Deathless

Papers fell from the sky between snowflakes. They clogged the chimneys, and in the street young girls would pick them up and start crying, uncontrollably, like someone turned on a switch in them and jammed it so that it could never be turned off again. The papers said, Women of Leningrad, go to the baths. Put on your white dresses. Eat funeral dishes. Lie down in your coffins and prepare for death. We will turn the sky blue with bombs.

Marya never cried. There was a switch in her, too, and it was also jammed.

Ivan Nikolayevich punched his rage like dough. It rose up and he hollered all day. “Marya, you have no papers! How can I get you a ration card? What devil can you be that you have no identification? I was a fool, a fool to take you into my house. You will make a criminal of me!”

“This is my house,” said Marya Morevna quietly.

They were both wrong. It is my house. But I let them fight over it because he is a fool and she is a devil like me, and what is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?

A ration card says, This much life we have allotted you. It says, This much death we can keep from your door. But no more. It says, In Leningrad there is only so much life to go around. It says, The only thing not rationed in Leningrad is death.

But he got her a full set of papers, didn’t he? And don’t think I didn’t see the marriage certificate in the pile. The ink was still wet when he brought them home and threw them at her. Marya, when I said I would choose another for you, he was not what I meant.

“You have made me a forger,” he spat at her. “You have made me a malfeasant. Every time you eat your bread you should think, I owe this to Ivan Nikolayevich, who overlooks my wickedness.”

Marya Morevna listened to him with only one of her ears. In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake, and eat only what you can stomach, she said to me later. Look who is so wise now, I said, and she answered, To have two husbands, I must be four times as clever.

Of course I knew about the basement. Nothing can happen in the corners of my corners that I do not know about. I creep as I have always crept, through the walls, the floors, in the spaces where my comrades used to meet as we raised glasses of our best paint thinner to the Revolution, our Revolution. I saw every kiss on every floor. Some of them were good kisses. Some were so-so. I’ve seen a lot of kissing, so I am a good judge. You might think a domovaya knows only about her own house. But a city is only a lot of houses put together, so don’t be closed- minded.

For an example, Marya Morevna left the house every morning and came home exhausted every night. Kseniya went with her, and Sofiya, toddling like a furry baby pig in a coat too big for her. Ivan came home angry to the dark house with no pancakes cooking, only a bit of slimy juniper brandy in a dirty cup. But the houses all knew where the women went, and not just the women of my house. They got pails full up of whitewash, and painted over every number they could find, every address, every street sign. Leningrad had no names anymore, like an infant city who does not know what she will look like when she grows up. They did this in case the Germans came crawling in, which the Germans are good at, having lots of practice at behaving like animals. Better that they should get lost, and we should not. I approved of this. The labyrinth is, after all, a devil’s trick. Devils know only good tricks.

For a while, the bread was bread and the butter was butter.

I believe that Marya Morevna saw him come first, for Marya saw as a devil sees. I heard her cry out of the left side of her mouth as she sat by the window—and all of us saw General Frost step over the Neva. All of us held our breath and snapped our fingers to keep off his eye. His shoes were straw and rags; his beard was all hard snow. He had no hat, but his skull had chilblains, and his great blue-black hands held the double chain of his dogs, December and January. How they bite, with those teeth! Old Zvonok does not make up stories to frighten you. Ask anyone, and you will be told that Russia’s greatest military man is General Frost. He whips our enemies with ice and freezes their guns in their paws and sends out his dogs. On the breast of General Frost hang more medals than icicles. Should you ever be so lonely and unlucky as to be a soldier in Russia—may some unbusy god preserve and keep you!—you may see him. Hold your left hand over your right eye, put a lump of snow in your mouth, and crouch in a trench all night without sleeping, and you may spy him wandering through the drifts, laying his hand on German heads and turning their helmets to death masks.

But, alas for us, General Frost was blinded in his youth. An oily rag he wears over his useless eyes, and the old man is just as happy to gobble up Russian souls as the Hun, as anyone else. It makes no difference to his big stomach. He blunders, the old god does, and his dogs get off the leash, yapping away into the dark.

No one could get out. Nothing could get in. Winter’s bitch dogs got hold of the ration cards, and shook them until they broke in half, and then in half again.

What does a domovaya eat, you ask? Sure as sin she doesn’t line up at the bread store for her crusts, equally divided two million ways? No. I eat ash, and embers, and the sweet, hot stuff of the stove. When everyone finally puts their sleep together, I make my ash-pies and my ember-cutlets and eat until my lips get all smeary with fire. When I was young, and only courting an apartment or two, I could not believe humans ate the fuel and not the fire. Who cares about cakes? I had no use for meat, except to keep the fire hot. But when you are old and married you learn to tolerate unbalanced foreign customs. So what I am saying is that at first it was not so bad for me. At the end of the bread there was ash enough. I thought, Tscha! Zvonok can live through this!

But still, the papers kept falling. They made drifts, like snow in the streets. Beat the Kommissars. Their mugs beg to be smashed in. Just wait till the full moon! Bayonets in the earth. Surrender. At least the Germans hire good writers, yes? But no one cried over the messages anymore. They reached up their hands to catch the papers before they fell and got wet, to use for fuel.

* * *

I had three conversations before the New Year which were all the same conversation. I will tell you about them.

The first one was with Kseniya Yefremovna, whom I could never startle, no matter how I tried. I stood on the stove bricks and got my feet warm while she fried some flour in fish oil for Sofiya. Hard to remember now, that in the beginning of it all we still had real flour, and real fish oil!

Why don’t you get out, eh, rusalka? I said to Kseniya Yefremovna. Why do you hang around like you’re one of them? Marya throws herself into the pot with these others, and who knows why crazy women do what crazy women do, but why don’t you go hop in Lake Lagoda and wait it all out?

Because it is not my lake, Comrade Zvonok, Kseniya Yefremovna said to me. I would bounce off the surface just like a skipping stone.

Then go to your lake, I said. I am smarter than all of them sealed in a jar together.

Instead of answering, Kseniya Yefremovna picked up an ember with her bare fingers. She held it up to her eye; her wet fingers popped and steamed, and then she handed it down to me. I chewed it while Sofiya chewed her pancake and the snow came down outside. The charcoal squeaked on my teeth.

I am not a rusalka anymore.

I spat to show her what I thought of that.

I am a Leningrader now. And so is Sofiya, and we will survive because of our strong backs, not because once, before the war, we were rusalki. No one is now what they were before the war.

To the furnace with her. I don’t care. What are tenants? Temporary. Might as well mourn cheese.

When General Frost had a foothold in every house, and the pipes froze like sausages, and Marya Morevna chopped a hole in the river every morning to lug water back to the house for soup—but also, secretly, for Kseniya’s and Sofiya’s hair—I marched down into the basement on account of the very witless situation going on down there. I did not like to see my Papa Koschei like that, with his moldy rope over his head and wearing three layers of Ivan Nikolayevich’s coats for warmth.

Papa, I said to my Papa, why do you not burst out of this place and take Marya Morevna with you? Even the pupils of her eyes are skin and bones. Can you not see it?

I see it, domovaya, my Papa said to me.

And do you see your brother the Tsar of Water outside, stomping on the streets, setting his dogs on old