Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

Evidently it turned out quite differently. Aba stopped in frequently to visit, as Mum boasted, and the two of them became fast friends.

‘Ala is so wonderful, such a shame you weren’t here to get to know her. I have never met such a marvellous creature.’

By her voice I could tell she meant it.

‘She is very, very kind,’ she said, touched.

* * *

The habit of repeating a word twice when she wanted to draw attention to it was new, just as was her custom of dividing people into kind and unkind. The ones who were kind, were kind, of course, to her.

‘Look what she gave me.’

‘Who?’

‘Why, Ala.’

She showed me two wooden combs with folklore motifs and a bottle of Roza rose liqueur. A little card dangled from the neck of the bottle on a golden ribbon, and on the card were the words:

‘Springtime is upon us, the trees are decked in tender young leaves, the fields are a riot of flowers, the nightingales are singing sweetly and amid it all, like Venus among her nymphs, the rose gardens glow the reddest of reds,’ I read out loud.

‘Why are you rolling your eyes?’ she asked.

‘I am not.’

‘That is just the way it used to be,’ she said, taking a staunchly defensive tone. ‘Roses bloomed everywhere. Your grandmother made special preserves every year from rose petals.’

In the wardrobe she kept several hand-embroidered tablecloths. They were gifts from her Bulgarian relatives and friends, and she knew precisely who had embroidered each one: Dia, Rajna, Zhana. The fabric had yellowed and was threadbare along the folds, but the tablecloths, in Mum’s opinion, were priceless.

‘Do you have any idea how many stitches there are here?’ she would ask me, and with solemn importance she would announce a random six-figure number she had plucked from the air.

* * *

For years she had an unsightly reproduction hanging on the wall showing an old man in Bulgarian folk costume, smoking a peasant pipe.

‘Throw that out, it’s awful,’ I’d tell her.

‘I am not letting go of the picture! It reminds me of Dad!’ she’d answer, meaning her own father. Grandpa didn’t look at all like the man in the picture. Later, in order to keep the picture from my grasp, she said that Dad (this time meaning my father) had bought her the picture during one of our summer visits to Varna. The picture was deteriorating. I finally used one of her sojourns in hospital to throw it out. She didn’t notice it was gone, or pretended not to.

She kept a wooden doll on her television set dressed in Bulgarian folk costume. The doll often toppled off the TV, but she insisted on keeping it there and nowhere else.

‘To remind me of Bulgaria,’ she said.

The Bulgarian woman had served a function far more important than the chance to speak Bulgarian now and then: she had painted the cupboard. The souvenirs, the ones that were supposed to remind my mother of Bulgaria, could not be compared to the thrill of the cupboard.

Her home had always been her kingdom. When I moved out of Zagreb I no longer had a flat of my own there. Whenever I came back, I stayed with her. More than anything she loved having people visit, yet when they left she would mutter about how they had littered the place with unrinsed coffee cups. She adored her grandchildren, her eyes would well with tears at the mere mention of their names, but after they left she would moan about how long it would take her to get the flat back into order. Whenever I left the country, I would leave some of my things, mostly clothing, there with her. She let me leave only clothes. With time I noticed that even the clothes were disappearing. It turned out she’d given my coat away to a neighbour, a jacket to another, shoes to a third.

‘You didn’t need them any more, and people here haven’t money for nice things,’ she protested.

It wasn’t the things I cared about, it was her obsessive cleaning that bothered me, her maniac insistence that she could not permit anything in her territory which was not to her liking and was not her choice, which was, after all, the real reason why she was so generous in giving my things away.

If I bought a newspaper in the morning it would be gone by afternoon.

‘I lent your paper to Marta, my neighbour. She hasn’t the money to buy a paper. She’ll bring it back. But you’d read it already, anyway.’

When I bought myself food it, too, would end up at the neighbour’s.

‘That cheese you bought – didn’t suit me,’ she’d say. ‘I gave it to Marta’s sister.’

‘And the biscuits?’

‘I tossed them out. They were nasty, the look and the taste.’

She would object if I ever hung any of my clothes in her wardrobe. She left the bottom-most shelf in the shoe cabinet for my shoes. My things in the bathroom took up only a small corner, and she’d immediately protest if by any chance my things mingled with hers.