Ivan made a very big show of yawning wide and loud, and Anya was about to tell him to knock it off when a voice from the door said, “Do you like scary stories, little boy?”
Ivan choked on the yawn and whirled. Babulya stood in the doorway, a basket full of gathered plants hanging from her arm. The domovoi perched on her shoulder, still glowering at Ivan. Not that his dirty looks mattered, since Ivan couldn’t see him.
“I . . . Yes, I do, Gospozha,” Ivan said, his voice cracking.
Babulya shuffled into the kitchen and set the basket down beside the braided challah dough. “Well, I’ve got a very scary story for you. Would you like to hear it?”
“Is it about Baba Yaga?” Ivan sounded hopeful and very nervous.
Babulya shook her head. “No, boy. It’s about a very bad, bad man.”
Ivan fidgeted with his tunic’s hem. “Of course, Gospozha.”
Anya held her breath. She knew what story Babulya was going to tell.
“A long time ago,” Babulya said, “a girl named Channah lived on a mountain, and she longed to travel to faraway places and have adventures. One day, a caravan of traders came through and camped for a few days. One of these traders was Channah’s age, and his name was Ötemish. Channah thought he was very handsome, and he thought Channah was very pretty. When the traders packed up to leave, Channah went with them to their land, Khazaria. To the beautiful city of Sarkel, all made out of white stone. And Channah and Ötemish fell in love and got married, and they had two little girls.”
Babulya patted each of the challah loaves softly and said nothing. Ivan looked between Anya and Babulya, clearly trying to figure out if that was the end of the story. Anya caught his eye and shook her head.
Babulya sighed. “Channah thought she would be happy forever. But one day, a very bad man rode with an army into Sarkel . . . and destroyed it. And while the bad man was destroying the city, and the homes, and the synagogues, Ötemish told Channah to take their daughters and the Torah they saved from the burning synagogue, and to run. He would meet her later, he said, up the river.”
Babulya tipped her sightless eyes in Ivan’s direction, as if she were staring at him. “Channah went, and waited, and Ötemish never came. When Channah saw the army on the move, she knew Ötemish was dead.”
She kept her blind eyes drilled on Ivan for several breaths, neither of them moving or making a sound.
Finally, Ivan broke the silence: “Who was the bad man? Was it Koschei the Deathless?”
Babulya said nothing.
“Is that the end of the story?” Ivan said.
Anya winced. He couldn’t just shut up, could he?
Anya expected Babulya to walk away then and leave Ivan to be puzzled. But to Anya’s surprise, Babulya said, “It’s not. Channah ran and ran and ran, until one day during a terrible blizzard, she found a little boy in the snow. She wrapped him up and put him in the sled with her daughters, and when Channah found the little boy’s father, Boris, he was so grateful she had brought him home, he offered her a room to stay in. When Channah learned the little boy’s mother had died, she couldn’t leave him. So she stayed, even though Boris kept too many goats, and many years later, Channah’s daughter Miriam married the little boy, Miroslav. They had a little daughter they named Channah but whom everyone called Anya, and one day Anya brought home a stupid boy who made their domovoi angry.”
She trundled past Ivan, and the domovoi snarled soundlessly at the fool as they passed. To underscore Babulya’s words, the house spirit stood up tall on Babulya’s shoulder and flicked his wrist at Ivan. A stray wooden spoon sitting on the counter flew up and hit the back of Ivan’s head.
“Ow!” Ivan grabbed at where the spoon had struck him and looked back at the kitchen, searching for who had thrown the spoon.
Babulya cackled on her way to the bedroom. “And that is the end of the story.” Babulya shut the bedroom door, the thump of the latch driving the story into Anya’s chest.
Ivan stared at the shut door, rubbing the back of his head, and then mumbled, “That wasn’t scary.”
Anya sighed. “You really are a fool, you know that?”
* * *
Anya tore a tiny piece of dough from each of the challah loaves, rolled them together into an olive-size ball, and set it aside. Ivan watched, quiet, his eyes darting to the bedroom door every few seconds.
“They have to rise again,” Anya said.
“Is that all bread does?” Ivan asked. “Rise?”
“It’s all flat and hard if you don’t let it rise.”
Ivan fiddled with the ends of his sleeves. “That story was about her, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” Anya had heard the story countless times, usually when Anya wondered why they couldn’t live in the village proper, or why they didn’t go to more festivals, or have more friends. “The man who destroyed Sarkel was the old tsar of Kievan Rus’. Tsar Kazimir’s father.”
Babulya could have taken Mama and Aunt Tzivyah to a bigger city where there were other Jews, but she hadn’t. She had stayed in a little tiny village for a reason. If the old tsar had so mercilessly killed the people of Khazaria in Sarkel, what would the new tsar do to the large communities of Jews living within his borders?
“He was a heathen,” Ivan said softly, as if that explained it. “Tsar Kazimir isn’t.”
“That same thing has happened to us in other places,” Anya said. “Places without Slavists.”
“To your family?”
Anya shrugged. “Kind of. Not my family specifically. But anything that happens to other Jews happens to us. So when the old tsar killed everyone in Sarkel and Atil and everywhere else in Khazaria, everyone felt it.”
Ivan’s eyes widened, and she knew what he was going to ask before he did: “Literally felt it?”
“No, not—”
“Because my mama’s people can do that,” he said quietly. He scrunched his mouth up, his concerned forehead W deepened, and he said “Hmm” a few times to himself. Then he stuck one finger up in the air and said, “What kind of greeting do Jews use to one another?”
She remembered his “Good Perun” attempt at a greeting earlier when he had thought she was Slavist. “Just ‘hello,’ I guess,” she said. “On Shabbat, we say ‘Shabbat shalom,’ but you don’t—”
“What’s Shabbat?”
“The Sabbath,” Anya said. “It starts tonight and ends tomorrow night.”
Ivan nodded. “Can I say it today?”
“I guess,” Anya said. “It can be a hello or a goodbye.”
Ivan pointed to his stack of books on the table. “Can you read?”
A little offended, Anya said, “Of course I can read, in Russian and Hebrew.”
He collected two of the books but left the others. “These are in Latin,” he said on his way past Anya toward the door. “I should get home, but I’ll leave those books for you to read more about dragons. You can bring them tomorrow when you come over.”
She should have been glad he was leaving, but she wasn’t. It was nice to talk to someone who wasn’t her immediate family, or a goat. “Okay.”
At the door, Ivan stopped and raised a hand in goodbye. “Shabbat shalom,” he said with a grin, and then he trotted up to the road and disappeared.
Chapter Nine
Anya read one of her borrowed dragon books until the challah had risen enough, and then she stuck both loaves plus the little extra piece in the oven. The loaves would bake and the little piece would char. Babulya said a long, long time ago, everyone had given some of their food and harvest to the high priests in the temple. And now, even though there was no more temple and no more high priests, they still left a little piece. To remember.
The domovoi appeared on top of the oven, still looking sour. Anya shut the oven door and put her hands on her hips. “He’s gone now. You can stop being upset.”
He stuck his tongue out at her.
“Or don’t,” she said, walking back to the kitchen. “Fine.” She picked up
the flour sack and took it to the barn cellar outside. She returned to the kitchen again so she could get some sugar, an egg, and water that wasn’t the freezing stuff from the cellar well, and returned to the barn. She added flour and sugar to the reserved dough in its bowl, then mixed in water until it was the right consistency. She’d do the same tomorrow, and the next day, until all the flour was gone and they had enough dough for next week.
She finally returned to the house and checked the challah in the oven, pulling out a loaf and knocking on it. It sounded hollow and the crust wasn’t too soft, plus the tiny piece was burned. She used towels to pull out the loaves and left them to cool on the table. When she turned back, the domovoi was on top of the oven again, peering down at the leftover little piece burning inside.
He pointed at the little piece, bushy eyebrows raised.
“It’s not for you,” Anya said. “You know that.”
He pinched his fingers together.
“Not even a little bit.” She shut the oven door. The little piece would burn up before the oven cooled. “You can have some later. But not that piece.”
The domovoi screeched in protest and vanished. Anya could hear him banging on the walls as he retreated to wherever he went when he disappeared. He was crankier that day than normal. Usually when she told him he couldn’t eat the challah sacrifice, he just shrugged and let it go.
Anya checked on Babulya, pausing by the bedroom door and listening for the old woman’s snores. Once she heard a few, Anya returned to read the dragon books. The big one with the terrifying two-page spread had been in Latin, so she didn’t have it. The three Ivan had left were much smaller than that one, but still incredible.
Papa had only three books total, leather bound and heavy, which Babulya had gifted to him when he had converted to Judaism. All three had been in the pack Babulya had fled Sarkel with, along with the Torah scroll: two different copies of the Talmud, and a geography book.
Anya flipped open the first book Ivan had given her. On the very center of the first page, it read:
A Compendium of Dangerous Creatures
Written and Illustrated by
Ivan Vosmyorka Ivanovich Ivanov
Eager to see what he knew, Anya flipped deeper into the text. Ivan’s book read very matter-of-factly, with diagrams and illustrations of various magical creatures:
Rusalki, which Ivan said were the fishtail-having souls of women who had drowned, and the only way to put them to rest was to christen them. A note had been scribbled next to the illustration: Rusalka seen today didn’t have a fishtail—investigate. Anya had never seen one with a fishtail, and everyone knew the only way to put them to rest was to either bury their bodies or avenge whoever had caused them to drown in the first place.
The leshy, a forest spirit that looked like a man crossed with a tree, who would lead travelers astray until they died. She wrinkled her nose. Zmeyreka’s resident leshy would get people lost as a prank, but he always returned them to the road eventually.
Vodyaniye, the sinister river-grass spirits who lived in bodies of water and would regularly capsize fishing boats and drown the fishermen. That entry, at least, was mostly correct. The fishermen in Zmeyreka affixed little knives to the bottoms of their boats to keep the vodyaniye away.
Anya flipped a page and saw an illustration of a domovoi. The one in the book—a small ape with a beard—looked nothing like her own house spirit. It didn’t even have clothing on. According to Ivan’s description, a domovoi was a ghostly entity that would destroy the home unless appeased with sacrifices, and could shape-shift into a wolf or rat if it wanted.
She studied the illustration, puzzled. The Kozlov domovoi protected their home, and would destroy things only if he felt insulted somehow. They didn’t sacrifice anything to him; he mostly got leftovers. Sometimes Dyedka would give him something special, like tobacco. He could change into a small dog or a cat, and sometimes he would make himself look like a very tiny version of Papa. He hadn’t done that since Papa had been gone, though.
She made a mental note to educate Ivan about the true nature of some of his entries, and also to ask about the emotional state of his house spirit. Or whether his family had a house spirit at all.
A ruckus of hooves and bleating outside alerted Anya to Dyedka’s return. She shut the book and peeked out the door. The herd hurried past, heading to the barn, and her grandfather followed behind them in a little cart. Two of the billy goats pulled it like draft ponies.
Dyedka waved at Anya. “Come help me put the goats up, Annushka!”
Anya followed the herd into the barn. Zvezda limped up to her, bleating loudly, with his tongue lolling out of his mouth. She scratched his long nose.
“Did you behave?” Anya asked.
“Myah,” Zvezda said.
“I didn’t think so.”
Dyedka heaved himself up, and Anya ran to help him step out of the cart. Once he was steady, she unhooked the goats that pulled Dyedka around.
“Thank you,” Dyedka said, rubbing at one leg absently. “Did you have a good day?”
She thought of the zmeyok, the magistrate, Sigurd, Ivan and his family, and Babulya’s story.
“It was busy,” she said.
“Good.” He pointed at the back of the cart, where stoneware bottles rested in hay that a few of the goats nibbled on. “I milked more in the field. Put it in the cellar, will you?”
Anya grabbed the bottles and lifted the barn’s cellar door up. She balanced the milk bottles in her arms and stepped carefully down the stairs into the cave-cellar. A cold, damp breeze blew the hair out of Anya’s face as she reached the bottom of the stairs. She arranged the milk bottles around the well’s edge, picked up the fish, then checked on the bread in its bowl at the other end of the cellar.
She retreated into the warmth of the main barn, and she lowered the cellar door as Dyedka said, “Zvezda did well out there, even with his leg. Good for you, Anya. Maybe you got some of your papa’s magic after all.”
Anya picked up the single milk bottle she had left in the main barn and said, “If I did it, it was by accident. Can people use magic by accident, Dyedka?”
He shrugged as he hobbled to the door. “Not real magic.”
It had taken every ounce of concentration she had to spray a little dirt in a zmeyok’s face that morning. The idea that someone could do that without meaning to was something Anya had a hard time imagining.
Once in the house, Dyedka went straight to the bread cooling on the table and sniffed it. “Smells good.”
“You can’t have any yet.” She pulled the white cloth out of its cupboard and ran to the table, draping it over the loaves before Dyedka could pick pieces out of them. “Wait for dinner.”
He grumbled and went to the bedroom.
When the door shut and she heard his bed creak as he sat on it, Anya went about cooking the fish. Mama fried it when she cooked, but Anya wasn’t as confident. She boiled it into a stew instead, tossing in various vegetables and herbs she found around the house. Today she stewed the fish with potatoes, onions, and leeks, plus a handful of random herbs from Babulya’s collection.
As the fish stew boiled away, Anya opened the special cupboard in the kitchen, where she had gotten the challah’s white cloth. She pulled out the long, white candles they would light, noting they had only one set left. There were six of them, mandated by Babulya: two that every family lit, plus one each for Mama, Aunt Tzivyah, Papa, and Anya. Babulya had started out lighting two extra candles for Mama and Aunt Tzivyah, and then added Papa, and then Anya last. Even though Aunt Tzivyah and Papa were gone, she still lit their candles.
Anya lined the candles up on the counter. She read Ivan’s books more while the stew cooked. Ivan had talked about conflicting schools of thought when it came to dragon development, but there were some points common to both schools. Dragons loved treasure, gold, and precious jewels. They were master linguists and could understand any language. They brought rain, but depending
on the dragon’s temperament, it could be good rain or bad rain. And they attracted birds.
“Why birds?” Anya wondered aloud as Mama walked through the door, a large sack in her hands. Behind her, the long, orange sunlight heralded the approach of evening.
Anya shut the book and took the sack from Mama. Inside were several items she had traded onions or rubles for, and among them, new candles. Good.
Mama tasted the fish stew and aimed a tired smile at Anya. “This is good.”
Anya smiled as she went to wake up Babulya and Dyedka. A few minutes later, they were all gathered around the counter, where the candles were lined up. Dyedka stood at the end, even though, as a Slavist, he could have just sat at the table and ignored their prayers. Mama held a long, thin stick she had lit from the oven. Anya held on to Babulya’s arm to steady her as Mama lit all six candles one after another. She made it to the last one just as the stick had almost burned down to her fingers, and she let it drop on the counter to burn itself out. Mama waved her open hands over the candles three times, as if sweeping the candlelight toward herself. Then she covered her face with her hands, took a deep breath, and said, “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu . . .”
She trailed off. Anya could see her swallowing hard, time after time after time. That was something Mama did when she was trying not to cry. Babulya shifted against Anya’s arm, cocking her head, probably wondering if she had suddenly gone deaf, too.
Mama took a sharp breath and continued, “Melech ha-olam, asher kidishanu b’mitzvotav vitzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.” She dropped her hands, tears shining on her cheeks in the candlelight. She wiped them away with her sleeve before turning around and saying, “Shabbat shalom.”
“Shabbat shalom,” Babulya said reverently.
“Shabbat shalom,” Anya mumbled.
“Shabbat shalom,” Dyedka grumped. “Can we eat now?”
* * *
They had been eating quietly for several minutes before Dyedka said, “Annushka, have you seen the domovoi?”
Anya paused, mouth full of soup.
Anya and the Dragon Page 6