The Best Continental Short Stories of 1927/Geese

by Božena Viková-Kunětická

GEESE

By BOZENA KUNETICKA

They seem like large daisies dotting the green meadows, when we see them from afar—so white and calm! Only when they spread their big wings and wave them in the air, stretch their long necks and turn about on awkward feet, does the illusion vanish.

The goose is beloved of women. I know women to whom a goose represents the bright side of life, who give it most wonderful care and converse with it in a strange, unknown voice, which they do not use even when talking to their children, their lover, or any one else in the world, as though that particular shading of tone were created only for geese. One cannot stroke, kiss or caress a goose; it does not understand such endearment, yet our women stroke, kiss and caress geese with their very glances.

The ladies of the fashionable world have their parrots; our peasant women have their geese. They are their pride, their luxury, their need.

No other bird can be as affectionate as a goose is when it fondles its mistress’ skirt, hanging on the fence. It gabbles gently all the while, as if to say: “I know you. You belong to our housewife. You dart about the yard, over the field, along the road. You bring us laps full of dandelions and oats. You are the skirt of our housewife.” And thus the goose stands looking at the skirt in a sort of ecstasy, murmuring sweetly, and touching the garment tenderly with its bill, as though overflowing with love.

I like to watch geese moving along in a line, one behind the other, rocking slowly in a severely pedantic manner. I like to watch them when they scatter over dry roads, raising dust. I like to watch them flying over a field, honking triumphantly, or swimming serenely and proudly in the pond, looking like great water lilies, or dozing in the grass, crops full, wings hanging, concerning themselves about nothing and whispering now and then as if in sleep—tired, satiated. I like to watch them during a rain, when they stand in the shower and look up to the sky, wondering whence all that water comes, so pleasing to them.

When twilight falls, voices float over the village square and dooryards, calling: “Geese, geese! Come home! Where are they? Geese, geese! Where are our geese?” And the geese return, as though hearing the bell call to vespers.

When the geese disappear from the square, it seems as though the little village had shut its white flower, like a sensitive plant.

There is one kind of geese that awakens my profound respect, the geese of the poor. No one asks them, “How do you get food” and yet they return cheerfully again and again to their ridiculously miserable abode, stepping more quietly than the others—here two, there three, one, in small flocks, paying no attention to the large courtyards where plenty of grain is lying about. They pass along placidly and majestically until they reach their own poor gates and are lost to sight behind them.

I knew three such geese—entirely white, old, with hoarse, sad voices. They used to march in single file, slowly and somewhat ceremoniously, each head ornamented with a little red cap, which became them well.

They used to come out of a shabby cottage resembling a wormy old mushroom covered with moss. The two small windows were dirty and cheerless. A three-year-old girl played in the dust and pools of the yard. Not far away, on the threshold, sat an old woman, bent and wrinkled, sewing something that had no shape, something that was formless and tattered. Occasionally she would stop to moisten the two fingers of her right hand, gnarled and covered with a network of swollen veins.

She used to limp about the yard, her head and hands quivering like the yellow leaves in autumn, when the slightest breeze loosens them and they flutter sadly and slowly to the ground. This poor old woman was the village beggar. She had inherited the hut from her son-in-law, a laborer, who departed this life the same year her daughter died, and left, besides the hut, the three geese with their red caps and a child four months old—Louise. Louise cried night and day and ate—my heavens, how she ate everything that passed her lips, after the old woman had prepared it by chewing it with her toothless gums, to make it soft!

It was a struggle between a new life and the old, as though one wanted to vanquish the other, all the while one gathered warmth from the other’s body. It was two small arms of the child seeking support from the lifeless shaking hands of the old woman. It was two toothless mouths, both hungry. It was two pairs of eyes, observing and recognizing each other with difficulty. It was two feeble hearts, both beating rapidly with exhaustion and weariness.

All night long could be heard the cry of the child, who could not fall asleep, and the voice of the old woman, who wanted to sleep.

At dawn the sun would find them slumbering; pale, spent, with lips tightly closed, and all about them poverty, bad odors, evidence of the night’s strife—the breath of death, through which both creatures fought for life.

At that moment, the three geese opened the gate with their bills and marched away, tranquil and dignified, to their feeding place, dewy and aromatic, prepared for them by God. Leaving behind them a most dreary corner of human habitation, they walked under the celestial canopy that adorns the rich halls of regal nature. They found gullies filled with grass, mown fields sprinkled with grain, roads strewn with plums and large beet leaves, dropped by peasants from wagons or barrows. The air was filled with the songs of larks, the sun gave warmth, and the pond breathed a damp fragrance, foretelling a delightful swim. The three geese threw themselves into its pleasant current, drugged with delight, and their jubilant cries mingled with those of the rest.

The sun was setting, the evening breeze fanned the air, the fields grew lonely, and the geese, in long, endless flocks, like white bands, wandered lazily home. Some darted up in the air and flew forward with a deafening racket; others, driven by a switch in the hands of a sunburned lad, trotted along quickly, but the three geese of the old woman walked slowly, as if they anticipated the cruel poverty of their home, from which came the cry of little Louise, lying on her wet pillow, while the old woman cooked broth for both.

When the geese announced their arrival, the old woman put aside her tin spoon, pushed away her bowl, let Louise cry, and, picking up a few dry crusts, stepped out. Her quavering, tired voice sounded sweet and loving as she said:

“Well, well; welcome home. Here is a bit of supper; I think you can chew it up.”

The geese took the crusts from her shaking hands, smoothed her apron, raised their blue, yellow-rimmed eyes, babbled softly, and then crept to the threshold, outvying each other in petting the old woman. It seemed as if they wanted to tell her about the feasts, the freedom, the happiness they had enjoyed that day.

Her eyes dimmed, her lips trembled, and she spoke to them, saying:

“It is well, geese. In two weeks I shall pick some feathers. Louise must have a feather bed from you. Eat, eat, my dears. Oh, my dears, life is hard! I raised ten children and buried them all; ten children, and now in my old age, standing by my grave, oh, good God in Heaven, I must again care for a little child! I carry it and am faint, my geese. I tremble, body and soul. Poor Louise! But I am not able—no, no; I cannot, can I, my geese?”

She sighed a little, smiled a little, and with halting step went to their shed to let them in, pushing the door to and saying:

“So you can open it again in the morning. I sleep only toward dawn. Oh, those nights, those dreadful nights! So, geese, so. Thank God for everything.”

The old woman took care of Louise in this fashion until the child was three years old, and never thinking much about the geese, how they lived and why they did not die of hunger.

Louise did not learn to walk for a long time, as though even in that she wanted to torment her grandmother. Her first word was “geese,” for she heard it oftenest from the old woman, who spoke it reverently, tenderly, and seriously, especially at night, when she sat down on the doorstep and the geese returned from pasture like faithful dogs.

At such times she pointed them out to Louise as proudly as a rich man displays his diamonds and treasures:

“Geese! See! Our geese, white as snow. Louise, who has come? Who is this? Stroke them. Say: ‘My geese, mine.’ But don’t choke them, you careless child.”

The blue, glittering sky arched above them, sending down a holy peace mingled with the song of larks. From the neighboring field came the murmur of grain. Children’s voices were heard in the road, somewhere an old dog barked angrily; and the little dooryard, dismal, unkempt, the hut about ready to fall, it was their whole world, and when they were both fed, surrounded by their geese, they wished for none better, no, not even the eternal world, for that is dubious and unknown.

From the time when Louise began to walk on her thin, crooked, brown legs and could call “Grandmother, grandmother,” and slept quietly all night, the old woman seemed to bask in her smile and forgave her for being the eleventh bairn to whom she devoted the last remnants of her strength. It was pleasant to hear the child laughing merrily in the room or yard, to watch the avidity with which she ate her black bread or yellow potato, begged by the grandmother. It was pleasant to the old woman to have Louise tug at her skirt and follow her from place to place, waddling like a little duck, or to find her, when she returned from the day’s begging, asleep under the settle, quiet as a mouse, with damp eye-lashes and lips parted and swollen.

She thought it a miracle that she had raised Louise and thought it showed that she still had strength to live many years, which was what she asked for in her prayers and dreams.

But alas, she had grown old and her face bore many signs of the grave. Her whole body seemed bowed by the heavy air of age, which Louise drank in, night and day. The little girl grew up in it, breathed it, was permeated with it; she herself seemed to be nearing the grave.

One day the old woman found her with fists closed tight, in a fever. She lay on the floor, in the centre of the room, on a small, heavy feather bed, in which the old woman used to wrap her when an infant. Evidently she had found it and made a bed with it on the hard floor, feeling that her head ached and everything whirled about her. She was sleeping.

The old woman noticed the child’s hot breath, shook her trembling head and laid Louise in the heavy oaken cradle, in which she herself had been rocked. She tried to awaken her, but Louise whispered something unintelligible and slept on.

“It was the wind—it changed. I will let her sleep, maybe sleep will cure her. Such a little thing, it does not take much to make her sick.”

The twilight deepened and spread over the land like a silver veil. The last rays of the sun gilded a few tiny clouds on the far horizon and covered them with a pearly lustre, so that they resembled fish scales. A warm August evening settled over the village, a time when a feeling of indescribable rapture blends with a sensation of sweet anxiety, created by the impression that we are alone with the sublime, mystical universe above us. It seems that we are ascending to it and the earth is dropping away.

The small, dreadful room in the old woman’s hut filled with shadows; darkness arose from the corners. She had finished drinking a large bowl of coffee, into which she had broken bits of bread. She had whispered her “The Lord be thanked, crossing herself at the same time, and, wiping her perspiring face, stepped out on the threshold. Louise had stirred several times, opened her parched lips, but the old woman saw her not. She was looking for the geese, which might come at any moment.

And because she was so unfortunate, wretched and old, she had no one in the immediate neighborhood to whom she could tell her troubles. She was so very destitute that even the poorest of the poor feared to give her a pleasant look, thinking she might take advantage of it for her hunger and want. Whenever she appeared they locked the door, or said crossly: “There is that old woman again. My good Lord, why does she not die?”

And so the old woman had no one with whom she could converse and to whom she could say: “Please do me a favor.” She had only God, to whom she prayed and prayed. Her old age was filled with pleadings and thanksgivings, whether she spoke to people or to God. She stood in the doorway alone and gazed on the sky, which to her dull eyes seemed bedimmed. Somewhere behind the rotten paling of the ugly yard sounded the voices of young women. The air echoed with the honking of geese, lowing of cows, the shrill blast of the little herder’s horn, and the croaking of frogs. But all these sounds seemed to fall to the ground; nothing of them arose to the quiet, brooding heavens.

The old woman shivered with cold. She wanted to go back into the room, but was overcome by anxiety about her geese, which had not returned at the accustomed hour.

“Well, well, where are they?” she said, stepping out. “They have never done such a thing. What has happened?”

She walked through the yard, stumbling over her feet, looked into the shed, shook her head, and went out into the road.

The young women still stood talking near the fence. The road was empty, nothing could be seen of the three white geese in the darkness.

“Something must have happened,” whispered the old woman. “I must go and look for them. What if something did happen—my good Lord in the Heavens!”

And forgetting Louise, forgetting everything, she hurried to the village, bowed and breathless. She called to the young women after she had passed them.

“My dears, did you not see my geese somewhere?”

“Why, have you any geese?”

“Three, my dears, three such good geese. What shall I do, they have not come home! There were three, with red caps. Try to recollect—did no one drive them past?”

“Oh my, many geese pass here. Why don’t you take better care of them?”

The old woman, seeing she was but wasting time with the foolish women who did not even know her geese, ran on, still breathless. She staggered along, slipping on the long grass into a little ravine, and looked about with wide, frightened eyes, to see if she could not find her geese, or some one who had seen them. The evening star appeared in the sky, shining like a drop of silver in a blue-gray blossom. The twilight deepened more and more; only the western horizon wore a narrow band of bright red. The old woman asked everybody she met, but nobody had seen anything of her geese.

When she reached the church of St. Barbara, tired to death, she found a man who knew about them.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“Geese, my geese—three such geese, with red caps. Oh, I could weep bloody tears for them.”

“Why don’t you take better care of them? They got into Konrad’s beets and he had them put in the pound—see? They had been in his field a great many times before; he couldn’t put up with anything like that all the time. Last spring his house burned down and he had no insurance. Why should he feed strange geese? Why do you keep them? Yes, yes, they are in the pound, locked up.”

“What? Put them in the pound? And what will happen to them, my dear?”

The man laughed aloud.

“What will happen? You pay ten kreutzers for each and take them home.”

“Ten kreutzers? No, that cannot be. You must be mistaken. I have not so many kreutzers.”

“Well, then they will starve,” said the man and walked away, for he was not quite so poor as the beggar woman and it might be she would ask him for the thirty kreutzers.

She remained standing, stunned by the blow, and tried to comprehend the misfortune that had befallen her. She could not understand why her geese had gone into Konrad’s beet field, and how it happened that they were now in the public pound as if they were thieves or tramps, and why they were not in their own little shed.

Poor things, surely they were surprised to find themselves within strange walls and wondered why the old woman in her blue skirt did not bring them dry crusts. What now?

There was nothing to do except to go home to Louise, who was ill, and figure out how to get thirty kreutzers, a veritable kingdom. Possibly in two or three days she might gather the sum, kreutzer by kreutzer, but the geese could not wait upon the charity of kind people. Surely they would be hungry and thirsty the very next morning. What now?

“O Virgin Mary, I have a great worry,” said the old woman, seeking the homeward path.

A deep anguish overcame her and broke into long, sobbing sighs as she stepped into the yard and thought of the empty, forsaken shed. The window of the hut was dark and she thought she heard Louise cry.

She went into the room and lighted a small kerosene lamp, which immediately sent out a cloud of blackish smoke and lit up the room but dimly. In this room was a large earthen oven, an oaken table, a settle, two chairs, a bed and a cradle. In the latter, sat Louise, with horror on her countenance. It was plain that she had been frightened by the darkness around her, by the solitude in which no one answered her, and by the silence, in which she heard only her voice and rapid breathing.

Her thin, hot hands were folded, her eyes wild and her hair tangled, while her lips had uttered numberless times the one word: “Drink!”

“Yes, yes, Louise,” the old woman pacified her, setting the lamp on the table. “Our geese are lost. Just think, I went to look for them and they are in the pound. Just think, Louise, think, think! Konrad had them put in the pound—the cruel man. They were in his beets. And I must pay thirty kreutzers. Where will I get them? Dear Louise, I have a great trouble. If I do not get thirty kreutzers together by to-morrow, the geese will be hungry. Poor things, such good geese, as the Lord knows!”

She gave Louise some water, which the child drank in great gulps, and then fell back into the cradle, without realizing that the geese had not returned and that her grandmother’s head was heavy with care. She felt a great weight and terror under her forehead and her grandmother’s words rebounded from something hard underneath, leaving behind them not the faintest echo. Louise’s brain, her whole head, was filled with something hot and impenetrable; something that seemed to press through her eyes, fill her ears, nose, mouth, and even her throat. When she drank she washed away that strange, throttling sensation for a moment, but presently it returned, twofold strong, from all sides, and seemed to cover even her lips.

Louise turned her poor head several times, but it did no good. She seemed wrapped in hot iron; it engirded her skull. “Can’t you sleep?” asked the old woman, still concerned with her geese, her entire fortune. “Try to sleep, all will be well in the morning, Louise. It is the wind. If I had some horseradish, I would make poultices to put on the soles of your feet. But it is hard to know what to do, when one has nothing. Just think, Louise, those geese. Sleep, Louise, sleep.”

And Louise really fell into a deep, leaden sleep. The lamp smoked so that the whole room seemed full of an oppressive fog. Through this fog presently was heard the hoarse breathing of the old woman, who had fallen asleep on the settle by the window, utterly exhausted.

It was eleven o’clock when she awoke. The sky was lighted up by the pale, cold gleam of the moon recently arisen. This gleam pierced into the room and fell upon three small, holy pictures, painted on glass.

The old woman awoke from a bad dream. She dreamed that strangers were stealing her geese. She tried to prevent them, when one of the men struck her on the breast. She felt the pain even after she was thoroughly awake.

Louise was sleeping.

“I must go,” said the old woman. “I shall have no peace. If I see them and know they are there, I shall feel better. My heart seems encased in thorns. I could not go in the daytime. The night is clear. Wait, my geese, I shall at least bid you good night. To-morrow you will be hungry, poor things.”

She picked up a shawl and walked out into the fresh, mysterious, starry night.

Such a night, in which the trees stand out like dark shadows and the white houses appear to be phantoms. Such a night, filled with silence and silver, seems like a bit of that great, sublime eternity, and each sound, each motion seems a trespass on the royal calm in which God himself veils his thoughts. So small, so insignificant, so meaningless is man, hemmed in by the inscrutable, which he will never solve. All that he did during the day, all that inspired him, all that was his pride, his creation, melts away in the majestic night, small and weak! The night encompasses his soul, his faith, takes away prayer from his lips and he knows, he feels there is no one to protect him. The light of the heavens chills him, the stillness suffocates him! He realizes how miserable, mortal, and ignorant he is. He believes there is Some One who guides the stars but does not think this Some One knows him, sees him, judges him. He is alone—alone. He is overwhelmed by awe, by a feeling of sadness and then by a strange comfort in the thought that there is no eternity for the bird which builds its nest, sings, suffers, brings forth a new generation and dies, while all the time not one atom has changed in the universe. And in such a night, when the skies glow with a white flame, engulfing all and flinging back to earth everything that is not of a starry splendor, in such a night the little, old woman climbed a heap of old bricks, dirt and rubbish and stooped to the narrow window of the pound, which was entirely dark except for a thin strip of moonlight, shining like a bright thread. And while the stars glowed like myriads of glittering creatures, which live, die, and think, being nearer to God, the little weak woman called into the pound:

“Geese! Are you there? Hey, geese, hey!”

She was answered by a rustle and then honking. Her eyes filled with tears.

“Yes, yes, I see you are there. I just wanted to know. Be still, dears. Good night!”

A white wing glistened in the moonbeam and then all was quiet and dark again.

She did not meditate on what the world, God, or she herself was. She only asked, peering at the heavens with tearful eyes, “Where will I get those thirty kreutzers? Where will I get them, Almighty God?”

The next day passed and the old woman had not the thirty kreutzers. She had crossed the whole village from one end to the other. She had begged and told every one, but her plight awoke no sympathy. It was theft, neglect, carelessness, audacity, cunning, but never misfortune. They all explained to her how she had made her mistake and what she deserved.

She brought home bread, potatoes, pears, even some tarts, but not a kreutzer, not one!

And her geese in the pound screamed with hunger and thirst. She threw them grass at noon, but in a little while they screamed anew.

Each hour and, later on, each minute intensified her grief and impatience. She had no thought for anything else; no feeling. It seemed as though she were dwindling away, as though she were giving up the very marrow of her bones to thoughts of her geese. She was even cross with Louise, when the child asked for water or spoke incoherently.

“Oh, must you bother me too?” she cried, beside herself with worry and anger. “You too? What do you want? Lie still. You will perspire and then all will be well. The geese are in a worse fix. For the wounds of Christ, they will die of hunger!”

The little girl was dizzy. Her heart burned and the cradle seemed to change into a bottomless pit, filled with hot lava. She felt as if she were falling deeper and deeper, and the flame enveloped and choked her. Hundreds of sparks seemed to fly from her forehead and danced about like stars. They whirled in a mad chase and each like a fiery needle stabbed her brain, her skull, her eyes.

She moved her hand. It appeared to be a strange, heavy object. She did not recognize her body; it seemed to separate from something with which it had been connected and fell apart in glowing fragments that did not belong to her any more. At one moment her heart closed convulsively, just as a flame draws in before it goes out. Louise saw two blazing eyes in the pit and they were coming nearer and nearer. She tried to cover her face but found she had no hands. She tried to hide her head in the pillow, but it had separated from her body. She suffered a deathly agony; she felt the sweat on her forehead, which did not belong to her now. She gasped with fear, breathed heavily, and fell deeper and deeper into the pit. Suddenly, the eyes appeared again, quite near, and seemed to sear her. She screamed.

The old woman felt of her forehead. “See, Louise, you are perspiring. Your forehead is cooler. Lie still, do not get up. I will go to Dame Lhotska and tell her you are sick, I will ask her for thirty kreutzers, for medicine. She is your godmother. She will give me the money. Why did I not think of her sooner? Something seems to tell me right now, here by your cradle.”

Louise did not hear a word, but she smiled. She realized that the two dreadful eyes were not eyes at all; they were the portals leading into a golden palace where everything glowed, sparkled, and exulted. She passed through them—and smiled for a long time after.

The old woman ran to Godmother Lhotska and with folded hands, as if in prayer, begged the thirty kreutzers for Louise. “Godmother, I must get medicine for the little chicken; medicine.”

Godmother Lhotska opened her box where she kept money received for milk and eggs, took out thirty kreutzers, and said: “Here is the money. Every time I think of that poor child, my heart aches.”

The old woman had her thirty kreutzers. She had wealth, treasure, a kingdom. She turned dizzy with so much happiness and triumph.

“Really, the guardian angel himself stood by the cradle as I stepped to it. Thank God! I will bring back the geese to Louise,” she whispered.

The sun was setting red as blood and its last rays, cast on the windows of the village houses, seemed filled with that same ruddy fluid. From each western pane in each little, white house a flame seemed to blow, as if the whole village were afire. The evening zephyr played in the trees and even they appeared to be enveloped in a scarlet haze; they looked like magic shadows in which fairies slept. People moved about in the red twilight like apparitions, as if they were floating in the air. A flock of partridges flew over the deserted field and along the road walked a white procession of geese, their wings touched pink by the setting sun.

The old woman, too, was taking home her geese. She held her head high; she seemed younger, and at intervals she called proudly: “Hey, hey!” so that people turned to look at her. She nodded to every one she met and smiled loftily.

She had her geese again!

“Well, old woman, do you think they will go into the beet field another time?” called somebody.

“Keep still, you scoffer, wherever you are!” she replied; she could not see her tormentor.

She drove the geese into the yard and they honked loudly, stretching their wings as though they wanted to embrace their poverty.

“See, Louise, do you hear?” said the old woman, stepping into the room, which was embellished with the garnet jewels of the sun. “The geese are home, Louise! Listen; do you hear them? They are home again, poor things. Do you want to see them? Come, I will carry you to them, Louise.”

She bent over the child, who was resting in a crimson mist, woven about her by the sun’s beams. On her lips shone the shadow of a departed smile, which had flown away and left but its faintest vestige. Louise did not answer.

“She sleeps. All the while she sleeps; she did not eat. I had no time to think of the poor thing, my mind was so filled with the geese. Louise! Louise!”

Suddenly the old woman stooped over the cradle, breathless. She touched the child’s hands—they were icy.

“Louise! For Christ’s sake, Louise!” she screamed, shaking the little one. “Louise! Don’t you hear me?”

She felt of the child’s forehead, cheeks, and feet; all was cold and lifeless. The old woman rubbed her eyes, clasped her head with her hands, and called in a loud voice, as if she wanted to drown her fears:

“Louise, the geese are home! For the martyrdom of Christ, Louise, it is not possible! I do not believe it! Louise, do you hear!”

The sun disappeared and took with it the rosy glow in which Louise was sleeping her last sleep.

The old woman beheld the livid face and blue, closed lips, now bereft of the last traces of the vanished smile. Her throat choked with pain and she dropped on her knees beside the cradle.

The evening sky was covered with stars when the old woman appeared on the threshold and whispered to the geese, standing about her like three white flames:

“Louise died, my geese. What shall I do with you now?”

And through the little, dusty window glimmered the yellow light of the flickering lamp at the head of dead Louise.