Kolya would have liked to make for the village and leave both his basket and his peculiar sister to themselves. But he was a man and a boyar’s son, and so he stalked forward, stiff-legged, to seize his catch. He might have wished to speak; certainly his mouth worked once or twice—rather like a fish himself, Vasya thought—but then he turned on his heel without a word, and strode away.
FALL CAME AT LAST TO LAY cool fingers on the summer-dry grass; the light went from gold to gray and the clouds grew damp and soft. If Vasya still wept for her brother and sister, she did not do it where her family could see her, and she stopped asking her father every day if she was big enough to go to Moscow. But she ate her porridge with wolflike intensity and asked Dunya often if she had grown any bigger. She avoided her sewing and her stepmother both. Anna stamped and gave shrill orders, but Vasya defied them.
That summer she rambled the woods, while the light lasted and into the night. There was no Sasha now to catch her when she fled, and she fled often, despite Dunya’s scolding. But the days drew in, the weather worsened, and on the short, blustery afternoons, Vasya would sometimes sit indoors on her stool. There, she would eat her bread and talk to the domovoi.
The domovoi was small and squat and brown. He had a long beard and brilliant eyes. At night he crept out of the oven to wipe the plates and scour away the soot. He used to do mending, too, when people left it out, but Anna would shriek if she saw a stray shirt, and few of the servants would risk her anger. Before Vasya’s stepmother arrived, they had left offerings for him: a bowl of milk or a bit of bread. But Anna shrieked then, too. Dunya and the serving-maids had begun hiding their offerings in odd corners where Anna rarely came.
Vasya talked between bites, kicking her feet against the legs of her stool. The domovoi was stitching—she had furtively handed him her mending. His tiny fingers flicked fast as gnats on a summer day. Their conversation was, as always, rather one-sided.
“Where do you come from?” Vasya asked him, her mouth full. She had asked this question before, but sometimes his answer changed.
The domovoi did not look up or pause in his work. “Here,” he said.
“You mean there are more of you?” inquired the girl, peering about.
The notion seemed to disconcert the domovoi. “No.”
“But if you’re the only one, then where do you come from?”
Philosophical conversation was not the domovoi’s strong suit. His seamed brow furrowed, and there was a suggestion of hesitation in his hands. “I am here because the house is here. If the house weren’t here, I wouldn’t be, either.”
Vasilisa could not make head or tail of his answer. “So,” she tried again, “if the house is burned by Tatars, you’ll die?”
The domovoi looked as though he were struggling with an unfathomable concept. “No.”
“But you just said that—”
The domovoi intimated at this point, with a certain brusqueness in his hands, that he did not care for any more talk. Vasya had finished her bread, anyway. Puzzling to herself, she slid from her stool in a scatter of crumbs. The domovoi gave her a tight-lipped glare. Guiltily, she brushed at the crumbs, scattering them further. Finally she gave up and fled, only to trip on a loose board and carom into Anna Ivanovna, who stood in the doorway staring with her mouth half open.
In her defense, Vasya did not mean to send her stepmother reeling against the doorframe, but she was strong and rawboned for her age and could scamper very fast. Vasya looked up in quick apology but stopped, arrested. Anna was white as salt, with a little color burning in each cheek. Her breast heaved. Vasya took a step backward.
“Vasya,” Anna began, sounding strangled. “Who were you talking to?”
Vasya, taken aback, said nothing.
“Answer me, child! Who were you talking to?”
Vasya, disconcerted, settled on the safest answer. “No one.”
Anna’s glance darted from Vasya to the room behind. Abruptly she reached out and slapped Vasya across the face.
Vasya put her hand to her cheek, pale with astonished fury. The tears sprang to her eyes a moment later. Her father beat her often enough, but with a grave application of justice. She had never been struck in anger in her life.
“I won’t ask again,” said Anna.
“It’s only the domovoi,” Vasya whispered. Her eyes were huge. “Just the domovoi.”
“And what manner of devil,” demanded Anna, shrilly, “is the domovoi?”
Vasya, bewildered and trying not to cry, said nothing.
Anna raised a hand to slap her again.
“He helps clean the house,” Vasya stammered hastily. “He does no harm.”
Anna’s eyes darted, blazing, into the room and her face flushed dully red. “Go away, you!” she screeched. The domovoi looked up in aggrieved confusion. Anna rounded back on Vasilisa. “Domovoi?” Anna hissed, advancing on her stepdaughter. “Domovoi? There is no such thing as a domovoi!”
Vasya, furious, bewildered, opened her mouth to contradict, caught her stepmother’s expression, and closed it with a snap. She’d never seen anyone look so frightened.
“Get out of here,” cried Anna. “Get out, get out!” The last word was a screech, and Vasya turned and fled.
THE ANIMALS’ HEAT STRUCK up from below and warmed the sweet-smelling loft. Vasya buried herself in a heap of straw, chilly, bruised, and baffled.
There was no such thing as a domovoi? Of course there was. They saw him every day. He’d been right there.
But did they see him? Vasya couldn’t recall anyone except herself talking to the domovoi. But—of course Anna Ivanovna saw him: Go away, she had said. Hadn’t she? Maybe—maybe there wasn’t such a thing as a domovoi. Perhaps she was mad. Maybe she was destined to be a Holy Fool and wander begging among the villages. But no, Holy Fools were protected by Christ; they would not be nearly as wicked as her.
Vasya’s head hurt with thinking. If the domovoi wasn’t real, then what about the others? The vodianoy in the river, the twig-man in the trees? The rusalka, the polevik, the dvorovoi? Had she imagined them all? Was she mad? Was Anna Ivanovna? She wished she could ask Olya or Sasha. They would know, and neither of them would ever strike her. But they were far away.
Vasya buried her head in her arms. She wasn’t sure how long she lay there. The shadows drifted across the dim stable. She dozed a bit in the manner of tired children, and when she awoke, the light in the hayloft was gray and she was furiously hungry.
Stiffly, Vasya uncurled herself, opened her eyes—and found herself looking straight into the eyes of a strange little person. Vasya gave a moan of dismay and curled up again, pressing her fists into her eye sockets.
But when she looked again, the eyes were still there, still large, brown, and tranquil, and attached to a broad face, a red nose, and a wagging white beard. The creature was quite small, no larger than Vasya herself, and he sat in a pile of hay, watching her with an expression of curious sympathy. Unlike the domovoi in his neat robe, this creature wore a collection of tattered oddments, and his feet were bare.
So much Vasya saw before she squeezed her eyes shut again. But she could not sit buried in the hay forever; at last she screwed up her courage, opened her eyes once more, and said tremulously: