Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

‘He tucked a little towel, my gift to him, under his arm, turned and went back into the house,’ she said, describing their last encounter.

It would seem that she had smuggled the towel into this last image. We always brought a pile of gifts every summer for my mother’s Bulgarian relatives. It wasn’t just that she liked giving things to people, she also liked this picture of herself: she would come back from the Varna she had left so many years before, feeling like the good fairy after distributing the gifts she had brought. I wondered why she had inserted that towel into the farewell scene with her own father. It was as if she was lashing herself with it, as if the towel he tucked under his arm was the most terrible possible image of a person’s decline. Instead of undertaking the grand, sincere gesture, which would have meant jumping through troublesome and time-consuming bureaucratic hoops with little guarantee of success, she stuffed a towel into Grandpa’s hand!

Her need to taint her dead was something new. These were not feasts but snacks, focused only on details, which I was hearing for the first time, and, indeed, she may have fabricated them on the spot to hold my attention and confide a secret she had never told a soul. Perhaps the fact that she was in possession of information relating to the dead gave her a glow of satisfaction. Recalling her late friends, sometimes, as if she’d just then decided to take their grades down a notch in the school records, she’d add importantly: I never took to him; I never liked her much either; They didn’t appeal to me; She was always stingy; No, they were not nice people.

Once or twice she even made as if to taint the image of my father, who was, in her words, the most honest man she’d ever known, but for whatever reason she relented, and left him on the pedestal where she herself had placed him after his death.

‘You weren’t exactly crazy about him, were you?’ I asked cautiously.

‘No, but I did love him.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he was so quiet,’ she said simply.

Dad was, indeed, a man of few words. And I remember my grandfather as being a quiet man. It hit me for the first time that both of them were not only quiet, but the most honest men Mum had ever known.

It may be that with this tainting of the memory of the dead she was easing her feeling of guilt for things she hadn’t done for them but might have, her guilt for what she had let slip by. She camouflaged her lack of greater attentiveness to the people closest to her with a hardness in judgement. She simply seemed afraid of caring more for others. At some point she had been scared of life just as she was scared of death. That was why she held on so firmly to her place, her stubborn coordinates, and shut her eyes to the scenes and situations that moved her too deeply.

Onion should always be well sautéed. Good health is what matters most. Liars are the worst people. Old age is a terrible calamity. Beans are best in salad. Cleanliness is half of health. Always discard the first water when you cook kale.

It may be that she had asserted things like this before, but I had paid no attention. Everything had got smaller. Her heart had shrunk. Her veins had shrunk. Her footsteps were smaller. Her repertoire of words had diminished. Life had narrowed. She uttered her truisms with special weight. Truisms gave her the feeling, I suppose, that everything was fine, that the world was precisely where it should be, that she was in control and had the power to decide. She wielded her truisms as if they came with an invisible stamp of approval, which she smacked everywhere, eager to leave her mark. Her mind still worked, her feet still moved, she could walk, though only with the help of a walker, but walk she did, and she was a human being who knew for a certainty that beans are best in salad, and that old age is a terrible calamity.

Are You Alive and Well?

She often phoned the ‘old witch’, especially now that she was no longer able to go and visit her. Pupa was my mother’s oldest friend not only in terms of age, but in how long the two had known each other.