The Witch with the Black Threads

About the witch at the edge of the village I kept silent as long as the last man lived who could pull it out of me. This week they buried him, so I'll tell it. Nobody counted Yavdokha's years: my grandfather carried honey to her in a jug as a boy, and his grandfather carried it too, and every one of them found the same woman with the same ball of thread. Houses in the village settled, were pulled apart for firewood and raised anew, but she was unchanging as a boundary stone.

The first strangeness happened at the end of winter, at the ford, so I'll begin with it. In March the ice at the ford still held, but down its middle steamed a strip exactly a palm wide - warm as fresh-drawn milk. The old folk explained the warmth like good farmers: a spring had broken through under the ice, the spring water was already moving underground. That happens before the ice breaks. Only the steam didn't rise upward as it should.

It spread low over the water and crawled across the field toward the gardens at the village edge, and toward one house. People saw it and kept silent out of a quiet, wicked joy: it's not coming to my yard. Such things aren't asked aloud in a village. Everyone knew something else too: Yavdokha began her round precisely at the edge of the village.

Once a month she went out with a ball of black thread and tied it to the boundary stones, circling the village all round, the way a herd is circled with a corral rope. They greeted her like a farmer: "How's the livestock?" - though no one had ever in their life seen any beast of hers. Among themselves they whispered: her livestock is all of us, whom she circles every month. Dogs lay down as she passed and looked away.

She gave the village a single prohibition, all too simple: never touch the thread with a bare hand, and never cross the ford after sundown. A few days after the round the thread usually vanished. In the last house, the one the steam crept toward, Kuzma lived with his mother; his father had been in the ground five years. He was nineteen. One day the lads, over a shot of horilka, made a laughingstock of him: afraid, they said, of an old woman's thread and dark water.

He said nothing, but on the night of the round he went to the ford - to cross to the other side and come back, so no one would laugh anymore. By the water it all began with silence. The space around fell quiet; only the water went on flowing. The thread hung over the ford, black, stretched taut from stone to stone. Kuzma stood a while, listening to his own pulse in his ears - and took hold of it with his bare hand.

Under his fingers the thread was warm and trembled faintly, like a vein under skin. He tore it by force, crossed to the other side, came back, and only then opened the palm he had been clenching mechanically all that time: wound around his middle finger sat a single hair. Long, a woman's, black as coal. He rubbed it with his fingers, pulled at it with his teeth - it sat as if grown in, and left on his teeth a metallic taste that didn't fade till morning.

At home he said nothing, hiding his hand all the while. In the morning the ford steamed harder still, and Kuzma repeated to himself what the old folk said: the underground water has moved, it happens before the ice breaks. Anyone will confirm it. Only there are no springs exactly the width of a man's palm. And no warmth crawls across a whole field to one house, passing all the others by.

On the second night he went to the water again - to see whether it was steaming. And again silence fell first, and out of the silence the ford spoke - quietly, with pauses, like a person choosing words in a foreign tongue. The current pronounced: "Little cricket." Then once more. Only his mother called him that, and no one else in the world - not his father while he lived, not friends, of which he had never had any.

His body answered before his mind: his saliva turned sweet, his feet stepped toward the water of their own accord, the way you step onto the threshold of your own house. And only then did he hear it - the stress fell in the wrong place. His mother said that word differently. Something was learning from a stranger's voice and hadn't finished learning yet. And to know a word no stranger had ever heard, that something must have been listening in their house for a long time.

From close by. He tore his feet from the water - and saw Yavdokha standing on the bank. He hadn't heard her come: not one dog in the village had barked, the snow beneath her hadn't creaked. She took his hand, and the hair came off his finger by itself, without a trace, as if it had never been there. Yavdokha tucked it into her bosom carefully, with two fingers, like someone else's property that would have to be given back.

- The house is already marked. You have three days. Tell your mother you tore the thread, warn her that the Night will call with the voice of the one she is waiting for, and bring her to me before dusk on the third day. - And if I don't tell her? - asked Kuzma. - Then she will open the door herself to the one who stands on the other side of death.

Yavdokha turned and walked away without looking back. Her shadow on the snow was wider than she was - with two dark juttings, like wings. Kuzma walked and watched after her until the woman and the shadow merged into one, and all the way home he heard the snow creak only under his own feet. He didn't tell his mother. On the first day - because he was ashamed to admit he'd been frightened of water. On the second - because that evening his mother laid the table for three.

His father had lain under the cross for five years, and she set out a third bowl, put down bread, and sat looking at the door. - Mama, why the third? - So he knows we're waiting. Kuzma thought: she's getting old. Three had long been supping at that table. The third had been sitting in their house all those days and nights, watching them both and learning his mother's words - one by one, slowly assembling from them a likeness of human speech.

On the third day Kuzma deliberately pastured the cattle till dusk. When he finally worked up the nerve to go back and tell everything, the sun had already set. He came back - a candle was burning in the house. The table laid for three, steam still standing over the bowls, and by the third bowl lay a spoon, dirty, as after a meal.

His mother's kerchief on its peg, her sheepskin coat in its place, her boots by the stove - everything a person leaves the house in had stayed home. His mother herself was nowhere: not in the byre, not at the neighbours', not at the graveyard beside his father. Only the bench where she usually sat stayed warm, constantly. The old women who came by the next day swore to God: the bench was still warm at noon. He searched all the following day.

In the night, from beyond the ford, a trembita sounded once, long and drawn out - the way a death is announced in the mountains. In the morning Kuzma went round every yard on both sides of the road. No one had played a trembita. At dusk, when the last householder crossed himself and said he hadn't so much as touched a trembita, Kuzma felt where he had to go. He rushed to the ford, falling on the frozen ground, getting up and running on.

On the opposite bank the darkness began. It stood from earth to sky in an even wall, and the stars broke off at its edge so cleanly, it was as if part of the sky had been cut away with a knife. Inside that darkness a window glowed. Deep in the lit room his mother was bent over the table. Three bowls. Bread. He shouted her name across the water, his own, his father's.

She turned her head toward the door - and the supper began again from the start: hand to the bread, gaze to the door, circle after circle, with the same learned precision with which the ford had pronounced "Little cricket." And by the stone stood Yavdokha, drawing the torn boundary together with black thread. He fell on his knees before her in the snow. - Let it take me instead of her. - Too late. The payment has been accepted.

- It was I who touched the thread! - You tore the boundary. But she opened the door. I gave you three days, and you did not take the dead man's place away from him. Tonight he will sit down at the table. And she - she will go in his stead. Beyond the river the darkness stirred and whispered a name at which the ice went cracking: - Lilith.

She pulled the last knot tight, rose, and stepped beyond the ford. The darkness parted before her - it must have recognized one older than itself - and then closed behind her back. From that time on the ford never steamed. Kuzma lived to grey hair without once crossing it, and every evening he laid the table for three. In the night, from beyond the ford, came: - Little cricket.

This time the stress fell where it should. By day they found him at the table. Before him three bowls were going cold. This week the old man was buried. It finished learning after all. Kuzma's lifetime was enough for it.