Deathless

I told you there were no rules.

I told you there was a difference between your world and mine.

I told you I couldn’t die.

* * *

And on that day, as Marya Morevna walked back up the steps into her other life, a glint of silver caught her eye. She dug in the black dust of the cellar, her fingernails pulling up chunks of the earthen floor until she had it: Svetlana Tikhonovna’s old hairbrush, boar’s bristles still stiff, silver still bright. And as she held it up in her hands, half-frozen muck crumbling from her fingers, the shadows hanging in the basement stitched themselves one to the other until old widow Likho stood there, just the same as Marya remembered, her black spine bent flat by the ceiling. She rubbed her long fingers over her knuckles and peered at Koschei with a smirk.

“Brother, girls are no good for you, you know that,” she said, her voice dragging across the floor as it always had.

“I hang here of my own will,” Koschei said. “She will release me of hers.”

“I wouldn’t,” cackled Likho. “Never, never.”

“You are meant to be elsewhere, are you not, Sister? Carrying out my program, my orders, are you not? Did I not make provisions for my absence, and were you not one of them?” Koschei’s eyes flared hatred at her; the air between them arced and bent.

“Oh, but I had to come! I had to come and watch! I can hardly think of worse luck, you know. Worse timing. Tscha! Of all the ci

ties, Marya, of all the years! It brings tears to these old eyes. My spleen is so proud. You follow in your old teacher’s footsteps after all.”

Likho reached out her long, skeletal hand and pinched Marya’s cheek, her smile stretching all the way around her face. Marya recoiled. She did not understand. She did not want to. Her place had been invaded, her secret meant only to hold two. She wanted to crush Likho down into that black hound and kick her.

From somewhere far off, the sound of an air raid siren wound up and spooled out over the city, and the street, and the cellar.

23

A War Story Is a Black Space

Look, I am holding up my two hands, and between them is Leningrad. I am holding up my two hands and between them is a black space where Marya Morevna is not speaking. She would like to, because she thinks a story is like a treasure, and can belong to only one dragon. But I make her share; I will not let her have the whole thing. I have this power. I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead. Besides, what happened between the two hands I am holding up is squeezed between the pages of the books of the dead, which are written on my hands, because I died in that space where Marya Morevna is not speaking. And now it is all clear, and now you understand.

For storytelling, a domovaya is always better than a human because she will not try to make a miserable thing less miserable so that a boy sitting at his grandmother’s knee can nod and say, The war was very terrible, wasn’t it, Babushka? But it is all right because some people lived and went on to be good and have children. I spit on that boy because he thinks only of his own interest, which is that he should be born. Miserable means miserable. What can you do? You live through it, or you die. Living is best, but if you can’t live, well, life is like that, sometimes. So now I stop everything, and I say it is time for the dead to talk with the dead, and Zvonok has the floor, if there is a floor left to have.

* * *

For a long time nothing changed, except that Ivan the Fool and Yelena the Bright finally escaped Baba Yaga because the black house on which they were painted was hit with a shell and burned down. That is an excellent strategy for escaping her, really, and maybe the only one, if you are a Fool. But the house burned down and red clouds fell like curtains over the whole city, not from the house of fairy tales, but from the granaries, where so much bread and butter and sugar burned up that later babushkas made cakes out of the scorched earth. Everything smelled like burning grease. When the red clouds that were like curtains lifted, Leningrad began to perform something very dreadful, but no one noticed yet.

It took a whole day for the house of fairy tales to burn. People came out to take turns looking at it.

Marya Morevna did not take a turn at looking. She took a turn at staring out the window, which she is very good at. Guns make horrible sounds, like a punching in the sky, and I heard the sound of the guns go through Marya and leave her burning down, like the house. She looked out the window because she was afraid that Leningrad was going to start dying, like Buyan did, and she was right, but she was also wrong. Like I told you, nothing had changed yet, except that we could all hear the guns, all the time—first sirens, then guns, and then no sirens anymore because there were so many guns the sirens could not keep up.

The houses of Leningrad inventoried themselves on the double. They said, How long? And their larders said to their cellars, Not long.

Papers fell from the sky between snowflakes. They clogged the chimneys, and in the street young girls would pick them up and start crying, uncontrollably, like someone turned on a switch in them and jammed it so that it could never be turned off again. The papers said, Women of Leningrad, go to the baths. Put on your white dresses. Eat funeral dishes. Lie down in your coffins and prepare for death. We will turn the sky blue with bombs.

Marya never cried. There was a switch in her, too, and it was also jammed.

Ivan Nikolayevich punched his rage like dough. It rose up and he hollered all day. “Marya, you have no papers! How can I get you a ration card? What devil can you be that you have no identification? I was a fool, a fool to take you into my house. You will make a criminal of me!”

“This is my house,” said Marya Morevna quietly.

They were both wrong. It is my house. But I let them fight over it because he is a fool and she is a devil like me, and what is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?

A ration card says, This much life we have allotted you. It says, This much death we can keep from your door. But no more. It says, In Leningrad there is only so much life to go around. It says, The only thing not rationed in Leningrad is death.

But he got her a full set of papers, didn’t he? And don’t think I didn’t see the marriage certificate in the pile. The ink was still wet when he brought them home and threw them at her. Marya, when I said I would choose another for you, he was not what I meant.

“You have made me a forger,” he spat at her. “You have made me a malfeasant. Every time you eat your bread you should think, I owe this to Ivan Nikolayevich, who overlooks my wickedness.”