Deathless

by Catherynne M. Valente

Everyone knows to make way. But you called; I had to come. I am here to educate you, to make you ready. There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise.

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.

But if you must insist on being clever, then be clever. Be brave. Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.”

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.”

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.”

But so it always goes in marriage. Half of matrimony is given over to those with no stake in our bed.

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.”

The rapt pupil will be forgiven for assuming the Tsar of Death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be virtuous. Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it will commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature—but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind. But of an end to their argument, we shall have none, not ever, until the end of all.

Punishment doesn’t mean you aren’t loved. On the contrary. You can really only punish someone you love.”

“Well, isn’t that just fascinating,” she breathed. “The devil take lunch! Let your old baba take you on an … expedition. It’ll be good for you! Morally fortifying, like having a good stare at a graveyard. A body needs a good memento mori to flush out the humors.”

That comrade nonsense is just a hook by which the low pull down the high. And then what do you get? Everyone rolling around in the same shit, like pigs.”

But if I am not innocent, are there lies in my heart? Smears on my soul? Am I a devil? What does it mean, to be one of them? Marya resolved to sort it all out when she had a moment to think through it, when Baba Yaga’s soup pot was not dangling over her head.

What say I shoot you now and get it over with? Why wait? Time is communal, Marya Morevna, the most purely communal of all commodities. It belongs to us all equally. So why hoard it?”

She leveled a stare at him. “If it belongs to us all equally, then I will take and enjoy my share, thank you.”

And yet Koschei lives in his great palace and Lebedeva hoards her night creams and her cameos and prizes her patronymic. Little folk scramble to wear badges of belonging on their breasts, to agitate and join up, but big folk live as they always have, like dragons, like Tsars. How can this be?”

“Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlor game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter.”

Let us be greedy together; let us hoard. Let us hit each other with birch branches and lock each other in dungeons; let us drink each other’s blood in the night and betray each other in the sun. Let us lie and lust and take hundreds of lovers; let us dance until snow melts beneath us.

Let us steal and eat until we grow fat and roll in the pleasures of life, clutching each other for purchase. Only leave me my death—let me hold this one thing sacred and unmolested and secret—and I will serve you a meal of myself, served on a platter of all the world’s bounty.

“If you want me, Koschei Bessmertny, tell me where your death is. Between us there must be no lies. To the world we may lie and go stalking with claws out, but not to each other.

It is only fair: You know where my death is, at the point of your knife or between strangling fingers or in a glass of poison.

rest in my hand like a chick, small and weak and knowing that I could crush you if I wished it, but...

“Death stands behind every bride, every groom. Even as they say their vows, the flowers are rotting in her crown, his teeth are rotting in his head. Cancers they will not notice for thirty years grow slowly, already, in their stomachs. Her beauty browns at the edges as the ring slides up her finger. His strength saps, infinitesimally, as he kisses her.

If you listen in the church, you can hear my clock tick softly, as they tock together toward the grave. I hold their hands as they stride proudly down the

very short road to dotage and death. It’s all so sweet, it makes me cry. Let me kiss your bride on both cheeks, Life. Let me feel her hot...

And Life, that old tyrant, he knows my land is fertile now. So many white flowers. So many dead since ’17. So many more of us than of you. Soon there will be nowhere you can walk where my folk do not flow over and around you, do not drink of your sweat, do not swallow your heat.

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.

LOL

“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.

“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.

“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.”

“Koschei, Koschei,” she whispered. “What would I have been if I had never seen the birds? I am no one; I am nothing. I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you.

Nothing in me was not made by you. I was six when the rook came—six! That’s my whole life that you’ve bent in your hands. What could I have grown up to be? What kind of human woman, what kind of simple, happy thing? If I had never been broken on a bird’s wing. If I had never seen the world naked.

I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know. Ivan looks like th...

A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be,

just the

color, just the...

“Look how you kiss me, Marya Morevna,” he whispered, “while you tell me what marriage is!”

“You will live as you live in any world,” Madame Lebedeva said. She reached out her hand as if to grasp Marya’s, as if to press it to her cheek, then closed her fingers, as if Marya’s hand were in hers. “With difficulty, and grief.”

“Someone told me once that even when children starve for the sake of righteousness, Papas always have wine at their table.” She sipped the wine herself. “When I was young, it seemed far too sweet. I savored bitterness, the spice of those who have lived long and wildly. Perhaps you, too, should learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, still you may have it.”

Marya Morevna drained the glass. “Now, even this candied syrup tastes bitter to my tongue,” she sighed.

“Well, I will tell you something, Masha, my girl. You should have stayed put. I understand the need to ride a new horse every now and then—you think I haven’t gone and taken a good look at the wallpaper in another house every century or two? But you don’t trade a tiger for a fat little kitten, you know what I mean? It’ll just piss on your floor and ignore you when it’s not biting you for fish you don’t have.”

“I wanted to be alive again. I wanted to be someone else.” Zvonok stood up, brushing off her red trousers. She put her hands on her hips.

“Well, I hope lying on that floor like a broken dog is everything you hoped it would be.”

“I do not tolerate a world emptied of you. I have tried. For a year I have called every black tree Marya Morevna; I have looked for your face in the patterns of the ice. In the dark, I have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.”

“Everyone endures hard things.” I endure them. There was never any choice because it is hard here and hard there. Hardness everywhere.

“I do not wish to be dragged back and forth between the two of you like a bone between two dogs. You promise the same things, and neither of you delivers.”

Koschei the Deathless answered, “When do you feel most alive, Marya, but when you are closest to death? That is where I live. That is what my body is made of.”

A ration card says, This much life we have allotted you. It says, This much death we can keep from your door. But no more. It says, In Leningrad there is only so much life to go around. It says, The only thing not rationed in Leningrad is death.

I am not Koschei the Deathless anymore. I spat to show him what I thought of that. After love, no one is what they were before.

Nobody talked. They breathed into their scarves and lugged and lugged. But no one was left to bury anyone else, so people just left the sleds in a pile by the cemetery gate. That’s where we left Sofiya, with Kseniya lying over her like a flower, with snow piling up on her hair. I said them a domovoi’s mass, but no one heard me because grief is louder than praying.

I looked out the window where she had looked for months stitched back to back. And there in the dark glowed silver wounds in the street where another Leningrad bled through: another Neva, another Dzerzhinskaya Street, all splashed with silver.