Deathless

by Catherynne Valente

  Koschei the Deathless regarded her knotwork. “That will not hold me. It is a joke. I could breathe on it and it would crumble.”

  “What proof would it be if you couldn’t get out?” said Marya softly, and kissed his pale mouth in the dark, all her child’s worship of him seething feverishly back into her. I need this. I need it. You will not deny me. She lifted his other graceful hand and bound it, too, pulleying his arms up above his head.

  He hung there, tears streaking down his face.

  “I love you, Marya.”

  She laid a finger over his lips.

  “There is no need for you to speak, Kostya. There is only one question: Who is to rule? And that is never answered with words. You will not move. You will not try to loosen my knots. You will suffer for me, as I suffered for you. Then I will know that your submission to me is total, and true. That you are worthy of me.” Marya Morevna took Koschei’s face in her hands and pressed her forehead to his. “We are going to do something extraordinary together, you and I,” she whispered. “Do you remember when you said that to me, so long ago? Do you know what it is we are doing? I will tell you, so that later, you cannot say I deceived you. I am taking my will out of you, and I am taking yours with it. Out of the eye of a needle, hidden inside an egg, hidden inside a hen, hidden inside a goose, hidden inside a deer. When we are finished you will give your will to me, and I will keep it safe for you.” She smiled, her eyes serenely shut. “I learned very well how to give up my will to my lover. I was a savant, you might say. You, however, are a novice. Less than a novice. And, like a good novice, you must swallow your pride.”

  Marya drew away, her eyes shining, her blood singing. Then, she turned and walked up the staircase, her red dress trailing behind her on the black steps. She shut the door behind her, and turned the key.

  * * *

  Thank you, Ivanushka. How good you are to me.

  That is all I want in the world, to be good to you.

  * * *

  Marya’s eyes sparkled with sudden interest, even delight.

  “Isn’t this fun?” she said, a grin starting on one side of her face and traveling the slow road to the other. It was a game, always a game. And when you were done playing, when you got bored, you just called it off, and went to hunt mushrooms by moonlight.

  “Pardon me?” Comrade Ushanka recoiled.

  “I do like games. You play so well! Almost like it’s all real.” Like the acronyms and colors and committees were real, which is to say not at all. All toys; all amusing; all tiresome, eventually.

  Ushanka spluttered, clutching her notepad. “I assure you, Comrade—”

  “Come play again tomorrow, will you? It’s been so dull! I feel as though we are friends already! How wonderful, to have friends again.” Get out, get out, get out, Marya’s body hissed, but she kept up her smile.

  “I am not finished, Comrade Morevna!”

  “Now, now, Ushanochka, it’s almost lunch, and nothing is so important it can interfere with lunch!”

  Ushanka stopped spluttering. She put down her pen and pad. She folded her hands over them and grinned down wolfishly.

  “Yes, Comrade Morevna,” she whispered. “It is fun.” And she walked calmly to the door, her hand steady and sure on the knob.

  * * *

  When the woman had gone, Marya put her hand to her throat, her heart hammering horribly, sweat prickling in the fine hair of her temples. She watched Ushanka go, down the long, thin street. A loose thread dangled from the hem of her skirt, catching the sunlight.

  22

  Each of Them Uncatchable

  Marya Morevna carried her secret like a child. Her heart grew fat with it, for secrets are the favorite food of the heart. Her life bent in half, and the seam of her life was the floor of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, separating her world into upstairs and downstairs, into day and night, into Ivan and Koschei, into gold and bone.

  “I swear March has come three times already this year, Kseniya Yefremovna,” she said in the morning, putting on her kettle, watching her tea disperse in the water like paint, hushing Sofiya, slicing sausage into a pan. Marya put her hand over her heart, to keep the secret in. Kseniya laughed and said the snow loved Leningrad too well to ever let it go before June. They talked like two young women with young women’s cares, and little Sofiya banged a wooden spoon on the table, hollering mamochka, mamochka like a whip-poor-will’s song.

  When Kseniya went to classes, Marya Morevna would take up her iron keys and open the door to the basement. Her secret would swirl up toward her out of the dark, and her heart would lead her down.

  * * *

  “You look older today,” she whispered, and pressed her whole body to that of Koschei the Deathless, bound to the wall.

  “I have always been old. It is only that you want to see my oldness now.”

  “If I kissed you, would you become young again?”

  “I will always be old.”

  And the kisses she had of Koschei in the dank, moldering cellar were the sweetest kisses of her life, so sweet her teeth hurt. She lay against him, or struck him with her fists and accused him of taking her girlhood, or took his body as she pleased. Sometimes, when she lifted her hands against him, he smiled so beatifically she thought he had died. But his excitement promised that he had not, and where his seed spilled on the cellar floor, strange blue plants grew. When they opened into flowers, dust trickled out, and the flowers died again. When she questioned this, and why sometimes he had wrinkles now, and sharp teeth, and long, protruding bones, Koschei the Deathless answered, “When do you feel most alive, Marya, but when you are closest to death? That is where I live. That is what my body is made of.”

  And she rested her head on his chest, so that her long black hair covered his nakedness like a cassock. She whispered, “I think we’re finally married, you and I.”

  When Ivan returned from his work, he, too, often looked older. He ate his cutlets and bread silently, with a sullen kind of savagery, and with a sullen kind of savagery he wrapped Marya up in his body, and kissed all of the skin she had, and cursed her for not having more. These kisses, too, were sweet, so sweet her head spun, and she hurtled between them like a trolley car, up and down, up and down. Marya Morevna carried her smile in her pocket, close to her skin, so no one could steal it. In her mind she pored over her secret, her hoard, as though it were gold. If she went to the market, she sped home to unbutton her winter coat and her blouse and press her breasts to Koschei’s lips in the cellar. If Ivan was delayed, she paced and stomped, so that he would hear her pacing and run home to her—but also so Koschei below would know whom she waited for. In those days, of every meat she ate only the tenderest parts.

  “Do you like it, Kostya? Hanging here, in the dark, waiting for me?” she asked Koschei the Deathless one day as the square of light from the one tiny cellar window traveled slowly across the floor.

  “Yes,” Koschei whispered, his eyes rolling back as she kissed his throat and stroked his chest like a favorite cat. “It is new.”

  “Losing the war, that’s new, too, isn’t it?”

  “Everything is new, volchitsa. There was a revolution, or hadn’t you heard?”

  To Ivan, she gave exactly seventy kisses each night, and no two kisses the same. She said to him, “Do you remember where I lived before? That we were at war? That I was a soldier?”

  Ivan yawned. “All that was so long ago, Mashenka. Like a dream. In fact, some days, I think it was a dream. I’m amazed you remember it at all.”

  “I can’t forget things. They stick to me.”

  “And what is sticking to you tonight?”

  “If there is war here, I think the war there will end. The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.”

  Ivan turned on his side beside her, the long, broad lines of him leonine and sated. “I have told you. The war is just so much foreign peacockery. German business. It’s nothing to d
o with us.”

  * * *

  In April, the melt held for an entire week. Festivals hummed in the Haymarket, and Kseniya Yefremovna insisted on taking the baby, and Marya, too, to see the balloons.

  “Mamochka!” cried Sofiya. “So many!” And she clutched at the sky with her little hands.

  As the spring sun wheezed and panted in the sky, they strolled back down the boulevards, each of the women with fried dumplings overflowing with bloody cherries in hand.

  “What is that?” said Marya Morevna suddenly. She meant the black house on Decembrists Street that rose up between two everyday apartment buildings.

  Kseniya Yefremovna answered her. “It is a house they painted with all sorts of things from fairy tales, so that it would be wonderful and people would bring their children to see it, just as we brought Sofiya today. You can see there a firebird on the door, and Master Grey Wolf on the chimney, and Ivan the Fool scampering over the walls, with Yelena the Bright in his arms, and Baba Yaga running after them, brandishing her spoon. And that’s a leshy, creeping in the garden, and a vila and vodyanoy and a domovoi with a red cap. And there—they’ve put a rusalka near the kitchen window.” Kseniya turned to Marya. “And Koschei the Deathless is there, too, near the cellar. You can see him, painted on the foundation stones.”

  Marya put her hand over her heart.

  “Isn’t it strange and marvelous, the things people will believe?” said the nursing student.

  “Yes,” said Marya shakily, and stared at the house, its colors, how everyone painted there seemed to be running, running, chasing each other forever, each of them uncatchable, in a long, chained ring. Tears blurred in her eyes. Where am I painted? Was I never part of them, those tales, that magic?

  “What I mean to say, of course,” said Kseniya softly, “is that I will not go down into the basement. You do not even need to ask me to promise.”

  Between them, they traded silence for a long while. The sun complained of arthritis, cracking its bones against the bare linden branches. Marya wanted to have a friend again, and sometimes she felt it was so. A living friend, with red cheeks.

  “Why do you want to be a nurse, Kseniya Yefremovna?”

  “It is better than being a rusalka,” Kseniya said, shrugging. Marya wondered at the deliberation with which her friend dropped the word between them. “Why should I not want something better?” she went on. “Doesn’t everyone? Don’t you? The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it. Well, I do not want to be beautiful, or a woman, or anything. I want to know how men breathe. I want my daughter to be in the Young Pioneers, and grow up to be something important, like a writer or an immunologist, to grow up not even knowing what a rusalka is, because then I will know her world does not in any way resemble one in which farmers tell their sons how bad beautiful women are.”

  “Sofa will be good,” said the child solemnly, and patted her own head.

  * * *

  It so happened that a shipment of peaches arrived from Georgia not long after that. Ivan, Marya, Kseniya, and the baby sat at the kitchen table near the brick stove, which still crackled and glowed away—for the melt had not stayed, but had given up its maidenhood to another snowstorm, and another after that. They all stared at the slightly overripe peaches, their fuzz, their green leaves still jutting out from the stems. The peaches looked like summer to each of them, like summer and sunlight and rain.

  “It is because I arrested a man skimming from his workers that we have these peaches before anyone else in Leningrad,” said Ivan Nikolayevich.

  “Why would they give them to you?” asked Marya Morevna, turning one over in her hands.

  “Because I am good at arresting. It is an art, you know. The trick is to arrest them before they have done anything wrong. That’s the best thing for everyone.”

  Marya looked at him out of the corner of her eye. What a disturbing creature a man is. “What I mean is: Even with the investigation into your affairs, they’re giving you peaches?”

  Ivan’s voice rose sharply. “What investigation? Has someone been to the house?”

  “Comrade Ushanka, who works with you. She asked how we met.” She had guessed he did not know. Comrade Ushanka had a secret, too, and Marya knew it, though she could not guess what it was. Like knows like.

  Ivan relaxed, rolling his head over his shoulders to pop the bones. “Well, that’s a relief. You’re mistaken, Masha. There is no Ushanka in my office. Nor in any other office in the city. It is my business to know. I think your brain wants work. Perhaps you have had enough time lying about idly, hm?”

  Kseniya bit into her peach, and the juice sprayed up in a sugary stream. The sound of her bite cut their conversation in two. All of them fell to the golden peaches, and soon they had slurped them up, every one. The pits lay strewn across the table like hard red bullets.

  Save the one peach Marya Morevna closed up in her skirt. She brought it to Koschei in the basement, when all the house slept. She showed him her breasts and fed him one piece of peach for every lie he confessed to her.

  I told you I didn’t care that you kissed the leshy.

  I told you a shield lay between you and Viy.

  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 cities, 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.