Baba Yaga Part One

CW: Domestic Violence

PART ONE

 All my life, I had lived in a little house on the edge of a dark forest. The forest was said to be the home of a witch who ate children. Even the men only ever hunted on the outskirts of the forest. My mother was a housewife, cooking and cleaning, and trying to please my father. My father was a hunter, a drinker and a gambler. A huge, red-faced man who would make his displeasure known to all. Especially my mother and I. We often bore the brunt of his rages.

 When I was sixteen, I went into the forest. I knew I had to get as far away as I could, so they couldn’t bring me back. I had tried to ask for help before, and no one had ever believed me. It was a quiet, peaceful little village that we lived in, where nothing out of the ordinary ever seemed to happen, and it seemed that they wanted to keep it that way. Even if it meant ignoring things that went on right under their noses. I wondered what else went on behind closed doors. I had tried to ask for help, and no one had given it, I had tried to run away before, but they had always caught up with me. It was too far to the next village, they always caught me somewhere down the road, my legs no match for their horses.

 At sixteen, I was old enough to be married. I would soon be engaged to another man, who drank and would beat me and our children. I would leave my father’s home only to become another copy of my mother, cowed, afraid and hurt.

 So there was one choice left. The forest. Even though we lived next to it and it was a part of our lives, everyone feared the forest. It was dark, and the trees made strange noises in the dark, as if talking to one another. It was old and dark, full of fir trees. The trees were so thick and the forest so large, you could only see a few metres in from the outside, so what lay within was forever mysterious. Even the grown men would not venture into the forest, nor did they dare to cut down the trees, felling instead the saplings that grew near the river. It was said that a witch lived there, and she fed upon children that wandered into the woods.

 By sixteen years old, I still half believed this story, even though none of the children of our village had gone missing in the last hundred years or so, occasionally a sheep would wander off and be devoured by wolves, and the adults would bring it to the town square and show us the mangled corpse and tell us that Baba Yaga the witch had done this, so we better stay out of the woods. Anyway, I didn’t care if Baba Yaga lived in the woods or not, or even if she ate children. All I knew was that surely the woods was the last place they would look for me. So that was where I headed that day. Into the woods.

 Inside the woods the trees were so thick, the sunlight barely shone through, and I found myself in a shadowy world, where dust motes danced in the dusky light, and everything seemed so still and silent, as if waiting for something. The only sounds were the far off cries of birds, and my own footfalls, echoing in the silence. I ran my hand over the trees as I passed, their rough bark rasping my skin, feeling the ancient years and secret knowledge deep withing them, and wishing I knew their language and could share their secrets. In their stoic silence, they had watched generations of my people live and die. The memories of generations were woven into their bark, pulsing in their green veins and their green blood. I wondered if sometimes they wanted to scream at the injustice, to take up arms, but were stuck here, unable to do a thing. Or perhaps that was just my own thoughts and feelings. Our lives were so short to them, the buzzing of a fly, gone before they even noticed.

 I pushed on through the forest. You can have a lot of determination at sixteen, especially if you have something to run from. I walked on until my legs ached and I was dripping with sweat, and still there was no end in sight. The forest seemed to stretch into eternity. I began to wonder if I had lost my way, if I was walking in circles. For the first time the thought occurred to me that I could die in this forest. Would the years of fear and hurt I was running from end in this, a slow painful death by starvation or being eaten by wolves?

I was musing on these dark thoughts as I came out into the light. I blinked in the sudden brightness. My eyes had grown so accustomed to the dim light, the sudden sunlight was blinding. When I could see again, I looked around me. At first, I thought I had come out of the forest, but then I realised I was merely standing in a large clearing. The golden afternoon light was pouring down on me, by which I realised I had been walking for most of the day. The ground was covered with the softest green moss here, so soft I wanted to lie down on it and sleep. But I didn’t, because standing in the very middle of the clearing, was a little cottage. That was when I knew that the stories were true. A witch did live in the middle of the woods. And I was standing right in front of her home.

 It didn’t look like I had always imagined it. It wasn’t dark and frightening. It was a log cabin, that clearly must have taken a lot of work to make. Around the edges of the roof hung herbs, like you might expect of a witch's cottage, but they smelled aromatic, and made me think of spices and delicious food. My mouth watered at the thought. Instead of sitting on chicken's legs, the house seemed to sit firmly on the ground, and there was no fence tipped with the skulls of children. And yet, if this house did not belong to a witch, to whom did it belong?

 As I stood there, a woman came out of the house, a grey cat twining in and out of her legs as she walked. She did not look at the cat as she walked, but gracefully stepped around it. The cat looked at me, and made a deep purring sound. It was a particularly masculine purr, and I felt at once that the cat was a he. The woman turned and looked at me. She was tall, with a very clear complexion, wide eyes, and long, curly hair. She smiled, and her smile was friendly. There was no sign at all that she was a child eater. A long green dress fell to her ankles, and her dainty feet were bare.

 “Are you lost?”

I didn’t want to say I was running away from home, so I just agreed that I was.

“You must be starving, come in.”

I was following a witch into her house. Was I mad? Well, better she eat me than I go back home. I followed her inside.

The hut was small but cosy. A fire blazed inside, and a cauldron boiled merrily above it. There was a rough-hewn table, two chairs and  a behind a small dividing screen, a large and comfortable looking mattress at the other side of the room. Everything was clean and well tended. From the roof hung more collections of herbs, along with strings of shells and beads that caught the sunlight. She clearly was proud of her little house.

The witch sat me at the table and gave me thick slices of fresh bread slathered with fresh berry preserve. I ate hungrily. There couldn’t be any children in bread and jam, so surely this was safe?

The witch laughed to see me stuffing myself. Her laugh was pleasant, friendly. Not the witch’s cackle I would have expected. Perhaps I had got her wrong, perhaps she was no witch, but a normal woman? But why was a normal woman living in the middle of the woods alone? Women didn’t do that. They lived with their fathers until marriage, and then they moved in with their husbands and raised children. I knew no other way.

After I finished eating, my tiredness caught up with me. I could not stop yawning. The woman led me to her own bed and tucked me in, promising I would be safe. I was too tired to fight her. If she was a witch, let her eat me. I would die happy after that meal.

I must have slept through the rest of the day, because it was morning when I awakened.

All my fingers and toes were still there. I had slept better than I had for the last few years in my parents home. My body already knew what my head was still unsure of. I was safe here.

 The woman knocked gently on the divider. “Come in”, I called shyly. She entered the room, barefoot and smiling, in her long green dress.

 “Hello, my dear, breakfast is on the table when you are ready.” She shot me a shy smile and left.

I dressed quickly, eager to learn more about my strange new companion. When I came out, she was waiting for me, a large pot of porridge bubbling on the stove. She ladled big bowls out for us, not like the measly portions I was used to. I looked at the porridge distrustfully. There didn’t seem to be any children in it. It just looked like good oats, not even any weevils to be seen. Gingerly, I took a spoonful. It was good. It had honey in it, cinnamon and other spices I didn’t recognise. It was quite possibly the most delicious thing I had ever tasted.

 After breakfast, my new friend went to the spinning wheel in the corner and began to spin. I came over and she gave me raw wool to card.

 “So, my dear,” she asked, as she wove, “what should I call you?”

 I thought of the tales of Baba Yaga using children’s names to call them into the forest at night. They never came home. But those were stupid stories told to frighten children. Sooner or later, I realised that there were worse things in our own village than child-eating witches.

 “My name’s Katya,” I told her, but I always wished it were Maraya.”

 “Then I will call you Maraya. And you can call me Yanuschka, if you like. That is my real name.”

 “It’s a lovely name”, I ventured shyly. She smiled.

 For the rest of that day, we didn’t talk much, but Yanuschka sang while she spun. These weren’t the fast and bawdy beer hall songs the fathers in the village sang, nor the sad folktales of love and betrayal our mothers sang. These were old, timeless, the words unrecognisable. Yet somehow you heard them in your heart.

 The wool fibres she gave me to card were different to any I had seen, they seemed to be all one long thread, tangled upon itself. The thread was soft and seemed to slip through my fingers as if it wasn’t really there at all. After a while, I realised if I focused on Yanushka’s singing instead, it somehow became easier, as if the song guided my hands.

 When I looked up from my work, the sky outside the window was as purple as the bruises on my arms. Yanuschka looked up too. “Do you want to know what I do with all that thread?” she asked. I nodded silently. There was something different about this evening, something magical. Questions seemed blasphemous.

 As we stepped out into the evening, our arms full of balls of thread, the cat twined around our ankles, soft as a shadow. I was glad that he liked me. Nobody had ever liked me before, and now I had two friends.

 I followed Yanuschka around the house, as she began to weave the thread among the trees, around trunks and over and under branches, singing her strange song. Her fingers moved so fast  they were almost a blur. The patterns that she formed were unspeakably beautiful, intricate geometric patterns that seemed to make pictures you could only see out of the corner of your eye. I thought that it was a story, but I wasn’t sure.

 When Yanuschka was done, the weaving encircled the house and clearing. I sensed that it would protect us through the long night. Protect us not from witches and other fairy tales, but from the real darkness and evil of the world.  

 Inside, we lit candles, and they filled the room with their flickering light, a sanctuary in a sea of darkness. I knew now that these candles couldn’t be made of the boiled fat of children. After all, most children where I lived were very skinny. Not half enough fat in them to make candles out of.

 Dinner was vegetable stew, cooked in a big pot with herbs and spices I again didn’t recognise. It was even more delicious than the porridge. Yanuschka winked at me, knowing my thoughts. “No, I never eat children, much too stringy, all bones!” she laughed. “I only eat fruit and vegetables, things that earth gives up willingly, I never kill a living creature. Although I haven’t managed to convince Vanya yet.” The fluffy grey cat gave what sounded like a snort of derision at her comment. Nothing was going to stop him eating mice.

 I was so tired from the excitement of my first day as a runaway that I fell asleep at the table. Through the haze of dreams, I felt Yanuschka help me to my feet and lead me to the little side room, where she gently tucked me into bed.

 I dreamed that night that I was a mouse and Vanya was chasing me, only at some point, I realised he was my father in a fur hat, an axe clasped in his hand.

 Despite my nightmare, when I awoke, I felt more rested than I ever had.

 “Did you sleep well, dear Maraya?” Yanuschka asked at breakfast.

 “I did, but I had odd dreams.”

 “That’s not surprising, considering this place,” Yanuschka smiled. “This is a magical place, hidden from the rest of the world. Dreams here all have a kernel of truth in them.

 That thought gave me a twinge of foreboding. What had been the truth in my dream, that my father would kill me, as I often feared he would in his rages? I didn’t want to think about that man, the monster who had dominated my life until yesterday. I wanted to forget the outside world and start a new life with Yanuschka and Vanya.

 After breakfast, Yanuschka and I worked at making thread again. That evening, I helped her weave fresh webs of protection around the clearing. The old ones had disappeared over night. She told me that the wool was actually spiderwebs, gathered before the first rays of the sun touched the forest.

 Slowly, our days fell into a routine, days blurred into weeks. We spent our days in a companionable silence, except for Yanushka’s singing. In the evenings, if I wasn’t too tired, we would end up on cushions in front of the fire. Vanya would curl up in my lap and Yanuschka would put her arm around us and tell us stories. Not the stories of doomed heroes and wicked witches that my grandmother told, but funny every day stories. Funny things that Vanya had done, or the time she found a bird’s egg and raised the chick herself. The chick saw Vanya first when it hatched and thought he was its mother. It followed him around until it was grown, and flew away. It was the only bird Vanya never tried to chase. It still visited sometimes and she hoped I would see it one day.

 One day. Perhaps she wanted me to stay for good. The thought filled me with warmth and happiness. To be more than just an extra mouth to feed. To live with someone who wanted me there. 

Read part 2 here

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This story has been a long time in the writing. I first began it in 2011, lost most of the notes (which were in hardcopy) until 2021, and finally finished it in January this year. 

(c)opyright Laura Morrigan 2011-2022