Deathless

silver moment no larger than the prick of a pin. He lifts his eyelids with one arm to see Marya Morevna one last time, lifting them over his daughter’s shoulders; and beneath the lids and lashes there is only light, more and endless light, silver as water, pouring out of him; and suddenly they are both gone and there is a bird in the room, a bird both like and unlike Marya’s firebird; and Marya’s belly is flat and firm as though she were never full of daughter, and she is not in bed, but standing in a corner of her house in Yaichka, in the dark, and all is grey and cold except the bird, the bird staring at her with a human face.

“Sit down, Marya Morevna,” says the bird, and his voice is like Georgy’s gusli. “I am going to tell you everything that ever happened to you. Come on, then, find your knees.”

Marya sits without knowing if a chair will catch her. But of course one does; this is Yaichka, where she cannot fall. Her face thins and hollows even as she stares at the bird, his feathers of indigo, fuchsia, and nine shades of gold, so bright in the freezing black house, so bright beside her drained body.

“Do you know where you are, Mashenka?” The bird cocks his head, his exquisitely beautiful face tender, his sorrowful eyes like an icon.

Marya Morevna stares dully out the window. The grass there freezes slightly at the tips of the blades.

“Do you remember when Koschei gave you his egg? How black it was, how silver?”

Marya Morevna puts her head in her hands. Her hair shrivels up. Her tears freeze slightly, falling to the floor with tiny shatterings.

The Tsar of Birds shakes his coppery green chest feathers. Beneath his wings human arms reach out to her, their fingers slender, perfect, soft as down. He lifts her cheeks up and kisses her, his mouth the color of blood, hers the color of ash, and in his kiss her gentle tears become harsh sobs, her whole body racked with them, her bones stretching to let more darkness in. Her lips peel back from her chattering teeth, and even they grieve, but still he kisses her, kisses her until she is screaming.

“I remember, I remember,” Marya weeps, and Alkonost wraps his flawless arms around her, and his turquoise-and-golden wings around them both. In the dark, she disappears into his iridescent embrace.

“I laid that egg, Masha, poor child. Every egg must be laid; otherwise they cannot live. I laid Koschei’s egg long ago, far away, up high in the air, and when we saw what was in it we swore to each other never to open it again. But brothers are built for breaking promises. Do you know what was in it?”

“His death.”

Alkonost strokes her hair with his human hand. “Well, yes, obviously. But an egg has a rooster and a hen both. The way a child has her mother’s impressive nose, her father’s sloping eyes; the way you could spend your whole life watching a person, picking out the parts of her which owe to her mother, the parts which are copied from her father. Our egg had a death from him, a beautiful death, compact, perfect, terrible. From me it had Yaichka. You have lived all this time within my egg, Marya, within my world. Oh, I know! How can you believe me? So many people, so many seasons, and the forest, and the firebird flashing between the birches! Even I did not understand it at first. I am a bird of prophecy, but no future I have ever seen contains Yaichka, hanging in it like a jewel. The trouble with prophecy is that it is alive. Like a small bear. It can get angry, frustrated, hungry. It can lick and bite and claw; it can be dear; it can be vicious. No one prophesies. You can only pursue prophecy. So perhaps my little bear was playing a trick on me, yes? I pored over this egg long after my brother left me to pursue war and girls, which are his particular obsessions. I pored over it and tried to understand what Koschei and I had made together. Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.”

The Tsar of Birds kisses Marya’s forehead, clucks over her like a mother.

“You told him to take you away, do you remember?”

Inside her heart, Leningrad opens up from a single, almost vanished point, growing bigger and colder and whiter, and a hunger begins in Marya, a hunger barely remembered, that chews at her like a worm and will not be satisfied. She groans against Alkonost, a groan so heavy, like iron crumpling. The warmth of his heart radiates out like a star in her arms.

“Yes, that is the sound of remembering,” sighs Alkonost, and his plumes flush violet. “Koschei brought you to me. You were so near death that ghosts crowded around you, weeping silver tears, waiting for you with such smiles. You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews. Sometimes, when a person has starved nearly to nothing, feeding them will hurt them worse than starving did, and push them the rest of the way over into dead. My brother wanted to show you his houses again, and feed you sweet things, and put into your ashen mouth a slice of thick bread with roe shining on it like rubies. He wanted to sink you in steaming water, and brush your hair, and make you well. But he could not. You were too far gone. So instead he and I held you between us and I fed you, I fed you like a chick. I chewed up clouds and starlight and the rind of the moon and vomited them back into you, the most wholesome food we have known since the youth of the world—it could not hurt you, not ever. And you opened your eyes. And I, more fool me, nuzzled you as I would a chick, and whispered nonsense in your ear, as chicks love to hear: Allee, allai! I should have known, but the little bear of prophecy was wicked that day. I spoke, and my speaking swept everything from your heart, and you vanished like a record skipping, and where you had been was the egg. The ghosts wailed for the loss of you, and my brother wailed, too. With his nails he clawed open the egg to climb after you, and I was suddenly alone in my nest with all abandoning me. And I understood, like revelation, like death. The place in the egg, Yaichka, is a very elaborate place, a place to hide a death from its owner, and also to lead him to it. It is a perfect world, a world which could not survive outside the jeweled egg of Alkonost and Koschei, no matter how many permutations of this story the world might cycle through. (For of course you know the world tries on this story over and over, trying to make it work out differently, trying to make it perfect as an egg.) The world that is left behind when you forget what sorrow looks like, and death, too. A prophetic world that can never come true.”

The Tsar of Birds wipes Marya’s tears, but more replace them, and his feathers darken with salt.

“Mashenka, his death was hidden in the depths of Yaichka, and you were the path to it, as life is always the path to death. Here, he could be yours, he could be whole, both Koschei and Ivan, devil and man, powerful and weak, dark and gold. You could be the girl you might have been, if you had never seen the birds. If you had never had your scarf stolen. And if he did not want to die, all he had to do was never touch you once, never get on you the child he cannot have in the real world, for he is the Tsar of Life, and death always looks like a child—the end and only purpose of an animal body. But of course it ended as it always ends. Life is like that. Who in a perfect world does not demand their lover, forever delighted? Oh, Marya Morevna! Do you know how the church-folk call me, me and my daughter Gamayun, when they paint us on their ceilings? They call us archangels, and say that we live in heaven, where no vine of sorrow or memory grows. That is where I sent you, not to heaven—tscha! I know nothing of that place. But to a place like the ceiling of a church.”

“Why didn’t he take me out again, to Buyan, where he could still be deathless?”

Alkonost sighed, and his sigh moved the strands of her hair like a winter wind. “Buyan is gone, Marya. Didn’t you know? The war is over.”

“Is that why the iron key bleeds?” Marya whispered, hiding her face in his feathers. If only she could stay there in his wings and forget again. Again and again.

“No, child. Those are the keys to your own house, and they bleed because in that house Ivan is dying, and he is alone.”

28 I Saw a Rook in the Ruins

Marya Morevna spun like a spool; she had the peculiar feeling of a huge hand pressing down on the crown of her skull, of her ribs being squeezed as they had so long ago, when a domovoi showed her the world behind the stove. She felt herself shrink down, fold up, all the golden light of Yaichka going out within her like luchina, the lit coal at the tip of a pine needle when no candle can be found. Her legs sucked in again, skinnier than branches; her arms hung down weak and light; her tongue so thirsty, so terribly thirsty and thick in her mouth. And she feared she would never be big again, never full, never warm. She hung in the dark like that, small, skinny, ragged. She put her shoulder to the dark, pushing, pushing, pushing as she had when Koschei’s death had been born.

Mama, the light!