Woman Made Out of Lace

Woman Made Out of Lace

She tied a knot at the end of the string. The strand eased into the eye of the sewing needle, lifting and descending like a waterfall of memory. She opened the pattern with the first stitch through circles of repetitive motion that unleashed a cascade of see-through ivory threads. The emerging web flowed onto her lap. Her gestures maintained a watery trait, at times mirroring the wrinkled rivers on her face. Despite her twilight years, she overcame the pulsing of her slouchy body, as if stitching liberated the old age restrictions. Deep into the process, she leaned back in her rocking chair with a suddenness of pain emanating from the thin seam of her mouth. She remembered the blatant ruby against the blanching of her early lace. The sharp pricks on her index finger released flecks of crimson, confronted immediately with the scolding voices. In those days, her learning hands were too small for a thimble.

She hid among the rustling giants of grain. Her plump head moved from side to side towards the emergent skylight, searching for late autumn’s sunbeams. She liked to disappear within this bread-making territory when she felt the immediacy of her father’s chastisement thickening in their shack. The girl carried a fresh redness of labour on her rustic skin, proudly clinging to her doll Luda. Through lack of toys, the children of the Anielin village made their dolls with corn, transforming nature’s eclectic designs into reimagined limbs. Once stripped of the encompassing verdure of long leaves, Luda displayed strings of pale hair on top. To complete its appearance, the doll needed a sketch of facial features with an aniline tint of plain black, which the children had quietly purloined from a dyehouse on the fringe of the countryside. The girl embellished Luda’s modest stature with an additional wraparound garment which was her first attempt at a linen lace. Uneven rows and tendons formed a pattern of hasty paper-cutting that unveiled a repeated merging of curvy angels. Although some had their legs entwined, most remained wingless creatures, forgetting how to fly.

She reached the end of the pasture, letting herself sink into a meadow that stretched before the forest. Her little hand enabled Luda to tiptoe atop the tall grassland in a playful self-conversation. The lace-shrouded corn soon drowned in the shadows of the canopies that interrupted their theatre of deception. As she grudgingly followed the pathway to her hut, she noticed a man who stood astride the land. Not fully aware of the reason for her presentiment yet, she fled from this intrusion into the field. But her childhood was cast out of the boundaries of innocence, taking wing where the lace angels could not reach. The soil that granted life to wheat was unruffled towards the faltering beating of her surviving heart. When she finally opened her eyes, she saw the corn remnants of what used to be Luda. It was a crushed maize without her linen robe, its eyes wiped with the choking sludge. The wizened woman completed half-single crochets.

Three mesh patterns, fourth and fifth rows. Not far from her village, the metropolitan ladies taught rural girls, like herself, to produce the unduly desired lace, replacing the low-priced linen with the more expensive cotton or even silk. Enticed with the possibility of social mobility, the peasant women arrived in the city in droves, only to realise that the cheap work would quickly waste away their youth. She was fourteen at the time of crocheting within the constraints of her chamber, located behind the masonry stove. The girl was unseen by the blind eye of her mistress who ignored her husband’s frequent incursions into her room. Though she was not yet a woman, she knew why none of the housemaids from Anielin stayed in these tenements indefinitely. Linen was never equal to silk, but lace morphed into a breath of emancipation, allowing the girl to continue to stitch her earnings for city production from Anielin. And so, her mesh had transformed into shoes for her brother, while she finished the spidery bridge that connected the two separate motifs of her doily.

When she started the subsequent patchwork of a daisy, the villagers gathered in Anielin’s barn for Dozhinki, a yearly harvest festival. The women’s braids accentuated their youthfulness with the thickness of their hair. This hairstyle was shaped like a crown and decorated with the jewels of cornflowers and yellow buttercups that the girls had collected during the time of the matutinal dew. The flowers now perched on their hair like cabbage white butterflies.

She framed her long neck with a coral necklace, a handmade chain stitch of rowan berries. The rural costumes were modestly cut, but their colour scheme contrasted the decaying timber of the barn. Her traditional skirt devised alternating stripes of pink, blue and green, whereas her white blouse with puffed sleeves moved with the rhythm of the draught. She had decided to enrich her shirt further with embroidery of lace poppies that caught her community’s attention. Still her fairness was promptly forgotten beneath the wall when a busker began to play a folk melody on his violin. Unchained braids flew in the air, led by the sturdy boys in the frenzy of obertas. At times, the music perished among the shrieks of mischievous joy, while the wooden floor was being riddled with leather boots. During this trance-inducing spinning in the room, the girl was scrutinised by an elder widower who worked in the mill; after the song had concluded, he marched fiercely towards her, grabbing her hand and conducting her bafflement into the following dance of a polonaise.

She was married to him within three months. In line with the local superstition, she had to wear lace around her weather-beaten forehead, which protruded from underneath the caul that surrounded her dismayed face. All these layers were put on her muffled bearing during the wedding ceremony as a symbol of entering into a cluster of the village’s wives. An old hag warned her that night that if she were to neglect this custom, her husband’s windmill would be devoured by an all-encompassing fire from a lightning strike. Now, as she reconstructed her memory through the presence of crocheting, she suddenly wished she had taken it all off.

Thunder struck the day she naively believed that her arranged marriage would overturn the foregoing experience of violence. As time had passed, the enclosure of their land turned into an open space, which situated her without womanly walls of safety. She had never wished to weave a motherhood, but children were forced into her world unasked. Like her mother, she withheld herself to protect them; detached from this generational cycle that now advanced her daughters as well, she silently watched them disappear on the horizon with their browsing cows. From then on, she only counted the stitched walls of her marriage – seventeenth and twentieth loops – while a crocheted veil meandered between the memories of her childhood and youth, where she had been a girl and a woman, a doll and a wife, and then finally a seamstress.

The husbands would depart first, unknowingly weighed down with a curse of increased physical weariness for their rampant idea of coexistence. At last, the female villagers unearthed their needles, clenching them as if they were an anchor of permanence. Once the space of the cottage filled with the booming laughter, the woman covered herself with a flower-patterned kerchief. In spite of her illiteracy, she was the unanimous mentor of this simple factory. The old age revolved into an unforeseen refuge, letting her exchange patterns of lace with other women. Her braids, no longer golden like wheat, were silvered brooks of intuitive knowledge that mirrored the timely serenades of the fields. Embroidered storytelling, immersed in the remaining single crochets, did not require traditional education after all.

More than she could have said had already been expressed in her lace doily. She felt detached from the timeworn hands that navigated the loops for her, untethered from her supervision. Her recollection transformed into the whiteness of her lace, each crescent of the string humming her presence in the world. Those were the furrowed pieces of her ending existence. By the time she had finalised her bespoke creation, her memory dissolved completely into her craft. All the fractured forms of herself, which would manifest her womanhood, forgot how to fly like her childhood angels. She may have wanted this oblivion, not fully understanding the reason for her ongoing thread. Or perhaps she wished to inspect her crochets one last time before she would cease to be.

The invisible and unnamed woman, who was just a commoner in her milieu, had made herself immortal through knitting. While the intricate webs had been mirroring the wave of her fingers, she had lost one life to be made out of lace. She couldn’t have known if anybody would ever decode her stitches, laced scars of her lifelong textbook of crochet patterns. But her lace continued to listen to unfamiliar stories, outstretched on a table within another shack. She was there as well, as always quietly enduring in a time that only diverged so little from her own laced epoch.