Deathless

by Catherynne M. Valente

And there walked a woman with swan feathers in her hair, vanishing around a corner; and there walked a short, fat creature with dead leaves on his head; and there walked a woman like a gun.

And there walked Kseniya, too, her chest stained and shimmering, holding baby Sofiya’s hand as the child jumped and t...

drifting just out of her reach. Mamochka, she...

In the middle of them all came walking like a kommissar a man with eyelids so long they brushed the snow out of his path, wearing a silver brocade and a silver crown. And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids...

Look, I am holding up my two hands, and between them is the old, dear house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, and between them is Marya Morevna and her husband, mad with hunger like a cow, and between them is Koschei the Deathless looking up from the darkness. He is smiling down there, and his smile has two edges.

Old Zvonok died because her house died. That’s what married means.

They’d all left us already, all of them, some more than once, and if a domovaya ever showed her tears, it wasn’t me. What else can you say? Everyone died. Kseniya Yefremovna died. Sofiya Artyomovna died. Even Ivan Nikolayevich died, by spring. Only Zvonok was left, and then not her, either. A German shell hit us and left the house on our right and the house on our left still standing. Well, that’s what happens to things you love.

I walk in the other Leningrad now. The silver one, the one with teeth. The one Marya and I saw out of the window...

And here, in the other house on the other Dzerzhinskaya Street, Kseniya Yefremovna still makes soup out of ration-card shadows, but now it tastes thick, and marrowy, and sweet. And I drink it down with the rest of them and it runs into my mu...

Will you not say to me once more That word which conquers death And answers the riddle of my life? —ANNA AKHMATOVA

But should Alkonost speak with the smallest kindness, the littlest mercy, the richness of his voice would sweep away any sorrow in any heart, and leave there instead only the perfect world that might have been, if only the world had not invented hearts in the first place. For this reason, some folk stuff their ears with wax.

Some seek out the bird of heaven all their days, praying to be drowned in him. Each of these cannot comprehend what drives the other. How can you want to lose yourself, your history, your name? How can you run from the voice of God?

But of course, no amount of seeking will find Alkonost, and ...

will avoid him. Life is ...

Marya Morevna’s husband, Koschei Bessmertny, is so handsome that he could lend a cup of his beauty to every man in Yaichka and still charm the bark from his dogs.

Sometimes, in a certain light, he seems to recall to Marya someone she used to know, and could almost remember: a kind of golden cast to his black hair, a way he had of laughing, like a hound baying.

wish they could drink from full glasses, too. I wish they could see the new lamb when it comes. But the moon waxes, and my sadness dries up. Life is like that, of course.”

“Of course.” And Ushanka puts her hand on Marya’s, for they have shared tea more often than tears. Her skin is like cloth. “The sweetness of it all is sharpest when placed alongside sorrow, close as knife and fork. But it is my job to interrogate your happiness, to prod its corners, to make sure it holds. When a sadness chews at the bottom of your heart, it’s as though you walk all day with your dress on backwards, the buttons facing the forest, the collar facing the village. To everyone else, all may seem normal, but my eyes are so keen.”

Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.”

“Mashenka, his death was hidden in the depths of Yaichka, and you were the path to it, as life is always the path to death. Here, he could be yours, he could be whole, both Koschei and Ivan, devil and man, powerful and weak, dark and gold. You could be the girl you might have been, if you had never seen the birds. If you had never had your scarf stolen. And if he did not want to die, all he had to do was never touch you once, never get on you the child he cannot have in the real world, for he is the Tsar of Life, and death always looks like a child—the end and only purpose of an animal body.

But of course it

ended as it always ends. Life is like that. Who in a perfect world does not demand their...

Those were days I wish I could eat now, but remembering is like eating, don’t you think? Gobble up the past to keep warm. I hope it was warm, where you were.”

“Talking is the only thing I can do! I cannot take you in my arms, or kiss you, or make love to you as one should to a wife who has returned after a long journey. I cannot make you understand that I forgive you, that I know you loved both he and I, the way a mother can love two sons. And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough, which was my crime. After all, I took you from him to begin with, so I cannot begrudge him taking you from me—”

In the space of one heartbeat to another I loved you and I was lost to you, like one of those dead soldiers made of cloth. And I have had such a long time to think about it, Marya! Such a long time to lie in the basement in the ropes that held him and wish that they had held me, because that would have meant you wanted me enough to keep me

“If this were really a story, Ivanushka, I could heal you with the Water of Life, and you would stand up and dance with me, and then we would find a table set with all sorts of food and the city would wake up from an endless sleep, and what shouting and singing we would hear, coming up from the streets like steam!”

“Tscha!” hacked Ivan, his cough catching in his throat and unspooling into threads of spittle and phlegm. “Life is not like that.” “Don’t worry,” Marya whispered, kissing his forehead. “My old bones will follow yours soon enough.”

“Wife, you could sow wheat in the rock of Dzerzhinskaya Street, wait for it to grow, reap it, thresh it, grind it into flour, bake it into bread, and eat the bread and share it round, and even then, you could not catch me.” And then Ivan died in her arm...

But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she

had been met—the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did—the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over.

“Babushka,” Marya said, and she meant it, here, at the end of everything. “I am so tired. I am so finished with it all. How can I live in this? I want to be held by everyone I have loved and told that it is all forgiven, all done, all made well.”

“Tscha! Death is not like that. The redistribution of worlds has made everything equal—magic and cantinas and Yelenas and basements and bread and silver, silver light. Equally dead, equally bound. You will live as you live anywhere. With difficulty, and grief. Yes, you are dead. And I and my family and everyone, always, forever. All dead, like stones. But what does it matter? You still have to go to work in the morning. You still have to live.”