Deathless Read online

  The house had definitely shrunk; that she knew. Where once she had counted, endlessly, the five steps to walk from the vanished cobalt-and-silver curtain to the disappeared green-and-gold curtain, it now took three. But then, maybe her strides were longer. There are so few of us now, she thought, and left a shoe for Zvonok that night. Ivan, endlessly vexed by her bottomless appetite for shoes, called her mad, a wolf. She winced. That night, while he slept, she suddenly sprang upon him and bit his cheek savagely. She was not mad, not a wolf, not anymore. He looked at her with such shock, such wounded surprise. She kissed away the blood and roused his body to her, her fingers and her lips. He protested, his hands plunged already in her hair. I have to report early in the morning, Masha!

  Do you think I came through the living and dead worlds to be a Party mistress? I am your loyalty; I am your kommissar.

  And he yielded to her, always.

  * * *

  It was because she could not sleep that Marya Morevna discovered Kseniya Yefremovna’s peculiar habits. In the long, impenetrable night of January, the queen from beyond the sea crept downstairs to put her freezing feet against the stove, meaning to walk on her softest toes and wake neither the earnest nursing student nor her little one. The child had a dark mess of tangled hair now, and babbled an unending stream punctuated by mamochka, Sofiya, milk, fishes! Sofiya had just learned to walk, and terrorized them all with her headlong rushes down the hallways, across the parlor. But Marya found them both wide-awake in the starless hours of night, waiting for a great kettle to steam on the great brick stove.

  “Good evening, Marya Morevna!” Kseniya whispered. “What is the matter?” The baby waved her fat arms senselessly.

  “Nothing, Ksyusha, I am only cold. The old roof still lets in a draft. May I sit by the stove?”

  Kseniya Yefremovna frowned. “Of course. Nothing belongs to me that does not belong to all.” Marya heard, too, the other half of her words: but I wish you wouldn’t.

  Marya huddled with them next to the baking brick of the stove. Warmth sopped through her, dull and sleepy. She put her finger into baby Sofiya’s hand.

  “She squeezes well. Maybe she will grow up to be a soldier.”

  Kseniya stared at her. Marya never said the right thing, especially around the child.

  “Have you begun teaching her words?” she tried again.

  “Yes, she’s very clever.”

  As if recognizing her cue, Sofiya threw her hands up and squawked, “Water!” And giggled riotously.

  “Yes, rybka, my little fish! It’s time for water.” Kseniya twisted her hands.

  “We are modest,” she added, awkwardly.

  “I shall turn my eyes if it will help. I am chilled, still. But why are you bathing at this time of night? You’ll chase your death in your sleep.”

  The young nurse sighed heavily, untwisting her long braid and loosening her dark hair, slightly damp. “I have … a condition. My daughter has it, too. We become … ill, when our skin dries out. Our hair. It is especially dangerous at night. Pillows drink up so much water. For myself I wouldn’t even get out the kettle, but my little fish can’t bear the faucet.”

  Marya Morevna laid her head on her shoulder, watching the nursing student with a crow’s interest. Rusalka were like that, she knew from long experience. They fall down dead if they dry out. In Buyan, the rusalki kept a great glass-ceilinged natatorium full of clear blue pools and hot saunas, so they could stay in the city overnight. At home, in their lakes, they never worried—a quick swim and they shone, sang, drowned their lovers with abandon and cheer. But too far from the green, grassy depths of mountain waters, they fell prey to a wide variety of arcane personal rituals, all of them necessary to keep a rusalka alive from day to day.

  “I knew someone once, who had a condition like yours,” Marya said slowly. She could not be sure; she did not dare call the young woman out.

  Kseniya Yefremovna fixed her with a deep, unwavering gaze. “I am not surprised that you did, Comrade Morevna.”

  In the silence of the kitchen, broken only by the settling of blackened wood chips in the stove, Marya helped Kseniya to fill a little tub and sink her long hair into it. She stroked the young woman’s curls, making sure every strand got soaked through. Impulsively, she kissed the young woman’s damp forehead.

  In the morning, they did not speak of it.

  * * *

  Was she happy? Did she think of Koschei? She saw herself from a long way off, moving as though through water. Little things brought her singing down into herself again: the smell of cherries rotting on the ground outside her window; the crackle of the radio, which always startled her; the sharp sear of the vinegar Kseniya used to preserve half the eggs, mushrooms, and cabbage that she brought in from the market. Kseniya was better at being alive than Marya. Marya accepted that difference, and only once a day, at dusk, did she look beyond her friend’s moist shoulder, expecting to see Naganya clicking her jaw disapprovingly in the corner. But she saw nothing; they hadn’t followed her, or were content to remain unseen. Marya did not know which she preferred.

  And then, Ivan, always Ivan, the motion of him within her, the ways in which she could force him to bend to her will, the getting of small items, a comb, a cup of water. She clung to him, for if she clung to him, then leaving Buyan could be right, could be right forever. He did not speak of his work. She did not ask him what he did when he left her. Ivan Nikolayevich did not seem to have much of an idea what to do with her, now that she had come to Leningrad, done as he asked. I can get you a job, Mashenka. Wouldn’t you like to work? Wouldn’t you like to have comrades? But she would not like that. She wanted only to rest and to read her old, rain-swollen books, turning the pages carefully, so carefully.

  “Ivanushka,” she asked one night as the jingling street sounds played below the window. “Would you perform tasks for me, if I asked?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Would you … get me a firebird’s feather, or fetch a ring from the bottom of the sea, or steal gold from a dragon?”

  Ivan pursed his lips. “Those sorts of things are so old-fashioned, Masha. They are part of your old life, and the old life of Russia, too. We have no need of them now. The Revolution swept all the dark corners of the world away. Yes, remnants still lurk in the hinterlands—Koschei, a Gamayun or two. But they are irrelevant. The old world left its dirty, broken toys lying about. But soon enough we’ll have everything tidy. Besides, there are no firebirds in Leningrad.”

  Marya Morevna turned her back to him, and he kissed her shoulder blades.

  The main thing was the tiredness, which swaddled her and stayed. The main thing was the ruin of her house, like film laid on top of other film, so that she could look at a wall and see not only the wall but Svetlana Tikhonovna and her mother arguing over laundry in front of it, and Zemlehyed pawing at it, and the skin of a Buyan wall, so far from her. Everywhere her vision doubled and trebled, and her head sagged with the weight of it. Everything kept occurring all at once, each thing on top of the last.

  Was she happy? Did she think of Koschei?

  She thought of mushrooms, and vinegar, and old wounds.

  * * *

  At last, after a year had come gone in the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, Marya sat on her bed by the long, thin window. She looked up at the red dress hanging there. It had a deep neckline, and a full skirt. A young woman’s dress.

  “What is thirty-three?” she said to the empty house. “A crypt?”

  And so she put on the dress, and let her black hair fall down to her waist. She took some of Kseniya’s lipstick—she would not mind, not with so many classes this term. Marya had gotten better at applying it, and her mouth shone neatly. Marya Morevna walked down the stairs and put her palm to the knob of the great cherrywood door. She would go down to the river, and have an ice cream of her own, and someone would dance with her at a piano hall, without even knowing her name. Outside, she could smell the summer acacia, blooming early this year
, in the long half-golden dusk that passed for night in Leningrad’s June. A young man played a violin a little ways off, singing boldly: We’ll meet again in Lvov, my love and I …

  Marya Morevna turned the knob and opened her door onto the city. She stood there in her bright red dress, and her face drained of blood. A man looked down at her, for he was quite tall. He wore a black coat, though the evening’s warm wind blew through his curly dark hair, so like a ram’s. Slowly, without taking his eyes from hers, the man in the black coat knelt before her.

  “I have come for the girl in the window,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears.

  21

  This House Has No Basement

  Ivanushka, you must make me a promise.

  Anything, wife.

  * * *

  A pure kind of light fell like cold hammer-blows on Dzerzhinskaya Street the next day. Morning passed, but the light kept its quality. Waxen, hard, merciless. A young woman with a pale blue band around her hat knocked crisply at the great cherrywood door. She had never been a bird—not a rook, nor a shrike, nor a plover, nor an owl. Her crisp features matched the morning, pitiless and sharp. She knocked again.

  * * *

  Ivanushka, no matter how strange it seems, you must obey me.

  Always, wife.

  * * *

  The man in the black coat held up one hand to her, as if he could not believe she was real. “I look at you, Masha, and it is like drinking cold water. I look at you and it is like my throat being cut.”

  “Get off your knees.” Her chest hurt. She felt old, and the wind off the river smelled sweet, but impossible.

  “I do not tolerate a world emptied of you. I have tried. For a year I have called every black tree Marya Morevna; I have looked for your face in the patterns of the ice. In the dark, I have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.”

  “Everyone endures hard things.” I endure them. There was never any choice because it is hard here and hard there. Hardness everywhere.

  “I refuse,” he whispered

  “No one can refuse.”

  “Is life here so filled with bliss?”

  Marya Morevna sank to her knees, her dress spreading out over the threshold like a pool of blood. She pressed her forehead to Koschei’s.

  “What about the war?”

  “The war is going badly.”

  * * *

  Ivanushka, this is my house, whatever the papers say.

  Yes.

  * * *

  “My name is Ushanka,” said the woman with the blue hatband, smoothing her crisp brown skirt as she seated herself, “and certain irregularities have come to light which I must ask you to make regular, Comrade Morevna. Answer my questions, and you may go about your afternoon as you please. Stroll by the river, make rolls.”

  Marya sat lightly in a threadbare green chair, wishing she were elsewhere, longing to spring away like a deer. But Ivan Nikolayevich had said that if anyone came asking questions, she had to answer; it was not about wanting or not wanting. “All right.”

  “I work with your husband; did you know that?”

  “No. We do not discuss his work.”

  “Ah! What a balm is the conduct of a good citizen. Still, I keep returning to these irregularities.”

  “Oh?” Marya did not move any part of her face. She was better at interrogation games than this woman could ever be.

  “Well, surely you admit the oddness of a man appearing out of nowhere, after a long absence from duty, and suddenly having a wife where he had none before.” Ushanka’s smile stretched very wide, very frank, as if they were old friends.

  Marya willed her fingers not to fidget. She stared straight ahead. “Surely soldiers often meet women in foreign parts.”

  “Are you a foreigner, then? Your Russian is excellent.” Her pen scratched against her notepad.

  “No, no. I was born here, in Leningrad. Before the Revolution, of course.”

  “Of course. Allow me to ask an obvious question, Comrade Morevna. Forgive me for insulting your intelligence, but it is only my job. Are you, in fact, married to Comrade Ivan Nikolayevich Geroyev?”

  * * *

  Ivanushka, if you break this promise it will be like breaking a very old crystal glass. Nothing will be able to be put right again.

  I understand.

  * * *

  “Come back with me,” insisted Koschei. “Hide inside me, as you did before. I will pile such jewels on your lap. Viy can burn this world, if I have you. Already the Chernosvyat is his. Already my country hoists a silver flag. Come with me. I will take out my death and smash it under a hammer and Viy can have us and in his silver country I will fuck you until the end of the world.”

  Marya brushed his nose with hers, two affectionate beasts.

  Koschei the Deathless shut his dark eyes. “I can take you anyway, if you say no.”

  “I know you can.” She felt his words in the basement of her belly.

  “But I will not. It would be sweeter to pay him back with the same currency.”

  “I do not wish to be dragged back and forth between the two of you like a bone between two dogs. You promise the same things, and neither of you delivers.”

  * * *

  Ivanushka, it will be difficult for you to keep this promise. You will have to build the keeping of it like a chimney.

  Tell me what I must do.

  * * *

  Ushanka leaned forward, putting her notepad aside. She had a long, Byzantine nose with a bump in the middle of it. “We already know, Comrade Morevna. There will be no punishment if you simply admit what is already a matter of public record. It is too late for Geroyev, but no blame need attach to you for this incident.”

  Marya blinked. “What is it you think you know?”

  Ushanka shrugged luxuriously. “Who is to say what I know? Maybe I know something now that I will not know when I leave. It all depends on you, Comrade.”

  The queen beyond the sea tried to remember how Naganya liked to play this game. No, no, Masha! You can’t avoid my eyes like that! Then I’ll know you’re lying! You’re doing it wrong! Now, tell me you’re innocent, and I’ll pretend to pull out your thumbnail.

  “I assure you that whatever you think I have done, I am innocent of it.”

  “Do you now?” Ushanka tapped an unlit cigarette on her knee. “I am absolutely certain you’re right. Do you mind?” Marya Morevna demurred, but the young officer flicked a brass lighter anyway, waving around the terminus of her cigarette. “Which is why you and I can be so convivial. We are just having a conversation in the afternoon, as ladies will. A cup of tea, a cigarette? All these little niceties, and no lies between us. Now, Comrade Geroyev reports that he met you in the vicinity of Irkutsk, near the Mongolian border. Is that correct?”

  “That sounds right.” She had no idea. Geography was fungible, fluid, unreliable.

  “And what brought you to such a distant city, when you say you were born in Leningrad, in this very house? And why have you no traveling papers? No identification? You see, I know you, Comrade Morevna—or is it Geroyev? I notice you did not answer my previous question. Silence, is of course, its own answer, and I will not embarrass you further by repeating myself. You see how quickly we progress!”

  Marya smiled faintly.

  “Something amusing?”

  “You remind me of an old friend, that’s all.”

  * * *

  Ivanushka, I know you will break your promise.

  I will not.

  * * *

  “Take it,” sighed Koschei.

  It weighed so heavy in her hand: a black egg, embossed in silver, studded with cold diamonds.

  “You rolled this over my back. To soak up my nightmares.” Marya stared at it, how it caught the light.

  “It is my death. Oh, my volchitsa, don’t you see? I have always been in your power. I have always been helpless.”

  “What about the butcher in Tashkent?”

  The corners of Koschei�
�s mouth quirked. “He sends his regards.”

  Marya turned the egg over in her hands. The diamonds pricked her; blood welled. Down in the dark of her, a door opened. She stood, her eyes blank, imperious, as strange as he had once been. She knew, finally. What she could become.

  “Come with me, Koschei.”

  * * *

  Ivanushka, do not go down into the basement of this house.

  Do not open the door. Do not peer into the lock.

  Is that all?

  * * *

  “Comrade Morevna, allow me to show my cards. When something is amiss in the life of a citizen, it is as though he walks around all day with his shirt inside out. To the casual observer, all may seem normal, but in truth, the natural order of things has been upset. Even if he wears a coat, even if for all the world he appears the picture of a man, something within him is backwards. I suggest that during his disappearance Comrade Geroyev associated with antirevolutionary elements, and continues their work even in the depths of Leningrad.”

  Marya laughed out loud. “Is that what you think?”

  “Either that or you yourself are a spy, having attached yourself like a lamprey to a good man, and harbor even now—in the attic? in the basement?—seditious persons of great interest to myself and those whom I represent. Tell me, Comrade. What would I find if I looked in your basement right this very moment?”

  Ushanka extinguished her cigarette on the windowsill.

  * * *

  Ivanushka, for you, this house has no basement.