On Wednesdays, Ushanka visits, her friend whom those old grandmothers most likely forgot to name, since she is the kind of girl who shows only half of her face at a time. No one knows her surname, but that’s all right. Surnames go politely unmentioned in Yaichka. Marya Morevna always makes sure she has a leg of rabbit and fresh bread with a little bowl of honey set out, and Wednesday is her day with the silver samovar that makes the rounds of all the houses, just like a horse.
“And how is your husband?” says Ushanka, a beautiful blue ribbon fluttering from the scalloped edge of her lace hat. Ushanka makes lace like a spider, and gives her shawls freely to the women of Yaichka. Just yesterday, gentle Galka pulled one up around her shoulders, feeling a draft.
“He feels sure the new calf will be a heifer, and so go to Aleksandr Fyodorovich. I’ve discussed the prospect of juniper-cheese with Natasha.”
“How lovely for all of us. And you, Masha? Are you well? Do the ladies visit when I am not about? Do the men let you drink with them when you’re thirsty?”
Marya Morevna puts her chin in her hands. “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.”
“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.”
Marya Morevna poured tea, coppery and steaming. “I have sometimes wished for a child,” she confessed. “But when I ask Koschei about it, even while he tells me he loves me with a bear’s love, he says, ‘Can we not wait a little longer? Just a little longer.’ Isn’t that strange?”
Ushanka shows only half of her face, and that half grows very thoughtful, but says nothing.
“I saw the bird again while hunting this rabbit,” says Marya brightly, picking at the gleaming bone. “So terribly bright it could have been on fire! I think it’s a male. His feathers shine golden, and bronze, and scarlet, and blue—such flames!—and the air around him bends into oily waves. His song echoes like Georgy’s playing. A firebird, just like in the old stories. I shall catch it, Ushanka, if I have to ride all the way through the forest and come out the other side.”
“What other side?” says Ushanka, showing the other half of her face. “You’ve been listening to Josef’s silly insinuations. There is only Yaichka, and you, and I, and Sasha’s juniper-cheese, and rabbit with bread on Wednesdays.”
That afternoon, Marya Morevna goes to the well after Yaichka has shaken off the dust of the day and sees someone working the fields. The someone wears a bright hat of many colors, and cuts grain with an enormous pair of shears.
“Who is that?” she asks of her husband, just returning, his hands all bloody with the afterbirth of the new calf.
“Do not look at him, volchitsa,” says the handsome Koschei. “Let him take his share.”
Aleksandra Fedorovna—who ought to know, having five of her own—once told Marya that a woman knows it when the night passes and leaves her with a child.
“They tap you, Masha. Like a root.”
“Oh, I don’t believe you, Sasha! How can you feel such a tiny thing?”
The beautiful Aleksandra shrugged. “When you are cut, you feel it, even if the cut is tiny. Such a thing is a child, a wound within.”
When the perverse moon pries through their windows, spying round the curtains, Marya does not feel it, but her handsome husband does. Koschei Bessmertny winds his red limbs in hers, as young as young, and shatters inside her, the shards of him floating free in her body, until one, sharp-edged and cruel, lodges in her and will not be moved, stubborn thing. In the guttering stove-light he lays his head on her belly.
“And death shall have no dominion over her,” he whispers, and kisses her navel.
“What a thing to say!” Marya moves her fingers in his shaggy hair. “Someone else said that to me, once, so long ago I cannot remember. Sometimes you seem to me to be two men: my Kostya and another I cannot quite recall, all squeezed into one body.”
Koschei looks up at her. The whites of his eyes show. “Nothing wants to die,” he says faintly, and Marya Morevna does not understand, because she has seen so few dark things.
“What will we call her?” Koschei says, and smiles the best smile he has learned, so golden and hot that Marya thinks of the bird in the forest, the one that eludes her still, and turns the air to oil.
“Who?”
“Our daughter, who already knows your name.”
Koschei Bessmertny will not sleep for nine months. He gives all his sleep to his daughter. It is her due.
Does magic number among the things Yaichka possesses, along with the river without a name and the pregnant sheep? One day, the old man Grigory Yefimovich decided to settle the question once and for all. He tells all the children he was once a priest, but everyone knows there is nothing before or after Yaichka, or alongside it, or underneath it, and only stars above it, so old Grisha seems mysterious and wise to them indeed. Nevertheless, all the folk of Yaichka entertain him, for he tells wonderful stories, knows how to deliver babies, and tugs on his beard when he lies, and thus can be relied upon utterly, so long as he leaves his beard alone. “I saw a star in his hair,” whispered little Olga Nikolayevna, Aleksandra’s daughter, and she was generally believed.
To settle the question of Yaichkan magic, Grisha took Aleksandra Fedorovna, whose hair was like gold wire, to the exact place where the larch forest meets the edge of Sergei Mironovich’s medicinal garden. He stood with one boot in the wood and one boot in the village—magicians know the import of such stances, and Grisha certainly knew the import of knowing what a magician should know.
“Now, Sasha, watch me eat this mushroom with silver spots on it, which you and all your children know has a terrible poison.”
Aleksandra watched carefully. Grigory Yefimovich chewed it up. Nothing ill seemed to happen. His limbs did not seize up; his tongue did not turn purple.
“Do you see?” said Grisha.
“I see,” said Sasha.
“Now, watch me hang myself from the larch. Give me your apron to throttle myself.”
Aleksandra watched carefully. Grigory wound the apron around his neck and hung himself from the tree. Nothing ill seemed to happen. He smiled pleasantly and swung back and forth for a while. His eyeballs did not burst; he did not sputter a final confession while choking.
“Do you see?” said Grisha.
“I see,” said Sasha.
“Now, you must shoot me, for the final proof.” And the old not-really-a-priest produced a small pistol—which, if Aleksandra had thought about it, was entirely the most magical thing to happen that afternoon, as no one in Yaichka had ever produced a pistol before.