No one leaves Cachtice

PROLOGUE

December 29, 1610

First I heard the boots.

For days, nothing had been heard in the castle except the wind in the embrasures and, upstairs, the countess pacing her room from one end to the other, like a large animal trapped in a box. Then, the boots: many, heavy, belonging to men who were not afraid of making noise. In Čachtice, no one had walked like that for years.

I was on the basement floor, my back against the wall and my knees pulled up to my chest. I was twenty-one years old, and for six years I hadn’t crossed a door without someone opening it for me.

The door gave way on the third kick. First came the light, orange and filthy with smoke, and behind the light a man with a sword in his hand and his mouth agape. He didn’t scream. He crossed himself. Then he vomited against the doorframe.

I didn't get up. I had learned that getting up was a way of asking for something.

"What is your name?" asked another man from behind, first in Hungarian and then in my language, the language of the villages, slowly, the way one speaks to a wounded beast.

I opened my mouth. In six years, no one had called me by my name.

It took me so long to answer that they thought my voice was gone. It wasn’t. I was deciding, just as I am deciding now, how much of what I know it suits me to tell.

No one leaves Čachtice. The old maidservants used to say it like someone praying the Lord's Prayer. I left that night, on foot, with someone else’s blanket over my shoulders.

It is the only thing I have never been able to explain.

CHAPTER 1

Now

I wake up before dawn. I have spent forty years trying to break this habit, and I cannot break it. In the castle, one had to be up before the household, with the fire lit and the hot water ready, because a maid caught sleeping was a maid who paid for it. Here, no one expects me, there is no household to beat to the start of the day, yet my body opens its eyes in the darkest hour, heart already racing, as if someone were about to knock on the door.

I sleep facing the entrance, feet toward the fire. That is another habit.

This morning I got up slowly, because my knees no longer obey at the first attempt. I am sixty-four years old, with a two-room house that smells of damp firewood and sheep’s wool, a bench, a table, and a goat that does not like me. My knuckles are swollen and the skin on my forearms is as thin as an onion skin, and underneath, if one knows where to look, lie the old marks. In the village, no one knows how to look.

I was blowing on the embers when I heard voices in the street.

I approached the window without opening the shutter and peeked through the crack, which is another thing I learned to do. In front of Hana’s house—she is my neighbor—stood a man in a long coat. He wasn't from around here. I knew it by his boots: too clean for November mud, the boots of someone who travels by carriage and doesn't step on what he doesn't need to. He spoke in a low, even tone—the voice of someone who has repeated the same phrases in many villages until their sharpness has worn away.

A job in a good house, two valleys over, he was saying. Hot food, decent pay, a bed with a blanket. The house needed young hands.

Hana is a widow too. She has three daughters and a rye field that isn't enough for four mouths. She listened with her hands tucked under her apron so no one could see them trembling, and when the man pulled a few coins from his pouch and let them drop into her palm, one by one, I heard the sound from my window. It is a small sound. At first, it resembles rain.

Then Tereza came out carrying a small bundle and wearing a new ribbon in her hair. Fifteen years old. Thin, with sharp elbows and the high chin of someone who has told herself many times that she is not afraid. I had a ribbon once too. Red, made of wool, a gift from my mother. I wore it the day I crossed the gates of Čachtice, and I don't remember when I stopped wearing it.

I put my hand on the latch.

I left it there for the space of three breaths. It would have taken opening the door, stepping outside, saying a single phrase. Just one. Hana would have looked at me like one looks at a madwoman, the man in the coat would have smiled in his calm voice, and Tereza would have left all the same. But it would have been said. I pulled my hand back.

That is the second thing I confess, and I confess it today, before I have even properly begun.

Tereza looked at me as she passed. She looked away immediately, not out of bad manners, but because of what she has been taught: you don’t look too much at the strange old woman. She knows nothing. No one in this village knows anything, or they know fragments mixed with other stories: that I was a maid in a grand house, that I came back quiet, that that’s why I never married. They have made a place for me in their own way. They bring me an egg at Easter, leave firewood by my door in winter, and ask no questions. I have spent more than forty years paying for that favor with silence. What else could I give them?

The three of them left down the south road: the man ahead, the girl behind, Hana watching until there was nothing left to see. Then she closed her door, and the village fell quiet again, like a pond when a stone sinks into it.

Perhaps the house two valleys over is a good house. Perhaps. I have heard that word many times in my life, and it was always said by those who didn't want to know.

I sat at the table with the door bolted and the fire low, my hands open on the wood. I don't know how to write. Judita wanted to learn, and I promised to teach her the little I knew about letters, which was nothing. I know how to speak. I will speak aloud, in this room, to anyone willing to listen: to the fire, to the goat, to the priest if he ever dares to walk up the hill. Words spoken aloud no longer belong to the person who says them. That is what I fear most about them, and it is the only thing I seek.

I realized then that if I die with this inside me, I take with me something that isn’t mine: the names.

I can still smell the castle on winter nights. Tallow, wet iron, and the rose water the countess used to wash her hands—which could never cover up the other thing. The judges counted the bodies the way one counts sacks of grain. Some said eighty, others many more, and the numbers swelled over the years, because a number is comfortable. It has no fear, it has no hunger, it has no mother.

They had all of those things.

So I begin with them.

Marka, who had crooked teeth and covered her mouth when she laughed, and who taught me how to fold sheets so the mending would never show.

Anežka, whose braids were so long she could sit on them. She used to sing softly while scrubbing the floors, and stopped singing on a Tuesday.

Ľubica, who smiled out of nerves and habit, and who had a tooth knocked out one November day because of that smile. She kept right on smiling, missing the tooth, as if it were a minor detail.

Barbora, who arrived with a broken shoe and left with the exact same one.

Judita, a miller's daughter, who wanted to learn how to read.

Helena, of whom I remember not a single word, and whose name I know only because another girl whispered it to me in the dark.

I can name forty-one. There were more. The last ones arrived when I had already stopped asking their names, because I discovered that a name you know weighs heavier than one you ignore, and I needed to stay alive.

That is the third thing I confess. It will not be the worst.

I begin, then, from the beginning, which is not the castle. It is an autumn afternoon in a village no one remembers anymore, and a man in a long coat with a very quiet voice.