Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“Well, that’s just stupid,” Emma declared. “The first trial was not so great either, not like battling a giant or finding a sorcerer’s stone or anything, but at least you can make something useful out of cloth. Why does the king want an itty-bitty dog? It can’t hunt or defend anything. And how does your ability to find a tiny dog make you good ruler material, exactly?” She had her blanket tucked neatly under the mattress and drawn below her chin in a straight line; her bed was free of stuffed animals, and the books on her nightstand were arranged by size in perfect order. Mrs. Caldwell imagined that inside Emma’s ten-year-old mind things were just as organized and logical and uncluttered. Emma possessed a clear-eyed, levelheaded need to make sense of the world, and she usually succeeded. Mrs. Caldwell did not worry about Emma.

“It’s not stupid,” Celia said in an impassioned voice from her side of the room. Her bed barely had space for her, crowded as it was with teddy bears and dogs and elephants, her favorite one-eared bunny dressed in her old baby nightshirt. “I think the king just loved pets. Like I love Squash. Like I loved Pepper before he went to dog heaven.” Her mouth curled downward, and Mrs. Caldwell hurriedly resumed her reading.

Mrs. Caldwell worried about Celia.

She read in English because the girls did not know Russian. Eugene was the only one who understood it, albeit imperfectly, for she had sung him Russian lullabies and told him tales of her own childhood; but when she had spoken Russian to the infant Emma, Emma had cried, as if sensing something amiss, and as a toddler she had flatly refused to submit to the pointless torture of learning some made-up word that no one but her mother understood for every normal word used by everyone around her. By the time the twins were born, Mrs. Caldwell had switched fully to English.

“‘The older princes brought many pretty little dogs, but none could fit in the walnut shell…’” The room flared up in a car’s headlights, and Mrs. Caldwell paused to glance out the window; but the car did not slow down by their gates, passing out of sight down the darkened street. “‘And so the old king again embraced his youngest son, told his servants to drown all the other dogs in the sea, and—’”

“Oh, Mama, does it really say that?” Celia cried, her lips turning down once again and beginning to tremble. Mrs. Caldwell looked at her without comprehension, then ran her eyes over what she had just read. She was in the habit of softening the harsher truths of the Brothers Grimm stories, omitting certain details, changing executions to exiles and deaths to prolonged absences—when she paid sufficient attention.

“No, sweetie, of course not, I read it wrong,” she hastened to say. “The king told his servants to release all the dogs by the sea.”

“Because the dogs will enjoy playing on the beach,” Celia said, and, nodding with understanding, subsided back into the pillows.

Emma snorted.

Mrs. Caldwell gave her older daughter a warning look, and returned to the book. At the account of the third task, that of finding the most beautiful girl, her thoughts wandered again, and by the time it came to the king’s ordering the entire crowd of second-rate ladies “to be thrown into the sea and drowned,” she neglected to amend it. Celia sat up in bed, blinking.

“So ladies who aren’t beautiful are drowned? What if I’m not beautiful when I grow up?”

“You probably won’t be. To be beautiful,” Emma said helpfully, “you need to be really skinny and at least eight feet tall.”

Celia looked alarmed.

“No, no, sweetie, Emma’s joking,” Mrs. Caldwell said, snapping the book shut and turning off the lamp, then gently pushing the bunnies and the bears aside to perch on Celia’s bed. “And in any case, I’m sure all the ladies knew how to swim and were perfectly all right in the end.”

Except for the old ones and the fat ones, a voice inside her added with bitterness.

Squash growled in uneasy slumber in the hallway, and she listened for a moment, but all was quiet again. It was almost nine o’clock. The girls’ room lay shadowy and warm, illuminated softly by a single nightlight shaped like a pale pink seashell. “Why don’t I tell you some stories from my childhood instead? How your grandfather and I used to hunt mushrooms, or about the brownie who lived in our dacha attic, or—”

“I don’t want real life,” Celia said. “I want a fairy tale about a princess, but only with a happy ending.”

Mrs. Caldwell looked over at Emma, but she had already fallen asleep, probably as soon as the light had gone out. (In her dream, Emma walked through a city, barefoot, still wearing her cherry-studded pajamas. It was a place she dreamed about often. The streets were straight, the squares wide and empty, the houses made of brightly polished white stones. There were no people around, only statues dressed in what looked like cascading sheets, but Emma was happy there; it seemed to her serious and good. Whenever she found herself visiting, she tried to commit to memory the gleaming geometry of the place so she could build a city just like it when she grew up.)

“All right,” Mrs. Caldwell whispered, stretching along the edge of Celia’s bed. “There once was a princess.”

“Was she beautiful?” Celia asked, snuggling closer.

“She was. But she was not one of those silly princesses who sit in front of their mirrors all day long combing their hair. The most beautiful thing about her was her voice, and above all else in the world she loved to sing. One day the princess decided to leave her home.”

“Why? Didn’t she live in a castle? Were her parents not nice?”

“She lived in a very small castle. Her parents, the old king and queen, were kind and noble, but their kingdom was tiny, and the princess wanted to see new places and learn new things. When she went to say good-bye to her parents, her father gave her a gift—a box that looked plain on the outside but had seven precious songs inside. And he told her to treasure these songs and to keep them secret from everyone. For her voice would stay beautiful and true only as long as the songs stayed hidden, the king told her, but if she let the songs out, she would no longer be able to sing at all. So the princess took the box, thanked her father, and traveled to a distant land across the sea, and in that land she met a prince.”

“Was he nice?”

“He was very, very nice. And he lived in a lovely castle that was much bigger than the castle where the princess had grown up. The prince fell in love with the princess, and the princess loved how nice the prince was, and she loved his castle too. So they got married, and the princess felt so happy on their wedding day that she opened her secret box and sang the first song to her new husband the prince. And the next morning her treasure box had only six songs left in it, but some time later a beautiful baby boy appeared asleep in the cradle, and the princess was happy—so happy that she opened her box and sang the second song to her little son. And then she had only five songs left in the box, but some time later a beautiful baby girl appeared in her cradle.”

“And did the princess sing a song to her baby girl too?”

“She did. In fact, she sang two songs, one to her new baby girl and one to her firstborn boy, to show that she loved them both equally. And then she had two new babies, and only three songs left. And this happened two more times—two more times the princess felt so happy that she sang one of her special songs—and so in the end she had six precious children, and only one song left in her secret box.”

“Six children, how nice,” said Celia sleepily. “You only have five. And did the princess sing her last song away too?”