Fairy Tales

The Father

THERE ONCE LIVED A FATHER WHO COULDN’T FIND HIS CHILDREN. He went everywhere, asked everyone-had his little children come running in here? But whenever people responded with the simplest of questions-“What do they look like?” “What are their names?” “Are they boys or girls?”-he didn’t know how to answer. He simply knew that his children were somewhere, and he kept looking. One time, late in the evening, he helped an old lady carry her bags to her apartment. The old lady didn’t invite him in. She didn’t even say thank you. Instead she suddenly told him to take the local train to the Fortieth Kilometer stop.

“What for?” he asked.

“What do you mean, what for?” And the old lady carefully closed the door behind her, bolting it and fastening the chain. Yet on his very first day off-and it was the middle of a cold, northern winter-he went off to the Fortieth Kilometer. For some reason the train kept stopping, for long stretches of time, and it was beginning to grow dark when they finally reached the station.

The hapless traveler found himself on the edge of a forest; for some reason he started tramping through snowdrifts until he reached its very heart. Soon he was on a well-beaten path, which in the twilight brought him to a little hut. He knocked on the door, but no one answered. He stepped into the hall, knocked again, and again there was nothing. Then he quietly entered the warm hut, took off his boots, coat, and hat, and began to look around. It was warm and clean inside, and a kerosene lamp was burning. Whoever lived there had just gone out, leaving their tea mug and kettle and bread, butter, and sugar on the table. The stove was warm. Our traveler was cold and hungry, and so, apologizing to anyone who might hear, he poured himself a cup of hot water. Then, after some thought, he ate a piece of bread and placed some money on the table. Meanwhile, outside it had grown completely dark, and the traveling father began to wonder what he should do. He didn’t know the schedule of the trains, and he was in danger of finding himself in a snowbank, especially as the snow had been coming down hard and covering all the paths. The father collapsed on the bench and fell asleep. He was roused by a knock at the door. Raising himself from the bench he said, “Yes-come in.”

A little child wrapped in some kind of frayed rag entered the hut.

He stopped at the table and froze, uncertain what to do.

“Now what’s this?” said the future father, who wasn’t yet fully awake. “Where are you coming from? How did you get here? Do you live here?”

The child shrugged and said “No.”

“Who brought you here?”

The child shook his head, wrapped in his torn-up shawl.

“Are you by yourself?”

“Yes,” said the boy.

“And your mom? Your dad?”

The boy sniffled and shrugged his shoulders.

“How old are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. What’s your name?”

The boy shrugged once again. His nose suddenly thawed and began to drip. He wiped it on his sleeve.

“Hold on there!” said the future dad. “That’s why we have handkerchiefs.” He wiped the boy’s nose with a handkerchief and then started carefully taking off the boy’s things. He unwound the shawl and took off the old fur hat and then the little overcoat, which was warm but very shabby.

“I’m a boy,” the child said suddenly.

“Well, that’s something already,” said the man. He washed the boy’s hands under the faucet-they were very small, with tiny fingernails. In fact the boy looked a lot like an old man, and at other moments, with his face scrunched up, his eyes and nose puffy, like he was wearing a space helmet. The man gave the boy some sweet tea and began feeding him bread.

It turned out the boy didn’t know how to drink-the man had to give him the tea with a spoon. The man even began sweating, it was such hard work.

“All right, let’s put you to bed,” said the man, by now completely exhausted. “It’s warmer on the stove, but you’d fall off. Sleep tight, sleep tight, till the morning comes all bright. We’ll put you on the trunk and surround you with some chairs. Now as for sheets…”

The man searched the hut for a warm blanket but couldn’t find one, and instead put down his warm coat for the child to lie on. He took off his sweater to cover the child with it. And then he looked at the trunk: What if there were something in there, some kind of blanket? The man opened the trunk and removed a blue silk quilted blanket, a pillow with lace, a little mattress, and a pile of little sheets. Under those he found a bundle of thin little shirts, also with lace, and then some warm flannel shirts and a knot of little knit pants, tied together with a light blue ribbon.

“How do you like that? There’s a whole dowry here!” cried the man.

“Of course this belongs to another little boy-but all children get equally cold and equally hungry, so they should share with one another!” the future father concluded aloud. “It wouldn’t be right for one child to have nothing, to walk around in rags, while another child has too much. Right?”

But the child had already fallen asleep on the bench.

With his clumsy hands the man prepared a luxurious blue bed, very carefully changed the child out of his old clothes and into clean ones, and put him down to sleep. For himself he threw his jacket on the floor next to the trunk and its chairs and covered himself with a sweater. The future father was so tired he fell asleep right away, and slept as he’d never slept before.

A knock on the door roused him.

A woman, all encrusted with snow but barefoot, entered the hut.

Leaping up and shielding the trunk, the man said: “I’m sorry, we made ourselves a little at home here. But I’ll pay you.”

“Excuse me,” said the woman, not hearing him, “I got lost in the forest. I thought I’d come in here for a minute and warm up. It’s a real blizzard out there; I thought I’d freeze to death. May I?”

The man realized that this woman didn’t live here, either.

“I’ll make you some tea,” he said. “Please, sit down.”

He had to feed firewood to the stove and look for the water bucket in the hall. Along the way he discovered a clay pot with potatoes that were still warm and another one with millet kasha and milk. “All right, we’ll eat this,” said the man. “But the kasha we’ll save for the child.”

“What child?” said the woman.

“Why, that one,” said the man, and pointed to the trunk, where the baby slept sweetly, his little arms up over his head.

The woman knelt before the trunk and suddenly began to weep.

“Oh God, it’s him, my little one!” she said.

And she kissed the edge of the blue blanket.

“Yours?” said the man, surprised. “What’s his name?”

“I don’t know-I haven’t named him yet,” said the woman. “I’m so tired after this night, a whole night of suffering. There was no one to help me. Not a soul in the world.”

“What is he, then,” said the man suspiciously, “a boy or a girl?”

“It doesn’t matter-whatever he is, we’ll love him.”

And once again she kissed the edge of the blanket.

The man looked closely at the woman and saw that her face really did show traces of suffering-her lips were cracked, her eyes were hollow, her hair hung like string. Her legs turned out to be very thin. But some time passed, and the woman warmed up, apparently, and became prettier. Her eyes began to shine, and her sunken cheeks became rosy. She looked thoughtfully at the ugly, bald little boy. Her arms, holding tightly to the edge of the trunk, trembled.

The boy, too, changed. He shrank, and now looked like a little old man with a puffy nose and little eyes like slits.