Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

After her second husband died, Kukla married a third time, this time someone who was already an invalid, a well-known writer, who after an unfortunate fall down some stairs was permanently confined to a wheelchair. The writer was a few years older than her and when she was sixty Kukla became a widow for the third time.

Kukla was a quiet, calm person; she spread serenity around her, she never talked about herself and never complained about anything, so that there was no reason for people not to like her. She had no children. There were children, in fact, of her second and third husbands, from their previous marriages, but the children were grown-up, they lived their own lives and had very little contact with Kukla.

Although she would never have admitted it herself, Kukla’s husbands served her as a shield: as a married woman she had tangible cover that there was nothing wrong with her. She had also served her husbands as a shield, although she would have sworn that this was not the case: being married to a woman like her was more than tangible proof that there was nothing wrong with them. Had she wanted, Kukla could have married fifty times, her qualities were highly prized. She was a perfect wife, a wife-cover, wife-prosthesis, wife-mask. She accepted her role, she made no demands, she did not attract attention in any way. She was feminine, but not provocative, open to a certain point, pleasant, but not overly so. And, what was most important, for all her above average height, Kukla gave the impression of being fragile and so instantly aroused protective impulses in men. And then, perhaps just because of her exceptional height, as well as the fact that she chose invalids as her protectors, those relations quickly changed, and the men perceived Kukla as a protector, nurse, mother, surrogate wife, all in the one package.

As far as Kukla herself was concerned, she had worked things out roughly as follows: the Fates had meted her out a destiny based on a ‘bad joke’, and she had done all she could to ensure that the ‘joke’ never saw the light of day. She had buried three husbands and remained a virgin, in virtually the literal sense. She tormented and belittled herself, saw herself as a ‘grave-digger’. Under her hand even the flowers on her balcony failed to flourish! She was convinced that her glance was enough to dry out even cactuses on the window-sill. For some reason those dried-out cactuses really got to her…

And then one day a young man appeared. He was writing a doctorate on Kukla’s third husband, the writer Bojan Kovač. He was interested in everything about this ‘enigmatic’ man. What intrigued him most was whether there was anything left in the ‘great writer’s’ papers. He was haunted by the idea of understatement, on which, according to him, Kovač’s work was based, particularly as it was precisely that – understatement as an integral element of the novel – that was the topic of his doctoral thesis. ‘Kovač is the Mona Lisa of Croatian literature,’ the young man claimed, ‘the enigmatic smile of his prose is the key to reading his whole opus.’

Kovač had left absolutely nothing, as Kukla knew better than anyone. He had written nothing for the last few years, mostly because of his illness. They had lived on her salary and his barely existent royalties. It would have been hard for him to write anything, because with time his disability was capped by diabetes, and then Alzheimer’s… ‘Is it possible that he left nothing at all?’ asked the young man. ‘What makes you think he left nothing? On the contrary, he left a lot,’ said Kukla. ‘I can help you organise his archive,’ the young man offered pleasantly. There was a great deal of material, over the last years Kovač had not been able to write himself, because of his arthritis, and she had put everything on the computer, she explained. She was Kovač’s typist; they had worked for ten hours a day, particularly just before the end, ‘because Kovač was determined to finish that novel,’ she added. ‘What novel? Can I see it?’ Of course, but not immediately, she would need time to sort out the manuscript… ‘Can you at least tell me the title of the novel?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Kukla, ‘Desert Rose

, that’s the working title. ‘Desert Rose, hmm, an unusual title, feminine, more suited to cheap romances than Kovač,’ observed the young man.

And so Kukla began to write. Later it occurred to her that she might find something else among Kovač’s papers: a short romance, for instance, or an unusually interesting essay-novel that he had written earlier, foreseeing events that were yet to happen. Yes, she knew that Kovač’s right to a second life was in her hands, that it depended only on her, Kukla.