Katerina Read Free

ignored me as though I didn’t exist. Sometimes he would brandish his fist at me and slap my face, distractedly, the way one swats a fly. My mother’s death freed him to drink as he wanted. Sometimes he would come home in a gay mood, like a wild young man.
    One night he approached me, may God forgive me, and spoke to me in a voice that wasn’t his: “Why not sleep with Daddy? The house is cold.” His eyes were glassy, and a kind of wanton redness glowed in them. He had never spoken to me in a voice like that. “It’s good to sleep with Daddy,” he said to me again in the voice that wasn’t his. I felt in my heart that this was sinful, but I didn’t know for sure. Icrawled under the table like a dog and didn’t utter a word. Father crouched on his knees and said, “Why are you running away from me? It’s your daddy, not a stranger.” Then he put his two huge hands on my shoulders, pulled me to him, and kissed me. He then got to his feet, made a dismissive gesture, and sank onto his bed, asleep. After that, he didn’t look at me again.

2
    A FEW MONTHS AFTER my mother’s death, Father brought a new wife home. She was a tall, broad woman who never spoke a word. The mountain from which she came was embodied in her face: a cramped face, like a workhorse’s. Father used to talk to her in a loud voice, as though to someone deaf.
    “What are you doing?” she would ask me in a frightening tone.
    “I?” I recoiled in my great fear.
    “You’ve got to work,” she said. “You can’t sit idle.”
    I used to spend most of the day outdoors. Even then I knew that this life would pass away and that another life, different and distant from here, would emerge from it. Every night I used to see my mother in a dream, and she, as always, was busy with housework, debts, and sick cattle. “Mother!” I wanted to have her near me, but she, as in life, was angry at everyone. I told her that Father had brought home a new wife. She seemed to grasp the fact, but ignored it.
    In the autumn, I left the house. “Where to?” asked my father.
    “To work.”
    “Be careful, and don’t step off the straight and narrow path,” he called, and without adding a word, he disappeared from my sight. My father was a powerful man; he didn’t dare strike my mother, but I heard that he used to beat his second wife fiercely. They told me that he changed in the final years of his life and started going to church on Sundays.
    I can hear my mother’s presence simmering and hissing, but I see my father before me as though he has refused to leave this world. In the summer many years ago, my father once stood leaning on a long pitchfork and smacked his lips to the cows, as if he were blowing kisses to slutty girls. The cows looked at him and smiled, which tickled his fancy, and he kept on smacking his lips. A strange kind of intimacy heated up between him and the cows. That summer, when I was in the third grade, on my way to school I suddenly heard my father’s voice: “Where is she going?”
    “To school,” Mother answered without raising her head.
    “What good does it do her? They don’t learn anything.”
    “You’re not a priest. The priest ordered us to send the girls to school.”
    “I say no.” A spirit of foolishness arose within him.
    But my mother wasn’t alarmed, and she told him, “There is a God in heaven and He is king and He is the father, and we are ordered to heed Him, not you.”
    Mother was a strong and brave woman. I saw her courage once in the winter, when she fought with a horse thief and made him run for his life. But for some reason she did not bequeath that courage to me. I was afraid of every shadowand listened for every sound; at night, even the crickets would alarm me.
    This isolated place gave me no joy, but my first memories are still crystal clear: the rains, for example, the furious rains, or the harrowing rains, as they call them here. For my part, I loved the swift rains of the summer and the mist that