Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.)

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  ‘Come and sit down. Over here, in the restaurant… You’re white as a sheet! Is everything all right?

  ‘It’s all white, don’t hurry,’ said Beba.

  Arnoš called the waiter and ordered two French cognacs, which the waiter brought with the speed of lightning.

  ‘Get that down you, you’ll feel better,’ ordered Arnoš.

  And Beba downed the cognac, and she really did feel a bit better. If nothing else, at least her ears had popped.

  ‘Well, warmest congratulations!’ said Arnoš, raising his glass and clinking it against Beba’s.

  ‘What for?’ she asked.

  ‘How do you mean, what for? How much did you bag? Go on, tell me!’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘People are saying you cleaned the casino out of half a million euros and that you’ve ruined that Russian.’

  ‘What Russian?’

  ‘The Russian, they call him Kotik, he’s the local con artist and Mafioso.’

  Beba felt a wave of exhaustion sweep over her again.

  ‘Are you yelling the truth?’

  ‘You’re a wealthy woman, my dear,’ said Arnoš.

  ‘Me? Healthy?! ’

  ‘Have a look in your handbag, they must have given you a figure…’

  Beba opened her bag, took out the form and showed it to Arnoš. It had the hotel casino’s stamp on it, and some signatures, including Beba’s.

  ‘Why yes!’ said Arnoš. ‘That’s what I thought, more than half a million. €612,500 tax free, to be precise.’

  ‘How did that happen?’ Beba asked as though a great misfortune had occurred.

  ‘I don’t know. Ever since I’ve been hanging around this casino, I’ve never seen anyone scoop up so much cash so quickly, effectively and in such a stupid way. Didn’t you notice that they were all freaked out?’

  ‘Why were they eked out?’

  ‘Dear child, you’re in a state of shock, you don’t know what you’re saying,’ said Arnoš sympathetically, giving Beba back her piece of paper.

  ‘Put that away. And remember that Latin saying: Dantur opes nullis nunc nisi divitibus! Let me see you to your room, I can see that you can barely stand.’

  Beba leaned her full weight against Arnoš. She was grateful that he was there. She would think about everything in the morning, it was best to weep on it.

  Here perhaps it should be said that in addition to her tendency in moments of excitement to pronounce words wrongly, Beba sometimes also reeled off series of numbers. But of course she was not aware of it. So once when she happened to be involved in a short-lived love affair with someone and he had hit her, instead of returning the blow, or bursting into tears, or saying anything, Beba had responded to the shock by listing a series of numbers. The guy was a creep, bone idle, but he did not lack imagination, so he wrote down the numbers, the next day he bought a lottery ticket, and, what do you know, he won a substantial amount of money, which he did not mention to Beba of course. After that the relationship went rapidly downhill, because the guy often hit her, frightened or insulted her, in the hope that she would again spit out some winning combination. Beba soon sent him packing, but the guy did not leave her in peace until she started another love affair, also short-lived, with a policeman.

  What about us? We charge ahead at full steam. While life may not know where the rudder and the prow are, the tale cuts through the billows, following its star!

  6.

  Who knows what factors shape our biographies? Lives can be very different, but Kukla’s life was like a bad film. And a very bad film at that. Perhaps Kukla’s future life’s choices had been determined by an incident that had occurred long ago, when Kukla was a very young girl. And what occurred was something comical, or tragic, or even banal: judgements of this kind generally depend on whether the person is a partici pant or an observer. In short, in her first sexual contact with a young man, inexperienced as she was herself, Kukla had what the medical profession calls a vaginal spasm. Although later on she found out something about it, she was not consoled by the fact that it was neither as bizarre nor as rare as people think. But in those days psychotherapists and sexual therapists barely existed. Be that as it may, Kukla buried that disagreeable episode deep in her subconscious and simply forgot it. However, the episode did not forget Kukla, and continued to disrupt and interfere with her life. To make matters worse, Kukla married that unfortunate young man, they were connected by the shame of the unpleasant incident, but after their wedding it turned out that the young man had leukaemia and very soon Kukla became a widow. And a very young widow at that.

  * * *

  Kukla studied English language and literature at university, she got a job teaching in a secondary school and stayed stuck in the same school her entire working life, until she retired. Kukla’s second husband was some fifteen years older than her, he was a prominent politician, but almost immediately after the wedding he had a stroke, and Kukla spent the next ten years nursing this man who had turned into a demanding houseplant. And a very demanding one at that.

  After her second husband died, Kukla married a third time, this time someone who was already an invalid, a well-known writer, who after an unfortunate fall down some stairs was permanently confined to a wheelchair. The writer was a few years older than her and when she was sixty Kukla became a widow for the third time.

  Kukla was a quiet, calm person; she spread serenity around her, she never talked about herself and never complained about anything, so that there was no reason for people not to like her. She had no children. There were children, in fact, of her second and third husbands, from their previous marriages, but the children were grown-up, they lived their own lives and had very little contact with Kukla.

  Although she would never have admitted it herself, Kukla’s husbands served her as a shield: as a married woman she had tangible cover that there was nothing wrong with her. She had also served her husbands as a shield, although she would have sworn that this was not the case: being married to a woman like her was more than tangible proof that there was nothing wrong with them. Had she wanted, Kukla could have married fifty times, her qualities were highly prized. She was a perfect wife, a wife-cover, wife-prosthesis, wife-mask. She accepted her role, she made no demands, she did not attract attention in any way. She was feminine, but not provocative, open to a certain point, pleasant, but not overly so. And, what was most important, for all her above average height, Kukla gave the impression of being fragile and so instantly aroused protective impulses in men. And then, perhaps just because of her exceptional height, as well as the fact that she chose invalids as her protectors, those relations quickly changed, and the men perceived Kukla as a protector, nurse, mother, surrogate wife, all in the one package.

  As far as Kukla herself was concerned, she had worked things out roughly as follows: the Fates had meted her out a destiny based on a ‘bad joke’, and she had done all she could to ensure that the ‘joke’ never saw the light of day. She had buried three husbands and remained a virgin, in virtually the literal sense. She tormented and belittled herself, saw herself as a ‘grave-digger’. Under her hand even the flowers on her balcony failed to flourish! She was convinced that her glance was enough to dry out even cactuses on the window-sill. For some reason those dried-out cactuses really got to her…

  And then one day a young man appeared. He was writing a doctorate on Kukla’s third husband, the writer Bojan Kovač. He was interested in everything about this ‘enigmatic’ man. What intrigued him most was whether there was anything left in the ‘great writer’s’ papers. He was haunted by the idea of understatement, on which, according to him, Kovač’s work was based, particularly as it was precisely that – understatement as an integral element of the novel – that was the topic of his doctoral thesis. ‘Kova. c is the Mona Lisa of Croatian literature,’ the young man claimed, ‘the enigmatic smile of his prose is the key to reading his whole opus.’

  Kovač had
left absolutely nothing, as Kukla knew better than anyone. He had written nothing for the last few years, mostly because of his illness. They had lived on her salary and his barely existent royalties. It would have been hard for him to write anything, because with time his disability was capped by diabetes, and then Alzheimer’s… ‘Is it possible that he left nothing at all?’ asked the young man. ‘What makes you think he left nothing? On the contrary, he left a lot,’ said Kukla. ‘I can help you organise his archive,’ the young man offered pleasantly. There was a great deal of material, over the last years Kovač had not been able to write himself, because of his arthritis, and she had put everything on the computer, she explained. She was Kovač’s typist; they had worked for ten hours a day, particularly just before the end, ‘because Kovač was determined to finish that novel,’ she added. ‘What novel? Can I see it?’ Of course, but not immediately, she would need time to sort out the manuscript… ‘Can you at least tell me the title of the novel?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Kukla, ‘Desert Rose, that’s the working title. ‘Desert Rose, hmm, an unusual title, feminine, more suited to cheap romances than Kovač,’ observed the young man.

  And so Kukla began to write. Later it occurred to her that she might find something else among Kovač’s papers: a short romance, for instance, or an unusually interesting essay-novel that he had written earlier, foreseeing events that were yet to happen. Yes, she knew that Kovač’s right to a second life was in her hands, that it depended only on her, Kukla.

  But then, when the young man appeared, there was only one thing on her mind: to maintain his attention for as long as possible. And she succeeded, only for a time, but that was enough. And the young man was clever, he got his doctorate without waiting to see his favourite writer’s last novel, and then he got a scholarship, set off to America and disappeared without trace.

  Given that Kukla’s life was in any case like a very bad film – at least that is what she thought – let us hope that it will support this one last observation: Kukla never forgot the young man’s attention. His attention had been like dew dropping onto a desert rose – and the foreword to Kukla’s second life.

  What about us? While life stories are muddled and extended, the tale slips along in its rush to be ended.

  7.

  It is not true that Mevludin knew no English at all. He knew a lot, of course he did. That is why he said to the girl who was standing in front of him, crying bitterly:

  ‘I am sorry, I understand the full extent of your damage.’

  Mevlo knew that kind of BBC and CNN English and he was in a position to enunciate eloquently such sentences as: There has been no let-up in the fighting in Bosnia. Heavy shelling continued throughout the night… Mevludin knew a lot, he knew about peace negotiations, about ceasefires and the ceasefire appears to be holding… He also knew about sporadic gunfire, progress towards a settlement, wail of ambulance sirens, the horror of the early-morning blast, he knew all about a pool of blood, explosion, reminders of horror and many, many other things.

  That is why he said to the girl:

  ‘Stay calm but tense.’

  Mevlo remembered the sentence The atmosphere in the city remains calm but tense as the ceasefire appears to be holding and he was sure that his words would comfort the girl. The girl glanced at him in horror, as though she had come face to face with smelly socks, and went on sobbing.

  Mevlo considered what he could do to console the girl. Then he remembered the cheque that Mr Shaker had given him. He took it out of the little pocket in his jacket, tapped the girl on the shoulder and said:

  ‘Look! Take it…’

  The girl looked at him with the same expression, as though there were smelly socks in front of her nose, leaned her elbows on the table, laid her head on her folded arms as on a pillow and continued to cry.

  ‘Look!’

  Mevludin tore the cheque into little pieces and tossed the pieces into the air like confetti. For a moment the girl watched the little pieces of paper floating through the air, stopped crying, and then remembered that she had been crying, and laid her head back on the table, arranging her folded arms like a pillow, and carried on crying.

  Mevludin looked at her lovely round shoulders shaking with sobs. He felt helpless.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, love, do stop crying, you’re going to melt clean away. And then what’ll I have left? Tepid water?’ Mevludin whispered in his Bosnian, a language Rosie could not understand.

  And then Mevludin thought that maybe the girl was hungry, she had probably not eaten anything all day, and he had some food in his bag that he had forgotten about, a boiled egg and a slice of bread. Mevlo placed the boiled egg and slice of bread in front of the girl. For a moment she raised her face out of the tangle of her copper-coloured hair, and then laid her forehead back on the pillow of her folded arms. Her sobs were slightly weaker, or so it seemed to him.

  Mevlo took the egg and started to peel it. And, what do you know, as he was peeling the egg, out of the blue, Mevlo was visited by a life-saving recollection. Once, while he was massaging one of his guests, the guest had demanded that they play him his favourite song during the massage, and he had explained the words of the song, so that Mevlo remembered it. When he left, the guest had even presented him with the CD…

  ‘You’re my thrill…’ said Mevlo.

  The sobs stopped, but the girl still did not move.

  ‘You do something to me…’

  The girl was as still as a little bug.

  ‘Nothing seems to matter…’

  The girl was silent.

  ‘Here’s my heart on a silver platter…’ he said, handing the girl the egg.

  The girl peeled her forehead off the table, and, without looking at Mevlo, took the egg with her pink, child’s fingers. First she nibbled the end indifferently and then went on nibbling the egg, gazing at an imaginary point in front of her. Mevlo crumbled bread with his fingers. He could see, as though through a magnifying glass, a little drop of yolk trembling on the girl’s lip. A leftover tear slipped out of her eye and came to rest on the drop of yolk. Mevlo broke off a piece of bread, picked up the drop of yolk and the tear with it and put it into his mouth. The girl watched him with wide-open eyes.

  In that instant, Mevlo felt that the tension eight inches below his navel was easing. As though something heavy had broken off him and fallen soundlessly onto the floor. Mevlo knew perfectly well what was happening. Just as that wretched shell had cast a spell on him, so this girl with the egg in her hand had broken it.

  ‘Where is my will, why this strange ceasefire…’ whispered Mevlo.

  The girl smiled. Those copper freckles on her face began to shine with a miraculous glow, and her wide-apart greenish eyes sparkled like two little pools.

  Day Four

  1.

  First thing in the morning, Beba popped into the Wellness Centre to invite Mevludin to a little celebration.

  ‘Mashallah! I heard,’ said Mevlo warmly. ‘So what’ll you do now, love?’ he added anxiously, as though Beba’s win in the casino was a great misfortune.

  ‘I’ve no idea. But, what’s happened to you?’ Beba asked, as Mevludin had fervently hoped she would.

  ‘That thing of mine… finally drooped!’ he said brightly.

  And Mevlo told Beba what had happened to him the previous evening, while he was consoling Rosie.

  Beba wanted to say something like ‘congratulations’, but then it seemed inappropriate, so she just said:

  ‘So that’s you sorted.’

  ‘I wish I was,’ he sighed.

  ‘Come to the pool, and we’ll talk,’ said Beba.

  Dr Topolanek showed exceptional understanding for his three guests’ idea, all the more so when Beba rewarded his understanding with a substantial wad of notes. Dr Topolanek ordered a notice to be put up announcing that the pool was closed due to the repair of an unexpected fault, and the three old ladies had the whole place to themselves. The hotel staff carried in vases of flowers, with b
road smiles on their faces, as they imagined what fun the three aged nymphs would have in the pool. When Beba thrust a flattering tip into each of their hands, they all became suddenly serious and now they carried the flowers with dignity, as though at a funeral. They brought special sun-loungers for ‘the elderly and less agile’. Beba had found a child’s one-piece swimming costume for Pupa in the local shop. It had a stupid Teletubbies design on it, but it was better than nothing, she thought, so that problem was solved. Pupa stubbornly insisted on keeping her long white socks on, as she was not allowed to go into the water in her fur boot. The staff placed Pupa carefully on the lounger in the shape of a horizontal ‘S’, and pushed her off into the waters of the pool. Beba had ordered champagne and a lavish selection of pastries from the hotel confectioner’s, which was all arranged on trays on the very edge of the pool. The only other person left in the pool room was a young waiter who opened the bottle of champagne, poured it into the glasses and then silently withdrew.

  ‘Well, cheers!’ said Beba with a smile on her face. The three old ladies clinked glasses. The water was agreeably warm, the champagne chilled. Beba took a round chocolate cake from the tray on the edge of the pool and put it into her mouth.