She might have been reading from some invisible printout of their lives. When she reached Masha’s tearful daughter she put her mouth to the girl’s back, walked to the corner of the room, and bent over, her body wracked with coughing. The girl started sobbing. “Cry, doll. Go on, let it all out. You’ll feel better soon,” said Nina Stepanovna kindly. “And when the first frost comes go out in your nightie and lie in a puddle at the nearest crossroads. Don’t worry, no one’ll see—and you won’t catch cold.” The girl hugged Natasha Stepanovna as if her life depended on it.
Next came a well-dressed woman from a long way away. Nina Stepanovna dealt with her briefly: “As for you, my china doll, why did you sell your wedding dress? Ai, ai, ai—you can’t sell wedding things. You can’t give ’em away and you can’t borrow ’em! You’re body’s cold all the way down the right side—go to church and confess.”
“It’s your thyroid,” she said to the next woman. “When you get home, take a knife and go like this”—passing the cross over her throat. Then she muttered: “Leave this white body, leave these yellow bones, amen, amen, amen. And avoid mushrooms.”
Next she came to the old man with the fearful eyes. “How old are you?” she asked. “Sixty-five? You look ten years older. Don’t worry, it’ll be all right—where were you in the army? It’s the radiation that done it. Oats and hops—three spoonfuls to a liter of water, strain and drink with fifty grams of honey. And what were you up in court for? I know. You didn’t mean it. You were drunk.”
There was no judgment, and no condescension. Like children, her patients showed her their bruises and let her kiss them better again. “What about kids?” she asked the old man. “Did you leave it too late? … There’s an adder hiding under your house. Go home and find it. Kill it, put it on the crossroads, and say: ‘Snake, dear little snake, wherever you came from, whoever put you in my house, I leave you at this crossroads. This is your family, and to me amen, healing, and grace’—that’s what you must do, dearie!”
Valya’s turn was next. Twisted over in pain, she could hardly wait, and nor could we. But Nina Stepanovna returned to the old man again. “Are your legs tired?” she said. “That’s the arthritis—is there a birch in your garden? Take the one that buds earliest, cut it down, and give away the wood to lonely old women—whatever you do, don’t take it into the house. And say this: ‘John the Baptist, John the Healer, take my darkness, give me your light. Cure my ills, my pains, my nerves, and my veins.’ ”
At last she reached Valya. She walked straight past the suffering woman and stood behind her handsome husband. He scowled as if to say: “Don’t look at me, I’m only here for her.” “Who’s Lyuda then?” she asked sternly. Ivan said nothing, but the blood rose to his cheeks. So did our collective anger—the cheat, the bastard! “Don’t go thinking your wife’s the one with the problem. It’s you, mister! Tell us about the crash then?” she murmured conspiratorially. “What crash?” Ivan bluffed. “Come on now,” she said, a complicit smile on her frog-like face. We hardly breathed. “You mean on the bike.” He sounded like a boy caught stealing apples. “The motorbike. You were drunk, weren’t you?” Valya was looking on astonished. The healer held up a warning finger: “Come back and I’ll cure you. Till then—keep those flies buttoned up!”
As the healer walked around the room, her mood lifted and so did ours. She touched one person with her hand, another with the crucifix. She blessed jars of honey, tea, towels, and photographs which people had heaped onto the table. She muttered prayers and recipes: “Save me from the Evil One, from war, from thunder and from lightning, heavenly host, despite my unworthiness. Cut up pine needles finely, add water, boil for five minutes, cover and leave till morning. Take with a spoonful of honey three times a day.” She was moving lightly as a girl, gaily, wrapping us in her protection as she went through her own ritual dance.
As she passed Valya, the sick woman grabbed her hand. “Don’t abandon me!” Nina Stepanovna sighed, tipped the woman over her knee, and worked her lower back like a skilled chiropractor. Valya howled, but it was relief we heard in her voice now.
Then the diva was gone. As people filed out into the dusk, leaving offerings of money, we sat stunned by the drama we had witnessed.
THE GODDESS AND BABA YAGA
Those of us staying overnight were considering our options for sleeping (a mattress, the table, a concrete floor, some narrow benches) when the healer reappeared: “You, doll,” she said to me sternly, “need help. Come upstairs with your friend.” Back in her quarters, Nina Stepanovna gave us blankets and unlocked a door on a fine room, unfurnished except for a chandelier and a few pot palms.
We were fast asleep on the carpet when the light flashed on and off a few hours later: “Wakey wakey!” Nina Stepanovna was standing in the doorway, frog face lit up by a grin. “You can sleep when you get back home! Here, I’m the boss!” It was four in the morning. In the kitchen, where dirty dishes were stacked on the side, the cherubic Yura was waiting, bottle in hand. “Hey, is there really a tunnel under the sea joining England to Europe? Glug! Glug! What’s it like going under the sea?”
“You can hear the fishes talk,” I answered, half asleep.
“Hey Nin—let’s go visit her under the sea!”
“She can have her England, fishes and all. I’ve got my love,” she answered, kissing Yura tenderly. “He was done for when we met. Tell ’em, Yur!”
“She saved my life! I was boss of the kolkhoz here. It was December. Terrible frost there was. I skidded. Got stuck in snow. Turned off the engine and went to sleep. When I woke I couldn’t move. It was dark. I could see lights out there—it was our guys, stealing bricks in a truck. Couldn’t budge, couldn’t shout. By the time they got to me my face was black. Hellish pain. Fingernails came off. Doctors were going to take my arms and legs off. The wife walked out.”
“I took him in,” Nina Stepanovna threw in.
“Do you remember?” Yura asked gently. “I reached over and took off your scarf. Turned you into a woman again. After eighteen years.” Nina Stepanovna tilted her frog face and batted her pale eyelids.
“Be a crime not to drink to that!” Yura bellowed.
“How did you save him?” I asked.
“By using God’s gifts. My mother had the gift, too. When it was dark she’d drop around and treat a sick kid.” Yura was nodding off again. “It wasn’t allowed then. You got prison for it. I knew nothing. But she must’ve passed it on. After she died, Pa gave me her book. Just a little exercise book. I chucked it in the corner. But later on, well …”
“Was Yura your first husband?”
“Oh no! We had four kids when Vasya died. He was a forest guard. Came on a group of ’em stealing wood. They beat him to death. God bless my enemies!” She crossed herself. “I was just a pig girl. Sometimes I amaze myself. How do I know that someone’s fifth vertebrae’s smashed. Huh?”
She paused to refill our glasses. What made Yura drunk only tuned her higher. “I get it from Him.” She threw a glance upward. “I was in Sergiev Posad.” The complex of monasteries at the heart of the Russian Orthodox Church was near Moscow, a long way away. “This priest, Father Naum—he tore into me! ‘You’re a bad girl,’ he said. ‘Stop doing spells—start curing people!’ So that’s what I do. I help people, and it makes me happy.” Yura surfaced from sleep: “A crime not to drink to that!” he mumbled, and we drank. So that was it—while we were waiting out there all day, she and Yura were sleeping off the night before.
She recalled the day she’d found a handsome young couple sitting in the basement: “I told ’em straight out: ‘You’re brother and sister.’ ‘Oh no we’re not,’ they said. ‘We’re both orphans, but we’re husband and wife!’ ‘Go away and find out about your parents,’ I said. A few weeks later they were back. Turned out I was right. There’d been six of them. Pa’d gone to jail, Ma’d died. Kids shoved in different orphanages. What should they do, they ask me? They already had kids. ‘Go to your priest. If he blesses th
e marriage, well and good,’ I said. A few months later they were back, with all the brothers and sisters they’d tracked down. ‘Now we’ve got a family, thanks to you. You’re our mother now.’ ”
“Crime not to drink to that!” Yura surfaced in time for the punchline. Soon he was asleep again. But was he really? A thought was stirring in his troubled brain, pushing through the slights, the needles of jealousy, foggy lumps of love. He looked across at his wife, sober suddenly: “I’m a wreck.” He spoke as if the two were alone. “I’m in the way, aren’t I?” “Shut it, fuck face,” she said, unconvincingly, and put her hand on my head. “As for you, Zina, someone’s put a curse on you—kicked sand in your eyes. You probably thought it was a joke. But that was no joke. You were wearing a swimsuit—white with red spots. Remember?” What could I say? She was magnificent.
We had entered a different reality. Here, the air was teeming with good and bad spirits. “Where’s your cross?” were the first words Nina Stepanovna addressed to me. To walk around unprotected, a prey to every piece of passing malevolence, was as stupid as going out in snow without boots.
This Russia was new to me. But I would find that scholars like Joanna Hubbs had been piecing together, from legends, folklore and artefacts, fragments of a history of Russia’s wise women. All over the Eurasian landmass the mammoth hunters had left behind statues of Ice Age goddesses. Those with heavy thighs and spilling stomachs might have been portraits of Nina Stepanovna. In the steppes, the hunters’ goddess had ruled over earth, air, and water. But somewhere between the seventh and third millennia B.C., as hunting gave way to agriculture, a shift of power took place. A legend Herodotus records seems to capture that transition: the Scythians who ruled over the Russian steppes in the first millennium B.C. worshipped a goddess, half-maiden, half-serpent, called Tabiti. One day Herakles went to sleep by the River Dneiper when tending his cows. He awoke to find that Tabiti had stolen them. She agreed to release them if he would become her lover. When the three sons she bore him reached manhood, she offered them the bow Herakles had left behind: the one who could bend it would become the first king of the Scythians.
Hubbs points out that when Prince Vladimir of Kiev was baptized by Byzantine missionaries in the tenth century, the prince’s warrior elites adopted Christianity. But the clans they protected held on to their female deity. However, by that time the powers of that female deity were greatly circumscribed by other gods. She evolved into the earth goddess, Mokosh, a word that evokes the dampness of Mother Earth in Russian. Her origin was Finno-Ugric, like Nina Stepanovna’s Eryza people, and Hubbs confirms that her cult remained particularly strong among these Finno-Ugric people. Indeed, in that legend of the golden woman which fascinated European travelers, we catch the image of that goddess. It echoes down to us through the painted wooden matroshkas in every Russian gift shop.
Christianity found ways of dealing with the tenacious culture of that female deity. It incorporated her into the Mother of God. It co-opted her, as the priest did Nina Stepanovna when she visited Sergiev Posad. It also demonized her as Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian fairy tales who kidnaps children and cooks them for her supper. My Baba Yaga had lured me into her house and she was not going to let me go until she had “cooked” me.
In the course of our long drunken night, I learned that the Communist Party had also co-opted the wise women. Back in the 1970s Nina Stepanovna was offered brilliant prospects by the KGB in Saransk if she would work for them. She turned them down. She preferred to work with pigs.
LIFTING ZINA’S CURSE
The operation to remove Zina’s curse took place in a room which Nina Stepanovna kept for chosen patients. The afternoon sun slanted down on Ira and me, two young couples, a bent old man and two babas in headscarves. Nina Stepanovna handed me a massive, leather-bound volume. “You, doll, can read to us.” It was a prayer book in Old Church Slavonic, the written language which missionaries had cobbled together for the Slavs after Prince Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity. Was she joking? One glance was enough to answer that. The carousing dame of the night before was a stern priestess now.
I plowed through the prayers, mutilating the mellifluous sounds as she attended to other patients. “Louder!” she kept saying remorselessly. “Louder!” Only when she finished with all her other patients did she turn to me: “You can stop now. You’re not very good at it, are you?” I heard the judgment behind her jeering: how dare you patronize me in my own house, crediting my showmanship, but not believing in my power?
Putting a hand on my head, she delivered a scathing report on the state of my internal organs. The questions she asked did not fish around, like gypsy fortune tellers and astrologers. They were precise and accurate. “You nearly drowned—when was that? Your house burned down recently? What’s this dog—black, white spot on chin, not yours, seems mighty fond of you?” It was as if, with her hand on my head, she was reading some holographic chronicle of my life, blurred but accurate.
Before Ira and I left to catch the night train, she repeated her warning: the work she had done to lift my “curse” would leave me in a bad state. So by next morning when our sleeper pulled into Moscow’s Kazan Station I was in a cocky mood: despite Nina Stepanovna’s dire predictions I was in the pink of health.
It was still early when I reached the flat where I was staying with Ira’s mother, Elena. I tiptoed in, took a shower, reveling in the luxury of hot water, and regaled Elena with stories over breakfast. Then I lay down for a brief rest. An hour later, I woke to find that I could hardly move. I forced myself to get up, and collapsed, as if every muscle and tendon in my body had been cut. Alarmed, Elena rubbed me down with spirit and plunged my feet in scalding water. But I knew that I was not ill, but jinxed.
For the next three days I lay there, unable to read or talk. Appointments came and went, but there was nothing I could do. I was immobilized. Through the window I watched the sunlight on the plane tree in the courtyard. No wonder Yura was wary of Nina Stepanovna. She was a potent force. She did not like my detachment, and she was right, too: it was monstrous of me to have imagined that I could go and observe a wise woman in Russia, and not be observed myself. Whatever she had done to me, it served its purpose: she had forced me to concede her power.
Lying there, I had a strange dream. The house was full of vermin. I was laying poison down on the floor when a mouse with pink punk fur minced across it. The mouse was followed by a hamster with a gold watch chain. A chipmunk gave a speech of interminable length. I was watching a revolution: self-possessed, unafraid, the animals were taking over. As I woke up, the chipmunk’s speech turned back into the sound of children playing on the rusty swing outside.
Powerless to move, or even read, I had plenty of time to reflect on why Nina Stepanovna had done what she had to me. I had come out here expecting to be able to understand whatever happened to me in Russia. But the chaos of the times had kept subverting my intentions, reminding me of the poet Feodor Tyutchev’s warning: “Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone.”
What had I really learned from my travels? That was what I was forced to consider as I lay there. Still, my way of dealing with my experiences had remained deeply Western. The stranger my journey became, the harder I clung on to my reason, the Western habit of detachment. Nina Stepanovna, the pig girl, had humbled me, forced me to stop, to recognize a power that I did not understand.
The longer I lay there, the more ashamed of myself I started to feel. Yes, I had always been sympathetic to the people I wrote about. But had I really engaged with the challenge of meeting people like the Old Believer Philimon, and the Cosmist Professor Kaznacheev? In their very different ways, both of them and Nina Stepanovna were militant crusaders against rationality, that progressive force which had displaced God and mystery from the center of the world. If asked, I knew they would all agree that we in the West were prisoners of our own achievement.
When St. Stephen of Perm asked the pagans why they were so resistant to Christiani
ty, they explained that they were a hunting people. They said that if they were converted they would lose their connectedness to the natural world, and to the animals they hunted. We had built the modern world on our ability to detach ourselves, to analyze. But in the course of that we had lost any sense of living in an equilibrium with that natural world. Nina Stepanovna’s question hung in the air: was I happy to remain the prisoner of my own detachment? Where did I want to belong now?
When Nina Stepanovna was laying into me during that final session she asked me: “Why did you sell your wedding dress?” The question shored up my skepticism, as my wedding dress was in a trunk in my parents’ attic. But now that I considered it I realized how shrewd it was. Her patients all came from Russia. When hyperinflation was raging, every married woman would have scanned her possessions for anything of value to sell. She gauged the question wrongly only because she had never met a woman who came from a land so far away that her life was not ruined by the post-Soviet collapse. She was not leafing through some holographic image of my wardrobe. She was challenging me on the subject of power, as she did the other women. Hold on to what is important, she was reminding me: do not think that by sacrificing yourself to your men, your children, you can make up for that abuse of power that is visited on everyone, but on women most of all.
“Give me gold,” she asked me harshly at one stage. I was wearing only my gold wedding ring, and I was not going to give her that. During the long pause that followed I could feel my fellow patients looking at me, thinking how rich I was, and how mean. Well, what the hell? It was just a ring. When I tugged at it, stung by the implication, Nina Stepanovna seized my hand and stopped me.
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