Deathless, Page 3

  “I should never reach the top bookshelf otherwise,” she protested, and the domovoi shrugged as if to say: The ways of girls and other big folk are arcane and incomprehensible.

  He led Marya through a dank hall, past three layers of padded wall, a stony escapement, and a loamy passage with bits of worm and grass-root poking through the clayey dirt. Finally, these gave way to floorboards and a curious wallpaper: dozens upon dozens of Party pamphlets plastered against the earthen wall, holding back stone and mud.

  The Workers Have Nothing to Lose but Their Chains! cried a painted earnest man with his fist in the air.

  Beware Mensheviks, SR Loyalists, and Tsarist Generals! Bishops and Landlords Follow Closely Behind! warned a child beset by demon-faced soldiers.

  Down with Kitchen Slavery! Give Us a New Life Under Socialism! announced a woman in a red kerchief, brandishing her broom.

  Elect WORKERS to the Soviet! Do Not Elect Shamans or Rich Men! admonished a group of white-clad young voters.

  Marya touched the papery faces of young girls with rosy cheeks. ALL Society Must Transform into a Workers’ Collective! they told her.

  The hall opened onto a broad room with its own high birch rafters and a cheerful hearth, small rugs on the floor, and a curious, fabulous flotsam jammed into every corner: heavy, gold-rimmed mirrors; polished silver doorknobs; china plates with tiny violets on their rims; copper teakettles; garden shears; thick goose-down pillows; an emerald-colored smoking jacket and a wide assortment of pipes; delicate snuffboxes with enameled lids; a heavy silver hairbrush with boar bristles and combs with tiny glass gems set into their teeth; a phonograph with a great golden bell; a croquet set with bright balls; a black lace fan with a long blue tassel. All this odd treasure surrounded a large table at which sat twelve little men, all like Chainik in their red vests and split mustaches, except that some of them had black hair and some blond, and some of them were women—though they had fine, thin mustaches as well, but no beards.

  “Comrade Chainik, why have you brought this giant with you? She ought to be safe in her bed, dreaming of strawberries and laundry!” cried one of the other domovoi, who had an enormous golden medal on his chest—though when Marya peered closer, she saw it was nothing more than a disassembled pocket watch, made to hang down beautifully like a medal of courage.

  “Chairman Venik!” Marya’s guide replied in wounded tones. “She has a report to make! I would not rob the komityet of the opportunity to hear delicious testimony, to make piquant judgments, to carry out policies sweeter than oatcakes!”

  The table sighed in relief and nodded vigorously to one another.

  A domovaya raised her hand and was recognized by Venik. “I am Comrade Zvonok,” she said in a brash, ringing voice, tugging at her silky blond mustache. “And I formally invite the giantess emissary from the House Above to deliver her report.”

  “Hear, hear!” shouted the komityet, rapping the table with their knuckles.

  Marya still towered over most of them—seated, they came to her waist, and she felt it was only polite to sit down on the floor, so that she did not shame them.

  “First, you must understand,” she said, suddenly shy, “I did not believe in domoviye before tonight.”

  Silence, bricked-up and mortared over, greeted her.

  Marya hurried to fill it up, to appear wise and learned so that they would not banish her when she had only just arrived. Her cheek warmed where a child had slapped her once, years before. “I mean to say: I believed that there might be domoviye in the world—there might be anything in the world. But my education was … rather specialized, and I did not assume that the presence of birds who turn into husbands indicated domoviye and a door behind the stove.”

  “Who,” coughed Zvonok, “do you think broke your favorite teacup last fall? The one with the cherries on the handle?”

  “I was careless, Comrade Zvonok. I left the window open and a storm blew through.”

  “Incorrect! I broke it because you left me no cream and no dry biscuits, and when your old boots wore through, you burned them up for heat instead of giving them to me!”

  “Hear, hear!” the table erupted in approval once more. “Well done, well done!”

  “I’m surely very sorry—”

  “So is your teacup.”

  “Comrade, I don’t understand. I have read my books and listened to my grandmother as well as any girl. I know very well that each house is only meant to have one domovoi. How did there come to be a committee of house imps?”

  Chairman Venik straightened his beard like a vest, and brushed his vest like a beard. “Before the Party, each house only had one family. We have all had to adjust our thinking towards more correct principles, child. I came with the Abramovs when the White Guard drove them out of Odessa. What was I supposed to do, abandon the twins because our house burned down? They have such sweet little cheeks—they’ve grown so much! I saved the hallway mirror and Marina Nikolayevna’s snuffboxes.” He gestured to the piles of belongings around them.

  Another domovoi, with a beard like a chimney brush, stood. “I came with the Ofonasevs from Moscow. Old Papa Kolya was a Menshevik, and his property was confiscated—nothing to be done, he had a big mouth. But they gave me nice old boots every Christmas, and his wife was a Party woman, no blame to her. So I snatched up her fan before they came and hitched a ride to Petrograd on the roof of the train.”

  Chainik patted Marya’s hand. “I watched the Blodniek girls grow up in Sevastopol. They were even pretty as babies, and always with salty biscuits for me after supper. Is it their fault there was no work? Those girls had nothing to eat—no turnips, no bread, no fish. In Petrograd, maybe, they thought, there would be fish. I brought their plates, I was so full of hope. But here we are, and ha! No fish.”

  “I would have been happy to stay in Kiev,” huffed a shrunken old domovoi, his skin almost blue with age, “but blasted Svetlana Tikhonovna knew the old ritual. She went out into her pumpkin rows in her best black lace-up boots with the sweet little heels, laid out a big round of cheese, and hollered, ‘Grandfather Domovoi! Don’t stay in this place, but come with our family!’ The old bitch.”

  A groan rose around the table, with much nodding and sympathetic tears wiped away.

  Each by each, all twelve of the domovoi told their tales, of the lost Dyachenko fortune; of the tragic Piakovsky children, who had lost their older brothers to the war; of the Semeoffs’ disgrace.

  “You must see,” chirped Chairman Venik finally, “that a communal house requires communal domoviye, and communal domoviye require a committee. We are happy to do our part! It is a new world, and we do not wish to be left behind.”

  “Of course, I’ve been here since before you were a baby,” said Comrade Zvonok. “This house is my husband, and we eat warmth together by the stove.” Her broad face grew sly. “I saw the birds come, too.”

  Marya started. In all her life, she had never expected to meet another who had witnessed her sisters’ seductions.

  “Deliver your report, girl!” shouted Chairman Venik. “We haven’t got all night to reminisce!”

  Marya drew herself up. She tried to calm her little heart. Though they had merry mustaches and very fine vests, when they spoke she could see the domoviye’s long yellow teeth, sharp and jagged.

  “I … I wish to report that I have examined the … the matter carefully, and I think, I am fairly sure … I am certain there can be no doubt that the house is at least two steps larger than it was a few months ago, and possibly more. I cannot investigate the Dyachenkos’ room, which adjoins ours.”

  “Too right you can’t!” bellowed a domovaya with a glossy brown mustache that had been curled with a tiny iron. “It’s not your business!”

  Chairman Venik hushed the Dyachenko domovoi. “Is that all, giantess? Do you really think there is anything about this house we do not know? You have selfishly allocated excessive size to yourself, and forgotten to steal a bigger brain to go with it!” He polished
his watch-medal proudly. “We are widening the house! We conferred over a period of six months, and determined that the Revolution requires more from us than mere mischief and teacup-breaking. If such a great number of people must hold the house, the house must hold a great number of people!”

  Chainik clapped his hands. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!” he crowed.

  “Well said, Comrade! We have abilities we have hoarded, selfishly, because we did not understand that we owed them to the People, that we had become decadent, lazy bourgeoisie, in love with wealth and houses and ignoring Great Duties, High Philosophy!” Chairman Venik thumped the table with his little red fist. “No longer! The domoviye belong to the Party!”

  “But surely,” protested Marya, “if you widen the house the houses on either side of us shall be crushed.”

  “Child,” said Comrade Zvonok in a patient tone, “we are not architects. We are imps. We are goblins. If we could not make a little room on the inside without budging the outside, we would not be worth our tails. After all, we have been making our little homes in the walls for centuries.”

  “We will open up the floors like untying a stack of newspapers—pop!—out they will spring! The house on Gorokhovaya Street will be a secret country in the midst of St. Petersburg! They will plant turnips in the kitchen, and grow wheat on the ceiling, and we shall all have biscuits till we are so fat we will roll and never walk!” burst out the Piakovsky domovoi deliriously.

  Silence forked across the table like ice cracking.

  “It’s Dzerzhinskaya Street now, Comrade Banya,” the chairman said quietly. “It’s Petrograd.”

  “Of … of course.” Banya sat down, abashed. His face grew bright red, and he began to tremble.

  “Oh, don’t worry!” Marya cried, wanting desperately to save the poor creature from embarrassment. “I can never remember!”

  “It is our duty to remember,” said Chainik coldly at her side.

  “You must not tell anyone what we have done,” interrupted the chairman. “You understand? We will report you to the House Committee, the other one, the Big Committee, and you’ll be carted away, faster than you can yawn!”

  “I won’t, I promise,” Marya said hurriedly. “Though you ought not to report people. It’s not neighborly, and really rather horrid of you.”

  Chairman Venik grinned, and all his yellow, jagged teeth showed, like the teeth of a wolf-trap. “Don’t misunderstand us. We are very sweet when you have cream for us, and biscuits, and boots, but you have brought us nothing, and so we owe you nothing. The Party is a wonderful, marvelous invention, and it has taught us wonderful, marvelous things—chiefly, that we can cause more trouble with less effort by filing complaints than by breaking teacups.”

  Marya began to tremble herself. Her stomach felt cold. “But a domovoi can’t file a complaint.…”

  “Who’s a domovoi?” laughed Comrade Banya, her teeth out, too. “I’m Ekaterina Piakovsky.”

  “I’m Pyotr Abramov,” chuckled Chairman Venik.

  “I’m Gordei Blodniek,” smirked Chainik.

  “It takes two of us to hold the pen, but we manage,” giggled the Malashenko domovoi.

  All the domoviye were laughing at her; all of their teeth were shining in the candlelight. Marya Morevna buried her face in her hands.

  “Stop it, Venik!” snapped Zvonok. “You old stove-snort! You’re frightening her, and she’s mine, so I say stuff your chimneys!” Her mustache quivered with rage. She left her seat to stroke Marya’s nightgown. “There, there, Masha dear,” she cooed, calling her by her old pet name. “If you like I shall mend your teacup. Would that make you feel better?”

  But Chairman Venik was leaning over the table, his grin wider and wider, until the sides of his mouth met somewhere behind his ears. “Just you wait,” he hissed. “Just you wait. Papa Koschei is coming, coming, coming, over the hills on his red horse, and he’s got bells on his boots and a ring in his pocket, and he knows your name, Marya Morevna.”

  Marya could not help it; she screamed. The domoviye’s mustaches were all blown back.

  Zvonok whirled on him. “Venichek, you are a hedgehog’s ass. You weren’t supposed to tell! Is it worth it to scare a poor girl?”

  “Zvonya, I live to scare poor girls! Their tears smell like the freshest, warmest cakes with cherry jam smeared all round them. Of course it’s worth it!”

  “We’ll see, when Papa gets here,” warned Comrade Zvonok.

  The domoviye drew away from Venik slightly, as if waiting for him to turn to ash before their eyes.

  “You all saw,” quavered Banya, twisting her mustache, eager to make up her fault. “I didn’t tell! It was Venik!”

  “It’s been recorded in the minutes,” Zvonok said darkly.

  “I don’t understand,” said Marya, her tears drying on her cheeks. “How do you know my name?”

  “Don’t worry about it, dear,” said Zvonok brightly. “It’s far past your bedtime. Let’s get you to sleep, shall we?”

  All Marya’s fingers and toes were numb. She let herself be led away from the cackling komityet, shaking as though she had been drenched in water dragged in frozen buckets from the Neva. The domovaya pulled her past a grim Lenin demanding: Have YOU Volunteered for the Front Lines? Marya had a moment of panic: What if she could not get big again, and was to be stuck down here forever with the goblins and frowning paper Lenin staring her down? Suddenly she wanted very much to see the front of the stove again, and her own bed.

  “What did he mean? Who is Koschei?” she asked softly.

  “You know, you’ve been very careless, Masha. I try to watch out for you, even though you’ve never given me boots or cream, and I think that’s a testament to my generous soul, but you insist on drawing attention to yourself.”

  “But I don’t! I’m so quiet the Abramov twins tripped over me last week.” Since the affair of the scarf she had tried very hard never to be noticed by anyone.

  “Marya Morevna! Don’t you know anything? Girls must be very, very careful to care only for ribbons and magazines and wedding rings. They must sweep their hearts clean of anything but kisses and theater and dancing. They must never read Pushkin; they must never say clever things; they must never have sly eyes or wear their hair loose and wander around barefoot, or they will draw his attention! Safe in a house and a husband, that’s where you belong! But it’s too late now, too late! Fool child, the house and I tried so hard to raise you right!”

  “But who is he?” Marya pleaded—yet she did know that name, didn’t she? The name pulled at the back of her mind, bending her toward it.

  But Zvonok had gone knuckle-white with fear and anger, and would say nothing. When they passed through the flower-carved door and back into the space between the stove and the wall, she yanked on Marya’s sash once more. Marya spun like a spool, and she felt the peculiar sensation of a great huge hand pulling her up by the crown of her skull, of her bones yawning and stretching. When she stopped spinning, she faced the stove, and was quite her own height again. And she found herself disappointed, only a little. It was over. The extraordinary thing was over and it had taken minutes. She had gotten big again with no trouble, and how long would she have to wait now for some other scrap of the naked world?

  “Here,” whispered Zvonok. “This is the best I can do for you.” The little domovaya reached into her red vest and drew out the silver hairbrush Marya had seen in the flotsam at the komityet. It grew larger and larger as she pulled it out, until it was taller than Zvonok but perfectly sized for Marya’s hand. “It belonged to Svetlana Tikhonovna. Did you know she was a dancer when she was young, with the ballet? Comrade Stoylik calls her names, but when she sleeps, he comes out to curl up in her hair and sleep next to her ear. He says she smells like Kiev.”

  “Won’t he know you took it?”

  “I’ll slap the bottoms of his feet until he says it was yours all along. But you keep it safe from old Svetlana—she’d love to ha
ve it back.”

  “I already have a hairbrush, though,” protested Marya.

  Zvonok winked, first with one eye, then the other. She put one hand over her left eye and spat.

  “You need this one.”

  And with that, the domovaya hopped up onto one foot, spun around three times, and vanished.

  4

  Likho Never Sleeps

  In a city by the sea that was certainly never called anything so bourgeois as St. Petersburg, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a young woman in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers watched her new neighbor arrive in the house next door. An old woman clutching her suitcase, shrouded in a black wool dress, very tall and thin, whose waist was so stretched and skinny that Marya could have put both her hands around it. The woman’s fingers were amazingly long, her nose sharp and spiked, and her white hair pulled tightly back into a bun. She walked with a limp and a hunch, but Marya suspected that this was to hide how tall she truly was.

  “That’s Comrade Likho,” said one of Marya’s twelve mothers, darning an ancient stocking. “A widow with no children. She says she’ll take in all our laundry, the dear old thing. I thought it might be nice if you visited her after school. She could tutor you, watch out for you while I’m at the factory.”

  Marya did not like this idea at all. In a classroom she could think her own thoughts and no one would bother her—no teachers called upon her anymore. With a tutor, she could not avoid being asked her opinions. She frowned down at the hunchbacked Likho. The crone stopped and looked up at the window, the turn of her head fast and sharp, like a bird’s. Widow Likho’s eyes were black and huge, as though they had drooped and melted and slid down into her cheekbones. Her gaze was barbed and biting. The cherry trees dropped their blossoms across Likho’s black dress, and she scowled.

  “You shouldn’t be frightened of old ladies,” admonished another of Marya’s mothers—the one, by coincidence, who had borne her. Marya knew she should not show favoritism, but her mother’s hands looked so thin, the skin so dry, she wanted to clap them between her own, to warm them and make them red again. “You’ll be one someday, you know.”