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Ariadna waited. The silence between them grew, filling with the scent of dry wormwood and distant smoke.
— They say you talked to him. By the river.
She didn’t deny it. She didn’t explain it. She simply ran her finger along his wrist—where the vein pulsed—and felt the blood scurry beneath the skin, like a mouse in a trap. There was no consolation in the gesture. There was exploration. She studied his fear the way one studies a new book: slowly, page by page.
Granny Agafya didn’t scream when she recognized her. She just looked at her granddaughter with a long, heavy gaze and said quietly:
“I should have drowned you then, as I advised your mother. It would have been easier for everyone.”
The words fell between them like a stone into water. The circles dissipated, and for the first time, Ariadne saw in the old woman’s eyes not just weariness, but an ancient, almost bestial horror at what she herself had once unleashed upon the world.
Autumn arrived early. The leaves fell heavily, as if saturated with lead. Adrian came less frequently, and when he did, he looked not at her face but somewhere over her shoulder—where, he sensed, the officer’s shadow already stood. Ariadna, meanwhile, walked through the village with a straight back, her eyes never lowered. Gossip swirled around her, thick and sticky, like cobwebs in an abandoned pantry. Someone saw her carrying milk to a German. Someone heard her laugh—that same crystal laugh—in response to his short sentences.
But no one saw how she sat by the window at night, clutching earrings with a greenish stone to her chest and whispering something in a language unknown in the village. Her mother’s language. The language of the blood that flowed within her, stubborn and alien.
One November day, when the first snow dusted the rooftops, as if trying to hide its tracks, Adrian came for the last time. He stood on the threshold, hesitant to enter, and the snow melted on his shoulders in small, pitiful tears.
“I can’t do this, Arisha,” he breathed out. “You’re… different. Always were. And now… the whole village is whispering.”
She came close. So close that she could smell his sweat mixed with the scent of pine resin. She raised her hand and touched his cheek. The gesture was almost gentle. Almost.
“Did you want a simple one?” she asked quietly. “A fair-haired one. Shoulder-length. With a button nose.”
Something flickered in his eyes—whether remorse or relief. He turned and walked away, leaving deep, jagged footprints in the snow. The footprints of a man who had finally decided to run.
Ariadna closed the door. The hut smelled of dried herbs and old wood. Grandma Agafya sat by the stove, hunched over like an ancient idol.
“Well, have you taken fate by the throat?” the old woman asked without turning around.
Ariadna smiled. It was a strange smile—neither joyful nor bitter, but somehow new, as if born in the very silence that now filled the entire village.
– I took it, grandma. Only the throat turned out to be mine.
Outside, the wind raked the bare branches like the fingers of a blind man trying to decipher writing on bark. A distant roar could be heard—either airplanes or simply the blood pounding in her temples. Ariadna approached the mirror, an old one with a darkened amalgam, and gazed for a long time into her green eyes. There, in their depths, something alive stirred. Not fear. Not shame.
Something that was just beginning to awaken.
In a village nestled among endless fields and quiet copses, there lived a girl…
Andrian’s mother, Evlampia, disliked the green-eyed bride at first sight. She didn’t shout or openly gossip—she simply looked through Ariadna, as if she were a transparent film stretched between worlds. That gaze concealed not jealousy, but weary recognition: a woman who had spent her life mending other people’s holes immediately sensed a hole in the girl that couldn’t be mended.
Adrian approached her as one approaches the edge of a cliff—enchanted and half-ready to fall. His fingers, roughened by the plane and axe, trembled as they touched her hand. He didn’t speak of love. He was silent, so silent that the silence became heavy, viscous, like resin flowing from a cut in a pine tree. In this silence, Ariadna read him: he loved her not for herself, but for the mirror in which he first saw his own smallness. And this knowledge warmed her more than any caress—with a quiet, almost cruel satisfaction.
The summer of ’41 smelled of more than just dust and wormwood. It smelled of change—a metallic tang in the air that appears before a thunderstorm or before a person decides to betray. Ariadna walked through the village, feeling her body suddenly become too loud: the rustle of a skirt, the click of a heel, her breathing. Every glance from her neighbors lay on her skin like a damp web. She didn’t quicken her pace. On the contrary, she slowed down, forcing them to stare longer. This was the first, still timid, pleasure of power: seeing others’ shame and curiosity mingle into one heavy mass.
When the officer appeared, everything changed inside, not outwardly. He wasn’t handsome in the conventional sense. His face seemed carved from a material that doesn’t accept human wrinkles—smooth, cold, attentive. He looked at Ariadna as if he’d known her for a long time, as if he were reading a book she hadn’t yet opened within herself. In his presence, for the first time, she felt something unravel inside her—long, dark, still coiled into a tight knot. Not desire. Not fear. Rather, a recognition of her own otherness.
Grandma Agafya stopped speaking. Her silence was worse than any scolding. The old woman sat by the stove, fingering her green earrings, and her entire life was reflected in this mechanical movement: guilt for having once screamed at her dying daughter-in-law, fear of the blood of another that had finally leaked out, and a strange, almost painful pride for the granddaughter she simultaneously hated and protected. Sometimes Agafya would raise her eyes, and in them Ariadna saw an abyss: “I didn’t want you. But now you are me, only more terrifying.”