Deathless

It was late spring when Marya Morevna slid her brass key into the lock of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, feeling it slide, too, between her own ribs, and open her like a reliquary full of old, nameless bones. The house stood empty. All the curtains—green-and-gold, cobalt-and-silver, red-and-white—had been yanked from their rods. Spiders’ webs made a palimpsest on the walls, endless generations of spiders weaving spider-tales into silk. The house seemed so much smaller than it had, darker, an old, hunched beast past its use. A hole had opened up in the roof, dripping rain and plum blossoms into the room which had once belonged to Marya and her parents. The downstairs stove stood silent and cold, full of old ash no one had taken out. Vacant room opened up into vacant room.

“The Dyachenkos lived in this room,” she said to no one. To Ivan Nikolayevich, she supposed, his hand proprietary on her back. It was all wrong. She was supposed to have found warmth here, like Ivan’s warmth. Life, and living. “They had four boys, all blond. I don’t remember their names. The father ate this awful pickle soup every night. The place just reeked of dill. And here—oh, the Blodniek girls! Oh, they were so beautiful. Their hair! How I wanted hair like that. Shiny and straight as wood. They used to read.” She turned to Ivan, her eyes hollow. “They used to read this fashion magazine. They each had their hour with it, every day. They memorized hemlines, and color palettes. Little Lebedevas! And oh, there, there the Malashenkos tied bunches of flowers to sell, and Svetlana Tikhonovna brushed her hair. Oh, why is no one living here? This was a good house! I had twelve mothers in this house, twelve fathers. I ate such sweet fish in this house.”

And Marya Morevna fell to her knees before the great brick stove in the empty kitchen. She did not cry, but her face grew redder and redder with the pain of her not crying.

“Zvonok,” she whispered to the floor. “Zvonok, come out.”

Finally, she curled up on the broken tile and went to sleep, like a ragged feral cat who has finally found shelter from the rain.

* * *

Ivan Nikolayevich went to the ministry that evening to ask them to pardon his disappearance from his camp posting with a long tale of illness and good service among the Buryatskaya province villages. He opened and shut the door with a kiss to Marya’s cheek that felt as alien to her as a tattoo pricked there. Kisses crushed, pulverized, obliterated, bit—they did not peck. They did not smack and then vanish in a second. The scent of new lime leaves and forsythia blew in after him to fill the space. Marya Morevna watched him go down the street. The blue-and-lavender evening threw sashes around him, and he passed by young men in black caps who leaned against the linden trees, playing guitars. Marya shut her eyes. When she opened them again, the guitars still twanged under the first faint stars and Ivan Nikolayevich had disappeared around a corner. She suddenly felt afraid to leave the house. What awful place waited out there, whose fountains spouted dead, tasteless water, whose tall houses had no names, no skin, no hair? This house, she knew. It stayed within her as it had always been, the architecture of her girlhood. The wood held the oils of her skin deep in its grain; the windows still bore the imprint—long gone, invisible—of her tiny nose. A ghost of the Marya without magic, the little girl who was not broken, not a soldier, not a wife. But Leningrad, Leningrad was a stranger. It did not even share a name with the city where she had been born.

The plumbing creaked to life, spitting brown chemical resentment into the sink. Marya waited, watching the baleful dragon-faucet spew its venom into the drain. It did not run clear, really, but it ran tepid, the color of weak tea. After a moment’s consideration, Marya Morevna took off her boots and placed them deliberately by the stove, where she had once shrunk to the size of a rolling pin. She rolled up the legs of her black trousers and slopped water onto the kitchen floor with cupped hands, having no bucket, kneeling to scrub with an oily rag and a few old newspapers she found stuffed into the stove. Vicious Spies and Killers Under the Mask of Academic Physicians! the newsprint said, and she crushed it into the floor until the ink ran with water and filth. Her creaky knee complained, popping against the tile, but gradually, she uncovered a single bleached and faded rose, the pattern she remembered in the once-tidy kitchen. I want to see those roses! Papa Blodniek had hollered at his daughters.

“What I would not give for one Blodniek sister to kiss me now, and light the stove with me,” Marya whispered. She scrubbed until her back wept and convulsed, giving up. She had been stabbed there, near her kidney, the night they lost the candlemakers’ district, and Koschei had howled at the sight of her blood, so like a wolf that the wolves in the wood had taken up the chorus. Marya lay flat on her stomach, waiting for her muscles to unclench and let her rise. The cool tile kissed her face. Outside, through the broken window, she heard a young girl laugh, a cream-colored, strawberry-ice kind of laugh. Her lover sang to her: We’ll meet again in Lvov, my love and I …

A rough, ringing voice chided her. “Not an hour in Leningrad and he’s got you scrubbing floors.”

Marya smiled against the wet floor. She squeezed her eyes shut, relief lancing through her chest.

“Zvonok, oh Zvonya, I thought you’d gone.”

She turned her head and the domovaya stood there, her blond mustache ragged and full of split ends, her vest buttons mostly missing, patches on her brick-colored trousers. “Not that I don’t appreciate it,” Zvonok said. “It’s been so long since anyone cared about the floor. A cat could give up a grudge since this house has heard a holler to shut the door, the winter’s coming in! But then, the winter came in, didn’t it? It did, it did.” The domovaya nodded to herself.

“But it’s a fine house. Why would no one live here? And what about the Domovoi Komityet, all your friends?”

“Gone, with the families. Only I stay with the house. It’s my house. I married the old bastard. I’m stuck. A lesson some girls haven’t learned, exactly.” Zvonok sat down, cross-legged, near Marya’s nose. “Well, you know, Svetlana Tikhonovna died. A bad business, that. And her boys, well, they had no one to get meat for them, and they went begging one day and never came back. It happens to little ones. I like to think they fell into the Neva, the monsters. They stuffed up the mouse holes with their old socks. I needed those holes! And then the Abramov twins caught something, and pretty soon everyone had it, and there was a line outside the bathroom like at the cabbage shop, and then they didn’t bother with the bathroom anymore. And then the municipal hygiene authority just started carrying them all out, one by one by one. Some flat dead. Some not. Your mother was one of the last. And with them, their domoviye crawled out, clutching their stomachs, pulling their mustaches. We can’t get dysentery, you know, but we feel it when our family hurts.” Zvonok tugged her own mustache and looked at the clean rose on the floor. “I felt it when you caught that bullet in your shoulder. And the bayonet in your back. Such a lot of bother I suffer for you. Anyway, the Housing Committee tried to assign new tenants, but I didn’t want them.” The domovaya spat—carefully avoiding the clean patch Marya had opened up. “No, I didn’t! Fat and lazy, nothing but toadies and drunks! They put the Baghirlis—all eight of them—in your old room upstairs. And then the Grusovs showed up. Husband and wife, rat and ratitsa! They informed on their last household, so they got the rest of the house all to themselves! And no

children between them! That bitch’s ferrety old womb would suffocate a babe, I’m sure. Well, Zvonok has opinions, and her opinions are this: to smoking hell with the lot of them. I broke things and rattled rafters until they ran off. Funny how no one’s asked for an assignment here since! Ha!” The imp slapped her knee.

Marya Morevna laughed a little, though it made her back hurt. “Oh, Zvonok, I have missed you.”

“Well, I can’t say you’ve moved up in the world. I saw that lug you brought in. Smells like an informant to me. Smells like a Grusov.”

“I don’t think so.” But then, she had not asked. She knew nothing about him, except the taste of his mouth. What else didn’t she know? Everything, everything.

“Bet Papa Koschei didn’t have you on your knees in filth sopping up his kitchen. Bet you had a kokoshnik all of sapphires and a striped cat on your lap.”

“Not exactly.” But gems there had been, and no weak pecking kisses. Perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps hasty. But she could not think that, not yet; she had to try. Because what’s back there? The war and blood and silver splashes like stars.

“Well, after Viy came, sure. I felt that too, even so far off from you. But before that. Before, it was good, yes? Sturgeon eggs every night? Copper bathtubs?”

Marya smiled again. Her hair slid off her back. “Yes, it was good, Zvonya. Before the war.”

“Well, I will tell you something, Masha, my girl. You should have stayed put. I understand the need to ride a new horse every now and then—you think I haven’t gone and taken a good look at the wallpaper in another house every century or two? But you don’t trade a tiger for a fat little kitten, you know what I mean? It’ll just piss on your floor and ignore you when it’s not biting you for fish you don’t have.”

“When I saw him I thought I could curl up inside him and go to sleep and never wake up.”

“Men are no good for that, Masha. They’ll always want you working, when you’re not softening their fall into bed at the end of the day.”

“I wanted to be alive again. I wanted to be someone else.”

Zvonok stood up, brushing off her red trousers. She put her hands on her hips.

“Well, I hope lying on that floor like a broken dog is everything you hoped it would be.” She shrugged. Then the domovaya hopped up onto one foot, spun around three times, took a deep breath—and stopped. She squinted at Marya for a moment and reached into her vest pocket, pulling out something tiny and white. It grew bigger and bigger until Zvonok could hardly manage it herself. She let it fall onto the tile: a china teacup, with cherries on the handle, cracked in many places.

Zvonok jumped through the hoop of the handle, and vanished.