Seemingly in spite of himself, Grandfather nods.
When he speaks, his voice has an old, feathery texture that must work a magic on mama, because she softens under the boy, and when he looks she is beaming. The boy nestles down, half his work not yet done, and listens.
This isn’t the tale, says Grandfather, but an opening. The tale comes tomorrow, after the meal, when we are filled with soft bread.
His eyes look past the boy, at mama. Silently, she implores him to go on.
And now, he whispers, we start our tale. Long, long ago, when we did not exist, when perhaps our great-grandfathers were not in the world, in a land not so very far away, on the earth in front of the sky, on a plain place like on a wether, seven versts aside, there lived a peasant with his wife and they had twins alike as the snow – a son and a daughter.
Now, it happened that the wife died of frost and the papa mourned sincere for a very long time. One year passed of crying, and two years, and three years more, and the papa decided: I must find a new mother for my boy and my girl. And so he married again, and had children by his second wife.
But a stepmother can think of old children like thistles in the wheat, and it happened that she became envious of the boy and the girl and used them harshly. They were beaten like donkeys and she gave them scarcely enough to eat. So it went until one day she wondered: what would life be like were I to be rid of them forever?
Grandfather pauses, with the simpering gas fire fluttering behind.
Do you know what it is to let a wicked thought enter that heart? he says, with sing-song voice and a single finger pointing to the boy’s breast. That thought can take hold and poison even the very good things in you. So it was for the stepmother. So she brought the boy and the girl to her and one day said: here is a basket, you must fill it with fruits and take it to my Grandma in the woods. There, she lives in a hut on hen’s feet.
So, the boy and girl set out. They found nuts and berries along the way and, with their flaking leather knapsack filled with wild, wild fare, they entered the darkest wood.
There is a look shimmering in Grandfather’s eyes that the boy can only describe as wonder. There are forests banking all edges of the city, rolling on into wilderness kingdoms of which the boy has only ever heard tell: the place called Poland, the northern realm of Latvia – and, in the east, the Russias, which once were the whole world.
On they went, the boy and the girl, and at once they found the hut with hen’s feet. It was a most lamentable thing, and on its head was a rooster’s ruff, with dark sad eyes. Izboushka! they cried. Izboushka! Turn your back to the forest and your front to us! The hen feet shuffled, the hut did as they commanded, and there in the little thatch door stood a witch woman, Baba Yaga, who was truly not a Grandma at all. The children were afraid, but they held to each other as children do, and said: our stepmother sends us to help you, Grandma, and we have brought fruit from our journey. And Baba Yaga, who was as old as the forest and older than that, said: well, I have had children before and I shall have children again, and if you work well I shall reward you, and if you do not I shall eat you up.
The boy watches as Grandfather says the final words. His throat constricts, and for an instant it seems that he has to choke them out.
That night, the boy and the girl were set to weaving in the dark of the hen feet hut. And as they wove, the boy cried: we shall be eaten. And as they wove, the girl said: we shall only be eaten if we do not work hard. If we work hard, we shall be rewarded. But a voice halloed them in the dark, and the voice came from a knot in the wall, for in the wall were the skulls of creatures of the forest, and one of those skulls was the skull of a little boy.
Ho, said the skull, but you are mistaken. Your reward will be to be eaten, because for Baba Yaga to be eaten is a great reward. Heed me, for I was once a boy who got lost in the woods and toiled in Baba Yaga’s hut.
But what can we do, asked the girl, but work hard and be rewarded?
You must run, said the skull, and take this ribbon. Be kind to the trees of the forest, for they will help if they can.
Well, the boy and the girl waited until dead of night, when Baba Yaga was abroad. And though the girl wanted to run, the boy was too afraid. So the girl said: I will run and find our papa and we will come back to help. And she ran.
But Baba Yaga knew a spiteful pine and the pine’s branches whispered to its needles who whispered to a crow who brought Baba Yaga down. And Baba Yaga gave chase on her broom. At once, the girl remembered the skull’s words. Be kind to the forest, and the forest will be kind to you. So she took the ribbon and tied it to a birch. And the birch was so filled with goodness that the trees of the forest, all but the spiteful pine, grew tangled and would not let Baba Yaga pass.
So the girl found her papa and told him what had come to pass, and the papa took his axe into the forest, but because the forest was kind it let him pass. And at last they came to Baba Yaga’s hut, but of the boy there was no sign. Now there was only another skull in the wall of the hen’s feet hut, one to sit next to the other little boy. For the boy had been eaten up and now was part of Baba Yaga forever and more.
And from that day until this, two boys can be heard talking at night in the dead of the forest.
‘Is it true?’ marvels the boy.
Oh, says Grandfather. I know it is true, for one was there who told me of it.
The boy beams. It is the way a story is always signed off, a thing he has heard every time mama tells him a story. He looks around, to see if mama has loved the story as much as him, but he sees, instead, that her face is webbed in strange patterns, that her eyes are sore and red, that some monster has hacked away at her beautiful hair to leave her scarred, ugly, naked as Grandfather’s pate.
‘Come on, boy,’ says Grandfather, lumbering to his feet. ‘I’ll make you a hot milk.’
Grandfather’s hands find his shoulders, try to drag him from mama’s knee. All around him, locks of blonde and grey shower down. His little hands reach out to catch them, but they slip away.
‘It’s okay,’ says mama, ‘I’ll finish it. Don’t cry, now.’
In the kitchen, the boy frets over a pan of milk that won’t stop scalding. He can hear Grandfather and mama, and mama has lost all of her words. Then he hears the footsteps and closing of a door that tells him mama has gone to her bedroom.
Grandfather finds him wrestling with the pan, and gently sets it down. ‘She wants to see you.’
A fist forces its way up the boy’s throat. Though they have been with Grandfather only weeks, it is a law as old as time itself, one of the rules whipped up when the world was young, the forests were just tiny green shoots, and Baba Yaga only a babe: you must not go through mama’s bedroom door, not after bedtime.
Grandfather ushers him down the hall and leaves him at the door.
At first, the boy does not want to go through. His hand dances on the handle and he is about to turn away, crawl into his bunk.
Then mama’s voice itself summons him through. ‘Don’t be afraid. It was only a few little tears.’
It is a small room, with a bed with red patchwork and a cabinet with a lamp. On one wall there is a dresser, and around that more photographs of the kind he has seen in the hallway. In these photographs there are no soldiers, nor men in jackboots with rifles on their shoulders, but only the same woman, over and over again. It is, the boy knows, his own baba, who once was married to Grandfather.
Mama is on the bed but not in the covers. She has a shawl on her shoulders, the same one in which she used to wrap the boy when he was but small, and the knotted handkerchief is