The doctor pulls back his pointing finger and grasps his own hands, makes a loose fist the size of his heart, the size of a Firebird’s egg, and pumps it a few inches at them, for emphasis. They know what he is saying, they hear it without words, they understand his instructions to them. The same thing Elena’s father said to her in the starry crown, and what Baba Yaga will say to Nikolai, come summer.
Live your life.
Live your life.
Live your life.
ON A DIFFERENT PIECE OF PAPER, FROM A DIFFERENT WINDOW in time and the world, I finish my examination of these events.
On the thousandth day of my imprisonment, when I pulled up my pail of breakfast, I found therein two things.
One was a key.
The second was a letter from someone named Brother Grigori, writing on behalf of the Tsar of All the Russias. It contained one sentence. It said:
You are now a member of the League of Freed Prisoners.
I thought to myself: Frankly, honeybucket, it’s about time.
I broke my breakfast bread into crumbs and left the whole thing on the windowsill for the birds. Then I unlocked the door and felt my way down the staircase, and I returned to life.
The wind wasn’t a soothing hand against my hoary cheek. It stung, it bit. The light was invasive; there was a smell of drains. A donkey was braying a few fields away. In three years I had forgotten: Yes, freedom is magnificent. But freedom is hard work.
I never did return to the service of the Tsar.
The study of Firebirds is nothing more or less than the study of life.
I have lived in devotion to the rubrics of my congregation. I have turned aside from worldly pleasures to try to learn what can be known of the spirit of Russia. What I know about the time the Firebird’s egg nearly failed to hatch is incomplete. What I could not imagine, even with the help of my companions, the birds, I’ve had to fill in with guesswork.
Still, some years after the events recounted herein, I found myself in a district of Moscow you could hardly call prosperous. It was a warm summer evening. I’d spent the day at an errand on behalf of an elderly brother in my order — a brother more elderly than myself, I mean, which by now is a rare creature indeed.
I’d become weary. I was in need of sustenance before returning to the dormitory in which I’d been granted a bed for the evening.
I should add that the years had been full of upheaval, and nothing in Russia was as it had once been. Where great wealth had been concentrated in some hands, it was now concentrated in others. The poor and the needy, though, hadn’t benefited much in the process of transfer. History rarely favors the lowly.
Looking for a place to find some supper before continuing by foot back to my lodgings, I turned onto a side street. Laundry hung on lines across the alley. Cats and dogs and urchins fought for such scraps of edible trash as could be found. High up in a tenement, some mother was singing a tuneless lullaby to some baby. Ah, lullabies. The air was pleasantly cool, appropriate to an evening at the end of a warm summer’s day.
It had been a long time since I’d served as advisor to the Tsar of All the Russias, may he rest in peace. I was an old man by now, in need of a place to sit. I asked a comrade on the street if he could spare a hank of bread or a sip of potato soup to settle an old man’s stomach.
He shrugged; he had nothing to offer. “But try around the corner,” I was told. “A small establishment near the end of the street. There is a sign out on the pavement. You will not miss it. It is called Egg & Spoon.”
“Is there no place else? I am a man of the cloth,” I told him. “I have no coin to sit in a café or a restaurant.”
“You will not be turned away,” he replied.
I continued on and located the place of which he was speaking. I went down a few steps to a room below street level. I found that he was right.
If I am not mistaken, the ancient woman sitting at a wooden table near the door was someone I had once met. She had been called, back then, Madame Sophia. Now she was too frail to rise when I came in, and thin and bony where she had once been buxom and broad. But her smile was immediate and welcoming. She didn’t recognize me, but gave me leave to enter anyway, and sent me to a table along the side of the room.
I sat amid a crowd of the poor. They were all eating peasant fare, a substantial if plain meal of eggs and slaw and black bread. Served with a swallow of vodka or, if there were children on the laps of their mothers, milk. I saw people come and sit down, and argue and joke, and clear their plates, and others take their places. Sometimes people left coins in the jug on the table where the old woman sat. More often they only left their thanks, and their good-evenings, and their hope to meet again the next night.
To my table came a strong young woman. I ought to have pretended that I didn’t recognize her. Nevertheless, I said to her, “Miss Ekaterina?” She didn’t hear me. The clatter of settling trays and the laughter of children with their parents, of workers with their mates, drowned me out. I didn’t speak again. I simply watched her.
She moved with efficiency and grace among the tables, delivering meals and wiping down tables. From time to time, she went to the door of the room in back, from where the food was coming, and called out a request or a question. I am almost sure I heard her address someone in the back as “Elena.”
Or was this only the poor hearing and the lively hopes of an old man?
I wanted to ask after Anton. Had he found adventure, had he changed his mind about marriage? I wanted to ask after the dragon-tooth boy. I wanted to know if any of them had ever seen Miss Yaga again. But their work was too important to interrupt. I comforted myself with watching Miss Ekaterina, the Tsarevna of the charitable hall, seeing everyone fed as well as she could manage.
I suppose she was calming the storm of need, sharing what she had — her time, her friendship with Elena, and maybe the eggs of that immortal hen!— thus, in her small way, helping the ice-dragon sleep when the wintertime came in.
As I left the establishment, I said, “I have no coin to pay.”
The old woman said, “Give us your blessing, good father. And peace be with you on the street tonight.”
I left then, and I never went back. But as I walked along the alley, I listened to the sound of children playing in the gutters. These children had been fed enough, this one night at least. The sound of their common joy made a kind of magic in the neighborhood. The setting sun spilled long drifts of light behind them, but as the children turned in its splash, I could see their laughing eyes.
I believe it was that night that I made my final stab of understanding about the Firebird. I had long since stopped wondering if the great sun could cause the illuminated Firebird to cast a bright shadow. The Tsar’s skepticism had nearly beaten my faith out of me. How could a flame be cast as an impression upon the earth?
But whether as divine inspiration or as a bit of old man’s folly, that night I came to a conjecture that I have never proven and yet never abandoned.
Yes, I decided. A Firebird flying across Russia in the strength of a noonday sun does indeed cast a shadow. Nothing that is spiritual can fail to shine. Of course we can’t see it directly, because the shadow it casts is just another kind of light. You have to look sideways to see it, but once you see it, you can never un-see it.
It is the light you see in the faces of children.
GREGORY MAGUIRE is the author of the incredibly popular books in the Wicked Years series, including Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which inspired the musical. He is also the author of many books for children, including What-the-Dickens, which was a New York Times bestseller. Gregory Maguire lives outside Boston.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2014 by Gregory Maguire
Damask pattern copyright © Nuttakit Sukjaroensuk/Veer
All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2014
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2014931834
ISBN 978-0-7636-7220-1(hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7636-7582-0 (electronic)
Candlewick Press
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Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
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Gregory Maguire, Egg & Spoon
(Series: # )
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