ЗНАХАРКА ПОКЛЯЛАСЬ БОЛЬШЕ НЕ ЛЕЧИТЬ… НО НОЧЬЮ К НЕЙ ПРИНЕСЛИ ТЯЖЕЛО БОЛЬНОГО РЕБЁНКА!

It had been raining for three days, and the frost outside had long since ceased to be a river. It became a black, moving strip, into which October dumped everything it had accumulated during the long, damp autumn: hollow leaves, broken branches, the cold coming from above from the low sky, where there were no

stars, no moon, but only a deep, water-swollen darkness. Marfa Tikhonovna did not sleep. She sat by the small stove, the one she stoked separately from the big Russian stove when she didn't want to light the whole house for one kettle, and listened to the water in the clay pot approach that first quiet

whisper that happens before it boils. Her hands lay calmly on her knees. Over a long life, these hands had learned to wait as well as they had learned to work, and now they simply waited, sorting through their memories in the darkness , as one sorts through dry herbs out of habit, without purpose. She was in her seventieth

year. She lived almost 50 of them in this village, in this house on the edge, right at the descent to the water, where in the evenings the fog rose from the river and stood until the morning, gray and motionless, like milk in a wide bowl. The village was called Kyorga, and it was one of those northern villages that do

not die completely, but do not truly live either. A dozen and a half courtyards, half of which looked out at the world through boarded-up windows, and the other half were held together by old people, habit and stubbornness. Everyone here knew Marfa. People went to her with things that they wouldn't go to a paramedic with: insomnia, a melancholy

that gnaws at them from the inside and doesn't respond to any pills, a child who cries at night for no reason, an illness that does n't even have a name in the official papers. She gave them decoctions to drink, rubbed them, and whispered over the water the words that she had received from the