Deathless

“Drink, Ivanushka.” She clucked gently, like a mother, and put the mug to his lips. “Your lungs want vodka.” Obediently, he drank, and coughed, and drank once more.

Marya Morevna sank his clammy feet in her sister’s shallow tub. She held a handful of water to his nose and ordered him to breathe it in. Ivan spluttered, and gagged, but did it anyway, so accustomed was he now to her voice, her command. Finally, she made him stand. She reached into the foggy corner of the banya, knowing with all of her marrow that a long white birch branch would rest there.

But Ivan had drifted away into his fever, and slept curled on the floor of the banya like a hound.

Marya let go of the birch branch slowly. She watched him in t

he dark without a sound.

* * *

When the dawn roused the humble hut’s household to work, Marya and Ivan Nikolayevich found Anna once more atop her steel egg, sorting keys like an engine, too fast to see.

“Masha, my own, my littlest sister,” the shrike’s wife called down. “Take this with you.”

She tossed a key to Marya, with brass teeth. It glowed dimly in her hand, catching the sun.

“It is the key to our old house, on Gorokhovaya Street. But of course it is Dzerzhinskaya Street now. One of us should still live there. One of us should be young again.” Anna climbed down the grey side of her egg and held out her arms to her sister. When Marya stepped into them, Anna pressed her face to her sister’s breast, took up her hand, and began to dance with her, a gentle, slow circle around the little hut. Marya laughed despite herself, as she always had. She remembered, as if through a glass, having laughed like that, a lifetime ago. She kissed Anna’s forehead with passion.

“When our mother died,” Anna said, “the Housing Ministry sent the keys to me. I was the only one they could find. We keep our registrations current.” Then Anna kissed Marya on both cheeks. She smelled like iron and strength, and Marya Morevna held her tight.

PART 4

There Are No Firebirds in Leningrad

And always in the frigid, prewar air,

The lascivious, menacing darkness

There lived a kind of future clanging …

But then, you could hear it only softly, muffled,

It could scarcely cloud the soul

And it drowned in the snowdrifts along the Neva.

As in a mirror of appalling night,

A man thrashes like a devil

And does not want to recognize himself,

Along the legendary embankment

The real—not the calendar—

Twentieth Century draws close.

—ANNA AKHMATOVA

20

Two Husbands Come to Dzerzhinskaya Street

In a long, thin house on a long, thin street, a woman in a pale blue dress sat by a long, thin window, waiting for her punishment.

Neither fell nor fiery did it come. For one year, one month, and one day, it did not come. And forgiveness did not, either.