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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
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.
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.
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
