tried to express this to them, but now language did fail them all, language and, perhaps, philosophy, since neither Mother nor Katerina had the male obsessiveness with mechanical cause - the mechanisms by which things worked in the natural world. What they cared for was intentional cause, motivation, purpose. When they wanted to know how to do something, it was because they intended to do it and needed to know. While Ivan wanted to know how things worked precisely because he couldn't do them himself and he felt a need to understand everything around him. In both cases, it was a matter of trying to be in control of the surrounding world. For Ivan, the question came up immediately: Was this thing between Mother and Katerina something all women could do? Or only these two women? While to them, all that mattered was that they were in the kitchen together, and they liked and understood each other despite the language barrier, and the mechanism, as long as it worked, was unimportant.
So Ivan stopped intruding, taking part in the conversation only when he was needed as an interpreter. He continued to watch, however, and gradually realized that Katerina and Mother had something else in common, something that he had never noticed in all the years he had spent in Mother's kitchen. Mother used magic.
Why hadn't he recognized it in the kitchen just outside King Matfei's house? The tiny bowl of salt and crust of bread near the cookfire - in Taina, he assumed it was an offering to a god that was not officially worshiped in that newly Christian land. But Mother also had these things on the stove. When Ivan was young and asked her why she never used the salt from the tiny bowl, she explained that it was "to take moisture out of the air." Later, Ivan realized that it was an old superstition that Mother had learned from her mother and on back, from time immemorial. Only when he got to Taina did he learn that these old gods were real, and that the salt and bread were not offerings at all, but charms - that is, they weren't there for some god to figuratively eat, but rather because they had been enchanted with power to drive off misfortunes. They were magical in themselves.
So when Katerina, the first time she approached the stove, dried her finger on her skirt and touched the salt and the bread, Ivan realized that this was no obeisance to a long-forgotten god, but rather a way to bring herself within the enchanted protection of the kitchen. And Katerina, who had a sense of these things, did not for a moment act as if the bread and salt might have been improperly magicked up - on the contrary, Katerina acted right at home in Mother's kitchen. No protections needed, because the place was already protected.
Ivan looked around. The string of garlic hanging in the pantry - again, a folk remedy, Ivan had thought, but now remembered the magical properties of garlic in folklore. He could no longer assume that anything was a "mere" superstition, and it occurred to him that keeping rats, roaches, and other vermin out of the pantry by the use of lightly enchanted garlic was certainly healthier than putting a No-Pest Strip in there to leak indiscriminate poison into the air.
Just how enchanted was the house he grew up in? And did Mother know that the rituals she followed really worked?
Of course she knew.
Ivan had grown up knowing his father's work, loving it, learning it, following in his footsteps. But he had been surrounded by another sort of lore entirely, just as ancient - no, more so, for instead of studying ancient things from a modern point of view, Mother actually did the ancient things, keeping alive that long unbroken tradition - and he had remained oblivious to it.
Still, he said nothing about it there in the kitchen. If they didn't discuss it with men - and Mother had certainly never discussed it with Ivan, or Father either, Ivan was quite sure - then there was no reason to plague them with questions they wouldn't answer.
Though back in Taina, men were not kept in ignorance of magic. In Taina, they knew perfectly well what the women were doing, and they did their own magic, what with the enchantments of the swordsmith at the forge and the farmer at the plow, the mushroom-gatherer and the hunter in the forest. So it