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: W
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
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.
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 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.”
“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
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?”
“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.”
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?”
