Three Bowls Under the Wheel

I killed a man! Because of me he stopped breathing. Those two sentences I wrote down twenty years ago, on that thrice-cursed night. The letters that should have come next, my hand refused to form. Now I am finishing the writing - little time is left, and also because I have finally understood the terms of the bargain. At dawn after that night they pulled Semen out of the reeds below the ford. People asked how a healthy man could drown in still water.

I knew the answer. A few hours earlier I had stood beneath the old water mill, waiting for him to stop breathing. But I told the people nothing. It was around two in the morning. The water in the bowl had gone black as tar. The candle went out without a whisper of wind. The great mill wheel was turning, and from beneath it a quiet voice said: "One." I stepped back from it, but my shadow stayed.

It lay where it had been a minute before, then turned its head and flowed down, under the wheel, into the water. I looked at my feet. The shadow was gone. Now, in order. In autumn the miller took to his bed, and the mill was to go for lease. Semen was first in line: more land, the people behind him. He had once even lent me a horse without asking when I'd return it. And I hauled other men's flour and had owed for my cart for the third year running.

About the one who sits beneath the wheel, a chumak told me for the price of a drink: three bowls, one from your own well, one from the river, the third empty; go at dusk and ask aloud for the way. And he added: "He's a merchant. He doesn't take money. He takes a down payment." I, who haggle over a horse for three days at a time, made up my mind. The voice from the water did not haggle and did not hurry me.

It asked: "Did he steal what is yours?" - "No." - "Did he wrong you?" - "No." - "Touched your wife? Hurt your child?" - "No." - "Then why should he die?" I stayed silent a long time, like a man over a used coffin. Then the words carried the truth out of my mouth, the first in many years: "Beside him I can see what my life could have been." - "Oh. Go on, man."

In the water under the wheel, when the moon turned onto it, lay old coins, a child's button, a golden spoon, and bright stones of an unfamiliar nature. About those, nobody told me anything. "Of all you call your own, what is dearest, friend?" it asked next. I felt - no, I knew: the question was for the rite. "Maria and Solomiika." - "Equally?" - "Equally. There is nothing dearer." - "I have heard." And that was all.

It did not say "that will be the price," nor "I will take them." It lied about nothing, hid nothing. I admit, I did not ask either. From beneath my feet came: "The down payment." - "I carry no money." - "Money is no use to me. I want the shadow." I almost laughed: a shadow, to hell with it, a trifle. "Take it." - "Tenebrae te accipient, sed ipsae malum oderunt." The water stirred, and something peeled away from my feet, like a wet shirt from a back.

No pain - I felt very light. But light in a bad way: like when they've stolen the chests off your cart, and only later do you remember they were yours. "I myself don't go out into the sun," it said further. "But the shadow does. And without it, dreams will not find you." I understood neither the first nor the second, and did not ask. "I almost forgot - the water will take as many last breaths as one wish requires," came the last of it.

I set the bowls under the wheel and left. There will be one breath, I gloated - his. Already at the edge of the village a dog squeezed itself under the stile and howled at the empty space behind me. The next morning they found Semen's boat downstream, and the man himself in the reeds. Not a wound or a bruise on him, only water in his lungs.

I looked at him and chewed on a single word: it worked. Mercilessly - this hurts too much. I walked home across the field, at dusk. Men were still coming back from the river, and by the boundary strip one of them stood. I decided he was one of theirs, fallen behind the group. I came closer. Wet. Very pale. Hair stuck to his forehead. Water ran from his coat without stopping. I made out the face.

"You'll ask whether I was afraid," said Semen. "Have you come for me?" - "No." - "Then why did you come?" - "I want you to know what you bought." I began making excuses, like at a fair when you've palmed off rotten goods: you had all the luck, and I was in debt, I did it for my family. He only listened. Maybe the dead don't interrupt? After a while he asked: "And is Maria to blame for this?" - "What does Maria have to do with it?" - "And your little daughter?"

- "They have nothing to do with it, you devil's spawn, you had no right." "No, no, friend. The uninvolved he cannot take," said Semen. "What was named to him, he can. He wasn't asking about the dearest in order to find out. He was asking so that you would name it." "How do you know?" - "Curious, are you? Of course..."

Every word of his cut somewhere in my body, and he went on: when the river closed over him and he drew his last breath, time closed up inside him but did not end. In the darkness he heard two. They did not see each other, but the water was one for the three of them. "After me the water went on." - "Where? What for?" He looked past me, over my shoulder, to where the dog had howled. "Home. For the thing that had walked with you for thirty years. Now it walks for him."

I already sensed what I was about to hear. "Then two more voices appeared in the water." - "Whose?" - "First a woman. Then a child." - "Maria?" He nodded. - "And Solomiika?" He nodded again. "I didn't see them, but I heard them as if we were all together in one dark water." "The little one was calling for her mama," Semen went on. "And Maria was calling for you." - "What was the last thing she said?" He was silent. I grabbed him by his wet coat. "Say it."

- "Matvii, help me." "And my daughter?" - "She asked why mama wasn't coming. I talked with her. I told her mama was near." "Did she hear you?" - "I don't know." He was silent a moment. "But after that she stopped calling." I asked if he had come so that I would listen. "There is no one else to tell that they were not alone." The man I drowned talked with my child while she was dying. And I stood under the wheel and waited.

The door of the house stood open. I stopped on the threshold, and from the dark entry hall came a quiet: "Two." Maria lay by the stove, her arm stretched toward the little one's room. Solomiika on her side in bed, a green scrap of duckweed at her lips. Everything around was dry. By the window, three bowls. Mine, of course, though I had left them under the wheel five versts from here.

Two full of black water, the third empty. Across the floor from the threshold to the table ran the tracks of my boots - the boots in which I stood on the threshold and had not taken a single step. I stared at the empty bowl until a drop fell into it. Drip. "Three." I ran to the mill as if through fog, my head empty, my heart overloaded. "Take me. Bring them back and take me." From under the wheel: "What for?" - "They're the dearest!" - "Yes, yes, I already know, remember."

- "I'll give my life." "Yesterday, for Semen's death, you gave your wife and child. Today, when they are already gone, you offer yourself. Trading yourself is easy now; it doesn't interest me." - "Then at least give back the shadow." - "No. You gave it of your own free will, so forget it." - "Then just kill me." Silence, only the wheel turning. "You asked for Semen's death. In a sense you are already dead - enjoy it." Nothing more was ever spoken from under the wheel. Ever.

Two sentences I wrote that autumn, and could go no further. Twenty years have passed. Cats still won't live in the village - they run away - and dogs always growl at the empty space beside me. I cast no shadow, neither in sunlight nor by candle. And Maria and Solomiika have not once come to me in a dream. Only now have I understood what was said under the wheel: without a shadow, dreams will not find you.

Semen once put it simply: "There is no road for them into your dreams." Semen comes when water begins to rush inside the walls. He sits on the bench under the window, the one where they were washed. Water still runs off him and vanishes without a trace. I have grown very old. He has not. Once I asked who the one under the wheel is and how long he has been sitting there. "I don't know," said Semen. Right, I forgot - he only knows what happened to him.

Once I asked something else: "Do you hate me?" - "Yes." - "Still?" - "Every moment." - "Will you forgive me?" - "No." - "Then why do you come?" - "You ask about them every time. I like your pain." By day I go out into the full sun and stand there; he does not go there. But the trouble is, the sun sets every day. At night, when water rushes beneath the house, though the river is far away, someone counts from the dark corner. "One" - and I stop breathing.

"Two" - and a cold river enters my chest. "Three" - and I choke and think: at last. Then the air comes back. "Not today," says Semen from the bench. "When?" - "You know who decides, so why do you keep asking?" I know why the air comes back. The bargain was for three last breaths: Semen's, Maria's, Solomiika's. Mine was not among them. I asked for another man's death, and lost my own. He never once deceived me. I hear... One. Two. Three.