The Slavic Myths, page 12
Slavic deities that dwell in homes, like the Russian Domovoy and Kikimora (male and female household gods, respectively),39 can be connected to deities and spirits in different mythologies that take care of the home and the hearth: the Greek Hestia and the Roman Lari among them. The Slavic home protectors, who are not always benevolent, demand small gifts – a cup of milk left for them at the threshold, for instance. Kikimora sometimes dwells outside the home, in a bog or a forest.40 In Dalmatia, the coastal region of Croatia, it is still common today to leave a cup of milk by the threshold of one’s home for a resident snake, which will then protect the home from other snakes. The threshold and doorway are, ritually, the most important part of a home, along with the roof. The door is a point of transition while the roof is inhabited by the spirits of ancestors. This is shown by the early 20th-century Serbian scholar and translator Veselin Čajkanović in his study of the role of the groom’s mother in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, who, during the wedding, climbs onto the roof and dances to attract spirits to come and bless the marriage.41
In light of all these elements, Libuše as the founder of a city named ‘Threshold’ might be regarded as the household deity of Prague. All too often, however, the female protagonists of Slavic myth must be sacrificed – either peacefully, like Libuše, simply abdicating power to a husband she did not need, or violently, as in the case of Gojkovica. The role of the woman builder is dangerously close to that of the built-in woman.
4
DO NOT WEEP
THREE VERSIONS OF THE GREAT GODDESS
DO NOT WEEP
Wander, my child, across three times nine kingdoms, thread the links in a chain of mighty mountains, and you will come to a remote tsardom where a merchant once dwelt. Twelve years had he been married but in all that time, no son was born, merely a single daughter. But like you, my child, this little girl was as beautiful as the moon, and so they called her Vasilissa the Beautiful.
When Vasilissa was eight years old, her mother grew sick and her condition worsened. Fearing that she would soon die, she called her beloved daughter to her. Vasilissa had once rejoiced when called to her mother’s bedroom, where the two would kiss and embrace and laugh upon the great bed. But now she moved with solemn weight upon her, for she could feel the darkness that approached and could guess what this summons meant.
Seeing Vasilissa’s face, hesitant and on the verge of tears, her mother tried to raise her own strength to pass it to her daughter. She called her over to the bed.
‘My little Vasilissa, my dear one, look who lies in the bed beside me.’ And she pulled aside the blanket to reveal a tiny wooden doll that she had carefully and secretly made as a gift. When the blanket was drawn away and the wooden face stared up at Vasilissa, the little girl could not help but smile, even though the face of the doll did not smile back. In fact, the doll had no face at all: its head was just a rounded egg of wood, without markings upon it.
At the sight of her daughter’s smile, Vasilissa’s mother felt a touch of peace.
‘Vasilissa, I am dying, as I see that you know. My time with you has been the most beautiful time of my life, and I am only sorry to leave you so soon. But a part of me will always remain with you.’ At this Vasilissa began to cry, but her mother touched her shoulders softly, as if they might crack, and went on, ‘Remember my words to you and be certain to fulfil my wishes, and you will keep my blessing with you always.
‘I have made this doll for you and it is my gift to you. Keep it with you at all times, and never, never show it to anyone. If you feel sorrow come upon you, or if evil threatens to harm you, then go into a dark corner where no one can see, remove the doll from your pocket and give it something to eat and to drink.’ Vasilissa’s teary eyes widened as her mother continued, ‘The doll will begin to move on its own. It will eat and drink a small amount and then it will look up at you. Then you may talk to it, tell it your troubles, express your fears, speak your sadness, ask its advice, and it will be there for you, to advise you and even help you in your time of need.’
Vasilissa took that wooden doll from her mother’s hands, pale, blue and cold as the ocean, and clutched it to her. Her mother kissed her daughter for the last time, made a blessing upon her and fell asleep, never again to wake.
Vasilissa was wracked with sorrow. Her mother had always been her only companion, for her merchant father was often away, she had no siblings and no children lived nearby. Now she was wholly alone. She took to her bed, pulled her blankets above her head and wept until she felt that every strand of feeling, every cup of tears that her small body could produce, had been purged. All that remained were exhaustion, fatigue and loneliness.
In her sadness, she had been clutching the wooden doll to her, hugging it as she would have liked to hug her mother, and it slowly dawned on her that, through this doll, a part of her mother might still remain with her. So she shook off her upset as best she could, pushed aside the blanket and took the doll into a shadowy corner of her bedroom. She sat it upon a stool there and stole away to the kitchen to fetch something to eat and something to drink. She returned with a crust of black bread and a tiny cup of kvass, the drink made from black bread, and she placed them on the stool beside the doll.
The doll did not move.
Vasilissa grew fearful that even this legacy of her mother would fail her, never to appear. But she fought back her hammering heart and said aloud, ‘Take this meal, my little doll. A bite to eat, a drop to drink and hear of me my sorrow. My beloved mother has died, and I am so lonely.’
There was a long pause, my child, but do you know what happened? The doll’s blank, egg-shaped wooden head suddenly lifted up. Its wooden arms slowly, almost mechanically, shifted and reached out for the crust of black bread and the cup of kvass. The doll brought the food and drink to its invisible mouth and both bread and drink disappeared, eaten away into nothingness, vanishing although there was no mouth to be seen. When the doll was done, she placed the empty cup back upon the stool and raised her head up towards Vasilissa. Upon that once-blank face, my child, now burned a pair of fire-orange eyes, looking up at Vasilissa. And then the doll spoke, with a voice like a mother’s whisper in the ear of a sleeping baby.
‘Do not weep, Vasilissa. Sorrow stalks by night but flees the morning light. Lie back in your bed, close your tired eyes, hold me close to you as you would like to hold your mother and welcome sleep. The morning light is wiser than night.’ Then the fire-orange eyes extinguished, and the doll’s face was once more a blank curve of wood.
Vasilissa nodded, lifted the doll to her, clutched it tight and climbed back into bed. Sleep overtook her, welcome sleep, and when she woke, her sorrow had inched back in slow, begrudging retreat.
When Vasilissa’s father returned from his travels and found his wife gone, he wept and mourned and retreated into himself. He was not there for Vasilissa when she needed him most, as indeed he had never truly been there, even when he was at home. Vasilissa was used to this and had expected no more from him. She was her own rock, small and humbled against the pull of the wake of sorrow, but she would have to hold fast, because she knew that no one but her mother would have been able to help her, and her mother was no longer.
Her father mourned for a respectable amount of time, one day longer than was prescribed by tradition, and then turned his attentions to finding a new wife. While he was poor of compassion and warmth, he was also wealthy, owned a goodly home and several horses, and generously – and visibly – donated to the church every Sunday, at least on the Sundays when he was neither travelling nor asleep. This all suited many women perfectly, and there was no shortage of potential new wives. Vasilissa’s father’s eye fell upon a widow his own age with two daughters of her own who, he thought, might be good companions for Vasilissa, and would provide extra hands to work around the house. The widow was particularly beautiful, but while Vasilissa’s father had a heart short on compassion and warmth, the widow did not seem to have any heart at all. Just a hollow, tin fist where her heart should have been.
Vasilissa learned this within days of the widow’s arrival at their home. She overheard her new stepmother telling her daughters that they would remain in this family only so long as the merchant father spent most of his time abroad and the money was ample. Vasilissa tried to warn her father during one of the few moments when the two were alone, but he would hear none of it, for women have ways, my child, of diverting a man’s attention from what it should be focused upon, and the stepmother was well versed in such traps.
That the stepmother should dislike Vasilissa made little sense, aside from the fact that her own daughters, somewhat older than Vasilissa, were plain of face and crow-like, while Vasilissa was the most beautiful girl anyone in their village had ever seen, or imagined that they ever would, with the beauty of a raven. First, the stepmother dismissed the merchant’s modest staff from the house: a married couple, one maid and one butler, who had been all Vasilissa could call family since her mother’s passing. Vasilissa knew that her stepmother had done this simply to save money so that she could keep more for herself, but she could not convince her father of the stepmother’s ill intentions. The housework fell not on the stepmother’s two daughters, as Vasilissa’s father had imagined, but onto Vasilissa herself.
Envy encouraged Vasilissa’s new stepsisters to pour both scorn and chores upon her, for they wanted not only to poison her good spirit, but also to wilt her beauty to amplify theirs. They instructed her to work outdoors, to tan her milk-white skin, and made her lift, sweep and drag so as to thin out her idyllic softness and bring out her bones. But their efforts failed, for Vasilissa’s goodness could not be siphoned off, and her beauty was neither burned away by the sun nor starved by toil.
The stepmother and her daughters were mad with confusion. No matter how arduous or complex the task, Vasilissa was able to complete it, and she never appeared the worse for wear. They came up with ever more arcane tasks. Once they emptied a pot of boiled lentils into the still-hot ashes of the kitchen hearth and told Vasilissa to pick them out again, every one, before the ashes had cooled. When they returned from whatever idle, boring, hard-hearted women do all day, the pot was once more filled with lentils and the ashes remained warm as wolf’s breath.
Vasilissa was able to achieve all this thanks to her great secret.
As soon as her stepmother and the daughters were out of sight, Vasilissa would find a shadowy corner and remove the tiny doll from a hidden pocket she had sewn into her dress. She would give the doll a small amount to eat and a small amount to drink, and say, ‘Take this meal, my little doll. A bite to eat, a drop to drink and hear of me my sorrow.’ Then she would explain what she was obliged to do. The doll would consume some food and quaff some drink with that mouthless wooden face, and then the fire-orange eyes would glow.
‘Do not weep, Vasilissa,’ it would say in her lost mother’s voice. ‘Sorrow stalks by night but flees the morning light. I will assist you in your tasks. The morning light is wiser than night.’ Then the doll would do whatever the girl had been tasked with. When the work was done, the fire-orange eyes would extinguish and Vasilissa would place the doll back into her hidden pocket. There was no joy in Vasilissa’s life, but at least the little doll prevented her from collapsing with suffering. In the form of the doll, a sliver of her mother remained with her, keeping her afloat in the storm.
In this sorry state, years passed. The stepmother and her daughters never stopped pouring work upon Vasilissa, but their jealousy grew stale out of habit and no longer bit at them each time they set eyes upon her beauty. Eventually Vasilissa reached the age when thoughts naturally turn to marriage. All the young men from the village and beyond stopped by the house when her father was in, to ask for Vasilissa’s hand in marriage. Not one came to enquire after the stepmother’s two daughters, even though they were older than Vasilissa and, by rights, should have been married off first. Whenever Vasilissa’s father considered a young man to be a good choice, the stepmother would say, ‘The elder daughters are first to wed, or you will never be welcome in my bed.’ And that was that. Each suitor poured fuel on the stepmother’s envy and hatred, and the only option for escape that appeared open to Vasilissa – marriage to, she hoped, a young man who would at least be kind, if not truly good, for one should not hope for too much – remained blocked. If not for the tiny doll hidden in her dress, that relic of her now long-lost mother, Vasilissa would have sought to take her own life.
For the past few months, the merchant father had encountered rough times. Thrice had ships bearing goods he wished to sell been dashed upon the rocks by storms at sea. He pooled the last of his finances and decided to make one more investment, all or nothing, to save his status and home. To do so, he would have to travel abroad for some time, much longer than his usual trips.
No sooner had his horse and carriage vanished over the horizon than the stepmother sold their house and all its contents, packed and moved away to a far-off place, a gloomy, shadow-stricken cottage at the edge of a briary forest, where the father would not be able to find them. Vasilissa was unable to do anything but follow meekly, for she could see no escape as a young, unmarried girl whom no one would believe, without a penny to her name or a friend in the world aside from that tiny wooden doll.
The stepmother was foul and vile of heart, but she was not a murderess, and she saw a material benefit in Vasilissa. Any work Vasilissa was given, no matter how difficult, would be completed swiftly and thoroughly. The stepmother had tested the limits of Vasilissa’s capabilities. Once, she asked her to chop firewood sufficient for the entire winter: the next morning, row upon row of logs were lined up neatly, each chopped to precisely the same size. The stepmother was no fool. She could see that some magic was about, although she could not figure out what it was. In any case, the figuring out was less important to her than the benefit of that magic, for Vasilissa would do anything the stepmother needed done, and that was a powerful tool.
That said, should some accident befall young Vasilissa, the stepmother would not have been bothered. With all the money she had made from selling the merchant father’s estate, she could easily afford to hire a maid and butler so that she would still never have to lift a finger.
It was her two daughters who wished Vasilissa would disappear, for they remained ever in her shadow. Plain and crow-like, they were ignored by suitors even here at their new home in a new land. The daughters wished more than anything for Vasilissa to vanish, because they saw in her raven beauty their only obstacle to finding husbands.
And so the stepmother began to set Vasilissa tasks that required her to venture deep into the briary, darkling forest behind the cottage. Often she asked Vasilissa to gather mushrooms. The reason for this was that the stepmother had learned that the forest was home to a horrible witch by the name of Baba Yaga. This ancient, evil crone was said to feast on children just as mortal men eat chickens. The comparison was a poetic one since, the story went, Baba Yaga lived in a hut perched on hundreds of severed hen’s legs that, through her enchantment, could walk about, moving the hut this way and that at her bidding.
Should Vasilissa bring us mushrooms and fulfil all the other chores, thought the stepmother, I shall be content with the work provided. But should Vasilissa encounter Baba Yaga and fall victim to her, I shall be just as content, and my daughters even more so. And so it went that, almost every day, Vasilissa was sent on an errand into the forest.
Now, my child, you might think that surely Vasilissa would run into Baba Yaga, or that the ancient witch would smell her delicious flesh and hunt her down. That is what would have happened – but every time Vasilissa entered the forest, no sooner did she step inside the shadow of the thorny trees than she would take the tiny doll from her pocket, offer it a crumb lifted from the pantry and a thimbleful of kvass, and the doll would brighten its fire-orange eyes and come to her aid.
‘Do not weep, Vasilissa,’ it would say in her lost mother’s voice. ‘Sorrow stalks by night but flees the morning light. I will assist you in your tasks. The morning light is wiser than night.’ The doll would provide whatever the stepmother had required and keep Vasilissa away from the ancient witch.
The two daughters were not satisfied. They did not recognize the value of keeping Vasilissa alive to work for them and wished only for her to disappear, for they imagined that, with her gone, they would find the happiness that had eluded their sour hearts. Finally the stepmother, growing tired of her daughters’ complaints, made a plan to force Vasilissa to encounter the ancient witch.
One evening in autumn, the stepmother summoned Vasilissa and her two daughters to the sitting room. She assigned each of them a task: one daughter must make lace and the other a pair of hose, while Vasilissa must spin a wicker basket full of flax. They had to finish by dawn and set to work by the light of a single candle, for darkness had fallen. While they worked, the stepmother carefully extinguished all the other candles in the house and poured well water onto the fires.
The two daughters, having been given the easier, faster tasks, naturally finished first. One of them, as she stood to leave the room, pretended to trip and knocked over the candle, dousing the flame as she fell upon it. Vasilissa would have to finish spinning the flax without light.
‘What a shame,’ said the other daughter.
‘Yes,’ said the first, ‘while we have finished our work, Vasilissa has not, and cannot do so without fire to light the candle. Vasilissa, you must go and fetch fire and bring it back here, so you can finish your work.’
‘But where shall I find fire in the middle of the night?’ Vasilissa asked innocently.
