Catherynne Valente: Deathless

“You know me?” But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she had been met—the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did—the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over.

The old woman shrugged expansively, as if to demur. Who is to say what I know?

And Marya Morevna recalled the raskovnik, and the black gold, and the mortar with its pestle grinding beneath her. To remember it hurt her; pinpricks stabbed at her chest, her fingers. The posters hushed her from the wall, and in her memory an orange flower bristled with white needles opened.

Baba Yaga leaned down so that their faces stood close as secrets.

“Listen, long-past-soup. There is a room in the dark. Where a ceiling fell through, and a floor, until all that was left was a hole leading down into the earth, into a basement. Into the shadows, peacock tapestries fell dusty and burning. A table lies broken down there, and a great chair of bone. You should go there. At night, when no one can see you. I could never guess what you might find in the frozen mud and shattered walls. I am not a betting woman these days. But you know, in the end, you can only be yourself in a basement, in the black, underneath everything, where no one can find you.”

The blister below Marya’s eye, that old scar, pulsed—twice, three times. “Is it because Viy rules you? Is that why you will not say my name? Are you afraid of him, like a wizard with a mustache? Why the posters say quiet, quiet, don’t breathe a word ? Because if all the world dwells in the Country of the Dead, I should not remember either, and yet I do—though it hurts like starving to do it.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I would never engage in underground, antirevolutionary activities,” purred the crone. “I am only suggesting a thing for you to see, the way an old lady with a sprung back and a greasy little cafe might do when tourists blow through her town. I say nothing; I know nothing; I certainly don’t remember a thing.” She put her withered hand, spotted as a leopard’s flank, onto Marya’s sternum, between her breasts. Marya felt something heavy and hot growing between them, like a bullet. “I would never attend meetings in dank, moldering cellars. I would never importune the character of your colleague, who tells the tale as powerful ears want to hear it. I would never mince about and pantomime a life full of dressmaking and marriages and a successful butcher shop so as not to be caught committing the crime of remembering that anything existed before this new and righteous regime. It’s so much easier when we say, There was never an old world. Everything will now be new forever. I am hurt that you look at me and assume such criminal tendencies in a nice babushka with only your best interests at heart.” The thing like a bullet between their skins burned at the heart of Marya Morevna, drawing heat from her, giving nothing back. “And on my life I would never suggest to you that stories cannot be forgotten in the bone even when a brother or a wizard or a rifle says you must, you must forget, it never happened; there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.”

“Babushka,” Marya said, and she meant it, here, at the end of everything. “I am so tired. I am so finished with it all. How can I live in this? I want to be held by everyone I have loved and told that it is all forgiven, all done, all made well.”

“ Tscha! Death is not like that. The redistribution of worlds has made everything equal—magic and cantinas and Yelenas and basements and bread and silver, silver light. Equally dead, equally bound. You will live as you live anywhere. With difficulty, and grief. Yes, you are dead. And I and my family and everyone, always, forever. All dead, like stones. But what does it matter? You still have to go to work in the morning. You still have to live.” The crone lifted her hand from Marya’s breast. In it was no bullet, not hot nor heavy, but a red scarf, bunched and knotted together. She tucked it into the flap of Marya’s uniform, next to her skin. She pulled her pinched, wrinkled, sullen face back on carefully, her practiced, amiable gaze.

Marya Morevna let her breath go. She made her face blank and unreadable. She looked up at her babushka as though she were a stranger—interesting, perhaps: such a face—but no relation of hers. After all, Marya was so good at games. She stood and walked out of the canteen, down a long, thin road toward the wreckage of some shattered black palace turned to rubble by endless shelling. The dust beneath her feet spangled in the evening light. She did not waver in her path, toward a place underground, down, down into the merciful dark, in a basement where a man with black curls flecked with starry silver would say her name like a confession; and in the place where their hands would touch, Marya Morevna could already see diamonds and black enamel swelling huge and gravid, yolk seeping from their skin like light.

There is no way to begin an accounting of those who contributed to this book except to say that my husband, Dmitri, and his family have included me in their lives for five years, engaging in the dangerous activity of telling a writer their stories and histories, and for that I am grateful beyond any mortal measure. It has been one of the most extraordinary things in my life, listening to their tales and jokes and being welcomed into their world. This book sprang from that very fertile ground, and from Dmitri especially, who in addition to acting as a human English-Russian dictionary and font of priceless details, first read me the story of Marya Morevna and Koschei the Deathless, leading to that immortal question: “Wait, what? Why is he chained up in her basement?”

Thank you also to the women of the Siege of Leningrad Museum in St. Petersburg, who humble everyone with the strength of their memory, and who were kind enough to speak with a young American; and posthumously to Anna Ahkmatova, the patron of Leningrad, whose work pierces and commands my soul; and Harrison Salisbury, whose seminal work The 900 Days was vital to my research and is responsible for many of the physical details of wartime Leningrad. And thank you to Anna Vasilevskaya, whose music accompanied me during long nights of writing.

Thank you to all those who have provided succor, advice, and encouragement to an admittedly grumpy writer without a paid cafe card, especially Tiffin Staib, Michael Broughton, Ferrett Steinmetz, Gini Judd, Amal El-Mohtar, Lee Harrington, and Claire Cooney, who kindly read an early draft.

Thank you to my agent, Howard Morhaim, and my editor, Liz Gorinsky, as well as my assistant, Deb Castellano, and the tireless Evelyn Kriete.

Thank you as ever to S. J. Tucker, my sister-tsarevna, who makes my world so bright, teaches me so much about authenticity and magic, and makes my books into such astonishing sorceries, and to her partner, Kevin Wiley, logistical god and dear friend.

And finally, to Rose Fox, il miglior fabbro .