Laura

Laura never haggled over the price of the brandy she bought. She took the bottle, threw the money on the table, and that was all. The people in these parts lived on the brandy they sold her, survived like the grass snakes, sticking to the stones and the brown soil that yielded only evil hot peppers and potatoes. Hawthorns, blackthorns, and damson trees throve on the wild rocky slopes, and those who picked their small fruits made the yellow brandy that Laura was interested in. The folks raised their children on the money from their demijohns, on wild plums and the sun. The moon didn’t give birth to days but to yellow brandy, wild and wicked, smelling of parasol mushrooms and rattling with the noises ravens made as they spread their wings.

Laura didn’t bargain with the guys from the village of Staro. They were skinflints and their shadows reeked of fights and unpaid debts. She drove her ramshackle van to Staro through the knee-deep mud and the holes in the dirt roads.

She hated all the villagers but knew she had to put up with one of them, Stoyko. He had two little sons, wild like eels, agile and taciturn, yet he regularly took Laura to one of the empty houses on the periphery of the village. Stoyko had a wife as well, a pale, silent shadow that climbed the hills, picking haws and sloes for the brandy. That woman sucked tomatoes out of the sand and planted cherry trees in between crags and rocks, stunted, undersized saplings that grew in spite of the savage heat. Laura had seen her many times dragging huge tin cans full of duckweedy water to her cherry trees. She bailed the water from puddles, miserable remnants of the river that didn’t run dry in summer.

In summer, Stoyko brought Laura to that derelict house; many of the houses remained ownerless, if you didn’t count the old dogs that outlived their masters. There, amidst the ancient rugs and bleached photographs of mustachioed men, women, and flocks of children, Laura and Stoyko made love. Laura didn’t know what Stoyko did to make the men in shabby trousers sell her their brandy cheap. Perhaps it was because of his ill temper, which at times scared her, or maybe they did it because he dug the graves for their deceased relatives for a very modest fee. In return for a loaf of white bread, Stoyko dug a most wonderful grave, deep and comfortable, and dead folks joined their maker without a hitch. Perhaps their maker was not very keen on that village, some suspected.

They had stones instead of land in their gardens, but then stones were useful, too. Snakes mated under them. The children here became rocks and snakes from an early age. They drank their fathers’ brandy, which smelled of ravens, clouds, and stolen pine trees. For fuel, men hewed the pines furtively, at night. The plundered hillsides, denuded of trees, shone like bones and produced toadstools. Snakes slept under their flat heads. Lizards, thick like ropes, ate them until unexpectedly the sky exploded and started dumping rains on the potato fields.

Rain after rain and no break for two months until the river was born again. It rushed, rumbling, sweeping roots and bushes, wrenching sand from beneath the sitting rooms of the houses. The water dragged along drowned snakes and lizards, and Laura remembered it had mixed with the brandy in the demijohns. Then the river smelled of pines and ravens, the brandy was the color of dead snakes, but she and Stoyko were very happy in that ownerless house in spite of the downpour. Everything around them was wet, and Laura wondered if the puddles on the floor were water or brandy. She had seen Stoyko’s wife in the mud, erect like a lamppost under the rain, watching.

Laura chose Stoyko for two reasons: the thick brandy and because most of the other villagers were old men who did not look at her the way Stoyko did. At times, she thought of his sons. Last year they went to...