“Manda, where are you headed so early?”
Mother Superior’s voice startled me. She was sitting down, leaning against a dried tree.
“To swim in the sea.”
“Isn’t it cold still? Come here, come here for a minute.”
I hid my hand behind my back and wondered whether to approach her.
“Come here,” Efrosinia said, and spread open the skirts of her wide habit. “First come here and get warmed up.” I went over, sat down by Mother Superior and let her embrace me. Tears burst from my eyes. I hadn’t known I wanted to cry. My whole body started shaking. Mother Superior pressed me close and stroked my hair. Her habit and hands always smelled like incense and thyme. I gradually calmed down and fell asleep. I was awakened by the sun, which was now blazing.
“Let me see.”
“See what?”
“Your hand.”
As she pulled it out from under her habit, two deep vertical wrinkles furrowed her forehead.
“Who did this to you?”
Silence.
“Come with me.”
I pulled away. “Please, no iodiiiine.”
“I’m not going to put iodine on it.”
“Will it hurt?”
“It won’t hurt—now come on!”
Mother Superior poured a mixture into a pan and washed the wounds with gauze dipped in the mix. It only stung slightly. Then she picked some stonecrop from the garden, peeled off the thin membrane, put it on my hand, wrapped it up in cheesecloth, and said, “Don’t get it wet today. You can tell me when you’re ready.”
“Grandma. Because she thought I had stolen fifty cents. But I found it and picked it up. But she didn’t believe me and punished me. She asked me whether I wanted cold or hot. I chose cold. Then I ran away. I slept in the tree.”
Mother Superior kept silent, her face taut, and pressed me to her.
“Next time you find something, show it to her. Now go home, they’ll surely be out looking for you. Come back tomorrow and I’ll put some more stonecrop on it. And don’t get your hand wet today.”
When I got home, Grandma wasn’t there. Grandpa was just going out. “Where have you been? We’ve driven ourselves crazy looking for you! What’s wrong with your hand?”
“Grandma jabbed it yesterday because she thought I had stolen some money. I slept in the woods. Mother Superior wrapped it up with herbs.”
He sighed. “I called your mother. She’ll be here soon. I’m going to the monastery.”
I was lying in the cellar. That’s where we lived when there were vacationers in the house. Through the ground-level window I could see my mother’s feet when they were going to or returning from her job at the health clinic. Her beautiful feet, shod in light beige shoes, so low-cut that you could see the base of her toes, with little doodads on the side and low square heels, a thin strap and open backs. I had already fallen asleep when she burst into the half-darkened room.
I sank into her soft, rustling embrace. How nice she smelled. She was wearing her favorite olive green dress with huge yellow roses and a plunging neckline, fitted at the waist and flared out below her knees. I loved that dress so much that I had once cut out one of those yellow roses, but Mama’s seamstress had cleverly sewed it back on and it didn’t show at all. I took a beating for that, of course.
“My dearest, sweetest little girl,” my mother whispered. “What has my crazy mother done to you? Does it hurt?”
I snuggled up to her. My whole body shook with sobs. I begged her not to leave me with Nikula, to take me with her. But she couldn’t. She worked in Vlas at a clinic for people with bone diseases. She was pulling double shifts in order to pay the lawyers to fight for me.
My paternal grandfather, an influential Sofia attorney, had been suing my mother for years to take away her parental rights and bring me back to Sofia. In front of the judges, he made her out to be the worst woman in the world—with the help of false witnesses. That’s what Nikula said.
“Who bandaged you up?”
“Mother Efrosinia.”
My mother hugged me and started to cry. It got really warm there pressed to her chest. It was so sweet to be together again. At that moment I caught sight of my grandmother’s feet, and seconds later she burst into the room. She took one look and set upon us, trying to pull us apart. She always did that when Mama cuddled me.
“That’s enough, now! That’s enough mollycoddling her!” Nikula pulled at us, but we clung together. “That’s why she’ll never amount to anything!”
Grandma stalked around the cellar. When her conscience pained her, she would go around straightening things up, and that gave her the courage to dig in her heels all the more.
“Mother, quit hurting her. You can’t treat her like this. She’s only a child!”
“This is my house and my discipline. I’m not going to look after thieves. She comes in here, drags home some money, I have no idea where from.”
“Fifty cents. I found it.”
“Silence!” Nikula swatted with her heavy hand. “Don’t you give me that cheeky look from behind your mother’s back. If you run away one more time, I’ll strangle you with my own bare hands and I’ll do the time for it, if I have to. Making me go around the streets hollering like a lunatic all night! The whole town knows our business!”
My mother shielded me with her arms. “Don’t you dare touch her. I won’t stand for that.”
“Well, if you don’t like it, you’re both free to leave!”
“There’s nowhere for us to go.”
“If you’d put up with your husband, you’d have a home in Sofia.”
“No. I’m not going to put up with it. I’m never going to put up with that again. You put up with it if you want.”
“I do put up with it, as you can see. Which is the only reason you have a roof over your head.”
“Which you are kicking us out of. I forbid you to torment her!”
“That’s my way of disciplining her. You never should have had her, since you don’t have time for her.”
“She would never have been born if you hadn’t forced me to get married. My life would have been completely different.”
At that point, they looked at each other and continued their row in Czech, as they usually did so I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. But I had begun to understand that language better than they suspected. That’s how I found out how my mother had come to marry my father.
“Nobody forced you into anything. You just sat there silent all night at the table when he came to ask for your hand.”
“Have you forgotten that when it was almost morning,” my mother hissed, “you said, ‘Since you’ve been silent for so long, I’ll take that as a yes.’ And you told him, you told him that I accepted. I kept quiet. Nine months later this poor little wretch was born.” My mother pointed at me.
The story of their marriage that I later heard from my father (always referred to in that house as “The Freak from Sofia”) was that, as a veterinarian sent by the government to work on the seaside, he once went to the movies in the old town of Nesebar with a local colleague. When they took their seats, his friend waved to a