Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

‘I have changed so much. I barely recognise myself.’

‘What are you saying? You haven’t a single wrinkle on your forehead.’

‘Maybe so, but the skin sags on my neck.’

‘The wrinkles on your face are so fine they are barely visible.’

‘Maybe, but my back is so hunched.’

‘You’ve kept your slender figure.’

‘My belly sticks out.’ she complained.

‘Sure, a little, but nobody notices,’ I consoled her.

‘I have changed. I barely recognise myself.’

‘Can you think of anyone your age who hasn’t changed?’

‘Well, now that you ask,’ she’d relent.

‘What were you expecting?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Your beloved Ava Gardner, for instance.’

‘Ava was the most beautiful woman in the world!’ she said firmly, but with a hint of melancholy, as if she had been speaking of herself.

‘Ava died at the age of sixty-eight.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘No, really, she had a stroke. Half of her face was paralysed. Near the end of her life she was penniless, so Frank Sinatra paid for her medical expenses.’

‘She? Broke!? I can’t believe it.’

‘Yes, she moved from the States to London. She was isolated there, she was probably no longer able to earn anything. Her last words to her servant Carmen were: “I am tired,”’ I said. ‘Story has it that Frank Sinatra locked himself up in his room for two days when he heard that Ava had died. They say he sobbed uncontrollably.’

‘Well, and so he should have!’ she said. ‘Such a little man, nothing much to look at, scrawny, a shrimp. Next to her he looked like a frog!’

‘What about Mickey Rooney?’

‘Why Mickey Rooney?’

‘Well, he was her first husband.’

‘Well, that Rooney was a shrimp too! Such an exquisite woman and around her she had only dwarves.’

‘Ava was only four years older than you.’

‘Ava was the most beautiful woman in the world!’ she repeated, ignoring the comment about the difference in their ages.

‘Take, for instance, Audrey Hepburn.’

‘That little woman? The skinny one?’

‘Yes. She died at sixty-four.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘And Ingrid Bergman?’

‘What about Ingrid Bergman?’

‘She died when she was sixty-seven.’

‘She was a little clumsy, but still exquisite.’

‘What about Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn was a two-month-old baby when you were born! And she died at thirty-six!’

‘Marilyn was my age?’

‘Your generation! You were both born in 1926!’

It seemed that the fact that she shared her year of birth with Marilyn Monroe left her cold.

‘What about Elizabeth Taylor?’ she asked.

‘She just celebrated her seventy-fifth. They wrote about it the other day in the papers.’

‘I can’t believe Liz is younger than me.’

‘A full six years!’

‘She, too, was a beautiful woman,’ she said. ‘There aren’t any more like her today.’

‘You should see her now!’

‘Why?’

‘They took a picture of her in her wheelchair for her birthday.’

‘How much older am I?’

‘Six years.’

‘Five and a half,’ she corrected me.

‘Just think how many operations she had,’ I added.

‘She had trouble with her spine.’

‘And alcohol, then those unhappy marriages.’

‘How many times was she married?’

‘Nine. When they reported her birthday celebration they said she may marry a tenth time.’

Mum grinned.

‘Hats off to her!’

At last we were talking. We chatted about Liz as if we were two good friends chatting about a third. I’m supposing that Mum was pleased to hear all that information. Liz was seventy-five and had her picture taken in a wheelchair. Mum would be turning eighty-one in another month or so, and she was not in a wheelchair. She wasn’t even fat.

‘I suppose beauty and fame don’t mean a thing,’ she said, relieved.

The expression on her face suggested that this time she was satisfied with the balance in her life.

‘Do you know what Bette Davis said?’

‘What?’

‘That old age is no place for sissies.’

‘Well, it isn’t,’ she said, heartened for a moment.

She often thought of herself as younger than she was. Once when she slid like this into a different, younger age, she addressed me as ‘Grandma’.

‘What, are you asleep, Grandma?’

She slid back and forth in time. She no longer knew exactly when different things happened. She would have been happiest to stay in her childhood, not because she thought of those years as the brightest period of her biography, but because her feelings in that period were ‘safe’, long since formulated, sealed, related many times over, chosen to be a repertoire which she was always able to offer her listeners. She retold the little events and details from her childhood in the same way, with the same vocabulary, ending with the same points or more often with the same absence of a point. It was a sealed repertoire which could no longer be corrected or changed, at least that was the way it seemed, and at the same time it was her only firm temporal coordinate. Sometimes, it’s true, harsh images would surface which I was hearing for the first time.

‘I was always afraid of snakes.’

‘Why?’

‘Once we went on an excursion to a wood and stumbled on a big old snake. Dad killed it.’

‘I hope it wasn’t poisonous!’

‘It was a price snake.’

‘You mean a dice snake?’

‘Yes, it was a big bad old snake and Dad killed it.’