Deathless

by Catherynne M. Valente

“Oh, I know who he is. Think lieutenants do not inform on each other, do you? Gossip is like ration cards in these parts. Just look at my sister, disloyal, a criminal, at her age! I’ll have you know I have lived with virtue since Zhulan took my conscience, and I’ve two upright little chicks to show for it!”

“Haven’t you heard? It is wicked to have more than your neighbors possess.” She grinned. “We must all do our parts for the Party.”

“Of course,” said Ivan.

“Tfu!” Anna spat. “That’s what you know, both of you.” But she turned her elegant back to him and embraced Marya Morevna once more. “But you must stay the night, refresh your poor horse—what an earnest beast! But your prisoner looks sick. He would throw up anything you fed him. You are my sister. What belongs to me belongs to you...

A man in a threadbare grey coat exited the banya with a puff of steam. His head was a lean shrike’s, and he would not look at Marya as he passed her by. Anna smiled at him, her face lighting like an oil lamp, took his wing and walked back towards the house, croaking and cawing to him in the strident, ordered language of the incorruptible.

“Take this with you.” She tossed a key to Marya, with brass teeth. It glowed dimly in her hand, catching the sun. “It is the key to our old house, on Gorokhovaya Street. But of course it is Dzerzhinskaya Street now. One of us should still live there. One of us should be young again.”

She knew nothing about him, except the taste of his mouth. What else didn’t she know? Everything, everything.

Miserable means miserable. What can you do? You live through it, or you die. Living is best, but if you can’t live, well, life is like that, sometimes.

But I let them fight over it because he is a fool and she is a devil like me, and what is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?

No one is now what they were before the war.

After love, no one is what they were before.

When you are this hungry, you cannot even remember who you used to be, she whispered. Who you might have been, if not for the hunger.

“I will remember these books for you,” said Ivan Nikolayevich, because he did love her, even if it was beef-love: stupid and tough and overcooked. “I will recite them to you whenever you want to read.”

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.

You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.

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 no amount of hiding will avoid him. Life is like that.

“I believe I have never been so well, Ushanochka. I am so well that my glass fills before I think to be thirsty. To be certain, I am sad when the moon is thin. I remember friends long gone, and how one of them painted her eyes to match her soup, and how one slept curled next to me, and another kissed me, just once, by a river. I remember one with wet hair, and her baby. I 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.”

“When you are cut, you feel it, even if the cut is tiny. Such a thing is a child, a wound within.”

“And then you came. You are here. My Marya, all whole and alive and come back for me. That was my whole soul gone out into the telling of all that has passed. But I have your dress and your brush and your rifle, just where you left them, in the closet, in the dresser, under the bed. Where is your pain, Marya Morevna? Where is your grief? Where is your death?”

You fought at Leningrad. So did I. Why should he be spared?”

“Someone ought to be.” And it will not be me. I have survived, but I have not been spared.

“Koschei died. Well, he always dies. And he always comes back. Deathless means deathless. He dies and plays out the same story again and again. How many people have told you that? The Country of Death looks so much like the Country of Life. So now he lives in Viy’s possession, and he has a little wife he spirited off from her family, and thinks he is a man. A man, like he always wanted to be. It’s a good joke, if you have the right humor for it. He won’t remember you. He’s not strong enough. Viy was always the better of them. Inexorable, that’s the word. Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That’s what death is for. That’s why they keep telling this story. It’s the only story. He will look at you and think you are a woman of rank getting on in years, and wouldn’t you like to try the kvass?” Ushanka put her hand back inside Marya’s grip, making it into an intimate touch, full of pity. “Marya,” she sighed. “No one is now what they were before the war. There’s just no getting any of it back.”

Marya Morevna looked up, and she felt so old, so awfully old and worn, and so young all at once, raw as a wound. Let it be over, she pleaded within herself. Let it never have happened—any of it. Let me be young again, and the story just starting.

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.

But you know, in the end, you can only be yourself in a basement, in the black, underneath everything, where no one can find you.”

“And on my life I would never suggest to you that stories cannot be forgotten in the bone even when a brother or a wizard or a rifle says you must, you must forget, it never happened; there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.”

“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.”

She did not waver in her path, toward a place underground, down, down into the merciful dark, in a basement where a man with black curls flecked with starry silver would say her name like a confession; and in the place where their hands would touch, Marya Morevna could already see diamonds and black enamel swelling huge and gravid, yolk seeping from their skin like light.