The Dniester That Takes Memories

I remember one guest who came to us some ten years back. A stranger from near Khotyn, boots caked in silt, smelling of the river and wet stone. He drank no mead, asked only for hot water with herbs. And when everyone had gone home, he told me a legend, and why he never goes out on the water in fog. It happened on the Dniester, in November three years ago. The autumn was windless, and over the water stood a white fog so thick that an oar was lost in it up to the very grip.

The ferryman - Yaroslav was his name - was sitting at his table finishing a heel of bread when he heard a knock at the window of his little hut. The knock was even, three raps. Yaroslav went out, and on the landing stood a woman in a long grey homespun coat, her face covered with a kerchief. She said nothing, only held out a copper coin. The coin was icy, enough to cramp his fingers. He seated her in the boat and pushed off from the bank.

The current that day was strange, slow, like tar. The woman sat in the bow without stirring. Yaroslav rowed, but no bank came into sight. The fog had thickened until the boat seemed to hang in a white void. That was when the ferryman noticed that the water no longer lapped against the side. He leaned over and saw that the Dniester had gone still as glass. And under that glass, deep down, pale faces were drifting. Dozens, hundreds. All of them looking up at the boat.

The woman slowly turned her head, and the kerchief slipped a little. Where her eyes should have been were dark whirlpools of water. The woman slowly turned her head, and the kerchief slipped lower still. Her face seemed made of water: there one moment, gone the next. Only her mouth showed dark, like a crack between stones. You do not remember us, ferryman, she whispered. But we all remember you. Every night. Every coin. Every "we'll make it yet".

Yaroslav wanted to cross himself, but his hand would not obey. Then, from under the glassy water, palms began to rise. They did not break the surface - they simply pressed against it from below, as against a windowpane. Small ones, old ones, women's, men's. And among them he recognized one: the hand of a boy he had once refused to take into the boat, because the lad had nothing to pay with.

The boat shuddered. Water seeped up through the bottom, but not river water - black, cold, smelling of a snuffed candle. The woman laid the copper coin on his knee. Now you pay, she said. Not with money. With memory. And then all the faces under the water opened their mouths at once, but there was no scream. Only the fog grew thicker.

Yaroslav came to on his own bank toward morning. He lay by the landing, grey-haired all over, though the evening before only his temples had been grey. In his pocket, instead of the coin, was a wet scale from an enormous catfish, and on his palm a dark mark, as if someone had been holding his hand. From that day on he never took payment in advance, and never refused anyone who asked to cross the river in foul weather.

But that was not the worst of it. When he died, his boat did not rot and did not sink. They say that on foggy nights it still stands in the middle of the Dniester with no oarsman. And if you listen closely, you can hear three even raps on the wood. As if someone were knocking from inside the boat. So there it is, good people. When fog settles over the river and someone knocks three times - do not answer - the boat may already have come for you.