She dreamed of dirt. It was the longest dream, all of dirt, the feeling of worms around her, the footfalls of birds above her, sticking their beaks in the ground and wrenching the worms from her. She hoped, in her hysteria, that the birds would wrench her from the ground. Her heart leaked cold all over her chest, and then it stopped, clenching like a fist and turning into itself. It began to pulse warm, and she could feel her toes and her fingers. When a worm crawled near her eye and was plucked from the dirt by a bird, she could see light through the hole it left behind. Her eyes moved to where she thought her hands would be, and she spread her fingers, feeling the cool, muddy earth around them. She moved them back and forth, a little at first, and then in wider arcs as the ground around them collapsed and the ground around her legs as well and suddenly she was able to sit up. She opened her eyes, expecting Matka to be beside her on the straw bed, her lalka under her armpit. But she was on the ground outside the bone house.
She wondered whether Matka had gone to town. There was so much she did not remember between going to sleep and waking up. She wondered whether she had a fever, whether Matka had buried her to quell her temperature. Perhaps she had needed more ingredients for a tincture and would be gone only a little while. Ela vaguely remembered soldiers, rabbits, Bolek. Her mouth was dry, coated with a chalky, flaky substance. She drew it out with her finger but could not quite identify it. She stood up in the hole and was surprised to find not one lalka beside her but two. The second had blonde hair and blue eyes. She shook them carefully free of dirt and then found her way through the woods to wash herself.
By the creek, she laid her dress on an exposed rock, splashing water on it and rubbing. She dipped her naked body in the water, cool and clear and lifting the dirt off her, little cloudy rings spreading into the creek like the haze of her dreams. One stain, a reddish whorl on her chest, did not wash away. It was round and scarred, just over her heart. She knew it was not something she’d had before, and she wondered whether her heart had been stolen. She pressed her fingers in her ears and held her breath. Her heart beat in her veins, as always. She traced the depression in her skin.
“Matka?” She called into the trees. Branches stood erect. They seemed to ignore her. Even the birds were quiet. She strained to hear leaves under feet, her mother’s hum, the splash of water against the sides of the well bucket. “Matka?”
But she was all alone. She wrung out the dress to dry and sat on the bank, letting the sun warm her skin.
At the front of the bone house, a skeleton of bones, clean, white in a rust-dirt blanket, lay near the hill’s edge. She approached it slowly, feeling her throat close, her heart hum dully against her chest. Inside the skeleton’s hand was a flower, white with a root, curled over from the bend of the fingers. A flower. She put it in the pocket of her dress and then lay her hand near the hand of the skeleton, relieved to find it too big to be her matka’s.
But she was not relieved long. She looked around her and saw that the road of the hill to their hut, normally well traveled and flattened into the earth, was overgrown with weeds and grass. She crouched and listened very hard to the ground like her matka had shown her. Silence. A silence that comes with time, forgetting, settled heavy over her like a humidity. It pressed at her chest, her eyes, and she did not know what to do.
The bone house had become porous. From holes in the arc of the ceiling, swords of light crossed through the center of the room, as if exposing the tumult that had occurred. Her mother’s tinctures and herbs were missing. The mattress was stained with old blood, rust colored and faded. Their few pieces of furniture—stools and a table—were broken and splintered. A damp, earthen smell of absence lingered. How long had she been in the dirt? She was no bigger than she remembered—it could not have been for long. She shut her eyes and groped for her mother—her scent, her voice, the intangible weight of her presence. But something had closed in the world, a door, a window, and she could no longer feel even the dimmest breeze of her. She dropped on the mattress, away from the blood, shut her eyes tightly against her tears, hoped things would be different when she woke up. She would have to be a big girl and wait.
She dreamed of fires, an herb flower, chalky in her mouth, her mother. And she also dreamed of Antoniusz.
He would know where her matka was. Perhaps she was with him. Although she’d never been to Antoniusz’s house, she walked toward the town to find him. At the first house she came to, on the outskirts of Reszel, a woman hung blankets in the green valley. The grass was lush and alive and so unlike the charred hill of her house.
“Antoniusz? Do you know where he lives?” Ela asked her, and the woman looked at her with soft, wet eyes. She patted the ground near her damp bundles.
“Looking for your father?” She pulled at Ela’s clothes and pinched her cheek. “No meat on you, that’s for sure. So many families torn apart after the fire.” She clucked her tongue. “It’s a shame.”
The woman went in the cottage, stone with a thatched roof, and brought out some goat’s milk and bread. A man, her husband, followed.
“She’s looking for her father, she says—Antoniusz.” The woman ruffled Ela’s hair as she tore the bread with her teeth.
“Antoniusz?” The man scrunched his dry, brown face at her. “Antoniusz has no children. He lives with his sister.”
“Where?” Ela stood up, wiping the milk from her face.
“Up aways, a good afternoon’s walk.” The man pointed up the road. “Too far to walk on little legs. I’m going to town later. I’ll give you a ride in the wagon.”
When he was ready, Ela climbed on the bench of the hay-filled wagon beside him. The town grew before them, the red roofs and stone walls, in various stages of construction, and they were different from the ones she remembered from the older, finished stone ones.
“Why is the town different?” she asked.
“From where you come, little one?” The man asked. He rapped the reigns softly against the behind of his horse. “Did you hear of the fire?”
She remembered the dream and shook her head.
“Do you have parents?”
“I want to see Antoniusz.”
“Antoniusz hasn’t been well since they burned the witch.” The man shook the reins and frowned.
She choked; her chest trembled. Witch was what some of the villagers, the mean ones, the ones who spread gossip or thought her mother overcharged for her tinctures, called Matka. Did he speak of her mother? She felt everything inside of her crumble like old stone, and the rubble filled her lungs and she cried out, gasping for air, her eyes singed with tears. She pressed herself against her knees, felt the dusty stone drain from her like sand. The farmer put his hand, big and calloused, on her back as she emptied the contents of her stomach over the side of the wagon.
“There, there, now. Why don’t you lie in back on the hay?” He stopped the horse. “Back there, it is not as rough a ride for little stomachs.”
“I’m fine.” She shook her head, lacing her arms around her stomach, empty and twitching. “Please, take me to Antoniusz.”
“What is your business with him?”
“It is my own,” she answered. “Why…why did she burn? The witch?”
“Why, it is known to everyone, I thought.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a minute. “And perhaps those who do not know have ears too young and tender to hear.”
“I am old enough to know, and if you do not tell me, I will find someone else, like Antoniusz.”
“Well, better me than Antoniusz tells you.” He bent toward her. “Did you not lose someone in the fire, child? Your parents, your brothers and sisters, perhaps? Then you have the witch, Barbara Zdunk, to blame, just as we all do. Some say she avenged Pilowski, our master, for killing her husband and daughter. But why, why burn the whole town? Why kill so many innocents, all for personal gain? And Pilowski is a good man—he pays us better for our crops than some of the others. He could have punished us all. But he burned the right one. And let it be a lesson to the rest of them and their silly uprisings—Antoniusz included.”
“There is no such thing as witches.” Ela felt her cheeks burn, her fists clench. She would make a tincture, she vowed, and kill him. “You are a stupid old man.”
“Who taught you your manners?” He lifted his hand and made to slap her. “Surely you are an orphan. No one in our village would allow such a mouth.”
“I would not want to be the child of any fool in this village,” she answered and hopped down from the wagon. A stone hut leaned at the top of the road, just outside the town, and a man, folded and beaten like a weathered sack, sat outside on a carved wooden bench, whittling a piece of wood.
“Antoniusz!” she shouted, and when he saw her, he stood up slowly, his mangled leg even more shrunken than she remembered it.
“Young thing.” He hobbled toward her, drawing a dirty wool cloak across her shoulders. “What business do you have with me?”
“It’s me, Antoniusz! It’s me, Ela!” She ran her hands on his good leg, feeling its warmness, inhaling the faint traces of pipe that lingered on his clothes. “Do you not know me?”
“What kind of laugh do you play on an old man?” He pulled from her grasp, and nodded toward the wagon, where the farmer sat watching. “Idzi, whose child is this?”
“I haven’t the faintest.” Idzi shrugged, drawing up his reigns. “A dirty orphan that I will call the magistrate on if she keeps talking her mouth.”
“Antoniusz!” She grabbed his good leg and did not let go. “Please, you have to believe me! Where is Matka?”
She felt his hands underneath her armpits, herself lifted up. She met his eyes, brown broken spires that drew in her features before rejecting them, the way an ocean rejects a shell. His brow wrinkled, his eyes wet before he blinked and put her back down.
“By God, if you don’t look like her.” Antoniusz reached and touched her hair, her shoulders. He looked past her. “Idzi, I will take care of this. I am sorry that I have detained you.”
The farmer shrugged and went on his way to Reszel.
“Would you like some milk, little girl? A little honey?”
“I want Matka.” She buried her face in his stomach. “Please tell me where she is.”
“Come.” He moved toward the cottage. Inside, she ate some bread and apple slices, hoping she would not throw them up as well. She studied the carved figurines that lined the walls of the cottage, little men and women and birds. He watched her eyes, the folds of his face leaking sorrow despite the firm lines of his brow. After a time, he reached into a box by the table, emerging with a wooden horse. He placed it in front of her.
“Is this the horse you made for my lalka?” She ran her fingers over the wood, so smooth and oiled, and moved the legs. When she moved one of the back legs upward, like she remembered him telling her, its stomach opened, revealing a hiding place. Antoniusz rubbed his fingers against his forehead until Ela was sure the skin would begin to tear.
“I do not know who you are,” Antoniusz said finally. “She has been dead for the year, almost. And her mother as well. Clearly you have heard the stories from someone, and you pretend to be her. Even down to the dress. Unless, of course, you are but a ghost, torturing me until the end of my days.”
“I’m not a ghost,” she answered. She looked at her hands, so small, even as her mind, her understanding, her memories, her sorrow, had grown. “I am Ela. I have been her forever.”
“I buried the girl myself after the fire. I shall prove you are an imposter.” He stood with surprising vigor, purpose. They got on his horse and rode to the bone house. The sun stabbed through the woods and Antoniusz knelt by the dirt behind it. The hole had healed over, a scab of earth with irregular borders, but still flat. Antoniusz bent and attacked it with his hands, digging and scattering dirt to all sides, his bottom lip low and dripping with sweat as he sank lower and lower into the earth. She went to the river to get him some water, and when she touched his back he ignored her, his shirt wet and sticking to his muscles, stringy like an old goat’s. She went inside the house and lay down on the straw bed, sleeping without dreams. When she woke, the sun lay low in the trees. Outside Antoniusz still knelt by the dirt. The hole was the size of her, a depth of several feet, and she looked at his hands, dry and cracked and covered with dirt and blood, and they both looked at the empty hole, Ela clutching her lalkas.
“She spoke the truth.” Antoniusz shook his head, and something in him looked so torn that her eyes hurt to look at him. He took a lalka from her and smoothed its hair, still dull with dirt. “And we did not heed it. I am so sorry, my child.”
“What do you mean?” She clutched her dolls tighter.
“She was tried as a witch, my dear, for burning the village.”
“But it was Bolek! I heard him tell my matka himself. I remember!”
“Of course, it was impossible to prove her innocence…but she implored me, while she was imprisoned, to get an herb, a tincture, from the house that she thought would protect her from the stake. She said to gather and hide you as well, that you had eaten the herb and would have survived. But when I came, you were dead. That I did see. So I buried you. But here you are, and I cannot believe it.”
He put his hands, smeared with dirt and blood, to his face and wept. Ela put her hand on his heaving back.
“Child, I have failed you. You and your matka both.” He leaned over, letting his arms fall into the grave. “And I am not fit to live on this earth.”
“But what about me?” She pulled at his shirt, feeling the strain of his weight, whatever he carried, against it. He leaned forward, as if to crawl all in the way in, before pushing himself out of the grave and sitting on his hauches.
“You are a little girl.” He turned and gathered her in his arms. “You are a little girl who needs a father.”
Ela lived with Antoniusz and his sister. They did not speak of the tinctures. Antoniusz insisted she not try to make them.
“Antoniusz, why do I grow no bigger?” Every few months she measured herself against a mark she’d made on the wall, just as her mother had made notches in an old oak by the bone house. But her line, made with a stub of coal, grew fatter, not taller.
“It is a mystery.” He stood with his hands on his hips, his brow furrowed. He did not look her in the eye.
“Why do you lie?” She put the lump back into the pocket of her smock. Although not height, time had given her bravery, suspicion, an adult’s ability to reason.
“I do not lie, child.” He put a hand, large and calloused and spotted, on her shoulder. He was becoming an old man, that was clear. “Your mother was a powerful woman, in her way, with her herbs. She may have done more than save your life.”
“But what?” She wanted to be as big as the other girls in town, the ones whose limbs became long and graceful like the necks of swans, whose lips filled like the flesh on cantaloupe slices.
At night, she studied the herb she had taken from the skeleton’s hand, remembering a potion, a lightning strike. Perhaps in time, the clouds in these events would clear, revealing the whole sky. She hid it in the stomach of her wooden horse so that Antoniusz would not take it and erase the last bits of her memory. She already was forbidden to travel home to the bone house, to the woods where the herb might still grow. At night, she lay awake and prayed to her mother to give her the strength to go home and find the truth that eluded her. She also prayed, squeezing the coal for luck, to grow, to grow so much her feet pressed against the wall of the room in which they slept, or at least long enough to reach the end of the bed. But each month, each year, the line of coal opposite the bed grew darker, fatter, never higher.
Antoniusz knew about the herb Ela kept in the wooden horse, but he pretended not to. Barbara would have wanted him to take the herb to be with Ela forever, but he could not bring himself to consider it, not when he had failed her. And yet, it would have been the only fitting punishment, to live forever with the knowledge he had let her die. There would have been a way to get her the herb from the bone house to the castle prison, where they had kept her before the burning, wait for her to arise from the ashes like a phoenix, if he had only believed her.
Like a veil over everyday life, the scene from that night replayed itself, the soldiers chaining Barbara, drunk with starvation and sleeplessness, to the stake, piling the faggots to mid-calf. The crowd leered and decreed vengeance for their loved ones, so many lost in flames almost a year before. He had been ashamed for feeling faint. Even after so many men had calloused his eyes to death, the sight of Barbara was a knife through the ropes holding his knees to his body and he fell to the dirt, feeling the sparks from the faggots catch his cheeks like the devil’s tears. He closed his eyes when her screams began, crawling toward the sound, feeling the fire wash him in greater waves, hotter, in his face, and he felt convinced that he would climb into the faggots and burn with her.
But hands grabbed him, not of God, but of men; they held him back and someone covered his ears and when he opened them, Barbara, mouth open like the brightest angel in heaven, full of song, was screaming.
They tied him to the bed at his sister’s house for seven days. He moved against the ropes and chafed his body but he could not escape, the ropes, her face, the scream. He peed and shat himself and cursed and cried. After four days, he drank a little broth, a little tea. By the seventh day, they removed the ropes but he could not move, could not walk. The fire burned lazily around the edge of his eyes, the smell of hair and flesh. Barbara’s face blurred in corners but disappeared when he tried to look directly. His sister wrapped him in clean clothes and he drank the broth, a little milk, a little stewed carrots. He began to crawl. His sister found him some balsa wood, a piece as big as his head, and left it on the table. He stared at it for days until the balsa wood became other things—a soldier, a ship, a catapult. He crawled to the table, running his hands over the wood and Barbara’s face, still in the cottage, receded a bit more. His sister gave him a knife, and he buried it in the balsa wood, ripping half away, and then little pieces, shavings like faggots.
He owed Ela this truth, his complicity in her mother’s death, and he decided to wait until she grew older to tell her. But she did not grow in body, ever, even as his sister died of consumption one winter and his leg became weaker, the strength of only a twig. But he did not speak of the herb, nor did she.
He waited still. They grew potatoes and bought a cow. They lived many more years alone, and Ela cooked and mended Antoniusz’s clothes and cut his hair, white and oily and thinning. When she suggested making a tincture to calm the fires in his leg, to build his strength, he left home and did not return for three days, white and blotched and stinking of vodka when she found him in a tavern in Reszel. She did not mention the tinctures again. But he began to whittle less and less, and sometimes he merely ran his fingers over the figurines he had already carved, as if conceding that his best work had already been done.
When Antoniusz was ready to go, he took no chances. He took the horse, now old and as broken as he, and rode it north to the Baltic Sea, where Ela could not find him, press the herb upon him, make him live forever with a kindling leg and an ashen heart. At the docks, he sliced the horse across the neck and tied himself to its leg. Then, with his wavering strength he rolled it off the docks. They plunged together into the sea, and after a splash, a bubbling, he died, too.
She waited many years for Antoniusz to come back, even when it was impossible for him to be alive because the earth would have asked for his old bones, and she no longer had a father, either. But Ela was still a little girl, even as her mind had begun to weave all manner of thoughts, complex and layered, rich, and desires, deep in her chest and loins, and she did not get older. One day, she packed the wooden horse with the herb and a few other trinkets and went back to the bone house. It had not changed, except for a slight weathering by the seasons, and she had not, either. It was one small comfort.