The Mara Under the Cradle

A young woman came into the inn with her arm bound in linen, asked for water, began to speak of a cradle and suddenly pressed her lips shut, as if she had bitten her own shadow. I already meant not to ask, because not everything that rocks a cradle has a mother's hands. But a spoken word does not go back down the throat: it blackens in the air and looks for someone to breathe through next.

From here on let her tell it, for a thread like that is easily torn by another's tongue. I lived beyond the dam, where the forest crept up to the gardens and at night the marsh breathed through the reeds like a sick stove through a cracked damper.

When I bore my child, for the first weeks the house was an almost convincing stage-set of happiness: milk in a clay bowl, linen on the drying pole, warm bread, the cradle by the stove, and sleep that came down on the infant like a light curtain.

Then, between the second and third cockcrow, when even the mouse under the bench became part of the night's motionless architecture, the child would wake and cry so evenly, so measured, as if a broken clock had been wound up inside the small body. The child's eyes did not seek me, nor the door, nor the window. They slanted downward, as if under the cradle.

I told myself: the belly, the cold, a draught, the evil eye - all that small medicine of old women's explanations with which we patch the abyss so it will not dawn inside the house. My husband checked the bolt, the chimney, the shutters; everything was locked. Yet every morning it was damp under the cradle, though the floor around it was dry, and on the cradle's leg darkened the print of a small wet finger.

They brought Baba Domakha toward evening. She did not rush to the icons, did not whisper long words, but squatted down like a doctor beside the world's festering wound and peered under the cradle. She was silent longer than is fitting for a living person. Then she pulled out a black wet hair, cold as cellar water. It would not tear. The old woman said: "That is not hair. That is a path."

Domakha said it was Mara - not a woman and not the shadow of a woman, but a night will that sits down beside the sleeping and measures out emptiness for them the way an apothecary measures a potion. "The child does not cry from pain. It cries so as not to fall asleep. Mara does not steal the body. First she steals sleep." And when sleep has been stolen, the crying runs dry, the eyes stay open, and the little one lies quiet as a wax doll.

"Do not call it by name at night," she said, and her lips grew narrow as a crack in a coffin. "A name is a key. Rock it, sing, pray, but do not call. If something below speaks in your voice, do not answer it with trust. And do not look under the cradle, for what is there is no hiding place and no beast, but a hungry place under the clay of the floor that has learned to pretend to be floor." I listened and felt the house becoming a labyrinth.

That night the stove died down for no reason, though the embers should have held till morning; the milk in the bowl took on a thin film, as if skin had grown over it; and the candle burned with a vitriol-blue, dead flame, the kind alchemists might use to set dreams alight. The child began to cry. The cradle moved by itself - not forward and back, as from a hand, but sideways, as if an invisible thread were being tugged beneath it.

From under the cradle came my own voice, only wet, muffled, pressed down by a damp pillow: "Let him sleep. You are tired. I will rock him." It was so mincing and gentle that every word was like a doll's hand inside a glove. My fingers turned to wood, my knees forgot their duty, and the ceiling of the house became a painted sky.

The child suddenly fell silent, and that silence was worse than the crying, because in it the cradle was still rocking. I was already parting my lips to say the name - the homely one, the warm one, the deadly one. Then I bit my own hand, and a ruby glow flared in my mouth. Instead of the name I sang: "Hushaby, little one, sleep not deep, come back early," with no key in it at all.

Under the cradle something scratched the wood from below - not fiercely, but patiently, like a scribe writing out a sentence. The shadow under the bench stretched itself out, wet black strands crawled from it and touched the edge of the child's little blanket. I did not look down. I sang until my voice became a dry mechanism in my throat and the world narrowed to the cradle, the candle and the forbidden name.

When the third cocks cut through the darkness, the house grew warm all at once, as if the stage-set had been shifted closer to the sun. The cradle stopped. Under it remained a wet black stain in the shape of a palm - too small for a woman's, but with fingers too long, with extra joints, as if it had been cut not from a body but from the intent to grab. The infant fell asleep for the first time without that crying. On my hand a dark mark came up, like a thread.

Since then, in our village, no one calls children by their names after midnight; they say "little sun," "little bird," "little one," because a child's sleep is a door through which the soul comes back to its mother every morning. Mine grew up and walked under a sky that always seemed to me a painted ceiling. And I no longer sleep. I have remained a lock without a door: every night an invisible key enters from below and turns inside my chest.