A Cloak so Red Read online

  A Cloak so Red

  Barbara Schinko

  Translated by Sasha Bond

  “A Cloak so Red”

  Written By Barbara Schinko

  Copyright © 2019 Barbara Schinko

  All rights reserved

  Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.

  www.babelcube.com

  Translated by Sasha Bond

  Cover Design © 2019 Charlotte Erpenbeck, Barbara Schinko using graphics materials by Captblack76/ shutterstock.com and Daniel Nanescu/Splitshire.com and johnny_automatic/Openclipart.org based on an illustration by Virginia Frances Sterrett for „Old French fairy tales“, Philadelphia, ca. 1920

  “Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Epilogue

  Your Review and Word-of-Mouth Recommendations Will Make a Difference

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  Part 1

  Once upon a time, there was a village in a wood up in the far North...

  In the bowl lay a mix of mashed potatoes, blueberries, and honey. Zoya squeezed the mixture one more time. She formed a flatbread and laid it on the stove, where it began to sizzle. Then she wiped her fingers off on the apron and went to the door. The single window allowed very little daylight into the cottage. The brightness outside felt dazzling, even though the sky over the wood was thick with fog.

  For a couple of seconds, Zoya breathed in the clear late-summer air. It felt so good after the smoky heat inside. To the left, the hillside fell steeply away – down to the murmur of the river, which wound its way tirelessly through the valley. The roofs of neighbouring houses grew like mushrooms from the green of the hillside. But looking further down the valley, you could see nothing but forest. Crippled pines and spruces, and in between a pair of slim birches under a grey sky, with grey mountain scree beyond.

  Zoya searched in vain among the grey and green, for a speck of brown or colour, for a coat whose wearer was heading home. She pricked up her ears – “What a vixen”, Venko would say, stroking her teasingly. No call, no stamp of soldiers’ feet over the murmur of the river, over the constant sighing of the wind.

  Disappointed, she turned away. Tomorrow, she said to herself. Tomorrow Venko would be back, and with him Oleg, Raisa’s husband, and the rest of the soldiers. Venko had promised. If anything could entice him home before Winter, then surely it would be the scent of Zoya’s delicious flatbread cakes!

  She went out behind the cottage. There, the terraces loomed above her; terraces that her husband, his grandfather, his father, Zoya’s father (who had long-since passed away) and other men from the village had built and always maintained through decades of hard work. In front of the hemp and potato gardens, there nestled beside the cottage wall a fenced patch of land. The fence had failed to keep the hares from Zoya’s salad and carrots, until one day Venko had cocked his rifle to the window and, from dawn till dusk, lain in wait.

  Zoya remembered him clearly – almost motionless on the stool, one eye pinched shut, the other staring straight down the barrel. Shortly before nightfall, a hare had rewarded his patience. Venko’s single shot lacerated its heart. Venko had wanted to leave the dead body lying there, as a warning to others. But Zoya didn’t let him because the stench would attract wolves. She made a soup from the hare. Then, she cleaned the hide and gave it to Venko, who tied it to a fence post. The hide was still hanging there, almost scraped clean by two Winters' worth of rain and frost, and the hares stayed away.

  Bent over the patch, Zoya gently shook the leaves of a carrot, then another, until she found two that seemed to be the right size. The root of the first was half-gnawed; the second was well-grown. She tore off the leaves, already thinking of the sweet taste...

  She saw the wolf only when its panting warned her of its presence.

  I knew it, she thought. We shouldn’t’ve hung out that hare hide.

  Then: Spirits, be merciful! The goats! Because no wolf could smell a leathery old hide when there was a shed next to the cottage stinking of goat, buck and fawn!

  The wolf fixed Zoya with piercing eyes. Its chest and snout were white, its ears browny-red. It had a dark-grey streak across the back, stretching down to the tip of the black tail.

  Where was its pack? Zoya didn’t dare move her head. In her mind, the wolves were already stalking her like a group of deserters. Desperately, she wished that Venko was standing beside her with his rifle. She prayed for a knife, her ladle... One of her fists clung to the carrots, the other to the leaves. She clamped her fingers shut so tightly that the plant’s juices ran from the meshed stalks into her palms.

  The wolf stepped closer and cocked its tail. Should she scream? Her voice was strong – but no neighbour could run quicker than a wolf’s jaws snapped shut. Raisa and the others would hear the cries and avenge Zoya’s death on the monster. Nothing more. Zoya’s heartbeat threatened to crack her ribs.

  The wolf’s snout brushed her apron. Zoya shrieked! Without thinking, she lashed out with a fist full of carrots. She heard a yowl, shot through the door and braced herself against it. Any moment, she expected the hideous impact of a body...

  It didn’t come!

  The goats! With quivering fingers, she drew the latch shut and hurried to the window. The patch and its hare hide stared back at her. Everything was still. No bleating, no death cry to be heard. Zoya craned her neck hesitantly. Would a snout emerge at the gap of the window? Would its panting breath mix with her own?

  She looked over the patch and the terraces.

  The wolf was gone.

  Disbelievingly, she turned her head. The sweet scent of flatbread was filling the cottage from the straw floor to the soot-blackened beams. Zoya’s gaze remained on the door latch. Had loneliness and fear simply ganged up to play a trick on her?

  Muffled hammering on the door!

  Zoya leapt. In her nervousness, she smashed her head against a beam. Nevertheless, she hurried to open the door.

  “Zoya! Open up!”

  Venko! Her heart rejoiced.

  And yet. Her hand froze on the latch. Her grandmother’s old wives’ tales flashed into her mind – stories of wolves who learnt to speak like humans, who knocked on the doors of guileless children.

  “Zoya! I know you’re there! Open up!”

  Venko’s voice, no question.

  And yet...

  “Zoya!”

  She heard her grandmother’s voice: They pretend to be people in order to eat people. But wolf or not, her heart refused to surrender to fear. Zoya pulled the latch back and threw herself into Venko’s arms. He caught her, the familiar grin stretched across his face.

  “Venko”, she stammered, “quick, your rifle, there’s a wolf, maybe a whole pack...”

  His kiss closed her lips.

  He tasted so good! Of sweat, gunpowder, and liquor, of sleepless lonely nights, of the smoke of countless fires between here and the enemy lands. For a couple of moments, she forgot her worries.

  Venko was back. He’d returned before Winter, as promised. Healthy and unharmed? She stroked his chest, his arms, the red-brown-spotted fur up to the elbows...

  He’s the wolf!

  Scared to death, she tore herself free.

  “Zoya?”

  Venko stumbled backwards. A silent reproach lay in his eyes, draining Zoya of fear and leaving behind only shame. In front of her stood Venko, her husband. Not a man-eating wolf out of a fairy tale. Over his arm, he was holding a rug made of wolf’s skin. That was all.

  Ashamed, she slid back into his embrace. “You’ve become jumpy, my Zoya”, he whispered into her ear. She buried her face in his shoulder and said nothing. As Venko was pressing kisses on her crown and forehead, the last suspicions melted away. No wolf fur could ever tickle like Venko’s beard.

  “You were gone for ages.”

  “Too long”, he agreed. He suddenly sniffed: “What’s that smell?”

  The taste on the air was bitter. Zoya followed Venko’s gaze to the stove, where the last sweet flatbread was burning to a cinder. She rushed over to it. “I’ve baked cakes for you”, she confessed, and burnt her thumb and index finger trying to scrape off the soot.

  Venko took her hand, kissed her sore fingers. “I know”, he said, grinning mischievously. “Ask the others if you don’t believe me; ask Oleg, ask Afanasy. This morning, I woke up about twenty miles from here. And do you know what I said? I said, ‘Afanasy, grant me a furlough. I want to be the first back because my Zoya’s baking sweet cakes for me.‘”

  “Oleg and Afanasy are alive then?” She felt guilty for not having thought earlier of the rest of the troop: strong Afanasy; Oleg, Raisa’s husband; the inseparable brothers Vadim and Vasily, Venko’s cousins; and young Evgeny, whose bride Olga cried herself every night to sleep.

  “They all are”, Venko confirmed. “All unharmed. We didn’t gift the enemy a single drop of our blood!”

  He reached for the flatbread in her hand. Nimbly and playfully, she ran away from him. Venko let his rug fall and chased her through the cottage, until a laugh escaped her and she surrendered to him. Her heart was light, as if Venko had been away for days rather than months. The time without him seemed to have gone from memory.

  He took her into his arms. Zoya only wrenched herself free to lay the table, putting out the flatbreads and a mug of goats’ milk. She also wanted to fetch some carrots, but Venko held her by
the apron.“Stay!”, he begged her. “In the woods, I dreamt of you so often, but you always turned away.”

  Obediently, she stayed. She sat down and watched as he lifted the mug to his mouth. This image was painfully familiar – Venko on his stool, a rim of milk around his beard. He put the mug down and frowned.

  “Is the milk off?”

  “No, only... I’d forgotten how milk tasted.”

  I’d forgotten how tall you were, thought Zoya. And how thin. And how you lick with your tongue all the way along the rim, not wasting a drop.

  She tried to stay cheerful. “What did you drink if not milk?

  “Spirits”, Venko replied, with a mouth full of cake. Boastfully, he continued: “And the blood of our enemies.” He tweezed out the blueberries with his tongue and crushed them with his teeth, savouring their sweetness. Had he done this before he’d left?

  It felt horrible, seeing him different and yet so familiar – as if there were two Venkos sitting at her table. He pushed over his mug for a refill. She started.

  “Has the goat given birth yet?”

  Zoya nodded.

  “One kid or two?”

  Her silence answered him. The war weighed like a curse on the village; twin goats were so seldom born as ... well, human children.

  “Shame. I could have done with a roast goat.” Venko laughed, but Zoya could see the hunger in his eyes. What had he and his troop eaten on the long road home? Roots and uncooked berries? Had there even been any fires?

  She handed him all of the cakes, and fetched the carrots and salad from the patch; more than she could spare with Winter approaching. Venko ate everything in silence, but she could see it wasn’t enough. Carrots and cakes – what a miserable spread for someone just returning from war! What hadn’t Zoya’s mother laid on the table when he’d courted her? At that time he’d been a hunter, not yet a soldier; like a wolf, light-footed and tireless, he’d hounded after his prey and brought back a young elk or deer. Zoya’s mother had cooked roast deer or stuffed elk-breast, and Venko’s parents had sat as guests of honour at the end of the table.

  Now all three of them - mother, step-mother, step-father – slept with the spirits in the Land Below.

  Zoya forced her thoughts away from such gloom. She stooped down to pick up Venko’s rug; only then did she notice that Venko no longer wore his coat. His beautiful hooded coat of deer hide and brown hemp yarn.

  “Where’s your coat? Did you leave it with the enemy?” Again, she strived to sound cheerful – trying not to think of the endless nights perched at the spinning wheel or of the fact that her own wedding coat was now without its twin.

  Venko nodded. “We killed so many of them, they begged us: ‘Leave us your coats to bury our comrades in!’” But he knew as well as her that the Tsar’s enemies didn’t bury their dead in their coats as people here did. The enemy didn’t believe in the Land Below. They believed in a Father in the Sky who governed from the clouds.

  “But see what the spirits gave me for my generosity”, Venko continued. “They meant to do me a favour!” He seized the rug. As he shook the wolf’s skin, Zoya believed for a mad moment that she could see the wolf within lumbering across the floor.

  The rug, she realized, was not a rug at all – but rather a coat, floor-length for a smaller man, ankle-length for Venko. The wide collar looked a bit like the chest of a wolf. The long sleeves stretched over the hands.

  With a mind of their own, Zoya’s fingers crept onto the hard rough fell. A clump of wolf hair in her fist conjured up memories. It brought her back to her maiden days, back to when she'd been a young girl with her small fist buried in her father’s coat. That wolf coat had been an heirloom – ancient, mangy, soft like fawn skin, a good luck charm and the sign of a first-born son in her father’s distant home village. But in these parts it was said: Whoever wraps themselves in wolf’s skin runs the risk of becoming a wolf.

  Zoya’s devout, righteous father had never in his life put a foot wrong, yet the villagers had always regarded him with suspicion. When he’d died, the elders had refused to bury him in his coat. Instead, her mother had had to buy hemp and leather for a body bag. In exchange, she had given the mangy wolf coat to a neighbour who’d used it to seal up his roof.

  Venko’s coat was far more handsome than her father’s had been. With a grand gesture, he threw it over his shoulders and grinned at her like one of the Tsars who let themselves be driven in their carriages from palace to palace.

  “Have you won it in battle?”, Zoya murmured reverently. She had never suspected that the enemies of the Tsar owned such wealth!

  He shook his head. “By a throw of the dice. We met up with another troop and – well, let’s just say, one of them is now running home in his shirt.” Smirking, he thrust his hands through the sleeves.

  “The coat is...” Beautiful was not the right word: the fur was too bristly, the cut too pretentious. And yet the coat had a certain charm which Zoya was unable to put into words. She sniffed it, and immediately felt like she was out in the misty forest...

  Venko’s nod seemed to understand her unspoken sentiments. He shook out the long sleeves and put a finger theatrically to his lips. Then he tied the two loosely dangling fur strips, one on each side of the collar.

  His head started to grow. His nose protruded into a snout. His ears became pointy and changed colour: black outside, a reddish brown inside. He gasped and fell onto his hands, which had turned into paws...

  The wolf inspected Zoya with piercing eyes.

  Zoya didn’t scream. Why not?, she later asked herself. What other reason could there possibly be for screaming, if not this one?

  “V-Venko!”, she stammered.

  The wolf narrowed his eyes.

  She repeated his name. Impetuously, he began to wag his tail. It snapped hither and thither, throwing Venko’s stool to the ground.

  Fear gripped Zoya’s heart with icy claws. “Venko! Venko, where are you?”, she sobbed. Every clear thought had left her. This wild wolf couldn’t be her Venko, it just couldn’t be!

  “W-where are you?”, she sniffed just like back in the moment when she’d found her father dead in the snow. The wolf resembled Venko as little as the stiff frozen body had resembled her loving, laughing father.

  “Where are you? Come back!”

  Only when the wolf raised himself onto his hind legs, grew and tore away his fur did she stop crying. Out of the wolf skin slipped Venko, grinning like a boy who’d stolen an elder’s coat.

  Patiently he kissed Zoya’s cheeks, her nose, her forehead, finally her lips, until the fearful shaking inside her ebbed away. She rubbed her face against his shoulder, dug her fingers into the collar of his shirt, stroked his ear with her other hand, his cheeks, his unkempt beard.

  He wasn’t a wolf. He was Venko. There were laugh lines around his blue eyes, and he had a nose rather than a hairy snout.

  When she finally looked up, his gaze met hers. “My Zoya, my wife. Don’t you know what the elders say?”, he whispered with tender mockery. “They say: ‘Whoever wraps themselves in wolf’s skin runs the risk of becoming a wolf.’”

  Although it was still light outside, they slid into bed together. Venko’s hands naughtily glided over her hips. His fingers pulled at her dress, at the rebellious knot of her apron string. His hands were human. The breath that raised and lowered his chest was human. His lips pressed against hers were human. Still Zoya didn't dare close her eyes, terrified that he’d change again if she looked away. Wolves flitted through her mind – wolves who knocked on doors, who were let in by guileless children and then devoured them. Her father’s battered old wolf coat. The wolf with those piercing eyes walking on the cottage’s straw floor and Venko, who’d slipped out of him like a schoolchild out of a too-big cloak.

  Venko kissed her and held her close with the hunger of a man who’d fasted for months. He then moaned and hugged her tighter. Her ear was pressed to his chest, she could hear his heart beating. With a shudder, her gaze fell on the wolf skinI. It hung from its peg by the door almost menacingly, as if the wolves it had been made out of were still alive, threatening to break free.

  A shriek! It came from the river. A man’s voice followed by a woman’s like an echo.