“Me too,” said Cat, trying to be polite. “I mean, my name is Cat.”
“Oh, she has a name. How affected,” said the witch. “I was going to call her Little Drear.”
Despite being dry, the food was not too bad. And now Cat could see why the table stood on human legs. As the room rocked back and forth, the legs took turns standing on tiptoe or bending at the knee, to keep the surface level and the food from spilling out of the bowls.
“Yummers. I am a good cook,” said Baba Yaga when she’d finished. “All done, Little Drear? I mean, Cat? Look, Mewster, our guest has finished up every morsel of toasted oat goodness. Now she’s obliged to be my slave for seven years.”
“For Cheerios?” asked Cat.
“I’m just kidding. Children are so literal. It’s a penance.”
The house was slowing down. “Are we there already, Dumb Doma?” The witch ran to the front window and peered through the lace curtain.
“No,” said Cat, “it looks as if we’re coming to a village.”
“Drat. This’ll slow us down.”
“She doesn’t like her house to be seen by human eyes,” said the kitten to Cat.
“I saw it, and my eyes are human.”
“Yes, but she intended to eat you. That’s different.”
“Why didn’t she eat me?” whispered Cat.
“Maybe because you brought her a present? No one does that,” replied Mewster. He nodded his little furry head to the Fabergé egg, still hovering in the Firebird’s nest. “Only children can see Dumb Doma, thanks to some ancient spell the witch can never remember nor revise. Sometimes children tell what they’ve seen. And sometimes their parents remember seeing Dumb Doma when they were young, and then, oh la! Quite the chase. Children shrieking and pointing, adults following blindly with catapults filled with burning oil, and a roundelay of curses.”
“You’re spoiling my digestion,” snapped the witch. “Still, I can’t be bothered with buboes today. They’re too finicky. We’ll have to sit here and wait until everyone is asleep. We can continue by moonlight.” She hit the wall with her pestle. “Dumb Doma! Settle down and roost in some copse not too near a school yard. The rest of you campers, it’s time for beddy-bye! Lights out!” She reached into the wall and somehow withdrew, like a drawer opening, a comfy bed with pink ruffles and a princess canopy. It was littered with heart-shaped pillows saying things like BE MINE, VALENTINE and ET TU, BRUTE? She threw herself in a heap upon the coverlets with her bony rump up in the air and started to snore instantly.
“Do we have to retire?” asked Cat.
“I find it easier to sleep in the daytime anyway.” Mewster chose a spot where sun slanted in through a high window. He licked himself to slumberland in a matter of seconds.
Cat, however, wasn’t tired. She tiptoed around the one-room hut, opening drawers and cabinets. She saw a lot of things she couldn’t recognize. Obscure medical instruments, or maybe they were cooking devices. She found scraps of writing in several languages. Spells, perhaps. She found bottles of vile liquid and deposits of powder in husks of paper. She found three dead parrots in a basket, yoked together at the talons, half covered with gold glitter as if they were a failed attempt at a holiday decoration. She found a jar labeled UNEATEN MACADAMIA NUTS. She found where the hummingbird lived, in a Tyrolean cuckoo clock carved to resemble a gravestone. A script over the front door read, TIME FLIES WHEN YOU’RE DEAD.
Above the settee, a whole shelf of masks. Some she could recognize and some not. A beaded Venetian plague mask with a beaky nose. A papier-mâché mask of someone a lot like Diderot. A mask of Comedy and one of Tragedy and a third one that cringed. Cat thought it might be named Malady.
She found a bookshelf. She found a Bible, which surprised her. It fell open to the Book of Job. She found a complete set of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, with little tabs of paper sticking out. They were scrawled over with the witch’s comments to herself. “Fun!” “Try this, but with exploding feathers!” and “Gotta love him — deeply sick.” She found a book of black-and-white etchings called The Far Side. Also a set of flat cardboard sleeves printed over in English, each containing a black dinner plate etched in thin concentric circles. ORIGINAL CAST RECORDING proclaimed each sleeve at the top of its front cover. The titles were things like Annie Get Your Gun, The King and I, Damn Yankees, and something called Cats.
Then there were drawers dripping with jewels, and other drawers deep in assorted jawbones, and a complicated kitchen labor-saving device that promised to slice and dice mice. A miniature guillotine.
Cat felt dizzy. She’d only barely scratched the surface. How could all this fit in a room that was hardly ten feet square? This was surely an enchanted home. When she returned to a drawer she’d already examined, she found this time that it was stuffed with unmatched socks.
She found a rocking chair and pulled up a cozy blanket over her shoulders. Maybe the meal was having a soporific effect. Or maybe the witch was singing a lullaby in her sleep. Cat felt her head nodding on her shoulders. Was this normal tiredness, or had she really been enchanted into servitude? True, it would be one way to get out of having to preen in front of the Tsar’s godson as a prospective bride, but she hadn’t bargained for such a commitment…. In seven years she’d be twenty.
When Cat came to, the witch was already awake. Her fancy bed had disappeared. But for a few candles, the room was steeped in darkness. It was juddering slightly. It took Cat a moment to remember what this motion felt like, but then she did. Like being on a train.
Cat, politely: “Good evening.”
“Is it? Well, we’ll have to do something about that,” snapped the witch. She was doing a jigsaw puzzle on a card table. It appeared to be a picture of a wreath of dead skunks. She picked up a pair of pinking shears, trimmed a piece, and smacked it into place.
“We’re moving again.”
“Oh, yes,” said the witch. “A cargo caravan was going by in the middle of the night, and when it slowed down for a curve, I instructed Dumb Doma to make a flying leap for it. Dumb Doma landed on a flatbed and settled down nicely. So we’re taking the train the way hoity-toity folks do.”
“Baba Yaga.” Mewster was nosing about in a cabinet. “Did you finish the biscuits while we were sleeping? You hog.”
“I did not. If they’re gone, she must have taken them.” The witch grunted in Cat’s direction.
“I never did,” said Cat.
“Well, we’re all out,” said Mewster.
“It’s a magic cracker tin,” replied the witch. ‘There’s no such thing as all out.”
“I think we’re running through our provisions,” said the cat. The hummingbird came out of the cuckoo clock and pretended to drop dead, but when Mewster tried to pounce, it flew back up and slammed its little door.
The witch put down the snippers. “I don’t understand,” she said. “It’s a very slight spell, a magic cracker tin, but it has never failed before.” Absentmindedly she began to nibble on the puzzle. Then she turned to Cat. “You’re human. How does it feel to be hungry?” she asked.
“Well,” replied the child, surprised at her own answer, “I suppose I don’t really know.”
It’s been so long since I’ve seen Saint Petersburg. I hope I’m equipped to present it to you as marvelous as it truly is.
It was the most enchanting thing Elena had ever seen. Often this feels true about whatever we are seeing for the first time, whether it be a newly discovered best beloved or steep mountains. Or justice. Whatever that is.
How appreciation for any of these things arises in the young, I don’t know.
As the sun set, it seemed to Elena, the horizon became a ridge of black shapes, lights above staining the flood below, wavering strips of gold and silver.
These were lights in the windows, though Elena couldn’t imagine so many lights in all the world, let alone in one city. They looked like stars. She tried to imagine walking among them, stars at eye level, stars within the reach of
her hands.
Then, bronze as dried orange rind, a gibbous moon appeared behind a cathedral. The torqued domes looked like paper cutouts across her bosom. In a few moments, she found her sister bobbing beneath the waves, looking more diffuse, the white of a poaching egg.
“I never knew the night to come in so fast.” Elena let out a breath between pursed lips, as if she might disturb the prettiness by being too urgent.
“I’ve told you all about this,” said Miss Bristol. “You’ve done your geography. You know how close to the Arctic Saint Petersburg is. Even more northerly than the farthest of the Hebrides, and about equal with the southern tip of mighty Greenland. We’re only five hundred miles or so from the Arctic Circle. You remember.”
“You forget,” said Elena. “Cat knows all about this, not me. Cat knows about miles instead of versts.”
“Oh, yes. Well then. I suppose I’m bewitched by the sight, too.” Miss Bristol fussed at her nostrils with a handkerchief.
“It got dark so fast,” said the girl. “Has the Tsar commanded it, to make the city shine so?”
“Don’t be fanciful. It’s not magic nor is it imperial taste,” said Miss Bristol. “It’s astronomy, no more than that. You see, the world is tilted, so, and the sun is a golden melon, so, and the earth floats about it, so.” Miss Bristol made fists of her hands and shook one and then the other, apparently under the delusion that she was the earth and the sun. “In winter, the sun is here and its light falls like this, so the nights are long and the days are short. In the summer, it is in reverse, and that is what makes the White Nights of the summer, when the sun hardly seems to set for longer than it takes to give your teeth a good brushing.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Neither do I, but dental hygiene is important. If you aren’t to be clapped in chains for halitosis, you’d better come with me. You’ll thank me for showing you a thing or two about rinsing with sodium bicarbonate and rubbing your teeth with pulverized chalk. You have a portion of tinted abrasive for your use — I mean, Cat had a portion for her use. You may as well avail yourself of it.”
So Elena was dragged away from the window and inducted into the care of her choppers.
Though the city seemed close, the train had slowed to a crawl. Monsieur d’Amboise reported that most of the tracks into the central rail station in Saint Petersburg had been flooded, and trains from other directions had been rerouted onto a single approach. A queue of trains waited to arrive on this line. It might take a whole day until it was their turn.
The larger grew this brilliant city of the north, the more Elena remembered how far she was from home. And why she had not run away when she’d had the chance. She was beginning to be more nervous. Her father was dead and her mother was dying, and her brother had been impressed into military service by the Tsar’s generals. Her village was starving, and she was starving herself, most of the time. (Only not tonight. She could feel Cat’s gown across her stomach pinch a little.)
She thought of the old doctor back in Miersk. Acting like a Tsar of fate, naming days! As if he had that right. From this distance, he seemed parochial. Still, what sort of day would he have named this one? Run for Your Life Day?
Once an hour or so, the train groaned and started to move, and inched for ten minutes until it came to a halt again. The twin moons swam in tandem.
“Up, up.” Miss Bristol was shaking her. “We arrive today, and the wheezy old calliope wants you to have breakfast with her. She won’t take no for an answer.”
Elena groaned. She was afraid that the excitement of returning to Saint Petersburg might bring the great-aunt some sharper faculty of awareness. Elena couldn’t afford to risk discovery now, just as she was about to flee. “Tell her I didn’t sleep well last night and I’m ill.”
“That’s a filthy lie, and I won’t be party to it. She insists, and if I don’t produce you this time, I’m not doing my job, and she will wonder why. We aren’t safe yet. Get up, and put this on.” Miss Bristol fussed in the wardrobe and selected a dark-blue dress with white stripes along the hem, and a white sailor bib-collar with blue stars in the corners.
“This shows my ankles!” said Elena.
“And a sorrier pair of knobby fetlocks I’ve never seen. You’ll wear stockings. And these black shoes. Wash your hands.”
“And brush your teeth,” said Elena in a singsongy way. She had gotten to know Miss Bristol.
“And your hair,” added the governess. “And mind your manners. And your tongue. Govern yourself. We aren’t out of the woods yet.”
It would seem we are, thought Elena, as the city crept closer and closer in the rose-green light of dawn.
Madame Sophia Borisovna Orlova was dressed and wolfing down a hearty breakfast. “Well. Brisk is as brisk does,” she said. Briskly. “Jus d’orange?”
Elena had learned enough to say, “Yes, please.”
“Are you ready for your return to my home, my child? It’s been so long since you visited, and you were quite small. With winters in London and summers in Brittany or the Riviera, that scandal strand, I expect Saint Petersburg will seem tame.” The words said one thing, the tone of voice quite another. “But manners in all the European capitals serve as your passport, and you will find yourself quite at home here.”
“I should be very happy if that happens.” Another truth, and said in the kind of tortured sentence of which Miss Bristol would approve. Perhaps, Elena thought, I’m not quite as stupid as I look.
“I must confess that all this”— Madame Sophia waved her hand about, indicating the wet world beyond the windows — “all this splash — well, it does worry me. For this I have dragged you across Europe? I cannot imagine what damp catastrophe is going on here. Perhaps we’ll discover that the Tsar has had to cancel the ball to introduce his godson to society.”
“Perhaps.” A safe word. Perhaps the safest.
Madame Sophia: “If I find I’ve ruined your season on a wild-goose chase, my dear, I shall be very cross with myself as well as with the Tsar. And with the floods. That great moon last night no doubt made things worse, dragging in heaps of extra water from the Gulf of Finland. Oh, my dear. I can see this trip has worn you out. Your voice has lost its youthful fluting. Though your carriage has improved, your carefree tone hasn’t returned. You are guarded. I have frightened you with the anticipation, and perhaps all for naught. Perhaps the Tsar will send all his guests away.”
“Maybe his godson drowned in the floods.”
“Hardly a cheery thought. I expect he can swim. Can you?”
Cautiously. “I rarely get the chance to try.”
“Yes, I know; the Atlantic waves are too rough, and the Mediterranean too lacking in smack to bother with. Nonetheless, my dear, to the point. Should we discover that the great event of the season has been canceled, I shall compensate you for the disaster.”
“You needn’t worry about me,” said Elena. I will be out of this train in an hour, she added to herself.
“My Persian rubies,” said the great-aunt. “You always admired them, and why should your irresponsible mother have them? The lavallière in the diamond-crusted pendant and the matching earrings. Your face isn’t yet mature enough to do them justice. Do you think the emerald brooch would accord nicely with the rubies, or is that gilding the lily? Not that I believe there is any such concept. Any lily can do with a little gilding against the next frost. Myself, I enjoy a little lavender-scented powder upon my Roman proboscis.” She turned her head this way and that, displaying the squat nose planted among the pleated quilt of her wrinkled cheeks. “I’m being humorous.”
“You’re looking very beautiful.”
“I think so, too, especially since I misplaced those cursed spectacles. Thanks to myopia, in the mirror I have come to resemble Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn. But do you accept my suggestion about compensation in case the Tsar cancels his festival? About the rubies and diamonds? Of course this is all speculation, but even so.” r />
“I suppose it is,” said Elena, and began to speculate.
She was going to run away. She was. She was. What if she didn’t, though? Could she somehow pass off that old egg as a Firebird’s egg long enough to get the Tsar’s attention? She no longer quite believed it was magic; she now wondered if she’d been sleepwalking off the train and found it in the woods that dawn, and if her dreamy imagination had filled in the indistinct fiction of a Firebird, a fox, and a chicken.
The old leathery thing in its box wasn’t quite as warm to the touch as before.
She pictured herself presenting it to the Tsar, curtseying, asking for clemency for her brother and food for her poor mother. She would look almost regal in the rubies, and he would have to pay attention.
Apparently Baba Yaga had told the truth about her house being visible only to the young. No one on the freight train seemed to have noticed that Dumb Doma had climbed aboard and was hitching a ride for hundreds of versts. “Did you enchant your house to be invisible to all but children in order to preserve the sanity of adults?” asked Cat. “Like the laborers caring for this train?”
Baba Yaga: “You mistake me for someone who spends her time worrying about other people. I don’t. If someone wants to freak out over seeing Baba Yaga’s hut on his train and spend the rest of his life babbling in some sanitarium, why should I care? I enchanted Dumb Doma to screen out nosey parkers, always coming around to borrow a spoonful of salt so they could get a glimpse at my lifestyle choices. I use my magic for my own purposes. To protect myself from the misery of normalcy, mostly.”
“Being normal isn’t that miserable.”
“Try it for a thousand years in a row, and you’ll be grateful for a little zaniness.” The witch cut a caper the likes of which Diaghilev would have approved.
“But you can’t approach the Tsar as you are,” said Cat. “You’d never be allowed anywhere near the court.”