by Nick Mamatas
And my mother put her arms around his neck and whispered his name over and over into the collar of his shirt: Yefrem, Yefrem. She watched a moth land on his black woolen coat and rub its slender brown legs together, and she winced as her body opened for the first time. She watched the moth until the pain went away, and I suppose she thought then that she would be happy enough in a house built of Yefrem and his wool and his shirts, and his larches and his light.
But when she came to his school and put her hands over her belly, when she told him under a gray sky and droning bronze bells that she was already three months along, and would he see about a priest so that her child might have a name, he just smiled thinly and told her that he did not want a house built of Vodzimira and her water and her stomach, that he wanted only a house of God and some few angels with feet of glass, and that she was not to come to his school any longer. He did not want to be suspected of interfering with local girls.
My mother was alone, and her despair walked alongside her like a little black-haired girl with gleaming shoes. She could not tell her father or her own mother, she could not tell her brothers. She could think of no one she could tell who would love her still when the telling was done. So she went into the forest again, into the larches and the birches and the moths and the light, and in a little lake which reflected bare branches, she drowned herself without another word to anyone.
I swallowed and continued hoarsely. “When my mother opened her eyes again, it was very dark, and there were stars in the sky like drops of rain, and she saw them from under the water of the little lake. She was in the lake and the lake was in her and her fingers spread out under the water until there was nothing but the water and her, spanning shore to shore, and she moved in it, in herself, like a little tide. She had me there, under the slow ripples, in the dark, and the silver fish were her midwives.”
I twisted the ends of my hair. A little water seeped out onto my knuckles.
Artyom looked at me very seriously. “You’re talking about rusalka.”
I shrugged, not meeting his gaze. “She didn’t expect it. She certainly didn’t think her child would go into the lake with her. When I was born, I swam as happily as a little turtle, and breathed the water, and as if by instinct beckoned wandering men with tiny, impish fingers. But she didn’t want that for me. She didn’t even want it for herself—she pressed her instinct down in her viciously, like a stone crushing a bird’s skull. She brought me to the city, and she worked in laundries, her hands deep in soapy water every day, so that I would have something other than a lonely lake and skeletons.” I picked at the threads of the mattress, refusing to look up, to see his disbelief. “But we had to stay wet, you know. It is hard in the city, there are so many things to dry you out. Especially at night, with the cold wind blowing across your scalp, through the holes in the walls. And even in the summer, the pillow drinks up your hair.”
Artyom looked at me with pale green eyes, the color of lichen in the high mountains, and I broke from his gaze. He scratched his head and laughed a little. I did not laugh.
“My mother died when I was very young, you know. I have thought about it many times, since. And I think that, after awhile, she was just so tired, so tired, and a person, even a rusalka, can only wake herself up so many times before she only wants to sleep, sleep a little while longer, before she is just so tired that one day she forgets to wake up and her hair dries out and her little girl finds her with brown hair instead of black, and no amount of water will wake her up anymore.”
My hands were pale and shaking as dead grass. I tried to pull away from him and draw my knees up to my chest—of course he did not believe me, how could I have thought he might? But Artyom took me in his arms and shushed me and stroked my head and told me to hush, of course he would remember to wake me, his poor love, he would wet my hair if I wanted him to, it was nothing, hush, now.
“Call me rybka, when you wake me,” I whispered.
“You are not a rusalka, Kseniya Yefremovna.”
“Nevertheless.”
The frost was thick as fur on the windows when he kissed me awake in the hour-heavy dark, a steaming basin in his hands.
III: By the Shore, in Love
It took exactly seventeen nights, with Artyom constant with his kettle and basin as a nun at prayer over her pale candles, before I slept easily in his arms, deeper than waves.
On the eighteenth night my breath was quick as a darting mayfly on his cheek, and he reached for me as men will do—he reached for me and I was there, dark, new-soaked hair sticking to my breasts, rivulets of water trickling over my stomach. I smiled in the dark, and his face was so kind above me, kind and soft and needful. He closed his eyes—I could see at their edges gentle creases which would one day be a grandfather’s wrinkles. When our lips parted he was shaking, his lip shuddering as though he had just touched a Madonna carved from ice, and I think of all the things I remember about Artyom, it is that little shaking that I recall most clearly, most often.
I was a virgin. Under the shadows of St. Isaac’s and a moon-spattered light like blueberries strewn on the grass I moved over him with more valor than I felt—but one of us had to be brave. He guided me, but his motions were so small and afraid, as though, after all this time, he could not quite understand or believe in what was happening. I felt as though I was an old door, stuck into my frame, and some sun-beaten shoulder jarring me open, smashing against the dusty wood. It hurt, the widening of my bones, the rearrangement of my body, ascending and descending anatomies, sliding aside and aligning into a new thing. Of course it hurt. But there was no blood and I kissed his eyebrows instead of crying. My hair hung around his face like storm-drenched curtains, casting long shadows on his cheekbones.
“Ksyusha,” he said to me, tender and gentle, without mockery, “Ksyusha, I will never forget how the light looks on your stomach in this moment, the light through your hair and the frozen windows. It looks like water, as though you are a little brook into which I am always falling, always falling.”
The bars of the window cut my chest into quarters. He arched his back. I clamped his waist between my thighs. These things are not important—no one act of love is different much in its parts from any other, really. What is important is this: I did not know. I bent over him, meaning to kiss, only meaning to kiss—and I did not know what would happen, I swear it.
The lake came out of me, shuddering and splashing—my mouth opened like a sluice-gate, and a flood of water came shrieking from me, more water than I had ever known, strung with weeds and the skeletons of fish and little stones like sandy jewels.
It tasted like blood.
I choked, my body seized, thrashing rapture-violent, and it gushed harder, streaming from my lips, my hair, my fingertips, my eyes, my eyes, my eyes wept a deluge onto the thin little body of Artyom. The windows caught the jets and drops froze there, hard knots of ice. I screamed and all that came from my throat was more water, more and more and more.
His legs jerked awkwardly and I clutched at him, trying to clear the water and the green stems from his mouth, but already he convulsed under me, spluttering and spitting, reaching out for me from under the growing pool that was our bed, the bubbles of his breath popping in the blue—the bed was a basin and the water steamed and I wet his hair in it, but I did not mean to, I could not close my mouth against it, I could not stop it, I could not move away from him and it came and came and his bones beneath me racked themselves in the mire, the whites of his eyes rolled, and I am sorry, Artyom, I did not know, my mother did not tell me, she told me only to live as best I could, she did not say we drag the lake with us, even into the city, drag it behind us, a drowning shadow shot with green.
I would like to remember that he called out to me, that he called out in faith that I could deliver him, and if I try, I can almost manage it, his voice in my ear like an echo:
“Ksyusha!”
But I do not think he did, I think he only gurgled and gasped and coughed and died. I think the strangl
ing weeds just passed over his teeth.
He never tried to push me off of him, he never tried to sit up. His face became still. His lips did not shake. His skin was pale and purpled. The water rippled over his thin little beard as it slowly, slowly as spring thaw, seeped into the mattress and disappeared.
The snow murmured against the glass.
IV: Shell Into Snail
Rybka, you have to wake up.
She rubs her eyes with little pink fingers and turns away from me, towards the wall.
Rybka, I’m sorry, you have to wake up.
She yawns, stretches her legs, and wriggles sleepily towards the edge of the bed. I am waiting, kneeling on the floor with our copper kettle and a glass bowl. I am her mother, I understand the shock of waking, the water is always warm. She stares up through the window-glass at the stars like salt on the skin of a black fish as I pour it over her scalp, clear and clean. I comb it through every strand—her hair is so soft, like leaves. Afterwards, we lie together in the dark, my body curving around hers like a shell onto its snail, our wet hair curling slowly around each other. I sing her back to sleep, and my voice echoes off of the walls and windows, where there is frost and bare branches scraping:
Bayu, bayushki bayu
Ne lozhisya na krayu
Pridet serenkiy volchok
Y ukusit za bochek
Her hair is yellowy-brown under the wet, but damp enough to seem always black, like mine. Her eyes are so green it hurts, sometimes, to look at them, like looking at the sun. She swims very well for her age, and asks always to be taken to the mountains for the holidays. She is too little for coffee, but sneaks sips when I am not looking—she says it tastes like wet earth.
There is money for coffee, and kettles, and birds with browned, sizzling skin. We can see a bright silver scrap of the Neva through our windows, and the gold lights of the Liteyny Bridge. A woman who can set a bone is never hungry. I wash my hands more than anyone on my ward—twelve times a day I thrust my skin under water and breathe relief.
I taught her before she could read how to braid her hair very tightly.
In the morning I will call her Sofiya and put a little red cup full of blueberries floating in cream in front of her, and she will tell me that after the kettle, she dreamed again of the man with the thin little beard and the big nose who sits on the side of a lake and shares his lunch with her. He has larch leaves in his lap, she will say, and he tells her she is pretty, and he calls her rybka, too. His beard prickles her cheek when he holds her. I will pull my coffee away from her creeping fingers and smile as well as I am able. She will eat her blueberries slowly, savoring them, removing the purple skin with her tongue before chewing the greenish fruit. I will draw us a bath.
But now, under the stars pricking the window-frost like sewing needles, I hold her against me, her wet eyelashes sticking together, her little breath quick and even. I decide I will take her to the mountains. I decide I will not.
Rybka, poor darling, I’m sorry, go back to sleep.
I wind her hair around my fingers; little drops like tears squeeze out, roll over my knuckles.
We are as happy as we may be, as happy as winters with ice on the stairs and coats which seem to always need patching and wet hair that freezes against our shoulders and the memory of still eyelids under water may leave us.
I am not tired yet.
Catherynne Valente lives in Ohio. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Fantastic Metropolis, The Women’s Arts Network, NYC Big City Lit, Jabberwocky, Fantasy Magazine, Electric Velocipede, Cabinet des Fees, and Star*Line, and has been featured in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #18. Her novels include The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass Cutting Sword, and The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden.
THE OTHER AMAZON
Jenny Davidson
I like a bricks-and-mortar bookstore as much as the next person—don’t even ask me how much I spent last week at Porter Square Books—but I’ve got an Amazon habit like you wouldn’t believe. It’s true that I’ve held out against the lure of one-click ordering. I even practice a stringent routine of self-editing: I fling things into the shopping cart, leave them there for a week or two and then go back and dump as many as I can (“save for later” the happy compromise between purchase and deletion) before taking the fatal step of typing in my password and navigating my way to further credit-card debt. At the end I almost always choose super-saver shipping. It makes me feel economical, and also my apartment is already so full of books that the extra waiting-time doesn’t make much difference; two-day shipping gives my Protestant soul the burn of indulgence, while the overnight charges ruin all my pleasure in a package whose prompt arrival becomes the stomach-turning reproach to my own shameful extravagance.
There are exceptions, of course, books I want so badly that I’ll pay any amount of money to get them in my hands as soon as I can. These painful precipitants of expensive longing include books released in the United Kingdom before they appear in the United States (if, that is, they are published here at all). International shipping charges are extortionate, but I simply had to have Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel the instant it came out in England. Other Amazon UK sprees have included the intelligent and vaguely Joan Aikenesque romances of Victoria Clayton, who when she was a teenager in the early 1970s published two delightful children’s books (The Winter of Enchantment and The House Called Hadlows) under her maiden name Victoria Walker, and new novels by Diana Wynne Jones and Eva Ibbotson, books which at once enchant and torment me by seeming always to be released months sooner on the other side of the Atlantic. It is both sinister and convenient, the way that as an American customer you don’t even have to re-enter any of your information (passwords, payment details, shipping addresses) on the British site.
Online shopping finds its psychic home in the hours after midnight when you can’t sleep and you’re bouncing off the walls just desperate for something good to read. Not that you’re not surrounded by books already, but it’s like looking in the fridge when you’re hungry late at night: you could perfectly well eat that strawberry yogurt (it’s not even past its sell-by date!) or the grilled chicken breast left over from dinner but somehow all you can think about is the local sushi place which closed hours ago. Of course there is a certain masochistic fulfillment to sitting there at the computer and placing an Amazon order with money you don’t have, it’s a lot like smoking too many cigarettes or using a blunt pair of scissors to cut your bangs too short in the bathroom mirror, they are all activities whose allure swells with every hour past midnight.
So one night in early January (this is 2006 I’m talking about) I put a bunch of stuff in the shopping cart and paid for it all and then more or less forgot about it until the box showed up a week later. I retrieved it from the hallway, tucked it under my arm and let myself into the apartment. I dropped my bag on the floor, then slit the tape along the seam of the box with my keys and dealt with the annoying inflated plastic packing thingy (what is the name for those useless pouches?). Inside I found new translations of two major canonical Russian novels (presumably ordered in the grip of an attraction not nearly strong enough to survive the presence of their actual Oprah-sanctioned heft) and a just-released hardcover novel that seemed in contrast to be vibrating audibly with desirability.
After making the sound Homer Simpson makes when he sees a donut, I picked the book up in my left hand and started reading the first lines of the opening as I stumbled in the direction of the bathroom. I awkwardly used my right hand to unbutton my jeans and pull down my underpants to pee; I didn’t want to put the book down even for a second.
Now, if you don’t really care about books, you might want to skip the next part. What you’ve already read is mainly in aid of setting the scene of my compulsions, and so as long as you’re obsessed with something (Nigella Lawson’s chocolate-cake recipes, for instance, or baseball or knitting or whatever—the details are immaterial) you can probabl
y identify with me. But the book I had in my hand that night in January was genuinely drool-worthy in a way that’s difficult for me to get across to the non-avid-novel-reader. It was Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, one of the most anticipated releases of 2006; I knew it was going to be magically good and it completely lived up to my expectations. I turned off my phone and lay down on my stomach on the bed and read like a maniac all the way through to the end. The only thing I wanted after that was to turn the clock back six hours and have the whole thing to read all over again.
A confession: for years I turned up my nose at Michael Chabon without having read him. Something about the eagerness, the love even, with which his fans spoke of his writing just annoyed me. (Mostly—I am perfectly willing to admit this, I am not a good person—out of irritation and envy at not being a critically-acclaimed and also best-selling novelist myself.) I did not see the movie adaptation of Wonder Boys , nor did I read the book; I did not care to read the irritatingly titled Mysteries of Pittsburgh and when I checked The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay out of the library I found the dust-jacket distinctly off-putting and returned it without having even cracked it open when it was recalled for another patron’s use. And though I once accidentally claimed to have read Chabon’s short-story collection Werewolves in their Youth during one of those drunken late-night bar conversations where you can hardly hear the other person speak over the jukebox, I realized the next day that the book I had read was actually Victor Pelevin’s A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia.
But the one kind of book I love above all other things is young-adult fantasy and when Michael Chabon published a book called Summerland that could have been hand-crafted by highly skilled psychic artisans in exact response to my dream-book specifications, I picked it off the shelf at the store and paid for it and went home and read it at once. And it was a work of genius, a brilliant and beautifully written fiction for readers of all ages that I found more interesting and more pleasing and more complex and altogether more delightful than almost any other book I have ever read.