Deathless

“Who cares how you wanted it? I’m a golem, Marya Morevna. A golem with no masters left. What am I to do now? My mission is over, and all I’ve got to show for it is a dolt of a mother in a butcher shop who can’t even remember that she is my mother.”

Marya snatched Ushanka’s hand and dug in her nails, though it couldn’t hurt her, not really, unless organdy could suffer. “Where are we?” she hissed. “It’s not Buyan, but it is.” And then she knew. She understood. The revelation moved in her like death. But it was too big; she could not hold it. She let go of the sergeant’s linen hand.

“This is Viy’s country, isn’t it?” she whispered, afraid to say it and make it so. “And the war is over. We lost. In the end, between Germany and the wizard with the mustache in Moscow, the one I told them about all those years ago—the two of them ate us alive. The dead overwhelmed us. While we were counting our ration cards, Buyan and Leningrad and Moscow and everything was shriveling and blowing away.” And her heart recited from the black book as she had once recited from Pushkin as a girl: Viy made his country as like the living world as he could, even to building film houses where silvery images of the war showed, so that the dead might be grateful, and not wish to return to life.

Marya put her hand on her heart. It hurt as though it were being cut out. Ushanka nodded, and for once her face grew sad and soft, like an old, oft-washed dress.

“It’s over, Marya. Koschei’s country has passed from the face of the earth. It doesn’t show silver on the streets anymore because the streets are gone. It’s all silver. It’s all dead. When the mud came up in the spring and mired the German tanks and broke them, do you think anyone thought, That must be the vodyanoy, rising up to protect their country, to fight alongside us? No, they thought it was weather. And so it was. The future belongs to the dead, and the makers of the dead. Men like Viy, who are blind to the deeds of their own hands, who reach out for souls. Our kind belong to him, now. We wander, lost, and you cannot even see the silver on our chests anymore, because all the human world is the Country of Death, and in thrall, and finally, after all this time, we are just like everyone else. We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive. This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell?”

But they’re all here, Marya thought, her head heavy and hot. Everyone I love is here. Except Ivan, and who is to say he is not here: a sheriff, a policeman, a cigarette maker, something, forgetful as the rest of them? And is there a nurse in a clinic called Kseniya, with a precocious daughter? Oh, I could find them. I could find them and make them know me.

Someone moved in the kitchen, banging pots together.

“Who do you think Koschei’s auntie is?” Ushanka continued. “This is Baba Yaga’s kitchen. Look under the porch and you’ll see the slats of this place gnarling and twisting—a little like chicken legs, yes? All her soups, all her cauldrons bubbling away, and oh, you must try the ukha!” Ushanka wallowed in Marya’s torment with glee. She leapt in it, turned somersaults. “What a place, where the Tsaritsa of Night runs a canteen and steals bites of carrot from her own soup.”

Marya thought she might throw up. She felt hot and sick all together. Her body wanted to do something in the face of it all, to throw something back at it. She looked uncertainly toward the kitchen.

“Then he is here, too. Visiting his sister. Discussing the week’s cuts of meat, the potato harvest, what sort of soup she might make tomorrow.”

Ushanka’s smile faded like a stain. She looked sorry for Marya.

“Koschei died. Well, he always dies. And he always comes back. Deathless means deathless. He dies and plays out the same story again and again. How many people have told you that? The Country of Death looks so much like the Country of Life. So now he lives in Viy’s possession, and he has a little wife he spirited off from her family, and thinks he is a man. A man, like he always wanted to be. It’s a good joke, if you have the right humor for it. He won’t remember you. He’s not strong enough. Viy was always the better of them. Inexorable, that’s the word. Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That’s what death is for. That’s why they keep telling this story. It’s the only story. He will look at you and think you are a woman of rank getting on in years, and wouldn’t you like to try the kvass?” Ushanka put her hand back inside Marya’s grip, making it into an intimate touch, full of pity. “Marya,” she sighed. “No one is now what they were before the war. There’s just no getting any of it back.”

The kitchen door creaked, and an old woman emerged. She wore a bloody leather apron, streaks of beef and fish blood crisscrossing themselves, making patterns on her bosom. Her white hair was pulled back into a savagely tight chignon. She looked directly at Marya Morevna, her eyes twinkling as if anticipating some particular amusement.

“How can I help you, Officers?” the woman said. Her dry lips cracked as she grinned at them.

Ushanka tucked her cheek in. “I want nothing,” she said curtly. “I have done as I was asked. I did not like it, but I did it. I want only to rest.” For a moment she did not move, staring at the floor with an expression of stubbornness that Marya knew so well, as a mother knows her child’s angry stomp. Then Ushanka rose, walked away from them, out the door of the canteen and onto the twilit road. As she walked, her head straight and high, a long golden thread unspooled from her foot, faster and faster, zipping up through her calf, her thigh, leaving little cairns of thread behind her. By the time she reached the center of what had once been Skorohodnaya Road, and perhaps still was, her hair and scalp were unraveling, and the wind blew through the strands, carrying them off towards the mountains.

The old woman turned back to Marya Morevna. “But certainly,” the crone continued, unperturbed, “certainly I can help you, madam.”

Marya Morevna looked up, and she felt so old, so awfully old and worn, and so young all at once, raw as a wound. Let it be over, she pleaded within herself. Let it never have happened—any of it. Let me be young again, and the story just starting. She glanced at the walls, at the faded old Party posters, each showing a man or a woman or a child with a narrow, hungry face and a finger laid over their mouths, abjuring some distant soul to be silent, be still. No slogans shouted from them; no moral directive told Marya how to behave, who to be in this place. And so she was herself—a bitter thing, and sour as onions in brine.

“When have you ever helped anyone?” she snapped. She could not sit there and let Baba Yaga pretend she was some ridiculous shopwoman.

“Oh, I help,” said the Tsaritsa of Night, her voice curling like ram’s wool. “Sometimes. It depends on the story. But I do help. When a girl has proven herself. When she’s kept my horses well or swept my floors or lifted my cauldron with just her own two arms. Or when her perversity has made me proud. How did she turn out, the woman you might have been?”

“You know me?” But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she had been met—the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did—the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over.

The old woman shrugged expansively, as if to demur. Who is to say what I know?

And Marya Morevna recalled the raskovnik, and the black gold, and the mortar with its pestle grinding beneath her. To remember it hurt her; pinpricks stabbed at her chest, her fingers. The posters hushed her from the wall, and in her memory an orange flower bristled with white needles opened.

Baba Yaga leaned down so that their faces stood close as secrets.

“Listen, long-past-soup. There is a room in the dark. Where a ceiling fell through, and a floor, until all that was left was a hole leading down into the earth, into a basement. Into the shadows, peacock tapestries fell dusty and burning. A table lies broken down there, and a great chair of bone. You should go there. At night, when no one can see you. I could never guess what you might find in the frozen mud and shattered walls. I am not a betting woman these days. But you know, in the end, you can only be yourself in a basement, in the black, underneath everything, where no one can find you.”

The blister below Marya’s eye, that old scar, pulsed—twice, three times. “Is it because Viy rules you? Is that why you will not say my name? Are you afraid of him, like a wizard with a mustache? Why the posters say quiet, quiet, don’t breathe a word? Because if all the world dwells in the Country of the Dead, I should not remember either, and yet I do—though it hurts like starving to do it.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I would never engage in underground, antirevolutionary activities,” purred the crone. “I am only suggesting a thing for you to see, the way an old lady with a sprung back and a greasy little cafe might do when tourists blow through her town. I say nothing; I know nothing; I certainly don’t remember a thing.” She put her withered hand, spotted as a leopard’s flank, onto Marya’s sternum, between her breasts. Marya felt something heavy and hot growing between them, like a bullet. “I would never attend meetings in dank, moldering cellars. I would never importune the character of

your colleague, who tells the tale as powerful ears want to hear it. I would never mince about and pantomime a life full of dressmaking and marriages and a successful butcher shop so as not to be caught committing the crime of remembering that anything existed before this new and righteous regime. It’s so much easier when we say, There was never an old world. Everything will now be new forever. I am hurt that you look at me and assume such criminal tendencies in a nice babushka with only your best interests at heart.” The thing like a bullet between their skins burned at the heart of Marya Morevna, drawing heat from her, giving nothing back. “And on my life I would never suggest to you that stories cannot be forgotten in the bone even when a brother or a wizard or a rifle says you must, you must forget, it never happened; there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.”

“Babushka,” Marya said, and she meant it, here, at the end of everything. “I am so tired. I am so finished with it all. How can I live in this? I want to be held by everyone I have loved and told that it is all forgiven, all done, all made well.”

“Tscha! Death is not like that. The redistribution of worlds has made everything equal—magic and cantinas and Yelenas and basements and bread and silver, silver light. Equally dead, equally bound. You will live as you live anywhere. With difficulty, and grief. Yes, you are dead. And I and my family and everyone, always, forever. All dead, like stones. But what does it matter? You still have to go to work in the morning. You still have to live.” The crone lifted her hand from Marya’s breast. In it was no bullet, not hot nor heavy, but a red scarf, bunched and knotted together. She tucked it into the flap of Marya’s uniform, next to her skin. She pulled her pinched, wrinkled, sullen face back on carefully, her practiced, amiable gaze.

Marya Morevna let her breath go. She made her face blank and unreadable. She looked up at her babushka as though she were a stranger—interesting, perhaps: such a face—but no relation of hers. After all, Marya was so good at games. She stood and walked out of the canteen, down a long, thin road toward the wreckage of some shattered black palace turned to rubble by endless shelling. The dust beneath her feet spangled in the evening light. She did not waver in her path, toward a place underground, down, down into the merciful dark, in a basement where a man with black curls flecked with starry silver would say her name like a confession; and in the place where their hands would touch, Marya Morevna could already see diamonds and black enamel swelling huge and gravid, yolk seeping from their skin like light.