Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(47)

It’s all in a prick of the sharp point, you see; this is how curses work. Of course there is a castle there.

No, a temple. It is new, actually. Because after a curse is enacted, it will spread outward—from an injection site (vaccinations are important) and through the blood vessels and capillaries, to the translucent skin that is already covered in febrile blooms, to the very quiet ward (that just a few weeks ago was filled with weak crying), to the families standing around dressed all in black, so quiet, to the borders of the republic and all the way to the capital, to the pages of the newspaper called Komsomolskaya Pravda. And as people there— so far—shake their heads and whisper about the horrors of the new disease, as the newspaper is congratulating itself for its newfound freedom and bravery—because until very recently no one ever said the word “AIDS” in print, it was all some mysterious virus X—as ? 151 ?

? Sleeping Beauty of Elista ?

UNESCO and WHO get involved and outraged, the curse continues

to work inside the city.

Elista never had much to brag about, apart from troubled history and the steppes surrounding it, where the grasses grew so green and then abruptly yellowed. There were no thickets to ensconce it, to hide it away from the world—it was just the yellowing of the grass and the distance, the slow falling-apart of everything inside, the hospital growing hollow and echo-filled under the curse.

It is a superstition to believe that the witch who cursed the town had meant it somehow; most curses are not manufactured out of

malice or pained outrage, but rather they happen, shaped by the whims of history and coincidence, like when there are drug users dying in the hospital, dying of despair and dissolution, and when there are newborns in need of vaccinations, and when there are not enough reusable syringes because they rust and get lost and are being phased out anyway, and there are too few of the disposable ones to even talk about—things like that, the sort of things that happen in fairy tales because in real life they would be entirely too sad.

And the witch: she is in her forties and Kalmyk, the descendant of those who were once banished but returned later, slightly more frost-bitten, more cynical; the nurse wears flat shoes and has small annoying corns on the balls of her feet, and her breasts that grew heavy with age sag against her gray-buttoned coat; you would mistake her for a kindergarten teacher if you saw her in one of the dusty, sleepy streets, or walking through the parks, or craning her neck to see the face of the bronze Lenin. She looks so tired and yet placid, her dark hair misting over with gray. This is before the Buddha and before the Temple, and even before the curse—before she even knows she is a witch.

Her job is in the pediatric ward, and she loves it—she loves babies and the swirl of their hair at the very tops of their heads, black or blond, the red cheeks, dimpled fists and bent legs. She doesn’t even mind when they cry. She hushes them, gently, like a mother would— with every prick of the needle their gurgling escalates to high-pitch ? 152 ?

? Ekaterina Sedia ?

cries which soon die, until the next one starts. She moves from crib to crib to crib, followed by the undulation of wailing. It’s for their own good, she tells herself. Disposable syringes are impossible to boil, but she soaks them in alcohol between her rounds.

The floor in the hospital is blue linoleum, covered in cracks like spiderwebs, or maybe it’s just the pattern. She was never interested enough to look closer. The walls are yellow subway tile, glossy and pale. There are no visitors allowed in the children’s ward, lest they bring some infection with them and get all the children sick. It is only the scrubbed nurses and the doctors, and the quiet humming of the electric plate they use to boil non-disposable syringes. It is lukewarm now.

The vaccinations do not take—or take altogether too well,

depending on your perspective: children develop symptoms and

ulcers. At first, everyone thinks that the vaccines are defective—that instead of attenuated smallpox, scarlet fever, mumps they contain live viruses. It is the stuff of nightmares, because who wants to tell the parents? And then it gets worse. The Kalmyk nurse is fired for negligence, even though she is neither the only nurse nor the most negligent one; but such is the nature of a curse—it needs a scapegoat.

Well, two: the curser and the cursed, the witch and the child, the criminal and the victim. And who is to say who gets it worse? But having one of each makes it easier to keep track: the rest of the nurses continue with their work, albeit with some extra training and the humanitarian syringes sent from overseas by the solicitous George Bush, and the rest of the children die. There is only one left by the time the scandal and the newspaper exposés fall away like dead skin; there is only one girl.