Here are the opening scenes of the book:
On
a rainy overcast Wednesday in the small town of Velika
Plana a baby girl was born to Dragan and Nevena Stanković. Seen very much
as a miracle – the proud parents were in their mid-forties and had almost given
up hope of ever conceiving a child – it would be no exaggeration to say that
little Milica (as she was soon to be called) came kicking and screaming into this
world. A perfectly natural state of affairs, many would assume. Only she didn’t
stop screaming. Not from the moment she was safely delivered into her mother’s
arms, to the moment Dragan and Nevena left the local hospital the following morning.
Nothing seemed to pacify her. No amount of shushing or cradling or rocking. Even
when her exhausted mother, in the hours immediately following the birth itself,
presented the baby with a teat, she somehow managed to both greedily suck the
milky goodness from Nevena’s swollen breast and continue to cry, sob, wriggle
around, and prostrate herself in a manner the midwife (a veteran of over ten
thousand deliveries) or any of the physicians on duty that day had ever seen
before.
“It’s the most curious thing,” observed Dr
Ivanović. “If I didn’t know any better, I would say the infant actually enjoys
being in a state of utmost distress.”
*
On
their return to the family home, a modest apartment in the working-class
district of town, the concerned parents did everything in their power to try
and settle the baby down – more shushing, cradling, rocking, and feeding. They
even let her suck on a wine-soaked finger (a now frowned upon but nonetheless
effective technique routinely deployed many years ago). And while their efforts
were rewarded with brief periods of respite when Milica had literally screamed herself
to sleep – it didn’t last long. A matter of thirty or forty minutes at a time.
After two sleepless nights, they were nearing
their wit’s end.
“Whatever are we going to do?” asked
Nevena, red-eyed and haggard through exhaustion. “I know all babies cry. But
this isn’t natural. It’s as if God has blessed and cursed us in equal measure,
as if He has given us the one thing we most wanted in life, only for that great
gift to be the most onerous of burdens.”
“I don’t rightly know,” Dragan replied.
“But you can cut out all that superstitious nonsense. Milica is a perfectly
healthy baby. You heard the doctors say so yourself. This is probably just a tetchy
period of adjustment. I’m sure she’ll be right as rain soon.”
But that didn’t prove to be the case, and
it caused untold problems in town.
*
By
the end of the first week of constant bawling all through the night and early
hours of the morning, not to mention the vast majority of the day, the
neighbours started to complain. Not just about the noise, you must understand –
if many a resident did bang a piece of wood against their radiators time and
again when the crying fit reached a feverish late-night or crack of dawn pitch.
But because these were still a deeply superstitious people, regardless of the
incredible technological advances made in recent decades. They saw something
strange and worrying, portentous of evil spirits and bad omens in an infant who
simply wouldn’t stop crying.
“Mark my words,” they said. “This don’t
bode well for any of us. That there little girl is possessed by dark forces. She
be cursed. If we don’t watch out, she’ll bring bad luck upon every decent man,
woman, and child in the region.”
If you like what you've read so far, the book can now be purchased in both paperback and kindle in the UK and US.
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