The Golden Fish

In the rushes by the waterside, on the loneliest bend of the river Ob, there lived a rusalka.

No. That is saying too much. Like all rusalki, she was dead. We try again.

On the loneliest bend of the river Ob, a little stalk of rushes was haunted by a rusalka.

Through short summers, she swirled idle feet at the water’s edge. Through long winters, the river held her ankles still, waiting for spring’s unshackling. And this, with a loll of her sunflower head to track the naked stars and the traveling sun and the occasional passing cloud, was all her stirring—all that remained to remind that she had once been a person, and not a cattail, or a ripple on the gentle water.

But one day—in that strange way the Lord sometimes calls on us to call—she rubbed her eye and came away with an eyelash on her fingertip, stuck straight up like the wildest feather on a red-breasted goose loath to leave its winter refuge. With an idle thought, she blew it away, and there, where it landed on the slow waters in the reeds—too softly for a ripple, too quiet to obtain the notice of any but those who count sparrows—there was a puckered ring, and her foot was struck by something firm and round where—for fifty years or a hundred (who could say?)—there had been neither log nor stone. And so, with a bracing pull across her withered back, she reached into the water and picked it up.

“Oh!” she cried, splashed from head to shin by a thrashing fish perhaps a foot long that twisted and turned with all its might, catching moonbeams on golden scales, so that it seemed the light—reflected twice—regained the brilliance of its source.

Before she could whisper any prayer, the fish cried out, “Don’t eat me! Don’t eat me!” and the rusalka leaned back, less startled at the fish’s speech than by the thought of harming such a lovely creature.

“Little fish,” she began, “I wasn’t going to—”

“I grant wishes, you know!” the fish went on, oblivious with fear. “I love granting wishes! Only let me go, and I’ll grant one for you. What is your name?”

A long while the rusalka’s eyes were far away, searching in a fall mist. “Bagida,” she said at last, laying the fish back into the water. “What is yours?”

The fish wriggled, as though shaking its head. “You could not pronounce it in air.”

“Well,” replied Bagida, peering down at the still-sparkling fish, now pale as champagne, “then I will call you Yoldız.”

For a moment, the fish’s gold seemed to ripple crimson—as though it blushed—and then was bright again. “Your hands are cold,” she observed. “Do you need a blanket, a fire, a warm bed?”

Bagida smiled softly. “Do not worry yourself for my hands,” she answered. “I am dead.”

Yoldız, who had been pacing the waters at Bagida’s feet, held still within the stream. “I am sorry.”

“Don’t be,” shrugged Bagida. “I left no one cause to mourn.”

A cool wind bent the rushes, and in the ripples, it seemed the fish looked her up and down. “That is hard to believe, aysilu. How could no one have missed you?”

Bagida sighed. “Because they missed only what I wished to be rid of—the extra digit that gave the shaman’s calling I did not ask for.” Her eyes, bluish-brown as a tidal pool, locked with the fish’s in the slow water. “I granted wishes, too, for people who told me I’d flit through the world tree’s branches as I pleased, but it pleased me to be a woman instead of a little bird . . .” Bagida’s voice hung on the breeze like a gull on an updraft, and her eyes seemed to drift with the current a long while, until she shook her head—tousled, sea-green hair jangling like a headdress. “There was so much blood. I couldn’t stop the blood. And the fan of it on the water was for wings. And I flew away from my burden.”

Yoldız was silent, and all was soft click of swaying reeds and burble of water, as though the patient earth, after all these years, might speak some comfort to Bagida’s pain. But it, too, kept its peace.

“I am sorry,” Yoldız said again. “Let me help. It is no burden for me. I love to grant wishes!” And the gleaming fish swam such circles in its eagerness that Bagida could not stop herself from smiling, as might any young woman unjealous of the living, whether from having life or from disdaining it. “I am certain now of what you must want,” declared Yoldız, “and I want only to give it.”

At this, Bagida’s smile smirked, like a tundra tree twisted by the constant wind. “Very well,” she said. But though Yoldız leapt and shimmered and shouted, nothing happened. And when the fish seemed thoroughly exhausted, she was not a doldrum, but a tempest.

“Argh!” she screamed. “I can’t do it!” Her fins struck out at every stalk of river plant, every leaf and petal in the river’s tow. “My scales betray me!”

“It’s alright,” soothed Bagida. “I didn’t need anything anyway.”

“No!” roared Yoldız. “You don’t understand! I’ve always granted wishes so easily; they didn’t even need to be spoken. But now . . .” The fish’s voice waned soft and frail. “Magic is currency, and I am poor.”

Bagida frowned. “Currency? What would it buy you?”

“My life!” Yoldız wailed, and the grasses at the river’s edge wailed with her. The clouds, which had seemed so light when night began, drooped heavy with her grief.

Bagida’s face was bright, her smile broad. “Oh, you silly, beautiful little fish! I was never going to eat you. Your shimmering scales delight me too much.” Yet Yoldız seemed no happier than before, and the water bubbled with pitiful moans, so that Bagida shook her head. Matted locks swung in and out of her vision, green as the new-sprouted tips of the conifers, and she remembered the day it had turned—how the brown drained away like blood, how it had been harder to watch it go.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I am sure your magic will return. Perhaps in the fall, when the river is filled again with larch needles and you can eat from the eight-branched tree?” Bagida’s smile was sadder, but still broad, and she leaned down to peer into the water, hoping for the littlest splash, but none came. “May I hold you?” she asked.

Yoldız leapt, the shine restored to her voice. “Of course!” she cried. “Of course! Why did I not think of that? In all the stories, the fisherman has the fish in hand when the wish is made. Pick me up, pick me up, and we will try again!”

So Bagida reached a second time into the water, and now Yoldız did not thrash or twist, but lay with taut excitement across her palm. Again, the moonlight struck her scales as though to give back sun. But nothing happened.

“Argh!” yelled Yoldız. “It is no use . . . Put me down! Put me down!”

With care, Bagida laid her back in the water, and Yoldız began to cry, so that the soft-hearted rusalka feared she might weep a second river to overbank the first. “Oh, my friend!” Bagida exclaimed. “For surely you are my friend, who are so committed to doing me a kindness though it pains you. Your grief is mine, too—not for my sake, but for yours. I only wish there were something I could say—” But she hadn’t time to say more before Yoldız was out of the water again in great, spattering arcs—a living aspergillum.

“Of course!” she shouted. “Oh, you brilliant, ayziräk girl! As I am your friend, will you be mine? Will you take a task if I have one to give you?”

“Anything,” answered Bagida.

“Then go and come back to me,” said Yoldız, “with two crowberries and a rosehip. I will wait for you here.”

Bagida rose. Her back was stiff, her spine weathered, her limbs weak, but she planted her hands beside her and drew up her knees, felt the air sting her feet as the waters of the Ob fell away.

And when she put them down, the slightest, softest edge of leaf was like a sharp stone against her sole, and the dark earth the sun had warmed by day was still, in the cool of night, a bed of coals. But she stood, and she walked in timid, halting steps along the bank, then back into the low bushes set away from the water’s edge, peering curiously into every bramble like she used to do as a child, and each startled bird that startled her in turn, each skillful spider weaving rugs for morning prayers, each ruby berry glowing in the darkness with flavours she had long forgotten, loosened her spindled limbs and set her feet to music only trees and stars could hear.

It was many paces back from the bank, on the leeward side of an old, erratic stone, that she found the crowberries in the low cover—two with an almost copper tinge grown tight together, as though they shared one fortune and were content to do so. And it was by the river again, at tiptoe height in a spreading bush all burst with red, that she found the perfect rosehip, with sepals splayed like a little star to remind her of her friend.

She had been gone perhaps only a few minutes when she slipped back into the rushes with her treasures, but when she took her seat again upon the bank, her feet met the water with a grace they’d not had in many summers, so that Yoldız almost did not know her for the delicacy of the ripples.

“I found what you asked!” announced Bagida, grinning still more widely than before, and she leaned her face eagerly toward the water. “What else can I get you?”

“The favour of the Zlata Baba, if we’re lucky,” Yoldız said. “Now toss the crowberries on the water. I have eaten nothing all day.”

So Bagida tossed the berries, and Yoldız gobbled them up.

“Good girl,” said Yoldız, and Bagida’s legs were wicks drawing up the waters of the Ob—her whole body silver flowing in the hush of night. “Now pop the rosehip in your mouth, and follow my tongue,” and Yoldız fed her Ostyak words that nibbled at her lips like fish, until all was quiet, and she did not know what she had said.

At last, there was a great thrashing, a spluttering, a splashing, and Yoldız’s anguished cry fluttered between frustration and physical pain. “I don’t understand!” she screamed. “You held me just right, you said all the right things!” Again and again, she leapt, slapping the reeds with her tail on every jump, so that she seemed—as much as any fish might manage—to spit the words through gritted teeth: “WHY . . . CAN’T . . . I . . . GRANT . . . WISHES!?”

Yoldız leapt again, but before she could slam her body down on the water, Bagida caught her in a slender hand and pressed her to her breast. “It’s alright,” she whispered. “It’s not your fault.” Gently, she stroked her finger over the fish’s back, but though the golden scales shone as brilliantly as ever, the rusalka did not smile. “It’s probably mine. I bled out here, in these rushes. Maybe there is only so much magic one river can bear.”

“Bagida!” cried Yoldız. “O my beautiful, clever Bagida! That must be it!”

Bagida was so startled she almost dropped her, but instead she merely dipped her in the water to breathe and then held her out again so that she could look at her eye-to-eye. “What must be it?”

“This river,” explained Yoldız. “It isn’t magical enough. Look around!” Bagida turned her head from left to right to left again, taking in the sparkle of the moon-kissed water, the deep green of the night-stained leaves, the subtle music of the clacking reeds, and it was as though she saw it now, with this golden fish in her hands, for the first time—a whole world held in her eye as in a single drop of dew on a quaking leaf of the world tree—and, likewise for the first time, she regretted the power she had severed from her—not for herself, but for another. “It’s all so familiar,” Yoldız went on. “Boring. In the stories, the golden fish is always caught in one of the great rivers of the west: the Dnieper, the Neman, the Neva—”

“The Volga,” said Bagida, almost to herself as she laid Yoldız back in the water. “My father used to sing of the Volga.”

“Yes!” whooped Yoldız. Then, in hushed awe, “The Volga . . .” And again she swam circles, as she had when they first met, but it seemed to Bagida now that those circles’ eddies matched her own strangely liquid body—the swirl and flow of her relimbered heart. “Will you take me?” asked Yoldız, and there was no question what Bagida would say.

So Bagida wove a basket from the reeds, tight enough to hold water, and together, for long weeks and through steep mountains, they followed the setting sun to the shores of the Kama, and then followed its banks, at last, to a junction with a still greater river, where an old woman knelt, collecting water.

“Babushka,” began Bagida, carefully tucking stray hairs under the headscarf she had donned on their journey. “Is this the Volga? Won’t you tell us? We have come so far.” The old woman looked up as though the cock of her eyebrow had lifted her whole head. “We?”

“Yes,” nodded Bagida, “me and my fish.” She held out the basket for the woman to see.

The woman snorted. “Yes, child, this is the Volga—”

“Oh, thank heaven!” interrupted Bagida, and she sprinted to the shoreline, first carefully changing the water in the basket out for fresh, and then washing her hands and her face and her feet.

“You have come some way, Tatar,” acknowledged the old woman, but the angle of her hand on her hip did not betray whether she was impressed or bemused. “Why do you seek the river?”

“We have come from the Ob,” explained Bagida. “This is a magic fish—a golden one! Her name is Yoldız. She could not grant wishes anymore, so we came to a river with greater magic.”

Again, the old woman was unreadable, her face flickering between a scoff and a soothe. “Oh, child . . .” she shook her head. “This is the Volga, and it is indeed magic, but I fear to tell you the truth of the old magic in it.”

“Why should you fear, babushka?” asked Bagida, quickly become all frown and trembling lip.

“Do you know what my people used to call this river?” The old woman’s question seemed rhetorical, yet she waited for Bagida to shake her head. “The Raha. And do you know what that means?” Bagida shook her head again. “Wetness,” said the woman.

Bagida blinked. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” the woman shrugged. “You see all this land around you, everything that grows? It is all because of the river—because God, in his providence, has placed it here. So long as it flows—so long as it is wet—that is magic enough to transform everything. I only pray it is enough for you.” And so saying, she walked away.

And the basket, which stood still on the bank, erupted in howls of rage, and the sides bowed in rhythmic strikes until it tipped, rolling on its rim like a clattering wheel come off a cart. Through her own tears, Bagida rushed beside it and dropped to her knees, scooping the paroxysmic fish from the shallow water that remained and holding her close to her heart. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . . It’s going to be okay.”

Yoldız struggled, and she screamed like she portended death.

“It’s going to be okay,” repeated Bagida. “Truly. Don’t you see?” she sniffed. “We have come so far, done so much, talked and laughed so many nights beside our fires! You have already given me everything I did not dare to ask for. You have already granted my wish, Yoldız! You really have.” She squeezed the little fish tighter and, though she wetted its gills with her tears, she smiled more widely than ever before, like the arc of her lips might join the two rivers and take them home.

In the towns along the Volga, at the wharfs where the traders put in, in the markets where the children gather to play, in palaces where princesses lay their heads upon their pillows, they say that Bagida’s smile joined the ends of the earth and all the branches of the world tree, and that the glow that she had lost came back to her, ignited by the golden fish upon her breast. They say that, in that moment, she flew through all the stars to find the light of her beloved Yoldız and restore it, so that they could each grant one another’s wishes. And so they stayed and built a little cabin where the Kama meets the Volga—a brown-haired girl very much alive and a girl with golden skin who liked to kiss her by the river until they both became one.

But in the villages that dot the Ob, at camps where trappers tell their tales, in taverns where travelers seek company, in woods where holy men and women go to know that they are not alone, they say Bagida filled the basket fresh and carried Yoldız back across the Urals to the rushes where they’d met. And if you can find it—the bend that was once the loneliest on the river Ob—you can hear them the first week of June, and somehow, too, a certain day in January: the rusalka swirling slender feet in running water, and the golden, circle-swimming fish that never leaves her side, talking and laughing in the dead of night.

None can say which story’s true—only that, in both, they both are happy.