“Eat it. You asked for food, and that is food. Eat it!”
“I can’t,” Senya said, thinking how awful, how unthinkable, it would be for her to eat a delicious savoury dumpling while her master ate stale bread and sour cheese. They whispered together. The cook said: “Eat it. You shall have something to take home with you.”
“Eat it,” the girl urged, wondering how long it would be before the one, the chosen, deserted her and she must console herself with the many.
“Eat it,” the boy said, contrasting what she had foretold with what he had hoped for.
So she ate it and it was so delicious that she abandoned the restrained manner of eating which she had adopted when, years ago, Melchior had said—Come, sit and eat, Senya, while the dish is hot. She allowed her teeth to clash, her lips to slap audibly, and somehow that added to her enjoyment of the dumpling.
Then, all suddenly, the boy said:
“I’ve seen you before. It’s bothered me, all the time. You serve that crazy old man who lives in the tower.”
Shame and disgrace; Melchior’s slave, going about trying to tell fortunes, begging for food.
She said, “What tower? What crazy man? I come from Pyangyong.”
“Then you must,” he said, ‘be sister to the old woman who awaits upon the madman in the tower at the top of the hill.”
She could not disgrace her master, so she denied him.
“I may have a sister of whom I know nothing. And I know nothing of madmen in towers. I am from Pyangyong. A poor widow.”
The cook said, “And you want something to eat this evening, I will fetch it.”
Well, that was what she had come out for; something for her master to eat tomorrow; and she had achieved it. Scooping up the last bit of dumpling, Senya said, “Thank you. Thank you kindly.”
The cook came back and handed to Senya one of those woven reed baskets in which fish and fruit were often carried. Such baskets were made by blind children in Pyangyong; some charitable ladies saw to it that there was always a supply of reeds, and they bullied shopkeepers into buying the baskets. A large household could collect four or five in a single day, and it was regarded as an unworthy act ever to hand back the baskets; if you had a use for them, well and good, if not they should be burned or dug into the garden to rot and enrich the soil; only thus could the orphans continue to eat, the ladies to be charitable. The basket she now had in her hand was closed by a sharp wooden skewer which pinned its edges together. And it weighed beautifully heavy. She was so glad that she had chosen to be paid in food, for no sum she would have dared if asked could have bought so much solid heavy provender.
She pushed her hands into her ragged multiplicity of sleeves and bowed,
expressing her gratitude again and again. Thehostility she thought she had sensed had vanished by this time, and they all smiled at her. The boy said, “Enjoy your supper!”
“Oh, I shall. I shall indeed. There is enough here for many meals. On the morrow’s morrow I shall still be blessing you.”
They smiled.
After the warmth of the kitchen the outer air struck even colder than before; and because she had lied she was compelled to walk away, downhill, as though making for the valley and the city beyond it. That was not all wasted effort, though, for she found, half buried in the thawing mud, a sizeable log, and later, when she had turned and was climbing back by a path which did not lead past the big house, she found several small bushes which the winter had killed; she grubbed them up, roots and all. She was fully loaded as she made her way up the steep incline below the tower breathless and rather dizzy, but too happy to mind. Food and fuel for two days.
The pig squealed when it saw her and then again, even more loudly, when she passed it by without a glance.
She relighted the fire first, feeding the feeble flame twig by twig and then putting one of the roots in place. The log was damp, and she laid it in the hearth where it could dry out a little. Then, as excited as a pampered wife who on New Year’s Day had received a prettily wrapped parcel the contents of which she could not guess, she opened the basket and gave a yelp of dismay. There was nothing edible in it at all.
What had weighed so heavy were some shards, the broken remains of a heavy jar, and a piece of dried plaster from a crumbling wall, and a great bone, bare and bleached.
She remembered the way the three had whispered together-planning this; the way the inexplicable hostility had given way to smiles; the latent cruelty in the way they had forced her to eat what she had wished to bring away. Who could have believed that there were people in the world so lacking in all feeling, so downright wicked as to have played this heartless trick on her? I did them no harm, she thought. And all at once she was crying.
Her life, pleasant compared with that of most slaves, and quiet, had for years been a hard one; she had suffered her share of aches and pains, but she came of a hardy stock, possessed of an animal-like patience and fortitude and she hadn’t wept since she was a girl, taking the wilted flower from behind her ear, smelling the wasted scent on her palms, knowing that it was all useless. She had wept then, slow sensual tears. Now she wept tears of rage and disappointment, and guilt because she had eaten the dumpling, because she had let herself be deceived. Oh, how she longed to punish them all; not realising that she had done so; that the cook would lie down tonight counting days on her fingers, and the young girl wonder how she could bear many lovers when she loved but one, and the boy dream of .the harsh fabrics, the discomforts, the rigours and dangers that made up a soldier’s life.
She cried for some minutes, with harsh, angry-sounding snorts. Then she realised that the light was changing. Soon it would be dark.
The day was ending. What a wasted day. The night would come, and the morning; her master would come down from his tower and she would have nothing to offer him except the half-portion of a half-portion of bread and cheese—and they both seemed to have grown smaller while she was away. The thought brought her back to her ordinary dumb, doggedly enduring self. She mopped her eyes and blew her nose on one of her sleeves and asked herself—What can I do?
Outside, the pig also saw daylight declining and cried aloud his hunger and despair.
I shall kill the pig, Senya said to herself.
Never before, in all her years of servitude, had she acted in defiance of an order, even an unspoken one. Every time that she had mentioned the pig, during these hungry days, she had been inviting Melchior’s order. It had not been given. That might be simply his usual dilatoriness about everyday things, or it might imply that for some obscure reason of his own he did that wish the pig to be slaughtered. But she intended to kill it. For many reasons. ‘ One she recognised; plain sense; an unfed pig lost flesh.
Another she recognised; there was nothing else to eat; and it took some
time to dress a pig carcass and make it fit for food.Another she recognised; she now had fuel.One reason, good and valid, she never even thought of. The feeling of fury, the desire for vengeance, had been building up in her ever since she opened that basket. Rage must be vented on something or somebody. The pig was the only available victim.
Savagely she sharpened the knife on the hearthstone. A pig-killing is never a pleasant process; and when the butcher is an old woman, enfeebled by long malnutrition and already exhausted by effort and emotion, and the pig is young and lively and madly hungry, several macabre touches are added to what is at best a bloody business. But her mind was set, and she had him cornered at last and she cut his throat, slash, slash, slash, one for each of the people who had made a fool of her that day. Once it was done she was calm. Outside, in the pen where the pig had spent his short, hungry little life, she disembowelled him, carefully saving such of the offal as was edible. Then, as dusk fell, she dragged the body indoors and with one last expenditure of energy, managed to get it suspended from a hook. She added another root to the fire and set a pan of water to boil. Soon, slowly, because she was tired, but doggedly, she began to dress the carcass.