by Neil Gaiman
Shadow and Wednesday climbed the dark stairs. The landing two stories up was half filled with black plastic garbage bags and it smelled of rotting vegetables.
“Are they gypsies?” asked Shadow.
“Zorya and her family? Not at all. They’re not Rom. They’re Russian. Slavs, I believe.”
“But she does fortune-telling.”
“Lots of people do fortune-telling. I dabble in it myself.” Wednesday was panting as they went up the final flight of stairs. “I’m out of shape.”
The landing at the top of the stairs ended in a single door painted red, with a peephole in it.
Wednesday knocked at the door. There was no response. He knocked again, louder this time.
“Okay! Okay! I heard you! I heard you!” The sound of locks being undone, of bolts being pulled, the rattle of a chain. The red door opened a crack.
“Who is it?” A man’s voice, old and cigarette-roughened.
“An old friend, Czernobog. With an associate.”
The door opened as far as the security chain would allow. Shadow could see a gray face, in the shadows, peering out at them. “What do you want, Votan?”
“Initially, simply the pleasure of your company. And I have information to share. What’s that phrase? . . . Oh yes. You may learn something to your advantage.”
The door opened all the way. The man in the dusty bathrobe was short, with iron-gray hair and craggy features. He wore gray pinstripe pants, shiny from age, and slippers. He held an unfiltered cigarette with square-tipped fingers, sucking the tip while keeping it cupped in his fist—like a convict, thought Shadow, or a soldier. He extended his left hand to Wednesday. “Welcome then, Votan.”
“They call me Wednesday these days,” he said, shaking the old man’s hand.
A narrow smile; a flash of yellow teeth. “Yes,” he said. “Very funny. And this is?”
“This is my associate. Shadow, meet Mr. Czernobog.”
“Well met,” said Czernobog. He shook Shadow’s left hand with his own. His hands were rough and callused, and the tips of his fingers were as yellow as if they had been dipped in iodine.
“How do you do, Mr. Czernobog?”
“I do old. My guts ache, and my back hurts, and I cough my chest apart every morning.”
“Why you are standing at the door?” asked a woman’s voice. Shadow looked over Czernobog’s shoulder, at the old woman standing behind him. She was smaller and frailer than her sister, but her hair was long and still golden. “I am Zorya Utrennyaya,” she said. “You must not stand there in the hall. You must go in, sit down. I will bring you coffee.”
Through the doorway into an apartment that smelled like overboiled cabbage and cat box and unfiltered foreign cigarettes, and they were ushered through a tiny hallway past several closed doors to the sitting room at the far end of the corridor, and were seated on a huge old horsehair sofa, disturbing an elderly gray cat in the process, who stretched, stood up, and walked, stiffly, to a distant part of the sofa, where he lay down, warily stared at each of them in turn, then closed one eye and went back to sleep. Czernobog sat in an armchair across from them.
Zorya Utrennyaya found an empty ashtray and placed it beside Czernobog. “How you want your coffee?” she asked her guests. “Here we take it black as night, sweet as sin.”
“That’ll be fine, ma’am,” said Shadow. He looked out of the window, at the buildings across the street.
Zorya Utrennyaya went out. Czernobog stared at her as she left. “That’s a good woman,” he said. “Not like her sisters. One of them is a harpy, the other, all she does is sleep.” He put his slippered feet up on a long, low coffee table, a chess board inset in the middle, cigarette burns and mug rings on its surface.
“Is she your wife?” asked Shadow.
“She’s nobody’s wife.” The old man sat in silence for a moment, looking down at his rough hands. “No. We are all relatives. We come over here together, long time ago.”
From the pocket of his bathrobe, Czernobog produced a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. Wednesday pulled out a narrow gold lighter and lit the old man’s cigarette. “First we come to New York,” said Czernobog. “All our countrymen go to New York. Then, we come out here, to Chicago. Everything got very bad. Even in the old country, they had nearly forgotten me. Here, I am just a bad memory. You know what I did when I got to Chicago?”
“No,” said Shadow.
“I get a job in the meat business. On the kill floor. When the steer comes up the ramp, I was a knocker. You know why we are called knockers? Is because we take the sledgehammer and we knock the cow down with it. Bam! It takes strength in the arms. Yes? Then the shackler chains the beef up, hauls it up, then they cut the throat. They drain the blood first before they cut the head off. We were the strongest, the knockers.” He pushed up the sleeve of his bathrobe, flexed his upper arm to display the muscles still visible under the old skin. “Is not just strong though. There was an art to it. To the blow. Otherwise the cow is just stunned, or angry. Then, in the fifties, they give us the bolt gun. You put it to the forehead, bam! bam! Now you think, anybody can kill. Not so.” He mimed putting a metal bolt through a cow’s head. “It still takes skill.” He smiled at the memory, displaying an iron-colored tooth.
“Don’t tell them cow-killing stories.” Zorya Utrennyaya carried in their coffee on a red wooden tray, in small brightly enameled cups. She gave them each a cup, then sat beside Czernobog.
“Zorya Vechernyaya is doing shopping,” she said. “She will be soon back.”
“We met her downstairs,” said Shadow. “She says she tells fortunes.”
“Yes,” said her sister. “In the twilight, that is the time for lies. I do not tell good lies, so I am a poor fortune-teller. And our sister, Zorya Polunochnaya, she can tell no lies at all.”
The coffee was even sweeter and stronger than Shadow had expected.
Shadow excused himself to use the bathroom—a closetlike room, hung with several brown-spotted framed photographs of men and women in stiff Victorian poses. It was early afternoon, but already the daylight was beginning to fade. He heard voices raised from down the hall. He washed his hands in icy-cold water with a sickly-smelling sliver of pink soap.
Czernobog was standing in the hall as Shadow came out.
“You bring trouble!” he was shouting. “Nothing but trouble! I will not listen! You will get out of my house!”
Wednesday was still sitting on the sofa, sipping his coffee, stroking the gray cat. Zorya Utrennyaya stood on the thin carpet, one hand nervously twining in and out of her long yellow hair.
“Is there a problem?” asked Shadow.
“He is the problem!” shouted Czernobog. “He is! You tell him that there is nothing will make me help him! I want him to go! I want him out of here! Both of you go!”
“Please,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. “Please be quiet, you wake up Zorya Polunochnaya.”
“You are like him, you want me to join his madness!” shouted Czernobog. He looked as if he was on the verge of tears. A pillar of ash tumbled from his cigarette onto the threadbare hall carpet.
Wednesday stood up, walked over to Czernobog. He rested his hand on Czernobog’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said, peaceably. “Firstly, it’s not madness. It’s the only way. Secondly, everyone will be there. You would not want to be left out, would you?”
“You know who I am,” said Czernobog. “You know what these hands have done. You want my brother, not me. And he’s gone.”
A door in the hallway opened, and a sleepy female voice said, “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong, my sister,” said Zorya Utrennyaya, “Go back to sleep.” Then she turned to Czernobog. “See? See what you do with all your shouting? You go back in there and sit down. Sit!” Czernobog looked as if he were about to protest; and then the fight went out of him. He looked frail, suddenly: frail, and lonely.
The three men went back into the shabby sitting room. There was a brown nicotine ring
around that room that ended about a foot from the ceiling, like the tide line in an old bathtub.
“It doesn’t have to be for you,” said Wednesday to Czernobog, unfazed. “If it is for your brother, it’s for you as well. That’s one place you dualistic types have it over the rest of us, eh?”
Czernobog said nothing.
“Speaking of Bielebog, have you heard anything from him?”
Czernobog shook his head. He looked up at Shadow. “Do you have a brother?”
“No,” said Shadow. “Not that I know of.”
“I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blond, very light, his eyes are blue, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair it is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair, too, I think, is gray. And you look at us, you would not know who was light, who was dark.”
“Were you close?” asked Shadow.
“Close?” asked Czernobog. “No. How could we be? We cared about such different things.”
There was a clatter from the end of the hall, and Zorya Vechernyaya came in. “Supper in one hour,” she said. Then she went out.
Czernobog sighed. “She thinks she is a good cook,” he said. “She was brought up, there were servants to cook. Now, there are no servants. There is nothing.”
“Not nothing,” said Wednesday. “Never nothing.”
“You,” said Czernobog. “I shall not listen to you.” He turned to Shadow. “Do you play checkers?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Shadow.
“Good. You shall play checkers with me,” he said, taking a wooden box of pieces from the mantlepiece and shaking them out onto the table. “I shall play black.”
Wednesday touched Shadow’s arm. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said.
“Not a problem. I want to,” said Shadow. Wednesday shrugged, and picked up an old copy of Reader’s Digest from a small pile of yellowing magazines on the windowsill.
Czernobog’s brown fingers finished arranging the pieces on the squares, and the game began.
In the days that were to come, Shadow often found himself remembering that game. Some nights he dreamed of it. His flat, round pieces were the color of old, dirty wood, nominally white. Czernobog’s were a dull, faded black. Shadow was the first to move. In his dreams, there was no conversation as they played, just the loud click as the pieces were put down, or the hiss of wood against wood as they were slid from square to adjoining square.
For the first half dozen moves each of the men slipped pieces out onto the board, into the center, leaving the back rows untouched. There were pauses between the moves, long, chesslike pauses, while each man watched, and thought.
Shadow had played checkers in prison: it passed the time. He had played chess, too, but he was not temperamentally suited to planning ahead. He preferred picking the perfect move for the moment. You could win in checkers like that, sometimes.
There was a click as Czernobog picked up a black piece and jumped it over one of Shadow’s white pieces. The old man picked up Shadow’s white piece and put it on the table at the side of the board.
“First blood. You have lost,” said Czernobog. “The game is done.”
“No,” said Shadow. “Game’s got a long way to go yet.”
“Then would you care for a wager? A little side bet, to make it more interesting?”
“No,” said Wednesday, without looking up from a “Humor in Uniform” column. “He wouldn’t.”
“I am not playing with you, old man. I play with him. So, you want to bet on the game, Mister Shadow?”
“What were you two arguing about, before?” asked Shadow.
Czernobog raised a craggy eyebrow. “Your master wants me to come with him. To help him with his nonsense. I would rather die.”
“You want to bet? Okay. If I win, you come with us.”
The old man pursed his lips. “Perhaps,” he said. “But only if you take my forfeit, when you lose.”
“And that would be?”
There was no change in Czernobog’s expression. “If I win, I get to knock your brains out. With the sledgehammer. First you go down on your knees. Then I hit you a blow with it, so you don’t get up again.” Shadow looked at the man’s old face, trying to read him. He was not joking, Shadow was certain of that: there was a hunger there for something, for pain, or death, or retribution.
Wednesday closed the Reader’s Digest. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “I was wrong to come here. Shadow, we’re leaving.” The gray cat, disturbed, got to its feet and stepped onto the table beside the checkers game. It stared at the pieces, then leapt down onto the floor and, tail held high, it stalked from the room.
“No,” said Shadow. He was not scared of dying. After all, it was not as if he had anything to live for. “It’s fine. I accept. If you win the game, you get the chance to knock my brains out with one blow of your sledgehammer,” and he moved his next white piece to the adjoining square on the edge of the board.
Nothing more was said, but Wednesday did not pick up his Reader’s Digest again. He watched the game with his glass eye and his true eye, with an expression that betrayed nothing.
Czernobog took another of Shadow’s pieces. Shadow took two of Czernobog’s. From the corridor came the smell of unfamiliar foods cooking. While not all of the smells were appetizing, Shadow realized suddenly how hungry he was.
The two men moved their pieces, black and white, turn and turnabout. A flurry of pieces taken, a blossoming of two-piece-high kings: no longer forced to move only forward on the board, a sideways slip at a time, the kings could move forward or back, which made them doubly dangerous. They had reached the farthest row, and could go where they wanted. Czernobog had three kings, Shadow had two.
Czernobog moved one of his kings around the board, eliminating Shadow’s remaining pieces, while using the other two kings to keep Shadow’s kings pinned down.
And then Czernobog made a fourth king, and returned down the board to Shadow’s two kings, and, unsmiling, took them both. And that was that.
“So,” said Czernobog. “I get to knock out your brains. And you will go on your knees willingly. Is good.” He reached out an old hand, and patted Shadow’s arm with it.
“We’ve still got time before dinner’s ready,” said Shadow. “You want another game? Same terms?”
Czernobog lit another cigarette, from a kitchen box of matches. “How can it be same terms? You want I should kill you twice?”
“Right now, you have one blow, that’s all. You told me yourself that it’s not just strength, it’s skill too. This way, if you win this game, you get two blows to my head.”
Czernobog glowered. “One blow, is all it takes, one blow. That is the art.” He patted his upper right arm, where the muscles were, with his left, scattering gray ash from the cigarette in his left hand.
“It’s been a long time. If you’ve lost your skill you might simply bruise me. How long has it been since you swung a killing hammer in the stockyards? Thirty years? Forty?”
Czernobog said nothing. His closed mouth was a gray slash across his face. He tapped his fingers on the wooden table, drumming out a rhythm with them. Then he pushed the twenty-four checkers back to their home squares on the board.
“Play,” he said. “Again, you are light. I am dark.”
Shadow pushed his first piece out. Czernobog pushed one of his own pieces forward. And it occurred to Shadow that Czernobog was going to try to play the same game again, the one that he had just won, that this would be his limitation.
This time Shadow played recklessly. He snatched tiny opportunities, moved without thinking, without a pause to consider. And this time, as he played, Shadow smiled; and whenever Czernobog moved a piece, Shadow smiled wider.
Soon, Czernobog was slamming his pieces down as he moved them, banging them down on the wooden tabl
e so hard that the remaining pieces shivered on their black squares.
“There,” said Czernobog, taking one of Shadow’s men with a crash, slamming the black piece down. “There. What do you say to that?”
Shadow said nothing: he simply smiled, and jumped the piece that Czernobog had put down, and another, and another, and a fourth, clearing the center of the board of black pieces. He took a white piece from the pile beside the board and kinged his man.
After that, it was just a mopping-up exercise: another handful of moves, and the game was done.
Shadow said, “Best of three?”
Czernobog simply stared at him, his gray eyes like points of steel. And then he laughed, clapped his hands on Shadow’s shoulders. “I like you!” he exclaimed. “You have balls.”
Then Zorya Utrennyaya put her head around the door to tell them that dinner was ready, and they should clear their game away and put the tablecloth down on the table.
“We have no dining room,” she said, “I am sorry. We eat in here.”
Serving dishes were placed on the table. Each of the diners was given a small painted tray on which was some tarnished cutlery, to hold on his or her lap.
Zorya Vechernyaya took five wooden bowls and placed an unpeeled boiled potato in each, then ladled in a healthy serving of a ferociously crimson borscht. She plopped a spoonful of white sour cream in, and handed the bowls to each of them.
“I thought there were six of us,” said Shadow.
“Zorya Polunochnaya is still asleep,” said Zorya Vechernyaya. “We keep her food in the refrigerator. When she wakes, she will eat.”
The borscht was vinegary, and tasted like pickled beets. The boiled potato was mealy.
The next course was a leathery pot roast, accompanied by greens of some description—although they had been boiled so long and so thoroughly that they were no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, greens, and were well on their way to becoming browns.
Then there were cabbage leaves stuffed with ground meat and rice, cabbage leaves of such a toughness that they were almost impossible to cut without spattering ground meat and rice all over the carpet. Shadow pushed his around his plate.