Enchantment

12

Charms

There was no way to explain it all to Father in an orderly way, Ivan realized that at once. No matter what he said, Father was going to pepper him with questions, while the whole picture was salted by Father's utter unbelief.

Mother was a marvel, though, merely nodding from time to time and otherwise holding hands with Katerina and smiling at her at odd moments. The conversation was half in proto-Slavonic and half in Ukrainian, but everyone seemed to understand everything. Except that Father understood nothing.

Ivan hadn't even meant to try to explain anything about the century that Katerina came from, but Father simply knew too much about the language. "There is no way that a pocket of pure proto-Slavonic could survive all these centuries," Father declared as a conversation-opener, almost as soon as they were in the car together. "A language in isolation is conservative, yes, but not that conservative. Even the Basque language is not the same as it was five hundred years ago. So the real question is, is your bride here the result of some weird Soviet language experiment or is this an elaborate practical joke that turned out not to be funny?" That much was in English, but Ivan immediately shifted the conversation to a combination of languages that he figured Katerina and Mother could both understand.

"What does the soviet have to do with language?" asked Katerina.

"There was a government in your country for the past seventy years or so that did strange and terrible things," Ivan explained.

"How isolated is her community?" Father demanded. "They didn't notice the Soviet government?"

With that, there was really no choice. Ivan had to start talking about getting drawn back into the ninth century and thinking he was going to live there forever, so he married Katerina there but then he came back and brought her with him. Father leapt to the conclusion that this was some weird sci-fi gimmick—"An alien abduction through time?"—until Mother patted his arm and said, "Think of it as magic, dear. Think of it as... finding Sleeping Beauty and wakening her with a kiss."

Father gave a sharp, derisive laugh at that.

"Father," Ivan said patiently, "don't think of it 'as if I found Sleeping Beauty and woke her up. Katerina is Sleeping Beauty. The child cursed by an evil witch. By the evil witch, the Widow." He caught himself. To Father, he had to speak her name. He wasn't in Taina now. "Baba Yaga. And her aunts, in an effort to save her from the curse of death, ended up getting her stranded, asleep in the middle of a moat that was patrolled by a giant bear. For about eleven hundred years."

"My how time flies," said Father dryly.

Katerina looked strangely at Ivan.

"What?" he asked her.

"Are you known as such a liar here, that your father doesn't believe you?" Then she winked.

Father didn't see the wink. "Liar? Vanya's no liar. What I'm worried about is his sanity." Only for sanity he had to use the modern Russian word and Katerina didn't get it. To Ivan's surprise, Mother came up with some halting proto-Slavonic.

"My husband thinks Vanya is crazy," she explained.

"You speak proto-Slavonic?" Ivan asked.

Mother shrugged. "I'm deaf? I can't hear you two tossing this language back and forth all the time?" But there was more to it than that, Ivan knew. What he and Father had spoken was Old Church Slavonic, the formal written language of the Church. What Mother had spoken was the oral language—with a slightly different accent from that of Taina, perhaps, but nothing she could have picked up from Father and Ivan's conversations.

He would have pursued the matter, but Father was back with more questions, and by the time they pulled into their driveway in Tantalus, Father knew what he needed to know... and maybe almost partly believed a small fraction of it. Father stalked off and went to his office, though what answers he hoped to find there Ivan didn't know, while Mother ushered Katerina into the kitchen and Ivan carried in their bags.

For Katerina, her second modern kitchen was perhaps more interesting than the first, not because it was so different from Sophia's, but because she now realized that everyone had these items in the whole world, and not just the wives of the gods. But then, as Ivan watched them together, laughing over the awkwardness of their language, he began to realize that there was a level of communication that he hadn't appreciated before, a level below language—or was it above?—in which two people recognize each other and leap to correct intuitions about what the other means and wants and feels. Do all women have this? Ivan wondered. And then thought: No. Mother never had this with Ruthie.

In Sophia's kitchen, Katerina had not even attempted to be helpful, as if she felt that the level of magic was beyond her. But in Mother's kitchen, Katerina, unasked, immediately set to work helping. In a way this didn't surprise Ivan at all—in Taina there had been no sense of princesses as fragile creatures who had to be waited on hand and foot. He had heard much about what a deft hand Katerina had at the harvest, able to tie off a sheaf of wheat faster than anybody, with fingers so agile that, as the saying was, "She could sew without a needle." Pampered princesses came much later in history, at least in Russia. What surprised him was not her willingness to work, then, but rather her instinctive grasp of what Mother needed her to do. She seemed to understand loading and unloading the dishwasher immediately, even though no one had explained to her what the dishwasher was or what it did. She seemed to know what tool Mother wanted and, most amazing of all, where it was in the kitchen. This was something that Ivan had never grasped. He had grown up helping his mother from time to time in the kitchen, certainly with the dishes, but he always had to ask where the more obscure tools went.

Finally, when Katerina went straight to a drawer and found the weird little grabbing tool that Mother used to pull the stems out of strawberries, Ivan had to flat-out ask, "How did you know?"

They looked at him like he was crazy.

"She told me," said Katerina.

"She was talking about how the field-grown strawberries were finally coming ripe, so it wasn't all greenhouse berries. She never once said what she needed or where it was."

Mother and Katerina looked at each other in puzzlement.

"Yes I did," said Mother finally. "You just weren't listening."

"On the contrary," said Ivan. "I was listening very closely, because I was amazed at how much proto-Slavonic you have already fallen into using, and I was amazed at how much modern Ukrainian Katerina was understanding. I could repeat your conversation to you word for word, if you wanted."

Mother looked at him in helpless bafflement. "But I could have sworn I said... I needed a..." And as she spoke, her hands moved exactly as they would have had she been grasping the tool and using it on a berry. Now Ivan remembered that she had made that gesture, and saw what he had not noticed before, that Katerina's hands imitated it. So what was passing was mechanical knowledge, not language, and Katerina apparently recognized the tool when she saw it, because her hands already knew how to use it. Not only that, but she had got such a feel for the kitchen already that she knew where in the kitchen Mother would have put such a tool.

Ivan tried to express this to them, but now language did fail them all, language and, perhaps, philosophy, since neither Mother nor Katerina had the male obsessiveness with mechanical cause—the mechanisms by which things worked in the natural world. What they cared for was intentional cause, motivation, purpose. When they wanted to know how to do something, it was because they intended to do it and needed to know. While Ivan wanted to know how things worked precisely because he couldn't do them himself and he felt a need to understand everything around him. In both cases, it was a matter of trying to be in control of the surrounding world. For Ivan, the question came up immediately: Was this thing between Mother and Katerina something all women could do? Or only these two women? While to them, all that mattered was that they were in the kitchen together, and they liked and understood each other despite the language barrier, and the mechanism, as long as it worked, was unimportant.

So Ivan stopped intruding, taking part in the conversation only when he was needed as an interpreter. He continued to watch, however, and gradually realized that Katerina and Mother had something else in common, something that he had never noticed in all the years he had spent in Mother's kitchen. Mother used magic.

Why hadn't he recognized it in the kitchen just outside King Matfei's house? The tiny bowl of salt and crust of bread near the cookfire—in Taina, he assumed it was an offering to a god that was not officially worshiped in that newly Christian land. But Mother also had these things on the stove. When Ivan was young and asked her why she never used the salt from the tiny bowl, she explained that it was "to take moisture out of the air." Later, Ivan realized that it was an old superstition that Mother had learned from her mother and on back, from time immemorial. Only when he got to Taina did he learn that these old gods were real, and that the salt and bread were not offerings at all, but charms—that is, they weren't there for some god to figuratively eat, but rather because they had been enchanted with power to drive off misfortunes. They were magical in themselves.

So when Katerina, the first time she approached the stove, dried her finger on her skirt and touched the salt and the bread, Ivan realized that this was no obeisance to a long-forgotten god, but rather a way to bring herself within the enchanted protection of the kitchen. And Katerina, who had a sense of these things, did not for a moment act as if the bread and salt might have been improperly magicked up—on the contrary, Katerina acted right at home in Mother's kitchen. No protections needed, because the place was already protected.

Ivan looked around. The string of garlic hanging in the pantry—again, a folk remedy, Ivan had thought, but now remembered the magical properties of garlic in folklore. He could no longer assume that anything was a "mere" superstition, and it occurred to him that keeping rats, roaches, and other vermin out of the pantry by the use of lightly enchanted garlic was certainly healthier than putting a No-Pest Strip in there to leak indiscriminate poison into the air.

Just how enchanted was the house he grew up in? And did Mother know that the rituals she followed really worked?

Of course she knew.

Ivan had grown up knowing his father's work, loving it, learning it, following in his footsteps. But he had been surrounded by another sort of lore entirely, just as ancient—no, more so, for instead of studying ancient things from a modern point of view, Mother actually did the ancient things, keeping alive that long unbroken tradition—and he had remained oblivious to it.

Still, he said nothing about it there in the kitchen. If they didn't discuss it with men—and Mother had certainly never discussed it with Ivan, or Father either, Ivan was quite sure—then there was no reason to plague them with questions they wouldn't answer.

Though back in Taina, men were not kept in ignorance of magic. In Taina, they knew perfectly well what the women were doing, and they did their own magic, what with the enchantments of the swordsmith at the forge and the farmer at the plow, the mushroom-gatherer and the hunter in the forest. So it wasn't men per se, it was rational men, men of science and scholarship, men like Father. And like me.

Father was grumpy—no, downright surly—when he came downstairs for supper. Uncharacteristically, he said little during the beginning of the meal, though his eyes burned a little when Katerina crossed herself and muttered a short Christian prayer before setting fork to food. Ivan tried to ignore his father's ill temper, preferring to watch the way Katerina learned the customs of the table, different here from Cousin Marek's. From the imperious traveler she had been upon crossing the bridge, contemptuous of strange customs, Katerina had in a few days changed herself amazingly, becoming downright adaptable, perhaps even welcoming of change. She fumbled now and then, but with a charming manner, and when Ivan did notice his father it was because his father was noticing Katerina and giving her grudging respect.

Or was that it? For after the meal, when Katerina and Mother were clearing away—Ivan would have helped, but both women insisted that this time he let them work together—Father leaned back in his chair and, a cynical little smile at his lips, said, "She certainly is picking up modern customs quickly, isn't she?"

The implication was clear—that Katerina was only pretending not to be a modern woman.

"How stupid do you think people of the ninth century were, and how difficult and complicated do you think our customs are?" asked Ivan.

"Don't get sarcastic with me," said Father. "You're asking me to believe in a pretty far-fetched story, when Occam's razor demands a much simpler explanation."

"Believe me, Father, if there were a simpler explanation, Occam and I would both be happy."

"You believe what you want to believe," said Father. "I must believe the evidence."

Ivan could hardly believe what he was hearing. Switching into English—his natural language for savage intellectual argument—he leaned in and said, "How often in my life have you known me to get sucked into some confidence game? Have I claimed to see UFOs? Did I join the Communist Party? Where exactly did I earn this reputation as an unskeptical believer of whatever bullshit comes down the pike? And you, Father, when did you become the supreme rationalist, the impartial judge of evidence you haven't even seen? It seems to me that I'm the eyewitness, and you're the one making judgments based solely on your pre-existing faith."

"Faith in a rational universe, yes."

"No, Father. You don't have faith in a rational universe. This is a universe where nothing can move faster than the utterly arbitrary speed of 186,000 miles per second, where feathers and rocks fall at the same speed in a vacuum, where a measurable but unexplainable force called gravity binds people to planets and planets to stars, and where a butterfly's wing in China might cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. But you have faith in all this incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo which you don't begin to understand, solely because the priests of the established church of the intellectuals have declared these to be immutable laws and you, being a faithful supplicant at their altar, don't even think to question them."

"You sound like a convert to a new religion yourself," said Father dryly.

"Maybe I am. Or maybe I'm the guy who crawled out of the cave, and you're still back inside it, trying to understand the universe by studying shadows on the wall. Well, Father, I've seen things that can only be explained by magic. Now, I guess I'm really still a closet materialist, because I believe these things all have rational explanations, using principles of nature that are not yet known to us. But what I can't do is close my eyes and pretend that the things that have happened to me will go away if I just say 'Einstein' five times fast."

"I was invoking Occam, you'll remember," said Father.

That was enough of a touch of humor to defuse the situation a little. "Look, Father, I can't argue with you, I can't persuade you, because you weren't there. All I can tell you is this: No language can survive without a community of speakers. As you said yourself, the proto-Slavonic that Katerina speaks is far too pure and ancient to come from an isolated pocket in the mountains somewhere. Occam's razor demands only one answer: She actually is from the ninth century."

"No, Vanya, it demands a completely different one—she's an Eliza Doolittle. She's been trained to speak proto-Slavonic, fluently."

"No!" Ivan slapped the table in frustration. "Listen to yourself! Listen to her. You of all people know that language is the one thing that can't be faked. She knows too many words that we don't know. She has an accent that neither of us could have guessed at—the vowels are shaped right, but not exactly as predicted, and the nasals are already fading sooner than we thought. A modern scholar would have taught her using the assumptions of modern scholarship. The nasals would be pure. The palatals more pronounced."

"Unless he realized that these vowels should be different—"

"Father!" said Ivan. "You sound like... like one of those boneheads who thinks the Trilateral Commission is controlling every nation to fulfill some nefarious plan! What conceivable motive could anyone have for putting on such a fraud? What great wealth and power await the plotters who are able to train a young woman to fake proto-Slavonic as her native language? You know every scholar in the field, personally—which of them did it? Whose creature is she?"

Father shook his head. "I don't know. I just can't—you're not a liar, Vanya, so I have to assume you're being fooled yourself. But I watched her all during dinner, and I... I liked her, but I thought, of course I like her, they chose her because she's likeable, if you want to run a con game you choose somebody that people will like and trust, and... but you're right, who is the 'they' I'm assuming? It makes no sense at all. But... even if—Sleeping Beauty, I thought it was a French fairy tale—but even if it happened, why you? Why us?"

"Why not us?" asked Ivan. "It has to be somebody."

"And why now? No, I know your answer—why not now?"

Ivan laughed. "There, that'll put the last nail in Occam's coffin."

"You can cut yourself when you use somebody else's old razor, anyway," said Father. "For the time being, then, will I have to pretend to live in this fantastic universe you've conjured up?"

Impulsively, Ivan took his father's hand. They hadn't held hands much—like good Russians, they greeted with a kiss, and the last time Ivan could remember clasping his father's hand in anything but a handshake was when he was little, and Father helped him cross streets in Kiev. But the hand felt familiar to him all the same. Some memories don't fade, some physical memories are forever. The feel of your father's hand; the sound of your mother's voice. Only, Father's hand was smaller now. No, Ivan's was larger, but to him, it was his father who had shrunk, who no longer had the power of the giant, of the god, to enfold him and keep him safe. If anything, it was Ivan who was the guide now, the one helping the other to cross the perilous, unfamiliar street. "Father, Mother knew about this. Not the whole thing, but she told me when I got engaged to Ruthie that I shouldn't, that it was wrong. Like an old story out of Jewish folklore, she told me that I was already bound by oath to someone else, and it would be an offense to God for me to marry another. I thought she was completely wacked out, but... she was right. I had already married Katerina eleven hundred years before."

"Her intuitions," said Father. "When I first claimed the right of a Jew to immigrate to Israel, she told me No, I mustn't do it, you had things yet to learn in Ukraine. And then after we went to Cousin Marek's house, she stopped being agitated. She was perfectly happy to go when we left. Now that you've told me the story, I do see a pattern. You had seen Sleeping Beauty. That's all that was needed. Having seen her, you'd go back." Father sighed deeply. "She couldn't explain it to me. I'd never have believed her. I'm only pretending to believe it now."

But he was not pretending, not now. He had recognized that it was the only story that made sense of things. "So did Mother know everything all along?" asked Ivan.

"No, no," said Father. "If she had known what it was you needed to do, she would have told me, even if I didn't believe it. It wasn't even her idea to go stay with Cousin Marek. No, she just had a feeling. So... I didn't take it seriously. A feeling! What's a feeling? But now. If what you say is real, then who's the fool?"

"No fools," said Ivan. "Except those who think they understand the world. Those are the fools, don't you think?"

Father shrugged. "Fools, but when they build rocket ships, they mostly fly, and when they drill for oil, it mostly comes up."

"Those are the engineers doing those things, Father. It's the professors who are the fools."

"It's a good thing you smiled when you said that," said Father, "or I'd take it personally."

"I want to be a professor, remember?"

"Oh?" said Father. "I thought you were going to be prince consort of the magical kingdom of Taina."

"Prince consort in exile," said Ivan. "And as long as we live in America, I need an American job. I've got a dissertation to write this summer. Believe it or not, I really did my research, before any of this happened, and now I've got to..."

"Got to what?"

Ivan shook his head, laughing bitterly. "I haven't thought about my dissertation till this moment, not even when I toted the papers across the Atlantic. How can I write it now? I've met Saint Kirill's clerk. I've seen documents written in Kirill's own hand. I know exactly how the letters were formed. I know exactly how the language was spoken and how the priests transformed it in writing it down."

"Oh Lord," said Father, realizing.

"Before I kissed Katerina, I was all set to write a valid scholarly paper. Now if I write it, I either have to pretend to complete ignorance, or—well, there's no other choice. I can't very well write the truth and then cite, as my source, 'personal experience among the proto-Slavonic speakers of the kingdom of Taina, a realm that left behind no written records whatsoever and does not rate a mention in any history.' " Then Ivan told Father about Sergei, and the records he had the young cleric write in the margins and on the back of Saint Kirill's manuscript. "But I wasn't expecting to leave as suddenly as I did," said Ivan. "So there's no chance of the documents surviving. I don't even know how to prepare them so they might have a chance. They have to survive with their provenance attached. If they make their way to some library in Constantinople, for instance, no one will believe they're genuine. Someone's bound to ascribe the annotations to some anonymous clerk in the fourteenth century or whatever. Or some nationalistic fraud. I mean, if the parchments survive at all, they'll make a splash—but someone else will find them and interpret them all wrong. I have to find them, and in such a way that I can publish about them and affirm that they are exactly what they purport to be—documents written by Kirill himself and then added to by Sergei with his accounting of contemporary history and folklore."

"You speak as if you expect to go back to Taina."

"I do," said Ivan. "Because coming here was temporary. Katerina won't be happy until she saves her people. Coming here didn't do that. Coming here only saved we."

It was Father's turn to take Ivan's hand now. "I have to ask you, son. I see you being protective toward her, but you don't look as though—forgive me, but you don't seem to be easy with each other. You married because of a kiss and a promise made with a bear looming over you, right? But does she love you?"

Ivan laughed. "Now, that's the question, isn't it? No, she doesn't. I think she likes me a little better now that she's passed through the experience of changing worlds. I mean, she has a little less contempt for me. But love? That's not even part of why people marry each other, not princesses, anyway."

"Your mother and I, in some ways we're still strangers to each other, I think all married people are. But we fit together, we know each other as well as two strangers can." Father smiled ruefully. "I love her, Vanya, and she loves me. We're devoted. We don't make a great show of it, but we are."

"I know."

"You deserve that, son. I had my doubts about Ruthie—she seemed a little too assertive of how she adored you, too public about it for it to be real—forgive me, I didn't say anything because you loved her—but this one makes Ruthie look like the queen of wifeliness. I don't like the thought of you being married to a woman who always thinks she married down."

"That's a problem, isn't it?" said Ivan. "But the truth is, she did."

"No," said Father. "No, that's not true. There is no woman alive who, marrying you, would be marrying down."

The words came to Ivan too suddenly, too unexpectedly. "I thought—that's a thing Mother would say."

"Yes," said Father. "Mothers say things like that more than fathers do."

"I'm proud that you feel that way about me," said Ivan. "But that doesn't mean that I believe you're right in such an assessment."

"I know," said Father. "That's what breaks my heart. That you would believe that this woman did you a favor to marry you."

"Well, as far as that goes, I think Katerina and I agree that neither of us did the other much of a favor with this particular match-up."

Father nodded. "Life," he said, with that resigned bitterness that only Russians can put into the word. Though Russian Jews manage somehow to slip a little bit of pride into it. Life is vile, but at least I'm one of the chosen victims.

"Why didn't you teach me to use a sword when I was little?" asked Ivan.

"None of the other professors' children were learning it," said Father. "But think a moment—at least I gave you Old Church Slavonic. You understood her when she spoke."

Ivan grinned and saluted his father.

Katerina had been terrified from the beginning of the journey, though she subdued it, tried to contain it, even deny it. Not until she got into the car with Ivan's mother and father did the fear begin to fade, though at that point she did not understand why. This was nothing like the gruzovik—it moved at a terrifying speed, weaving in and out among other fast-moving vehicles, while Ivan's father barely seemed to be paying attention to his driving. And yet she was not afraid. She felt protected.

Only when she entered Ivan's home did she realize why. The house really was protected, as she now realized the car had been. An old wasps' nest hung in the eave over the entrance of the house—Katerina knew at once that there were others above every other door, and all the windows would have a daub of menstrual blood on the frames.

There was music playing as they entered the house, coming from nowhere and everywhere, but it did not frighten her, for she saw charms of harmony and understood that a very deft and subtle witch had put this house under guard. No hate would last here, and no hypocrisy, while any enemy who entered here would leave in confusion. Katerina had made no great study of magic—the aunts, if they were still alive, had never strayed from their distant homes, what with Baba Yaga sworn to kill them because of their thwarting of her curse on Katerina—and so who was there to teach her the deepest arts? She learned what was available to learn. Enough to recognize the touch of a master in the subtle work. For the charms were concealed, embedded into objects that seemed to be mere decorations when they couldn't be disguised as natural stains or, like the wasps' nests, the work of innocent creatures.

The little porcelain on the mantel was an invocation of Bear, though, and that worried Katerina, considering that Bear was rumored to be under Baba Yaga's sway. Still, gods were gods, and whoever protected this house was no fool. Bear would not be invoked if Bear were an enemy in this time and place.

In the kitchen, she found herself so in harmony with Ivan's mother that they hardly needed to talk; yet when Ivan pointed it out, his mother seemed unaware of how they had been communing beyond the level of speech. Interesting. Was this kind witch unaware of the great power she had? In my time, thought Katerina, you would have been enough to worry Baba Yaga. Of course, that would have guaranteed your death, so it's just as well you didn't live then.

Only when supper was over and Ivan stayed in the dining room with his father was Katerina able to ask Mother—for so she already thought of her—just how widely known magic was. "Ivan seemed to know nothing of it," said Katerina. "And yet... he lived in this house."

Mother smiled and looked shyly down at the dishwater in the sink—for the pots did not go in the machine, since the dishwasher could not preserve the charms that made the food in the pots always wholesome and flavorful. "Most are like Vanya," she said, trying to use old words whenever she knew them. "Most know nothing. I had a teacher."

"A teacher, yes. But talent also."

Mother didn't know the word that Katerina used.

"You have it in you," Katerina explained. "Not just learned. It's in you."

Mother shook her head. "I'm nothing special. But we lived in a hard place, in a hard time. I was born at the end of the war, but my mother told me how it was. Terrible things happened. My father and older brothers died when the Germans came through. Reported and taken off as Jews. Only my mother and my sister survived by hiding. Like this."

Mother pulled the bib of her old-fashioned apron up over her face. At once she became unnoticeable. Katerina found it disconcerting. She knew Mother was there, that in fact she was perfectly visible standing by the sink. Yet Katerina had no choice but to look elsewhere, and it was very hard to force herself to continue thinking of Mother, to not allow herself to forget whom she was talking to, and what they were talking about. Then Mother was there again, the apron restored to its place. "I was in my mother's womb at the time," said Mother. "My father's last gift to her. But she taught me. That sometimes the old ways are the only way to stop new evils. So I learned. She died too soon to teach me all, and she didn't know that much, anyway. But before she died, she introduced me to Baba Tila, in Kiev."

I had a Tetka Tila once, Katerina remembered. One of the aunts who modified Baba Yaga's curse. But Tetka Tila lived farthest away of all, and never visited after I was little. She saved my life, but taught me nothing.

"She was very old," Mother was saying, "but even a powerful old witch like her couldn't live forever. I was her last pupil." Mother sighed. "Everyone dies so soon."

"You keep it secret?"

"The Church, the Christians—they killed witches. Rarely the real witches, you understand. Just old women who foolishly muttered something, or people that had enemies who charged witchcraft just to get rid of them. The real witches could hide from their vindictiveness. But it wasn't good, the way people hated the very idea of witches. So we kept it to ourselves. I speak as if I were one of them. Not much of one. Do you even understand me? Baba Tila taught me the old language, but it's been so long, and I've forgotten so much."

"I understand everything," said Katerina. "Or almost."

"Now they don't even believe witches ever existed. That makes it easier. They don't look for us. There are foolish women who call themselves witches and prance around naked—they think it has something to do with talking to the devil! Or some nature religion. They have no idea. They embarrass me." Mother laughed. "But then, at least they wouldn't fear us. My husband... if he knew... your coming here, it threatens to reveal the truth to him."

"I'll keep still," said Katerina.

Mother shook her head. "Too late. Vanya knows, and Vanya will tell his father, meaning no harm."

"Can't you ask him not to?"

"Vanya has no talent for lying or even for concealing the truth. We'll see what Piotr does about it. It's time he knew."

They talked more, about what Mother knew about Ivan as he was growing up. "Only that he was important, for some reason. All mothers think that about their children, though, don't they? Fathers too. Piotr always knew Vanya was something special. Not that he was an easy child. All this running. He wanted to be an athlete. Piotr wanted him to be a scholar. I just wanted him to be good."

"You all got your wish." And Katerina thought: A strong knight. A wise mind. A pure heart.

Mother patted Katerina's hand and smiled. "Oh, yes, praise my child and you know that we'll be friends."

"I tell only what I know," said Katerina. "He is good. I depend on that. It's my hope."

"I was so afraid when he left this world," said Mother. "I didn't know he had found you. I only knew he was gone. But then I saw that he was alive, and so I didn't worry. Whatever need drew him to you—and it has been calling to him, I've heard it, since he was little—whatever need that was, I knew that he would be man enough for it, in the end."

Katerina loved this woman with her simple manner and her deep wisdom, loved her like the mother she barely remembered. Piotr also seemed a good man, though he was so full of his own doubts that Katerina could hardly talk to him. And for the first time in her life, inside this protected house, knowing that Baba Yaga was thousands of miles away, Katerina felt utterly safe and at peace.

She was, in fact, happy. It was not an unfamiliar feeling—she had been happy many times. Standing with her father after a hard day at the harvest, watching the people dance despite their weariness. Delighting in the children, dancing at a wedding, there was often joy in her life. But it was always joy in others, the happiness of a princess glad that her people are happy. Or sometimes it was the momentary peace of confession, of communion, knowing that the God of love had forgiven her and would welcome her to him when her life ended, even if Baba Yaga had found some terrible way to overmaster her beforehand—peace was also a familiar feeling. But here in this house it simply... well, it did not end. She would be happy and at peace one moment, and then, the next moment, she would still be happy, still be at peace. She wanted to cry. When Mother showed her to her own room, not one to be shared with Ivan, and offered it to her, she did cry. "No," she said. "I want to share your son's room."

"He already told me," said Mother. "That you would be more comfortable apart from him."

Katerina shook her head. "No, you don't understand. In this house I am comfortable everywhere."

"Then let me say it another way. He would be more comfortable apart from you."

The two women looked at each other a moment, and then burst into laughter, though for Katerina the laughter was tinged with despair. "All right then," said Katerina. "My own room for now. But I do mean to be a true wife to your son. However we began, I do mean for it to end well."

Mother touched a finger to Katerina's lips. "I know that," she said. "There isn't much time in this world, but there is always enough time, if you know how to use it."

Katerina shook her head. "Not enough time for everything," she said. "Not enough time with my mother."

Ivan's mother reached out and embraced her. "Your mother surrounds you every moment," she said. "I know, because I feel her love for you in my own arms, around you now."

Katerina was weeping as Mother gently closed the door behind her, leaving her alone in the room. And that, too, was joy, for there are tears of joy, and tears of peace as well.

Ruth cried bitterly about the broken engagement, and her mother made sure that within hours every Jew in Tantalus knew that Ivan Smetski had broken his vow to Ruthie in order to marry a shiksa, and the first Ruthie heard about it was at the airport, seeing the girl hanging on Ivan like a goiter. Everyone was properly horrified, which helped Ruth's parents feel better. But not Ruth.

Nor did talking to her friends at school and listening to their almost triumphant response. What do you expect of men? Women as property, men as walking cauldrons of hormones, yadda yadda, she had heard it all before and wasn't particularly glad to have provided the occasion for more triumphant feminism. What she wanted from them was sympathy—because she still felt, or at least feared, that Ivan was a good man and she had lost a prize. But if he was a good man, how could he leave me? So he must not be a good man. But if he isn't good, then why does it hurt so much to lose him? Is it just my pride that's wounded?

Maybe. But she still knew, deep in her heart, that this was not true, either. Because if Ivan came back to her, even now, she would go to him. She wouldn't trust him, but she would take him back. Because she really did love him. And love doesn't disappear just because of the vile unworthiness of the loved one.

She had always thought Ivan was the kind of man who kept a promise.

Time, that's what was supposed to heal this kind of injury. Plus keeping busy so the time would pass. A flurry of shopping; but when she got home she didn't even bother taking things out of the sacks and boxes. A book, another book, another. All dog-eared at page ten or twenty, all stacked beside her bed. She even typed up her resume in the vain thought that it was time for her to get out in the real world and earn a living. When she typed, "Last position: Fiancée. Reason for leaving: Replaced by shiksa," she knew it wasn't going to happen.

"Do what I do," her mother said. Which is how Ruth ended up at the beauty parlor getting her nails done and her hair cut, dyed, and permed at the same time—which was going to be terrible on her hair and her allergies, but she'd come out of it looking like a new woman.

"You're so beautiful," said the old woman next to her. "I can't think why you'd want to change that gorgeous long hair."

It was actually a marginally creepy thing to say, especially because of the way the woman looked at her—are there ninety-year-old lesbians who cruise the beauty parlors?—but Ruth was polite. "A change is as good as a rest."

"So what was it, a man or a job?"

"What?"

"This angry self-destructive action," said the old lady. "This obliteration of your self. Either you lost a job or you lost a man."

"Forgive me," said Ruth, "but... have we met?"

"We're meeting now," said the old woman. "You need more than a bob-and-dye, sweetie. Get him back."

"You mean get him? Or get back at him?"

"Whatever."

The woman's eyes were dancing with delight.

And then, abruptly, there was only a wasp sitting on the chair beside her. It walked around the fake leather for a few minutes, then flew out the door.

I'm losing my mind, thought Ruth.

She worried for a little while about a woman who turned into a wasp—or a wasp into a woman, whichever. And then she worried about depression so deep it led to hallucinations, and whether Prozac was really as good as people said it was.

And then she thought about what the woman said. Get him back. Get him back. And for the life of her she couldn't decide what she herself wanted. Revenge or reconciliation?

She walked along the street, looking for her car. Where had she parked? That's another sign I'm losing my mind, she thought. Lately I don't remember things like where I parked or whether I had breakfast. Just since he dumped me. The bastard. That bitch.

Sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall opposite her car, was a homeless woman. No, she was dirty and all, but she wasn't begging. She was selling. A little cloth was spread out before her, with weird little bags and corked vials and tiny jars stopped up with clay. Ruth stopped and looked at her wares.

The gypsy reached behind her and took out a small piece of paper. On it were written the words Get him back.

This was too weird. Especially because a moment later, the words on the paper changed into nothing but meaningless squiggles. The paper said nothing at all, or at least it wasn't an alphabet she had ever seen before. She must have hallucinated the words she read.

The gypsy held up a tiny bag and pointed to Ruth with her other hand.

"I don't want it," said Ruth.

The gypsy woman smiled. She had no teeth.

"This will make him love me?"

The gypsy woman thought for a moment, as if translating laboriously. Then she shook her head, set down the bag, and picked up a little clay-stopped jar.

"This one, then?" asked Ruth. "And he'll forget the bitch and love me?"

The gypsy nodded, grinning.

"How much?" I can't believe I'm asking. I can't believe I'm going to buy it.

But there she was, pulling her wallet out of her purse. "Hmm? How much?"

The gypsy just kept smiling.

Ruth pulled out a five. The gypsy didn't seem to respond at all. A ten? No. A twenty. What's happening to me?

The gypsy took the twenty. She looked dubious. Then she beamed at Ruth. She wasn't completely toothless. She had a couple of blackened molars.

"How do I use it?" asked Ruth. "I mean, do I wear it? Eat it? Drink it? Serve it to him?"

At this last phrase, the gypsy nodded vigorously.

"Right, like he and I are going to have a picnic," said Ruth. She felt cheated. But how stupid did she have to be, anyway? She was buying a love potion from a gypsy street vendor. All because a stranger in a beauty shop had told her to get him back? Ivan has driven me insane. Do I even want him to love me?

She was getting into her car, but at this thought she impulsively got back out. The gypsy woman cocked her head and looked quizzically at her.

Ruth pointed to the bag that the gypsy had first offered. "What does that do?"

The gypsy started scratching herself and cackling with laughter. Ruth wasn't sure whether this meant that Ivan would itch, that someone would tickle him, or that he would turn into a monkey, but in any event, it sounded promising.

Besides, nothing said she had to give it to Ivan. It might be more useful to give it to the shiksa bitch.

Again, she had to know—bake it into cookies? Dash it in his face?

The gypsy pantomimed eating.

"Just like the other one," said Ruth.

The gypsy nodded.

"The bag gets even, the jar gets him to love me."

The gypsy held out her hand. Ruth gave her another twenty. The gypsy shook her head. Ruth added another twenty. The gypsy tucked it down into her bosom, then gathered up the cloth, tied the top into a knot, and got up and walked away.

That's it? I'm the only customer of the day?

Or maybe when she gets sixty bucks from one sucker, she can go buy enough wine to stay drunk for a week.

I'm not going to use these. When would I have a chance? And considering I don't even know what I want. Maybe I should give him both. Or better yet, make both of them fall in love with me. Then it would be my turn to jilt him for the same woman! Now that would be ironic.

Maybe what I should have bought is a gun.

The moment she thought of it, it felt like poison in her mind. A gun! For him? For her? For me? What's happening to me? I don't want anybody dead. I just want my life to go on.

She dropped the little jar and the little sack into the trashbox she kept on the floor of her car. Sixty bucks down the drain, but that's cheaper than buying a new dress that I don't even take out of the bag when I get it home.

Baba Yaga

She was exhausted. If magic had been hard before, it was almost impossible now, so far from Bear's land. Baba Yaga hadn't realized how dependent she was on his power till she tried to do magic without it.

But nothing was going to stop her. She was days behind Ivan and Katerina, but it was easy enough to find them. The house was protected, though, and Baba Yaga was too weak to get through all the magic. It infuriated her to be stopped by a witch that ordinarily she could blow away with a puff of air. But she had to deal with the world the way she found it. Ivan and Katerina were inside the house. Baba Yaga was able to probe just enough to be certain that the marriage was not complete yet. But almost instantaneously, the curtains were flung open and there in the window stood a middle-aged woman, staring right at her.

I'm not supposed to be noticeable, thought Baba Yaga. And yet she knew where to look.

So maybe it would have taken more than a puff of air, she thought.

She turned away from the house, wondering what to do next.

Listen, that's what she'd do. She might not be able to work magic on anyone in that house without being noticed and blocked, but that witch couldn't prevent her from doing magic on herself.

It took hours to put it all together, and she had to make do with substitute herbs, but it worked well enough, a spell of hearing. After she had chewed the mixture into paste and then swallowed it, she sat in the darkness under a tree and began to focus the sounds as they rushed in upon her. People eating, doing dishes, cooking, arguing, listening to machines that talked. House after house. Baba Yaga tuned them out, turned them into nothing in her own mind. Until at last there was only the sound from one house left.

By the time the spell wore off, a couple of hours later, Baba Yaga knew only that there was a woman named Ruth to whom Ivan had been betrothed.

A jilted woman, thought Baba Yaga. I can use her.

Not knowing where she lived, Baba Yaga again had to use magic to find her. It took two days, searching for rage and pain. There was plenty of it to be found—what angry people these are!—but finally, after casting her net rather widely, she detected Ruth driving along the freeway. So quickly everyone moved! But now that she had Ruth's soul imprinted in her heart, Baba Yaga would always be able to find her.

Not speaking the language, Baba Yaga had to do the wasp trick, guiding the little pricker into the beauty parlor and then causing Ruth herself to imagine the woman and the words and the language to draw out of Ruth's turmoil of feelings about Ivan the ones that Baba Yaga figured would be most useful to her: The desire to have him back, and the desire to destroy him.

Then, on the sidewalk, Baba Yaga appeared in person, because this time it couldn't be hallucination, the potions had to be real. Sixty dollars? Baba Yaga wanted to laugh at the money. But she knew she had to take it, or Ruth wouldn't believe the potions had any value.

Whichever one she chooses will suit me fine, thought Baba Yaga.

The next morning, Ruth woke up to find all her hair lying on her pillow. The mirror confirmed it: She was bald as an egg. She screamed. She wept. She resolved that she was going to get back at Ivan, because somehow this crowning misery had to be his fault, too. She wouldn't have had a perm and a dye on the same day if it hadn't been for him!

Out in the woods, where Baba Yaga was catching insects and killing them for the magic they held in their tiny bodies, Baba Yaga sensed Ruth's rage and horror. This time the curse wasn't just a bit of extra fun. Within hours, Ruth would fish the potions out of the trash in her car. For in Ruth's mind, her baldness was also, however indirectly, Ivan's and Katerina's fault, and someone was going to pay, one way or another.