Deathless

  Viy looked at her with a strange expression—something, Marya thought, like love and care. “And what of your carcass, Night? I’ll have it too, before the century turns. We’ll all be together, one family, with one head.” The edges of Viy’s smile vanished beneath his eyelids. “The raskovnik,” he hissed with vicious satisfaction, “unlocks all locks. How considerate of our Marya to go and fetch it for us! No fool like a new bride, the old tales say. And it was not so hard a thing to send my soldiers following her stinking, beating, hollering heart across the border, then pull her off her horse so she might not see us snuffling where her vintovnik snuffled. The doors of the Country of Life lie open, and even now my comrades are streaming in like water to celebrate your wedding and leave our gifts at your doorstep. I do hope you like them. After all, Marya Morevna, we are family now.”

  Viy bowed courteously, his long eyelids wrinkling. Before anyone could take another breath, he bent over at the waist until he folded up into a great white albatross and flapped slowly out of the door and down the long black stairs. Marya tore away from her new husband and after the Tsar of Death, chasing the pale, gleaming tail feathers of the bird until he burst through the huge, carved gate of the Chernosvyat and wheeled up into the grey morning sky, cawing a lonely, doleful cry.

  Skorohodnaya Road stretched out before her, streaked with silver like spilled paint. Wherever the silver lay it wriggled, eating into the stone until it boiled. Infantrymen with silver-plashed chests marched through the houses, bashing in windows with the butts of their rifles, calling inside with their faraway voices, bayoneting the taverns until the walls bled. From everywhere came the sound of glass shattering.

  And leaning against the rear wall of the magicians’ cafe, piled up with pale flowers and ribbons as though they were meant to be presents, rested Zemlehyed, mud trickling from a gash in his stony head, and Naganya, her iron jaw stove in, and Madame Lebedeva, a neat bullet hole blooming over her heart. She had painted her eyes red, of course, to match. Their dark stares tilted towards the dawn, but saw nothing.

  PART 3

  Ivanushka

  You enter here, in helmet and greatcoat,

  Chasing after her, without a mask.

  You, Ivanushka of the old tales,

  What ails you today?

  So much bitterness in your every word

  So much darkness in your love

  And why does this stream of blood

  Disturb the petal of your cheek?

  —ANNA AKHMATOVA

  14

  All These Dead

  In the autumn, when the woodsmoke hung golden and thick and the snow tested the wind with white fingers, a young officer walked alone down a long, thin road, smoking a long, thin cigarette. He enjoyed his cigarette, sucking smoke with relish, taking his time. Tobacco was precious, one of his few privileges as an officer. It was like smoking gold. Little shivers of delight ran down his spine as the cold sun hit his smoke, splitting into paradisiacal rays. His boots crunched on the frosted dirt of the road, and that too, he enjoyed: the crisp, bright sound of his own steps through the broad-leafed forest, the warmth of his woolen coat and fur cap, the meeting of cigarette and frozen dirt and yellow leaves and Ivan Nikolayevich, for whom the morning proceeded exceedingly well.

  Ivan had already tasted not only tobacco but butter that day. The memory of his knife scraping over fried bread and leaving a trail of glistening salted cream still thrilled him. He had begun to think butter a prize from some mythical tale, like a firebird’s feather. But even now his blood beat faster recalling the slip of grease on his bread. His bones felt strong, his legs big enough to take three rivers in one stride. Just last Saturday, during his mandatory volunteer labor, he had picked more apples than any of the city boys, those brainy students with glasses and sloppy hair. The pleasant hum of his muscles and the taste of his one stolen apple, hard and sweet and sour, still hung around him like a bright, beery haze. What to do with this surplus of good feeling and big legs? Ivan Nikolayevich had taken up the jewel of his lunch break and gone for a walk in the larch forest beyond the fences of his camp.

  And so Ivan strode expansively through the first falling leaves, taking tiny gulps of his cigarette to make it last. But the sweetness of cigarettes is, in part, that they spend themselves so fast. The young officer, with regret, but a chest full of richness, stomped out the last tiny nub of it into the frost.

  A few feet away, under a bright scaffolding of golden leaves, Ivan Nikolayevich saw a man’s hand. The fingers had gone grey and bluish. The hand still clutched a scrap of last night’s snow. Ivan did not move, but followed the hand with his eyes, up to the wrist, the forearm, the shoulder, and finally the face of the dead man, lying in the forest, his eyes shallow and staring, his mouth open as though he had forgotten what he meant to say. He was not Russian—Ivan could be certain of that. The man wore a spangled, scarlet scarf around his head, and a row of steel earrings in his left ear, which had been half sawed off. His clothes glittered with ornament; his boots shone, a strange buttery green leather. Further, he still clung to his rifle, even in death, and Ivan Nikolayevich knew well that Russian dead never kept their rifles long. Ivan knew he ought to return to his camp at once and report the dead foreigner in the woods. Instead he took a few steps in his threadbare boots and prodded the corpse with his toe.

  Maybe those boots will fit me, thought Ivan Nikolayevich. He could already feel their softness on his sore feet. Russian dead do not keep their boots long, either. I’ve a dog’s luck today! Butter, a good smoke, and new boots! But beyond the dead man lay another upturned hand, a woman’s, spattered with blood. Ivan shivered and shoved his hands deep in his pockets. Best to leave them. He could never explain the color to his comrades, anyway. But still, he inched forward, peering around a slim birch to see the face of the dead girl, her cheek well pecked by birds, one eye gone. She wore a wild scarf, too, yellow as the leaves, and on her forehead twisted two small horns, like a baby goat’s. Ivan hissed through his teeth and made the sign of the cross. It was a bad habit, crossing yourself, but like biting fingernails, hard to break.

  As if they were bread crumbs, he followed the dead deeper into the wood. Sometimes a cluster of them lay fallen in a circle, back to back, having perished defending themselves. Sometimes they had died alone. Sometimes they had horns, like the woman in the yellow scarf. Sometimes they had tails. Sometimes they looked not very different from Ivan himself. Here and there the frozen ground glittered: splashes of something awful, like silver paint. There were so many of them. Ivan began to feel sick, and he regretted his precious butter. But he did not stop. How could there have been such a battle so near to his camp without one of the sentries raising the alarm for rifle fire? The wind kicked at the flaps of his grey coat. He longed for another cigarette to comfort himself.

  Finally, the wood opened out onto a deep, stony valley clouded with brown leaves. Ivan Nikolayevich’s horror escaped his lips—he cried out, and fell to his knees. Thousands of dead littered the earth, their hands upturned, their eyes blind and flat, their beautiful clothes flapping in the breeze. A shrike cawed bitterly overhead, swooping in to yank on an eyelid, shaking his little black head to rip it free. Great gouts of the silver paint soaked the ground. Many of the fighters’ chests were sprayed with it. It had no smell. None of the dead smelled. Up on the next ridge of the valley a black tent stood, long, thin flags in red and white and gold snapping stiffly under low clouds.

  Ivan shouted into the wind, “If any man remains alive here, let him answer! Who slew this great army?”

  One soldier, near to him, coughed, blowing bubbles of blood from the corners of his mouth. Ivan Nikolayevich rushed to him, gave him water from his own flask. But the water just ran over his face, wetting it darkly, like silk. The soldier drew a ragged breath, and threads popped free in the corners of his lips. Ivan recoiled.

  “All these dead belong to Marya Morevna, the queen from beyond the sea.”

  And then the soldier d
ied, with that name on his threadbare lips.

  Ivan stumbled up toward the black tent, tripping over bodies, clutching his hat to his head. He knuckled tears from his eyes, moving like a mountain climber over their scarves, their spangles, their perfect boots. Don’t look down. Don’t look down.

  No guards flanked the tent. Ivan Nikolayevich started as a silver-white thing moved in the corner of his eye. When he turned toward it, he saw only more dead, only more leaves. The tent shuddered.

  “Screeeach,” croaked something neither the tent nor a soldier. Ivan whirled. It lumbered over the broken flotsam, teetering here and there over a crooked elbow, a twisted leg. Ivan could not tell if it was a man or a woman—its dark, hairy shoulders hunched up, hiding its head, and it creaked when it moved, like a weather vane. Ivan desperately longed to run, to move his strong legs, to take three rivers in a stride. Instead, he waited, his heart half-faint, until the thing stepped over a bony corpse and pulled up its head from deep in its chest.

  It had a woman’s face, so perfectly young and beautiful that Ivan Nikolayevich hurt with the force of her gaze, his skin prickling to life. Her exquisite eyebrows arched over fierce blue-violet eyes, and her lips parted like a bride waiting to be kissed. But her dark hair snarled and matted like a bear’s, and she wore no clothes but bedraggled feathers, more like fur than down, hanging in clumps all the way from her huge, square, skeletal shoulders to her lizard-yellow, three-toed feet—a bird’s talons, clawing at the frozen ground.

  “I’ve a dog’s luck today,” she barked, spittle flying. “Butter, a good smoke, and new boots!” The bird-woman chuckled as though she had made a quality joke. When her lovely mouth opened, Ivan could see that she had only three teeth, sunk in rickety white gums. She arched her back; her shoulders opened up into half-denuded wings. She flapped them twice, three times before settling, folding them down against her back. Ivan crossed himself again.

  “Please, boy. What is that? You’re supposed to be through with God. Threw up your hands and called Him a lot of dirty names, what? Threw bricks through His windows! Personally, I have nothing against opiates or masses, but you had Him there. It’s a fair charge.” The bird-woman opened her mouth wide and screeeached again.

  “You’re a devil!” cried Ivan Nikolayevich.

  “Well spotted.”

  Ivan tried to breathe more slowly. The cold sliced up his mouth. “God doesn’t exist only so long as devils also don’t exist,” he whispered. “Otherwise, the whole game is up.”

  She lifted one leg, then put it down and lifted the other, rocking back and forth.

  “Then up it goes, Ivan Nikolayevich.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Do you know, every time I have spoken to a human, I have been asked that? It’s almost a comfort. Almost endearing, how you look at me all big-eyed like that. I am the Gamayun, boy. I know everyone’s names. Of course, even if I didn’t, you’re always named Ivan Nikolayevich. It’s cheating, I admit. Not too much better than pulling an egg out of your ear.”

  Ivan did not believe in God. Not really, the way he believed in breakfast, in butter, in cigarettes. Unlucky enough to have been born before the Revolution, he had been baptized and was prone to unfortunate lapses such as crossing himself. But Ivan knew that religious dogma served only to oppress the workers. He was proud of his clean mind, his modern thinking, which was free of all those holy, hollow promises.

  Ivan Nikolayevich did not believe in God, but he did believe in the Gamayun. His mother had stopped reading the Bible to him as a good mother should, but she had never stopped telling stories around the stove, when winter hunkered down in the dark. Ivan could not remember her saying, Our Father who art in Heaven. But he recalled with a piercing clarity her face lit by the pitch-pine firelight as she whispered, The Gamayun eats from the bowl of the past and the present and the future, the bowl in which my Ivanushka is a baby, and a strong boy, and an old man with grandchildren. Here she comes, looking like a bird, but she is not a bird—creak, creak, creak!

  “You know me, eh?” The Gamayun grinned. “Good. I know people in high places, see. I have assurances from the government. If Christ returned on a golden cloud, they’d arrest him on the spot, but me they leave alone. Revolutions can only go so far.”

  Ivan’s palms stuck together in his fists, clammy, cold. How could he put this in his daily report? “Who is in that tent, Gamayun?”

  “Go in and find out. You will eventually anyway. It can’t unhappen before it happens. And then it will all start, like an engine, going and going ’til there’s nothing left to burn.”

  “I don’t understand,” he whispered.

  The Gamayun waddled toward him, her head bobbing over her massive wing-shoulders. She crouched on the belly of a dead soldier, her weight cracking ribs, her claws gripping clumps of his wine-colored shirt. “Sit down, Ivan Nikolayevich. I am going to tell you everything that will ever happen to you. Come on, then, find your knees—there you are, that’s how they bend.” The Gamayun’s beautiful face peered out of the wreckage of her bird’s body. Her neck stretched out long and sinuously, like a swan’s, but thick, ropy with sinew.

  Ivan sat down in the grass, carefully avoiding offense to some poor dead creature.

  “Why would you do such a terrible thing?” Ivan asked.

  “Because I have to make sure things happen the way they happen.”

  “But they must, mustn’t they?”

  The Gamayun laid her head to one side. Her eyes shone. “Oh, Ivanushka, not by themselves, they don’t. Think of when your mother told you stories by the stove. You had heard those stories a hundred times. Jack always climbed the beanstalk. Dobrynya Nikitich always went to the Saracen Mountains. Finist the Falcon always married the merchant’s daughter. You knew how they ended. But you still wanted to hear your mother tell them, with her gentle voice and her fearful imitation of a growling wolf. If she told them differently, they would not happen the way they have already happened. But still, she must tell them for the story to continue. For it to happen the way it always happens. It is like that with me. I know all the stories. The boyars always shave their beards. The Church always splits. Ukraine always withers in a poison wind. But I still want to hear the world tell them the way only it can tell them. I want to quiver when the world imitates a wolf. It still has to happen for it to happen. You have already gone into that tent. You have already made off with her. You have already lost her. You could tell your tale differently this time, I suppose. But you won’t. Your name will always be Ivan Nikolayevich. You will always go into that tent. You will see her scar, below her eye, and wonder where she got it. You will always be amazed at how one woman can have so much black hair. You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast. You will always run away with her. You will always lose her. You will always be a fool. You will always be dead, in a city of ice, snow falling into your ear. You have already done all of this and will do it again. I am only here to make sure it happens.”

  “You frighten me.” And indeed, he was shaking, all over, every cell vibrating with the presence of the Gamayun, with the pressure of her words, so heavy, like a storm coming that he could feel in his knees, in his chest.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “I don’t understand. I want to understand.”

  “You will. Before the end. You will. You always do.”

  “Then why do things happen the way they happen? If I understand it I can change it. Is it your fault? Do you stop me from changing it?” The Gamayun had to tell the truth. Ivan knew that; he remembered it from every tale. And so he could not find any part of himself with the capability to disbelieve her.

  “They happen because Life consumes everything and Death never sleeps, and between them the world moves. Winter becomes spring. And every once in a while, they act out a strange, sad little pantomime, just to see if anyone has won yet. If the world still moves as it used to.” The Gamayun ruffled her ra
gged feathers and glanced up at Ivan under her eyelashes. “Like a passion play. Like a sacrifice. It is certainly not my fault.”

  Ivan looked towards the black tent. “I could run home, back to my camp. I could resume my watch and say nothing, ever, of this.”

  The Gamayun arched one perfect eyebrow. “Go, then, Ivanushka. Run. Believe me, she isn’t worth it.”

  Clouds riffled through Ivan Nikolayevich’s hair. He frowned and thought of how much he had loved the cigarette of this morning. Of his dog’s luck. If he ran, he would still die, sometime. It was 1939. People died all the time. He would still die, but he would die not knowing who was in the black tent. He would wonder about it constantly, like a cut on the inside of his mouth he could never stop worrying with his tongue. Whenever he died, wherever he died, it would be the last thing he thought of: the flapping of the black silk, and how it sounded like whispering.

  Ivan had not moved.

  “Dobrynya Nikitich always goes to the Saracen Mountains,” said the Gamayun softly. Then she tucked her head under her shoulders and disappeared between two blinks.

  15

  Dominion

  Marya Morevna bent over her desk, her hair bound up in a braid around her head, her marshal’s uniform mud-stiff.

  The war is going badly.

  The war is always going badly.

  She passed a hand over her eyes. A year and more now, that she had needed glasses. Look, those glasses said from her desk. Look how much you are not like the others. You grow older and your eyes wear out. In case you could ever mistake yourself for belonging. Marya supposed this was why no one asked after stolen fairy tale girls. What embarrassments they turn out to be. They grow tempers; they join the army; they need glasses. Who wants them?