Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.)

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  ‘She just celebrated her seventy-fifth. They wrote about it the other day in the papers.’

  ‘I can’t believe Liz is younger than me.’

  ‘A full six years!’

  ‘She, too, was a beautiful woman,’ she said. ‘There aren’t any more like her today.’

  ‘You should see her now!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They took a picture of her in her wheelchair for her birthday.’

  ‘How much older am I?’

  ‘Six years.’

  ‘Five and a half,’ she corrected me.

  ‘Just think how many operations she had,’ I added.

  ‘She had trouble with her spine.’

  ‘And alcohol, then those unhappy marriages.’

  ‘How many times was she married?’

  ‘Nine. When they reported her birthday celebration they said she may marry a tenth time.’

  Mum grinned.

  ‘Hats off to her!’

  At last we were talking. We chatted about Liz as if we were two good friends chatting about a third. I’m supposing that Mum was pleased to hear all that information. Liz was seventy- five and had her picture taken in a wheelchair. Mum would be turning eighty-one in another month or so, and she was not in a wheelchair. She wasn’t even fat.

  ‘I suppose beauty and fame don’t mean a thing,’ she said, relieved.

  The expression on her face suggested that this time she was satisfied with the balance in her life.

  ‘Do you know what Bette Davis said?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That old age is no place for sissies.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t,’ she said, heartened for a moment.

  She often thought of herself as younger than she was. Once when she slid like this into a different, younger age, she addressed me as ‘Grandma’.

  ‘What, are you asleep, Grandma?’

  She slid back and forth in time. She no longer knew exactly when different things happened. She would have been happiest to stay in her childhood, not because she thought of those years as the brightest period of her biography, but because her feelings in that period were ‘safe’, long since formulated, sealed, related many times over, chosen to be a repertoire which she was always able to offer her listeners. She retold the little events and details from her childhood in the same way, with the same vocabulary, ending with the same points or more often with the same absence of a point. It was a sealed repertoire which could no longer be corrected or changed, at least that was the way it seemed, and at the same time it was her only firm temporal coordinate. Sometimes, it’s true, harsh images would surface which I was hearing for the first time.

  ‘I was always afraid of snakes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Once we went on an excursion to a wood and stumbled on a big old snake. Dad killed it.’

  ‘I hope it wasn’t poisonous!’

  ‘It was a price snake.’

  ‘You mean a dice snake?’

  ‘Yes, it was a big bad old snake and Dad killed it.’

  She used to call my father, her husband, Dad, while she usually referred to her own father as Grandpa. Now she was using Dad to refer to her father.

  Three years had passed since she’d been given the ‘ugly diagnosis’. Would there be another year? Two? Five? Bartering with death suited her (If I could just stick around for my grandson’s birth! If I could see my grandson start first grade! If I only have the chance to see my granddaughter start school!). There was one thing for certain: she had taken care of it all, wrapped everything up, everything was ‘neat and tidy’, it was ready. She sat in life as if she were in a clean, half-empty doctor’s waiting room: nothing hurt, nothing moved much, she was waiting to be summoned and it was as if she no longer cared when it would happen. All that mattered was her everyday rhythm: Kaia came over at 7:30 a. m., she ate her breakfast while watching the morning television programme Good Morning, Croatia, then she got dressed and went out to the café for her cappuccino and cheese turnover, her slow return home with little chats along the way with neighbours, then waiting for Kaia to bring her lunch at about 1:30 p. m., then an afternoon nap, then Kaia with her dinner at about 6:30 p. m., dining with her favourite television show, The Courtroom, and then the television news, then off to bed. Kaia came three times a day and went with her for the walk to the café where they had their coffee together. Jasminka came three times a week, helped her with little exercises and to bathe, neighbours dropped in every day, she saw her grandchildren once a week, usually on Sundays. I called her at least three times a week, and I often came to Zagreb, staying several days or more.

  She was sleeping more than she used to. Sometimes she slept so soundly that she wasn’t even wakened by the phone ringing or my banging on the door. When she lay down she took the same pose as on her CAT scans, her head tilted a little forward. She lay there peacefully, relaxed, with a hint of a smile on her lips. Sitting in the armchair she would often dip into a brief, deep sleep as if slipping into a hot bath. I happened upon her when she was asleep, sitting in front of the blaring television, her head bare, duster in hand. Then she opened her eyes, slowly lifted the duster, a small brush on a long handle around which she’d wrapped a soft rag, and wiped the television screen clean of dust. Then, spotting a smudge on the floor, she got up and slowly, shuffling, she went to the bathroom, moistened the rag, wrapped it around the brush, went back and sat down in the armchair again, and from there she wiped up the smudge.

  ‘Buy me those sphincters, they are the best,’ she’d say.

  ‘You must mean Swiffers, Mother.’

  ‘Yes, we’re out of them.’

  I had been bringing her those boxes with the magical soft cloths, which were ‘death to dust’ (Those cloths are death to dust!). Shuffling around the house, she wielded the light plastic handle with a Swiffer cloth wrapped around the rec tangular base, and with slow movements she wiped the dust off the walls, the furniture, the floor. The bright sun shone through the lowered blinds and splashed the floor with golden specks. She stood there in the middle of the room sprinkled with shafts of sunlight, her hair cropped close to her shapely head, her pale face with slightly slanted light-brown eyes and her lips surprisingly still full, awash in the sun as if it were an abundance of gold coins. A million particles of dust were afloat in the air around her, shimmering. She’d wave the handle through the air to chase them away, but the golden particles remained. And then she’d sit in the chair again and sink back into sleep. The golden dust swam around her. Sitting like that under an array of sun specks, surrendered to sleep, she looked like an ancient slumbering goddess.

  Once, when she started awake, she said, groggily,

  ‘Do you know what my mother once told me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That when she was giving birth to me there were three women standing there by her bed. Two were dressed in white, and the third was in black.’

  ‘Do you suppose those were the Fates who determine your destiny?’ I asked, cautiously.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Most likely mother was suffering from the labour and hallucinated them. Two in white, one in black,’ she mumbled, and sank back to sleep.

  During those fifteen days in March 2007, the sunrise was so lavish and bright that we had to lower the blinds every morning. The air had the smell of spring. My mother’s balcony was neglected; the soil in the flower boxes was dry.

  ‘We should buy some fresh loam and plant some flowers,’ I said.

  ‘We will be the first to have flowers in our building!’

  ‘Yes, the first.’

  ‘Yes, pelargoniums.’

  Sparrows settled onto the balcony railing. That was a good sign; Mother was convinced that this year there wouldn’t be a swarm of starlings.

  ‘Those pests are gone,’ she said.

  ‘Which pests?’

  ‘You know, the darlings!’

  ‘Starlings are birds, darlings are your grandchildren.’

 
‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That the pests are gone.’

  Then she added, with an air of mystery,

  ‘As they came, so they went away.’

  PART TWO

  Ask Me No Questions and

  I’ll Tell You No Lies

  Day One

  1.

  As soon as the receptionist, Pavel Zuna, caught sight of the three figures approaching the desk, he became aware of a slight current running upwards from his left big toe and stopping somewhere in the small of his back. Or the other way round: running downwards from his back to his toe. Pavel Zuna was not a neurologist but a receptionist, and a receptionist rather than a poet, so he did not abandon himself to contemplating this unusual sensation, especially as the picturesque appearance of the approaching figures occupied his full attention. In a wheelchair sat an old lady with both feet tucked into a large fur boot. It would have been hard to describe the old lady as a human being; she was the remains of a human being, a piece of humanoid crackling. She was so little and so crumpled that the boot appeared more striking than she did. The old lady had a tiny face that consisted of a skull and aged skin stretched over it like a nylon stocking. She had thick, closely cropped grey hair and a hooked nose. Her lively grey eyes sparkled brightly. The old lady was hold ing a big leather bag on her lap. The other one, the one pushing the wheelchair, was exceptionally tall, slender and of astonishingly erect bearing for her advanced years. Although Pavel Zuna was not a particularly short man, a quick glance suggested that he would barely reach the tall woman’s shoulder. The third was a short breathless blonde, her hair ruined by excessive use of peroxide, with big gold rings in her ears and large breasts whose weight dragged her forward. Pavel Zuna’s career as a receptionist had been neither brief nor unsuccessful, nor indeed uninteresting, that is to say he had seen all kinds of things – even more intensely bleached hair and even bigger earrings. But still, Pavel Zuna did not recall ever, either behind the reception desk or in his entire life, seeing women’s breasts larger than those of the breathless blonde.

  Pavel Zuna was an experienced receptionist with a particular talent. He was endowed with a built-in financial scanner, which had, up to now, proved infallible: Zuna was able to guess at once to which class a given person belonged and his or her financial status. Had Pavel Zuna not loved his receptionist’s job so much, he could have been head-hunted by any tax department in the world, so infallible was his estimate of the depth of other people’s pockets. In short, Zuna could have sworn that this unusual troika had just wandered into his hotel by mistake.

  ‘Good morning, ladies. What can I do for you? Might you have lost your way?’ asked Zuna in that patronising manner adopted by medical personnel in hospitals and old people’s homes when addressing their older patients.

  ‘Is this the Grand Hotel?’ the tall lady addressed Zuna.

  ‘It is indeed.’

  ‘Then we have not lost our way,’ said the lady, handing Pavel Zuna three passports.

  Pavel Zuna felt that current in his toe again, this time so forcefully and painfully that it took his breath away. However, in the practised manner of a supreme professional, Zuna smiled agreeably and went to verify their names on the computer. Pavel Zuna’s face illuminated by the light of the computer screen turned pale, partly with pain, partly with surprise: the two best and most expensive suites in the hotel had been reserved in the names on the passports.

  ‘Excuse me, how long will you be staying? I don’t see the date of your departure here,’ said Pavel Zuna in the tone of a man whose professional pride has just been bruised.

  ‘A couple of days, maybe,’ said the little old lady asthmatically.

  ‘Or maybe a week,’ said the tall lady drily.

  ‘Or maybe forever,’ chimed the blonde.

  ‘I see,’ said Zuna, although he didn’t see at all. ‘May I have your credit card, please?’

  ‘We’re paying in cash!’ said the blonde with the large breasts, smacking her lips as though she had just consumed a tasty morsel.

  The little old lady in the wheelchair silently confirmed the authenticity of the blonde’s statement by opening the zip of the leather bag that was lying limply on her knees. Pavel Zuna bent slightly forward and caught sight of the fat bundles of euro notes arranged tidily in it.

  ‘I see…’ he said, feeling a little dizzy. ‘Ladies of a certain age always pay cash-in-hand.’

  There had clearly been a serious malfunction of Pavel Zuna’s inner scanner, and that troubled him. He waved a hand feebly and at the same instant three young men in hotel uniforms appeared.

  ‘Help these ladies to their rooms, lads. Presidentske apartma! Cisarske apartma!’ Zuna commanded, handing them the keys.

  * * *

  Surrounded by hotel personnel of the male gender, the three female figures glided away towards the lift. Pavel Zuna just managed to observe a sudden breeze blow petals off the luxuriant floral display in a Chinese vase on the reception desk, before his eyes clouded over. The pain from his left big toe swept upwards. It struck him in the small of the back with such force that he simply collapsed.

  This whole scene was observed out of the corner of his eye by Arnoš Kozeny, as he sat comfortably sprawled in one of the lobby armchairs. Arnoš Kozeny, a retired lawyer, was a kind of fixture in the Grand Hotel. He came here every morning for a cappuccino, to leaf through the fresh newspapers and smoke a cigar. He would reappear in the hotel about five in the afternoon, in the café, and in the evening he would hang around the hotel casino. Arnoš Kozeny was a well-preserved seventy-eight-year-old. He was wearing a sand-coloured suit, a freshly ironed light-blue shirt and a bow tie of a bluish hue, with canvas shoes that matched the colour of his suit.

  As he leafed through the papers, Arnoš was struck by the news that Czech vets had found an unidentified strain of bird ’flu on two farms near the town of Norin. The vets had confirmed that it was the H5 virus, but they were not sure whether it was the H5N1 type, which, if measures were not taken in time, would be as deadly to humans as the Spanish ’flu of 1914. The article suggested that, in the course of the last year, the virus had appeared in some thirty countries. Josef Duben, spokesman for the Czech Veterinary Service, announced that, as far as the Czech Republic was concerned, it had not yet been decided whether or not to decontaminate the two farms where the H5 virus had been detected. For the time being there was a three-kilometre quarantine.

  The item caught Arnoš’s attention because of Norin, where his first wife, Jarmila, lived. He hadn’t called her for more than a year now. This would be a good excuse for a little chat, he thought, puffing the smoke from his cigar with relish.

  What about us? We carry on. While the meaning of life may slip from our hold, the purpose of a tale is to be told!

  2.

  Beba was sitting in the bath weeping bitterly. No, she had not burst into tears as soon as she entered the suite, because it took her some time to produce the quantity of tears she was going to shed. When she first came in, she swept her eyes slowly over every detail, exactly like a diver examining the seabed. She ran her hand over the snow-white linen in the bedroom, opened the cupboards, went into the bathroom, removed the disinfectant tape from the toilet, examined the little toiletries by the washbasin, stroked the soft white towelling wrap. Then she opened the curtains and before her eyes stretched a magnificent view of the spa and the wooded hills around it. Here Beba suddenly remembered a Bosnian she had asked to redecorate her flat. It was long ago. Beba had asked for it all to be painted white. When he finished the job, the Bosnian had said: ‘Here you are, my dear, now your flat is like a swan!’

  And now everything congealed in that stupid word swan. The word stuck like a bone in her throat – and Beba burst into tears. And what exactly was the matter? In that hotel with its white façade, spreading its wings over the town like a swan, in the soft space of the imperial suite, wrapped round her like an expensive fur coat, Beba w
as forcefully struck by a sudden awareness of how ugly her life was. As though under powerful police searchlights, all at once the image of her Zagreb flat appeared before her eyes. The miniature kitchen where she had pottered and fiddled about for years, the fridge with the broken handle and its plastic interior now grey with age, the rickety chairs, the sofa and worn armchairs that she covered with rugs and cushions to make them look ‘jollier’, the moth-eaten carpet, the television set in front of which she sat mindlessly more and more often and for ever longer periods. And then the licking and cleaning of all that junk and trembling at the thought that something might stop working – the television, the fridge, the vacuum cleaner – because she could no longer buy anything much. Her pension was barely enough to cover her basic outgoings and food, while her meagre savings had vanished with the Ljubljana Bank some fifteen years before, when the country fell apart and suddenly her bank was in a different state, and everyone had been rushing headlong to steal from everyone else. Had she wanted, she could have derived some bitter satisfaction from it all: in comparison with many other people’s losses hers were negligible, because she had simply had nothing in the first place.

  Then all at once, everything had turned ugly. The people around her had grown ugly with hatred, and then with self- pity and the realisation that they had been cheated. They had all developed a rat-like expression, even the young, those who had begun to come of age breathing in their parents’ poisonous breath.

  * * *

  Beba was weeping because she could not remember when she had last had a holiday. She used to go in both summer and winter. Winter holidays on the coast had been especially cheap. Now they were out of the question, now everything was out of the question. The coast had apparently been bought up by wealthy foreigners and local tycoons.