Lauren Chater - Lace Weaver

I sense Kati watching me, although she pretends to concentrate on slipping her stitches onto the next row. Her fingers dance around the needles, barely touching the fine yarn. She holds her hands slightly bent, thumbs flat, the way I taught her. In the lace already knitted I see my favourite shape leap out: wolf’s paw, a pattern I designed many years ago as a child, long before we moved into this farmhouse nestled among the firs.

Why a wolf?

In Haapsalu, we did not see wolves. The coastal air was too laden with salt for their taste. Such creatures prefer the scent of balsam. It was foxes who came to our doors and windows. Foxes who rummaged in the kitchen peelings for scraps and riled up the chickens, melting away through broken fence palings when we shouted at them from the window.

It was not foxes I dreamed of as a girl, though. It was wolves, travelling fleet-footed through the snow, dancing across the marshes, skirting farmhouses on their way into the deep forest. I’ve always wanted to see one but it has never occurred. Perhaps I knitted my desire into my work. I wonder if Kati, too, dreams of wolves or if she, in reverse, dreams of the sea. She travelled outside Tartu but once as a child and so can only imagine Haapsalu from my descriptions – the sweeping promenade, the lap of the tide, the narrow streets which all lead down to the sea.

It comes as if I have conjured it; a howl that pervades the room, a lone animal cry from the darkness beyond the window. I’m not surprised. Winter is wolf season. Best check the bolts and count the ewes, my husband would say. Yet I can’t help but think that the sound is symbolic, a portent meant for my ears.

Kati begins to rise to her feet, unnerved, but I shush her with a gesture and take up the yarn again. The wool unspools in my hands, the fibres separating briefly before the spindle draws them in, twisting them together in a soft rope. ‘When I’m gone,’ I tell her, ‘I will send you a sign. You will know it’s me. I will wear the pelt of a wolf.’

She makes a small noise of disbelief.

‘There will be no need to fear,’ I continue. ‘I will travel alone. Everyone knows a lone wolf is kind.’

‘You’re dreaming,’ she says softly. After a moment, her needles begin to click again. ‘You’re tired.’

I smile to myself. Let her think she is right.

In my mind, I turn away from my husband’s ghost. His face is full of sorrow, and for that I am contrite. He reaches out a hand to touch me, but his fingers find only mist. One day, I tell him, we will be together again. But not now. When he begins to fade, his eyes are last to disappear.

‘Grandmother,’ I hear Kati say again, but it is as if we are speaking from opposite ends of the forest. The trees form a barrier between us. The air is sharp with sap and silt. My limbs no longer ache. They pound the ground and blood thrums in my veins. Old songs and stories cry out from each twig and leaf. My breath is a plume of white mist.

It would be easy to lose myself in the intoxicating sense of freedom, but I hear Kati’s cries drawing me back. A weight settles over me like a mantle of snow. There are shadows up ahead. Horrors nobody else has foreseen.

I have made a promise I intend to keep.

Katarina

June 1941

I saw my wolf again tonight.

She appeared at dusk, a shadow among shadows, slipping down the slopes on spindly legs to the edge of the forest where the trees begin to thin. The dying sun made a golden silhouette of her pointed ears and muscled flanks, her long whiskered snout.

I say ‘my’ but she no more belongs to me than does the wind that rattles through the ash trees or the soggy fields surrounding our house where people buried their belongings in haste before they fled the Soviet invasion. Tarnished cutlery, a child’s soiled leather shoes, a bound journal of spotty, dog-eared photographs. The churned earth spits up their treasures after a heavy rain as if to say, You see? Nothing stays buried forever .

In the room behind, Papa tapped his pipe against his hand, a familiar thwack-thwack .

Mama clattered the bowls into place on the table, humming a song beneath her breath. The rhythm of it rose and fell: an old folk song about the baking of bread. I knew the words. I longed to hear them. But I knew also that Mama would not sing them aloud.

I pressed my ribs against the sill, searching in the semi-darkness with my hand until I found the hard edge of the planter box on the other side where our herbs were kept, far away from the greedy maws of sheep. The sprigs of dill tickled my palm.

The soup was spluttering on the stove. Sprinkling the herbs over the broth, I let my mind wander to the sheep, already penned in the barn below us, the ewes separated from the ram by a thin timber wall.

Should I warn Papa about the wolf? Some said that to slaughter a wolf was to bring misfortune down upon your herd. There were better ways to deal with such things; smearing birch tar upon the sheep’s fleece to mask its scent. Scattering a sacrifice of bones into the forest when the first frosts came. In my great-grandparents’ time, perhaps a spell. My grandfather once told me of a wolf that had wandered so far from the forest that he became lost in the village, and my great-grandfather along with the other local men had driven him back, arms raised, calling at him: ‘Be gone, old grey streak eye, billygoat of the forest! Go back to the bogs, go rove in forests, scratch the trees, tear at stones.’

Yet none of those men had dared raise his gun at the creature for fear of the bad luck it might bring.

Throwing caution to the wind, I glanced back at the window and the gathering darkness filling the yard.

My wolf was gone.

I breathed again. Despite his reluctance, there was no doubt Papa would be obliged to take up his gun. While other farms were forced to hand over all their goods and livestock to the state when the Soviets first arrived last year, we were, by some fortune, permitted to stay. As long as the sheep were kept safe and the apple trees in our orchards continued to bear fruit, we were allowed to continue living as if our lives were not pieces on a chessboard, able to be scattered at will by the local Partorg, the Communist Party Organiser, whose job it was to ensure that the state’s property was in good hands. My father often said that the sheep were our angels and I their guardian.

If I was of good humour – if the weather had been mild, if I found a moment to add some stitches to my shawls and there was the prospect of meat or tender vegetables to line my belly, I would grit my teeth in a smile. But most of the time, I didn’t. Each bleat and baa echoing up through the floorboards was a reminder of how the stupid creatures were fed the best of each harvest, while we boiled chicken bones until they were bleached of every marrow scrap. Each snuffle and scrape of their horns, a reminder that they were worth more than we were. The only thing they were good for, the only thing that made me bless their ‘angel’ heads, was the fleece we sheared from their backs each spring. Sometimes in my dreams I saw blankets of fleece laid out upon the threshing room floor, ready to be sorted and fed through the spindle to create the yarn we send to factories, after I have saved some for the knitting of shawls. In dreams, there was an endless supply, a bounty; as soon as the wool was spun, more fleece appeared to take its place. Even asleep, I was aware of this blessing. It meant our knitting circle would never falter. It meant my promise to my grandmother would not be broken.

Mama cleared her throat. ‘Katarina?’

‘What is it?’

‘Your sleeve is in the soup.’

I cursed and stepped back from the pot, flicking droplets of broth onto the floor. Mama sighed and nudged me away. ‘Here. Let me serve. You’ve got your head in the clouds again. What were you thinking of?’