Before I left for the day, I looked in the yard. It was so quiet there, so separate from the world outside. So peaceful. I found the skulls lined under the trees behind the building, where the graveled path traveled between the house and the wall.
I looked at the row of skulls, all of them with one hole through the base, and I regretted that I had never seen Ninochka’s face among the silent wraiths. I did not know which one of these skulls was hers; all of them looked at me with black holes of their sockets, and I thought I heard the faint rattling of the bullets inside them, the cluttering that grew louder like that of the tin cans dragging behind a running dog.
I turned away and walked toward the gates, trying to keep my steps slow and calm, trying to ignore the rattling of the skulls that had been dragging behind me for the last sixty years.
ONE, TWO, THREE
When Anton and Claudia moved into their new house in an Ohio suburb, they thought it was a sign of how things would be from now on—new and clean and brilliant. Now they could start a family, although Claudia disliked that expression.
“It’s not like we’re not a family,” she told Anton after another phone conversation with her mother. Claudia’s relatives, a loud clan of sun-baked, stocky Bulgars, intimidated Anton to such an extent that he loathed disagreeing with them, even in their absence.
“You know what she means,” he told his wife, and put his arm around her slender hips. “It’s just not the same without children.”
Claudia nodded and gently wrestled from under his heavy arm. “I better get the dinner started,” she said. She slipped into the kitchen and chopped onions and carrots, then tenderized chicken cutlets with a wooden mallet. She would never be enough for him, she thought. She wanted a baby, sure enough, but she wished it were not required to be complete.
When Anton started his new job, she stayed home, working in the garden, building a chicken coop, embroidering curtains and knitting baby jumpers, striped green, yellow, and red—her only rebellion against tradition, but she just couldn’t stomach any pink and blue. She fed the chickens, and made pancakes and crepes for Fat Tuesday. When March came, she made martenitsas—little red and white yarn dolls—and hung them over windows and doors to greet the arrival of spring. But she just couldn’t get pregnant.
At first, Claudia resisted seeing the doctor, afraid to give Anton more ammunition he would use to blame her for her inadequacy. Soon she ran out of excuses, and sat in the doctor’s office as the doctor explained the common causes of infertility. Anton’s gray gaze hung over Claudia like a rain cloud, and she knew he was not paying attention to the doctor, but quietly smoldering, furious that his wife was defective.
A few weeks later, when the doctor informed them that there was nothing wrong with her, Claudia felt a short-lived burst of satisfaction. It was Anton who had the problem.
The doctor suggested artificial insemination, anonymous donors. Claudia looked at Anton with hope. She did want a baby, after all, but Anton would not hear of it. Claudia proposed adoption, but he only sighed and shook his dark-haired head. It was expensive, he said; Claudia did not argue, knowing that Anton would not raise a child that was not his.
By the time March came again, Claudia busied herself with tying together bundles of red and white yarn, and hanging her martenitsas above every window and doorway. Most of the residents in Somerville, Ohio did not know what these dolls were, but other Bulgarians instantly recognized the traditional greeting of the springtime. And so did other Slavs, even those that weren’t quite human.
The first sign that something was amiss came when Claudia went into the basement to fetch some pickles and raspberry preserves she’d made last fall. She skipped down the steps, invigorated by the fresh bite in the air, and a large onion flew past her head.
Claudia gave a small cry of alarm, and squinted into the dusk of the basement. Another onion hit her in the shoulder, with little force but startling nonetheless.
“Who’s there?” Claudia said, in English and then Bulgarian. Another onion (that missed badly) was her only answer. Claudia ran over to the barrel with onions, and dodged
another projectile. Her assailant, moving with such speed that its outline blurred, rushed past her and up the stairs. She chased after, encouraged by the fact that her assailant was rather small.
Outside, there was no sign of the attacker, and when Anton came home, he only laughed at her story. However when a horrid racket woke them up in the middle of the night, Anton was not laughing. He grabbed the baseball bat he kept by the bed for such an occasion, and tiptoed into the kitchen, hitching up his pajama bottoms nervously. Claudia followed, less alarmed, feeling vindicated.
Their best china—wedding gifts from countless relatives— lay in shards on the kitchen tiles, glistening in the moonlight seeping through the window. The screen door flapped in the wind. The mysterious little troublemaker was nowhere in sight, but high-pitched shrieks and ululations started outside.
“What the hell?” Anton hefted his bat and headed outside.
The screams came from the chicken coop in the back yard, but quieted as soon as Anton and Claudia reached the door.
“Shh,” Claudia whispered. “Listen.”
“One, two, three,” came a little stuttering voice from inside the coop. “One, two, three . . . ”
Anton threw the door open, and in the swath of moonlight they saw a little girl, dressed in a poorly patched potato sack. She was counting chickens, but turned toward the sound of the opening door, her eyes flashing huge and dark, and shrieked. Before Claudia or Anton could react, she rushed outside, running so close to Claudia that she felt a brush of cloth and a gust of icy wind, but no flesh.
The mysterious girl carried on like that, throwing onions and potatoes, breaking dishes and preserve jars, and shrieking in the coop. She could only count to three, but that did not stop her obsessive attempts to count clucking, ruffled chickens.
“One, two, three,” she screamed, sending them into a wild flapping panic. “One, two, three!” All attempts to chase her away brought only temporary relief.
Claudia became convinced that the wild girl was not of any earthly agency. She asked her mother to send any and all books of fairytales and folk superstitions she could find. Claudia found the answer in one of the books describing the pagan Slavic traditions. Eastern peoples spoke of the malevolent house spirit called Kikimora. Claudia could not wait to tell Anton about her discovery.
For once, he listened. Dark circles under his eyes spoke of his lack of rest, and Claudia was certain that his willingness to listen was due to his exhaustion.
“See?” Claudia showed him the picture of a lopsided girl. “It says here, the kikimoras throw onions, break dishes and count livestock, but can’t go past three.”
“Yep,” Anton said. “Sounds like one of those things. What else does it say?”
“It says that they can’t sew, but try anyway. The stitches all come out crooked and weak. It says that before misfortune they make lace, and clicking and rattling of their bobbins keeps the inhabitants of the possessed house up all night.”
Anton yawned and rubbed his face. “Does it say how to get rid of them?”
Claudia paused for a moment, thinking of the best way to translate the words on the page in front of her. “If you catch her and cut the shape of a cross into her hair, she will become human.”
“What else?”
Claudia flipped through the book. “Doesn’t say anything else.”
“I suppose it could work,” Anton said. “If she becomes a person, we can hand her over to the police.”
Claudia nodded. Or we can keep her, she thought. Some things were best left unsaid, and thought about only in Bulgarian.
“How do we catch it?”
“It says the kikimoras can’t resist bobbins, warm milk, and unfinished sewing.”
“Let’s try all of those,” Anton said, his eyes glinting with unexpected enthusiasm.
Before they went to bed, they laid out their enticements on the kitchen table: Claudia’s mother’s birchwood bobbins, a cup of microwaved milk, and one of Anton’s shirts Claudia began to hem, but never got around to finishing. Next to the shirt they left thread and needles, turned off the lights, and stomped to the bedroom with an overwrought display of fatigue. They stretched, yawned, and told each other how tired they were; they giggled like children at their deceit, and whispered conspiratorially, their lips brushing past the other’s ears. Claudia could not remember the last time she felt so close to him; they lay in bed, listening, whispering, holding hands.
At midnight, the kikimora started her habitual wailing and screeching and shattering of now sparse glass, but soon she fell quiet. There was a brief clatter of the bobbins, and Claudia tensed and sat up, grabbing a pair of scissors from the bedside table. Anton and Claudia tiptoed back to the kitchen, and watched silently as the kikimora drained the milk in one long thirsty swallow, and started on sewing. She was no better at it than at counting, but persisted, quickly covering the bottom of Anton’s shirt in mismatched tracks of stitches and crooked seams that weaved through the fabric like the footprints of a drunk in the snow. She was so preoccupied with her task, her small soiled hands flying, that she did not notice when Claudia snuck up behind her.
