Deathless

bought her three dresses and two suits with trousers, one black, and one brown. She never wore the dresses. They hung on the empty curtain rod—red, white, and yellow—and kept the sun out. Many days Marya, Kseniya, and the baby walked together to the market to get potatoes and bread, cabbage and onions. Sometimes there was fish. Sometimes there was not. If all the stars aligned, there might be beef, but it would certainly have run out by the time they got to the head of the line. Kseniya Yefremovna and Marya would joke about the riches that the people ahead of them would already have snapped up.

“Those who get here at three o’clock get bananas!”

“Old widow Ipatiev gobbles up all the chocolate. See how brown her teeth are!”

And Marya thought, I sound just like a Leningrader. Imagine it.

And at night, in a narrow bed in her old room, Marya Morevna would hold Ivan tight inside her, demanding his obedience to her, demanding that his soul be ripped out and emptied into her. Only then did she feel whole and rooted—but she did not feel like herself. Sister of Anna and Tatiana and Olga. Daughter of twelve mothers. Young Pioneer. Six years old and birdless, birdless.

Marya began to stalk the house as she had long ago, restless, uneasy. She paced. Reading, thinking, speaking. Her sleep came in brief, spontaneous concussions; at night she kept her eyes peeled like an owl’s. She was afraid to dream, afraid, still, to leave the house. Every time she looked out the long, thin windows onto the cherry tree where her sisters’ husbands had ever so briefly alighted, she thought she might see Buyan again, all crimson, all bone, all radiant, whole, no silver to be seen. Or worse, to see Viy’s colorless country seeping through the seams of Leningrad, too. She did not know whether she longed to see these things, or feared to. Her body still tensed in every moment, ready to take up her rifle again (hidden now under her bed, with Ivan above it, as though he, too, might spark and fire in her hands) and run with all those men behind her, all those woven men with their soft, soundless shoes. At the raucous, talkative bursts of boys and girls passing below the windows on their way to Nevsky Prospekt, to ice cream and films and cafes, she jumped in her skin, ready to leap on them and bite out their throats.

The house had definitely shrunk; that she knew. Where once she had counted, endlessly, the five steps to walk from the vanished cobalt-and-silver curtain to the disappeared green-and-gold curtain, it now took three. But then, maybe her strides were longer. There are so few of us now, she thought, and left a shoe for Zvonok that night. Ivan, endlessly vexed by her bottomless appetite for shoes, called her mad, a wolf. She winced. That night, while he slept, she suddenly sprang upon him and bit his cheek savagely. She was not mad, not a wolf, not anymore. He looked at her with such shock, such wounded surprise. She kissed away the blood and roused his body to her, her fingers and her lips. He protested, his hands plunged already in her hair. I have to report early in the morning, Masha!

Do you think I came through the living and dead worlds to be a Party mistress? I am your loyalty; I am your kommissar.

And he yielded to her, always.

* * *

It was because she could not sleep that Marya Morevna discovered Kseniya Yefremovna’s peculiar habits. In the long, impenetrable night of January, the queen from beyond the sea crept downstairs to put her freezing feet against the stove, meaning to walk on her softest toes and wake neither the earnest nursing student nor her little one. The child had a dark mess of tangled hair now, and babbled an unending stream punctuated by mamochka, Sofiya, milk, fishes! Sofiya had just learned to walk, and terrorized them all with her headlong rushes down the hallways, across the parlor. But Marya found them both wide-awake in the starless hours of night, waiting for a great kettle to steam on the great brick stove.

“Good evening, Marya Morevna!” Kseniya whispered. “What is the matter?” The baby waved her fat arms senselessly.

“Nothing, Ksyusha, I am only cold. The old roof still lets in a draft. May I sit by the stove?”

Kseniya Yefremovna frowned. “Of course. Nothing belongs to me that does not belong to all.” Marya heard, too, the other half of her words: but I wish you wouldn’t.

Marya huddled with them next to the baking brick of the stove. Warmth sopped through her, dull and sleepy. She put her finger into baby Sofiya’s hand.

“She squeezes well. Maybe she will grow up to be a soldier.”

Kseniya stared at her. Marya never said the right thing, especially around the child.

“Have you begun teaching her words?” she tried again.

“Yes, she’s very clever.”

As if recognizing her cue, Sofiya threw her hands up and squawked, “Water!” And giggled riotously.

“Yes, rybka, my little fish! It’s time for water.” Kseniya twisted her hands.

“We are modest,” she added, awkwardly.

“I shall turn my eyes if it will help. I am chilled, still. But why are you bathing at this time of night? You’ll chase your death in your sleep.”

The young nurse sighed heavily, untwisting her long braid and loosening her dark hair, slightly damp. “I have … a condition. My daughter has it, too. We become … ill, when our skin dries out. Our hair. It is especially dangerous at night. Pillows drink up so much water. For myself I wouldn’t even get out the kettle, but my little fish can’t bear the faucet.”

Marya Morevna laid her head on her shoulder, watching the nursing student with a crow’s interest. Rusalka were like that, she knew from long experience. They fall down dead if they dry out. In Buyan, the rusalki kept a great glass-ceilinged natatorium full of clear blue pools and hot saunas, so they could stay in the city overnight. At home, in their lakes, they never worried—a quick swim and they shone, sang, drowned their lovers with abandon and cheer. But too far from the green, grassy depths of mountain waters, they fell prey to a wide variety of arcane personal rituals, all of them necessary to keep a rusalka alive from day to day.

“I knew someone once, who had a condition like yours,” Marya said slowly. She could not be sure; she did not dare call the young woman out.

Kseniya Yefremovna fixed her with a deep, unwavering gaze. “I am not surprised that you did, Comrade Morevna.”

In the silence of the kitchen, broken only by the settling of blackened wood chips in the stove, Marya helped Kseniya to fill a little tub and sink her long hair into it. She stroked the young woman’s curls, making sure every strand got soaked through. Impulsively, she kissed the young woman’s damp forehead.

In the morning, they did not speak of it.

* * *