From the day she arrives at the Illuminata’s palace, the girl dresses in velvet, and in the summer she wears satin, silk, and lace. She learns the names of these fabrics and how to judge threads and brocades. She is taught to sew, to embroider, to sing, and to write. She is called Forest Girl. She’s given a personal servant, Maslova. She’s never hungry; she even forgets what it’s like to feel hungry, and she forgets how to laugh the way she used to in her parents’ cottage.

The Illuminata lives in a wing of the enormous palace where the girl is forbidden to go. An entire year passes, and then another, and then ten more. One of these years the girl forgets the cottage and the forest. She can no longer recall her mother’s face or hear her voice. She has a vague memory of her father from dreaming about him, but she can’t see him clearly, not even in her dreams. In another year, he disappears from her memory too. And in another year, she forgets the name she was given at birth, and how to laugh. Her face, expressionless and austere, has become the face of a beautiful woman, as has her body.

In the forest that surrounds her parents’ cottage (which she never thinks of any longer), the wolves who devoured huge mouthfuls of the stew made from the unidentifiable creature laugh night and day, the same laugh as the girl, mimicking what they heard when the Illuminata first met the woodsman—sheer evil.

Some might say that the girl in our story is not living in paradise: she has lost her loved ones, and all she has left is her Maslova—but even she disappears from the story, mentioned in passing only a few times. The girl had a deep bond with her father—poor man!—and her mother, too (after all, they had both eaten the stew made from the talking animal), whereas with the Illuminata there’s not even a trace of affection. Before, all she had was the laugh that quickly became frightening; now, she has everything, but there are no commas, no periods, no parentheses, nothing to fill her mouth, her heart, her soul but a jumble of words.

Others, however, might say that the girl has enviable good fortune, because she wants for nothing. Thanks to the art of magic, she has gone from famine to feast; from poverty to a life in a palace so huge she still hasn’t explored it all; from washing her father’s face with her own skirt to having lots of dresses and plenty of servants to wait on her.