The Wake for the Body

She is dead. They had already washed her, dressed her in a clean shirt and laid her behind white linen in the next room. On the table the kutia was going cold, the candle at her head burned blue, and the people sat so quietly it was as if they were afraid to breathe after her. Then, by the stove, she banged a spoon angrily against a pot. Nobody screamed. Everyone recognized that knock. That was how Maryna got angry when hungry people sat in her house.

People were afraid even to lift a spoon. Maryna's husband Ostap gripped the edge of the bench so hard his knuckles went white. Old Khyma whispered to her neighbour: wipe your tears and keep quiet, let her understand on her own. Behind the linen the outline of the body could be seen. The candle at her head burned steadily, but with a cold blue flame, and the shadows on the walls did not move.

The poker stirred by itself beside the hearth. A pot slid along the stove ledge. The spoon began to stir the broth, and you could hear it clicking against the clay sides. The tablecloth on the table smoothed itself out, and the bowl of kutia slid to the middle. Then from the corner by the stove came Maryna's voice: well, people, why are you sitting there like at a wake?

A small child on its mother's lap suddenly pointed a finger into the corner and asked: mama, why is Auntie Maryna wet? Everyone froze; the grown-ups could only hear her. For the dead, they say, are seen first of all by children's eyes. Maryna's voice answered, offended: wet how, I'm warming myself by the stove. But drops began to fall onto the earthen floor. Water was running down invisible shoulders.

Maryna had drowned in the well before dawn, and her soul had not accepted it. Maryna took the bread, and dark wet fingerprints stayed at once on the crust. She pushed the bowl toward her husband - and it jerked across, tipping the kutia out onto the tablecloth. Ostap, have you gone deaf? she shouted. Ostap did not raise his eyes. He only wept, and the tears dripped straight into the memorial spoon.

The dog in the corner whimpered and looked not at the linen where the body lay, but at the empty place beside its master, from which came the cold breath of the well. Old Khyma quietly told the living: don't tell her the truth, let her see it herself. Another's word wounds a dead soul, and a wounded soul does not leave - it stays and takes the living. Maryna caught only scraps of this and thought something was being hidden from her.

The stove suddenly began to go cold, though the embers still glowed. In the pot, instead of borshch, icy black water darkened, and something that looked like hair floated in it. Why is there kutia in the house? Maryna asked aloud, and now it was no longer grumbling but alarm. Why is a candle burning by the icon corner? Why is my white shirt lying on the bench? Nobody answered. She went up to the linen behind which the body lay.

The linen was stirring, though there was no draft in the house. Ostap finally raised his head and whispered: Marynka, don't look. But that only made her pull back the edge of the cloth. She saw her own hands, folded not the way she liked. Her hair had been plaited by strange fingers into a thin braid. On her chest lay a candle, and on her lips a white thread of wax had set hard. The face was calm, but strange, as if she had never known it. Maryna was silent a long time.

Then she asked, in a terribly simple voice: then who has been cooking your supper all evening? In the house every candle went out except the blue one by the body. The pot on the stove ledge cracked in half, and black water spilled across the earthen floor. The tablecloth slid off the table by itself. People heard Maryna weeping, but the weeping came from all the bowls on the table, as if the clay were keening for her.

Ostap whispered: don't be angry, we didn't know how to tell you. And she answered: and I didn't know that I no longer had anyone to cook for. In the morning they buried Maryna. The house grew quiet, but not empty. Every evening, when Ostap sat down to the table alone, an ember flared up in the stove by itself, though he had laid no kindling. The empty bowl slid closer to him across the table, and from the dark corner came a quiet, angry whisper: eat, before it goes cold.

He pretended to eat. Maryna stayed not out of spite. She simply did not know how to leave him. And Ostap did not drive her away. The living sometimes hold the dead beside them tighter than the coffin does.