Baba Palazhka Prepares the Newlyweds

Baba Palazhka could prepare a young couple for their first wedding night so thoroughly that afterwards they feared not sin, not shame, not the dark, but her explanations. She would say: "Children, I'll tell you everything in plain human words." And she told it in such a way that Tymko spent till evening checking whether he still knew how to breathe, and Motria looked at the house as if after the wedding somebody else, a third one, was going to move in. Besides the cat.

Palazhka called Tymko into the storeroom and said: "When you see a woman's beauty, don't stand there like a calf in front of painted gates. Breathe. The main thing is - breathe. Because many a lad in that moment loses his wits, his tongue, and all the dignity that held itself so nicely in his belt that morning." After that, Tymko breathed so diligently over the bowl of aspic at the wedding that Auntie Hanna asked whether he was cooling it.

Motria got her lesson from Palazhka separately: "And when you see a man's pride, don't scream. It may look self-assured, but on the first night it's often no less frightened than its master." After those words Motria kept imagining that in the evening it wouldn't be her and Tymko in the house, but her, Tymko, and one more respectable gentleman who was his own master and probably even had opinions of his own. It made her blush.

The wedding thundered by, the guests went home, and the newlyweds were left alone. The house was quiet. The stove smoldered, a cricket somewhere far off counted the minutes, and the cat sat on the bench looking as if he'd been invited as a witness. Tymko perched on the very edge of the bed, straight as a stake by the wattle fence. Motria fingered the hem of her shift and said nothing. Both of them could hear some drunk out in the street giggling.

And both pretended it wasn't about them. Tymko wanted to say something wise, something manly, something even the cat would believe. But all that stood in his head was Palazhka's: "Breathe." He drew in air, let it out, and finally whispered: "Motria... don't be afraid. I'm a little afraid myself." Motria looked at him and breathed out too. Because he was speaking to her not with swagger, but with the very same fright. And it got a little warmer for it.

And then the cat, who could shove human tenderness under his tail, leapt, caught his claw on Motria's shift and flew down together with it. The cloth slid off. Tymko saw a woman's breasts for the first time. He froze. Eyes round, mouth open, breath gone like money after the fair. Then he took off his hat, though there was no hat on him, and bowed. Motria whispers: "What are you doing?" And he: "I don't know.

Before such beauty it feels somehow improper to stand without paying respect." Motria first flared up like a poppy in the sun, and then couldn't hold out and laughed. Because Tymko was looking not brazenly, not foolishly, but as if before him were not breasts but two great mysteries nobody in his whole life had prepared him for. "Then sit down," she says, "before you fall over from my beauty." Tymko drew himself up: "I do not fall. I stand with dignity."

But he sat down all the same. And even the bed creaked under him with relief. But night, you see, loves balance. Thanks to that same cat, the candle, the darkness and Tymko's clumsiness, Motria saw his man's pride for the first time. She froze, blinked once, then twice, and said very politely: "Well... good evening to you too." Tymko went red to the ears and covered his face with his palms: "Motria, pay him no mind. He's newly married for the first time today too."

The cat snorted and went off to the stove, because he hadn't ordered this level of human learning. And there they both burst out laughing. Not the way you laugh at somebody, but the way people laugh together when fear finally backs off. Their first night began not with the great passion lads lie about by the wattle fence, but with red ears, a cat at the wrong moment, and two people who stopped being afraid of looking funny in front of each other.

They sat side by side, took each other's hands, and the darkness became not a stranger's, but their own. In the morning Baba Palazhka peeked in at the window and asked: "Well then, still alive?" Motria hid her smile in her kerchief, Tymko coughed as if he'd swallowed a whole apple, and the cat lay on the stove with the look of a witness who knows too much but will keep quiet for sour cream.

Palazhka narrowed her eyes and said: "You see? It was only frightening until you laughed." Shyness in the young is no enemy of love. The enemy of love is when two people are afraid to laugh together.