The Rope That Knew the Truth

Look how the moisture beads on this hempen rope. I only just brought it in from the shed, and already it's wet, and it smells not of rain but of deep, standing silt. There are places where water doesn't flow - it waits. And where a rope always knows the truth, even when people shut their eyes. I know a village in Podillia that stands on solid limestone. They dig their wells deep there, ten sazhens down, breaking through the stone.

In the middle of the square stood the common well with an old timber curb, older than the church itself. But there was a strict custom - no drawing water after the evening bell. The old folk said - when the sun goes down, the stone gets slippery. But it wasn't about the stone. The old women whispered that you had to drop a sprig of mugwort to the bottom, to drive off the drowned. Because water that stands in the dark begins to remember those who perished in it.

And hemp soaks up their whisper better than memory does. The rope the heavy bucket hung on was always dry. Except for the last three arshins. The end that went down into the dark oozed icy water and reeked of deep silt. That smell of silt and wet hemp you'd know blindfolded. And each time the smell grew stronger, as if someone were breathing down into the depths.

One dusky evening the blacksmith's apprentice, who had lately buried his younger brother, went for water with a little oil lamp. The bell had already rung. He lowered the bucket. The rope ran easy, all too easy. And suddenly from below, from the abyss where there should have been splashing, came a wet whisper. The lad froze over the curb.

Hand down the bucket, my arms are tired. The lad froze. It was his brother's voice. His head knew that his brother lay in the earth at the graveyard, that the river five versts away had taken him forever. But his heart tugged the rope. From the deep it rasped again - pull. He hauled the bucket up into the lamplight. There was no water. On the bottom lay black, icy clay, as if taken from under winter ground, and stuck in it was a copper button.

The very one his mother had sewn with her own hands onto the coat his brother was laid in the coffin in. The lad dropped the bucket and fled into the night. In the morning the village elder came with two men. They took the old rope down without touching it with bare hands, carried it out beyond the gardens and burned it. The bucket they scoured with ash and rinsed three times, and from the shed they brought new dry hemp rope, still fragrant with sun and hemp.

In front of everyone they tied it to the handle and lowered it into the well. When they pulled it back up, the top was dry, and the last three arshins oozed icy water and reeked of that same deep silt. And on the wet knot, as if someone had hung it there from below, dangled that same copper button. The village went still. The village sexton took an oak board out of a chest.

All it bore was scratched with a knife on the back - they hadn't dug for water, but to flood an old cave vein in the limestone. As long as the water stays black, it sleeps. The well was not a spring but a burial place. But the lad had forgotten how to sleep. The next night the apprentice came back to the well with a long hook.

He touched the new rope, the very one that had been tied on dry that day in front of everyone. He lowered the bucket. The rope drew taut. And the voice, no longer from the well but quite close, right at his ear, whispered wetly - thank you for pulling me out. Nothing climbed out of the well in the body. It climbed out along the rope, along the pity.

When the lad turned around, the lamp had gone out. They found him in the morning by the curb. Alive, whole, only his eyes empty as dried-up wells. He never spoke another word, as if a foreign depth now lived inside him. Only when he raised a mug to his lips, what ran from the corners of his mouth was no longer water but black silt.

That same day they boarded the curb over crosswise, heaped it with stones and thorn. They say he doesn't age and doesn't die, that he sits in his house to this day. What crawled out of the limestone will never go back, for it has found itself a new vessel. I'd better throw some wood on the stove. And the rope in the corner has grown heavier again, because it knows the truth.