“The Almighty sent me a dream about that just now.”
Zuleikha throws the robe-like coat on the Vampire Hag’s shoulders, puts on the fur cap, and wraps her neck with a soft shawl.
All-powerful Allah, another dream! Her mother-in-law rarely dreamt, but the dreams that came to her turned out to be prophetic. They were strange and sometimes ghastly visions filled with hints and innuendo, where what was to come was reflected indistinctly, distorted as if by a hazy, warped mirror. Even the Vampire Hag herself was not always able to interpret their meaning. A couple of weeks or months later, the mystery would come to light, when something would happen, usually bad and rarely good, but always important, repeating with twisted precision a picture from a dream that was already half-forgotten.
The old witch was never wrong. In 1915, right after her son’s wedding, Murtaza appeared to her, trudging among red flowers. They were unable to unravel the dream but there was soon a fire in the household; the storehouse and old bathhouse burned to the ground and so the answer to the riddle was found. One night a couple of months later, the old woman saw a mountain of yellow skulls with large horns and predicted an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease that would go on to mow down all the cattle in Yulbash. The dreams came for the next ten years, all sorrowful and frightening: children’s shirts desolately floating along the river, cradles split in half, chickens drowning in blood… During that time, Zuleikha gave birth to and immediately buried four daughters. A vision of the Great Famine in 1921 was scary, too. Air as black as soot appeared to her mother-in-law and people were swimming in it as if it were water, slowly dissolving, gradually losing their arms, legs, and heads.
“Are we going to sweat here much longer?” The old woman impatiently knocks her walking stick and is first to head for the door. “You want to make me sweat before going outside so I catch cold?”
Zuleikha hurriedly turns down the wicks on the kerosene lamps and rushes after her.
The Vampire Hag stops on the front steps; she doesn’t go outside alone. Zuleikha catches her mother-in-law by the elbow – the Vampire Hag jabs her long, gnarled fingers painfully into Zuleikha’s arm – and leads her to the bathhouse. They walk slowly, carefully placing their feet in the loose snow: the blizzard hasn’t subsided and the path is partially covered again.
“It must have been you that cleared the snow in the yard, wasn’t it?” the Vampire Hag smirks with half her mouth, standing in the entryway, allowing her snow-covered coat to be taken off. “It shows.”
She shakes her head, throws her cap on the floor (Zuleikha quickly dips to pick it up), fumbles for the door, and goes into the changing room by herself.
It smells of steamed birch leaves, bur-marigold, and fresh damp wood. The Vampire Hag sits down on the wide, long bench by the wall and freezes in silence: she’s permitting herself to be undressed. Zuleikha first takes off her white headscarf embroidered with large, heavy beads. Then a roomy velvet vest with a patterned clasp on the stomach. Beads: a coral strand, pearl strand, glass strand, and a hefty necklace that has darkened over time. A thick outer smock. A thin inner smock. Felt boots. Baggy wide pants; one pair, a second. Downy socks. Woolen socks. Cotton socks. Zuleikha wants to pull the heavy crescent earrings from her mother-in-law’s fat, creased earlobes but she screams, “Don’t touch! You might lose something… Or say you lost it…” Zuleikha decides not to touch the rings of dulled yellow metal on the old woman’s misshapen, wrinkled fingers.
When her clothing is neatly laid out in a strict, set order, taking up the entire bench from wall to wall, Zuleikha’s mother-in-law carefully feels all the objects, pursing her lips in dissatisfaction, straightening and smoothing out some items. Zuleikha quickly throws her own things in the laundry basket by the entrance and leads the old woman into the steam room.
As soon as they open the door they’re enveloped in hot air and the aromas of white-hot stones and steamed bast fiber. Moisture begins streaming down their faces and backs.
“You were too lazy to heat it properly, it’s barely warm,” the old woman says through her teeth, scratching her sides. She climbs up on the highest steaming shelf, lies with her face toward the ceiling, and closes her eyes – so she’ll be soaking wet.
Zuleikha takes a seat by the basins she prepared and begins kneading at the dampened bundles of birch leaves.
“You’re kneading them badly,” says the Vampire Hag, continuing to grumble. “I might not see, but I know it’s bad. You’re running them back and forth in the basin like you’re stirring soup with a spoon, but you have to knead it like it’s dough. What made Murtaza pick you anyway? So careless of him. Honey between the legs isn’t going to satisfy a man his whole life.”
Zuleikha gets onto her knees to work the leaves. Her body starts feeling hot right away, and her face and chest grow wet.
“That’s better,” a raspy voice carries from above. “You wanted to hit me with unsoftened bundles of leaves, you good-for-nothing. But I won’t allow you to disrespect me. Or my Murtaza, either. I won’t allow it. Allah granted me this long life to defend him from you. Who else but me will stand up for my little boy? You don’t love him, don’t honor him, you only pretend. You’re a cold, soulless faker, that’s who you are. I feel it, oh, how I feel it.”
Not a word more about the dream, though. The mean old woman will wear her down all evening. She knows Zuleikha is desperate to hear about it. She’s torturing Zuleikha.
Zuleikha takes two bundles of leaves trickling with greenish water and goes up to the Vampire Hag on the steaming shelf. Her head enters a dense layer of baking air under the ceiling and begins to throb. Her vision blurs as grains of color flash and float before her eyes.
There she is up close, the Vampire Hag, stretched out from wall to wall, almost like a landscape where odd hillocks of hundred-year-old flesh and thick landslides of skin seem to have been dropped between protruding bones. Meandering streams of glistening sweat flow along that entire uneven valley, where indented gullies and magnificent rises alternate.
The Vampire Hag needs to be beaten with leaf bundles in both hands, beginning at the belly. First Zuleikha carefully draws a bundle of leaves along her skin as preparation, then begins thrashing the Vampire Hag with each bundle in turn. Red spots appear immediately on the old woman’s body; black birch leaves fly off everywhere.
“And you don’t know how to beat me, either. How many years have I been teaching you?” The Vampire Hag raises her voice to outshout the long, lashing swats. “Harder! Go on, go on, you pitiful hen! Warm my old bones! Hit meaner, you good-for-nothing! Get your thin blood moving, so it thickens! How do you love your husband at night if you’re that weak, huh? Murtaza will leave, leave for another woman who will beat and love him harder! Even I can strike harder. Beat me better or I’ll hit you! Grab you by the hair and show you how to do it! I’m not Murtaza, I won’t let you off! Where’s your strength, you hen? You’re not dead yet! Or are you?” The old woman is shouting at the top of her lungs by now and her face lifts toward the ceiling, distorted by fury.
Zuleikha swings with all her might, striking with the bundles of leaves as if they were an axe, at a body that glimmers in the wafting steam. The birch switches shriek as they split the air and the old woman shudders heavily; broad crimson streaks run across her belly and chest, where blood is swelling into dark grains.
“Finally,” the Vampire Hag exhales hoarsely, throwing her head back on the bench.
Zuleikha’s vision darkens and she climbs down the steps from the steaming shelf to the slippery, cool floor. Her breathing is rapid and her hands are shaking.