Deathless (32 page)

As the spring sun wheezed and panted in the sky, they strolled back down the boulevards, each of the women with fried dumplings overflowing with bloody cherries in hand.

“What is that?” said Marya Morevna suddenly. She meant the black house on Decembrists Street that rose up between two everyday apartment buildings.

Kseniya Yefremovna answered her. “It is a house they painted with all sorts of things from fairy tales, so that it would be wonderful and people would bring their children to see it, just as we brought Sofiya today. You can see there a firebird on the door, and Master Grey Wolf on the chimney, and Ivan the Fool scampering over the walls, with Yelena the Bright in his arms, and Baba Yaga running after them, brandishing her spoon. And that’s a leshy, creeping in the garden, and a vila and vodyanoy and a domovoi with a red cap. And there—they’ve put a rusalka near the kitchen window.” Kseniya turned to Marya. “And Koschei the Deathless is there, too, near the cellar. You can see him, painted on the foundation stones.”

Marya put her hand over her heart.

“Isn’t it strange and marvelous, the things people will believe?” said the nursing student.

“Yes,” said Marya shakily, and stared at the house, its colors, how everyone painted there seemed to be running, running, chasing each other forever, each of them uncatchable, in a long, chained ring. Tears blurred in her eyes.
Where am I painted? Was I never part of them, those tales, that magic?

“What I mean to say, of course,” said Kseniya softly, “is that I will not go down into the basement. You do not even need to ask me to promise.”

Between them, they traded silence for a long while. The sun complained of arthritis, cracking its bones against the bare linden branches. Marya wanted to have a friend again, and sometimes she felt it was so. A living friend, with red cheeks.

“Why do you want to be a nurse, Kseniya Yefremovna?”

“It is better than being a rusalka,” Kseniya said, shrugging. Marya wondered at the deliberation with which her friend dropped the word between them. “Why should I not want something better?” she went on. “Doesn’t everyone? Don’t you? The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it. Well, I do not want to be beautiful, or a woman, or anything. I want to know how men breathe. I want my daughter to be in the Young Pioneers, and grow up to be something important, like a writer or an immunologist, to grow up not even knowing what a rusalka is, because then I will know her world does not in any way resemble one in which farmers tell their sons how bad beautiful women are.”

“Sofa will be good,” said the child solemnly, and patted her own head.

*   *   *

It so happened that a shipment of peaches arrived from Georgia not long after that. Ivan, Marya, Kseniya, and the baby sat at the kitchen table near the brick stove, which still crackled and glowed away—for the melt had not stayed, but had given up its maidenhood to another snowstorm, and another after that. They all stared at the slightly overripe peaches, their fuzz, their green leaves still jutting out from the stems. The peaches looked like summer to each of them, like summer and sunlight and rain.

“It is because I arrested a man skimming from his workers that we have these peaches before anyone else in Leningrad,” said Ivan Nikolayevich.

“Why would they give them to you?” asked Marya Morevna, turning one over in her hands.

“Because I am good at arresting. It is an art, you know. The trick is to arrest them before they have done anything wrong. That’s the best thing for everyone.”

Marya looked at him out of the corner of her eye. What a disturbing creature a man is. “What I mean is: Even with the investigation into your affairs, they’re giving you peaches?”

Ivan’s voice rose sharply. “What investigation? Has someone been to the house?”

“Comrade Ushanka, who works with you. She asked how we met.” She had guessed he did not know. Comrade Ushanka had a secret, too, and Marya knew it, though she could not guess what it was. Like knows like.

Ivan relaxed, rolling his head over his shoulders to pop the bones. “Well, that’s a relief. You’re mistaken, Masha. There is no Ushanka in my office. Nor in any other office in the city. It is my business to know. I think your brain wants work. Perhaps you have had enough time lying about idly, hm?”

Kseniya bit into her peach, and the juice sprayed up in a sugary stream. The sound of her bite cut their conversation in two. All of them fell to the golden peaches, and soon they had slurped them up, every one. The pits lay strewn across the table like hard red bullets.

Save the one peach Marya Morevna closed up in her skirt. She brought it to Koschei in the basement, when all the house slept. She showed him her breasts and fed him one piece of peach for every lie he confessed to her.

I told you I didn’t care that you kissed the leshy.

I told you a shield lay between you and Viy.

I told you there were no rules.

I told you there was a difference between your world and mine.

I told you I couldn’t die.

*   *   *

And on that day, as Marya Morevna walked back up the steps into her other life, a glint of silver caught her eye. She dug in the black dust of the cellar, her fingernails pulling up chunks of the earthen floor until she had it: Svetlana Tikhonovna’s old hairbrush, boar’s bristles still stiff, silver still bright. And as she held it up in her hands, half-frozen muck crumbling from her fingers, the shadows hanging in the basement stitched themselves one to the other until old widow Likho stood there, just the same as Marya remembered, her black spine bent flat by the ceiling. She rubbed her long fingers over her knuckles and peered at Koschei with a smirk.

“Brother, girls are no good for you, you know that,” she said, her voice dragging across the floor as it always had.

“I hang here of my own will,” Koschei said. “She will release me of hers.”

“I wouldn’t,” cackled Likho. “Never, never.”

“You are meant to be elsewhere, are you not, Sister? Carrying out my program, my orders, are you not? Did I not make provisions for my absence, and were you not one of them?” Koschei’s eyes flared hatred at her; the air between them arced and bent.

“Oh, but I
had
to come! I had to come and watch! I can hardly think of worse luck, you know. Worse timing.
Tscha!
Of all the cities, Marya, of all the years! It brings tears to these old eyes. My spleen is so proud. You follow in your old teacher’s footsteps after all.”

Likho reached out her long, skeletal hand and pinched Marya’s cheek, her smile stretching all the way around her face. Marya recoiled. She did not understand. She did not want to. Her place had been invaded, her secret meant only to hold two. She wanted to crush Likho down into that black hound and kick her.

From somewhere far off, the sound of an air raid siren wound up and spooled out over the city, and the street, and the cellar.

23

A War Story Is a Black Space

Look, I am holding up my two hands, and between them is Leningrad. I am holding up my two hands and between them is a black space where Marya Morevna is not speaking. She would like to, because she thinks a story is like a treasure, and can belong to only one dragon. But I make her share; I will not let her have the whole thing. I have this power. I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead. Besides, what happened between the two hands I am holding up is squeezed between the pages of the books of the dead, which are written on my hands, because I died in that space where Marya Morevna is not speaking. And now it is all clear, and now you understand.

For storytelling, a domovaya is always better than a human because she will not try to make a miserable thing less miserable so that a boy sitting at his grandmother’s knee can nod and say,
The war was very terrible, wasn’t it, Babushka? But it is all right because some people lived and went on to be good and have children
. I spit on that boy because he thinks only of his own interest, which is that he should be born. Miserable means miserable. What can you do? You live through it, or you die. Living is best, but if you can’t live, well, life is like that, sometimes. So now I stop everything, and I say it is time for the dead to talk with the dead, and Zvonok has the floor, if there is a floor left to have.

*   *   *

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.