However, like all stories about great men, this one, in truth began with his mother. Her name was Ajda. When Ajda was a little girl, she lost both of her parents, one after the other. Her father spooked the horse behind which he walked and the next winter, dysentery took her mother, a horrible way to go, out in the grass on all fours. After each burial, the lord, mercilessly punctual, sent a man on horseback to collect the customary death tax. Her father's oxen. Her mother's best dress. A cousin handed them over, and thus inherited the building and the land but with no oxen to till the latter. About this, people in the village talked for a long time, talking as compensation for recourse, until it became like most things, "the way of the world." Too young to be aware of such a bitter situation, little Ajda went to live with her aunt and uncle and their children in a slouching hovel closer to the town. Built from timber sealed with mud, the hearth of the house consisted of a pit in the middle of its single room. Thatching kept the rain out, but the smoke in. A table and four stools, some utensils, a chest full of blankets and clothes: these were the family's most valuable possessions. The elders slept on two beds stuffed with straw and the young ones, once they’d aged out of the basket, on rushes strewn about the hard, dirt floor.
Theirs was a life ordinary and small. Behind the house: a pigpen enclosed by a twig-woven fence; a shed full of tools; two oxen, tied up; a small garden for vegetables; chickens; a latrine. Then three fields: one for barley to be reaped in July, one for wheat to be reaped in August, one to lay fallow for a year. This was what the men in the house did, raise and slaughter animals, sow and reap. The women, in addition to this same labor, also served as laundresses for the lord and his family in exchange for loaves and wine. The wine they pawned for coinage with which they paid the lord's ever-increasing rent. Even though little Ajda was yet another mouth to feed, the family, out of love for their kinswoman, took this in stride and soon she became the same as any other child. "Another mouth to feed at first, but soon a pair of working hands," said Ajda’s aunt, Marija, a practical woman, if a little shrewd. She was married to Bodin, who people said was only ever earnest, if somewhat naïve. Hardworking to the point of detriment. Theirs was a large family. The little girl had many cousins of varying ages, and the house was always full of people working, eating, coming and going.
For a long time, Ajda’s life progressed no different than what was expected of a girl like her. She grew into a beautiful young woman: bright green eyes, light-colored hair, a full figure. She was quiet in manner but internally very lively. No one ever questioned that she would be a wife, a mother, a laundress. She became the latter first. A laundress bent over the riverbank, lye burning her nostrils, dizzying the senses. Scrubbing until her shoulders ached and her fingers grew raw. But there was, Ajda’s aunt always told her, worse work to be found in the butcheries or the latrines. Go slaughter pigs out in the sty with your uncle. You'll be begging to be by the river, then. The laundry lent itself to gossip and chatter. The latest fashions the lady wore, which man so and so fancied, who shrugged off their work, who could be suspected of adultery.
As the years passed, the girl made a handful of informal friends who were also laundresses, and soon there was a boy, Aleksandr, son of a pea farmer, for whom she developed a fondness. In the evenings she often met Aleksandr by the bank of the river and together they would walk back to her house. His was a mild disposition; even at a young age he had tempered somewhat that boyish instinct for recklessness. When she spoke to him, he bobbed his head in over-eager agreement, and behind a fringe of brown hair, his eyes sparkled. Despite his poverty, Ajda’s uncle had, over the years, saved up a little bit of a dowry with the hope that Ajda would leave his household and form a family of her own. Indeed, everything in her life seemed to follow a certain, well-trodden path.
But even though Ajda behaved appropriately, worked diligently, was kind to children and respectful of her elders, such a happy, simple life would soon elude her. Like all beautiful young women, she had no control at all over the way she looked or the body she inherited. And, perhaps owing to the insularity of her world, it never occurred to her that anyone of note or privilege would acknowledge, much less dwell on her at all. Regardless if it did, the particular pair of eyes she drew would have rendered her opinion on the matter unimportant.
It began earlier in her 19th year, when her uncle ran into some trouble with the Pettau steward Sigismund, who suspected Bodin of harboring sheep and avoiding wool dues. Bodin found this to be a baffling accusation, as the family owned no sheep. Compared to pigs, which ate acorns off the ground and fed a family well through the winter, to him the benefit of sheep did not justify the upkeep. Can't you see? Only the pigs, the chickens and the oxen. Look, lord steward, you can even look in the house, if you wish.
The sight of Sigismund was nothing special to the peasants in the villages, be they German settlers or Slavs. After all, every Monday he came out and set the lord's work schedule for the week, and if one wanted to use the lord's wine presses, baking ovens or grain mills, one had to first pay Sigismund his fee. However, finding the steward on one's doorstep was, without exception, a dreadful affair. Visits from him were bad enough when they were expected. Two days each, every June and July, he traveled from household to household, collecting, collecting, collecting; the land rent, the church tax, the head tax just for being alive, and worst of all, grain dues - each leaving a bitter taste in the mouth of every man, a string of empty barns and even emptier pockets. But for the steward to come unannounced?
That the steward could barely talk to or understand his subjects only made matters more distressing, as misunderstandings had dire consequences. Hence from a young age, the children of the villages, boys and girls alike, learned not German proper but stolnikova nemščina, Steward’s German. Numbers. Yes, no, we don’t have it, we do have it, this is all we have, we are late, I don’t know, forgive me, I promise, can we please, I beg, work out a deal? All working men knew that Sigismund, not the lord, was the arbiter of whether a man starved that winter, whether his children lived to see next spring. Three times that year, Sigismund came to Bodin’s house on some trumped up charge or another. Each time, he banged on the door, made everyone line up outside, looked them up and down, asked them questions about money. Then, after taking stock of the house, he turned to his men and left, puzzlingly empty handed.
Pettau guarded the border between the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary. Its relationship with its Hungarian neighbors was, in the days of Frederick II of Pettau, tensile and violent. Far from the supervision of his suzerain, Adalbert, Archbishop of Salzburg, Frederick set upon a one-man crusade to move the Empire's border further east along the fertile river Drau. For years he worked tirelessly to erect archery towers, fortifications, and settlements on land that did not belong to him. Skirmishes, burned houses, murders, and thefts: these became daily realities for the men manning the towers and the vassals on the land surrounding them. It wasn't uncommon for those in town or in the villages to see the glow of fires feathering the boundary between earth and night sky. Neither an ongoing feud with his uncle over an inheritence in the Lungau, nor a prohibitive letter from the archbishop at the behest of King Béla could keep Frederick, belligerent to his core, away from his central task. War cost money. Taxes and dues, as a result, were high. And when taxes and dues were high, the steward Sigismund kept plenty busy.
One day, on suspicion of a Hungarian threat, Sigismund armed himself. Not to collect taxes, but to knock on the doors of men who could be reasonably readied for service. On his way out of town, crossing the Roman bridge, he noticed her. A young woman washing linens in the river. Blonde, with big, expressive eyes. Slender hands. Pert mouth. Had he seen her before? He stopped his horse, alarmed by how constricted his chest felt under all that armor. Do I not know everyone in this town? He thought. But try as he may, he did not recognize this girl. For a moment, he watched her, paying special attention to the heaving of her breast, the way the water trickled through her fingers, down her arms. By the time he regained his composure, his company was already halfway up the road. In the end, the threat amounted to nothing, just a peasant lighting a bonfire. But after that day, a great internal force compelled Sigismund to find this girl again. And not only to find her, but to see her from afar, to try and learn everything about her, going so far as to pay coinage for the smallest bits of information. How old was she? Nineteen. Who is her father? Father? I don’t know. She lives with Bodin, the wheat-grower by the big linden tree. Is she married? No. What is her name? Ajda.
By this time in his life - he would have been in his late twenties, then - Sigismund was already a powerful man. His family, while originally from Bavaria, had resided in Pettau for two generations. Each generation, militarily skilled as they were, rose in importance from land-owning vassals to low ranking knights, and finally, with Sigismund, to the level of steward, the lord’s second in command. The only higher post available to men born commoners was that of the ministerialage, and this Sigismund hoped to ensure for his progeny. Unfortunately for such ambitions, Hilda, his wife of five years, remained - and not for lack of trying - unable to conceive. Being the daughter of a ministerial herself, securing the marriage for someone of Sigismund's rank had cost the lord a pretty sum. Divorce was out of the question. But beyond their childlessness the two were unhappy together. She was older than him. He didn't love her. And in response, she never let him forget both his lower status and the backwater nature of his town. For years now, she'd lavished upon him the same old yarns. We never travel, Sigismund. We never see my family up in Klagenfurt. When the cloth merchants visit us, you never call on them. You want me to give you a child yet refuse to take care of me first. You always make love to me in the dark. You are cold to me at dinner, even during feasts. You spend all your time with the garrison and all your money on yourself.
Women are like that, people told him. One of the more unfortunate human truths. Deep down, however, this failure to have a child angered and emasculated Sigismund. It made his future uncertain and he found uncertainty intolerable. The position of steward was not a hereditary one, but since Sigismund had proven himself so gifted in both warfare and reckoning, he hoped to bear a similarly talented son and make the position inheritable. The lord liked Sigismund immensely and was amenable to such a proposal. Indeed, Frederick had every reason to like him, and to reward him for exceptional service. Nobody had ever been better at securing what was owed and, of course, beyond, which was a little harder to get. From Frederick's perspective, Sigismund approached the peasantry with just the right amount of fear and persuasion. No one could say he was kind – no one at all – but he was no indiscriminate butcher either. Force was a tool among many. He had no qualms about using it, but there were other tools, too. The people were naturally afraid of him, in part because he was tall and cut a strong figure. Stories abounded of his own escapades on the border. Magyar heads tied by their hair to his saddle, blood dripping down the hocks of his white horse. It was enough.
Yet despite its prestige, the steward's was a life of restriction, of formalities. Long days, thankless nights, a little too much requisite bravery. Ajda, with her lower social status seemed so comparatively natural and free. A woman for her own sake; a woman who could be roused to passion, sensuous and ungirdled by propriety. Her body in his arms, warm to the touch, willing, grateful, uncorrupted by material shallowness...The more he thought of her - while working, while out on his rounds, while taking his wife to bed in the dark - the more these thoughts drove Sigismund to madness. One could call it love, and certainly he himself did. To him, spying on Ajda was an act of love, as was terrorizing her family in order to get that much closer to her - to make her aware of him and his power. If she would just look at him once, really look at, no, into him, then she would immediately see what about him was so desirable...The worst irony of Sigismund's predatory devotion was that of his handsomeness. Blond curls, long eyelashes, strong hands. He could’ve had no shortage of willing mistresses, yet the thought didn’t even cross his mind. It was Ajda he wanted. Ajda, who he deserved. Ajda, who should be begging him. Indeed, power had made the steward a very big man with an intolerable smallness to him.
Time dragged on like this. Following, obsessing, always from a distance because Sigismund knew he could not approach Ajda himself, at least not out in the open. It would not only spread rumors throughout the peasantry alerting them to his weakness but cause a scandal among people of his own class. Fine, Sigismund, have an affair, Lord knows you’ve earned one at this point, but with a merchant’s daughter at minimum. The steward thus became terribly secretive. Underlying his secretiveness, a strange resentment towards the turgidity of his feelings. Months had passed, and yet there she remained - in his dreams, in his waking fantasies, an incorrigible distraction at a time when every armed man needed to be nimble and prepared for anything. What was once a trivial matter now seemed rather dire. Disease-like. Weak, he hated weakness. After too many sleepless nights and tired mornings, Sigismund decided that he had to act, if only to spare himself, and by extension, the lord's subjects. The steward began to ideate. He came to believe that if he could have her just once, he would be cleansed of his terrible ailment. Just once, and then his life would return, thankfully, finally, to normal.
And so, one day, when he knew the laundresses would be out by the river, he paid one of them three pence to tell Ajda to come up to the castle and bring back more tallow for the soap. He reckoned that at midday, the kitchen staff would either be out gathering food for dinner or stationed at the bread ovens. Ajda, then, would have no choice but to follow the voices down the hallway in search of someone to grant her permission to take what she needed. And this she did, none the wiser. When she got to the dark storeroom at the end of the hall, she found Sigismund there with one of his subordinates, whom the steward then told to leave. Upon seeing Sigismund, Ajda apologized. She tried to explain in her broken German that she was only looking for some tallow and didn’t mean to intrude. But when the steward said nothing in return, when he walked over to the door and shut it, her voice trailed off and she stood there paralyzed with fear.
The steward, too, was afraid. Unexpectedly so. There she was before him, finally, alone, the door closed. Ajda. Confronted directly with the object of his lust, and once more with her aversion to him, no, don’t look at me like that Ajda, he began to try and explain himself, rambling quickly under his breath. Despite her heightened senses, she strained to hear him. With the softness of his voice and the lowness of her language, she could only understand bits and pieces of what was being said.
How beautiful you are...Every time I catch sight of you I lose control of myself. I can do nothing else but look.
He came towards her and she, in turn, backed away from him.
At first I thought not much of it, but now you tempt me, you haunt me in my sleep. I am an honest man, a married man...
The finality of the wall behind her. Ajda stammering, please, lord steward, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really, I haven't, I am--
Sigismund took her jaw in his hand. He said, "You don’t understand." He said to her, oppressively close, "Look at me."
Ajda struggled and squirmed in his grasp. She opened her mouth to scream, but Sigismund moved his hand down to her throat, and immediately she stopped. He pulled Ajda tight against his chest, coaxed her to the ground, the uncinching of metal, the rustling of clothes. His mouth on her. The question, Was it really going to happen like this? Then the whole world left her, and there existed only the stone wall on the far end of the room, fixed, unmoving. And Ajda, clinging to it with her eyes, became a series of images. She is a fabric being rent. She is the shore of the river, subject to the blows of waves in a storm. She is an open grave.
And the worst part: Sigismund believed so utterly in his own tenderness, that when she went limp in his arms, he interpreted it as a sign of womanly acquiescence. This was seduction to him – she would see to what lengths he was willing to go and give into his passion, and his passion would in turn arouse passion in her. Perhaps if he noticed her discomfort earlier, things would have been different. But all he thought in that moment was: Ajda. Finally, now, Ajda. His Ajda. Ajda, the scent of soap on her skin, the softness of her hair; how she trembled, her quiet, sharp, uneven breath, her body, warm, resisting, resisting, and then suddenly all around him, enveloping him, consuming him, and to his slight embarrassment, overwhelming him sooner than he would have liked, overwhelming him in a heartrending way he had never experienced before, as though he really was giving her all of himself, down to his very essence. Groaning, slowing to a halt, he kissed her deeply. He held her in his arms, face pressed against the top of her head. The room, utterly silent save for the shallowness of their breathing.
When Sigismund finally pulled away, he was confronted not with the soft, misty eyes of a lover, but with an utterly shattered expression. Tears, a gaping, quivering mouth. Terror and pain. Shocked, he searched her face for an explanation. No, he told himself, that can't be right. She must just feel a little ashamed, is all. Girls like her...they don't really know what to do at their age. But the more she stared at him, the more he realized that, despite what he believed to be sincere and within the boundaries of desire, he had harmed, perhaps irrevocably, this girl for whom there was something like love in him. No, he thought stubbornly, no, no, no, no. Can’t you see? Stupid woman, can’t you see? He righted himself, tucked himself away, noticing that there was blood on his hands. Oh no, that explains it, the crying...What should I do? On wretched impulse, he untied his coin purse and shoveled money into her hands, more money than she had ever seen before, panicking, mumbling, "Take this, please, I insist. Not as though you are a whore, but because it is just, and I swear, I know it is just, Ajda, and please, if you come to see me here, a week from now, anything you want or need, I promise to you." Anything. He would do anything to stop her from looking at him like that.
Shaking, she whispered, "I don’t want your money."
"Then the money is for your uncle, who will want it. It is the least I owe him."
Owe him?
"Consider it, Ajda," the steward pleaded, his palms extended in a sign of benevolence. But when she said nothing, he turned his back to her reluctantly and left, finding the scene unbearable. And Ajda, still in shock, gathered the coins into the pockets of her apron. What else was she to do? She, who had never held such money? Unable to think about anything – anything at all beyond that same, unwavering stone wall, the fabric, the river, the grave - she wandered home in a daze, stopping every so often to wipe away the blood trickling down her thigh.
Perhaps more humiliating than the rape was having to face the people who loved her. Having to plead for amnesty from a violence committed against her. She came into the house, dumped the money onto the floor, and burst into tears. Luckily it was only the three of them at home. Aunt, uncle, niece. It took some time to get the words out, to find some air to breathe, to make the room stop spinning. Her aunt, as she slowly learned what had happened, also began to weep. Nobody knew what to say. What could be said? Everyone understood that, for Ajda, this was a living death. That nothing now would come of this girl. That she would work herself to the bone and die the aunt to other people’s children. That she would not see justice.
The news made her uncle succumb to the vile reality of his powerlessness. This poor girl, whom he had raised as his own child, stolen from him, stolen from a future husband, stolen from things as they should be. Bodin was himself and the steward was the steward, and there would, in this world, be no recourse beyond the money glittering menacingly among the rushes. Sick with hate, Bodin knew that he would still have to look the steward in the eye twice a year come harvest; that he would speak to him with the same frightened deference; born, as he was, to look at and speak to the steward that way. Making him ask the question of winter; absconding with the fruits of his labor - it wasn't enough. Nothing was ever enough.
As her aunt and uncle deliberated, Ajda boiled water for the basin and scrubbed herself down, her body erupting in red blotches. She thought, finally, of Aleksandr. You may as well lay with me too, since it costs you nothing now. And so it unraveled, the long ribbon of grief for the things she would not be able to do. No wedding, no marriage, no children, and Aleksandr would go to someone else, someone with virtue and they would wed and they would have children and he would forget about her and so would everyone else, what a shame, they would say, what a shame. And why? She asked God what she had done to deserve this – not what she could have possibly done but what she had done, for it must have been something. Was I too vain? Was I behaving provocatively? Was I envious or greedy? But her inquisition turned up nothing. She felt, for the first time, the profound discomfort of His silence. All she had ever done was work.
Of all her earthly punishments, the worst was this: when she told her uncle about what the steward had asked of her, he told her to go. She pleaded with Bodin as though he were Sigismund: "Why would you make me do this? You know what he wants." But Bodin replied, trying his best to show what little he could do to change the situation, “If the steward does not get what he wants, who do you think he will take his wrath out on? Not only on you, but on all of us. Would you prefer to go to him and perhaps appeal to him directly, or would you rather he come here and find you?”
Weeping, she shouted back, "Does my honor mean nothing to you?"
"Your honor? What about your honor? You want to go to the law? It's your word against the steward's. Whose do you think the lord is going to believe?"
Returning to see Sigismund was a choice neither she nor her family could make. It wasn't a choice at all. Cruel as they were - and Bodin went to great lengths to communicate that he recognized such cruelty - these were the facts of life.
Ajda turned to her aunt, thinking that perhaps she, as a woman, would understand her plea. But her aunt shook her head. Quietly, she said, "Really, what were you thinking? Wandering around like that? When you saw them standing there, you should have left. You shouldn’t have ever been in a room alone with that man." Such cold words proved what Ajda knew from then on out to be true: one is alone in this world and can only count on oneself. It was, in a disgusting way, remarkable. A few hours ago, Ajda was happy. A few hours ago, she walked the earth a person embraced by a society of people. Now, she stood alone, in private exile. For days she wept. But tears offered little relief from either the loneliness or the injustice of her defilement. The truth was the truth. No one, including herself, would ever look at her the same way again.
