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And so Anna went dutifully to the estates of Lieutenant Zhulan, and wrote properly worded letters home to her sisters, in which her verbs were distributed fairly among the nouns, and her datives asked for no more than they required.
If a bird or any other beast comes out of that uncanny republic where husbands are grown, I will see him with his skin off before I agree to fall in love.
If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.
Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.
It didn’t matter. She was a person, but she was not one of the People.
After that, Marya Morevna understood that she belonged to her secret and it belonged to her. They had struck a bloody bargain between them. Keep me and obey me, the secret said to her, for I am your husband and I can destroy you.
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.
Of course, rich men have been made obsolete by the Party, but if you learn a second thing from me tonight, let it be this: The goblins of the city may hold committees to divide a single potato, but the strong and the cruel still sit on the hill, and drink vodka, and wear black furs, and slurp borscht by the pail, like blood. 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.”
Oh, I will be cruel to you, Marya Morevna. It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you? You are clever enough. I am a demanding creature. I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable. But I am your servant. 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.”
If I let him do this to me, what else will I allow? Anything, anything, anything.
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.
“But you know, a wizard with black hair and a thick mustache put a curse on Moscow, and Petrograd, too, so that no one would be able to tell the truth without lying. If a novelist wrote a true story about how things really happened, no one would believe him, and he might even be punished for spreading propaganda. But if he wrote a book full of lies about things that could never really happen, with only a few true things hidden in it, well, he would be hailed as a hero of the People, given a seat at a writers’ cafe, served wine and ukha, and not have to pay for any of it.
“Husbands lie, Masha. I should know; I’ve eaten my share. That’s lesson number one. Lesson number two: among the topics about which a husband is most likely to lie are money, drink, black eyes, political affiliation, and women who squatted on his lap before and after your sweet self.”
“That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”
Fiendishly convenient things, wives. Better than cows. They’ll love you for beating them, and work ’til they die.”
I don’t get to give the tests because I buttered up the right kommissar. I give them because I know. A wife must terrify, she must have a stronger arm than a boyar, and she must know how to rule. That’s all that matters, in the end. Who is to rule.
He ought to be scrambling to prove he’s worthy of me!”
In marriage, the highest virtue is humility. If you’re humble, they’ll never see you coming!”
There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.”
Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.”
“If it belongs to us all equally, then I will take and enjoy my share, thank you.”
“If you think my brother is any different, girl, then there’s no help for you. He’ll burn you down like wax if you let him. You’ll think it’s love, while he dines on your heart. And maybe it will be. But he’s so hungry, he’ll eat you all in one sitting, and you’ll be in his belly, and what will you do then?
Blue is for cruel bargains; green is for daring what you oughtn’t; violet is for brute force. I will say to you: Coral coaxes; pink insists; red compels. I will say to you: You are dear to me as attar of roses. Please do not get eaten.”
“All these dead belong to Marya Morevna, the queen from beyond the sea.”
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.
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.”
“They happen because Life consumes everything and Death never sleeps, and between them the world moves.
“What I am saying is, in this graveyard, I would like to feed you, so that you will not have holes in you like bullets. Sit at my table, Marya Morevna. Let me be a mother to you. Be fat. Be alive.”
Why do men come knocking at my door? Why do they take their hats off and look at me with big deer eyes and bare their necks? If they stayed home and gave their kitchen tables such stares, I might have a little peace.
I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too.
One will presented to another, wrapped in a bow. The question is always who is to take and who is to give. I took first, that’s all. You will take last.
“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
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How long was it, between the time when you were happy, and the time when you wanted to kill him?”
“When I saw him I thought I could curl up inside him and go to sleep and never wake up.” “Men are no good for that, Masha. They’ll always want you working, when you’re not softening their fall into bed at the end of the day.”
She clung to him, for if she clung to him, then leaving Buyan could be right, could be right forever.
“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.”
Tears blurred in her eyes. Where am I painted? Was I never part of them, those tales, that magic?
The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it. Well, I do not want to be beautiful, or a woman, or anything. I want to know how men breathe. I want my daughter
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For storytelling, a domovaya is always better than a human because she will not try to make a miserable thing less miserable so that a boy sitting at his grandmother’s knee can nod and say, The war was very terrible, wasn’t it, Babushka? But it is all right because some people lived and went on to be good and have children. I spit on that boy because he thinks only of his own interest, which is that he should be born. Miserable means miserable. What can you do? You live through it, or you die.
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.
We wander, lost, and you cannot even see the silver on our chests anymore, because all the human world is the Country of Death, and in thrall, and finally, after all this time, we are just like everyone else. We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive.
Let me be young again, and the story just starting.
