Catherynne Valente - Deathless

“Thank you. We find a way to be comfortable wherever we land. But this is certainly … better. I bathe frequently.”

Ivan beamed at them. “Will you excuse us, Comrade Ozernaya? I wish to have a word with my wife.”

“Of course.”

Marya snorted softly. How odd you are, Ivanushka, kicking her out of the room you just gave her .

Kseniya Yefremovna ducked into the parlor where the Malashenkos had once squabbled over rouge creams. Where Svetlana Tikhonovna had posted all her playbills. The Pharaoh’s Daughter. Giselle. Spyashaya Krasavitsa.

Ivan Nikolayevich crushed Marya to him in a rush. He buried his face in her hair.

“Masha,” he breathed, “do not look at this house. Do not look at the dead stove, the hole in the roof. I will make this place whole for you, your childhood home, and then you will know that you chose well, in choosing me. You will see how well I serve you.”

Marya Morevna sighed against his shoulder. She breathed his scent. Yes, like that. More like that. Tell me all the ways in which this was the only choice.

“Take me upstairs,” she whispered.

He did. And as they passed out of the kitchen, Marya noticed that a puddle of water, perfectly round, rippled in the place where the young girl with her braid and her baby had been standing.

So it went. The Housing Committee sent men to repair the roof, and Ivan grinned widely at Marya, as if to say, Look how I command men, too . With harsh blue soap and lye they burned the filth and any lingering sickness away from the kitchen floor. All the roses bloomed on the tiles—though they were never to be pink again, but faint and brown. Ivan carried out bucket after bucket of ash from the stove, and oh, how Marya wept when she saw the burnt corner of a magazine in the grey coals, the scorched tip of a lady’s feathered hat. All four of them gathered in the kitchen to light the clean stove for the first time. Baby Sofiya clapped her chubby hands, and they all blew on the little flame until it caught. Soot and smoke and the smell of sawdust and pine needles filled the house, but it was warm. Kseniya made them all a sweet ukha that night, with salted mackerel she had been saving for an occasion and green, redolent dill from the old window garden, now overgrown and thick with new sprouts.

They were allotted furniture and food cards according to Ivan Nikolayevich’s new civic position in the Cheka, the Extraordinary Commission. Marya laughed when he said those words to her.

“But that doesn’t mean anything, Ivanushka! What’s extraordinary about it?”

“It’s like a kind of policeman, Masha. A sheriff.”

But she never could keep it straight. All the letters, the acronyms, the codes, the colors, changing like musical chairs, every week, every month. Games demons play. It meant nothing to her, except in a charming sort of way, as it had when Naganya wanted to play at interrogation, while the rest of them wanted chess.

Ivan bought her three dresses and two suits with trousers, one black, and one brown. She never wore the dresses. They hung on the empty curtain rod—red, white, and yellow—and kept the sun out. Many days Marya, Kseniya, and the baby walked together to the market to get potatoes and bread, cabbage and onions. Sometimes there was fish. Sometimes there was not. If all the stars aligned, there might be beef, but it would certainly have run out by the time they got to the head of the line. Kseniya Yefremovna and Marya would joke about the riches that the people ahead of them would already have snapped up.

“Those who get here at three o’clock get bananas!”

“Old widow Ipatiev gobbles up all the chocolate. See how brown her teeth are!”

And Marya thought, I sound just like a Leningrader. Imagine it.

And at night, in a narrow bed in her old room, Marya Morevna would hold Ivan tight inside her, demanding his obedience to her, demanding that his soul be ripped out and emptied into her. Only then did she feel whole and rooted—but she did not feel like herself. Sister of Anna and Tatiana and Olga. Daughter of twelve mothers. Young Pioneer. Six years old and birdless, birdless.

Marya began to stalk the house as she had long ago, restless, uneasy. She paced. Reading, thinking, speaking. Her sleep came in brief, spontaneous concussions; at night she kept her eyes peeled like an owl’s. She was afraid to dream, afraid, still, to leave the house. Every time she looked out the long, thin windows onto the cherry tree where her sisters’ husbands had ever so briefly alighted, she thought she might see Buyan again, all crimson, all bone, all radiant, whole, no silver to be seen. Or worse, to see Viy’s colorless country seeping through the seams of Leningrad, too. She did not know whether she longed to see these things, or feared to. Her body still tensed in every moment, ready to take up her rifle again (hidden now under her bed, with Ivan above it, as though he, too, might spark and fire in her hands) and run with all those men behind her, all those woven men with their soft, soundless shoes. At the raucous, talkative bursts of boys and girls passing below the windows on their way to Nevsky Prospekt, to ice cream and films and cafes, she jumped in her skin, ready to leap on them and bite out their throats.

The house had definitely shrunk; that she knew. Where once she had counted, endlessly, the five steps to walk from the vanished cobalt-and-silver curtain to the disappeared green-and-gold curtain, it now took three. But then, maybe her strides were longer. There are so few of us now, she thought, and left a shoe for Zvonok that night. Ivan, endlessly vexed by her bottomless appetite for shoes, called her mad, a wolf. She winced. That night, while he slept, she suddenly sprang upon him and bit his cheek savagely. She was not mad, not a wolf, not anymore. He looked at her with such shock, such wounded surprise. She kissed away the blood and roused his body to her, her fingers and her lips. He protested, his hands plunged already in her hair. I have to report early in the morning, Masha!

Do you think I came through the living and dead worlds to be a Party mistress? I am your loyalty; I am your kommissar.

And he yielded to her, always.

It was because she could not sleep that Marya Morevna discovered Kseniya Yefremovna’s peculiar habits. In the long, impenetrable night of January, the queen from beyond the sea crept downstairs to put her freezing feet against the stove, meaning to walk on her softest toes and wake neither the earnest nursing student nor her little one. The child had a dark mess of tangled hair now, and babbled an unending stream punctuated by mamochka, Sofiya, milk, fishes! Sofiya had just learned to walk, and terrorized them all with her headlong rushes down the hallways, across the parlor. But Marya found them both wide-awake in the starless hours of night, waiting for a great kettle to steam on the great brick stove.

“Good evening, Marya Morevna!” Kseniya whispered. “What is the matter?” The baby waved her fat arms senselessly.

“Nothing, Ksyusha, I am only cold. The old roof still lets in a draft. May I sit by the stove?”

Kseniya Yefremovna frowned. “Of course. Nothing belongs to me that does not belong to all.” Marya heard, too, the other half of her words: but I wish you wouldn’t.

Marya huddled with them next to the baking brick of the stove. Warmth sopped through her, dull and sleepy. She put her finger into baby Sofiya’s hand.

“She squeezes well. Maybe she will grow up to be a soldier.”

Kseniya stared at her. Marya never said the right thing, especially around the child.

“Have you begun teaching her words?” she tried again.