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 naivete.
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 facade 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.
