Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

‘Help these ladies to their rooms, lads. Presidentske apartma! Cisarske apartma!’ Zuna commanded, handing them the keys.

* * *

Surrounded by hotel personnel of the male gender, the three female figures glided away towards the lift. Pavel Zuna just managed to observe a sudden breeze blow petals off the luxuriant floral display in a Chinese vase on the reception desk, before his eyes clouded over. The pain from his left big toe swept upwards. It struck him in the small of the back with such force that he simply collapsed.

This whole scene was observed out of the corner of his eye by Arnoš Kozeny, as he sat comfortably sprawled in one of the lobby armchairs. Arnoš Kozeny, a retired lawyer, was a kind of fixture in the Grand Hotel. He came here every morning for a cappuccino, to leaf through the fresh newspapers and smoke a cigar. He would reappear in the hotel about five in the afternoon, in the café, and in the evening he would hang around the hotel casino. Arnoš Kozeny was a well-preserved seventy-eight-year-old. He was wearing a sand-coloured suit, a freshly ironed light-blue shirt and a bow tie of a bluish hue, with canvas shoes that matched the colour of his suit.

As he leafed through the papers, Arnoš was struck by the news that Czech vets had found an unidentified strain of bird ’flu on two farms near the town of Norin. The vets had confirmed that it was the H5 virus, but they were not sure whether it was the H5N1 type, which, if measures were not taken in time, would be as deadly to humans as the Spanish ’flu of 1914. The article suggested that, in the course of the last year, the virus had appeared in some thirty countries. Josef Duben, spokesman for the Czech Veterinary Service, announced that, as far as the Czech Republic was concerned, it had not yet been decided whether or not to decontaminate the two farms where the H5 virus had been detected. For the time being there was a three-kilometre quarantine.

The item caught Arnoš’s attention because of Norin, where his first wife, Jarmila, lived. He hadn’t called her for more than a year now. This would be a good excuse for a little chat, he thought, puffing the smoke from his cigar with relish.

What about us? We carry on. While the meaning of life may slip from our hold, the purpose of a tale is to be told!

2.

Beba was sitting in the bath weeping bitterly. No, she had not burst into tears as soon as she entered the suite, because it took her some time to produce the quantity of tears she was going to shed. When she first came in, she swept her eyes slowly over every detail, exactly like a diver examining the seabed. She ran her hand over the snow-white linen in the bedroom, opened the cupboards, went into the bathroom, removed the disinfectant tape from the toilet, examined the little toiletries by the washbasin, stroked the soft white towelling wrap. Then she opened the curtains and before her eyes stretched a magnificent view of the spa and the wooded hills around it. Here Beba suddenly remembered a Bosnian she had asked to redecorate her flat. It was long ago. Beba had asked for it all to be painted white. When he finished the job, the Bosnian had said: ‘Here you are, my dear, now your flat is like a swan!’

And now everything congealed in that stupid word swan. The word stuck like a bone in her throat – and Beba burst into tears. And what exactly was the matter? In that hotel with its white façade, spreading its wings over the town like a swan, in the soft space of the imperial suite, wrapped round her like an expensive fur coat, Beba was forcefully struck by a sudden awareness of how ugly her life was. As though under powerful police searchlights, all at once the image of her Zagreb flat appeared before her eyes. The miniature kitchen where she had pottered and fiddled about for years, the fridge with the broken handle and its plastic interior now grey with age, the rickety chairs, the sofa and worn armchairs that she covered with rugs and cushions to make them look ‘jollier’, the moth-eaten carpet, the television set in front of which she sat mindlessly more and more often and for ever longer periods. And then the licking and cleaning of all that junk and trembling at the thought that something might stop working – the television, the fridge, the vacuum cleaner – because she could no longer buy anything much. Her pension was barely enough to cover her basic outgoings and food, while her meagre savings had vanished with the Ljubljana Bank some fifteen years before, when the country fell apart and suddenly her bank was in a different state, and everyone had been rushing headlong to steal from everyone else. Had she wanted, she could have derived some bitter satisfaction from it all: in comparison with many other people’s losses hers were negligible, because she had simply had nothing in the first place.