Deathless Read online

  * * *

  For a long time nothing changed, except that Ivan the Fool and Yelena the Bright finally escaped Baba Yaga because the black house on which they were painted was hit with a shell and burned down. That is an excellent strategy for escaping her, really, and maybe the only one, if you are a Fool. But the house burned down and red clouds fell like curtains over the whole city, not from the house of fairy tales, but from the granaries, where so much bread and butter and sugar burned up that later babushkas made cakes out of the scorched earth. Everything smelled like burning grease. When the red clouds that were like curtains lifted, Leningrad began to perform something very dreadful, but no one noticed yet.

  It took a whole day for the house of fairy tales to burn. People came out to take turns looking at it.

  Marya Morevna did not take a turn at looking. She took a turn at staring out the window, which she is very good at. Guns make horrible sounds, like a punching in the sky, and I heard the sound of the guns go through Marya and leave her burning down, like the house. She looked out the window because she was afraid that Leningrad was going to start dying, like Buyan did, and she was right, but she was also wrong. Like I told you, nothing had changed yet, except that we could all hear the guns, all the time—first sirens, then guns, and then no sirens anymore because there were so many guns the sirens could not keep up.

  The houses of Leningrad inventoried themselves on the double. They said, How long? And their larders said to their cellars, Not long.

  Papers fell from the sky between snowflakes. They clogged the chimneys, and in the street young girls would pick them up and start crying, uncontrollably, like someone turned on a switch in them and jammed it so that it could never be turned off again. The papers said, Women of Leningrad, go to the baths. Put on your white dresses. Eat funeral dishes. Lie down in your coffins and prepare for death. We will turn the sky blue with bombs.

  Marya never cried. There was a switch in her, too, and it was also jammed.

  Ivan Nikolayevich punched his rage like dough. It rose up and he hollered all day. “Marya, you have no papers! How can I get you a ration card? What devil can you be that you have no identification? I was a fool, a fool to take you into my house. You will make a criminal of me!”

  “This is my house,” said Marya Morevna quietly.

  They were both wrong. It is my house. But I let them fight over it because he is a fool and she is a devil like me, and what is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?

  A ration card says, This much life we have allotted you. It says, This much death we can keep from your door. But no more. It says, In Leningrad there is only so much life to go around. It says, The only thing not rationed in Leningrad is death.

  But he got her a full set of papers, didn’t he? And don’t think I didn’t see the marriage certificate in the pile. The ink was still wet when he brought them home and threw them at her. Marya, when I said I would choose another for you, he was not what I meant.

  “You have made me a forger,” he spat at her. “You have made me a malfeasant. Every time you eat your bread you should think, I owe this to Ivan Nikolayevich, who overlooks my wickedness.”

  Marya Morevna listened to him with only one of her ears. In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake, and eat only what you can stomach, she said to me later. Look who is so wise now, I said, and she answered, To have two husbands, I must be four times as clever.

  Of course I knew about the basement. Nothing can happen in the corners of my corners that I do not know about. I creep as I have always crept, through the walls, the floors, in the spaces where my comrades used to meet as we raised glasses of our best paint thinner to the Revolution, our Revolution. I saw every kiss on every floor. Some of them were good kisses. Some were so-so. I’ve seen a lot of kissing, so I am a good judge. You might think a domovaya knows only about her own house. But a city is only a lot of houses put together, so don’t be closed-minded.

  For an example, Marya Morevna left the house every morning and came home exhausted every night. Kseniya went with her, and Sofiya, toddling like a furry baby pig in a coat too big for her. Ivan came home angry to the dark house with no pancakes cooking, only a bit of slimy juniper brandy in a dirty cup. But the houses all knew where the women went, and not just the women of my house. They got pails full up of whitewash, and painted over every number they could find, every address, every street sign. Leningrad had no names anymore, like an infant city who does not know what she will look like when she grows up. They did this in case the Germans came crawling in, which the Germans are good at, having lots of practice at behaving like animals. Better that they should get lost, and we should not. I approved of this. The labyrinth is, after all, a devil’s trick. Devils know only good tricks.

  For a while, the bread was bread and the butter was butter.

  I believe that Marya Morevna saw him come first, for Marya saw as a devil sees. I heard her cry out of the left side of her mouth as she sat by the window—and all of us saw General Frost step over the Neva. All of us held our breath and snapped our fingers to keep off his eye. His shoes were straw and rags; his beard was all hard snow. He had no hat, but his skull had chilblains, and his great blue-black hands held the double chain of his dogs, December and January. How they bite, with those teeth! Old Zvonok does not make up stories to frighten you. Ask anyone, and you will be told that Russia’s greatest military man is General Frost. He whips our enemies with ice and freezes their guns in their paws and sends out his dogs. On the breast of General Frost hang more medals than icicles. Should you ever be so lonely and unlucky as to be a soldier in Russia—may some unbusy god preserve and keep you!—you may see him. Hold your left hand over your right eye, put a lump of snow in your mouth, and crouch in a trench all night without sleeping, and you may spy him wandering through the drifts, laying his hand on German heads and turning their helmets to death masks.

  But, alas for us, General Frost was blinded in his youth. An oily rag he wears over his useless eyes, and the old man is just as happy to gobble up Russian souls as the Hun, as anyone else. It makes no difference to his big stomach. He blunders, the old god does, and his dogs get off the leash, yapping away into the dark.

  No one could get out. Nothing could get in. Winter’s bitch dogs got hold of the ration cards, and shook them until they broke in half, and then in half again.

  What does a domovaya eat, you ask? Sure as sin she doesn’t line up at the bread store for her crusts, equally divided two million ways? No. I eat ash, and embers, and the sweet, hot stuff of the stove. When everyone finally puts their sleep together, I make my ash-pies and my ember-cutlets and eat until my lips get all smeary with fire. When I was young, and only courting an apartment or two, I could not believe humans ate the fuel and not the fire. Who cares about cakes? I had no use for meat, except to keep the fire hot. But when you are old and married you learn to tolerate unbalanced foreign customs. So what I am saying is that at first it was not so bad for me. At the end of the bread there was ash enough. I thought, Tscha! Zvonok can live through this!

  But still, the papers kept falling. They made drifts, like snow in the streets. Beat the Kommissars. Their mugs beg to be smashed in. Just wait till the full moon! Bayonets in the earth. Surrender. At least the Germans hire good writers, yes? But no one cried over the messages anymore. They reached up their hands to catch the papers before they fell and got wet, to use for fuel.

  * * *

  I had three conversations before the New Year which were all the same conversation. I will tell you about them.

  The first one was with Kseniya Yefremovna, whom I could never startle, no matter how I tried. I stood on the stove bricks and got my feet warm while she fried some flour in fish oil for Sofiya. Hard to remember now, that in the beginning of it all we still had real flour, and real fish oil!

  Why don’t you get out, eh, rusalka? I said to Kseniya Yefremovna. Why do you hang around like you’
re one of them? Marya throws herself into the pot with these others, and who knows why crazy women do what crazy women do, but why don’t you go hop in Lake Lagoda and wait it all out?

  Because it is not my lake, Comrade Zvonok, Kseniya Yefremovna said to me. I would bounce off the surface just like a skipping stone.

  Then go to your lake, I said. I am smarter than all of them sealed in a jar together.

  Instead of answering, Kseniya Yefremovna picked up an ember with her bare fingers. She held it up to her eye; her wet fingers popped and steamed, and then she handed it down to me. I chewed it while Sofiya chewed her pancake and the snow came down outside. The charcoal squeaked on my teeth.

  I am not a rusalka anymore.

  I spat to show her what I thought of that.

  I am a Leningrader now. And so is Sofiya, and we will survive because of our strong backs, not because once, before the war, we were rusalki. No one is now what they were before the war.

  To the furnace with her. I don’t care. What are tenants? Temporary. Might as well mourn cheese.

  When General Frost had a foothold in every house, and the pipes froze like sausages, and Marya Morevna chopped a hole in the river every morning to lug water back to the house for soup—but also, secretly, for Kseniya’s and Sofiya’s hair—I marched down into the basement on account of the very witless situation going on down there. I did not like to see my Papa Koschei like that, with his moldy rope over his head and wearing three layers of Ivan Nikolayevich’s coats for warmth.

  Papa, I said to my Papa, why do you not burst out of this place and take Marya Morevna with you? Even the pupils of her eyes are skin and bones. Can you not see it?

  I see it, domovaya, my Papa said to me.

  And do you see your brother the Tsar of Water outside, stomping on the streets, setting his dogs on old women? For so General Frost’s family calls him, on formal occasions.

  I see him. But I bound myself. I used her as a chain. I cannot unbind myself. I cannot use her as a key.

  Well, what a lazy husband you turned out to be, old cock-wit! Zvonok learned boldness from a boiler, and does not always profit from it.

  I am not Koschei the Deathless anymore.

  I spat to show him what I thought of that.

  After love, no one is what they were before.

  When the bread was only half bread, because the other half was birch bark, and the butter half butter, because the other half was linseed oil, I went to Marya Morevna, who every day stared at the gun under her bed like it was a cross.

  I could go to the front and fight, said my girl to me. Then I would get a double ration. But what of my two husbands, then?

  Why should the wolf worry about the safety of the sheep? I said to my girl. If my hand were bigger I would whap you one. Grab Koschei by the horns and hang the rest of us!

  I cannot leave Ivan Nikolayevich. Or Kseniya or baby Sofiya. Or you.

  If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.

  I think I could make a kind of biscuit out of paint, and turpentine, for frying, said my Marya, and scraped some paint off the wall with her fingernail.

  I spat to show her what I thought of that.

  When you are this hungry, you cannot even remember who you used to be, she whispered. Who you might have been, if not for the hunger.

  That night, she burned all the books in the attic for heat. She carried them down, one by one, because December ate up her strength. She lit them in the stove while they all huddled around and put out their hands. Last one in was the Pushkin, and she cried, but without tears, because you cannot have tears without bread.

  “I will remember these books for you,” said Ivan Nikolayevich, because he did love her, even if it was beef-love: stupid and tough and overcooked. “I will recite them to you whenever you want to read.”

  I ate the ashes, slowly, to make them last. I put out my hands with the rest of them. Outside, the wind and the guns went on and on.

  After the pipes, the lights went off, like a throat being cut. Ah, I felt it in my shins! My poor house, his bowels frozen, his heart beating only every other beat! I coughed blood when the electricity went black.

  * * *

  Marya Morevna did a secret thing. I will tell you about it. Every morning when the dark kicked up dark outside the windows, she sat down at the table and pulled out an apple from the pocket of her coat. She cut it in half. Half she gave to Ivan Nikolayevich before he went to work at the arrest factory; half she gave to Kseniya Yefremovna, who gave half of that to Sofiya. Every morning the apple burned so bright in her skinny white hands. Redder than red. She kept a few slivers of the core, like chicken bones, and before the stars could get all the way around the sky, the apple would swell up again, just as whole as before. Made Zvonok wish she ate apples, it did. Marya never said anything. They ate it like people used to eat communion. Not chewing. Letting it melt. She just held out the halves like the halves of a heart, and even when little Sofiya started forgetting her words, even half-blind in her frozen cradle, she still reached out for her bit of apple at that hour of the morning.

  That is not the secret thing. I saw that every day. The secret thing I saw only once. After the apple, when they finally let her alone, Marya went down to the basement. My Papa got skinny, too, but of course, of all of us, he couldn’t die from ugly and starving. He looked at her, and oh, if a house had ever looked at me like that, even bound up on the wall like poultry, I’d have never spoken to a human in all my days. Marya started sniffing and shaking, and her face broke up into pieces. Her shoulders fell, like when she was little and her mother was in a punishing mood. She was crying, not out of her eyes but out of her hungry bones.

  Papa Koschei closed his eyes. A wound opened up on his neck just like a kiss. Redder than red. No knife, no anything. Blood dribbled out; and down in the basement, with me hiding under the staircase, Marya Morevna put her mouth on Koschei and drank like a baby, worse than a baby, her face all smeared with it. She kept on with her dry, shuddering crying the whole time.

  * * *

  Finally, the bread wasn’t bread at all and the butter wasn’t butter, because the bread was cottonseed cake and paper and dust, and the butter was wallpaper paste, and you still had to hold up a ration card to get a scrap of the stuff. Dust cakes, dust tarts, dust bread that didn’t even rise. Nobody had anything to burn because if you could burn it, you could eat it, and a fire does a dead man no service. So no embers for a poor domovaya, and her house also sick. Still, I thought, Tscha! Zvonok can live through this. I will tell you how we made soup in those days: Hold a ration card over a pot of boiling water for thirty minutes, so that the shadow of the card falls on the broth. Then eat it up, and don’t you dare spill a drop.

  Once, Ivan Nikolayevich came home in his leather coat. The leather coat meant he had been busy arresting people. He went up to his bed and found Marya Morevna on it. Both of them were just sticks, sticks from old trees. He wrapped her up in his arms and their bones knocked together. He petted her hair like a cat. Long pieces of it came away in his hand. Ivan would not tell her what was wrong, but I knew because I could put my ear to the roof and hear the other houses say, There is meat in the Haymarket, and it is for sale. A fat old woman sells it. She wears a leather apron and a black fur coat; her cart has strange wheels, like claws. She has cutlets, dozens, dozens. For pearls she sells it, for watches, for rubles, for boots. Where did she get it all? Only a fool questions good meat.

  Send a boy back to me with some, I told the domovoi I know in Maklin Prospekt.

  You do not want this meat, he said to me.

  I said back, Sofiya must have meat now or she will die, and this house cannot bear even one death or they will all start in on it.

  So a boy arrived with two cutlets, for which I left a diamond necklace I swiped from Svetlana Tikhonovna years back. The boy didn’t like it one bit, but he took the necklace and left the meat. Kseniya Yefremovna shook her head.

  I know what this is. />
  So do I. You’re not human. What difference does it make?

  You cannot argue good sense. She fried it in a pan, and the house smelled very rich with it. Sofiya ate it all, every scrap, and paid us back with a small laugh. Fair trade, thought the both of us, and I had an ember out of it all. That was the night Ivan Nikolayevich wore his leather coat.

  What could I do? Miserable means miserable.

  * * *

  When Sofiya died, Kseniya Yefremovna and Marya Morevna wrapped her in sheets and put her on her little yellow sled. They pulled her onto the road, and each of them left their hearts on the doorstep. Everyone else was pulling sleds, too. There were more sleds than snow. Sometimes, a wife would pull her husband to the cemetery, frozen as a pipe, and she’d die pulling him, so neither of them got where they were going, but they both did. Because of the ice nothing smelled, but everywhere stopped sleds grew mounds of snow like hair. I sat on Sofiya’s tummy as they pulled. A house makes a family, and they were mine. My last family.

  Nobody talked. They breathed into their scarves and lugged and lugged. But no one was left to bury anyone else, so people just left the sleds in a pile by the cemetery gate. That’s where we left Sofiya, with Kseniya lying over her like a flower, with snow piling up on her hair. I said them a domovoi’s mass, but no one heard me because grief is louder than praying.

  By the window that night, Marya Morevna said to me, I think I have finally found my home, for everyone I love is here.

  Close up your head; your brain is getting loose.

  Koschei is below me, and Ivan above. And out in the snow, everything has gone silver, and there is Madame Lebedeva making jelly with her lipstick, and Zemlehyed minding the linden trees, and Naganya down on the frozen river, pouring gasoline into her mouth so her trigger does not freeze. And you, and Kseniya Yefremovna, and little Sofiya. We are all together, at last.