Masha Bruskina.

             "Over the Town" Marc Chagall, 1918, Belarus, Russia


Cornelia's house sat half down Quail Lane. 
A road from the settled part of town leading away. Her grass was so tall it was hard to see she pruned her apple trees to perfection. Octobers the town kids crawled under the broken fence and stole apples but she didn't mind. Knew their names since they were born. 
Squalor, that place, said the Sheriff, but no one gave a shit what the Sheriff said. 

Evelyn Story said Cornelia's house was modest, and not an ostentatious bone in its body just like its mistress. Stacy Brant remarked the house sagged and was destined to returned to the earth, which it was, but so was everything else. 

For sure the one everything of the town was the Mountains. Cornelia loved the way the mountains felt with snow on themselves in August. She loved everything about her little house and the yard around it and the apple trees in the yard and her garden and the way beyond all that the mountains were. She loved seeing Margaret Bleeker and her two daughters who lived across the street. She watched from her kitchen window Margey taking the girls to school in the morning, coming out of the house across the narrow porch and down five steps the little one grabbing the balusters one by one on the way down and the older girl brushing her mother's skirt, skipping ahead, while the woman turned to watch the little one and her accomplished expression morning after morning, week after week, the children with their little backpacks and young determination going about their lives. 

Cornelia was lovely as cherry blossoms, said Ophelia Jones. A wild iris someone said. Her eyes changed color from green on the sea to blue in the mountains to gray blue in the winter wherever she was. Dull as dust said Vincent Viner, and a peach pit face besides. 

But Martin Starlight hung around in such a way she could tell - the way he showed up places she was. The abandoned carriage house on Quail she walked by every day. 

Hello Cornelia.
How are you doing Martin?
Oh, same old same old you know.

Hello Cornelia.
How's it going Martin?
Oh, it's GOIN. 

Hello Cornelia.
How have you been Martim?
Oh, I been there, done that, you know. 

Cornelia, what a surprise!
Martin, how are you?
I'm fine, thank you very much. 

Hello Cornelia.
Hello Martin. 


Cornelia's favorite place was the library where her friend Elizabeth Peach worked. One day Cornelia told Elizabeth she had several selves that sometimes talked to each other and sometimes not and sometimes all her selves confused her. Elizabeth said she knew just what Cornelia meant and asked if she heard talk about a witch, and that reminded her of the hushed voices over the wall and recognizing the peculiar accent of NoNo, the old immigrant from somewhere no one could remember, but not that of the other man. 

Why'd they kill her?
Why'd they kill anyone, 'cause they want to, said NoNo. 
Who knows why anyone does anything anymore.
Sometimes there ain't no reason for nothin. 
Shh, maybe a witch, we don't know. 

There was nothing remarkable about the townsfolk who thought they knew everything.
That's ridiculous, said Cornelia, There's no such thing as witches.
Well, said Elizabeth Peach, they don't know that.

The elder cretin Slide Slater passed her house one day and saw black cats on the porch roof. And lo, he saw one of the cats explode off the roof, somersault, and land on its feet with a goldfinch in its mouth. Those broken flying feathers incensed Slide who loved his mother Agnes whose favorite bird in the whole world was the goldfinch. He stood stunned. Warnings got around about walking Quail Lane at night, and best not to let children pass Cornelia's cottage untended any time of day. 

Next the elder moron Hap Hazard weighed in with his report of late night seams of light from Cornelia's attic, and his swearing out that he seen bats land in her hair at dusk and fly away at dawn. The good Church Ladies took that to heart, assumed responsibility for town reverence and sanctity, and swore to double down and pass the word on non-fungible realities. 

She still started at the click of a latch, reminders of sock feet shuffle and Uncle Slim starting on her at nine years old. Then his sons, her cousins Garner and Havish. She lost track, what with three a day the little shit Havish only thirteen. Say anything and we'll cut the dog's head off, they said. When Cornelia walked barefoot through the campfire their jaws dropped and they pulled their marshmallow sticks aside to let her pass. 


She told Elizabeth Peach the librarian who said the same thing happened to her not by three but two different some years apart. That's why you found me, sweetheart, Elizabeth Peach said, hugging the younger girl. She gave Cornelia a book of stories told by survivors of sexual assault. She didn't have to read in a book but did anyway that victims' shame and guilt sometimes last a lifetime. She didn't know why she told mere acquaintances like Redford the butcher, Angelica the postmistress, and Moses the mailman. She soon saw Martin on the carriage house stairs. 

Hello Cornelia. 
Hello Marin, how have you been? Martin stood and walked to the edge of the Lane where Cornelia waited. When he got close and saw she was taller he stepped back and took off his hat, a hobo sort of hat he was fond of. 

Just say so Corny and I'll kill'em. I got a gun and I'll find'em and shoot'em. 

Blood pulsed on Martin's forehead, face and arms, and his entire neck, usually unusually thin, vibrated like a wire. 
Oh Martin, please..
I'm good for it, I am, and will let you know
Oh Martin, please, no I mean, I don't want you to hurt anyone. 
No?
No Martin.

Cornelia had a green thumb and grew most of her food from the time a young girl. She favored root crops, carrots, beets, and potatoes and also squashes, delicata, acorn, butternut she stored in her cellar over the winter. She supplied Alice, her ninety-two year old neighbor on the other side of Margey and the girls, with one leg short from polio, with vegetables through the winter too. 

One rainy day she decided to go to the library and collected some kale and mesclun and put them in a paper sack for Elizabeth Peach, The Librarian. She dropped the bag at her desk before pulling a book of old English poets she sometimes looked at, and settled into the leather chair near the fireplace. She loved sinking into it's smell and the largesse such a chair brings to the world. As if the chair had absorbed the library's exhalations, and siting in it, she imagined breathing the books herself. Later Elizabeth walked by on her silent library shoes and dropped a book on the table beside Corneila's chair. She glanced at the book titled Women in WWII and thought it odd, but a few minutes later lost interest in the dead poets and pulled the book into her lap. 

It fell open near the middle to a photograph of an execution. A woman with her hands tied behind her back hanging by her neck, left breast stretching a coarse button-down sweater across her chest. Gut punched, she looked into the clerestory space where sunlight illuminated a galaxy of desultory dust. She liked the geometry of the windows up there, everything so regular and resolved at the same time of helplessness. She read the caption. 

The Execution by hanging of Masha Bruskina and Volodya Sherbateyvish on October 26, 1941 by an officer of the 707th Infantry Diy Division. 

Cornelia felt sludge fill her body. 

She read further, about twelve Communist partisans hung that day in Minsk, Belarus, in four groups of three. They hung Masha first, and in the photograph she is dead, or unconscious, and the officer is adjusting a rope around Volodya's neck. His hands are tied behind his back, and his face turned part way toward the camera and he might be smiling, or maybe speaking. His acceptance, and the odd serenity of the violence was so confusing. 

The German soldiers looked on, Cornelia looked away. Back to the rays of clerestory light where the desultory dust floated in the fine varnished architecture. Despair thickened in her veins, and she closed the book and left it on the table where Elizabeth had dropped it an hour before and walked out the library and started for home unable to get the image of German soldiers standing around watching Masha hanging from a rope out of her mind.

She walked through the hush of her house to the backyard and stepped into the black earth, past the carrots and beets and cucumbers and the leafy green rows to the back where the corn grew and lay down away from the sun and looked at the sky through the curved leaves, searching for the ears of Butter and Cream, same corn she planted every year. She counted fourteen before her eyes closed and she fell asleep thinking about Masha. Volodya too, but mostly Masha. 

And the wind rattled ninety million acres of corn. Darkness scudded west, and above, cloud energy unfurled in quickened currents. From inside the gray black canyons yellow sparks flashed like muzzle fire. When she was a young girl her father pushed her into thunderstorms to teach her survival he said. Distant at first, almost quaint, the thunder approached. People went about their business as long as they dared. Closer to town up Quail Lane Hattie Molloy used her new cane to walk to her mailbox. Mr. Hooper lost his voice yelling at the crows as the first drops of rain darkened his flagstone steps. She heard Margey calling the girls and hoped they were not far away. She moved her head between the cornstalks to get shelter from the rain but then decided she didn't mind and rolled into the straw mulch between the rows and lay face up to the storm. 

A week later she returned to the library to see Masha again. Strangely the book was still on the table beside the leather chair. 
Why did you give me this book, she asked Elizabeth Peach.
I just thought it would interest you, Corny. 
Have you read it?
Me? No, I couldn't. Too much misery for me.
But not for me?
Liz looked up and smiled. Apparently not. 

Again the book opened to the picture of Masha hanging and the German putting the rope around Volodya’s neck, and the same inferno kindled in her guts. What strong, fine faces, thought Cornelia, staring. Eventually her heart turned the page to another picture of Masha marching down a street wearing a sign saying she and others had shot at German soldiers. That was a lie. Masha volunteered at a prison hospital inside the Minsk Ghetto, and was arrested for smuggling clothes and papers into Red Army soldiers to help them escape. She stood up to German torture and rape and refused to name partisan collaborators.

Cornelia held her place on the page and looked ahead in the book. Concentration camp photos, captions describing torture and gang rape, 80,000 Jews herded into the Minsk Ghetto, most shot, hung, gassed. A line about laughing Germans throwing candy to children before burying them alive. 

A stir in the fireplace. She leaned forward to see, then stood and pulled the screen aside and found a bird standing on an andiron. 
Oh my goodness, she said. The bird blinked and tried tousling the soot off her wings. 
Let me help, said Cornelia, and knelt to pick up the bird, who didn’t resist, and allowed herself into the cusp of Cornelia’s hands. 
Look, she said, showing the bird to Elizabeth Peach. She came down the chimney. 
Oh dear. I hope she’s not hurt. 
I don’t think so, I’ll see how she is outside.
I’ll get the door for you. 
I’m hoping she’ll just fly away.  
Cornelia put the bird on the ground near the trunk of a cherry tree and stepped back onto Elizabeth’s foot. 
Oh, I’m so sorry. 
Elizabeth, wearing her soft and silent library shoes, lurched in pain, and grabbed Cornelia’s waist to keep her balance. Their hands clasped together.
Are you Ok?
Elizabeth bending at the waist. I’ll be fine, and she dragged Cornelia toward the steps several feet before letting go. 
What kind of bird was that, she asked. 
I don’t know, so many of those brown ones are similar. Something sparrowish. 
Yes, that's what I was thinking. Look. She’s gone. 
So she is. 
She was only seventeen when she was hung. 
Who’s that?
Masha Bruskina, a Russian Jew murdered by the Germans. In that book. 
I couldn’t look at that book. 
You should. 
I can’t. 
Well you gave it to me and I can’t get the pictures out of my mind. 
You’re not supposed to get them out of your mind, Cornelia. 
They stood at the top of the steps shoulder to shoulder looking at the cherry tree. 
What? said Cornelia, looking at the soft curve of Elizabeth’s nose, the shallow heart shape of her mouth. She thought Elizabeth the Librarian a most attractive woman.
What what? said Elizabeth. 
Nothing. 

Cornelia returned to the fireplace and swept the disturbed ashes toward the back. She hadn’t noticed when she picked up the bird a fire was laid. Three birch logs on a bed of split kindling waiting for the fall frost. She didn’t really want to return to the book but she didn’t know what else to do. Everyone in the book was dead. That was the thing about history, everyone was dead. She read more, and more, that Masha and Volodya and ten others were left hanging for three days. The Germans used public hangings to deter partisan participation. One of the prisoners in the hospital where Masha worked informed on her. She was seventeen and just graduated from high school where she'd been an exceptional student. 

Cornelia walked home on her usual route through Mason’s old pastures until she got to Quail Lane. The road was dusty this time of year. There were those wanted to pave it, but she liked it the way it was. She was hungry and hoped she’d find a couple ears of corn ripe enough to eat, but reminded herself to be patient. 

She approached the carriage house and glanced up at the cobwebbed windows. Some said the place was haunted. Last time she was inside she was a young like Margey’s girls. Why not, she said aloud, the corn’s not going anywhere, and she went around back and climbed through the partially collapsed granite wall. A thicket of blackberries grew out of the tumbled corner and climbed over the hewn blocks toward the sun. Raccoon, coyote, mouse tracks stitched the sandy floor. The air cooled under the shade of the building. She expected the hatch to stick, but from the third step she pushed it with her head and hands and it swung up, and she climbed onto the floor and let it back down. 

Cornelia, what are you doing here?
Oh, she started, and turned. Martin, you scared me. What are you doing here?
Me? 
Yes, Martin. 
I’m reading, can’t you see. He sat at a child’s school desk, one of the old wooden one-piece kind where the chair is attached to the desk and the top lifts up so you can put things inside. 
Reading what Martin? 
He blushed and looked down. I’m studying, Cornelia, for the get into college exams. Um, you didn’t answer what you’re doing in the carriage house.
I don’t know what I’m doing here Martin. Not really. I’m just here, right now, that’s all. 
I see. Well, I come here to study sometimes. It’s quiet. 
Yes it is. Actually Martin, right now, I’m wondering if when you’re done studying you want to come over for some corn on the cob if it’s ripe. I think it is but I’m not sure. 
Corn on the cob? At your house? 
Yes. Butter and Cream. 
That sounds great.
Remember, I’m not sure it’s ripe but I think it is I’m going to check it right now.
I wasn’t going to study much longer. 
Are you ready to go now?
I think I am. Yes, I’m ready now.
Well, then, let’s go. She climbed down into the cellar and scrambled up into the long grass surrounding the carriage house and stood on the side of the road. Margey and the two girls were coming back from town carrying bags of groceries. The girls wore their little backpacks. She wished she could remember their names and now felt so bad she didn’t she was embarrassed to ask. She loved seeing the little girls and wondered if she might get to know them. 

Cornelia, hi. 
Hi Margaret. 
Serena, Dory, say hello to Miss Cornelia. 
Martin came from behind the building hitching up the strap of his satchel. Margaret looked between them.
Oh. Well. Martin. 
Oh Mum look, said Serena, pointing up at the second floor. A bird inside the window. 
Everyone looked up. Dory's little fingers pointed too. There she is, she said. Oh, poor bird.
The bird fluttered and skidded against the glass then disappeared leaving the shape of wings in the dust. 
Poor bird, said Serena, starting to cry, we have to do something.