And this, though she didn’t say it, was the beginning of her mother’s decline. In Natasha Rudina’s shock, the baby came early. That infant girl had nursed at first, but she hadn’t strengthened. She was laid in the paupers’ field.
The goat couldn’t be recaptured and was eaten by a wolf, or something.
That’s where Elena stopped. She didn’t say that her mother was ready to follow her husband and youngest child to the village of the anonymous dead beyond the churchyard. There was a limit to how much could be said.
“Wait here,” said Cat, and disappeared into the cabin.
Elena heard drawers opening. Madame Sophia interviewing Miss Bristol on the weather. Monsieur d’Amboise reporting on the day’s progress in bridge repair. At least that is what Elena assumed they were saying. They spoke in Russian mostly, but time and again slipped into English or French almost as if they weren’t paying attention to their own words.
When Cat returned, she had a bundle in her hands. “Here,” she said. It was a hard cheese but still good; and three brown rolls; and a pot of some sort of jam.
“I don’t want you to get in trouble,” said Elena, reaching for it anyway.
“They won’t notice this, at least not right away.” Cat paused. “I’m sure you would rather have your father back and your drowned friends. Cheese and bread is sour comfort, no substitute …”
“My father would give me cheese and bread if he could,” said Elena, but that made no sense. She stopped talking. She knew she ought to add, “Thank you.” More words that wouldn’t quite come. She wondered if she should curtsey to Cat, but that seemed false. Cat didn’t notice; she’d turned to run to her obligations.
Elena walked home slowly. She’d been paid for the story of all those deaths with bread. It seemed wrong, even unholy, that the bread, that evening, tasted so wonderful.
Grandmother Onna gobbled down half of one of the rolls and some cheese. Peter Petrovich Penkin had some. Natasha Rudina couldn’t take any in. Elena ate the rest. “If they think that throwing us some rolls and a cheese will quiet us,” soused the old woman, “they’re right. But only until we get hungry again.”
That night Elena discovered that when you fill up your stomach after a long emptiness, it still hurts. Just in a different way. Whimpering in her sleep, she woke herself up. A few feet away, Grandmother Onna was resting on Luka’s mattress, and she heard Elena’s distress. “What is it, child?” she whispered.
“Why are you staying overnight?” asked the girl.
“I don’t want you to be alone if … if … if you’re alone.”
That was too mixed up for Elena to understand. In her mind were waters and bread, and friends, and a father. But as she tried to arrange words to enquire, everything rearranged, became ordinary, not worth saying.
“The morning is wiser than the night, my dear,” said the old woman. “Hush now, or you’ll wake your mother.”
If only I could, thought Elena. She lapsed into a cold, character – less sleep.
Is the morning wiser than the night, as the old saying has it? In the morning, Elena remembered that her mother had given her the matryoshka. Before walking to the train, Elena slipped the doll into her apron pocket.
She felt a new determination. The train would leave soon, get somewhere else before long. It could restock on supplies there. If Cat were anything like a friend, she might leave some food behind. Elena would pay for it by giving Cat the matryoshka.
Was Cat a friend? If so, maybe Cat would ask the Tsar to release Luka and the grown-up men from Miersk. For, despite her bravado, Elena couldn’t leave her mother now. Not like this.
She neared the station. The train had uncoupled, and the engine was returning from a short run. Perhaps to keep its parts from seizing up like the doctor’s legs, thought Elena. She watched the crew reattach the back two carriages. As soon as Cat appeared, Elena pressed her request. She explained about the galloping hunger that cursed Miersk.
Cat regarded the doll Elena had thrust in her hands, Cat’s expression quizzical, not quite a sneer. She said, “Miersk isn’t the only place with crop failure. Your mild winters and dry summers? Ever since we began this trip, trouble is all we’ve heard about. All down the line. Everyone is suffering.”
“I’m giving you my mother’s doll,” said Elena. “Please. We need more of your supplies.”
“Aren’t we a bit beyond dolls?” said Cat. “You’re so full of fancy, with your tales of Baba Yaga and Saint Nicholas and your enchanted brooms and such.” She wagged the doll in the air, an exhibit of Elena’s naïveté.
“If you won’t help, just say so. I’ll go to the Tsar myself, after my mother dies. And when I get to Moscow, I’ll tell the Tsar the truth about our suffering and your stinginess. If I meet up with Baba Yaga on the way, I’ll tell her the truth, too. That’s all that poor people own, the truth.”
“Well, you’d better carry your truth in the right direction. For your information, the Tsar isn’t even in Moscow. He’s in Saint Petersburg. That’s why this private train is headed north. Didn’t you know?”
“The Tsar doesn’t inform me as to his whereabouts.”
“I can’t imagine why not.” Maybe Cat regretted her gibe at Elena, or maybe she liked lording it over the girl. She went on in a blasé manner. “The Tsar is having a ball to celebrate the availability of some remote cousin, his godson, to marry. It’s called a Festival of All the Russias. In his godson’s honor. That’s why I’ve been hauled all the way from London: because Madame Sophia is a distant friend of the court. Along with several hundred other girls, I’m to be presented to the young princeling.”
Elena thought, I might have gone all the way to Moscow only to find the Tsar was at the other end of the country. I owe Cat for this information, at least.
Her irritation began to dissolve. “You are presented at court — as a present?”
Cat looked guarded and angry. “No. I am not the present. At least I don’t want to be the present. I shall be polite but chilly and hope he doesn’t much like the look of me. I don’t want to be engaged to be married.”
“You’re too young for that, surely.”
“At thirteen, not a bit too young to be betrothed, and neither are you. No, I’m going simply because my great-aunt insists.”
“What do your parents think?”
This was the first time Elena had dared ask about Cat’s parents. But Cat just waved her hand as if dismissing flies. “They are in Venice, I think. Or Buenos Aires. Or, let’s see … Manhattan? Vienna? Take a guess. They sent a wire to approve my traveling with my great-aunt.”
“What are they doing in those places?”
“I don’t know, really. Going from here to there. Hotels and restaurants. Dinners at the Russian ambassador’s mansion. Taking a cruise, taking the waters, taking a bath. Taking it seriously, though it seems to me quite a dreary life.”
To Elena, Manhattan was more fantastic than the country at the back of the moon. “You’d better watch out, Cat, or you’ll find yourself being a present to the Tsar’s godson.”
“No, no. We brought an actual present to leave with him. My tante had it made especially to her design.” Cat looked this way and that. “Would you like to see it?”
Elena would rather have seen several loaves of fresh bread, but she was working up to that. Cat hadn’t rejected the matryoshka as a trade. “Yes.”
“It’s a perfect time. My great-aunt is having her toenails trimmed by Miss Bristol. A long operation involving a footbath with scented oils. They won’t notice.”
“Is Monsieur d’Amboise out on his campaign to rebuild the bridge?”
“Not today. The men are having a day off, I think. But he’s up in the front, busy with the engineers. Wait here.”
As if I’d follow you into that cavern of luxury, thought Elena.
In a few moments, on tiptoe, Cat returned. She’d put on a hip-length lambswool jacket against the cold. She had left the matryoshka inside, Elena
noticed — good, the start of a bargain for food. Or perhaps she’d just put it down so she could carry the gift. She held a wooden box carved with flourishes of flowers, stems, and leaves.
Cat said, “Madame Sophia had this made in London. It’s fragile and valuable. I’m not supposed to know that my great-aunt hides this box under her bed. She sleeps with it there, for safekeeping. But she’s too stout to kneel down and check on it. Since I can’t give you all the food in the train as you ask, and I can’t pester the Tsar with petty complaints, I’ll show you this instead. A compensation.”
Elena didn’t intend to take this as Cat’s final answer, but she was too curious to argue.
Cat turned a small key in the box. The lid lifted with ease, a backward hush. A smell of faraway places. “Cedar and sandalwood,” said Cat. “Draw closer. I don’t dare show this outside in the sunlight. Come, where’s the harm?”
Elena sank to the station platform, nearer the door of the train than she’d been before. Inside the box were folds of patterned silk, blue and gold swirls. “I’ve never seen such fabric.”
“Cloth from Florence. But that isn’t the gift.” Cat unfolded the top layers of the cloth. A dull gleam beneath. She put her hands into the box, as gently as one might lift a baby out of a cradle, and she pulled the gift into the light.
It was an egg. An artist’s artificial egg. It took both hands to hold. About the size of two hands clasped together. It could cradle in your arm like a small cozy hen. Made of porcelain, Elena guessed and, if so, quite fragile indeed.
“Fabergé,” said Cat. “That’s the artist’s name. Madame Sophia directed the design. She had it made in his London studio rather than in his main salon in Saint Petersburg so word wouldn’t slip out to his other customers and give them ideas. She wants it to be a surprise and to attract the Tsar’s attention. He loves this kind of thing. It’s a music box, too. It comes with a stand that plays a lullaby.”
“Hold it up so I can see it,” said Elena.
“No, I don’t dare. No one must know it is here. If you want to see it better, sit next to me in the doorway.”
Elena hesitated.
“It’s all right. They’re only at the second toe. It’ll be a long time yet.”
So Elena stepped over the threshold, across the space between the platform and the train. Such a small step, across that crack. Into a vestibule that crossed the car to the opposite side. She squatted upon the matting to see the egg.
The thing was even more fabulous close up. Painted plaster furbelows, like curling bits of ribbon, were applied to the outside. Jewels bulged from the sides. The skin of the shell was painted rosy pink and pale grey and a luminous, silly yellow that made Elena want to laugh. Every inch of the shell of the distorted globe was covered in design.
Even more wonderful, though, was the interior.
Three different openings were cut into the egg. They were like windows. You could see one after the other if you carefully spun the egg about. A theater in an egg.
Inside were carved scenes, like tiny paintings but alive in porcelain. You might run your finger in and feel the edges of things if you dared. Elena didn’t dare. She peered close, though. “Look,” she said. “Baba Yaga.”
There she was, a tiny image of the famous old witch. She was staring out the window of her house on chicken legs. She didn’t look ancient and bony as in Cat’s storybook. She looked serious and bright and strong and dangerous. Her house had the teensiest eaves, all in scarlet, with the head of a dragon carved onto the roof beam. A dark forest was painted onto the curved wall behind the house. Above the treetops, a sun glowed in gold leaf, its identical flames like the petals of a sunflower.
“What else?” Elena, hungrier to see than she’d ever been to eat, or that was how it felt just now.
Cat turned the ovoid globe. The next opening showed the magic Firebird flying at midnight. A full moon on the back wall of this niche was painted in silver leaf, and it made the black sky look soft as old paper. The Firebird was a jeweled figurine in red and golden flames. The artist had put two birch trees on either side of the clearing, as if the Firebird were flying just behind them. Between them a metal thread was strung, holding up the extended wings of the magic bird. Its lovely feet trailed behind it, sparky twigs.
“This is the very egg of truth.” Elena remembered to keep her voice low. In her excitement she forgot not to let their shoulders touch, but Cat didn’t seem to notice. “What else?”
Cat turned and grinned. “How could any princeling care about me with this to admire? I’ll wind it up, and as the music casts its charm, I’ll slink off back to my school.” She revolved the egg one more time, a third of the way, to the final opening.
In this window was a creature Elena didn’t know from the legends of Russia. A huge albino dragon hunched on a plain glistening with new snow. How did the artist do that? The dragon’s eyes were mere slits. Behind its head was a blue circle near the horizon, a moon or a frozen sun, either rising or setting, slightly blobby. “I don’t know who this is.”
“An ice-dragon, I guess,” said Cat. “Whatever story that’s from, it’s not in my book.”
“Well, if you ever needed proof that Baba Yaga exists,” said Elena, pointing at the egg, “there you are. How could the artist know to make it so true?”
“The artist made what my great-aunt told him. That’s all.”
Elena didn’t want to argue. The common matryoshka must seem pretty shabby to Cat. Elena wanted to ask for it back. “You’d better put this thing away. But would you wind up the music part so I can hear it, just once?”
“And let the whole village know about it? Are you mad?”
Just then, from inside the cabin, a shriek accompanied by a wail. The voice of Miss Bristol. “Oh my. Good heavens.”
“You clot!” cried the voice that Elena had come to identify as that of Great-Aunt Sophia. “You are trying to kill me.”
“Miss Ekaterina, come quickly,” cried Miss Bristol. “Bring a towel.”
“Child, save me from this murderess!” insisted Great-Aunt Sophia.
Cat had turned pale. She went to thrust the egg into Elena’s hands and leap up, but Elena reared back, her palms up in the air. “I can’t touch that, I’ll ruin it. I’ll dirty it. I’ll drop it. I’ll give it lice.”
“She’s stabbed me with her scissors. I’m dying.” For a dying woman, the great-aunt had a voice that was full of vigor.
“It’s just a little blood,” insisted Miss Bristol. “Oh, my smelling salts …”
“Don’t you dare faint at the sight of blood, or I’ll stab you with the scissors.”
A loud clunk. Apparently Miss Bristol had disobeyed her employer and collapsed upon the floor.
“Open the box,” hissed Cat. “I can’t run in there with this in my arms.”
Elena fumbled at the key to the lid. The lock jammed, and the key hung at a funny angle. It wouldn’t turn.
“Child!” bellowed the great-aunt.
“Oh, merde. I’m coming, tante Sophia.” Gently Cat set the egg on the sisal matting that covered the floor of the entranceway. She was up on her feet, and Elena was gathering her skirts and preparing to leave, when the disaster happened.
Yesterday had been Pay Attention Day. Today Elena had paid too little attention, and the engine jerked, causing a shudder to travel through the train.
Despite the porcelain bits and jewels appended to its outside, the egg began to roll. Not in the direction of Elena, or she’d have caught it. In the other direction. Only then did Elena notice that the door on the far side of the entranceway was also open. The egg was making a break for it — lurching to escape out the opposite door.
“Cat.” Elena, venturing forward on hands and knees, pointing.
Cat turned and saw with horror that the egg was trembling on the doorsill. Beyond, the village was beginning to slide by. Cat dove through the air and grabbed the egg as if it were the ball in a game of scrimmage, on the fields of some b
oarding school in London. With both arms, she clutched it to her breast, and ducked her head down to protect it further.
Then she disappeared out the open doorway, an acrobat in a somersault, rolling. Leaving Elena kneeling on the sisal mat, in her place.
I’VE HEARD IT SAID THAT THERE ARE ONLY TWO KINDS of stories.
One type of story is when the hero goes on a voyage.
One of the few times I ever met the Tsar’s children, they were all nattering about a play they’d recently seen in a London pantomime, of children flying off from their nursery beds to a fabulous island called Neverland. Who doesn’t like going on a little journey?
All of those stories end with people coming home.
Then there is the second type of story. This is the type when a mysterious stranger comes to town and changes everything for everyone. It could be a fairy godmother coming uninvited to a christening with a nasty surprise as a gift. It could be Elijah coming in disguise to deliver a blessing. It could be, oh, an anarchist with a secret past and a bomb in his viola case.
The person who comes from afar usually goes away, too. Elijah never stays to rent the dacha next door, the anarchist often blows himself up by accident, et cetera.
So far, this story I’m writing out for you has been about a stranger coming to town. That girl who calls herself Cat. Quite by accident, and out of boredom, she’s just gotten herself and her peasant friend Elena into trouble. She’s changed everything. What happens next?
When we last saw them, the train was moving. One girl was not on the train, but another one was. So perhaps this story I’m telling is both kinds at once: a stranger comes to town and a hero goes on a journey.