Baka's Wish
(page 3)
That was the irony. The ultimate sacrifice for a decent man was to risk death himself while he was protecting his family or his country while killing someone else. This was something God admired. At least that's what most people felt. It showed moxie, and God liked that. He liked a good fight. God had given you life, a family, bread to eat. It was worth a righteous battle to protect it. A righteous battle then, was one that prevented a villain from disrespecting those gifts that God had personally given you. Thinking that way, one could say then that all wars honored God.
But accidents happen. That's why a person needed to make sure he was always right with God. You could, of course, pray and wear your crucifix all the time like Baka, just in case. Even then, you might unexpectedly be launched over to the other side while you were in the midst of a gallant display of heroism. If that was indeed the case, God probably had wished it to be so. He obviously needed you to do some special work for Him in Heaven. It was an invitation to His head table. You'd been drafted into God's special army. It was the least He could do to reward your bravery. Or, maybe you'd just committed a sin.
So, Mara spun day in and day out. She made spindle after spindle of fine yarn. She could spin yarn from anything. She spun yarn out of sheep's wool mostly, but she knew of one neighbor lady who had spun yarn for a beautiful winter hat from the shed hairs of her dog. One could even use horse hair if they wanted to.
One day while she was spinning and Baka was taking a nap, a man came and knocked at the door. "Good day," he said. His shoes were dusty and it seemed that he'd been doing a lot of walking. He spoke her language without an accent, so she knew he wasn't an Austrian or a Turk. A good thing too, Turks were considered fearsome people. But this man's hair was too light and his face was too soft, not that Turks couldn't have soft faces.
Mama and Baka had told her not to answer the door for strangers, which made a lot of sense. Strangers might be here to hurt you. Strangers had killed her father. They might have been sent by the emperor of some far away country; an emperor who was carried from place to place in a golden carriage with servants jogging beside him. Someone in search of a conquerable land.
The person knocking at your door also might be someone you hadn't seen in a long time. It wasn't unheard of to be stunned by the sight of relatives from far away unexpectedly standing there in your doorway. There they'd be, with big smiles on their faces, so proud of themselves for dropping by to do you the favor of cheering you up. They'd say, "Oh we didn't tell you we were coming because we didn't want you to go to any trouble." Of course you were, in fact, going to have to go to quite a lot of trouble to feed and entertain them.
It was considered a courtesy and a requirement to immediately offer them food and drinks, even if they weren't hungry or thirsty. It didn't matter that you didn't have anything prepared. You'd just go out and pluck a chicken and boil some potatoes or fry some dough. You'd cook and cook until you ran out of things to cook. Your guests would eventually whimper for mercy because you kept insisting that they have more food. You could imagine that the lady of the house was trying to get revenge on them, passively, yet aggressively. If they didn't eat everything that was offered, they'd risk offending her. Then things could get uncomfortable, so they'd just eat to be polite. Eventually, they might try to sneak away just so they could finally put an end to the gluttony. It was quite a ritual and quite fun, actually, despite all the work, Mara thought. It really was. It just put you behind in all your work.
But this man at the door... he wasn't an old friend or relative. He was just a passerby. A feast would be inappropriate. A little coffee perhaps, brewed in the djezva. That would be the extent of it. Actually, that would be overdoing it. It would require grinding some coffee into a powder, then just barely boiling the water in the pot, taking it off the flame, then just barely re-boiling again. Then she'd have to carefully pour the coffee into a small cup so as not to upset the layer of foam on top. It was definitely a lot of trouble for a stranger. She noticed him licking his lips as though his mouth was dry. Maybe she could just give him directions and a glass of water and be done with it.
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