Jaro’s Journal

I think there’s a ghost in my attic.

Eleanora could’ve become a very good heroine of a story. She has just the right premise for that. You see, she was the only survivor of My Little Wanderer’s Massacre. A band of outlaws, who call themselves The Clan, attacked the town and killed every single one of its inhabitants. Except for her—a twelve-year-old girl. She survived by a miracle. She was plucking grape leaves in a cave by the river, and the cave got flooded, so she was trapped there for two days. When she managed to get out, she found her whole town slaughtered.

Little Nora became a sensation. No surprise there. How could she not? A little girl, so innocent and sweet, like an angel, walking away from such a horror, alive and unharmed. It even made the tragedy of My Little Wanderer a little less tragic.

Yes, she could’ve become such a great heroine of a story. She could’ve become a warrior, seeking revenge on those savages. An explorer, daring the hazards of the Steppe. An adventurer. A scientist. A hunter. A writer. Instead she… simply grew up. She spent a few years in an orphanage. Then she met a boring lawyer with a boringly decent income and married him. She moved into a nice house in the city. Got pregnant. Got fat.

Wait, you don’t think I envy her, do you? Okay, maybe I do. But only a little bit. I wish that I lived of course. I wish I had that chance. I wouldn’t have squandered my life as she did. I wouldn’t have let it become ordinary. Sometimes I wish I could trade places with Nora—we used to do it quite often when we were kids. I pretended to be her, she pretended to be me. We looked so much alike, even our mother couldn’t always tell us apart.

But I’m not Nora. I’m but her wretched sister who got her heart ripped out in the middle of the night, in the town by the name of Little Wanderer.

What can I say? Lucky me…

So yeah, I’m a ghost, you see. I wish I could say the phrase sounded better in my head, but that wouldn’t be true. There isn’t any way to make it sound any better. Still, I thought it’d be nice to get it out of the way, just so that we’re on the same page, you know?

Right then. What else do I need to tell you?

My name, perhaps? Well, my name doesn’t suit me. It’s too robust. It should’ve been something different—pale, light, tickly, like a cobweb brushing against your cheek in a dark cellar. Anne, for example, or Aya, or, better yet, Celectina… yeah, I like the sound of that. But any name would suit a ghost better than mine does. Karina. Ka-ri-na. KaRIna. Ugh…

My sister and I are twins, but we are—oh so different. Cliché, I know, but it’s also true. I’d been called wild, while Nora had always been a nice, girly girl. She took pleasure in womanly things, in womanly activities, while I have been a tomboy. But our difference lies far deeper than that, I think. I wouldn’t have moved on as she did. You see, there are people like Eleanora, who don’t dwell too hard on the past. Feelings are like bubbles to them. They rush through their souls in a sparkling stream. People like her, they cry, they laugh. They anger. They love. They hate. But it all goes away eventually, barely leaving a trace.

Then there are people like me. For us, emotions are like nails. They thrust deep into our souls and stay there forever, even as the wounds heal around them. Even good things bleed. Even happy memories hurt.

But Eleanora’s life wasn’t a complete waste. Eventually, she did manage to do something great. She gave birth to Jaro.

* * *

Jaro’s Journal

Mom can’t see her. I wonder why.

Jaromir was born in the very first light of the very first spring day. A beautiful boy, that’s what everyone said, but for me, he was just a child. I didn’t think him beautiful or anything special at all. I wasn’t interested, not in the least.

Until, quite suddenly, I was.

It happened when Jaro turned… I don’t know exactly. Time is difficult for me. Past. Present. Future. They blend. I can’t always tell them apart. It’s like everything is happening at once when you’re a ghost or rather not happening at all. He must’ve been one? Or maybe two? When do babies usually start to walk? Yeah, well, it was around that time. Nora took him out to the park and set him down so he could walk a little. I followed them because that is what I did back then – I followed Nora everywhere, her personal little ghost. So I watched her setting him down and then settling herself on a bench nearby.

Jaro walked. First, he walked up to the fountain and watched the coy fish. Then he walked up to a flowerbed and watched a bee. I looked away, bored. It was painful, really, to watch him staggering on those short awkward legs. Whenever babes walk, it ends the same – a few clumsy steps and then they fall and cry and their mothers rush to their sides, all ‘oh’s and ‘ah’s and ‘oh-my-poor-baby-mommy’s-here’. Whatever.

But to my surprise, Jaro didn’t fall. He walked and walked and walked. He watched people. He watched dogs. He watched the sky. He tripped a couple of times, but always managed to regain his balance. Stubborn boy, I remarked lazily, still not particularly impressed.

And then he suddenly turned his head and looked straight at me. I flinched. Then blinked. Then gaped.

Can’t be! I thought. No one sees me! Oh, don’t be silly, Kara. He must be looking at something behind me…

But immediately I knew it to be untrue. He was looking at me. Not through me, but at me. How, in the world?

He smiled then, not the way children smile, but the way elder folk smile – in a meaningful way, like he knew something important, but wasn’t saying because he wanted me to figure it out on my own or was just being a smug asshole…

And then he turned away from me, pretending to be a boring ordinary child once again.

Oh, no, young man! You aren’t getting away so easily!

I walked up to him and stood in from of him.

“Hey,” I said, snapping my fingers. “Hey, boy!”

I creased my forehead trying to remember his name.

“Err… Jaromir? Hey! Look here!”

I waved my hands in front of his face. He ignored me, and I almost laughed. Of course! He couldn’t actually see me! How silly of me to even consider such a possibility!

But I wasn’t entirely convinced. And from that day on, I watched him. From that day on I wasn’t Nora’s ghost anymore. I became Jaro’s.

* * *

Jaro’s Journal

I always knew she was here, but I never questioned her presence.

You don’t question, say, an old clock or a painting,

that’s been hanging on the wall since before you were born.

You just accept it.

I don’t remember when we started talking to each other.

I don’t remember the exact moment I realized she wasn’t something ordinary.

Jaro’s father died when the boy was four, and that was the day we started to talk. I don’t know why. It’s not that I could offer any consolation or be of any help. I don’t get the whole dying thing. I don’t have any insight or some special understanding or whatever else you might expect. I think ghosts know even less about these things than living people do.

Nora was wailing in her room, but I knew she’d be alright. She survived her whole family and friends being killed, she’d survive this as well. But Jaro… I didn’t know if he was going to be alright. He didn’t cry, but he was awfully quiet. Unmoving. And so I kneeled beside him and he looked at me.

“My name is Kara,” I said then.

“Okay,” he answered after a couple of seconds.

And just like that, we became friends.

* * *

Jaro lives in the Attic. It’s a nice place, really. It doesn’t even look like a boy’s room—too tidy, too sunny, too grown up. Jaro could never be a proper child. He was born old.

The Attic is a curious place, tiny and creaking, crammed under the roof. Somehow all the sounds of the house reach here, like small rivers rushing toward the great sea. They climb the old wooden planks, squeeze through the little holes and cracks in the plaster, like an army of insects, shuffling their tiny feet, and the Attic grabs hold of them like a pitcher plant. The voices of the servants fighting in the kitchen. Birds’ cooing as they settle for the night under the roof. Mice scurrying away with pieces of bread or cheese. A maid whispering nonsense to her lover on the porch at midnight. All of it I hear. These sounds make me feel a little alive. They run like blood through my veins.

But there is another reason why I like the Attic. It reminds me a little of the room Nora and I shared back at home, in My Little Wanderer. Way back, when we were still sisters, and twins, and friends.

Jaro and I spend most of our days in the Attic, talking, reading, but mostly arguing. It usually starts with Jaro closing his book and looking up at me with this particular expression on his face. The “I am going to ask you a question” kind of expression. And that’s the thing about Jaro. He loves to ask the most uncomfortable questions. The majority of them are for his mother to answer, fortunately, but I, too, get my share. And unlike other children who ask fewer questions as they get older, Jaro asks more and more. And they only get more and more uncomfortable.

Like the other day. He came up with a particularly nasty one:

“Why do the savages attack our settlements?” he asked, not even giving me a chance to brace myself.

What?! What kind of question is that?

“What?!” I said indignantly. “What kind of question is that?”

“Why do they hate us?” he mused. “Why do they murder us?”

Seriously, has this boy ever heard of a thing called consideration?

“I was one of those who they murdered! Have you forgotten about that?”

“Of course not! That’s why I’m asking.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just… I don’t know… I just assumed that, since you were personally involved in this conflict, you must have given this a lot of thought. I would’ve.”

Personally. Involved. I wasn’t “personally involved” in it! I was a child murdered in cold blood by some gang of madmen!

Jaro cowered a little under my cool gaze.

“Don’t be angry,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s just… I just thought that…”

“You thought wrong.”

Why would I think about things like that? I mean savages are like the last thing in the world that I care about! I don’t care why they attack us. They are beasts. They are evil. Evil doesn’t need reasons.

Jaro was silent for some time, but curiosity got the better of him eventually.

“Do you remember what happened that night? Anything at all?”

“I don’t,” I snapped, but the way he asks his questions is always so quiet and serious, it’s really hard for me to be angry at him, so after a while, I added: “I don’t remember anything about that night.”

And that’s the truth. Whenever I look back, there is nothing there, just a great gaping hole. No screams. No battle cries. No horse hooves beating against the dry ground. No pain. No taste of blood in my mouth. Just—nothing.

So very unexciting, I know, but that’s what it is.

For some reason my whole past is blurry. My life before the massacre is wrapped in thick smoke. Washed out, as if it all happened to someone else as if I read about it in a book or something.

I get Jaro’s interest. The Clan has become a bit of a fashion lately. A fascinating tale of boogeymen. As has the Steppe itself. I notice it everywhere. The patterns. The jewelry. Even Nora has one of those short vests, similar to those Steppe-women wear, and sometimes she braids her hair into two long plaits with tiny jingling coins.

I would’ve loved to wear my hair like that…

My thoughts turn to Alma. She was my older brother’s wife and one of those Steppe-women. It was a bit of a shock for the family when he married her, but there was nothing they could do. Alma was very fond of jewelry—her wrists always heavy with golden bracelets, her vest fastened with silver brooches, rings with jade stones on every finger. So unlike the demure solemn women of Little Wanderer, but she was never garish, never vulgar. She was beautiful. So beautiful it almost hurt.

Thinking of it distresses me. I remember suddenly how I dreamed to become like her when I grow up. I float down from Jaro’s Attic and to Nora’s room, and there I drift aimlessly, running my shadowy fingers through my sister’s clothes, tracing the intricate patterns carved on her broaches and ivory combs and tiny wooden boxes with powder.

I was twelve when I was murdered. The grown-up world was just a step away from me. Young women with their hair long and curled, their faces powdered and lips red, dancing with their sweethearts, or sitting on the porches with some handiwork on their laps, or having picnics by the river, laughing… I watched them from afar, and I knew I’d be a part of that world soon. Sooner than I wanted to. But then something awful happened, and my future was torn away from me. I’ve never realized how badly I wanted it until it was gone.