Moscow but Dreaming

KIKIMORA

The fall of communism came about when I was in the middle of my PhD in astrophysics; the steel jaws of 1990 followed close behind. My hometown, a speck on the forested expanse of Siberia, felt its hungry bite. Even Novosibirsk, where I attended graduate school, careened into the cold, joyless chaos, buckled by that wolf-year. This was when I decided to move to Moscow, trying to escape the grey limbo.

“Looking for an easy life,” they called it. I just wanted to be able to support myself; is that asking for too much? But there were no need for astrophysicists, and secretute jobs that were abundant did not appeal to me. I had to fall back on my gymnastic childhood, and started teaching aerobics to the tourists who stayed in Ukraina Hotel. There, through the gym window, I could see the river bend carving off the downtown from the rest of the city. And there I met Anya.

She was a maid with the master’s degree in psychology. We ran into each other in the locker room—I was just getting ready for class, and she was cleaning the mirrors. I noticed her because of the way she was looking at me—not sizing up competition, but simply appraising. I introduced myself, and soon we were commiserating on the impossibility of finding a job in one’s field.

We laughed at first, and then grew silent, contemplating the world in which an advanced degree was a requirement for a janitorial job. She was younger than I, but still she felt old and outdated in the scary, shifty-eyed world that was springing around us, the world with no past or future but only a slightly soiled present. Then we kissed.

I looked over her shoulder, to make sure that there was no one watching, and I saw a tall, dark-skinned man with deep green hair, who stood in the doorway. I jolted and pushed her away; she gave me a wounded look, and the stranger was gone.

“Marina?” She stared at me, puzzled and annoyed. “Sorry,” I said. “ I thought there was someone at the door.” She smiled, and a hidden secret place seemed to have opened in her eyes, letting thorough a warm glow. Like a hearth. Like home. Protected from the cold river wind and uncertainty. “When are you getting off?”

“After 6 pm class. You?”

“At eight. You can wait for me, and come over if you want.” I nodded. “Where do you live?”

“Kozhukhovo.”

It was a long trip to the suburbs, but I didn’t mind. We held hands on the subway. Anya laughed.

“What?”

“Just funny. If we were men, can you imagine the looks we would’ve got?”

“Prejudice has its place,” I murmured, sinking my face into the faux fur collar of her coat. Even the most opinionated old women did not seem to think that we were anything more than friends.

It suited me fine—Anya’s wispy hair was brushing against my forehead, and I breathed in the smell of her skin and the stillpresent aroma of mothballs from her coat. Out of the corner of my eye, half-closed in bliss, I saw the green-haired man again. He stood holding onto the overhead rail, oblivious to my attention. Everyone in the subway car either ignored or did not notice him. At first, I guessed him for a Chechen, with his dark skin and an old-style Caucasus cloak, with its ostentatious shoulder pads. But no shoulder pads swept up so abruptly and vertically; the shape of the cloak suggested parts no human body had a right to possess. And the dark hue of his skin was imparted by neither sun nor ethnicity—it was the color of tree bark, furrowed by more than age. He swayed with the car, and his dark green hair shimmered and swayed too.

It occurred to me that he was supposed to have a green beard.

At first, I could not puzzle out the source of this thought; then I realized that I had seen such a creature before. Deep within the Siberian woods, a forest spirit commonly known as a leshy. I smiled at the green-haired stranger. The thought that there was something untouched by the present made living tolerable. His moss-green eyes met mine, and a slow smile cracked the dark wood of his face. That smile made me feel like someone from home came to visit, bringing homemade preserves and letters from long-forgotten relatives.

“What are you looking at?” Anya whispered into my ear. I knew better than to point at the leshy, and just shrugged.

He got off at the next stop, and Anya’s hand snuggled under my elbow.

I was glad to find out that even a place so cold and pedestrian as Moscow in November had its own spirits. After all, it used to be a forest once, and apparently its guardian leshy had endured longer than the trees.

Anya nudged me, and withdrew her soft hand from the comforting proximity of my breast. “We’re here.”

Anya lived with her parents and a grandmother. All of them seemed quite happy to meet me, and fed us supper of stuffed peppers, followed by several liters of tea. It was a warm and homey three-room apartment, replete with a cat and a fish tank. I petted the cat who purred emphatically, and tried to ignore the kitchen-table conversation that centered on politics and inflation, like every conversation did those days. I kept glancing over to the window, where I could see the streetlamps reflected in black river water. I wondered if the granite-encased riverbank was home to rusalki.

The sound of Anya’s name brought me back to the kitchen table.

“She’s almost twenty-five,” her grandmother lamented. “Only in a time like this, how’re you supposed to find a man? All the good ones are barely making ends meet, and all the rich ones—”

She stopped, her wrinkled face expressing a great desire to spit.

“Bandits and thieves.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m twenty-seven.”

Anya’s mother nodded sympathetically, and Anya drank her tea to conceal a fit of laughter.

I never told my parents about my sexual proclivities—I didn’t want to complicate things; yet, I was mad at Anya. I felt dirty as they invited me to stay the night, promising to lay out an inflatable mattress in Anya’s room. They wouldn’t be so welcoming if they knew. I just didn’t like taking advantage of their naiveté.

Anya kicked me under the table. I caught myself, trying to straighten out my facial expression—I knew that I was giving Anya what my grandmother called a “wolf look.” Not pretty on a girl.

We waited until everyone was asleep, and giggled and made love in the dark, hushing each other and giggling more. It was still dark outside, but the quality of the darkness, the way it retreated around the streetlamps in the yard and the edges of the sky suggested that the morning was not far off. I returned to my inflatable mattress, leaving Anya to sigh in her sleep, but felt restless.

I perched on the windowsill. It started to snow, and I watched the fat snowflakes flutter through the cones of light cast by the streetlamps, and disappear into the darkness again. I was not surprised when I saw the leshy standing in one of the light cones, his hair encrusted in a translucent helm of melting snow. “What do you want?” I whispered.

His answer resounded clear in my ears, as if he were standing next to me. “Come with me, and bring her along.”

I glanced at Anya, who smiled in her sleep, the tabby cat curled up on her pillow.

“Yes, her.”

“Why?”

“Trees need water to grow.”

“What do you need me for?”

“You’re a swamp thing, a green kikimora from a Siberian bog, an in-between place that bridges wood and rivers.”

I huffed. I read enough children’s stories to know that kikimoras were nasty, ugly things. “I’m certainly not a kikimora.

Get bent.” I slid off the windowsill and lay down, my heart beating against my ribs. I thought of the fairy tales, of everything I knew about leshys. They seemed malevolent more often than not—they could fool you, twist you around, make you lose your way in a forest. Only until now I never believed the stories. I slept very little that night. My dreams were heavy, suffocating—I had no doubt that it was the leshy’s doing. I dreamt of green slime covering my body, of tree bark growing over my skin, of the tree branches sprouting from my arms and legs. Of poisonous mushrooms in my underarms.

The leshy was apparently offended by my rudeness, and did not manifest himself for a while, except in dreams. Still, I tried to make sense of his words—forest and swamp and water, of his need, of how Anya fit into it. If she were the one he wanted, why didn’t he show himself to her? Was I just an intermediary, or something greater? I could sense his presence in my dreams, deep and dark, tangled and permeated by the smell of the swamp. In my waking life, I spent all my free time with Anya, and often could not wait to get out of my class to see her sweet dimpled face, to feel her soft hand in mine. And when she did not show up for work one day, my heart ached with a premonition of disaster. I called her at home, but no one there knew where she was.

I was a mad woman then, torn by grief and remorse, furious with my failure to ward off misfortune. I looked for Anya in every crowd, on every subway station, in the windows of every building I passed. I looked for her on the granite riverbanks, but the river was already encased in sickly green ice.

I looked for her in the ghostly-pale faces of rusalki, souls of drowned girls, their mouths gaping like underwater caves, their long, loose hair streaming and floating around their faces as if lifted by slow current. I found them under the bridge the night of the winter solstice. They did not shiver in their thin garments, and their eyes were remote and starless. They held hands and danced in a circle, their bare feet insensitive to the cold of the stone bank and of ice that encrusted it.

“Have you seen her?” I begged. “Did she drown?” Their ethereal faces turned one pale cheek, then the other in a slow underwater no. “Not our sister,” came their quiet, gurgling voices. “We’ve seen no girl falling through the ice; we’ve seen no girl struggling for air; we’ve seen no girl dragged into black, silent water. We’ve seen no new sister, and we dance without her.”

I was somewhat comforted by their words. “Can you ask others?”

“Drowned puppies and alley cats haven’t seen her either.”

“Can you ask the leshy?”

They shook their heads in unison, their hair undulating like seaweeds. “Ask him yourself. You’re an in-between one, a neitherhere-nor-there—” Their voices trailed off, and they returned to their slow dance. They held hands and spun, sometimes on stone, sometimes on ice.

I stood and watched them, deaf and dumb from cold, darkness, and despair. They were long gone, and my feet grew numb, and the stars spilled over the sky like breadcrumbs on a table, when I regained my voice. I howled at the dark river, at the city nestled like an infant in the crook of its frozen elbow. I screamed for the leshy to come out, come out, wherever he was, and to give my Anya back. I knew that the bastard twisted her around, made her lose her way in the dark and the cold, to make me come for her.

No answer came, and I wandered away from the river, toward the boulevards that circled the heart of the city, studded with oversized jewels of frozen ponds, towards Alexandrovsky Garden. The streets were sleek with black ice that reflected the streetlights, as if there were another city hidden in frozen puddles. A façade of a three-story old mansion reflected there too, and its closed doors seemed open in its reflection. After a moment of hesitation, I closed my eyes and stepped into the upside-down maw of the reflected doorway.

For a moment, my foot touched the slippery solid surface of ice, and then broke through, into a faintly fluorescent, moldy air of an underground forest. Long beards of Icelandic moss hung from the rimed branches of dead spruces, and no footsteps resonated on a soft carpet of their fallen needles.

“Leshy,” I called. “Give my girl back to me.”

The wind rose and moaned and bent the treetops almost to the ground. The frozen whip of my hair lashed my face, and the hoarfrost in the air stung my eyes, narrowing them to rheumy slits.

“Come out, you bastard!”

I had no idea of where I was going in the underground dead forest, screaming into the wind. I never questioned it, but let my guts lead me as long as my legs would carry me. Soon, buckled over by the wind, I sank to my knees in deep moss by a slender birch. It creaked and moaned under the assault of the wind. Yet, its bare branches bent over and around me, forming a protective cocoon, stroking my shoulders.

“Help me,” I whispered.

The branches hugged me closer, and I felt rejuvenated and strong, as the dying tree poured the last of its life into me.

“I’m looking for a girl, as fair as your bark, as gentle as your touch. Have you seen her?”

The birch shuddered and stretched its branches against the howling storm, pointing deeper into the forest. I cringed as I heard a sharp crack of snapping wood. I thanked the birch and was on my way, plunging headlong into the solid wall of the wind.

I had no sense of direction, but the leshy was too eager to divert me: as much as he tried to confuse me, to make me lose my way, I kept turning into the wind, until I crossed a clearing and stood on the shore of a lake, its water calm despite the storm. Cattails fringed its shores, their leaves green and erect, their brown heads nodding to me as if in greeting. Yellow water lilies stood still over its mirror-clean surface; I realized how thirsty I was.

I drank on my knees, like an animal, the cool water soothing my cracked, burning lips, its water washing away the sting of the cold. I looked at the surface, waiting for it to calm down. I was expecting to see my face, but instead I saw Anya. The water caressed my fingers, and I recognized her despite her change.

A quiet fell over the world, and I could hear my labored breathing. And then, someone else’s.

I turned around.

“So you’ve found her,” the leshy said.

I nodded, and touched my fingers to the lake Anya’s surface in reassurance. “I came to take her back.”

The leshy smiled, and I noticed how much he’d aged since our last meeting. The bark of his skin seemed diseased, mottled with fungi, and the deep green of his hair was turning lichen-grey. “Take her back, eh? How are you going to accomplish that?”

I scrambled for an answer. If she were dead or unconscious, I would’ve gathered her into my arms and walked away. Were she turned to stone, I would’ve broken my back but carried her out. But she was liquid that poured over my fingers, streamed down my face, wetted my lips. “Turn her back to her human form,” I said.

He smiled still. “I wish I could do that.”

I raised my fist, furious with his smirk. “Don’t play with me, or I’ll smash your face in; I’ll burn your forest, I’ll salt the ground—”

He raised his palm. “Quiet, girl. I cannot do what you ask, threaten all you want… I am not strong enough.” He seemed embarrassed as he uttered the last words.

“Why not?”

“My forest is dying without water. I need you to bring it to the trees.”

“And then you’ll let us go?”

His steep shoulders slumped. “If that’s what you wish, kikimora.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“I can call you whatever you wish me to, but it won’t change what you are.” His eyes were black holes, bottomless in the bark of his face; deep dark caverns, home to bats and night birds. “I need a swamp to bring the water to my trees; I need creeks and puddles, moss and bogs.”

I sighed. “How do I do that?”

He gave me an apprehensive look, as if worried that I will swing at him again. “I’ll help you along. Just be what you are.”

And then I was. I unraveled and un-spun, my limbs splaying and elongating. My fingers twined with Anya’s, watery and comforting. My skin split, exposing the hummocks of sphagnum moss (were they always there?), and my veins divided and opened, overflowing with blood as clear as Anya’s. The tree roots entangled in my toes, I stretched and engulfed, fed and watered, laughed and nurtured. And Anya’s hands caressed mine, our lips met, our hearts beat as one. I felt the leshy nearby, getting stronger, feeding on us, melding with us, mud and water, blood and moss, lichen and stone.

I did not know how many days had passed, but the trees came back to life—the spruces had regrown their needles, and the birches stood surrounded by a pale halo of young greenery. The leshy, healthy and exuberant, disengaged himself from the tree roots and my mires, and stood once again in a human form next to Anya’s shore. I followed his example and deflated and creaked, putting myself back together. My skin had grown green like my hair, and mushrooms sprouted where my fingers used to be. “Turn her back,” I said. I would take care of myself later.

“As you wish.”

The water of the lake agitated and formed a pillar, still and shining like glass. Then its surface clouded, as if someone spilled milk into it, and Anya’s sweet face looked at me without reproach. She stepped onto the shore of an empty lake basin, her skin clear, her hair long and golden, flowing down her shoulders. My breath caught in my throat, and simultaneously I grew selfconscious and ashamed. She was so pretty and perfect, and I had become a nasty, ugly thing. A swamp kikimora, fit only to frighten travelers and give children nightmares.

The leshy and Anya smiled at me, unfazed.

“I can’t go back like this,” I said to the leshy. “Can you make me the way I used to be?”

“If that’s what you want.” He shrugged with pretend indifference, and looked away.

“Anya?”

She shook her head. “I’d rather stay.” Her voice lilted and sung, like a creek jumping from stone to stone. “What’s back there? What do you miss?”

I stumbled for words. There was nothing there but the cold and the wolf-year, eager to tear out every jugular. Nothing but the shifty-eyed people, quickly dismantling everything that we ever knew, everything that retained a shred of meaning. Nothing but money that no one had but everyone wanted.

“Well?” the leshy said. “Should I turn you into a girl and send you on your way?” A spark danced inside his deep tree hole eyes, as if he already knew what I was going to say.

“I’m not a girl,” I said. “I’m a kikimora.” I wrapped one arm around Anya’s soft waist, and the other around the snags of the leshy’s shoulders, becoming a deep morass between a crystal clear lake and a dark forest, an in-between, a bridge between water and land, past and future, now and forever.