Ivan shrugged bashfully. “I would not presume.”
“Of course you will. You presume already.”
“You are a human woman,” he said quietly. “You do not belong here, with all this blood, all this pickling. And their brine is seeping into you, bit by bit. You can even disappear like they can. And who knows what else!”
“Well.” Marya laughed gently. “I can’t really, not like they can. I’m not very good at it. I can only do it in certain places, where the boundaries are quite thin. We had to walk to the place where I spun around and carried you off, remember? I do not know so many of those places. Territory changes too fast to keep the maps up-to-date. But you could probably do it, too, in the thin places. If you practiced. It isn’t hard.”
“I don’t want to do it.” Ivan Nikolayevich began to roll a cigarette. Without her asking, a bronze tray had quietly appeared, set neatly with papers and crisp, curling tobacco. Ivan thought the stuff hers, but Marya knew better—Koschei had inserted himself here, between them, even when he was gone.
“Why not?” She shrugged. “It’s fun. It feels good.”
“Not to me. You feel good, and sunlight on wheat, and fresh butter and eggs and cigarettes like these, which I roll myself, just as I like them. Magic feels like stripping off my skin and putting it on again, backwards.”
Marya put down her brush and crawled onto the bed, reveling in the feeling of stalking him, catlike, hungry. Of knowing more than he did. It was how Koschei felt, she guessed. All the time.
“Well,” she purred, “I like all of those things, too. I don’t want to choose between them. Koschei doesn’t make me choose.”
“Yes,” Ivan said softly, stroking her face with his hand. “He does. It’s only that he makes stripping off your skin taste like fresh butter and feel like sunlight on wheat.”
Marya frowned. If he would only ask her, if he would only behave like a bird, like a man in black, she would find all this so much easier. “Ivan, you do not understand us. 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 shape.”
Ivan kissed her, hesitantly, sweetly, as a boy kisses a girl on the schoolyard. Her mouth flowed with warmth.
“Look how you kiss me, Marya Morevna,” he whispered, “while you tell me what marriage is!”
“It is selfish to hoard resources, Ivan Nikolayevich, when we might share, each according to need. Why can I not have both? Both of you, Leningrad and Buyan, pickled and fresh, man and bird?”
He kissed her again, deeper, and the taste of him in her mouth was bright, brighter than blood.
“What do we carry between us, then, Masha?”
“Nothing,” she breathed. What he dared, to call her Masha so soon! “Yet.”
Marya Morevna gripped his shoulders in her hands and pushed him down beneath her. She clamped his narrow hips between her lion-thighs and kissed him with all the biting and possessing she had learned, with everything she had to give to a kiss. Her hair swept over his face, a black curtain, hiding all light, plunging him inescapably into her.
Ivan clapped his hand to the back of her neck, moving under her, arching his back to press closer. He moaned under her, his coin-colored lashes so long, like a girl’s.
“Come with me, back to Leningrad,” he whispered. “Come back.” There. There, he has asked. And I must choose. War before me, and behind, a woman I do not know, the woman I could have been, a human woman, whole and hot.
And in the depths of herself, Marya felt her old house on Gorokhovaya Street, on Kommissarskaya Street, on Dzerzhinskaya Street, unfold and creak and beckon, and the sounds of the Neva gurgle greenly. Things she had not allowed herself to remember came pouring out of Ivan’s kisses, out of his skin, out of his seed. She smelled the sea. But 1942 is not so far off now, she thought desperately, his warmth suffusing her whipped belly. Not so far.
And the heart of Ivan Nikolayevich broke inside the body of Marya Morevna, and the pieces of him lodged deep in her bones, and through the window, the stars watched.
Later, after they had shared water and a few slices of ruby meat, Marya saw the red scarf Ivan Nikolayevich had had knotted around his arm peeking out from beneath his jacket. She bent and touched its tip, which protruded like a tongue.
Ivan smiled a little. “It’s my Young Pioneers scarf. I don’t know why I still carry it. I just like it. It made me feel safe when I was young. Made me feel good, as though I could not be harmed, because I was so good, because I belonged.”
He looked at her for a long moment, his warm tea-colored eyes darkened by candlelight until they were almost black, like Koschei’s. But Ivan’s gaze held her in a circle of heat and quiet night truths. Marya said nothing; held her breath. And then he did it, and she thought her body would shake itself apart. Ivan Nikolayevich untied the scarf from his coat and hung it around Marya Morevna’s naked neck, lifting her long hair over its cloth, so that the tails hung down over her breasts, covering them in scarlet like bloody tears.
Marya woke in the bottomless well before dawn, her eyes snapping open in the dark. She sat up straight, Ivan a pleasant warm heap beside her, insensate. A silvery white woman sat at her vanity, her long, pale fingers touching the pots, one by one. Her white hair hung loose to her waist. She wore a cameo, a perfect carving of a woman with long pale hair and a silver star on her breast.
“Mashenka, my darling,” Madame Lebedeva sighed. “How I miss you. How I wish you would talk to me.”
The vila turned, and the silver star on her chest cast sinuous shadows on the ceiling. Her eyelids were painted a lighter color than Marya had ever seen.
“I won’t hurt you,” the ghost said softly. “I won’t. All these years, and you still don’t know I would never drag you after me, not ever. It is the terrible hour when anything may be said. I have waited for this hour. Speak one word to me, Masha. Acknowledge me. I love you. Once you are dead, shame sloughs off like an old shirt. It costs nothing to be plain about such things. I love you. Do you not love me?”
Marya’s eyelids slid heavily closed again—but she forced them open. And she did look, intently, at her old friend. She could hardly bear her face. She wanted to run to her and be held, but no, no, never again. Never. She would not mean to drag Marya off, but it would happen anyway, like gravity, like falling a long way. She did not want to speak. But the weight of those years spent not looking behind her, not noticing the silver footsteps at her back, oh, that weight sat heavy in her lap.
“I love you, Lebed,” Marya Morevna said finally, and wept, slowly, without sound, without tears. She had dried up, utterly.
“It’s not so bad, my darling. Being dead. It’s like being alive, only colder. Things taste less. They feel less. You forget, little by little, who you were. There isn’t much love, but there is a lot of vodka, and reminiscing. It’s rather like a university reunion, but the cakes and tarts are made of dust. And there is always a war on. But there was always a war on before, too, wasn’t there? And the sight of warm things just makes you furious, angrier than I ever thought I could be. I have no warm things of my own, you see. I want them so. And I cannot remember things so well. As though I am getting old—but I cannot ever get any older. Still, I am glad you spoke to me before I forgot you.”