Deathless (35 page)

No one ever leaves Yaichka—what is out there to want? And no one ever visits from out of town. In the village they have a saying,
Yaichka possesses many things, but the forest possesses Yaichka.

Among the other things Yaichka possesses is a short, wide house where Marya Morevna lives with her husband. She has always lived here, and never anywhere else. One other thing Yaichka owns is the secret sight of Marya lying naked in the summer forest, drying her black curls in the sun. On Thursdays and Mondays she briefly touches the ring of iron keys hanging over her hearth, but cannot remember what they might unlock. Then she takes out one of the four horses—her favorite, a dapple grey named Volchya—and gallops into the larch forest so fast her heart flies out ahead of her. With her rifle on her back and her best red scarf knotted around her shoulders, she hunts in the depths of the shadows, crouching, chasing, firing—and on Thursdays and Mondays her peals of laughter are the Yaichka’s church bells. She returns with deer or rabbits, pheasant or goose, sometimes, mysteriously, a wolf flopped over Volchya’s broad back, one of those who howls but is not seen. Marya Morevna shares her meat with her village. No one likes wolf soup much, but they do not complain. Marya does not complain when her hens forget to give her eggs. Life is like that.

Marya Morevna’s husband, Koschei Bessmertny, is so handsome that he could lend a cup of his beauty to every man in Yaichka and still charm the bark from his dogs. Wheat falls into loaves at his feet, but also at the feet of his friends, and all of Yaichka is friends with Koschei Bessmertny. When he bends to pull beets out of the earth, he sings a little song with four lines of five words each, and the last word of the song is
wife
. When his cow catches pregnant, he offers the calf to the family with the fewest cows, and the milking heifer to the family with the most children. Of the goat he says nothing, and lets him go on his onion-hunting way. Sometimes, in a certain light, he seems to recall to Marya someone she used to know, and could almost remember: a kind of golden cast to his black hair, a way he had of laughing, like a hound baying.

Once, Marya Morevna woke and saw someone working the fields before Yaichka had washed the dreams from its eyes. The someone wore a bright coat of many colors, and cut grain with an enormous pair of shears.

“Who is that?” she asked of her husband.

“Do not look at him, volchitsa,” said the handsome Koschei. “Let him take his share.”

Marya Morevna thought no more of it, kissed both of her husband’s sunburned cheeks, and rode into the wood after two fat beavers with tails like pancakes. When she returned to Koschei Bessmertny in the evening, being held by him was like being held by the sun, and together they relished the pale god of the butter on their bread.

*   *   *

On Marya’s left-hand side lives Vladimir Ilyich and his wife Nadya Konstantinovna, whose hens have such good memories they never forget an egg. Nadya’s scowl is so severe even winter leaves her well enough alone. Vladimir has gone bald and needs glasses, but he broke his comb over his knee and made his peace with God long ago. Around that time old Vova fell asleep with his new glasses on and was visited by a dream involving an army of red ants and an army of white ants. Somehow this led him to gather together the four Yaichkans who owned horses and devise the system of horse-shares which provides both for Marya’s hunting expeditions and for the equitable tilling of Yaichka’s several fields.

In his youth, a smaller Vladimir encountered a beautiful jackdaw with a red blaze on her chest. The bird snapped savagely at him, and ever since then the boy has possessed a gift for convincing people of strange things. Once, he declared to his neighbors that the tall, beautiful roses that climbed the walls of his house grew unjustly, so that they received both theirs and the lilacs’ share of the rain. The roses were corrupt, he said, and both Aleksandr Fyodorovich and Grigory Yevseevich listened sympathetically over cups of sweet myod. The roses are vicious by their nature, Nadya agreed, and scowled so fiercely that the myod spilled immediately, in order to absolve itself of any involvement. Vladimir Ilyich tried to encourage the lilacs to take the rain for themselves, going so far as to hang buckets from his eaves and distribute the water himself, sprinkling it evenly among the flowers with his long, thin fingers. But this did not suffice.

“What is to be done?” he demanded. “What is to be done?”

And one morning the village of Yaichka woke, and the heads of Vova’s roses had all been hacked off at the neck.

Vladimir and Nadya have two sons under their roof, Josef and Leon. They dream boys’ dreams: of getting a slice of their father’s fortune, of girls, of growing big mustaches. Several jokes concerning the brothers buzz through Yaichka, for one never hugged the other without making his hands into fists. Josef has chased Leon into the woods many times, red in the face, bellowing for his brother never to return. But of course, around dinner, Lyova slinks back, and Josef embraces him as if nothing was amiss. Leon, for his part, scowls in his room and breaks his toys to show them who their master is. After the incident with Vladimir’s roses, Josef stomped upon all the flowers of the garden—lilac, rose, peony, daisy, and even his mother’s flowerless savories, mint and dill and thyme. He stood in the middle of all his destruction, panting, his dark eyes wild as a kicked horse, looking to his father for praise.

“You are my favorite son,” said Vladimir Ilyich to Josef, which is all the boy ever wished to hear. “And so I forgive you for the flowers.”

This made the child smile, but did not really shine up his disposition. One spring day, as fine as a cake, the boy marched straight up to the very kindly Sergei Mironovich and shot him with finger pistols:
pow, pow!
The two stared at each other in the muddy, fragrant road of Yaichka, as if remembering something that happened long ago.

“Lyova did it!” cried Josef, frightened by Sergei’s silence, and ran off to hit his brother soundly. So it goes with Josef. Every village has one.

On Marya’s right-hand side lives Georgy Konstantinovich, who sits out on his steps and plays his birchwood gusli so prettily that the moon faints away from love, and whose wife Galina Ivanova has a lamb’s modesty. Everything in Georgy’s house proceeds with perfect precision. Even the eggs boil when he says so, and not a moment sooner. The bees in his garden sup only at the flowers he likes best. When the wolves in the forest howl, Georgy wakes up and stands watch with his daughters all in a line, their rifles on their shoulders, and it cannot be disproven that this is why wolves are heard but not seen. Georgy is more modest, even, than his wife. He would never say that he saves Yaichka each night with his strong antiwolf posture, but his neighbors say it for him, and bring to him and his girls hot tea and slices of pie wrapped in muslin when the cold snaps. Georgy herds the cows as well, for they recognize his authority, and proceed in formation into their pen without argument.

Now, just down the way lives Nikolai Aleksandrovich and his long-haired wife Aleksandra Fedorovna. Before their open door play their four beautiful daughters—Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia—and their sickly young son, Aleksey, who sits in the shade of a poplar and reads while his sisters kick pine cones between them on the green. Nikolai himself is a bit dim and distracted, but his mustache is thick, and he means very well, even if his garden half dies every winter for lack of water, even if his cow screams to be milked every so often, and he does not hear her. Vladimir Ilyich once tried to discuss his doctrine of roses and lilacs with Nikolai, who gave him a cup of kvass and listened intently. The sun passed behind a cloud. But Nikolai Aleksandrovich only laughed and sent old Vova on his way, his sympathies being rather with the roses. Aleksandra, her apron embroidered with a moth’s delicacy, her arms muscled from arguing with sheep, once told Marya Morevna that her husband was visited by the same dream as his neighbor, of the white ants and the red, and had wept in his sleep for weeks. She kisses Nikolai’s knuckles, where dreams live, until he quiets, but then she herself cannot sleep, and watches the stars spell out the words of a long poem from the warmth of her bed.

Many more folk bustle and quarrel and clap their hands over their ears in Yaichka. That is what villages are like. All day long, this or that grandmother could tell tales that stretch on like taffy concerning Vova’s plans for the distribution of the pregnant sheep’s lamb, or Josef’s somewhat more worrying plans for the goat, and they wouldn’t have even begun to recount the rumors of Aleksandra’s infidelity with a certain monk, let alone remember to name half the folk in Yaichka. That is what grandmothers are like. Cows moan in the grass; hens flutter when the rooster happens by; the earth turns blackly, wetly under plows; and for a while, just a little while, everything shines and nothing is the matter, anywhere, ever.

Yaichka has always been here, and never anywhere else. It has always possessed these people; their four horses; ten head of cattle; two hens and a rooster for every family; three sheep (one pregnant); the small and nameless river and its mill, owned by everyone and worked on a biweekly schedule designed by you-know-who; the solitary goat who would stop eating up everyone’s onions if he knew what’s good for him; and several fields whose deep, dark soil forgives everything done to it.

26

What Will We Call Her?

In the house of Marya Morevna, even the windows laugh. Long after the winter hearth has gone dark, the bodies of Marya and her husband glow. He is so alive in her that his skin tastes like an apple tree, full of sap and juice.
The warmth of him,
she thinks,
the warmth!

“Oh, volchitsa,” he whispers to her, his belly brimming with soup and good bread, “I’ve a dog’s luck! Butter in the barrel, a good smoke after supper, and you, my bootlace girl, drawn up so tight to me!”

“When you said that just now, I almost thought you were someone else,” sighs Marya. But Koschei is always himself, perfectly so, whole and bright.

And he sets on her like the sun, and all her teeth show when she smiles. Each day she looks at the iron keys hanging by their door, and tries to think:
Where have I seen those before? When have I had a thing I needed to lock?
And each day, unless it is Sunday and the mist is down and all of Yaichka staying in, she shakes her head to gather it and strides out onto the long, thin road. Each morning, Marya Morevna thinks that she has never been so full, and each evening she is fuller still. Her black curls shine as if seen underwater.

On Wednesdays, Ushanka visits, her friend whom those old grandmothers most likely forgot to name, since she is the kind of girl who shows only half of her face at a time. No one knows her surname, but that’s all right. Surnames go politely unmentioned in Yaichka. Marya Morevna always makes sure she has a leg of rabbit and fresh bread with a little bowl of honey set out, and Wednesday is her day with the silver samovar that makes the rounds of all the houses, just like a horse.

“And how is your husband?” says Ushanka, a beautiful blue ribbon fluttering from the scalloped edge of her lace hat. Ushanka makes lace like a spider, and gives her shawls freely to the women of Yaichka. Just yesterday, gentle Galka pulled one up around her shoulders, feeling a draft.

“He feels sure the new calf will be a heifer, and so go to Aleksandr Fyodorovich. I’ve discussed the prospect of juniper-cheese with Natasha.”

“How lovely for all of us. And you, Masha? Are you well? Do the ladies visit when I am not about? Do the men let you drink with them when you’re thirsty?”

Marya Morevna puts her chin in her hands. “I believe I have never been so well, Ushanochka. I am so well that my glass fills before I think to be thirsty. To be certain, I am sad when the moon is thin. I remember friends long gone, and how one of them painted her eyes to match her soup, and how one slept curled next to me, and another kissed me, just once, by a river. I remember one with wet hair, and her baby. I wish they could drink from full glasses, too. I wish they could see the new lamb when it comes. But the moon waxes, and my sadness dries up. Life is like that, of course.”

“Of course.” And Ushanka puts her hand on Marya’s, for they have shared tea more often than tears. Her skin is like cloth. “The sweetness of it all is sharpest when placed alongside sorrow, close as knife and fork. But it is my job to interrogate your happiness, to prod its corners, to make sure it holds. When a sadness chews at the bottom of your heart, it’s as though you walk all day with your dress on backwards, the buttons facing the forest, the collar facing the village. To everyone else, all may seem normal, but my eyes are so keen.”

Marya Morevna poured tea, coppery and steaming. “I have sometimes wished for a child,” she confessed. “But when I ask Koschei about it, even while he tells me he loves me with a bear’s love, he says, ‘Can we not wait a little longer? Just a little longer.’ Isn’t that strange?”

Ushanka shows only half of her face, and that half grows very thoughtful, but says nothing.

“I saw the bird again while hunting this rabbit,” says Marya brightly, picking at the gleaming bone. “So terribly bright it could have been on fire! I think it’s a male. His feathers shine golden, and bronze, and scarlet, and blue—such flames!—and the air around him bends into oily waves. His song echoes like Georgy’s playing. A firebird, just like in the old stories. I shall catch it, Ushanka, if I have to ride all the way through the forest and come out the other side.”