Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

On the other hand, what is left for women when they stumble into old age? One rarely sees those few fortunate ones with übermensch genes, such as that crone of Hitler’s, Leni Riefenstahl, who lived to be a hundred and one, and showed everyone the meaning of ‘the triumph of the will’! She carried on climbing mountains and skiing until her hundredth year, at ninety she learned scuba-diving, travelled through Africa, photographed the poor Nubians and slept with them, sucking their blood – it kept her fit! And what other, worthy examples are there? Jessica Fletcher? Gloria Swanson in the film Sunset Boulevard

? Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But most are left with the ‘old-lady in good-health look’. These are desexualised old hags with short, masculine haircuts, dressed in light-coloured windcheaters and pants, not differentiated in any way from their male contemporaries, and noticed only when they are in a group. Yes, perhaps that is the way out: perhaps one should disguise oneself as a third sex, a sex without a sex, and live an unnoticed, parallel life: climbing mountains, walking with Nordic poles, travelling in organised tour groups of opera lovers, lovers of Alsatian wines, lovers of Mediterranean cheeses… Because what other variants are there in the typology of old women? Those dotty old creatures surrounded by cats, whose neighbours break into their house one day and find them dead, in a stench of cat pee? Those greedy old hags of unquenched sexual appetite who each spring visit geographical zones in which the local young men prostitute themselves for money? Those wealthy old women who submit hysterically to treatments – face-lifts, liposuction, hormone therapy, shit therapy if necessary – just to delay by a little the inexorable onset of age? Are spas not places which offer the illusion that they delay ageing? Yes, spas are the natural habitat of old hags, except that what used to be called a spa is now – same crap, different packaging – a wellness centre.

With the white towelling robe draped over her naked body, Beba looked at herself in the mirror. Everything was hanging out, everything was old, everything was distorted, and only that ‘little bush’ down below, sprinkled with grey, was still luxuriant. Come now, why this idiotic pride in the ‘luxuriance’ of her ‘little bush’? As though it were treasure! As though the other parts of her body were police, accountants, porters – existing only in order to attend to the treasure! But what was this, why this sudden moralistic protest? Had not her ‘little bush’ been her ‘treasure’ for many years, had not everything revolved around sex for a major part of her life? When she was younger, she would have sold her soul to the devil for that, for the simple mechanism of the snap fastener. ‘Men and women are like snap fasteners’, one of her lovers had once said. She no longer recalled his name, but she remembered the sentence. At the time, she had found the image irresistibly comic. Click-clack! Click-clack! Now she felt it was inappropriate. But if she really thought about it, was there anything apart from that click-clack? Was everything else not mere fog to soften the truth and make the human snap-fastener mechanism appear less frighteningly simple? Of course, it was all a matter of perspective. Now it seemed to her that before, when she was younger, she used to think the opposite. She was prepared to die for that damned ‘snap fastener’.

Beba plucked at her ‘little bush’ down below in a desultory fashion. But just as she was about to go into the bathroom, it seemed to her for an instant that instead of that dry, greyish ‘bush’, she saw sleek, black feathers. Beba went up to the mirror and – oh my! – now it seemed that a bird’s eye was observing her from that place and, what is more, that gleaming, malicious bird’s eye was winking at her. ‘Shoo, you fiend!’ muttered Beba, and, wrapping her robe tightly round her, made her way to the bathroom.

What about us? We carry on. While life can at times be hard and rough, the tale shies away from anything tough.

5.

Mr Shaker, who was lying on the stone massage table, pasted with soapy foam like a car in a carwash, saw it at once: the young man could have been Clooney’s son. Olive skin, large, dark eyes, but a fuller and more finely shaped mouth, a natural smile, which did not, like Clooney’s, end in a fan of lines at his temple. And he was far taller than Clooney! But why was he so stuck on Clooney? The young man was simply good-looking and would appeal to both women and men, regardless of their age, which, from a marketing perspective, was the key. And those wide oriental pants, imposingly taut in the right place, hinted that the rumours of the young man’s sexual prowess may have been well-founded.

‘Hi, mai neym iz Suleiman. I em yor maser!’ muttered the young man through his teeth.