Deathless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Master Grey Wolf serves her very well.

There, in her mortar, sweeping beneath the skies,

the demon Baba Yaga flies.

There Tsar Koschei,

he wastes away,

poring over his pale gold.

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

Bolstered by her comrade Pushkin, who surely understood her, Marya broke her usual rapt classroom silence.