My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (5 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Yet, the more trouble they took, the less their efforts worked to draw her near. The king watched as his subjects flattered and bribed Ardour, tended to her more unctuously than to his majesty. The winter, previously a period of rest, was more trying than a season of sowing, and what did it reap? For all but the man who ushered Ardour’s departure, another nine months of labor.
The wintertime clamor became almost intolerable, each man playing whatever instrument he knew, dancing, tendering bread, mead, gold. Ardour could scarcely choose which way to look, let alone who to let tempt her. One year she was drawn to the peasant who had the loudest horn, which she mistook—simple soul—for the force of his desire. Another winter, she went for the one who danced most gracefully, which she misunderstood—foolish girl—as a measure of his sensitivity. And then came the season that she fell for the man with the greatest goods, which she misinterpreted—dumb broad—as a token of his generosity.
After that, she entirely forgot what she’d wished once to find amongst men. She came back with winter, her annual ritual, and stormed around in search of bigger, better—
what
? No longer was she shy. She smothered fires, buried farmers under her coats of snow. The people called her cruel—no more dumb fool simple soul—and wondered how she’d come to resemble them.
Winter that year stretched into April, May, June, July. By August they were burning the days of their calendars for warmth. The king ordained that whoever brought about her fall would never work again. But the men who’d once fought so hard to woo her now just begged her to be gone. Horns and flutes abandoned, their voices became one:
Curse Ardour! Go away! Leave! Scram!
September, October, November. Winter led into winter. The king’s hunters laid traps to catch her. They shot to kill, sunk their munitions into snow. December, January, February, March. Months lost their meanings, years their numbering. Words were moot. Time was marked only by the aching advance of starvation. Folk looked forward to dying.
At last the king had only his son to send from his castle for firewood to warm his gruel. The boy had been quite young when that interminable winter began, and had heard of Ardour only as a monster, insatiable in her appetite for human life. He knew well to fear her, a beast as immense as his country, her body encompassing mountains and valleys, a woman said to freeze men with her breath. His father didn’t have to tell him to take care.
He wore boots of cowhide lined in fur, laced up to his thighs, triple-tied. His hat and gloves had been crafted from the same, fit to him so tight that there wasn’t even the space for a shiver. The coat, though, was a nobler matter: It had been willed to the king by his father, to whom it had been given by his father’s father—a tradition, in short, that went back to a generation before there was gold to leaf the family tree. What the coat was made of, though, people no longer knew: the skin of an extinct animal—a dragon, perhaps—or even the earth’s own crust? That day, the king laid it on his son.
With ax and saw, the boy made his way into the woods. And it might have been the first time in his sixteen years that he was alone, were there not, he wondered, another set of eyes fixed on his own. They were, at a glance, an overcast gray, but cleared, as he stared, to two open pupils. They belonged to a girl such as he’d never seen before. The snow covered her small body completely, her hair wrapped in the fierce weather that ravaged every inch of bare flesh.
He was not, in truth, especially brave. But had he been moved to rescue the girl from winter, to bring her to shelter, presumably he would have met the same fate as if he had thought to drive the weather away by attacking her. Instead, he approached with no motive other than to come closer.
Colder, colder, and colder. He reached out to her. The coat of snow was soft as fur. He brushed it off, and as it fell, her bare hands met his shoulders, to lift away his own shell.
It is said that the last sensation felt by a body freezing is an all-encompassing heat. As the girl drew nearer—frost melting from her breasts and hips, the stretch of her neck, the pale of her belly—he also let go deeper layers of clothing. Ardour then, folk say, led him away.
Winter withdrew into spring, fell fast on summer. The king went in quest of his son. But all he found, in a clearing, was that greatcoat the boy had worn. It wasn’t bloodied by the bite of any beast. There weren’t even bones to bury. Life went on.
That year, the winter didn’t come. None of the peasants met Ardour. They worked clear through December, barely even seeing one another, so relentlessly did the land produce. Prosperous, who had time to rest? Another year passed, two and three more, four. The weather never dropped off enough for the fields to sleep a season beneath a blanket of snow. And so it went that the workers never more were idle.
Till and sow and reap and till and sow and reap and till. Only rarely was the rhythm broken for an hour by the sounding of a distant storm. The king, shut up in his castle, believed that it was the gods above weeping with him over the loss of his son. But the peasants knew that the tantrum came from the forest floor: the noise of Ardour struggling with her lover, the boy who had fallen for her and who made her feel furiously—could it be true?—human.
I can’t say when I first heard about the Russian snow maiden Snegurochka, or who told me her legend. Moreover, I’ve never since encountered anything like the version I remember hearing. Presumably my recollection is mistaken; the version I remember perhaps doesn’t exist. I wrote “Ardour” to preserve the Snegurochka who has lingered with me, even as a figment of my imagination.
Folklore is layered. Each recounting is a revision suited to a particular time and place. I would like to believe that this process can go on, even in a society that has shifted from a tradition of spontaneous storytelling to one that privileges writing and recording. The past century and a half has seen a ballet, an opera, and two movies based on the Russian snow maiden legend, which would suggest that Snegurochka at least has survived the transition to recorded media. She is very much alive, and if she seems quite different in each of these appearances—including my own story—it is in keeping with her chimerical ways.
—JK
LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA
I’m Here
HOW CAN YOU FORGET THAT FEELING, IT COMES LIKE A BLOW, WHEN life flees from you, and happiness, and love, thought a woman, Olga, watching as her husband plunked himself down and practically inserted himself next to, essentially, a child—everyone here a grown-up and suddenly out of nowhere this girl-child. And then he stood up with her and went over to dance, addressing Olga gleefully on the way, “Look at this little treasure! I knew her when she was in the sixth grade.” And laughed happily. It was the hosts’ daughter—of course. She lives here. How’d she forget that, Olga thought as they rode the subway home, her partly drunk husband, a hearing aid in his ear under cover of his eyeglasses, taking a folded-up newspaper, self-importantly, from his pocket, then squinting morosely under the harsh subway light. They rode, they came home. He settled down with that same paper on the toilet and then fell asleep, apparently, because Olga had to wake him up with a loud knock at the door, and everything was so petty, so embarrassing, though of course everything is always embarrassing in one’s own home, thought Olga. Her husband snored in bed, as he always did when he’d been drinking. “My God,” thought Olga to herself. “Life is over. I’m an old woman. I’m over forty and no one needs me. It’s all over, my life is gone.”
In the morning Olga fixed breakfast for her family. She needed to go somewhere. Anywhere—to the movies, to an exhibit, maybe even the theater. But who’d go with her? It’s a little odd, going alone. Olga called all her friends: one was sitting with a warm wrap—she had a condition she called “a movable feast,” her kidneys were bad. They chatted. Another friend didn’t answer, maybe they’d shut off the phone, another was just about to go out, she was at the door practically, yet another one of her elderly relatives had fallen ill. That one was a lonely spinster but was always cheerful, energetic, a saint almost. Not like us.
She might try cleaning the house—her boss used to say: “When I hit bottom, like when they gave me the diagnosis, the same as my sister’s and she’d just died—well, I came home and just started mopping the floor.” This was always followed by the tale of the diagnosis—magically mistaken! And the lesson was, Don’t give up! Keep the floor clean!
The laundry, the dishes—everything everywhere after last night’s preparations for that idiotic birthday with her husband’s college friends. So Olga should clean up and all the while think about how no one does anything to help her? Her husband will get up, hungover, won’t look them in the face, will nag, yell, brood over the magic vision of the little girl from last night, the daughter, that’s right. Then he won’t be back until evening. No, she needs to get out, get away, hide somewhere. Let them take care of themselves for once in their lives. She’s tired.
And then Olga realized: Why not visit the only place on earth where no one will turn her away, where they’ll always be happy to see her, where they’ll sit her down, make her tea, ask how she is and even invite her to stay over; why not visit their old landlady, from the dacha, where they lived so many years in a row when Nastya was still little, and she and Seryozha still hoped for a better life? She was an especially dear memory, this landlady, for Olga; with her complicated relations with her own mother, Olga had become attached to this stranger, this wise and touching old woman. She even seemed beautiful to Olga, and kind, and clever like a child. Meanwhile Baba Anya had been long divorced, if you can say that, from a daughter who never visited and was sleeping around on a grand scale, and who left the mother something to remember her by in the form of little Marina, a beaten-down creature in black hair who was afraid of everyone.
Yes! When you’ve been abandoned by everyone close to you, do a kindness for a stranger, and you’ll feel the warmth of their gratitude on your heart, and it will give your life meaning. And most of all, you will find a quiet refuge, and that’s all we want from our friends, isn’t it.
Inspired, Olga chuckled to herself, quickly cleaned everything, trying not to wake her family, and then went to look for her stash of Nastya’s old things that she’d been collecting over the years for Baba Anya, knowing that her little girl was being raised without any outside help.
She even found something for Anya, a warm shawl, and just two hours later was running across the square in front of the train station, having almost been hit by a car on the way (now, that would really be something, wouldn’t it, if she died, it would certainly be a solution to all sorts of problems, the disappearance of a person no one needs or wants, it would free everyone, Olga thought, and even paused on this thought for a while, amazed by it)—and a moment later, as if by magic, she was descending from the commuter train at the little rural station that she knew so well, and, dragging her big backpack behind her, walking down the familiar dirt road from the station to the edge of the settlement, in the direction of the river.
 
It was a Sunday in October. The place was light, empty, the trees were bare already, the air smelled of smoke and Russian baths. The fallen leaves gave off the scent of young wine and other people’s established lives, as well as a whiff of the graveyard, somehow, and the windows were already lit, though it wasn’t yet dark. Nostalgia, wide-open spaces, the pearly white skies and the happiness of years gone by, when she and Seryozha were young, when their friends came out here, all of them so happy, drinking, barbecuing, etc. And they helped Baba Anya, because something was always leaking, or collapsing, or needing someone to hammer something in. In those years you could leave little Nastya with her for an evening, Nastya had befriended silent little Marina. Baba Anya would put them in bed while Olga and Seryozha went into town for someone’s birthday party, drank and sang until sunrise, and maybe wouldn’t even make it back until the next evening. The whole time their daughter was safe, and Baba Anya would even say, Go on, take a vacation, you think I can’t handle these two? So they did, they went south for two weeks. And Baba Anya also enjoyed it, they left her money and groceries. True, when they got back Nastya was so excited she immediately got sick and stayed sick for exactly two weeks. Their whole vacation was forgotten, their tans erased, Olga didn’t sleep for ten nights: the girl almost died. Everything in life seeks equilibrium, Olga said to herself, walking with her backpack, said it with such assurance she might even have said it out loud.

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