do not want to die. But I know that with every new wound a dead person wakes through my mouth. Today they all cried out together: - Do not wake the last one. The one whose name is Satan will return! I pressed my palms over my lips, but the voices beat through my teeth. And deep beneath the skin someone answered quietly: - Do not listen to them, Marta. They are only afraid of becoming me, but in truth I am already in each of them.

Mother ran in at the scream and saw my hands. - Marta, look at me. You are Marta. You are twenty-one years old. You are my daughter. I wanted to say I knew. But my lips spoke in a boy's voice: - Auntie, don't let her wake him. Mother dropped the bowl. - Who are you? My mouth smiled. - Pavlyk. And the Ginger Cantor promised he would find me. My father Ivan came running at mother's scream. Hearing "the Ginger Cantor", he stopped on the threshold.

Only Pavlyk had ever called him that, back when the two of them still ran to church as boys. Pavlyk died long before I was born, and Ivan himself never once mentioned him in front of me. Mother bandaged my hands and took out a shirt. On the inside my name was embroidered dozens of times. - What for? - So you would have somewhere to return to. - I'm not going anywhere. She ran her finger along the threads. In every word "Marta" the last letter had vanished.

In the mirror behind me stood a wet boy. And Pavlyk would not fall silent until Ivan promised to take us to the old pear tree in the cemetery. - Mama's there. She comes every Sunday, only she no longer knows to whom... Ivan remembered the grave: he had carried the little coffin there himself after the spring flood. But now there were no letters on the stone. Beside it sat a grey-haired woman. - Is your son buried here? - I never had children.

Icy water gurgled in my lungs, and I felt a child's fingers slip out of a mother's hand. Ivan went pale. - Let's go to the church. If the name has worn off the grave, we'll check the book. In the church Ivan found the page of the year Pavlyk drowned. Between two entries darkened a damp emptiness, as if the name had not been erased but pulled out through the paper. Then he turned to the year mother had brought me home. In the place of my name was the same stain.

- Your name was here, - said mother. Scratched into the margins: "Satan wakes last. An erased name becomes a voice in the body that carries them. Thirty-three names hold the Nameless One. A name is returned with the doors open: water on the threshold, a candle, witnesses and the answer: "It is I". The hand that writes in truth returns the memory of the Named." We took the book, hoping to find answers. At night it opened by itself.

Ivan slept beside it, and his hand scratched with a fingernail: "Pavlyk". The moment his hand tore away, someone exhaled from my mouth like a child. By dawn the scratched name had vanished: the dead one could not answer "It is I", and even his own mother did not remember him. - Father, you do remember how Pavlyk died? - I remember his laughter, his voice, the funeral, even that cursed nickname. But the day he died is gone. As if someone had cut it out of my head.

Mother came over and silently took the shirt with the embroidered name off me, locked it in the chest and hid the key behind the icons. - What else is in there? - I asked. - What you must not remember. At night a scratching came from under the lid. The voices in me whispered one word: - Open. The key was already lying in my palm. In the chest I found a list of thirty-three names.

Opposite each one darkened a stain, as if a finger dipped in ink had touched the paper from the inside. Below the list, set apart: "Marta. The name is to be kept by a living voice until Olena's last breath". No date of birth. No father. No baptism. - When was I born? Mother sat down on the earthen floor and covered her face with her hands. - You were not born for this world. All the wakened voices whispered: - At last.

Mother said that after Radunytsia something had gone from grave to grave and begun to eat names. In a single day the village lost thirty-two of its dead a second time: people stopped remembering them. That very next night Olena gave birth to a dead girl.

The midwife gathered and wrote down the last memories, the hair and the scraps of clothing of the forgotten, burned them and sealed them with the ash inside the infant's body, together with the thing that had been devouring them. Demian gave his own name as the thirty-third - as the final seal; beside the name was written: "Sexton. Gave his name last".

- I gave birth to a dead body, - said mother. - The midwife locked inside it the one they called Satan. Thirty-three human names became the seals. You did not exist yet. I called that body Marta every day, until one morning it was you who answered me. - And who looked through my eyes before I appeared? My lips slowly stretched into a smile. - I did, - whispered Satan. The moment Satan whispered "I", under the bandage on my palm the skin parted by itself in a thin line.

An old man spoke through my mouth: - I am Demian. Do not believe him. He did not look through your eyes. He waited behind them. - Are you the last seal? - Yes. Every voice you wake breaks one. When the last one breaks, he will be whole again. My right hand wrote on the wall: "OPEN". The left rubbed the word away to the bare clay. Demian wept with my eyes. And the laughter that came out of my mouth was no longer his.

By morning I remembered less of my own and more of what was not mine. I knew how Pavlyk drowned. How Demian died by the cold church altar. How a stranger's mother screamed over her daughter's body and then forgot whom she was mourning. - What were you like at seven? Remember, daughter, - mother asked through tears. I remembered three childhoods and not one of my own. In the mirror I saw myself at seven. - When mama forgets you, name yourself.

I could not remember why I was called Marta. At night the voice sounded in my teeth. - Who are you? - I am darkness and your salvation. And I am also Satan. - What will you save me from? - From having to remember every morning who you are pretending to be. In the mirror my face split apart into dozens of strangers' faces. - Why do they fear you? - Because in each of them a part of me is locked away. When their names vanish, I will proclaim my own.

Behind me mother woke and barely recognized me; holding on to the last threads of memory, she dragged me to the church. In the church mother tried to name me before the people. - This is my daughter Ma... The candle went out. All the voices in me drew breath together. Ivan flung the doors open, poured holy water across the threshold, lit a candle of pure wax and scratched into the book with a knife: "Marta, Olena's daughter". The people repeated the name.

I wanted to answer, but my lips cracked. - Demian, - whispered the wound. Then my mouth itself named the one the seals had been holding: - Satan. From inside me came the answer: - It is I. The people wept and began to pray on their knees. And by dawn there was not a single name left in the book. In the line Ivan had carved for me, only one word showed black: "Satan". Mother looked at my body and did not recognize her daughter.

Ivan no longer remembered that he had once taken me for a daughter. Behind my teeth it grew quiet. Pavlyk, Demian and the others were gone. And then Satan spoke in their thirty-three voices: - I have returned again, because you forgot my name. To forget the dead is to set free what was locked away by their names and by the memory of their mistakes.