There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (18 page)

Once again begging forgiveness, he took from the pile of felt boots behind the trunk one adult pair that looked like they would fit a woman—she had been barefoot! With this load he ran as fast as he could through the cold back to the first hut. Already there was no one there. The teapot was still hot, and there was bread on the table. The trunk was empty.

“She must have dressed him in silk and lace,” said the failed father. “But that’s so silly—I have everything he needs!”

He ran out the door onto the other path and, dragging the sled behind him, soon caught up with the woman, who could barely stand and even swayed a little. Her bare feet were red from the snow. She carried the child wrapped in all his silky things.

“Hold on!” cried the father. “Wait! This won’t do at all! First you need to dress a fellow up. I have everything he needs.”

He took the child from her, and she, obediently, closing her eyes, gave him her burden, and together they walked back to their hut. Only then did the father remember the strange old lady whose bags he had carried home, and he asked the woman: “Tell me, did the old woman give you the address, too?”

“No,” said the woman, who was nearly asleep on her feet, “she only told me the name of the train station, Fortieth Kilometer.”

But just then the child started crying, and both of them rushed to change his clothes, and he was suddenly so small that no boots could fit him, and instead they had to put him in diapers, wrap him up in a blanket, and that’s when the fur sleeping bag with its hood came in handy. The rest of it they tied up in a bundle. The woman put on her new boots, and the three of them continued back together. The newfound father carried the baby, and the woman dragged the things, and along the way they forgot all about how they met, and the name of the station. They remembered only that there had been a trying night, a long road, and painful loneliness—but now they’d given birth to a child and found what they’d been looking for.

THERE ONCE LIVED A WOMAN WHO HAD A TINY LITTLE DAUGHTER named Droplet. The girl was just a tiny droplet of a baby, and she never grew. Her mother took her to doctors, but as soon as she showed her to them, they refused to treat her! No, they said—and that was that. They didn’t even ask any questions about her.

So then the mother decided to play a trick: she wouldn’t show her little Droplet to the next doctor. She went to his office, sat down, and asked: “What should you do if your child isn’t growing properly?”

To which the doctor replied, as a doctor should: “What’s wrong with the child? What’s the child’s medical history? What is the child’s diet?” And so on.

“This child wasn’t born,” the poor mother explained. “I found her in a head of cabbage, young cabbage. I took off the top leaf, and there she was, a little cabbage-patch girl, a little dewdrop, this big”—she showed him with her fingers—“a little droplet. I took her with me, and I’ve been raising her ever since, but she hasn’t grown at all, and it’s been two years.”

“Show me the child,” said the doctor.

The girl’s mother took out a matchbox she kept in her breast pocket, and out of this matchbox she took half of a hollowed bean, and in that cradle, wiping the sleep from her eyes with her tiny little fists, sat a tiny little girl.

The mother took a magnifying glass from her purse, and with this magnifying glass the doctor began examining the child.

“A splendid girl,” the doctor said under his breath. “In good health, well nourished—you’ve done an excellent job, mother. Now get on your feet, little girl. That’s right. Good.”

The little droplet climbed out of her little bean and walked around on the doctor’s desk, back and forth.

“Well,” the doctor said. “I’ll tell you this: She’s a splendid girl, but this isn’t the right place for her to live. Now where exactly she
should
be living, I can’t tell, but definitely not here with us. We’re not the right crowd for her. This isn’t the right place.”

The mother said: “It’s true. She tells me she has dreams about her life on a distant star. She says everyone there had little wings, and they flew through the fields—she did, too—and she ate pollen and dew from wild flowers, and they had an elder, who was preparing them, because some of them would have to leave, and they all waited in terror for the day their wings would melt—because then their leader would take them to the top of a high mountain, where there was an opening to a cave, and steps leading down to it, and the ones whose wings had melted would descend into the cave,
and everyone else watched them as they went down, farther and farther down until they were as small as little droplets.”

Sitting on the desk, the girl nodded.

“And then my little princess also had to leave, and she cried and walked down the steps, and that’s where her dream ends, and she wakes up on my kitchen table, in a cabbage leaf.”

“Interesting,” said the doctor. “And, tell me, what about you? What’s happened in your life? What’s your medical history?”

“Me?” said the woman. “What’s it matter? I love my girl more than I love my life. It’s so terrible to think she’s going to return to the place she came from . . . As for my history, well, my husband left me when I was pregnant, and I didn’t have the baby . . . I went to a doctor who referred me to a hospital, and there they killed my baby inside me. Now I pray for him. Maybe he’s in that place, in the land of dreams?”

“Interesting,” said the doctor. “I see now. I’m going to write you a note, and you’ll take it to a certain person. He’s a hermit, and he lives in the forest. He’s a very strange man, and sometimes it’s impossible to find him, but he might help you. Who knows.”

The woman put her little girl back into the cradle made out of a little bean, put the bean back into the matchbox, put the matchbox back into her pocket, and took her magnifying glass and left—directly for the forest, to look for the hermit there.

She found him sitting on a pile of garbage near the road. Without uttering a word she showed him the doctor’s note and then pointed at her breast pocket.

“You need to put her back where you found her,” the hermit said, “and not look at her anymore.”

“Back where? The produce store?”

“Stupid woman! Where’d they find her?”

“In a cabbage patch. But I don’t know where that is.”

“Stupid woman!” the hermit yelled. “You knew how to sin; you must know how to save yourself.”

“Where’s the cabbage patch?” the mother asked again.

“Enough,” said the hermit. “And don’t look at her.”

The woman cried, bowed down, crossed herself, kissed the hermit’s smelly, frayed sweatshirt, and walked away. When she turned around a minute later, there was no longer any hermit, or any trash pile—just a wisp of fog.

The woman grew scared and ran. Evening was approaching, and she kept on running through empty fields. Suddenly she saw a patch filled with rows of little cabbage buds poking through the earth.

It was growing dark out, and the woman stood there in the drizzle, holding her breast pocket, thinking she couldn’t leave her daughter here in the cold and the fog. The girl would get scared and start crying!

So with her bare hands the woman dug up a big clump of soil and a cabbage bud with it, wrapped this into her slip, and dragged the heavy bundle with her to the city and all the way home.

As soon as she crossed the doorstep, falling down with exhaustion, she took out her largest pot and placed the clump of soil and the cabbage into the pot and then put all this on her windowsill. And to avoid ever looking at it, she closed the curtain.

But then she thought: she’d have to water the little cabbage. And in order to water the cabbage, she’d have to look at it.

So she took her pot out onto the balcony, into real field conditions. If there was rain, there’d be rain, and if there was wind, there’d be wind, and birds, and so on. If the baby lived and grew inside her, like all other babies, then she’d be protected from the cold and the wind, but her little Droplet was different—she couldn’t hide inside her mother’s body; she’d have only one cabbage leaf to protect her.

Carefully moving aside the young, firm leaves of the cabbage bud, the mother put her little daughter inside it. Her Droplet didn’t even wake up—in general she loved sleeping and was an unusually quiet, happy, and easygoing child. The cabbage leaves were hard, naked, and cold, and they immediately closed around little Droplet.

The mother quietly stepped back from the balcony, closed the door, and began living all by her lonesome again, just as before. She went to work, returned from work, prepared herself some food, and never looked out her window to see what was happening with her cabbage plant.

The summer went by, and the woman wept and prayed. So as to hear even just a little of what was happening out on the balcony, she slept on the floor right next to the door. When there wasn’t any rain, she worried that the cabbage would wilt; when there was rain, she worried that it would drown; but the mother forbade herself to think for even one second about what her little Droplet was doing there, what she was eating and how she was crying, there by herself in her green grave, without a single motherly caress, without any warmth at all . . .

Sometimes, especially at night, when the rain came down in buckets and the lightning flashed, the woman tore herself up trying not to go out on the balcony and cut down the cabbage plant and take out her little Droplet and feed her a drop of warm milk and put her into her cozy bed. Instead, she ran downstairs and stood in the rain, making quite a spectacle of herself, to show her Droplet that there was nothing scary about rain and lightning. And the whole time she told herself it must have been for a reason that she’d met the filthy hermit-monk and that he’d told her to put her little Droplet back where she found her.

In this way a summer passed, and the autumn came. All the produce stores were selling young firm cabbage plants, but the woman couldn’t bring herself to go out on the balcony yet. She was afraid she wouldn’t find anything there. Or she’d find a wilted cabbage plant and inside a little clump of red silk, the dress of poor Droplet, whom she’d killed with her own hands, just as she’d once killed her unborn child.

And then one morning the first snow fell, unusually early for autumn. The poor woman looked out her window, terrified, and rushed to open the door to her balcony.

As the door began to open, reluctant, with a heavy creaking sound, the woman heard a frightened meowing from the balcony, persistent and shrill.

“A cat!” the poor woman cried, thinking a cat had come over from a neighboring apartment. “There’s a cat on the balcony!” And everyone knows how much cats love to eat anything that is small and runs around.

At last the balcony door opened, and the woman ran out into the snow just like that, in her slippers.

Inside her pot was an enormous, glorious cabbage, covered with numerous curly leaves like rose petals, and on top of the plant, lying on its many curls, was a thin, ugly baby, all red, with flaking skin. The baby, closing tight its tiny eye slits, made mewling noises, choking with sobs, shaking its clenched little fists, wobbling its bright-red toes the size of currant berries. And as if that weren’t enough, the baby had, stuck to its bald head, a little scrap of red silk.

“But where’s Droplet?” the woman thought to herself, bringing the whole cabbage plant and the baby into the room. “Where’s my little girl?”

She put the crying baby on the windowsill and began digging into the cabbage. She lifted every leaf very carefully, but her Droplet wasn’t there. “Who left this baby here?” she thought. “Is this a joke? What am I going to do with this thing? Look at the size of her. They took my little Droplet, and left me with this . . .”

The baby was clearly cold, its skin bluish, its cries more and more piercing.

But then the woman thought that after all it wasn’t this girl-giant’s fault that she’d been dumped here, and she picked her up carefully, without pressing her to her breast, took her to the bath, washed her with warm water, cleaned her off, dried her, and then wrapped her in a clean, dry towel.