The Girl from Malesh

/, Literature, Blesok no. 07/The Girl from Malesh

The Girl from Malesh

So that breakfast passed. We had hoped that when we had help we would all have an easier life. And indeed, there were some signs that our expectations might be fulfilled. She began to move about the house, though rather slowly, dragging her crooked leg. Her first task with us was to look and learn. And we couldn’t be sure how she was getting on with this task. She was always standing somehow at an angle toward whatever object she ought to be turned toward, and she was anxious to conceal her curiosity. Nevertheless, that curiosity existed, but it could be discovered only with great patience. And why did she not turn all of herself, her eyes and her body, toward what was shown her? Perhaps so as not to give way too quickly and too easily. Her resistance came somehow instinctively. She didn’t yet know what might happen to her if she turned her face to life. My mother must have suffered from our coming across this girl, this creature shrunk in on her misery. She was not sorry that the domestic help was slightly hunchbacked and had a crooked leg. In fact, my mother would have forgiven her that, but she could not forgive the fact that the girl did not distinguish among the various degrees of height on the scale on which people are arranged. For this girl you could be whoever you wanted, you could stand low or high, she couldn’t see that. My mother wanted to have her height noticed, and when she would see the indifference on the girl’s face, she took it to heart.
Autumn that year came very late. The summer did not want to give way at all, so our help would experience some of the warmest days in our town, which suffered from heat in the summer months like some people suffer from rheumatism when the rainy season comes. But autumn did arrive, though after some delay, and husks started to fall from our little walnut tree in the garden, and the leaves soon followed. The birch, the branches of which touch one of the western windows of the house, went orange, and the tops of the little boughs began to drop their leaves, and finally only bare twigs remained. Then in those days we noticed that the girl was collecting the leaves fallen on the stairs and balcony and that she often went down toward the grass in the garden. That was the first thing she started doing independently. In a short time we had the cleanest yard in the neighborhood. She did not feel comfortable among the many delicate and fragile objects in the house, but she did in the garden, which only Andro, the man who looked after it, had cared about up till that time. Other than feeling satisfied that we had a garden, we didn’t really have anything to do with it.
At almost the same time, we saw that some other changes were taking place with our help. That burned-out and darkened look that she had on her face before was disappearing. Those red veins on her cheeks were still there, but now they were more expressive on her cleaner face. Her eyes became larger and brighter. Indeed she was still ugly, but in some milder way. Her movements also became freer, and when she was by herself, she relaxed completely. Then she started going to the bathroom more often, looking at herself in the mirror. Obviously, she herself noticed the changes and was pleased.
But then again, she lost that freshness. The mold in the room seems to have gotten into her contorted bones. The tranquillity she started to show at home disappeared. She looked undernourished, quite worn out.
Why don’t you eat? I say. If you haven’t got any money you should ask for some, I can manage to help you. Come to see us sometimes, I say.
My heart cries to be at your home, she says. What have I done, leaving you like that. Your father, she says, looked after me when I was ill. I don’t know, she continues, whether I left or your mother turned me out; I can’t say, I can’t swear to it.
She put a crust in her mouth and chewed on it for some time. She had bits stuck on her teeth. She was talking and nervously putting her finger into her mouth to scratch off the doughy bread, which was also clinging to her palate.
You don’t eat anything, I say to her, you must eat. You think I don’t want to eat, she says. Let someone come for me, eh? No one visits me, she says. They brought my father and left him in the hospital… they left him to me… I bathed him as if he were my baby and I put him in his grave. I’ve been to the hospital twice. Once I burnt my leg at the factory, once I had something on my breasts… I saw everybody getting visitors… They talked. Visitors beside all the beds, but nobody with me… Why do I go on living… an old maid. You think that’s it? I didn’t get married? No that’s all over; my soul used to weep before, I had some hope, that’s why
it was so easy to leave you, I thought people liked workers more than maids, but nothing came of it. Am I guilty before God? Then she puts her hand to her stomach and lets out sporadic moans. She jumps up again in a moment, catches my hand and presses herself against me, or breaks into broken and nervous laughter.
While she was with us I often saw her in such changeable moods. She has been having these changes since then, but now they are more painful. When she was happy at our home, she laughed awfully loud, almost screaming. Once I met her in the garden, we talked a little and then she went away leaping and screaming. In those moments she felt movements in her shrunken chest, she felt it being filled with air, which was driven out of her in the form of hilarious yelps. After these attacks of joy I used to find her bent over in an armchair crying bitterly. I looked at her and usually said nothing to her, because I knew I would not get a reply. In the end I wasn’t even sure whether she was in pain or not. I know that often when your heart swells with great excitement, you can burst into tears immediately afterwards, so as to free yourself of the heavy burden of joy. And it was difficult to find a visible reason for those cries and that leaping around at such moments, a reason for the girl’s tears. If I asked her then why she was sad, she usually didn’t answer, or only said: ah, why am I sad! And she had already been doing all the work in the house. She was not only cleaning, but also cooking. What impressed you particularly was her fresh mind. She very quickly learned and mastered the words we used in the house, or those she heard on television. In the evening, when we gathered around the television set she would also come; she was also attracted by that world, which is a kind of lie.

AuthorDimitar Baševski
2018-08-21T17:23:59+00:00 February 1st, 1999|Categories: Prose, Literature, Blesok no. 07|0 Comments