More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
But the little bird bounced up, and when he righted himself, he was a handsome young man in a handsome black uniform, his buttons flashing like raindrops, his nose large and cruelly curved.
First resolution: Perhaps one was not meant to see what a husband looked like before he made himself more or less presentable. Perhaps the republic of husbands was a strange and frightening place full of not only birds, but bats too, and lizards, and bears, and worms, and other beasts waiting to fall out of a tree and into a wedding ring.
Her sisters had been rescued from the city as beautiful girls are often rescued from unpleasant things, but they did not know what their husbands really were. They were missing vital information. Marya saw right away that this made a tilted kind of marriage, and she wanted no part of that. I will never be without information, she determined. I will do better than my sisters. 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. For this was how Marya Morevna surmised that love was shaped: an
...more
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.
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.
On the twelfth night, when Marya Morevna was four steps across the floor, poised halfway between cobalt and green with her leg extended like a parade soldier, she heard a little breath beneath her own, so quiet she had to stretch her ears around it, a tiny sound, a faucet hissing in a thunderstorm. She looked down, her black hair spilling over her shoulder like a curious shadow. Thus Marya Morevna first saw the domovoi, and the face of the world changed again.
There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise.
She had not known before that she wanted all these things, that she preferred dark hair and a slightly cruel expression, that she wished for tallness, or that a man kneeling might thrill her. A whole young life’s worth of slowly collected predilections coalesced in a few moments within her, and Koschei Bessmertny, his lashes full of snow, became perfect.
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.
Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.”
Marya dropped gratefully into the car, relieved to have done it, to finally be inside the magic instead of looking at it through a window. To never have to hear again that something black was coming for her—it was here, and it was handsome, and it wanted her.
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.”
She looked out the little round window of the hut and, in her dreamy, satisfied glow, thought she saw not a long automobile parked outside, but a huge black horse bent over a trough of glowing red coals, chewing them thoughtfully. Sparks fell from its velvet mouth.
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.”
You must have room to fear new things. I shall make you all new, my own revolution, neither red nor white, but black.”
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.
Of course, it is just as easy, in this manner, to reach the country of the Tsar of Death. Travel is never without risk.
“If you keep cutting at me I shall have no clothes left,” said Marya Morevna. The gems in her hair clattered against one another as he cupped her skull in one large hand. With the other, he cut away the skirt of her dress in a stroke, like peeling the skin off a red, red apple.
She thought nothing of it now, of kissing him alive.
You cannot punish someone unless you wish to forgive them, after all. What would be the point?
The waiter wrinkled his lovely nose. “Why would you tell a story about something that didn’t really happen? At least the poetry was straightforward, manful. Not concerned with idle fancies, just a respectable census report!”
“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.”
Don’t look so shocked—after an eon or two of being a wife you’ll want one of your own, too. Fiendishly convenient things, wives. Better than cows. They’ll love you for beating them, and work ’til they die.”
“Remember this when you are queen,” said the vintovnik solemnly. “That I went into the dark for you, and scared an old woman half to death.”
“Goats and gangrene, girl, I can’t stand the smell of your youth!” “Wait a while. It’ll go away.”
The boys can’t resist it! They come panting with their cocks on a silk leash, their balls painted gold for my pleasure. I give them a night on my knees, just like they like, sweet and obedient and dumb as a thumbnail, confused by their mysterious bodies, oh my, so much stronger than mine!
There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.”
Time is communal, Marya Morevna, the most purely communal of all commodities. It belongs to us all equally. So why hoard it?”
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?
I will say to you: Coral coaxes; pink insists; red compels.
A bashful winter’s noontime showed only its modest ankle before slipping into darkness again.
“Volchya, you must swear it. What do horses swear on?” “Nothing.” Volchya spoke with a strange accent, his brassy deep voice pinched and contorted. “Horses are godless. There is only the rider, and the whip. But I promise.”
It wants force, Marya. It wants you to be bigger than it is. It wants a mistress, and it is accustomed to one who is ancient and strong, whose thighs can crush it between them, whose iron hips drive it home.
Maybe it will be me standing by your wraith at a silver altar, putting a stone ring on the shade of your finger, suckling at the ghost of your virginity. I could fight on the field of your belly. We could split you like a province, between him and me.”
You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.
“Kiss me again, Marya, and I’ll go anywhere.” She did. It felt like firing her rifle, and watching a firebird fall out of the sky.
You are my sister. What belongs to me belongs to you, even if you are a wicked Delilah with a double ration of men. What is a little bad behavior, among family?”
You are my sister. What belongs to me belongs to you, even if you are a notorious slattern. We are family; we take after each other!”
“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.”
And at night, in a narrow bed in her old room, Marya Morevna would hold Ivan tight inside her, demanding his obedience to her, demanding that his soul be ripped out and emptied into her. Only then did she feel whole and rooted—but she did not feel like herself.
smash it under a hammer and Viy can have us and in his silver country I will fuck you until the end of the world.”
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 to be in the Young Pioneers, and grow
...more
In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake, and eat only what you can stomach, she said to me later.
I heard her cry out of the left side of her mouth as she sat by the window—and all of us saw General Frost step over the Neva. All of us held our breath and snapped our fingers to keep off his eye. His shoes were straw and rags; his beard was all hard snow. He had no hat, but his skull had chilblains, and his great blue-black hands held the double chain of his dogs, December and January.
After love, no one is what they were before.
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 don’t believe you, said my Marya. She is so stubborn her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat.
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.
We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive. This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell?”
