Mrs. Yaga

by Michal Wojcik

Mrs. Yaga

For all the Baba Yagas out there.

Aurelia grew up in a cabin a little ways outside of town, the one with the red mailbox and the twisted iron fence surmounted by skulls. Sometimes the house would groan and shift and flex its long chicken feet; every so often it would stretch out its legs, lifting Aurelia’s room up over the trees and making crockery slide and smash. Then Mrs. Yaga would speak to the walls and soothe their domicile into settling back down again, to fold its legs like a hen does. An old black-and-white TV stayed perpetually switched on and soundless in the living room, drawing static off the aerial that spindled from the peak of the thatch roof. No wires came in off the main line but there was always power for the TV and the radio and the Mac Classic; as for a phone line, Mrs. Yaga had a cell.

“Did you have to do it, baba?” Aurelia asked as she washed dishes. She was nineteen, her hair black as electrical tape and her skin as white as bone. “He was so sweet.”

“You think I took you under my roof just to let the next chłopak with a strong chin and a guitar sweep you away?” Mrs. Yaga cackled, bending into a fridge that dated from the 40s at the very least. She didn’t look like Aurelia’s mother (because she wasn’t), not even her grandmother (because she wasn’t that either). She was old, gnarled like old branches left out in the sun and dry as a pomegranate husk, a collection of spikes and corners. She always wore fur over her shoulders, winter or summer. She always wore a necklace of claws from bears and wolves and tigers that clinked wherever she went.

“Greg doesn’t play a guitar. He draws webcomics,” Aurelia replied stubbornly, making the water splash with the vigour of her scrubbing.

Mrs. Yaga extracted an oversized egg coloured deep violet, clicking her tongue happily before slamming the fridge shut. One tap from her fingernail and a small hole cracked in the egg’s top. She held that to her lips, slurping down its contents, liquid red and thick as blood dribbling down from the corners of her mouth. “Don’t worry,” she said. “If he’s worthy of you he’ll be back. The tasks are simple.”

She wiped her chin clean with her sleeve and shook the shell, eliciting a dull rattle, then split it open on the counter. Out tumbled a foetus with a lizard’s tail and a rooster’s head, its eyes screwed shut tight. Mrs. Yaga held it up and squinted at it a moment before popping the creature into her mouth, crunching the bones with her pointed old teeth. She tossed the broken shell into the compost bin.

“All he has to do is bypass the gatekeeper of the thrice-tenth kingdom and bring me a fern flower, a dragon’s heart, and a rusałka’s lock of hair. Easy.”

“They never come back,” said Aurelia. “Not Daniel. Not Brendan. Not Steve.” The three suitors never returned from their easy tasks: the first was killed by a great grizzly (unlike our grizzlies, the great grizzly is wise and terrible and prowls the Mountains of Dusk leaving the clean-picked corpses of mammoths in its wake); the second was frozen by a basilisk’s stare; the third, less stupid than the others, simply wrote off Aurelia and her baba as irrational and ceased his romantic advances.

“You deserved better, my little chick. A girl with your hips needs a true bohater. Besides, I gave him a sword, which is more than I ever gave the others. Isn’t that good enough?”

Aurelia bit back her next words, let the slosh of porcelain plates in water drift up over their absence. Why must you do this to me? You aren’t my mother. You aren’t of my blood. I don’t even know your first name; all the years I’ve been here you’ve only been baba to me.

Mrs. Yaga leaned in closer, claws clicking together, unfelt wind stirring her wild white hair. She’d always seemed to know what Aurelia thought, her deep grey eyes filled with knowing. But now she only grunted before shuffling out of the kitchen, leaving Aurelia to wipe the counter and sweep the floor.

Mrs. Yaga had no steady job, received no regular income or pension cheques. Whatever money she made came from the strange trinkets she sold every Thursday at the market: charms and amulets and love potions and little statues of Slavic gods that no Canadian would have known but that they bought anyway. Sometimes strangers would come from afar asking for private audience, promising countless rewards, but if Mrs. Yaga decided to aid them she seldom asked for cash. Instead she requested less tangible things: a stray dream caught in a web, a bundle of love letters exchanged before the First World War, their soft pencilled marks long faded into illegibility, the soul of a firstborn son. These she all kept in a great iron chest that doubled as a coffee table, until she had need of them.

As far as Aurelia knew she was one of these gifts, left here by her parents after some great favour, though Mrs. Yaga didn’t keep her in the chest. Instead she ordered Aurelia about—to tend the cows and chickens and demons, keep the cabin clean, stoke the fire, cook meals, awaken the skulls at night so that their gazes would roam the yard like searchlights. In return, Mrs. Yaga taught her how to read and do arithmetic and advanced chemistry, how to speak Polish and Russian and Czech, how to churn butter and spin wool. Later, she tried to teach Aurelia how to chant spells, but Aurelia was rubbish at magic. She could sing the words prettily enough, but she could not make the words come true. She couldn’t even transform a secret visitor into a pin to stick in her embroidery, to hide away from baba’s prying—the most basic of spells for any ward of Mrs. Yaga.

The one thing Aurelia didn’t learn much about was Mrs. Yaga herself. She was unaccountably old, and yet she seemed to have no past, no youth, as if she came into the world already bent and bruised. Only once had Mrs. Yaga relented to Aurelia’s pestering about what her life had been before coming to Canada, saying, “I am a Yaga of a sisterhood of Yagas. When folk came across the water to this land from Ukraine and Poland and Russia, they brought their babas with them. I was a jędza baba of Poland, so I joined my sisters and crossed the sea in my mortar. Wherever the Slavs go, the Yagas follow.”

That was as much an explanation as she ever gave.

Aurelia had a lingering sense that the old lady was constantly appraising her with eyes that betrayed gnawing hunger. She feared that one day Mrs. Yaga would bake her in the oven and eat her, but that hadn’t happened. Not yet, not for nineteen years.

The mortar still loomed in the attic, but these days Mrs. Yaga preferred driving the pickup she kept parked outside. The crone puttered into town that night, leaving Aurelia behind to lie in her room and listen to Greg’s mix tape on her battered old Walkman and think on what life might’ve been like if she weren’t Mrs. Yaga’s ward, the people she might have met. The boys she might have met.

Since she turned thirteen, boys cast longing glances when she ran errands in town. They were terrified of Mrs. Yaga, though, who would grab tight hold of Aurelia with her bony fingers and affix any who stared with the evil eye. So when Aurelia started going out alone some years later, few men worked up the courage to talk to her. Even less to try and kiss her. And inevitably, if things went far enough and Aurelia couldn’t keep the relationship a secret anymore (she never could keep secrets from Mrs. Yaga, baba knew them all) then her suitor would meet Mrs. Yaga and Mrs. Yaga would send him on a quest.

Poor Greg. He was by far her favourite. He’d come back from uni for the summer and would wait every week with a bouquet of hand-picked flowers on the path Aurelia took from the grocery store. She should have done more to resist his advances, drive him away, because now Mrs. Yaga had sent him to the thrice-tenth kingdom wherefrom few mortals could return.

The Walkman stopped playing, electromagnetic tape spilling out in one big tangle when Aurelia tried to pull the cassette free. She slipped off the headphones, threw the Walkman on the floor and balled her hands into fists. She grabbed a jacket and a shawl from the closet and then her handbag, and made her way up the twisty shambling staircase and the rickety ladder to the topmost floor.

She hesitated when she saw the mortar big and round and filled with shadow. She froze and listened for footsteps or the sound of a truck pulling into the driveway. All she heard were the usual pops and groans and whispers of the house. A thrill shook her, fear and excitement tangling as she gripped the long pestle leaning against the wall beside the skis and bicycle wheels, and the pestle seemed to respond, warming to her touch. Aurelia took it with her to the shutters and threw them open, startling the ravens perched on the ledge beyond. Dust swirled up in the wind, motes catching the dying sunlight before blowing away.

She leaned on the pestle and looked out over the road and the forest for one long moment before squaring her shoulders and turning back, hoisting herself into the pestle’s bowl. The inside was dark and moist against her legs and thighs. It too responded to her, accepting her, letting her settle in its maw, and when she pushed against the floorboards with the pestle, the mortar rose a few inches into the air then lurched in an unsteady spinning way towards the open window.

Aurelia fought the wobble that threatened to spill her, brought the pestle around like a paddle and hastily rowed at the sky. She’d never ridden the mortar before, but she’d seen Mrs. Yaga depart in its embrace and she’d read the old books in the library, the ones written in Old Church Slavonic by hand on vellum, and she’d also gone canoeing once or twice. So she succeeded in steadying the beastly container as she passed the window frame and out over the yard. Her brow furrowed in determination as she swiftly brought the mortar to bear, passing beyond the fence, beyond this sleepy town in northern British Columbia, and over the wavering boundary to the thrice-tenth kingdom.

An hour elapsed before Aurelia spotted the lair of the dragon under starlight and moonlight, the entrance to its cavern folded between the heels of the Mountains of Dusk. Smoke billowed from there in intertwining streams, threading together like rope. I’ll wait for him here, Aurelia thought, directing the mortar to descend onto the narrow path to the dragon’s gates. She stowed the pestle away and hoisted herself out from the bowl, her legs cramped and muscles aching, and she tumbled indelicately in the dirt. When she lifted her head, she saw something glimmer in the rocks above her, and she reached into her handbag for a flashlight before wandering up the path.

It was the sword. A sabre, its hilt hammered together in the form of an eagle’s head. The flashlight’s beam went this way and that, lancing the sheer cliffs above before settling on Greg’s footprints leading down from the mountain. Then it moved to a great disturbance of shattered boulders, tumbled stone. Gregory had seen the dragon, that was plain. He’d dropped the sword and fled.

Aurelia took up the blade and sat on a nearby stone, idly contemplating the size, the weight, before her gaze went back to the dragon’s cave and the smoke that issued in puffs with each of the dragon’s breaths. Then back down the path, to wherever Greg might be. He was probably back in British Columbia, the thrice-tenth kingdom peeling away until he emerged on some highway somewhere and hitched a ride back home. Memories of rusałki and other forest demons would fade until they became but dreams, mere fodder for essays while he completed his folklore degree. He would forget Aurelia, too, and all she’d have left of Greg would be wilted flowers and a broken mix tape.

Why do they always listen to Mrs. Yaga? Are they so afraid, that they’d rather chance the thrice-tenth kingdom than whisk me away themselves? Do they think I’m someone they can own, something they can barter for? Aren’t I prize enough without a quest attached?

And lastly: A fucking mix tape?

No. Fuck no. A man needed to do more than that. I need to do more than that.

Aurelia gripped the sabre tight and headed up the path towards the smell of ash and brimstone.

Mrs. Yaga was waiting in the yard by the chicken coup when Aurelia glided down in the mortar. Three months had gone by, three long hard months etched into Aurelia’s face and the cracked skin of her hands. Her jeans and jacket were replaced by a Polish peasant’s dress and cloak of deepest indigo. The old witch said nothing when Aurelia clambered out from the pestle and reached in again for a rough leather sack. The young woman said nothing when she opened the mouth and deposited the sack’s contents at Mrs. Yaga’s feet.

A delicate flower with five golden petals each the size of a hand, a ghostly white light at its centre flicking about like a cat’s pupil. It smelled of mangos. A bound cord of sea-green hair. A heart that glowed with inner fire, not much larger than a human heart, and yet clearly the heart of something other.

Mrs. Yaga stared into Aurelia’s eyes and a smile touched those cracked and bloody lips. “Why did you bring these to me? You are no suitor, my little chick. I did not send you on this quest.”

They stared at each other a while longer, measuring.

“I am my own suitor,” answered Aurelia.

“Ah.” Mrs. Yaga nodded, then she thrust her chin towards the mortar. “You stole that from me.”

“You weren’t using it.”

Mrs. Yaga clicked her tongue, stooped and dug her fingers into the dragon’s heart, hefting it, admiring the glow.

“I—” Aurelia began, stopped herself, began again. “I always wondered, why only the men were allowed to be bohaterowie. Why you only gave quests to them.”

Mrs. Yaga shook her head. “I never gave quests to them. The fools would never have finished them, never would have trodden the dark paths of the world’s mirror and emerged unscathed. It was not in their hearts.” She paused, pierced Aurelia with her gaze. “The quests were for you, when you realized you had strength to complete them. Your training is done, Aurelia Wiśniewska. You may go where you will.”

Aurelia swallowed, nodded. “Thank you, baba.”

“Don’t mention it.” Mrs. Yaga was already shuffling towards the cabin, waving a hand dismissively, and Aurelia watched as the mortar slowly wobbled after its master.

Then she turned to the gate, and the road, and the world beyond the fence of skulls, and began to walk.

The End

Inspirations & Influences

Of course I was going to write a story about the Baba Yaga at some point. That was decided when my father departed for a refugee camp near Rome, beginning the long journey that would take me from a small village in Poland to the Canadian north.

I grew up in the Yukon Territory, for the most part, going from a Polish home to an English school and back again, growing up between Polish and mainstream western Canadian culture. I never did feel like I “fit” in the latter, but when I finally did make the trip back to my place of birth, I failed to find that sense of belonging I so desperately wanted there.

That was my borderland of identity, negotiating between one culture and another. In Polish folklore, the borders are where witches dwell. Witches buried their spells “na granice,” on the borders. And the most powerful witch of all lives in the borderlands between the field and the forest, between the human world and something other: an old woman with wild hair and bony legs and iron teeth. She lives in a house perched atop chicken-feet, and she flies over the woods in an over-sized mortar. She is a mainstay of Slavic fairy tales, appearing as jędza baba in Poland, jeźibaba in the Czech Republic, and (most famously) as Baba Yaga in Russia.

She’s fascinating, unpredictable. She’s fascinating because she’s unpredictable. For while Baba Yaga is a cannibal skilled in dark magic who holds a grudge against humanity, she will just as often help heroes as oppose them—by giving them useful items for their quest, by dispensing wisdom, by granting safe passage into the land beyond her strange hut.

Baba Yaga is the ultimate liminal figure, forged from criss-crossing identities, indelibly imprinted in Slavic culture as the eternal mother and yet living apart from it. I’ve been irresistibly drawn to her as a child and even more so as an adult, I think, because I’ve internalized her as a folkloric reflection of the immigrant experience.

That personal interpretation came into play when I started writing Mrs. Yaga. The initial spark, though, was encountering Midori Snyder and Taiko Haessler’s paired poems The Baba Yaga Duet about a year ago. It encapsulates Baba Yaga’s contradictions so well:

My daughter when you were small

How I wanted to eat you.

From there, I inevitably started to think about Baba Yaga’s daughter, who appears in a few fairy tales (though almost never as an antagonist). Surely she reflected what it was like to grow up na granice best! Yet she didn’t seem to appreciate her mother at all. Take, for instance, “The Bogatyrs Soska, Usynia, Gorynia, and Duginia,” where four Russian heroes (bogatyrs) encounter Baba Yaga and must do various tasks for her or face mortal punishment. Baba Yaga’s daughter hides them from her mother and helps them defeat the old woman in a final battle. The daughter is an aid and the ultimate prize, trapped in her mother’s home and waiting for deliverance.

That narrative doesn’t satisfy me...I like Baba Yaga too much to rejoice in her death. More importantly, I couldn’t accept the daughter meekly bringing about her mother’s destruction simply because the heroes were the heroes and that was the end of it.

I set out writing Mrs. Yaga in response to “The Bogatyrs Soska, Usynia, Gorynia, and Duginia” and stories like it, this time telling the tale from the daughter’s point of view so I could puzzle out how things got to that point. Yet the simple act of choosing that viewpoint ended up making me decide she hadn’t. All this was just one more of the many tests Baba Yaga foisted on the young peasant girls she allowed into her home. So the story diverged widely as more elements demanded inclusion. Well, yeah Baba Yaga immigrated to Canada along with all the Poles and Ukrainians who came here because western Canada is na granice, duh her penchant for testing the heroes would apply just as well to her adopted daughter, because she’d expect her daughter to become a hero in her own right. The bogatyrs vying for the daughter’s hand weren’t interesting to me. I wanted to explore the relationship between the daughter and her baba, between a second generation immigrant and her parent from the homeland. So I did.

That is the nature of retelling a fairy tale, adding our own lived experience to the bones of the story and coming out with something new. Mrs. Yaga is my small contribution to the corpus of tales surrounding Baba Yaga, as interpreted through my youth in an immigrant family. I hope you enjoyed it.

A Chat with Michal Wojcik

Mrs. Yaga features Baba Yaga, a prominent mythical figure in Slavic culture. What drew you to this specific character? Are there any particular themes in the existing stories featuring Baba Yaga that you wanted to explore and subvert in your version?

I don’t think you can escape Baba Yaga if you have a Slavic background—she looms over tales and legends in an awe-inspiring way, and stands out as a truly unique archetype. I talked about my personal connection with the Baba Yaga in my “Inspirations and Influences” essay, about her chaotic, border-straddling nature. The first story where I became aware of this was “The Frog Princess.” It features a trio of Baba Yagas as the princess’s protectors, which is so different from what I’d associated with Baba Yaga until then.

“Baba jaga” is a derogatory word in Polish aimed at older women, the equivalent of “crone” or “hag”. It’s a loan word from Russian, and the Russian Baba Yaga is the same person as baba jędza in Polish tales. But the Baba Yagas of “The Frog Princess” weren’t just stereotypical old witches, and the Baba Yaga rarely boils down to something so simple in Slavic fairy tales. Yes, she can be a spiteful worker of harmful magic and a cannibal who delights in the taste of peasant girls and boys, but she’s also full of wisdom, a guardian, a donor, and a judge of human worth. I really wanted to engage with those seemingly contradictory qualities in my story, to reconcile the child-eater of some Baba Yaga stories (and implicit in the insult “baba jaga”) with the benevolent Baba Yaga I knew from “The Frog Princess.”

Speaking of fairy tales and folklore, are you a fairy tale enthusiast? Do you have any favorites you’d like to share with our readers? Conversely, do you have a least favorite fairy tale (you must also tell us why, of course).

I am a fairy tale enthusiast! But that enthusiasm didn’t spring from childhood; I was certainly aware of fairy tales when I grew up…my parents had Polish translations of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm in the house along with a book of Polish folklore, I just didn’t feel any more interested in them than I was in other children’s stories. It wasn’t until I took a comparative literature course on fairy tales in undergrad that they began to fascinate me. Reading Marina Warner’s work for the first time was a big part of that; I found her scholarship on stories like Beauty and the Beast incredibly compelling. After that, I went back to that old book of Polish folklore with new eyes. Later on I discovered Terri Windling’s anthology Snow White, Blood Red, and Jane Yolen, and Patricia C. Wrede, which deepened my appreciation of fairy tales and the art of retelling them.

My favourite fairy tale is the story of the Wawel dragon. A dragon demands the sacrifice of the King of Krakow’s daughter, but a clever cobbler defeats it by stuffing a sheep full of sulphur. When the dragon eats the sheep, it ends up trying to quench its thirst by drinking so much water from the Vistula it explodes. There’s something so delightfully gruesome about that.

Least favourite? I’m not sure, probably the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. I much preferred Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s version of the story, where the beast was kind-hearted all along.

We’d love to hear about your experience writing short stories. Your fiction has appeared in places such as On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic and Daily Science Fiction—what would you say are the advantages and potential pitfalls of writing short stories?

I’ve been writing short stories ever since I was in high school; I think I submitted my first short story to On Spec when I was 17 (back when *gasp* you had to submit by mail!). I’ve always been a big reader of short fiction; I like the economy of them. A great short piece can pack a huge amount of emotional resonance in such a short space; the brevity can pare away a narrative right down to the emotional core. Conversely, an unsatisfying short story ends up cutting away too much.

They’re also a great way to experiment with unusual voices or story forms without committing too much time to them. Except that’s not wholly true: short stories can be almost as time-consuming as novels during the revision process. Every word counts. There’s a huge sense of accomplishment in writing one that really works.

What are you working on next?

I honestly don’t know. I’ve been querying a novel to agents, a flintlock fantasy set in a cross between the medieval Baltic and 17th-century New France. I have some ideas floating around a character who’s a strzyga (another creature out of Polish folklore); another idea for a novel about clerical magic in 14th century Europe based on a seminar paper I wrote in grad school. We’ll see.

Finally, a question we ask all of our interviewees: We Book Smugglers have faced threats and criticisms concerning the sheer volume of books we purchase and read—hence, we have resorted to “smuggling books” home to escape scrutinizing eyes. Have you ever had to smuggle books?

I’ve certainly faced criticism sometimes for having too many books, and I’m always running out of room for them, but I haven’t had to resort to smuggling books yet.

About the Author

Michal Wojcik was born in Poland, raised in the Yukon Territory, and educated in Edmonton and Montreal. He has a Master’s degree in history from McGill University, where he studied witchcraft trials in early modern Poland. His short fiction has appeared in On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic and Daily Science Fiction. Follow him on his blog:

onelastsketch.wordpress.com

Book Smugglers Publishing

Book Smugglers Publishing: Fall 2014

Hunting Monsters by S.L. Huang (10/7/2014)

In Her Head, In Her Eyes by Yukimi Ogawa (10/21/2014)

Mrs. Yaga by Michal Wojcik (11/4/2014)

The Mussel Eater by Octavia Cade (11/18/2014)

The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind by Kate Hall (12/2/2014)

The Ninety-Ninth Bride by Catherine F. King (12/16/2014)

For other original & subversive fairy tales, visit:

goo.gl/XE14Wl.

Copyright Information

Mrs. Yaga

Published by Book Smugglers Publishing

Copyright © 2014 Michal Wojcik

Cover Illustration by Jacqueline Pytyck

Content

Mrs. Yaga
by Michal Wojcik

Mrs. Yaga

Inspirations & Influences

A Chat with Michal Wojcik

About the Author

Book Smugglers Publishing

Copyright Information