Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

As they made their way to the golf course, Mr Shaker had given Kukla a vivacious account of the meaning of his existence. He was like the drawer in an old-fashioned lady’s dressing table, which emits clouds of powder when opened. Mr Shaker choked on his own words. Kukla felt sorry for him, as she did for everyone who saw their work as the only reason for their existence. She found this human machine producing words, movements and gestures amusing, until the moment when the conversation snagged on Rosie, Mr Shaker’s daughter.

‘Rosie is, unfortunately, incompatible.’

‘How do you mean, incompatible?’ asked Kukla.

‘It is our duty to make ourselves into better and more perfect beings than God made us, is it not?’ said Mr Shaker.

‘I can’t see what your daughter’s lacking,’ said Kukla.

‘There’s nothing lacking, unfortunately; on the contrary, there’s altogether too much of her.’

‘That’s just a bit of puppy fat, youthful sturdiness.’

‘Sturdiness could be the source of her future unhappiness. Unfortunately, we live in a time when even a little excess weight determines our life’s course.’

It could not be said that Mr Shaker was not concerned about his daughter. But his concern was for the product, and, in Mr Shaker’s eyes, although of course he would never have admitted it, Rosie was a kind of reject.

‘What about your wife?’

‘My late wife… She was perfect. Like you,’ said Mr Shaker.

She was perfect until she broke down. Of course Mr Shaker did not use the expression ‘broke down’, he said ‘fell ill’, but he meant ‘broke down’. The mechanism stopped working properly, and Mr Shaker had done everything in his power to get the mechanism mended. But, unfortunately, there was nothing to be done.

‘Strange,’ said Mr Shaker.

‘What’s strange?’

‘Well… When I’m with you I feel as though I were beside a fan,’ he said.

Mr Shaker became exceptionally animated when they reached the golf course, evidently because the role of teacher appealed to his vanity. Kukla didn’t have a clue about golf and Mr Shaker endeavoured to explain the rules. What had always seemed to her pointless – strolling around a grassy expanse with a stick in one’s hand and knocking a little ball into a hole – did after all have some point: being outside in the fresh air.

They were an incompatible couple. The tall, bony woman with large feet and a golf club in her hand strode across the sun-drenched grassy expanse like a kind of female knight. Her partner, a short, breathless man, rushed energetically over the grass like a lawn mower. Kukla watched him: he was saying something, waving his club, gesticulating, demonstrating movements, making her imitate them, waving his arms and hitting the ball energetically with his club.

While Mr Shaker was preoccupied with the idea that all incompatible bodies must be transformed into compatible ones, Kukla had always thought that there was too much noise in this world and amused herself imagining how nice it would be to be able to control that noise, to turn off talkative people like radios, to put silencers on sharp sounds, to turn down the shrill din of ambulance sirens and amplify birdsong. As she waited for the green light at crossings, she imagined stopping the traffic completely for a moment and serenely crossing the road. These were childish imaginings, daydreams, her mental exit lights. Sometimes those daydreams were so strong that they seemed quite real. When she was a little girl, the sheer force of her intentions had sometimes made things happen: something would shift, scrape, collapse, fall onto the floor. With time she learned to walk cautiously through the world, as though on eggshells, quiet and silent as a shadow, accompanied by currents of air whose origin she could never fathom.

* * *

Come on, gesticulated Mr Shaker, hit the ball. Kukla thought he was far further away than he really was. For God’s sake, come on, the man on the green horizon waved his arms, and Kukla finally swung her club, hit the ball, the ball spun in the air and took flight. The man jumped up and down with delight, bravo, a perfect shot, he made a fist with his thumb pointing up and waved it at Kukla, congratulating her. The little ball hovered for a moment in the air, or at least so it seemed to Kukla, and then with all its force it plummeted and lodged in the man’s wide-open mouth. The man dropped to the ground, as though felled.

When Kukla reached him, Mr Shaker was lying motionless on the grass. The little ball had trickled out of his mouth like saliva and was now calmly settled by his head, like a miniature gravestone. Mr Shaker’s death had been crouching inside an innocent golf ball.