The Mavka of the Dark Wood

Sometimes, when the wind hums in the chimney, I remember a certain lullaby. It is not sung to children. It is whispered into the emptiness, to summon that which does not yet have a body. Old people say: never rock an empty cradle, and never name the unborn. For there are things that wait in the darkness until we ourselves call them by name. This story I heard from a forester who went mad in his old age.

That forester often drank at my inn and muttered about an old midwife from a Polissia village that borders a deep, blind wood. All her life she had delivered children, but most of all she feared the ones who never drew breath, for the forest took their souls while they were still in the womb. Her hands were black from walnut husks, and her coat reeked of wet earth and dog nettle. She knew that the forest listens to every sigh of a woman with child.

At the edge of that village, where the gardens ran up against the black wall of the forest, lived a young woman named Maryna. Her husband never came back from the winter logging - he went under the ice at the crossing. Maryna was left alone, but under her heart she carried a child. Out of grief she began going to the old willow on the boundary. She would stand in the fog and whisper into the darkness the name she and her husband had chosen.

The midwife warned her: before the birth, a name does not yet belong to the child. It is soft, like warm wax. It is held together by the mother's thoughts. But if a woman whispers that name at night to a dark window or into the forest, it will be heard by the one who lives in the bark and the moss. A mavka does not steal the body. She steals the word that has not yet become sound. She takes the future, leaving only an empty shell.

First the people heard singing. Quiet, without words, it drifted from the abandoned hunter's house that stood by the willow. The villagers said it was the wind in the chimney. But the pregnant women, hearing that melody, clutched their bellies and wept. Not from pain. From the sudden, icy feeling that they had forgotten someone. That in their womb beat something alien, denied the right to the light.

Maryna was the first to lose her child. Not in body - she still walked heavy. But one morning she found on the bench a small wooden spoon her husband had carved. She turned it over in her hands for a long time, and then asked the midwife: "Granny, who in our village carves such little spoons? Who is it for?" There was no pain in her eyes. Only a bottomless, dead emptiness.

The midwife went into Maryna's house. In the corner stood a cradle, and on it hung an embroidered cloth with protective crosses. But Maryna looked at it with glassy eyes and said: "Why did I put this here? Am I expecting someone?" The name had vanished from her head. The waiting had been wiped away. The child in her womb had become simply a burden, a lump of meat without a future - a future the forest had already taken.

The old woman understood what she was dealing with. She took a bunch of wormwood, bound it with red thread, and went toward evening to the willow. Under the roots, in a rotten hollow, it was not bones she found. There lay small bundles of birch bark, covered in slime. Woven into each one was something like a half-transparent membrane that rose and fell, as if from an invisible heartbeat.

When the midwife untied one bundle, she heard a whisper. It was the name Maryna was to have given her son. It sounded not in a human voice, but in the wet rustle of leaves and the sound of drops falling onto rot. The mavka had taken it for herself, to rock it in the forest silence. For the forest is always hungry for what does not yet exist in the world of people. It feeds on our hopes.

What has been stolen cannot be returned. One can only guard what has not yet been given away. Since that time, in that village, pregnant women never sew after sunset. And cradles are brought into the house only when the child is already crying and breathing. Empty wood must not wait. For if a cradle stands empty, it begins to rock by itself, calling for its mistress.

Maryna gave birth to a healthy boy. But when the priest asked what to name him, she was silent a long time, staring at the icon. She did not remember what she had promised her husband. The boy was given a stranger's name. He grew up silent, pale-skinned, and always listening for someone calling him from beyond the forest's edge. His true name is rotting in the willow's hollow to this day.

The forester who told me this later died by that same willow. They say that before his death he was carving small wooden spoons. When the inn grows very quiet and the firewood in the stove burns down to ash, I never look into the darkness. Because if you hear a quiet, wordless song coming from it, then someone has already given their future to the forest.