Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. Dubravka Ugrešić
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I say.
‘Just like the jungle,’ she agrees.
‘There are jungles everywhere these days,’ I say.
Birds are apparently out of control; they have occupied whole cities, taken over parks, streets, bushes, benches, outdoor restaurants, subway stations, train stations. No one seems to have noticed the invasion. European cities are being occupied by magpies, from Russia, they say; the branches of trees in the city parks bow down under their weight. The pigeons, seagulls and starlings fly across the sky, and the heavy black crows, their beaks open like clothes pegs, limp along over the green city swards. Green parakeets are multiplying in the Amsterdam parks, having fled household birdcages: their flocks colour the sky in low flight like green paper dragons. The Amsterdam canals have been taken over by big white geese, which flew in from Egypt, lingered for a moment to rest and then stayed. The city sparrows have become so bold that they wrest the sandwiches from people’s fingers and strut brazenly about on the tables in outdoor cafés. The windows of my short-term lease flat in Dahlem, one of the loveliest and greenest of the Berlin neighbourhoods, served the local birds as a favourite repository for their droppings. And you could do nothing about it, except lower the blinds, draw the curtains or toil daily, scrubbing the splattered window.
She nods, but it is as if she is paying no attention.
The invasion of starlings in her neighbourhood apparently began three years earlier, when my mother was taken ill. The words from the doctor’s diagnosis were long, alarming and ugly (That is an ugly diagnosis), which is why she chose the verb ‘to be taken ill’ (Everything changed when I was taken ill!). Sometimes she would get bolder, and, touching a finger to her forehead, she’d say:
‘It’s all the fault of this cobweb of mine up here.’
By ‘cobweb’ she meant metastases to the brain, which had appeared seventeen years after a bout of breast cancer had been discovered in time and treated successfully. She spent some time in hospital, went through a series of radiation treatments and convalesced. Afterwards she went for regular check-ups, and everything else was more or less as it should be. Nothing dramatic happened after that. The cobweb lurked in a dark, elusive cranny of the brain, and stayed. In time she made her peace, got used to it and adopted it like an unwelcome tenant.
For the last three years her life story had been scaled back to a handful of hospital release forms, doctors’ reports, radiological charts and her pile of the MRIs and CAT scans of her brain. The scans show her lovely, shapely skull planted on her spinal column, with a slight forward stoop, the clear contours of her face, eyelids lowered as if she is asleep, the membrane over the brain like a peculiar cap, and, hovering on her lips, the hint of a smile.
‘The picture makes it look as if it is snowing in my head,’ she says, pointing to the CAT scan.
The trees with their dense crowns growing under the window are tall, and reach all the way to my mother’s sixth-floor flat. Thousands and thousands of little birds jostle for space. Close in the hot summer darkness we, the residents and the birds, evaporate our sighs. Hundreds of thousands of hearts, human and avian, beat in different rhythms in the dark. Whitish feathers are borne on gusts of air through the open windows. The feathers waft groundward like parachutes.
Some Of The Words Have Got Altered
‘Bring me the…’
‘What?’
‘That stuff you spread on bread.’
‘Margarine?’
‘No.’
‘Butter?’
‘You know it’s been years since I used butter!’
‘Well, what then?’
She scowls, her rage mounting at her own helplessness. And then she slyly switches to attack mode.
‘Some daughter if you can’t remember the bread spread stuff!’
‘Spread? Cheese spread?’
‘That’s right, the white stuff,’ she says, offended, as if she had resolved never again to utter the words ‘cheese spread’.
The words had got altered. This enraged her; she felt like stamping her foot, banging her fist on the table or shouting. As it was, she was left tense, fury foaming in her with a surprising buoyant freshness. She would stop, faced with a heap of words, as if before a puzzle she could not assemble.
‘Bring me the biscuits, the congested ones.’
She knew precisely which biscuits she meant. Digestive biscuits. Her brain was still functioning: she was replacing the less familiar phrase digestive with the more familiar congested, and out of her mouth came this startling com bination. This is how I pictured it working, perhaps the connection between language and brain followed some different route.
‘Hand me the thermometer so I can give Javorka a call.’
‘Do you mean the cell phone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you really mean Javorka?’
‘No of course not, why ever would I call her?!’
Javorka was someone she had known years before, and who knows how the name had occurred to her?
‘You meant Kaia, didn’t you?’
‘Well, I said I wanted to call Kaia, didn’t I?’ she snorted.
I understood her. Often when she couldn’t remember a word, she would describe it: Bring me that thingy I drink from. I usually knew what her thingies were. This time the task was easy: it was a plastic water bottle she always kept at hand.
And then, she began coming up with ways to help herself. She started adding diminutive words like ‘little’, ‘cute little’, ‘nice little’, ‘sweet’, which she had never used before. Now even with some personal names, including mine, she would add them. They served like magnets, and sure enough, the words that had scattered settled back again into order. She was particularly pleased to use words like these for the things she felt fondest of (my sweet pyjamas, my cute little towel, that nice little pillow, my little bottle, those comfy little slippers). Maybe with these words and phrases, as though with spit, she was moistening the hardboiled sweets of words, maybe she was using them to buy time for the next word, the next sentence.
Perhaps that way she felt less alone. She cooed to the world that surrounded her and the cooing made the world seem less threatening and a little smaller. Along with the diminutives in her speech the occasional augmentative would jump out like a spring: a snake grew to be a big bad snake, a bird into a fat old bird. People often seemed larger to her than they really were (He was a huuuuuuge man!). She had shrunk, that is what it was, and the world was looming.
She spoke slowly with a new, darker timbre. She seemed to enjoy the colour. A little crack showed up in her voice, the tenor became a touch imperious, with a tone demanding the absolute respect of the listener. With this frequent loss of words the timbre of her voice was all she had left.
There was another novelty. She had begun to lean on certain sounds as if they were crutches. I’d hear her shuffling around the house, opening the fridge or going to the bathroom, and she would be saying, in regular rhythm, hm, hm, hm. Or: uh-hu-hu, uh-hu-hu.
‘Talking to someone?’ I’d ask.
‘No one, just me. Talking to myself,’ she’d answer.
Who knows, maybe at some point she was suddenly unnerved by the silence, and to chase off her fear, she came up with her hm-hm, uh-hu.
She was scared of the dying and that is why she registered deaths so carefully. She, who was forgetting so many things, never missed mentioning the death of someone she knew, either close to her or distant, the friends of friends, even