Lapvona

by Ottessa Moshfegh

‘Beauty is the Devil’s shade,’ Jude said.

Marek did nurse the ewes when Jude wasn’t looking.

Yuck

The difference was that Jude had known Agata. And he knew the truth about her absence. All Marek knew was that she had given her life for his own, like any good mother would do.

But secretly, Marek was a little pleased that he was bleeding and that surely the broken bucket would be reason enough for Jude to give him a sound beating when he got home.

Pain was good, Marek felt. It brought him closer to his father’s love and pity.

Good, Marek thought. I deserve this hardship. He lived for hardship. It gave him cause to prove himself superior to his mortal suffering.

‘Why does he look so strange?’ Jude asked. ‘Your girl tried to kill it, that’s why,’ Ina said. ‘She came to me many times for herbs to get it out of her.’ And that was it. Agata was dead to Jude.

Marek and Jude always watched the mating rituals.

Yu k

He remembered how Agata turned her head as he released his grip on her neck and moved her face to look back at him from where it had been pushed into the hay pillow.

Oh!

And then she bent her neck and lifted her breast to her mouth—she was thin enough that her bosoms had no real integrity, were just bags of fluid. She nursed herself. She drank.

‘Maybe some of me will get into these babes,’ she thought. ‘And so they will all be mine.’

Now there was no milk left, and Marek was grown, but he still came to suck. Ina could smell his manhood stink up from his loins when they lay on the small bed, but it didn’t trouble her.

Ok...

Never again. She cared too much for the boy to so abuse him.

U DID

‘They’ll suck the blood right out of you,’ Ina had said, and pointed up to the hill where the abbey was. And there she went and stayed for all these years. Ina didn’t tell Jude or Marek where Agata had gone.

‘My father hates beggars, but I think they are free,’ Jacob went on.

He fell and said one word as he flew down through the air: ‘No!’ and Marek heard him land on the plateau below.

His face was split and flattened on the side that had hit, and an eyeball was hanging from its socket.

‘If my father was to die, nobody will know what I’ve done,’ he heard his mind say.

Villiam believed that his appetite was nothing but a physical symptom of his greatness. He needed more because he required more, because he deserved more, because he was more.

He remembered Agata and Marek. He remembered his babes. He spent all his time trying to remember, as if memories could sustain him.

If Marek had been with him, he thought, maybe the lambs would still be living. Marek could have carried water from the lake. This was a comforting thought for Jude, as he could rest his mind on hating the boy, blaming him for everything. It gave him strength to pity himself, a man starving alone while his son lived in the lap of luxury, or so he could imagine.

If the Lapvonians had any sense, he thought, they would have noticed long ago that the bandits only raided the town when there were rumors of villagers hoarding foodstuffs after a plentiful harvest. They didn’t understand that their crops were not taken as necessary taxes, but were simply sold for profit so that Villiam could continue to live so well and rule them.

The priest had no sympathy for such stupid people. And yet he didn’t see the hypocrisy of his disdain, as he was stupid, too.

Marek could see that she had retreated from her spirit. She got an empty look in her eyes whenever Villiam abused her.

Villiam was well aware that he was punishing the poor girl because she carried Jacob’s ghost.

Marek wished he could be more like Villiam, dumb and numb to other people’s sorrow.

Lol

Had she eaten the sacred animals who spoke to her?

‘Go get him,’ Ina said, her head rolling like a fallen apple on the ground. ‘I’ll eat him raw, I’m so hungry. Do it. Now.’

Yuck

So she preferred to stay faithless rather than hold on to a fantasy.

It did not occur to him that Villiam had forced the village to suffer this drought, stealing what was rightfully owned by nature for his own excess and pleasure.

Nobody loves me. And he was right. He began to cry.

‘If you love that baby more than me,’ he said, ‘I’ll kill myself. Then you’ll be sorry.’

He believed that wonderful things came to him because he was wonderful and therefore deserved them.

Ina knew that Marek was Agata’s brother’s son, and she knew that her brother had been caught and pilloried and hanged and gutted last Easter, for all of the town to see.

‘Did anybody see me trip on the steps of the church?’ he asked Father Barnabas. ‘Nobody noticed. They were all too stunned by your lordliness.’

He was too ashamed—he put it in his mouth and swallowed it.

Ok...

There was no right way to deal with grief, of course. When God gives you more than you can tolerate, you turn to instinct. And instinct is a force beyond anyone’s control.

Villiam hadn’t worked for his blessings. The villagers had. That was the great tragedy of Christmas as Grigor now saw it.

‘Don’t worry,’ Marek said. ‘Death is not the end. You shall rise. What are the birds but angels? You will never have to walk among the monsters. It’s much better up there. You’ll see, you’ll see. You will be so happy and free, you’ll sing.’