In a human voice, the birch replied, ‘I’ve served you for many years. You’ve never once even tied a thread round my trunk, but the little girl gave me a pretty ribbon!’
Yaga stopped shaking the birch tree and turned instead to her maid, ‘Lazy, sponging slut! How dare you let the little girl out of the hut? How dare you leave me without any supper?’
She punched the maid with her fists. She gnashed her teeth at her. She kicked her in the back with her bone leg.
And the maid replied, ‘I’ve served you for many years. You’ve never once given me so much as a torn rag, but the little girl gave me a pretty kerchief!’
Yaga wanted to gnaw her maidservant to death, but she didn’t have time. She had to catch up with the little girl.
Yaga crawled down into the storeroom. She got out her copper mortar and rolled it along the ground. She found her pestle and her broom. She got into the mortar – and off she went, crashing and rumbling.
Yaga hurtled on in her mortar, spurring it on with her pestle, sweeping up her tracks with her broom.
The little girl felt the earth start to shake. She put her ear to
the ground and listened: Yaga was catching up with her. She was very close indeed.
The little girl remembered what the cat had said and threw down the towel he had given her.
The towel fell on the grass and turned into a broad, broad river. It was so broad that you wouldn’t be able to cross it even in three days.
Baba Yaga hurtled up to the edge of the river and stopped. What could she do? How could she cross the water in a copper mortar?
Baba Yaga ground her teeth, banged her pestle and returned home. Then she herded her oxen together, drove them to the river and ordered them to drink up the water.
The oxen drank and drank. They drank and drank until they had drunk the river dry.
Baba Yaga got back into her mortar. She set off again over dry land. The mortar roared and rumbled. She spurred it on with her pestle and swept up her tracks with her broom.
The little girl felt the earth start to shake. She put her ear to the ground and listened: Yaga was catching up with her again. She was very close indeed.
The little girl remembered what the cat had said, took the comb and threw it down on the path behind her.
And straight away a dense, dark forest rose out of the earth. It was so dense and so dark that not even a worm would have been able to worm its way through – let alone a human being.
But Baba Yaga knew nothing of this. She hurtled on in her mortar, spurring it on with her pestle. She was determined to catch up with the girl.
‘I didn’t get any lunch,’ she was thinking, ‘but it doesn’t matter. There’ll be all the more room for my supper.’
Her mortar knocked and banged and rumbled. Pillars of dust twisted into the sky.
Yaga hurtled on towards the forest – but there was no way through. There was no way she could pass through the trees.
Baba Yaga got out of her mortar, ran to the very edge of the forest and began gnawing the trees. She gnawed and gnawed – but
after gnawing for a long time she had felled only ten oaks. All she had really done was to make her teeth even sharper.
Yaga made her way back home.
The girl’s father was also on his way back to his hut. When he got in, he asked, ‘Where’s my daughter?’
The stepmother replied, ‘She’s gone to her auntie’s.’
The father didn’t believe this.
And then, all of a sudden, there was his daughter. Her face blank from terror, she came running in as fast as her legs would carry her.
‘Where have you been, my darling?’ he asked her.
‘My stepmother sent me to my auntie’s to ask for a needle and thread so she could sew me a shirt. But this auntie is a Baba Yaga, Bone Leg, and she wanted to eat me.’
‘Dear daughter, how did you manage to get away from her?’
And the girl told her father everything: how her real auntie had given her wise advice, how the tomcat had pitied her and given her a comb and a towel, how the maid had disobeyed Baba Yaga and not heated the bathhouse. She told her father about the gate and about the dogs and about the birch tree.
Her father was very angry when he learned that his wife had wanted to feed his daughter to Baba Yaga. He took a large stick and drove the wicked stepmother out of the hut.
And he and his daughter lived and prospered.
I was there, and I drank mead and beer. It ran down my beard but did not pass my lips.
(a story from a stranger)
Do you remember that tragic death? The death of that artful Edvers? The whole thing happened right in front of my eyes. I was even indirectly involved.
His death was extraordinary enough in itself, but the strange tangle of events around it was still more astonishing. At the time I never spoke about these events to anyone. Nobody knew anything except the man who is now my husband. There was no way I could have spoken about them. People would have thought I was mad and I would probably have been suspected of something criminal. I would have been dragged still deeper into that horror – which was almost too much for me as things were. A shock like that is hard to get over.
It’s all in the past now. I found some kind of peace long ago. But, you know, the further my past recedes from me, the more distinctly I can make out the clear, direct, utterly improbable line that is the axis of this story. So, if I am to tell this story at all, I have to tell you all of it, the way I see it now.
If you want to, you can easily check that I haven’t made any of this up. You already know how Edvers died. Zina Volotova (née Katkova) is alive and well. And if you still don’t believe me, my husband can confirm every detail.
In general, I believe that many more miracles take place in the world than we think. You only need to know how to see – how to follow a thread, how to follow the links in a chain of events, not rejecting something merely because it seems improbable, neither jumbling the facts nor forcing your own explanations on them.
Some people like to make every trivial event into a miracle.
Where everything is really quite straightforward and ordinary, they introduce all kinds of personal forebodings and entirely arbitrary interpretations of dreams, made to fit their stories. And then there are other, more sober, people who treat everything beyond their understanding with supreme scepticism, dissecting and analysing away whatever they find inexplicable.
I belong to neither of these groups. I do not intend to explain anything at all. I shall simply tell you everything truthfully, just as it happened, beginning at what I myself see as the story’s beginning.
And I myself think the story begins during a distant and wonderful summer, when I was only fifteen.
It’s only nowadays that I’ve become so quiet and melancholic – back then, in my early youth, I was full of beans, a real madcap. Some girls are like that. Daredevils, afraid of nothing. And you can’t even say that I was spoiled, because there was no one to spoil me. By then I was already an orphan, and the aunt who was in charge of me, may she rest in peace, was simply a ninny. Spoiling me and disciplining me were equally beyond her. She was a blancmange. I now believe that she simply wasn’t in the least interested in me; but then neither did I care in the least about her.
The summer I’m talking about, my auntie and I were staying with the Katkovs, who lived on a neighbouring estate, in the province of Smolensk.
It was a large and very sweet family. My friend Zina Katkova liked me a lot. She simply adored me. In fact the whole family were very fond of me. I was a pretty girl, good-natured and lively – yes, I really was very lively indeed. It seemed I was charged up with enough joy, enough zest for life to last me till the end of my days. As things turned out, however, that proved to be far from the case.
I had a lot of self-confidence then. I felt I was clever and beautiful. I flirted with everyone, even with the old cook. Life was so full it filled me almost to bursting. The Katkovs, as I’ve said, were a large family and – with all the guests who had come for the summer – there were usually about twenty people around the table.
After supper, we used to walk to a little hill – a beautiful, romantic spot. From it you could see the river and an old abandoned mill. It was a mysterious, shadowy place, especially in the light of the moon, when everything round about was bathed in silver, and only the bushes by the mill and the water under the mill-wheel were black as ink, silent and sinister.
We didn’t go to the mill even in daytime – we weren’t allowed to, because the wooden dam was very old and, even if you didn’t fall right through it, you could easily sprain your ankle. The village children, on the other hand, went there all the time, foraging for raspberries. The canes had become dense bushes, but the raspberries themselves were now very small, like wild ones.
And so we would often sit in the evenings on the little hill, gazing at this old mill and singing all together, ‘Sing, swallow, sing!’
It was, of course, only us young who went there. There were about six of us. There was my friend Zina and her two brothers – Kolya, who was the elder by two years, and Volodya, who is now my husband. At the time he was twenty-three years old, already grown-up, a student. And then there was his college friend, Vanya Lebedev – a very interesting young man, intelligent and full of mockery, always able to come up with some witticism. I, of course, thought he was madly in love with me, only trying his best to hide it. Later the poor fellow was killed in the war … And then there was one more boy – red-haired Tolya, the estate manager’s son. He was about sixteen years old and still at school. He was a nice boy, and even quite good looking – tall, strong, but terribly shy. When I remember him now, he always seems to be hiding behind somebody. If you happened to catch his glance, he would smile shyly and quickly disappear again. Now, this red-haired Tolya really was head-over-heels in love with me. About this there could be no doubt at all. He was wildly, hopelessly in love with me, so hopelessly that no one even had the least wish to make fun of him or to try to laugh him out of it. No one teased him at all, though anyone else in his position would have been granted no mercy – especially with people like Vanya around. Vanya even
used to make out that Fedotych the old cook was smitten with my charms: ‘Really, Lyalya, it’s time you satisfied poor Fedotych’s passion. Today’s fish soup is pure salt.
1
We can’t go on like this. You’re a vain girl.
You
may enjoy his suffering – but what about
us
? Why should
we
be punished?’
Tolya and I often used to go out for walks together. Sometimes I liked to get up before dawn and go out to fish or pick mushrooms. I did this mainly in order to astonish everyone. People would walk into the dining room in the morning for a cup of tea and say, ‘What’s this basket doing here? Where have all these mushrooms come from?’
‘Lyalya picked them.’
Or some fish would suddenly appear on someone’s plate at breakfast.
‘Where’s this come from? Who brought it?’
‘Lyalya went fishing this morning.’
I loved everyone’s gasps of astonishment.
So, this redheaded Tolya and I were friends. He never spoke to me of his love, but it was as if there were a secret agreement between us, as if everything was so entirely clear and definite that there was no need to talk about it. Tolya was supposed to be a friend of Kolya Katkov, although I don’t really think there was any particular friendship between them. I think Tolya just wanted to be a part of our group; he just wanted the opportunity to stand behind someone and look at me.
And then one evening we all of us, including Tolya, went off to the hill. And Vanya Lebedev suddenly decided that each of us should tell some old tale or legend, whatever they could remember. The scarier, the better – needless to say.
We drew lots to decide who should begin. The lot fell to Tolya.
‘He’ll just get all embarrassed,’ I said to myself, ‘and he won’t be able to think of any stories at all.’
But, to our general astonishment, Tolya began straight away: ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you all for a long time, but somehow I’ve never got round to it. A story about the mill. The story’s quite true – only it’s so strange you’d swear it was just a legend. I heard it from my own father. He used to
live six miles away, in Konyukhovka. It was when he was a young man. The mill had been out of use for a long time even then. And then an old German with a huge dog suddenly came along and rented the mill. He was a very strange old man indeed. He never spoke to anyone at all; he was always silent. And the dog was no less strange; it would sit opposite the old man for days on end, never taking his eyes off him. It was only too obvious that the old man was terribly afraid of the dog, but there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. He seemed quite unable to get rid of the dog. And the dog just kept on watching him, following the old man’s every movement. Every now and then the dog would suddenly bare its teeth and growl. But the peasants who went there for flour said the dog never attacked any of them. All it ever did was look at the old man. Everyone found this very odd. People even asked the old man why he kept such a devilish creature. But there was no chance of getting any reply out of him. He simply never answered a word … And then it happened. All of a sudden this dog leaped on the old man and bit through his throat. Then the peasants saw the dog rushing away, as if someone were chasing it. No one ever saw the dog again. And the mill’s been empty ever since.’
We liked Tolya’s old legend. Vanya Lebedev, however, said, ‘That’s splendid, Tolya. Only you missed out a few things. And really it should be more scary. You should have added that the mill has been under a spell ever since. Whoever spends one whole night there will be able, if ever he wishes, to turn himself into a dog.’
‘But that’s not true,’ Tolya replied shyly.
‘How do you know? Maybe it
is
true. We simply don’t know. I’ve got a feeling that that’s the way it is. It’s just that no one’s tested this out yet.’