Catherynne Valente - Deathless

Ushanka banged open the door of the canteen and dropped herself insolently into a chair by a little table with one leg shorter than the others. She let her face hang open, as though it didn’t trouble her a bit. Marya wanted to strangle her until she told her everything she’d ever known. No one came to ask them what they wanted to drink, to eat, anything. They were alone with the sunlight pouring in like the light after an air raid.

Marya hissed at her comrade, “Why are you so angry? It’s me that’s come home to find all my dead friends don’t know who I am, and nothing as I wanted it.”

“Who cares how you wanted it? I’m a golem, Marya Morevna. A golem with no masters left. What am I to do now? My mission is over, and all I’ve got to show for it is a dolt of a mother in a butcher shop who can’t even remember that she is my mother.”

Marya snatched Ushanka’s hand and dug in her nails, though it couldn’t hurt her, not really, unless organdy could suffer. “Where are we?” she hissed. “It’s not Buyan, but it is.” And then she knew. She understood. The revelation moved in her like death. But it was too big; she could not hold it. She let go of the sergeant’s linen hand.

“This is Viy’s country, isn’t it?” she whispered, afraid to say it and make it so. “And the war is over. We lost. In the end, between Germany and the wizard with the mustache in Moscow, the one I told them about all those years ago—the two of them ate us alive. The dead overwhelmed us. While we were counting our ration cards, Buyan and Leningrad and Moscow and everything was shriveling and blowing away.” And her heart recited from the black book as she had once recited from Pushkin as a girl: Viy made his country as like the living world as he could, even to building film houses where silvery images of the war showed, so that the dead might be grateful, and not wish to return to life.

Marya put her hand on her heart. It hurt as though it were being cut out. Ushanka nodded, and for once her face grew sad and soft, like an old, oft-washed dress.

“It’s over, Marya. Koschei’s country has passed from the face of the earth. It doesn’t show silver on the streets anymore because the streets are gone. It’s all silver. It’s all dead. When the mud came up in the spring and mired the German tanks and broke them, do you think anyone thought, That must be the vodyanoy, rising up to protect their country, to fight alongside us? No, they thought it was weather. And so it was. The future belongs to the dead, and the makers of the dead. Men like Viy, who are blind to the deeds of their own hands, who reach out for souls. Our kind belong to him, now. We wander, lost, and you cannot even see the silver on our chests anymore, because all the human world is the Country of Death, and in thrall, and finally, after all this time, we are just like everyone else. We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive. This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell?”

But they’re all here, Marya thought, her head heavy and hot. Everyone I love is here. Except Ivan, and who is to say he is not here: a sheriff, a policeman, a cigarette maker, something, forgetful as the rest of them? And is there a nurse in a clinic called Kseniya, with a precocious daughter? Oh, I could find them. I could find them and make them know me.

Someone moved in the kitchen, banging pots together.

“Who do you think Koschei’s auntie is?” Ushanka continued. “This is Baba Yaga’s kitchen. Look under the porch and you’ll see the slats of this place gnarling and twisting—a little like chicken legs, yes? All her soups, all her cauldrons bubbling away, and oh, you must try the ukha!” Ushanka wallowed in Marya’s torment with glee. She leapt in it, turned somersaults. “What a place, where the Tsaritsa of Night runs a canteen and steals bites of carrot from her own soup.”

Marya thought she might throw up. She felt hot and sick all together. Her body wanted to do something in the face of it all, to throw something back at it. She looked uncertainly toward the kitchen.

“Then he is here, too. Visiting his sister. Discussing the week’s cuts of meat, the potato harvest, what sort of soup she might make tomorrow.”

Ushanka’s smile faded like a stain. She looked sorry for Marya.

“Koschei died. Well, he always dies. And he always comes back. Deathless means deathless. He dies and plays out the same story again and again. How many people have told you that? The Country of Death looks so much like the Country of Life. So now he lives in Viy’s possession, and he has a little wife he spirited off from her family, and thinks he is a man. A man, like he always wanted to be. It’s a good joke, if you have the right humor for it. He won’t remember you. He’s not strong enough. Viy was always the better of them. Inexorable, that’s the word. Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That’s what death is for. That’s why they keep telling this story. It’s the only story. He will look at you and think you are a woman of rank getting on in years, and wouldn’t you like to try the kvass?” Ushanka put her hand back inside Marya’s grip, making it into an intimate touch, full of pity. “Marya,” she sighed. “No one is now what they were before the war. There’s just no getting any of it back.”

The kitchen door creaked, and an old woman emerged. She wore a bloody leather apron, streaks of beef and fish blood crisscrossing themselves, making patterns on her bosom. Her white hair was pulled back into a savagely tight chignon. She looked directly at Marya Morevna, her eyes twinkling as if anticipating some particular amusement.

“How can I help you, Officers?” the woman said. Her dry lips cracked as she grinned at them.

Ushanka tucked her cheek in. “I want nothing,” she said curtly. “I have done as I was asked. I did not like it, but I did it. I want only to rest.” For a moment she did not move, staring at the floor with an expression of stubbornness that Marya knew so well, as a mother knows her child’s angry stomp. Then Ushanka rose, walked away from them, out the door of the canteen and onto the twilit road. As she walked, her head straight and high, a long golden thread unspooled from her foot, faster and faster, zipping up through her calf, her thigh, leaving little cairns of thread behind her. By the time she reached the center of what had once been Skorohodnaya Road, and perhaps still was, her hair and scalp were unraveling, and the wind blew through the strands, carrying them off towards the mountains.

The old woman turned back to Marya Morevna. “But certainly,” the crone continued, unperturbed, “certainly I can help you, madam.”

Marya Morevna looked up, and she felt so old, so awfully old and worn, and so young all at once, raw as a wound. Let it be over, she pleaded within herself . Let it never have happened—any of it. Let me be young again, and the story just starting. She glanced at the walls, at the faded old Party posters, each showing a man or a woman or a child with a narrow, hungry face and a finger laid over their mouths, abjuring some distant soul to be silent, be still. No slogans shouted from them; no moral directive told Marya how to behave, who to be in this place. And so she was herself—a bitter thing, and sour as onions in brine.

“When have you ever helped anyone?” she snapped. She could not sit there and let Baba Yaga pretend she was some ridiculous shopwoman.

“Oh, I help,” said the Tsaritsa of Night, her voice curling like ram’s wool. “Sometimes. It depends on the story. But I do help. When a girl has proven herself. When she’s kept my horses well or swept my floors or lifted my cauldron with just her own two arms. Or when her perversity has made me proud. How did she turn out, the woman you might have been?”