Deathless

The woman leapt up, drawing her knees together with a dry knocking sound. Naganya dove down and clapped her irons on the old lady’s legs, giggling.

“Marya,” came a soft voice. But Marya reminded herself not to speak to anyone, and stared straight ahead.

“March, Comrade Lazybones!” cried the vintovnik. She boxed one of her own ears, stamped her foot, and shot three bullets out of her mouth with the soft psht psht psht of a silencer. The shots landed all around the old grandmother but did not hurt her, only made her leap forward like a spooked cow. “Faster! Faster! The police are after you! Run! You remember how to hike up your skirts!”

The woman bawled and stumbled, her ankles tangling up in the manacles. “Don’t fall or I shall have you arrested for wasting your life on babies and borscht!”

“Marya,” said the voice again. Marya squeezed her eyes shut. I will not answer, she thought frantically.

Naganya nipped at her human’s heels, spitting silenced bullets and whacking at her toes with bayonets Marya had not known she hid under her arms.

“Don’t cry, you wrinkly old camel! Just think of the stories you’ll have to tell all the other spitting beasts! The devil chased you through the snow! You’ll be Queen Camel, prize pisser!”

“Marya Morevna, look at me.”

Marya could not help it. She looked down. A beautiful young woman stood below her horse, her blond hair gathered up in an elegant ballerina’s bun. She wore a thick white fur coat, the kind a man gives to his mistress. On her chest glimmered a splattering of light, as though someone had thrown a bucket of molten silver onto her. It glowed like a watery star.

“Svetlana Tikhonovna!” Marya gasped.

“Yes, it is me,” the woman said. “Come down and hug me, my darling. I was one-twelfth your mother, after all.”

Svetlana held out her arms. The star on her breast rippled.

“I’m not supposed to.” But she felt her eyes burning with tears. She had not known how much she wished to see a human face, a motherly face.

“The Marya I know didn’t care much for supposed to. You stole my hairbrush, after all, and ran off in the middle of the night like an ungrateful brat. But I give without bitterness, as a mother should.”

“How can you be here, Svetlana? This is the other side of the world.” Marya’s fingers ached to brush her icy cheek, to say, What of my birth mother? What of my father? Any word of my sisters? And I am not a brat.

“So true, so true! Well, the tale of it is, I died a few months after you left. I couldn’t help it, I was so hungry. When the police came to question my husband about his club memberships, I spat at them and told them they ought to be shamed, to be so fat, in their big apartments, while my babies and I didn’t remember what meat tasted like! You can’t say that sort of thing. I knew that. I think I was just tired of being alive. It’s no good, these days, being alive.

”

“I like it,” whispered Marya.

“That’s because you don’t live in Leningrad. Can you believe it? It’s Leningrad now that the old dragon is dead. They keep changing the name. Mark me, in twenty years they’ll call it Lemon Popsicle and shoot people who laugh when they say it. Life is nice when there’s cucumber soup and eye powder the color of scallions and a samovar piping away on every table. I forgot how nice, until I came to the Country of Death, where Viy is Tsar and the ghosts of the meals the living eat make all our larders groan. Come down, Masha. I’ll give you a candy.”

“I’m afraid. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be hungry. I don’t want to be ordinary and ignored. And I certainly don’t want to be dead. My home is in Buyan, in the Country of Life.”

“Your home is Leningrad,” Svetlana Tikhonovna snarled. “You’ve only forgotten it.”

“I haven’t! But you can leave your home and find someplace new. People do it all the time. Why can’t I?”

Svetlana Tikhonovna shrugged as if it didn’t matter to her in the least. “Come and kiss my cheeks, devotchka, and I will tell you how beautiful you’ve grown up to be. What have the living to fear from the dead?”

Naganya whooped from the far corner of the field, where the woman had stopped, her manacles springing off with a clang. The old grandmother set off at a dead run back to her house, and the vintovnik danced, the shackles jangling in her hand.

Marya shook her head. She felt as if a silver fog clung to her head, making her dull and drowsy. “Svieta, you do not mean to kiss me, really.”

Svetlana Tikhonovna cackled and leapt at her, clawing and grasping at her leg. Folk spiraled up out of the snow like smoke, men and women and children, all with the silver splatter of death on their chests, all hungry and showing their teeth.

“Come down, come down!” they wept. “We only want to love you, and embrace you! You are so warm! Why should our enemy have all your kisses?”

A hundred cold fingers pulled at Marya, and no rider can stay on their horse with such hands on their skin. She toppled and fell into the mass of them, snow and vapor puffing up around her. As one they fell on her, weeping all the while. They did not bite her or claw her, but kissed her, over and over, their lips on her flesh. With every kiss she felt colder and colder, thinner and thinner, as though the night wind might blow her away. Svetlana Tikhonovna lay against her, her full, frosted lips closing over the mouth of Marya Morevna.

“Come down,” the ballerina whispered in her frigid ear. “I will teach you to dance so perfectly as to stop a hundred hearts with every step.”

Marya moaned beneath the shades. She tried to think, to fill her heart with living, hot things, to remember that she was alive and not sunk in the earth under the weight of all these ghosts.