I narrow my eyes and, instead of white California sand, see the snowy mountains of Magadan. Skiing in those young days of spring felt like flying high above life, a sensation duplicated when one is newly in love. It is a pleasant reminiscence. But only in solitary confinement does memory become a merciless editor, cutting a bearable story out of the ever-accumulating mess of days.
The Witch, 1989
We set out for the witch’s house in the still-gray morning. Babushka drove, squeezed behind the steering wheel of our boxy yellow Zhiguli. Mama sat in the front, fumbling with my migraine diary. Over the last year, the doctors had failed to establish any correlation between the excruciating pain that assaulted me weekly and what and how much I ate, when and how much I slept, what I did, the season, the weather, or my geographical location. No medication had helped. The witch was our last resort.
Although my babushka, a nurse at the Polyclinika, had assured me that this witch, a good witch, a healer, had cured her friend’s heart disease, I was scared. I kept picturing the fairy-tale Baba Yaga, who lived deep inside a dark forest in a cabin held up by chicken legs. Her home was surrounded by a fence of bones, on top of which human skulls with glowing eye sockets sat like ghastly lanterns. Baba Yaga flew in a giant iron mortar, driving it with a pestle and sweeping away her trail with a broomstick, on the hunt for children to cook in her oven for dinner. Were Baba Yaga and this good witch sisters? Were all witches sisters? How often did they visit each other for tea?
The car smelled of gasoline, and a cauldron of nausea was already brewing in my stomach. I didn’t need the migraine diary to predict another cursed day. Soon the world would be ruined by blobs of emptiness, like rain on a fresh watercolor. Everything familiar would shed its skin to reveal a secret monstrous core. And, after a tug-of-war between blackness and fire, an invisible UFO would land on my head. The tiny aliens would drill holes on the sides of my skull, dig painful tunnels inside my brain, and perform their terrible electric experiments. I’d rather get eaten by Baba Yaga.
We took the same road out of the town as for our frequent mushroom-picking trips. The trees grew in two solid walls, the leaves silvering in the windy sun like coins. Mama stared out the window. After whispering late into the night, she and Babushka hadn’t said a word to each other all morning. This was a strange summer. Mama would usually accompany me on the three-day train from home to Syktyvkar, spend a week at Babushka’s, then head back to Papa and work. This time, she showed no signs of planning to leave. In fact, she hadn’t been herself all year: all the time awake, eyes and cheeks burning, telling me to remember that she loved me most of all in the world, as if she was about to die or move away.
Often, after an especially long bout of migraine, I imagined myself an orphan. How miserable and sad I would be without Mama, how feeble and helpless, and how lucky Vasilisa the Wise was in the fairy tale. Her mother had left her a magical doll, who, when fed, became alive and told Vasilisa to go to bed and not worry about anything. While Vasilisa slept, the doll did all the impossible work that was demanded of Vasilisa by her mean stepmother and stepsisters or by Baba Yaga. Oh, how I wished for a magical doll of my own.
“If you decide on it, at least make sure you don’t bring them the same gift, like your brilliant stepfather, Lev Davidovich. Twice,” Babushka said in a brash, joking tone. “Did I already tell you this story?”
Mama ignored her.
“Goes to Sweden, brings me a watch,” Babushka went on. “I look at the receipt in the box: two ladies’ watches. Gets all nervous, says they made a mistake at the register. Yes, very likely — a mistake at a Swiss register. One of the best lawyers in town and a complete idiot in life. A few months later I’m unpacking his suitcase from another business trip — two nighties. One small, one big. I leave them, see what happens. Surprise-surprise, he gives me the bigger one, the small one disappears. He wasn’t sure what size I wore, he says, so he got two. After sixteen years of marriage he wasn’t sure!”
“Quit it,” Mama said and turned back to me. “How are you feeling, kitten?”
“Another one’s coming,” I said. I missed my old, understandable illnesses — coughs, stuffed noses, ear infections. And I missed the gamelike remedies: mustard chest compresses, an orchestra of little glass cups tinkling and tingling on my back, a night spent in a headscarf soaked with vodka.
“Of course, I later gave him and that witch such a beating they took turns writing complaints to the regional Ministry of Health. Fools,” Babushka cried out. “I always had more friends than him because I am a good person. Our chief doctor, Olga Nestorovna, bless her soul, looks out for her women, always has. She knows that most men are dogs, as I say as well, except for one.” She shot Mama a look.
“The witch?” I said.
“That one’s another witch, Alinochka,” Babushka said. “A bad witch.”
“Enough. This is not helping. You’re scaring Alina.”
“I just don’t want you to do something you might regret for the rest of your life.”
“You don’t think I know that? You don’t need to torture me!” Mama yelled. My heart winced. “Stop it now. If it passes, you’ll be the first one to know, I promise. Please, let’s focus on Alina.”
“Precisely,” Babushka said.
Mama climbed over into the backseat and curled up next to me, her head on my lap. This made me uncomfortably hot, but I was too weak to move.
“Don’t listen to us, Alinochka. The most important thing is for you to get better.” She kissed my hand and put it under her cheek, which was pink and covered in fine hairs, like a peach.
* * *
We stopped for a picnic lunch; I was too nauseous to eat. I wanted to crawl into a cool, dark hole and stay there with my eyes closed. My ears burned — two red signal flags for the incoming UFO.
After lunch Mama returned to the front seat, and I lay down in the back. From time to time she turned back and looked at me with worry, circling her lips with her finger. She and Babushka kept arguing, but I no longer heard them.
Soon we arrived at the witch’s house. Instead of the cabin on two chicken legs like I had imagined, it was a regular izba on the edge of a small village. The airport inside my brain pulsated with light. The UFO beamed its invisible radioactive rays at Mama and turned her into a gray rabbit, while Babushka became a brown bear. At least this was one of the less scary of their transformations.
Babushka the Bear got out the plastic bag for the witch, and Mama took my hand in her soft paw. The three of us went up to the witch’s doorstep. Babushka crossed herself and knocked. My forehead shook under the UFO’s landing gear. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the pain.
The door opened. “Hello. Come in, come in.” The witch’s voice was low and kindly. I felt a light touch on my head and opened my eyes. Instead of an old hag with rotten teeth and eyes like live coals, before us stood an orange fox in a blue housecoat. She wore metal-framed glasses on her long, thin snout and a headscarf. “So, this is Alinochka, our little patient. Does your head hurt now?” I nodded. My temples had just begun to throb. “Nu, don’t be so gloomy. We’ll cure you.”
We went in. It was pleasantly dark inside. The room was dominated by a giant old-fashioned stove, on top of which Ivan the Fool, the youngest and laziest of the three fairy-tale brothers, usually snored away his days. And where Baba Yaga cooked naughty children for dinner! Orthodox icons hung in the far corner; the gold halos around the stern faces of the saints shimmered in the glow of several church candles. An episode of The Rich Also Cry, Babushka’s favorite Mexican soap opera, played on a small black-and-white TV on a bookshelf in front of the bed. I recognized the two-tone spines of the World Literature Series, the same one we had. Multicolored carpets covered the walls and the floor. It was a disappointingly ordinary home for a witch.