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.“Tfu!” Anna spat.“That’s what you know, both of you.” But she turned her elegant back to him and embraced Marya Morevna once more.“But you must stay the night, refresh your poor horse—what an earnest beast! But your prisoner looks sick.He would throw up anything you fed him.You are my sister.What belongs to me belongs to you, even if you are an exile.We are family.But you mustn’t tell anyone I harbored you.”And so Anna led them outside, through the silver ice to a little bathhouse, hardly bigger than one of Olga’s closets.A man in a threadbare grey coat exited the banya with a puff of steam.His head was a lean shrike’s, and he would not look at Marya as he passed her by.Anna smiled at him, her face lighting like an oil lamp, took his wing and walked back towards the house, croaking and cawing to him in the strident, ordered language of the incorruptible.Marya Morevna refused to let Ivan speak.This time she made her will iron, flexing it, testing it.Ivan submitted to her, and there was gratitude in his submission.You are spoiled, she thought.All that rich food and you have kept it all in your belly, enjoyed every bite.But you are sick now, and must yield.She seated him in the bathhouse.On a little paint-scraped table rested a mug of vodka.Marya stood very still.She felt as though she were two women: one old and one young; one innocent and one knowing, strange, keen.Marya undressed Ivan Nikolayevich, and her hands seemed to move twice for each motion, to unbutton his shirt now, and to unbutton her own then.His eyes rolled and his red brow sweated.He nearly called out her name, but remembered to be silent, and she kissed him for it.Marya Morevna rubbed his skin with her long, hard fingers.Her golden boy nearly fell asleep sitting up, calmed by her hands and her soft, sad little singing, melodies half-remembered, about biting wolves and uncareful girls.Soon both sweat and tears rolled down Marya’s face, and she wished Koschei were with her to show her how to tend to this sick human, the care of whose body was now inexplicably hers.But gone is gone.There could be no more Koschei.Only Marya remained.“Drink, Ivanushka.” She clucked gently, like a mother, and put the mug to his lips.“Your lungs want vodka.” Obediently, he drank, and coughed, and drank once more.Marya Morevna sank his clammy feet in her sister’s shallow tub.She held a handful of water to his nose and ordered him to breathe it in.Ivan spluttered, and gagged, but did it anyway, so accustomed was he now to her voice, her command.Finally, she made him stand.She reached into the foggy corner of the banya, knowing with all of her marrow that a long white birch branch would rest there.But Ivan had drifted away into his fever, and slept curled on the floor of the banya like a hound.Marya let go of the birch branch slowly.She watched him in the dark without a sound.* * *When the dawn roused the humble hut’s household to work, Marya and Ivan Nikolayevich found Anna once more atop her steel egg, sorting keys like an engine, too fast to see.“Masha, my own, my littlest sister,” the shrike’s wife called down.“Take this with you.”She tossed a key to Marya, with brass teeth.It glowed dimly in her hand, catching the sun.“It is the key to our old house, on Gorokhovaya Street.But of course it is Dzerzhinskaya Street now.One of us should still live there.One of us should be young again.” Anna climbed down the grey side of her egg and held out her arms to her sister.When Marya stepped into them, Anna pressed her face to her sister’s breast, took up her hand, and began to dance with her, a gentle, slow circle around the little hut.Marya laughed despite herself, as she always had.She remembered, as if through a glass, having laughed like that, a lifetime ago.She kissed Anna’s forehead with passion.“When our mother died,” Anna said, “the Housing Ministry sent the keys to me.I was the only one they could find.We keep our registrations current.” Then Anna kissed Marya on both cheeks.She smelled like iron and strength, and Marya Morevna held her tight.PART 4There Are No Firebirds in LeningradAnd always in the frigid, prewar air,The lascivious, menacing darknessThere lived a kind of future clanging …But then, you could hear it only softly, muffled,It could scarcely cloud the soulAnd it drowned in the snowdrifts along the Neva.As in a mirror of appalling night,A man thrashes like a devilAnd does not want to recognize himself,Along the legendary embankmentThe real—not the calendar—Twentieth Century draws close.—ANNA AKHMATOVA20Two Husbands Come to Dzerzhinskaya StreetIn a long, thin house on a long, thin street, a woman in a pale blue dress sat by a long, thin window, waiting for her punishment.Neither fell nor fiery did it come.For one year, one month, and one day, it did not come.And forgiveness did not, either.It was late spring when Marya Morevna slid her brass key into the lock of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, feeling it slide, too, between her own ribs, and open her like a reliquary full of old, nameless bones.The house stood empty.All the curtains—green-and-gold, cobalt-and-silver, red-and-white—had been yanked from their rods.Spiders’ webs made a palimpsest on the walls, endless generations of spiders weaving spider-tales into silk.The house seemed so much smaller than it had, darker, an old, hunched beast past its use.A hole had opened up in the roof, dripping rain and plum blossoms into the room which had once belonged to Marya and her parents.The downstairs stove stood silent and cold, full of old ash no one had taken out.Vacant room opened up into vacant room.“The Dyachenkos lived in this room,” she said to no one.To Ivan Nikolayevich, she supposed, his hand proprietary on her back.It was all wrong.She was supposed to have found warmth here, like Ivan’s warmth.Life, and living.“They had four boys, all blond.I don’t remember their names.The father ate this awful pickle soup every night.The place just reeked of dill.And here—oh, the Blodniek girls! Oh, they were so beautiful.Their hair! How I wanted hair like that.Shiny and straight as wood.They used to read.” She turned to Ivan, her eyes hollow.“They used to read this fashion magazine.They each had their hour with it, every day.They memorized hemlines, and color palettes.Little Lebedevas! And oh, there, there the Malashenkos tied bunches of flowers to sell, and Svetlana Tikhonovna brushed her hair.Oh, why is no one living here? This was a good house! I had twelve mothers in this house, twelve fathers.I ate such sweet fish in this house.”And Marya Morevna fell to her knees before the great brick stove in the empty kitchen.She did not cry, but her face grew redder and redder with the pain of her not crying.“Zvonok,” she whispered to the floor.“Zvonok, come out.”Finally, she curled up on the broken tile and went to sleep, like a ragged feral cat who has finally found shelter from the rain
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