“Try not to get any older, Grandma. Otherwise, who knows, maybe you’ll lose your way. And don’t forget to rinse your eyes with pee more often. I hope you’ll find a boy there like me who’ll give you his pee. But woe betide you, Grandma, if you decide to stay with that boy for good!”

“I won’t get any older. Rather, I will grow younger, ever younger and smaller, until I am a baby again. Once that has happened, I’ll hasten back, back to you.”

This seemed strange and frightened me: Not Grandma, but somebody else? A little baby, of all people? “But I don’t want anybody else, I don’t want a baby, I want you back, Grandma.”

“But the other one, the baby, that will be me, darling.”

“A baby—and you’ll still find your way back?”

“Everybody finds his way back, so why not me as well?”

This made sense. Everybody finds his way back meant that other people, too, had to go home, hence the notion that everybody has to. It followed that I, too, would have to go one day. How terrible, but also how interesting! But I kept this thought to myself. Instead I asked Grandma how I would recognize her once she had turned into a baby.

“You just will.”

She said it cheerfully and firmly.

The nearer Grandma got to her end, the more stories she told and the more instructive her stories became. The very last story I heard from her was this one: Grandma did not think much of superfluous habits. By that she meant smoking, taking snuff, and drinking. Yet once she had drunk a whole bowl of liquor made from fermented mare’s milk, and since then she knew that sometimes the bad can be better than the good.

One day, during the foaling season, a horseman arrived at a late hour. He was a much dreaded ruffian who was now drunk to boot. Understandably, people hoped to get rid of him peacefully, and so Grandma quickly filled a huge bowl with the steaming hot liquor that had just been distilled, and offered it to the guest in response to his greeting. He took the gift from her, had a sip, paused, tasted it again, and began to roar: “Why don’t you knock back this dog piss yourself, woman? Go right ahead! Or else I’ll knock your brains out and tear your yurt’s roof ring down onto the stove!”