6 - The Dying Village 2
I went back and forth between the hill behind the village and the houses where my parents and the Daltowa couple were nursing the sick, busily carrying snow berries. Keeping busy helped lift my mood a little. It wasn't my fault that the village chief died, but because I had wished, even once, in my heart, "I hope he dies," having him actually die left me with a strange sense of guilt clinging to me, an unpleasant feeling. When I had nothing to do, all I could remember was having wished for his death, and my mood would sink. Going back and forth between the village and the hill was a good distraction.
Most of the villagers were grateful for my parents' devoted care, but there were some who took their frustration out on them. Asking why they were the only ones who never got sick.
...Well, that's because you all ostracized our family, I thought.
With the mysterious illness spreading through the village, trying to find the source of infection seemed pointless now, but it was probably triggered by Nicola's funeral. The infection spread rapidly from the relatives who carried Nicola's coffin and the villagers who attended the funeral.
...Huh? Was the first one Marcel? Wasn't it Marcel who fell ill first?
I felt like I'd heard that Marcel fell ill and Nicola went to visit him. Marcel recovered once, and then Nicola should have fallen ill after that.
...Wait? But Nicola died first, so did Marcel get infected by Nicola too?
Which was it? I thought about it, then quickly abandoned the thought, it doesn't matter. Even if I pondered the source of infection, there was nothing I could do about it. Even if it was only for peace of mind, I had no choice but to protect myself within my own limits.
"You two are the ones who spread some kind of curse!!"
At first, the villagers had been grateful for my parents' devoted care, but as they gradually lost their restraint, or perhaps began to mistake my parents for their slaves or something, some villagers started saying things like this. Even my parents seemed hurt by this, their faces twisting with frustration, and yet, they still didn't abandon the villagers. When I asked my father if he was still going to nurse the villagers after being told such things, he smiled sadly and said everyone was suffering from illness and couldn't make sound judgments right now. When I asked my mother why she was nursing people who had always ostracized us, she smiled, a little troubled, and said that when people are in trouble, we should help each other.
...The honest ones get taken advantage of, as they say.
That's what I thought, but I also felt somehow that it wasn't the villagers making my father and mother sad and troubled, it was me. My parents were honest to a fault, unable to abandon the villagers. And I was the daughter born to such parents. Even knowing that abandoning the villagers was necessary for survival, I couldn't so easily cast them aside. I decided that at the very least, I would support my parents so that we didn't all go down together.
When I asked my parents if there was anything else I could do besides carrying snow berries, they stopped me, saying they didn't want me getting close to houses with sick people. Even as they risked catching the illness themselves nursing the villagers, they apparently wanted to avoid having their daughter catch it.
...This is bad. My parents in this life... if I don't keep an eye on them, they're going to end up buying expensive vases or something without even realizing it...!
With parents this good-natured, I felt a real mix of emotions, happy, sad, proud, worried, just genuinely complicated.
By the middle of winter, the number of dead began to rise sharply. The symptoms were the same for everyone. First, a high fever that left them bedridden, then just when they seemed to recover a little, their skin grew red and inflamed with intense itching. Some developed pox, and perhaps bacteria entered where they scratched, because they'd spike a high fever again and take to their beds. In severe cases, they'd vomit blood, so if you dissected the bodies like in a drama, you might find pox inside their bodies too.
Over half the villagers died, and my mother Chloe also collapsed with a fever. If it was just exhaustion, that would be fine, but I couldn't help worrying, what if she'd caught the villagers' disease? As I was pacing around my mother's bed, my father sent me off to the Daltowa couple's house.
Once again forbidden from going outside, I found myself constantly gazing out the window. I couldn't bring myself to pass the time playing alone like before. My father and the Daltowa couple had been busy going house to house nursing the sick, but lately they were more often heading to the graveyard carrying shovels. When their figures disappeared from view, I slipped out of the Daltowa couple's house and returned to my own. I understood why I'd been sent away, so I didn't go inside. Instead, I circled around the house and peered through the window of my parents' bedroom.
"Mama, are you okay?"
I tapped on the window and called inside. After waiting a while, my mother's hand, wrapped round and round with bandages, lifted and waved at me.
...There's blood seeping through the bandages. She really did catch the others' illness.
There was no convenient medicine like anti-itch cream. My father had probably wrapped bandages around my mother's hands at least to prevent her from scratching herself raw. If the nails are covered by bandages, they can't damage the skin, and with the fingers immobilized, she can't scratch.
...Maybe I should boil the bandages to disinfect them?
My father and the Daltowa couple still weren't infected. Which meant that masks could prevent infection to some degree. Thinking about it that way, this disease might be spread by droplets. There was no way to know where droplets, from the sick people's saliva or blood, had landed, so we had no choice but to be as cautious as possible about everything.
"Tina-chan, what are you doing!?"
"Wah!?"
Aunt Ulary, who had apparently returned without my noticing, grabbed hold of me and immediately lifted me up. She glanced at what I'd been looking at and quickly realized it was the bedroom window. She seemed to understand that I'd come to see my mother.
"Chloe is sick right now. We sent you to our house because it would be terrible if Tina-chan caught it. Until your mother's illness gets better, let's wait quietly at Auntie's house, okay?"
"...Mm, I'm sorry."
Carried in Aunt Ulary's arms, I returned to the house. Whether because I'd broken the rule about not leaving the house, or because she thought I'd gone to see my mother out of loneliness, Aunt Ulary stayed at home with me the whole day. As I clung to her feet helping with dinner, only my father returned to the Daltowa couple's house.
"...Where's Uncle?"
Was he still working outside? When I asked my father, he smiled, his brows knit in a troubled expression.
"Oban-san is going to take care of your mother tonight."
There was no way I could take my father's words at face value. Oban-san must have caught the villagers' disease too.
By the time most of the villagers had died, my mother Chloe also breathed her last. My father still didn't want to let me outside, but I begged him to at least let me help dig my mother's grave. When I persisted, my father finally accepted this.
...There are so many new graves.
The graveyard was full of small mounds that were clearly freshly made. I couldn't tell which was whose grave. The graves of the villagers who died early on had been prepared by other villagers who were still healthy, so they had some modest decoration, but the graves my parents made after most of the village was bedridden were little more than places where bodies had been buried. There were too many bodies to bury, there was no time to fuss over decoration.
"Papa, whose grave is that?"
Beside me, as I helped dig my mother's grave with a child-sized shovel, though I felt like I was probably just in the way, my father began digging a new grave. Looking at the lines drawn on the ground as a guide, it was an adult-sized grave.
"...There aren't enough graves no matter how many we have right now. Since Tina is helping today, Papa is digging graves for the others."
"Going outside is bad. Papa said so. If you told me, I would help too."
He was the one who'd forbidden me from going outside, and yet he was acting as if I was trying to get out of helping. I puffed out my cheeks in protest. With my mask on, he probably couldn't see much of my expression, but my sulking must have gotten through. My father stopped digging and gave a wry smile.
"It makes Papa happier to have Tina stay quietly at home than to have you helping outside."
"The village people are suffering. Only me, doing nothing. That's weird."
"Tina is still a child. There's not much you can do to help, so the best help you can give is staying inside so you don't catch the illness."
"What I can do, I want to do it."
"Of course, you are helping with what you can. ...There, the soil's getting hard now, isn't it? Switch with Papa."
After digging through the relatively soft upper layer of soil, it turned into hard, clay-like earth. Just as I realized it was beyond a child's strength to dig, I switched places with my father. My father dug the hole I'd been working on deeper, and I started digging anew at the spot where he'd marked out the size.
"...Tina, you can go home now. The agreement was just to dig your mother's grave."
"This one, whose grave?"
I tapped the ground and looked up at my father. He quietly averted his gaze and resumed his work. I waited a while, but no answer came.
...This is probably Papa's grave.
An adult-sized grave being dug next to my mother's, that must be what it meant. My father Saro was preparing his own grave.
The day the Daltowa couple's burial was finished. Perhaps from exhaustion as well, my father finally took to his bed. Just as I'd heard, a high fever persisted, and once it broke, he began to complain of itching. But perhaps because my father had strong self-restraint, or because he couldn't lose himself scratching in front of his young child, he didn't scratch his body the way the villagers had. Perhaps because of that, though his skin was red and inflamed, there wasn't a single wound.
"Tina, you have to wear your mask, you know?"
Like my mother once had, my father moved the mask hanging around my neck back to where it belonged. When the masks were first made, my father had doubted their effectiveness, but now there was no room for doubt. He seemed convinced that the reason only they had avoided infection when all the villagers fell ill was partly due to being ostracized, but also thanks to wearing masks.
"I'll get sick too. Living alone, impossible."
There were still mountains of things I needed to learn about this world's common sense. If I lost the parents who were supposed to teach me those things, there would be no way for me, still only an eight-year-old child, to survive. It was a little frightening, but rather than being left alone in the village to die, I wanted to die together with my father.
"Don't say that. You are my and Chloe's one and only daughter. It would make me sad if you didn't live a long life, for Papa and Mama's sake too."
"But I'll be alone. I don't know what I should do."
If it was just living in the village, I could manage the housework. I'd learned it. But tending the fields while handling all the housework with this small body still seemed impossible.
"The peddler came to the village sometimes, right? Ask him to take you to town, and rely on the orphanage there."
"Ofanage?"
"Orphanage."
My father repeated the word I couldn't pronounce correctly right away several times, teaching me. I kept repeating "ofanage" at his bedside, and when I was finally able to say "orphanage," he gently stroked my head and said, "Well done."
"It's a place that takes care of children who have lost their parents for various reasons. They'll look after children until they come of age."
"No one I know is there. I don't want to."
The reason I was allowed to speak in broken phrases even at eight years old was because I'd grown up in this village. All the villagers knew that I simply wasn't good at talking, but that my hearing was fine and I had sound judgment. It was because I'd basically lived as a good child who followed instructions. But if I had to live outside the village now, this broken speech would be a problem. If I didn't quickly learn to speak this world's language fluently, I might be disposed of as a disabled child. I didn't know whether facilities that protected and raised disabled children even existed in this world. If they killed me because they had no resources to raise a disabled child, then there would be no point in relying on an orphanage to survive. Leaving the village to live elsewhere was too difficult for me as I was now.
"...You'll make lots of friends. There are many children there."
"If there's someone like Marcel, I don't want to."
He had bothered me constantly and caused me trouble, but I should stop speaking ill of the dead. Thinking that, I turned my face away from my father with a huff. My father seemed to remember the long days of my battles with Marcel, and an indescribably subtle smile crossed his face.
"Marcel... well, Tina is cute. No matter where you go, people like Marcel will swarm around you."
"I know. People like Papa, they're called doting parents."
"Papa is not a doting parent. I'm a Tina-fool."
"You admitted you're a fool."
"What's wrong with a father being head over heels for his daughter...!"
With a cough, a cough, my father, who should have been proudly puffing out his chest, suddenly began to choke. Lately, whenever my father tried to raise his voice even a little, he would be unable to breathe for a while, choking. Since my father was desperately holding back the itching, there were few visible pox, but there might have been sores inside his body too, in his lungs, perhaps.
"Papa, are you okay?"
I didn't know if it really had any effect, but without thinking, I rubbed my father's back. It was a gesture I couldn't help making when I saw someone choking.
"Ah, I feel a little better. Thank you. ...But Tina, shouldn't you have added more firewood by now?"
"Firewood, there's still some at Oban-san's house. I'll go get it."
This winter, there was no need to go into the hill to search for extra firewood, what was already in the village was more than enough. The firewood the villagers had gathered in autumn remained, little by little, in every house, because the villagers who were supposed to use it had died. If I collected all of it, there was no need to go into the hills to gather wood.