Drufmna

Ánsaflys

Young Drufmna, still somewhat inexperienced, kneels on the bank and plunges both hands into the cool water of the crystal-clear stream.

There, in the cool shade of the trees of Fenoidfenifur’s eternal forest, which covers the whole territory, Drufmna is wrestling with the watercourse that feeds the tree she cares about most. She is busy and feels a little exhausted, but she is eager to carry out the task. With each small success she smiles, wipes the sweat from her forehead and moves on to the next thing.

The water is washing the soil away from the roots. She finds a stone beneath a layer of mud, rolls it until it comes free of the bottom and hauls it against her stomach. Its weight draws a grunt from her. By the time she manages to set it beside the others, her skirt is soaked to her thighs and one of her nails is split. The current strikes the stone, divides and flows on. It still reaches the lowest root of her beloved tree: Ánsaflys.

Drufmna slips her fingers underneath and feels a hollow where there used to be firm ground. The rain has widened the channel overnight. She sits back on her heels. Water drips from her elbows.

“Another one,” she murmurs.

The next stone is farther away. She has to wade in up to her knees to reach it, her feet searching for purchase among the slippery stones. The cold numbs her ankles. She manages to drag it to the bank and then pushes it with her shoulder. A strand of her long hair, so fair it is almost white, catches beneath her palm; she pulls it by accident, curses and brushes it out of her face with her muddy wrist.

Her mother finds her like that, bent over a stone she can barely move.

“I’ve called you three times, Drufmna.”

“I didn’t hear you, Mum.”

“I know that.”

She has a basket over her arm. She sets it beyond the reach of the water and studies the little wall her daughter is building, the diverted current, the roots jutting from the earth. Then she gathers up her skirt and steps into the stream.

“From that side,” Drufmna tells her. “If we push it from here, it’ll sink.”

Her mother changes position. Between them, they manage to wedge the stone into place. The water spills over the edge, stirs up the mud and finds a new way through, farther from the trunk. Drufmna remains motionless, watching the current. She waits to see whether any of the stones will give way. When she is sure they are holding, she wipes her forehead with her forearm, leaving a dark smear on her skin.

“There. Now it’s right.”

Her mother steps out of the water, takes off her sandals and tips one upside down. A little stone and a stream of mud fall out.

“Are you having breakfast here?”

“I was going to come back.”

“You left before I got up.”

Drufmna looks towards Küny’s place in the violet sky, between the crowns of the tall forest trees. Küny’s bluish-white light already reaches the opposite bank.

“I lost track of time.”

Her mother opens the basket. There is some nistrierf bread, known for its fibrous texture and flavour, wrapped in a cloth, and a small bowl with a wooden lid. Drufmna comes closer, but the woman pushes her hand away.

“Wash them.”

She returns to the stream. She rubs her palms until the mud is gone and discovers that her split nail has begun to bleed. She studies it for a moment with her grey eyes, puts her finger in her mouth and returns to the basket. They eat sitting on a high root of Ánsaflys, their legs stretched out towards the water, letting their bare feet get wet. The bowl holds a walnut paste that her mother spreads on the nistrierf bread with the same knife she uses to cut it.

Drufmna receives the larger share. When she tries to give some of it back, the woman gestures towards the stones with her chin.

“Since you’ve decided to do this work, at least eat. You need to keep yourself fed.”

The fertile soil of Fenoidfenifur holds the rain in all its folds. Heavy drops fall from leaves whose dark green is so characteristic of this territory of the nistrierf people; they are slow to let go, although the violet sky above the forest is clear.

Something small runs through the ferns on the opposite bank. Drufmna follows the movement with her eyes until it vanishes beneath a tangle of branches. Beyond the stream, paths fork among the trees. One leads back towards the stone cottages; another descends to a place where the water pools. The one that passes behind Ánsaflys is so narrow that, along some stretches, only Drufmna keeps the plants from closing over it.

She chose that spot when she could still curl up inside the hollow now occupied by the trunk. Often, when she is comfortable there, she likes to remember the seed Ánsaflys once was, held in her small hand when she was still a very little girl. It was a dark, hard seed, almost hidden among her tiny fingers. At night she kept it in a cloth bag and woke eagerly to check that it was still there.

Her mother had finally sewn a pocket into her dress so she could carry it without losing it. While she searched for a place to plant it, Drufmna walked with one hand pressed to the pocket. Every nistrierf child received a seed. In the houses, people talked about the seeds that had taken root and those that had yet to sprout; adults stopped to look at the first shoots and listened to names the children sometimes changed from one morning to the next.

Drufmna had chosen hers before she broke the ground. Ánsaflys, which in the language of the nistrierf means: Melody of Nature. That name came to her out of nowhere, like lightning illuminating the night. She had said it aloud several times, sitting in that very spot, to grow used to calling it. Then she brought water from a distant lake and poured it over the loosened soil. For several cycles she returned to find the ground undisturbed.

One morning she discovered a little crack and stayed crouched for so long that her legs would no longer support her when she tried to rise. Now Ánsaflys has grown so much that its cool shade reaches the opposite bank.

“There’s blood on your bread,” her mother warns her.

Drufmna looks down. The cut on her finger has opened again.

“Only a little.”

The woman takes her hand and examines the nail. She tears a strip from the worn edge of the cloth and winds it around the finger. Drufmna waits without protesting. Her feet are drying in the sun.

“I need you to help me this afternoon,” her mother says as she tightens the knot. “The mats are still outside. If it rains again, we’ll have to start all over.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Before it rains.”

“Yes… before.”

Her mother gathers up the bowl, the crumbs left on the cloth and the knife. Drufmna hands her the basket, but she gives it back.

“Bring it yourself when you come home.”

Her mother walks away along the path towards the stone houses with their roofs of leaves, her sandals in one hand. Drufmna watches her stop to remove a branch lying across the path. When she loses sight of her, she studies the wall of stones they have built again. The water no longer touches Ánsaflys’s root. She runs her fingers over the exposed part, removes a leaf stuck to the damp bark and gathers soil from the bank to fill the hollow.

She works carefully so as not to loosen the bandage. Afterwards she washes, picks up the basket and walks around the trunk. There is a mark at the height of her shoulder: a small, elongated scar that the bark has been closing over for years. She made it as a child when she tried to climb with a loose buckle on her dress. She still remembers the shame she felt on discovering it, and how she spent the whole afternoon trying to cover that scratch with her hands.

She rests her palm on the scar. Every ridge of its roughness is familiar.

“I’ll be back this afternoon,” she tells Ánsaflys, stroking its bark.

She bows her head until her forehead touches the trunk and sighs. For a moment she stays like that, her eyes closed and the basket against her leg.

Then, at last, she draws away from Ánsaflys and sets off home.

In the afternoon she helps her mother bring in the mats. They have spread them on some boards to dry, and one is still damp in the middle. Drufmna holds it while the woman brushes the fibres. The dust tickles their noses; they end up laughing when neither can speak without sneezing.

Afterwards they eat tender shoots from the crops and some fruit. One leg of the table has worked loose, and whenever either of them rests an arm on it, the bowl of water slides. Drufmna puts a folded scrap of cloth underneath.

“That won’t last,” her mother tells her.

“I promise I’ll fix it tomorrow, Mum, once the mats are put away and we can turn the table over on the floor.”

“I hope you keep your promise.”

She collects the plates, rinses them in a pond and leaves the bowl beside the door. The bandage on her finger is damp. She unties it, checks that the nail has stopped bleeding and puts on a clean strip. Before night falls, she returns to the stream. The stones are still in place. After greeting Ánsaflys affectionately, Drufmna nudges the smallest stone with her foot, dries her arms with a cloth she has brought from home and hangs it on a low branch.

A little greenish light remains beneath the forest canopy. She sits beside Ánsaflys, her legs tired and a sore patch on her heel. She undoes a braid that has been poorly secured since the morning. Her almost-white hair spills over her shoulder as she works the knots loose with her fingers. She talks about the mats, the table she will have to fix, the bowl her mother knocked over while trying to prove that the leg was still loose. She laughs at the memory. Ánsaflys listens in silence.

Then she falls quiet, listening to the stream. In the early years she used to sing to it. She repeated melodies she heard at home, made up others and grew angry when she forgot how they went on. Even now, in the middle of some task, she sometimes finds one of those songs and follows it to a point where she can no longer remember the words. That afternoon she tries to recover one. She hums a little, gets it wrong, laughs and starts again.

A drop falls from the leaves and lands on her neck.

“That doesn’t help either,” she murmurs.

When the air begins to cool with the coming of night, she gathers up her hair, stands and rests both hands on the trunk.

“Tomorrow.”

She goes home with her sandals in her hand so they will stop rubbing her heel.

That night she sleeps on her side, something she does not usually do. Before falling asleep she hears her mother move the table, then a sharp knock: the bowl has slipped again. The woman mutters a complaint. Drufmna smiles into the pillow, closes her eyes and, before she knows it, falls fast asleep.