Tuesday 6th – Marta and Ivan – Spring 1941

Marta felt very close to Ivan that summer, and she loved him very much. In the late afternoon, when they’d grown tired of their dam building, and their calves, thighs and backs were aching from the constant leaning forward, they’d lain for a while on the lawn, the hot sun drying their skin and clothes. Weary, Marta had closed her eyes, and felt the cooler air from above the stream breathing across her face. Neither she nor Ivan said anything, but she could sense his presence there, as if she could feel the weight of his body impressing the grass with his shape. With one forearm resting on her own forehead, she stretched out her other arm and her fingertips brushed against Ivan’s soft bicep. She laid her fingers there, on the smooth skin, unable to tell if it was the beat of his blood or hers that she could feel.

[…]

In the autumn Marta’s family were invited to mark the success of the harvest in the traditional way. The [district’s major landowner] had a tiny chapel up in a small clearing up on the forest fringe, where a select few townspeople were invited to celebrate the successful getting in of the crops. The chapel was usually only opened three times a year (Easter, Harvest Festival and Christmas) – sometimes more if there was a significant death in the landowner’s family. Mama and papa were dressed in their most formal clothes, and mama’s vertiginous shoes were wholly unsuitable once she’d stepped out of the custard-coloured limousine and had to negotiate the rough path that led to the chapel [glade]. Her sharp heels skewered leaves and lichen, creating kebabs of organic matter that she paused periodically to unspike. Papa stood a few yards away while she did this, shaking his head and tutting.

White sunbursts were angling obliquely through the trees that morning, dazzling, air-/mist-catching, speaking of the end of the summer and the promise of autumn. Everything was crisp underfoot, and the leaf colours had a doomed, poignant intensity. There was a plaited [garland?] of blue cornflowers and wheat stalks woven around the chapel door, the patterns and colours neat and simple against the almost organic backdrop of ole, weathered stone and damp-faded wood. At the bottom of the door there were vertical, parallel scratches, as if an animal had been sharpening its claws there. Papa had to duck in under the arch.

The inside of the chapel smelt of damp, and of [acid?] mouse droppings. They squeezed into a tiny pew that rocked on its worn runners when they sat on it. Ivan, in his pale blue Scout uniform, stood by the altar with two other Scouts, each of them holding a flag with a significant emblem (country, district, landowning family) while the priest read the harvest blessing. The sunlight played on the frame of the small window behind the priest and dust drifted slowly through the rays. Marta watched Ivan’s flag pole sway and jerk as her brother tried to keep it upright and his arms tired as the service went on. He shifted his weight from foot to foot to try and find a comfortable position where there was no strain, and where he could rest his arms and balance the weight of the heavy wooden pole. Marta could see the strain on Ivan’s face: the unselfconscious frowns and grimaces as he tried to stave off the embarrassment of dropping the thing in the confines of the tiny chapel. As she shifted uncomfortably, willing Ivan’s struggle to be over, she could feel the faint dampness of the pew that had soaked through her cotton dress.

After the service, when the priest had shaken their hands as they filed shyly out, she and Ivan had raced each other back to the limousine. Ivan put on a final spurt of speed as they’d approached the big car, and she saw that there were little patches of sweat under his arms and at the small of his back. She hugged him and gripped him tight as they waited for mama and papa.

[How you can be too sensitive [badly phrased: what I mean is that the power of sympathy and compassion can be overwhelmingly powerful…those moments when you get completely possessed by an emotion, especially when it’s nostalgic/melancholy/plangent with anticipated loss/bitter sweetness/loss of love.]

(c. 700 words)