Egg & Spoon

by Gregory Maguire

  Oh, but what a portrait. The hag flew through the forest in something of a lurch. Her carriage was a narrow wooden bucket. She leaned forward, swinging a stout stake, hitting the ground with it to propel herself along.

  As a man might pilot a small craft by nudging his pole against the bottom of the lake, thought Elena. But men have no magic spell to cry out when their raft unsettles.

  If Baba Yaga had come along to save the drowning. If, if.

  The fragrant, glossy girl: “She flies in a mortar. And the pole is a pestle. Like for grinding herbs.”

  “Everyone knows that. Oh, but look at her vicious eyes. She’s the worst witch in all the Russias. Even were I to starve to death, I wouldn’t ask her for a lump of bread. Or for a little cup of wheat porridge.” Elena paused, sniffing the air. “Or stewed fruit with cinnamon.”

  “I hate wheat porridge. Miss Bristol knows that. She served some this morning anyway. I scowled at her. I won’t give her the satisfaction of watching me take a single bite. She said I’ll have to do triple the number of pages of French translation today unless I eat it, but I just can’t.”

  Elena couldn’t stop herself. “What did you do with your portion?”

  “I left it to turn to stone on the table. And there it still is.”

  The clearing fell silent. Someplace, someone was doing something. A chunk of an ax on a tree trunk, a command of a mother to a disobedient child. Wind tousled the bare branches at the tops of the eternal forest. A small militia of common wrens stormed a bush for berries and found none; most of the wrens disappeared. One stayed behind, lost in thought or maybe curious about humans. Curious to hear what the peasant girl would say next.

  Slowly Elena brought out her thought in words: “I’ll eat it for you.”

  “Would you?” Ekaterina turned her head and looked at Elena. Their eyes were close. They both had green-brown eyes, deep water in a working well. I don’t know if they saw the similarities at once. You can, because I’m telling you.

  Ekaterina said, “You’re not trying to help me out. You’re just greedy, aren’t you?”

  “I’m both,” said Elena. “Also,” she added, “I’m truthful.”

  This made Ekaterina laugh. “Take my book and I’ll fetch the horrid muck.”

  It was frightening to hold Baba Yaga on her lap. So Elena closed the book. She half believed that Baba Yaga might emerge from the picture, right here in Miersk.

  In a moment Ekaterina was back with a bowl and a spoon. There was no way for Elena to bring the porridge home to her mother. She had either to eat it or to let it go to waste. A cramp of guilt gripped her as she swallowed the slippery sweetness of it.

  When she was done, she licked the bowl as far as her tongue would reach.

  “You would not meet with approval in la salle à manger de ma tante,” said Ekaterina.

  Elena didn’t know French, but she understood dismissal. “What are the other pictures like?”

  They peered through the rest of the volume. The pictures showed figures frozen in a bookish world as foreign as it was familiar. Forests and pink skies, birch groves, lunar light upon snow. Magnificent palaces and crisply neat izbas. A Firebird here, a dragon there, and Baba Yaga’s hut, standing on two giant chicken legs.

  All too soon, though, a voice came from inside the railway carriage. It was a word Elena did not recognize. “Yes, Miss Bristol,” replied Ekaterina. “I am coming.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She called me ‘Cat.’ It is a word in English.” As it happened, a starving local cat was sitting not far away, twitching its whiskers at the ghost of wheat porridge. “Cat,” said Ekaterina, pointing at it.

  “Why are you called that?”

  “Cat,” called Miss Bristol again, more fiercely.

  “She calls me that because it sounds like part of my name. Ekaterina. Cat.”

  Elena tried it. “Cat. Cat.” She waited for Cat to ask what her name was.

  “You’d better go,” said Ekaterina, said Cat. “You can’t have the book, though. It’s mine.”

  “I don’t want it. I don’t want to have a picture of Baba Yaga in my home. It might attract the real Baba Yaga in the middle of the night.”

  The other girl stood up and began to hasten a brush through her hair. “You are some superstitious turnip. There is no real Baba Yaga. That’s only a story.”

  “You might have your own chamber and you might have a book,” said Elena, “but you don’t …” She was going to say, “You don’t know a thing about the real world,” but she didn’t want to offend this strange girl. She also wanted more food if she could get it.

  She just let the sentence trail off.

  Ekaterina twisted her hair upon her head and plunged a comb at a wrong angle. It looked as if she had gotten her head caught in a windstorm. Elena laughed.

  Cat: “Why are you snorting like a little celibate pig?”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, I hope. Cat.”

  “All right. We’re not going anywhere in a hurry.” The girl brushed invisible lint off her forest-murmurs skirt. “Do you have a name, by the way, or are you just Peasant Child?”

  “Yes,” said Elena. “I have a name. Good-bye.”

  That morning, what gnawed at Elena wasn’t hunger but shame. She’d been too distracted by the drama of book illustrations to ask for some food for her mother. So she stumbled along the edges of her world. She looked for nettles for soup, borage, mushrooms. Nothing. Only twigs for soup, and old filthy snow.

  Odd, don’t you think, how the hunger of children is so much more affecting to consider than the hunger of a more elderly member of the human family? When the elderly are so much more likely to be humble, loyal, devout? But enough about me.

  Elena found the hut empty but for her sleeping mother, who lay on her side. Such a look on her face, as if she were turning to candle wax. Under the blankets, she’d drawn her knees up. Only the rising and sinking of the blanket showed that her mother was still alive, still breathing.

  “Can you even hear me anymore?” asked Elena.

  Elena pulled the curtains wide. She got the matryoshka and opened it. The great mother’s first offspring, who was also a mother, came out. Next emerged mothers three, four, and five. Then the last of the mothers, the size of Elena’s thumb.

  She shook out the seventh doll. This one was a baby, in clean white swaddle. Eyes closed, smiling. It must be dreaming of breakfast, with all those mothers nearby.

  Elena tried to tuck the baby doll into her mother’s hand, but the hand had gone crooked and wouldn’t take it.

  She sat there at the base of the motherland plateau, looking up and down from the headlands to the foothills. There was no play to invent here. She sat matching her breath to her mother’s, one at a time. The dolls held their breath.

  The door opened. The doctor and his cane, poking.

  Elena fit the dolls together and slipped them into her apron pocket. “I’m glad you’ve come. I’ve had nothing to feed her today, not a scrap.”

  The doctor hobbled over, grunting. He felt her pulse. “Unlike me, she seems to be in no pain.”

  “She’s getting worse, isn’t she?”

  Peter Petrovich Penkin put his head to one side as if trying to shake the right words into place. “There isn’t much worse she can get now. You understand this, I think.”

  Elena’s words came out chock-chock, iron leaves off a sterile tree. “I had a bowl of porridge.” Hatefully: “The girl on the train gave it to me.”

  “It was right you ate it. Your mother would have insisted you did, and she’d have taken none of it even if she were able.” From a pocket the doctor fished a small square of paper. He unwrapped it. Inside, look, some wet tea grounds. “I’ll heat this up again and see if I can get your mother to sip something.”

  As he fussed about the house, he began to cry. It was horrible to see a man cry. Elena thought she should leave. But where could she go? She sat stiffly upon her stool and looked at the i
kon. We need Saint Nicholas, we have a horse doctor.

  Peter Petrovich blew his nose. If that noise didn’t wake Natasha Rudina, only the last trumpet would get through. He said to the girl, “When your mother is gone, you and Alexei and Luka will come and live with me.”

  She had no reply for this. Alexei was in Moscow with the báryn’s family, and who knew where Luka was?

  Peter Petrovich: “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Is there really a witch named Baba Yaga?”

  “If I ever meet her, I will ask her if she is real. But listen. I declare this Pay Attention Day. I am telling you about something else. About what happens next.”

  “Cat said Baba Yaga was only in storybooks.”

  “Cat?”

  “The girl on the train. She has a great-aunt, and a governess, and a butler. She has a book with pictures of Baba Yaga in it. But she says Baba Yaga is pretend.”

  “Moscow girls know Moscow facts, and rural girls know something different. You need to stop talking nonsense and listen to me.”

  “Who are you to scold me?”

  “Dr. Nobody, at your service.”

  Grandmother Onna came in then, blowing on her hands. “How is our martyr to poverty tonight?” she asked the doctor.

  “Which one?” he replied, which made the old woman angry.

  “Your soul of goodness betrays your common sense. We should attack that train. We should break its windows and climb inside. We should find ourselves something to eat. It isn’t fair.”

  “No need for violence. They should offer. They can see we are starving.”

  “They aren’t looking our way,” she snapped.

  “Is Baba Yaga real?” asked Elena. “The girl on the train says she isn’t.”

  “Stop your nonsense.” Grandmother Onna in a rage. “You give me kinks in my patience.”

  The doctor picked up his cane. “You heard me, Elena. You will have a home with me when the time comes.”

  “Have you forgotten? I am going to Moscow to plead with the Tsar,” she reminded him. “The real Tsar, not some butler.”

  “You’ve spouted too much nonsense as it is. Pay Attention Day,” he snapped. “I forbid that.”

  “Pay Attention Day yourself.” Yelling at him. “You’re not my father or my mother, or even one of my stupid brothers. Go jump in the well.” She picked up the broom. There wasn’t much straw in it to be threatening with.

  “Save room in the well for me, I’m right behind you,” said Grandmother Onna to the doctor as they both got ready to leave. To the girl, she said, “I’ll return when you’ve come to your senses, if I haven’t died first.”

  Everyone angry at everyone else. Through the commotion, Mama descended ever more steeply into sunless caverns of sleep.

  Elena didn’t dare leave the hut until the doctor came in the afternoon to sit with her mother and read the psalms of heaven aloud. It was heavenly to escape.

  “The old lizard is having her beauty rest,” said Cat in a false whisper. “As if it could help.”

  “It’s Pay Attention Day,” said Elena. “I truly, truly need some bread.”

  “I can’t distribute our food. What if we run out, here in Nowhere Forest?”

  “I don’t know. But we have nothing to eat, and my mother is very sick.”

  “Well, even if we could spare something, I can’t just give it away for nothing. That would be charity, and demeaning to you. You must work for your food.”

  Alexei was a houseboy picking up things for the báryn’s son, whose legs wouldn’t hold him up. At least Alexei got fed. Elena stared at the girl. “What can I do for you?” Her tone is hard to characterize, except to say it wasn’t lilting.

  Cat put a finger to her lip to chew her nail. “I suppose you could brush my hair. Miss Bristol usually puts it up for me, but she’s malingering in her cabin with Wuthering Heights and a cup of spiced tea. She blames the bad air of the provinces for her congestion.”

  “I don’t know how to brush hair, really.”

  “I can tell.” Cat produced a hairbrush and showed her how. “Start up here, and then long straight strokes, pulling away from my shoulders. Ow.”

  Elena practiced. She learned how to pull Cat’s hair up top and arrange it with the comb. “Underneath, your hair is darker,” she said. “More like mine.”

  “Fancy that,” said Cat with a yawn. She disappeared into the carriage and returned carrying a looking-glass with a shiny engraved handle. “Not dreadful,” she said, examining her locks. “For a first try.”

  “May I look?” asked Elena. She’d never seen herself in a mirror before, only the shadowy silhouette against window glass. “I’m not so bad.”

  “You could do with a good scrub. Several good scrubs in a row.”

  “That day will never come. But when the weather warms up, we sometimes bathe in the stream. If there is a stream this year. What do you call your great-aunt?”

  “Her name is Madame Sophia Borisovna Orlova, but I call her tante Sophia. Tante means ‘aunt’ in French.”

  Elena tried it out. “Tante Sophia.”

  But here were the butler and his crew, returning earlier than usual that day. Monsieur d’Amboise wasn’t happy to see Cat sitting on the floorboards like a common peasant. He foraged for a blanket upon which he insisted Cat sit.

  Cat introduced Monsieur d’Amboise to Elena. He didn’t say hello to Elena and answered Cat in French.

  “That’s rude,” said Cat. “Don’t speak over the girl’s head.”

  The butler, in Russian with a French accent: “You are taking advantage of this situation, Miss Ekaterina. Have you worn your worthy governess to the bone?”

  “Miss Bristol is busy keeping my great-aunt diverted. They are playing cards. They sent me outside for being coltish.”

  “It won’t be long now. We finished the bracing today. Luckily the steel beams don’t seem to be damaged. Hoisting them up with ropes was some heavy labor, believe me. All that remains is to secure the tracks to their footing. Don’t give me that look. The conductor will test the supports before allowing the train to venture across. Now you should come inside.”

  “But I am learning why this child is the only girl in the village.”

  “I’m too tired to argue,” said Monsieur d’Amboise. “You will be ready to sit down with your aunt when I call you.” He moved past Elena without acknowledging her. Burrs and shreds of splintered logs clung to his smooth leggings. He smelled of normal sweat and of rope and grease, but there was a hint of cologne there, too.

  “You were explaining why you have no companions of your own age,” said Cat.

  “Why do you care?” asked Elena.

  “Look,” said the visitor. “Do you see me surrounded by schoolmates and sisters and girl cousins? No, you do not. Great-Aunt Sophia summoned me from my boarding school in London, where I actually have friends. Monsieur d’Amboise chaperoned Miss Bristol and me across the English Channel to Paris. There we were joined by my tante and traveled to Moscow. From there we engaged this private train, to make an impression, don’t you see, as we approach Saint Petersburg. I’ve had nothing but adult company for weeks and weeks. I’ve been like a pretend adult, paralyzed in right behavior. Here I finally find an accidental playground. Such relief. A week frozen in time between my leaving school and all the festivities and challenges awaiting me. And, and, and … is there a supply of girls to play with, to sing with? Or race, or dance, or gossip? No. All I get is one stiff-faced, hollow-eyed, knock-kneed skeleton in a patched skirt.”

  “How would you know what my knees are like? I don’t fling them around for anyone to see. And my eyes are not hollow.” Elena would have liked to burst into tears just then, to prove it, but pride forbade her.

  “I’m sorry,” said Cat. “Forgive me.” She didn’t sound sorry.

  “You have friends at school. I have only two brothers. One of them is in domestic service as a houseboy, and the other has been kidnapped by soldiers. I have no fri
ends and no chance for friends.”

  “But why not? You keep hinting, you keep halting.” Cat looked as if she were going to hit Elena.

  So Elena told her. The whole thing. Two years earlier. How the disaster began, with the boys in the village being sent up to the hills to gather wood. Luka and Alexei among them that day.

  How one of the girls noticed that a billy goat, who had gotten loose and tramped through a marshy lowlands to a dry hillock, an island, and had managed to pick his way back, lingonberry juice staining his pelt.

  Lingonberries? So early in the year? Well, better than nothing. All the girls in Miersk gathered baskets. Sloshed their way across the mud to harvest what they could, and who cared if it was out of season?

  All the girls except Elena, for her mother was nearly ready to deliver the new baby. Finally, someone for Elena to be big sister to. Elena had to tend her mother, for her time was almost near, and Papa was at work on the estate.

  How the girls promised they would share lingonberries when they got back. But they never got back.

  You see, up on the estate, the báryn had noticed his fields drying. He’d decided to open some sluices at the edge of his ornamental lake, to drain off some reserve into a channel that could bring it nearer to the rye. But when the workers inched open the floodgates for a controlled trickle, the wood proved to have rotted and couldn’t hold. The whole barrier collapsed.

  The lake drained in a gargling rush. It gathered force as it coursed downhill through narrowing channels. The panels arranged to direct a slight flow toward the fields couldn’t withstand a torrent. They were slapped akimbo, like this, pffft, pffft, one after the other. So the water sought a place it could settle, lower down, and that was the swampy muckland near Miersk. Through which girls loaded with lingonberries were making their way home. Mired in unseasonable mud even before the deluge.

  “And the girls … drowned?”

  “Not all at once. Not at first,” said Elena. She spoke out the tragedy roughly now, like dealing out cards, slap slap. “Up at the estate, my father was nearest the broken floodgate. He didn’t know about the goat and the lingonberries, but he had a mind for worry. He ran home to Miersk, outpacing the other workers. Heard the cries of the girls — few of them could swim. Dragged an old raft to the rising waters. Kept pulling waterlogged bodies onto the raft in the hope that someone might be alive. Maybe he dove and hit his head on a stone. By the time the other men had arrived, he was gone too, as well as the girls. My other friends.” The ghostly daughters of Miersk.