by Olga Grushin
“That was a long time ago. I am the beekeeper now,” he repeated, tersely.
“But why? Why did you leave?”
He shrugged. Still he would not look at her.
“I like bees better.”
His tone was brusque. She saw that her questions made him unhappy, and she chewed her lip, frowning. Memories moved through her mind, shifting, shaping themselves, with a slow yet sure sense, into a story with a different meaning. Her nausea and weakness in the early days of her confinement, her sickly inability to reciprocate the prince’s attentions, which had been infrequent already and then stopped altogether, the prince’s subsequent departure on a diplomatic mission to some southern land and the steady stream of thoughtful gifts that followed, the courier on his bent knee, bearing the tray of overripe fruit, not meeting her gaze, then as now, his childlike mouth drawn in an oddly sorrowful bow, as though in some unspoken apology, the prince gone for days that stretched to weeks, and, preserved in a more recent pocket of wretchedness, the aging three-chinned duchess hissing with bitterness—
“The exotic southern mistress,” she whispered, scarcely opening her lips.
“What?”
She looked at his knocked-over cup—and saw everything as clearly as she had seen any number of shameless couplings in her magic mirror.
“You chose to leave the prince’s service because you’d witnessed too much on your travels with him. Because . . . you felt sorry for me?”
The cider was soaking into the tablecloth, a blush was soaking into his face, and she understood that what he had felt for her was more than pity. She thought with a sudden certainty: But this is a dream. I know this for a fact, because my past few years in the palace felt like a dream but were real, and this place feels real, so it must be a dream. I never did go down to the kitchen to get more nettles. I fell asleep in my starched, lacy prison of a bedroom, in the middle of drinking another accursed cup of tea, in the middle of weaving another accursed shirt, and all the bits and pieces of my daily miseries congealed in my mind, Arbadac the Bumbler and the sentence of silence and that horrid duchess with her spiteful truths—and now I find myself, still in my nightdress, transported to some imaginary hut abuzz with bees, stripping more meat off the carcass of my marriage while I sit across the table from the youth who belongs to my faraway past, the youth with the golden-brown eyes and quiet words and gentle hands, the youth whose arrival with fruit I once awaited so eagerly. In truth, though—for, asleep, I can speak freely—I never ate any of the fruit. I abhorred those star-shaped monstrosities. I also abhorred plush blankets, and eternally closed windows, and knitting. Oh, I abhorred knitting most of all! I was alone, and I was bored, and I resented the pedantic physician forever telling me that I was too frail, that I needed to keep to my bed, “Prince’s orders,” and I resented the prince himself, who—quite possibly, fresh from the embraces of some southern slut—would arrive once a month on a scheduled visit so we could exchange halting banalities for an endless hour, while I hid my yawns behind yet another ugly sweater I was making for my kind old father-in-law, my heart beating out a sluggish rhythm: bored, so-bored, so-bored. Because what I really longed for, all through that year, the tedious year until the baby came, the miserable second year of my marriage—yes, what I really wanted, even if I would never dare confess any of it to my waking self—was a hearty plate of herring, a loaf of black bread, and the presence of the shy young man with that childlike mouth and those golden eyes that darkened every time he looked at me.
So here he is now, summoned into transient being from the far reaches of my nighttime fantasies. And since this is a dream, I can do as I please.
And with that, she rose, leaned over the table, and kissed him.
He pushed his chair back, holding himself away from her stiffly, his eyes wide with shock. Then his eyes closed, and he kissed her back.
And even though it was a dream—and it was, of course it was, she was sure of it—the smell of honey in his hair was real, and the taste of apple cider on his lips, and so were his lips themselves, pliant and warm, and his hands, which drew her closer to him, and the darkness behind her eyelids, gentle yet increasingly insistent, so much so that for one half-panicked instant she worried whether this was no dream, after all, and was just about to draw back when she forgot to worry, and simply succumbed, and there they were, the two of them, enclosed in the long, soft, enveloping moment like no other moment in her life, and within its glowing seclusion the world felt surprising and thrilling, yet it also felt solid and good—yes, the world made sense at last—and then trumpets exploded just outside the wall.
She jumped back, he jumped up, his chair tottered and crashed, her cup fell and broke. Fists pounded on the door. They stared at it with a wild surmise. He moved toward it just as it shuddered and flew open, and three or four guards burst in, all chain mail and gauntlets. She screamed, realizing that the blissful dream she had anticipated blushingly was about to become a full-blown nightmare. Upon seeing her, however, the guards started to bow, bumping and elbowing each other in the narrow doorway, and the dream turned harmless, commonplace, and disappointing. They were all speaking at once, and she stopped paying attention, for there was some nonsense about frogs who had seen her sleepwalking this way and her presence required immediately at the palace and the king, the kind old King Roland, dying, dying just before sunrise that morning.
“Your Majesty,” the guards called her, bowing, bowing.
She allowed herself to be led outside. The beekeeper stood mute on the threshold, shielding his eyes against the sun, which hung directly over the meadow now, watching them all impassively, as the sun would, while they blundered about on their small human errands of love and grief. She realized that she did not even know his name, and she wanted to ask, but did not—she just accepted a cloak from one of the guards and, meekly obeying the dream’s illogic, climbed onto a horse they brought her, and rode away with the men.
In the palace, unresisting, unquestioning, she was dressed in robes trimmed with ermine by maids weeping copious tears, then taken to the grandest ballroom, all marble and gilt, and there placed next to that man who looked like her husband but was most certainly not. Her fake husband’s face, she noticed absently, was not like it always was, not sleek and bright and cold but drawn and pained, filled, it almost seemed, with some real emotion. He turned to her and tried to speak, but she did not listen, and when he tried to take her hand, she pulled away, so he grew hard-eyed once again and stared ahead. Courtiers came in a long procession as the two of them waited there, side by side on the raised dais, and the ladies cried and the lords offered their condolences and everyone called them “Your Majesties.” She smiled at them with gracious compassion, but her smiles became more strained as the interminable day, as the interminable dream, wore on, for, as she stood there, dressed in the ermine-fringed robe of somber velvet, receiving the line of mourners, listening to the man next to her thank his ministers for their offers of sympathy, she began to feel a bit winded with a suspicion that was tiny at first, a sneaking thought, a flickering, twinging “maybe,” but which grew and grew and grew, until, abruptly, she had a sensation that the world was now only a hillock of land with dark waves encroaching upon it from all sides, rising higher and higher, lapping already at her embroidered slippers.
She turned and stared at the man next to her, the man pretending to be her husband.
“Are you feeling well, Your Majesty?” the court physician inquired solicitously at her shoulder. “Well, technically, Your Highness. The coronation is not until next Sunday.”
She let out a small, wild cry and, for the first and last time in her life as a princess, fainted.
* * *
• • •
“Not the beekeeper, my dear!” The fairy godmother sniffs. “I must tell you, child, you have positively plebeian tastes.”
But I can see that her heart is not in it, and
at last I understand her proprieties to be mere gestures of courtesy, kept about her like a perennial clean handkerchief on offer, for the sake of politeness, while her eyes are warm with compassion and her timid hands flutter about me, as though she would like to comfort me, if she only knew how.
“Down to one button, then,” the witch notes, and her voice, too, is not unsympathetic. “I’m sensing an unfortunate trend here.”
In the graying predawn light, her face has lost much of the hook-nosed, ancient-crone menace it seemed to possess in the harsh blooming of darkness. She is not even that old, I notice with surprise—in her sixties, perhaps—and her features, far from ugly or frightful, are merely weathered and strong.
“This is all very sad, I do agree,” the fairy godmother says. “The prince was clearly not the man we all thought him for much of your marriage. But only a short while ago, you wanted to lift his curse—and here you are now, trying to murder him. What happened in your final months together?”
“Why don’t we see for ourselves,” offers the witch. “Are you ready to finish this, madam?”
I unclench my hand, look at the last snippet of Roland’s hair on my palm.
“My child,” the fairy godmother says quietly. “There will be no turning back if you go through with this.”
“That’s the whole point, though, isn’t it?” I say, archly.
My defiance rings forced to my ears.
“She’s right, you know.” The witch gives the brew one final prod. “Not only will this seal your husband’s fate—it will also tie your own fate to his, forever and ever. In a way, you will never be rid of him. Not after this. Hate traps you as much as love does. Because hate is not the opposite of love. Indifference is.”
“So I’ll be indifferent once he is dead,” I tell her. And I take a breath, and I take a step, and I stretch my hand over the potion, and then—and then I hesitate. My husband’s fate, my fate . . . I assumed that his death would liberate me, once and for all, from the confines of impersonal fairy-tale destiny—but am I fooling myself, am I simply driven to take yet another predictable step in a predictable story? I peer into the cauldron, and its oily black surface readily serves up the reflection of a woman with aggrieved eyes, sharpened cheekbones, and mad, wispy hair. This is not the face I thought of as mine for so long, the unchanging face of a young bride with rosy lips and gaze ever widened in anticipation of conjugal happiness—and yet I see, my heart sinking, that it is a familiar face all the same.
The face of a spurned, jealous wife, the face of a middle-aged villainess.
I take a step back.
“Well, do you still want him dead, or what?” the witch asks.
In my mind, I struggle to recite the litany of hate I used to repeat to myself on many a sleepless night. I want him dead because I hate the smooth perfection of his face, the purposeful nature of his days, the grace with which he charms everyone around him, the ruthlessness with which he discards whatever he no longer needs. I want him dead because I’ve given him the best years of my life, my youth, my beauty, and he has treated me in such a shameful way. I want him dead because I loved him once upon a time. I want him dead because . . . because . . . I want him dead . . . And then I realize that something is different inside me. The night has burned through like a splinter of kindling, and my anger—my anger has burned away with it. Somehow, without my noticing, the memories of my married years have left me one by one, drowned in the cauldron’s darkness, leaving me purged and empty, ready for something else, something new.
I do not want him dead.
All I want is to be free—free of him, free of my past, free of my story.
Free of myself, the way I was when I was with him.
I glance from the doughy pancake of the fairy godmother’s face, all soggy with commiseration, to the flinty angles of the witch’s face, made hard with wisdom, then look away to the horizon. The sun has not yet risen, but the ink of the night has become diluted, and I discern, beyond the drab stretch of the fallow fields, at the very end of the dusty road, a denser line—the invitation of the woods. And so, I release my fingers, just like that, and, not waiting for the half-hair to spiral harmlessly down to the ground, turn my back on both women and start toward the forest, one foot in front of the other.
As I walk away, I hear the fairy godmother sob once, a soft sob of relief. Then the witch’s raised voice hits me squarely between my shoulders.
“If that be the case, madam, have you considered divorce?”
I do not stop running until I burst into the trees.
Part Two
In the Forest Clearing
The wood is just as I imagined it, just as I dreamed it. Leaves have not yet fallen but are already shot through with copper and bronze, and the trees stand tall, like columns in some mysterious autumnal cathedral carved out of gems, wrought out of precious metals, all rubies and amber and gold. Paths crisscross and disappear into the russet-colored dusk. I inhale the smell of ripeness, the smell of rain, the smell of wild things growing, dying, changing freely. It is neither day nor night under the trees, but a lingering in-between gloaming. The path I follow seems to have a will of its own, twisting, turning, always taking me deeper and deeper in. The farther I go, the more ancient the beeches, aspens, and elms, the more pungent the scents, the more solemn the world around me—and the less afraid I feel, as though with every step into the unknown, I am shedding a bit of my familiar past, losing a bit of my familiar self.
The wood is quiet with a profound, churchlike silence, but as I keep walking, I begin to sense stealthy presences all about me, traveling along invisible forest roads on hushed errands of their own. Enormous white moths that look like flowers—or else flowers that look like moths—glide slowly, weightily, from one pool of shadow into another. Glinting eyes stare at me from under misshapen roots, from inside hollowed trunks, yet when I draw nearer, they are quick to blink out of sight or turn into innocuous fireflies that zigzag across my path, winking in and out, before dissolving in the canopy above. The path soon takes me to the edge of a clearing, runs alongside it. I can hear water trickling somewhere nearby. It is dark on my left, light on my right: pale dawn has begun to glow between the giant oaks that line the clearing. I glance over, squinting after the dimness of the forest—and catch my breath.
A circle of slender sprites, translucent like leaves held up against the morning sun, are leading a swaying fleet-footed dance in the grassy glade. Without thinking, almost without knowing what I am doing, quite as if summoned, I abandon the path and rush out toward them.
Then I stand blinking in the brightness.
The clearing is empty, the grass undisturbed by footprints; only a breeze is moving long branches of willows back and forth, back and forth, above a shallow fast-running brook. Oddly, it seems that autumn has not touched this place at all: the grass is verdant here, the leaves vivid, the air full of midday summer warmth. There is a smell here, too, a sharp, clean smell that I cannot name, yet that reminds me of the wild, exhilarating way the night smelled when I walked out of the palace and ran to the crossroads, the now-empty velvet pouch at my hip still filled with my husband’s fingernails, with my mother’s flowers—was it only hours before?
It feels like another life—or else, a life of another.
A life of someone I did not like very much.
Something swoops over my head with an eerie cry, so low that the wind raised by its wings brushes my face. An owl chasing after the departing night, I tell myself—but when I swing around to follow its flight, I see a long-tailed creature wreathed in flickering fire. It trails sparks across the skies, then vanishes in the gloom of the forest. A firebird? Or even a small dragon? There are no dragons left in our orderly, civilized kingdom, of course, but I have gone so far into the woods that it no longer feels like any place I know, and I am suddenly sure that I would not find this hidden summer oasis drawn, bordere
d, and labeled on any of the maps my children pore over in their geography lessons.
My heart beating, I stand peering into the oaks that guard the clearing, but all is quiet again; only bumblebees hum, and the brook tinkles gently. All at once, I yearn for a refreshing sip of cold water. The brook is clear as crystal, and its bottom gleams with a pattern of bright pebbles. Too parched to care about grass stains on my dress, I kneel on the ground and scoop some water in my hand.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” a breezy voice says above me.
The water trickles out between my fingers as I meet the gaze of a girl who sits swinging her legs on the lowest branch of a nearby willow. She is stark naked, and her skin has a wet sheen. Perky pink nipples of an adolescent peek through the messy tousle of abundant curls the color of river weeds, and the eyes she has turned upon me are like two forest ponds, dark green and still; as I look closer, I can almost see tiny specks of water lilies floating inside them and tiny streaks of dragonflies darting through.
Looking into those eyes for long is a bit like drowning, and I glance away, dizzy.
“Unless, of course, you want to be a fish,” the girl continues blithely. “It’s not so bad, being a fish. Some may even prefer it. Not me, though. I enjoy having toes.” She wiggles them for emphasis; her toenails look just like the pebbles glistening in the brook’s merry current. “Also, I like eating the fish, myself. Girl fish are delicious.”