Lili’s World

Let us, however, recover the Sceptre,

the rod of power:

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it is crowned with the lily-head

or the lily-bud:

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it is Caduceus; among the dying

it bears healing:

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or evoking the dead,

it brings life to the living.

H. D. From "The Walls Do Not Fall"

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The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. It tended to portray the currents of the present rowdy days, but not always. Sometimes it was too obscure to decipher the meaning, but the stories buzzed like a melting pot.

She often wondered what it was, the past or the future. She couldn’t know the truth. Not yet. The window showed wars on land or sea, battles fought on horses and vehicles of various origins and purposes that she had no memory of. It was imprinted in her mind here and now, like in front of a TV screen, but she couldn't know what the small screen was for. This is just a modern man's thought.

His window was the last in a series of divine twelve in the building's long façade. She counted them once when she was running after a famished, careless, curious cat, Charlie, as she called him one day. The set of windows stretched incredibly wide from one end of the corridor to the other, though when she tried to peer through any of them, everything beyond them seemed to be non-existent. Black numbness seeped through them as through the throat of an ancient beast, igniting the darkness. But the darkness never came, always dispelled by him.

He came every day around dinner time, so she had to seek refuge in her room. At night, every detail of her world seemed sombre again, until the moment of dawn when she could again see the world outside through the window of his room, as if through his eyes.

Father Francis was a selfless man. He unconditionally invited her to his world, knowing that wildness must be tamed. She didn't know who she was, moreover, what the world outside was. He never explained anything. He didn't know how. She had been as absent as last winter's snow since the first day he had found her among the burning embers of the old world. The incinerated forest was a threat to her life. She couldn’t remember what sort of conveyance he used. It was so long ago; she was a toddler then.

They named her Lili because she was found among the lilies near a pond in the forest. Her skin was delicate, alabaster, like the skin of the baby she was when she was found, but as she grew older, her features remained unchanged over the years. It was the most bizarre, unheard of here, alienating her, inimical to the swarthy complexion of other villagers, even women. Her hair was the colour of summer wheat all year round, as if time itself had stood still, and the girl seemed miraculously preserved like a plum in a jar intended for consumption during the most momentous festivities. However, those times were yet to come, and everyone around her wondered if they would ever come.

Not much has changed in her world since that first encounter. She still couldn't speak any language. Trisha's kind housemaid's persistent attempts to teach the girl sign language failed after a wild child bit her right index finger, affecting her ability to chop vegetables for dinner, so Trisha explicitly refused to try any further. It seemed that only a girl left to herself could finally feel at ease. She could even eat regularly, not with everyone, of course, as it seemed to aggravate her to the point of regurgitating, but the tray in her room always seemed to supply her with enough, and her face envisaged that of a pristine peat.

The nescient outsider readily mistook her for a slightly fairer native rather than a concealed wild child, for like a fish she adapted to the water, even being able to give a quiet greeting to any visitor on the mission. But deep down, she never accepted the rules of this world. What were they anyway? She did not know. Illiteracy had deprived her of the vast world enclosed in those books in the library. She was not allowed there, not in the presence of the master, not ever, but every day she found a way to enter the sanctuary of the educated man by following Charlie's paw prints. Those moments in the sun were the brightest of her life. She remembered little of her past, but her present left much to be desired. Days filled with monotony from dawn to dusk were like daily, tedious work for her, paid as much as she could discover in the library and outside his window.

It wasn't always the same. Even the same events taking place on different days were not announced with exactly the same fanfare. Sometimes, before the cruellest bloodshed, a little bird would appear in the window. She always knew it wasn't real. It came from the outside world, the world where everything begins and ends.

On the contrary, some of the havoc came abruptly, so she couldn't watch the slides roll in front of her. Then she ran fast through a section of all twelve windows to hide under the stairs, as it was the only place without windows to which she had access. There was also a cellar, but its doors were always closed. She screamed until Trisha ran over to her with the greatest concern etched on her face, throwing her muscular arms around the girl's slender figure.

Lili imagined sharp talons ripping out her heart and throat, clutching at her limbs and eyes. Though she couldn't speak, she felt as if her ability to express things had been crushed by the ruins of the stairs. The sounds from the voice box resonated in her ears like time bombs, louder with each step that receded, as if logic had suddenly been distorted and working against her.

When she came to her senses, for a while she felt the vestiges of the world she had experienced, as if it were the aftermath of the war. Her body trembled in response to any movement or sound from the outside world – a portent of danger. She could not know that there was no enemy in the immediate vicinity, and yet she could feel the horror of her surroundings, which clenched her senses as if they were the claws of wild birds. I guess it's the power of the imagination. Imagining things that do not exist in reality from sounds and objects locked in a distorted brain. Sometimes it felt too tight, throttling her skull like a girth under a horse, and it couldn’t let go util the enlightening moment of stillness. It happened eventually, as the sun comes out after every storm, albeit a little too late to soothe all broken connections.

In those moments that were not of her world, visits of Hieronymus, the haggler, occurred. He brought to the door of the mission all the unique products of the world, including those related to the conflagration caused by the Tatars.

Stories of burning down villagers' houses and taking women and children to jasir were always heralded by hordes of ravens as wraiths of destruction following him down the path like a mourning retinue. Did they conjure up the guardians of the worst of all worlds, or were they just a figment of Lili's imagination? She never knew, and just as she couldn't ask anyone, hidden behind the porch lattice where no one would suspect she could squeeze through, in the everlasting pitch-black darkness of the corridor.

The resonant voice of the bargaining chip carried the wind and found a safe space in the girl's eardrums. She dreamt up the stories she heard as if they were her own. Stories of old and young, of the past, of lives that have breathed their last breaths and lives that are not yet over, of lives that are quite young. They were incomparable, and yet the same melancholy emerged from their corners like a disease – death. The end, the beginning? What is death, she often wondered, and since she had never seen it in any tangible form, she could not grasp it. It must have been something or someone everyone was afraid of, but no one had ever seen it in its pure form, only through the marks left on someone else.

All the confines of Lili’s world were not confines in the usual sense. Perhaps some casual bystander might say that she felt trapped in Father Francis' mansion, but what might have looked like slavery was in fact her salvation. She certainly wouldn't know what to do in a world dotted with danger around every corner, moreover, she would probably die in the woods or be devoured by wild animals, even though she still considered them her friends.

The stories of the local hawker were the only time she could immerse herself in an alien world. In those tiny moments of truth through the mouth of a dweller, her thin, constricted bubble gave way to much wider matters, galloping like horses in the open.

Though she never dared even peek outside, neither into the vast, lush garden that stretched out like a baulk, nor to the front wicket hardly a few steps from the porch, she was there with the peasants, sharing their misery, inspired by the rare moments of hope that came from man's lips. However, she never betrayed her espionage goals, always hiding in the shadows like the most effective detective.

The sun changed position several times a day, adjusting the light in his room as if preparing to paint or take an aesthetic photograph. In the morning, the walls were suffused with a brightness that made it possible to see every crack in the wall, only to transform them in the early afternoon to an almost trifling glow emitted from the blinds. In the days when the brightest light leaked through, the images evoked by the window were vague; she saw only silhouettes that groped in despair and had no special meaning to her.

The story fortuitously changed direction when the light dimmed due to the sun hiding behind rain or storm clouds, or the approaching dusk, which in the winter months would come much earlier, even long before dinner. The darkness allowed the silvery glimmer of the moon to penetrate her eyes, so she could see it all like in a movie theatre. Though she did not know what it was, she was the most avid viewer. Faces and scenes flickered before her eyes like firelight, leaving traces of madness in her eyes and soul.

And on one of those bright days, when the sun had not yet dared to cast its full rays on people's possessions and was limited to the bleak importance of the early afternoon, the merchant, as usual, came with a need. The girl took this opportunity to taste freedom in its fullest form. Just like that. Her light steps led her straight to the water lilies, her first and best home. From then on, she stayed there to cultivate the past and live in harmony with nature. After all, she was just a wild child, nothing more.

When one day the Tatars came to the mission's door to ask for a girl with wheat-coloured hair, seduced by the promise of easy prey, her absence like an ether dragged and dispersed an invisible veil in the airy corridors of the mission, leaving the lace curtain dancing like a ballerina in the treacherous wind.

The last window remained open forever. Now it showed the lilies that had grown in the garden after her disappearance, in numbers beyond human comprehension. Nowadays, in the mission of Francis, they make tea from the lilies growing in their garden. It has become a tradition since little Lili left her mark on this world. Perhaps it has its own properties, not fully revealed to the world, hidden behind the last window, who really knows?

– THE END –

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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