Marta became sick. She complained about a sharp pain under the ribs, where the heart flutters caged forever. She told me that either God or the Devil had sent a disease there to destroy yet another being and thus put an end to her sojourn on earth. I could not understand why Marta did not discard her skin like the snake and start life all over again.
When I suggested this to her she grew angry and cursed me for being a blasphemous Gypsy bastard, kin to the Devil. She said that disease enters a person when he least expects it. It might be sitting behind you in a cart, jump on your shoulders as you bend down to pick berries in the woods, or crawl out of the water as you cross the river in a boat. Disease sneaks into the body invisibly, cunningly, through the air, water, or by contact with an animal or another person, or even—and here she gave me a wary look—from a pair of black eyes set close to a hawk nose. Such eyes, known as Gypsy or witches’ eyes, could bring crippling illness, plague, or death. That is why she forbade me to look directly into her eyes or even those of the household animals. She ordered me to spit quickly three times and cross myself if I ever accidentally looked into an animal’s eyes or her own.
She often became enraged when the dough she kneaded for bread turned sour. She blamed me for casting a spell and told me I would get no bread for two days as punishment. Trying to please Marta and not to look into her eyes, I walked about the hut with my eyes closed, stumbling over furniture, overturning buckets, and trampling flower beds outside, knocking against everything like a moth blinded by sudden brightness. In the meantime Marta collected some goose down, and scattered it over burning coals. She blew the resulting smoke all over the room to the accompaniment of incantations designed to exorcise the evil spell.
She would announce, finally, that the spell was lifted. And she was right, for the next baking always produced good bread.
Marta did not succumb to her sickness and pain. She waged a constant, wily battle against them. When her pains started bothering her, she would take a chunk of raw meat, chop it up finely, and place it in an earthenware jar. Then she would pour water over it that was drawn from a well just before sunrise. The jar was then buried deep in a corner of the hut. This would bring her relief from the aches for a few days, she said, until the meat decomposed. But later, when the pains returned, she went through the whole painstaking procedure once again.
Marta never drank any fluids in my presence, and she never smiled. She believed that if she did so, it could give me a chance to count her teeth, and that each tooth so counted would subtract one year from her life. It is true that she did not have many teeth. But I realized that at her age every year was very precious.
I tried to drink and eat without showing my teeth, and I practiced looking at my own reflection in the blue-black mirror of the well, smiling at myself with unopened mouth.
I was never allowed to pick up any of her lost hairs from the floor. It was well known that even a single lost hair, if spied by an evil eye, could be the cause of serious throat trouble.
In the evenings Marta sat by the stove, nodding and mumbling prayers. I sat nearby thinking of my parents. I recalled my toys, which now probably belonged to other children. My big teddy bear with glass eyes, the airplane with the turning propellers and its passengers whose faces were visible through the windows, the small easy-moving tank, and the fire engine with its extending ladder.
Suddenly Marta’s hut would become warmer as the pictures grew sharper, more real. I could see my mother sitting at the piano. I heard the words of her songs. I recalled my fear before an appendix operation when I was only four years old, the glossy hospital floors, the gas mask the doctors placed on my face which prevented me from even counting to ten.
But this past of mine was rapidly turning into an illusion like one of my old nanny’s incredible fables. I wondered whether my parents would ever find me again. Did they know that they should never drink or smile in the presence of evil-eyed people who might count their teeth? I would remember my father’s broad, relaxed smile and begin to worry; he showed so many teeth that if an evil eye were to count them, he would most certainly die very soon.
One morning when I awoke the hut was cold. The fire in the stove was out and Marta was still sitting in the middle of the room, her many skirts tucked up and her bare feet resting in a bucket full of water.
I tried to speak to her, but she did not answer. I tickled her cold, stiff hand, but the knobby fingers did not move. The hand hung down from the arm of the chair like wet linen from a clothesline on a still day. When I lifted her head, her watery eyes seemed to be staring up at me. I had seen such eyes only once before, when the stream threw up the bodies of dead fish.
Marta, I concluded, was waiting for a change of skin and, like the snake, she could not be disturbed at such a time. Though uncertain what to do, I tried to be patient.
It was late fall. The wind was cracking the brittle twigs. It tore off the last of the wrinkled leaves, tossing them into the sky. Hens perched owlishly on their roosts, sleepy and depressed, opening with distaste one eye at a time. It was cold, and I did not know how to kindle a fire. All my efforts to talk to Marta failed to elicit any response. She sat there motionless, staring fixedly at something I could not see.
I went back to sleep, having nothing else to do, confident that when I woke up Marta would be scurrying around the kitchen humming her mournful psalms. But when I awoke in the evening she was still soaking her feet. I was hungry and frightened of the darkness.
I decided to light the oil lamp. I began to search for the matches Marta kept safely hidden. I carefully took the lamp off the shelf, but it slipped in my hand and spilled some kerosene on the floor.
The matches refused to light. When one finally flared up, it broke off and fell on the floor into the pool of kerosene. At first the flame timidly stopped there, casting off a puff of blue smoke. Then it boldly leapt into the middle of the room.
It was no longer dark, and I could plainly see Marta. She did not appear to notice what was happening. She did not seem to mind the flame, which had by then moved to the wall and up the legs of her wicker chair.
It was not cold any more. The flame was now close to the bucket in which Marta was soaking her feet. She must have felt the heat, but she did not move. I admired her endurance. After having sat there all night and all day, she still did not stir.
It became very hot in the room. Flames climbed up the walls like clinging vines. They flapped and crackled like dried pods underfoot, especially by the window where a meager draft managed to penetrate. I stood by the door, ready to run, still waiting for Marta to move. But she sat stiffly, as though unaware of anything. The flames started to lick her dangling hands as might an affectionate dog. They now left purple marks on her hands and climbed higher toward her matted hair.
The flames sparkled like a Christmas tree, and then burst into a high blaze, forming a peaked hat of fire on Marta’s head. Marta became a torch. Flames circled her tenderly from all sides, and the water in the bucket hissed when shreds of her ragged rabbit-fur jacket fell into it. I could see under the flames patches of her wrinkled, sagging skin and whitish spots on her bony arms.
I called out to her for the last time as I ran outside into the yard. The hens were cackling furiously and beating their wings in the coop adjoining the house. The usually placid cow was mooing and butting the barn door with her head. I decided not to wait for Marta’s permission, and set about freeing the hens on my own. They rushed out hysterically, and tried to take flight on desperate, beating wings. The cow succeeded in breaking down the barn door. She took up an observation point at a safe distance from the fire, pensively chewing her cud.