Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

Aba found a common, secret language with my mother immediately. Perhaps they were made of the same stuff, and recognised each other without realising they had. They were bound by the same fear of vanishing, an unconscious desire to leave their mark behind them, to inscribe themselves on the map. They did not choose the means or the map in the process; it could have been the skin of their own children, the hand of a stranger. It was not their fault, nor was it anything they had done wrong. As if a capricious and thoughtless fairy had branded them at birth and made them think they were invisible. The sense that they were invisible acted on them like stomach acid and made them hungrier yet. There was nothing to assuage a hunger like that, not a giant magnifiying glass, or powerful spotlights, or the lavishing of attention. The hunger whimpered in their stomachs like a stray dog. This was a cunning hunger, gluttonous, capable of proudly refusing food, a sly foe able to hide and keep from being discovered, a tremulous foe who dared not raise a hand against itself, a lying and cheating foe, who knew how to make its whimpering sound like a siren song and left its saliva.

I looked at her. The kind face shaded with melancholy, which immediately provoked a feeling of guilt in the onlooker. She did everything she could to get others to like her. She loved her parents, if she had them, her friends, which she most certainly had. Because she was the one who never forgot a birthday, she was the one who sent courteous notes, postcards and emails, she was the one who was always first to pick up the phone and dial the number. She had never harmed anyone else; she had never kicked anyone in the shins; she never cheated in school; she was always a good pupil and a good student; she helped others; she never, or almost never, lied; she was kind to everyone; and in her bartering with emotions she always felt the loser. She watched me. She was interested in figuring out how the wheels and gears of my clock worked, and for the sake of discovery she was prepared to take the clock apart. Because why was it that everyone else in this world ticked and tocked so regularly, while only she was on the wrong beat?

I recognised the seductive whimper. I had been feeding my mother’s hunger for too long. After all, wasn’t I serving one of them here as a bedel, and the other as a potential morsel? Yes, love is on the distant shore of a wide sea. A large oak tree stands there, and in the tree there is a box, in the box a rabbit, in the rabbit a duck, and in the duck an egg. And the egg, in order to get the emotional mechanism going, had to be eaten.

6.

The next morning dawned a quiet, grey day. I learned that the storm the night before had wreaked terrible damage, brought down electric lines, roofs had been ripped from houses, some of the local roads were blocked.

I kept to my decision to leave. The afternoon bus was going to go at four thirty.

‘You can stay if you like,’ I said, ‘and spend a few days with your cousin,’ I added cautiously.

‘No, we haven’t seen each other for years.’

She said it without pretence. There was no longer any point in pretending that she had come here to see her cousin.

‘I’m leaving. I’m going to see if I can find the street where my grandparents lived.’

‘I am going with you,’ she said. A childish determination rang in her voice.

‘No,’ I said.

She pressed her lips together as if she were a little insulted. All the more so because it was clear that we’d be skipping our morning cup of coffee. We parted ways in front of the hotel, agreeing to meet back there at three o’clock. I didn’t ask her what she would do.

‘Priyatno snimane!’ she shouted in the tone of a child who is being left behind. Perhaps this is a common phrase in Bulgarian, but it, too, grated on my ear. Have a great time with the picture-taking!