However, like all stories about great men, this one 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 was walking 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's steward, mercilessly punctual, parted the fields on his black horse 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 some stools, some utensils and a chest full of blankets and clothes: these were the 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.
Behind the house: a pigpen enclosed by a twig-woven fence; a shed full of tools; a plowhorse, tied up; a small garden for vegetables; 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. That was what the men in the house did, raise and slaughter animals, sow and reap. The women served as laundresses for the lord and his family in exchange for loaves and wine. The wine they pawned in the town in exchange for coinage with which they paid the lord's ever-increasing rent. Even though little Ajda became yet another mouth to feed, the family, out of love for their kinswoman, took this in stride and soon she was the same as any other child. Another mouth to feed at first, but soon a pair of working hands. Those were the words of Ajda’s aunt, Marija, a practical woman, if a little shrewd. Bodin, her husband, complemented her well. He 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 of her status. She grew into a beautiful young woman: bright green eyes, blonde hair, an elegant 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 in 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 work lent itself to gossip and chatter. The latest fashions the lady wore, which men 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 flax grower, for whom she developed a fondness. In the evenings she often meet 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 of whether it did occur to her that her form attracted attention, 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, the benefit of sheep did not justify the upkeep. Can't you see? Only the pigs, the chickens and the plowhorse. Look, lord steward, you can look in the barn.
Sigismund was no stranger 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, no one wanted to see the steward at their doorstep. Nothing could be more dreadful. Visits from the steward were bad enough on those two days in June and July when 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 bitterness in the mouth of every man, and a string of empty barns and even emptier pockets.
That the steward could barely talk to or understand his subjects only made matters more distressing. Misunderstandings had profound consequences. Hence from a young age, the children of the villages and fields, 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 only to scare the living daylights out of everyone in the house, turn to his men, and then leave muttering, empty handed.
However, the steward was looking for something, just not what Bodin thought.
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 those 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 where earth met 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, from picking at the border like an old scab. 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 across the Roman bridge out of town, something, or rather someone, caught his eye. 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 tight his chest felt in his armor, as though unable to breathe. I thought I knew everyone in this town, he thought, but no, I really haven't seen this girl before. 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, Sigismund felt compelled 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.
Sigismund had made himself a powerful man. His family, while originally from Bavaria, had lived 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 ministerial level of steward, the lord’s second in command. The only higher post available to men born commoners was that of the archiepiscopal ministerialage, and this Sigismund hoped to achieve for his progeny. Unfortunately for these ambitions, Hilda, his wife of five years, remained - and not for lack of trying - unable to produce a baby. 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 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, he had suffered from 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.
Deep down, however, this failure to have a child angered Sigismund, emasculated him. 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, if overzealously carried out 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 horse. It was enough.
The steward's was a life of formalities. Long days, thankless nights, a little too much requisite bravery. Ajda, in 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...The more the thought of her - while working, while out on his rounds, while taking his wife to bed in the dark - the more the thought of her drove Sigismund to madness. One could call it love, and certainly he himself did. Spying on Ajda was an act of love, as was terrorizing the family that didn't deserve her, that kept her from him. If only she would just look at him once. Really looked at him, into him, then she would see...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. Power had long made the steward a very big man with an intolerable smallness to him.
Time went 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 emotions. 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 had become rather dire. Disease-like. Weak, he hated weakness. He had to act, if only to spare himself from a now-prolonged agony. The steward began to ideate. He began 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 be out gathering food for dinner or would be 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 store-room at the end of the hall, she found Sigismund there with one of his subordinates, whom the steward then told to leave. Ajda, believing to be in trouble, 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.
What she did not know, however, was that 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 with the devastating reality of 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 the heightening of her 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.
The way you are...Every time I come across you I take leave of my senses. I can do nothing else but look. Do you know how long I’ve been merely looking at you?
He came towards her and she, in turn, backed away from him.
You tempt me, you haunt me in my sleep. I am an honest man, a married man, but now…
The finality of the wall behind her. Ajda stammering, please, I don’t know what you’re talking about, lord steward, I have done nothing, I am--
Sigismund took her jaw in his hand. He said, "You don’t understand." He said to her, impossibly 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. The sliding down to the ground, the uncinching of metal, the rustling of clothes. 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. Ajda, the scent of soap in her clothing, the softness of her skin, 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, and in a heartrending way in which he had never been overwhelmed before. The sensation of having given her all of himself. Groaning, slowing to a halt, he kissed her deeply. He begged to see her again. He said to her, face buried in her neck, "See how I love you?" And for a short time after that, 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.
But when he finally pulled away, he was confronted not with the quivering, misty eyes of a lover, but with an utterly shattered expression. Tears, a gaping, quivering mouth... Sigismund went cold. No, that can't be right. She must just feel a little ashamed. But in truth he knew at once that, despite what he believed to be sincere and within the boundaries of love, he had harmed, perhaps irrevocably, this girl for whom there was something like love in him. No, he thought stubbornly, no, no, no, no. It can't be. Can’t you see? Stupid woman, can’t you see? He righted himself, tucked himself back away, noticing that there was blood on his hands. On wretched impulse, he untied his coin purse and shoveled money into her hands, more money than she had ever seen before, panicking, mumbling, "Give this to your father, please, I insist. Not as though you are a whore, but because it is just, and I know it is just, Ajda, and please, if you come to see me here, a week from now, anything you want or need you will have. I promise to you." Anything to stop her from looking at him like that.
Quivering, she whispered, "I don’t want your money."
"Then the money is for your kinsman, who will want it. It is the least I owe him."
Owe him? Ajda wanted to protest, but instead she fell silent.
"Just think about it, Ajda," the steward pleaded, palms out in a sign of benevolence, before he finally turned his back to her. He left, then, 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 were the repercussions, the confession to the people who loved her. Having to defend herself for a wrong 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, too, as she heard what was being said, began to weep. Everyone knew that, for a young woman, to be raped 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. Her uncle, meanwhile, carried the full weight of his powerlessness. He was himself and the steward was the steward, and there would be no recourse beyond that money, glittering menacingly among the rushes. It made him sickly with hate, knowing that he would have to look the steward in the eye twice a year come harvest with nothing but the same frightened deference. Born as he was, to look at the steward this way. To take the fruits of his labor wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever enough for the people who had everything. 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 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. She then asked God what she had done to deserve this – not what she could have possibly done but what she had done, for it had to be something – and for the first time she felt His silence. Was I too vain? Was I behaving provocatively? Was I envious or greedy? But she could find nothing. 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, to her utter betrayal, he told her to go. She pleaded with Bodin as though he himself were the steward, why would you make me do this? You know what he wants. But Bodin replied, trying his best to be merciful: “If the steward does not get what he wants, who do you think he will take his wrath out on?” These were the facts of life. That her aunt confirmed this only proved what Ajda then knew forever to be true: that one is alone in this world and can only count on oneself. You shouldn’t have been in a room alone with a man. Those were Marija’s words. A few hours ago, Ajda walked the earth a person among a society of people. Now, she stood alone, in private exile. For days she wept. But no amount of tears offered any relief from the loneliness and injustice of her defilement.
