“Why not?”
Triglav wouldn’t say. “We ought to get away from the river,”he said. “A bachelor is worth the same as a grave here.”
“What’s that?” The composer had never heard the proverbbefore.
“Nothing,” Triglav said. “Nothing. That’s just what we saidunderneath the surface.”
◊
Magdalena was not inside her house when the composer nextcame to her door. Steam rose from the roof of her banya, so he determinedthat he would return in an hour; an hour passed and still she sat inside thebathhouse. Long into the night she remained. Every half hour, boys brought hotstones and fresh water to her banya door.
The composer did not question them, though he wanted to. Noone in Sklep would speak to him since he listened to Magdalena sing. His musicstudents stopped attending their lessons and his interview subjects madeimplausible excuses that the composer recognized for what they were:rejections, closed doors. At night he played Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude on thepianoforte. He remembered a story about how Chopin had written the piece afterhe saw a vision of himself drowned on the floor of a river, raindrops fallingover him in a steady patter. The composer thought perhaps he could call therain to Sklep if he played that prelude enough times. The sun could not shinewhile someone played Chopin well.
The villagers of Sklep were too reserved to openly blame himfor their drought, but the magistrate did come once to the stranger house. Thecomposer admitted him and then returned to the piano bench, continuing wherehe’d left off in the Raindrop Prelude. “You can leave this town,” themagistrate said, when the composer came to a rest, “whenever you want—perhapsyou did not know?”
“Do you fear to be seen with me?” the composer said,dropping to the bottom of the piano as he came to the slow, solemn portion ofthe piece marked sotto voce. He could hear the rainfall especially wellin this bit, the drops coming steadily down. “Will they cast you out too?”
“I fear starving more than I fear the wrath of any woman.The only thing she can do is what she’s already doing: not singing.”
The composer stopped playing and made a note: music amechanism of social control.
“You believe there will be no rain if the girls won’t sing?”he said, returning to the piano.
“The girls? No. They are—needed. For what they are. For theblood their children inherit. But for now, Magdalena is the only woman whomakes the rain come.”
“And when she dies?”
“Another woman will sing for Sklep.”
The composer had reached the prelude’s closing motif, abright tentative passage like the morning after a storm. He played the lastchords. He held them down for longer than the score prescribed. Without turninghis head, he said, “That might be for the best, don’t you think?”
◊
Magdalena was still inside her banya when the composercame to her house. Steam rose from the bathhouse in white shuddering waves, butstill the air felt dry. For weeks there had been no rain. The composer knockedon the door twice, then waited. When she told him to come inside, he did.
Magdalena was wrapped in wet willow leaves, a rustling graygarment that covered her from chin to ankles. Her bare feet, pale and shriveledwith water, sat propped on one of the wooden benches affixed to the walls. Herwet hair was bound with fern fronds and hung down her back in heavy bundles.
“I want you to bring the rain,” said the composer.
“No,” said Magdalena, and rose from the bench. The willowleaves crackled softly when she moved. Outside, the wind picked up.
“You won’t?”
“No,” she said. “Not while an outsider stays in the strangerhouse, banging on foreign instruments and writing songs that sound like badcopies of the ones we sing at Cemuk-time.”
“You refuse?”
“Leave Sklep.”
The composer understood. The crops were wilting in thefields. The river had gone down so far that the Sklep river-girls swimmingalong the floor were visible from the bank. The trees were as bare as they werein wintertime. Even bathhouse wood couldn’t retain its moisture. Even thewettest things had become perilously dry.
◊
Everyone knew who burnt down the banya with Magdalenainside. They also knew when the banya burnt, because the first rain inweeks fell in time to put out the last of the flames.
Sometime later, when he had left the stranger house andtaken a wife of his own among the village people, the composer asked Triglav’swife, the new rain-bringer, to sing for him. She did, in a cool, sonorousundertone that made each note sound like a secret dropping from her lips. Thecomposer could hear her perfectly.
The Warriors, the Mothers, theDrowned
The coyote follows Anaand her baby from inside a shroud of dust, swallowing the distance between themdown into his empty belly. Over her shoulder, she can see how his indolent lopematches the frantic, foam-lipped canter of her tired old mulestride-for-stride. He would catch them even if she didn’t draw back on thereins and tell the mule to slow his pace. That’s what she says to herself,trying to slow the thud of her heart in her throat. “This won’t be more than amoment, mi querida,” she tells little Sylvie, who is oblivious andhalf-asleep in a makeshift sling. “We’ll just see what he wants.”
Already she knows what he’s after; how could she not? Butshe wearies of pretending not to know, of his tracks in figure-eights allaround their aluminum-roofed shack, of his shadow stretching out long on thesand, of his hot breath on the back of her thighs now as she dismounts to facehim. Only an animal, she’s been saying to herself; she can’t yet force herselfto call him by that other name. In all the stories her mother told, no scabbed,hideous creature stole the living into the land of the dead. The nagualwere wise and noble and only came after the deceased were wind-whispers laidinto graves.
“You should not be still running with the little girl,” saysthe coyote.
“Why do you chase after us?”
“She belongs in the land of the dead,” says the coyote.
“She is not dead yet.” Ana can hardly even speak that word, dead.
“But here is the river,” says the coyote.
And there is the river. Ana has lived all
