Deathless

The dark gave; Marya Morevna stepped out from behind the old stove into her kitchen. Snow sifted down off of the bricks—a shell had taken out half the roof, and flakes drifted down from splintered rafters. The rose tiles lay burst and shattered over the floor like broken dishes. Ice coated the iron pans in blue; pipes had burst and wet everything—the cabinets, the table, the chair where Sofiya used to sit. Marya’s knees nearly buckled as the memory of Sofiya cracked open inside her. The table was still set for someone to eat. Snow filled all the bowls like soup.

“Ivan?” Marya called softly. She felt as though she had not used her voice in years. How does one measure the time spent inside an egg? “Ivanushka?”

Wind answered, blowing blackly through the rooms. The house was boarded up with silence. Marya crept up the stairs, afraid to find him, a skeleton still wondering where his wife had gone. “Oh, Ivanushka, where are you?”

The roof upstairs had held, but their bed was frosted in silver, furry with ice. The linens lay wrecked in forlorn hillocks and heaps. Frozen dust speckled the bedknobs. Finally, Marya whispered, “Zvonok?”

And the domovaya tugged at Marya Morevna’s trousers. Marya looked down, her black hair spilling over her shoulder like a curious shadow. Her friend stood there, stooped almost in half, her beautiful golden hair straggled and grey, her mustache falling out, her clothes torn and tattered. She wore no shoes, her toes chilblained and sore. Zvonok’s cheeks stood out like knives; her eyes flared yellow, starveling and feral.

“He’s there,” growled Zvonok, her voice scratched and ugly with disuse. Marya knew hers sounded much the same. The domovaya pointed to the frosted bed, and Marya saw how the hillocks were shaped something like a man.

“Zvonok, what’s happened to you?”

“The house is sick, so I am sick. All the houses are sick. Everyone is dying. The winter will never end.”

Marya shut her eyes. “What year is it? How long have I been gone?”

“Nineteen forty-two. It is February. If such things still existed, it would be the end of Lent now. But of course they don’t, even though we fasted so well this year. So well we could be mistaken for pious. I think that’s funny. Isn’t it funny? Last week a man held a concert at Glinka Hall. Snow fell in through the broken roof the whole time, piling up on the oboist’s head. The air raid sirens played, too. We all listened from the roofs. Like cats. But not like cats. There are no cats left in Leningrad. Ivan said, If only we could eat violin music. I kissed his thumbnail. He said he was glad of me. Then he crawled into that bed, and I don’t know if he’s dead or not, but I will be, soon, I think. I wonder how Comrade Chainik has fared? Old Chairman Venik? I would like to think they are fat, still. I remember what it was like to be fat. Wonderful, it was. You could roll them down the hall like marbles. Those were days I wish I could eat now, but remembering is like eating, don’t you think? Gobble up the past to keep warm. I hope it was warm, where you were.”

Marya Morevna lay down on the frozen floor of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, the house on Gorokhovaya Street. Zvonok crept into the crook of her neck, near her ear, where the blood flows so close to the skin, where warmth stays when it is gone from everywhere else. She kissed her there, and held her arms wide to embrace the whole of Marya’s face.

“Where were you?” the domovaya whispered. “Where did you go?”

And then she vanished, arms outspread, melting away like vapor.

Marya stood up, her mind expecting her Yaichkan body to respond, young and full and strong. But her Leningrad body answered, creaking, wizened, brittle. She limped to the bed, not wanting to see what lay beneath the frosted covers, to pull back the blankets and find herself too late for anything, useless to both her husbands, in the end.

“Ivanushka, are you alive? Are you awake?”

From under the linens, a moan, tapering into a rattling breath, then a cough. “Leave me alone, Zvonok. Don’t, not today. Don’t pretend to be her.”

“It is me, Ivanushka, it is me. Come out; look.”

A hand rose out of the bed: blackened around the fingernails, fingers shrunken into claws with huge knuckles, grey as the frost. It could not be Ivan’s, not Ivan, always so warm, always so big. His eyes peered up at her, sunken and old, the same starveling, feral flame in them that the domovaya had. He was so thin, so thin she could not imagine how he still lived. But somehow, Marya Morevna felt that she saw him naked for the first time, the intimacy of his bones showing through his skin, his helplessness. He was beautiful, still. She felt as though she looked at him from a long way off, through a telescope, at the bottom of a well. Bounce up, she thought. Bounce up and become Ivan again.

“Oh,” he rasped, “oh.”

“I do not know if I ought to say I am sorry,” Marya said, putting her hand gingerly on his head, on his matted hair. “It seems too small a thing to say.”

“I will say it,” Ivan whispered. “I was harsh with you. You did not make me a criminal. I should not have said such a thing. In fact, when I forged our wedding certificate, I was so happy to write your name beside mine, so happy to hold in my hands evidence of us, something to carry between us, this falsified document which told the truth even while it lied. I’m sorry, Masha. I should not have said half again the things I said.”

“Hush, Ivanushka. It doesn’t matter.” It didn’t. She had said cruel things in both her marriages. She had never begrudged him his share of barbed words. Marya lifted him into her arms—he weighed so little, so little, and if her muscles were shrunken and battered, still they remembered Yaichka, still they remembered being strong. In her grey arms she wrapped her grey boy, and the snow fell outside without sound, and no one talked on the streets or played guitars, and no one came to any door looking for any girl in any window. Leningrad lay so empty, as empty as an old bed.

“Masha, do you know, I tried so hard to find you!” Ivan coughed, and Marya wiped his mouth a little, but her hand only opened up the pink sores there.

“Don’t speak, my love. Talking isn’t worth the strain.” And I cannot bear to hear how loyal you were. Do not tell me.

Ivan rasped; his throat rattled like stones in a jar. “Talking is the only thing I can do! I cannot take you in my arms, or kiss you, or make love to you as one should to a wife who has returned after a long journey. I cannot make you understand that I forgive you, that I know you loved both he and I, the way a mother can love two sons. And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough, which was my crime. After all, I took you from him to begin with, so I cannot begrudge him taking you from me—” Marya Morevna tried to protest, to absolve him or herself or both. But he looked at her with eyes leached of color and tried to lift his hand to hush her. “Oh, don’t interrupt, Masha! If I stop I shall never start again. I know I did not take you and he did not take you. I thought that for a long while, but you chose me, and then you chose him, and choosing is hard—one choice is never the end of the story. Gamayun told me this was all a story, and I had to be sure to love you, or else it would not work out as it should. He needn’t have worried: In the space of one heartbeat to another I loved you and I was lost to you, like one of those dead soldiers made of cloth. And I have had such a long time to think about it, Marya! Such a long time to lie in the basement in the ropes that held him and wish that they had held me, because that would have meant you wanted me enough to keep me secret, the way I wanted you, and kept you secret.” Ivan rested his ashen hand on her arm. It was so dry, so light. She could feel his bones, as she had once felt Koschei’s bones beneath his skin. “But do you know, after you disappeared—I had forgotten you could do that—and after they cut the rations again, and then again, I thought, Why did she stay so long? And that was comforting, because you must have stayed for me. Don’t answer. I don’t want to be corrected. But do you know, I looked for you? All over the city, over thrice nine districts, thrice nine prospekts. I asked everyone for news of you. I went to Maklin Prospekt, to Decembrists Street, where that house you liked used to stand, the one with all the paintings on it? It burned down, did you know?”

“Yes, I knew.”

“Zvonok cried when she saw it. But I went to that house and I saw bits of the paintings in the rubble: golden like a girl’s hair, like chicken legs; and red like a firebird; and green, where the coat of Ivan the Fool once was. And I laughed because of course I am Ivan the Fool, of course I am. Only a fool is so innocent as to think he can measure up to a woman’s first love, can measure up to deathless. You know, it’s like when the Tsar was killed. I think maybe Russia had two husbands, too, and one was rich and one was poor, one old and one young, and the poor husband shot the rich husband in the chest, and all his daughters, too. He was braver than I am.”

Ivan shut his eyes. His brow furrowed as though he might like to cry, but had no strength for it. “I went to