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There’s a comfort in creation, she discovers. Before, such things held a firm association with her step-mother and the two horrors that came with her. House and fieldwork spelled blisters and seared skin, bone-deep exhaustion she only half-remembers after a night of rest.
It’s not that she minds work. With her mother, things weren’t so terrible. They split the toil; her father lent a hand when he could and the effort was lightened. She was still a child when her step-mother arrived, and her spine could only handle so much before it snapped. Shifting her burden onto the doll was simpler. When it was her head, not her back, put on the line, the choice became plainer than that.
The rhythmic clack and whir as she spins provides a soothing cadence to her duty. Had she tasked her doll with this, it would already be finished. The finest in the land. Vasilisa debates it, even as she continues, but the further she delves, the fewer times it enters her mind.
Doing this, she can forget. She disregards the crackle of Baba Yaga’s voice, the house with chicken legs and burning skulls. For short stretches, she can put out of her mind the smell of her step-mother and step-sisters burning to cinders before her.
Vasilisa cannot forget the fact she murdered them, whether such an act was deserved or not. Her father would tell her, she knows, somethings are not meant to be forgotten. Before everything, Vasilisa would have but three things to add to that list: her mother, her father, and her doll. But now, everything has lengthened and she tries her best not to fear the immensity. All that she wills herself to put aside (and that which she cannot), she pushes into the cloth.
When she first begins, Vasilisa expects it to come out black and coarse, like her soul. Her time with the witch stained her into murder and she attempted to flee those ghosts. Instead, she finds her creation thin and gold, as beautiful as people claim she is. The cloth she then creates comes out finer, if that is possible. If she hoped this to bear the burden of her sins, it is not strong enough. The gold bleaches into white, color almost melting away.
If only it is that easy to become pure again.
Vasilisa takes her doll out at night, after the matron of the house is safe in bed. She feeds it and gives it a little to drink, things she saves from supper, and spills her heart to it.
Each time, she says, “You did what you had to do. You did what was right.”
And each night, Vasilisa replies, in broken sobs, “Then why does it feel so wrong?”
She loses the cloth as a gift to the Tsar, but she cares not for the loss of beauty. Rather, it’s the onset of idleness, the hours to spare in thought.
When it returns after several days brooding, with the charge to make a shirt, Vasilisa nearly weeps for joy.
She crafts each stitch with deliberation and care. It matters not that this will go to the Tsar when she finishes. Had Vasilisa been sewing this for the peasant man down the way, she would offer it the same attention. It’s the work, the glorious work, which ensnares her senses. When it captivates her down to the last detail, she can try to forget again. The attempts ultimately fail, but now, she has something to do other than stew in her memories.
In the end, she creates two shirts, and even she can say they are beautiful. As the old woman runs to deliver them, Vasilisa pull out her doll and feeds her a bit of bread from the loaf cooling on the counter.
“You have finished,” she observes, looking down at Vasilisa’s needle-pricked fingers. “And?”
“And what, my dearest friend?”
“Do you not see?”
“I do not understand.”
If the doll can sigh, she does. “Despite what all the world has done, there are still beautiful things. You can make them.” She pauses. “You are one of them.” Then, she goes still and no matter what she does, Vasilisa cannot make her speak any more.
Tucking her back into her pocket, Vasilisa has the briefest flash of the thought that perhaps, her doll is right once more.