Marya wanted to run out of the house, but she could not move. Her throat dried up. “Who are you?” she whispered.
“Say my name, daughter. You know who I am.”
“Widow Likho.”
“What is my name, Marya Morevna?” the crone roared, her black voice bending the windows and rattling the books on the shelf.
Marya quailed, shrinking away into the upholstery. “Widow Likho! Comrade Likho! Comrade … oh … oh. Likho. Bad luck.”
The old woman leaned forward. “Yeeeeessss,” she said again, stretching her voice like dark glue. “And you have my brush. You called me to you.”
“No … I didn’t mean to!”
“Intent is trivial,” barked Likho. Suddenly she stood up with a swiftness no young woman could match. She towered; the ceiling forced her to bend at the waist, but beneath it her back was straight, without a hunch. She hovered over Marya, her huge black eyes crackling violet. “But never you fear me, Marya Morevna!” Her voice turned crooning, sibilant, her breath sawing back and forth. She took Marya’s face in her impossibly long hands. “I cannot touch you. You are not for me. Papers have been drawn up in your name, silks and candies allocated. Everyone knows to make way. But you called; I had to come. I am here to educate you, to make you ready. There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise. 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.” Likho grinned. “Don’t forget to brush your lovely black hair. And come to me when the sun is low. Come to me and be my pupil, my pet, my daughter.”
Marya bolted from the room. She ran down the long hallway, bumping her arm against the wall, and out into the long, thin street, panting and crying, her heart hiding behind her ribs.
She still clutched the book to her chest.
Every evening, while the sun dripped red wax into the Neva, Widow Likho stood outside the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street and looked up at Marya’s window. Her hunch returned—she seemed just a simple old woman again, but she watched the window like a raven with white hair, and smiled unwaveringly, silent, utterly still.
Marya did not read the book. She hid it under her bed. She shut her eyes so tightly her brow ached and recited Pushkin until she fell asleep. And at the rim of her sleep, at the edge of her reciting, there the black name sat, hunched, waiting: There Tsar Koschei, he wastes away, poring over his pale gold.
Spring became summer in this manner, and Marya’s own mother, not the one who tucked her in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, nor the one who cooked supper on Fridays and Wednesdays, but the one who had carried her for nine months, began to visit Widow Likho, embarrassed that her daughter was so rude and neglectful. Marya begged her not to, but the two women shared tea and sour cherries from their tree every night when Marya’s mother returned from her shift. And, though she had never been clumsy or careless, Marya’s mother began to stumble on the stairs, to get splinters in her fingers, to lose her left shoes. Her work at the munitions factory became sloppy, faulty bullets slipping past her on the line, and she was reprimanded twice.
Marya thought she knew why—but whenever she thought she was brave enough to face the Widow once more, the awful vision of the crone bending over her filled her heart, and her skin went cold. 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. Her body clenched itself and refused to let her act, no matter how tired her mother looked each day. When, just once, all her courage piled itself hand over hand, and she made it so far as the door, the moment her fingers grazed the knob she vomited horribly, her stomach emptying itself of anything good she might have had to eat and wanted to keep.
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.
And then, in June, Marya’s mother tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and broke her ankle. While she convalesced in the great, tall house (slowly growing greater and taller), the close air gathered in her lungs, and she began to cough up dust, awful, racking sounds in the night. And like a fever, Marya’s fear broke.
“I’m here!” screamed Marya Morevna into Widow Likho’s curiously empty house. No other families greeted her or told her to shut up, for heaven’s sake. “Do you hear me? I’m here! I brought your book! Leave my mother alone!”
Likho stepped quietly into the hall and turned her head to the side to face Marya without moving the rest of her long black body.
“I haven’t done a thing to your mother, child. She’s such a nice lady, bringing an old woman tea and sweets in the evening! What a shame her daughter has no manners.”
“Bad Luck, I know you! It’s your fault she broke her foot, and your fault she’s coughing, and it will be your fault when she loses her job at the factory!” Marya shook—she felt like she might throw up again, but she savagely bit the inside of her lip, willing her body to obey her.
Likho spread her long white hands. “I am what I am, Marya Morevna. You cannot be angry with a stove for heating the house. That is what it was built for.”
“Well, I’m here now. Leave her alone.”
“It’s dear of you to visit your old baba, little one, but there’s no need. It’s too late; the time has passed.”
“Too late for what? What’s going on? Why do the domoviye know my name? Please tell me!”
Likho laughed harshly. Her laugh bounced off of the parlor lamp; the bulb shattered.
“When the world was young, it knew only seven things. And one of these was the length of an hour. Such a pity little Marya doesn’t know it. You had an hour to learn at my knee, and an hour, if I wish it, can be as long as all of spring. But the hour has chimed. He is coming; I am leaving. We try to stay out of each other’s way. Family occasions can be so awkward.”
Marya’s mind surged ahead of itself. Her cheeks burned. The black book was warm in her arms.
“You’re the Tsaritsa of the Length of an Hour.”
“Bad luck relies absolutely on perfect timing.” Likho grinned.
“Who is coming?” pleaded Marya Morevna. The Tsar from the poem? But that was only a story—but so were domoviye, and yet. She could not put it all together. She was missing vital information, and she hated it. When she knew and others didn’t, that was better. “Tell me!” Marya tried to command the Widow; she tried to bellow and grow taller in her shoes.