Deathless Read online

  And it drowned in the snowdrifts along the Neva.

  As in a mirror of appalling night,

  A man thrashes like a devil

  And does not want to recognize himself,

  Along the legendary embankment

  The real—not the calendar—

  Twentieth Century draws close.

  —ANNA AKHMATOVA

  20

  Two Husbands Come to Dzerzhinskaya Street

  In a long, thin house on a long, thin street, a woman in a pale blue dress sat by a long, thin window, waiting for her punishment.

  Neither fell nor fiery did it come. For one year, one month, and one day, it did not come. And forgiveness did not, either.

  It was late spring when Marya Morevna slid her brass key into the lock of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, feeling it slide, too, between her own ribs, and open her like a reliquary full of old, nameless bones. The house stood empty. All the curtains—green-and-gold, cobalt-and-silver, red-and-white—had been yanked from their rods. Spiders’ webs made a palimpsest on the walls, endless generations of spiders weaving spider-tales into silk. The house seemed so much smaller than it had, darker, an old, hunched beast past its use. A hole had opened up in the roof, dripping rain and plum blossoms into the room which had once belonged to Marya and her parents. The downstairs stove stood silent and cold, full of old ash no one had taken out. Vacant room opened up into vacant room.

  “The Dyachenkos lived in this room,” she said to no one. To Ivan Nikolayevich, she supposed, his hand proprietary on her back. It was all wrong. She was supposed to have found warmth here, like Ivan’s warmth. Life, and living. “They had four boys, all blond. I don’t remember their names. The father ate this awful pickle soup every night. The place just reeked of dill. And here—oh, the Blodniek girls! Oh, they were so beautiful. Their hair! How I wanted hair like that. Shiny and straight as wood. They used to read.” She turned to Ivan, her eyes hollow. “They used to read this fashion magazine. They each had their hour with it, every day. They memorized hemlines, and color palettes. Little Lebedevas! And oh, there, there the Malashenkos tied bunches of flowers to sell, and Svetlana Tikhonovna brushed her hair. Oh, why is no one living here? This was a good house! I had twelve mothers in this house, twelve fathers. I ate such sweet fish in this house.”

  And Marya Morevna fell to her knees before the great brick stove in the empty kitchen. She did not cry, but her face grew redder and redder with the pain of her not crying.

  “Zvonok,” she whispered to the floor. “Zvonok, come out.”

  Finally, she curled up on the broken tile and went to sleep, like a ragged feral cat who has finally found shelter from the rain.

  * * *

  Ivan Nikolayevich went to the ministry that evening to ask them to pardon his disappearance from his camp posting with a long tale of illness and good service among the Buryatskaya province villages. He opened and shut the door with a kiss to Marya’s cheek that felt as alien to her as a tattoo pricked there. Kisses crushed, pulverized, obliterated, bit—they did not peck. They did not smack and then vanish in a second. The scent of new lime leaves and forsythia blew in after him to fill the space. Marya Morevna watched him go down the street. The blue-and-lavender evening threw sashes around him, and he passed by young men in black caps who leaned against the linden trees, playing guitars. Marya shut her eyes. When she opened them again, the guitars still twanged under the first faint stars and Ivan Nikolayevich had disappeared around a corner. She suddenly felt afraid to leave the house. What awful place waited out there, whose fountains spouted dead, tasteless water, whose tall houses had no names, no skin, no hair? This house, she knew. It stayed within her as it had always been, the architecture of her girlhood. The wood held the oils of her skin deep in its grain; the windows still bore the imprint—long gone, invisible—of her tiny nose. A ghost of the Marya without magic, the little girl who was not broken, not a soldier, not a wife. But Leningrad, Leningrad was a stranger. It did not even share a name with the city where she had been born.

  The plumbing creaked to life, spitting brown chemical resentment into the sink. Marya waited, watching the baleful dragon-faucet spew its venom into the drain. It did not run clear, really, but it ran tepid, the color of weak tea. After a moment’s consideration, Marya Morevna took off her boots and placed them deliberately by the stove, where she had once shrunk to the size of a rolling pin. She rolled up the legs of her black trousers and slopped water onto the kitchen floor with cupped hands, having no bucket, kneeling to scrub with an oily rag and a few old newspapers she found stuffed into the stove. Vicious Spies and Killers Under the Mask of Academic Physicians! the newsprint said, and she crushed it into the floor until the ink ran with water and filth. Her creaky knee complained, popping against the tile, but gradually, she uncovered a single bleached and faded rose, the pattern she remembered in the once-tidy kitchen. I want to see those roses! Papa Blodniek had hollered at his daughters.

  “What I would not give for one Blodniek sister to kiss me now, and light the stove with me,” Marya whispered. She scrubbed until her back wept and convulsed, giving up. She had been stabbed there, near her kidney, the night they lost the candlemakers’ district, and Koschei had howled at the sight of her blood, so like a wolf that the wolves in the wood had taken up the chorus. Marya lay flat on her stomach, waiting for her muscles to unclench and let her rise. The cool tile kissed her face. Outside, through the broken window, she heard a young girl laugh, a cream-colored, strawberry-ice kind of laugh. Her lover sang to her: We’ll meet again in Lvov, my love and I …

  A rough, ringing voice chided her. “Not an hour in Leningrad and he’s got you scrubbing floors.”

  Marya smiled against the wet floor. She squeezed her eyes shut, relief lancing through her chest.

  “Zvonok, oh Zvonya, I thought you’d gone.”

  She turned her head and the domovaya stood there, her blond mustache ragged and full of split ends, her vest buttons mostly missing, patches on her brick-colored trousers. “Not that I don’t appreciate it,” Zvonok said. “It’s been so long since anyone cared about the floor. A cat could give up a grudge since this house has heard a holler to shut the door, the winter’s coming in! But then, the winter came in, didn’t it? It did, it did.” The domovaya nodded to herself.

  “But it’s a fine house. Why would no one live here? And what about the Domovoi Komityet, all your friends?”

  “Gone, with the families. Only I stay with the house. It’s my house. I married the old bastard. I’m stuck. A lesson some girls haven’t learned, exactly.” Zvonok sat down, cross-legged, near Marya’s nose. “Well, you know, Svetlana Tikhonovna died. A bad business, that. And her boys, well, they had no one to get meat for them, and they went begging one day and never came back. It happens to little ones. I like to think they fell into the Neva, the monsters. They stuffed up the mouse holes with their old socks. I needed those holes! And then the Abramov twins caught something, and pretty soon everyone had it, and there was a line outside the bathroom like at the cabbage shop, and then they didn’t bother with the bathroom anymore. And then the municipal hygiene authority just started carrying them all out, one by one by one. Some flat dead. Some not. Your mother was one of the last. And with them, their domoviye crawled out, clutching their stomachs, pulling their mustaches. We can’t get dysentery, you know, but we feel it when our family hurts.” Zvonok tugged her own mustache and looked at the clean rose on the floor. “I felt it when you caught that bullet in your shoulder. And the bayonet in your back. Such a lot of bother I suffer for you. Anyway, the Housing Committee tried to assign new tenants, but I didn’t want them.” The domovaya spat—carefully avoiding the clean patch Marya had opened up. “No, I didn’t! Fat and lazy, nothing but toadies and drunks! They put the Baghirlis—all eight of them—in your old room upstairs. And then the Grusovs showed up. Husband and wife, rat and ratitsa! They informed on their last household, so they got the rest of the house all to themselves! And no
children between them! That bitch’s ferrety old womb would suffocate a babe, I’m sure. Well, Zvonok has opinions, and her opinions are this: to smoking hell with the lot of them. I broke things and rattled rafters until they ran off. Funny how no one’s asked for an assignment here since! Ha!” The imp slapped her knee.

  Marya Morevna laughed a little, though it made her back hurt. “Oh, Zvonok, I have missed you.”

  “Well, I can’t say you’ve moved up in the world. I saw that lug you brought in. Smells like an informant to me. Smells like a Grusov.”

  “I don’t think so.” But then, she had not asked. She knew nothing about him, except the taste of his mouth. What else didn’t she know? Everything, everything.

  “Bet Papa Koschei didn’t have you on your knees in filth sopping up his kitchen. Bet you had a kokoshnik all of sapphires and a striped cat on your lap.”

  “Not exactly.” But gems there had been, and no weak pecking kisses. Perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps hasty. But she could not think that, not yet; she had to try. Because what’s back there? The war and blood and silver splashes like stars.

  “Well, after Viy came, sure. I felt that too, even so far off from you. But before that. Before, it was good, yes? Sturgeon eggs every night? Copper bathtubs?”

  Marya smiled again. Her hair slid off her back. “Yes, it was good, Zvonya. Before the war.”

  “Well, I will tell you something, Masha, my girl. You should have stayed put. I understand the need to ride a new horse every now and then—you think I haven’t gone and taken a good look at the wallpaper in another house every century or two? But you don’t trade a tiger for a fat little kitten, you know what I mean? It’ll just piss on your floor and ignore you when it’s not biting you for fish you don’t have.”

  “When I saw him I thought I could curl up inside him and go to sleep and never wake up.”

  “Men are no good for that, Masha. They’ll always want you working, when you’re not softening their fall into bed at the end of the day.”

  “I wanted to be alive again. I wanted to be someone else.”

  Zvonok stood up, brushing off her red trousers. She put her hands on her hips.

  “Well, I hope lying on that floor like a broken dog is everything you hoped it would be.” She shrugged. Then the domovaya hopped up onto one foot, spun around three times, took a deep breath—and stopped. She squinted at Marya for a moment and reached into her vest pocket, pulling out something tiny and white. It grew bigger and bigger until Zvonok could hardly manage it herself. She let it fall onto the tile: a china teacup, with cherries on the handle, cracked in many places.

  Zvonok jumped through the hoop of the handle, and vanished.

  * * *

  “Masha!” came the voice of Ivan Nikolayevich, booming through the house along with a bluster of last year’s leaves.

  Marya Morevna started awake. She pushed herself up off the kitchen floor, her bones crackling their displeasure, her back still shaky, but it had released its awful grip. She brushed her black jacket clean—it was still too cold to take it off, and she had nothing else but her marshal’s uniform, which Ivan had said she should not wear on the street.

  “I have good news, Masha!” Ivan called. His golden head appeared in the kitchen door, and his smile upon seeing her lit the room like a stove.

  Behind him, a young woman with a long braid followed shyly, carrying a sleeping baby in her arms.

  “The Housing Committee was so grateful to have someone willing to live in this damned old place, they’ve only asked that we share with one other family. Isn’t that extraordinary? Just think of the space! Marya Morevna, may I present Kseniya Yefremovna Ozernaya and her daughter, Sofiya. Comrade Kseniya is a nursing student, so we shall be very glad of her, I’m sure. Mashenka, did you try to clean the floor by yourself? With no soap or bucket? You see what an industrious wife I have, Kseniya!” Ivan was babbling. He was nervous; she could see it. Fear sluicing through him, that they should be found out. She was not his wife. Marya pitied him his need for no one to know it. Who could care? She thought of the Grusovs, and shuddered. What else did she not know about him? But she did not care. She only wanted him to take her to a bed and make her feel warm again, make her feel the sun on her insides.

  But all she said was, “Good evening, Comrade Ozernaya.”

  “Good evening, Marya Morevna,” said the young woman, and her dark eyes filled with such warmth and hope.

  How lonely she must be, Marya thought.

  “Where is the child’s father?” she said curiously, and not without coldness. She did not sniff at the propriety of it, but it was interesting.

  “He died,” the young woman said bitterly. “Men die. It’s practically what they’re for.”

  Ivan Nikolayevich cleared his throat. “Well, there will be plenty of time for sharing personal histories. Would you prefer the upstairs or the downstairs, Kseniya Yefremovna?”

  “Please,” Marya hurried, before the girl could answer. “Take the downstairs. It is nearer the stove. For the infant.” And upstairs is home, she added silently.

  “Thank you. We find a way to be comfortable wherever we land. But this is certainly … better. I bathe frequently.”

  Ivan beamed at them. “Will you excuse us, Comrade Ozernaya? I wish to have a word with my wife.”

  “Of course.”

  Marya snorted softly. How odd you are, Ivanushka, kicking her out of the room you just gave her.

  Kseniya Yefremovna ducked into the parlor where the Malashenkos had once squabbled over rouge creams. Where Svetlana Tikhonovna had posted all her playbills. The Pharaoh’s Daughter. Giselle. Spyashaya Krasavitsa.

  Ivan Nikolayevich crushed Marya to him in a rush. He buried his face in her hair.

  “Masha,” he breathed, “do not look at this house. Do not look at the dead stove, the hole in the roof. I will make this place whole for you, your childhood home, and then you will know that you chose well, in choosing me. You will see how well I serve you.”

  Marya Morevna sighed against his shoulder. She breathed his scent. Yes, like that. More like that. Tell me all the ways in which this was the only choice.

  “Take me upstairs,” she whispered.

  He did. And as they passed out of the kitchen, Marya noticed that a puddle of water, perfectly round, rippled in the place where the young girl with her braid and her baby had been standing.

  * * *

  So it went. The Housing Committee sent men to repair the roof, and Ivan grinned widely at Marya, as if to say, Look how I command men, too. With harsh blue soap and lye they burned the filth and any lingering sickness away from the kitchen floor. All the roses bloomed on the tiles—though they were never to be pink again, but faint and brown. Ivan carried out bucket after bucket of ash from the stove, and oh, how Marya wept when she saw the burnt corner of a magazine in the grey coals, the scorched tip of a lady’s feathered hat. All four of them gathered in the kitchen to light the clean stove for the first time. Baby Sofiya clapped her chubby hands, and they all blew on the little flame until it caught. Soot and smoke and the smell of sawdust and pine needles filled the house, but it was warm. Kseniya made them all a sweet ukha that night, with salted mackerel she had been saving for an occasion and green, redolent dill from the old window garden, now overgrown and thick with new sprouts.

  They were allotted furniture and food cards according to Ivan Nikolayevich’s new civic position in the Cheka, the Extraordinary Commission. Marya laughed when he said those words to her.

  “But that doesn’t mean anything, Ivanushka! What’s extraordinary about it?”

  “It’s like a kind of policeman, Masha. A sheriff.”

  But she never could keep it straight. All the letters, the acronyms, the codes, the colors, changing like musical chairs, every week, every month. Games demons play. It meant nothing to her, except in a charming sort of way, as it had when Naganya wanted to play at interrogation, while the rest of them wanted chess.

  Ivan
bought her three dresses and two suits with trousers, one black, and one brown. She never wore the dresses. They hung on the empty curtain rod—red, white, and yellow—and kept the sun out. Many days Marya, Kseniya, and the baby walked together to the market to get potatoes and bread, cabbage and onions. Sometimes there was fish. Sometimes there was not. If all the stars aligned, there might be beef, but it would certainly have run out by the time they got to the head of the line. Kseniya Yefremovna and Marya would joke about the riches that the people ahead of them would already have snapped up.

  “Those who get here at three o’clock get bananas!”

  “Old widow Ipatiev gobbles up all the chocolate. See how brown her teeth are!”

  And Marya thought, I sound just like a Leningrader. Imagine it.

  And at night, in a narrow bed in her old room, Marya Morevna would hold Ivan tight inside her, demanding his obedience to her, demanding that his soul be ripped out and emptied into her. Only then did she feel whole and rooted—but she did not feel like herself. Sister of Anna and Tatiana and Olga. Daughter of twelve mothers. Young Pioneer. Six years old and birdless, birdless.

  Marya began to stalk the house as she had long ago, restless, uneasy. She paced. Reading, thinking, speaking. Her sleep came in brief, spontaneous concussions; at night she kept her eyes peeled like an owl’s. She was afraid to dream, afraid, still, to leave the house. Every time she looked out the long, thin windows onto the cherry tree where her sisters’ husbands had ever so briefly alighted, she thought she might see Buyan again, all crimson, all bone, all radiant, whole, no silver to be seen. Or worse, to see Viy’s colorless country seeping through the seams of Leningrad, too. She did not know whether she longed to see these things, or feared to. Her body still tensed in every moment, ready to take up her rifle again (hidden now under her bed, with Ivan above it, as though he, too, might spark and fire in her hands) and run with all those men behind her, all those woven men with their soft, soundless shoes. At the raucous, talkative bursts of boys and girls passing below the windows on their way to Nevsky Prospekt, to ice cream and films and cafes, she jumped in her skin, ready to leap on them and bite out their throats.