The gods and wizards of this world were no match for Baba Yaga, even in her weakened state. She got the better of every opponent. And every ally, too, for that matter. Even death. Someday she'd find a way around that, too. If feebleminded old gods like Mikola Mozhaiski could do it, so could she.
12
Charms
There was no way to explain it all to Father in an orderly way, Ivan realized that at once. No matter what he said, Father was going to pepper him with questions, while the whole picture was salted by Father's utter unbelief.
Mother was a marvel, though, merely nodding from time to time and otherwise holding hands with Katerina and smiling at her at odd moments. The conversation was half in proto-Slavonic and half in Ukrainian, but everyone seemed to understand everything. Except that Father understood nothing.
Ivan hadn't even meant to try to explain anything about the century that Katerina came from, but Father simply knew too much about the language. "There is no way that a pocket of pure proto-Slavonic could survive all these centuries," Father declared as a conversation-opener, almost as soon as they were in the car together. "A language in isolation is conservative, yes, but not that conservative. Even the Basque language is not the same as it was five hundred years ago. So the real question is, is your bride here the result of some weird Soviet language experiment or is this an elaborate practical joke that turned out not to be funny?" That much was in English, but Ivan immediately shifted the conversation to a combination of languages that he figured Katerina and Mother could both understand.
"What does the soviet have to do with language?" asked Katerina.
"There was a government in your country for the past seventy years or so that did strange and terrible things," Ivan explained.
"How isolated is her community?" Father demanded. "They didn't notice the Soviet government?"
With that, there was really no choice. Ivan had to start talking about getting drawn back into the ninth century and thinking he was going to live there forever, so he married Katerina there but then he came back and brought her with him. Father leapt to the conclusion that this was some weird sci-fi gimmick—"An alien abduction through time?"—until Mother patted his arm and said, "Think of it as magic, dear. Think of it as... finding Sleeping Beauty and wakening her with a kiss."
Father gave a sharp, derisive laugh at that.
"Father," Ivan said patiently, "don't think of it 'as if I found Sleeping Beauty and woke her up. Katerina is Sleeping Beauty. The child cursed by an evil witch. By the evil witch, the Widow." He caught himself. To Father, he had to speak her name. He wasn't in Taina now. "Baba Yaga. And her aunts, in an effort to save her from the curse of death, ended up getting her stranded, asleep in the middle of a moat that was patrolled by a giant bear. For about eleven hundred years."
"My how time flies," said Father dryly.
Katerina looked strangely at Ivan.
"What?" he asked her.
"Are you known as such a liar here, that your father doesn't believe you?" Then she winked.
Father didn't see the wink. "Liar? Vanya's no liar. What I'm worried about is his sanity." Only for sanity he had to use the modern Russian word and Katerina didn't get it. To Ivan's surprise, Mother came up with some halting proto-Slavonic.
"My husband thinks Vanya is crazy," she explained.
"You speak proto-Slavonic?" Ivan asked.
Mother shrugged. "I'm deaf? I can't hear you two tossing this language back and forth all the time?" But there was more to it than that, Ivan knew. What he and Father had spoken was Old Church Slavonic, the formal written language of the Church. What Mother had spoken was the oral language—with a slightly different accent from that of Taina, perhaps, but nothing she could have picked up from Father and Ivan's conversations.
He would have pursued the matter, but Father was back with more questions, and by the time they pulled into their driveway in Tantalus, Father knew what he needed to know... and maybe almost partly believed a small fraction of it. Father stalked off and went to his office, though what answers he hoped to find there Ivan didn't know, while Mother ushered Katerina into the kitchen and Ivan carried in their bags.
For Katerina, her second modern kitchen was perhaps more interesting than the first, not because it was so different from Sophia's, but because she now realized that everyone had these items in the whole world, and not just the wives of the gods. But then, as Ivan watched them together, laughing over the awkwardness of their language, he began to realize that there was a level of communication that he hadn't appreciated before, a level below language—or was it above?—in which two people recognize each other and leap to correct intuitions about what the other means and wants and feels. Do all women have this? Ivan wondered. And then thought: No. Mother never had this with Ruthie.
In Sophia's kitchen, Katerina had not even attempted to be helpful, as if she felt that the level of magic was beyond her. But in Mother's kitchen, Katerina, unasked, immediately set to work helping. In a way this didn't surprise Ivan at all—in Taina there had been no sense of princesses as fragile creatures who had to be waited on hand and foot. He had heard much about what a deft hand Katerina had at the harvest, able to tie off a sheaf of wheat faster than anybody, with fingers so agile that, as the saying was, "She could sew without a needle." Pampered princesses came much later in history, at least in Russia. What surprised him was not her willingness to work, then, but rather her instinctive grasp of what Mother needed her to do. She seemed to understand loading and unloading the dishwasher immediately, even though no one had explained to her what the dishwasher was or what it did. She seemed to know what tool Mother wanted and, most amazing of all, where it was in the kitchen. This was something that Ivan had never grasped. He had grown up helping his mother from time to time in the kitchen, certainly with the dishes, but he always had to ask where the more obscure tools went.
Finally, when Katerina went straight to a drawer and found the weird little grabbing tool that Mother used to pull the stems out of strawberries, Ivan had to flat-out ask, "How did you know?"
They looked at him like he was crazy.
"She told me," said Katerina.
"She was talking about how the field-grown strawberries were finally coming ripe, so it wasn't all greenhouse berries. She never once said what she needed or where it was."
Mother and Katerina looked at each other in puzzlement.
"Yes I did," said Mother finally. "You just weren't listening."
"On the contrary," said Ivan. "I was listening very closely, because I was amazed at how much proto-Slavonic you have already fallen into using, and I was amazed at how much modern Ukrainian Katerina was understanding. I could repeat your conversation to you word for word, if you wanted."