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They freeze, fall silent, stare expectantly at her through the empty, bee-swarmed gaps in the hive-head tilting atop its crisp cravat. November puts her hands on the tailor's face, holding up his cheeks, withered as a wasps nest. Her gaze is solemn and wide, her hold on him tender.
“Don't try that nonsense with me, girl. I've had more women than you've ever met.”
But she says nothing. This is just a dream, really, she thinks, and in dreams nothing is forbidden.
“Sleeves,” she sighs, and her voice is thick with poison and warmth. “Skirts, inseams, legs. Collars, cuffs, belts, bustles.” She strokes his thick white hair and presses her face to his. “These are things that have touched a thousand bodies in place of your hands, in place of your kisses and your worship. These are the things that have stroked their bellies and their throats and lay alongside them in the dark.”
The bee-golem grins blackly and gives a shuffling leap of delight. Victorious, they pull at the peacock feathers of the dress in the window. Aloysius just watches November, and she can feel his judgment: her hair is too coarse, striped dull, washed-out violet against dyed black. Her eyes don't match the dress either, mottled gray-green. But he wants to obey, whether her or the bees she cannot tell, and soon enough her pale, soft belly shows through deep blue cloth, her body moves beneath the silk proxy-hands of Aloysius and a regiment of bees sweeps up her hair, smooths her scalp with their loving feet.
November walks out onto Seraphim Street; her lavender-draped escort takes her arm. A few errant creatures buzz lazily behind her. They sing silently a long and intricate song, simply to tell their queen, their mother, simply to tell Casimira that they are coming to her, coming, O Mother, O Mistress, and oh, what a thing they have brought!
THREE
THE THREE OF TENEMENTS
The tea at Oleg's table was bitter and red. He could not quite remember buying it, but was sure he had, of course he had, sometime. Hibiscus something. Blood orange. He didn't know. He emptied two pills from an equally orange bottle into his hand and washed them down with the phantom tea. It tasted like dead skins shriveled up to bright husks.
“Olezhka,” his sister said. Water spilled out of her mouth, just a trickle. When he was a boy, it had been a torrent. Now it was just a tear. “Your tea is already cold.”
He did not answer her, but shook out two more pills and rubbed a rough-stubbled cheek with one hand. He had dreamed in the night, dreamed until sweat fled from him and soaked the sheets. It had been so vivid—no, not vivid, livid, like a bruise. There had been the taste of sugarcane, and a girl with blue hair, and there had been something like a great iron bird…
“You smell like copper keys, brother. And perfume. I don't wear perfume.”
“Would you rather hear that her name was Lyudmila, or that it was not?” he said softly.
The woman in the red child's dress combed a long brown weed from her hair, embarrassed, but not for herself—she was forever without and beyond shame. Only embarrassed for him, who could still taste the blond woman's mouth in his.
“Mila, I'm still a man, I still have blood in me.”
Her wide blue eyes regarded him, absent of guile or cruelty. She had never been cruel—she called herself his pet, his poor old cat, but she did not beg for milk or tear his curtains. She sat at his table, waited for him to come home from school, and then from work, and the years ground against each other like gears.
“I am not angry. When have I ever been angry? Drink your tea.”
He drank, and grimaced. No honey in the house—he always forgot something at the market.
“Do you think a ghost should be angry?” she asked, her wet mouth sopping her words. “I can try, if you think I ought to be. I think I remember ‘angry’—it was yellow, wasn't it? Like custard.”
Oleg caught her gaze, as a fish catches a barb in its mouth—it must have known such a thing was inevitable. But he smiled. The dyed lace on her collar was twisted up around her neck, and her face was open and sweet, her broad cheeks, her dripping hair.
“I love you, Mila.”
She nodded absently. “Yellow, right?”
“Yes, it was yellow.”
When he climbed out of th
e bath, she was gone. It was like that. He'd grown accustomed to her comings and goings, as one becomes accustomed to a wayward wife or, indeed, a cat only partially belonging to the places she sleeps. When he was seven he had awoken from some nameless child's dream-terror to see her sitting on his ashen footboard, knees drawn up to her chin, her dress seeping a wet crescent onto the edges of his blankets.
“That's my bed,” she had said, and crawled in next to him, sodden and sniffling and cold. She had put her arms around his neck and fallen asleep that way, her face buried behind his ear. In the morning, his father had been furious that he'd wet the bed, and though he knew he hadn't, he could not argue with the soaked, wadded sheets.
And so it had gone. She was not entirely his sister, nor really his friend. She did not do any of the things he had thought ghosts might do: steal his breath, demand sweets from the cupboard, send him on dangerous quests through the forests. She did not drive him mad. She did not plead for stories of the living. She did not, beyond dripping the Volkhov all over his bed, destroy his things or get him in trouble. He counted himself lucky to have got such a polite ghost. She also knew she was a ghost, or at least that she was dead, and Oleg felt that this was a lucky thing as well, for he would not have liked to tell her about it, about that day on the river, and how his mother cried so loud he heard it deep in her belly, and how he cried too.
Once, when he was fourteen and a brown-eyed girl in his class had made fun of his accent, when he had beat his pillow with his skinny arms and wept the sour, oily tears of that year, Lyudmila had crawled under the covers again, her dress already too short to be decent when faced with such activity, and put her arms around him, her mouth so close to his ear that afterward he would have to hop up and down like a swimmer to get the water out.
“In the land of the dead,” she rasped, weeds tangling up her tongue, “a boy who was run over by a black automobile fell in love with the Princess of Cholera, who had a very bright yellow dress and yellow hair and shiny yellow shoes. The boy chased after her down all the streets of the dead, past the storefronts and the millineries, past the paper mills and the municipal parks. But the princess would not stop running, for cholera is swift as anything. Finally, he caught her in the stillborn slums, where those who have not got anything of life to make a house out of dwell. And she said to him: ‘I will never love you, for you are not one of my people.’ So the boy painted his face white and gray, and wore a yellow rainslicker for her sake, and bled from his mouth for her love. But still she would not look at him with sweetness, and so he was made to go to the city well and draw up the fouled water so that he might forget her, and himself, and all things save the hospice where such unfortunates sleep who cannot find peace even behind the doors of the world.” She kissed his cheek, and ever after he would feel the mark. “So you see? It will all come out right.”
“I don't really see. That's a terrible story.”
