As tall as the Tsar, in one corner, lurked the fantastic life-size matryoshka.
In another corner stood the immense snow globe. Inside the glass was an impossibly correct rendition of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, submerged in viscous liquid. If you spun the globe with your hand, it revolved on a track. The Prince tried it. Lightweight paper flakes floated up, fluid curtains of December, settling on domes and spires. A hurdy-gurdy melody tinkled thinly.
In a third corner hulked a giant metallic rooster. His wattles were made of fine chain mail; his copper cape overlapped onto a brassy breast. He loomed as tall as the nesting dolls, his strutting male magic looking his female counterpart in her balsawood painted eye.
“It’s got to be here,” said Miss Yaga. She made her way to the center of the pavilion. There, she overturned her reticule and shook it. All that fell out was the raggedy nest. She set her bag down with the sides folded open, perhaps to prevent a latter suggestion of larceny. Her hands went to her chin, and she turned a suspicious eye on the other people present. One by one.
It seemed to Elena as if the music and charm of the festival was fading, distancing. Becoming a thing of the past. As Miersk had seemed a dissolving village, a village in the act of turning ghostly, the celebration seemed to be ghosting, too.
Miss Yaga, like a good reproving chaperone, examined her charges. All the guards, then Prince Anton and the Tsar. Elena and the Deputy Sub-Lieutenant. Madame Sophia and Cat. Everyone found it hard not to flinch under her glare, which was accusatory and diagnostic.
Finally she said, “All right. I don’t believe any of you is lying. So the Firebird’s egg must be here. And if it is, I will find it.”
They hardly dared move, any of them. The night had a quality of seizure about it, as if laws had been broken and anything might happen. As if magic was disturbed from its safe channels. As if all the dangerous maybes were inching toward probablys. Elena’s eyes had dried, and her crusty lids felt like sand. Cat’s ears rang.
Prince Anton looked as if he had won at Monte Carlo.
“What are you waiting for?” said Miss Yaga. “Everybody, look everyplace. Unless it finally hatched of its own accord and the Firebird flew away, the egg should be here. And even if it has hatched, the pieces of the shell should be crackling underfoot. Where did you see it last?”
“I set it down next to this set of 624 matching monogrammed towels,” said the captain. “My companions watched me come in, place it down, and retreat. Perhaps it rolled someplace.” But though they all hunted, they saw no sign of it.
“I’ll take some depositions,” said Miss Yaga. She ran over to the giant snow globe. It was as tall as she was. She picked it up and shook it.
“Look at this!” she snapped. They all hurried to see.
Whether the donor of this gift had been some wizard of the north or djinn of the south, or Baba Yaga’s nervous energy was infectious, no one knew. Perhaps the whole tent was under an enchantment. When the witch set down the enormous globe and spun it, something unexpected happened.
As the globe rotated, the snow rose around the delicate model of the colored spires of Saint Basil’s Cathedral. It first coated the onion domes with white. Then, somehow, the snow turned to a drizzle of rain, and the flakes dissolved and ran down the building, pooling as runoff. Saint Basil’s looked to be planted in two feet of sludgy wastewater. The music, I gather, was cribbed from Gerzhensky’s Symphony No. 1, “Blizzard Pastorale”— the plangent andante movement, though all four movements were lugubrious and andante — based on the Russian folk song “Frostbite in July.”
“You’re going to let your whole country drown?” Miss Yaga bowled the globe aside. Its music sped up until it sounded like shattering prisms of ice. The globe ripped through the loosely strung tenting and drowned in the Neva, bubbling Gerzhensky all the while.
Next she muscled up to the nesting dolls. The largest doll, the matriarch-general in her painted wooden scarf, stared at the golden rooster. “What are you looking at, hussy?” shouted Miss Yaga. “Wipe that smirk off your face, or I’ll wipe it off for you.” The doll didn’t change her expression, which was complacent, assured, somewhat sassy.
“I suppose you’re a music box, too? You think you can hide secrets from me? Well, you can’t,” said Miss Yaga. “When I find your windup key, you’ll sing like the rest of them, sister.” She reached up and wrestled with the matriarch, whose head came off with a cork-popping sound, leaving the bottom in place. Inside, an identical smarmy doll snugly waited, as superior as her mother if a little less zaftig. “Your mouth is painted shut too, dollface?” Miss Yaga decapitated her and handed her head to the Tsar. Before long there were thirty severed dolls. They seemed to have taken a vow of silence. There was nothing musical about them.
“I know they know more than they’re letting on,” said Miss Yaga. “All this revolting motherliness must be good for something.” By now she was hauling off a half-dozen heads at a time.
“Better start putting these dolls back together,” said the Tsar. “They’re taking up too much room.” The soldiers started to pair the tops with the correct bottoms, but forgot to insert the dolls within one another in ascending order. So the Tsar dismissed most of the dolls, and his men jettisoned them out the new rip in the tent, where they bobbed in the river, giant ducklings huddled together.
Miss Yaga reached the last doll. This infant came up nearly to Miss Yaga’s knee and was a foot in diameter. It wasn’t at all baby-like, more like a little fierce dwarf mother with a grudge. When Miss Yaga opened it up, she found a piece of parchment on which was written: HISTORY ISN’T FINISHED YET. COME BACK LATER.
“No egg here,” she admitted. “Sorry about your dollies, Tsar.”
“Each one represented a clan or tribe of my peoples,” he said. “Now they are all afloat on the flood.”
“I think the water is making them swell,” reported Prince Anton, who had been sticking his head out of a side flap to watch. “You’re never going to pack them tightly together again. They’re all the same size now.”
“Release them to the wild, and may they live and flourish.” The Tsar put his hand on his forehead as if about to indulge in a major headache.
“A lot of this stuff is just junk you can buy on the open market,” said Miss Yaga. “I mean, unless there’s a nice flying carpet from Samarkand I haven’t noticed, it’s all ready for the rubbish bin. And I don’t see anything else that could hide an egg.”
The six soldiers, who had been ripping through gift wrapping as if hunting for a ticking time bomb, paused in their exertions and had to agree.
“I can only think of one other thing.” Miss Yaga marched through the sea of crinkly gilt paper to the well-planted legs of the golden cockerel. “What is this, an emissary from Pushkin himself? What do you know, big boy? Spill the beans! We have ways of making you talk.”
The golden rooster kept his own counsel.
“Oh, you’re going to play that game. Well, you asked for it.” At this the fiendish little woman leaped upon the back of the rooster and sat down as if prepared to ride him across the steppes at the head of a Mongol horde. Her little booted feet came out on either side in an unladylike fashion, and her skirt rode almost up to her hips. Everyone could see that her stockings were laddered. But she was not one to mind about that.
She reached into the tin feathers of the rooster’s cape and felt around. Elena thought perhaps she was trying to choke the thing, to force him to confess. But the old woman was hunting for a key. She found it, and inserted it in one of the rooster’s ears, and turned it tightly until it would wind no more. Then she let go of it.
The rooster opened his tin mouth and began to crow in a tin voice.
“Oh, the weather outside is rotten.
See how damp the ground has gotten.
But since we all like to complain,
Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.
Oh, the storms continue pelting
And the pola
r ice is melting.
Though it has no place to drain,
Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.”
“Whoever gave you this rooster ought to be shot,” said Miss Yaga to the Tsar.
“Well,” said Prince Anton, “the rooster does have a tin ear.”
“I want to know about the egg! Where did it go, Tarnish-breath?”
The rooster filled its mechanical lungs with melody and started a second verse:
“Oh, the weather is so revolting
That the chickens all are moulting …”
“Cock-a-doodle-don’t,” said Prince Anton to the rooster, once Miss Yaga had finished stamping it silent.
When the last spring had finished springing, the last cog had wheeled away and lost itself in the shadows, Miss Yaga seemed to shrink back to the size she had appeared at first. The campaign, it seemed, was a failure. “There’s nothing more I can do here,” she said. “The first time in my life I’ve admitted such a thing. Which is even more proof that the Firebird is dead. If this is so, then all that is spirit and magic in the wide world will die, too.”
With that statement, a certain buttress slipped, a strut gave way. The sound of the festival reasserted itself. Miss Yaga went to her reticule and pulled out a sunny yellow parasol that hadn’t been there before. She opened it up. She alone remained dry as a small, impossible rain began to fall from clouds that had gathered under the tent canopy. She did not offer her parasol, not even to the Tsar. It looked as if Miss Yaga was done with them, done with them all.
You came here an impostor, and there’s been nothing but upset since you arrived,” said the Tsar to Elena. “Guards, take her into custody.”
Cat wouldn’t return Elena’s glance. Elena had hijacked Cat’s life for her own improvement and had left Cat behind to starve in Miersk or be eaten by a wild kitten.
“Tell them it was all an accident,” pleaded Elena. But Cat wouldn’t speak in the girl’s defense.
Miss Yaga gave Cat a long, contemptuous glare. Then she picked up the reticule, clipped it closed with a vicious snap, and said, “I’m giving my notice, effective immediately.” She didn’t bow to the Tsar as she passed him. She didn’t acknowledge Cat’s sputter of surprise, her unchained syllables. They signified nothing to Baba Yaga.
There was nothing more to be done. Elena was escorted away by soldiers. Cat watched her go, and then turned her face.
The Tsar forgave Madame Sophia any part she might have played in the night’s proceedings, including being so inept as to have lost her spectacles at an important moment. She managed to regain some composure, barely.
The Tsar ordered the guests to leave the pavilions and come back the next evening, and they’d start over. He sent Prince Anton to his room.
The guests all hove away feeling that they’d been ignored. But they were determined to put all this behind them, return tomorrow, woo the Prince, and astound the Tsar with their own precious gifts.
As they evacuated the premises and surged along the quays, they were amazed to see the navy of about sixteen dozen floating dolls bobbing in the Neva River. Even the guest who had brought them, a merchant from the Ukraine, didn’t recognize them, for his dolls had been built to nest, and this set seemed ready to invade Norway.
Ekaterina slipped her hand into her great-aunt’s hand as they waited for their carriage. When it arrived, Korsikov’s eyes grew wide with disbelief. “So it was you all along!” he said. “What happened to my eyes, that I didn’t see?”
Cat didn’t reply. Generally she didn’t talk to staff.
Miss Bristol sat inside the carriage, huddled over an iron box with a grilled lid and hot coals inside. At the sight of Cat climbing in the door, she started. “Oh, Miss Ekaterina!” she cried. “What magic is this, that returns you to our midst?”
“I have had an excursion,” said Cat.
“Quite the excursion, it seems,” said Madame Sophia. “I wonder if I shall believe any of this in the morning, or merely wake up and find myself still marooned on a train in the middle of the countryside.” Putting her head against the side of the seat, she fell instantly asleep.
To avoid the congestion of carriages collecting guests, Korsikov looped a long way around, along the English Embankment, the Palace Embankment. The windows of the Winter Palace. All this glory. Cat couldn’t really picture Elena being banished to the depths of a prison. She didn’t try. She was too tired to examine the matter closely. She just looked out the window of the carriage as the pavilions began to fall back behind them.
In the black water of the Neva River, she could still see the flotilla of liberated matryoshka dolls. Among them, paying little mind, paddled the serene vessel of Dumb Doma, carrying Miss Yaga into some private Russia, a Russia of secret coordinates. Away from these distresses. Away from her.
ONE EVENING I SAT DOWN TO WRITE TO THE TSAR, NIBBLING some bread I’d saved from breakfast. As I filled my pen with ink, a storm stuttered at some distance.
I watched hidden lightning pulse the clouds with an oily stain. The flare of a passing dragon, were I given to that sort of fancy. Though what actually nipped by was a wren, stopping at my windowsill. It must have been new to the neighborhood, as I was known for my miserliness with crumbs. I was thinking about lightning, and how life can be changed by a slash of brilliance. Almost without meaning to, I broke a crumb off the crust and flicked it onto the sill. The bird hopped forward, looked at me with one eye, pecked the crumb, and left.
Please don’t think I was becoming sentimental. I was in the practice of husbanding my crumbs, and to hell with the birds. But as I considered how I came to be imprisoned, I realized how little sense this story makes unless you see both sides of it. Cat’s side and Elena’s side, too. The side of the rich and the side of the poor. (Let’s just say.) A bird sees out of both sides of its head. It can see two stories happening at the same time, on two sides of its world. We humans can’t do that very often.
The rain started up. The wren didn’t come back. I ate the rest of my bread. And I continued to think about lightning and thunder, about fire and water and ice.
I have tried to see both sides of the story of the Firebird. On the one hand, his bright and liberated life (so different from mine in prison!), and then his smoky death, when he gives up a wish to some plucky child and is reborn in his own egg. It is a magic cycle but a cycle just the same, like the turn of the seasons, spring to summer to fall to winter to spring again.
And when the cycle is broken? What happens to the magic?
What happens to the world?
The following morning, Madame Sophia Borisovna Orlova was decidedly not at home to callers. She’d taken to her boudoir. She hunched herself in a dressing gown and sipped orange tea, and she didn’t bother to brush her hair.
She had the canary cage brought in, but Madame’s mood must have been contagious, for the canary wouldn’t sing.
She rang for Miss Bristol and Monsieur d’Amboise. “Do not speak,” she said. “Just listen. You knew that my niece had disappeared into the wild. You knew that an impostor had taken her place. In short order, you taught Elena just enough of the social graces so she could masquerade as a young woman of breeding. On the one hand, I consider that a job well done. On the other, you collaborated with a reckless brigand at the risk of Ekaterina’s life and well-being. I should have you brought up on charges of aiding and abetting, or at least sacked without references.”
“But I —” began Miss Bristol.
“I told you not to speak.”
Miss Bristol fell silent, but Monsieur d’Amboise did not.
“Madame,” he said, “I will speak. You may accuse us of any treachery you like once you hear our side. But you may not accuse us without allowing us testimony.”
“I said to be silent.”
“I will be silent, but not yet. The truth is, the accidental exchange of the girls happened several days before we realized it, as the impostor, Elena, kept herself cloistered. By the time we
’d discovered the switch, it was too late to do anything useful.”
“It’s never too late to save a child. I should have you hanged.”
“With all due respect, you should have noticed the difference in the girl yourself, Madame.”
The contempt in the room, a blinding frost.
“If you call out the law upon us, we will point out that you traveled with the impostor for several hundred versts without noticing she was the wrong child. What does that say about your capacities as a guardian? Or does it suggest you were in on some scheme to infiltrate the court of the Tsar with rebel peasants? That you’re a sympathizer for so-called Bolshevist reform?”
Madame Sophia pulled her coverlets to her neckline as if she imagined being hauled to prison herself. “You never had a child, did you, Monsieur d’Amboise? You can’t imagine how they do grow and change under your very eyes. And I’m a woman with weak eyes.”
“You’re a woman with a weak imagination. And unless I am mistaken, you never had your own child, either. You never married. Miss Ekaterina upstairs is the grandchild of your brother. Don’t presume to lecture me about child rearing.”
“Me either,” said Miss Bristol, daringly.
“And you her governess!” seethed Madame Sophia. “Go, you are dismissed, leave my sight, such as it is.”
“Dismissed from our positions or just to the downstairs kitchens?”
“Do I have to make all the decisions? Just get out of here!”
So they went downstairs and had tea, rubbed raw by the truth of Madame’s accusations. But they also felt they had managed, against the odds, to survive their tribulations, at least so far.
Madame Sophia then summoned Miss Ekaterina. Cat knocked, and entered, and stood looking sideways at the mantelpiece. The great-aunt studied her through the spectacles given her by Miss Yaga, that deranged interloper governess, who seemed to have skived off somewhere.
Madame Sophia began. “Your adventure has changed you a good deal. I’m not sure I approve.”