Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(48)

And what about the girl? Indeed, there isn’t much to say about the Sleeping Beauty while she is conforming to her moniker—before or after, when she is awake, maybe. Before: she was one of the children, crying weaker, her limbs growing thinner, losing their caterpillar-like segmentation of baby fat and becoming tapered candles, waxen, melting until there was nothing but a fragile bone wick in the center, ? 153 ?

? Sleeping Beauty of Elista ?

barely hidden. Her eyes grew dark as her face receded away, and her mouth filled with thrush, white fungal threads covering the red inflamed tissue underneath.

But she didn’t die. Instead she slipped into a coma, and the doctors debated what to do. They decided against life support—because why extend the suffering of something too small to even understand what suffering was and there was a nobility in it—but she breathed on her own. They disconnected the glucose drip, and the thrush subsided, but the girl didn’t die. She continued to breathe, sleep, and—very slowly—grow.

Her parents took her home when she was two. The hospital didn’t want to keep her, and the doctors had grown uncomfortable with her failure to die despite any source of nourishment—it was as if sleep itself sustained her; and she wasn’t a bad child—quiet, never fussy, never hungry. Almost pretty. She slept at home, on her older sister’s cot, under the billowing of white cheesecloth curtains in the summer and heavy, silver-shot darkness in winter. They changed her clothes only as she grew out of them, because they never got soiled.

She turned sixteen in 2005, the year the Buddhist Temple was

built. They don’t tell you that, but she was the reason why the Dalai Lama came to Elista in the first place. The Sleeping Beauty of Elista— the only survivor out of the twenty-seven infamous pediatric AIDS

patients—was a secret, but rumors travel. He came to see her when she was a mere child, but by the time the temple he had requested was finished, she had grown too long for her sister’s cot. As soon as the temple was ready, her parents carried the cot with the sleeping girl on it to the hidden room, made especially for her, at the temple’s center.

She sleeps in the temple from then on. Her sleep is a peculiar thing: like the curse, it spreads through the town; others do not sleep like she does, but they are stricken by a particular malaise—timelessness of sorts, the blunting of affect and feeling. It grows and it radiates through the country, where the outrage dims to smirking discontent and fear—to wary mistrust, as things continue to decay and fall into ? 154 ?

? Ekaterina Sedia ?

disrepair. Tractors rust. Inflation is a part of this too, I’m sure, and it is difficult not to look to the miraculous sleeping girl as some sort of salvation—and one has to wonder why didn’t the Dalai Lama ever come back to see her again, or to visit the temple built for him.

They talk about practical miracles in Elista—their Buddhism

tinged with the terrible shadow of Christianity and its fairy tales— they talk about how some miracles are meant as object lessons, and maybe the Sleeping Beauty is one of those. Maybe the dead children were a lesson too, maybe they were meant to remind us about proper sterilization techniques, although the price seems altogether too high for such a trivial lesson. Maybe there is something deeper in it, too. But no one can agree what the sleeping girl is meant to teach us. In fact, no one seems to agree about her either. Some say she is Kalmyk, and others insist she is Russian, the descendant of the settlers of Stepnoy—the ones for whose benefits the Kalmyk nurse’s ancestors had been exiled to Siberia. There may or may not be some symbolism there, or historic justice, or whatever you want to call it.

No one can ask her parents since they had passed away, and her older sister moved to some better city, possibly less decaying, leaving her cot behind. And now the Sleeping Beauty belongs to the town and the temple, floating uprooted and possibly dreaming.

The witch visits her occasionally, and it is assumed that she is there to ask for forgiveness. The more mythically minded citizens of Elista whisper when they see the nurse (the witch) walking through the park, in her flat nurse shoes, with her thick compression hose and gray coat. Her back is bent now, and people whisper about who she is. She doesn’t have the advantage of the usual witch’s disappearance after the curse has been cast and takes over the story; she is left to linger along with it, but with not much else to do, her historical function completed, but to crane her neck and try and discern the inanimate features of the two largest statues: the Lenin is older than the Buddha, and no less enigmatic. Neither offers her solace.