Enchantment (35 page)

The gods and wizards of this world were no match for Baba Yaga, even in her weakened state. She got the better of every opponent. And every ally, too, for that matter. Even death. Someday she’d find a way around that, too. If feebleminded old gods like Mikola Mozhaiski could do it, so could she.

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 preexisting
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.”