They say that in the village of Ravenholm, which was not truly an island, only a stretch of higher ground between two branches of the river, there once lived a woman named Magdolna, whose year had been so hard that when she finally fell pregnant, she had to bear her husband’s death and the total loss of the harvest within the same twelve months. Her husband, a fisherman named János, went out on the river one early autumn day to bring in the last great catch before winter, and his boat, which he had known safely for years, overturned in a sudden gust at a stretch of water that had never before been dangerous, and János, though he swam well, could not pull himself from the cold water in time. Magdolna was already four months along with her child, and the village women who helped her after the funeral said to each other that they had rarely seen so solitary a widow, for Magdolna had no mother and no wider family left to turn to.
That winter, while she carried her child, was so harsh that the river froze deep beneath its ice, and Magdolna, left alone in the small house, one night when she could barely bear the loneliness and the fear any longer, went out and sat on the threshold, looked up at the stars, and whispered — not to God, not to a spirit, not to anyone, only to the dark sky and the hard, frozen earth — what she had not dared say until then: that she wished the child she carried would bring something good into the world, because her own life had so far brought only sorrow to everyone she loved, and she could not go on bearing that alone any longer.
Ravenholm was a poor village, embraced by two branches of the river, and the people’s lives always depended on which branch flooded and which ran low, since the fields worked between the two branches were never safe from both at once. Magdolna’s house stood on the poorest stretch, close to the point where the two branches had once, long ago, run as a single channel before a great flood split them apart, and the old folk said this place already seemed, in itself, to carry two fates at once, since no one could ever know which branch would decide the year.
By the legend, the earth lying frozen hard beneath her and the sky scattered with stars above gave no answer in words, and Magdolna expected none, only went back inside and lay down, tired from weeping. But when her time came, and the midwife, an old woman named Teréz, helped her from the bed, it was not one child who came into the world, but two: twins, a boy and a girl, and Teréz, who had attended many births, told the village women afterward that she had never seen so strange a pair of twins, for one child’s cry was so strong and clear that it woke the neighboring houses, while the other only whimpered softly, as though it already felt coming into the world as pain.
*
When Teréz set off home that dawn, having helped bring the two children into the world, she told her husband she had felt something strange while holding them: as though they shared a single heartbeat between them, not two equal ones, and as though in one child’s chest that beat sounded stronger, and in the other’s, fainter. She did not know exactly what this meant, only told her husband she would pray for that family every night, for she sensed a hard road lay ahead of them, though she herself did not yet understand why she thought so.
Years later, when Teréz had grown too old to attend births herself, Katalin, whom she had trained, took her place, and it was Katalin who stood beside Veronika when Boldizsár and Veronika’s first child was born. Remembering Teréz’s old words, that one must never believe at once what the village says of a child, Katalin examined the newborn with particular care, in case she might find some strangeness again, but the child proved an ordinary, healthy infant, with no unusual sign at all, and Katalin concluded from this that whatever had happened to Magdolna that old winter could not happen twice in one family, only once, as though fate had asked a single great question and wanted no second one from the same blood.
The boy was christened Boldizsár, the girl Ildikó, and already in the first weeks something showed itself that the village could never truly explain, only accept. That spring, when Boldizsár and Ildikó were born, Magdolna’s small plot of land, which flood or drought had carried off every year before, suddenly gave such an abundant harvest that the neighbors came to see what had happened, and found no other explanation than that perhaps the blessing of children had brought the luck. Yet in that same week, when the children were christened, Magdolna’s one cow, healthy until then, suddenly sickened and died, and though anyone might have called this a simple accident, the village women, who had already begun watching the small family, whispered to each other that fortune and misfortune seemed to follow the twins at once, only not divided evenly.
There was another early incident the village long remembered: on the day of the christening, as Father Elek — not the Elek of Harasztvég other villages tell of, but a plain Ravenholm priest bearing the same name — held both children at once over the font, the church’s oldest candle, which had burned through years of ceremonies without ever running out, suddenly went out for no reason, exactly at the moment Ildikó’s name was spoken. The priest, though he tried not to react with alarm, at once lit a new flame from another candle and went on with the rite, but from that moment everyone present knew that these two children would not be like the village’s other children.
Boldizsár and Ildikó grew less alike in looks too, as they grew, though they were twins: Boldizsár developed into a tall, broad-faced boy, always smiling, while Ildikó became a girl of finer features and quieter movement, who rarely looked anyone long in the eye, as if afraid of what they might read there. The village women, who loved to find signs in everything, wove this outward difference into their story too, saying that fate had walked a separate path with them not only in their hearts but in their bodies, though Teréz the midwife called this too only another shape of fear seeking confirmation in everything.
*
As the years passed, the village came to see the two children as though they stood for two separate fates, not merely two separate people. Everyone welcomed Boldizsár gladly: if a farmer wanted the sowing to go well, he would ask Magdolna to let her son walk the length of the field before it was ploughed; if a woman wanted her hens to lay well, she invited Boldizsár over for an afternoon to play in the yard. Ildikó, by contrast, many began to avoid — not out of malice, but out of fear — and though no one was openly cruel to her, mothers warned their children not to play with her too much, and in the market the women quickly moved their stalls along if Ildikó came near.
There was an old man in the village, Mihály Balla, who had once traveled distant lands as a merchant before growing old and returning to his birth village, and who never shared the others’ fear. Mihály often sat on a bench before his house, and whenever Ildikó passed, he always stopped her for a minute to tell her something of the faraway cities he had seen, and never drew away from her, and never let anyone speak ill of the girl in his presence. When asked why he was not afraid, he answered only that he had seen enough of life to know that misfortune does not come from the one who carries it, but from wherever it comes from, and that blaming a child for what her fate brings is like blaming the chimney for the storm that blew through it.
Teréz the midwife, who over the years watched more and more closely how the two children’s lives unfolded, never let the matter rest when someone showed their fear of Ildikó too openly. Once, when a woman in the market told her daughter to pull her basket away because Ildikó was coming, Teréz, who happened to be standing nearby, spoke so loudly that half the street heard: that the child was every bit as much God’s creature as anyone else, and that if the village kept on this way, it would not drive misfortune off itself, only create a lonely child who, grown, would be left even more alone — and that would be good for no one.
*
Magdolna, who knew why she had wished what she had wished that winter night, never spoke of it to her children, and tried to love them both equally, though this proved harder and harder as the village grew more and more open in treating the two twins differently. In the evenings, putting them to bed, she told them the same story and gave the same number of kisses to each forehead, but she felt that her hand, when stroking Ildikó, sometimes hesitated for an instant, as though afraid of what her daughter carried — and this hesitation, however much she tried to hide it, Ildikó sensed even as a small girl.
Every year, after the harvest, Ravenholm held its own harvest festival, though the village grew no grapes, only fruit and grain, and on this day the whole population gathered in the square to taste the new harvest and give thanks for it. The festival always held one moment the children watched with particular attention: when Father Elek blessed the gathered grain and placed an ear of it in the hands of whichever child was reckoned luckiest, to hold aloft on behalf of the whole village. In the first years this was always Boldizsár, and though he himself felt uncomfortable with the honor, he could not refuse, for the Father Elek who had succeeded his own father insisted on the old custom. Ildikó was never called up for this role, and though she herself never asked to be, being left out stung afresh every year, like a small but constantly returning reminder of where she stood in the village’s eyes.
Boldizsár and Ildikó, though the village might have expected otherwise, stayed closely bound together in childhood, for no one but each other treated them the same. Boldizsár, who quickly understood that he carried a gift he had not sought and had done nothing to earn, often tried to share his luck with his sister: when the children raced each other in the village, and Boldizsár always won no matter how he ran, he tried to pull Ildikó into it too, hoping his luck might rub off on her if they ran together. But it never worked the way Boldizsár wanted: if they ran together, Boldizsár won, but Ildikó fell and scraped her knee, as though fortune and misfortune would not let themselves mix, only run side by side, never intertwined.
The first incident the village long remembered happened when they were seven. The children were playing by the riverbank, and Ildikó, always more careful than her brother, had not even gone near the water, only sat in the grass, watching Boldizsár try to skip stones across the surface. Suddenly, for no reason, a piece of the bank’s earth gave way beneath Ildikó, and the girl slid into the water — though not far — and Boldizsár, hearing her cry, jumped in at once and pulled her out before anything worse could happen. When the village heard the story, they said, see, the boy’s luck saved the girl’s — but Teréz the midwife, by then aging but still sharp-eyed, told the neighbor women in her kitchen that they saw only what they wanted to see: that it was not Boldizsár’s luck that saved Ildikó, but Boldizsár himself, with his own body, by his own decision to jump in for her.
When Magdolna heard what had happened, and saw both her children standing healthy and soaked on the threshold before her, laughing from fear and relief at once, she did not scold them, only sat them both by the fire, and while drying their clothes, told them, for the first time in their lives, where the wish that had brought them into the world came from. The children were still too young to truly understand what this meant, but Ildikó, already then more sensitive to the difference between sounds and silences, sensed that her mother’s voice trembled as she told it, and years later could recall that tremor exactly, whenever she tried to understand why her life was as it was.
That night Boldizsár could not sleep, and crawled into Ildikó’s bed, as small children do when afraid, and told her in the dark that it did not matter if her fate was harder, because he, Boldizsár, would always be there to pull her out, wherever from. Ildikó only answered that she did not want her brother to spend his whole life rescuing her, for that was not fair to him either — but Boldizsár, who did not yet understand what fairness meant in this context, only took her hand and fell asleep beside her, and Ildikó lay awake a long while, listening to her brother’s even breathing.
*
Teréz the midwife was by then nearing her seventieth year, and though her hands still moved surely when called to births, she complained more and more often of her legs, and the village began watching to see who might take up her knowledge after her. She herself had begun training a young woman, Katalin, who was not her own daughter, only an orphan Teréz had taken in years before, and when Katalin asked what she truly thought of the twins, Teréz answered only that she had lived long enough to know that every child was a riddle the village tried to solve according to its own fears, and that Katalin must learn never to believe at once what the village said of a child, before she had seen with her own eyes who that person truly was.
By adolescence the village had already shaped an entirely separate way of treating the two twins. At thirteen, Boldizsár was already being invited by the best farmers to help with the harvest, not because he was especially strong or skilled — though he was not weak either — but because it was held that his presence brought a good crop. He himself began to feel uneasy with this attention, feeling that people did not love him for himself, only for what he brought, and once, when a farmer named Péter boasted especially loudly that the boy had worked his land, Boldizsár quietly walked away, and did not go back to help that day, though he never explained why.
That evening Magdolna asked him what had happened, and Boldizsár, who until then had found no words for his feelings, said he felt like a good-luck charm people hung around their necks, not like a person they wanted to talk to. He said farmer Péter had talked of nothing all day but how much he would gain from the boy having worked there, and never once asked how he felt, or what he wanted to do when he grew up. Magdolna, deeply saddened to hear this, could find no good answer for him, only said that perhaps in time he would find people who loved him for himself, not for what he brought, and that until then he should try to tell the two apart, hard as that might be.
Ildikó’s life, meanwhile, grew harder and harder. At fourteen she fell in love with a boy, Gábor, the blacksmith’s son, and the boy liked her too, but when the smith learned where his son’s eye had fallen, he forbade him firmly to come any closer to Ildikó, saying that near such a girl even the forge-fire would burn worse, and the iron would come out more brittle. Gábor, though he wished to defy his father, in the end yielded, and Ildikó, who learned in a single letter that the boy was betrothed to another, spoke to no one for a long while, only to her brother, who sat beside her all night, not trying to solve her pain, only present with it.
Gábor was never truly happy with that decision, and years later, already married with two children, he happened to meet Ildikó at the well one market day, and told her he had never forgiven himself for not standing by her, and that even now he sometimes wondered what his life might have been, had he been braver. Ildikó, though the old wound still ached, did not wish to hold a grudge, and answered only that she did not blame him either, for she understood how hard it was for someone whose father, beside the forge-fire, had taught him his whole life that anything unusual meant danger.
The smith himself, Gábor’s father, came to regret what he had done in his old age, especially after his own fire once, for some strange reason, would not catch for a whole week, however hard he worked the bellows, and he privately wondered whether this too was a consequence of that old decision, though he never spoke of it openly to anyone but his wife, who reassured him that iron sometimes simply misbehaved, for no reason at all.
There was another case in those years that deepened the village’s fear still further. A young woman, Erzsók, of an age with Ildikó, and the only one among the girls who never turned away from her, fell suddenly and severely ill one day, exactly after spending a whole afternoon with Ildikó in the garden, tying flowers together. The village doctor, who was in truth only an experienced herb-woman, could not say what had caused the illness, and though Erzsók eventually recovered, she lay in bed for weeks, and her mother, though she had never before said an ill word of Ildikó, never again let her daughter near her. Erzsók herself did not share her mother’s fear, and though she obeyed her as a young girl, once grown and keeping her own household, she still came secretly to see Ildikó sometimes in the evenings, when her mother could not see, and the two women, though they never spoke openly of why they had to keep it secret, kept their friendship their whole lives, quietly, as something that need not be known to everyone, only to the two of them.
An even graver case occurred in those years, one the village could never truly forget. On a dry summer night, when Ildikó was sixteen, a fire broke out in the hay barn beside the mill, and though its cause was never determined exactly — most suspected a discarded ember — two barns and a stable burned down, and an old horse, which could not be brought out in time, perished. Because Ildikó happened to have walked by that way that evening, before the fire broke out, some, including the mill’s owner, Boldizsár Kovács — no relation, merely a namesake — openly said that the girl’s presence had summoned the disaster, though no one could find any real cause linking the fire’s start to Ildikó’s walk.
Teréz the midwife, by then quite old but still heard in the council, publicly opposed this claim, saying that if every fire that broke out on a night when Ildikó had walked nearby were blamed on her, then every bad harvest in any year would have to be blamed on her too, and by that logic the village would soon pin every misfortune on a single child — which was not justice, only fear disguising itself as justice. The elders in the end made no formal ruling against Ildikó, but the mill’s owner never truly forgave her, and for years would not let the family’s grain be milled there, until at last his son, who took over the mill, quietly restored the old arrangement, saying — as he put it — that he no longer wished to carry his father’s old fear.
*
As Boldizsár grew older, he felt more and more that the luck he had never asked for raised a kind of wall between himself and other people, since he could never be sure whether they liked him for himself, or only for what he brought. He had one hard year too, at eighteen, when hail destroyed the harvest on the neighboring farm, scarcely a field away from their own, while his family’s crop remained untouched, and Boldizsár, seeing the face of the neighboring farmer, old Tamás, as he looked at his ruined wheat, felt such shame that for days he could not go out onto his own land, feeling that every step he took there was a kind of mockery of his neighbor’s suffering. In the end it was Ildikó who persuaded him to go out and help Tamás with what he could, saying that the shame he sat with at home helped no one, but the two hands he worked with outside could at least make something right.
Veronika, who soon understood her husband’s inner struggle, in time devised a custom the family kept for years: after every harvest, before storing anything in their own barn, they set aside a separate share for whoever had fared badly that year, and this they called not charity, but simply “the shared portion,” as though by this too acknowledging the truth that Boldizsár’s abundance was never entirely his own, but belonged, in some way, to the whole village. At twenty he asked for the hand of a girl, Veronika, from a neighboring village, who did not know his story, and who, upon learning it, said only that she did not care why everything he touched always succeeded, only what kind of man he truly was. This was the first time in Boldizsár’s life anyone had spoken to him this way, and though he was happy, for a long while he could not quite trust that happiness, fearing that Veronika simply had not yet seen what his luck truly meant.
After their engagement, Boldizsár took Veronika to Ravenholm to meet the village, and the first evening, sitting in the kitchen with Magdolna, Veronika asked whether what the neighboring villages said of her children was true. Magdolna, who had learned by then that it was better to speak plainly than to let gossip shape the story, told her the whole truth, from the winter wish onward, all the way to what the whole village had witnessed over the years. Veronika was silent a long while, then said that she came from a family where two of three siblings had died as children, and that she had learned fate was never equal, whether spoken into a wish or not, and that she would rather marry into a family that had faced this truth than one whose luck seemed clean only because no one had ever asked where it came from.
Veronika’s family, when they learned whom their daughter was to marry, worried at first over what they had heard of Ildikó from the neighboring village, but once they met her in person, and saw how carefully she treated her mother and brother, they softened in time, and Veronika’s mother once told her daughter that a girl who could bear so much pain without growing hard from it would surely make a good relation, not a bad one.
Ildikó, meanwhile, grew lonelier, though she did not give up hope of someday finding someone unafraid of her. Once, when she was already twenty-two, a wandering glazier arrived in the village, a man named Simon, who did not know her story, since he came from elsewhere, and who stayed a few weeks to repair the windows the winter had cracked. Simon and Ildikó spent days together while she helped him carry the glass panes, and the man, who knew nothing of the superstitions circling around Ildikó, began to like the girl’s quiet, attentive nature. Once, when Simon accidentally broke a valuable pane meant for a wealthy merchant, and tried desperately to work out how much money he would lose by it, Ildikó helped him gather the shards, and spoke to him so calmly all the while, offering such practical ideas for how he might make up the loss with smaller jobs at other houses, that Simon later told her he had never met anyone who could help like that in a bad situation, without panic. But before anything could develop between them, Magdolna, Ildikó’s mother, fearing another hurt for her daughter, told Simon the story herself, saying it was better he know before he became too entangled. Simon, though not an ill-natured man, could not entirely shake off the fear the news stirred in him, and a few days later, finishing his work, left the village without saying goodbye to Ildikó.
When Ildikó realized why Simon had left so suddenly, and why right after speaking with her mother, she grew angry at Magdolna for the first time in her life, telling her she would rather have carried her pain alone than have someone else decide for her what she deserved to know. Magdolna, though she had acted in good faith, recognized then what a heavy responsibility she had taken upon herself that old winter night when she spoke her wish, and how little she had considered what that wish would mean for her children’s real, everyday lives.
After this Ildikó barely spoke to her mother for a full year, and though they went on living together in the house, their meals passed in silence, and Magdolna, sensing that her daughter’s anger truly sprang from an older, deeper pain, did not try to force a reconciliation, only went in to her every evening once Ildikó had fallen asleep, and stroked her hair, as she had done when she was a small girl, hoping that one day even this gesture would be enough to mend what words could no longer reach.
*
Boldizsár and Veronika’s wedding was held with great celebration, and the village, which had always surrounded Boldizsár with joy, celebrated now doubly, for it was said such a wedding would surely bring a whole year’s abundance to everyone who attended. Ildikó was there too, standing beside her brother through the ceremony, and though she tried to be glad, the guests whispering around her, some even drawing their clothes a little further away as she passed, showed her that even on her own brother’s happiest day, she could not truly share in the joy.
That night, once the wedding ended and the guests had gone home, Boldizsár sought out his sister, who sat alone on the riverbank, in the very spot where, as children, Ildikó had once slid into the water. He sat beside her, and for a long while said nothing, only watched the moonlight on the water with her. At last he told her that his whole life he had wanted to share his luck with her, but had come to realize it would never work the way he wanted, because their two fates were not drawn from one vessel that could be divided, but two separate rivers that, though they rose from one spring, never flowed in a single bed. Ildikó answered that she had long suspected as much, but that what she truly wanted had never been a piece of his luck, only that her brother never leave her — and Boldizsár promised her that this, at least, would always be hers, whatever else their fates might bring.
*
Boldizsár and Veronika’s three children — two boys, Marcell and Dávid, and a girl, little Magdolna, named for her grandmother — all grew up healthy, and of them, the youngest girl especially clung to her Aunt Ildikó, who came over every Sunday afternoon to tell her long tales of the river and the stars, which she herself had heard from her own mother. Little Magdolna was never afraid of Ildikó, for the children born after the twins’ story were already children of a different village — one that knew both Boldizsár’s kindness and Ildikó’s quiet patience as parts of their own family, not as two separate legends.
Years later, when Boldizsár and Veronika already had three healthy, strong children, and the village reckoned Boldizsár’s land the most abundant estate in the region, a severe drought struck the country such as no one had seen before. The river, which had always given freely of its water, began to shrink, and the eldest farmers said they could not remember such dryness their whole lives. The wells dried up one after another, and the women had to walk farther and farther for water, while the children, who had once played all day on the riverbank, could now only run across the dry, cracked mud where the water had once glittered. Farkas Dénes’s own child, a two-year-old girl, grew feverish in the heat, and though she eventually recovered, her father barely slept that week, and many later said that his proposal to send Ildikó away had sprung not from malice, but from fear for his own child — though that did not make his words any more right. The village council, led by Judge Elemér, gathered to discuss what might be done, and someone, a young, impatient farmer named Farkas Dénes, suggested that perhaps Boldizsár’s luck, brought close enough to the river, might bring the water back, while Ildikó, perhaps, would be better kept far from whatever remained.
This proposal, though many felt it wrong even as it was spoken, found an echo in many houses, and some began to whisper that it might be best for everyone if Ildikó left the village, at least until the drought passed.
Old Mihály Balla, who had never turned from Ildikó since her childhood, spoke up at the council house too, though he could barely stand from age. He told Farkas Dénes that in his younger years he had seen many villages where, in a hard year, people always found someone to point to, and that this had never brought water to a river, only poisoned the hearts of those who let fear carry them away. Judge Elemér, himself uncertain what to do, in the end did not put Farkas Dénes’s proposal to a vote, only said they should allow a few more days before any final decision, since a village that made such a decision in haste could never truly undo it later. Boldizsár, hearing these discussions, went angrily to the council house and told the judge that if the village believed his luck alone could solve anything, it deeply misunderstood what it truly was, for the luck he carried had never solved anything by itself, only made the road easier for those who stood beside him — and that if they meant to send Ildikó away, he would have to go first, for he was not willing to live in a village that made his sister a scapegoat for a drought no one had caused.
Ildikó, who happened to overhear this conversation from behind the door, later told her brother she was grateful for his words, but that she herself had been thinking of what she might do, for she did not want anyone to go on suffering because of her, whether that was fair or not. That evening she went down to the riverbank, to the same place where they had spent so much time as children, and sat looking at the dry, pebbled bed, trying to understand whether there was anything she could do about a fate she had never chosen and had never truly understood.
*
That night, while Ildikó sat on the riverbank, Boldizsár came out to join her, and they sat together, as they had so many times as children. Ildikó told him that perhaps the village was right that something needed to be done, only wrong that the solution had to be her leaving, for she had already tried avoiding people, tried making herself smaller to cause less harm, and it had never solved anything, only slowly broken her. She said perhaps the trouble was that the village had always wanted to treat them separately, as though her brother’s fortune and her own sorrow were two separate things that could be split apart, when in truth, she felt, they rose from one and the same spring, and perhaps only together, not divided, could anything be done with them.
The sun was already setting as she said this, and the two siblings’ voices, though tired from the long wait, sounded as calm as they had in childhood, when they used to tell each other about their day each evening before sleep. Boldizsár asked what exactly she meant, and Ildikó, though not fully certain herself, said she remembered their mother once telling her, as a small girl, where the wish that had brought them into the world came from: that Magdolna had asked the stars and the frozen earth that her child bring something good into the world, because her own life had so far brought only sorrow to those she loved. Ildikó said that perhaps the wish had not meant to create two separate children, one for good and one for ill, only to give a single answer to a hard life — and that the answer had come down into the world the way an answer often comes to a hard question: divided, not whole, because a single heart might not have been able to bear both at once.
Boldizsár thought on this a long while, and at last said that if she was right, then perhaps the solution the village sought was not to separate them from each other, but to stand together where the trouble was greatest, and let their two fates, which could never truly be divided, become one again, at least for a moment — just as their mother’s wish had once been one, before it split in two within them.
*
The next morning Boldizsár and Ildikó walked together to the dry riverbed, and the village, which had already heard something of their plan, though no one knew exactly what they meant to do, came out to watch them. There was no magic or ceremony in it that they could perform: they simply sat down together among the dry stones, hand in hand, as they had so often done as children when one of them was hurt or had fallen, and stayed silent, asking for nothing, only being there together, the way they had once set out into the world as one, in a single wish.
The sun stood high, and the stones they sat on grew hot in the heat, but they did not move, even as morning turned to afternoon, and the crowd on the bank slowly thinned, as some grew tired of waiting and went back to their work. Veronika, standing with the children at the edge of the bank, called once to ask if they wanted water brought to them, but Boldizsár only shook his head, feeling that if they stood even for a moment, their silence until then would lose its strength. Ildikó, holding his hand, closed her eyes, and tried to recall the feeling her mother had once spoken of: that before they were born, Magdolna had carried in a single heart the two things they now each carried apart — and Ildikó set herself to restoring that unity, at least in imagination, as though her body might for a moment become her mother’s body again, in which good and ill had not yet split into separate paths.
By the time the sun leaned downward, their clasped hands had gone entirely numb, and neither Boldizsár nor Ildikó could have said how long they had sat there motionless. At one point Ildikó began quietly humming the melody their mother had once sung them as a lullaby, and Boldizsár, though he had never had a good voice, hummed along quietly with her, and the two voices, however uncertain each sounded alone, somehow came together into a whole, in a way their running never had as children.
Judge Elemér, who had led the village’s affairs at the council house for years, always took pride in never rushing a decision, and this patience showed itself now too: when a few younger farmers began restlessly asking how much longer they would have to wait, Elemér only said that a village that had lived beside the river for generations should have learned by now that water, too, has its own time, and that human impatience had never once hurried the rain, only embittered the waiting.
The village standing around them did not know what to expect, and many hoped for some immediate miracle, the water returning at once, or at least a cloud gathering in the sky. But nothing of the kind happened right away, and some had already begun shifting restlessly, when Judge Elemér, standing there himself, hushed them, saying to let it be, for perhaps this was not a matter of an instant miracle, but of something that could not be measured by the hour.
Three days later, when the rain finally came — not as a sudden deluge, but as a slow, steady rain that soaked deep into the dry earth, the kind the farmers said was the best sort, since it did not wash away the soil, only drank it in — the village could not say for certain whether this had anything to do with what the twins had done on the riverbank. Some said it was simple coincidence that the weather turned just then; others said their being together had truly broken the curse their separation had caused. Judge Elemér, when asked what he thought, answered only that he could not say for certain, but that he had seen the village look differently at the twins from that day on, for everyone who had stood on the bank had seen that it was not two separate fates standing side by side, but one, which had only been able to come into the world divided.
Farkas Dénes, who had stood in the crowd when the rain finally arrived, and who held his daughter in his arms that day, healthy and fever-free, went to Ildikó, and though the words came hard, apologized for what he had proposed at the council house. Ildikó, who had learned by then that words born of fear were easier to forgive than those born of malice, only told him she hoped his daughter would stay healthy, and that no one should ever again have to choose the way the village had nearly chosen that winter.
*
From that day on, Boldizsár and Ildikó stopped trying to avoid each other, and stopped trying to share the luck the way they had, in vain, as children. Though misfortune never entirely vanished from around Ildikó — a bad harvest here, a sick animal there still followed her for years, whenever she came near — the village no longer looked at her as it once had, for everyone remembered the dry riverbed and the rain that came after the siblings sat side by side. Some even learned that if trouble struck near Ildikó, it was worth seeking out Boldizsár too, and asking the two of them together for help, since it was held that their presence together balanced out what, separately, they might not have been able to.
A few years after the drought, Mihály Balla’s grandson, a quiet, book-loving young man named Ábel, who had heard the story from his grandfather, and who had never feared Ildikó the way the village’s other young people did, began visiting her regularly, bringing books he bought in the neighboring town. Ábel knew what was said of Ildikó, and did not try to ignore it, but spoke to her plainly about it, telling her he had learned from his grandfather that misfortune is not caused by those close to it, only borne by them, and that he would rather live a life with someone who knew what it meant to endure than with someone who had never learned what it was like when life was not equal. Once, when the village tried again to pin some small new misfortune on her — a broken wheel-hub on a cart that happened to fail just as Ildikó walked by — Ábel stood up among the gossips in the market and simply asked how many wheel-hubs had broken before in the village when Ildikó was nowhere near, and how many had not broken when she was. No one could answer with an exact number, and Ábel drew the public lesson from this that people notice only the cases that confirm their fear, and forget all the days when nothing went wrong, though Ildikó had been there too. From that day some began to see the matter differently, though the old fear never vanished entirely.
Ildikó, who had already given up hope of ever finding someone who would not run once they learned the truth, at first could not quite believe Ábel’s words, but the young man persisted for years, and at last, when Ildikó was twenty-eight, they married, in a quiet ceremony that Boldizsár and Veronika attended too, and on which — the village long remembered this — the weather that day was especially fine and mild for spring, neither too much rain nor too little.
Magdolna, who lived to see her children at peace with their fate, though she never learned for certain how much she had been responsible for all that happened through her old wish, often told her neighbors in her last years that if she could wish again, she would not ask the world for one good thing, but would ask instead that her children be strong enough to bear whatever fate brought, whatever that might be — for this, it seemed, was a far more lasting gift than luck itself. When she grew very old, and could barely leave her bed, Ildikó and Boldizsár sat with her in turns every evening, and once, when both happened to be there together, Magdolna took both their hands, pressed them together beneath her own, and said that now, at last, she saw what she had always wished to see: not two separate children, but her one old wish, which had grown up in two bodies, but returned to her in a single heart.
Both Boldizsár and Ildikó grew old in the village, and though they never lived under one roof once grown, rare was the week they did not see each other at least once. In their old age the village no longer spoke of them as two separate legends, but as one: “the twins,” they simply said, and the younger generations, who had not lived through the old hard years, were often surprised to learn that the two had once been held as two entirely separate fates, for by then Boldizsár and Ildikó’s lives had grown so intertwined in everyone’s eyes that it was hard to imagine one without the other.
The last shared memory the village kept of them belongs to a summer evening when both were past seventy, sitting together on the riverbank, in the very spot where Ildikó had once slid into the water, and where, years later, they had waited together for the rain. A child passing by, who did not know them personally, only knew their names, asked whether it was true that one of them brought fortune and the other sorrow, and Ildikó, before Boldizsár could answer, only smiled, and said that they had long ago learned this was not the point — the point was that whatever they brought separately, together they were always worth more than apart, and that this, perhaps, was true of every pair of siblings, not only them.
In the village they still say, when someone has a hard year, to go down to the riverbank and sit quietly, and if there is someone who will go with them, to hold that person’s hand — for it is said that fortune and sorrow, though they grow up separately in each person, in truth rise from a single spring, and find their true strength only when allowed to become one again, if only for a single night, in a single heart.
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