Tver was "Formerly a land of woods and bogs" OK? It just makes sense. It got trampled over to make room for Moscow's suburbs, OK?

I was Tatar, and you?

Many Russian boyar (noble) families traced their descent from the Mongols or Tatars, including Veliaminov-Zernov, Godunov, Arseniev, Bakhmetev, Bulgakov (descendents of Bulgak) and Chaadaev (descendents of Genghis Khan's son Jagatay). In a survey of Russian noble families of the 17th century, over 15% of the Russian noble families had Tatar or Oriental origins.[11]

Who’s baking bread in this evil wigwam?

That must be the smell of baking bread, which is always welcome in a hopeless leathery kiln of a room like this one. Nobody here is going to bake any bread. This place is where you get eaten, or you eat a rat or a frog, or find a bone to suck on. Been nothing but death, death, death for hundreds of years, here in Baba Yaga’s place. The smell evanesces, and then I catch it again: bread! I look over at Frommers, who’s just crying into his beard with his eyes closed. I’ve been here before, gotten out before, even surprised Yaga so that she laughed out loud and forgot to kill me. Never smelled anything like bread here, though. It has occurred to me that Yaga might be out of town. Her pestle is gone, and her noisy old traveling sweater made of horseshoe crab tails. The place is lacking something, even in the way the fleas cross the floor like they’re on vacation, all lackadaisical and brimming with whimsy like. The boss has left. So who’s got me and Frommers all tied up and dying of thirst, next to the iron oven and the fleas and the heap of fresh scalps? Who’s baking bread in this evil wigwam? I wink at the fleas, and some of the saucier ones sort of bound around and click their flea heels at me. So my hunch is right: there’s some kind of reprieve at work. I’m not khleb dreaming. What’s more, the flea parade is moving towards this worn mess of a rug, made of woven particolored rags like a suffocated jester. They stream into one side of the rug, but they don’t come out t’other side. What gives? I spend a minute stealing Frommer’s belt and knife, and then roll my fat self across the floor away from the oven and over to the nasty rug. The smell of bread gets a whole lot unmistakeabler. Somebody under that rug is making some nourishing buttery goodness. It’s like April sunlight streaming in through a window, but it’s covered by a flattened clown. I pray for some kind of water, since I’m so thirsty, and I bite down on the belt I stole from Frommers with my hands tied together, and I try to roll over to the mangy rug.

The Horrible Hen of Hrastvecy

⟴ They both stopped for a moment and stared at their hands. The blood was inevitable, of course, and the trembling and the burn marks. Where had the chicken feathers come from, though? That was weird. Was there a chicken involved, and they were both so involved that they had missed it? Had someone been casting feathers from a high branch as they pummeled one another? Now that they were paying attention, there really were a ton of feathers under foot, and floating around them like snowflakes. Afanasy glanced at Frommers and made the “let’s take a break from brawling and figure out this chicken thing” gesture. It had gotten dark since they had begun to try to break one another, and a pair of crows had found an ear behind a log and begun processing it. Afanasy produced a glowing coal from a sack at his waist, and used it to start a little fire in a heap of dry pine needles. The thick smoke from the smoldering needles frightened off the crows and the light from the fire made the smoke heavy and weighty between the two foes. There was a pair of eyes reflecting light from the pine woods to the northeast, where the land declined into marshland. They blinked and then reappeared. Afanasy gestured again to Frommers. Abruptly, Frommers picked up a helmet and tossed it, rotating expertly, at the pair of eyes. There was a deep, throaty clucking from the gloomy void. A spreading of flightless wings and a determined charge over snapping underbrush. The two bitter enemies confronted the raging fowl as symmetrical parts of a whole, Afanasy striking with his left and Frommers with his right. The mindless creature, which loomed over them like a spinning cedar, coughed out a gob of foam and blood, and brought its sail-sized wings over and across them like a boat righting itself in a hurricane. Frommers and Afanasy felt their skulls bounding off each other with the force of a wave trying to dislodge a piece of coast. Baba Yaga’s hut looked a little better than the last time he had awakened there. She had taken down the depressing garlands of seaweed and onions, and widened the only window so that there was a view of the wet mud outside. There was a smell of damp hair, pepper and dried tar that drifted into Afanasy’s nostrils. A stream of determined-looking fleas crossed the floor and streamed over his boot. Something was definitely different. Had Baba Yaga gotten married or something? “Yaga?” “Baba Yaga?!” No response. The fleas paused and staggered for a moment, as though they had lost their sense of purpose. A crock of pickled vegetation burst open, with a shower of brine, garlic and sochevitsa out into the wooden interior of the shack. Frommers hadn’t opened his eyes, but he turned to Afanasy and coughed “I don’t smell Baba Yaga.” Afanasy reviewed replacement ideas in his mind. Who else lived in Baba Yaga’s haunted shack? Who would dare? Who else needed a place to live that bad? Then he remembered Yaga’s pretty niece from Yemen... what was her name? Baba Ghannoush. Please let it not be her.

The God of Shoes

The god of shoes finally ran out of money. It seemed like only weeks ago that everyone was driving him nuts with all the checks they had to mail him! “More money?!” he would angrily shout as he opened another envelope with his special pinky nail that he grew out for opening envelopes of money. “More money?!? Just put it back in the mailbox. Who has time for this?!” he would grate, covering the pile of money from an hour ago with a fresh layer of how-do-you-do. He would even try to give the shoes away, but nobody would take free shoes. “Just put a price on them already!” was the complaint. So he would slip a Sharpie from behind his ear, lick a finger, work a sticker out of his vest pocket, write some ridiculous number on the sticker, and before the smell of the ink had even quieted down, there was another sack of wherewithal to deal with. He would make the ugliest shoes Mankind had ever seen. He would make a shoe and put it next to a turd rolled in hay, and compare. “Yep, that shoe is uglier!” he would chuckle. And he would put a price on it so humongous that the poor sticker would just wheeze and wilt. Just zero after zero, after five, after nine after seven, and then he would cap the Sharpie, and then take the cap off and add some more numbers. “There aren’t enough of these shoes!” was the complaint. “How did I run out of money?” he asked himself, watching all of his shoes strolling past him. Sometimes someone would stop, slide a coin between his toes, and wink at him.

My favorite restaurant.

Talking With Dad

"You were seriously born inside a tree?" "Sure. An egg was deposited inside an ash tree by a mammalian skunk-wasp using its ovipositor, and fertilized by the tree itself. The egg matured over the course of about 75 years, and I was born mashed in between layers of dewy phloem. About forty years later the layer of phloem I was born in finally became part of the protective outer layer of the ash tree, and I fell out through the bark and had breakfast." "What?" "Sausage, eggs, kasha, and grapefruit juice. Apparently a hunter had left his breakfast near the tree and forgot about it. I guess." "No, I mean how did you survive for one hundred and fifteen years inside a tree?" "I drank sap, and thought about sports." "What?" "Football, mostly. And the Highland Games, like the caber toss and Maide Leisg. I was lonely, I imagine." "No, I mean how did you even know about sports?" "Everyone knows about sports, son. What's wrong with you?" ... "So you're part tree? And part mammalian skunk-wasp?" "Near as I can figure it, anyway. But I feel like a regular ol' fellow." "Hm. So, how did you meet Mom?" "She was enslaving a village with her three-headed serpent, and I sidled up next to her and asked for a pinch of snuff." "Why didn't she enslave you?" "My pretty eyes, and rakish grin. That's what she always told me. She did entomb me in a chrysolite mine for a few months, though, after I said her chicken-legged apartment was dumpy. Do you have any more tobacco?" "Foma? Tobacco." Foma rose from the mud with a horrendous sucking sound, dropped a leather pouch into the lap of the reclining hermit, and collapsed back into the mud. "Did you actually live together in the chicken-legged apartment?" "No, no doors, no windows. Plus it's full of human bones and old magazines. And she keeps it too damn hot! It's a sauna in there. A sauna of bones and man jerky." "Is there even a shred of human goodness in Mom?" [They laugh heartily together for several minutes] "No, seriously." [They wail with laughter as a light rainstorm passes, and a group of villagers pass by, hunting for mushrooms] "She does love that three-headed serpent, I'll give her that. Say anything bad about ol' Ghugguk and she'll drop you right off her flying mortar into the Sun. And she has a great sense of humor." "Do you still see Mom at all?" "Sure! She's right over there, remember?" And Afanasy remembered that she was, in fact, sitting on the other side of the sauna, whistling, and constructing an enormous deadly scythe out of volcanic pumice.

Job 28: 3-4

Man puts an end to darkness
     and searches out to the farthest limit
     the ore in gloom and deep darkness.
He opens shafts in a valley away from where anyone lives;
     they are forgotten by travelers;
     they hang in the air, far away from mankind; they swing to and fro.

                                             Job 28: 3-4 (ESV)

Mr. Peters thinks that both this verse, and Job 9:26, refer to navigation, then in a state of infancy; for the sea is not so much as mentioned; but נחל nachal, a torrent or flood, some river or arm of the sea perhaps of a few leagues over, which, dividing the several nations, must interrupt their hospitality and commerce with each other, unless by the help of navigation. According to this opinion the verse may be translated and paraphrased thus: The flood-rivers and arms of the sea - separateth from the stranger, מעם ג meim gar, divides different nations and peoples: they are forgotten of the foot - they cannot walk over these waters, they must embark in vessels; then they dwindle away, דלו dallu, from the size of men, that is, in proportion to their departure from the land they lessen on the sight; נעו nau, they are tossed up and down, namely, by the action of the waves. This receives some countenance from the psalmist's fine description, Psalm 107:26, Psalm 107:27, of a ship in a rough sea: They mount up to heaven; they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, ינועו yanuu, (the same word as above), they stagger like a drunken man. Mr. Good's translation is singular: - He breaketh up the veins from the matrice, Which, though thought nothing of under the foot, Are drawn forth, are brandished among mankind. This learned man thinks that it applies solely to mining, of which I cannot doubt; and therefore I adopt the first interpretation: but as to agreement among translators, it will be sought in vain. I shall just add Coverdale: With the ryver of water parteth he a sunder the straunge people, that knoweth no good neighbourheade; such as are rude, unmannerly, and boysterous.  (from Clarke's Commentary on the Bible).