A Peek into the Picnic Basket
Nov. 26th, 2019 08:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerHappy Tuesday! I thought I would go ahead and post an excerpt from my upcoming novel, The Wolf and the Girl, because… why not, I suppose! Tuesday is a good day for posting things.
***
In the spring of 1911, when the snow was still on the ground, Mariya Petrovna walked through the woods to her grandmother’s house with a round loaf of rye bread in her basket.
Masha’s grandmother did not live in the village of Kostin with all the other peasants, but a little way outside it, in a cottage in a birch grove in the forest. She was a good help to have at your side during a birth or a death, and it was said that she’d saved Count Michugin himself when he was a little boy suffering from fever; which all in all meant that she was a person of power, and the villagers were a little afraid of her. As she grew old and bent, everyone began to call her Babushka, and the children began to whisper that she was a cousin of Baba Yaga, the old witch who lives in the forest in a cottage on chicken legs. One day Masha, quiet Masha, sweet little round-faced Masha, surprised everyone by punching big Foma Fomavitch in the nose after he made chicken noises at her.
No one talked about Baba Yaga in front of Masha after that.
A few of the girls in the village used to come to Babushka’s house to hear her tell stories. Not that they believed her stories of talking blini and men who turned into wolves, of course, for they had all been to the school Count Michugin set up in the village; but a good story is a good story. And perhaps there was something to the talk of Babushka’s powers, after all, for all these girls went on to great things, by the standards of the village, at least.
Alyona Emiliovna became a maid in Count Michugin’s St. Petersburg house, and married a footman. And Manya Ivanovna emigrated to America, and sent back enough money that her little brother and sister could go join her in that land where the streets are paved in gold. And red-haired Raisa Fomovna rose highest of all, for she won Count Michugin’s scholarship to go to university in St. Petersburg.
But Raisa Fomovna fell the farthest, too, for she joined up with a group of anarchists and tried to assassinate the tsar (actually it was a mere tsarist official, but no one was about to let facts get in the way of the story), and got sent to Siberia, which gave the good people of Kostin no end of satisfaction.
“But they were all so proud when she went to study in St. Petersburg,” Masha protested to Babushka. “Why are they happy it ended like this?”
“Pride and jealousy are two sides of the same coin,” Babushka told her. “If you toss it up in the air, you never know which way it will come down.”
Masha did not understand. When Raisa Fomovna had gone off to study in St. Petersburg, Masha had been so jealous she could spit. And yet she seemed to be the only person in Kostin who took no satisfaction in Raisa Fomovna’s fall, but grieved over it as if it were her own wound.
But Masha did not expect to understand everything Babushka said, for Babushka was old and wise, and Masha young and inexperienced.
For alone of the foursome who once sat on Babushka’s stove to listen to her stories, Masha had never gone far. She was the youngest of the four, the plainest, the shyest, who sat in the shadows and listened quietly while the other three laughed and talked, and knew she had the pleasure of their company only because she was Babushka’s granddaughter, and came as it were with the house.
They all went on to great things, and meanwhile the farthest Masha had been from Kostin was the year she spent as a maid on Count Michugin’s estate. There she picked up a few French words like baubles, for the Michugins often spoke French to each other.
But then last summer Babushka had taken ill, and Masha had come back to Kostin to take care of her. All winter Babushka had been failing; and now the spring had come, and Babushka was no better.
Masha had walked into the village that morning to visit her brother Tikhon and his wife Anna and their four children, who were soon to be five, for Anna was big with child. Anna packed a round loaf of good rye bread in Masha’s basket, and invited Masha to stay for a cup of tea; but Masha said, “No, I don’t like to leave Babushka alone.”
Anna nodded, and looked grave, for everyone knew that Babushka was dying.
In the village the snow was all melted, except in the shadows of the houses. But in the woods, the snow persisted, and Masha walked along the path in her felt boots. That path wound up past Babushka’s house, and before Babushka was so sick they used to follow it to secret places in the woods to gather mushrooms or berries or the mosses Babushka used to stanch bleeding wounds.
Masha had never reached the end of the path, and Babushka said there was no end to it, and it just wound on forever until it met the road, for paths, she said, are like streams, which converge on the rivers which flow to the sea.
And Masha was thinking about this as she walked. She had never seen the sea, but in Count Michugin’s house there was a great oil painting of a crystal blue bay, with a high blue sky and a gay little boat with a bright red sail, which seemed as different from the rowboats Masha knew as a plow horse from one of Count Michugin’s racehorses. Masha imagined following the path till it met the road that wound on down to the sea (although she knew, of course, that Babushka had only been speaking figuratively, and roads flowed to cities rather than oceans), where she would stand on the shore and smell the salt air and watch the boats sail past beneath the shining blue sky.
And so, lost in her thoughts, Masha didn’t see the wolf until she reached Babushka’s clearing. But there it was, amber eyed and big as life, lying almost at Babushka’s door.
***
Masha had grown up hearing stories of the wolves. They were fearsome beasts, the wolves of Russia, who moved in packs so vast that they darkened the hills, and feared neither man nor beast. Everyone knew the story about the bridal couple who did not hear the wolves howling above the tinkling of the bells on their sleigh until it was too late: though the groom whipped the horses to a frenzy, and the beautiful bride clung to the sleigh with the moonlight bright on her tears, they could not outpace the pack, and the wolves dragged the bride and groom from the sleigh and rent them in the snow, and nothing was ever found of them, unless perhaps (this was a detail Raisa Fomovna liked to add) one of their silver sleigh bells had been found, years later, in the belly of a wolf killed in one of Count Michugin’s wolf hunts.
And so when Masha saw the wolf, she nearly gave herself up for dead. She froze stock still, clutching her basket in both hands, and the wolf filled her vision like it was the only thing in the world: its amber eyes, the reddish tinge like dried blood on its fur, the glistening white fangs that must lurk behind those black lips.
She must not run. Masha had learned this lesson young, with the dogs of the village, and it must hold good for wolves too. If you run, they will chase you.
She took a step forward instead. Her foot crunched on the snow.
The wolf’s ears flicked toward her. It lifted its head. Masha screamed, half in panic and half in fury, and ran toward it full tilt.
The wolf cowered back. If Masha had been in fit state to see anything, she would have seen that it was trembling. But she was in terror, and saw only that it had given her a little space, and she used it to open the door and fling herself inside, and drag the door shut behind her.
“Masha!” Babushka cried, as Masha struggled to lift the heavy bar across the door. “What is wrong?”
“A wolf!” Masha cried. She dropped the bar into place with a sob of relief and pressed herself against the door, as if the wolf might try to batter it down with its weight.
There was a scratch on the door, like a dog that wanted to get in. Masha’s strength gave way to terror. She bounded across the room as she had bounded across the clearing, and flung herself on her grandmother like a frightened child. Babushka’s thin arms went around her neck, as light as a bird’s wings. “Masha, Mashuchka,” Babushka murmured. “You’re safe now. Our walls are thick, and saints Cyril and Methodius will protect us.” For an icon of the saints hung on the wall in the cottage’s good place, gazing down with their benign bearded faces. “Go, give thanks for your deliverance, and then stir the kasha, that’s a good girl.”
And so Masha thanked St. Cyril and St. Methodius, who invented an alphabet for Russia in the days when it was still the Kievan Rus. And then she stirred the kasha, and fed Babushka her dinner, and wiped the porridge from Babushka’s chin afterwards, and was almost calm again when she happened to glance out the window.
And there was the wolf, lying in the snow, so perfectly in the center of the window that it looked almost like it had framed itself for a picture.
Masha stood a moment, almost paralyzed again with terror. But the window was too small for a wolf to get through, and the walls were thick; and then the wolf licked its nose, like a dog, and Masha’s terror ebbed. “The wolf’s still here,” she said, almost lightly, in the tone she might tell something to one of Tikhon’s little children, so as not to frighten them.
“You can see it through the window?” Babushka said.
“Yes,” Masha said. And because she was less frightened, she began to notice more things, and now she saw the red blood that stained the snow beneath the wolf. “It’s bleeding,” she told Babushka. “One of its legs is hurt, I think.”
“Bleeding?” Babushka said. “Bleeding and just lying there out in the open?”
“Yes,” said Masha, and as she said it, it struck her too as odd. “You’d think it would hide away to lick its wounds, like a dog,” she mused.
The rustle of cloth tore her attention from the window. Babushka, who for the last two weeks had barely raised her head, was sitting up. “Help me to the window.”
“Babushka…”
But Babushka was already unfolding herself from her place on the stove. Her limbs seemed as long as a grasshopper’s. But she was shorter than Masha now, and so light that it was easy for Masha to help her across the small room.
Babushka stood a long time gazing out the window. The sunlight gave her skin a strange translucent look, as if she were half a ghost already, and Masha felt a pain in her throat as it struck her once again that Babushka would soon die.
Babushka let out a breath. She turned and walked back to her bed, moving on her own two feet although Masha walked at her side to catch her in case she fell. But she needed no help until the very end, when she had to climb back on the stove.
She rested a few minutes from the exertion, while Masha stood beside her and listened to her rough breathing. But at last Babushka said, “That’s not a wolf, child. That’s a man who had been transformed by dark magic. Fetch your grandfather’s coat.”
“Babushka!” Masha cried in dismay. She knew the old stories, of course: if you put human clothing on a person who had been transformed into a wolf, that person would transform back. “Those are only stories. No one believes that these days.”
“I won’t be no one till I’ve died, Masha, my dove. That’s not a wolf and you know it as well as I do. Would a wolf scratch at the door to be let in? Would a wolf drag itself around the house just to put itself in view of our window? Would a wolf have let you through the door, child?”
“No,” Masha said. But her feet felt heavy as she crossed the room to take her grandfather’s dusty coat, which had hung on his old chair above his crutches ever since he died two years before.
“What if he eats me?”
“Take the ax if you’re so worried. But you won’t need it.”
Masha took it anyway, although it made awkward walking to carry the heavy coat over one arm, and the ax over her shoulder. It seemed a long walk around the corner of the little cottage.
The wolf lay just as it had lain when she looked at it through the window, on the blood-stained snow beneath the white birch trees at the edge of the clearing. There was more blood than Masha had seen through the window, and she could smell it now too, that rank coppery scent, and when the wolf lifted its head and looked at her with its amber eyes the old terror flared in her breast, and she stopped by the corner of the house and could not move forward.
But then the wolf’s tail twitched, with just the littlest hint of a wag, like a dog who wanted to make friends. Then its amber eyes fastened on the ax, and the wagging stopped, and the wolf and the girl faced each other across the expanse of snow. The wolf remained unmoving, as if it understood that death was coming and meant to meet it stoically.
Masha gave a sob of terror and let the ax fall from her shoulder onto the ground. Then she shook the coat open, and held it before her, and clutched it against her in fright when the wolf struggled to its feet.
Perhaps the wolf saw her terror, or perhaps its wounded leg simply gave out. It fell back on the snow, and waited as Masha crossed the clearing to it, watching her with its eyes so wide that the whites were visible just around its amber irises, as if it were afraid.
Masha tossed the coat over it, and then leapt back, as if she expected lightning to strike.
The change happened so fast that it would have been impossible to say just when it took place. One minute a wolf lay in the snow, its fur ruffled by the light breeze; and the next, the coat was over it, and it was a wolf no longer, but a human being.
Only not a man, but a girl, whose long red hair had a hint of a curl. And when the girl lifted her face, her eyes still amber even in this human form, Masha recognized her, although she had not seen her for three years.
“Raisa Fomovna!” Masha cried.
***
In the spring of 1911, when the snow was still on the ground, Mariya Petrovna walked through the woods to her grandmother’s house with a round loaf of rye bread in her basket.
Masha’s grandmother did not live in the village of Kostin with all the other peasants, but a little way outside it, in a cottage in a birch grove in the forest. She was a good help to have at your side during a birth or a death, and it was said that she’d saved Count Michugin himself when he was a little boy suffering from fever; which all in all meant that she was a person of power, and the villagers were a little afraid of her. As she grew old and bent, everyone began to call her Babushka, and the children began to whisper that she was a cousin of Baba Yaga, the old witch who lives in the forest in a cottage on chicken legs. One day Masha, quiet Masha, sweet little round-faced Masha, surprised everyone by punching big Foma Fomavitch in the nose after he made chicken noises at her.
No one talked about Baba Yaga in front of Masha after that.
A few of the girls in the village used to come to Babushka’s house to hear her tell stories. Not that they believed her stories of talking blini and men who turned into wolves, of course, for they had all been to the school Count Michugin set up in the village; but a good story is a good story. And perhaps there was something to the talk of Babushka’s powers, after all, for all these girls went on to great things, by the standards of the village, at least.
Alyona Emiliovna became a maid in Count Michugin’s St. Petersburg house, and married a footman. And Manya Ivanovna emigrated to America, and sent back enough money that her little brother and sister could go join her in that land where the streets are paved in gold. And red-haired Raisa Fomovna rose highest of all, for she won Count Michugin’s scholarship to go to university in St. Petersburg.
But Raisa Fomovna fell the farthest, too, for she joined up with a group of anarchists and tried to assassinate the tsar (actually it was a mere tsarist official, but no one was about to let facts get in the way of the story), and got sent to Siberia, which gave the good people of Kostin no end of satisfaction.
“But they were all so proud when she went to study in St. Petersburg,” Masha protested to Babushka. “Why are they happy it ended like this?”
“Pride and jealousy are two sides of the same coin,” Babushka told her. “If you toss it up in the air, you never know which way it will come down.”
Masha did not understand. When Raisa Fomovna had gone off to study in St. Petersburg, Masha had been so jealous she could spit. And yet she seemed to be the only person in Kostin who took no satisfaction in Raisa Fomovna’s fall, but grieved over it as if it were her own wound.
But Masha did not expect to understand everything Babushka said, for Babushka was old and wise, and Masha young and inexperienced.
For alone of the foursome who once sat on Babushka’s stove to listen to her stories, Masha had never gone far. She was the youngest of the four, the plainest, the shyest, who sat in the shadows and listened quietly while the other three laughed and talked, and knew she had the pleasure of their company only because she was Babushka’s granddaughter, and came as it were with the house.
They all went on to great things, and meanwhile the farthest Masha had been from Kostin was the year she spent as a maid on Count Michugin’s estate. There she picked up a few French words like baubles, for the Michugins often spoke French to each other.
But then last summer Babushka had taken ill, and Masha had come back to Kostin to take care of her. All winter Babushka had been failing; and now the spring had come, and Babushka was no better.
Masha had walked into the village that morning to visit her brother Tikhon and his wife Anna and their four children, who were soon to be five, for Anna was big with child. Anna packed a round loaf of good rye bread in Masha’s basket, and invited Masha to stay for a cup of tea; but Masha said, “No, I don’t like to leave Babushka alone.”
Anna nodded, and looked grave, for everyone knew that Babushka was dying.
In the village the snow was all melted, except in the shadows of the houses. But in the woods, the snow persisted, and Masha walked along the path in her felt boots. That path wound up past Babushka’s house, and before Babushka was so sick they used to follow it to secret places in the woods to gather mushrooms or berries or the mosses Babushka used to stanch bleeding wounds.
Masha had never reached the end of the path, and Babushka said there was no end to it, and it just wound on forever until it met the road, for paths, she said, are like streams, which converge on the rivers which flow to the sea.
And Masha was thinking about this as she walked. She had never seen the sea, but in Count Michugin’s house there was a great oil painting of a crystal blue bay, with a high blue sky and a gay little boat with a bright red sail, which seemed as different from the rowboats Masha knew as a plow horse from one of Count Michugin’s racehorses. Masha imagined following the path till it met the road that wound on down to the sea (although she knew, of course, that Babushka had only been speaking figuratively, and roads flowed to cities rather than oceans), where she would stand on the shore and smell the salt air and watch the boats sail past beneath the shining blue sky.
And so, lost in her thoughts, Masha didn’t see the wolf until she reached Babushka’s clearing. But there it was, amber eyed and big as life, lying almost at Babushka’s door.
***
Masha had grown up hearing stories of the wolves. They were fearsome beasts, the wolves of Russia, who moved in packs so vast that they darkened the hills, and feared neither man nor beast. Everyone knew the story about the bridal couple who did not hear the wolves howling above the tinkling of the bells on their sleigh until it was too late: though the groom whipped the horses to a frenzy, and the beautiful bride clung to the sleigh with the moonlight bright on her tears, they could not outpace the pack, and the wolves dragged the bride and groom from the sleigh and rent them in the snow, and nothing was ever found of them, unless perhaps (this was a detail Raisa Fomovna liked to add) one of their silver sleigh bells had been found, years later, in the belly of a wolf killed in one of Count Michugin’s wolf hunts.
And so when Masha saw the wolf, she nearly gave herself up for dead. She froze stock still, clutching her basket in both hands, and the wolf filled her vision like it was the only thing in the world: its amber eyes, the reddish tinge like dried blood on its fur, the glistening white fangs that must lurk behind those black lips.
She must not run. Masha had learned this lesson young, with the dogs of the village, and it must hold good for wolves too. If you run, they will chase you.
She took a step forward instead. Her foot crunched on the snow.
The wolf’s ears flicked toward her. It lifted its head. Masha screamed, half in panic and half in fury, and ran toward it full tilt.
The wolf cowered back. If Masha had been in fit state to see anything, she would have seen that it was trembling. But she was in terror, and saw only that it had given her a little space, and she used it to open the door and fling herself inside, and drag the door shut behind her.
“Masha!” Babushka cried, as Masha struggled to lift the heavy bar across the door. “What is wrong?”
“A wolf!” Masha cried. She dropped the bar into place with a sob of relief and pressed herself against the door, as if the wolf might try to batter it down with its weight.
There was a scratch on the door, like a dog that wanted to get in. Masha’s strength gave way to terror. She bounded across the room as she had bounded across the clearing, and flung herself on her grandmother like a frightened child. Babushka’s thin arms went around her neck, as light as a bird’s wings. “Masha, Mashuchka,” Babushka murmured. “You’re safe now. Our walls are thick, and saints Cyril and Methodius will protect us.” For an icon of the saints hung on the wall in the cottage’s good place, gazing down with their benign bearded faces. “Go, give thanks for your deliverance, and then stir the kasha, that’s a good girl.”
And so Masha thanked St. Cyril and St. Methodius, who invented an alphabet for Russia in the days when it was still the Kievan Rus. And then she stirred the kasha, and fed Babushka her dinner, and wiped the porridge from Babushka’s chin afterwards, and was almost calm again when she happened to glance out the window.
And there was the wolf, lying in the snow, so perfectly in the center of the window that it looked almost like it had framed itself for a picture.
Masha stood a moment, almost paralyzed again with terror. But the window was too small for a wolf to get through, and the walls were thick; and then the wolf licked its nose, like a dog, and Masha’s terror ebbed. “The wolf’s still here,” she said, almost lightly, in the tone she might tell something to one of Tikhon’s little children, so as not to frighten them.
“You can see it through the window?” Babushka said.
“Yes,” Masha said. And because she was less frightened, she began to notice more things, and now she saw the red blood that stained the snow beneath the wolf. “It’s bleeding,” she told Babushka. “One of its legs is hurt, I think.”
“Bleeding?” Babushka said. “Bleeding and just lying there out in the open?”
“Yes,” said Masha, and as she said it, it struck her too as odd. “You’d think it would hide away to lick its wounds, like a dog,” she mused.
The rustle of cloth tore her attention from the window. Babushka, who for the last two weeks had barely raised her head, was sitting up. “Help me to the window.”
“Babushka…”
But Babushka was already unfolding herself from her place on the stove. Her limbs seemed as long as a grasshopper’s. But she was shorter than Masha now, and so light that it was easy for Masha to help her across the small room.
Babushka stood a long time gazing out the window. The sunlight gave her skin a strange translucent look, as if she were half a ghost already, and Masha felt a pain in her throat as it struck her once again that Babushka would soon die.
Babushka let out a breath. She turned and walked back to her bed, moving on her own two feet although Masha walked at her side to catch her in case she fell. But she needed no help until the very end, when she had to climb back on the stove.
She rested a few minutes from the exertion, while Masha stood beside her and listened to her rough breathing. But at last Babushka said, “That’s not a wolf, child. That’s a man who had been transformed by dark magic. Fetch your grandfather’s coat.”
“Babushka!” Masha cried in dismay. She knew the old stories, of course: if you put human clothing on a person who had been transformed into a wolf, that person would transform back. “Those are only stories. No one believes that these days.”
“I won’t be no one till I’ve died, Masha, my dove. That’s not a wolf and you know it as well as I do. Would a wolf scratch at the door to be let in? Would a wolf drag itself around the house just to put itself in view of our window? Would a wolf have let you through the door, child?”
“No,” Masha said. But her feet felt heavy as she crossed the room to take her grandfather’s dusty coat, which had hung on his old chair above his crutches ever since he died two years before.
“What if he eats me?”
“Take the ax if you’re so worried. But you won’t need it.”
Masha took it anyway, although it made awkward walking to carry the heavy coat over one arm, and the ax over her shoulder. It seemed a long walk around the corner of the little cottage.
The wolf lay just as it had lain when she looked at it through the window, on the blood-stained snow beneath the white birch trees at the edge of the clearing. There was more blood than Masha had seen through the window, and she could smell it now too, that rank coppery scent, and when the wolf lifted its head and looked at her with its amber eyes the old terror flared in her breast, and she stopped by the corner of the house and could not move forward.
But then the wolf’s tail twitched, with just the littlest hint of a wag, like a dog who wanted to make friends. Then its amber eyes fastened on the ax, and the wagging stopped, and the wolf and the girl faced each other across the expanse of snow. The wolf remained unmoving, as if it understood that death was coming and meant to meet it stoically.
Masha gave a sob of terror and let the ax fall from her shoulder onto the ground. Then she shook the coat open, and held it before her, and clutched it against her in fright when the wolf struggled to its feet.
Perhaps the wolf saw her terror, or perhaps its wounded leg simply gave out. It fell back on the snow, and waited as Masha crossed the clearing to it, watching her with its eyes so wide that the whites were visible just around its amber irises, as if it were afraid.
Masha tossed the coat over it, and then leapt back, as if she expected lightning to strike.
The change happened so fast that it would have been impossible to say just when it took place. One minute a wolf lay in the snow, its fur ruffled by the light breeze; and the next, the coat was over it, and it was a wolf no longer, but a human being.
Only not a man, but a girl, whose long red hair had a hint of a curl. And when the girl lifted her face, her eyes still amber even in this human form, Masha recognized her, although she had not seen her for three years.
“Raisa Fomovna!” Masha cried.
