- 1
- "Marya watched from the upper floor as birds gathered in the oak trees, sniping and snapping at the first and smallest drops of rain, which all winged creatures know are the sweetest, like tiny grapes bursting on the tongue."
- "Marya watched from the upper floor as once more the birds gathered in the great oak tree, sniping and snapping for the soaked and wrinkled cherry blossoms, which every winged creature knows are the most savory of all blossoms, like spice cakes melting on the tongue."
- "She was filled like a silk balloon with the flaming sight of her handsome young man (...)"
- "Marya watched from the upper floor as once again the birds gathered in the great oak tree, sniping and snapping for the last autumn nuts, stolen from squirrels and hidden in bark-cracks, which every winged creature knows are the most bitter of all nuts, like old sorrows sitting heavy on the tongue."
- 2
- And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.
- No matter what she appeared to do—sweeping out the leaves or studying her history or helping one of her mothers sew a shirt—her heart raced with problem of the birds, trying to outrun it into someplace where everything could make sense again.
- Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.
- 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.
- Still, she was not sorry. If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.
- It meant she was one of the good children at school, the children of the revolution, handing out pamphlets or flowers with her classmates on street corners, adults smiling at her scarf, at her goodness.
- Having once seen the world naked, the engine which drove Marya Morevna through the long, thin streets of Petrograd was a terrible hunger for knowing things, for knowing everything.
- Yes, Marya thought, the smell of woodsmoke and old snow pushing back her long black hair. 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.
- 3
- Mama Blodniek sighed for dreams of days long dead, for rowan berries in her hair and sweet cream on her table.
- “Your bones are so stubborn!” snorted Chainik. “It’s almost as though you don’t want to shrink at all! Brazen thing, why do you want to be so tall?”
- The ways of girls and other big folk are arcane and incomprehensible.
- Marya touched the papery faces of young girls with rosy cheeks.
- She ought to be safe in her bed, dreaming of strawberries and laundry!
- " I live to scare poor girls! Their tears smell like the freshest, warmest cakes with cherry jam smeared all round them."
- “Marya Morevna! Don’t you know anything? Girls must be very, very careful to care only for ribbons and magazines and wedding rings. They must sweep their hearts clean of anything but kisses and theater and dancing. They must never read Pushkin; they must never say clever things; they must never have sly eyes or wear their hair loose and wander around barefoot, or they will draw his attention! Safe in a house and a husband, that’s where you belong! But it’s too late now, too late! Fool child, the house and I tried so hard to raise you right!”
- 4
- Slowly, like ice sliding across a plate, she smiled.
- hate it here. Please take me away, let me be something other than Marya, something magical, with a round belly. Frighten me, make me cry, only come back.
- (...) her heart was so cold that she could hold ice in her mouth and it would never melt.
- Keep your bread. Keep your tears. Neither will help you, and you will work hard to outgrow need of them. Go home. Pat your mother’s hand and kiss your father’s cheek. Drink out of your broken teacup.
- Did everything that had magic have teeth? She had liked the world better when it served up sweet-looking birds and sweet-looking men. Likho was too much; Marya’s mind could not even touch the edges of that blackness.
- Was that magic, or am I just a weak and stupid and cowardly girl? Marya did not know, could not know, and she felt frozen all over with shame as she cleaned her sickness from the carpet.
- 5
- She was sixteen years of age, with seventeen’s shadow hanging heavy on her every tear. Old enough to work after school, old enough to be tired in her joints and her heels, old enough to know that something irretrievable had passed her by.
- his dark hair curly and thick, flecked with silver, his mouth half-smiling, as if anticipating a terribly sweet thing.
- “Invite me in, Masha,” Comrade Bessmertny said softly. The street drank up his voice, sunk it into the snow, disappeared it.
- She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling. She did not feel it would be at all safe to kiss him on the cheeks.
- 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.
- Even if you went out into the fields and offered me dancing shoes and called to me, I would not come.”
- What a dreadful girl I have raised! Still, if you don’t ask their permission, they can’t say no. That’s our sort of logic.
- Prick your finger with a needle and let the blood fall over your threshold—it will hurt less, and you will dream of daughters. 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.
- But if you must insist on being clever, then be clever. Be brave. Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.
- her black hair long and loose, her cheeks lashed red, her breath a hanging mist in the air. Snow crunched beneath her boots.
- Tears dropped from her eyes like tiny, hard beads.
- Koschei turned, gripped Marya’s chin, and kissed her—not on the cheek, not chastely or unchastely, but greedily, with his whole, hard mouth, cold, biting, knowing. He ate up her breath in the kiss. Marya felt he would swallow her whole
- 6
- “I will keep you,” he said softly, as sweet as black tea, “and I will keep you warm.” But his own skin had frosted over; his fingernails shone pearly blue.
- “Comrade,” Marya said, “you are colder than I. I fear your flesh will freeze me.”
- Koschei studied her as if she were a terribly curious creature, to crave warmth so. His dark eyes moved over her face possessively, but he did not release her. If anything, the cold of his body deepened, until Marya felt as though a pillar of ice clung to her, sending out silver tendrils to cover her, too, in the stuff of itself.
- Little savage wolf! Please, sit at my table, brush the snow from your hair.
- We are taking your will out of your jaw—for that is where the will sits—and pressing it very small between our two hands, like a bit of dough. We are rolling it, and squeezing it, until it gets very small. Small enough to fit into the eye of a needle which is hidden inside an egg, which is hidden inside a hen, which is hidden inside a goose, which is hidden inside a deer. When we are finished you will give your will to me, and I will keep it safe for you.
- Koschei poured vodka for her. It trickled into her glass like music. The sides of Marya’s throat stuck together, so dry, so thirsty.
- She did not like to be ordered. She wanted to say a hundred, a thousand things.
- I have to know, I have to, or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not.
- But if I may teach you anything, it will be to relish everything, to devour it all—the richest things first, for they are your due.
- But oh, Marya, Marousha, I do pore over my treasures! And some of them are glistening sturgeon eggs like piles of onyxes, and some of them are vials of vodka glittering like diamonds, and some of them are beets heavy and red as garnets, and some of them are beautiful girls from Petrograd, sitting in my house, silent as gold, because I asked them to be silent, which is the sweetest silence of all.
- Suddenly, it was a relief not to have to speak, to make conversation, while her body exhausted itself in poring over the delights of salt and heavy bread.
- Now the beets, volchitsa. And look at them first, how bloody they are, how crimson, how they leave trails behind them, like wounded things. Sip your vodka, and then bite one of the peppers—see how the vinegar and the vodka mix on your tongue? This is a very marvelous thing. A winter thing, when everything is pickled and preserved under glass. You can taste summer in this mixture, summer boiled down and soaked in brine, mummified, packed with spices to be born again on this table, in this place, in this snow.
- This magic filled her up, made her belly ache with fullness.
- you must guard your own words carefully, speaking only the wise and clever ones
- The firelight dazzled her, the marrowy broth of the stew made her drunk, and Koschei’s low, inexorable voice, a voice like black tea, rose and fell like a ballad, lulling her, pulling at her, stroking her. Her mind chattered away, since her mouth could not
- Finally, Koschei placed a teaspoon full of sour cherry jam on Marya’s tongue and instructed her to sip her tea through the lump of fruit. When she had swallowed, he kissed her, their mouths warm and sweet with tea and cherries, and Marya Morevna fell asleep in his arms, with his lips still pressed to hers.
- Shame flowed into her mouth, sour and thick.
- 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.”
- He placed honey on her tongue, and pear jelly, and brown, moist sugar. She swallowed his steaming tea. And he kissed her, again and again, sharing sweetness and heat between them.
- He simply murmured to her, stroked her hair, called her volchitsa, medvezhka, koshechka. Wolfling, she-bear, wild little kitten.
- Marya nearly fell asleep sitting up, calmed by the brushing and his snatches of sad little songs about biting wolves and uncareful girls.
- “All the girls are wearing their deaths this year,” the model said haughtily. “It’s just the thing for a plain country girl hoping to make her fortune.”
- At least I can still see the naked world, even if it will only show me an ankle or a flash of wrist now.
- 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 do not understand this yet. Not yet, not yet. You are not ready. You would be rough with my gift. But it is our last night, and I shall soak up all your fears and nightmares and proletariat city-girl terrors. You must have room to fear new things. I shall make you all new, my own revolution, neither red nor white, but black.”
- She felt the crackling of the delicate shell against her bones, the jewels scraping her skin.
- When he had finished, he pulled her up roughly and crushed her to him, kissing her again. His mouth was cold, and there was no passing of pear jelly or cherries between them. But all the same, Marya Morevna tasted sweetness in his empty kiss.
- 7
- Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding. Marya thought these thoughts, her breath and pulse calming. Of late, she had felt that coldness in herself, and though she feared it, she loved it too, for it made her strong.
- 8
- She thought nothing of it now, of kissing him alive. Everything in this place was livid and lurid and living, and when he loved her and hurt her all at once she lived, too, higher and harder than she had thought she could.
- Yes, she thought, magic is like that, when it comes. Like the fountains of blood, the houses of skin and hair,
- She wanted so much these days, everything she touched.
- “War is not for winning, Masha,” sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. “It is for surviving.”
- Living in Marya’s little room was like living inside a heart.
- even when you have been wicked, sometimes there is a warm bed and a warm friend somewhere, if only you know where to look.
- 9
- Madame Lebedeva exhaled a thin, fine curl of smoke from her cigarette, nestled in its ivory holster. She reclined in a plush blue chair, her angular body sheathed in a sleeveless gown of swan feathers, speckled with tiny glass beads.
aug 12 2013 ∞
aug 27 2013 +