Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

Arnoš was right, they’re all incompetent. Few can boast that their screenplay writer really suits them. Who knows, perhaps the bureaucratic offices of Destiny are like Hollywood or Bollywood, perhaps instead of millions of diligent bureaucrats, there are millions of bunglers copying, rewriting, smudging the paper and scribbling. Maybe there are even different departments, and some do the dialogue, others the storyline, still others the characters, and maybe that is why our lives are such an indescribable mess. As soon as we are born, an invisible bundle is thrust into our hands and we all scatter off into our lives like Boy Scouts, each of us clutching our invisible coordinates in our hands. And perhaps that anxious race is the reason for our monstrous ignorance of other people’s lives, the lives of those who are closest to us.

‘So why don’t you intervene?’ asked Arnoš.

‘How could I intervene?’

‘Well, for instance, you could go back to your hotel room and confront the new circumstance in your life, your little granddaughter! And then endeavour to make the very best you can of the situation.’

‘How?!’

‘You’ll know, when it comes to it.’

Perhaps Arnoš was right about this as well. Perhaps intervening in the screenplay is all that is left to us? To offer our shoulder at the right moment for someone to cry on, to hand someone a handkerchief, show them the way. Because people often do not know the most basic things. Once Beba was waiting in a queue at the bank when a man asked her: ‘Excuse me, which is the right-hand side here?’ Everyone who heard him burst out laughing. It was only Beba who felt sympathy for the confused man. Showing someone which is right and which left, that is perhaps the intervention Arnoš means. We cannot do more than that, even if we wanted to. Take Pupa. Ever since she had known her, Pupa had always been reticent and restrained. If she ever said anything it was usually a comment on what others were saying. Beba had always thought that tiny little woman was as strong as an oak. Now she recalled a distant scene which she had forgotten. She had once gone to see Pupa, her door was open, and she had gone in and found Pupa kneeling on the floor, sobbing. It was a chilling scene, and Beba had wanted to tiptoe out again, to simply run away from the place of someone else’s misery. That was when she realised for the first time that we are capable of swallowing all sorts of things. After all, she had herself had her fill in hospital – of stomachs split open and guts falling out – and all that could be borne; there was only one thing that it was very hard to accept: the sight of someone else’s pain, a glimpse of a soul seeping unstoppably out of a body like a stream of urine. In the face of such a sight, we are hypnotised, like a rabbit confronting a boa constrictor. Beba sat down on the floor, without a word, spread her legs, placed Pupa in her lap, clasping her with both her arms and legs, pressing her to herself like a cushion, and who knows how long the two of them sat there like that in silence, fitted one into the other like two spoons. They never mentioned it afterwards, Beba did not ask, and Pupa never told her what it was about. Perhaps it had not been anything special. Perhaps some inner sorrow had risen up in her and stuck in her throat like a fish bone. Beba had helped her cough it out. And that was all. As we grow older, we weep less and less. It takes energy to weep. In old age neither the lungs, nor the heart, nor the tear ducts, nor the muscles have the strength for great misery. Age is a kind of natural sedative, perhaps because age itself is a misfortune.

‘How will I know? I was a lousy mother. I’ve wasted my own life pointlessly. I’m not qualified to be a grandmother,’ said Beba.

‘Just take a look around you, see how many people have placed their stakes on you!’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Your son, for example, he placed his stake on you! And the dice went in your favour! And your late friend, she too gave you a chance. And I, talking to you now, I am placing my stake on you. Admittedly it’s only a small coin, but I’ve placed it on you, and not on anyone else.’

‘You’re a good man, Arnoš.’

‘Perhaps, but I was a bad husband, father and grandfather. All I cared about in my life were women. I’m nothing but a scatterbrain, my dear. But still I’m lucky. There are few people my age who can afford such luxury.’

‘I don’t know. I’m seventy years old; I haven’t learned anything sensible in my life. Sometimes I think it would be best to kill myself…’ mused Beba thoughtfully.

Arnoš looked at her and said cheerfully:

If you want to end it all, do it with good taste:

You would not wish to leave a pall or a bitter taste.

Choose with care, as though it were a matter of fine wine:

Leave those who stay here with a sense of touching the divine.

If you want to end it all, do it with good taste:

Let others know you had a ball, your life was not a waste.

Choose a plaited rope of silk, in the hour before dawn,