Mourning Baba Yaga

Fiction - by Megan Baffoe

And the black-browed maid ran in and began to feed Baba-Yaga. She brought her a pot of borsch and half a cow, ten jugs of milk and a roasted sow, twenty chickens and forty geese, two whole pies and an extra piece, cider and mead and home-brewed ale, beer by the barrel and kvass by the pail. Baba-Yaga ate and drank up everything, but she only gave Vasilisa a chunk of bread.

When I think of my grandmother, I think of her eating. She spent afternoons in her bedroom, and mornings and evenings watching television—in both cases, telling me to go and play if I so much as put my head around the door. But she ate meals with us. It was my father, I think, that thought a family should all eat together.

I can picture it now, her little plate, piles of vegetables on top of it, with meat sliced thin enough to cut your fingers. White bone china patterned with pale blue-and-yellow primroses. She insisted on eating all her meals on her own dinnerware—my mother’s certainly wouldn’t do. Perhaps by her possessiveness over it, I was enchanted; I used to stand on my tiptoes and stare at her cups and plates and pretty floral bowls. Once, the greed got the best of me, and I set out on a mad mission to have a fairytale picnic.

I dropped the whole set in its box, outside on the concrete path of the garden. She pinched my ear until it throbbed; she and my mother had a blazing row. In the end, to apologize, my parents bought my grandmother a whole new set, patterned in purple. Grandmother never even took it out of the box, just looked at it until her lips thinned and left it where it was.

That was what it was like, with Grandmother. You could sort out the peas from the poppy seeds, but she’d eat you anyway.

The funeral is absurdly bright. It doesn’t seem right, death in Summer, and with everyone dressed up in their itchy starch and severe black, it feels like hellfire has come upon the Earth to mark the occasion. My uncle has brought a big, black handkerchief, and he mops his forehead just as often as his eyes.

I think he’s doing the eulogy. I’m suddenly glad—bizarrely, because I wasn’t and wouldn’t be asked at all—that it isn’t me. The scenario is purely imagined, but it somehow makes me anxious anyway; I can feel my pulse shuddering at the very thought, me up there in my dress that is too tight at the back and slips at the shoulders, starting, stammering—when I think of my grandmother, I think of her eating.

Grandmother never ate whole pies or geese or drank beer by the barrel, of course. She ate very small portions in very dainty bites, and her eyes burned through you if she felt you were being greedy. I know that her ghost is there when I eat. Unseeing eyes look me up and down if I seem too eager to tuck in, spectral fingers tap on my knuckles when I go for the second slice of cake.

I put down my fork. It's as if she’s still there, watching me.

I know what’s really happening, of course, and what’s really happening is that my insides are lined with big, blinking eyes. My spirit has taken small, polite bites of Grandmother, and the pieces of her will not rest. They are part of me, absorbed into me and then forming outwards like growths.

Vasilisa's mother knew that she was dying. She placed a little doll in her child's hands, and said, "My darling, I shall be gone soon. Take this doll as my blessing. Always keep it with you and never show it to anyone. If you are ever in need of help, feed the doll and ask her for guidance."

If my mother gave me anything to defend myself against Grandmother, it was nothing more than her service as a human shield. But that was fine; I learnt to perform magic on myself, become the girl and the doll in one. I knew how to earn her favour. My doll was best fed by not being fed at all.

Grandmother had always hated that my father deserted his piano lessons early into his childhood. She still complained about it, even now. My asking for them received a severe little smile, and the first time she heard me practising—a stilted version of Mary Had a Little Lamb, played mostly by ear—I received an approving nod for my effort, although her lips pinched at the ugly, limping music. Every time I passed one of my grade exams, I received applause. My father’s eyes would tighten slightly at the sound of her dry, papery little hands meeting together, but I could never name the emotion in them.

At the funeral reception, there is a lot of polite chatter to people I sometimes remember and rarely know. It is nice, in a strange way, to see everyone and talk with them and know that they are all here to remember Grandmother and miss her too. But the whole afternoon is stretched thin by tensions. I didn’t see my aunt at the funeral; I stared forward, back straight and eyes down, as if she could see me through the lid of her coffin. But I can see my aunt now, wearing an ugly hat and her hair in a pixie cut.

Grandmother would be furious.

My father always buys my aunt a birthday card. He writes it at work and posts it on his way home, so Grandmother never knew. That had been the extent of their contact for as long as they could remember; as long as she had exiled herself from Grandmother.

Vasilisa carried Baba Yaga's skull into the house. As she entered, it fixed its flaming eyes upon the step-mother and her two daughters, and the fire burnt them. They tried to hide, but you could not escape the eyes of the skull, and by morning-time nothing was left of the three women but heaps of ashes upon the floor.

Grandmother will be nothing but a skull, soon. Death will take her narrowed eyes and her pinched, pink lips will be stripped away.

No, I think. No, whatever Baba Yaga is, death does not demand anything of her.

I'm surprised she accepted death in the first place. Perhaps she wanted to get away from us.

Get away from me.

I look back at my aunt, at that horrific hat and rebellious hair and trousers. To Grandmother's funeral. I feel lots of things about her presence, and I know my father must too. I don’t dwell on them, though, but I don’t have a slice of cake, so Grandmother’s ghost will approve of me. That might keep her from haunting Aunt Jennifer.

At the very least, it will keep her from haunting me. I know that Vasilisa cannot save her step-family; if Baba Yaga decides to punish my aunt for her impudence, that will be that. She will not be able to escape the eyes of the skull.

When I was seven, my mother started working Sunday evenings. Grandmother thought that was a ridiculous thing for a mother to do, but she took up the duty of preparing me for school. Someone, she would say, had to act as a family should. And then she would glare at my mother.

I would lay out my homework across the table, and she would snap and bark at me until the writing was all neat and my answers were all right. Then she would iron my clothes in the corridor outside the bathroom while I washed. My school skirt never had neater pleats than when Grandmother did it. And after that, I would sit between her knees, and she would brush my hair.

This was not just any birch-forest. For in this forest lived the terrifying witch, Baba Yaga, a witch who ate people like others ate chicken.

One night I had answered nearly all my questions wrong, and was very stupid when she demanded I correct them. I was sulky from then on, lingering in the bath even when she asked that I get out. I was fidgety and difficult when she was brushing the knots out of my hair, and when she shouted, I started to cry.

When you live in a forest, you must listen to all that the trees tell you. There are things that cannot be done when you live in close proximity to a witch.

She took her sewing shears out of her cupboard and hacked all of Vasilisa's golden hair from her head. I cried and screamed myself to sleep, and—when my mother returned home—she cried and screamed too. If you were here, Grandmother had said, I wouldn’t have to spend my Sundays like this. Perhaps she wouldn’t be such a little madam. They didn’t speak to one another for weeks.

My father cut my hair so that it was all the same length in the mirror the next morning. I bawled my eyes out at the sight of myself with my hair above my ears.

The car drive home is almost silent, and as soon as we get home, I go upstairs to change out of my funeral dress. I was going to put on pyjamas, but my eye is caught by my prom dress, hanging like a pink shadow at the back of my wardrobe.

I put it on and stare at the mirror. The face of the girl in there doesn’t look like mine, but she’s familiar. I stand there trying to figure out where I’ve seen her before until Mum comes in to check on me. I flinch like I’m guilty of something, but there’s no need to do that, and she wraps her arms around me and we both cry together.

'You will stay with me,' said Baba Yaga to Vasilisa, and the gates of bone swung open. 'If you work well, I will give you a light. But if you fail, I shall cook you and eat you.'

I remember buying my prom dress. It was the smallest size in the shop and it still didn’t fit enough about the waist. Grandmother smiled at me and I felt like I was floating. It was expensive, too expensive, but my mother said I could have it as long as I had my hair and makeup and everything else done at home.

Grandmother took it in for me. You should know how to sew, she said, but even that lacked bite.

I wasn't allowed to touch it until it was time to get ready for prom. Putting it on felt like I was getting dressed for a wedding. I sat at my dressing table while my mother did my nails and said that I looked beautiful.

Grandmother didn’t like the nails. I could see it on her face.

I flinched, and grasped the light.

We rubbed my fingers with nail polish remover until they were red and sore. My mother’s lips quivered, but she did not cry. Grandmother did my makeup. My mother was supposed to do my hair, but Grandmother said that she didn’t know why, because she couldn’t even do nails right, and besides, she was the one who had been doing it all these years while my mother was off doing who knows what. She had never had a daughter she could send looking presentable to prom, only That Girl, and two boys.

Mothers in fairytales don't last long. Grandmother sighed and said that it didn’t matter, and if she wanted to leave she could, and that she would make sure I went to my prom looking as I should.

When she had finished doing my hair, she smiled—a real smile, with teeth—and said that I was the most beautiful girl in the world.

'My mother's blessing helped me,' Vasilisa said truthfully.

At that, the witch said, 'I knew it. You must be gone. I will not have people with blessings in my home.' And so Baba Yaga opened the gate.

Dinner feels strange tonight, because Grandmother is not there with us.

My mother gives me her plate. I’m not sure whether I want to cry or not, and I’m not sure if it’s blasphemous or righteous for me to be eating from her china. I simply can’t speak, so my father fills the noise—gentle, meaningless chatter that is simply allowed to drift through the kitchen without Grandmother’s barbs about quiet at the table.

My mother brings out a trifle for dessert. She asks me if I want some, and I make a strange, non-committal noise. The world feels like it’s floating on water.

I can feel my father’s arm around me, and my mother stroking my hair. Neither calms me down. Outside the window, I can see the sun setting, and when it disappears beyond the edge of the pain, all the rocking stops.

That's all I needed to know, I wanted to say. That's all I needed to know, that the world is still centred around Grandmother, and the whims of her little nods and pale fingers. I close my eyes.

‘It was getting on toward evening, and the black-browed maid set the table and began to wait for Baba-Yaga's return. The black horseman galloped past the gate, night fell, and the eyes of the skulls crowning the fence began to glow.’

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