Deathless

Inside the body of Marya Morevna, her daughter grows very quiet, and listens to the sound of the firebird’s impossible, enormous heart beating slowly, sounding so much like her mother’s, so much like her own.

Marya Morevna returns to Yaichka empty-handed, but that is all right. Shame is for other villages, other women. There is still so much, even without firebird soup. She says nothing of the bird in the forest, and no one asks. On Monday, Marya Morevna caught two beavers (and their tails) as well as a young boar with one broken tusk. Tonight, with the help of her handsome husband and Nikolai Aleksandrovich (whose mustache sweats prettily), she lugs their great wedding table out into the middle of the village, where the red leaves of autumn already skip and blow, bright and sharp as stars. She boils a stew of onions and potatoes and mushrooms with glistening lumps of those pancake-tails floating in the broth. She roasts the pig over a great fire. Georgy Konstantinovich brings fish he caught yesterday through stealth and planning; Grigory Yevseevich brings a basket of apples redder than the leaves. Vladimir and Nadya Konstantinovna contributed a store of honey smelling faintly of their long-vanished roses. Nikolai brought vodka from his own still, just as clear as rain. The children run around the table, pelting each other with leaves, their laughter rising up to the sky like smoke. Little Anastasia and Aleksey dance together to Georgy’s gusli, and Josef pinches all of them savagely under the table.

Around the great table all the people of Yaichka rise and hold up their glasses.

“Nastrovye!” cry Georgy and Aleksandr; cry Grigory and Sergei; cry Josef and Leon; cries Koschei Bessmertny; cry all four of Aleksandra’s beautiful daughters and their brother, too; cry Grisha and Sasha; cry Nikolai and Vladimir. The setting sun shines through their glasses.

“To life,” they say, and crash their glasses together, laughing, as wolves howl distantly from the forest, but never show themselves.

And Marya cries out, too. She clutches her great belly as her child protests the hunt and the lugging of the table and the drinking without her. The child sears through her, ready at last to be born, right now, right this very moment. Marya Morevna falls to her knees, her hair spreading out around her, as black as if it has been burnt.

27

The Sound of Remembering

In Yaichka, they say a child draws her first breath through her ears, her second through her eyes, and her third through her mouth. This is why it sometimes takes a moment for a baby to cry. The first breath is for the mother, the second breath is for God, and the third breath is for the father. The breath through the mouth brings the most pleasure, and we forget immediately that we ever knew how to breathe any other way. When a child in Yaichka cries, his mother will pick him up and hoist him on her hip and laugh and say, Look at my little bearlet, breathing through his eyes again! And the child stops his crying because he likes to be called a bearlet.

Marya and Koschei’s daughter takes her first breath through her ears, like any other child. The breath makes a tiny whistling sound, too high for even dogs to hear.

Then she grows up.

It happens so fast even the cabinets turn their heads twice. Marya Morevna puts her child to her breast; she latches just as perfectly as any child has ever done, and with one long drink, the baby takes all the milk of her youth into her belly and stands up seventeen years old, naked, with her mother’s blood still sticky in her black hair.

Koschei Bessmertny smiles so sadly Marya puts her hand over her heart as though a bullet had bit her there.

“But you have been happy here,” he says softly. “You have been happy here with me?”

“Kostya, why are you so sad?” says Marya, and she is perplexed, but not upset, for a daughter grown up so fast is strange and a little tragic, but not less strange than a firebird. “Help me name our girl!”

Koschei looks long at his child. The girl takes her second breath, through her eyes. It makes no sound at all. “She has a name already, volchitsa, my love, my terrible wolf. She is my death. And I love her abjectly, as a father must.”

Death, their daughter, who will never learn to speak, who will never need to speak, holds out her bloody arms, streaked white and silver with fluid.

“I always die at the end,” he whispers, and he is afraid now, his hands shaking. “It is always like this. It is never easy.”

The iron keys on the wall bead blood as though they are sweating. Marya stretches out her hands, and she is a mirror of her daughter, but she does not know whom she wishes to catch, only that she wishes to catch someone, anyone, to be anchored, to be connected, to be not abandoned.

But Koschei the Deathless steps into his daughter’s embrace and holds her, gently, tenderly, proudly, for a moment, smoothing her wet hair with his hand before kissing her forehead as perfectly as any father has ever done. She opens her mouth and takes her third breath, wholly, fully, through her mouth, the last trickles of the water of her mother’s womb spilling from her lips. The force of her third breath drags Koschei’s eyelids down, down, down, until they droop, and fall like scrolls unfurling to the floor; and he is become his brother, the Tsar of Death, for a tiny silver moment no larger than the prick of a pin. He lifts his eyelids with one arm to see Marya Morevna one last time, lifting them over his daughter’s shoulders; and beneath the lids and lashes there is only light, more and endless light, silver as water, pouring out of him; and suddenly they are both gone and there is a bird in the room, a bird both like and unlike Marya’s firebird; and Marya’s belly is flat and firm as though she were never full of daughter, and she is not in bed, but standing in a corner of her house in Yaichka, in the dark, and all is grey and cold except the bird, the bird staring at her with a human face.

“Sit down, Marya Morevna,” says the bird, and his voice is like Georgy’s gusli. “I am going to tell you everything that ever happened to you. Come on, then, find your knees.”

Marya sits without knowing if a chair will catch her. But of course one does; this is Yaichka, where she cannot fall. Her face thins and hollows even as she stares at the bird, his feathers of indigo, fuchsia, and nine shades of gold, so bright in the freezing black house, so bright beside her drained body.

“Do you know where you are, Mashenka?” The bird cocks his head, his exquisitely beautiful face tender, his sorrowful eyes like an icon.

Marya Morevna stares dully out the window. The grass there freezes slightly at the tips of the blades.

“Do you remember when Koschei gave you his egg? How black it was, how silver?”

Marya Morevna puts her head in her hands. Her hair shrivels up. Her tears freeze slightly, falling to the floor with tiny shatterings.

The Tsar of Birds shakes his coppery green chest feathers. Beneath his wings human arms reach out to her, their fingers slender, perfect, soft as down. He lifts her cheeks up and kisses her, his mouth the color of blood, hers the color of ash, and in his kiss her gentle tears become harsh sobs, her whole body racked with them, her bones stretching to let more darkness in. Her lips peel back from her chattering teeth, and even they grieve, but still he kisses her, kisses her until she is screaming.

“I remember, I remember,” Marya weeps, and Alkonost wraps his flawless arms around her, and his turquoise-and-golden wings around them both. In the dark, she disappears into his iridescent embrace.

“I laid that egg, Masha, poor child. Every egg must be laid; otherwise they cannot live. I laid Koschei’s egg long ago, far away, up high in the air, and when we saw what was in it we swore to each other never to open it again. But brothers are built for breaking promises. Do you know what was in it?”

“His death.”