The Mirror in a Dark Frame

The shirt clung temptingly to her full breasts, and through the wet linen you could see the body breathing - slowly, deeply, arousingly. That was how they saw her in the dark entry hall of the abandoned house that had stood empty beyond the village for ten years. That summer the sultry heat didn't lift even at midnight: skin never dried, dogs didn't bark - they whimpered quietly, into the ground. A window lit up in the empty house.

A steady warm light, without a single shadow on the earthen bench by the wall. The chimney was cold in the morning. The door locked. And every night the light came back. First it was the miller who stepped off the road, without any invitation - he was walking home late from the mill, stopped by the wattle fence - and saw a woman's bare feet in the entry hall. White, motionless. In that moment the night itself changed: it grew quiet, as under water.

Then warmth breathed into his face. And only then the smell: apples from his mother's cellar, gone these twenty years, warm hay, and a woman's skin heated through the day - close, so close, though she stood half the yard away. The miller's mouth filled with saliva. His legs were no longer his own. She stepped nearer. Dark hair lay across her breasts, which moved sensually under the linen with every breath.

The voice sounded right at his ear, like breath on the back of his neck: "What is it you won't miss?" His thoughts whispered that she already knew how he wanted to be touched. Knew it better than he did himself. He laughed with a dry mouth: "My wife. For one night she won't even find out. I want someone younger." The door opened by itself.

He could never describe the face afterwards - he only said that he looked at her and remembered things he was ashamed even to think about by day. Of the night itself he told that her skin was hot as the hearth of the stove, and that heat pulled you into itself, and he went into it until he forgot his own name. In the morning he smelled of apples; women in the street stopped and didn't know why themselves. The miller came home. His wife sat at the table sorting beans.

She raised her head: "Who are you here for?" He showed his wedding ring, called the children. The children called him father, told their mother where she had been wed, how she had lived with him. She listened politely. And then she asked the strange man to leave her house. A few nights later a second one took the path. He walked fast, like a lad going to his sweetheart, and unbuttoned his shirt on the way. To her question he answered: "My friendship. I won't miss it."

The next day he met the kum he had grown up with. The kum remembered everything: how they stole plums from the deacon, how they got drunk for the first time, how they carried his father to the graveyard. He could name the day they became kums, and the shirt the man had worn. He stood looking him straight in the face. "I remember it all," he said. "Only I don't care anymore." Then the widow from beyond the pond went down.

In that house her dead husband appeared to her - young, with his hair still on, with those hands she had been afraid to remember for twenty years, because at the memory her body turned disobedient. She said: "My memories. I won't miss them. What do I want with that torment." All night she felt him inside her. She came back in the morning feeling light, younger even.

In the night she woke: her own hand was groping over the empty half of the bed, searching for a warmth her head no longer knew. A few days later the widow pulled a man's shirt out of the chest. A worn collar, a patch on the elbow, her own stitches. She pressed it to her face and wept so hard the neighbour came running. "What's wrong with you?" - "I don't know." The head had forgotten, but the hands had not. The body remembered everything.

The heat would not break; windows all over the village stood open till morning. A husband lay beside his wife, listened to her breathing - and heard, far beyond the gardens, the gate of the empty house creak. Then quietly, so as not to wake her, he lowered his feet to the clay floor. Wives began listening for men's footsteps. Husbands - for women's.

In the morning the path beyond the village was covered with bare footprints, and everyone knew whose they were, and no one said it aloud. People met out there in pairs and pretended they had gone out to relieve themselves. There had never been such a queue for church. They hung hawthorn, scattered poppy seed, laid knives under the thresholds blade up. It didn't help. All that holds back the one who forces his way into your yard. But she had never crossed anyone's gate.

She called no one. The next night I too came as far as the wicket gate. Don't ask why - I don't like that question. The light from the window lay on the grass. Inside someone was walking barefoot: two steps, a pause, one more. It burned under my skin like at nineteen. There came a smell of something so familiar that my hand reached for my groin before I remembered where I knew that smell from. Then my own voice came from the house. Mine. Calm, sober.

It named the thing I wouldn't miss. She hadn't asked anything yet. I was touching myself in rhythm. Now I know something new about myself. The last to go was the man the village held to be the most decent. A good householder, never wronged his wife, his word carried weight. He stood a long time on the threshold. "What is it you won't miss?" He was silent. The door had already begun to close, and then he said quietly, as at confession: "May I ask for something small?"

She waited. "My shame," he said. In the morning he had breakfast with his family, kissed his wife on the forehead, joked with his son, stroked the little one's head. He was the same man. Only his eyes had gone calm and sated, like a cat's beside the cream. After dinner he went out to the people and began to speak. Evenly, as if about the weather. He named the headman. He named his kum.

He named the woman who had watched over her husband for three nights and on the fourth went beyond the village herself - and said what shirt she went in. He named the one who told everyone about the poppy seed, though he himself had stood under that window twice. They shouted at him: "Shut your mouth!" He was sincerely surprised: "What's there to be ashamed of? It's the truth." And he went on talking.

And people stood and listened, because they wanted to listen, slipping their hands under their own clothes. How pleasant and sweet it was to listen. That very evening one woman barred her door and wouldn't let her husband come home. By the well two kums fought in silence, without cursing, until they were pulled apart. People spat after the headman. Someone left the village in the night with a sack and never came back.

Everyone passed one another without a greeting: each knew about each what they had no business knowing. Before dawn they gathered to burn the abandoned house. At the door the people stopped short. No one hurried to go in. I went in first. Inside it was warm - too warm for a house where no fire had been lit in ten years.

The bed was rumpled; I touched it with my palm - still warm, and the palm didn't want to come away. On the table lay a round mirror in a dark frame, face down. Someone behind me said: "Turn it over." I didn't. Another man was found. He lifted it, looked - and at once spoke a woman's name. His wife's name was different. The headman snatched the mirror, looked, went pale. Handed it to me. What I saw in the glass I will tell neither you nor the priest.

The succubus was never seen again. And the day before yesterday, at the market, I found that mirror again. Feeling an arousal wrap itself around me, I bought it. In the night it began to smell of apples and of a woman, so sweetly. The glass fogged over from the inside. A palm slid slowly across it. Then another, lower down. I was nineteen again, warmth pooled low in my belly, my trousers went tight, and right at my ear something whispered: "What is it you won't miss?"