The Plum Dumplings
The devil came on a winter night, took the chair beside Nina Pavlovna’s stove without asking, and announced he’d be staying for dinner.
She was sixty-eight that February, widowed seven years, son buried in Yekaterinburg, daughter married off to a Polish welder and gone
The flat was becoming colder and colder every winter because the building was settling on bad foundations and the radiators didn’t like the cold either, you can understand them, they were getting old too.
So she fed him. What else could she do? She put the soup in front of him, watery cabbage with one good piece of pork the size of a coin, and she sat opposite and watched him eat.
The devil ate neatly. His teeth weren’t anything special.
He looked, she thought, like a man you’d give your seat to on the trolleybus — late forties, narrow face, a scarf tucked into his coat as though he had a sore throat. Only the smell wasn’t right. Burnt sugar and something sour, like fruit forgotten in a paper bag.
“I’d like,” he said, when the bowl was empty, “the plum dumplings your grandmother taught you in 1947.”
She didn’t move.
“I haven’t made those in twenty-six years,” she said.
“Twenty-six and seven months,” the devil said.
“I’ve been waiting.”
He came back the next night. And the night after. By the seventh evening she’d stopped pretending to be surprised when she heard the lock turn, and by the twelfth she had begun talking back.
“I don’t have plums,” she said. “Plums in February? You’re a fool if you think I have plums.”
“I brought them,” the devil said.
He’d set a paper bag on the linoleum.
Inside, twelve plums, blue-black, perfect and smelling like September in a fashion no plum had smelled in this flat since Brezhnev was alive. She left them on the floor. The next morning they were still perfect. The next week they were still perfect. Her old cat, if he’d still been alive, would have walked round them with his ears flat back.
“I’m not making them,” she said, on the fifteenth night.
“I’m patient,” said the devil.
“I’ll die first,” she said.
“I’m patient about that too.”
She started cooking him other things. She thought, “if I cook well enough, he’ll forget what he wanted.”
She made him pelmeni stuffed with rabbit she got off a man at the market who’d shot it himself. She made him pirozhki with mushrooms she’d dried two summers ago. She made him a goose that took a quarter of her pension and three afternoons. He ate everything. He praised her. He asked for the plum dumplings.
Then she got clever, or thought she did.
On the twenty-second night she made him a soup of crow. She’d caught the crow with a length of fishing line and a piece of sausage on the windowsill, and she’d plucked it on the kitchen floor and boiled it for a long afternoon.
The devil ate the soup. He said it was excellent. He told her he hadn’t had crow since the time of the last Tsar; possibly a lie, but it flattered her anyway.
“Plums,” he said, when the bowl was empty.
That’s when everything started losing meaning.
She didn’t sleep after that. She sat up in her chair with the light off and looked at the bag of plums on the floor. They glowed slightly, or she thought they did.
She began to cook things she couldn’t have cooked when she was young. She rendered down a kilo of pork fat and stirred in poppy seeds and rust from the radiator pipes, and she served the devil this in a teacup and he drank it.
She boiled her own hair in the kettle and seasoned it with peppercorns and presented it as a sort of jellied dish. The devil licked the plate clean. He told her she had a gift.
“Plums,” he said.
The neighbours had started to notice Nina Pavlovna wasn’t going down to the shop any more.
They knocked on her door and she shouted through the wood that she was perfectly fine, leave a poor old woman alone, she had company anyway, a dinner guest, and they could come back when she was free, which would be never.
The neighbours went away. They had their own problems: Alexandra down the corridor had a husband who’d lost half his foot to diabetes and she didn’t have time for old Nina and her shouting.
On the thirty-first night Nina Pavlovna decided to give the devil something he couldn’t refuse.
She’d been thinking about it for days. The plum dumplings — she remembered everything about them. Her grandmother in the village outside Kharkov, the dough kneaded on a board black with use, the plums halved and the stones put aside for the children, the flour, the egg, the exact drop of water that made the dough behave.
She remembered the plums bursting inside the dough in the boiling water, the colour seeping out, the moment her grandmother had told her, “Ninushka, taste this, this is what kept your father alive in the war.”
She wasn’t going to make them. She was going to do something else.
She took the bag of plums. She took the flour out of the cupboard, the egg she’d been saving, the little tin of cinnamon she’d bought twelve years ago. She made the dough. She filled it with plums.
She prepared the dumplings as she’d been taught. And then, instead of dropping them into the water, she ate them. She ate them raw. Twelve dumplings, raw flour and raw plums together, swallowing them whole one after the other while standing over the sink, the dough sticking to the roof of her mouth, the plums leaking dark juice down her chin and onto the front of her dress.
She didn’t chew. She swallowed.
By the time the devil arrived that evening, she was sitting in her chair with the front of her dress stained purple and her stomach distended like a woman six months pregnant. She was burping, slowly, with a smell of yeast and raw fruit. She looked, she would say later, like she’d swallowed something she had no business swallowing.
The devil sat down. He studied her. His eyes took in the empty kitchen and the unset table.
“Nina Pavlovna,” he said.
“They’re inside me,” she said.
He didn’t speak for some time.
“You can have them now,” she said, “if you want them.”
The devil thought about it. He thought about it for an unreasonably long stretch, his head slightly tilted, like a man calculating the price of a flat in a building he wasn’t sure was structurally sound. Then he stood up. He put his scarf back in place. He bowed slightly, a small old-fashioned gesture some men still gave.
“Goodnight, Nina Pavlovna,” he said.
He didn’t come back the next night, or the night after. Nina Pavlovna lived another four years. She got bigger and bigger, her stomach swelling slowly with whatever was inside her, plums or dumplings or something else entirely, and when she died in her chair in the spring of the fifth year, the neighbours had to break the door down.
Alexandra from down the corridor, who was a widow herself by then, said the smell in the flat was sweet, very sweet, like a kitchen on a holiday morning, and that was all anybody said about it for a long time after.
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