Enchantment (36 page)

“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 fulfil 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
me
.”

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.”