Ivanych stumbled out onto the porch, squinting against the cruel brightness of snow. Not a curl of smoke rose over the village—everyone wintered in the city now, or finally rested in their graves. Too bad he’d already filled the night bucket with yellow ice. It used to be the bucket never needed emptying, but lately it was full to the brim. He gripped the railing and followed his own footprints down the porch steps. The banya, the shed, and the pigsty stood loyally around the yard, his world’s solid pillars. Eyes watering, he peered at his favorite sight, his land dipping toward the forest. Except something looked wrong, too big and out of place.
Behind the pigsty now stood a chicken-legged hut.
He crouched and rubbed his eyes. Logs interlocked at the corners, woodcut windows with sky-blue trim, a gable roof. It was like his own izba, except smaller, lacking a porch, and perched atop giant chicken legs. All of it oddly familiar from the tales his mother had read to him and Mashenka once read to their son.
Ivanych looked around, muttering and pointing, but there was no one to tell. He crossed himself and shuffled to the outhouse.
On his return he crept to the corner of the pigsty and jumped out, half hoping to catch the disturbing vision in the midst of disappearing, but the chicken-legged izbushka only shifted from foot to scaly yellow foot. Jagged tracks marked the gentle slope of his land from the forest.
Ivanych stepped closer, each crunch in the snow as loud as a rifle shot, until the pale winter sun placed him in the visitor’s blue shadow. An unprecedented visitor, but there were holes in the world, he now knew. One day Mashenka was pinching his ass with her weirdly muscular toes, gleeful at his helpless laughter, and the next she was gone. If his wife could drop out of the world, then things could come through those holes too.
And if her house was here, then Baba Yaga, the guardian of the doorway to the land of the dead, wasn’t far behind. Ivanych toed at a snowdrift but found neither skulls nor human bones.
He leaned to see just how the legs attached to the underfloor, but the chicken-legged izbushka tilted toward him, shutters rattling, as if he were a boy caught peeking under a skirt.
Vova the pig oinked for his breakfast. The chickens stirred in their coop.
Perhaps Baba Yaga wasn’t coming and the chicken-legged hut was a stray on his land. Lost, or even abandoned. He longed to crawl under his heap of blankets and into the oblivious pit of sleep. No skin off his back if she sat there in the snow, so he called her like any chicken.
“Tsyp-tsyp,” Ivanych said. “Tsyp-tsyp.”
The massive feet scratched in place, scooping dark grooves through the compacted snow and into the frozen soil. Folding her legs, the hut settled on the ground.
He shrugged and turned to go back inside.
On his porch two chickadees pecked at the frozen remnants of salo, clawed feet fisted around the twine. Every year he chided his wife that everyone ate the cured pig fat themselves, but Mashenka hung whole cubes of it for the birds anyway.
Inside the seni he sat down to take off his boots, surrounded by the scent of drying herbs and birch leaves. On a cold day like this, Mashenka would soak their dried birch bundles in a bucket of scalding water while he stoked the fire. The steam would fill their banya, pulling the pine scent from its walls. They’d slap each other, hot leaves smacking skin, muscles singing, skin reddening, pleasure at the edge of pain. Her flesh curving in the steamy dimness, a birch leaf stuck to her buttock, and how he’d kneel before her, weakened by the exertion and the heat, and peel that leaf from her skin. His ravenousness for her ate him so much that he almost resented her sometimes. They’d jump in the snow afterward, naked as babes.
The wind howled. A deafening blow rattled the porch.
Ivanych crossed himself. Had he cut down any trees? Only the fallen ones, for firewood. Killed any wildlife? Only domestic, for sustenance. Was he particularly fetching? Still handsome for his advanced years, he thought, although getting scrawny without Mashenka’s cooking. The cell phone Kolya got him for New Year’s lay on the bench like a dead mouse. If he’d charged it sooner, he could’ve tried texting his son now, although the little letters were impossible to see.
Three knocks shook the seni door.
It could be a human lost on the road. Either way, he wouldn’t want to displease them. He cracked the door open.
Baba Yaga sat chest-deep in her wooden mortar, both of them taller than the tales had led him to believe. Her eyes, from their deep burrows, flickered like snake tongues.
She had come for him. The keeper of the wood, the eater of the flesh, she had come to make him pay. Something ripped and fell away inside him, a certainty he’d always taken for granted, of another day after this.
He pointed a shaking finger. “Your ch-chicken-legged hut is right there.”
Yaga sneezed, startling a flock of bullfinches from the rowan tree next to the porch, their chests red like blood spatter.
“It’s s-safe and sound, waiting for you.”
She didn’t answer. Frost and icicles clung to the hair around her face. The wind snapped her dress.
He was a dead man and nobody to help him.
She’s freezing, can’t you see? Mashenka’s voice chided in his head. Invite her in already.
Yaga sneezed again, and her pestle struck the step next to his foot, leaving a dent.
Hospitality was surely the only way not to die where he stood.
“Some tea?” His words drifted in a cloud of frozen vapor. “Please, come in. Feel yourself at home.”
Baba Yaga grasped the edge of the mortar and hopped out. Broad shouldered, she looked strong, and smelled not of rotten meat, not even of a freshly dug grave, but of autumn leaves caught in the first frost. She stooped inside his seni, and the herb bundles parted to let her pass. Her nose twitched near his night bucket, and he reddened, Mashenka saying tsk-tsk, as if she still walked behind him.
He followed Yaga into the kitchen.
Before he could stop her, she sat on the daybed next to the kitchen table, and the springs keened under her weight. He couldn’t bear to sit on it himself, had been passing through the kitchen averting his eyes.
She’s coughing, can you hear? Make her some tea.
Ivanych turned on the electric kettle and opened a tin of thyme, his wife’s answer to sore throats.
Baba Yaga gnashed her large teeth. “Your izba reeks of smoke. But it’s as cold as the outside.”
True, but Mashenka’s absence bit deeper than the cold, choked him worse than the smoke. He’d kept the flue open since November and slept in his coat, indifferent to waking. One space heater in the bedroom ran up the electric bill. Before he thought what to say, Yaga stood next to him. He hadn’t heard her get up, had not seen her move. The speed of her, he could never outrun her
She palmed the side of the kettle, pulled the plug, pushed the buttons, plugged it back in. “Guess you need one of those if you don’t stoke the fire.”
Her tone struck him as quarrelsome. He wanted to say, Go ahead, eat me, that oughta warm you right up, but what if she did? What a painful way to go. Touchy about pain, Ivanych crossed the street to avoid the dentist, complained about his back when time came to dig for potatoes.
The kettle boiled and clicked off.
He slid her cup across the wooden table, patted its surface worn to a sleekness, seeking assurance that things were still as he knew them. Ivanych’s own boyish fingers once grasped the edge as his father had sanded the table and told the boy of his grandfather Ivan, who was the village’s best carpenter. After Ivanych’s father had been called to the front at eighteen, grandfather Ivan sat at his carving stump, and whenever a soldier’s cap bobbed over the fence, he’d hurry to offer a heel of bread and ask for news of his son. Sawdust gritty on his lips, his father’s words swirling around him, the boy Ivanych tongued the tender spot where he’d just lost a milk tooth, making it sore with sawdust, and wondered if saplings would sprout in his mouth. When he whispered his fear to his mother, she mixed him a saltwater rinse, milked the cow so he could drink body-hot milk. As he sipped, his father continued the story. Grandfather Ivan kept waiting and asking the strangers for news, but years passed without a word, and by the time Ivanych’s father returned from the war, concussed and on crutches, grandfather Ivan had died and no one knew where he was buried. Now, over a decade into the next century, Ivanych whispered a grateful prayer for getting to raise his own son in a time of peace.
Yaga stared at the stove, tapping her foot. She scowled at the dry cherry branch he’d picked up in the yard after Mashenka’s funeral, then sneezed again, sending the branch spinning. At the risk of offending her, he moved the jar with the branch further away. His father had planted that tree as a boy with grandfather Ivan’s help, and Ivanych, who never met the latter in life, liked to imagine his ancestral Ivans together, hands easing the roots into the soil.
“I can stoke the fire,” said Ivanych, willing his feet to move.
Seated, Yaga was as tall as him. As she sipped, her skin smoothed to the luster of polished wood. “The tea warmed me, but I feel a hunger growing.”
“When did you, um, dine last?”
She reached into her pocket and took out a gold watch, still clasped around the wrist of a bloated severed hand with neatly trimmed nails.
Ivanych reared back toward the seni door.
“Two weeks ago. Caught him killing foxes for sport.” She slid her tongue over her teeth. “Fast food. Left a nasty taste in my mouth. I told him that as he screamed, and let the wolves have him.”
He was next. Out in the seni Ivanych found himself on his knees next to the stack of chopped wood. For the last few months, life had seemed a stranger in his body, and here it was—his sure end. Was he ready to go? His son rarely visited, busy with his city job, scoffing at his parents’ offerings of the things they grew, the things they gathered. Except last year, when Mashenka gave Kolya a horseshoe she found. He saw how his son grabbed for it. Didn’t bother to tell his own father what kind of luck he hoped the horseshoe would bring him. He’d bet that Mashenka knew. The two of them always conspiring over endless mugs of tea, forcing Ivanych to interrupt to get some dinner in his own house.
He missed a younger Kolya, mouth agape as Ivanych split firewood or painted the tree trunks with slaked lime. He’d hand his son a piece of hard candy, pat his head, and that was enough for Kolya to love him. And now, where Ivanych saw the land worked by his ancestors, his son only saw old junk he could bulldoze, then put up a two-story cottage with an indoor toilet and pave the rest over with lawn grass. Hadn’t they raised him to know grass was weeds?!
“How’s that firewood coming?” Yaga called, and Ivanych scrambled to gather the wood. He had to feed her something, anything.
Holding the seni door open with his foot, he saw two jam jars on the kitchen shelf. “I’m going to make vareniki with cherries. Bloodred, should be to your liking.” He had loved watching Mashenka wipe her brow while rolling the dough, shaping delicious crescents, tray after tray.
Yaga raised the tea to her lips.
Ivanych faced the cold stove, its plastered bulk filling the center of the izba, floor to ceiling. The stove’s intricate inner passageways were made to keep the heat inside the izba, and the izba’s inhabitants alive through the winter. He swayed, clutching the wood. It’d be easier to stuff the kindling down his own throat.
Her end was peaceful, they said.
You were lucky to survive, they said.
Always should check the flue, they said, when they thought he could overhear.
Had to tear him away from her, when they thought he could not.
Ivanych crouched to open the black iron door, struck a match with shaking fingers. It broke. Again and again he struck. Finally, the newsprint caught, passed the fire to small twigs, curled, and blackened, and he clanged the door shut.
As if keeping busy would stay her, he set to mixing the flour with water and an egg. He kneaded the tough dough, arms aching, until Mashenka stopped urging another go, and leaned against the counter to catch his breath. She’d always made it look so easy.
A puff of hot air in his ear puckered the skin on his neck.
“You’re working up a sweat.” Baba Yaga inhaled, wrapped his bicep with her fingers, and squeezed.
The flour fell like snow from Ivanych’s fingers.
“Funny how I still feel sick.” He rubbed his stomach. “Must have eaten a bad batch of marinated mushrooms a few days ago, gave me the runs. Must still be, um, poisoning me.”
Ivanych watched her from under the furry brim of his hat, proud of his cunning.
She sneered, exposing glistening canines. “It’s your self-pity that reeks.”
He thought he smelled like an old barn, wholesome, perhaps musty. Mashenka always bathed before she cooked and would have insisted on him washing. His wife cajoled with a smile, but he’d resented her endless lists of things for him to do.
Yaga sauntered her fingers closer, leaving ovals on the floured surface.
Trying to ignore her approach and the queasiness in his gut, he rolled a small chunk of dough to near translucency and spooned cherries into it. Last August his wife had picked the cherries, pitted them by hand, and simmered them with sugar.
“Crying won’t help,” Yaga said.
One jar left. If he survived this, nobody to stop him from eating every last cherry himself.
He spooned more cherries, crimson syrup blazing in the wintry light. “I bet you’ve never had cherry jam as good as this.”
Yaga leaned closer to the jar.
He’d done the same in August, and Mashenka snatched it away, twisted the lid shut. “It’s for Kolya. He’s not getting any vitamins from that store food covered in plastic.”
Baba Yaga closed her eyes and inhaled, the jar diminished under the hook of her nose. “Smells like love for her son. Exhaustion, too, and a hint of bitterness.”
Ivanych gulped, hands squeezing, red and white pulp extruding between his fingers. He’d forgotten how, while Mashenka skimmed pink foam from the jam, he’d gone to the city to help Kolya assemble some newfangled furniture, after his son said no to this table his own grandfather had made, solid wood, and spent money instead on some Swedish nonsense glued from sawdust. He’d hoped they’d talk, father to son, about their land and their ancestors, but Kolya praised the new cottages poking up all over the village like toadstools. His son made fun of the outhouse, and Ivanych retaliated against Kolya’s fancy Japanese toilet. Then Kolya shouted that the open-pit mine had devoured two villages already, and what was his plan when they knocked on his gate? Wasn’t he too old to pretend this wasn’t happening? Why was he refusing more comfort for the both of them? Both pursed their mouths. Ivanych tried to smooth out the childish Swedish instructions he’d crumpled in his hands. Silence clotted the air. Ivanych broke first and tried to tell Kolya how the men of their line had always had one son, all named Ivan Ivanych, the patronymic extending into the future like linked arms. In a swell of fresh fatherly responsibility, Ivanych had already broken with tradition and given Kolya a name all his own, wishing his baby boy more, but not at the expense of what they’d been, of what they already had. He tried to explain, but Kolya stared at his phone, intent on something Ivanych couldn’t see.
In his hurry to the train that morning, he’d forgotten to bring the first batch of Mashenka’s jam, and her voice was pinched when she called from a neighbor’s phone. He tried to tell her how he felt invisible to their only son, but she nagged about the importance of listening to one’s children, when she should have listened to her one and only husband herself.
“Woman! It’s just jam!” he’d said, and hung up.
Lost in the memory, Ivanych looked at his hands in confusion, then scraped the varenik mush from his fingers into the slop bucket. Vova the pig ate everything. Potato peels, cherry pits, his son’s fancy pager. A lame pigeon who hobbled too close to a crust of moldy bread: the swift swipe of greedy pink snout that Ivanych didn’t see coming, the flapping, the crunch. He shuddered. Like a true autocrat, Vova was never sated and devoured everything within reach with the same bone-chilling calm.
Everything turned into something else in the end, nothing remained. And though he’d pushed Kolya’s words from his mind, he knew the mine kept coming, a terrible hole in the earth, vast and unnatural. Old folk like him who didn’t move out of the way simply disappeared. He ought to be glad Kolya was willing to stow him in a corner of his cement city flat, as if he were a newborn calf threatened by February frost.
Ivanych rolled the dough as thin as he could, pinched each circle into a crescent, his edges not as prettily crimped as Mashenka’s but serviceable, and dropped the trayful of them into the boiling water. He cracked his back. It had taken him hours, and though it wasn’t dinnertime, outside was already the midnight-blue of a winter night. If he survived this, he could take the last cherry jar to Kolya, who’d have more city treats to go with it, except the dirt road to the train station was icy and studded with cow shit.
Yaga’s nose twitched. He hoped his cooking would tempt her over his own stringy flesh. He handed her the cleanest tea towel for a napkin, buttered the vareniki, then ate one to show that she could trust him, and to taste Mashenka’s cherries one last time. The dough disappointed him with its thickness. When his wife had made vareniki, the thin bundle split at the lightest bite, the summer-essence taste jammy on his tongue, so sweet it was almost bitter.
Baba Yaga slipped one varenik into her mouth, then ate heartily, spooning sour cream and butter into her bowl. She didn’t need to saw each varenik in half like his city son, wasting the filling, or bite it on her fork like his father, but fit each one into her mouth without stuffing her cheeks. It gave him a startling sense of pleasure to feed another person.
By the time she pushed away her plate, she smelled of wet and disturbed spring soil. Her face plumped, and her eyes shone lively and greenish, as if he’d circled a lake out of the shadows and into the sun.
“A hospitable greeting you make, Ivanych, but my izbushka is also cold to the bones of her scrawny chicken legs.”
He hadn’t read many books in his life, but what he read he remembered. She was testing him. He’d been hospitable enough to survive this far, but he wasn’t done. Ivanych scratched under the furry flaps of his ushanka, then placed some river rocks into the bottom of the oven to warm them. When they grew hot, he piled them into the bucket they used for firewood. On his way out through the seni, he grabbed the night bucket, which was starting to melt from the stove heat, to dump the block of his piss behind the outhouse.
In the light of the full moon, snowflakes twirled and his grandfather’s ghost sat carving at the stump in the middle of the yard. What was there when one died? He wished he’d asked Mashenka what she thought, but any mention of death had them both spitting over their left shoulders and knocking on wood, so they’d never discussed it. One night in December Ivanych had edged closer to the stump and asked if his grandfather would pass his wife a word. The ghost looked up and Ivanych flinched, but grandfather Ivan merely gazed past him toward the fence.
Izbushka shivered as he approached, and the icicles along the roof’s overhang clinked. Ivanych scratched his head until he noticed izbushka also had a chimney. He sat the bucket into the snow and grabbed the ladder, only to find it frozen to the side of the pigsty.
“Tsyp-tsyp.”
Izbushka stepped closer. Ivanych hauled the bucket from one rung to the next, knees shaking, his toes curling inside his valenki. To his relief, the hut tilted, and he tossed a warm rock into the chimney as gently as he could. He didn’t hear it land, but izbushka shimmied side to side and tilted closer. He tossed the rocks, cooing endearments as Mashenka had to their livestock, until the bucket was empty and the hut settled into the snow with a satisfied creak.
His arms and legs trembled from the effort. In the months since November he’d been lying in the cold, dark izba like a corpse. Mashenka would have smacked him for such nonsense. But now his blood quickened and ran livelier. He swung the bucket, humming a tune. He’d sit down with Baba Yaga at the table, in the lake-lucid pull of her eyes, and talk over another round of tea, proper black this time. If he could bring himself to say it, he would ask about the other side of death.
When he entered the kitchen, twisting his mustache, Yaga’s disconcerting eyes bore into him. “The thing is, Ivanych—”
He’d lived long enough with Mashenka to know a bad-news voice when he heard one. In these, surely his last moments, he only wished he’d found a way to tell Kolya how Ivanych’s father washed and dried his hands before opening a library book, how he had wrung longing from the accordion, how it took him two years to walk home from the war on one leg, but he never gave up. Like a sinking ship with helpless passengers, Ivanych would take with him the Ivans who came before him, his mother, and his young wife. They’d pass again with Ivanych’s death, deeper into the unknown.
“Listen, Baba Yaga, truth is, ever since Mashenka died.” His throat closed up. He hadn’t yet had to say those terrible words—Mashenka died—aloud. Voicing them twisted his face from the inside. His wife flashed before him, how her strong ankles balanced over the round rocks as she waded into the river, before she plunged in with a shriek, how she never cried but stood outside, toes in the dirt, swaying, and yelled at him to stay the hell away. How she’d lie down in the meadow of orange globeflowers until he lay down too and they’d watch the bugs crawl through their own unfathomable lives. It had never occurred to him that all of it would end.
On that awful November night, he’d complained of the chill and she rushed from stoking the fire to making dinner, while he sulked over a mug of cocoa on the couch. Next thing he knew, he was waking to thick smoke and stumbled to find her on the daybed by the stove, reeled, unseeing, scrambled about amid the crash of pans, desperate to help her, and with his fool’s luck fell through the kitchen window, crawled to the road to call for help, and to this day his memory still wouldn’t disclose if she had faded first from the smoke, or if he had. He could never say aloud how he wished, when he touched his wife’s cold skin, her rigid arm, to have died in her place, yet also felt relieved that he still breathed, which filled him in turn with acrid shame. His wife had always been the one to open the flue, the one for details. He should have reached into the chimney with his own hand and checked.
He deserved Baba Yaga tearing him apart as he screamed.
But instead of eating him already, Baba Yaga sat, chin propped on her hand, and gazed through the kitchen window down to the forest.
“My izbushka likes it here,” Yaga said. “I might have to stay awhile.”
Ivanych gripped his knobby knees under the table to keep them from knocking into each other—she’d stay, for how long, he’d be a snack, a leg here, an arm there. Living with such suspense, his ticker couldn’t take it. “Oh, you two wouldn’t like it. My land gets soggy in the spring.”
“Your land?” She rose and so did her hair, darkening and rumbling with distant thunder.
Ivanych pressed himself into the chairback.
Baba Yaga loomed over the table. “The land doesn’t care about your lines, your petty divisions. The land is life itself mixed with as much death as it can take. It doesn’t care about you.”
“You’re r-right,” he said. “I’ll be gone and the land will go on.” I can still love it, he thought stubbornly. Even if it won’t love me back.
“So it’s settled,” she said, sitting down, “we’ll stay.” She sipped her tea.
Why was this happening to him? Mashenka had been the tougher one, and he should’ve been the one to die on that November night. “It just doesn’t seem right,” he muttered.
A hint of forest fire glinted in Baba Yaga’s eye. “It does not!” She slammed her fist down, sending the cups upward in a short, thrilling flight. They rattled down into their saucers. “How dare she not let me in!”
Ivanych stared, mouth open. So that’s why she came—the chicken-legged hut had gone on strike! “So, Izbushka-izbushka, turn your back to the forest, turn your front to me, that doesn’t work anymore?”
As the refrain left his lips, both glanced at the chicken-legged hut through the melted center of the frost-etched window, but she remained motionless.
Baba Yaga heaved a sigh, spreading her hands.
The fear that had been brewing in Ivanych’s gut since he first saw the hut’s scaly yellow legs began to fizz. He tried to suppress his laughter, pretending to cough, to sneeze, but it was no use. Tears streamed down his face, and bursts of laughter escaped his chest. He laughed until his belly hurt. Yaga hadn’t come to gnaw the meager meat off his bones but had gotten cold chasing her wayward abode. It was never about him.
She watched him, brow raised.
Sobered, he wiped his eyes with his sleeve and scooted closer to the daybed she sat on.
“You’re locked out.” He shrugged.
Her face spread with a smile, reminding him of the old cherry tree flowering white-pink in the spring.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” she laughed, the cups trembling in their saucers.
“Ha! Ha!” The glass vibrated in the windows.
“Ha!” The dried branch on the table burst into bloom.
Ivanych touched a petal with his index finger. A powerful woman, she’d find a way to return to her izbushka and vanish as suddenly as she appeared.
“You’re right. This is silly.” She moved over, about to stand, sturdy thighs outlined by the linen, muscular arms. Her scent turned to meadow on a hot summer day, reminding him of burrowing into sunbaked hay as a boy. Her tea towel fell onto the bed. He reached for it, brushing his hand against her warm hip. She too had been left by someone too necessary for words, she too must feel this terrible loneliness. He watched his hand land on her knee, felt the strength of her thigh through the cloth.
Yaga’s eyes fixed him like lightning. Her brow arched.
Would Mashenka think him unfaithful?
The seni door creaked, and there stood his wife in the frothy white nightgown she’d worn on their wedding night, her whole being now as sheer as her veil, as if the light that had shone through her in life had worn her flesh away.
Baba Yaga sat up and raised her eyebrows. “And that is why I prefer the ladies.”
Mashenka fluttered her eyelashes at the witch, arousing in Ivanych a terrible jealousy. Then she turned to Ivanych. “You called?”
He stammered. If he’d known calling would have worked, he would have called every day. To pick this particular moment to return struck him as punitive. He hiccuped, half laughter, half tears, daring to hope this unexpected desire could be forgiven.
Heading into the kitchen, Mashenka glanced over her shoulder. “If you were dead, and Kikim—I mean, Leshiy stumbled out of the forest, I’d hope you’d encourage me in a mossy romp.” She peeked into the pots.
He tried to get up and go to her, but his legs wouldn’t listen. He glanced at Baba Yaga sideways. If she’d give them some privacy, he could tell Mashenka something, something important.
“But more to the point, I’m dead.” Mashenka’s golden curls faded to white, her cheeks softened downward, her dress stiffened into the yellowish weave of her burial dress. “And you’re not far behind.”
The seni door slammed behind her.
Surely she was upset, being dead and all, but why so harsh? He would have liked to fall asleep inside a life he understood, without any fear, and never wake. He patted his pockets for one of those handkerchiefs she used to wash, iron, and fold for him, but of course, none were left.
The door creaked. Mashenka stuck her head in. “I’m touched you thought to ask, though,” she said, and disappeared.
What did she mean by that? Countless times she’d walked up the slope of their land toward him, sunlit, shifting her load of vegetables to one hip to wipe her brow and wave to him. How happy he’d been to lower the newspaper, a short break between hammering yet another thing she needed fixed, and nod back from the shaded porch. She’d stop to pump the water and rinse a fresh-picked cucumber, hand it to him on her way to the kitchen to cook this or preserve that, and he’d never missed a chance to show his love by slapping her ass.
He rubbed his chest. He’d had vague apologies ready to say to the ghost of his wife, if she’d given him a moment, but he knew now that she hadn’t returned to hear them.
Blinking through moisture, distant from the chilled well of his body, Ivanych turned to find his hand forgotten on Yaga’s thigh. He squeezed lightly, to show Mashenka’s insolent ghost—not dead yet!—then took his hand back, but Baba Yaga whipped him over onto the mattress and straddled him, his pants floating to the wooden floor. He teared up to feel warm skin against his. Before he could say, Well, if you insist,and, Perhaps not there, not there, Yaga twitched her nose, whispered over her shoulder, and in a flurry they were atop the stove. He hadn’t been up to that secret nook since he was a boy, climbing up teetering chairs he’d stacked to get atop the stove’s warm bulk. The ceiling bowed over the massive cloud of Yaga’s hair to give her room. Her skin smelled of buttered sourdough and honey and every happy childhood memory, and his old parts cooperated with his yearning and he was rising toward her like a seedling toward the sun and the heat inside her was drawing him in. The pleasure was almost unbearable on the edge of oblivion, and he welcomed the forgetting of his burdens. She absorbed him like July soil gulps the rain, like when the river Sur’ swells with snowmelt and rises and rises beyond its shores until he finds himself on the roof of his izba, that much closer to the starry sky.
After, he lay dreamy. Everything suddenly seemed so dear to him: the hoarfrost on the window, the stove’s warmth. He would have begrudged Mashenka this pleasure, this momentary shedding of a tiresome self, but she did not begrudge it to him.
He lifted his hand, turned and flexed it, marveling—one breath away from rotting meat and bones. “Were you ever going to eat me?”
Yaga smirked.
“You know, fence of bones topped with the skulls, their eyes glowing at night?”
Yaga arched her brow. “Why do you believe such propaganda, Ivanych?” She winked. “The eyes don’t glow.”
Outside the window, grandfather Ivan looked up toward the fence and faded in the light of the rising sun. All these souls sparking up and flaming out, leaving things behind, or bones, or scars on the living. Ivanych somehow went on, their lives echoing into his. The world kept slipping out of recognition, yet here his father lived in the sturdiness of the table, Mashenka in the foraged goodness of the seni and the marrow of his ribs, his son in every room. Perhaps when the cell phone charged, he’d poke at the only saved number and invite Kolya for tea. He’d open the last jar of the cherry jam. He’d tell Kolya he could build any goddamn toilet he wanted. He’d sit on the edge of his seat, like Mashenka would, and listen to anything his son wanted to tell him.
Yaga sat up, the ceiling still bowed above her. She pressed her finger to his lips, listening, hopped to the floor, and ducked into the seni. “She’s leaving.”
Ivanych scooted his legs off the stove first, hung by his forearms, his fingertips. He hobbled after her, pulling his clothes on, and stopped in the doorway to catch his breath.
In the bluish predawn the chicken-legged izbushka was rising, creaking, and leaning left and right, shaking off the snow. It turned around of its own accord, swung the door open, and here it was, the glimpse of the other side he’d so badly wanted. He could run and sneak a look.
It began to snow, large flakes floating to earth. The chicken-legged izbushka shut its door and turned toward the forest.
“What a tease.” Yaga hopped into the mortar. He tried to hand her the pestle but couldn’t budge it. She grabbed it and whirled off the porch.
Ivanych raised a hand in silent goodbye. He knew so little now and yearned to continue to stare open-mouthed at his son’s grown-up face, at the izbushka waddling through the deep snow, at a chickadee that landed on the string and tilted her head to study the spot where salo used to be. He met the bird’s shiny eye. What other food could she possibly find, all the fields harvested, all the bugs dead or asleep under the snow, and the bird’s hunger gnawed at his own gut. How had Mashenka always known what everyone needed?
The izbushka had almost reached the line of trees. Yaga’s hair shone silver, the pestle aloft in her hand as she floated above the snow in pursuit. He squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them, they’d gone into the tree cover yet still traveled across the snow, an afterimage on its way from life to memory.
He shifted at the top of the stairs, the izba behind him empty and dark. Snow continued to fall without a sound. As it thickened, he could no longer see the bottom of the slope and was seized with a sudden certitude that Mashenka was there, just out of sight, coming up the slope, laden with salo to last through the winter, or fresh cucumbers and weighty bull’s-heart tomatoes, or those happy orange globeflowers frilly with yarrow and stalks of wheat. Ivanych stumbled off the porch, waded across the yard, the snow filling his felt boots, singeing his ankles, but it didn’t matter. This time, he’d run and meet her. He’d take the burden off her hands. They’d walk together home.
“Wait, Mashenka, I am coming,” he called, his voice weaker than he wanted, muffled by the wind.
The blizzard howled, and when he looked behind him, he couldn’t even see the pigsty in the swirling white, forget the izba. The snow took one valenok, and then the other, and still he pressed on in wet socks, stepping onto the thick windswept crust before falling through to his thighs. Snowflakes landed cold on his lips. If he could just catch up to her, he’d lay his small love at her feet.
Karolina Letunova grew up in Western Siberia. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work appears in AGNI, Kenyon Review, and Threepenny Review, among others. She’s currently at work on a novel. More at karolinaletunova.com
Elsewhere on the site: read more about Issue 21.2, and peruse a special folio on writing about sex.
