The Windowpane

Dreams... the kind better left unremembered... Especially out loud... Especially when it is dark outside the window and the house suddenly goes so quiet, as if the darkness itself had sat down by the bed and was waiting. But sometimes I dream of that night again. I wake in a cold sweat, and for the first moment I don't know whether I have truly woken. Again I hear him under the window. He is calling me.

He draws my name out long, wet, along the very glass, as if tracing it with a blue finger. And that name doesn't sound outside. It seeps through the windowpane, crawls into the house, settles straight into my ear. And I lie there knowing that my eyes are open, the stove burned out long ago, the coarse blanket is soaked with sweat, and I cannot move a single finger. The house was dark, darker even than the deepest night gets.

The corner by the door was blacker than the others, and something heavy was breathing there together with me, exhaling a raw, swampy stench onto me. And a weight lay on my chest. Someone had sat down, pressed me to the boards, and was waiting to see whether I would give voice or whether my ribcage would crack. I knew that the moment I answered, he would come in. He wouldn't knock, wouldn't ask to enter - he would simply come in, because my name would serve him as a key.

The dogs outside were silent. The whole village was silent, though with us every dog barked even at the shadow of a willow. And now it was as if there had never been any dogs at all, only thick silence. I lay like an orphan in a stranger's house, in the corner under the icons, and the house suddenly became my old house, where my mother still kneaded dough. I couldn't see the face, but I felt it was her.

She stood by the stove with her back to me, pouring out poppy seed, and it fell not down but up, toward the ceiling, in black drops that froze in the air. The voice under the window drew out my name again. Mother, or the one who was supposed to be mother, told me not to look back, though I was lying face-up as it was. She spoke without a mouth, and that voice locked my jaws shut. I saw this, though I never saw the face.

Then I understood that my eyes were walking about the house without me. The windowpane became water. Beyond it the yard stirred, the wattle fence, the well, the graveyard path, and all of it hung outside the window in a black whirl. He stood there barefoot, in a shirt, clean as if for Sunday. I couldn't see the face, but I knew who it was. The one over whom the earth on the grave had long since sunk in, and who was now looking for a companion for the road.

He didn't pound at the door. Upyrs don't have to pound when they call the right way. He only said my name so gently, as if he were bringing me a heel of bread. I even felt hunger in my teeth, a thirst for rotten damp. My hand wanted to rise by itself, to open for him, but the hand was not mine, longer, white and slick as a fish's belly.

Then the house stretched out like a road. The threshold moved far away, and I lay there and at the same time walked toward it on bare feet. Under my soles there was clay, cold and wet, sucking at my toes. I stepped over the threshold, and there it was before me again. And from under every threshold called the same voice, gurgling like water in a flooded pit.

I wanted to wake up and bit my tongue, but the tongue was someone else's, thick, far too big. Out of the stove came sliding a little grey old man, a domovyk, the master of a house, only not of mine. He looked at me with eyes full of frog spawn and turned away to the wall. The things on the bench stood all wrong, the bowl bottom-up, the shirt inside out.

I grew so frightened that I very nearly answered. The name already stood in my throat, ready to climb out along with my innards. Maybe it was a mara that had sat on my chest, maybe the house spirit himself was pressing me down so that I wouldn't open myself. I only saw the windowpane sweating on the outside with rusty water.

And then I seemed to wake. Truly woke, because I saw the stove, the bench, the icon in its embroidered towel. Only the voice hadn't ended. It was no longer outside the window but under the bench. It drew my name from below, from the earthen floor: someone lay under the house, in the raw earth, and spoke through the boards, straight into the back of my head.

The door stood open. On the threshold the poppy seed lay swept apart, though I had never sprinkled any. Under the window lay wet clay in two prints of bare feet, toes toward the house. I raised my hand to my chest and felt a cold dent there, as if someone's palm had lain on me all night, leaving scales and swamp slime on my skin.

These days, when I hear my name, it doesn't answer inside me at once. As if part of it had stayed under that window and were listening in my place, waiting for the moment I answer after all. And the dogs never did bark that night. Even now, as I write this, it is quiet beyond the wall, and the windowpane is growing wet again from the other side.