When the bread was only half bread, because the other half was birch bark, and the butter half butter, because the other half was linseed oil, I went to Marya Morevna, who every day stared at the gun under her bed like it was a cross.
I could go to the front and fight, said my girl to me. Then I would get a double ration. But what of my two husbands, then?
Why should the wolf worry about the safety of the sheep? I said to my girl. If my hand were bigger I would whap you one. Grab Koschei by the horns and hang the rest of us!
I cannot leave Ivan Nikolayevich. Or Kseniya or baby Sofiya. Or you.
If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.
I think I could make a kind of biscuit out of paint, and turpentine, for frying, said my Marya, and scraped some paint off the wall with her fingernail.
I spat to show her what I thought of that.
When you are this hungry, you cannot even remember who you used to be, she whispered. Who you might have been, if not for the hunger.
That night, she burned all the books in the attic for heat. She carried them down, one by one, because December ate up her strength. She lit them in the stove while they all huddled around and put out their hands. Last one in was the Pushkin, and she cried, but without tears, because you cannot have tears without bread.
“I will remember these books for you,” said Ivan Nikolayevich, because he did love her, even if it was beef-love: stupid and tough and overcooked. “I will recite them to you whenever you want to read.”
I ate the ashes, slowly, to make them last. I put out my hands with the rest of them. Outside, the wind and the guns went on and on.
After the pipes, the lights went off, like a throat being cut. Ah, I felt it in my shins! My poor house, his bowels frozen, his heart beating only every other beat! I coughed blood when the electricity went black.
* * *
Marya Morevna did a secret thing. I will tell you about it. Every morning when the dark kicked up dark outside the windows, she sat down at the table and pulled out an apple from the pocket of her coat. She cut it in half. Half she gave to Ivan Nikolayevich before he went to work at the arrest factory; half she gave to Kseniya Yefremovna, who gave half of that to Sofiya. Every morning the apple burned so bright in her skinny white hands. Redder than red. She kept a few slivers of the core, like chicken bones, and before the stars could get all the way around the sky, the apple would swell up again, just as whole as before. Made Zvonok wish she ate apples, it did. Marya never said anything. They ate it like people used to eat communion. Not chewing. Letting it melt. She just held out the halves like the halves of a heart, and even when little Sofiya started forgetting her words, even half-blind in her frozen cradle, she still reached out for her bit of apple at that hour of the morning.
That is not the secret thing. I saw that every day. The secret thing I saw only once. After the apple, when they finally let her alone, Marya went down to the basement. My Papa got skinny, too, but of course, of all of us, he couldn’t die from ugly and starving. He looked at her, and oh, if a house had ever looked at me like that, even bound up on the wall like poultry, I’d have never spoken to a human in all my days. Marya started sniffing and shaking, and her face broke up into pieces. Her shoulders fell, like when she was little and her mother was in a punishing mood. She was crying, not out of her eyes but out of her hungry bones.
Papa Koschei closed his eyes. A wound opened up on his neck just like a kiss. Redder than red. No knife, no anything. Blood dribbled out; and down in the basement, with me hiding under the staircase, Marya Morevna put her mouth on Koschei and drank like a baby, worse than a baby, her face all smeared with it. She kept on with her dry, shuddering crying the whole time.
* * *
Finally, the bread wasn’t bread at all and the butter wasn’t butter, because the bread was cottonseed cake and paper and dust, and the butter was wallpaper paste, and you still had to hold up a ration card to get a scrap of the stuff. Dust cakes, dust tarts, dust bread that didn’t even rise. Nobody had anything to burn because if you could burn it, you could eat it, and a fire does a dead man no service. So no embers for a poor domovaya, and her house also sick. Still, I thought, Tscha! Zvonok can live through this. I will tell you how we made soup in those days: Hold a ration card over a pot of boiling water for thirty minutes, so that the shadow of the card falls on the broth. Then eat it up, and don’t you dare spill a drop.
Once, Ivan Nikolayevich came home in his leather coat. The leather coat meant he had been busy arresting people. He went up to his bed and found Marya Morevna on it. Both of them were just sticks, sticks from old trees. He wrapped her up in his arms and their bones knocked together. He petted her hair like a cat. Long pieces of it came away in his hand. Ivan would not tell her what was wrong, but I knew because I could put my ear to the roof and hear the other houses say, There is meat in the Haymarket, and it is for sale. A fat old woman sells it. She wears a leather apron and a black fur coat; her cart has strange wheels, like claws. She has cutlets, dozens, dozens. For pearls she sells it, for watches, for rubles, for boots. Where did she get it all? Only a fool questions good meat.
Send a boy back to me with some, I told the domovoi I know in Maklin Prospekt.
You do not want this meat, he said to me.
I said back, Sofiya must have meat now or she will die, and this house cannot bear even one death or they will all start in on it.
So a boy arrived with two cutlets, for which I left a diamond necklace I swiped from Svetlana Tikhonovna years back. The boy didn’t like it one bit, but he took the necklace and left the meat. Kseniya Yefremovna shook her head.
I know what this is.
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So do I. You’re not human. What difference does it make?
You cannot argue good sense. She fried it in a pan, and the house smelled very rich with it. Sofiya ate it all, every scrap, and paid us back with a small laugh. Fair trade, thought the both of us, and I had an ember out of it all. That was the night Ivan Nikolayevich wore his leather coat.
What could I do? Miserable means miserable.
* * *
When Sofiya died, Kseniya Yefremovna and Marya Morevna wrapped her in sheets and put her on her little yellow sled. They pulled her onto the road, and each of them left their hearts on the doorstep. Everyone else was pulling sleds, too. There were more sleds than snow. Sometimes, a wife would pull her husband to the cemetery, frozen as a pipe, and she’d die pulling him, so neither of them got where they were going, but they both did. Because of the ice nothing smelled, but everywhere stopped sleds grew mounds of snow like hair. I sat on Sofiya’s tummy as they pulled. A house makes a family, and they were mine. My last family.