Deathless

by Catherynne Valente

  Around the great table all the people of Yaichka rise and hold up their glasses.

  “Nastrovye!” cry Georgy and Aleksandr; cry Grigory and Sergei; cry Josef and Leon; cries Koschei Bessmertny; cry all four of Aleksandra’s beautiful daughters and their brother, too; cry Grisha and Sasha; cry Nikolai and Vladimir. The setting sun shines through their glasses.

  “To life,” they say, and crash their glasses together, laughing, as wolves howl distantly from the forest, but never show themselves.

  And Marya cries out, too. She clutches her great belly as her child protests the hunt and the lugging of the table and the drinking without her. The child sears through her, ready at last to be born, right now, right this very moment. Marya Morevna falls to her knees, her hair spreading out around her, as black as if it has been burnt.

  27

  The Sound of Remembering

  In Yaichka, they say a child draws her first breath through her ears, her second through her eyes, and her third through her mouth. This is why it sometimes takes a moment for a baby to cry. The first breath is for the mother, the second breath is for God, and the third breath is for the father. The breath through the mouth brings the most pleasure, and we forget immediately that we ever knew how to breathe any other way. When a child in Yaichka cries, his mother will pick him up and hoist him on her hip and laugh and say, Look at my little bearlet, breathing through his eyes again! And the child stops his crying because he likes to be called a bearlet.

  Marya and Koschei’s daughter takes her first breath through her ears, like any other child. The breath makes a tiny whistling sound, too high for even dogs to hear.

  Then she grows up.

  It happens so fast even the cabinets turn their heads twice. Marya Morevna puts her child to her breast; she latches just as perfectly as any child has ever done, and with one long drink, the baby takes all the milk of her youth into her belly and stands up seventeen years old, naked, with her mother’s blood still sticky in her black hair.

  Koschei Bessmertny smiles so sadly Marya puts her hand over her heart as though a bullet had bit her there.

  “But you have been happy here,” he says softly. “You have been happy here with me?”

  “Kostya, why are you so sad?” says Marya, and she is perplexed, but not upset, for a daughter grown up so fast is strange and a little tragic, but not less strange than a firebird. “Help me name our girl!”

  Koschei looks long at his child. The girl takes her second breath, through her eyes. It makes no sound at all. “She has a name already, volchitsa, my love, my terrible wolf. She is my death. And I love her abjectly, as a father must.”

  Death, their daughter, who will never learn to speak, who will never need to speak, holds out her bloody arms, streaked white and silver with fluid.

  “I always die at the end,” he whispers, and he is afraid now, his hands shaking. “It is always like this. It is never easy.”

  The iron keys on the wall bead blood as though they are sweating. Marya stretches out her hands, and she is a mirror of her daughter, but she does not know whom she wishes to catch, only that she wishes to catch someone, anyone, to be anchored, to be connected, to be not abandoned.

  But Koschei the Deathless steps into his daughter’s embrace and holds her, gently, tenderly, proudly, for a moment, smoothing her wet hair with his hand before kissing her forehead as perfectly as any father has ever done. She opens her mouth and takes her third breath, wholly, fully, through her mouth, the last trickles of the water of her mother’s womb spilling from her lips. The force of her third breath drags Koschei’s eyelids down, down, down, until they droop, and fall like scrolls unfurling to the floor; and he is become his brother, the Tsar of Death, for a tiny 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 ra
diates 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!

  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, wi
zened, 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.”