The Dream of the Poterchata

I stood knee-deep in the bog, and in my hands I held wet herbs, though I knew my herbs were drying above the stove. The water wasn't cold, no, worse. It was like a stranger's palm under my skirt, sticky and quiet. By a tussock a small light glowed, like an ember. - So Olesia began the telling of her nightmare, and so let her go on...

Then there were more of them. Wandering lights on the bog, one after another, and from each of them a child was crying. Not the way a living child cries. Thinly, without breath. Little hands reached out to me, small, blue with moonlight, and their little mouths begged me to carry them across the furrow. I couldn't see the furrow, but I knew it was there.

I told them I was a herb-woman, not a midwife, not a godmother, not a mother. But they knew my name all the same. They had not learned it from my voice - they simply laid it in my mouth, and I nearly answered myself. One potercha touched my finger, and the finger was no longer mine, wooden, like the spoon by the stove.

The furrow showed itself where the water had just been. Black, straight, fresh, as if someone had ploughed the bog by night. Beyond it the night stood thicker. The poterchata shone as wandering lights on the bog and cried with a child's crying, stretching their hands out to me and begging me to carry them across the furrow, and each one was heavier than a mountain.

I picked up the smallest. It looked light, but it fell into my arms so that my knees went down into the mire. Not a child - the whole earth, with its little graves, with its roots, with the stone under the plough. It pressed itself to my chest and whispered for me to give it a name. I had forgotten every name. I wanted to make the sign of the cross over it, but my arm would not bend. Instead of fingers I had rootlets, and they were crumbling away.

There should have been a little knot of poppy seed at my throat - I had tied it myself for the night - but bog grass hung there instead. It stirred, as if it were breathing for me. Beyond the furrow stood my house. But not right. The window was down low, like an eye in the earth, and the smoke from the chimney went down into the stove, not out of it. On the doorpost a charcoal sign showed black, my sign, only turned upside down.

I knew that if I carried the child across, it would fall asleep. And I knew that then I would not. I stepped, and the furrow drew away. I stepped again, and again it drew away. The child grew heavier. It was no longer crying, only listening to me from inside, to how I breathed. The other lights drifted along behind my back. Don't look back, an old woman once told me, don't look back when they call from a wet place.

But they weren't calling from behind, they were calling inside me. Then I seemed to wake. I was lying on the sleeping bench, the stove dark, the Candlemas candle by the icon smouldering blue. And my arms were wet, and something round weighed on me under the coarse blanket. I wanted to throw it off, but I heard that same thin crying, now inside the house, by the stove, where a cradle had never stood.

I told myself it was a mouse, it was water off the roof, it was a fever in my head. But a mouse doesn't ask for a name. Water has no fingers. A fever leaves no tracks in the clay. And through the house, from the stove to the door, stretched a black furrow, fresh, with a greasy sheen, and in it poppy seed stirred, as if it had just been sown by small hands.

I climbed down from the sleeping bench, and my feet sank not into the clay floor but into that same bog. The house had grown long as a field. The embroidered cloth on the icon hung wet. In the corner sat something small, and it glowed through its ribs. I couldn't see a face, I only heard it counting my breaths and waiting to see which one I would give away.

I snatched it up, because it was already reaching for the stove, and the stove was like a black mouth. Whether to carry it to the furrow or away from the furrow, I didn't know. Suddenly it grew warm, dear, almost mine. I held it close, and then all the lights beyond the walls fell silent at once. In that silence I heard something open inside me.

By morning, if it was morning, I was sitting on the bench with my hands on my knees. Black clay under my nails, the charcoal sign on the doorpost wiped away by a wet finger. The stove cold, though the embers should have held. And ever since, my hands are as though the smallest one were still lying in them. Empty, and they weigh like a mountain.