The Blue Gazelle

I occasionally scan the Internet for the recipes of borscht, just out of curiosity. I wonder what people write about it. None of the recipes I encounter are right. Some people fail to mention you need a homemade chicken broth to start a borscht. Others forget to include cabbage, which is vital. Also, if you add cabbage too early in the process your borscht will inevitably become a shchi - and this is a different dish. I never make shchi but I could probably produce a decent Ukrainian borscht with my eyes half-closed. I'll let you in on a secret: not even the richest, most fragrant cholent can replace borscht. Not even the cholent my friend Chaim used to create—and I can think of no better word than create—could ever compete with it. That was a different kind of art altogether.

I can still see Chaim standing over his enormous cauldron, bending so low that his spectacles fogged up with steam. He would stir the thick, bubbling stew with a wooden spoon the size of an oar and murmur to himself,

"Do you know what cholent is? It's one of life's great joys. And when a person truly delights in life, all the shedim—the devils—keep well out of their way."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Chaim's story can wait.

As for Aunt Fenya—my uncle's wife—her borscht was in a league of its own. Finger-licking hardly began to describe it; you had to be careful not to swallow your fingers altogether. And beside the steaming bowl she would always set a decanter of homemade plum cordial —dark, thick, just tart enough, warming your throat like a small glowing ember.

I'd already spent six hours at Uncle Misha's house, sipping that cordial, smoking his wonderfully aromatic home-grown tobacco, and talking about life.

My uncle is the village constable in Melovoye. He's a decent man—kind-hearted, sensible in that practical country way—but spectacularly uneducated. Worse still, he devours every tabloid he can get his hands on. And these days those papers print every imaginable piece of nonsense about werewolves, UFOs, vampires, ghosts, spirit mediums—you name it.

How many times had I told him not to believe that rubbish?

It didn't matter.

He'd even started keeping a notebook, filling it in with painstaking schoolboy handwriting sprinkled with tiny spelling mistakes, carefully excerpting every outlandish article.

"You never know," he'd say. "Something might come in handy on the job. Life throws all sorts of things at you. Better to have it written down somewhere. If I ever run into a vampire—or heaven forbid, a werewolf decides to settle around here—I'll know what to do."

So we sat, ate, and discussed the country's political problems the way people always do over good food and homemade liquor. Around eight in the evening I stopped sipping the cordial altogether because I intended to drive home later that night.

Around eleven, with the night already settled over the fields, I decided it was time to drive back to town.

The moment I mentioned leaving, Uncle Misha dug in his heels.

"You're staying the night. End of discussion. No business driving country roads after dark. Especially not past the kurgans, the burial mounds. Funny things have been happening there lately."

Had he not mentioned the burial mounds—or anything supernatural—I probably would have stayed.

Instead I became just as stubborn.

"I'm leaving."

We argued back and forth until Uncle Misha finally threw up his hands.

"Fine then, you impossible woman. But keep your eyes open—and watch out for the blue Gazelle."

"The what?"

"The blue Gazelle van. Five people have already been killed driving at night. Three others barely made it out alive. It comes flying around the bend straight at you, forces you off the road... and then it's gone. Vanishes as if it had never been there."

"Don't worry about me, Uncle Misha," I laughed. "I'm almost an unbeliever—and completely free of superstition. Creatures like that aren't interested in people like me. Besides, I happen to love life. And demons can't stand people who do."

"Mm-hmm," he grumbled. "We'll see."

The road stretched empty beneath the stars.

I rolled down the windows, letting the cool steppe wind pour into the car, while Louis Armstrong drifted softly from the speakers.

Then headlights exploded in my face.

Some idiot shot around the bend—drunk, by the look of it—and came barreling straight at me. I barely managed to swerve in time.

Strangely enough, he was driving a blue Gazelle.

Uncle Misha's words came rushing back to me.

I drove on.

A few minutes later another pair of headlights started flashing insistently in the mist behind me.

They wanted me to pull over.

"As if," I muttered.

The driver grew impatient, flashing his high beams, honking, blinking his indicators.

And it was the same damned blue Gazelle.

The one that had supposedly been heading in the opposite direction not five minutes earlier.

By now I wasn't feeling nearly so brave.

I put my foot down on the gas.

All the while I kept thinking that as soon as I got home I'd phone Uncle Misha and give him a piece of my mind. Fill a person's head with ghost stories before midnight and, sure enough, every shadow on the road would look haunted.

I rounded the next bend—

—and there it was.

A blue Gazelle stood sideways across the road blocking my way.

A woman waited beside it.

Alone.

I couldn't exactly run a woman over simply because my uncle believed in ghost stories and my nerves had begun playing tricks on me.

I stopped the car and stepped outside.

"What's happened?" I asked.

"My engine died," she said with an apologetic smile. "Won't start at all."

"I'd gladly tow you," I replied, "but I'm afraid I don't have a tow rope."

As I spoke, I found myself studying her.

Had I been a man, I probably would have fallen in love on the spot.

She possessed that rare, unsettling kind of beauty that seems almost borrowed from another age. Her skin was olive-dark, her eyes an astonishing blue. Her hair had been gathered into an intricate style and fastened with long ornamental pins. She was tiny—almost delicate enough to disappear in a strong gust of wind.

And then there was her perfume.

Sweet, rich, strangely intoxicating.

At first I thought of peaches.

Then perhaps patchouli.

Or passionflower.

Something warm and exotic that lingered just a little too long in the air.

"I'll leave the van here," she said. "Would you be kind enough to give me a lift to the town? It's terribly lonely out here."

"Of course," I said. "Hop in."

She climbed into my old Niva, and we set off.

Almost immediately I began to feel uncomfortable.

Not frightened exactly.

Just... wrong.

As though someone were slowly drawing the point of a needle down the length of my spine.

Her eyes seemed different now. They caught the misty darkness and reflected it oddly, their pupils narrowing into almost perfect vertical slits.

Like a cat's.

Neither of us spoke.

Louis Armstrong filled the silence.

His voice has always had a remarkable way of calming me.

My passenger sat quietly, glancing now and then—not at me—but at the little hamsa hanging from the rear-view mirror.

At last she spoke.

"I hope you won't think me terribly rude," she said softly, "but I simply can't take my eyes off your charm. Would you consider exchanging it... for this?"

She reached into her handbag and drew out a bracelet.

It was breathtaking.

A broad band of darkened silver, ancient by the look of it. Serpents twisted over its surface, their tiny ruby eyes glowing like live embers. Between them emerged the heads of wolves and lynxes, their emerald eyes catching the faint light inside the car.

Without thinking, I reached out.

The moment my fingers touched it, I wished I hadn't.

The bracelet was unnaturally cold.

Not cool.

Cold—as though it had spent centuries buried beneath ice.

It was astonishingly heavy, too.

Have you ever picked up an object and known, instantly and without explanation, that it did not belong with you?

That's what it felt like.

It was beautiful.

Ancient.

Extraordinary.

And profoundly other.

Not mine.

Not meant for me.

There was something deeply wrong about it.

The hamsa, on the other hand...

That was mine.

More than that—it had been a gift.

Years ago, in Jerusalem, on one of the narrow winding streets of Mea Shearim, there lived a man who had refused to become the rabbi of a great Hasidic court, despite being the eldest son of a revered rebbe.

His real name hardly matters.

Let's call him Chaim.

Every Sabbath evening, as soon as the first large white stars appeared overhead, I would put on my cream-coloured dress and my pink hat and walk halfway across Jerusalem just to spend the evening with him.

Usually I came carrying little more than homesickness and the sorrow of an unhappy marriage.

Chaim...

He was a scholar, a lover of books, and one of the greatest cooks I have ever known.

No one baked strudel the way he did.

No one made gefilte fish, chopped liver, or meatballs quite like his.

No one baked challah that filled an entire street with the scent of home.

Every Friday at sunset he lit candles in the window of his tiny house.

He lived alone among shelves of books, prayer volumes, and old cooking pots polished smooth by decades of use.

On Shabbat he always invited guests to share the evening meal.

He won me over completely for another reason.

After listening to me sigh over Bulgakov... and Tyutchev... he somehow managed to find Hebrew translations of both.

He read them with extraordinary seriousness—as though they were respected commentaries on the Tanakh or the Talmud.

He underlined passages he found puzzling.

Then, every Sabbath, he would quietly interrogate me about them with patient, relentless curiosity.

Sometimes he would open an old Jewish text and point to a passage whose echo carried, for me, the unmistakable music of Tyutchev.

Those moments seemed almost miraculous.

But above all, Chaim knew how to listen.

Better than any psychoanalyst.

He would peer at you over the rim of his old wire spectacles, nodding beneath the shtreimel that, I suspected, he removed only to sleep.

Nothing you confessed ever surprised him.

Nothing shocked him.

He simply listened.

And when, exhausted by the sound of your own voice, you finally fell silent...

he would answer with two or three quiet sentences.

Sometimes those few sentences were almost a miracle.

The key you'd been searching for without knowing it.

One day Chaim gave me the little hamsa.

"Take it," he said with a smile.

"It's medicine for sadness."

Oddly enough...

it was.

And now she wanted to trade for it.

"No."

I withdrew my hand.

The woman's eyes narrowed.

For a fleeting instant they flared with something bright and terrible.

Beneath the exquisite lines of her face, something else slipped into view—

something ancient,

something that had never belonged to this world.

"So..." she said at last, her voice barely more than a whisper, soft and hissing at once.

"Where are you coming from, little dove?

And where are you going?"

The cassette player crackled suddenly, as though choking on the tape.

Then—

silence.

Only the growing sweetness of her perfume, cloying now instead of pleasant.

The cold wind pressing against the windows.

The mist outside.

And my passenger's face...

changing.

The beautiful features seemed to sink inward.

The skin stretched tight.

The eyes became hollow shadows.

For one impossible heartbeat I was looking at a skull.

I lifted my eyes to the small patch of star-filled sky that the fog had not yet swallowed.

Then I answered quietly,

"I'm driving from people I love...

to people I love."

She turned away.

For a long time she said nothing.

When she finally spoke, her voice sounded almost tired.

"Let me out here."

She pointed toward the burial mounds.

"I'll walk from here."

I stopped the car.

She stepped out without another word.

The wind caught at her clothes as she stood alone beside the ancient earthworks.

Then she began walking.

Her slight figure trembled in the sweeping steppe wind, growing smaller and smaller until the darkness folded around her.

Somewhere in the distance a night bird gave a single mournful cry—

and fell silent.

Inside the car the cassette player cleared its throat, as if waking from a dream.

Louis Armstrong began to sing again.

Of course he was singing about love.