Siegfried, Part 1, Chapter 1

Ajda came to Sigismund for the last time around Pentecost. She told him what he had already suspected: that she was with child. Seeing the uncertain look in her eyes, her belly swelling beneath her dress, Sigismund thought, weak as the day he himself was born, the mother of my child. What a totalizing thought it was. The sight of her like that, that sentence the mother of my child, made him remorseless, justified every single one of his actions. Helplessly, he pulled Ajda into his arms, Oh, my beautiful girl, look at you. And Ajda, crying for reasons she didn’t understand, buried her face in the soft wool of his mantle. For a single moment, never to be repeated, she wished that what happened between the two of them had turned out differently. That they had been born different people, that they could have known one another absent of pain. But such an alternative was unimaginable. They were who they were. What they were. Out of her long-standing devotion to resistence, she disliked thinking such things. Maybe the child made her think that way.

"What will you do?" She asked Sigismund quietly.
"What do you mean, what will I do?"
"About the baby. It’s your baby."
"Well," answered Sigismund truthfully, "If it’s a girl, you can do what you like with her. But if it’s a boy…"
Ajda's pulse quickened. "Don't tell me you wish to take him away."
"Take him away?" He grimaced. "My God, woman. You think I would bring such humiliation upon my wife? Make her raise another woman’s son?"
"But he is also your son."
"So he is. If the baby does turn out a boy, you will give him a German name. You will take care of him, and after certain age the boy will be brought up the way I was brought up, trained the way I was trained."
"What do you mean?" She didn't quite understand him.
"I mean, my son will be no peasant. And I prefer to have a bastard than no son at all."
It hurt Ajda, unexpectedly, to hear Sigismund refer to her like that. As a peasant.
"And what should I tell him about his father?"
The steward shrugged. "That is your decision."
"So you will pretend not to know him?"
"For a while, yes. But at the right time, he will know. Why are you looking at me like that, Ajda?"
She couldn't believe it. How casual he was. That this was how it was going to be, after all this. That he saw himself merely as an adulterer hiding from both his wife and his mistress. After a long, cold silence, she told him, "If this is what you wish, then I want to be left alone. In peace."
To her surprise, there was no argument, no struggle.
"Alright," he said, and left her.

But Sigismund couldn't truly leave her, even though he tried his best at first, believing that the baby required a new diplomacy between them. He thought of Ajda often and longingly, fantasized about the three of them together, mother, father, child. Sometimes he had dreams of waking up to her in the morning, of having her dressed in his wife’s clothes, of servants combing her hair before pinning it up in a barbette. Dreams of her coy smile in his direction from across the banquet table. The two of them walking inside the courtyard, a baby in her arms, suckling at her breast. But then, on the other side of wakefulness, his wife laying next to him, the same long days, now without reward. He became like he once was when he first met her. The same kind of secretive. He kept his eye on her, his ear to the ground. When she was out working with the other laundresses, their shoulders all rounded from carrying water - and what a pity, he thought, that Ajda's would soon be that way too - he passed by on his horse. He didn't linger, per se, but he passed. Made his presence felt, but not enough to warrant an accusation. Often he stood in the eastern tower observing the women laying out the linens and clothes to dry in the field. He kept track of how Ajda's belly became bigger and rounder. He could pick her out of a crowd just by the lumbering way she walked. It aroused him deeply, the thought of his child growing inside her, taking shape as the combination of their two forms. And yet, as much as he wanted to see her, he kept his distance. He followed his word.

Then, on the last harvest day, the steward came to call on Bodin and his wife. As was the case every year, Ajda walked out of the house to watch the carters load the stacks of sheaves, watched Sigismund have his men round up one of the pigs, watched her uncle pay the steward his accumulated coinage. Not once had Sigismund come to her home and address her by name. When they were embroiled in their arrangement, his ignoring her used to both insult her and come as a source of relief. But this year, he dismounted and walked over to where she was standing, in the threshold. It was strange seeing him like that, in his full armor, in his role of steward, looking down at her for what she really was. Now they were in their natural circumstances, and she had no choice but to address him with the utmost deference. As he stood before her, she felt the eyes of everyone in her family and her face burned with shame.
"How is the baby?" he asked.
"Fine, lord steward."
Realizing no kindness would come from her, he had his horse brought over.
"You'll have to pay a new head tax, soon," he told her. As he remounted, he said a word Ajda didn't understand. Siegfried.
She looked at him, confused.
"The name. That's what you will call him. Siegfried."



The thought of hurting the child occurred to Ajda only once, when she was bent over her immense stomach washing, washing, washing in the frigid river. Imagine if it were a son. Imagine the satisfaction that could be had of robbing Sigismund of what he so desperately wanted. But the image she conjured of holding a baby underwater, little bubbles of air dwindling into stillness frightened Ajda so much, she made the opposite vow: to treat the child better than it deserved, to love it as though it were a product of love. And after all, it was her child. It would need her as a mother, love her as a mother, love her, perhaps, when no other being on earth loved her; love her more than anyone.

The boy was born at night on Shrove Tueday. He was an easy birth, if there was such a thing, and an easy baby as well. Healthy, strong, alert. Blond like both of his parents, but with green eyes like his mother. Per his father’s request, she called him Siegfried. Sejfrid, it sounded on her lips. That the boy had a German name rankled the noses of Ajda’s peers, who took it as confirmation of everything they suspected of her, from her self-importance to her whoredom. Even her family, who knew the details of her situation, disapproved. Instead, they called him Žiga, which, in their tongue, was also the name of the steward. Ajda hated this. She and her aunt fought mightily over how to address the child. Siegfried was his name, whether anyone liked it or not. And besides, as a baby, he had no knowledge over what was one kind of name and what was another. Mostly she didn't want him being called the same name as Sigismund. It became clear early on that no one would truly love Siegfried other than his mother. Many pitied him, but unlike love, pity could be exhausted. Bodin and Marija did their best, but when anyone else in her family took care of him, they did so with such negligence, Ajda preferred to go to the river with him slung on her back even though it made her shoulders ache that much more.

Meanwhile, things grew more concerning outside of Pettau that year. The fighting on the border escalated, even in winter when men shivered under the weight of their armor. It wasn't uncommon to see garrison men coming and going in groups of five and ten. For Sigismund, suddenly there were bigger things to worry about than babies and mistresses. Sometimes he was on the border, other times in the castle alongside the lord, other times still he was out rousing troops, running supplies, taking stock of arms, paying mercenaries. For the first few months of Siegfried's life, Ajda saw his father only once, riding across the Roman bridge in front of two carthorses full of supplies for the archery towers. Unsure of whether his absence made her feel relieved or uneasy, Ajda tried not to dwell on Sigismund too long. She and her son began to form a society of two. She bathed him, changed him, fed him, taught him to walk and speak. The baby made her happy, made her feel less alone. She found herself talking to him freely, even though he couldn’t possibly understand, and when he peered up at her with his big green eyes, when he smiled and cooed and laughed, she loved him beyond comprehension. What a blessing it was, to love this child who had been inflicted upon her. They had much in common, Ajda and Siegfried. Two people born into misfortune and yet living and living and living under God's sun.

In his first year, when her family began reaping the July barley, Ajda became consumed by the thought of Sigismund entering the house and the two, father and son, looking at one another for the first time, up close. I hope it hurts, she thought, I hope it kills you. That’s your boy, you fool. He even looks like you. But when the steward came to call, he did so as usual - only in the fields, omitting the house altogether. And from the threshold she watched him ride away, baby in her arms, thinking, you coward. You utter coward. However, when the winter came, so too, clandestinely, did the steward’s men in the middle of the night, with food and wood and wool blankets. Ajda, at first upset, later inwardly accepted the gifts owing to the unusual brutality of the winter. Snow piled halfway up the door. Many thatched roofs collapsed, and a few village children died of starvation. Burying them proved difficult as the ground was frozen solid. Those who lived in small households combined them so as to all sleep together and keep warm. Christmas came leanly, as many animals died. Bodin kept his chickens in the house. Some nights, he even brought the pigs in, which was a sight to see.

That same, first winter, the lord died. Rumor had it that he was out riding along the border one day in the terrible, hard snow, and collapsed from cold and exhaustion. No one could revive him. It took too long to get back into town. In what seemed like a pageant of miracles, the Archbishop and his dazzling menagerie came down from Salzburg to intervene, so as to prevent war between the Empire and Hungary. For years afterwards, Pettau was without a lord, as the lord’s eldest son Frederick remained in Graz serving first as a page, later a squire. The lady, Benedicta, ruled alone. Some in those parts say these years were easier, as the Hungarians had relaxed now that their chief antagonist had perished. Others say that without a lord to keep them in check, men like Sigismund were permitted to act with too much freedom. Other taxes went down, but, in compensation, the head tax had never been higher.

And so the first few years of Siegfried’s life passed. When it became clear that the child would survive infancy, the gifts in the night ceased. As soon as the boy came into his own sense of self, burst into language, anyone with eyes could see that he possessed an almost insouciant brightness. He learned quickly, and asked questions. Difficult ones. Why? Why can't we see God? Why do some people live in the castle and others in the fields? Why do we have to give away what we grow ourselves? Why do ladies wear dresses and men wear braies? Why do people die? When, while still very young, he asked his mother: who is my father? His mother replied, "Nobody. You see, you are like me. I didn’t have a father either." Everyone tried to answer the boy's questions best they could, but it was never enough for him. "I regret ever teaching him that word 'why'," his aunt used to mutter. Bodin, however, noticed that Siegfried seemed to be better placated when the answer to his question came in the form of a story. When Siegfried asked him, "Uncle, why do we grow wheat?" Instead of saying, simply, "to eat," Bodin told him a tale his father had once told him.

A long time ago, there was no wheat anywhere along the Drava river. Not here in Ptuj, nor upstream closer to what the Germans call the Jauntal. When the people here tried to grow it with seeds bought from Carinthia, the seeds shriveled up or became moldy. There weren't so many people here in those days, in part because they all hungered for bread, and the traveling merchants charged them a pretty penny for it. Think of how much bread and pottage you eat, little one. Do you think we could survive on vegetables and meat alone? Anyway, one day, the town fisherman sat on the banks and spoke to the Drava. He said to the river, I have grown old and tired. I have pledged myself to your waters and you have, in turn, been very good to me. My nets have always been plentiful, and I have not only fed others but have made quite a fortune for myself. I live in a fine house with my wife, and my sons are well-fed and have wives of their own. Is there any possible way I can repay you?

The Drava said to the man, "Travel widely throughout the world, see all the things that can be seen. One day you will come to a place far from here where people grow wheat, barley, and rye in fields as far as the eye can see. Go into the town and buy a loaf of bread made with each, and then bring them back to me."
The fisherman packed up his horse with provisions, kissed his wife, and then set off. They say he went all the way to Celovec, Bavaria, even to France. Finally, he found a merchant selling each of the three loaves and brought them back to the Drava. As soon as the bread touched the water, the river swelled and flooded the plains, soaked the soil and drew the attention of thousands of birds - storks and swifts, geese and songbirds. The sky burst into song. And then, when the water receded, to the amazement of everyone in the town, little sprouts of wheat, rye and barley, emerged from the soil. And that's why we grow all three here.

Siegfried’s perceptiveness, however, came with a price: from an early age he sensed that he and his mother were both despised. Other children did not play with him because he had a German name. And why did he have a German name? Because his mother was a whore. What was a whore? But he lived with his mother, slept in the same bed – it couldn’t be true! No matter where he turned, no one ever seemed to tell him the truth, which only made him value the truth more. Despite his efforts, Siegfried’s was a lonely early childhood. Other children kicked him around even when he kept to himself. A black sheep, they called him, a bastard. Siegfried, for a long time, tolerated this. Kindness, his mother lied to him, begets kindness. But when kindness proved unrewarding, he found the courage to fight back. And he did this tenaciously. All it took was a few bites on the arm, a few ripped out clumps of hair, for even older children to leave him alone. However, in fighting, there was no winning. He faced punishment at home. So let them punish me, he thought, indignantly. He preferred formal punishment, considered it just and therefore bearable. In him developed a sense that all of this suffering he would have to endure, up to a point, and then, when he had endured enough, it would stop. All pain would someday be useful to him. From a very young age, the age at which a child can grasp objects and move them with decent precision, he was put to work in the fields. From fieldwork, he learned to reckon, to move numbers and things around in his mind. Reckoning was the only part of the toil that involved stopping, standing around, deliberating. How much have we sown? How much should we cut? How much is owed? How much will get us through the winter? How much wheat, how much chaff? And in reckoning, what existed became magically manipulated into what should be or must be or will be. Through reckoning, the future came to pass. Siegfried watched adults doing this reckoning – counting aloud, using their fingers – and, wanting to be useful, imitated them. The fieldwork was so grueling and dull, he began to challenge himself, inventing more and more difficult sums and later percentages to solve. This became a cherished activity even beyond the fields. When people fought in the house, when they screamed at each other, when everyone grew hungry and bitter in winter, when he was cold and miserable, he shut out the world. He separated the field into ever more infinitesimal parts, he visualized sheathes of wheat with precise numbers of stalks, separated them too, imagined them as flour and doled it all out. Everyone would have enough. Everyone would be full. His numerical world was governed by a logic of fairness the real one did not possess. When Siegfried decided to show his family what he’d learned, his cousin Ivo beat him until he was black and blue, thinking the boy was cheating. You didn’t do those sums yourself. You heard someone else do them and now come to us with your false pride. No amount of protestation could change Ivo’s or anyone else’s mind. Shaking him by the shoulders, adults asked Siegfried, who do you think you are? A boy pretending to the talents of a man? There it was again, this constant accusation, which he did not understand, that he thought himself better than others. Over and over, they called him a bastard, but how could he be? His mother had never married and therefore could never deceive. It never made sense to him, these questions of his existence. He asked his mother over and over, but she refused to say a word. You are my son, she said, my child. And that is enough. How he cherished his mother. How he willed her to be loved, to be relieved from what anyone could see was a difficult life. Every day, from across the river, he watched his mother, bent over the riverbank, her hands always raw, slaving away at tablecloths and underclothes and coifs and linens. Toiling thanklessly, the subject of so much abuse and derision. His mother who loved him and took care of him, who asked so little of others, who bore the whole of everything on her own shoulders. How he wanted to make her life easier. What a burden he believed himself to be. He, the reason people treated her as they did. What it meant to him that she loved him despite the disgrace he brought into her life. Siegfried saw in his mother resolve and dignity. And no matter how poorly people behaved towards him, he promised to act with dignity himself. Our rewards, his mother once said, will be reaped in the Kingdom of Heaven. Hence, the boy did his work in the fields without complaint. An uneasy truce settled over his relationships with other children. Once he grew a little older, he adopted an air of geniality to hide his surliness, all the while keeping his cleverness close to his chest. Belonging became his mission. If he could belong, his mother wouldn’t have to worry about him, and they could be happy. Meanwhile, every year, at harvesttime, Sigismund saw his son. He saw his son stringing sheaves of wheat together with nimble fingers. He saw his son speaking a peasant language. He saw his son looking up at him with nothing but foreign, understandable loathing. And every time he saw this face which bore such resemblance to his own, it took all his resolve to pretend he did not recognize it. And as for his mother, he let her be. He tried his best not to lay eyes on her, forced himself to pass over the bridge without so much as a glance in her direction, killing himself over the fact that this made her happy. But when he did see her, the same feelings stirred in him as always, as always, and one day he thought, why not? Why not have her come back up to the castle to see him? Just to speak a little while? Why hadn’t the child changed him? He wondered. Why hadn’t it changed her? And so he called for her, and she came, Siegfried in tow, as he had felt ill that day. Wait here, she told him. I’ll be back soon. But, beholden to his curiosity, he did not wait long. He followed his mother down the hallway, where the door to the storeroom had been left slightly ajar. And there, his mother and the steward arguing, the steward picking his mother up in his arms, touching her face, covering her mouth with his, his mother crying, and yet also reaching for him, him uncinching his belt, her against the wall…In absolute terror, the boy watched the scene unfolding, wanting to intervene, wanting to be brave – that’s my mother, that’s my mother – yet feeling completely trapped, hopelessly trapped, as though the steward’s hands were around his throat. Wide-eyed he watched until, unable to bear it any further, he ran. He ran and ran and ran down to the riverbank where he threw himself to the ground beneath a willow tree, so breathless he began to heave. And then he pressed his face into the dark soil and screamed. He screamed like a crow, no, like a startled animal in the night. The steward takes! He takes and takes and takes! I’ll kill him, thought Siegfried, I’ll kill him with my own hands. I’ll die if I have to, but I’ll kill him. But most of all Siegfried wept because now it all made sense: the way he’d been treated, his mother’s aversion to his questions, everything, everything – he had no father! Of course he had a father. He begged God to take this knowledge away from him, to wipe the very day from his memory. He wished even more that he didn’t know exactly what it was he saw. A lack of privacy teaches children things too young. And his mother? Was she hurt? She was crying…pinned like an animal by the man who steals everything. Under the willow tree was where his panic-stricken mother found him hours later. I know now why they call me Žiga, said Siegfried. And there, in tears, Ajda told her son as much as he needed to know. I’ll kill him, Siegfried said again. I’ll kill him. No, protested his mother. Listen to me. You must understand. Your father will provide for you when the time comes. He told me so, before you were born. You were not meant for this life, Siegfried. It is God’s will. God made you this way. God gave you this life. God gave you gifts. Who are you, child, to refuse them? Who?