Belaya Sogra

That’s how many fairy tales begin: the mother dies, a man brings a stepmother into the house, and she takes an instant dislike to her stepdaughter—sending her to her aunt, a baba-yaga… But Zhu, who has suffered the same fate, isn’t sure she’s in a fairy tale. The village she ends up in is somewhere in the North, a place forgotten by God, where the sun never sets; it’s surrounded by forests and swamps, and the phone doesn’t work here. There’s simply nothing to do, and the local old women speak in an odd way—everything they talk about is sorcery and the dead, who come to the living, as well as house spirits and some unclear herb that helps find lost people, though it’s hard to pick: it grows far away in a warm place and is guarded by an unclean power. Still, Zhu isn’t interested in any of it.

Since her mother is gone, it’s hard for her to communicate with people. For her, an inner twin-brother does it—about whom Zhu begins to think that he might actually be herself. Whether she is a boy or a girl, whether she lives in a city or a village, doing something or doing nothing at all—nothing matters to Zhu anymore. But from the day when the local witch, in anger, said “let the goblin take you,” and Zhu disappeared into the swampy woods with her brother, and emerged—alone—only from that day on does she have to learn to live again: listen to the old women and understand what they tell about the forces living in the surrounding swamps, and how to deal with them. Only then can she understand something about herself, too.