by Olga Grushin
The shutters on the cabin’s solitary window are painted a cheerful orange, and a few chickens peck in the dust behind a low fence of the same bright shade. As I pause to watch, a stocky woman in late middle age, her gray hair cut as short as a man’s, strides briskly out of the door and scatters some seeds on the ground. I realize with a start that she is wearing a loose linen shirt tucked into a pair of britches, tucked, in turn, into weathered leather boots. “Here, chicky chicky,” she croons, then looks up abruptly, as though sensing my presence. Our eyes lock.
It is the witch.
“Well, here is a surprise,” she says, no surprise in her voice. “You are up early, Your Majesty. Come in, why don’t you, I’m about to have my coffee. Oh, and look, my hens have laid me a couple of gifts. How do you like your eggs?”
The inside of the cabin is light and pleasant, and somehow much roomier than the outside led me to imagine. Bunches of aromatic herbs hang around whitewashed walls; sturdy wooden chairs, stained sunshine yellow, circle a table piled high with books. A creature the size of a cat wobbles between the table legs, clicking its tough little claws against spotless floorboards. I stare at it. Its curling green snout is steaming around the narrowly slitted nostrils, and one of its leathery wings trails behind at an odd angle.
“Don’t mind Gilbert, he’s harmless,” the witch says over her shoulder as she busies herself with frying the eggs on a woodstove in the corner. “I’m just taking care of him temporarily for his mother. Once his wing is fully mended, he’ll be able to go back home.”
The eggs ready, she pushes the books aside, sets down plates and cups, gestures for me to sit. She is both like and unlike the witch of the crossroads: her movements are just as efficient, her tone just as matter-of-fact, and I recognize the compressed forcefulness of her manner—but I hardly recognize the woman herself, with her man’s hair, her man’s garb, her strong, calm face, her nose shaped more like a potato than a hook, and no traces of warts in existence. Only her eyes are the same, shrewd, piercing, all-knowing. She digs into her food with gusto. I take a cautious sip of whatever is in the cup before me; it is delicious.
“Fresh blueberry juice,” she says. “You can call me Gwendolyn.”
“But . . . I thought you lived in that cave.” I find my tongue at last. “And your hair is short. Also . . . these aren’t the right clothes for a woman.”
She glances at me sharply.
“The cave, the wig, and the rags are just for show, girl—a way of doing business. Resentful wives expect certain things. Drama, gloom, warts, and perdition. I prefer comfort and simplicity, myself. As for my clothes, conventions are for the weak.”
“And . . . and is Gilbert . . .”
“A baby dragon, yes. Eat your eggs, you are looking much too skinny. What brings you to my doorstep?”
“No, I . . . I was just taking a walk through the woods. I’ve been working for a lady in the manor down that way.”
“Ah, yes, Miss Rosa. A very silly woman. I tried to do her a favor once, when she was born, but it was misunderstood. Perhaps I shouldn’t have phrased it as a curse, but even I have to follow rules now and then. Still, I was hoping she’d see it as an opportunity.”
“The thirteenth fairy, that was you?” I ask in astonishment.
“Hardly a fairy,” she snorts, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. “So, then. Do you need help with the divorce?”
My breath stills. “Can you? Can you help?”
“Not for free, mind you. I’m not in the charity business here.”
“Oh.” I look down at my untouched plate. “I don’t have anything, just the dress on my back. I was earning a little, but my job with Miss Rosa is over now, I think.”
“I imagine so. Such a waste.” She shrugs. “Well, girl, you didn’t exactly get your money’s worth with the spell, I suppose, and I still have your trinkets. Why don’t we consider them a retainer for my future services, and we’ll go over the contract later.”
“I am grateful,” I start to say—and pause, reminded anew of the mystery that has lingered at the back of my mind for many weeks. I have resigned myself to not knowing, yet here is the witch, mopping up runny eggs with a chunk of bread across the table from me. I could just ask. If I were brave enough. “That night, at the crossroads—”
I hesitate.
“Yes?”
“You wanted my life’s spark in payment, but then—”
She winces.
“I’ve told you already, appearances are in the job description. I wouldn’t have taken it, though, I promise, not even if . . . But never mind about that.” She presses her lips together, and I know the matter is closed. When she speaks again, her voice is gruff, the momentary note of uncertainty banished. “Tell me what happened between you and your husband in your last months with him, why don’t you. The part I don’t already know.”
I open my mouth—and say nothing.
She studies me in the ensuing silence, not unkindly.
“I see,” she says at last. “Well. I know you think you had it bad. And I’m sure you did. But I will tell you a story now. Did you happen to pass a village on the way here? This is a story of a girl from that village.”
“Are you the girl?” I ask, suddenly shy. “Is this your story?”
The witch—Gwendolyn—does not reply. She rises to rinse out her cup, puts away her plate, then sits back down, stretches her boots out in front of her, and begins to fill a pipe with tobacco, not spilling a single crumb, deftly, briskly, as she does everything. The baby dragon clambers into her lap, and, once her pipe is lit and clenched squarely between her strong teeth, she rubs the scales on his back as she talks, making him purr and puff and send occasional clouds of fiery smoke into the air through the slits in his long nose. I watch him, mesmerized, for a minute or two, then forget all about him as the story unfolds.
Once upon a time, Gwendolyn starts—some fifty or sixty years ago, at the tipping point of the last century, the precise date is not important—a girl was born in the village. The girl was bright and bold, perhaps overly bold, but not overly pretty, a bit on the chubby side, if truth be told, with a nose rather resembling a potato, and with a meager dowry to boot; her father was the village chemist and his shop, on the main street, was respectable and stocked with many a rare herb, but the village inhabitants were a stolid, healthy, unimaginative folk in scant need of sleeping draughts or nerve-soothing potions. Still, the family managed to get by well enough. The girl, the oldest of four siblings, grew up reading her father’s medical journals, playing with ingredients, and dreaming of going away to a large town across the river, where she would study science at a university. She wanted to find out how nature worked—wanted to strip it naked, take it apart, wrest away its secrets, and touch its dark, pure heart with her steady hand, before choosing to put it back together again. Her father encouraged her, but when she was sixteen years old, disaster struck: the chemist perished in an explosion in the barn he used for mixing his more complex tinctures (there were those who whispered that it had not been an accident, that the man had turned rancid with bitterness from his own thwarted ambitions), and her mother informed her that, in their newly strained circumstances, they would not be able to afford her schooling. The family left their comfortable house for much smaller quarters, and two or three years after, the shop, too, had to be put up for sale, to pay off their rising debts. They placed announcements in all the local newspapers, but for months, no potential buyers came to inquire—until one spring day the bell above the shop door jingled and in strode a stranger.
The girl was minding the counter; she looked up in surprise. The stranger was like no one she had ever seen: around forty years of age, he was tall, handsome, and powerfully built, with a short black beard and gold-rimmed glasses, dressed from head to toe in black velvet. There was an air of subtle authority about him; he looked like someone important, someone used t
o being obeyed. He introduced himself as Dr. Merlin Stone, a science professor at the town university. He had heard that their shop stocked unusual powders and unguents that might be of value in his experiments, he told her. The girl’s heart beat violently as she showed him around, answering his questions about the inventory, her head only just reaching his soft velvet shoulder. And so knowledgeable did she prove in her explanations that, upon announcing that he would take their entire supply, Dr. Stone gave her a closer look and asked whether she would not like to come away with him and work as his assistant. He would provide her with room and board in his townhouse, and plenty of pocket money. She could even—if her interests happened to lie that way, of course—attend his lectures at the university, entirely for free, when he resumed teaching in the fall.
She stared at him, then at her feet, then back at him. His eyes, behind the golden rims of his glasses, were gray and intense, and his beard so glossy that, from certain angles, it seemed almost blue. He was waiting for her reply with a look of patience on his face, but his lips were pressed thin and his hands hung too still at his sides, and she saw that he was not a patient man by nature.
“Yes,” she cried, “yes, yes, yes!”
And as soon as the first “Yes” passed her lips, she knew that she loved him.
She stuttered from an uncharacteristic nervousness when she asked her mother for permission to go, but the exhausted widow, relieved to have one mouth less to feed, readily gave her blessing, and thus the girl left with the man for the town across the river. His house, she soon discovered, was the grandest in the square, and had she been given to delighting in the world’s finer things, she would have found much to admire therein, for the professor, it now transpired, was fabulously rich and in possession of highly discriminating tastes. Yet, having been thrust amidst hitherto unimaginable luxuries, the girl paid no heed to precious old Burgundy vintages in delicately chiseled Bohemian goblets, or poetry volumes bound in tooled Moroccan leather, or luminous Dutch still lifes with lemons unspooling thin golden skins next to yellowing skulls staring out of empty black sockets. Her great, thirsty, indomitable spirit was not fine-tuned enough to be receptive to the fragile beauty of such frivolous human pursuits and enjoyments.
What she sought, in this house of indulgence, was pure knowledge.
A week had not passed since her arrival when she and the professor became lovers. The girl had left the village at twenty, and she was no innocent. She had let the butcher’s taciturn younger son tumble her in a haystack behind the cornfield when she was barely fourteen, and since then had had her share of rushed, awkward, utilitarian couplings, had been hurriedly shoved against stove corners or groped on floors behind counters, and had shoved and groped back, taking whatever, whenever, she wanted—yet Dr. Stone was unlike any of the boys, any of the men, she had known. His touch was assured and deliberate, his ministrations thorough and profound, and in response, she discovered her own hidden fire slow to kindle but unquenchable for long, languorous, delightful hours to follow; and if, on occasion, his fingers pinched a bit too hard, his nails scratched a bit too deep, and his teeth tore into her skin with such brute savagery that they left behind jagged blue bruises, she only tingled all over, with a warm, secret flush, pleased that his desire for her was so unstoppable it could turn him into a beast—him, the most civilized, the most refined of all men.
She did, however, prefer him to return to his civilized self soon thereafter; for what she wanted most was to be invited into the hallowed sanctuary of his work.
She lived with him for two or three months, perhaps, when she started to feel troubled. She had not been made welcome by the townsfolk. Whenever she left on some brief errand, to purchase rosemary or sage in the market, to consult a new treatise on chemical reactions in the library, to order a shipment of mercury from the pharmacist, she would walk past the dressmaker’s shop, located directly across from the professor’s house, and always there would be a flock of women gathered on the sidewalk in the summer heat, women in tightly laced shoes, women with bejeweled little purses, women in ridiculous hats, peeking at her from under swaying ostrich feathers or clusters of silk roses, whispering with hot malice as she went by. She assumed that they were scandalized by her mere existence—a girl staying in an unmarried man’s dwelling with no chaperone present; but occasionally she overheard hints of a darker nature. There she goes, the women tittered, tottering in their impossible shoes, a fresh-faced new assistant—but what do you think happened to the other ones, the ones before? That little blond Gretchen, she had such a sweet tooth, the baker adored her? And the voluptuous redhead, what was her name, Elisa, she liked to come into the shop and try on white hats before the mirror, she had such lovely, shiny curls, she dreamed of having a perfect wedding? And oh, oh, do you remember Camille? And remembering Camille, they would smile knowingly at one another.
She brushed off the poisonous gossip, undisturbed by it, for just as she had not been a maiden, so the professor, of course, had had his past diversions. Something, however, had begun to bother her greatly: he no longer mentioned the possibility of her attending his lectures in the fall, and worse, he would not let her into the mystery of his experiments. His laboratory, behind the imposing metal door at the end of the basement corridor, remained off limits to her. She knew that he was working on something extraordinary, something momentous—he had told her as much—but every morning, rising from their passion-tossed bed, he would slap her, at times rather hard, on her naked rump, still reddened and smarting from the blows of the previous night, and say, as he buttoned his exquisitely tailored batiste shirt: “Off to work now, my sweet. Do have the cinnamon ground, and pick up arsenic in town for me, there’s a dear. Oh, and for dinner, let us have your delicious rabbit stew, yes?”—upon which he would saunter downstairs, humming a snippet from some opera into his black-blue beard, while she stayed sprawled in the moist (and, now and then, after a particularly vigorous flogging, bloodstained) sheets, staring sullenly at his retreating back, biting her fingernails to the quick, until she heard the great metal door clanging shut in the bowels of the house.
Then she would get up in turn, dress listlessly, and trudge off to the kitchen to grind the powders and cook the meals he required, feeling unhappy. For not only did she love him—she had begun to think of the two of them as partners, as equals. Surely, she mattered more to him than any of his other assistants could have mattered, all those flighty, featherbrained women who cared more for fashions and chocolates than scientific endeavors and who in the end, having grown bored or disenchanted, abandoned him in search of husbands or careers in glove-making? Surely, surely, she understood him better than any of them? Why, then, was there always the sense of an invisible arm outstretched, holding her at bay, whenever she questioned him about the nature of his research? Why did the door to his laboratory, the door at the end of the basement corridor, remain staunchly locked against her?
“All in good time,” he would say, smiling down at her over the rim of his glass filled with wine so dark it looked like blood. “I promise you, my sweet, you will find out soon enough.”
Another month passed, and the professor announced that he was departing on a short trip to obtain some supplies for his experiments. He would be gone three days. In his absence, he asked her to be a dear and take care of his house. He gave her the keys to all the rooms, an immense bunch whose unexpected weight made her meekly held-out hand dip. He told her she could have the run of the place, could open any door—any, that was, apart from the door to his laboratory, for she had not yet earned the right to learn its secrets.
“This one, right here,” he said, tenderly caressing a huge, jagged key of darkened iron. “A lesser man would hide it, but I trust you, my sweet.”
She accepted the keys with an obedient nod, smilingly suffered a playful farewell slap on her cheek, so harsh that her skin was branded with four round red marks of his fingers, then, the docile smile vanishi
ng off her face the moment his back was turned, went to the window to watch him leave. She no longer loved him. When his chugging automobile, the first in town, disappeared around the corner, she spat at the window, took the jagged key off the ring, and ran down the stairs to the locked basement door.
The key turned with a surprising readiness, and the massive door opened smoothly, too smoothly, on well-oiled hinges, inviting, ushering her in, then swinging shut behind her. She found herself in chilly darkness, took a step, another. The cavernous echoes of her footfalls made her think of infinitely stretching dungeons, of cemeteries, of eternity. She felt for the nearest wall, happened upon a switch, flipped it. A single weak bulb blinked into faint blue life on the low ceiling.
She looked, her mouth grim.
Broad gleaming tables ran the length of the enormous stone-walled chamber, and on them, between intricate machines that bristled with saw blades, spiked wheels, thumbscrews, and guillotines, stood dozens of bottles and jars, the kind her mother used for pickling mushrooms and cucumbers. In their thick greenish liquid swam glowing, white, bloated pieces of the women who had come before her, their names neatly labeled next to each specimen in the professor’s beautiful hand. She saw the heart and the jaw of the chocolate-loving Gretchen—the red hair, once lustrous, now dull, and the breasts, their large nipples like spreading stains of mold, of the fashionable Elisa—the reproductive organs of Camille, who made the townspeople smile. And others, so many others. She read their names aloud as she walked along the tables, and the echoes returned each name manifold, like the last tribute, the final remaining memory tossed briefly between the dungeon walls, then fading, fading, fading, until it was gone in the descending hush.
“Violetta. Helena. Ariadne. Margarita. Isolde. Leonora . . .”
The door clanged. She swung around. Merlin Stone stood in the doorway, smiling with cruel delight into his glossy beard.