Deathless (8 page)

Finally, Koschei placed a teaspoon full of sour cherry jam on Marya’s tongue and instructed her to sip her tea through the lump of fruit. When she had swallowed, he kissed her, their mouths warm and sweet with tea and cherries, and Marya Morevna fell asleep in his arms, with his lips still pressed to hers.

*   *   *

Somewhere deep in the well of the night, she woke, her belly aflame, scalding, and while Koschei slept cold and insensate, Marya Morevna rushed out of the hut to retch all her marvelous supper onto the frozen ground. She tried to do it quietly, so that he would not know that she had lost all the lovely things he had set out for her.
It’s not my fault,
she thought furiously, unable to speak even now, when he was sleeping.
Bellies trained on dry bread rations and salt fish cannot bear all this richness!

Marya Morevna looked up. The great black horse watched her calmly, his eyes burning phosphorescent in the dark.

Shame flowed into her mouth, sour and thick. She crept back into the little house so softly, like a thief.

*   *   *

In this way they traveled, across thrice nine kingdoms, thrice nine republics, the whole of the world, between Petrograd and Koschei’s country. The sleek, driverless car, which never seemed to need gasoline or maps, sped them on through wild, brambly woods and snowy mountains like old bones. It remained cold as midnight within the automobile no matter how bright the sun outside. Marya’s teeth ached from chattering. Yet each evening they would unfailingly discover a little house cheerily aglow in a larch forest or amid razor-spiky firs. Each evening a table would be set for them, the food growing finer and finer as they proceeded east and the snow grew deeper. Roast swan, vereniki stuffed with sweet pork and apples, pickled melons, cakes piled with cream and pastry. Each evening Koschei would ask her not to speak and then feed her with his long, graceful hands. Each evening she would sneak into the woods to throw it all up again, the muscles of her stomach sore with eating and retching, eating and retching.

“The vineyards that gave us this wine also provide the wine for Comrade Stalin’s table,” he said one night with a sly grin. “You will remember what I said about children and Papas, and who eats first, and who eats last.” Koschei the Deathless made a face as he tasted the wine. “It is far too sweet. Comrade Stalin fears bitterness and has the tastes of a spoiled princess. I savor bitterness—it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived. You, too, must learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, you may still have bitterness in abundance.”

Marya Morevna thought this did not sound quite right. But the glistening swan meat and the vodka so pure it tasted only of cold water spun her faster and faster, and the faster she spun in his arms, the more sense he seemed to speak. And because her body could not keep the sumptuous food down, she found herself all the more ravenous whenever he lifted a spoon of roast potato to her mouth.

He placed honey on her tongue, and pear jelly, and brown, moist sugar. She swallowed his steaming tea. And he kissed her, again and again, sharing sweetness and heat between them. Outside the hut, the strange tall horse nosed at his trough of embers every night, watching her secret sickness without blinking. Only now his coat was red, with a mane like fire. And whenever she woke from her deep, downy bed, the automobile would be waiting in the mist, puffing exhaust, it, too, no longer black but scarlet, like beets, like blood.

But Marya was only a girl, thin and young, and the constant lurching from frozen car to warm, crackling fireside began to eat at her. She began to cough, only a little at first, but then harsh and sharp. She became feverish and sickly until, finally, she could not even eat the little candied quails or holiday bread piled with apricot syrup. She had to push the spoons away or else spill out her guts on the fine fur rugs.

Marya lay on the floor by the fire in the latest cheerful, obedient hut, her knees drawn up to her chest, sweating and shivering all at once. If she had wanted to speak, she could not have. Her eyes glassed over; the room swam. Koschei looked down at her, his dark hair wet with melted snow. “Poor volchitsa,” he sighed. “I have been in such a hurry to get you home. I have been too impatient, and you are only human. But you must learn to keep up with me.”

Koschei the Deathless knelt at her side and unbuttoned her work shirt. Even through her fever, Marya would always remember how his fingers shook as he pushed and peeled her clothes away until she lay naked by the hearth, trying to hide her breasts in her hands. But Koschei turned her over onto her stomach, and Marya heard the clinking of glasses. She smiled against the plush pelts laid over the floor. Her mother had done this when she was very little.
Banki
. She could feel the movements, so terribly familiar: Koschei set rubles on her skin and lit matches on the coins so they would not burn her, then caught up the matches in little vodka glasses so that her flesh was sucked up into the vacuum. It was meant to pull out her fever, to suck the illness away from her chest. When she was very small, before the birds or the war or Dzerzhinskaya Street, her mother had done this for her when she fell ill. Soon Koschei had several glasses on her, and when Marya moved she jingled like sleigh bells, glass against glass. She imagined herself a great beast, lumbering through the steppes with sparkling glass towers on her back, roaring at villagers, stamping down whole forests with her paws. Her fever carried these images far, making them lurid, loud, playing before her eyes as though they were real. She moaned. Koschei did not speak this time, did not lecture or instruct. He simply murmured to her, stroked her hair, called her volchitsa, medvezhka, koshechka. Wolfling, she-bear, wild little kitten.

The next night, the car brought them smokily to rest, not at a rustic hut full of food, but at a banya, a bathhouse. It had no food for them. On a little green marble table waited a black jar and a neat pile of long, linen bandages. The bottle of vodka remained. Koschei undressed Marya again and sat her on a wooden slab. He rubbed her skin with those long, thin fingers, suddenly hot and not frozen at all. He brushed her long hair, hundreds of strokes. And with every stroke, the dry, brittle, broken strands became soft and shining again, as though she had never had so little eggs or milk to eat that her hair had dimmed and frayed. Marya nearly fell asleep sitting up, calmed by the brushing and his snatches of sad little songs about biting wolves and uncareful girls. When her hair shone, he gathered it up into a deft braid, and laid her down on the slab.

Then Koschei arranged the bandages over her so that no skin showed. When he cracked the seal on the black jar, Marya’s poor, raw nose was assailed with the prickling, slashing scent of hot mustard. Oh, how she had feared this when she was small! She would conceal any cold or sniffle from her mother, for if she was discovered, out the mustard plasters would come, smelling of burning and sickness. Marya Morevna had imagined that if hell had a smell, it smelled like mustard plasters. Koschei smeared the mustard over the wrappings. Marya’s eyes smarted and wept, her skin sweated, and in her fever she cried for her mother, for Zvonok, for Tatiana and Olga and Anna, for her red scarf and poor Svetlana Tikhonovna and lastly, more softly than the rest, for Koschei. At the sound of his name he took away the mustard plasters and held her in his arms.

“Drink, Marousha,” he clucked gently, like a mother, and put a glass to her lips. “Your lungs want vodka.” Obediently, she drank, and coughed, and drank once more.

He picked her up in his arms and carried her to the bath. Calling her his wolverine, his lioness, he scrubbed her skin with harsh salt until it was red, then sunk her in a hot bath. He held a handful of water to her nose and ordered her to breathe it in. She spluttered, and gagged, but did it anyway, so accustomed had she become to his voice. Finally, Koschei made her stand, and took up a long birch branch. Marya marveled at the catch in his breath as he brought it down against her skin, first gently, then harder, then stopping to rub her down with oil and whipping her again. At first she shrank away, but by his last blow, Marya Morevna found herself arching her back to meet the branch, as though the forest itself were commanding her body to heal.

Finally, hot and aching and wrung out, Marya let Koschei lead her to the wood stove, where he had made a bed for her, tucked up against the warm bricks. She slept, and dreamed of the London fashion magazine the Blodniek sisters had so cherished. The magazine had grown as huge as a museum hallway. She wandered through the pages, cowed and small next to the beautiful tall women with their crisp coats and feathered hats.

One of them turned to her. She wore a bright blue turban and waved a golden fan.

“All the girls are wearing their deaths this year,” the model said haughtily. “It’s just the thing for a plain country girl hoping to make her fortune.”

The woman gestured at her turban. In the folds rested a hen’s egg, white and gleaming.

*   *   *

When Marya woke, the red car had gone, and in its place a sparkling white one rolled towards them, its fenders arcing with a swan’s grace. She felt much better, though she had a headache and her back still throbbed where the birch branches had struck her. Still, her skin hummed with heat, and she leaned gratefully against Koschei as the icy, mountain-hunched world slipped by, as though everything had been caked in salt to wait for spring.

That night, the last night, the car ground through the rocky snow to another low little house, its eaves carved like icing, its door thick and red. Koschei lifted her up and carried her. Marya lifted her head sleepily to look over his shoulder and saw the white car roll up the path, only to bounce on a hard, icy lump of snow and spring up a great pale horse, his mane twisting in the wind. The horse whinnied happily and trotted off in search of supper.
At least I caught the car changing,
she thought dreamily.
At least I can still see the naked world, even if it will only show me an ankle or a flash of wrist now.
She had grown used to silence, and it had grown used to her. And because she had relaxed into muteness and ceased to think about it very much, because she was dizzy and warm and not at all vigilant, Marya Morevna slipped.

“Marya, we are nearly there, nearly at the borders of my country. I will have you healed before all the hustle and busyness there.”

“Really, I’m feeling much better,” she assured him before she knew she had spoken.

Like lamps extinguished, Koschei’s eyes darkened. He put her down, less gently than usual.

“I have asked you not to speak, Masha,” he said. His voice was as twisted as a rope. Marya fell silent, abashed.

A simple supper steamed on the table: turnip greens, bread, mashed eggplant, and salted chicken jelly with bits of meat suspended in it. Soft, bland food for her wrung-out body. Marya still could not eat much.

“This is our last night alone, Marya,” said Koschei. “Tomorrow you will be beset with my relations and my serfs and all manner of tasks at hand. I shall miss this, our selfish private hours, secreted away from the collective share. But so it always goes in marriage. Half of matrimony is given over to those with no stake in our bed. I suppose you wonder if your sisters fared so, with their handsome bird husbands; if they grew sick or thrived, if they traveled so far, so fast. All those lieutenants were my brothers, my comrades, and though they did not have so far to go so fast, nor did they travel so well, they too had their moments with borscht and vodka and birch branches. It is a mating dance all birds know. I wish you would have looked out the window, Masha! I was such a lovely owl for you. I fell so hard onto the streetside. So that you would be comforted; so that what you expected would happen just as you wished it to. That is how much I want to please you. But
tscha
! You missed it! Perhaps if you had seen me that way everything would have happened differently. Perhaps
you
would have commanded
me
to be silent. It was a risk I took. I confess it excited me, the possibility of being caught out. But no, I got to keep my secrets after all. A chance passed is a chance passed. Oh, I will be cruel to you, Marya Morevna. It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you? You are clever enough. I am a demanding creature. I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable. But I am your servant. When you starve I will feed you; when you are sick I will tend you. I crawl at your feet; for before your love, your kisses, I am debased. For you alone I will be weak.”

On her bed by the stove, Marya lay down, her naked back red as a ruby in the firelight. Like a magic trick, Koschei pulled an egg from behind his ear—but not a hen’s egg. A black egg, embossed in silver, studded with cold diamonds. Marya smiled, for her father had done this once when she could not sleep, had rolled an egg along her body to soak up all the nightmares into the yolk and away from her heart.

“You do not understand this yet. Not yet, not yet. You are not ready. You would be rough with my gift. But it is our last night, and I shall soak up all your fears and nightmares and proletariat city-girl terrors. You must have room to fear new things. I shall make you all new, my own revolution, neither red nor white, but black.”

Koschei the Deathless rolled his egg over Marya’s skin. She felt the crackling of the delicate shell against her bones, the jewels scraping her skin.

When he had finished, he pulled her up roughly and crushed her to him, kissing her again. His mouth was cold, and there was no passing of pear jelly or cherries between them. But all the same, Marya Morevna tasted sweetness in his empty kiss.