“It’s not American or English or French or anything else. It’s magic. Handsome Alyosha can pedal it on water and above the clouds. He’s ridden it through the heavens. Every new moon there’s a race around the largest of Saturn’s rings, and Handsome Alyosha always wins.”
“Who else is in the race? Who comes in second and third?”
“Hermes and Chronos. God of travel and god of time.”
“What about Zeus?”
“He watches. The race is meant to entertain him.”
“How can it be entertaining if it always turns out the same?”
“Because Zeus and all the others never believe Handsome Alyosha will win. No matter how many times he comes in first, they think it will be different the next time. After all, they’re gods. They don’t understand how a boy on a red bicycle can win, especially not against Chronos, who can slow the hand of a stopwatch, or Hermes, with his winged sandals.”
“Are all the gods there watching?”
“The men, yes, but not all the women. There’s a grandstand and clubhouse built on one of Saturn’s inside rings, just as at a horse race. Dionysus runs the concession and all he serves is champagne, fois gras, and caviar. Toast points, of course, for the pâté and the caviar. Demeter won’t come, because she’s always quarreling with her father—he’s Chronos. And Artemis hates cycling. She disapproves of everything except bows and arrows. That’s as much technological advancement as she tolerates. But Hera and Aphrodite are there, and Athena, of course. Hestia sometimes, but she’s a home-body. She never feels she has the right clothes for going to the races.”
Sitting by Alyosha’s bed, I could invent this kind of nonsense for hours, so Handsome Alyosha never lacked for adventures, but the beginning of his story, the part Alyosha asked for more often than any of the others, was the story of Handsome Alyosha and Baba Yaga.
Handsome Alyosha had a cruel stepfather who made him do all the most menial chores while he and his ugly sons lazed about. But Handsome Alyosha had a secret. Before his real father died, he had called his son to his bedside and from under his pillow he pulled a little soldier doll. Keep him with you wherever you go, Alyosha, his real father said, and never let anyone see him. If you get into trouble, give him a morsel of food and ask his help.
And so he did. The stepfather thought he could destroy Handsome Alyosha’s health and good looks by working him to death in the cold while he and the louts who were his sons warmed themselves by the hearth, but it was the soldier doll who chopped wood and drew water from the well. Since the wicked ones made no effort to help Handsome Alyosha, they never saw how it was that the brave doll hunted and dressed the game he killed. Be sharp, little sword, said the doll to his knife, be swift, and so it was.
One day, when his useless lazybones stepbrothers allowed the fire to go out, Handsome Alyosha’s stepfather sent him to Baba Yaga to fetch a light, and the doll told the boy to be brave and do as he was asked. As long as he kept the doll in his pocket, no witch could harm him. But Handsome Alyosha couldn’t help but feel frightened, for, as everyone knows, Baba Yaga eats children. She flies through the night in a mortar, using the pestle as a rudder and a broom to sweep away the traces.
“What traces can she make if she flies?” Alyosha asked.
“Why, the bits of hair and gristle she spits out. The fingernails and the teeth.”
Handsome Alyosha could hardly speak for fear when he found that the hut was made of human bones. But, Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest, your front to me, he said when he reached its door.
Naturally, Baba Yaga didn’t give a boy what he asked for until he had performed the usual sorts of terrible tasks witches impose on children. Baba Yaga flew off in her mortar and left Handsome Alyosha behind to kill the thousand snakes in her corncrib and to fill her wood box with tinder gathered on a distant mountaintop, and all the while the hut’s frightful scaly legs went on dancing so wildly the furniture flew about the room. But with the help of the soldier doll, Alyosha accomplished his impossible chores easily. He even bridled Baba Yaga’s three bewitched horses, red for the sun, white for the day, and black for the night.
How did you! Baba Yaga screamed, when she flew home and found she couldn’t punish the boy.
My father’s blessing, Handsome Alyosha answered, as he knew this was the one magic Baba Yaga could not overcome. She had to give the boy fire as well as a skull in which to carry it home.
Handsome Alyosha walked through the dark forest without further trouble, holding the skull so its flame-bright eyes shone like headlamps to show him the way through the trees. When he reached his home, the fire leapt out of the skull and burned up the stepfather and stepbrothers as just desserts for their unkindness. Three heaps of ashes, that’s all that was left of them.
“And then?” Alyosha would prompt.
And then Handsome Alyosha kept the magic soldier doll in his pocket until the day he died, when he was no longer a poor boy but the tsar of all Russia, an old man who had fought many battles and won many wars and who had nine hundred and ninety-nine great-grandchildren. That’s how far his dying father’s blessing had taken him and why the story was Alyosha’s favorite. Often in danger of being extinguished, the life of Handsome Alyosha was filled with peril and impossible quests, even more so than the real Alyosha’s.
I knew I couldn’t help him as my father had done, couldn’t whisper to the clamoring blood and stop its flow. Couldn’t lay a hand on an injury and make it disappear. But I could tell stories, and they were, most of them, true.
The Virgin in the Silver Forest
“IT HAPPENED IN the Silver Forest.”
“The one outside Moscow,” Alyosha said.
“Yes, outside of Moscow.”
The setting was important. It wasn’t any forest but that particular forest of birch and pine.
“Once upon a time, when you were a little boy, you fell down in the park and injured your arm, and your poor frightened mother summoned my father to come to you from Moscow.”
“He was there for the opening of an orphanage,” Alyosha continued. “Father Grigory’s Home for Children.”
“Yes.” Although it wasn’t so much an orphanage as a place for destitute families to leave their children, lest they starve. All the money Father was given as bribes he gave away, often to orphanages, and this one had thanked him by changing its name. I think it was a hard thing for a tsarevich to consider: that loving parents might abandon their children to be fed, clothed, and protected—care they could not themselves provide.
“He missed the opening,” I said. “The re-opening, really. He bought a ticket for the first available train to Petersburg.”
“And then?” Alyosha said.
“And then,” I answered, “as there were hours to fill before its departure, he went for a walk.”
After I’d told Alyosha the story of the Virgin in the Silver Forest once or twice, it became something closer to a prayer than a distraction. Were I to omit a detail, Alyosha supplied it. If I changed anything inadvertently, he corrected me. It had to be the same each time, exactly the same.
“Your father didn’t like walking in cities,” he’d prompt, and I’d say, “No, he didn’t. He didn’t like it at all.”
For Father, a walk meant going beyond the outskirts of Moscow, with its poverty-choked streets. Apart from their taverns, where he could dance with gypsy women, Father found the noise and ugliness of cities offensive. To get to the Silver Forest, he crossed a fallow field. Once inside the trees, sheltered from the wind, he found the woods silent, and he saw how a storm had left everything,