“I am not finished, Comrade Morevna!”
“Now, now, Ushanochka, it’s almost lunch, and nothing is so important it can interfere with lunch!”
Ushanka stopped spluttering. She put down her pen and pad. She folded her hands over them and grinned down wolfishly.
“Yes, Comrade Morevna,” she whispered. “It is fun.” And she walked calmly to the door, her hand steady and sure on the knob.
When the woman had gone, Marya put her hand to her throat, her heart hammering horribly, sweat prickling in the fine hair of her temples. She watched Ushanka go, down the long, thin street. A loose thread dangled from the hem of her skirt, catching the sunlight.
22
Each of Them Uncatchable
Marya Morevna carried her secret like a child. Her heart grew fat with it, for secrets are the favorite food of the heart. Her life bent in half, and the seam of her life was the floor of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, separating her world into upstairs and downstairs, into day and night, into Ivan and Koschei, into gold and bone.
“I swear March has come three times already this year, Kseniya Yefremovna,” she said in the morning, putting on her kettle, watching her tea disperse in the water like paint, hushing Sofiya, slicing sausage into a pan. Marya put her hand over her heart, to keep the secret in. Kseniya laughed and said the snow loved Leningrad too well to ever let it go before June. They talked like two young women with young women’s cares, and little Sofiya banged a wooden spoon on the table, hollering
When Kseniya went to classes, Marya Morevna would take up her iron keys and open the door to the basement. Her secret would swirl up toward her out of the dark, and her heart would lead her down.
“You look older today,” she whispered, and pressed her whole body to that of Koschei the Deathless, bound to the wall.
“I have always been old. It is only that you want to see my oldness now.”
“If I kissed you, would you become young again?”
“I will always be old.”
And the kisses she had of Koschei in the dank, moldering cellar were the sweetest kisses of her life, so sweet her teeth hurt. She lay against him, or struck him with her fists and accused him of taking her girlhood, or took his body as she pleased. Sometimes, when she lifted her hands against him, he smiled so beatifically she thought he had died. But his excitement promised that he had not, and where his seed spilled on the cellar floor, strange blue plants grew. When they opened into flowers, dust trickled out, and the flowers died again. When she questioned this, and why sometimes he had wrinkles now, and sharp teeth, and long, protruding bones, Koschei the Deathless answered, “When do you feel most alive, Marya, but when you are closest to death? That is where I live. That is what my body is made of.”
And she rested her head on his chest, so that her long black hair covered his nakedness like a cassock. She whispered, “I think we’re finally married, you and I.”
When Ivan returned from his work, he, too, often looked older. He ate his cutlets and bread silently, with a sullen kind of savagery, and with a sullen kind of savagery he wrapped Marya up in his body, and kissed all of the skin she had, and cursed her for not having more. These kisses, too, were sweet, so sweet her head spun, and she hurtled between them like a trolley car, up and down, up and down. Marya Morevna carried her smile in her pocket, close to her skin, so no one could steal it. In her mind she pored over her secret, her hoard, as though it were gold. If she went to the market, she sped home to unbutton her winter coat and her blouse and press her breasts to Koschei’s lips in the cellar. If Ivan was delayed, she paced and stomped, so that he would hear her pacing and run home to her—but also so Koschei below would know whom she waited for. In those days, of every meat she ate only the tenderest parts.
“Do you like it, Kostya? Hanging here, in the dark, waiting for me?” she asked Koschei the Deathless one day as the square of light from the one tiny cellar window traveled slowly across the floor.
“Yes,” Koschei whispered, his eyes rolling back as she kissed his throat and stroked his chest like a favorite cat. “It is new.”
“Losing the war, that’s new, too, isn’t it?”
“Everything is new, volchitsa. There was a revolution, or hadn’t you heard?”
To Ivan, she gave exactly seventy kisses each night, and no two kisses the same. She said to him, “Do you remember where I lived before? That we were at war? That I was a soldier?”
Ivan yawned. “All that was so long ago, Mashenka. Like a dream. In fact, some days, I think it was a dream. I’m amazed you remember it at all.”
“I can’t forget things. They stick to me.”
“And what is sticking to you tonight?”
“If there is war here, I think the war there will end. The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.”
Ivan turned on his side beside her, the long, broad lines of him leonine and sated. “I have told you. The war is just so much foreign peacockery. German business. It’s nothing to do with us.”
In April, the melt held for an entire week. Festivals hummed in the Haymarket, and Kseniya Yefremovna insisted on taking the baby, and Marya, too, to see the balloons.
“Mamochka!” cried Sofiya. “So many!” And she clutched at the sky with her little hands.
As the spring sun wheezed and panted in the sky, they strolled back down the boulevards, each of the women with fried dumplings overflowing with bloody cherries in hand.
“What is that?” said Marya Morevna suddenly. She meant the black house on Decembrists Street that rose up between two everyday apartment buildings.
Kseniya Yefremovna answered her. “It is a house they painted with all sorts of things from fairy tales, so that it would be wonderful and people would bring their children to see it, just as we brought Sofiya today. You can see there a firebird on the door, and Master Grey Wolf on the chimney, and Ivan the Fool scampering over the walls, with Yelena the Bright in his arms, and Baba Yaga running after them, brandishing her spoon. And that’s a leshy, creeping in the garden, and a vila and vodyanoy and a domovoi with a red cap. And there—they’ve put a rusalka near the kitchen window.” Kseniya turned to Marya. “And Koschei the Deathless is there, too, near the cellar. You can see him, painted on the foundation stones.”
Marya put her hand over her heart.
“Isn’t it strange and marvelous, the things people will believe?” said the nursing student.
“Yes,” said Marya shakily, and stared at the house, its colors, how everyone painted there seemed to be running, running, chasing each other forever, each of them uncatchable, in a long, chained ring. Tears blurred in her eyes.
“What I mean to say, of course,” said Kseniya softly, “is that I will not go down into the basement. You do not even need to ask me to promise.”
Between them, they traded silence for a long while. The sun complained of arthritis, cracking its bones against the bare linden branches. Marya wanted to have a friend again, and sometimes she felt it was so. A living friend, with red cheeks.
“Why do you want to be a nurse, Kseniya Yefremovna?”
“It is better than being a rusalka,” Kseniya said, shrugging. Marya wondered at the deliberation with which her friend dropped the word between them. “Why should I not want something better?” she went on. “Doesn’t everyone? Don’t you? The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a
