Catherynne Valente - Deathless

For a while, the bread was bread and the butter was butter.

I believe that Marya Morevna saw him come first, for Marya saw as a devil sees. I heard her cry out of the left side of her mouth as she sat by the window—and all of us saw General Frost step over the Neva. All of us held our breath and snapped our fingers to keep off his eye. His shoes were straw and rags; his beard was all hard snow. He had no hat, but his skull had chilblains, and his great blue-black hands held the double chain of his dogs, December and January. How they bite, with those teeth! Old Zvonok does not make up stories to frighten you. Ask anyone, and you will be told that Russia’s greatest military man is General Frost. He whips our enemies with ice and freezes their guns in their paws and sends out his dogs. On the breast of General Frost hang more medals than icicles. Should you ever be so lonely and unlucky as to be a soldier in Russia—may some unbusy god preserve and keep you!—you may see him. Hold your left hand over your right eye, put a lump of snow in your mouth, and crouch in a trench all night without sleeping, and you may spy him wandering through the drifts, laying his hand on German heads and turning their helmets to death masks.

But, alas for us, General Frost was blinded in his youth. An oily rag he wears over his useless eyes, and the old man is just as happy to gobble up Russian souls as the Hun, as anyone else. It makes no difference to his big stomach. He blunders, the old god does, and his dogs get off the leash, yapping away into the dark.

No one could get out. Nothing could get in. Winter’s bitch dogs got hold of the ration cards, and shook them until they broke in half, and then in half again.

What does a domovaya eat, you ask? Sure as sin she doesn’t line up at the bread store for her crusts, equally divided two million ways? No. I eat ash, and embers, and the sweet, hot stuff of the stove. When everyone finally puts their sleep together, I make my ash-pies and my ember-cutlets and eat until my lips get all smeary with fire. When I was young, and only courting an apartment or two, I could not believe humans ate the fuel and not the fire. Who cares about cakes? I had no use for meat, except to keep the fire hot. But when you are old and married you learn to tolerate unbalanced foreign customs. So what I am saying is that at first it was not so bad for me. At the end of the bread there was ash enough. I thought, Tscha! Zvonok can live through this!

But still, the papers kept falling. They made drifts, like snow in the streets. Beat the Kommissars. Their mugs beg to be smashed in. Just wait till the full moon! Bayonets in the earth. Surrender. At least the Germans hire good writers, yes? But no one cried over the messages anymore. They reached up their hands to catch the papers before they fell and got wet, to use for fuel.

I had three conversations before the New Year which were all the same conversation. I will tell you about them.

The first one was with Kseniya Yefremovna, whom I could never startle, no matter how I tried. I stood on the stove bricks and got my feet warm while she fried some flour in fish oil for Sofiya. Hard to remember now, that in the beginning of it all we still had real flour, and real fish oil!

Why don’t you get out, eh, rusalka? I said to Kseniya Yefremovna. Why do you hang around like you’re one of them? Marya throws herself into the pot with these others, and who knows why crazy women do what crazy women do, but why don’t you go hop in Lake Lagoda and wait it all out?

Because it is not my lake, Comrade Zvonok, Kseniya Yefremovna said to me. I would bounce off the surface just like a skipping stone.

Then go to your lake, I said. I am smarter than all of them sealed in a jar together.

Instead of answering, Kseniya Yefremovna picked up an ember with her bare fingers. She held it up to her eye; her wet fingers popped and steamed, and then she handed it down to me. I chewed it while Sofiya chewed her pancake and the snow came down outside. The charcoal squeaked on my teeth.

I am not a rusalka anymore.

I spat to show her what I thought of that.

I am a Leningrader now. And so is Sofiya, and we will survive because of our strong backs, not because once, before the war, we were rusalki. No one is now what they were before the war.

To the furnace with her. I don’t care. What are tenants? Temporary. Might as well mourn cheese.

When General Frost had a foothold in every house, and the pipes froze like sausages, and Marya Morevna chopped a hole in the river every morning to lug water back to the house for soup—but also, secretly, for Kseniya’s and Sofiya’s hair—I marched down into the basement on account of the very witless situation going on down there. I did not like to see my Papa Koschei like that, with his moldy rope over his head and wearing three layers of Ivan Nikolayevich’s coats for warmth.

Papa, I said to my Papa, why do you not burst out of this place and take Marya Morevna with you? Even the pupils of her eyes are skin and bones. Can you not see it?

I see it, domovaya, my Papa said to me.

And do you see your brother the Tsar of Water outside, stomping on the streets, setting his dogs on old women? For so General Frost’s family calls him, on formal occasions.

I see him. But I bound myself. I used her as a chain. I cannot unbind myself. I cannot use her as a key.

Well, what a lazy husband you turned out to be, old cock-wit! Zvonok learned boldness from a boiler, and does not always profit from it.

I am not Koschei the Deathless anymore.

I spat to show him what I thought of that.

After love, no one is what they were before.

When the bread was only half bread, because the other half was birch bark, and the butter half butter, because the other half was linseed oil, I went to Marya Morevna, who every day stared at the gun under her bed like it was a cross.

I could go to the front and fight, said my girl to me. Then I would get a double ration. But what of my two husbands, then?

Why should the wolf worry about the safety of the sheep? I said to my girl. If my hand were bigger I would whap you one. Grab Koschei by the horns and hang the rest of us!

I cannot leave Ivan Nikolayevich. Or Kseniya or baby Sofiya. Or you.

If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.

I think I could make a kind of biscuit out of paint, and turpentine, for frying, said my Marya, and scraped some paint off the wall with her fingernail.

I spat to show her what I thought of that.

When you are this hungry, you cannot even remember who you used to be, she whispered. Who you might have been, if not for the hunger.

That night, she burned all the books in the attic for heat. She carried them down, one by one, because December ate up her strength. She lit them in the stove while they all huddled around and put out their hands. Last one in was the Pushkin, and she cried, but without tears, because you cannot have tears without bread.

“I will remember these books for you,” said Ivan Nikolayevich, because he did love her, even if it was beef-love: stupid and tough and overcooked. “I will recite them to you whenever you want to read.”

I ate the ashes, slowly, to make them last. I put out my hands with the rest of them. Outside, the wind and the guns went on and on.

After the pipes, the lights went off, like a throat being cut. Ah, I felt it in my shins! My poor house, his bowels frozen, his heart beating only every other beat! I coughed blood when the electricity went black.

Marya Morevna did a secret thing. I will tell you about it. Every morning when the dark kicked up dark outside the windows, she sat down at the table and pulled out an apple from the pocket of her coat. She cut it in half. Half she gave to Ivan Nikolayevich before he went to work at the arrest factory; half she gave to Kseniya Yefremovna, who gave half of that to Sofiya. Every morning the apple burned so bright in her skinny white hands. Redder than red. She kept a few slivers of the core, like chicken bones, and before the stars could get all the way around the sky, the apple would swell up again, just as whole as before. Made Zvonok wish she ate apples, it did. Marya never said anything. They ate it like people used to eat communion. Not chewing. Letting it melt. She just held out the halves like the halves of a heart, and even when little Sofiya started forgetting her words, even half-blind in her frozen cradle, she still reached out for her bit of apple at that hour of the morning.