Deathless

1 Three Husbands Come to Gorokhovaya Street

In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her.

This would be cause for most girls to be very gently closed up in their rooms until they ceased to think such alarming things, but Marya Morevna had seen all three of her sisters’ husbands from her window before they knocked at the great cherrywood door, and thus she was as certain of her own fate as she was certain of the color of the moon.

The first came when Marya was only six, and her sister Olga was tall as she was fair, her golden hair clapped back like a hay-roll in autumn. It was a silvery damp day, and long, thin clouds rolled up onto their roof like neat cigarettes. Marya watched from the upper floor as birds gathered in the oak trees, sniping and snapping at the first and smallest drops of rain, which all winged creatures know are the sweetest, like tiny grapes bursting on the tongue. She laughed to see the rooks skirmish over the rain, and as she did, the flock turned as one to look at her, their eyes like needle points. One of them, a fat black fellow, leaned perilously forward on his green branch and, without taking his gaze from Marya’s window, fell hard—thump, bash!—onto the streetside. But the little bird bounced up, and when he righted himself, he was a handsome young man in a handsome black uniform, his buttons flashing like raindrops, his nose large and cruelly curved.

The young man knocked at the great cherrywood door, and Marya Morevna’s mother blushed under his gaze.

“I have come for the girl in the window,” he said with a clipped, sweet voice. “I am Lieutenant Gratch of the Tsar’s Personal Guard. I have many wonderful houses full of seed, many wonderful fields full of grain, and I have more dresses than she could wear, even if she changed her gown at morning, evening, and midnight each day of her life.”

“You must mean Olga,” said Marya’s mother, her hand fluttering to her throat. “She is the oldest and most beautiful of all my daughters.”

And so Olga, who had indeed sat at the first-floor window, which faced the garden full of fallen apples and not the street, was brought to the door. She was filled like a wineskin with the rich sight of her handsome young man in his handsome black uniform, and kissed him very chastely on the cheeks. They walked together down Gorokhovaya Street, and he bought for her a golden hat with long black feathers tucked into its brim.

When they returned in the evening, Lieutenant Gratch looked up into the violet sky and sighed. “This is not the girl in the window. But I will love her as though she was, for I see now that that one is not meant for me.”

And so Olga went gracefully to the estates of Lieutenant Gratch, and wrote prettily worded letters home to her sisters, in which her verbs built castles and her datives sprung up like well-tended roses.

The second husband came when Marya was nine, and her sister Tatiana was sly and ruddy as a fox, her sharp grey eyes clapping upon every fascinating thing. Marya Morevna sat at her window embroidering the hem of a christening dress for Olga’s second son. It was spring, and the morning rain had left their long, thin street slick and sparkling, jeweled with wet pink petals. Marya watched from the upper floor as once more the birds gathered in the great oak tree, sniping and snapping for the soaked and wrinkled cherry blossoms, which every winged creature knows are the most savory of all blossoms, like spice cakes melting on the tongue. She laughed to see the plovers scuffle over the flowers, and as she did, the flock turned as one to look at her, their eyes like knifepoints. One of them, a little brown fellow, leaned perilously forward on his green branch and, without taking his gaze from Marya’s window, fell hard—thump, bash!—onto the streetside. But the little bird bounced up, and when he righted himself, he was a handsome young man in a handsome brown uniform with a long white sash, his buttons flashing like sunshine, his mouth round and kind.

The young man knocked at the great cherrywood door, and Marya Morevna’s mother smiled under his gaze.

“I am Lieutenant Zuyok of the White Guard,” he said, for the face of the world had changed. “I have come for the girl in the window. I have many wonderful houses full of fruits, many wonderful fields full of worms, and I have more jewels than she could wear, even if she changed her rings at morning, evening, and midnight each day of her life.”

“You must mean Tatiana,” said Marya’s mother, pressing her hand to her breast. “She is the second oldest and second most beautiful of my daughters.”

And so Tatiana, who had indeed sat at the first-floor window, which faced the garden full of apple blossoms and not the street, came to the door. She was filled like a silk balloon with the flaming sight of her handsome young man in his handsome brown uniform, and kissed him, not very chastely at all, on the mouth. They walked together through Gorokhovaya Street, and he bought for her a white hat with long chestnut-colored feathers tucked into its brim.

When they returned in the evening, Lieutenant Zuyok looked up into the turquoise sky and sighed. “This is not the girl in the window. But I will love her as though she was, for I see now that one is not meant for me.”

And so Tatiana went happily to the estates of Lieutenant Zuyok, and wrote sophisticated letters home to her sisters, in which her verbs danced in square patterns and her datives were laid out like tables set for feasting.

The third husband came when Marya was twelve, and her sister Anna was slim and gentle as a fawn, her blush quicker than shadows passing. Marya Morevna sat at her window embroidering the collar of a party dress for Tatiana’s first daughter. It was winter, and the snow on Gorokhovaya Street piled high and mounded, like long frozen barrows. Marya watched from the upper floor as once again the birds gathered in the great oak tree, sniping and snapping for the last autumn nuts, stolen from squirrels and hidden in bark-cracks, which every winged creature knows are the most bitter of all nuts, like old sorrows sitting heavy on the tongue. She laughed to see the shrikes scuffle over the acorns, and as she did, the flock turned as one to look at her, their eyes like bayonet points. One of them, a stately grey fellow with a red stripe at his cheek, leaned perilously forward on his green branch and, without taking his gaze from Marya’s window, fell hard—thump, bash!—onto the streetside. But the little bird bounced up, and when he righted himself, he was a handsome young man in a handsome grey uniform with a long red sash, his buttons flashing like streetlamps, his eyes narrow with a wicked cleverness.

The young man knocked at the great cherrywood door, and Marya Morevna’s mother frowned under his gaze.

“I am Lieutenant Zhulan of the Red Army,” he said, for the face of the world had begun to struggle with itself, unable to decide on its features. “I have come for the girl in the window. I have many wonderful houses which I share equally among my fellows, many wonderful rivers full of fish which are shared equally among all those with nets, and I have more virtuous books than she could read, even if she read a different one at morning, evening, and midnight each day of her life.”

“You must mean Anna,” said Marya’s mother, her hand firmly at her hip. “She is the third oldest and third most beautiful of my daughters.”

And so Anna, who had indeed sat at the first-floor window, which faced the garden full of bare branches and not the street, was brought to the door. She was filled like a pail of water with the sweet sight of her handsome young man in his handsome grey uniform, and with a terrible shyness allowed him to kiss only her hand. They walked together through the newly named Kommissarskaya Street, and he bought for her a plain grey cap with a red star on the brim.

When they returned in the evening, Lieutenant Zhulan looked up into the black sky and sighed. “This is not the girl in the window. But I will love her as though she was, for I see now that that one is not meant for me.”

And so Anna went dutifully to the estates of Lieutenant Zhulan, and wrote properly worded letters home to her sisters, in which her verbs were distributed fairly among the nouns, and her datives asked for no more than they required.

2 The Red Scarf

In that city by the sea which was now firmly called Petrograd and did not even remember, under pain of punishment, having been called St. Petersburg, in that long, thin house on that long, thin street, Marya Morevna sat by her window, knitting a little coat for Anna’s first son. She was fifteen years, fifteen days, and fifteen hours of age, the fourth oldest and fourth prettiest. She waited calmly for the birds to gather in the summer trees, waited for them to do battle over thick crimson cherries, and for one of them to lean perilously forward on his branch, so very far forward—but no bird came, and she began to worry for herself.

She let her long black hair hang unbraided. She walked barefoot over the floorboards of the house on Gorokhovaya Street to preserve her only shoes for the long walk to school—and Marya, like a child whose widowed mother has married again, could never remember to call the long, thin street by its new name, having known it as Gorokhovaya for all her youth. There were other families in the house now, of course, for no fine roof such as this should be kept to one selfish patronym.

It was obscene to do so, Marya’s father agreed.

It is surely better this way, Marya’s mother said, nodding.

Twelve mothers and twelve fathers were stacked into the long, thin house, each with four children, drawing the old cobalt-and-silver curtains down the center of rooms to make labyrinths of twelve dining rooms, twelve sitting rooms, twelve bedrooms. It could be said, and was, that Marya Morevna had twelve mothers and twelve fathers, and so did all the children of that long, thin house. But all of Marya’s mothers laughed at her aimless manner. All her fathers looked troubled at her wild, loose hair. All their children stole her biscuits from the communal table. They did not like her, and she did not like them. They were in her house, in her things, and though it was surely virtuous to share, her stomach had not marched in any demonstration, and did not understand its patriotic duty. And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.

It takes a very long time to think through something as peculiar as the birds. One cannot simply leave it to the usual bash and bustle of memory and its underhanded tactics. And so, as it became clear that no shrike would come and take her away from her overcrowded house, the incessant noise of all those Blodnieks cooking or Dyachenkos fixing up the staircase; away from her hair growing thinner and more brittle as the communal table had to stretch further and further, from Comrade Piakovsky’s sweaty staring in her direction; Marya’s mind marshaled itself to the task of sorting out the whole business. No matter what she appeared to do—sweeping out the leaves or studying her history or helping one of her mothers sew a shirt—her heart raced with problem of the birds, trying to outrun it into someplace where everything could make sense again.

Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation. Given: The world is ordered in such a way that birds may be expected to turn into husbands at a moment’s notice and no one may comment upon it all. What conclusions can be drawn? That everyone already knows this, and it is only unusual to me. Or else only I saw it happen, and no one else knows that the world is like that. Since neither her mother nor her father nor Svetlana Tikhonovna nor Yelena Grigorievna had ever made reference to their husbands having been birds, Marya rejected the first conclusion. However, the second conclusion led only to more delicate and upsetting hypotheses.

First resolution: Perhaps one was not meant to see what a husband looked like before he made himself more or less presentable. Perhaps the republic of husbands was a strange and frightening place full of not only birds, but bats too, and lizards, and bears, and worms, and other beasts waiting to fall out of a tree and into a wedding ring. Perhaps Marya had broken a rule of some sort, and visited that country without papers. Were all husbands like that? Marya shuddered. Was her father like that? Was Comrade Piakovsky like that, following her with his wolfish eyes? What of wives, then? Would she turn into something else when she married, the way a bird could turn into a handsome young man?

Second resolution: Rules or no rules, it was certainly better to see these things than not to see them. Marya felt that she had a secret, a very good secret, and that if she took care of it, the secret would take care of her. She had seen the world naked, caught out. Her sisters had been rescued from the city as beautiful girls are often rescued from unpleasant things, but they did not know what their husbands really were. They were missing vital information. Marya saw right away that this made a tilted kind of marriage, and she wanted no part of that. I will never be without information, she determined. I will do better than my sisters. If a bird or any other beast comes out of that uncanny republic where husbands are grown, I will see him with his skin off before I agree to fall in love. For this was how Marya Morevna surmised that love was shaped: an agreement, a treaty between two nations that one could either sign or not as they pleased.

When Marya saw something extraordinary again, she would be ready. She would be clever. She would not let it rule her or trick her. She would do the tricking, if tricking was called for.

But for a long while she did not see anything but the winter coming on and folk squabbling over bread, and her own arms growing so skinny. Marya tried not to come to the third resolution, but it hung there in her heart until she could not ignore it. Birds did not come for her because she was not as good as her sisters. Fourth prettiest, too lost in her own thoughts to steal back bread from the horrible little twins with their matching, cruel laughters. They did not come for her because she had seen them without their costumes on. Perhaps marriage was meant to be tilted, and she was spoiled for everything now, all because she had spied where she ought not to have. Still, she was not sorry. If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.

But thoughts are not food. Alone and birdless, Marya Morevna wept for her sisters who had gone, for her empty stomach, for the overfull house, which she could hear groaning at night like a woman laboring to bring twelve children into the world all at once.

Only once did Marya Morevna try to share her secret. If it was wrong to hoard a house, surely it was wrong to hoard knowledge. She was younger then, only thirteen, past the plovers and the shrikes. It was at thirteen years old that Marya Morevna learned how to keep a secret, and that secrets are jealous things, permitting no fraternization.

In those days, Marya Morevna walked to school with her red scarf tied around her neck, like all the other children. She loved her scarf—in the midst of the dreary house, turning grey with so many people scrubbing their laundry in it and sweating in it and boiling potatoes in it, her scarf was bright and gorgeous—and it meant that she belonged. It marked her as part of the young workers’ committee, one of the loyal, one of the true. It meant she was one of the good children at school, the children of the revolution, handing out pamphlets or flowers with her classmates on street corners, adults smiling at her scarf, at her goodness.

Besides her scarf, the great love of Marya’s young life was books. By extension, she loved her lessons, since they meant discussing books and the wonderful things inside them. The one miracle of the twelve families in her house was that they had each brought at least one suitcase of books with them, and all those new books with all their new treasures were meant to be shared among all. Having once seen the world naked, the engine which drove Marya Morevna through the long, thin streets of Petrograd was a terrible hunger for knowing things, for knowing everything.

Particularly, Marya Morevna loved the dashing Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, who wrote about that naked world she knew, where anything at all might happen and a girl had to be ready, had to be ready for that anything to bash onto the streetside once more. When she read the great poet, she would say softly to herself, Yes, that is true because I saw it with my own eyes. Or, No, it’s not like that, when magic comes. She measured Pushkin against the birds, against herself, and believed the poor dead man to be on her side, the two of them steadfast, shoulder to shoulder.

That morning when Marya was thirteen, she had been reading Pushkin while walking to school down the endless cobbled streets, deftly avoiding men in long black jackets, women in heavy boots, newspaper boys with gaunt cheeks. She had become quite good at keeping her face hidden in a book while never faltering in her steps, never swerving from her path. Besides, a book kept the wind out. Pushkin’s coppery words rang in her heart, warm and bright, almost as sweet as bread:

There, weeping, a tsarevna lies locked in a cell.

And Master Grey Wolf serves her very well.

There, in her mortar, sweeping beneath the skies,

the demon Baba Yaga flies.

There Tsar Koschei,

he wastes away,

poring over his pale gold.

Yes, Marya thought, the smell of woodsmoke and old snow pushing back her long black hair. Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.

Bolstered by her comrade Pushkin, who surely understood her, Marya broke her usual rapt classroom silence. Her teacher—a young and pretty woman with large, nervous blue eyes—led the class in a discussion of the virtues of Comrade Lenin’s wife, Comrade Krupskaya, who was neither young nor pretty. Marya found herself speaking without meaning to.

“I wonder what sort of bird Comrade Lenin was before he bounced up to become Lenin? I wonder if Comrade Krupskaya saw him fall out of his tree. If she said, That is a beautiful hawk, and I will let him put his claws into my heart. I think he must have been something like a hawk. Something that hunts and gobbles things up.”

All the other children were staring at Marya. She flushed, realizing she had spoken all that aloud. She touched her red scarf nervously, as if it would keep off the staring.

“Well, you know,” she stammered. But she could not say what they should know. Could not bring herself to say, I saw a bird once that turned into a man and married my sister, and the sight of it bruised my heart so that I cannot think about anything else. If you had seen it, what would you think about? Not laundry, or whether it will rain, or how your mother or father is getting on, or Lenin or Krupskaya.

After school the others were waiting for her. A throng of her classmates with narrowed eyes and angry expressions. One of them, a tall blond girl Marya thought especially beautiful, walked up to her and slapped her hard across the face.

“You’re a crazy girl,” she hissed. “How can you talk about Comrade Lenin like that? Like he’s some kind of animal?”

The rest of them took their turns slapping her, pulling at her dress, yanking on her hair. They didn’t speak; they did it all as solemnly and severely as if it were a court-martial. When Marya fell to her knees, crying, bleeding from her cheek, the beautiful blond girl shoved her chin up and tore Marya’s red scarf from her neck.

“No!” Marya gasped. She snatched at it, but they held it out of her reach.

“You’re not one of us,” the girl sneered. “What does the revolution need with crazy girls? Go home to your mansion and your bourgeois parents.”

“Please, no,” wept Marya Morevna. “It’s my scarf, mine; it’s the only thing I don’t have to share. Please, please, I’ll be quiet, I’ll be so quiet. I’ll never talk again. Give it back. It’s mine.”

The blond girl sniffed. “It belongs to the People. And that’s us, and not you.”

And they left her there, scarfless, her nose running, sobbing and shuddering, shame flooding her skin like scalding water. One by one they spat on her as they went to their suppers. Some called her bourgeois, a traitor; some called her worse, a kulak, a whore—though she could not be all those things at once. It didn’t matter. She was a person, but she was not one of the People. Not to her old friends, not anymore. The last of them, a boy with glasses, his own scarf voluminous and thick against his neck, pulled her book of Pushkin’s poems from her hands and tossed it far into the snowdrifts.

After that, Marya Morevna understood that she belonged to her secret and it belonged to her. They had struck a bloody bargain between them. Keep me and obey me, the secret said to her, for I am your husband and I can destroy you.

3 The House Committee

Marya noticed it first because she paced while she was thinking, and paced while she was reading, and paced while she was speaking. Her body never wanted to sit still, never wanted to be calm or measured. Thus, she had an immaculate knowledge of the dimensions of the upper floors of her house, even as the space that could be called hers had shrunk. Only a month previously it had taken her five steps to walk from the cobalt-and-silver curtain to the green-and-gold curtain that marked the beginning of the Dyachenko family and their four boys, each as blond as birchwood. Then, suddenly, without anyone posting a notice of intent or collecting twelve signatures, it took seven steps to get there.

She counted her steps very carefully, both with slippers and without. She kept up her counting for twelve days and nights, though the Abramov twins pounded on their ceiling with brooms and pots, bellowing for peace, and old Yelena Grigorievna threatened to report her twice. On the twelfth night, when Marya Morevna was four steps across the floor, poised halfway between cobalt and green with her leg extended like a parade soldier, she heard a little breath beneath her own, so quiet she had to stretch her ears around it, a tiny sound, a faucet hissing in a thunderstorm. She looked down, her black hair spilling over her shoulder like a curious shadow. Thus Marya Morevna first saw the domovoi, and the face of the world changed again.

At her feet stood a little man, frozen in midstep, his leg, like hers, stuck stiffly into the air, his arm caught in a comic martial upswing. He had long, thin hair and a long, thin mustache that was split down the middle and flung over his shoulders, where it was tied to his hair with neat red bows. His white beard was full of dust, yet it did not seem unkempt; rather, he wore the grey dust like an ornament. He had a thick red vest, which looked as though it was made of tiny roof shingles, over a work shirt the color of concrete, and his trousers were crisscrossed with black stripes like window sashes. They were also split in the middle to allow a long, thin tail to escape, bald as a possum’s.

Marya and the domovoi stared at each other for a long moment like two wild animals drinking from the same stream, both deciding whether or not to run and hide from the other. This is it, Marya thought, her heart leaping inside her. The world is naked again, the underside of the world, and I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t. I shall be clever, and I shall not let him go.

Finally, she spoke.

“Where are you going to, Comrade?”

“Where are you going to, Comrade?” he repeated snappishly. His enormous eyes crackled hearth-red, ember-gold.

“I am measuring the house with my feet.” Marya put her foot down, and the domovoi followed suit, pertly brushing his vest clean.

“I was on my way to a meeting of the Domovoi Komityet, the House Committee, which is why I have worn my most marvelous clothes, but I thought there was a military tattoo, and so I hurried to take my place in the ranks before I was reprimanded.”

Marya longed to tug at the little domovoi’s mustache and pinch his cheeks. She wanted to clap him up in her arms and tell him to take her away to whatever country he came from, where no one would slap her for knowing things, where there was enough bread and vodka to give him that round belly. Even if this was her husband come for her, unbounced and untransformed … but she did not think that was what the little man was about. She kept her face very grave. Her heart tripped over her breath. “You were right,” she said finally, with what she hoped was stern authority. “And you should immediately take me to your superior officers, for I have discovered discrepancies in the state of the house.”

The domovoi saluted. His eyes shone with delight. “Excellent! All house matters must immediately be brought to the attention of the komityet! Come! We will make a report! We will file paperwork! We will make formal complaints!” The domovoi’s voice rose, higher and higher, like a teakettle boiling, until it was little more than an ecstatic squeak. “Follow me! Comrade Chainik shows the way!”

Marya thought she knew the house on Gorokhovaya Street. After all, she had lived there all her life. She had sipped 3,070 bowls of soup in the kitchen with black tile. She had eaten 2,325 entire fish at the cherrywood table with three knots in its center. She had dreamt 5,475 dreams in her little bed with its red blankets. She lived inside the house—she belonged to it. But little Chainik led her past the cobalt-and-silver curtain, past the green-and-gold curtain, down stairs grown rickety with the leaping ministrations of children. He led her creeping, tiptoeing around the rose-printed walls of the parlor (now the Malashenkos’ room, piled high with mirrors, lipsticks, and combs, trophies of Svetlana Tikhonovna’s days as the great beauty of the Kiev stage) and through the ragged linen sheet the Blodnieks had nailed over the kitchen to give their four daughters a kind of rough privacy. Though truly, having the luck to be allocated to the kitchen, where the warm iron stove puffed out ruddy heat, no one pitied the girls in the least.

Chainik scrambled over the sleeping bodies of the Blodniek daughters. The four of them curled together on two mattresses flopped onto the tile, amid a ruin of stumpy candles, saucers, shoes, discarded dresses, and the girls’ prize possession clutched in the youngest sister’s dreaming hands: a London fashion magazine, ten years out of date. Their long hair mingled, brown and rich, flowing back over the bed linens, the color of bread. The domovoi stopped on the shoulders of each to give their ears a little kiss. Marya Morevna held her breath and stepped over each of them, then their mother, her braid tight and severe even in sleep, and finally their father, resting in the position of honor next to the great benevolent stove, its rosy glow dim and delicious. Chainik wedged himself behind the stove and shoved—the stove creaked away from the wall. Papa Blodniek spluttered in his sleep, but did not wake. Chainik shoved again—the little domovoi had a donkey’s strength! The stove scraped forward once more. Mama Blodniek sighed for dreams of days long dead, for rowan berries in her hair and sweet cream on her table. Chainik gritted his yellow teeth and pushed with all his vigor to let Marya squeeze in between the stove and the wall, for she was so much bigger, and the poor imp was not accustomed to making room for anyone but himself. Four daughters turned over in their sleep, each after the other, like a wave rolling across the sand.

Behind the stove was a little door. It was a fine, rich door, arched and tapering to a peak, carved over with the flowers of a happy garden, whose polleny centers were stamped in polished brass. It was as tall as a cathedral entrance for a creature of Chainik’s size, but it barely rose to Marya’s shin. Chainik knocked softly—three times, then two, then three again. The door creaked open.

“Comrade Chainik,” Marya whispered. “I am too big! I shall never fit through!”

“We must all tighten our belts!” hissed the domovoi, and yanked on the sash of her nightgown. Marya spun like a spool; she had the peculiar feeling of a huge hand pressing down on the crown of her skull, of her ribs being squeezed as though Chainik were lacing her into one of her mother’s old corsets. When he tucked her sash back into place, Marya faced the carved door once more. She had dwindled down until she was just barely small enough to fit inside the door, if she ducked. Marya fought to keep herself from laughing out loud—magic, Pushkin’s magic, real magic, and done to her!

“Your bones are so stubborn!” snorted Chainik. “It’s almost as though you don’t want to shrink at all! Brazen thing, why do you want to be so tall?”

“I should never reach the top bookshelf otherwise,” she protested, and the domovoi shrugged as if to say: The ways of girls and other big folk are arcane and incomprehensible.

He led Marya through a dank hall, past three layers of padded wall, a stony escapement, and a loamy passage with bits of worm and grass-root poking through the clayey dirt. Finally, these gave way to floorboards and a curious wallpaper: dozens upon dozens of Party pamphlets plastered against the earthen wall, holding back stone and mud.

The Workers Have Nothing to Lose but Their Chains! cried a painted earnest man with his fist in the air.

Beware Mensheviks, SR Loyalists, and Tsarist Generals! Bishops and Landlords Follow Closely Behind! warned a child beset by demon-faced soldiers.

Down with Kitchen Slavery! Give Us a New Life Under Socialism! announced a woman in a red kerchief, brandishing her broom.

Elect WORKERS to the Soviet! Do Not Elect Shamans or Rich Men! admonished a group of white-clad young voters.

Marya touched the papery faces of young girls with rosy cheeks. ALL Society Must Transform into a Workers’ Collective! they told her.

The hall opened onto a broad room with its own high birch rafters and a cheerful hearth, small rugs on the floor, and a curious, fabulous flotsam jammed into every corner: heavy, gold-rimmed mirrors; polished silver doorknobs; china plates with tiny violets on their rims; copper teakettles; garden shears; thick goose-down pillows; an emerald-colored smoking jacket and a wide assortment of pipes; delicate snuffboxes with enameled lids; a heavy silver hairbrush with boar bristles and combs with tiny glass gems set into their teeth; a phonograph with a great golden bell; a croquet set with bright balls; a black lace fan with a long blue tassel. All this odd treasure surrounded a large table at which sat twelve little men, all like Chainik in their red vests and split mustaches, except that some of them had black hair and some blond, and some of them were women—though they had fine, thin mustaches as well, but no beards.

“Comrade Chainik, why have you brought this giant with you? She ought to be safe in her bed, dreaming of strawberries and laundry!” cried one of the other domovoi, who had an enormous golden medal on his chest—though when Marya peered closer, she saw it was nothing more than a disassembled pocket watch, made to hang down beautifully like a medal of courage.

“Chairman Venik!” Marya’s guide replied in wounded tones. “She has a report to make! I would not rob the komityet of the opportunity to hear delicious testimony, to make piquant judgments, to carry out policies sweeter than oatcakes!”

The table sighed in relief and nodded vigorously to one another.

A domovaya raised her hand and was recognized by Venik. “I am Comrade Zvonok,” she said in a brash, ringing voice, tugging at her silky blond mustache. “And I formally invite the giantess emissary from the House Above to deliver her report.”

“Hear, hear!” shouted the komityet, rapping the table with their knuckles.

Marya still towered over most of them—seated, they came to her waist, and she felt it was only polite to sit down on the floor, so that she did not shame them.

“First, you must understand,” she said, suddenly shy, “I did not believe in domoviye before tonight.”

Silence, bricked-up and mortared over, greeted her.

Marya hurried to fill it up, to appear wise and learned so that they would not banish her when she had only just arrived. Her cheek warmed where a child had slapped her once, years before. “I mean to say: I believed that there might be domoviye in the world—there might be anything in the world. But my education was … rather specialized, and I did not assume that the presence of birds who turn into husbands indicated domoviye and a door behind the stove.”

“Who,” coughed Zvonok, “do you think broke your favorite teacup last fall? The one with the cherries on the handle?”

“I was careless, Comrade Zvonok. I left the window open and a storm blew through.”

“Incorrect! I broke it because you left me no cream and no dry biscuits, and when your old boots wore through, you burned them up for heat instead of giving them to me!”

“Hear, hear!” the table erupted in approval once more. “Well done, well done!”

“I’m surely very sorry—”

“So is your teacup.”

“Comrade, I don’t understand. I have read my books and listened to my grandmother as well as any girl. I know very well that each house is only meant to have one domovoi. How did there come to be a committee of house imps?”

Chairman Venik straightened his beard like a vest, and brushed his vest like a beard. “Before the Party, each house only had one family. We have all had to adjust our thinking towards more correct principles, child. I came with the Abramovs when the White Guard drove them out of Odessa. What was I supposed to do, abandon the twins because our house burned down? They have such sweet little cheeks—they’ve grown so much! I saved the hallway mirror and Marina Nikolayevna’s snuffboxes.” He gestured to the piles of belongings around them.

Another domovoi, with a beard like a chimney brush, stood. “I came with the Ofonasevs from Moscow. Old Papa Kolya was a Menshevik, and his property was confiscated—nothing to be done, he had a big mouth. But they gave me nice old boots every Christmas, and his wife was a Party woman, no blame to her. So I snatched up her fan before they came and hitched a ride to Petrograd on the roof of the train.”

Chainik patted Marya’s hand. “I watched the Blodniek girls grow up in Sevastopol. They were even pretty as babies, and always with salty biscuits for me after supper. Is it their fault there was no work? Those girls had nothing to eat—no turnips, no bread, no fish. In Petrograd, maybe, they thought, there would be fish. I brought their plates, I was so full of hope. But here we are, and ha! No fish.”

“I would have been happy to stay in Kiev,” huffed a shrunken old domovoi, his skin almost blue with age, “but blasted Svetlana Tikhonovna knew the old ritual. She went out into her pumpkin rows in her best black lace-up boots with the sweet little heels, laid out a big round of cheese, and hollered, ‘Grandfather Domovoi! Don’t stay in this place, but come with our family!’ The old bitch.”

A groan rose around the table, with much nodding and sympathetic tears wiped away.

Each by each, all twelve of the domovoi told their tales, of the lost Dyachenko fortune; of the tragic Piakovsky children, who had lost their older brothers to the war; of the Semeoffs’ disgrace.

“You must see,” chirped Chairman Venik finally, “that a communal house requires communal domoviye, and communal domoviye require a committee. We are happy to do our part! It is a new world, and we do not wish to be left behind.”

“Of course, I’ve been here since before you were a baby,” said Comrade Zvonok. “This house is my husband, and we eat warmth together by the stove.” Her broad face grew sly. “I saw the birds come, too.”

Marya started. In all her life, she had never expected to meet another who had witnessed her sisters’ seductions.

“Deliver your report, girl!” shouted Chairman Venik. “We haven’t got all night to reminisce!”

Marya drew herself up. She tried to calm her little heart. Though they had merry mustaches and very fine vests, when they spoke she could see the domoviye’s long yellow teeth, sharp and jagged.

“I … I wish to report that I have examined the … the matter carefully, and I think, I am fairly sure … I am certain there can be no doubt that the house is at least two steps larger than it was a few months ago, and possibly more. I cannot investigate the Dyachenkos’ room, which adjoins ours.”

“Too right you can’t!” bellowed a domovaya with a glossy brown mustache that had been curled with a tiny iron. “It’s not your business!”

Chairman Venik hushed the Dyachenko domovoi. “Is that all, giantess? Do you really think there is anything about this house we do not know? You have selfishly allocated excessive size to yourself, and forgotten to steal a bigger brain to go with it!” He polished his watch-medal proudly. “We are widening the house! We conferred over a period of six months, and determined that the Revolution requires more from us than mere mischief and teacup-breaking. If such a great number of people must hold the house, the house must hold a great number of people!”

Chainik clapped his hands. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!” he crowed.

“Well said, Comrade! We have abilities we have hoarded, selfishly, because we did not understand that we owed them to the People, that we had become decadent, lazy bourgeoisie, in love with wealth and houses and ignoring Great Duties, High Philosophy!” Chairman Venik thumped the table with his little red fist. “No longer! The domoviye belong to the Party!”

“But surely,” protested Marya, “if you widen the house the houses on either side of us shall be crushed.”

“Child,” said Comrade Zvonok in a patient tone, “we are not architects. We are imps. We are goblins. If we could not make a little room on the inside without budging the outside, we would not be worth our tails. After all, we have been making our little homes in the walls for centuries.”

“We will open up the floors like untying a stack of newspapers—pop!—out they will spring! The house on Gorokhovaya Street will be a secret country in the midst of St. Petersburg! They will plant turnips in the kitchen, and grow wheat on the ceiling, and we shall all have biscuits till we are so fat we will roll and never walk!” burst out the Piakovsky domovoi deliriously.

Silence forked across the table like ice cracking.

“It’s Dzerzhinskaya Street now, Comrade Banya,” the chairman said quietly. “It’s Petrograd.”

“Of … of course.” Banya sat down, abashed. His face grew bright red, and he began to tremble.

“Oh, don’t worry!” Marya cried, wanting desperately to save the poor creature from embarrassment. “I can never remember!”

“It is our duty to remember,” said Chainik coldly at her side.

“You must not tell anyone what we have done,” interrupted the chairman. “You understand? We will report you to the House Committee, the other one, the Big Committee, and you’ll be carted away, faster than you can yawn!”

“I won’t, I promise,” Marya said hurriedly. “Though you ought not to report people. It’s not neighborly, and really rather horrid of you.”

Chairman Venik grinned, and all his yellow, jagged teeth showed, like the teeth of a wolf-trap. “Don’t misunderstand us. We are very sweet when you have cream for us, and biscuits, and boots, but you have brought us nothing, and so we owe you nothing. The Party is a wonderful, marvelous invention, and it has taught us wonderful, marvelous things—chiefly, that we can cause more trouble with less effort by filing complaints than by breaking teacups.”

Marya began to tremble herself. Her stomach felt cold. “But a domovoi can’t file a complaint.…”

“Who’s a domovoi?” laughed Comrade Banya, her teeth out, too. “I’m Ekaterina Piakovsky.”

“I’m Pyotr Abramov,” chuckled Chairman Venik.

“I’m Gordei Blodniek,” smirked Chainik.

“It takes two of us to hold the pen, but we manage,” giggled the Malashenko domovoi.

All the domoviye were laughing at her; all of their teeth were shining in the candlelight. Marya Morevna buried her face in her hands.

“Stop it, Venik!” snapped Zvonok. “You old stove-snort! You’re frightening her, and she’s mine, so I say stuff your chimneys!” Her mustache quivered with rage. She left her seat to stroke Marya’s nightgown. “There, there, Masha dear,” she cooed, calling her by her old pet name. “If you like I shall mend your teacup. Would that make you feel better?”

But Chairman Venik was leaning over the table, his grin wider and wider, until the sides of his mouth met somewhere behind his ears. “Just you wait,” he hissed. “Just you wait. Papa Koschei is coming, coming, coming, over the hills on his red horse, and he’s got bells on his boots and a ring in his pocket, and he knows your name, Marya Morevna.”

Marya could not help it; she screamed. The domoviye’s mustaches were all blown back.

Zvonok whirled on him. “Venichek, you are a hedgehog’s ass. You weren’t supposed to tell! Is it worth it to scare a poor girl?”

“Zvonya, I live to scare poor girls! Their tears smell like the freshest, warmest cakes with cherry jam smeared all round them. Of course it’s worth it!”

“We’ll see, when Papa gets here,” warned Comrade Zvonok.

The domoviye drew away from Venik slightly, as if waiting for him to turn to ash before their eyes.

“You all saw,” quavered Banya, twisting her mustache, eager to make up her fault. “I didn’t tell! It was Venik!”

“It’s been recorded in the minutes,” Zvonok said darkly.

“I don’t understand,” said Marya, her tears drying on her cheeks. “How do you know my name?”

“Don’t worry about it, dear,” said Zvonok brightly. “It’s far past your bedtime. Let’s get you to sleep, shall we?”

All Marya’s fingers and toes were numb. She let herself be led away from the cackling komityet, shaking as though she had been drenched in water dragged in frozen buckets from the Neva. The domovaya pulled her past a grim Lenin demanding: Have YOU Volunteered for the Front Lines? Marya had a moment of panic: What if she could not get big again, and was to be stuck down here forever with the goblins and frowning paper Lenin staring her down? Suddenly she wanted very much to see the front of the stove again, and her own bed.

“What did he mean? Who is Koschei?” she asked softly.

“You know, you’ve been very careless, Masha. I try to watch out for you, even though you’ve never given me boots or cream, and I think that’s a testament to my generous soul, but you insist on drawing attention to yourself.”

“But I don’t! I’m so quiet the Abramov twins tripped over me last week.” Since the affair of the scarf she had tried very hard never to be noticed by anyone.

“Marya Morevna! Don’t you know anything? Girls must be very, very careful to care only for ribbons and magazines and wedding rings. They must sweep their hearts clean of anything but kisses and theater and dancing. They must never read Pushkin; they must never say clever things; they must never have sly eyes or wear their hair loose and wander around barefoot, or they will draw his attention! Safe in a house and a husband, that’s where you belong! But it’s too late now, too late! Fool child, the house and I tried so hard to raise you right!”

“But who is he?” Marya pleaded—yet she did know that name, didn’t she? The name pulled at the back of her mind, bending her toward it.

But Zvonok had gone knuckle-white with fear and anger, and would say nothing. When they passed through the flower-carved door and back into the space between the stove and the wall, she yanked on Marya’s sash once more. Marya spun like a spool, and she felt the peculiar sensation of a great huge hand pulling her up by the crown of her skull, of her bones yawning and stretching. When she stopped spinning, she faced the stove, and was quite her own height again. And she found herself disappointed, only a little. It was over. The extraordinary thing was over and it had taken minutes. She had gotten big again with no trouble, and how long would she have to wait now for some other scrap of the naked world?

“Here,” whispered Zvonok. “This is the best I can do for you.” The little domovaya reached into her red vest and drew out the silver hairbrush Marya had seen in the flotsam at the komityet. It grew larger and larger as she pulled it out, until it was taller than Zvonok but perfectly sized for Marya’s hand. “It belonged to Svetlana Tikhonovna. Did you know she was a dancer when she was young, with the ballet? Comrade Stoylik calls her names, but when she sleeps, he comes out to curl up in her hair and sleep next to her ear. He says she smells like Kiev.”

“Won’t he know you took it?”

“I’ll slap the bottoms of his feet until he says it was yours all along. But you keep it safe from old Svetlana—she’d love to have it back.”

“I already have a hairbrush, though,” protested Marya.

Zvonok winked, first with one eye, then the other. She put one hand over her left eye and spat.

“You need this one.”

And with that, the domovaya hopped up onto one foot, spun around three times, and vanished.

4 Likho Never Sleeps

In a city by the sea that was certainly never called anything so bourgeois as St. Petersburg, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a young woman in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers watched her new neighbor arrive in the house next door. An old woman clutching her suitcase, shrouded in a black wool dress, very tall and thin, whose waist was so stretched and skinny that Marya could have put both her hands around it. The woman’s fingers were amazingly long, her nose sharp and spiked, and her white hair pulled tightly back into a bun. She walked with a limp and a hunch, but Marya suspected that this was to hide how tall she truly was.

“That’s Comrade Likho,” said one of Marya’s twelve mothers, darning an ancient stocking. “A widow with no children. She says she’ll take in all our laundry, the dear old thing. I thought it might be nice if you visited her after school. She could tutor you, watch out for you while I’m at the factory.”

Marya did not like this idea at all. In a classroom she could think her own thoughts and no one would bother her—no teachers called upon her anymore. With a tutor, she could not avoid being asked her opinions. She frowned down at the hunchbacked Likho. The crone stopped and looked up at the window, the turn of her head fast and sharp, like a bird’s. Widow Likho’s eyes were black and huge, as though they had drooped and melted and slid down into her cheekbones. Her gaze was barbed and biting. The cherry trees dropped their blossoms across Likho’s black dress, and she scowled.

“You shouldn’t be frightened of old ladies,” admonished another of Marya’s mothers—the one, by coincidence, who had borne her. Marya knew she should not show favoritism, but her mother’s hands looked so thin, the skin so dry, she wanted to clap them between her own, to warm them and make them red again. “You’ll be one someday, you know.”

The widow Likho stared up at Marya’s window. Slowly, like ice sliding across a plate, she smiled.

Marya had heard no more from the domoviye. But she had very carefully put out her favorite boots, her black ones with fine black ribbon, and tucked a precious biscuit into each. All my fine things belong to the House, which is the same as saying the People. She placed them neatly at the foot of her bed. Besides, I have no place now to wear anything that makes me look like a rich man’s daughter. When she woke in the morning, the shoes were gone.

In their place was a little teacup with cherries on the handle, glued inexpertly back together. When she picked it up, the handle fell off.

Each evening, she brushed her hair with Svetlana Tikhonovna’s brush. Her hair rustled dryly, strand against strand, no longer so soft or shining as it had once been, but not yet falling out. Nothing of note happened. Perhaps Zvonok had been making a commentary on the state of Marya’s own ragged, wooden comb. It’s not my fault my hair is so tangled it broke off two of the teeth. She sniffed.

Marya wanted very much to send a message to the House Below. At night, she whispered into the pipes: I hate it here. Please take me away, let me be something other than Marya, something magical, with a round belly. Frighten me, make me cry, only come back.

Despite Marya’s pleas to the contrary, all twelve of her mothers insisted she visit old Widow Likho after her lessons every day. And take her some nice rolls; she’s old and can’t walk to the bread line.

Marya stood very still in front of her neighbor’s door. Her toes had gone clammy and blue in her threadbare shoes, and her stomach chewed on itself. She wanted to go home. She ought to have gone behind the stove and called out Zvonok or Chainik to go with her. They would not have come—they never answered her tapping. But she would have felt better. She didn’t need a tutor, or looking after. She knew her algebra and her history and could recite two hundred lines of Pushkin from memory.

Widow Likho opened the door and stared down at Marya like a vulture on a hawthorn branch. Marya half expected her to open her mouth and caw or screech like one. She stood so tall that she could not get through the door without bending down beneath the jamb. Her long hands clutched the sides of the door—she had sharp, pearly fingernails, without a hint of yellow or age. In fact, though her face was wrinkled and withered, her hands were young, firm, certainly able to snatch a girl from the street without trouble.

Widow Likho said nothing. She turned around and walked slowly down her hall, her black dress trailing behind her like a stain. She pushed aside the curtain that divided her room from the next family’s, and Marya crept in behind her, hoping only to be invisible, for the old witch to take a nap while Marya read until she could politely leave. She laid out yesterday’s bread ration, wrapped in slick brown paper, on a little brass table with cherubs winging its legs. Widow Likho did not touch the food. She merely stared at Marya, inclining her head faintly. She folded her long hands together in her lap—so long the tips of her middle fingers grazed her forearm.

“My mother said you might like to tutor me, but if you’re tired, I can read to you until evening. Or make you tea, or whatever you like,” Marya stammered nervously.

Likho curled up her thin pale lips into a smile. It seemed to take some effort.

“I never sleep,” she said. Marya shuddered. Her voice was deep and rough, like black heels dragged over stone.

“Well … I suppose that saves time.”

“Lessons.” Her voice dragged across the room again.

“You don’t have to.”

“On the contrary. Lessons are a specialty of mine.” Widow Likho inclined her head in the other direction. “Shall we begin with history?”

The crone turned, her bones creaking and popping as she did, and pulled a large black book off of the shelf. It was so wide that the edges hung off Widow Likho’s lap, polished and gleaming. She extended it towards Marya.

“Read,” she rumbled. “My voice is what it used to be.”

“Do you mean ‘isn’t what it used to be’?”

Likho smiled again—the same blank, distant smile—as though she had thought of something amusing that happened a hundred years ago.

Marya was grateful not to have to look at her. She opened the massive black book and began to read:

The Causations of the Great War were several. First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds, and the length of an hour. Each of these things had Tsars or Tsaritsas, and chief among these were the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life.

Marya Morevna looked up from the book.

“Comrade Likho, this is not the history of the Great War,” she said uncertainly. “This is not a book approved by my school.”

The widow chuckled, and the sound was a heavy stone falling into a shallow well.

“Read, child.”

Marya’s hands shook on the black book. She had never seen a book so beautiful, so heavy and rich, but it did not seem friendly, like the books in her mother’s room, or in Svetlana Tikhonovna’s or Yelena Grigorievna’s suitcases.

“The world is a slow learner,” Marya Morevna read.

And only after eons did it master the techniques of the sun, earth, sugar, the length of a year, and men. The Tsars or Tsaritsas retreated into mountains and snow. They stayed far from each other out of family respect, but had no interest in these new things, which were surely passing fashions.

But the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life greatly feared one another, for Death is surrounded by souls, and is never lonely, and the Tsar of Life had hidden his death away in a place deeper than secrets, and more secret than depth. The Tsaritsa of Salt could not reconcile them, though they were brothers, and the Tsaritsa of Water could not find an ocean wide enough to place between them.

After a space of time longer than it takes the stars to draw breath together, the Tsar of Death was so well loved by his court of souls that he became puffed up and proud. He bedecked himself in onyx, agate, and hematite, and gave bayonets of ice, and cannons of bone, and horses of drifting ash with eyes and nostrils of red sparks to each of the souls that had perished in the long, tawdry history of the world. Together this great army, with shrouds flying like banners and trumpets of twelve swords lashed together marched out across the deep snow and into the lonely kingdom of the Tsar of Life.

Marya swallowed. She felt as though she could not breathe.

“Comrade Likho, the Great War began because Archduke Ferdinand was shot, and the West would have crushed a noble Slavic people to dust underfoot if we had not intervened.”

Likho chewed her cheek. “You are a very clever child,” she said.

“Not really, everyone knows that.”

“If you are so clever that you know everything, why did you call me?”

Marya sat back in her chair. The black book slid perilously forward on her lap, but she did not reach out to catch it.

“Me? I didn’t call you! You’re a widow! You were allocated housing!”

“Your hair is so long and tidy,” sighed Widow Likho, as if Marya had not even spoken. Her breath rattled like bones in a cup. “However did you get it to behave?”

“I … I have a silver brush. It belonged to a ballerina before me.…”

“Yeeeeessss,” the crone said, drawing the word out longer and longer, until its end flapped like a broken rope. “Svetlana Tikhonovna. I remember her. She was so beautiful, you cannot imagine. Her hair was the color of water in winter, and her bones were so delicate! She hardly had any breasts at all. When she danced, men killed themselves, knowing they would never again see such beauty. She had four lovers in Kiev, each richer than the other, but her heart was so cold that she could hold ice in her mouth and it would never melt. We could all have taken lessons from her. And then, one New Year, her second lover, who owned a cosmetics company and a fleet of whaling ships that harvested ambergris for perfumes and lipsticks so red they would leave spots in your vision, made her a present of a silver brush with boar bristles. Who knows where he found it? A peddler woman, maybe, hunched and thin, in a black dress, hauling her cart along a larch-lined road. Svetlana loved the brush; oh, how she loved it! The longer she spent brushing her hair, the more terrible and beautiful she grew. So she let her lover comb her pale hair over and over, and I heard the sound of strand against strand on the other side of the snow. I came to her immediately; I wasted no time for one such as her. And when she performed for the Tsar’s daughters, the ribbons of her shoes were just a little loose—such an infinitely small difference—but she fell, and shattered her heel. Her four lovers left her, since she could no longer dance so that they wished to die. But, ah, bad luck! She was pregnant, and though ice would not melt in her mouth, she hurried to marry the first bricklayer who didn’t care about dancing, and had four children who ruined her beauty. Then her house burned during the purges. Terrible to happen to such a sublime creature, but tscha! Life is like that, isn’t it?”

Marya wanted to run out of the house, but she could not move. Her throat dried up. “Who are you?” she whispered.

“Say my name, daughter. You know who I am.”

“Widow Likho.”

“What is my name, Marya Morevna?” the crone roared, her black voice bending the windows and rattling the books on the shelf.

Marya quailed, shrinking away into the upholstery. “Widow Likho! Comrade Likho! Comrade … oh … oh. Likho. Bad luck.”

The old woman leaned forward. “Yeeeeessss,” she said again, stretching her voice like dark glue. “And you have my brush. You called me to you.”

“No … I didn’t mean to!”

“Intent is trivial,” barked Likho. Suddenly she stood up with a swiftness no young woman could match. She towered; the ceiling forced her to bend at the waist, but beneath it her back was straight, without a hunch. She hovered over Marya, her huge black eyes crackling violet. “But never you fear me, Marya Morevna!” Her voice turned crooning, sibilant, her breath sawing back and forth. She took Marya’s face in her impossibly long hands. “I cannot touch you. You are not for me. Papers have been drawn up in your name, silks and candies allocated. Everyone knows to make way. But you called; I had to come. I am here to educate you, to make you ready. There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise. Keep your bread. Keep your tears. Neither will help you, and you will work hard to outgrow need of them. Go home. Pat your mother’s hand and kiss your father’s cheek. Drink out of your broken teacup.” Likho grinned. “Don’t forget to brush your lovely black hair. And come to me when the sun is low. Come to me and be my pupil, my pet, my daughter.”

Marya bolted from the room. She ran down the long hallway, bumping her arm against the wall, and out into the long, thin street, panting and crying, her heart hiding behind her ribs.

She still clutched the book to her chest.

Every evening, while the sun dripped red wax into the Neva, Widow Likho stood outside the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street and looked up at Marya’s window. Her hunch returned—she seemed just a simple old woman again, but she watched the window like a raven with white hair, and smiled unwaveringly, silent, utterly still.

Marya did not read the book. She hid it under her bed. She shut her eyes so tightly her brow ached and recited Pushkin until she fell asleep. And at the rim of her sleep, at the edge of her reciting, there the black name sat, hunched, waiting: There Tsar Koschei, he wastes away, poring over his pale gold.

Spring became summer in this manner, and Marya’s own mother, not the one who tucked her in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, nor the one who cooked supper on Fridays and Wednesdays, but the one who had carried her for nine months, began to visit Widow Likho, embarrassed that her daughter was so rude and neglectful. Marya begged her not to, but the two women shared tea and sour cherries from their tree every night when Marya’s mother returned from her shift. And, though she had never been clumsy or careless, Marya’s mother began to stumble on the stairs, to get splinters in her fingers, to lose her left shoes. Her work at the munitions factory became sloppy, faulty bullets slipping past her on the line, and she was reprimanded twice.

Marya thought she knew why—but whenever she thought she was brave enough to face the Widow once more, the awful vision of the crone bending over her filled her heart, and her skin went cold. Did everything that had magic have teeth? She had liked the world better when it served up sweet-looking birds and sweet-looking men. Likho was too much; Marya’s mind could not even touch the edges of that blackness. Her body clenched itself and refused to let her act, no matter how tired her mother looked each day. When, just once, all her courage piled itself hand over hand, and she made it so far as the door, the moment her fingers grazed the knob she vomited horribly, her stomach emptying itself of anything good she might have had to eat and wanted to keep.

Was that magic, or am I just a weak and stupid and cowardly girl? Marya did not know, could not know, and she felt frozen all over with shame as she cleaned her sickness from the carpet.

And then, in June, Marya’s mother tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and broke her ankle. While she convalesced in the great, tall house (slowly growing greater and taller), the close air gathered in her lungs, and she began to cough up dust, awful, racking sounds in the night. And like a fever, Marya’s fear broke.

“I’m here!” screamed Marya Morevna into Widow Likho’s curiously empty house. No other families greeted her or told her to shut up, for heaven’s sake. “Do you hear me? I’m here! I brought your book! Leave my mother alone!”

Likho stepped quietly into the hall and turned her head to the side to face Marya without moving the rest of her long black body.

“I haven’t done a thing to your mother, child. She’s such a nice lady, bringing an old woman tea and sweets in the evening! What a shame her daughter has no manners.”

“Bad Luck, I know you! It’s your fault she broke her foot, and your fault she’s coughing, and it will be your fault when she loses her job at the factory!” Marya shook—she felt like she might throw up again, but she savagely bit the inside of her lip, willing her body to obey her.

Likho spread her long white hands. “I am what I am, Marya Morevna. You cannot be angry with a stove for heating the house. That is what it was built for.”

“Well, I’m here now. Leave her alone.”

“It’s dear of you to visit your old baba, little one, but there’s no need. It’s too late; the time has passed.”

“Too late for what? What’s going on? Why do the domoviye know my name? Please tell me!”

Likho laughed harshly. Her laugh bounced off of the parlor lamp; the bulb shattered.

“When the world was young, it knew only seven things. And one of these was the length of an hour. Such a pity little Marya doesn’t know it. You had an hour to learn at my knee, and an hour, if I wish it, can be as long as all of spring. But the hour has chimed. He is coming; I am leaving. We try to stay out of each other’s way. Family occasions can be so awkward.”

Marya’s mind surged ahead of itself. Her cheeks burned. The black book was warm in her arms.

“You’re the Tsaritsa of the Length of an Hour.”

“Bad luck relies absolutely on perfect timing.” Likho grinned.

“Who is coming?” pleaded Marya Morevna. The Tsar from the poem? But that was only a story—but so were domoviye, and yet. She could not put it all together. She was missing vital information, and she hated it. When she knew and others didn’t, that was better. “Tell me!” Marya tried to command the Widow; she tried to bellow and grow taller in her shoes.

But Likho only shuddered, and folded up her body like a suitcase, and the black of her dress became the black pelt of a tall racing hound, its ribs tucked up into its dark belly. It barked once, so loud Marya clapped her hands over her ears, and then disappeared with a crackling, crushing sound.

5 Who Is to Rule

In a city by the sea, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street, and by a long, thin window, Marya Morevna sat and wept in her work clothes, and did not look out into the leafy trees. The winter moon looked in at her, stroking her hair with a silver hand. She was sixteen years of age, with seventeen’s shadow hanging heavy on her every tear. Old enough to work after school, old enough to be tired in her joints and her heels, old enough to know that something irretrievable had passed her by.

If she had looked out the window, she might have seen a great, hoary old black owl alight on the branch of the oak tree. She might have seen the owl lean perilously forward on his green-black branch and, without taking his gaze from her window, fall hard—thump, bash!—onto the streetside. She would have seen the bird bounce up, and when he righted himself, become a handsome young man in a handsome black coat, his dark hair curly and thick, flecked with silver, his mouth half-smiling, as if anticipating a terribly sweet thing.

But Marya Morevna saw none of this. She only heard the knock at the great cherrywood door, and rushed to answer it before her mother could wake. She stood there in her factory overalls, her face turned bloodless by moonlight, and the man looked down at her, for he was quite tall. Slowly, without taking his eyes from hers, the man in the black coat knelt before her.

“I am Comrade Koschei, surnamed Bessmertny,” he said with a low, churning voice, “and I have come for the girl in the window.”

The house on Dzerzhinskaya Street leaned in and held its breath. In the corners of the chimneys, the domoviye waited to hear what she might say. Marya held hers, too. Her breast filled to bursting, but she could not let her breath go. If she did, what might happen? She wanted several things at once: to run; to cry out; to shrink and crawl away; to throw her arms around him and whisper, At last, at last, I thought you would never come; to beg him to leave her alone; to faint in a ladylike fashion and escape the whole incident. Her heart shook, beating abrupt and hot, all out of time and measure. He took her hand, and she stared down at this man getting snow on his trousers and how big his eyes seemed, how black, how unforgiving, how sly, how old. And yet he was not old. Older than she, but if he were more than twenty she would eat the curtains. He had long, smoky lashes like a girl, and his hair flew about in the wind like the fur of a wild dog. Marya did not often think men beautiful, not in the way she thought the Blodniek sisters were, or hoped that she herself might one day be.

“Invite me in, Masha,” Comrade Bessmertny said softly. The street drank up his voice, sunk it into the snow, disappeared it.

Marya shook her head. She did not know why. She wanted him to come in. But it was all wrong: He should not call her by her pet name; he should not kneel like that. She should have seen him fall from the tree; she should have been more clever, more watchful. She should have seen what he was before—this was not how it was supposed to go. It was too familiar, and a little lascivious, how close he crouched to her. She knew already he would not take her walking down Dzerzhinskaya Street or buy her a hat. She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling. She did not feel it would be at all safe to kiss him on the cheeks. Marya Morevna shook her head: No, not like this, when I have not seen you without your skin on, when I know nothing, when I am not safe. Not you, whose name all my nightmares know.

“Then get your things, and come with me,” said Koschei, unperturbed. His eyes sparkled in the cold, the way distant stars will when the night freezes. And Marya’s heart stopped—that was what they said. When they came for you, because you were not good, because you were not worthy of a red scarf. Get your things and come with me. Perhaps he was not like her sisters’ husbands at all.

But the shape of Comrade Bessmertny’s lips fascinated her and made her feel sick all at once—and that was what magic did to her. His lips shone bright and dark, soft and heart-shaped. She felt, looking at him, that she could not see him at all, but could see only the things that made him unlike a man, the lushness of his face and the slowness of his manner. Though he frightened her, though the house moved in its sleep around her, no doubt dreaming of this very creature the domoviye called Papa and feared as though he might come wielding a belt, he also seemed familiar, a thing already part of herself, like herself even in the shape of his lips and the curve of his lashes. If she had spent her hours knitting a lover instead of coats for Anna’s son, the man who knelt before her would have sprung from her needles, even down to the ghostly flecks of silver in his hair. She had not known before that she wanted all these things, that she preferred dark hair and a slightly cruel expression, that she wished for tallness, or that a man kneeling might thrill her. A whole young life’s worth of slowly collected predilections coalesced in a few moments within her, and Koschei Bessmertny, his lashes full of snow, became perfect.

Marya shivered and, without really thinking about it, she took her hand from the man in the handsome black coat and withdrew into the house. He had come for her—for good or ill, she had little choice in it. When they come for you, her mother had once warned, you have to go. It’s not about wanting or not wanting.

She pulled a suitcase—not her own, and perhaps this was the first humble sin in her ledger—from the hall closet. She had little enough to take, but in went a few dresses, work clothes, her grey cap. Marya paused, hovering precariously over the suitcase as though she might pitch herself in at any moment. Finally, she squeezed her eyes shut and placed Likho’s great black book very gently beneath the clothes. The latches made small, hushed smacking noises as they closed.

Very suddenly, Zvonok the domovaya was sitting on the lid of the suitcase. Her boots shone new and polished, and her mustache had been beautifully oiled.

“I am not coming with you,” the house imp said grimly. “You understand that. I am married to the house, not to you. Even if you went out into the fields and offered me dancing shoes and called to me, I would not come.”

Marya nodded. Speaking seemed like such tremendous work just now. But at least Zvonok knew the man; at least he was only some demon-king of the domoviye and probably more besides, and not an officer come to carry her off to oblivion.

“Will you even say good-bye to your mothers?”

Marya shook her head. What would she say? How could she explain? She couldn’t even explain to herself. Mother, I have been waiting for something to happen to me my whole life, and now that it has I am going, even though it is a tilted kind of thing, and I meant to be so much better at it than my sisters.

“What a dreadful girl I have raised! Still, if you don’t ask their permission, they can’t say no. That’s our sort of logic.” The domovaya gestured for Marya to crouch down so that they could talk face-to-face, on equal footing. “But if not your mother, who will tell you how to behave on your wedding night? Who will twine flowers in your bridal braid?”

From somewhere deep in her muscles, Marya Morevna pulled up her words. “I’m not getting married,” she whispered.

“Oh ho! Easy to say, devotchka; not so easy to keep the house standing when the wolf comes thumping his tail in the grass. Listen, Masha. Listen to old Zvonok, who knows you. The domoviye have been marrying up and out and over each other just about as long as girls and boys. Prick your finger with a needle and let the blood fall over your threshold—it will hurt less, and you will dream of daughters. Men, they feel nothing like what we must endure. You have to make room in yourself for him, and that is the same in a house as in a body. See that you keep some rooms for yourself, locked up tight. And if you don’t want to get big in the belly … Well,” Zvonok wrinkled up her wide nose, “I don’t suppose that’ll be the same trouble for you as it is for the rest of us. The deathless can’t play our little genealogical games. Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.”

Zvonok patted Marya Morevna’s face with her little hand. “Ah! My heart! I warned you about reading Pushkin! I would choose another husband for you, I would, if the choosing of it were mine. I could have hoped for a different life for my Masha than his mouth on her breast like a babe, sucking her pretty voice down, her little ways, ’til she’s dry and rattling. But you like him already, I can tell. Even though we showed our teeth and were very clear about his being wicked. That’s not your fault. He makes himself pretty, so that girls will like him. But if you must insist on being clever, then be clever. Be brave. Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.” Comrade Zvonok shrugged and sighed with a little whistling sound. “But I am selfish! I must learn to give the best of my house away.”

The domovaya hopped up to her feet and kissed Marya roughly on the tip of her nose. She did a shuffling, cock-legged little dance and laid her finger aside her own nose. “Who is to rule,” Zvonok hissed, and disappeared.

Marya blinked. Tears dropped from her eyes like tiny, hard beads. Her legs, all against her head, longed to straighten and take her to the door, to Comrade Bessmertny, still kneeling there in the cold like a knight. She ruled nothing, Marya knew. Nothing and no one.

Marya Morevna ran out onto Dzerzhinskaya Street, which had been Kommissarskaya Street, which had been Gorokhovaya Street, her black hair long and loose, her cheeks lashed red, her breath a hanging mist in the air. Snow crunched beneath her boots. Comrade Bessmertny smiled at her without showing his teeth. The birds never hurt my sisters, Marya said to her galloping heart. He is not a bird, said her heart. You weren’t careful, you didn’t see. He held open the door of a long, black car—a sleek, curving thing, the kind Marya had only glimpsed rumbling by, always followed by the grumbling of her neighbors regarding the evils of the merchant class. The car growled and snorted, a baleful red peeping through the vents. Marya dropped gratefully into the car, relieved to have done it, to finally be inside the magic instead of looking at it through a window. To never have to hear again that something black was coming for her—it was here, and it was handsome, and it wanted her. She couldn’t change her mind once the door shut—ah, and there it went, nothing to be done now. She shivered in the backseat. The car was as cold as a forest, and she had forgotten her good fur hat.

Marya jumped a little as Comrade Koschei slid in beside her. The car, driverless, roared ahead down the street with a whine and a screeching whinny. Koschei turned, gripped Marya’s chin, and kissed her—not on the cheek, not chastely or unchastely, but greedily, with his whole, hard mouth, cold, biting, knowing. He ate up her breath in the kiss. Marya felt he would swallow her whole.

6 The Seduction of Marya Morevna

The black car knew the forests like a boar knows them. It sniffed at the bone-bright birch trees and blared its low, moaning horn, as if calling out to fellow beasts within the pine-slashed shadows. Marya Morevna shuddered to hear it, but when she shuddered, Koschei held her nearer to him, twined his hand in hers.

“I will keep you,” he said softly, as sweet as black tea, “and I will keep you warm.” But his own skin had frosted over; his fingernails shone pearly blue.

“Comrade,” Marya said, “you are colder than I. I fear your flesh will freeze me.”

Koschei studied her as if she were a terribly curious creature, to crave warmth so. His dark eyes moved over her face possessively, but he did not release her. If anything, the cold of his body deepened, until Marya felt as though a pillar of ice clung to her, sending out silver tendrils to cover her, too, in the stuff of itself.

That first night, the black car wheezed, spat, and coughed triumphantly as they entered a clearing around a little house whose ruddy windows beamed through the sharp, clear night, whose eaves bowed under fresh straw, whose door stood ever so invitingly ajar. A peasant house, to be sure, nothing like her own tall, thin home, but squat and pleasant as a grandmother, a brown chimney puffing away. Koschei helped her, shivering, out of the car and slapped its fender fondly, whereupon the automobile leapt up cheerfully and scampered off into the dark.

The house had made itself ready for dinner. A thick wooden table sparkled with candles and a neat spread: bread and pickled peppers and smoked fish, dumplings and beets in vinegar and brown kasha, mushrooms and thick beef tongue, and blini topped with little black spoonfuls of caviar and cream. Cold vodka sweated in a crystal decanter. Goose stew boiled over the hearth.

Marya would have liked to have been polite, but the sight of so much food dazzled her. She fell to the bread and fish like a wild thing.

“Wait, volchitsa,” said Koschei, holding up his hand. “Little savage wolf! Please, sit at my table, brush the snow from your hair. No one will take your meal from you.”

Marya started to apologize, to explain how scarce food had been in Petrograd, how her belly had felt like a clenched fist with nothing inside.

“Comrade, I am so hungry—”

“There is no need for you to speak tonight, Marya Morevna. That time will come, and I will hang on your words like a condemned man. But for now, please, listen to me, and do as I say. I know that is difficult for you—I would not have chosen you if you found it easy to be silent and pliable! But we are going to do an extraordinary thing together. Do you know what it is we are doing? I will tell you, so that later, you cannot say I deceived you. We are taking your will out of your jaw—for that is where the will sits—and pressing it very small between our two hands, like a bit of dough. We are rolling it, and squeezing it, until it gets very small. Small enough to fit into the eye of a needle which is hidden inside an egg, which is hidden inside a hen, which is hidden inside a goose, which is hidden inside a deer. When we are finished you will give your will to me, and I will keep it safe for you. I am very good at this thing. A savant, you might say. You, however—” Koschei poured vodka for her. It trickled into her glass like music. The sides of Marya’s throat stuck together, so dry, so thirsty. “—are a novice. Less than a novice. And like a good novice, you must swallow your pride.” Koschei raised his glass. Marya raised hers more slowly, unsure. Her hand shook a little. She did not like to be ordered. She wanted to say a hundred, a thousand things. She wanted to leap upon him and demand he explain it all: Likho, the domoviye, the birds, her whole life. I have to know, I have to, or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not. But he only smiled at her, encouraging, benevolent, serene as an icon. “To life,” he said, and drank his vodka down in a long swallow.

“Now. Taste the caviar first, I must insist. I know that you would like to save it for last, to savor the delay because it has been so long since you tasted such a thing. But if I may teach you anything, it will be to relish everything, to devour it all—the richest things first, for they are your due. You have read your Pushkin—what is it old Aleksey says about me? There Tsar Koschei wastes away, poring over his pale gold. Tfu! That boy needed a haircut. But oh, Marya, Marousha, I do pore over my treasures! And some of them are glistening sturgeon eggs like piles of onyxes, and some of them are vials of vodka glittering like diamonds, and some of them are beets heavy and red as garnets, and some of them are beautiful girls from Petrograd, sitting in my house, silent as gold, because I asked them to be silent, which is the sweetest silence of all. And in the dark, I do pore over my riches, my impossible bounty.”

Beautiful girls? Marya heard his plurals. Had there been others? Questions hammered at her lips, but she wrestled with them, and kept her peace. If I do this, she reasoned, perhaps I will earn my answers.

Koschei cut a thick slice of bread from the loaf. The crust crackled under his knife, and the slice fell, moist and heavy, black as earth. He spread cold, salted butter over it with a sweep of the blade, and scooped caviar onto the butter, a smear of dark eggs against the pale gold cream. He held it out to her, and she shyly reached for it, but he admonished her. And so Marya Morevna sat, silently, as Koschei fed her the bread, and butter, and roe. The taste of it burst in her mouth, the salt and the sea. Tears sprang to her eyes. Her empty belly sang for the thickness of it, the plenty. Suddenly, it was a relief not to have to speak, to make conversation, while her body exhausted itself in poring over the delights of salt and heavy bread.

“Now the beets, volchitsa. And look at them first, how bloody they are, how crimson, how they leave trails behind them, like wounded things. Sip your vodka, and then bite one of the peppers—see how the vinegar and the vodka mix on your tongue? This is a very marvelous thing. A winter thing, when everything is pickled and preserved under glass. You can taste summer in this mixture, summer boiled down and soaked in brine, mummified, packed with spices to be born again on this table, in this place, in this snow. Now, a spoonful of kasha to smooth your excited palate.” He slipped the silver spoon into her mouth, his thumb grazing her chin. Marya felt as though she had never eaten before, never considered her food at all. She liked this better than Likho’s angular, hard magic. This magic filled her up, made her belly ache with fullness. “As you swallow the cow’s tongue, think for a moment about how strange and holy that is, to devour the tongue of another. To steal from it all its power to speak, to low at the moon, to call to its calf. To be worthy of such food you must guard your own words carefully, speaking only the wise and clever ones, lest your tongue end up likewise, on the plate of a rich man. Of course, rich men have been made obsolete by the Party, but if you learn a second thing from me tonight, let it be this: The goblins of the city may hold committees to divide a single potato, but the strong and the cruel still sit on the hill, and drink vodka, and wear black furs, and slurp borscht by the pail, like blood. Children may wear through their socks marching in righteous parades, but Papa never misses his wine with supper. Therefore, it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one’s stomach than of one’s nation.”

In this way, over hours, Marya Morevna ate her supper. The firelight dazzled her, the marrowy broth of the stew made her drunk, and Koschei’s low, inexorable voice, a voice like black tea, rose and fell like a ballad, lulling her, pulling at her, stroking her. Her mind chattered away, since her mouth could not: What kind of bird are you really, under your skin? Are you truly the domoviye’s Papa? Likho’s brother? I am not fooled by you pretending Bessmertny is your surname! Likho taught me better than to think names are only names and mean nothing! Koschei the Deathless, that’s what it means, and that’s you, it must be you. But what does that mean for me now? What will you do with me?

But she said none of these things. The drowsy, easy pleasure of allowing herself to be fed, to be spoken to without speaking, overwhelmed her. She felt like a fierce woodland creature, a volchitsa in truth, a little wolfling, brought inside and brushed and petted and fed until it seemed the most natural thing in the world to fall asleep by the fire. She looked out the little round window of the hut and, in her dreamy, satisfied glow, thought she saw not a long automobile parked outside, but a huge black horse bent over a trough of glowing red coals, chewing them thoughtfully. Sparks fell from its velvet mouth.

Finally, Koschei placed a teaspoon full of sour cherry jam on Marya’s tongue and instructed her to sip her tea through the lump of fruit. When she had swallowed, he kissed her, their mouths warm and sweet with tea and cherries, and Marya Morevna fell asleep in his arms, with his lips still pressed to hers.

Somewhere deep in the well of the night, she woke, her belly aflame, scalding, and while Koschei slept cold and insensate, Marya Morevna rushed out of the hut to retch all her marvelous supper onto the frozen ground. She tried to do it quietly, so that he would not know that she had lost all the lovely things he had set out for her. It’s not my fault, she thought furiously, unable to speak even now, when he was sleeping. Bellies trained on dry bread rations and salt fish cannot bear all this richness!

Marya Morevna looked up. The great black horse watched her calmly, his eyes burning phosphorescent in the dark.

Shame flowed into her mouth, sour and thick. She crept back into the little house so softly, like a thief.

In this way they traveled, across thrice nine kingdoms, thrice nine republics, the whole of the world, between Petrograd and Koschei’s country. The sleek, driverless car, which never seemed to need gasoline or maps, sped them on through wild, brambly woods and snowy mountains like old bones. It remained cold as midnight within the automobile no matter how bright the sun outside. Marya’s teeth ached from chattering. Yet each evening they would unfailingly discover a little house cheerily aglow in a larch forest or amid razor-spiky firs. Each evening a table would be set for them, the food growing finer and finer as they proceeded east and the snow grew deeper. Roast swan, vereniki stuffed with sweet pork and apples, pickled melons, cakes piled with cream and pastry. Each evening Koschei would ask her not to speak and then feed her with his long, graceful hands. Each evening she would sneak into the woods to throw it all up again, the muscles of her stomach sore with eating and retching, eating and retching.

“The vineyards that gave us this wine also provide the wine for Comrade Stalin’s table,” he said one night with a sly grin. “You will remember what I said about children and Papas, and who eats first, and who eats last.” Koschei the Deathless made a face as he tasted the wine. “It is far too sweet. Comrade Stalin fears bitterness and has the tastes of a spoiled princess. I savor bitterness—it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived. You, too, must learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, you may still have bitterness in abundance.”

Marya Morevna thought this did not sound quite right. But the glistening swan meat and the vodka so pure it tasted only of cold water spun her faster and faster, and the faster she spun in his arms, the more sense he seemed to speak. And because her body could not keep the sumptuous food down, she found herself all the more ravenous whenever he lifted a spoon of roast potato to her mouth.

He placed honey on her tongue, and pear jelly, and brown, moist sugar. She swallowed his steaming tea. And he kissed her, again and again, sharing sweetness and heat between them. Outside the hut, the strange tall horse nosed at his trough of embers every night, watching her secret sickness without blinking. Only now his coat was red, with a mane like fire. And whenever she woke from her deep, downy bed, the automobile would be waiting in the mist, puffing exhaust, it, too, no longer black but scarlet, like beets, like blood.

But Marya was only a girl, thin and young, and the constant lurching from frozen car to warm, crackling fireside began to eat at her. She began to cough, only a little at first, but then harsh and sharp. She became feverish and sickly until, finally, she could not even eat the little candied quails or holiday bread piled with apricot syrup. She had to push the spoons away or else spill out her guts on the fine fur rugs.

Marya lay on the floor by the fire in the latest cheerful, obedient hut, her knees drawn up to her chest, sweating and shivering all at once. If she had wanted to speak, she could not have. Her eyes glassed over; the room swam. Koschei looked down at her, his dark hair wet with melted snow. “Poor volchitsa,” he sighed. “I have been in such a hurry to get you home. I have been too impatient, and you are only human. But you must learn to keep up with me.”

Koschei the Deathless knelt at her side and unbuttoned her work shirt. Even through her fever, Marya would always remember how his fingers shook as he pushed and peeled her clothes away until she lay naked by the hearth, trying to hide her breasts in her hands. But Koschei turned her over onto her stomach, and Marya heard the clinking of glasses. She smiled against the plush pelts laid over the floor. Her mother had done this when she was very little. Banki. She could feel the movements, so terribly familiar: Koschei set rubles on her skin and lit matches on the coins so they would not burn her, then caught up the matches in little vodka glasses so that her flesh was sucked up into the vacuum. It was meant to pull out her fever, to suck the illness away from her chest. When she was very small, before the birds or the war or Dzerzhinskaya Street, her mother had done this for her when she fell ill. Soon Koschei had several glasses on her, and when Marya moved she jingled like sleigh bells, glass against glass. She imagined herself a great beast, lumbering through the steppes with sparkling glass towers on her back, roaring at villagers, stamping down whole forests with her paws. Her fever carried these images far, making them lurid, loud, playing before her eyes as though they were real. She moaned. Koschei did not speak this time, did not lecture or instruct. He simply murmured to her, stroked her hair, called her volchitsa, medvezhka, koshechka. Wolfling, she-bear, wild little kitten.

The next night, the car brought them smokily to rest, not at a rustic hut full of food, but at a banya, a bathhouse. It had no food for them. On a little green marble table waited a black jar and a neat pile of long, linen bandages. The bottle of vodka remained. Koschei undressed Marya again and sat her on a wooden slab. He rubbed her skin with those long, thin fingers, suddenly hot and not frozen at all. He brushed her long hair, hundreds of strokes. And with every stroke, the dry, brittle, broken strands became soft and shining again, as though she had never had so little eggs or milk to eat that her hair had dimmed and frayed. Marya nearly fell asleep sitting up, calmed by the brushing and his snatches of sad little songs about biting wolves and uncareful girls. When her hair shone, he gathered it up into a deft braid, and laid her down on the slab.

Then Koschei arranged the bandages over her so that no skin showed. When he cracked the seal on the black jar, Marya’s poor, raw nose was assailed with the prickling, slashing scent of hot mustard. Oh, how she had feared this when she was small! She would conceal any cold or sniffle from her mother, for if she was discovered, out the mustard plasters would come, smelling of burning and sickness. Marya Morevna had imagined that if hell had a smell, it smelled like mustard plasters. Koschei smeared the mustard over the wrappings. Marya’s eyes smarted and wept, her skin sweated, and in her fever she cried for her mother, for Zvonok, for Tatiana and Olga and Anna, for her red scarf and poor Svetlana Tikhonovna and lastly, more softly than the rest, for Koschei. At the sound of his name he took away the mustard plasters and held her in his arms.

“Drink, Marousha,” he clucked gently, like a mother, and put a glass to her lips. “Your lungs want vodka.” Obediently, she drank, and coughed, and drank once more.

He picked her up in his arms and carried her to the bath. Calling her his wolverine, his lioness, he scrubbed her skin with harsh salt until it was red, then sunk her in a hot bath. He held a handful of water to her nose and ordered her to breathe it in. She spluttered, and gagged, but did it anyway, so accustomed had she become to his voice. Finally, Koschei made her stand, and took up a long birch branch. Marya marveled at the catch in his breath as he brought it down against her skin, first gently, then harder, then stopping to rub her down with oil and whipping her again. At first she shrank away, but by his last blow, Marya Morevna found herself arching her back to meet the branch, as though the forest itself were commanding her body to heal.

Finally, hot and aching and wrung out, Marya let Koschei lead her to the wood stove, where he had made a bed for her, tucked up against the warm bricks. She slept, and dreamed of the London fashion magazine the Blodniek sisters had so cherished. The magazine had grown as huge as a museum hallway. She wandered through the pages, cowed and small next to the beautiful tall women with their crisp coats and feathered hats.

One of them turned to her. She wore a bright blue turban and waved a golden fan.

“All the girls are wearing their deaths this year,” the model said haughtily. “It’s just the thing for a plain country girl hoping to make her fortune.”

The woman gestured at her turban. In the folds rested a hen’s egg, white and gleaming.

When Marya woke, the red car had gone, and in its place a sparkling white one rolled towards them, its fenders arcing with a swan’s grace. She felt much better, though she had a headache and her back still throbbed where the birch branches had struck her. Still, her skin hummed with heat, and she leaned gratefully against Koschei as the icy, mountain-hunched world slipped by, as though everything had been caked in salt to wait for spring.

That night, the last night, the car ground through the rocky snow to another low little house, its eaves carved like icing, its door thick and red. Koschei lifted her up and carried her. Marya lifted her head sleepily to look over his shoulder and saw the white car roll up the path, only to bounce on a hard, icy lump of snow and spring up a great pale horse, his mane twisting in the wind. The horse whinnied happily and trotted off in search of supper. At least I caught the car changing, she thought dreamily. At least I can still see the naked world, even if it will only show me an ankle or a flash of wrist now. She had grown used to silence, and it had grown used to her. And because she had relaxed into muteness and ceased to think about it very much, because she was dizzy and warm and not at all vigilant, Marya Morevna slipped.

“Marya, we are nearly there, nearly at the borders of my country. I will have you healed before all the hustle and busyness there.”

“Really, I’m feeling much better,” she assured him before she knew she had spoken.

Like lamps extinguished, Koschei’s eyes darkened. He put her down, less gently than usual.

“I have asked you not to speak, Masha,” he said. His voice was as twisted as a rope. Marya fell silent, abashed.

A simple supper steamed on the table: turnip greens, bread, mashed eggplant, and salted chicken jelly with bits of meat suspended in it. Soft, bland food for her wrung-out body. Marya still could not eat much.

“This is our last night alone, Marya,” said Koschei. “Tomorrow you will be beset with my relations and my serfs and all manner of tasks at hand. I shall miss this, our selfish private hours, secreted away from the collective share. But so it always goes in marriage. Half of matrimony is given over to those with no stake in our bed. I suppose you wonder if your sisters fared so, with their handsome bird husbands; if they grew sick or thrived, if they traveled so far, so fast. All those lieutenants were my brothers, my comrades, and though they did not have so far to go so fast, nor did they travel so well, they too had their moments with borscht and vodka and birch branches. It is a mating dance all birds know. I wish you would have looked out the window, Masha! I was such a lovely owl for you. I fell so hard onto the streetside. So that you would be comforted; so that what you expected would happen just as you wished it to. That is how much I want to please you. But tscha! You missed it! Perhaps if you had seen me that way everything would have happened differently. Perhaps you would have commanded me to be silent. It was a risk I took. I confess it excited me, the possibility of being caught out. But no, I got to keep my secrets after all. A chance passed is a chance passed. Oh, I will be cruel to you, Marya Morevna. It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you? You are clever enough. I am a demanding creature. I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable. But I am your servant. When you starve I will feed you; when you are sick I will tend you. I crawl at your feet; for before your love, your kisses, I am debased. For you alone I will be weak.”

On her bed by the stove, Marya lay down, her naked back red as a ruby in the firelight. Like a magic trick, Koschei pulled an egg from behind his ear—but not a hen’s egg. A black egg, embossed in silver, studded with cold diamonds. Marya smiled, for her father had done this once when she could not sleep, had rolled an egg along her body to soak up all the nightmares into the yolk and away from her heart.

“You do not understand this yet. Not yet, not yet. You are not ready. You would be rough with my gift. But it is our last night, and I shall soak up all your fears and nightmares and proletariat city-girl terrors. You must have room to fear new things. I shall make you all new, my own revolution, neither red nor white, but black.”

Koschei the Deathless rolled his egg over Marya’s skin. She felt the crackling of the delicate shell against her bones, the jewels scraping her skin.

When he had finished, he pulled her up roughly and crushed her to him, kissing her again. His mouth was cold, and there was no passing of pear jelly or cherries between them. But all the same, Marya Morevna tasted sweetness in his empty kiss.

Suddenly, the sweetness fled and pain forked through her lip—Koschei had bitten her. She stared at him, hurt, raising her hand to her mouth. Her fingers came away bloody. Koschei’s lips were smeared with it. His eyes sparked and glowed.

“When I tell you to do a thing, you must do it. It is not about wanting or not wanting. It is about the will in your jaw, and the egg on your back.”

Marya balked; her vision swam; her lips pulsed hotly where his long, thin teeth had cut her. She felt herself tottering on a needle-tip: If I let him do this to me, what else will I allow?

Anything, anything, anything.

Koschei the Deathless wiped the bright redness from his lips. He looked down at his finger with Marya’s blood upon it. Without taking his eyes from her, he lifted his hand to his mouth and tasted it hesitantly, as if waiting for her to stop him.

Marya Morevna held her breath, and made no sound.