a little longer? Just a little longer.’ Isn’t that strange?”
Ushanka shows only half of her face, and that half grows very thoughtful, but says nothing.
“I saw the bird again while hunting this rabbit,” says Marya brightly, picking at the gleaming bone. “So terribly bright it could have been on fire! I think it’s a male. His feathers shine golden, and bronze, and scarlet, and blue—such flames!—and the air around him bends into oily waves. His song echoes like Georgy’s playing. A firebird, just like in the old stories. I shall catch it, Ushanka, if I have to ride all the way through the forest and come out the other side.”
“What other side?” says Ushanka, showing the other half of her face. “You’ve been listening to Josef’s silly insinuations. There is only Yaichka, and you, and I, and Sasha’s juniper-cheese, and rabbit with bread on Wednesdays.”
That afternoon, Marya Morevna goes to the well after Yaichka has shaken off the dust of the day and sees someone working the fields. The someone wears a bright hat of many colors, and cuts grain with an enormous pair of shears.
“Who is that?” she asks of her husband, just returning, his hands all bloody with the afterbirth of the new calf.
“Do not look at him, volchitsa,” says the handsome Koschei. “Let him take his share.”
Aleksandra Fedorovna—who ought to know, having five of her own—once told Marya that a woman knows it when the night passes and leaves her with a child.
“They tap you, Masha. Like a root.”
“Oh, I don’t believe you, Sasha! How can you feel such a tiny thing?”
The beautiful Aleksandra shrugged. “When you are cut, you feel it, even if the cut is tiny. Such a thing is a child, a wound within.”
When the perverse moon pries through their windows, spying round the curtains, Marya does not feel it, but her handsome husband does. Koschei Bessmertny winds his red limbs in hers, as young as young, and shatters inside her, the shards of him floating free in her body, until one, sharp-edged and cruel, lodges in her and will not be moved, stubborn thing. In the guttering stove-light he lays his head on her belly.
“And death shall have no dominion over her,” he whispers, and kisses her navel.
“What a thing to say!” Marya moves her fingers in his shaggy hair. “Someone else said that to me, once, so long ago I cannot remember. Sometimes you seem to me to be two men: my Kostya and another I cannot quite recall, all squeezed into one body.”
Koschei looks up at her. The whites of his eyes show. “Nothing wants to die,” he says faintly, and Marya Morevna does not understand, because she has seen so few dark things.
“What will we call her?” Koschei says, and smiles the best smile he has learned, so golden and hot that Marya thinks of the bird in the forest, the one that eludes her still, and turns the air to oil.
“Who?”
“Our daughter, who already knows your name.”
Koschei Bessmertny will not sleep for nine months. He gives all his sleep to his daughter. It is her due.
Does magic number among the things Yaichka possesses, along with the river without a name and the pregnant sheep? One day, the old man Grigory Yefimovich decided to settle the question once and for all. He tells all the children he was once a priest, but everyone knows there is nothing before or after Yaichka, or alongside it, or underneath it, and only stars above it, so old Grisha seems mysterious and wise to them indeed. Nevertheless, all the folk of Yaichka entertain him, for he tells wonderful stories, knows how to deliver babies, and tugs on his beard when he lies, and thus can be relied upon utterly, so long as he leaves his beard alone. “I saw a star in his hair,” whispered little Olga Nikolayevna, Aleksandra’s daughter, and she was generally believed.
To settle the question of Yaichkan magic, Grisha took Aleksandra Fedorovna, whose hair was like gold wire, to the exact place where the larch forest meets the edge of Sergei Mironovich’s medicinal garden. He stood with one boot in the wood and one boot in the village—magicians know the import of such stances, and Grisha certainly knew the import of knowing what a magician should know.
“Now, Sasha, watch me eat this mushroom with silver spots on it, which you and all your children know has a terrible poison.”
Aleksandra watched carefully. Grigory Yefimovich chewed it up. Nothing ill seemed to happen. His limbs did not seize up; his tongue did not turn purple.
“Do you see?” said Grisha.
“I see,” said Sasha.
“Now, watch me hang myself from the larch. Give me your apron to throttle myself.”
Aleksandra watched carefully. Grigory wound the apron around his neck and hung himself from the tree. Nothing ill seemed to happen. He smiled pleasantly and swung back and forth for a while. His eyeballs did not burst; he did not sputter a final confession while choking.
“Do you see?” said Grisha.
“I see,” said Sasha.
“Now, you must shoot me, for the final proof.” And the old not-really-a-priest produced a small pistol—which, if Aleksandra had thought about it, was entirely the most magical thing to happen that afternoon, as no one in Yaichka had ever produced a pistol before.
Aleksandra shot carefully. Her bullet entered his heart exactly as every bullet dreams of doing. Blood seeped out of Grisha’s shirt, which he had gotten from Galina Ivanova in exchange for a tale about a great warrior who defended a city against soldiers with faces like rats. Galina had nightmares for weeks, and called it a good trade. But then, Grigory Yefimovich smiled and showed Aleksandra that his breast was whole, with the same scraggly hairs still on it as had been before. He took the pistol back and no one ever saw it again. Sasha did not tell anyone that Grisha had ever had it, or that she herself now knew what a pistol was, and had fired it as easily as rolling out dough for vereniki.
“I will tell you the magic of Yaichka, Sasha. Death has forgotten Yaichka, and knows nothing of it.”
“Surely not. Everything dies. The cows, the sheep. Marya shoots her deer.”
“Can you remember any
Aleksandra was silent for a long while. The sky got blue and depthless. “I seem to, in my heart. In a part of my heart locked up behind the farthest, smallest room of my heart. Under that lock is a place with a dirt floor where it is always winter. There I seem to think that someone has died, and no one helped them. Then I weep so bitterly that horrible flowers grow from my tears.”
Grigory Yefimovich put his long, rough arms around Aleksandra Fedorovna, whom he had loved secretly since he was young. She knew it, of course, and because of both of them knowing a thing like that, they treated each other with a very tender kindness.
“Never mind, Sasha,” said Grisha. “It was only a trick I can do. Don’t cry.”
On Fridays, Marya Morevna goes to the fields to cut grain. In Yaichka, the grain always sighs to be cut. Even six months along, she does not shirk, but takes up a short scythe, its handle well worn by all the hands of Yaichka, all those oils, all that skin. The sun polishes the tips of the trees and turns Marya’s black hair blue. Up she raises the scythe and down again, and the blade knocks back the golden stalks, and the solitary goat bleats ecstasy as he discovers a patch of wild onion no one will scold him for devouring; and up sings the scythe and down again, and lovely little Anastasia Nikolayevna drops a stitch in her knitting, and Volchya the dapple grey deliberately throws a shoe so that Marya will have to tend to him later, because he is that sort of beast; and the grain falls in a pile, a cairn, and six mice that Yaichka does not know it possesses wash each other’s ears with pink tongues; and up she swings her blade and down she swings it low, and without knowing why, the women of Yaichka go to the exact place where the well-tilled field whose soil forgives them all meets Nadya Konstantinovna’s radishes, and they watch Marya without understanding why it is they came to watch a pregnant woman with a belly like a bow drawn back all the way, her scythe raised like a sword, slicing down again and again, and the clean sweat dampening her hair as the sun sings a little song with four lines of five words each, and the last word of the song is
