1.
- Do you believe in witches? – Maud asked Emma.
- I don’t know – Emma said. – I’m never sure. Do you?
- I used not to -Maud said. – But it seems that these days everybody else does. I meet people talking of black and white magic nearly every day. Why do you think they’ve suddenly become so much interested in witches? It didn’t seem like a popular subject just a short while ago.
- Who do you mean they? – Emma asked.
- I’ll give you one example. Last week I heard somebody to deliver a paper on a relationship between living in a close-knit community and helping your friends in a village and witchcraft.
- What’s the relationship?
- You see, when people live very close to each other in a small village, they have a different type of economy. They use money less than we do, and quite often do things for each other out of friendship. If your friend had worked in your garden, you’ll work in his, to pay him back. I think, the person who talked about it, called it reciprocal economy.
- What’s bad about it?
- The idea is that they are way too close: very tight ties lead to disputes and disputes lead to killings. When somebody is killed, people often give being a sorcerer as a reason.
- So are they really? Or do they just use it as a reason to kill?
- So you think sorcerers do exist? Could they live somewhere away from Indonesian villages with their, whatever economy it is, or is it a specifically Indonesian thing?
- I guess they should, especially if they’ve got something to do with this type of reciprocity – you know – party plans – when you buy something from you friends who invite you to a party. They must be everywhere. After all, some of these party plans ladies do a couple of thousands a week – how can you explain it, if it’s not sorcery?
- Exactly – Maud said. – But you know what troubles me most? I couldn’t get whether the person who talked about it believes himself in sorcery. Or does he just see it as a pretext for killing in some villages, as I would, probably, so I asked.
- And what did he say?
- That it doesn’t matter. How can it not to matter. I mean, if you see two of something before you, it either because there is two of something, or because you are drunk. Isn’t it interesting which one of the two options is true? But from some, epistemological, I think, they call it, position, it doesn’t matter. You just see two of something. Who cares why?
- But if you do want to know why, how can you tell?
- There is only one way to tell, as I see it. You should ask other people. If they see two of something as well where you see two, then you are right, and there is, really, two of something. If they don’t – you are just drunk or hallucinating. Everything else is just an extension on this simple method – instead of asking other people what they see, which is not always convenient, you can try and imaging what they would see. If you see red, for example, and want to know why, this could work sometimes. Or you can choose what other people you ask – you can’t ask absolutely everybody, anyway.
- What you are saying – Emma noticed – is that if everybody, or, rather, your personal everybody, believes in witches and sorcery, they exist, or, it they don’t believe it – they don’t. It’s too simple.
- But madness proof. – Maud said.
- What is sorcery, anyway? – Emma asked. – Or is it witchcraft?
- I don’t think it’s something that’s meant to be terribly clear – Maud answered. Sorcery, I think, is supposed to be something that cannot be explained naturally or rationally. Something that couldn’t happen in a normal and rational world, if it wasn’t for a witch. They are mostly wicked, of course, but, I guess, not all of them. Those who are white magic are not. How do you tell which witch is which? I mean, whether they do white or black magic?
- You probably feel it – Emma said. – But there is something else I don’t understand here. If we say that something is supernatural, we gotta know what’s natural. But what is it? May be I believe that I dream of some things because the wicked witch of the West is sending those dreams to me. Do you think I can prove it or does it make sense anyway?
- Do you really? – Maud asked. – Why?
I doesn’t matter, if I do – Emma answered. – If I did, I would support it this way. All these dreams I see are much too literary and well structured, to be real dreams. Real dreams are all incoherent and disorderly. They are not really mine, or, at least, not all of them. Somebody is just trying to prove a point or two to me. And she is a witch. Is it convincing?
- Is she into white magic or black? – Maud asked.
- I haven’t thought about it. Sometimes it can be quite entertaining, like a bit of not so bad film.
- It would be good if we could catch a witch somewhere and see what they are like for real. – Maud said. – Where do you think we can do it?
- I used to know one when I was very young – Emma said. – I hope she is still functioning and well. I’ll take you there next week.
2. Emma’s favourite witch.
Two days later Emma took Maud to a small village where she used to spend summers as a child. The witch’s name was Yaga. She lived in a small wooden hut on big chicken’s feet, on the edge of the village. In fact, it didn’t matter if it was the edge of the village or not, because the hut could run anywhere. Once you got inside it, you could sit at the table before a big globe and spin it any way you want. All that had to be done was to fix your gaze at a place where you wanted the chicken’s feet to run.
- You know – Emma said. – I just realized, that if you read Yaga back, it’s Gaia. Or almost.
Yaga always had a mortar and a broom (instead of a pestel) in her hut and could fly them anywhere in these.
- OK, girls, - Yaga said. – Where would you like to go?
- Can you fly as far as Sidney in Australia? – Emma asked. – Or America? I can’t believe it.
- Let’s try. – Yaga said.
- What is your chicken feet hut going to do when it comes to crossing oceans? – Maud asked.
- There are two options. – Yaga said. – The hut can be rearranged in either an ocean liner or a jet. Which one do you choose?
- I want a cruising liner – Emma said. If your hut was a jet, I’d be nervous. How many levels is it going to have anyway? Remember how this joke went? On the first level of our luxury jet you will find a passenger’s salon and a spa, on the second level there is a restaurant and on the third – you will find a reading room. Now let’s see it we are going to take off. Are we?
- We’ll go by sea, as a steam liner, Maud and Yaga said together.
3. Ocean cruising in baba Yaga’s hut.
Perhaps Yaga’s hut wasn’t the best vessel to cruise in. After it had departed from Archangelsk on the early morning of a beautiful summer day in July, and reached the open waters of the White Sea, Maud and Emma were almost permanently seasick. The hut rocked and rolled and bounced on the waves and dove inside them, and the feeling of nausea it caused was one of the worst things they both have ever experienced. It was a little bit better, when Yaga turned the oaring regime on. In the oaring regime, the chicken feet were used to propel the hut forward as paddles, and every single push could be felt inside the hut, where they were sitting. Emma felt as if it was who was doing the paddling and pushing, and it distracted her from seasickness. With those oars, my sympathy with the boat soars high – she said. After a while, they met a whale.
It was huge and must have been a blue whale – one of the biggest in the world, if not the biggest altogether.
4. Inside the whale.
- I am tired of all these ups and downs on the waves – Maud said. – Can we do something to change it?
At this point the whale opened its mouth and started slurping the water in. The opening of the mouth itself was covered with baleen – lots of stiff ceratin plates used by whales for sucking krill and shrimp in, to help them filter out all the big unwanted objects that they cannot digest. Baleen is famous for being the stuff they used to make corsets of – may be this is the reason why they called it bal –een?
- I know what I want. – Emma said. – It would be lovely to get inside this whale, for a change. But I’m afraid this hut is way too big. Can you make us smaller? Small enough for the whale to slurp in?
The next moment the tiny hut was in between two baleen plates and a moment later fell down into the whale’s stomach, almost intact. The only loss incurred in the process was a little bit of roof broken off the top of the hut.
- Oof – they said, all three. – Isn’t it dark in here? I guess this is what you call smug – no more rock- n – roll on the waves, and no more seasickness. But not so much space either. What are we going to eat?
The main source of food, they found it, was the food inside the whale’s stomach – and there was plenty. There were other girls there, too. The most entrepreneurial of them pulled out small bunces of baleen plates and made vintage underwear. They planned party plan gatherings to sell it, and, further down the track, all girls balls to show it off.
The only unpleasant thing was tidying off. All those broken baleen plated produced a lot of dust, and of course, there was a need to wipe it off. They made a roster, and every day another woman would pick up tiny bits of baleen here and there and everywhere. It was lucky, from this perspective, that there were so many of them. The biggest problem, of course, was to dispose of the baleen plates. With a bit of luck and a certain skill, one could place them inside the whale so that they’d be picked up by a stream of water forming a fountain going out of the blowhole.
5. Stampede.
The chicken feet hut went underwater once again and emerged, after a while, near the South Yarra bridge, Federation Square, in Melbourne.
- We can all get out of the hut here and go stretch our legs – Yaga said.
Maud and Emma said as she said – they climbed on shore and started to stroll along the busy quay, eyeing the coffee shops and cafes the passed with a faint hope to pick the most attractive.
- What about this one? – Emma started. – I like these small friends. And mixed berries is such a good – she had to stop in the middle of the sentence because something quite extraordinary was happening, at the same time. A big crowd of people was running towards them, noisy and angry, shouting something unclear. After a bit of effort, Maud seemed to have discerned that what they screamed was:
- Here, here. She ran this way! Turn here!
- What is it? – she asked, incredulous. – What are they doing?
- It’s a witch hunt - Yaga said. – They are trying to catch the witch.
- Which witch? – Emma asked. – Do you mean you?
- No, I hope not. – Yaga was calm and composed. – Some other witch who just ran around the corner.
- Do you know any of these people? – Maud asked – of those who are running now?
- As a matter of fact, I do. – Yaga said. – This big woman in the first row is the Editor of Now and Dzen magazine. She is the kind of person who thinks nothing of putting two different photos of two very different people together and making them look like one. For example, she sticks the head of one woman on the naked body of another, if she thinks it would look better this way. And publishes it in her Now and Dzen magazine. By the way, Thomas Mann did the same thing, in one of his stories, the main difference with this woman is he knew these manipulations, not even digital at his time, were fantasy. I’m sure it’s her in the head of the stampede crowd.
- Stop – Emma said. – Not this. I’ve seen something like this recently. Where? Ah, I remember. In Australia. There is a herd of cattle stampeding and one person can…
- It’s different – Yaga said. – It was cattle in the movie. And these are, as you can see, real people. They just happen to be stampeding at the moment. But I’m sure it can be stopped.
- How? – Maud asked.
But the crowd turned the corner by this moment and it wasn’t relevant anymore. Obviously, they were trying to catch another witch.