Deathless Read online

  Marya tapped her silver telegraph. Telephones did not agree with her countrymen. She did not know why and neither did they, but their noses bled when they tried to speak into the receivers. Their ears, too, but not so much. Tap-tap-tick-tap. It is over. No one is left. I am coming home.

  She felt a man in her tent suddenly, like a bolt sliding into place. The warmth of him beat against her back, golden, innocent. He smelled like cigarettes and hot bread and male skin. She had gotten good at smelling as everything wore on; she smelled as a wolf smells, now. Marya Morevna did not turn to look at him, but she knew him, how big he seemed in the tent, big as the whole sun. Not now, oh, not now. She almost threw up—and that was how she knew how far she had gone. Once, magic made her feel hot and sick all at once. Now humans did it, twisting her stomach until she longed to rip it out and have done with her whole body.

  “I assume,” she said, her throat thick, “your name is Ivan Nikolayevich.” She wanted to accuse him, to have him arrested and brought up on charges of being Ivan, to see him hung for it. How often had Koschei and Yaga told her this day would come, warned of it like a cholera outbreak in the next village, extolled its inevitability. How she had always laughed.

  “Yes.” And she heard his voice for the first time, soft and deep as summer mud. She heard as a wolf hears.

  “And naturally, you are the youngest of three sons.”

  “I … I am.”

  “And you are the honest one? Your older brothers, they are wicked and false, and your poor father could never tell the difference?” Marya tasted the bitterness in her voice, like a tannic tea brewed from everything unfair, puckering her mouth.

  “My brothers died. In Ukraine, in the famine. I could not say if they would have grown up to be wicked or false.”

  Marya paused, her hand floating over a map of the gnarled, twisting borderland between Buyan and the Siberian city of Irkutsk.

  “I could call in my men. I could have you killed. For no reason but that your name is Ivan and I wish it. I should kill you myself. A bullet is not so bad.”

  His voice rolled over her again, rich and alive, Russian and familiar. “Please don’t.”

  “She said you’d come and I swore to eat your heart. You can’t break oaths to the dead.”

  “Who said?” asked Ivan Nikolayevich.

  “An old friend. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Who are those soldiers there? For what did they die?”

  “For the war. For me. I don’t know.”

  “What war? There is a treaty. We are safe from Germany.”

  Marya laughed harshly. She rubbed her aching eyes again. What a word to hear, now, in this place. “I had forgotten there was such a thing as Germany. We fight for Koschei, against Viy. For Life, against Death. Some of those soldiers are ours. And once they die, they go over to Viy, conscripted. We bleed souls to him. The ones with silver on their chests, they are Viy’s dead, his ghosts, whom we have killed. But we don’t know where they go. They do not come over to our side. They leave corpses, like the living. But they’re just gone. Maybe there’s another army, invisible, even more invisible than ghosts, fighting over things we don’t know and can’t see, and they fill the ranks there. But we don’t know. And what can you do? Died means died. Even for them.”

  “How is it possible to kill a ghost? And will you please look at me?” Marya could hear it in his voice: Crazy girl. You’re a crazy girl. Her ears burned.

  “Same way you kill anything else. A bullet works fine. Bayonets, too. A good strangling never goes wrong. And no. I will not look at you. I will never look at you.” And I’m not crazy. How dare you think such a thing, how dare you come here, how dare you live?

  “You are Marya Morevna,” Ivan said. “The queen from beyond the sea.”

  “Do they still call me that? It’s so strange. I’m too young to remember when there was a sea here.”

  “Are you a demon? Do you have horns? Wings?”

  Marya thought for a long while. Who do you belong to, little girl? Why are you out here in the deep, dark wood?

  “I am Koschei’s wife,” she answered finally. “And I am a woman. I do not have horns.”

  She could feel Ivan breathing, as though the tent expanded and contracted to fill him and drain him and fill him again. “I think I have intruded,” he said softly. “I only wanted to have a cigarette and a walk. I do not understand what is happening here. I understand my camp, and my comrades, and that we will each have broth and a turnip tonight. I am looking forward to it. I like turnips. They taste a little buttery, and they are so hot when they first come out of the pot. I can be satisfied with turnips all my days, I think. I do not need to know about the kind of girl who would marry Koschei the Deathless.”

  Marya’s knees ached. Have I ever been so tired? Tired as an old saddle. She realized that she still worked the telegraph beneath her cold fingers. Tap-tap-tick-tap. Automatic, like a charlatan medium channeling the little lost tsarevich.

  “Do you know we tell stories about you?” she said, staring at the telegraph knob under her hand. “You are a monster, an ogre. We laugh about you. Be good to your girl, Koschei, or an Ivan will come and whisk her away! That’s what they like best, Ivans. To seduce Koschei’s wives. It is their number one hobby. Somehow, I forgot that there really are boys named Ivan.”

  “I am not seducing you!”

  “You are, though,” said Marya, and she heard her own voice fill up with familiarity, with longing. She almost turned. She almost called him Vanya, Ivanushka, as though they were already lovers. Her hip already moved toward him a little, as though her whole self meant to fix him with a gentle expression and forgive him, in the beginning, so that she would not have to, later. She could not explain it, the pull of him, like Viy pulling at her breasts with his pinprick sting. The dead Tsar had caught her by the death and spun her around. Ivan, oh, just his voice, had caught her by the life. “You are. Just by lifting the flap of my tent, you are. Just by being warm and alive and near me. After this long day, and all of Viy’s cavalry sweeping over my battalion like water. I lost two colonels today. Two colonels and a major and so many horses. So many girls. And tomorrow I will wake up and pin up the front of my uniform and look them all in the eye, my comrades, the very same, only they’ll have silver stars shining on their chests and they’ll want to cut out my liver. And into all that you come, so hot and young and innocent. You smell like a human. I can smell your heart. It’s like a rich meal, set out just for me. And I should know by now: Rich meals laid out as if by magic, in the wood, unlooked-for—those are seductions. And even though I know you are an Ivan and you exist to make me betray my husband, I still want to kiss you. To feel the life in you seize on the life in me. Raw and fresh and new. And you—you have not even seen my face, but I can feel the shock of your desire in my shoulder blades. The shape of me, the size of me—already you will not leave this tent without me.”

  “Yes,” breathed Ivan.

  “Yet you insist on your innocence.”

  “I only found you by accident. I followed a trail of bodies.”

  “Then maybe I am seducing you, too.”

  “It’s a grisly kind of bride gift,” Ivan said, and did not laugh.

  “Maybe every soldier I killed fell in just a certain way, to lead you out of your world and to me. Maybe my body did it without my knowing, the strokes of my sword, the shots of my rifle.” Had she? Marya felt as though all her limbs were connected by thin threads, and a wind would blow her apart. Who was she to know what those disconnected limbs wanted, what they did when she was not looking? “But it’s not so bad as you think. Most of the soldiers are just empty, cloth, with a little breath in them, a thimbleful of blood. It troubles no one when they are torn. Well. No one that matters. But some, yes. Some are grisly. Some were alive.”

  Marya gasped as Ivan placed his hand on her waist. She had not heard him move toward her. Had not been on guard. And what had he looked like before he came into her tent? Had
he fallen from a tree? Had he been a crow, a robin, a sparrow? No. Not him. He had been a man, out there and in here. There was no bird in him. Ivan did not circle her waist with his arm, was not possessive. He just rested his palm against the curve of her, hesitant. The nearness of him crushed her, like being held by the sun. His gravity pulled at her ears; his breath blossomed against her neck. He whispered, unseen, as close as a ghost, and she could not understand why he was saying this to her, not at first. But the sound of him speaking, the vibrations of his words against the bottom of her skull, moved in her like soldiers, staking territory, gaining ground.

  “When I was a boy,” he said, “my grandfather died. My mother was very close to him, and for a year we visited his grave every day. But I was a boy, restless, so I wandered away from her. Her grief was a closed house, and it made me afraid. I learned to read from the gravestones, sounding out each letter in the long grass. One in particular struck me. A little one, no bigger than a schoolbook. Dorshmaii Velichko, it said. 1891–1900. Underneath it said: For death hath no dominion over her. I didn’t know what dominion meant. But I imagined Dorshmaii over and over, with black hair or blond hair, taller than me, not so tall as me. A long braid, or short hair like a boy. She would be my friend and read gravestones with me. She would be haughty and shun me and I would love her anyway. I would reveal my loyalty to her quietly; I would declare my love in loud songs and promises. I thought of her all the time, and those words: Death hath no dominion over her. And then one day when my mother went to see grandfather and I went to see Dorshmaii, there was an old woman standing near her grave with a brown scarf over her head. One of her stockings had fallen down. The old woman had set up a table among the tombs and she was setting it with food: bread and relishes and dumplings and big green grapes and little chocolate candies and an old samovar full of tea. She set places at the table like someone was coming to eat with her. But she didn’t eat. She turned around like she knew I was there and held out her arms to me. ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘Eat.’ I was shy. I didn’t know the woman. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘My son died in the war. He was all I had in the world. That is him, there. Vitaliy. My Vitaliy. I will never see him again. There is a hole in me like a bullet. I want to feed everyone who is not my son, to keep them living. I want no one to have holes in them. I have no one anymore whose mother I can be. Eat, eat. Here are some blintzes, sweet boy; here is cheese pastry. Eat. Be fat. Be alive.’ And I ate her food while the rainclouds drifted in. I have never eaten anything sweeter. I left grapes on Dorshmaii’s grave, and I never went back. The day after I ate the old woman’s bread and cheese, my mother finished her grieving, and took me to the park instead. I never went back.”

  Marya shut her eyes. She thought of a hut in a dark wood; a heavy table. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Ivan Nikolayevich leaned his head against her hair. “What I am saying is, in this graveyard, I would like to feed you, so that you will not have holes in you like bullets. Sit at my table, Marya Morevna. Let me be a mother to you. Be fat. Be alive.”

  And Marya turned. She saw a young man, but not so young, with a broad, sun-reddened face and dark gold hair, like a coin that has often changed hands. His eyes were tea-colored and crinkled at the edges, and this made them look kind. She clenched her jaw to show him that she was not kind, would never be.

  Around his arm he wore a red band, an old scarf, knotted like a ludicrous sort of knight’s favor. Marya touched it with her fingertips gently. She thought for a moment it might go up in flames. That it might vanish rather than allow her touch. A person, but not of the People. But it stayed soft and bright in her hand.

  “You are so hard, Marya Morevna. You could cut me. Why are you so hard?”

  “Because I joined the army and all my friends died.”

  And then she burst into tears, her first tears since that awful night-wedding. She rested, just for a moment, her burning forehead against the chest of Ivan Nikolayevich.

  16

  The Constant Sorrow of the Dead

  During the Great War, the Tsar of Death came closest to victory. His great strength has always been in numbers, and in patience. Death can always afford to wait.

  It was in those lightless years that the Tsaritsa of Salt was killed.

  In the Land of Death, Viy grew rich. The treasuries of death filled up with burnt grain and apples, with starved cattle and blighted potatoes. The cafes of the dead filled up with patrons drinking spilled coffee and reading banned books. Souls were relieved to come to Viy’s country, for they were not shot at there, nor did they get dysentery, nor did any of their friends suffer. Viy made his country as like the living world as he could, even to building film houses where silvery images of the war showed, so that the dead might be grateful and not wish to return to life. For this is the constant sorrow of the dead, that though they drink and eat and dream much as they did before, they know they are dead, and yearn desperately to live again, to feel blood inside them once more, to remember who they were. For the memory of the dead is short, and thought by thought they lose all sense of their former lives until they drift from place to place as shades, their eyes hollow. After a time, they believe they are alive again.

  So it was that Viy sent his chief boyars among his people to announce that if any among them would serve in his army, he would send them home when their terms of service ended. Home, to Life, to hearth and blood and labor. He lied, and they knew he lied, but the dead can live for a long while on such a diet. No longer would the Tsar of Death be content to wither corn on the stalk or slowly rot men with infections. He would attack the source of all he hated, the Tsar of Life. After all, why should he dine on the ashes of living feasts? Why should he be held in less esteem than his brother? Why shouldn’t the Empire of Death surpass any earthly power?

  And they tore the streets of Buyan piece from piece. The territory of Death advanced one inch each day; the territory of Life retreated. But the next day the territory of Life would advance, and Death retreat. While Viy’s ranks filled up with human dead from the French front and the German lowlands, he would not lie still. To walk down Skorohodnaya Road was a heedless hurtling through patches of dark and light. That cobblestone might belong to the enemy, and to touch it with one toe called their dogs. Soon Buyan became a country of dancers, leaping and turning and crawling to remain in their own country and not slip, putting just a fingernail, just a strand of hair, into Viy’s territory.

  In those days the Tsaritsa of Salt called herself neutral. She would not take part. She worried and wept over the cities of the human world, where she made her home and took in morality plays and entertained pigeons in her pale parlor. But even there the Country of Death showed through in patches: Men and women would fall dead in the streets, having sunk their foot, all unknowing, into that invisible and depthless world. The Tsaritsa of Salt defended the cities as best she could, laying the endless salt of her body over the snowy holes where Death bled through. Each time she saw an old grandmother tottering, her eyes rolling back in her head, the Tsaritsa of Salt threw herself toward the babushka to catch her, give her salted bread, and set her aright. Soon the Tsar of Death hated her more even than the Tsar of Life and sent his chief boyars, all of who had mouths like crocodiles and wings hung with jangling knives, to cut her to pieces and scatter the pieces throughout Russia, so that she would never repair.

  It is not easy to kill a Tsaritsa. But Viy was bold, and his boyars hewed her arm from leg from neck, and threw down her salt-crystal kokoshnik from a great height, so that it shattered. Without her, the cities began to starve and joined Viy in great sheaves, not only souls but opera houses shelled to dust, and apartments exploded one unit from the next, and factories obliterated by gasoline.

  It is said that Viy married the left arm of the Tsaritsa of Salt to finally silence her completely, and that it rests, fingers rigid with grief and rage, on a throne of knucklebones in the heart of the Country of Death.

  “Do you understand?” Marya looked
up from Likho’s black book and stared intently at Ivan, searching for signs of disbelief. If he didn’t believe her, then she would not love him. Crazy girl. You’re a crazy girl. Why would you say things like that? Silently, she willed him not to believe her, to make this easier.

  “Koschei is the Tsar of Life and you are married to him. And that’s why you lead his armies.”

  “Yes, but it’s the part about the sinkholes you ought to listen to. If I’m going to take you home you must listen to me, and do exactly as I say.”

  Ivan kissed her instead. Oh, thought Marya, I will not survive this. Why do men come knocking at my door? Why do they take their hats off and look at me with big deer eyes and bare their necks? If they stayed home and gave their kitchen tables such stares, I might have a little peace.

  “We have to travel through Viy’s country to get back to Buyan. It is not far, but you must step just as I step, and breathe just as I breathe, and speak only as I speak. Everything is contested ground now. If you picked up a single leaf in this forest, it would have a dead side and a living side. You may see people you once loved, once knew. You cannot speak to them, or they will pull you close and never let go. You cannot even look at them. If they wear a splash of silver on their chests, you must turn your face away.”

  “What about my camp? They will worry about me. I will be classified as missing, or dead.”

  Marya gave him a withering look. She could not care about his little camp. Leningrad was far enough away. The war would not have reached there yet. It would be beautiful there; the lime trees would be just flowering. Violinists would play something sweet and nostalgic in a cafe Marya would just barely remember. She could stop. Just stop. And sleep. Get me away from this war, human. Why are you being so slow about it? “You know, when I was in your position, Koschei said ‘get your things and come with me.’ And I didn’t make such a fuss about it.”