Burning Girls and Other Stories

by Veronica Schanoes

  The revolution had become a corrupt, hierarchy-bound dictatorship. And her sister had died. And she was far from her home of forty years, never to return for longer than the space of a lecture tour.

  Her heart, previously anarchist black and red, was turning gray with grief.

  And then she and Berkman were invited to join the Museum of the Revolution. And they said yes.

  What a strange thing to do! Goldman could not bring herself to put her nursing skills to use in a corrupt medical system, but she could turn her attention to preserving mementos of the revolution?

  What a strange thing to exist! The Party claimed that the only true safety was in worldwide revolution, and it was their only duty to spread that revolution via the Red Army and the Cheka. But it could commit to making a museum in the former Winter Palace?

  I approve of preserving history and culture—I am a scholar, am I not?—and I like the symbolism of throwing open palace doors. But it does not seem a natural fit for Goldman and Berkman—collecting historical memorabilia when the suffering and the need were raging around them? On the other hand, the institution was nonpartisan, and Goldman liked the secretary and his staff, who were not Bolsheviks. She would not be constantly under the eye of a commissar. And indeed, she could get the hell out of Petrograd.

  For the museum wanted Goldman to join an expedition south to the Ukraine and the Caucasus. She could travel, take an unsupervised breath of fresh air, and speak to people around the country.

  So a caravan was found and fitted out, and Goldman and Berkman and several other comrades, only one of whom was a Bolshevik (in the early 1920s, party membership was not open—it required a variety of approvals and an intensive investigation of one’s history), set out.

  And this is where we join them, between Kiev and Odessa, in the Kiev province, where the wait times to couple their museum car to trains heading south dragged on indefinitely. They spent time visiting little towns and villages, talking with the people there. In late summer 1921, almost twenty years before the Holocaust, most of the people there were Jewish.

  The Jewish population of Russia had by 1921 suffered many pogroms as well as assaults by bandits and even the occasional Red Guard. The pogroms during the civil war, 1918–1921, had been as bad as anything under the czars. By 1921, some localities petitioned the revolutionary government for weapons to protect themselves with. They were refused. But to their credit, the Bolsheviks ended the pogroms.

  Jews of no particular political persuasion were confused by the revolution. The Bolsheviks had forbidden the trade by which Jewish merchants made their living. Jewish Bundists felt that the corruption, cruelty, and depravity of the Bolsheviks betrayed every revolutionary value they had espoused. Zionists feared the Bolshevik disapproval of specifically Jewish culture, the desire of the Party to assimilate all peoples into one proletariat, to dissolve specific cultures into one.

  Goldman did not approve of these criticisms. She thought the critics making them bourgeois. But that does not necessarily mean they were wrong. Sometimes you cannot deny truth, even when it comes in a voice you don’t want to hear.

  2. THE FANTASY

  And so it was that Emma Goldman—stymied, exiled, grieving her beloved older sister and the life she had known, grieving also the hopes she had harbored for the Revolution—walked out of the little Jewish town she had been visiting, and into the Russian forest.

  She walked alone, without Sasha, for his heart was not broken by death, though he too was exiled and disillusioned. She walked alone, to listen to her own thoughts, to search the smoldering embers of her heart and find something left to burn.

  The day was cold; the woods were beautiful; Emma Goldman walked alone. And she walked, and she walked, and she walked. And eventually she walked right out of Russia, and into the thrice-tenth kingdom.

  How long does such a journey take? Kingdom after kingdom after kingdom, until you get to thirty? Well, for us, not long at all, really, for didn’t Goldman make it in only a few short paragraphs? This is the nature of time—it dilates during suffering and also during joy, rushes through our fingers into the sea when we seek to hold it tight; when we are depressed, the hours open up indefinitely as we are condemned to endure yet another day of consciousness, and then, and then, we look up and realize that we have lost weeks, months, even years to the sticky-fingered destroyer of joy, never to be regained.

  So not long for us, but for Goldman, her walk stretched on and on, and she felt every second it took her to trudge onward, and she was cold in her fingers and in her soul. The color leeched out of the woods, for there was a gray veil separating her from the land of the living. But for us, it takes only a wave of my hand, a scrawl of ink, a metaphorical snap of my fingers, and we are already there, in the land of magic and fairy tale.

  Goldman did not know that she had crossed over, of course. There was no billboard proclaiming WELCOME TO THE THRICE-TENTH KINGDOM, WE HOPE YOU SURVIVE YOUR STAY! There was not even a crude wooden signpost, let alone a lamppost in the woods. There was just forest and then more forest, and if there was a warning, a wolf howling at Goldman to turn back, turn back, turn back while you still can, she could not hear it.

  And what anarchist cares for borders anyway?

  There was no sign of anything strange at all, until Goldman came to the fence. It was weathered and old, and it surrounded a building in shadow. There were twelve fenceposts, and atop each post was a skull, and the twelve skulls were chattering, each louder than the last.

  But they were not moaning out warnings. Nor were they groaning ominously in pain or fear, or cackling harshly or anything else appropriate to a skull stuck up ominously on a fencepost. Instead, they were giggling and gossiping.

  “Ooooh! She’s coming!” squealed one.

  “I don’t know, that’s not how I thought she’d look, are you sure that’s her? She doesn’t look terribly dangerous.”

  “Nobody ever does, I’m not worried about that, but isn’t she supposed to be, you know, fast? A bit of a loose woman? I thought she’d be more alluring. She looks like my old bubbe!”

  “She looks like anybody’s old bubbe! Ask her for her recipe for blintzes!”

  Goldman sighed. As it happened, she made excellent blintzes, but she wasn’t going to waste the recipe on a bunch of skulls that couldn’t cook, couldn’t eat, and had no manners to boot.

  That’s the thing about depression: it inures you to wonder, even to fear. Skulls are chattering and squealing and all you can do is sigh and accept that they’re right, that your best days are behind you, to agree that you’ve gotten too old and fat and aren’t good for anything but making blintzes, and blintzes are delicious, but they are no adventure, and you are unable to recognize the adventure going on around you.

  Well, perhaps “recognize” is the wrong word, for of course she recognized the house. It was a plain peasant home, standing with its back to the bone-gate, ignoring the insulting skulls.

  Goldman lingered at the gate for a long time, not out of fear, but in weariness and boredom. She would’ve drummed her fingers on a femur-fence-slat if it hadn’t seemed so infinitely difficult to do so, so overwhelmingly complex to move each muscle, for each muscle to pull the old bones, to maintain even the most basic rhythm: da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, the anapest of boredom.

  Pull yourself together, she screamed at herself silently, but the thread of being remained slack.

  Eventually one of the skulls rotated on its fencepost and looked at her blankly, which is the only way a skull can look, really.

  “Are you going to say it, or are you going to run away? She won’t wait forever, you know.”

  Goldman bridled a bit. “I’m not running away. I don’t run away from anything.”

  “Then you might as well say it,” said the skull. “We’ve all looked at you long enough.”

  “You’re no balm to the eyes, either,” Goldman told it, but nonetheless, she squared up and spoke: “Little house, little house, turn a
nd place your back to the woods, your front door to me.”

  I don’t know, perhaps it rhymes in Russian.

  The house rose, exposing two scaly, clawed chicken’s feet, more like the dinosaur talons we now know them to be, and slowly, deliberately turned. There was a pregnant pause while it looked at Goldman with the knots in its weathered, stained wood. Then the door swung carefully open. A gust of warm air floated out, like an exhalation.

  Without looking to either side, ignoring the insulting skulls, Emma Goldman walked into the cottage.

  The door swung shut behind her.

  The skulls couldn’t shrug, of course, or raise their eyebrows, but they allowed a beat of silence before they resumed yakking again.

  * * *

  Once she was inside the house, Goldman couldn’t hear them. At first she heard nothing, saw nothing. But her eyes began to adjust to the meager light inside the cottage, and she was able to make out a figure, a figure all harsh angles and stringy muscle, sitting at a table, grinding something with a mortar and pestle. Farther back in the room, a cauldron sat over the hearth. It was very warm in the hut.

  All Goldman could hear was the scrape of stone on stone, the fire crackling. A bird sang, somewhere outside the hut.

  Finally the figure spoke. “Sit down, Emma.” It gestured to a stool on the opposite side of the table.

  Goldman sat, her back already hurting from the lack of support.

  “Do you know me, Emma?” the figure asked. Its voice was surprisingly pleasant. Instead of the harsh, grating rasp one might expect from a … woman, Goldman could now see, a skinny old woman whose tits hung down to her lap, her jaws clamped firmly around a battered pipe, her low alto flowing out like warm honey. Or like pooling blood. “Do you remember me?”

  Goldman nodded.

  “But do you really remember? You were so young the first time we met.”

  Goldman hesitated. “I was ten. I remember ten.”

  “That was the second time,” said the Baba Yaga, for you must know by now that it was she. “When you came searching for my house after your mother had rebuffed you. You had almost worked up the nerve to step through my door when that older sister of yours came and dragged you back.”

  “Yes,” said Goldman, with some difficulty as she thought of Helena, Helena young and gay, Helena unafraid. “That is what I remember.”

  “But that was the second time. The first time was when you were a little baby, not even crawling yet, barely sitting. I found you napping outside, ignored by all your family, and I thought, what a pretty child, what a child full of fire and curiosity! I shall take her, and either raise her up as my own or roast her for dinner. These Goldmans don’t know what they have and do not deserve her.

  “So I did. I took you in my arms and lifted you into my mortar and took you away.

  “And I set you down in my garden and left you playing with my hens and their chicks while I went to light the oven, or possibly to prepare a cradle.”

  “When I was a baby,” said Goldman, “we lived in Kovno. It was the capital of the Kovno Governorate. Somebody would have noticed you traveling in a mortar and pestle through the streets.”

  The Baba Yaga waved a hand irritably. “Disguised, disguised. The mortar was a carriage, the pestle a gray horse.”

  Goldman shrugged.

  “I did not think the Goldmans would notice your absence, but I was wrong. One did, and she was young enough to see that my carriage was no carriage, and my horse no horse. And she came after you, though she was younger than you were ten years later when you sought me out.”

  “Helena,” breathed Goldman.

  “Helena,” agreed the Baba Yaga. “I saw her though my windows. I pulled back a corner of the curtains and watched as she approached my little house, my garden, my chickens, my new baby or possibly my dinner. I still hadn’t decided.

  “And as she set her jaw and ignored my chattering skulls and walked steadily into my garden to claim you and bring you home, I thought to myself, I took the wrong girl. It is this Helena who belongs with me.”

  Goldman’s face was impassive, and she remained silent.

  “But now that I look back over your life,” continued the Baba Yaga, “I see I was right the first time, and you are the Goldman sister with teeth and a will of iron, and a heart of fire.

  “Or a heart that was once of fire. For hasn’t her loss left your heart ashes, Emma? Cold and gray with not a spark left with which to kindle the smelting flames that have always before immolated all doubt, all hesitation in your breast?

  “Whatever happened to Helena, anyway?”

  “She died,” said Goldman, and the famed orator hesitated and then added, “some months ago.”

  “Yes, yes,” said the Baba Yaga. “I see that much in your face. But before that.”

  Goldman shrugged. “She married. A decent man, but no businessman, and there was no passion between them. She had children. She died.”

  “Ah,” said the Baba Yaga, and nodded knowingly. “Such is the lot of women.”

  There was a pause while the woman and the witch listened to the forest.

  “How did you manage to avoid it, dear Emmele?”

  Goldman looked at the Baba Yaga. “I have a tipped uterus. I cannot bear children.” She tried to summon up her wonted fervor and dedication. “The revolution will be my child.”

  They listened to the forest again.

  “Will it?” asked the Baba Yaga, somewhat delicately. It was a dusty delicacy, long unused.

  “I’d hoped so,” admitted Goldman.

  “Has it not worked out so?” Again, the rare delicacy, and this time Goldman could hear its hinges catch and scrape, protesting such activity after its long sleep.

  “No,” Goldman said shortly.

  “Ah.”

  The Baba Yaga filled their teacups. Goldman added cherry preserves to hers, and they sipped quietly for a while.

  “I suppose it still might,” said Goldman at last.

  The Baba Yaga tossed delicacy aside. “Here? This revolution? You haven’t seen enough? You still believe that?”

  “Not here.” Goldman shook her head slowly. “But perhaps … elsewhere.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said the Baba Yaga.

  Goldman glared at her. “The working people are a force too potent to be suppressed. All over, we will see uprisings—”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  Goldman sighed and subsided. “I have believed in this revolution for a long time. Perhaps it is not my belief that matters.”

  “Certainly not to it,” said the Baba Yaga. “In any case,” she continued, waving a bony hand, “I have an offer for you.”

  “A place on your empty post outside?”

  “No, of course not. You will keep that space for me. You are tired of life, Emmele. Very well, I understand, for I too felt that way, many years ago. And that is when I became the Baba Yaga, when I took my predecessor’s place, and she became one with Mother Russia. And now, I feel my old bones longing to dissolve into the earth, and it is time for another to step into the role and occupy this cottage. And Emmele, I think it should be you.”

  Goldman raised her eyebrows. “But I am not Baba Yaga.”

  “But you could be,” returned the other. “It is a title, not a name, and I can pass it to you, just as the previous Baba Yaga passed it to me.”

  Goldman considered the prospect with perhaps more equanimity than one might expect from a committed atheist who held that the physical world was all that existed. “What does it involve, being the Baba Yaga?” she asked.

  The Baba Yaga was briefly unable to meet Goldman’s gaze. “Not as much as once it did,” she admitted finally. “The Russian populace is less frightened of my cooking pot than once it was.”

  “They are less gullible, you mean,” said Goldman. “Less inclined to believe in fairy tales.”

  The Baba Yaga clucked her tongue and shook her head. “Just as gullible as ever, Emmele. The
y just believe in different fairy tales now. And what a thing to say, as you sit conversing with the Baba Yaga.

  “I mostly keep to myself. I cook and eat the odd child who is cruel or thoughtless, or sometimes I give it a charmed life. I consult the skulls for predictions. I keep order among the sun, the moon, the wind, the stars, and the forest. When I am displeased, I add bones to my fence outside. And I am safe, and I am powerful, and I am left alone. It is … the best a woman can hope for, in this world.”

  “Are the skulls always so rude?” asked Goldman absently, while she thought about it.

  “Usually,” answered the witch. “And I certainly shall be.”

  Goldman looked at the Baba Yaga questioningly.

  “To take over my cottage,” the Baba Yaga explained, “you must strike off my head with a cleaver. You must wrench the iron canines from my mouth and affix them in your own. And you must bury my body but put my head on the empty post outside.”

  “And then what?” asked Goldman. “You sit up there chattering your teeth forever?”

  “Not exactly. The part of me that is still mortal dies and melts into the ground of Mother Russia. The part of me that is witch … stays on the post and becomes an oracle, and gives light. The part of me that is goddess … ascends.

  “And you move into my cottage. You practice magic. You aid or eat the Russians, depending on your inclination and whether or not they can find you. You can plot against the Bolsheviks if you like, make them suffer for ruining your beautiful revolution.”

  Goldman picked up the cleaver that lay on the table between them and fitted the handle to her hand contemplatively. “And Sasha, he can stay with me?”

  “No,” said the Baba Yaga firmly. “He cannot.” After a minute she added, somewhat cruelly, “You know he would never be happy without his girls around him, anyway.”