Deathless

20 Two Husbands Come to Dzerzhinskaya Street

In a long, thin house on a long, thin street, a woman in a pale blue dress sat by a long, thin window, waiting for her punishment.

Neither fell nor fiery did it come. For one year, one month, and one day, it did not come. And forgiveness did not, either.

It was late spring when Marya Morevna slid her brass key into the lock of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, feeling it slide, too, between her own ribs, and open her like a reliquary full of old, nameless bones. The house stood empty. All the curtains—green-and-gold, cobalt-and-silver, red-and-white—had been yanked from their rods. Spiders’ webs made a palimpsest on the walls, endless generations of spiders weaving spider-tales into silk. The house seemed so much smaller than it had, darker, an old, hunched beast past its use. A hole had opened up in the roof, dripping rain and plum blossoms into the room which had once belonged to Marya and her parents. The downstairs stove stood silent and cold, full of old ash no one had taken out. Vacant room opened up into vacant room.

“The Dyachenkos lived in this room,” she said to no one. To Ivan Nikolayevich, she supposed, his hand proprietary on her back. It was all wrong. She was supposed to have found warmth here, like Ivan’s warmth. Life, and living. “They had four boys, all blond. I don’t remember their names. The father ate this awful pickle soup every night. The place just reeked of dill. And here—oh, the Blodniek girls! Oh, they were so beautiful. Their hair! How I wanted hair like that. Shiny and straight as wood. They used to read.” She turned to Ivan, her eyes hollow. “They used to read this fashion magazine. They each had their hour with it, every day. They memorized hemlines, and color palettes. Little Lebedevas! And oh, there, there the Malashenkos tied bunches of flowers to sell, and Svetlana Tikhonovna brushed her hair. Oh, why is no one living here? This was a good house! I had twelve mothers in this house, twelve fathers. I ate such sweet fish in this house.”

And Marya Morevna fell to her knees before the great brick stove in the empty kitchen. She did not cry, but her face grew redder and redder with the pain of her not crying.

“Zvonok,” she whispered to the floor. “Zvonok, come out.”

Finally, she curled up on the broken tile and went to sleep, like a ragged feral cat who has finally found shelter from the rain.

Ivan Nikolayevich went to the ministry that evening to ask them to pardon his disappearance from his camp posting with a long tale of illness and good service among the Buryatskaya province villages. He opened and shut the door with a kiss to Marya’s cheek that felt as alien to her as a tattoo pricked there. Kisses crushed, pulverized, obliterated, bit—they did not peck. They did not smack and then vanish in a second. The scent of new lime leaves and forsythia blew in after him to fill the space. Marya Morevna watched him go down the street. The blue-and-lavender evening threw sashes around him, and he passed by young men in black caps who leaned against the linden trees, playing guitars. Marya shut her eyes. When she opened them again, the guitars still twanged under the first faint stars and Ivan Nikolayevich had disappeared around a corner. She suddenly felt afraid to leave the house. What awful place waited out there, whose fountains spouted dead, tasteless water, whose tall houses had no names, no skin, no hair? This house, she knew. It stayed within her as it had always been, the architecture of her girlhood. The wood held the oils of her skin deep in its grain; the windows still bore the imprint—long gone, invisible—of her tiny nose. A ghost of the Marya without magic, the little girl who was not broken, not a soldier, not a wife. But Leningrad, Leningrad was a stranger. It did not even share a name with the city where she had been born.

The plumbing creaked to life, spitting brown chemical resentment into the sink. Marya waited, watching the baleful dragon-faucet spew its venom into the drain. It did not run clear, really, but it ran tepid, the color of weak tea. After a moment’s consideration, Marya Morevna took off her boots and placed them deliberately by the stove, where she had once shrunk to the size of a rolling pin. She rolled up the legs of her black trousers and slopped water onto the kitchen floor with cupped hands, having no bucket, kneeling to scrub with an oily rag and a few old newspapers she found stuffed into the stove. Vicious Spies and Killers Under the Mask of Academic Physicians! the newsprint said, and she crushed it into the floor until the ink ran with water and filth. Her creaky knee complained, popping against the tile, but gradually, she uncovered a single bleached and faded rose, the pattern she remembered in the once-tidy kitchen. I want to see those roses! Papa Blodniek had hollered at his daughters.

“What I would not give for one Blodniek sister to kiss me now, and light the stove with me,” Marya whispered. She scrubbed until her back wept and convulsed, giving up. She had been stabbed there, near her kidney, the night they lost the candlemakers’ district, and Koschei had howled at the sight of her blood, so like a wolf that the wolves in the wood had taken up the chorus. Marya lay flat on her stomach, waiting for her muscles to unclench and let her rise. The cool tile kissed her face. Outside, through the broken window, she heard a young girl laugh, a cream-colored, strawberry-ice kind of laugh. Her lover sang to her: We’ll meet again in Lvov, my love and I …

A rough, ringing voice chided her. “Not an hour in Leningrad and he’s got you scrubbing floors.”

Marya smiled against the wet floor. She squeezed her eyes shut, relief lancing through her chest.

“Zvonok, oh Zvonya, I thought you’d gone.”

She turned her head and the domovaya stood there, her blond mustache ragged and full of split ends, her vest buttons mostly missing, patches on her brick-colored trousers. “Not that I don’t appreciate it,” Zvonok said. “It’s been so long since anyone cared about the floor. A cat could give up a grudge since this house has heard a holler to shut the door, the winter’s coming in! But then, the winter came in, didn’t it? It did, it did.” The domovaya nodded to herself.

“But it’s a fine house. Why would no one live here? And what about the Domovoi Komityet, all your friends?”

“Gone, with the families. Only I stay with the house. It’s my house. I married the old bastard. I’m stuck. A lesson some girls haven’t learned, exactly.” Zvonok sat down, cross-legged, near Marya’s nose. “Well, you know, Svetlana Tikhonovna died. A bad business, that. And her boys, well, they had no one to get meat for them, and they went begging one day and never came back. It happens to little ones. I like to think they fell into the Neva, the monsters. They stuffed up the mouse holes with their old socks. I needed those holes! And then the Abramov twins caught something, and pretty soon everyone had it, and there was a line outside the bathroom like at the cabbage shop, and then they didn’t bother with the bathroom anymore. And then the municipal hygiene authority just started carrying them all out, one by one by one. Some flat dead. Some not. Your mother was one of the last. And with them, their domoviye crawled out, clutching their stomachs, pulling their mustaches. We can’t get dysentery, you know, but we feel it when our family hurts.” Zvonok tugged her own mustache and looked at the clean rose on the floor. “I felt it when you caught that bullet in your shoulder. And the bayonet in your back. Such a lot of bother I suffer for you. Anyway, the Housing Committee tried to assign new tenants, but I didn’t want them.” The domovaya spat—carefully avoiding the clean patch Marya had opened up. “No, I didn’t! Fat and lazy, nothing but toadies and drunks! They put the Baghirlis—all eight of them—in your old room upstairs. And then the Grusovs showed up. Husband and wife, rat and ratitsa! They informed on their last household, so they got the rest of the house all to themselves! And no children between them! That bitch’s ferrety old womb would suffocate a babe, I’m sure. Well, Zvonok has opinions, and her opinions are this: to smoking hell with the lot of them. I broke things and rattled rafters until they ran off. Funny how no one’s asked for an assignment here since! Ha!” The imp slapped her knee.

Marya Morevna laughed a little, though it made her back hurt. “Oh, Zvonok, I have missed you.”

“Well, I can’t say you’ve moved up in the world. I saw that lug you brought in. Smells like an informant to me. Smells like a Grusov.”

“I don’t think so.” But then, she had not asked. She knew nothing about him, except the taste of his mouth. What else didn’t she know? Everything, everything.

“Bet Papa Koschei didn’t have you on your knees in filth sopping up his kitchen. Bet you had a kokoshnik all of sapphires and a striped cat on your lap.”

“Not exactly.” But gems there had been, and no weak pecking kisses. Perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps hasty. But she could not think that, not yet; she had to try. Because what’s back there? The war and blood and silver splashes like stars.

“Well, after Viy came, sure. I felt that too, even so far off from you. But before that. Before, it was good, yes? Sturgeon eggs every night? Copper bathtubs?”

Marya smiled again. Her hair slid off her back. “Yes, it was good, Zvonya. Before the war.”

“Well, I will tell you something, Masha, my girl. You should have stayed put. I understand the need to ride a new horse every now and then—you think I haven’t gone and taken a good look at the wallpaper in another house every century or two? But you don’t trade a tiger for a fat little kitten, you know what I mean? It’ll just piss on your floor and ignore you when it’s not biting you for fish you don’t have.”

“When I saw him I thought I could curl up inside him and go to sleep and never wake up.”

“Men are no good for that, Masha. They’ll always want you working, when you’re not softening their fall into bed at the end of the day.”

“I wanted to be alive again. I wanted to be someone else.”

Zvonok stood up, brushing off her red trousers. She put her hands on her hips.

“Well, I hope lying on that floor like a broken dog is everything you hoped it would be.” She shrugged. Then the domovaya hopped up onto one foot, spun around three times, took a deep breath—and stopped. She squinted at Marya for a moment and reached into her vest pocket, pulling out something tiny and white. It grew bigger and bigger until Zvonok could hardly manage it herself. She let it fall onto the tile: a china teacup, with cherries on the handle, cracked in many places.

Zvonok jumped through the hoop of the handle, and vanished.

“Masha!” came the voice of Ivan Nikolayevich, booming through the house along with a bluster of last year’s leaves.

Marya Morevna started awake. She pushed herself up off the kitchen floor, her bones crackling their displeasure, her back still shaky, but it had released its awful grip. She brushed her black jacket clean—it was still too cold to take it off, and she had nothing else but her marshal’s uniform, which Ivan had said she should not wear on the street.

“I have good news, Masha!” Ivan called. His golden head appeared in the kitchen door, and his smile upon seeing her lit the room like a stove.

Behind him, a young woman with a long braid followed shyly, carrying a sleeping baby in her arms.

“The Housing Committee was so grateful to have someone willing to live in this damned old place, they’ve only asked that we share with one other family. Isn’t that extraordinary? Just think of the space! Marya Morevna, may I present Kseniya Yefremovna Ozernaya and her daughter, Sofiya. Comrade Kseniya is a nursing student, so we shall be very glad of her, I’m sure. Mashenka, did you try to clean the floor by yourself? With no soap or bucket? You see what an industrious wife I have, Kseniya!” Ivan was babbling. He was nervous; she could see it. Fear sluicing through him, that they should be found out. She was not his wife. Marya pitied him his need for no one to know it. Who could care? She thought of the Grusovs, and shuddered. What else did she not know about him? But she did not care. She only wanted him to take her to a bed and make her feel warm again, make her feel the sun on her insides.

But all she said was, “Good evening, Comrade Ozernaya.”

“Good evening, Marya Morevna,” said the young woman, and her dark eyes filled with such warmth and hope.

How lonely she must be, Marya thought.

“Where is the child’s father?” she said curiously, and not without coldness. She did not sniff at the propriety of it, but it was interesting.

“He died,” the young woman said bitterly. “Men die. It’s practically what they’re for.”

Ivan Nikolayevich cleared his throat. “Well, there will be plenty of time for sharing personal histories. Would you prefer the upstairs or the downstairs, Kseniya Yefremovna?”

“Please,” Marya hurried, before the girl could answer. “Take the downstairs. It is nearer the stove. For the infant.” And upstairs is home, she added silently.

“Thank you. We find a way to be comfortable wherever we land. But this is certainly … better. I bathe frequently.”

Ivan beamed at them. “Will you excuse us, Comrade Ozernaya? I wish to have a word with my wife.”

“Of course.”

Marya snorted softly. How odd you are, Ivanushka, kicking her out of the room you just gave her.

Kseniya Yefremovna ducked into the parlor where the Malashenkos had once squabbled over rouge creams. Where Svetlana Tikhonovna had posted all her playbills. The Pharaoh’s Daughter. Giselle. Spyashaya Krasavitsa.

Ivan Nikolayevich crushed Marya to him in a rush. He buried his face in her hair.

“Masha,” he breathed, “do not look at this house. Do not look at the dead stove, the hole in the roof. I will make this place whole for you, your childhood home, and then you will know that you chose well, in choosing me. You will see how well I serve you.”

Marya Morevna sighed against his shoulder. She breathed his scent. Yes, like that. More like that. Tell me all the ways in which this was the only choice.

“Take me upstairs,” she whispered.

He did. And as they passed out of the kitchen, Marya noticed that a puddle of water, perfectly round, rippled in the place where the young girl with her braid and her baby had been standing.

So it went. The Housing Committee sent men to repair the roof, and Ivan grinned widely at Marya, as if to say, Look how I command men, too. With harsh blue soap and lye they burned the filth and any lingering sickness away from the kitchen floor. All the roses bloomed on the tiles—though they were never to be pink again, but faint and brown. Ivan carried out bucket after bucket of ash from the stove, and oh, how Marya wept when she saw the burnt corner of a magazine in the grey coals, the scorched tip of a lady’s feathered hat. All four of them gathered in the kitchen to light the clean stove for the first time. Baby Sofiya clapped her chubby hands, and they all blew on the little flame until it caught. Soot and smoke and the smell of sawdust and pine needles filled the house, but it was warm. Kseniya made them all a sweet ukha that night, with salted mackerel she had been saving for an occasion and green, redolent dill from the old window garden, now overgrown and thick with new sprouts.

They were allotted furniture and food cards according to Ivan Nikolayevich’s new civic position in the Cheka, the Extraordinary Commission. Marya laughed when he said those words to her.

“But that doesn’t mean anything, Ivanushka! What’s extraordinary about it?”

“It’s like a kind of policeman, Masha. A sheriff.”

But she never could keep it straight. All the letters, the acronyms, the codes, the colors, changing like musical chairs, every week, every month. Games demons play. It meant nothing to her, except in a charming sort of way, as it had when Naganya wanted to play at interrogation, while the rest of them wanted chess.

Ivan bought her three dresses and two suits with trousers, one black, and one brown. She never wore the dresses. They hung on the empty curtain rod—red, white, and yellow—and kept the sun out. Many days Marya, Kseniya, and the baby walked together to the market to get potatoes and bread, cabbage and onions. Sometimes there was fish. Sometimes there was not. If all the stars aligned, there might be beef, but it would certainly have run out by the time they got to the head of the line. Kseniya Yefremovna and Marya would joke about the riches that the people ahead of them would already have snapped up.

“Those who get here at three o’clock get bananas!”

“Old widow Ipatiev gobbles up all the chocolate. See how brown her teeth are!”

And Marya thought, I sound just like a Leningrader. Imagine it.

And at night, in a narrow bed in her old room, Marya Morevna would hold Ivan tight inside her, demanding his obedience to her, demanding that his soul be ripped out and emptied into her. Only then did she feel whole and rooted—but she did not feel like herself. Sister of Anna and Tatiana and Olga. Daughter of twelve mothers. Young Pioneer. Six years old and birdless, birdless.

Marya began to stalk the house as she had long ago, restless, uneasy. She paced. Reading, thinking, speaking. Her sleep came in brief, spontaneous concussions; at night she kept her eyes peeled like an owl’s. She was afraid to dream, afraid, still, to leave the house. Every time she looked out the long, thin windows onto the cherry tree where her sisters’ husbands had ever so briefly alighted, she thought she might see Buyan again, all crimson, all bone, all radiant, whole, no silver to be seen. Or worse, to see Viy’s colorless country seeping through the seams of Leningrad, too. She did not know whether she longed to see these things, or feared to. Her body still tensed in every moment, ready to take up her rifle again (hidden now under her bed, with Ivan above it, as though he, too, might spark and fire in her hands) and run with all those men behind her, all those woven men with their soft, soundless shoes. At the raucous, talkative bursts of boys and girls passing below the windows on their way to Nevsky Prospekt, to ice cream and films and cafes, she jumped in her skin, ready to leap on them and bite out their throats.

The house had definitely shrunk; that she knew. Where once she had counted, endlessly, the five steps to walk from the vanished cobalt-and-silver curtain to the disappeared green-and-gold curtain, it now took three. But then, maybe her strides were longer. There are so few of us now, she thought, and left a shoe for Zvonok that night. Ivan, endlessly vexed by her bottomless appetite for shoes, called her mad, a wolf. She winced. That night, while he slept, she suddenly sprang upon him and bit his cheek savagely. She was not mad, not a wolf, not anymore. He looked at her with such shock, such wounded surprise. She kissed away the blood and roused his body to her, her fingers and her lips. He protested, his hands plunged already in her hair. I have to report early in the morning, Masha!

Do you think I came through the living and dead worlds to be a Party mistress? I am your loyalty; I am your kommissar.

And he yielded to her, always.

It was because she could not sleep that Marya Morevna discovered Kseniya Yefremovna’s peculiar habits. In the long, impenetrable night of January, the queen from beyond the sea crept downstairs to put her freezing feet against the stove, meaning to walk on her softest toes and wake neither the earnest nursing student nor her little one. The child had a dark mess of tangled hair now, and babbled an unending stream punctuated by mamochka, Sofiya, milk, fishes! Sofiya had just learned to walk, and terrorized them all with her headlong rushes down the hallways, across the parlor. But Marya found them both wide-awake in the starless hours of night, waiting for a great kettle to steam on the great brick stove.

“Good evening, Marya Morevna!” Kseniya whispered. “What is the matter?” The baby waved her fat arms senselessly.

“Nothing, Ksyusha, I am only cold. The old roof still lets in a draft. May I sit by the stove?”

Kseniya Yefremovna frowned. “Of course. Nothing belongs to me that does not belong to all.” Marya heard, too, the other half of her words: but I wish you wouldn’t.

Marya huddled with them next to the baking brick of the stove. Warmth sopped through her, dull and sleepy. She put her finger into baby Sofiya’s hand.

“She squeezes well. Maybe she will grow up to be a soldier.”

Kseniya stared at her. Marya never said the right thing, especially around the child.

“Have you begun teaching her words?” she tried again.

“Yes, she’s very clever.”

As if recognizing her cue, Sofiya threw her hands up and squawked, “Water!” And giggled riotously.

“Yes, rybka, my little fish! It’s time for water.” Kseniya twisted her hands.

“We are modest,” she added, awkwardly.

“I shall turn my eyes if it will help. I am chilled, still. But why are you bathing at this time of night? You’ll chase your death in your sleep.”

The young nurse sighed heavily, untwisting her long braid and loosening her dark hair, slightly damp. “I have … a condition. My daughter has it, too. We become … ill, when our skin dries out. Our hair. It is especially dangerous at night. Pillows drink up so much water. For myself I wouldn’t even get out the kettle, but my little fish can’t bear the faucet.”

Marya Morevna laid her head on her shoulder, watching the nursing student with a crow’s interest. Rusalka were like that, she knew from long experience. They fall down dead if they dry out. In Buyan, the rusalki kept a great glass-ceilinged natatorium full of clear blue pools and hot saunas, so they could stay in the city overnight. At home, in their lakes, they never worried—a quick swim and they shone, sang, drowned their lovers with abandon and cheer. But too far from the green, grassy depths of mountain waters, they fell prey to a wide variety of arcane personal rituals, all of them necessary to keep a rusalka alive from day to day.

“I knew someone once, who had a condition like yours,” Marya said slowly. She could not be sure; she did not dare call the young woman out.

Kseniya Yefremovna fixed her with a deep, unwavering gaze. “I am not surprised that you did, Comrade Morevna.”

In the silence of the kitchen, broken only by the settling of blackened wood chips in the stove, Marya helped Kseniya to fill a little tub and sink her long hair into it. She stroked the young woman’s curls, making sure every strand got soaked through. Impulsively, she kissed the young woman’s damp forehead.

In the morning, they did not speak of it.

Was she happy? Did she think of Koschei? She saw herself from a long way off, moving as though through water. Little things brought her singing down into herself again: the smell of cherries rotting on the ground outside her window; the crackle of the radio, which always startled her; the sharp sear of the vinegar Kseniya used to preserve half the eggs, mushrooms, and cabbage that she brought in from the market. Kseniya was better at being alive than Marya. Marya accepted that difference, and only once a day, at dusk, did she look beyond her friend’s moist shoulder, expecting to see Naganya clicking her jaw disapprovingly in the corner. But she saw nothing; they hadn’t followed her, or were content to remain unseen. Marya did not know which she preferred.

And then, Ivan, always Ivan, the motion of him within her, the ways in which she could force him to bend to her will, the getting of small items, a comb, a cup of water. She clung to him, for if she clung to him, then leaving Buyan could be right, could be right forever. He did not speak of his work. She did not ask him what he did when he left her. Ivan Nikolayevich did not seem to have much of an idea what to do with her, now that she had come to Leningrad, done as he asked. I can get you a job, Mashenka. Wouldn’t you like to work? Wouldn’t you like to have comrades? But she would not like that. She wanted only to rest and to read her old, rain-swollen books, turning the pages carefully, so carefully.

“Ivanushka,” she asked one night as the jingling street sounds played below the window. “Would you perform tasks for me, if I asked?”

“What do you mean?”

“Would you … get me a firebird’s feather, or fetch a ring from the bottom of the sea, or steal gold from a dragon?”

Ivan pursed his lips. “Those sorts of things are so old-fashioned, Masha. They are part of your old life, and the old life of Russia, too. We have no need of them now. The Revolution swept all the dark corners of the world away. Yes, remnants still lurk in the hinterlands—Koschei, a Gamayun or two. But they are irrelevant. The old world left its dirty, broken toys lying about. But soon enough we’ll have everything tidy. Besides, there are no firebirds in Leningrad.”

Marya Morevna turned her back to him, and he kissed her shoulder blades.

The main thing was the tiredness, which swaddled her and stayed. The main thing was the ruin of her house, like film laid on top of other film, so that she could look at a wall and see not only the wall but Svetlana Tikhonovna and her mother arguing over laundry in front of it, and Zemlehyed pawing at it, and the skin of a Buyan wall, so far from her. Everywhere her vision doubled and trebled, and her head sagged with the weight of it. Everything kept occurring all at once, each thing on top of the last.

Was she happy? Did she think of Koschei?

She thought of mushrooms, and vinegar, and old wounds.

At last, after a year had come gone in the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, Marya sat on her bed by the long, thin window. She looked up at the red dress hanging there. It had a deep neckline, and a full skirt. A young woman’s dress.

“What is thirty-three?” she said to the empty house. “A crypt?”

And so she put on the dress, and let her black hair fall down to her waist. She took some of Kseniya’s lipstick—she would not mind, not with so many classes this term. Marya had gotten better at applying it, and her mouth shone neatly. Marya Morevna walked down the stairs and put her palm to the knob of the great cherrywood door. She would go down to the river, and have an ice cream of her own, and someone would dance with her at a piano hall, without even knowing her name. Outside, she could smell the summer acacia, blooming early this year, in the long half-golden dusk that passed for night in Leningrad’s June. A young man played a violin a little ways off, singing boldly: We’ll meet again in Lvov, my love and I …

Marya Morevna turned the knob and opened her door onto the city. She stood there in her bright red dress, and her face drained of blood. A man looked down at her, for he was quite tall. He wore a black coat, though the evening’s warm wind blew through his curly dark hair, so like a ram’s. Slowly, without taking his eyes from hers, the man in the black coat knelt before her.

“I have come for the girl in the window,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears.

21 This House Has No Basement

Ivanushka, you must make me a promise.

Anything, wife.

A pure kind of light fell like cold hammer-blows on Dzerzhinskaya Street the next day. Morning passed, but the light kept its quality. Waxen, hard, merciless. A young woman with a pale blue band around her hat knocked crisply at the great cherrywood door. She had never been a bird—not a rook, nor a shrike, nor a plover, nor an owl. Her crisp features matched the morning, pitiless and sharp. She knocked again.

Ivanushka, no matter how strange it seems, you must obey me.

Always, wife.

The man in the black coat held up one hand to her, as if he could not believe she was real. “I look at you, Masha, and it is like drinking cold water. I look at you and it is like my throat being cut.”

“Get off your knees.” Her chest hurt. She felt old, and the wind off the river smelled sweet, but impossible.

“I do not tolerate a world emptied of you. I have tried. For a year I have called every black tree Marya Morevna; I have looked for your face in the patterns of the ice. In the dark, I have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.”

“Everyone endures hard things.” I endure them. There was never any choice because it is hard here and hard there. Hardness everywhere.

“I refuse,” he whispered

“No one can refuse.”

“Is life here so filled with bliss?”

Marya Morevna sank to her knees, her dress spreading out over the threshold like a pool of blood. She pressed her forehead to Koschei’s.

“What about the war?”

“The war is going badly.”

Ivanushka, this is my house, whatever the papers say.

Yes.

“My name is Ushanka,” said the woman with the blue hatband, smoothing her crisp brown skirt as she seated herself, “and certain irregularities have come to light which I must ask you to make regular, Comrade Morevna. Answer my questions, and you may go about your afternoon as you please. Stroll by the river, make rolls.”

Marya sat lightly in a threadbare green chair, wishing she were elsewhere, longing to spring away like a deer. But Ivan Nikolayevich had said that if anyone came asking questions, she had to answer; it was not about wanting or not wanting. “All right.”

“I work with your husband; did you know that?”

“No. We do not discuss his work.”

“Ah! What a balm is the conduct of a good citizen. Still, I keep returning to these irregularities.”

“Oh?” Marya did not move any part of her face. She was better at interrogation games than this woman could ever be.

“Well, surely you admit the oddness of a man appearing out of nowhere, after a long absence from duty, and suddenly having a wife where he had none before.” Ushanka’s smile stretched very wide, very frank, as if they were old friends.

Marya willed her fingers not to fidget. She stared straight ahead. “Surely soldiers often meet women in foreign parts.”

“Are you a foreigner, then? Your Russian is excellent.” Her pen scratched against her notepad.

“No, no. I was born here, in Leningrad. Before the Revolution, of course.”

“Of course. Allow me to ask an obvious question, Comrade Morevna. Forgive me for insulting your intelligence, but it is only my job. Are you, in fact, married to Comrade Ivan Nikolayevich Geroyev?”

Ivanushka, if you break this promise it will be like breaking a very old crystal glass. Nothing will be able to be put right again.

I understand.

“Come back with me,” insisted Koschei. “Hide inside me, as you did before. I will pile such jewels on your lap. Viy can burn this world, if I have you. Already the Chernosvyat is his. Already my country hoists a silver flag. Come with me. I will take out my death and smash it under a hammer and Viy can have us and in his silver country I will fuck you until the end of the world.”

Marya brushed his nose with hers, two affectionate beasts.

Koschei the Deathless shut his dark eyes. “I can take you anyway, if you say no.”

“I know you can.” She felt his words in the basement of her belly.

“But I will not. It would be sweeter to pay him back with the same currency.”

“I do not wish to be dragged back and forth between the two of you like a bone between two dogs. You promise the same things, and neither of you delivers.”

Ivanushka, it will be difficult for you to keep this promise. You will have to build the keeping of it like a chimney.

Tell me what I must do.

Ushanka leaned forward, putting her notepad aside. She had a long, Byzantine nose with a bump in the middle of it. “We already know, Comrade Morevna. There will be no punishment if you simply admit what is already a matter of public record. It is too late for Geroyev, but no blame need attach to you for this incident.”

Marya blinked. “What is it you think you know?”

Ushanka shrugged luxuriously. “Who is to say what I know? Maybe I know something now that I will not know when I leave. It all depends on you, Comrade.”

The queen beyond the sea tried to remember how Naganya liked to play this game. No, no, Masha! You can’t avoid my eyes like that! Then I’ll know you’re lying! You’re doing it wrong! Now, tell me you’re innocent, and I’ll pretend to pull out your thumbnail.

“I assure you that whatever you think I have done, I am innocent of it.”

“Do you now?” Ushanka tapped an unlit cigarette on her knee. “I am absolutely certain you’re right. Do you mind?” Marya Morevna demurred, but the young officer flicked a brass lighter anyway, waving around the terminus of her cigarette. “Which is why you and I can be so convivial. We are just having a conversation in the afternoon, as ladies will. A cup of tea, a cigarette? All these little niceties, and no lies between us. Now, Comrade Geroyev reports that he met you in the vicinity of Irkutsk, near the Mongolian border. Is that correct?”

“That sounds right.” She had no idea. Geography was fungible, fluid, unreliable.

“And what brought you to such a distant city, when you say you were born in Leningrad, in this very house? And why have you no traveling papers? No identification? You see, I know you, Comrade Morevna—or is it Geroyev? I notice you did not answer my previous question. Silence, is of course, its own answer, and I will not embarrass you further by repeating myself. You see how quickly we progress!”

Marya smiled faintly.

“Something amusing?”

“You remind me of an old friend, that’s all.”

Ivanushka, I know you will break your promise.

I will not.

“Take it,” sighed Koschei.

It weighed so heavy in her hand: a black egg, embossed in silver, studded with cold diamonds.

“You rolled this over my back. To soak up my nightmares.” Marya stared at it, how it caught the light.

“It is my death. Oh, my volchitsa, don’t you see? I have always been in your power. I have always been helpless.”

“What about the butcher in Tashkent?”

The corners of Koschei’s mouth quirked. “He sends his regards.”

Marya turned the egg over in her hands. The diamonds pricked her; blood welled. Down in the dark of her, a door opened. She stood, her eyes blank, imperious, as strange as he had once been. She knew, finally. What she could become.

“Come with me, Koschei.”

Ivanushka, do not go down into the basement of this house.

Do not open the door. Do not peer into the lock.

Is that all?

“Comrade Morevna, allow me to show my cards. When something is amiss in the life of a citizen, it is as though he walks around all day with his shirt inside out. To the casual observer, all may seem normal, but in truth, the natural order of things has been upset. Even if he wears a coat, even if for all the world he appears the picture of a man, something within him is backwards. I suggest that during his disappearance Comrade Geroyev associated with antirevolutionary elements, and continues their work even in the depths of Leningrad.”

Marya laughed out loud. “Is that what you think?”

“Either that or you yourself are a spy, having attached yourself like a lamprey to a good man, and harbor even now—in the attic? in the basement?—seditious persons of great interest to myself and those whom I represent. Tell me, Comrade. What would I find if I looked in your basement right this very moment?”

Ushanka extinguished her cigarette on the windowsill.

Ivanushka, for you, this house has no basement.

I promise, wife.

The basement of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street stank of shadow and disuse. Old jars of onions cured into mothballs grew veils of cobwebs, sharing space with a rusted typewriter, a box of nails, a dressmaker’s form, and three jugs of home-brewed beer long ago overfermented and burst, even their spilt foam calcified, crumbling. Koschei wrapped his long arms around Marya’s waist, pressing his cheek to her hair. She squeezed the black egg in her palm; he moaned into her scalp. She tucked his death into her dress, between her breasts, where it touched her heart.

“Stand against the wall, Koschei.”

Without a word he obeyed her. In the jetsam, Marya Morevna found, as if by magnetism or divining, what she wanted: a coil of moldy rope. She stood against Koschei, so much taller than she, her hips moving against him out of old memory. She lifted one of his hands, knotted the rope around it, and looped the rest through an iron ring that once held a hook for the curing of meat.

Koschei the Deathless regarded her knotwork. “That will not hold me. It is a joke. I could breathe on it and it would crumble.”

“What proof would it be if you couldn’t get out?” said Marya softly, and kissed his pale mouth in the dark, all her child’s worship of him seething feverishly back into her. I need this. I need it. You will not deny me. She lifted his other graceful hand and bound it, too, pulleying his arms up above his head.

He hung there, tears streaking down his face.

“I love you, Marya.”

She laid a finger over his lips.

“There is no need for you to speak, Kostya. There is only one question: Who is to rule? And that is never answered with words. You will not move. You will not try to loosen my knots. You will suffer for me, as I suffered for you. Then I will know that your submission to me is total, and true. That you are worthy of me.” Marya Morevna took Koschei’s face in her hands and pressed her forehead to his. “We are going to do something extraordinary together, you and I,” she whispered. “Do you remember when you said that to me, so long ago? Do you know what it is we are doing? I will tell you, so that later, you cannot say I deceived you. I am taking my will out of you, and I am taking yours with it. Out of the eye of a needle, hidden inside an egg, hidden inside a hen, hidden inside a goose, hidden inside a deer. When we are finished you will give your will to me, and I will keep it safe for you.” She smiled, her eyes serenely shut. “I learned very well how to give up my will to my lover. I was a savant, you might say. You, however, are a novice. Less than a novice. And, like a good novice, you must swallow your pride.”

Marya drew away, her eyes shining, her blood singing. Then, she turned and walked up the staircase, her red dress trailing behind her on the black steps. She shut the door behind her, and turned the key.

Thank you, Ivanushka. How good you are to me.

That is all I want in the world, to be good to you.

Marya’s eyes sparkled with sudden interest, even delight.

“Isn’t this fun?” she said, a grin starting on one side of her face and traveling the slow road to the other. It was a game, always a game. And when you were done playing, when you got bored, you just called it off, and went to hunt mushrooms by moonlight.

“Pardon me?” Comrade Ushanka recoiled.

“I do like games. You play so well! Almost like it’s all real.” Like the acronyms and colors and committees were real, which is to say not at all. All toys; all amusing; all tiresome, eventually.

Ushanka spluttered, clutching her notepad. “I assure you, Comrade—”

“Come play again tomorrow, will you? It’s been so dull! I feel as though we are friends already! How wonderful, to have friends again.” Get out, get out, get out, Marya’s body hissed, but she kept up her smile.

“I am not finished, Comrade Morevna!”

“Now, now, Ushanochka, it’s almost lunch, and nothing is so important it can interfere with lunch!”

Ushanka stopped spluttering. She put down her pen and pad. She folded her hands over them and grinned down wolfishly.

“Yes, Comrade Morevna,” she whispered. “It is fun.” And she walked calmly to the door, her hand steady and sure on the knob.

When the woman had gone, Marya put her hand to her throat, her heart hammering horribly, sweat prickling in the fine hair of her temples. She watched Ushanka go, down the long, thin street. A loose thread dangled from the hem of her skirt, catching the sunlight.

22 Each of Them Uncatchable

Marya Morevna carried her secret like a child. Her heart grew fat with it, for secrets are the favorite food of the heart. Her life bent in half, and the seam of her life was the floor of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, separating her world into upstairs and downstairs, into day and night, into Ivan and Koschei, into gold and bone.

“I swear March has come three times already this year, Kseniya Yefremovna,” she said in the morning, putting on her kettle, watching her tea disperse in the water like paint, hushing Sofiya, slicing sausage into a pan. Marya put her hand over her heart, to keep the secret in. Kseniya laughed and said the snow loved Leningrad too well to ever let it go before June. They talked like two young women with young women’s cares, and little Sofiya banged a wooden spoon on the table, hollering mamochka, mamochka like a whip-poor-will’s song.

When Kseniya went to classes, Marya Morevna would take up her iron keys and open the door to the basement. Her secret would swirl up toward her out of the dark, and her heart would lead her down.

“You look older today,” she whispered, and pressed her whole body to that of Koschei the Deathless, bound to the wall.

“I have always been old. It is only that you want to see my oldness now.”

“If I kissed you, would you become young again?”

“I will always be old.”

And the kisses she had of Koschei in the dank, moldering cellar were the sweetest kisses of her life, so sweet her teeth hurt. She lay against him, or struck him with her fists and accused him of taking her girlhood, or took his body as she pleased. Sometimes, when she lifted her hands against him, he smiled so beatifically she thought he had died. But his excitement promised that he had not, and where his seed spilled on the cellar floor, strange blue plants grew. When they opened into flowers, dust trickled out, and the flowers died again. When she questioned this, and why sometimes he had wrinkles now, and sharp teeth, and long, protruding bones, Koschei the Deathless answered, “When do you feel most alive, Marya, but when you are closest to death? That is where I live. That is what my body is made of.”

And she rested her head on his chest, so that her long black hair covered his nakedness like a cassock. She whispered, “I think we’re finally married, you and I.”

When Ivan returned from his work, he, too, often looked older. He ate his cutlets and bread silently, with a sullen kind of savagery, and with a sullen kind of savagery he wrapped Marya up in his body, and kissed all of the skin she had, and cursed her for not having more. These kisses, too, were sweet, so sweet her head spun, and she hurtled between them like a trolley car, up and down, up and down. Marya Morevna carried her smile in her pocket, close to her skin, so no one could steal it. In her mind she pored over her secret, her hoard, as though it were gold. If she went to the market, she sped home to unbutton her winter coat and her blouse and press her breasts to Koschei’s lips in the cellar. If Ivan was delayed, she paced and stomped, so that he would hear her pacing and run home to her—but also so Koschei below would know whom she waited for. In those days, of every meat she ate only the tenderest parts.

“Do you like it, Kostya? Hanging here, in the dark, waiting for me?” she asked Koschei the Deathless one day as the square of light from the one tiny cellar window traveled slowly across the floor.

“Yes,” Koschei whispered, his eyes rolling back as she kissed his throat and stroked his chest like a favorite cat. “It is new.”

“Losing the war, that’s new, too, isn’t it?”

“Everything is new, volchitsa. There was a revolution, or hadn’t you heard?”

To Ivan, she gave exactly seventy kisses each night, and no two kisses the same. She said to him, “Do you remember where I lived before? That we were at war? That I was a soldier?”

Ivan yawned. “All that was so long ago, Mashenka. Like a dream. In fact, some days, I think it was a dream. I’m amazed you remember it at all.”

“I can’t forget things. They stick to me.”

“And what is sticking to you tonight?”

“If there is war here, I think the war there will end. The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.”

Ivan turned on his side beside her, the long, broad lines of him leonine and sated. “I have told you. The war is just so much foreign peacockery. German business. It’s nothing to do with us.”

In April, the melt held for an entire week. Festivals hummed in the Haymarket, and Kseniya Yefremovna insisted on taking the baby, and Marya, too, to see the balloons.

“Mamochka!” cried Sofiya. “So many!” And she clutched at the sky with her little hands.

As the spring sun wheezed and panted in the sky, they strolled back down the boulevards, each of the women with fried dumplings overflowing with bloody cherries in hand.

“What is that?” said Marya Morevna suddenly. She meant the black house on Decembrists Street that rose up between two everyday apartment buildings.

Kseniya Yefremovna answered her. “It is a house they painted with all sorts of things from fairy tales, so that it would be wonderful and people would bring their children to see it, just as we brought Sofiya today. You can see there a firebird on the door, and Master Grey Wolf on the chimney, and Ivan the Fool scampering over the walls, with Yelena the Bright in his arms, and Baba Yaga running after them, brandishing her spoon. And that’s a leshy, creeping in the garden, and a vila and vodyanoy and a domovoi with a red cap. And there—they’ve put a rusalka near the kitchen window.” Kseniya turned to Marya. “And Koschei the Deathless is there, too, near the cellar. You can see him, painted on the foundation stones.”

Marya put her hand over her heart.

“Isn’t it strange and marvelous, the things people will believe?” said the nursing student.

“Yes,” said Marya shakily, and stared at the house, its colors, how everyone painted there seemed to be running, running, chasing each other forever, each of them uncatchable, in a long, chained ring. Tears blurred in her eyes. Where am I painted? Was I never part of them, those tales, that magic?

“What I mean to say, of course,” said Kseniya softly, “is that I will not go down into the basement. You do not even need to ask me to promise.”

Between them, they traded silence for a long while. The sun complained of arthritis, cracking its bones against the bare linden branches. Marya wanted to have a friend again, and sometimes she felt it was so. A living friend, with red cheeks.

“Why do you want to be a nurse, Kseniya Yefremovna?”

“It is better than being a rusalka,” Kseniya said, shrugging. Marya wondered at the deliberation with which her friend dropped the word between them. “Why should I not want something better?” she went on. “Doesn’t everyone? Don’t you? The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it. Well, I do not want to be beautiful, or a woman, or anything. I want to know how men breathe. I want my daughter to be in the Young Pioneers, and grow up to be something important, like a writer or an immunologist, to grow up not even knowing what a rusalka is, because then I will know her world does not in any way resemble one in which farmers tell their sons how bad beautiful women are.”

“Sofa will be good,” said the child solemnly, and patted her own head.

It so happened that a shipment of peaches arrived from Georgia not long after that. Ivan, Marya, Kseniya, and the baby sat at the kitchen table near the brick stove, which still crackled and glowed away—for the melt had not stayed, but had given up its maidenhood to another snowstorm, and another after that. They all stared at the slightly overripe peaches, their fuzz, their green leaves still jutting out from the stems. The peaches looked like summer to each of them, like summer and sunlight and rain.

“It is because I arrested a man skimming from his workers that we have these peaches before anyone else in Leningrad,” said Ivan Nikolayevich.

“Why would they give them to you?” asked Marya Morevna, turning one over in her hands.

“Because I am good at arresting. It is an art, you know. The trick is to arrest them before they have done anything wrong. That’s the best thing for everyone.”

Marya looked at him out of the corner of her eye. What a disturbing creature a man is. “What I mean is: Even with the investigation into your affairs, they’re giving you peaches?”

Ivan’s voice rose sharply. “What investigation? Has someone been to the house?”

“Comrade Ushanka, who works with you. She asked how we met.” She had guessed he did not know. Comrade Ushanka had a secret, too, and Marya knew it, though she could not guess what it was. Like knows like.

Ivan relaxed, rolling his head over his shoulders to pop the bones. “Well, that’s a relief. You’re mistaken, Masha. There is no Ushanka in my office. Nor in any other office in the city. It is my business to know. I think your brain wants work. Perhaps you have had enough time lying about idly, hm?”

Kseniya bit into her peach, and the juice sprayed up in a sugary stream. The sound of her bite cut their conversation in two. All of them fell to the golden peaches, and soon they had slurped them up, every one. The pits lay strewn across the table like hard red bullets.

Save the one peach Marya Morevna closed up in her skirt. She brought it to Koschei in the basement, when all the house slept. She showed him her breasts and fed him one piece of peach for every lie he confessed to her.

I told you I didn’t care that you kissed the leshy.

I told you a shield lay between you and Viy.

I told you there were no rules.

I told you there was a difference between your world and mine.

I told you I couldn’t die.

And on that day, as Marya Morevna walked back up the steps into her other life, a glint of silver caught her eye. She dug in the black dust of the cellar, her fingernails pulling up chunks of the earthen floor until she had it: Svetlana Tikhonovna’s old hairbrush, boar’s bristles still stiff, silver still bright. And as she held it up in her hands, half-frozen muck crumbling from her fingers, the shadows hanging in the basement stitched themselves one to the other until old widow Likho stood there, just the same as Marya remembered, her black spine bent flat by the ceiling. She rubbed her long fingers over her knuckles and peered at Koschei with a smirk.

“Brother, girls are no good for you, you know that,” she said, her voice dragging across the floor as it always had.

“I hang here of my own will,” Koschei said. “She will release me of hers.”

“I wouldn’t,” cackled Likho. “Never, never.”

“You are meant to be elsewhere, are you not, Sister? Carrying out my program, my orders, are you not? Did I not make provisions for my absence, and were you not one of them?” Koschei’s eyes flared hatred at her; the air between them arced and bent.

“Oh, but I had to come! I had to come and watch! I can hardly think of worse luck, you know. Worse timing. Tscha! Of all the cities, Marya, of all the years! It brings tears to these old eyes. My spleen is so proud. You follow in your old teacher’s footsteps after all.”

Likho reached out her long, skeletal hand and pinched Marya’s cheek, her smile stretching all the way around her face. Marya recoiled. She did not understand. She did not want to. Her place had been invaded, her secret meant only to hold two. She wanted to crush Likho down into that black hound and kick her.

From somewhere far off, the sound of an air raid siren wound up and spooled out over the city, and the street, and the cellar.

23 A War Story Is a Black Space

Look, I am holding up my two hands, and between them is Leningrad. I am holding up my two hands and between them is a black space where Marya Morevna is not speaking. She would like to, because she thinks a story is like a treasure, and can belong to only one dragon. But I make her share; I will not let her have the whole thing. I have this power. I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead. Besides, what happened between the two hands I am holding up is squeezed between the pages of the books of the dead, which are written on my hands, because I died in that space where Marya Morevna is not speaking. And now it is all clear, and now you understand.

For storytelling, a domovaya is always better than a human because she will not try to make a miserable thing less miserable so that a boy sitting at his grandmother’s knee can nod and say, The war was very terrible, wasn’t it, Babushka? But it is all right because some people lived and went on to be good and have children. I spit on that boy because he thinks only of his own interest, which is that he should be born. Miserable means miserable. What can you do? You live through it, or you die. Living is best, but if you can’t live, well, life is like that, sometimes. So now I stop everything, and I say it is time for the dead to talk with the dead, and Zvonok has the floor, if there is a floor left to have.

For a long time nothing changed, except that Ivan the Fool and Yelena the Bright finally escaped Baba Yaga because the black house on which they were painted was hit with a shell and burned down. That is an excellent strategy for escaping her, really, and maybe the only one, if you are a Fool. But the house burned down and red clouds fell like curtains over the whole city, not from the house of fairy tales, but from the granaries, where so much bread and butter and sugar burned up that later babushkas made cakes out of the scorched earth. Everything smelled like burning grease. When the red clouds that were like curtains lifted, Leningrad began to perform something very dreadful, but no one noticed yet.

It took a whole day for the house of fairy tales to burn. People came out to take turns looking at it.

Marya Morevna did not take a turn at looking. She took a turn at staring out the window, which she is very good at. Guns make horrible sounds, like a punching in the sky, and I heard the sound of the guns go through Marya and leave her burning down, like the house. She looked out the window because she was afraid that Leningrad was going to start dying, like Buyan did, and she was right, but she was also wrong. Like I told you, nothing had changed yet, except that we could all hear the guns, all the time—first sirens, then guns, and then no sirens anymore because there were so many guns the sirens could not keep up.

The houses of Leningrad inventoried themselves on the double. They said, How long? And their larders said to their cellars, Not long.

Papers fell from the sky between snowflakes. They clogged the chimneys, and in the street young girls would pick them up and start crying, uncontrollably, like someone turned on a switch in them and jammed it so that it could never be turned off again. The papers said, Women of Leningrad, go to the baths. Put on your white dresses. Eat funeral dishes. Lie down in your coffins and prepare for death. We will turn the sky blue with bombs.

Marya never cried. There was a switch in her, too, and it was also jammed.

Ivan Nikolayevich punched his rage like dough. It rose up and he hollered all day. “Marya, you have no papers! How can I get you a ration card? What devil can you be that you have no identification? I was a fool, a fool to take you into my house. You will make a criminal of me!”

“This is my house,” said Marya Morevna quietly.

They were both wrong. It is my house. But I let them fight over it because he is a fool and she is a devil like me, and what is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?

A ration card says, This much life we have allotted you. It says, This much death we can keep from your door. But no more. It says, In Leningrad there is only so much life to go around. It says, The only thing not rationed in Leningrad is death.

But he got her a full set of papers, didn’t he? And don’t think I didn’t see the marriage certificate in the pile. The ink was still wet when he brought them home and threw them at her. Marya, when I said I would choose another for you, he was not what I meant.

“You have made me a forger,” he spat at her. “You have made me a malfeasant. Every time you eat your bread you should think, I owe this to Ivan Nikolayevich, who overlooks my wickedness.”

Marya Morevna listened to him with only one of her ears. In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake, and eat only what you can stomach, she said to me later. Look who is so wise now, I said, and she answered, To have two husbands, I must be four times as clever.

Of course I knew about the basement. Nothing can happen in the corners of my corners that I do not know about. I creep as I have always crept, through the walls, the floors, in the spaces where my comrades used to meet as we raised glasses of our best paint thinner to the Revolution, our Revolution. I saw every kiss on every floor. Some of them were good kisses. Some were so-so. I’ve seen a lot of kissing, so I am a good judge. You might think a domovaya knows only about her own house. But a city is only a lot of houses put together, so don’t be closed-minded.

For an example, Marya Morevna left the house every morning and came home exhausted every night. Kseniya went with her, and Sofiya, toddling like a furry baby pig in a coat too big for her. Ivan came home angry to the dark house with no pancakes cooking, only a bit of slimy juniper brandy in a dirty cup. But the houses all knew where the women went, and not just the women of my house. They got pails full up of whitewash, and painted over every number they could find, every address, every street sign. Leningrad had no names anymore, like an infant city who does not know what she will look like when she grows up. They did this in case the Germans came crawling in, which the Germans are good at, having lots of practice at behaving like animals. Better that they should get lost, and we should not. I approved of this. The labyrinth is, after all, a devil’s trick. Devils know only good tricks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not a rusalka anymore.

I spat to show her what I thought of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not Koschei the Deathless anymore.

I spat to show him what I thought of that.

After love, no one is what they were before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I spat to show her what I thought of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is not the secret thing. I saw that every day. The secret thing I saw only once. After the apple, when they finally let her alone, Marya went down to the basement. My Papa got skinny, too, but of course, of all of us, he couldn’t die from ugly and starving. He looked at her, and oh, if a house had ever looked at me like that, even bound up on the wall like poultry, I’d have never spoken to a human in all my days. Marya started sniffing and shaking, and her face broke up into pieces. Her shoulders fell, like when she was little and her mother was in a punishing mood. She was crying, not out of her eyes but out of her hungry bones.

Papa Koschei closed his eyes. A wound opened up on his neck just like a kiss. Redder than red. No knife, no anything. Blood dribbled out; and down in the basement, with me hiding under the staircase, Marya Morevna put her mouth on Koschei and drank like a baby, worse than a baby, her face all smeared with it. She kept on with her dry, shuddering crying the whole time.

Finally, the bread wasn’t bread at all and the butter wasn’t butter, because the bread was cottonseed cake and paper and dust, and the butter was wallpaper paste, and you still had to hold up a ration card to get a scrap of the stuff. Dust cakes, dust tarts, dust bread that didn’t even rise. Nobody had anything to burn because if you could burn it, you could eat it, and a fire does a dead man no service. So no embers for a poor domovaya, and her house also sick. Still, I thought, Tscha! Zvonok can live through this. I will tell you how we made soup in those days: Hold a ration card over a pot of boiling water for thirty minutes, so that the shadow of the card falls on the broth. Then eat it up, and don’t you dare spill a drop.

Once, Ivan Nikolayevich came home in his leather coat. The leather coat meant he had been busy arresting people. He went up to his bed and found Marya Morevna on it. Both of them were just sticks, sticks from old trees. He wrapped her up in his arms and their bones knocked together. He petted her hair like a cat. Long pieces of it came away in his hand. Ivan would not tell her what was wrong, but I knew because I could put my ear to the roof and hear the other houses say, There is meat in the Haymarket, and it is for sale. A fat old woman sells it. She wears a leather apron and a black fur coat; her cart has strange wheels, like claws. She has cutlets, dozens, dozens. For pearls she sells it, for watches, for rubles, for boots. Where did she get it all? Only a fool questions good meat.

Send a boy back to me with some, I told the domovoi I know in Maklin Prospekt.

You do not want this meat, he said to me.

I said back, Sofiya must have meat now or she will die, and this house cannot bear even one death or they will all start in on it.

So a boy arrived with two cutlets, for which I left a diamond necklace I swiped from Svetlana Tikhonovna years back. The boy didn’t like it one bit, but he took the necklace and left the meat. Kseniya Yefremovna shook her head.

I know what this is.

So do I. You’re not human. What difference does it make?

You cannot argue good sense. She fried it in a pan, and the house smelled very rich with it. Sofiya ate it all, every scrap, and paid us back with a small laugh. Fair trade, thought the both of us, and I had an ember out of it all. That was the night Ivan Nikolayevich wore his leather coat.

What could I do? Miserable means miserable.

When Sofiya died, Kseniya Yefremovna and Marya Morevna wrapped her in sheets and put her on her little yellow sled. They pulled her onto the road, and each of them left their hearts on the doorstep. Everyone else was pulling sleds, too. There were more sleds than snow. Sometimes, a wife would pull her husband to the cemetery, frozen as a pipe, and she’d die pulling him, so neither of them got where they were going, but they both did. Because of the ice nothing smelled, but everywhere stopped sleds grew mounds of snow like hair. I sat on Sofiya’s tummy as they pulled. A house makes a family, and they were mine. My last family.

Nobody talked. They breathed into their scarves and lugged and lugged. But no one was left to bury anyone else, so people just left the sleds in a pile by the cemetery gate. That’s where we left Sofiya, with Kseniya lying over her like a flower, with snow piling up on her hair. I said them a domovoi’s mass, but no one heard me because grief is louder than praying.

By the window that night, Marya Morevna said to me, I think I have finally found my home, for everyone I love is here.

Close up your head; your brain is getting loose.

Koschei is below me, and Ivan above. And out in the snow, everything has gone silver, and there is Madame Lebedeva making jelly with her lipstick, and Zemlehyed minding the linden trees, and Naganya down on the frozen river, pouring gasoline into her mouth so her trigger does not freeze. And you, and Kseniya Yefremovna, and little Sofiya. We are all together, at last.

I looked out the window where she had looked for months stitched back to back. And there in the dark glowed silver wounds in the street where another Leningrad bled through: another Neva, another Dzerzhinskaya Street, all splashed with silver. And there walked a woman with swan feathers in her hair, vanishing around a corner; and there walked a short, fat creature with dead leaves on his head; and there walked a woman like a gun. And there walked Kseniya, too, her chest stained and shimmering, holding baby Sofiya’s hand as the child jumped and tried to catch the silver balloons drifting just out of her reach.

Mamochka, she cried. So many!

In the middle of them all came walking like a kommissar a man with eyelids so long they brushed the snow out of his path, wearing a silver brocade and a silver crown. And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.

The shoulder blades of Marya Morevna touched behind her back, and the knees of Ivan Nikolayevich banged together in front of his belly. Icicles grew inside the house. Together they pulled down the wallpaper to get at the paste, and then they boiled the wallpaper to make bread. They were all mouth and bone, and their eyes slipped gears whenever they tried to meet. They ate their bread with paisley and flowers on the crust, and smeared paste on it like butter. Bread had never been bread, and butter had never been butter. They could not remember such things.

“The Germans have printed invitations to a gala ball at the Hotel Astoria,” Ivan Nikolayevich whispered, as though anyone but me might overhear him. “They will serve whole pigs, and a hundred thousand potatoes, and a cake that weighs five hundred pounds. I have seen the invitation myself. Embossed in gold ink, with a red ribbon. They say, ‘Leningrad is empty. We are only waiting for the crows to tidy things up a bit before the party.’”

I don’t believe you, said my Marya. She is so stubborn her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat. I know. I raised her, I did.

When you are hungry, a whisper is a shout. “Whore! I will let them have you, and they will roast you on a spit with their suckling pig. What do you keep in the basement?”

You promised, Ivanushka.

“Fuck your promises. You are keeping food from me down there, I know it. Devil bitch. Kulak goat-wife.”

You promised, Ivanushka.

“Promises to the devil’s woman are no promises! No court would hold me! You are hoarding food, and you put a spell on me, in Irkutsk! Why else would I want a sack like you?”

I hid behind the stove. Marriage bears few witnesses.

You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.

When you are hungry, a step is a shove. Ivan hobbled to the basement door, and, well, he was a fool. Hasn’t he always been? You can’t blame a fool for his thick head. Why else was he born, but to blunder and buffoon and once a year make a black-haired girl laugh? Look, I am holding up my two hands, and between them is the old, dear house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, and between them is Marya Morevna and her husband, mad with hunger like a cow, and between them is Koschei the Deathless looking up from the darkness. He is smiling down there, and his smile has two edges.

“Who’s down there?” Ivan said, though he knew already.

I am so thirsty, Comrade.

“Who is it?” Ivan peered down, his eyes searching for pickled eggs, for cherry preserves, for a jug of beer, for every good thing a cellar might have.

I am so hungry, Comrade.

And Ivan went down because he was a fool, and because it could not be only Koschei she kept from him. All winter he had tortured himself with dreams of the food she was hiding, and it must be there, it must, or else he was worse than a fool.

Will you not give me a little water, Ivan Nikolayevich? Koschei said.

Ivan’s dry body could not weep, so he borrowed on the tears of his future, so that Koschei could see his grief, and there could be no confusion.

“Why can’t you leave us alone? Get out, get out, old man; leave us in peace.”

I would be glad to, only I am so weak. No one should relent just because my Papa smiles.

So the fool loosened Koschei’s ropes, and gave him water from a filthy, half-frozen puddle. Marya Morevna watched it all from the top of the stairs, and her black hair hung all around her; and I was there, so I saw him roar up toward her, and I can tell you now that she looked at the two of them with crow’s eyes and said, Yes, Kostya. Take me. Take me.

And then we were left alone together, Ivan Nikolayevich and I, in the frozen, dank cellar.

I spat to show him what I thought of that.

Old Zvonok died because her house died. That’s what married means.

They’d all left us already, all of them, some more than once, and if a domovaya ever showed her tears, it wasn’t me. What else can you say? Everyone died. Kseniya Yefremovna died. Sofiya Artyomovna died. Even Ivan Nikolayevich died, by spring. Only Zvonok was left, and then not her, either. A German shell hit us and left the house on our right and the house on our left still standing. Well, that’s what happens to things you love.

I walk in the other Leningrad now. The silver one, the one with teeth. The one Marya and I saw out of the window on the coldest night of winter.

And here, in the other house on the other Dzerzhinskaya Street, Kseniya Yefremovna still makes soup out of ration-card shadows, but now it tastes thick, and marrowy, and sweet. And I drink it down with the rest of them and it runs into my mustache instead of into my mouth, but my soul is drunk and sated.