Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

No, it’s not possible! thought Kukla. The little girl is far too bright for her years, no adult is capable of playing with words like that at such speed. Kukla shuddered. What if reversing words was the symptom of some serious illness?

‘Mum makes lunch, Dad reads the paper,’ said Kukla, knowing that what she was saying was stupid, but it was the first thing that occurred to her.

‘Mumdad makes lunch and reads the paper!’ said the little girl.

‘Who’s Mumdad?’ asked Kukla surprised.

‘Filip,’ said the little girl and drew herself into the boot.

* * *

There was a silence. Again, Kukla did not know what to say.

‘What are you doing in that boot?’ she asked after a while.

The little girl said nothing.

‘Where are you? I can’t see you.’

‘I can see you,’ said the little girl.

‘You’re like a mouse… Like a mouse in a slab of cheese doing just what you please.’

‘I’m a little girl.’

‘Come on, then, get out of that boot.’

‘I can’t.’

‘What are you doing in there?’

‘I’m flying,’ said the little girl.

‘Floating, more like,’ Kukla corrected her.

‘Flying, more like,’ said the child.

Good heavens, thought Kukla in surprise. She had no experience whatever of children, admittedly, but it seemed to her that little girls of four did not talk quite like this.

‘Hey, come out of there a minute, I want to ask you something.’

‘What?’ asked the little girl, but she did not poke her head out.

‘Do you know what two plus two makes?’

Out of the boot poked the little girl’s hand, showing four fingers.

‘And how old are you?’

The little girl showed four fingers again.

‘What about you?’ came a little voice from the boot.

Kukla stood up, found a piece of paper and a pencil, wrote a large figure 80 on the paper and turned it towards the child.

‘Come out and I’ll show you!’ said Kukla.

The child peered out.

‘Eighty!’ she said.

‘Not quite, actually, I’ll be eighty in December.’

‘You’re twenty times older than me,’ said the little girl.

‘Which makes you twenty times younger than me,’ said Kukla.

Kukla was alarmed again. She wondered whether the little girl was not too clever for her years. She would have to talk to Beba. Poor Beba, she must be lying in her room in despair. David was inaccessible. You couldn’t ask him anything. He was rushing about sorting out Pupa’s affairs.

‘Listen, little one, what would you say to the two of us ordering something sweet from the cake shop?’

The little girl poked her head out of the boot and nodded.

‘Ice cream or cakes?’

‘The first,’ said the little girl.

Kukla felt better. She was a child after all. A dear, sweet little girl…

‘What about Toto?’

‘Who’s Toto?’ asked Kukla in surprise.

Wawa pointed at the puppy.

‘Hmm… OK, let’s go for a walk; we’ll buy some dog biscuits for Toto, and the two of us will find somewhere to sit and have an ice cream. How about that?’

The little girl clambered out of the boot and cheerfully held her hand out to Kukla. Kukla noticed that the little girl had dark eyebrows, almost touching in the middle. On her round face they looked like a child’s drawing of a bird in flight.

3.

Everything had fallen apart, as though the cupboard in her little office in the medical faculty had burst open. The office was where she had spent her whole life drawing sketches that no one needed any more, and now those sketches, rolled up in dusty bundles, had tumbled out of the cupboard and unfurled like little rugs. Fragments scampered in front of Beba’s eyes: bones, muscles, nerves, the nervous system, cells, reproductive organs, the urinary tract, the cardiovascular system, the heart, veins, arteries, the liver, ears, the auricular canal, the spleen, stomach, intestines, large and small, the rectum, anus, lungs, windpipe, oesophagus, the eye… That was Beba’s field, Beba’s Guernica. And in that paper snowstorm a lost child wandered, Beba’s son.