Moscow but Dreaming

by Ekaterina Sedia

  No answer came, and I wandered away from the river, toward the boulevards that circled the heart of the city, studded with oversized jewels of frozen ponds, towards Alexandrovsky Garden. The streets were sleek with black ice that reflected the streetlights, as if there were another city hidden in frozen puddles. A façade of a three-story old mansion reflected there too, and its closed doors seemed open in its reflection. After a moment of hesitation, I closed my eyes and stepped into the upside-down maw of the reflected doorway.

  For a moment, my foot touched the slippery solid surface of ice, and then broke through, into a faintly fluorescent, moldy air of an underground forest. Long beards of Icelandic moss hung from the rimed branches of dead spruces, and no footsteps resonated on a soft carpet of their fallen needles.

  “Leshy,” I called. “Give my girl back to me.”

  The wind rose and moaned and bent the treetops almost to the ground. The frozen whip of my hair lashed my face, and the hoarfrost in the air stung my eyes, narrowing them to rheumy slits.

  “Come out, you bastard!”

  I had no idea of where I was going in the underground dead forest, screaming into the wind. I never questioned it, but let my guts lead me as long as my legs would carry me. Soon, buckled over by the wind, I sank to my knees in deep moss by a slender birch. It creaked and moaned under the assault of the wind. Yet, its bare branches bent over and around me, forming a protective cocoon, stroking my shoulders.

  “Help me,” I whispered.

  The branches hugged me closer, and I felt rejuvenated and strong, as the dying tree poured the last of its life into me.

  “I’m looking for a girl, as fair as your bark, as gentle as your touch. Have you seen her?”

  The birch shuddered and stretched its branches against the howling storm, pointing deeper into the forest. I cringed as I heard a sharp crack of snapping wood. I thanked the birch and was on my way, plunging headlong into the solid wall of the wind.

  I had no sense of direction, but the leshy was too eager to divert me: as much as he tried to confuse me, to make me lose my way, I kept turning into the wind, until I crossed a clearing and stood on the shore of a lake, its water calm despite the storm. Cattails fringed its shores, their leaves green and erect, their brown heads nodding to me as if in greeting. Yellow water lilies stood still over its mirror-clean surface; I realized how thirsty I was.

  I drank on my knees, like an animal, the cool water soothing my cracked, burning lips, its water washing away the sting of the cold. I looked at the surface, waiting for it to calm down. I was expecting to see my face, but instead I saw Anya. The water caressed my fingers, and I recognized her despite her change.

  A quiet fell over the world, and I could hear my labored breathing. And then, someone else’s.

  I turned around.

  “So you’ve found her,” the leshy said.

  I nodded, and touched my fingers to the lake Anya’s surface in reassurance. “I came to take her back.”

  The leshy smiled, and I noticed how much he’d aged since our last meeting. The bark of his skin seemed diseased, mottled with fungi, and the deep green of his hair was turning lichen-grey. “Take her back, eh? How are you going to accomplish that?”

  I scrambled for an answer. If she were dead or unconscious, I would’ve gathered her into my arms and walked away. Were she turned to stone, I would’ve broken my back but carried her out. But she was liquid that poured over my fingers, streamed down my face, wetted my lips. “Turn her back to her human form,” I said.

  He smiled still. “I wish I could do that.”

  I raised my fist, furious with his smirk. “Don’t play with me, or I’ll smash your face in; I’ll burn your forest, I’ll salt the ground—”

  He raised his palm. “Quiet, girl. I cannot do what you ask, threaten all you want… I am not strong enough.” He seemed embarrassed as he uttered the last words.

  “Why not?”

  “My forest is dying without water. I need you to bring it to the trees.”

  “And then you’ll let us go?”

  His steep shoulders slumped. “If that’s what you wish, kikimora.”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “I can call you whatever you wish me to, but it won’t change what you are.” His eyes were black holes, bottomless in the bark of his face; deep dark caverns, home to bats and night birds. “I need a swamp to bring the water to my trees; I need creeks and puddles, moss and bogs.”

  I sighed. “How do I do that?”

  He gave me an apprehensive look, as if worried that I will swing at him again. “I’ll help you along. Just be what you are.”

  And then I was. I unraveled and un-spun, my limbs splaying and elongating. My fingers twined with Anya’s, watery and comforting. My skin split, exposing the hummocks of sphagnum moss (were they always there?), and my veins divided and opened, overflowing with blood as clear as Anya’s. The tree roots entangled in my toes, I stretched and engulfed, fed and watered, laughed and nurtured. And Anya’s hands caressed mine, our lips met, our hearts beat as one. I felt the leshy nearby, getting stronger, feeding on us, melding with us, mud and water, blood and moss, lichen and stone.

  I did not know how many days had passed, but the trees came back to life—the spruces had regrown their needles, and the birches stood surrounded by a pale halo of young greenery. The leshy, healthy and exuberant, disengaged himself from the tree roots and my mires, and stood once again in a human form next to Anya’s shore. I followed his example and deflated and creaked, putting myself back together. My skin had grown green like my hair, and mushrooms sprouted where my fingers used to be. “Turn her back,” I said. I would take care of myself later.

  “As you wish.”

  The water of the lake agitated and formed a pillar, still and shining like glass. Then its surface clouded, as if someone spilled milk into it, and Anya’s sweet face looked at me without reproach. She stepped onto the shore of an empty lake basin, her skin clear, her hair long and golden, flowing down her shoulders. My breath caught in my throat, and simultaneously I grew selfconscious and ashamed. She was so pretty and perfect, and I had become a nasty, ugly thing. A swamp kikimora, fit only to frighten travelers and give children nightmares.

  The leshy and Anya smiled at me, unfazed.

  “I can’t go back like this,” I said to the leshy. “Can you make me the way I used to be?”

  “If that’s what you want.” He shrugged with pretend indifference, and looked away.

  “Anya?”

  She shook her head. “I’d rather stay.” Her voice lilted and sung, like a creek jumping from stone to stone. “What’s back there? What do you miss?”

  I stumbled for words. There was nothing there but the cold and the wolf-year, eager to tear out every jugular. Nothing but the shifty-eyed people, quickly dismantling everything that we ever knew, everything that retained a shred of meaning. Nothing but money that no one had but everyone wanted.

  “Well?” the leshy said. “Should I turn you into a girl and send you on your way?” A spark danced inside his deep tree hole eyes, as if he already knew what I was going to say.

  “I’m not a girl,” I said. “I’m a kikimora.” I wrapped one arm around Anya’s soft waist, and the other around the snags of the leshy’s shoulders, becoming a deep morass between a crystal clear lake and a dark forest, an in-between, a bridge between water and land, past and future, now and forever.

  MUNASHE AND THE SPIRITS

  Oh, how she wailed. The sky shuddered and storm clouds split open at her hoarse, inhuman cries. Munashe cringed at his mother’s unarticulated, bare suffering, at her voice rising higher and higher, lunging for heaven. He looked at blood that came out of her throat and curdled on the earthen floors and rank pallet, black and granular like coffee grounds. He listened to the sound of her fingernails biting into the floor, dragging across it with a jerky movement of the dying.

  He sat by her, trying not to be annoyed at her eyes, white with f
ear, swiveling in her hollow-cheeked face. He made nice, and brushed her long hair out of her face, stroked her cheek with filial attention.

  “Let me go,” she pleaded in staccato gasps.

  He tried to make his voice soothing, reassuring, as if talking to a child. “Where would you go, mother? You’re too weak to walk, and no village would take you.”

  “Munashe.”

  “I can’t, mother. You should be grateful that I am staying here with you.”

  “Please.”

  He sighed. “You should’ve thought about that before you went and turned into a lioness.”

  She gasped and cried some more, and he could not help but laugh. The woman was deluded enough to think that she was still human. She tried to convince him, thrusting her dark, withered arms into his face. “Look at me. I am not a lion, I am your mother.” As if he couldn’t see the hungry beast looking out of her eyes, the red glow of its pupils burning hotter than embers of the cooking fire. He heard from old men that women went wild, turned into beasts, and there was only one way of turning them back into humans.

  He took a charred piece of impala meat from the coals, and offered it to his mother. “Will you eat now?”

  She cried. “It is too hot, too black. I can’t eat this.”

  He nodded to himself. She wanted raw meat, of course, like any lion would. He tried to do good by her, taming her with cooked meat, but so far she hadn’t taken any. And her time was running short. AIDS was killing her, and if she went as a lion, her afterlife would be bleak—if she would even have an afterlife.

  He ate alone, in the retreating light of the fire. The darkness reached for him, spreading its hungry fingers like a wrathful spirit, its bottomless mouth opened wide to swallow him whole. His mother made no other sound but her labored breath, and faint scratching of her fingernails on the floor. Like a beast, she wanted to crawl away, to find a secluded place in the savannah grass, where she would expire alone, lamented by wind, buried by ants, kissed by red dust. Fortunately, she was too weak to do so. He waited for the scratching to stop before he went to sleep, curled on the earthen floor of the grass hut. Far away, hyenas gloated. They knew that a lion would be dead soon.

  When Munashe woke up, his mother was dead, her eyes opened wide but blind, her pallet stained with sweat and blood. Munashe grunted his discontent, and hurried toward the doorway of the hut. There, he stopped and clamped his hands over his mouth to hold back a wail of terror that swelled in his chest. Instead of the yellow, undulating expanse of the savannah, punctuated by lopsided umbrellas of acacias, a solid green wall of a forest surrounded him. There were no lions or hyenas, but only colobus monkeys chattering up in the trees.

  The monkeys saw him, and wrinkled their faces, baring tiny, needle-sharp teeth that curved inward. “Munashe,” they sang in nasty childish voices, “Munashe, mother-killer.”

  Their taunt, as direct as it was cruel, brought him out of the daze. “No,” he yelled back. “It was not my fault. AIDS killed her, not I.”

  One of the bigger monkeys swung on the bough and leapt from branch to branch, until its face was level with Munashe’s. The monkey’s breath smelled stale, and its inward-curving teeth glistened like small yellow fishhooks. “Really?” it hissed. “Did you take her to the doctor, did you make sure that she ate well? Did you care for her in her comfortable home, or did you drag her away from people, from help?”

  “I was trying to help. She turned into a lion—she wouldn’t eat anything but raw meat.”

  The monkey’s eyes gleamed; its terrible mouth opened wide, and the monkey cackled, the sound of its laughter like scratching of dead leaves. The monkey leapt and landed on Munashe’s shoulders. Before he could toss off the unwelcome rider, the monkey’s hind legs and long tail wrapped around his neck, and the sharp claws of its hands dug into tender cartilage of Munashe’s ears. “Run now, donkey boy, mother-killer!”

  Munashe twisted and struggled to get out of the monkey’s hurtful grip, but it only laughed and tightened the chokehold of its tail, and wrenched his ears until they bled. Exhausted and terrified, Munashe ran, as the monkey steered him by the ears, deeper into the forest.

  It was dark and stuffy under the canopy of the tall trees, and thorny lianas snagged the sleeves of his shirt and the trouser legs, ripping them, digging into his skin until he bled. His lungs expanded and fell, but sucking in the humid air was like trying to breathe underwater. His vision darkened and he took a faltering half-step, stumbling on the ropy roots, falling, anticipating the touch of soft ferns that lined the forest floor. A sharp tug on his ear made him cry out and right himself, picking up his step.

  “You don’t get to rest, mother-killer,” the monkey screeched in his ear.

  He ran until the air turned purple and then black, and strange noises filled the air. Something hooted, something chuckled, something else whined in a plaintive, undulating voice. Before the darkness swallowed him, he saw a single bright light beckoning him from behind the trees. The monkey made no objections as he directed his torn feet toward the light.

  He came across a grass hut nestled between two strangler figs. The light he saw came from a small lantern perched atop the flat roof.

  The monkey gave him a quick, vicious smack on the back of his head, and Munashe bent low, and hurried through the blanket-covered doorway.

  “I brought him as you asked,” the monkey said, and leapt off his shoulders, to take place next to a military-style woodstove that filled the hut with unbearable heat.

  In the glow of the embers, he saw a low cot, and an old, fat woman that reclined upon it. Her bare breasts glistened, framing her swollen abdomen, from which a belly button protruded like an upturned thumb. Her bright eyes held Munashe’s for a moment. “Well, well,” she said. “Looks like Tendai did a good job.” She gave the monkey a fond glance, and it hopped and chittered.

  “Who are you, lady?” Munashe’s cracked and swollen lips moved painfully.

  “I am Tapiwa,” she said. “You will serve me until your debt is paid.”

  Munashe was about to protest, to say that it wasn’t his fault, but only sighed. Salt of his sweat burned like fire on his cracked lips. He felt certain that no matter what he said, he was already judged and found responsible for his mother’s demise. His only hope of returning home was to listen and to obey; perhaps then they would let him go. “How may I serve you?” His gaze wandered involuntarily to her elephantine thighs circled by rims of fat, and to the dark, curly vegetation of her pubic hair.

  Tapiwa noticed the direction of his glance, and shook with a booming laugh. “Ah, not that way, boy. I have bad bedsores, and I need someone to take care of them. Tendai and Vimbai are not strong enough.”

  “I’ll do whatever you need me to, lady. But can I have a drink of water?”

  Tapiwa nodded. “You may drink and you may rest. Tomorrow morning, you start.”

  The morning brought feeble light and the smell of dead embers and sweat, as Munashe started on his task. It took him a few tries to roll Tapiwa’s bulk to her side. Waves traveled under her skin with every move, and his fingers slipped on her smooth, damp skin. Two monkeys—Tendai and his brother Vimbai—watched from the perch atop the woodstove.

  Munashe puffed, but finally Tapiwa was stable on her left side, her left breast flopping to the floor. Munashe looked at her back and gagged—where her skin should have been, there was nothing but an open sore, running from her shoulders to her backside. A white mass shimmered and moved inside the wound, filling it, spilling to the pallet with every breath Tapiwa took. Maggots.

  “What are you waiting for, boy?” Tapiwa said. “Clean them up.”

  Munashe extended his shaking hand to the living carpet of vermin, and a few maggots popped under his touch. Still, he gathered a handful, looking for a place to throw them.

  “On the floor, on the floor,” Tapiwa said, impatient.

  He obeyed.

  Tendai and Vimbai left their roost, and gathered the maggots with
their long fingers, stuffing them in their mouths.

  “You want to help me?” Munashe said.

  The monkeys chattered and laughed, and shook their heads, their jaws moving energetically.

  And so it went—Munashe scooped out the maggots by the handful, and the monkeys ate them, showing no signs of getting sated. Munashe kept his eyes half-closed, and breathed through his mouth; his mind wandered far away, back to his home village, to the fields worked by women and children, to the smells of manure and upturned soil, to the proud cassava mounds, surrounded by yam and cowpeas.

  Munashe missed home every day of his joyless labor. While Tapiwa was not unkind, her wounds grew re-infested every day, and Munashe was starting to suspect that his labor would never be over. And he gave Tapiwa the care he did not give his mother, care he could not give to all the people in his village—hollowcheeked men that came home from the city one last time, to their patient wives, thin and hard and strong like strips of leather. Tapiwa, the fat spirit—for he was sure that he was in the spirit forest—was all the sick, all those destroyed by the new way of life that he could not heal. Her sores wept for all.

  At night, when the woodstove blazed, burning the already hot air of the hut, Munashe crept outside, under the sultry starless canopy of the forest, and prayed to the ancestral spirits to free him. He cried until his eyes ran dry, and rested in a crouch, listening to the night-sounds; there was chittering and chirping, sighing and moaning, wailing and weeping. And grumbling. His muscles tensed as he listened to the approaching roar—could that be a leopard? Twin lights shone through the treetops, and moved closer, like falling stars. Munashe’s mouth opened in awe as he realized that the sound and the light issued from a very old, very large Cadillac, painted bubble-gum pink. The Cadillac descended, leaping from branch to branch like a most agile monkey.

  The Cadillac gripped a low horizontal branch with its front wheels playfully, swung, and somersaulted, landing in front of Munashe with a flourish.