My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

ILYA KAMINSKY. Little Pot

A SLENDER GIRL AND HER MOTHER LIVED IN OUR TOWN, GOOD PEOPLE but poor. They had nothing to eat, like everyone else in our town. The girl was always wandering in the forest. She walked, snapping the branches, scaring the squirrels, looking for something to put in her mouth. Here the story turns: The slender girl meets an old crone. The crone’s hand opens. In the open hand, a pot.

A little pot. From nothing, it appeared.

The crone said: When you are hungry, say Cook, little pot, cook and the pot will give you sweet porridge. And she said a few other words. A few words, the old crone smiled, and vanished from this tale. As for the girl, she did what the girls do, she ran to her mother. They whispered Cook, little pot, cook as they swallowed sweet porridge. And the pot cooked, and they kept whispering. And the porridge was good. But the story keeps turning: Here, they feed a neighbor’s aged child. Here, they share their porridge with a pigeon. Here, the girl walks to school where she learns from schoolbooks about cookbooks and from cookbooks about constitutions.

She walks. Her mother whispers: Cook, little pot, cook.

The pot cooked as the mother ate, the pot cooked. The mother ate and became full and asked the pot to stop—

But she had no words to make it stop.

Her slender girl knew the words. But she was at school learning of theorems and tomatoes and generals who liked tomatoes. The pot kept cooking. The mother kept eating. And the porridge kept bubbling over the top. And it cooked into the next paragraph and the next. And the kitchen floor was soon covered with porridge and the tables covered with porridge and the chairs. Then the stove covered, and then the bedroom where lights were on but the porridge put out even the lights. The town darkened.

And the pot did what pots do.

The porridge began to drip on the cobbled sidewalks, on the splintering staircases. The next house was covered with sweet porridge, the nearby street covered: its barbershop and its tailor shop and its bakery. And the neighbors sat on the pavement, eating biscuits and breads and sweet pies covered in porridge. The baker said, eat! eat! While his money-till filled with porridge.

The porridge was sweet.

And it rose to the branches of birch, the branches of ice, and the birds landed, and swam, and washed themselves. And they ate. And dogs swam, and ate. And the chickens made tiny noises. And then they began to drown. Everyone prayed for the pot to stop cooking, and everyone ate.

No one could stop.

Only one house remained that was not covered with sweet porridge to its copper roof. One house. All the neighbors sat on its roof and ate, their feet dangling in porridge. It was heavy on their feet. It was hard to pull their feet out, but they pulled. At last. The girl returned from school. A little girl swimming in the porridge on two large books. She yelled: Stop, little pot, stop! The townspeople all looked at one another and shook their heads.

This is how I remember my childhood. First a fantasia of plenty, yes: but then; eating my way back through time.

The second tale begins: eighteen-year-old peasant girl Talia and her husband, a White Army officer, had a baby girl, six months old. They walked the streets of Odessa with a cradle and ate chocolate cakes at Deribasovskaya. He bought her an umbrella and she was learning French. In the seventh month the government changed. The White Army officer had to escape because the color of his uniform was politically incorrect. Or perhaps something else about him was incorrect. He escaped from this story. But Talia stayed, her baby girl was seven months old.

In the eighth month the government closed the borders. Talia began to sew blue dresses so she could buy milk. She sewed day and night for the opera singers, she walked behind the stage after the performance taking measurements, giving compliments, taking measurements. They loved her. Talia was sewing, the opera was singing, the soup was in the little pot, the baby was turning nine months old.

In the tenth month the government prevented the food from coming into our province. It was an easy month. The opera was still open, the audiences still arrived. But soon the audiences began to walk out of our streets. They thought they could find food in the neighboring villages. But there was no food in the neighboring villages. There was no food in the farthest villages, but they did not learn of that. They died midway. And the borders remained closed. And there was no food on the table, there was no table, and there was no food even in the little pot. And the bellies began to sing, and then the singing stopped.

And the baby began its eleventh month. The opera singers left. Talia did not leave. Talia ate the earth. She dug a hole in the earth, she put the body of her baby girl into the box from the sewing machine and dug the earth. She dug the hole herself. She did everything herself. She even survived on her own somehow. She even married somehow. She even managed not to have another child — holding out till she was forty-two years old. That she did herself, against her new husband’s wishes. When she was forty, everything changed. Everything changed.

She adopted my father. Everything changed. She told my father the story of the little pot when she taught him how to cook, how to chop vegetables, how to pinch the spices into the little pot. Her finger would weave through the air as she spoke. It landed on my father’s forehead. “You must remember this.”

Here the page turns. There was once a man who lived in an empire preoccupied with food. It was said of him that he opened an underground business that sold soups so good that when government officials tasted them, their eyes lit up and they carried that light into the higher offices and courts but could no longer pretend to be loyal to the system that ruled us — and they all lost their offices. But the soup factory kept going, tomato soups and spinach soups and onion soups with fish. His name was Vitya. He was of middle height, and at the time of my birth, his second son, he was middle-aged.

Tomato soup was not merely of a physical world — not as far as my father was concerned. What we put in our mouths feeds not only our bodies, but also what lives inside our bodies. There was something strange about that illegal soup factory of Sovetskaya Militsiya Street, everybody said so, but nobody knew for sure.