I wrote it in 2016, it references the Welsh tale of Bloudewedd, and is a tale for the spring equinox.
A New Land
‘Oak, broom and meadowsweet.’
‘What, Agnieszka?’ my husband asked.
I was sitting in the armchair by the window, sun pouring over me. The book I was reading lay open on my lap. It told the story of two magicians who magicked a woman from the blossoms of oak, broom and meadowsweet.
‘No oak or meadowsweet here,’ Gregor said wistfully. ‘And broom is a weed. How do you say? Noxious.’
Perhaps we are like the weeds, I thought. Introduced. Noxious. Do we really belong?
‘She was a woman not born of woman,’ I told him, ‘but created by men. Made to be the bride of a man cursed never to have a human wife.’ I sighed. ‘She had no say in her life.’
‘Poor girl. And made from flowers. It is unnatural.’
Yes, poor girl, I agreed. But what could be more natural than flowers?
It seemed an age since I had been in the garden, or worked on a painting. I’d been laid up in bed with a bad case of early spring flu. Gregor had been tending to me, and to the vegetable patch too, which was springing into new life. Though something, or someone, had been eating things during the night.
‘A possum,’ I said.
‘What damn possum pulls up beets and radishes by the roots?’
Gregor led me out to see the damage. Some nibbled kale, a small round beet with a bite out of it so that it looked like a waning moon. It did not seem so bad.
‘It’s good-for-nothing kids, I tell you.’
But I knew it could not have been. Some bored children might vandalise a garden, but what children would then eat what they had found? Raw beetroot and radishes, Russian kale and spinach. No, it could not have been children.
That night I woke, my mouth dry, and I carefully descended the stairs in the dark. In the kitchen I poured water into a glass and drank. How lucky we are to have water come straight out of the tap like that. It was not that way in the old country. But, I wondered, will our luck one day run out, like the water?
I looked through the kitchen window over the dark garden and then put down the glass in surprise. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shadow begin to move towards the veggie patch. Slight, oddly-shaped. I stared. She stooped and seemed to take something before moving off into the darkness.
Why did I say she? Something about her size, her quick, graceful movements. I knew she was a girl. And something moved in my belly, a fleeting recollection of sad tenderness.
If Gregor and I had had children, perhaps we would have felt more like we belonged here, their births and lives rooting us with this soil, this land. But little Jezebella did not live even a week, and there were no others after her. It is so hard to be a mother without a child, never called mama, never to be called babcia, grandmother. Yet we made a life here, Gregor with his piano, his teaching. Me with my painting. Both long-since retired, mostly we pottered about the garden, tended the vegetables and roses, ate kasha and schnitzel and cabbage rolls.
Our house is the very last one on this street, quiet (as we had wanted), but surrounded by the bush. So we grew a European garden around it, and our beloved vegetables, sealing ourselves in to our own little domesticated place of old memories. Despite many decades living in this land, we still did not understand the wild landscape here, the strange spikiness of the plants, the grey-green drabness of the eucalyptus forest. We shut it out, thinking only of Europe, what we had had to leave behind—the green countryside, the great cities, the culture—ignoring the way the sealed road ended abruptly just beyond our driveway, degenerating into dirt and continuing on into the bush, nothing more than a fire trail. Sometimes it felt like we had emigrated to a place at the very end of the earth. What was there beyond us but emptiness?
I didn’t tell Gregor about what I had seen. I don’t know why. She seemed like my secret, come to me out of the empty, unknown place beyond the garden. And the next night, when Gregor’s slow, deep breathing told me that he was sleeping soundly, I crept down to the kitchen again, for I knew I would see her. Yet, I must have stood in the dark for hours, in a daze, for just when I thought I had glimpsed a movement in the moonlit garden, Gregor found me, switching on the light.
‘Agnieszka, what are you doing standing in the cold? You mustn’t get ill again.’
Startled, I stood gaping at my sleep-bedraggled reflection in the blackness of the window.
*
I woke to the sound of kookaburras laughing loudly, yodelling magpies, and the sweet song of a blackbird—yet another creature who did not belong. Like the weeds. Like rats, rabbits and foxes. All emigrants, like Gregor and I. Though had any of us had a choice? We had all been subject to human intervention—species introduced unwisely, wars waged. We were all here now, and we had to go on living.
I was still regaining my strength, and walked unsteadily along the driveway to the letterbox. I knew the postman had been. You could always hear the squeaking brakes of his motorcycle from a mile off. Though as I reached in to get the mail the neighbour’s German shepherd appeared from nowhere, barking madly. I froze, remembering all of the vicious dogs I had seen during the war, and their even more vicious handlers.
‘Fred, no!’ a young man shouted, running out and grabbing the dog.
Fred? More like Killer, or Fang.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, as he roughly dragged the dog by the collar back through the gate. ‘Bad dog!’
I shook with anger and fear. Why did I dislike the dog? If anything it was the humans who owned him who were at fault. And that fence was not high enough to keep in an animal of that size. It worried me. He could bite someone. What poor creatures might die in those powerful jaws?
After that shock I felt listless, tired. I busied myself for a time, laying out our traditional decorated eggs to mark the season (I had never learnt to celebrate Easter in autumn), but I could not bring myself to paint. Gregor made me comfortable outside where I could breathe in the peace of my plants, the vitality of spring. The faint sound of the piano drifted out the open door, and I strayed in and out of sleep.
But that night I could not sleep at all. I crept downstairs again—I could not help myself—and I saw her, touched by the moonlight, crouching in the garden, her hair so long it flowed right round her small body. And then I heard the dog bark.
‘No! No! No!’ I fumbled with the lock, then flung the door open, rushing out, yelling, ‘Run! Run!’ And I saw her turn to me, eyes wide, before she skittered away like a frightened rabbit.
Gregor came stumbling down the stairs and outside. ‘Agnieszka, what on earth?’
‘She is not safe, she is hungry. She’s just a little girl. Oh Gregor, we must help her.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There was a girl in the garden, eating the vegetables.’
‘A girl? What girl would be out there at this hour?’
Even after all his talk of vandal-children, I could tell from the tone of his voice that he didn’t quite believe me. He was worried. I trembled in his arms as he coaxed me back into the house. He warmed some milk on the stove and poured it into a mug, holding it to my lips, making me drink.
‘I saw her.’
‘Yes, my Agnieszka, I know. But now you must go back to sleep.’
Calmed by the milk, I did sleep. Though I dreamed over and over of a rabbit running, running, a dog snapping at her heels. She plunged into a hole in the ground just in time to escape his jaws, and I knew, somehow, that she was running still, through the underworld, just like the sun did each night.
*
I left food out every night after that. Bread and milk, and vegetables, peeled and sliced. More palatable like that than straight out of the ground. Gregor was not pleased about this new obsession, still not convinced there was a hungry girl visiting our garden, but he indulged me. And every morning the food was gone, down to the last drop of milk, the veggie patch left untouched.
Now it was his turn to say, ‘Possums, foxes, rats’. I only shook my head.
I began to ponder, to dream. If I were to charm a woman out of flowers, what blossoms would I use? Not oak, broom and meadowsweet. Perhaps eucalyptus, wattle and native iris. I knew my woman would be sharp and spiky like this place, but beautiful. She would belong. And unlike the men in the story who created their hapless, captive bride, I would set her free.
I started to paint again, but not my usual still lifes. Now I painted landscapes. Olive green and ochre and ironbark grey, full of light. The land that had been empty now seemed full of great mystery and splendour. I would stand at the letterbox some days, staring at the pale road disappearing into the trees. It was like I had brand new eyes.
I was sleeping more soundly now, knowing that the girl was well fed, but one night I was woken. Perhaps I heard the dog bark, or an owl screech. Whatever the cause, I was suddenly wide awake, and carefully eased myself out of bed. I tiptoed down the stairs, opened the back door as silently as I could, and crept out into the garden. I sat myself on a bench, the bench I would often sit on during the day, to read, or admire my roses. In the gentle quiet and dark perfume of the night world I waited until she came.
And she did come. Cautiously, with an animal grace, moving in complete silence. She watched me alertly as she ate the food I had provided. And I watched her, her tiny mouth nibbling so neatly, her long, tangled hair, the worn rabbit-skin clothing that covered her delicate frame. When she had had her fill she came to me and crawled right onto my lap, her weight little more than that of dead leaves, as if she was just a wisp of air in the shape of a girl. The fur she wore was soft under my hands.
‘My Jezebella,’ I crooned. ‘My child.’
I must have fallen into a doze, nestled there with the girl’s small, warm body pressed against mine, because suddenly it was dawn, the world emerging in shades of pale blue and grey, and I felt her slip from my arms. A coldness immediately moved into the place where she had been. And when I opened my eyes I saw a rabbit turn to look at me before hopping away into the bush.
As I slipped back inside the house, back up the stairs and into bed, I realised that I felt different. I even smelled different, covered in the musty scent of a feral creature. I pulled the covers around me and closed my eyes, imagining the dirt road outside that pierced through the trees, and smiled. I knew what I must do. I felt a new wildness in me, and in my heart I went into the grey-green forest, and I never looked back.
~
This story was first published in Heroines: An Anthology of Short Fiction and Poetry – Volume 2, The Neo Perennial Press, 2019.
