“Invite me in, Masha,” Comrade Bessmertny said softly. The street drank up his voice, sunk it into the snow, disappeared it.
Marya shook her head. She did not know why. She wanted him to come in. But it was all wrong: He should not call her by her pet name; he should not kneel like that. She should have seen him fall from the tree; she should have been more clever, more watchful. She should have seen what he was before—this was not how it was supposed to go. It was too familiar, and a little lascivious, how close he crouched to her. She knew already he would not take her walking down Dzerzhinskaya Street or buy her a hat. She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling. She did not feel it would be at all safe to kiss him on the cheeks. Marya Morevna shook her head: No, not like this, when I have not seen you without your skin on, when I know nothing, when I am not safe. Not you, whose name all my nightmares know.
“Then get your things, and come with me,” said Koschei, unperturbed. His eyes sparkled in the cold, the way distant stars will when the night freezes. And Marya’s heart stopped—that was what they said. When they came for you, because you were not good, because you were not worthy of a red scarf. Get your things and come with me. Perhaps he was not like her sisters’ husbands at all.
But the shape of Comrade Bessmertny’s lips fascinated her and made her feel sick all at once—and that was what magic did to her. His lips shone bright and dark, soft and heart-shaped. She felt, looking at him, that she could not see him at all, but could see only the things that made him unlike a man, the lushness of his face and the slowness of his manner. Though he frightened her, though the house moved in its sleep around her, no doubt dreaming of this very creature the domoviye called Papa and feared as though he might come wielding a belt, he also seemed familiar, a thing already part of herself, like herself even in the shape of his lips and the curve of his lashes. If she had spent her hours knitting a lover instead of coats for Anna’s son, the man who knelt before her would have sprung from her needles, even down to the ghostly flecks of silver in his hair. She had not known before that she wanted all these things, that she preferred dark hair and a slightly cruel expression, that she wished for tallness, or that a man kneeling might thrill her. A whole young life’s worth of slowly collected predilections coalesced in a few moments within her, and Koschei Bessmertny, his lashes full of snow, became perfect.
Marya shivered and, without really thinking about it, she took her hand from the man in the handsome black coat and withdrew into the house. He had come for her—for good or ill, she had little choice in it. When they come for you, her mother had once warned, you have to go. It’s not about wanting or not wanting.
She pulled a suitcase—not her own, and perhaps this was the first humble sin in her ledger—from the hall closet. She had little enough to take, but in went a few dresses, work clothes, her grey cap. Marya paused, hovering precariously over the suitcase as though she might pitch herself in at any moment. Finally, she squeezed her eyes shut and placed Likho’s great black book very gently beneath the clothes. The latches made small, hushed smacking noises as they closed.
Very suddenly, Zvonok the domovaya was sitting on the lid of the suitcase. Her boots shone new and polished, and her mustache had been beautifully oiled.
“I am not coming with you,” the house imp said grimly. “You understand that. I am married to the house, not to you. Even if you went out into the fields and offered me dancing shoes and called to me, I would not come.”
Marya nodded. Speaking seemed like such tremendous work just now. But at least Zvonok knew the man; at least he was only some demon-king of the domoviye and probably more besides, and not an officer come to carry her off to oblivion.
“Will you even say good-bye to your mothers?”
Marya shook her head. What would she say? How could she explain? She couldn’t even explain to herself. Mother, I have been waiting for something to happen to me my whole life, and now that it has I am going, even though it is a tilted kind of thing, and I meant to be so much better at it than my sisters.
“What a dreadful girl I have raised! Still, if you don’t ask their permission, they can’t say no. That’s our sort of logic.” The domovaya gestured for Marya to crouch down so that they could talk face-to-face, on equal footing. “But if not your mother, who will tell you how to behave on your wedding night? Who will twine flowers in your bridal braid?”
From somewhere deep in her muscles, Marya Morevna pulled up her words. “I’m not getting married,” she whispered.
“Oh ho! Easy to say, devotchka; not so easy to keep the house standing when the wolf comes thumping his tail in the grass. Listen, Masha. Listen to old Zvonok, who knows you. The domoviye have been marrying up and out and over each other just about as long as girls and boys. Prick your finger with a needle and let the blood fall over your threshold—it will hurt less, and you will dream of daughters. Men, they feel nothing like what we must endure. You have to make room in yourself for him, and that is the same in a house as in a body. See that you keep some rooms for yourself, locked up tight. And if you don’t want to get big in the belly … Well,” Zvonok wrinkled up her wide nose, “I don’t suppose that’ll be the same trouble for you as it is for the rest of us. The deathless can’t play our little genealogical games. Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.”
Zvonok patted Marya Morevna’s face with her little hand. “Ah! My heart! I warned you about reading Pushkin! I would choose another husband for you, I would, if the choosing of it were mine. I could have hoped for a different life for my Masha than his mouth on her breast like a babe, sucking her pretty voice down, her little ways, ’til she’s dry and rattling. But you like him already, I can tell. Even though we showed our teeth and were very clear about his being wicked. That’s not your fault. He makes himself pretty, so that girls will like him. But if you must insist on being clever, then be clever. Be brave. Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.” Comrade Zvonok shrugged and sighed with a little whistling sound. “But I am selfish! I must learn to give the best of my house away.”
The domovaya hopped up to her feet and kissed Marya roughly on the tip of her nose. She did a shuffling, cock-legged little dance and laid her finger aside her own nose. “Who is to rule,” Zvonok hissed, and disappeared.
Marya blinked. Tears dropped from her eyes like tiny, hard beads. Her legs, all against her head, longed to straighten and take her to the door, to Comrade Bessmertny, still kneeling there in the cold like a knight. She ruled nothing, Marya knew. Nothing and no one.
* * *
Marya Morevna ran out onto Dzerzhinskaya Street, which had been Kommissarskaya Street, which had been Gorokhovaya Street, her black hair long and loose, her cheeks lashed red, her breath a hanging mist in the air. Snow crunched beneath her boots. Comrade Bessmertny smiled at her without showing his teeth. The birds never hurt my sisters, Marya said to her galloping heart. He is not a bird, said her heart. You weren’t careful, you didn’t see. He held open the door of a long, black car—a sleek, curving thing, the kind Marya had only glimpsed rumbling by, always followed by the grumbling of her neighbors regarding the evils of the merchant class. The car growled and snorted, a baleful red peeping through the vents. Marya dropped gratefully into the car, relieved to have done it, to finally be inside the magic instead of looking at it through a window. To never have to hear again that something black was coming for her—it was here, and it was handsome, and it wanted her. She couldn’t change her mind once the door shut—ah, and there it went, nothing to be done now. She shivered in the backseat. The car was as cold as a forest, and she had forgotten her good fur hat.
Marya jumped a little as Comrade Koschei slid in beside her. The car, driverless, roared ahead down the street with a whine and a screeching whinny. K
oschei turned, gripped Marya’s chin, and kissed her—not on the cheek, not chastely or unchastely, but greedily, with his whole, hard mouth, cold, biting, knowing. He ate up her breath in the kiss. Marya felt he would swallow her whole.
6
The Seduction of Marya Morevna
The black car knew the forests like a boar knows them. It sniffed at the bone-bright birch trees and blared its low, moaning horn, as if calling out to fellow beasts within the pine-slashed shadows. Marya Morevna shuddered to hear it, but when she shuddered, Koschei held her nearer to him, twined his hand in hers.
“I will keep you,” he said softly, as sweet as black tea, “and I will keep you warm.” But his own skin had frosted over; his fingernails shone pearly blue.
“Comrade,” Marya said, “you are colder than I. I fear your flesh will freeze me.”
Koschei studied her as if she were a terribly curious creature, to crave warmth so. His dark eyes moved over her face possessively, but he did not release her. If anything, the cold of his body deepened, until Marya felt as though a pillar of ice clung to her, sending out silver tendrils to cover her, too, in the stuff of itself.
That first night, the black car wheezed, spat, and coughed triumphantly as they entered a clearing around a little house whose ruddy windows beamed through the sharp, clear night, whose eaves bowed under fresh straw, whose door stood ever so invitingly ajar. A peasant house, to be sure, nothing like her own tall, thin home, but squat and pleasant as a grandmother, a brown chimney puffing away. Koschei helped her, shivering, out of the car and slapped its fender fondly, whereupon the automobile leapt up cheerfully and scampered off into the dark.
The house had made itself ready for dinner. A thick wooden table sparkled with candles and a neat spread: bread and pickled peppers and smoked fish, dumplings and beets in vinegar and brown kasha, mushrooms and thick beef tongue, and blini topped with little black spoonfuls of caviar and cream. Cold vodka sweated in a crystal decanter. Goose stew boiled over the hearth.
Marya would have liked to have been polite, but the sight of so much food dazzled her. She fell to the bread and fish like a wild thing.
“Wait, volchitsa,” said Koschei, holding up his hand. “Little savage wolf! Please, sit at my table, brush the snow from your hair. No one will take your meal from you.”
Marya started to apologize, to explain how scarce food had been in Petrograd, how her belly had felt like a clenched fist with nothing inside.
“Comrade, I am so hungry—”
“There is no need for you to speak tonight, Marya Morevna. That time will come, and I will hang on your words like a condemned man. But for now, please, listen to me, and do as I say. I know that is difficult for you—I would not have chosen you if you found it easy to be silent and pliable! But we are going to do an extraordinary thing together. Do you know what it is we are doing? I will tell you, so that later, you cannot say I deceived you. We are taking your will out of your jaw—for that is where the will sits—and pressing it very small between our two hands, like a bit of dough. We are rolling it, and squeezing it, until it gets very small. Small enough to fit into the eye of a needle which is hidden inside an egg, which is hidden inside a hen, which is hidden inside a goose, which is hidden inside a deer. When we are finished you will give your will to me, and I will keep it safe for you. I am very good at this thing. A savant, you might say. You, however—” Koschei poured vodka for her. It trickled into her glass like music. The sides of Marya’s throat stuck together, so dry, so thirsty. “—are a novice. Less than a novice. And like a good novice, you must swallow your pride.” Koschei raised his glass. Marya raised hers more slowly, unsure. Her hand shook a little. She did not like to be ordered. She wanted to say a hundred, a thousand things. She wanted to leap upon him and demand he explain it all: Likho, the domoviye, the birds, her whole life. I have to know, I have to, or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not. But he only smiled at her, encouraging, benevolent, serene as an icon. “To life,” he said, and drank his vodka down in a long swallow.
“Now. Taste the caviar first, I must insist. I know that you would like to save it for last, to savor the delay because it has been so long since you tasted such a thing. But if I may teach you anything, it will be to relish everything, to devour it all—the richest things first, for they are your due. You have read your Pushkin—what is it old Aleksey says about me? There Tsar Koschei wastes away, poring over his pale gold. Tfu! That boy needed a haircut. But oh, Marya, Marousha, I do pore over my treasures! And some of them are glistening sturgeon eggs like piles of onyxes, and some of them are vials of vodka glittering like diamonds, and some of them are beets heavy and red as garnets, and some of them are beautiful girls from Petrograd, sitting in my house, silent as gold, because I asked them to be silent, which is the sweetest silence of all. And in the dark, I do pore over my riches, my impossible bounty.”
Beautiful girls? Marya heard his plurals. Had there been others? Questions hammered at her lips, but she wrestled with them, and kept her peace. If I do this, she reasoned, perhaps I will earn my answers.
Koschei cut a thick slice of bread from the loaf. The crust crackled under his knife, and the slice fell, moist and heavy, black as earth. He spread cold, salted butter over it with a sweep of the blade, and scooped caviar onto the butter, a smear of dark eggs against the pale gold cream. He held it out to her, and she shyly reached for it, but he admonished her. And so Marya Morevna sat, silently, as Koschei fed her the bread, and butter, and roe. The taste of it burst in her mouth, the salt and the sea. Tears sprang to her eyes. Her empty belly sang for the thickness of it, the plenty. Suddenly, it was a relief not to have to speak, to make conversation, while her body exhausted itself in poring over the delights of salt and heavy bread.
“Now the beets, volchitsa. And look at them first, how bloody they are, how crimson, how they leave trails behind them, like wounded things. Sip your vodka, and then bite one of the peppers—see how the vinegar and the vodka mix on your tongue? This is a very marvelous thing. A winter thing, when everything is pickled and preserved under glass. You can taste summer in this mixture, summer boiled down and soaked in brine, mummified, packed with spices to be born again on this table, in this place, in this snow. Now, a spoonful of kasha to smooth your excited palate.” He slipped the silver spoon into her mouth, his thumb grazing her chin. Marya felt as though she had never eaten before, never considered her food at all. She liked this better than Likho’s angular, hard magic. This magic filled her up, made her belly ache with fullness. “As you swallow the cow’s tongue, think for a moment about how strange and holy that is, to devour the tongue of another. To steal from it all its power to speak, to low at the moon, to call to its calf. To be worthy of such food you must guard your own words carefully, speaking only the wise and clever ones, lest your tongue end up likewise, on the plate of a rich man. Of course, rich men have been made obsolete by the Party, but if you learn a second thing from me tonight, let it be this: The goblins of the city may hold committees to divide a single potato, but the strong and the cruel still sit on the hill, and drink vodka, and wear black furs, and slurp borscht by the pail, like blood. Children may wear through their socks marching in righteous parades, but Papa never misses his wine with supper. Therefore, it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one’s stomach than of one’s nation.”
In this way, over hours, Marya Morevna ate her supper. The firelight dazzled her, the marrowy broth of the stew made her drunk, and Koschei’s low, inexorable voice, a voice like black tea, rose and fell like a ballad, lulling her, pulling at her, stroking her. Her mind chattered away, since her mouth could not: What kind of bird are you really, under your skin? Are you truly the domoviye’s Papa? Likho’s brother? I am not fooled by you pretending Bessmertny is your surname! Likho taught me better than to think names are only names and mean nothing! Koschei t
he Deathless, that’s what it means, and that’s you, it must be you. But what does that mean for me now? What will you do with me?
But she said none of these things. The drowsy, easy pleasure of allowing herself to be fed, to be spoken to without speaking, overwhelmed her. She felt like a fierce woodland creature, a volchitsa in truth, a little wolfling, brought inside and brushed and petted and fed until it seemed the most natural thing in the world to fall asleep by the fire. She looked out the little round window of the hut and, in her dreamy, satisfied glow, thought she saw not a long automobile parked outside, but a huge black horse bent over a trough of glowing red coals, chewing them thoughtfully. Sparks fell from its velvet mouth.
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.