by Olga Grushin
A silver-haired woman in an antique bridal dress gone gray with age is lying stretched out on top of a mauve bedspread.
Once my heart slows down, I see the waxy pallor of her profile in the gloom, the hands folded on the motionless chest, the immense amethysts on the lifeless fingers. The rings are those of an old woman, yet the smooth, slender hands seem young somehow. I do not want to look closer, for fear that, unlike the birds, the woman is truly dead. My face averted, I make a few sweeps at the furriest cobwebs, then tiptoe to the door, forcing myself not to break into a run—and just as I reach the threshold and am about to exhale, I sneeze, and it is not a delicate, ladylike sneeze, either, but the most deafening, earsplitting sneeze of my life, which makes my broom crash onto the floor and my pail explode in a symphony of metallic clangs and rattles.
My blood freezes. I brace myself, steal a backward glance. Her eyes are still closed. Gingerly I pick up the broom and start once again for the freedom of the tapestried corridor—and it is then that the languid, coquettish purr intercepts me.
“My prince!”
Her body has not moved, but the yellowing layers of Flemish lace on her bodice are heaving theatrically, and her pale lavender lips are unmistakably puckered up for a kiss. I notice a gray glint behind the trembling lashes of her lowered eyelids.
“I am the new maid, milady,” I whisper.
The eyelids fly open.
“I know that, I’m not blind,” she says loudly, peevishly. “You could have humored me for a moment, of course. But sympathetic maids are hard to come by nowadays. Bring me a cup of tea, why don’t you. Plenty of milk, no sugar.”
Downstairs, all the birds are awake and chirping madly. When I return with the loaded tray, she is sitting up, propped against the pillows, shuffling a pack of Tarot cards with an intricate cobweb design on their backs. I set the tray down on the bed—a puff of dust rises to meet my face—then move to draw the curtains open.
“Leave it, leave it!” she snaps. “My eyes are too weak for the light.”
I bow and hasten toward the door.
“No, stay,” she orders. “Cool the tea for me. What year is it?”
“What . . . year?”
In the dimness, it is impossible to tell how old she is. Seen from across the chamber, she appeared young, so young, sixteen or seventeen, no older, and breathtakingly lovely, her silvery hair the palest shade of blond, like the delicate wing of a nighttime moth, her slight, birdlike gestures filled with an ethereal grace. Yet now, as I bend down to blow on the steaming cup, I catch a sour smell of dissolution or ill health masked by some ancient perfume, and her hair has lost its luminous sheen, become a dull gray of long years, while her brittleness resembles the frailty of age.
“Oh, never mind, it makes precious little difference.” Listlessly, she drops the pack of cards, scattering suns, moons, and winged angels all over the bedspread, and yawns. Her tongue is like a cat’s, neat and shockingly pink, trembling tensely in the dark, hot cave of her malodorous mouth. I shrink back. “Who can keep track? Things are different every time I wake up—sometimes only a little, but I can tell, I am quite sensitive, you know. Once, they replaced all the candles in the house with strange new lamps, gaslight, they called it. Another time, they had a man come who made new, magic kinds of portraits. He did one of me. He had a sinister apparatus on legs, and he covered his head with a black cloth, like this, and there was a bright white flash that blinded me. I cried out—I was quite frightened, I am delicate like that—but the likeness was better than any artist’s hand could have made it, only it had no color, it was all gray. I would show you, but my birds pecked it apart. Well, but they are always inventing new things, it’s the age, you know. And the maids change. Almost every time I wake up, it seems, there is someone new. Of course, that is to be expected. Sometimes I sleep for only a day or two, but other times it will be five or ten years at a stretch. On one occasion, it was thirty or forty, I myself was not sure how long. True, the same queen was still on the throne, but so much had moved past. You can take the tea away now, I want to go back to my dreams. You will find your wages in the purse with the beaded peacock, over there by the vanity.”
When I reach downstairs, the birds are asleep once again, heads hidden under their wings. But the next morning, they are jumping on and off their perches, chattering frenziedly, and in the bedroom the silver-haired woman in her rotting bridal gown is ensconced amidst the dusty pillows, counting out her faded cards, primly covering her yawns with the amethyst-studded hand.
“Are you a princess?” she asks without greeting me first, as though continuing our conversation of the previous day. “I thought so. Born or made? Ah. Well, we cannot all be born princesses. And really, being born to it is not as desirable as I once thought. There are just so many expectations, you know. The world expects things from you, that goes without saying, but you also expect things from the world. Sometimes, when I feel really blue, I even wonder if my expectations will ever be realized. Of course, I know they will be, because it was foretold, and every time I ask the cards, I always see the same lovely man in my future—but now and then, you know, all this waiting gets to be a trifle tedious. Now, don’t just stand there, bring me a cup of tea. Plenty of milk, no sugar, and add a spoonful of sherry while you’re at it—you will find the sherry in the drawing room cupboard, unless they’ve moved everything again. And say ‘Yes, Miss Rosa’ when I give you an order. And always curtsy.”
“Yes, Miss Rosa,” I say as I curtsy. But when I return with the tray, she is asleep again, her mouth hanging open, the Lovers card, a naked woman reaching out to a naked man, clutched in her mottled hand, the fusty lace on her shrunken chest stirring faintly with her exhalations—just as I will find her on most days when I tiptoe in to freshen up her stale-smelling chamber, which is entangled in new cobwebs every morning, fat gray spiders busy spinning and spinning and spinning their dreamlike threads above the slumbering woman’s face. When awake, Miss Rosa reads her fortune, exclaiming with a somewhat forced delight over the lovely groom invariably promised her in the brittle, graying constellations of the ancient cards, then requests cups of tea with increasingly generous splashes of sherry, and talks in breathless, fluttering monologues. Slowly I piece her story together.
A long-awaited daughter of a long-childless queen, she came into the world beloved and cherished, and her father the king arranged a grand feast to celebrate her birth. Unfortunately, the king cared more for the elaborate ritual of royal dining than for keeping his subjects happy, and thus, having thirteen fairies in the kingdom but only twelve place settings of solid gold, he chose not to invite the thirteenth fairy at all rather than sully his best damask tablecloth with mismatched cups and bowls of inferior silver and risk losing face before neighboring rulers whose offspring might, in due time, serve as suitable candidates for his precious daughter’s hand. (He was especially interested in the young son of King Roland the Second who would rule as Roland the Third, for their lands bordered his own.) The twelve lucky fairies marked the occasion by gifting the infant princess with all the customary accoutrements, such as porcelain skin, legible handwriting, and the knowledge of cutlery etiquette. Ten had already given their blessings when the uninvited thirteenth fairy—who, in truth, was more a witch than a fairy anyway and most likely did not belong at a decent gathering—appeared in the doorway, accompanied by bolts of lightning and black ravens tearing through the hall’s festive garlands, and called a booming curse upon the babe’s head. The girl, she cried, would grow up to be as perfect as a gilded doll—but she would never marry.
“She will die an old maid!” cackled the witch. “A fruitless virgin! A bitter, shriveled-up spinster!”
And she vanished in an explosion of frogs and vipers.
Immediately panic set in amidst the gathering. The king blamed the queen for not keeping a proper household supplied with a proper number of proper place settings, and the
queen did the only proper thing in response and died of a broken heart on the spot. The eleventh fairy was then heard to step in and try to amend the curse. She had no powers to overturn it completely, she said with a sigh, but she could make it so the princess would marry, and marry for love, and marry happily, which was, after all, the thing that truly mattered—she would just not marry a prince. The king, having grown purple in the face, ordered the unfortunate fairy beheaded. The grooms then chased after the last, twelfth, fairy who was attempting to sneak away unnoticed through the servants’ entrance. They dragged her before the king. She was young and inexperienced; she had never given a baptismal gift or lifted a curse before.
“Fix it, or else!” the king barked, and the poor thing, trembling, whimpered that the princess would, the princess would, of course, marry a real prince. It might, however, take . . . a bit of time. A while, actually. So it would not be Roland the Third, but it might, just might, be one of his descendants. Or a different prince altogether, but equally royal, no doubt. The king, somewhat mollified, had her dewinged and imprisoned, in case any adjustments to the curse needed to be made at a later date, but at least he allowed her to keep her life.
Princess Rosa, now sadly motherless, was raised by a beribboned and bejeweled flock of court ladies who filled her flawlessly coiffured head with stories of proper royal matches. They told her about the purpose of a woman’s life, love at first sight, passionate declarations accompanied by massive engagement rings, dimpled flower girls, personalized stationery, and baptismal lace, then touched, more obliquely, on the interesting subject of conjugal duties. When Princess Rosa turned sixteen—the age of most proper royal marriages—she began spending her time sitting decorously in the window, peeking out from behind the curtains in an attempt to spot the royal suitor as he approached, eager to bid farewell to her girlhood; yet no suitor was forthcoming.
Days became weeks became months, and the princess grew bored and fell into a doze. She dreamed of a blood-red room full of spindles, powerful, turning, vibrating, thrumming. Fascinated, she reached for the largest one—and pricked her finger on its sharp, throbbing end. The pain made her cry out, and the cry woke her. When she opened her eyes, she was disoriented for a minute, for she was lying, dressed in a beautiful bridal gown, or was it a burial shroud, on her bed, her hands crossed ceremoniously on her chest, the room wreathed in mournful shadows, the court physician fussing about her pulse, an anxious crowd of courtiers holding a candlelit vigil around her. They rejoiced to see her awake, for they had nearly lost all hope. They told her she had been asleep for a full year, during which time the king had grown so displeased that he had beheaded the treasurer, the assistant gardener, and half the royal guard. (He had also sent to the dungeons to question the captive fairy, but when they unlocked the last of the rusty locks, they found the cell empty—or almost empty, for there was a small, frightened mouse cowering in one corner. The jailer swore that the fairy could not have fled and therefore the mouse must have been the fairy transformed, but in the ensuing commotion, while the enraged king spewed out spittle-punctuated decapitation orders, the mouse was somehow allowed to escape. Rumor had it, the creature found refuge in the kitchens of King Roland’s neighboring palace, where, in another century or two, a clumsy cook slipped and landed on it with her ample backside, putting an end to it, albeit not before it managed to pass its immortal fairy powers to one of its twin offspring, a girl mouseling conceived in mystery and born with the ease of a sneeze.)
Having heard the courtiers’ tale of woe and being sentimental by nature, Princess Rosa resolved to stay awake. She filled her bedroom with chirping birds to keep her company and had musicians play violins under her window as she continued to sit, day and night, awaiting her prince. Yet the tedium of her life was overwhelming, and she simply could not help it. The next time she fell asleep, she dreamed of the familiar blood-red room, this time crammed full of not only the whirring spindles but also oblong wine bottles, magnificent mushrooms with meaty white stems, and plump red umbrellas in tight sleeves of crimson satin. When she woke up, she discovered that five years had passed and the crowd around her bed had thinned considerably. Some had lost their heads and many others had fled, for the king was growing ever more irascible. By the time he himself passed away, another decade later, from choking on a fish bone in a fit of anger (Princess Rosa slept through both his death and his funeral), the palace was mostly deserted; only the birds, a handful of devoted old servants, and the court physician remained. When, emerging briefly from a dream of thick-handled walking sticks, buckets entering wells, and trains rushing into welcoming tunnels, she learned of her father’s demise, her deepening solitude, and the unceasing rotation of the world, she found that she did not mind all that much. By now, she much preferred sleep to being awake, as waiting for the prince was a thankless pastime and her dreams had become quite involved; nor were her hands necessarily folded over her chest every time she woke up—all alone now, as the last of her maids had died from respectable age, and the physician, borrowing the king’s golden inkstand, had departed for lands unknown—for on occasion they seemed to meander deep into her lacy maidenly lap, and pretending to be asleep for a little while longer, she kept them moving there before sighing the final sigh and refolding them anew on her subsiding bosom, just as she drifted off into another dream.
“Except lately,” she tells me after her second cup of sherry with a splash of tea, “something strange has been happening. I fall asleep but . . .” She lowers her voice to a dramatic whisper. “I hardly ever dream. It’s all just black before my eyes. Like nothing. Like death. And sometimes I wonder . . . I wonder if that nervous young fairy really knew how to lift curses. And if I shouldn’t have eloped with that nice musician who played under my window when I was sixteen. Oh, I suppose I am still sixteen, I know I look sixteen, I have been sixteen for the past hundred, or has it been two hundred, years. But I no longer feel it. Life has moved past, and I feel . . . spent, somehow. Empty. Old. But back when I still felt sixteen, back when I sat at the window waiting for my prince, I would often catch myself gazing into the ardent face of the first violin laboring with his impassioned bow under my window. He was in love with me, of course, they all were, but he was the one I liked best. Yet I did not let myself love him back, because he was not a prince and he was poor, so I thought he would never make me happy, his splendid mustache notwithstanding. But now I don’t know. I wonder if I haven’t wasted my entire life, waiting, just waiting. Perhaps I will fall asleep one day soon and simply fail to wake up, and everything will remain black and empty forever.”
“Don’t talk like that, Miss Rosa,” I say quietly, taking the cup of sherry from her unresisting hand. “Why don’t you get up and go for a walk in the garden? I will help you find some shoes, help you down the stairs. The air is so fresh and crisp out there. Winter is getting close. Shall we go, right now? Let me open the window at least.”
But she has already fallen asleep and is snoring softly, a bit of sherry-flavored saliva dribbling down her withered chin. I wipe it gently, wondering if she truly does not realize that she looks sixteen no longer, that, in fact, she looks like the very old, frail woman that she is. There are no mirrors in her dim lavender chamber to present her with the truth, and I myself would never tell her anything upsetting, for somehow, without noticing, I have come to feel sorry for Princess Rosa, I have come to care for her. When she spends a week without waking, I miss her tipsy chatter; and when I emerge from the woods a few mornings later to find the lawn hopelessly overgrown with brambles and her manor hidden by an overnight eruption of wild rosebushes, so dense that it is now impossible to reach the front door, I feel as though I have lost a friend—and a friend who has not paid me for the last fortnight of work, at that.
I touch my finger to the nearest bush, and instantly pull it away, and watch a drop of blood swell on my fingertip.
“Sweet dreams, Miss Rosa,” I say sadly, and turn back into the fo
rest.
At the Log Cabin
The day lies empty before me. I do not want to return to Melissa’s house, not yet. They will be finishing their breakfast now; there will be the customary morning kiss from Tom as he rises from the table; their eight children will move in organized, smiling groups, helping with the chores. Seeing them all together makes me miss Angie and Ro so much I am sometimes unable to breathe. When I reach the broad forest road, on an impulse, I take a diverging path, away from the cottage.
Oaks and aspens are fully transparent now, leaves blanketing the ground, birds silent. Every step is a rustle. My solitude is a sadness, but it is also a gift. The woods are beginning to thin, and soon the path emerges from under the shade of the trees and winds along the top of a crest. Close by, I hear a rooster crow, then another. A panting dog bursts from the bushes and runs past me, head to the ground, chasing after some scent, and before I have time to wonder where it has come from, I see, in the ravine below, the slate-gray roofs of a village, spare rivulets of smoke rising from a few chimneys into the cold wintry skies. Mouthwatering smells of baked bread mix with the good, clean aromas of burning yew and birch, trailing after me even as the village falls behind, filling me with longing. I blow on my hands, chilled—and when I lift my head, I see before me, set back from the path, a neat little log cabin surrounded by spruce trees.