Olenka and the wax that looked like a wall

A literary legend written for Ask the Signs. The witches are fictional and nothing in the story predicts a future.

Daryna came for a love charm. Olenka refused, melted the wax anyway, and showed her something Daryna had not wanted to see.

In Konotop they said the witches read cards better than anyone, but about Olenka they said, above all, that she laughed best. She was the youngest of the seven, with a red ribbon in her hair, freckles all the way to her elbows, and a ginger cat named Kminek who, according to her, understood Polish, Ukrainian and a little Latin. The older witches shook their heads at her, because she could eat half a jar of jam during a reading, but they all admitted one thing: nobody read love in wax the way she did.

Her room smelled of bees. Candles stood on the shelves in every color from honey to deep cherry, bundles of lavender dried in the corner, and on the windowsill lay pieces of hardened wax that Olenka collected the way other people collect shells. Among them was a wax swan, a wax teapot, and one that looked exactly like the village elder, though Olenka swore that was an accident. Kminek usually slept on the elder.

On a November evening, just before the Andrew's night divinations, Daryna came to her. She came in fast, as though someone were chasing her, and said from the doorway the sentence she had rehearsed the whole way: "I want Andrij to love me. Do something. I will pay whatever it takes." Olenka put down the jar of jam. For a moment she looked at Daryna with such seriousness that Kminek woke up and sat. "I do not do those things," she said calmly. "Neither I nor any of us. Love on demand is like bread made of clay: it looks lovely on the table and feeds nobody."

Daryna sat down as if her legs had been cut away. "Then why did I come?" "To see what you are carrying," replied Olenka, already smiling, because she could not stay serious for long. "The wax does not say what he feels. The wax says what you carry. That is sometimes much more interesting." She set a bowl of cold water on the table, melted a piece of pale wax over the candle in an old spoon, and handed Daryna a large iron key. "Hold it over the water. Wax is poured through the ear of a key, and always has been, so the reading knows which door to open."

The wax hissed in the water and set. Olenka fished it out with her fingers and laid it on her palm. It was flat, wide and angular, with a row of small bumps along the top like bricks. Daryna groaned. "A wall. It is a wall, isn't it? He does not want me." Olenka turned the wax against the light, squinting. "A wall, yes. The interesting question is whose. Tell me, how many times have you talked to Andrij seriously?" Daryna opened her mouth and closed it. She talked to him every day at the well. She laughed at his cap, at the way he carried the buckets, at the way he blushed. Seriously, she had never talked to him at all.

Olenka reached for the cards. She shuffled them the way cards are shuffled in a tavern, with flair and a snap, until Kminek jumped off the table in offense. The first card was the Page of Cups: a young man in a flowered jacket looking at a fish that pokes its head out of his cup. "Ah, this is somebody shy who has something important to say and no idea how to begin. Maybe him. Maybe you. Often there are two people in this card at once, both waiting for the other to speak."

The second card was the Two of Cups: two people facing each other, exchanging cups, a winged lion's head above them. "A meeting," said Olenka. "But look, girl, they stand as equals. Nobody pulls, nobody enchants. Each brings their own cup. That is what love that feeds looks like." The third card was the Knight of Cups, riding slowly on a white horse with a cup held out ahead of him like an invitation. "And this is someone who comes with his heart in his hand. Who that will be is your choice."

Then Olenka did the trick only she knew. She set a candle behind the piece of wax so that a shadow fell across the whitewashed wall. And the shadow was not a wall. The bumps that looked like bricks in her hand looked like spans on the wall, and the whole shape curved into an arch. "A bridge," whispered Daryna. "A wall and a bridge are built from the same stones," said Olenka. "The difference is that a wall stands across the road and a bridge stands over it. Your jokes at the well are those stones. You built a wall out of them so nobody would see that you care. You can move them."

Daryna did not take the shortest road home that evening. She went to the well where Andrij carried water for his mother every night, and she told him, without a single joke, that she liked talking to him and would like to talk longer sometime. She said it very quietly and very fast. Andrij put down the buckets, red as a beetroot, and answered that he had thought she was laughing at him. That for a year he had avoided the well at the hour her friends came. That he would like to talk longer. Starting now, if that was all right.

What came next is their business, and Konotop does not repeat it, though everyone knows they floated wreaths on the river together that summer. Olenka received a jar of cherry jam from Daryna and, for reasons nobody established, a new cap for Kminek from Andrij, which Kminek never wore. The piece of wax shaped like a bridge still lies on the windowsill, between the swan and the village elder.

And when someone still comes to Olenka for a love charm, she gives the same answer every time: "Nobody can be made to love. But anyone can choose to tell the truth. And then accept the answer, whatever it is. That is the strongest spell I know, and it works even when the answer is no, because at least then you stop standing under a wall." And immediately afterwards she offers jam.

Nobody can be forced to love, but anyone can choose honesty and accept the answer.

Cards from this story

Her whisper for today

Ask for the answer you are afraid of. The fear is usually louder than the answer.

Whispers are lines to carry, not forecasts. They say nothing about other people, money or health.

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