“What offense against magic and manners is this?” demanded the witch.
“I think it’s called an early spring,” said Cat.
“Not in my backyard, it isn’t!” She was furious and, Cat realized, perhaps frightened. “Mewster, go investigate!”
“I’ll help,” said Cat, seeing her chance.
“Oh no you don’t, you little pain-in-a-pinafore. You stay put.”
The witch used her sword to open the window latch on the ceiling. The panel of glass swung inward. A few jonquils and hyacinths and some green leaves of grapevine fell in. The witch recoiled as if they were poison ivy or, worse yet, blooms from a wedding nosegay. She shrank back into a corner of her izba as the kitten bounded from a toppled wardrobe to the leg of an upended table, and from there to the window and out into the springtime.
The table legs were real hairy human legs. They seemed happy to be freed from their job of holding up the tabletop. They were all bending their knees and kicking out their kinks. “Stop that cavorting!” cried Baba Yaga, and hit the nearest leg in the knee. It kicked her in her own knee. “Ow! Call social services! That’s downright abusive!”
Then she turned and looked at Cat. “This is all your fault, isn’t it?”
Cat wasn’t sure if she should claim credit. That might only make things worse.
“Or is it that stupid frippery-finicky egg you brought me?”
“I’m beginning to think it’s cursed.”
“If it were cursed, I’d like it. I’d cradle it to my withered bosom. Look, it’s the only thing that didn’t get broken in the collapse of my own personal housing market.” True enough, the egg was serene in its floating perch, remaining upright even as the house had tumbled about it.
“That’s some remarkable nest.” Cat hoped that small talk might distract the witch from her hunger.
“Once belonged to the Firebird, but I stole it right out from under him. Where is that darn cat?”
Mewster returned. “It’s worse than you feared.” He sounded pleased.
“Give me the skinny straight or you’ll never grow up to sniff your own sandbox.”
“Something has broken the hold of your magic.” The kitten interrupted his report to lick his front paws free of wet. When finished, he said, “Spring, it seems, has sprung a hole in your winter.”
“I don’t see how this could be. Why have we fallen?”
“Because the snow melted all at once while your house was hibernating.”
“Well, it’s time to wake up.”
Cat now realized that the low sound she’d been hearing since she arrived wasn’t a wind in the eaves but a gentle snoring. Baba Yaga found an iron frying pan and began to smack the walls of her hut, making half-circle dents in the wallpaper. “Dumb Doma! Rise and shine, you silly cluck!”
Wonder of wonders, the house began to right itself. Cat and the witch both tumbled face forward as the room reasserted itself into traditional orientation.
“All my nighties will have gotten wrinkled,” said Baba Yaga. She hurried to the open window. “Egads, Mewster, you’re right. A horrid stink of springtime. Ferns and folly in every direction. My private weather has been canceled.”
“It’s all her fault.” The kitty hissed at Cat.
“No, it’s not,” said the witch. “She isn’t strong enough to break my spells.” She peered through the woods. “I can’t see my bridge from here. Hut, make tracks!” She rapped on the wall. The house began to lurch back and forth as if in a swing. It couldn’t be true, but it seemed to be true: the little house lifted up eight feet in the air. It trudged through sudden mud into the clear light of morning. Its sheds and bins slapped against its hips like saddlebags.
“Look.” The kitten rolled his head toward the windowpane.
“I am looking.”
Cat came up behind her to see what they were talking about. She spied the bridge over which she’d walked. It now appeared little more than an ornamental structure in a Japanese garden, going from nowhere to nowhere, each end descending into early spring posies. The skulls mounted on the poles were rotating, inspecting the mess.
Baba Yaga drew a breath between her big iron teeth. “Zut alors, crikey, gee willikers, and Bob’s your uncle,” she exhaled. “It’s worse than I thought. My winter’s been abolished. The nerve. Mewster, go get my souvenir skulls.”
“I live to serve, and I serve to live.” The kitten darted out the window.
“Something is wrong with the world,” said the witch, almost to herself. “It appears to be broken.”
“You’ll have your work cut out for you, setting it to rights,” whispered Cat. “Don’t want to be in the way. I’ll let myself out.”
The witch: “Well, it’s true, I’ve been put off my lunch, but you’re not going anywhere without me. If I’ve lost my magic protections, I need a hostage. Consider yourself invited on the trip.”
“What trip?” said a skull at the window. The kitten was wearing it as a helmet.
“We have to go tell the Tsar. I mean, if the world is ailing, he should know. Perhaps his wise men will have some theory or other about it. Wise men often do. Myself, I don’t dabble much in logic.”
“How are you going to find the Tsar?” asked the cat. “You can’t even find the powder room.”
“We could head for Saint Petersburg, if I were any good with maps.”
“You couldn’t find your way from A to B in an alphabet book.”
“True. I don’t even know where we are starting from.” At Cat’s expression, she added, “What? You think Baba Yaga lives by ordinary coordinates? Not. The latitude and attitude of magic require me to change my address frequently, often in the middle of the night when the local welcome wagon comes to call with torches and pitchforks. I rarely know where I’m going to wake up in the morning.”
“I know how to get to Saint Petersburg,” said Cat. “Just cross your bridge and keep on through the forest until you come to the railroad tracks. Then turn to the left and follow them. That’s the line to Saint Petersburg, and that is where I was going anyway.”
“Isn’t that convenient,” said Baba Yaga. “I adore having a personal navigator, as I’m bad with directions. Fasten your seat belts, honeybuckets — it’s going to be a bumpy walk.”
So far the ruse was working. For several days now, Elena had kept to her room, complaining of a rheumy chest and dribbling nose.
Monsieur d’Amboise continued to bring her meals, though less formally arranged on the plate than before.
Miss Bristol proved a sullen chaperone. She painted the heels of her shoes with gutta-percha so as to be able to run more swiftly, without loss of grip, away from the authorities when the moment came. The unguent stank, but Miss Bristol, so thin, felt a chill whenever the window was cracked a smidgeon for fresh air. So Elena had to put up with it.
They looked out the train windows as the shapes of the land changed. They chatted. Elena told Miss Bristol about Luka, Alexei, their mother. Out of habit or maybe only to busy herself, Miss Bristol corrected Elena’s grammar and comportment. She shared her portfolio of arcane knowledge, like it or not. How one holds a fork. How one sits up straight so one’s spine does not look as if it were made of wool. How one keeps mindful of the drape of one’s hem. How one speaks French.
Though she tried and tried at this, Elena couldn’t speak French.
She accepted lessons, though, on how to speak Russian like a townsperson and not like a mud snipe.
“If someone asks you about London, you must answer in English, just this one line. It will make them laugh and will relieve their anxiety about your insistence on Russian,” said Miss Bristol. “You must say, Ah, London! London, it is veddy, veddy grand indeed. Cheerio, what?”
Elena practiced this repeatedly.
“As for Paris,” added Monsieur d’Amboise, who had stopped with cups of tea, “you might say, C’est vrai, la Ville-Lumière, elle vous enchante comme aucune autre.”
“I might not,”
said Elena.
She didn’t like being improved, but it helped to pass the time. Elena pretended to listen and learn. Sometimes she accidentally took something in.
Daily Elena would wait until the drapes were drawn against the afternoon sun. Then she’d steal into the parlor chamber where Great-Aunt Sophia was often nodding asleep in her chair. The canary would nap with sympathetic exhaustion. Elena brought the picture storybook with her and prepared to tell the old lady a story when she woke up. This worked well until once when the great-aunt said, “I’m tired of this peasant drivel. Read to me from Thackeray.”
“But I have my heart set on this ‘Tale of the Golden Cockerel,’” said Elena. She’d learned to be more forthright; everything depended on her getting safely to Saint Petersburg. Talking to the nearsighted old lady was good practice for approaching the Tsar.
“You go more native every day,” complained the old woman. “I don’t know why I spend so much money on that school in Kensington. Young lady, I’ve noticed you’re avoiding my favorite texts in English and French. I want to know why.”
“I prefer the old Russian tales.”
“You must have misheard me. I didn’t ask you what you preferred. I have no interest in what you prefer. Imagine if you are to behave with such dread arrogance when you meet the Tsar’s godson. Don’t forget you must woo him with docility, my child. None of this ‘I think’ and ‘I want’ and ‘What it seems to me’! It’s unseemly for a young woman to express opinions.”
She added, perhaps to herself, “You have to become old and ugly before anyone listens to you, and then they don’t, because you’re ugly and old.”
The train shuddered on a crossing. Elena put the book down. “The truth is that reading in a moving train makes me feel sick. It’s easier to tell stories.”
“Yes, I have noticed you’re good at telling stories. Scant talent that is. Well, have your way this time, ma chérie. But don’t think you’re going to make it a habit, having your own way. No good comes of such indulgence. Where is that blasted butler with my afternoon sherry? Standards are going to the dogs.”
Elena told the “Tale of the Golden Cockerel.” In the pictures, the world of Russia was antique and clean. The Tsar looked a little like Peter Petrovich, but not as fat. He wore embroidered sashes at the waist. His throne room was dignified but largely empty. Elena tried to imagine walking across that space, among the colorful pillars, bowing to a man swamped in a colored bedspread. “Dear Tsar. I am here on behalf of my starving village, my missing brother, my sick mother …”
“I’m not following. The story has taken a false turn, it makes no sense,” snapped the great-aunt. “You’re not on your mettle today. That’s enough.” Elena slammed the book shut with a guilty wince. “Pull aside the curtain on the far window, and let’s see what we can see. The light is changing, and I feel we are closing in on Saint Petersburg.”
Elena did as she was told, but she took care to stand in the shadows.
The afternoon sun had slid down the bowl of the sky. The long night was almost upon them. The world was filled with a pearly light. The great-aunt: “Oh, for my spectacles! Is that what I think it is, my dear?”
“I don’t know what you think it is.”
“Confound your adolescent contrariness. Is that flooded fields, at this time of year?”
Elena shaded her eyes. “Yes, ma tante. Some wide meadows underwater. One can tell by the rows of trees that mark out boundaries and tracks.”
“Bizarre. Is that Saint Petersburg in the distance? Oh, these old eyes. Would I could see in light what gleams so bright in memory. We’re almost home, I think, but my child, can you remember?— home doesn’t look like this.”
“I don’t remember,” said Elena, daring the truth. The old woman didn’t seem to notice.
“Canals and lakes and rivers. Saint Petersburg was built on a swamp, ma chérie, by Peter the Great. An Asiatic interpretation of European finesse. He ordered canals to drain the water away so he could have a northern capital city that faced Europe. For part of every year, it would enjoy easier access to France and Prussia and England. What could have happened, that the canals are overflowing? Is Saint Petersburg drowning? Have you brought your rubber ducky in your kit bag from school?”
Elena didn’t reply. She’d learned that not to reply to what she didn’t follow was seen as an act of subservience, not stupidity.
“And look, look; are these old eyes playing tricks on me? Were it not confounding, I should call it beautiful. A prospect laid out in duplicate. The most elegant city on the continent above, and its reflection in the accidental mirror below.”
Elena was silent, awed not by its splendor but by its size. At this distance, the city of Saint Petersburg spread across half the horizon, coherent as a form of nature.
Elena had imagined that the Winter Palace would be directly across the road from the train station. She’d simply dash from the door of the train to the door of the throne room. Which would be empty of anyone but the Tsar and the supplicant (herself), like in that picture in the storybook. Once there, she’d curtsey in the way she’d been practicing. She’d present the Tsar with her gift of a Firebird’s egg, if that’s what it was — she was beginning to doubt her own recollections about finding it — and she’d ask for his release of Luka. She’d be in and gone, just like that, and beginning the long walk home along the railroad tracks.
Now she wondered if it would take her days even to identify which of these magnificent buildings was the right palace.
As the train continued its rickety approach, Elena and Great-Aunt Sophia watched the mirrored city, above and below the water line, growing at the same rate. An escarpment almost porous with blue and ocher light. Structured water, liquid stone.
“I don’t know what the crisis is,” muttered Great-Aunt Sophia, “but have you ever noticed that the world can hardly fail to be beautiful even when it is falling apart?”
Baba Yaga’s hut was called Dumb Doma. Doma means “house” in Russian, Cat knew. As to why it was called Dumb, Cat didn’t take long to guess. Baba Yaga treated the house like a kind of stupid cluck, beating it from the inside, sticking her head out a window and talking to it from the outside, whispering when she didn’t want it to overhear what she was saying. The house was a sort of cluck, standing as it did on two giant chicken legs.
A certain odor. I’ll leave it at that.
Without ceremony they prepared to evacuate the melted island of winter in the middle of the impossible early spring. Baba Yaga told Dumb Doma to pause on the bridge. The witch then leaped out the door and sprang onto the railings. For an old withered dame, she was mighty spry, thought Cat, watching from the porch. Baba Yaga sniffed the air in four directions. “Smells like we’re lost already,” she announced. “Well, let’s get more lost.”
As Dumb Doma lurched along, and the floors of the little house tilted about like the deck of a ship in a high wind, the witch began to pitch the four skulls toward a basket near the fireplace. “Skittles, come play skittles!” she shrieked to Cat. “Whoever gets her two skulls in the basket first wins. Here, you can take Caligula and Richard the Third, and I’ll keep Robespierre and Tamburlaine.”
“I don’t want to bowl with skulls,” said Cat.
“Mind your manners or I’ll have your head to complete the set.”
So Cat played. She landed Caligula almost at once, but Richard the Second proved traitorous and wouldn’t settle.
Dumb Doma paid no attention to the game going on within its walls. It picked its way through the woods with jaunty tread. Tree branches brushed its porches with a sound of tulle skirts. When that sound stopped, Cat could tell that they’d arrived at the railroad tracks. The veering and listing of the cottage subsided.
Baba Yaga opened the front door. The front porch was no longer a rustic portico but a little Iberian balcony in wrought iron. “When did you manage this renovation?” asked Cat.
“Dumb Doma remodels itself. A nasty habit
, like binge shopping. But what can I do? I’m only a tenant.”
They stepped onto the balcony. The tracks stretched in both directions.
“Which way?” said Baba Yaga. “Directions confound me, as all ways are one to me.”
“Left,” said Cat, and pointed. The house obeyed.
“Time for elevenses,” said Baba Yaga, pushing Cat back inside before she got any bright ideas. The witch slammed the door. “Are you hungry, child?”
“A little,” said Cat.
The kitten commented, “Don’t eat anything the witch gives you, or you’ll have to serve her for seven years.”
“That’s a filthy lie,” snapped the witch. “You just want more for yourself, Mewster, because I’m such a good cook. Take it back.”
“I never take anything back,” said the kitten. As the witch picked up a frying pan and began to swing, the creature continued, “Though I do declare, her Munchy Mouse Buttocks aren’t to be sneered at.”
“Old family recipe,” said the witch.
“You don’t have any family and you never did,” said the kitten. “You’re all by yourself, come from no parents and yielding no kits.”
“I invented the recipe a long time ago; I’m my own family; I’m old: so it’s an old family recipe. What, you want me to send you to law school? Be quiet, I’m trying to concentrate. Let’s see what we have in the larder. We have eye of newt and toe of frog, carbon-crisp residue of manticore loin, a beaker of all-natural belladonna extract, some wolfbane, some romaine, a poteen of ptomaine, and a few limp radishes in butter, pinched from the platter left out for Marat after his bath, which he never got to since he died therein. Let’s have Cheerios.”
“I don’t know what Cheerios are,” said Cat.
“They haven’t been invented yet. You’ll love them.” The witch brisked up three bowls of some dry, light brown circlets. “Here. Bon appétit. They’re better with milk, but we’re out of milk. Mewster, why are we out of milk? That’s odd.”
The kitten sneered. “This looks like cat food.” At the witch’s glower, he added, “And lady, do I love cat food. I’m a cat.”