Deathless Read online

  Now, just down the way lives Nikolai Aleksandrovich and his long-haired wife Aleksandra Fedorovna. Before their open door play their four beautiful daughters—Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia—and their sickly young son, Aleksey, who sits in the shade of a poplar and reads while his sisters kick pine cones between them on the green. Nikolai himself is a bit dim and distracted, but his mustache is thick, and he means very well, even if his garden half dies every winter for lack of water, even if his cow screams to be milked every so often, and he does not hear her. Vladimir Ilyich once tried to discuss his doctrine of roses and lilacs with Nikolai, who gave him a cup of kvass and listened intently. The sun passed behind a cloud. But Nikolai Aleksandrovich only laughed and sent old Vova on his way, his sympathies being rather with the roses. Aleksandra, her apron embroidered with a moth’s delicacy, her arms muscled from arguing with sheep, once told Marya Morevna that her husband was visited by the same dream as his neighbor, of the white ants and the red, and had wept in his sleep for weeks. She kisses Nikolai’s knuckles, where dreams live, until he quiets, but then she herself cannot sleep, and watches the stars spell out the words of a long poem from the warmth of her bed.

  Many more folk bustle and quarrel and clap their hands over their ears in Yaichka. That is what villages are like. All day long, this or that grandmother could tell tales that stretch on like taffy concerning Vova’s plans for the distribution of the pregnant sheep’s lamb, or Josef’s somewhat more worrying plans for the goat, and they wouldn’t have even begun to recount the rumors of Aleksandra’s infidelity with a certain monk, let alone remember to name half the folk in Yaichka. That is what grandmothers are like. Cows moan in the grass; hens flutter when the rooster happens by; the earth turns blackly, wetly under plows; and for a while, just a little while, everything shines and nothing is the matter, anywhere, ever.

  Yaichka has always been here, and never anywhere else. It has always possessed these people; their four horses; ten head of cattle; two hens and a rooster for every family; three sheep (one pregnant); the small and nameless river and its mill, owned by everyone and worked on a biweekly schedule designed by you-know-who; the solitary goat who would stop eating up everyone’s onions if he knew what’s good for him; and several fields whose deep, dark soil forgives everything done to it.

  26

  What Will We Call Her?

  In the house of Marya Morevna, even the windows laugh. Long after the winter hearth has gone dark, the bodies of Marya and her husband glow. He is so alive in her that his skin tastes like an apple tree, full of sap and juice. The warmth of him, she thinks, the warmth!

  “Oh, volchitsa,” he whispers to her, his belly brimming with soup and good bread, “I’ve a dog’s luck! Butter in the barrel, a good smoke after supper, and you, my bootlace girl, drawn up so tight to me!”

  “When you said that just now, I almost thought you were someone else,” sighs Marya. But Koschei is always himself, perfectly so, whole and bright.

  And he sets on her like the sun, and all her teeth show when she smiles. Each day she looks at the iron keys hanging by their door, and tries to think: Where have I seen those before? When have I had a thing I needed to lock? And each day, unless it is Sunday and the mist is down and all of Yaichka staying in, she shakes her head to gather it and strides out onto the long, thin road. Each morning, Marya Morevna thinks that she has never been so full, and each evening she is fuller still. Her black curls shine as if seen underwater.

  On Wednesdays, Ushanka visits, her friend whom those old grandmothers most likely forgot to name, since she is the kind of girl who shows only half of her face at a time. No one knows her surname, but that’s all right. Surnames go politely unmentioned in Yaichka. Marya Morevna always makes sure she has a leg of rabbit and fresh bread with a little bowl of honey set out, and Wednesday is her day with the silver samovar that makes the rounds of all the houses, just like a horse.

  “And how is your husband?” says Ushanka, a beautiful blue ribbon fluttering from the scalloped edge of her lace hat. Ushanka makes lace like a spider, and gives her shawls freely to the women of Yaichka. Just yesterday, gentle Galka pulled one up around her shoulders, feeling a draft.

  “He feels sure the new calf will be a heifer, and so go to Aleksandr Fyodorovich. I’ve discussed the prospect of juniper-cheese with Natasha.”

  “How lovely for all of us. And you, Masha? Are you well? Do the ladies visit when I am not about? Do the men let you drink with them when you’re thirsty?”

  Marya Morevna puts her chin in her hands. “I believe I have never been so well, Ushanochka. I am so well that my glass fills before I think to be thirsty. To be certain, I am sad when the moon is thin. I remember friends long gone, and how one of them painted her eyes to match her soup, and how one slept curled next to me, and another kissed me, just once, by a river. I remember one with wet hair, and her baby. I wish they could drink from full glasses, too. I wish they could see the new lamb when it comes. But the moon waxes, and my sadness dries up. Life is like that, of course.”

  “Of course.” And Ushanka puts her hand on Marya’s, for they have shared tea more often than tears. Her skin is like cloth. “The sweetness of it all is sharpest when placed alongside sorrow, close as knife and fork. But it is my job to interrogate your happiness, to prod its corners, to make sure it holds. When a sadness chews at the bottom of your heart, it’s as though you walk all day with your dress on backwards, the buttons facing the forest, the collar facing the village. To everyone else, all may seem normal, but my eyes are so keen.”

  Marya Morevna poured tea, coppery and steaming. “I have sometimes wished for a child,” she confessed. “But when I ask Koschei about it, even while he tells me he loves me with a bear’s love, he says, ‘Can we not wait a little longer? Just a little longer.’ Isn’t that strange?”

  Ushanka shows only half of her face, and that half grows very thoughtful, but says nothing.

  “I saw the bird again while hunting this rabbit,” says Marya brightly, picking at the gleaming bone. “So terribly bright it could have been on fire! I think it’s a male. His feathers shine golden, and bronze, and scarlet, and blue—such flames!—and the air around him bends into oily waves. His song echoes like Georgy’s playing. A firebird, just like in the old stories. I shall catch it, Ushanka, if I have to ride all the way through the forest and come out the other side.”

  “What other side?” says Ushanka, showing the other half of her face. “You’ve been listening to Josef’s silly insinuations. There is only Yaichka, and you, and I, and Sasha’s juniper-cheese, and rabbit with bread on Wednesdays.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, Marya Morevna goes to the well after Yaichka has shaken off the dust of the day and sees someone working the fields. The someone wears a bright hat of many colors, and cuts grain with an enormous pair of shears.

  “Who is that?” she asks of her husband, just returning, his hands all bloody with the afterbirth of the new calf.

  “Do not look at him, volchitsa,” says the handsome Koschei. “Let him take his share.”

  * * *

  Aleksandra Fedorovna—who ought to know, having five of her own—once told Marya that a woman knows it when the night passes and leaves her with a child.

  “They tap you, Masha. Like a root.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe you, Sasha! How can you feel such a tiny thing?”

  The beautiful Aleksandra shrugged. “When you are cut, you feel it, even if the cut is tiny. Such a thing is a child, a wound within.”

  When the perverse moon pries through their windows, spying round the curtains, Marya does not feel it, but her handsome husband does. Koschei Bessmertny winds his red limbs in hers, as young as young, and shatters inside her, the shards of him floating free in her body, until one, sharp-edged and cruel, lodges in her and will not be moved, stubborn thing. In the guttering stove-light he lays his head on her belly.

  “And death shall have no dominion over her,” he whisp
ers, and kisses her navel.

  “What a thing to say!” Marya moves her fingers in his shaggy hair. “Someone else said that to me, once, so long ago I cannot remember. Sometimes you seem to me to be two men: my Kostya and another I cannot quite recall, all squeezed into one body.”

  Koschei looks up at her. The whites of his eyes show. “Nothing wants to die,” he says faintly, and Marya Morevna does not understand, because she has seen so few dark things.

  “What will we call her?” Koschei says, and smiles the best smile he has learned, so golden and hot that Marya thinks of the bird in the forest, the one that eludes her still, and turns the air to oil.

  “Who?”

  “Our daughter, who already knows your name.”

  Koschei Bessmertny will not sleep for nine months. He gives all his sleep to his daughter. It is her due.

  * * *

  Does magic number among the things Yaichka possesses, along with the river without a name and the pregnant sheep? One day, the old man Grigory Yefimovich decided to settle the question once and for all. He tells all the children he was once a priest, but everyone knows there is nothing before or after Yaichka, or alongside it, or underneath it, and only stars above it, so old Grisha seems mysterious and wise to them indeed. Nevertheless, all the folk of Yaichka entertain him, for he tells wonderful stories, knows how to deliver babies, and tugs on his beard when he lies, and thus can be relied upon utterly, so long as he leaves his beard alone. “I saw a star in his hair,” whispered little Olga Nikolayevna, Aleksandra’s daughter, and she was generally believed.

  To settle the question of Yaichkan magic, Grisha took Aleksandra Fedorovna, whose hair was like gold wire, to the exact place where the larch forest meets the edge of Sergei Mironovich’s medicinal garden. He stood with one boot in the wood and one boot in the village—magicians know the import of such stances, and Grisha certainly knew the import of knowing what a magician should know.

  “Now, Sasha, watch me eat this mushroom with silver spots on it, which you and all your children know has a terrible poison.”

  Aleksandra watched carefully. Grigory Yefimovich chewed it up. Nothing ill seemed to happen. His limbs did not seize up; his tongue did not turn purple.

  “Do you see?” said Grisha.

  “I see,” said Sasha.

  “Now, watch me hang myself from the larch. Give me your apron to throttle myself.”

  Aleksandra watched carefully. Grigory wound the apron around his neck and hung himself from the tree. Nothing ill seemed to happen. He smiled pleasantly and swung back and forth for a while. His eyeballs did not burst; he did not sputter a final confession while choking.

  “Do you see?” said Grisha.

  “I see,” said Sasha.

  “Now, you must shoot me, for the final proof.” And the old not-really-a-priest produced a small pistol—which, if Aleksandra had thought about it, was entirely the most magical thing to happen that afternoon, as no one in Yaichka had ever produced a pistol before.

  Aleksandra shot carefully. Her bullet entered his heart exactly as every bullet dreams of doing. Blood seeped out of Grisha’s shirt, which he had gotten from Galina Ivanova in exchange for a tale about a great warrior who defended a city against soldiers with faces like rats. Galina had nightmares for weeks, and called it a good trade. But then, Grigory Yefimovich smiled and showed Aleksandra that his breast was whole, with the same scraggly hairs still on it as had been before. He took the pistol back and no one ever saw it again. Sasha did not tell anyone that Grisha had ever had it, or that she herself now knew what a pistol was, and had fired it as easily as rolling out dough for vereniki.

  “I will tell you the magic of Yaichka, Sasha. Death has forgotten Yaichka, and knows nothing of it.”

  “Surely not. Everything dies. The cows, the sheep. Marya shoots her deer.”

  “Can you remember any person dying?”

  Aleksandra was silent for a long while. The sky got blue and depthless. “I seem to, in my heart. In a part of my heart locked up behind the farthest, smallest room of my heart. Under that lock is a place with a dirt floor where it is always winter. There I seem to think that someone has died, and no one helped them. Then I weep so bitterly that horrible flowers grow from my tears.”

  Grigory Yefimovich put his long, rough arms around Aleksandra Fedorovna, whom he had loved secretly since he was young. She knew it, of course, and because of both of them knowing a thing like that, they treated each other with a very tender kindness.

  “Never mind, Sasha,” said Grisha. “It was only a trick I can do. Don’t cry.”

  * * *

  On Fridays, Marya Morevna goes to the fields to cut grain. In Yaichka, the grain always sighs to be cut. Even six months along, she does not shirk, but takes up a short scythe, its handle well worn by all the hands of Yaichka, all those oils, all that skin. The sun polishes the tips of the trees and turns Marya’s black hair blue. Up she raises the scythe and down again, and the blade knocks back the golden stalks, and the solitary goat bleats ecstasy as he discovers a patch of wild onion no one will scold him for devouring; and up sings the scythe and down again, and lovely little Anastasia Nikolayevna drops a stitch in her knitting, and Volchya the dapple grey deliberately throws a shoe so that Marya will have to tend to him later, because he is that sort of beast; and the grain falls in a pile, a cairn, and six mice that Yaichka does not know it possesses wash each other’s ears with pink tongues; and up she swings her blade and down she swings it low, and without knowing why, the women of Yaichka go to the exact place where the well-tilled field whose soil forgives them all meets Nadya Konstantinovna’s radishes, and they watch Marya without understanding why it is they came to watch a pregnant woman with a belly like a bow drawn back all the way, her scythe raised like a sword, slicing down again and again, and the clean sweat dampening her hair as the sun sings a little song with four lines of five words each, and the last word of the song is death.

  * * *

  It is Thursday, and Marya is too big around to ride Volchya into the larch forest. She walks instead, her long red woolen dress trailing behind her, her black hair almost as long as her dress, her rifle strapped to her back. The leaves pose at the exact moment before they should fall, but do not. Tiny birds like scraps of bark fly up in whorls behind her. The smell of the forest pricks at her cheeks, brightening them, kissing them. She holds her belly with her right arm—she is sure that Mars in all its mountains could not be so huge as she.

  “If I could talk to you, Daughter, I would say, We made you when our eyes were at their darkest, when the solitary goat was full of onion, and the moon looked just like an egg. I would say, Who will you be when you are grown? I would say, What will we call you?”

  Behind a copse of seven birches, a thing rustles. The leaves crisp and spark under the feet of the thing, and smoke wisps up. A streak of orange winks out of the birch trunks, and Marya cannot run, really, but she can hold still as a house. Inside her, her daughter moves, pushes her tiny hand against her mother, her tiny foot against the eggshell of her world. I want it, Mama, the hand says. The beautiful bird, the foot says. One step forward, through the leaves, then another, and there it shines: the bird’s long, long tail, shaming any peacock ever born, dragging along the forest floor like a red dress burning.

  Marya Morevna hoists her rifle. She loves her rifle. Someone made a present of it to her, though she cannot remember who, or when. It is warm from her hands. The bird rears up, flapping his wings, sending sparks into the air, smoke, and the bird is burning, burning, so white and gold Marya sees spots dancing around her eyes. Her daughter stretches out her tiny arms inside her. Mama, the arms say, the light! When she fires, the child in her belly surges downward, as though she means to be born right now, right this very moment.

  In all of Yaichka, no one can beat the firing arm of Marya Morevna. The bullet collides with the firebird like a child leaping up into her papa’s arms when he comes home after a long journey. The bird stumbles back
wards against the birches, trapped by their trunks. He lifts up his eyes to the sky and Marya clutches her belly; but there are tears floating like naphtha in the firebird’s eyes, there is a song in his mouth like blood; and the sound hurts her, pulls at her, plucks the bones of her ribs like gusli strings. The tips of his wings blaze like blue gaslights. Allee, allai! the bird ululates; Marya hears a beckoning in it, like a calling to prayer. Allee, allai!

  Mama, the light! Marya steps into the ring of the firebird’s flames. He does not burn her, nor is he wounded, no more than Grisha was wounded by Sasha’s pistol. His eyes grow huge, crimson, spinning; his wings fold around her, drawing her close in, his tears dripping wax on her head, but he does not burn her any more than she killed him, and together they fall to the forest floor in each other’s arms—allee, allai!

  “What does it mean?” whispers Marya in the embrace of the firebird. He smells of burning bread, and butter, and sugar, boiling down into the earth.

  “It means I forgive you,” he sings to her, “for the last time you killed me, and this time, too, and forever and forever, until death.”

  Inside the body of Marya Morevna, her daughter grows very quiet, and listens to the sound of the firebird’s impossible, enormous heart beating slowly, sounding so much like her mother’s, so much like her own.

  Marya Morevna returns to Yaichka empty-handed, but that is all right. Shame is for other villages, other women. There is still so much, even without firebird soup. She says nothing of the bird in the forest, and no one asks. On Monday, Marya Morevna caught two beavers (and their tails) as well as a young boar with one broken tusk. Tonight, with the help of her handsome husband and Nikolai Aleksandrovich (whose mustache sweats prettily), she lugs their great wedding table out into the middle of the village, where the red leaves of autumn already skip and blow, bright and sharp as stars. She boils a stew of onions and potatoes and mushrooms with glistening lumps of those pancake-tails floating in the broth. She roasts the pig over a great fire. Georgy Konstantinovich brings fish he caught yesterday through stealth and planning; Grigory Yevseevich brings a basket of apples redder than the leaves. Vladimir and Nadya Konstantinovna contributed a store of honey smelling faintly of their long-vanished roses. Nikolai brought vodka from his own still, just as clear as rain. The children run around the table, pelting each other with leaves, their laughter rising up to the sky like smoke. Little Anastasia and Aleksey dance together to Georgy’s gusli, and Josef pinches all of them savagely under the table.