Deathless

by Catherynne M. Valente

  It takes a very long time to think through something as peculiar as the birds. One cannot simply leave it to the usual bash and bustle of memory and its underhanded tactics. And so, as it became clear that no shrike would come and take her away from her overcrowded house, the incessant noise of all those Blodnieks cooking or Dyachenkos fixing up the staircase; away from her hair growing thinner and more brittle as the communal table had to stretch further and further, from Comrade Piakovsky’s sweaty staring in her direction; Marya’s mind marshaled itself to the task of sorting out the whole business. No matter what she appeared to do—sweeping out the leaves or studying her history or helping one of her mothers sew a shirt—her heart raced with problem of the birds, trying to outrun it into someplace where everything could make sense again.

  Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation. Given: The world is ordered in such a way that birds may be expected to turn into husbands at a moment’s notice and no one may comment upon it all. What conclusions can be drawn? That everyone already knows this, and it is only unusual to me. Or else only I saw it happen, and no one else knows that the world is like that. Since neither her mother nor her father nor Svetlana Tikhonovna nor Yelena Grigorievna had ever made reference to their husbands having been birds, Marya rejected the first conclusion. However, the second conclusion led only to more delicate and upsetting hypotheses.

  First resolution: Perhaps one was not meant to see what a husband looked like before he made himself more or less presentable. Perhaps the republic of husbands was a strange and frightening place full of not only birds, but bats too, and lizards, and bears, and worms, and other beasts waiting to fall out of a tree and into a wedding ring. Perhaps Marya had broken a rule of some sort, and visited that country without papers. Were all husbands like that? Marya shuddered. Was her father like that? Was Comrade Piakovsky like that, following her with his wolfish eyes? What of wives, then? Would she turn into something else when she married, the way a bird could turn into a handsome young man?

  Second resolution: Rules or no rules, it was certainly better to see these things than not to see them. Marya felt that she had a secret, a very good secret, and that if she took care of it, the secret would take care of her. She had seen the world naked, caught out. Her sisters had been rescued from the city as beautiful girls are often rescued from unpleasant things, but they did not know what their husbands really were. They were missing vital information. Marya saw right away that this made a tilted kind of marriage, and she wanted no part of that. I will never be without information, she determined. I will do better than my sisters. If a bird or any other beast comes out of that uncanny republic where husbands are grown, I will see him with his skin off before I agree to fall in love. For this was how Marya Morevna surmised that love was shaped: an agreement, a treaty between two nations that one could either sign or not as they pleased.

  When Marya saw something extraordinary again, she would be ready. She would be clever. She would not let it rule her or trick her. She would do the tricking, if tricking was called for.

  But for a long while she did not see anything but the winter coming on and folk squabbling over bread, and her own arms growing so skinny. Marya tried not to come to the third resolution, but it hung there in her heart until she could not ignore it. Birds did not come for her because she was not as good as her sisters. Fourth prettiest, too lost in her own thoughts to steal back bread from the horrible little twins with their matching, cruel laughters. They did not come for her because she had seen them without their costumes on. Perhaps marriage was meant to be tilted, and she was spoiled for everything now, all because she had spied where she ought not to have. Still, she was not sorry. If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.

  But thoughts are not food. Alone and birdless, Marya Morevna wept for her sisters who had gone, for her empty stomach, for the overfull house, which she could hear groaning at night like a woman laboring to bring twelve children into the world all at once.

  * * *

  Only once did Marya Morevna try to share her secret. If it was wrong to hoard a house, surely it was wrong to hoard knowledge. She was younger then, only thirteen, past the plovers and the shrikes. It was at thirteen years old that Marya Morevna learned how to keep a secret, and that secrets are jealous things, permitting no fraternization.

  In those days, Marya Morevna walked to school with her red scarf tied around her neck, like all the other children. She loved her scarf—in the midst of the dreary house, turning grey with so many people scrubbing their laundry in it and sweating in it and boiling potatoes in it, her scarf was bright and gorgeous—and it meant that she belonged. It marked her as part of the young workers’ committee, one of the loyal, one of the true. It meant she was one of the good children at school, the children of the revolution, handing out pamphlets or flowers with her classmates on street corners, adults smiling at her scarf, at her goodness.

  Besides her scarf, the great love of Marya’s young life was books. By extension, she loved her lessons, since they meant discussing books and the wonderful things inside them. The one miracle of the twelve families in her house was that they had each brought at least one suitcase of books with them, and all those new books with all their new treasures were meant to be shared among all. Having once seen the world naked, the engine which drove Marya Morevna through the long, thin streets of Petrograd was a terrible hunger for knowing things, for knowing everything.

  Particularly, Marya Morevna loved the dashing Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, who wrote about that naked world she knew, where anything at all might happen and a girl had to be ready, had to be ready for that anything to bash onto the streetside once more. When she read the great poet, she would say softly to herself, Yes, that is true because I saw it with my own eyes. Or, No, it’s not like that, when magic comes. She measured Pushkin against the birds, against herself, and believed the poor dead man to be on her side, the two of them steadfast, shoulder to shoulder.

  That morning when Marya was thirteen, she had been reading Pushkin while walking to school down the endless cobbled streets, deftly avoiding men in long black jackets, women in heavy boots, newspaper boys with gaunt cheeks. She had become quite good at keeping her face hidden in a book while never faltering in her steps, never swerving from her path. Besides, a book kept the wind out. Pushkin’s coppery words rang in her heart, warm and bright, almost as sweet as bread:

  There, weeping, a tsarevna lies locked in a cell.

  And Master Grey Wolf serves her very well.

  There, in her mortar, sweeping beneath the skies,

  the demon Baba Yaga flies.

  There Tsar Koschei,

  he wastes away,

  poring over his pale gold.

  Yes, Marya thought, the smell of woodsmoke and old snow pushing back her long black hair. Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.

  Bolstered by her comrade Pushkin, who surely understood her, Marya broke her usual rapt classroom silence. Her teacher—a young and pretty woman with large, nervous blue eyes—led the class in a discussion of the virtues of Comrade Lenin’s wife, Comrade Krupskaya, who was neither young nor pretty. Marya found herself speaking without meaning to.

  “I wonder what sort of bird Comrade Lenin was before he bounced up to become Lenin? I wonder if Comrade Krupskaya saw him fall out of his tree. If she said, That is a beautiful hawk, and I will let him put his claws into my heart. I think he must have been something like a hawk. Something that hunts and gobbles things up.”

  All the other children were staring at Marya. She flushed, realizing she had spoken all that aloud. She touched her red scarf nervously, as if it would keep off the staring.

  “Well, you know,” she stammered. But she could not say what they should know. Could not bring herself to say, I saw a bi
rd once that turned into a man and married my sister, and the sight of it bruised my heart so that I cannot think about anything else. If you had seen it, what would you think about? Not laundry, or whether it will rain, or how your mother or father is getting on, or Lenin or Krupskaya.

  After school the others were waiting for her. A throng of her classmates with narrowed eyes and angry expressions. One of them, a tall blond girl Marya thought especially beautiful, walked up to her and slapped her hard across the face.

  “You’re a crazy girl,” she hissed. “How can you talk about Comrade Lenin like that? Like he’s some kind of animal?”

  The rest of them took their turns slapping her, pulling at her dress, yanking on her hair. They didn’t speak; they did it all as solemnly and severely as if it were a court-martial. When Marya fell to her knees, crying, bleeding from her cheek, the beautiful blond girl shoved her chin up and tore Marya’s red scarf from her neck.

  “No!” Marya gasped. She snatched at it, but they held it out of her reach.

  “You’re not one of us,” the girl sneered. “What does the revolution need with crazy girls? Go home to your mansion and your bourgeois parents.”

  “Please, no,” wept Marya Morevna. “It’s my scarf, mine; it’s the only thing I don’t have to share. Please, please, I’ll be quiet, I’ll be so quiet. I’ll never talk again. Give it back. It’s mine.”

  The blond girl sniffed. “It belongs to the People. And that’s us, and not you.”

  And they left her there, scarfless, her nose running, sobbing and shuddering, shame flooding her skin like scalding water. One by one they spat on her as they went to their suppers. Some called her bourgeois, a traitor; some called her worse, a kulak, a whore—though she could not be all those things at once. It didn’t matter. She was a person, but she was not one of the People. Not to her old friends, not anymore. The last of them, a boy with glasses, his own scarf voluminous and thick against his neck, pulled her book of Pushkin’s poems from her hands and tossed it far into the snowdrifts.

  * * *

  After that, Marya Morevna understood that she belonged to her secret and it belonged to her. They had struck a bloody bargain between them. Keep me and obey me, the secret said to her, for I am your husband and I can destroy you.

  3

  The House Committee

  Marya noticed it first because she paced while she was thinking, and paced while she was reading, and paced while she was speaking. Her body never wanted to sit still, never wanted to be calm or measured. Thus, she had an immaculate knowledge of the dimensions of the upper floors of her house, even as the space that could be called hers had shrunk. Only a month previously it had taken her five steps to walk from the cobalt-and-silver curtain to the green-and-gold curtain that marked the beginning of the Dyachenko family and their four boys, each as blond as birchwood. Then, suddenly, without anyone posting a notice of intent or collecting twelve signatures, it took seven steps to get there.

  She counted her steps very carefully, both with slippers and without. She kept up her counting for twelve days and nights, though the Abramov twins pounded on their ceiling with brooms and pots, bellowing for peace, and old Yelena Grigorievna threatened to report her twice. On the twelfth night, when Marya Morevna was four steps across the floor, poised halfway between cobalt and green with her leg extended like a parade soldier, she heard a little breath beneath her own, so quiet she had to stretch her ears around it, a tiny sound, a faucet hissing in a thunderstorm. She looked down, her black hair spilling over her shoulder like a curious shadow. Thus Marya Morevna first saw the domovoi, and the face of the world changed again.

  At her feet stood a little man, frozen in midstep, his leg, like hers, stuck stiffly into the air, his arm caught in a comic martial upswing. He had long, thin hair and a long, thin mustache that was split down the middle and flung over his shoulders, where it was tied to his hair with neat red bows. His white beard was full of dust, yet it did not seem unkempt; rather, he wore the grey dust like an ornament. He had a thick red vest, which looked as though it was made of tiny roof shingles, over a work shirt the color of concrete, and his trousers were crisscrossed with black stripes like window sashes. They were also split in the middle to allow a long, thin tail to escape, bald as a possum’s.

  Marya and the domovoi stared at each other for a long moment like two wild animals drinking from the same stream, both deciding whether or not to run and hide from the other. This is it, Marya thought, her heart leaping inside her. The world is naked again, the underside of the world, and I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t. I shall be clever, and I shall not let him go.

  Finally, she spoke.

  “Where are you going to, Comrade?”

  “Where are you going to, Comrade?” he repeated snappishly. His enormous eyes crackled hearth-red, ember-gold.

  “I am measuring the house with my feet.” Marya put her foot down, and the domovoi followed suit, pertly brushing his vest clean.

  “I was on my way to a meeting of the Domovoi Komityet, the House Committee, which is why I have worn my most marvelous clothes, but I thought there was a military tattoo, and so I hurried to take my place in the ranks before I was reprimanded.”

  Marya longed to tug at the little domovoi’s mustache and pinch his cheeks. She wanted to clap him up in her arms and tell him to take her away to whatever country he came from, where no one would slap her for knowing things, where there was enough bread and vodka to give him that round belly. Even if this was her husband come for her, unbounced and untransformed … but she did not think that was what the little man was about. She kept her face very grave. Her heart tripped over her breath. “You were right,” she said finally, with what she hoped was stern authority. “And you should immediately take me to your superior officers, for I have discovered discrepancies in the state of the house.”

  The domovoi saluted. His eyes shone with delight. “Excellent! All house matters must immediately be brought to the attention of the komityet! Come! We will make a report! We will file paperwork! We will make formal complaints!” The domovoi’s voice rose, higher and higher, like a teakettle boiling, until it was little more than an ecstatic squeak. “Follow me! Comrade Chainik shows the way!”

  Marya thought she knew the house on Gorokhovaya Street. After all, she had lived there all her life. She had sipped 3,070 bowls of soup in the kitchen with black tile. She had eaten 2,325 entire fish at the cherrywood table with three knots in its center. She had dreamt 5,475 dreams in her little bed with its red blankets. She lived inside the house—she belonged to it. But little Chainik led her past the cobalt-and-silver curtain, past the green-and-gold curtain, down stairs grown rickety with the leaping ministrations of children. He led her creeping, tiptoeing around the rose-printed walls of the parlor (now the Malashenkos’ room, piled high with mirrors, lipsticks, and combs, trophies of Svetlana Tikhonovna’s days as the great beauty of the Kiev stage) and through the ragged linen sheet the Blodnieks had nailed over the kitchen to give their four daughters a kind of rough privacy. Though truly, having the luck to be allocated to the kitchen, where the warm iron stove puffed out ruddy heat, no one pitied the girls in the least.

  Chainik scrambled over the sleeping bodies of the Blodniek daughters. The four of them curled together on two mattresses flopped onto the tile, amid a ruin of stumpy candles, saucers, shoes, discarded dresses, and the girls’ prize possession clutched in the youngest sister’s dreaming hands: a London fashion magazine, ten years out of date. Their long hair mingled, brown and rich, flowing back over the bed linens, the color of bread. The domovoi stopped on the shoulders of each to give their ears a little kiss. Marya Morevna held her breath and stepped over each of them, then their mother, her braid tight and severe even in sleep, and finally their father, resting in the position of honor next to the great benevolent stove, its rosy glow dim and delicious. Chainik wedged himself behind the stove and shoved—the stove creaked away from the wall. Papa Blodniek spluttered in his sleep, but
did not wake. Chainik shoved again—the little domovoi had a donkey’s strength! The stove scraped forward once more. Mama Blodniek sighed for dreams of days long dead, for rowan berries in her hair and sweet cream on her table. Chainik gritted his yellow teeth and pushed with all his vigor to let Marya squeeze in between the stove and the wall, for she was so much bigger, and the poor imp was not accustomed to making room for anyone but himself. Four daughters turned over in their sleep, each after the other, like a wave rolling across the sand.

  Behind the stove was a little door. It was a fine, rich door, arched and tapering to a peak, carved over with the flowers of a happy garden, whose polleny centers were stamped in polished brass. It was as tall as a cathedral entrance for a creature of Chainik’s size, but it barely rose to Marya’s shin. Chainik knocked softly—three times, then two, then three again. The door creaked open.

  “Comrade Chainik,” Marya whispered. “I am too big! I shall never fit through!”

  “We must all tighten our belts!” hissed the domovoi, and yanked on the sash of her nightgown. Marya spun like a spool; she had the peculiar feeling of a huge hand pressing down on the crown of her skull, of her ribs being squeezed as though Chainik were lacing her into one of her mother’s old corsets. When he tucked her sash back into place, Marya faced the carved door once more. She had dwindled down until she was just barely small enough to fit inside the door, if she ducked. Marya fought to keep herself from laughing out loud—magic, Pushkin’s magic, real magic, and done to her!

  “Your bones are so stubborn!” snorted Chainik. “It’s almost as though you don’t want to shrink at all! Brazen thing, why do you want to be so tall?”