WARNING: one passage here that is highly NSFW (and also, the whole interlude runs the risk of being sappy)!
INTERLUDE THREE-QUARTERS.
The Halštrow Baths
26 November 1844 – 3 February 1845
As he disrobed in the dressing room, Maćij wondered once again whether he’d done the right thing.
The trip from Drježdźany to Kupjelow Halštrowa was uneventful: three days by horse-drawn carriage, from the middle of the Arcywójwodstwo to the southwesternmost edge, with overnight stays in the suburbs of Kamjenica (Kamenica) and in Šwikawa na Modłej (Cvikov nad Muldou) en route. But the distance between the Sorbian capital and the famous spa village was never what daunted him.
For over two years now, he hadn’t seen a true smile come to his wife’s face. That she was grateful to him for his efforts to comfort her and empathise, he didn’t doubt. But he wondered if the wounds from the loss of their children—three to the Flemish sickness, and one to stillbirth—hadn’t simply been too much to bear. Fara had thrown herself into charitable and activist efforts: and her work with mothers who had likewise lost children to disease was the cause nearest to her heart. She was working with several other bereaved mothers to draw up a plan for ‘sick funds’, to be implemented locally in rural villages or in workplaces. Maćij, of course, supported her efforts. He would have been delighted to see her this engaged at any other time, but the feelings clearly still ran too raw for her.
Maćij sat naked on the bench, glaring at the frosted-glass panes of the door that led to the thermal mineral bath. Once again he doubted if this was a good idea after all. He remembered the darkening of Fara’s heavy black brows when she heard of the immense and lavish parties that were being thrown in the mansions and clubs and opera halls of Praha by the wealthy Czechs of that town… all while countless hundreds of thousands were barely scraping by, and who knew how many shivering and starving in miserable silence?
In that light, was it not a bit… ostentatious… to reserve an entire wing of the Spring Bathhouse at Kupjelow Halštrowa (with brine and mineral thermal baths, mud bath, and sauna) for two whole weeks, just for his and Fara’s private use? Would she take it as a romantic gesture? Or would she disdain it as a misguided attempt at placation, and a misuse of his lordly prerogative and status? Maćij sighed. Well. There was only one way to find out.
He stood up, wrapped a towel around his waist, and went out into the bath.
It was late November and cold outside, but the covered thermal pool in their reserved wing of the Bathhouse was saturated in sultry steam.
At the edge of the thermal mineral pool, he saw a familiar and welcome silhouette. On approach, he saw a slender hand dipping and ladling the pyretic, crystal-clear water over a smooth, naked caramel shoulder, and a head of glistening, lank black waves of hair reclining in a pose of contented relaxation. Fara heard Maćij’s footfalls over the flagstones lining the pools, and she turned to face him. Her umbral southwest-Asiatic features lit up brightly as she saw him. That heart-melting doomsday weapon of hers finally made its first appearance in two years—two fine rows of glistening white teeth between full dark lips, giving him just the reaction he’d hoped for.
‘Enjoying the water?’ asked Maćij.
‘Too much,’ replied Fara. ‘I haven’t felt this relaxed in years!’
‘Think I’ll just dip a toe in first,’ Mac said. Finding it pleasantly balmy but not scalding, he slid his whole foot into the water, then sat on the edge of the pool and kicked both his calves down in. He sat next to his bathing wife. To his surprise and delight, Fara turned and leaned against his leg, pressing her cheek and shoulder against it.
‘I didn’t think there could be any pain worse than losing a child,’ she unburdened herself. ‘It turns out that losing four is worse, far out of proportion. Losing our sons, losing Zusi… and never getting to meet Javâd… But you were with me. The whole time, you were there.’
Mac stroked the long wavy strands of her wet hair. ‘Where else could I have been?’
Fara lifted an arm out of the water and gesticulated around her. ‘You’re the Arcywójwoda’s son. You could have been anywhere. I told you after our wedding, remember? You could have flown away from me long before now. You didn’t have to stay with me while my heart was being cut out, day after day, into small pieces. And there was nothing to be said or done to lessen the sting. But I can’t possibly say to you how much it means to me, that you never left my side, as near me as my liver.’
Maćij hugged her bare shoulder. ‘Well, that goes both ways. You agreed to come with me.’
Fara turned a shrewd look up at her husband. ‘What? You thought I’d resent coming here?’
‘Well…’ Maćij trailed off with a nervous laugh.
Fara laughed back—a peal of pure delight—as she splashed her husband with the mineral bathwater in good-natured reproach. ‘Oh, ‘Azizam. Maybe it makes me a hypocrite, I don’t know, but… if I’d had any objections to coming here with you, I had three whole days and two whole nights to voice them. Besides, I know you’ve been looking for a good place to catch me alone for months.’
‘Oh? And how do you figure that?’
‘I don’t wash my hair in a mill,’ Fara chided her husband, flicking another handful of water up at him. ‘You think I don’t know what the men in your family, ah, “get up” to when they bring their women to places like this? And even if I didn’t: that’s, um… quite the tent you’re pitching, under that towel.’
Maćij felt his face redden, for reasons which had nothing to do with the steamy heat of the bath. Fara slid herself around his knee and knelt in the water in front of him, reaching up out of the water once more and tugging the towel away from his loins and ‘tent-pole’.
‘That’s better, no?’ Fara purred. ‘Come on. The water’s great. Slide in with me.’
Fara knew exactly where she was leading, as soon as he was in the water with her. With the privacy that their reserved wing of the Spring Bathhouse afforded, and the steamy, comfortable warmth of the naturally-heated effervescent mineral bath—how could the Sorbian-German-British nobleman and his Tât-Russian Cossack peasant wife possibly keep their hands and lips and bodies off of each other? With no one else around to hear them, the steamy air was soon full of the sounds of their gusty breaths, male and female in the primal duet. About ten minutes later:
‘I’m getting incorrigible as I age,’ Fara mused in between gasps. ‘I’m past forty, and the only thing on my mind is getting a taste of your—!’
‘Here, then! Have as much as you like—!’
Nothing that might have been comprehensible to anyone else followed that, until:
‘Don’t you dare pull out of me!’
There was a break; a pause in their breathing. ‘You sure?’
‘Nêki, aô porsiš?’ came Fara’s indignant voice, as she made an angry splash in the water.
‘But—but what if—’ Maćij broke off, his voice thick with conflicting emotions. He couldn’t give voice to it. What if she wound up again in a family way, and lost this child the same way she’d lost Javâd? But Fara shook her dripping black locks and kept rearing her swarthy torso back against her husband’s pale loins. She’d already guessed at where his thoughts had gone.
‘If my heart has to break again,’ Fara cried, ‘let it break when I’m in your arms! Don’t let me go!’
That bout finished, gloriously, just the way Fara wanted. How could a loving husband do otherwise?
After that, the Arcywójwoda’s son and his spouse did use the other amenities of the Spring Bathhouse spa… both according to their intended public use, and for their own private marital pleasure. (The sauna was, after all, equipped with obligingly-wide benches and suitably-absorbent bath-towels, and the various baths of therapeutic mud and thermal brine each, for the adventurous, had their more creative uses.)
That wasn’t to say they spent all that fortnight in lovemaking.
They had unfortunately arrived too late for the spectacular Martinmas bonfires in southwestern Drježdźany—an occasion which also commemorated the Blood Court of Brehna. But Fojtsko still had one of the Archduchy’s best concert halls and opera houses. The Zoological Garden in Pławno had acquired a pair of marals: a diplomatic gift from the Kingdom of Georgia to Moravia. Maćij took his wife as far north as Šwikawa na Modłej to see the Dmitri Gubastov Monument: a heroic equestrian piece in bronze, erected to the memory of the Don Cossacks of the Ryazanian Third Army who had fought to defend Šwikawa from the hated Germans under Karl Haase.
‘It’s entirely too likely that some of your ancestors fought here,’ Maćij noted.
‘Yes—entirely too likely against some of yours, husband,’ Fara answered him with an arched brow. ‘Is this your way of telling me something?’
Maćij gave a shrug and an ironic smile. ‘Not at all! Unless that “something” is simply that I know how deeply you cherish your babuška and your Cossack blood, and thought you’d appreciate seeing this place.’
Fara gave him a faint smile and a gleaming look of one doe-brown eye. ‘Well. You wouldn’t be at all wrong about that. Spasibo tebe, moj dorogoj, moj prekrasnyj vrag!’
Also—despite the bare trees and chilling weather of late autumn that required some forethought in dress—there were some remarkably pleasant nature walks in the Maiden-Green and the Haarbach Valley, in the hills just adjacent the Moravian border north of Cheb. (One had to be careful one didn’t trespass into Germany, however.) But when evening came, and then night, there was always the canopied bed awaiting them back in the Kupjelow Halštrowa. Despite the soft, downy appointments of that furnishing, it was spent less for sleeping than for renewed sessions of strenuous exertion.
By the time the carriage took them back home through Kamjenica and Šwikawa on their three-day return journey, Maćij was thanking God for Šahrazade and the excellent notion she’d supplied him. All in all, it was a thoroughly pleasant, agreeable and satisfying holiday for the two of them. Fara and Maćij were as close together, heart, soul and body, on their carriage ride back to Drježdźany as they had ever been since they were first married. And maybe even closer than then! The two of them had been children back then, knowing nothing of life. But since then, Fara and Maćij had become teacher and pupil; they had become comrades in a common cause; and they had been bereaved together; and all their class differences and cultural gaps and doubts and struggles and losses had only served to draw them closer together where they might easily have driven them apart.
But by the time Maslenica came that year with its attendant festivities, and Fara had passed her forty-second birthday on the third of February, knew for certain that she was in a family way.
Wife gave husband the news aglow, but for them both that joy was subdued with an equal dose of terror and looming dread. After the disasters that had befallen four of their other offspring, did they dare to hope that a happier fate awaited this one? And Fara pregnant again, at her age? When the baby wasn’t keeping her up with kicking, Fara discovered that she couldn’t fall asleep without Maćij’s arm draped over her. Even though she knew he couldn’t protect her from the heartbreak, now much nearer and much more real and threatening to her than it had been in the bath at Halštrow, Maćij’s presence at her side was warm enough to let her close her eyes… for these few precious moments.
INTERLUDE THREE-QUARTERS.
The Halštrow Baths
26 November 1844 – 3 February 1845
As he disrobed in the dressing room, Maćij wondered once again whether he’d done the right thing.
The trip from Drježdźany to Kupjelow Halštrowa was uneventful: three days by horse-drawn carriage, from the middle of the Arcywójwodstwo to the southwesternmost edge, with overnight stays in the suburbs of Kamjenica (Kamenica) and in Šwikawa na Modłej (Cvikov nad Muldou) en route. But the distance between the Sorbian capital and the famous spa village was never what daunted him.
For over two years now, he hadn’t seen a true smile come to his wife’s face. That she was grateful to him for his efforts to comfort her and empathise, he didn’t doubt. But he wondered if the wounds from the loss of their children—three to the Flemish sickness, and one to stillbirth—hadn’t simply been too much to bear. Fara had thrown herself into charitable and activist efforts: and her work with mothers who had likewise lost children to disease was the cause nearest to her heart. She was working with several other bereaved mothers to draw up a plan for ‘sick funds’, to be implemented locally in rural villages or in workplaces. Maćij, of course, supported her efforts. He would have been delighted to see her this engaged at any other time, but the feelings clearly still ran too raw for her.
Maćij sat naked on the bench, glaring at the frosted-glass panes of the door that led to the thermal mineral bath. Once again he doubted if this was a good idea after all. He remembered the darkening of Fara’s heavy black brows when she heard of the immense and lavish parties that were being thrown in the mansions and clubs and opera halls of Praha by the wealthy Czechs of that town… all while countless hundreds of thousands were barely scraping by, and who knew how many shivering and starving in miserable silence?
In that light, was it not a bit… ostentatious… to reserve an entire wing of the Spring Bathhouse at Kupjelow Halštrowa (with brine and mineral thermal baths, mud bath, and sauna) for two whole weeks, just for his and Fara’s private use? Would she take it as a romantic gesture? Or would she disdain it as a misguided attempt at placation, and a misuse of his lordly prerogative and status? Maćij sighed. Well. There was only one way to find out.
He stood up, wrapped a towel around his waist, and went out into the bath.
It was late November and cold outside, but the covered thermal pool in their reserved wing of the Bathhouse was saturated in sultry steam.
At the edge of the thermal mineral pool, he saw a familiar and welcome silhouette. On approach, he saw a slender hand dipping and ladling the pyretic, crystal-clear water over a smooth, naked caramel shoulder, and a head of glistening, lank black waves of hair reclining in a pose of contented relaxation. Fara heard Maćij’s footfalls over the flagstones lining the pools, and she turned to face him. Her umbral southwest-Asiatic features lit up brightly as she saw him. That heart-melting doomsday weapon of hers finally made its first appearance in two years—two fine rows of glistening white teeth between full dark lips, giving him just the reaction he’d hoped for.
‘Enjoying the water?’ asked Maćij.
‘Too much,’ replied Fara. ‘I haven’t felt this relaxed in years!’
‘Think I’ll just dip a toe in first,’ Mac said. Finding it pleasantly balmy but not scalding, he slid his whole foot into the water, then sat on the edge of the pool and kicked both his calves down in. He sat next to his bathing wife. To his surprise and delight, Fara turned and leaned against his leg, pressing her cheek and shoulder against it.
‘I didn’t think there could be any pain worse than losing a child,’ she unburdened herself. ‘It turns out that losing four is worse, far out of proportion. Losing our sons, losing Zusi… and never getting to meet Javâd… But you were with me. The whole time, you were there.’
Mac stroked the long wavy strands of her wet hair. ‘Where else could I have been?’
Fara lifted an arm out of the water and gesticulated around her. ‘You’re the Arcywójwoda’s son. You could have been anywhere. I told you after our wedding, remember? You could have flown away from me long before now. You didn’t have to stay with me while my heart was being cut out, day after day, into small pieces. And there was nothing to be said or done to lessen the sting. But I can’t possibly say to you how much it means to me, that you never left my side, as near me as my liver.’
Maćij hugged her bare shoulder. ‘Well, that goes both ways. You agreed to come with me.’
Fara turned a shrewd look up at her husband. ‘What? You thought I’d resent coming here?’
‘Well…’ Maćij trailed off with a nervous laugh.
Fara laughed back—a peal of pure delight—as she splashed her husband with the mineral bathwater in good-natured reproach. ‘Oh, ‘Azizam. Maybe it makes me a hypocrite, I don’t know, but… if I’d had any objections to coming here with you, I had three whole days and two whole nights to voice them. Besides, I know you’ve been looking for a good place to catch me alone for months.’
‘Oh? And how do you figure that?’
‘I don’t wash my hair in a mill,’ Fara chided her husband, flicking another handful of water up at him. ‘You think I don’t know what the men in your family, ah, “get up” to when they bring their women to places like this? And even if I didn’t: that’s, um… quite the tent you’re pitching, under that towel.’
Maćij felt his face redden, for reasons which had nothing to do with the steamy heat of the bath. Fara slid herself around his knee and knelt in the water in front of him, reaching up out of the water once more and tugging the towel away from his loins and ‘tent-pole’.
‘That’s better, no?’ Fara purred. ‘Come on. The water’s great. Slide in with me.’
~~~
Fara knew exactly where she was leading, as soon as he was in the water with her. With the privacy that their reserved wing of the Spring Bathhouse afforded, and the steamy, comfortable warmth of the naturally-heated effervescent mineral bath—how could the Sorbian-German-British nobleman and his Tât-Russian Cossack peasant wife possibly keep their hands and lips and bodies off of each other? With no one else around to hear them, the steamy air was soon full of the sounds of their gusty breaths, male and female in the primal duet. About ten minutes later:
‘I’m getting incorrigible as I age,’ Fara mused in between gasps. ‘I’m past forty, and the only thing on my mind is getting a taste of your—!’
‘Here, then! Have as much as you like—!’
Nothing that might have been comprehensible to anyone else followed that, until:
‘Don’t you dare pull out of me!’
There was a break; a pause in their breathing. ‘You sure?’
‘Nêki, aô porsiš?’ came Fara’s indignant voice, as she made an angry splash in the water.
‘But—but what if—’ Maćij broke off, his voice thick with conflicting emotions. He couldn’t give voice to it. What if she wound up again in a family way, and lost this child the same way she’d lost Javâd? But Fara shook her dripping black locks and kept rearing her swarthy torso back against her husband’s pale loins. She’d already guessed at where his thoughts had gone.
‘If my heart has to break again,’ Fara cried, ‘let it break when I’m in your arms! Don’t let me go!’
That bout finished, gloriously, just the way Fara wanted. How could a loving husband do otherwise?
After that, the Arcywójwoda’s son and his spouse did use the other amenities of the Spring Bathhouse spa… both according to their intended public use, and for their own private marital pleasure. (The sauna was, after all, equipped with obligingly-wide benches and suitably-absorbent bath-towels, and the various baths of therapeutic mud and thermal brine each, for the adventurous, had their more creative uses.)
That wasn’t to say they spent all that fortnight in lovemaking.
They had unfortunately arrived too late for the spectacular Martinmas bonfires in southwestern Drježdźany—an occasion which also commemorated the Blood Court of Brehna. But Fojtsko still had one of the Archduchy’s best concert halls and opera houses. The Zoological Garden in Pławno had acquired a pair of marals: a diplomatic gift from the Kingdom of Georgia to Moravia. Maćij took his wife as far north as Šwikawa na Modłej to see the Dmitri Gubastov Monument: a heroic equestrian piece in bronze, erected to the memory of the Don Cossacks of the Ryazanian Third Army who had fought to defend Šwikawa from the hated Germans under Karl Haase.
‘It’s entirely too likely that some of your ancestors fought here,’ Maćij noted.
‘Yes—entirely too likely against some of yours, husband,’ Fara answered him with an arched brow. ‘Is this your way of telling me something?’
Maćij gave a shrug and an ironic smile. ‘Not at all! Unless that “something” is simply that I know how deeply you cherish your babuška and your Cossack blood, and thought you’d appreciate seeing this place.’
Fara gave him a faint smile and a gleaming look of one doe-brown eye. ‘Well. You wouldn’t be at all wrong about that. Spasibo tebe, moj dorogoj, moj prekrasnyj vrag!’
Also—despite the bare trees and chilling weather of late autumn that required some forethought in dress—there were some remarkably pleasant nature walks in the Maiden-Green and the Haarbach Valley, in the hills just adjacent the Moravian border north of Cheb. (One had to be careful one didn’t trespass into Germany, however.) But when evening came, and then night, there was always the canopied bed awaiting them back in the Kupjelow Halštrowa. Despite the soft, downy appointments of that furnishing, it was spent less for sleeping than for renewed sessions of strenuous exertion.
By the time the carriage took them back home through Kamjenica and Šwikawa on their three-day return journey, Maćij was thanking God for Šahrazade and the excellent notion she’d supplied him. All in all, it was a thoroughly pleasant, agreeable and satisfying holiday for the two of them. Fara and Maćij were as close together, heart, soul and body, on their carriage ride back to Drježdźany as they had ever been since they were first married. And maybe even closer than then! The two of them had been children back then, knowing nothing of life. But since then, Fara and Maćij had become teacher and pupil; they had become comrades in a common cause; and they had been bereaved together; and all their class differences and cultural gaps and doubts and struggles and losses had only served to draw them closer together where they might easily have driven them apart.
But by the time Maslenica came that year with its attendant festivities, and Fara had passed her forty-second birthday on the third of February, knew for certain that she was in a family way.
Wife gave husband the news aglow, but for them both that joy was subdued with an equal dose of terror and looming dread. After the disasters that had befallen four of their other offspring, did they dare to hope that a happier fate awaited this one? And Fara pregnant again, at her age? When the baby wasn’t keeping her up with kicking, Fara discovered that she couldn’t fall asleep without Maćij’s arm draped over her. Even though she knew he couldn’t protect her from the heartbreak, now much nearer and much more real and threatening to her than it had been in the bath at Halštrow, Maćij’s presence at her side was warm enough to let her close her eyes… for these few precious moments.
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