XVI —The witch and other Stories

Yegor, tasked by Vasilisa to pen a letter to her long-lost daughter Yefimya in Petersburg, finds himself in the homely yet stifling atmosphere of the tavern kitchen during the Christmas season. Vasilisa, having not heard from Yefimya for four years since her wedding, is driven by a mother’s yearning to reconnect. She and her husband, Pyotr, an old man seemingly lost to his own sight, bear the weight of years passed in silence from their daughter. The task is simple yet monumental: convey the love, the greetings, and the life updates of parents to their distant daughter.

Vasilisa, her face shadowed with worry and the scars of time, instructs Yegor to write of parental blessings, Christmas wishes, and the perennial state of their well-being, hoping her daughter and son-in-law, Andrey Hrisanfitch, share the same fortunes. Yet, as the letter begins to take form, her thoughts overrun with the depth of all that remains unsaid. Years of change, of village life continuing its cycles of joy and sorrow without her daughter’s presence, seem impossible to compress into a mere letter.

Yegor, amidst the simplicity and heat of his surroundings, probes for more to add to the letter. The revelation that Andrey was once a soldier like himself, now employed at a hydropathic establishment in Petersburg, leads them to digress into the specifics of his current life based on an old letter, almost lost to memory. Vasilisa’s heart hangs heavy with the fear that her daughter and son-in-law may no longer be alive.

Eager to fulfill his task, Yegor proceeds to craft the letter with a blend of formal advice and personal updates, seemingly strange yet deeply reflective of the gap between the lives of the villagers and the imagined existence of their kin in the bustling, distant capital. The warmth and pain of the humble kitchen scene contrast sharply with the cold unknown of Yefimya’s life in Petersburg, underlining a story of familial love stretched thin by distance and silence. The chapter closes on the reflections of a family disconnected by life’s unpredictable tides, yet clinging to hope through the act of writing, a poignant reminder of the enduring bond between parents and their child, bridged by words on paper.