Catherynne Valente - Deathless

“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 do 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.