Twelve Spoons on the Table

Twelve. You repeat it in your head before you've even opened your eyes, counting the spoons on the table that sinks far below. You are seven, and the stove beneath you breaks off like a riverbank. Honey, poppy seed, warm wheat - the smell of kutia tickles your throat, though outside it is August, and no kutia has been cooked in the house since Christmas. Mama and Tato are laying the supper and won't glance up at you.

The towel on its pole stretches across the whole room like a footbridge. There are three of you in the family. You remember your granny. One Christmas Eve you were counting the spoons on the table, and she covered your hand with hers - warm and dry: "Don't count after sundown." You asked why. "Because you might count your way to your own." Everyone at the table laughed then, Tato loudest of all. Here nobody laughs. One spoon lies a little apart from the others.

There's a scratch on the handle - you made it yourself with a little knife last summer and hid the spoon at the bottom of the dish cupboard so you wouldn't be scolded. The oil lamp blinks. The table stands empty. Somewhere far away, as if from beyond the polonyna, a trembita drones - for the dead. The oil lamp blinks a second time. They are already sitting there. No one came in, the door never creaked.

Big people in old sheepskin coats, real snow melting on their shoulders, though your little sled has lain forgotten under the hay shelter since spring. They are eating, and that is the worst of it: a spoon dips into the kutia - and not a sound. Someone swallows - silence. A single poppy seed falls onto the table, and you hear it like a stone. You recognize the guests. Or rather, parts of them. Grandpa's eyebrows. Granny's birthmark above the lip. Mama's mouth.

The faces seem put together out of your family, only a little too large, like an adult's mask over a child's face. The smile on them begins before the corners of the lips have moved. The woman at the far end of the table has your eyes. You look at her once and somehow know: a second time is not allowed. Under the table something is slowly shifting its feet. There, too, you must not look. You cry out: "Mama!" She freezes with the towel in her hands.

Slowly she turns her head, and hot relief flares in your chest. But Mama is not looking at you - a little to the right and a little above your shoulder. There sits an old woman with Granny's birthmark. Mama smiles at her, sets a bowl before her, passes the salt with the words "I'm laughing, not angry" - so there will be no quarrel. Then she sets another bowl before an empty chair. They are waiting for someone else. You wake in your own bed.

Morning, eggs sizzling, Tato in the entry hall cursing at the damp firewood. Everything is in its place. You ask: "Mama, did Granny leave kutia for the dead?" Mama turns and looks at you longer than she needs to. "She did. Kutia and a clean spoon - for those of the family who have no one left to set a place for them. But how do you remember that? You were three." You don't answer. Because just then you run your tongue along your lip and pick off a tiny black seed. Poppy.

You hadn't eaten any. On the second night you wake not on the stove - on the bench. The bench is sticky with old wax, the floor icy under your bare feet. The table is closer. The guests are the same, only one more of them. You look at the photographs above the chest: on one of them there is now an empty place, only a lighter patch on the glass where a face was yesterday. You shift your gaze to the table.

That man is sitting among the guests, and the snow on his shoulders has not yet melted. Someone slowly, without a single sound, turns their bowl toward you. Across from you sits a man with Grandpa's eyes, which look slightly away from where his head is turned. Before him lies a spoon, long as an oar. He takes it in both hands and pushes it toward you.

Wood scrapes across the table - the first loud sound of the whole night, and it makes your teeth go numb. You edge away. From under the table, fingers touch your bare heel, cold as water in a cellar. You scream. "Don't be afraid," says Mama. For the first time in all these nights she speaks to you. But she is looking under the table. Mama calls: "Sonny." Your legs are already carrying you to her - and then you remember your granny.

She said once, sorting poppy seed: when a dead one wants you to follow him, he calls you the way you were loved. The house is no longer enormous: at the table everything is just right, everything in its place, and you - in yours. Twelve spoons. Eleven in the guests' hands. The twelfth lies before you, and on the handle - your scratch. You have counted your way to it.

"Eat," says the guest opposite, and his voice sounds with many voices at once: you hear in it Granny, and Grandpa, and someone you don't yet know. You turn away from the bowl. And then Mama finally looks straight at you. Smiles. "Mama," you whisper. She takes the twelfth spoon, lays it before you neatly, the way one lays it for a guest, and says for the whole house to hear: "At last we're all gathered." You wake from your own scream.

Your room, night, Mama rushing in, Tato turning on the light. Alive. They see you. You hang on Mama's neck, and then over her shoulder you look at the table she wiped dry the evening before. In the middle of the table lies a wooden spoon. Wet. "What's that you've got?" Mama asks. You run your tongue between your teeth and take out a tiny black seed.

And from the kitchen comes the smell of kutia - honey, poppy seed, warm wheat. Though none has been cooked since Christmas itself. In the morning Mama silently hides the spoon at the very bottom of the dish cupboard. You see her check the little doors twice and fasten the hook. In the evening there are three of you at the table.

Mama sets out three bowls, Tato cuts the bread. You don't count the spoons. Never again. In the night you are woken by a soft knock of wood against the table. And from the kitchen Mama gently asks: "Sonny, have you sat down yet?"