* * *
Despite Marya’s pleas to the contrary, all twelve of her mothers insisted she visit old Widow Likho after her lessons every day. And take her some nice rolls; she’s old and can’t walk to the bread line.
* * *
Marya stood very still in front of her neighbor’s door. Her toes had gone clammy and blue in her threadbare shoes, and her stomach chewed on itself. She wanted to go home. She ought to have gone behind the stove and called out Zvonok or Chainik to go with her. They would not have come—they never answered her tapping. But she would have felt better. She didn’t need a tutor, or looking after. She knew her algebra and her history and could recite two hundred lines of Pushkin from memory.
Widow Likho opened the door and stared down at Marya like a vulture on a hawthorn branch. Marya half expected her to open her mouth and caw or screech like one. She stood so tall that she could not get through the door without bending down beneath the jamb. Her long hands clutched the sides of the door—she had sharp, pearly fingernails, without a hint of yellow or age. In fact, though her face was wrinkled and withered, her hands were young, firm, certainly able to snatch a girl from the street without trouble.
Widow Likho said nothing. She turned around and walked slowly down her hall, her black dress trailing behind her like a stain. She pushed aside the curtain that divided her room from the next family’s, and Marya crept in behind her, hoping only to be invisible, for the old witch to take a nap while Marya read until she could politely leave. She laid out yesterday’s bread ration, wrapped in slick brown paper, on a little brass table with cherubs winging its legs. Widow Likho did not touch the food. She merely stared at Marya, inclining her head faintly. She folded her long hands together in her lap—so long the tips of her middle fingers grazed her forearm.
“My mother said you might like to tutor me, but if you’re tired, I can read to you until evening. Or make you tea, or whatever you like,” Marya stammered nervously.
Likho curled up her thin pale lips into a smile. It seemed to take some effort.
“I never sleep,” she said. Marya shuddered. Her voice was deep and rough, like black heels dragged over stone.
“Well … I suppose that saves time.”
“Lessons.” Her voice dragged across the room again.
“You don’t have to.”
“On the contrary. Lessons are a specialty of mine.” Widow Likho inclined her head in the other direction. “Shall we begin with history?”
The crone turned, her bones creaking and popping as she did, and pulled a large black book off of the shelf. It was so wide that the edges hung off Widow Likho’s lap, polished and gleaming. She extended it towards Marya.
“Read,” she rumbled. “My voice is what it used to be.”
“Do you mean ‘isn’t what it used to be’?”
Likho smiled again—the same blank, distant smile—as though she had thought of something amusing that happened a hundred years ago.
Marya was grateful not to have to look at her. She opened the massive black book and began to read:
The Causations of the Great War were several. First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds, and the length of an hour. Each of these things had Tsars or Tsaritsas, and chief among these were the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life.
Marya Morevna looked up from the book.
“Comrade Likho, this is not the history of the Great War,” she said uncertainly. “This is not a book approved by my school.”
The widow chuckled, and the sound was a heavy stone falling into a shallow well.
“Read, child.”
Marya’s hands shook on the black book. She had never seen a book so beautiful, so heavy and rich, but it did not seem friendly, like the books in her mother’s room, or in Svetlana Tikhonovna’s or Yelena Grigorievna’s suitcases.
“The world is a slow learner,” Marya Morevna read.
And only after eons did it master the techniques of the sun, earth, sugar, the length of a year, and men. The Tsars or Tsaritsas retreated into mountains and snow. They stayed far from each other out of family respect, but had no interest in these new things, which were surely passing fashions.
But the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life greatly feared one another, for Death is surrounded by souls, and is never lonely, and the Tsar of Life had hidden his death away in a place deeper than secrets, and more secret than depth. The Tsaritsa of Salt could not reconcile them, though they were brothers, and the Tsaritsa of Water could not find an ocean wide enough to place between them.
After a space of time longer than it takes the stars to draw breath together, the Tsar of Death was so well loved by his court of souls that he became puffed up and proud. He bedecked himself in onyx, agate, and hematite, and gave bayonets of ice, and cannons of bone, and horses of drifting ash with eyes and nostrils of red sparks to each of the souls that had perished in the long, tawdry history of the world. Together this great army, with shrouds flying like banners and trumpets of twelve swords lashed together marched out across the deep snow and into the lonely kingdom of the Tsar of Life.
Marya swallowed. She felt as though she could not breathe.
“Comrade Likho, the Great War began because Archduke Ferdinand was shot, and the West would have crushed a noble Slavic people to dust underfoot if we had not intervened.”