5

Naked

Ivan stepped off the bridge onto the grassy meadow and his clothing disappeared.

Startled, he let go of Katerina's hand and tried to cover himself, then realized how pathetic he looked, clutching his genitals, and turned his back on her.

"What are you doing?" she asked. "Peeing?"

Since all his sphincters were firmly clamped down, that wasn't likely. "I'm naked," he said. "What happened to my clothing?"

"I don't know," said Katerina. "Your skin is very smooth. Like a baby's."

It bothered him that she didn't seem bothered by his nudity. He sidled toward the bridge. "Maybe if I cross over to the middle again, I'll get my clothes back."

"They'd just disappear again the minute you came back here," said Katerina impatiently.

If I come back, Ivan thought.

"Your skin is so smooth," she said again. "And white. Have you been sick?"

Her comment annoyed him. He was proud of having a decathlete's body. She was looking at him as if he were... what? Unmanly.

But there were worse things to worry about than her rude assessment of his body. The bridge was invisible again, and he couldn't remember quite where it had been.

"Take my hand again so I can see the bridge," he said.

"No," she said.

"I need my clothes."

"You can't have them," she said.

"I don't like being naked in front of you."

"I already saw," she said. "You don't have to hide your deformity."

Deformity?

It took him a moment to realize what she meant. In America practically everyone in the locker room had been circumcised. But to Katerina's people it would be rare. Nudity, however, must be common. Well, it wasn't common to him.

"I need to wear something," he said.

"I know, it's cold. Too bad you couldn't get the skin off that bear."

"Give me your..." He tried to think of the Old Church Slavonic word for hoose, but if he ever knew it, he didn't know it now. "Your clothing. Robe. Coat." That about exhausted the approximations he could think of.

No answer.

He looked over his shoulder at her. She was, finally, blushing.

"What, I can be naked and you can't part with one piece of clothing?"

"Are you trying to shame me?" she whispered.

"I'm trying not to shame us both," he said. "I can't walk into your parents' house naked."

"Better naked than wearing women's clothing," she said.

"I'm not going to wear it like a woman," he said. "Now give it to me before I freeze to death standing here."

Sullenly she dropped her hoose off her shoulders, then leaned down to pick it up from the ground. She looked away as she handed it to him.

True to his word, he didn't put it over his shoulders—since it was open-fronted, it would hardly have served his purpose that way. Instead he wrapped it around his waist and tucked it like a bath towel.

"Good," he said, facing her again. "I'm covered."

But she who had stared frankly at his nakedness would not look at him now.

"I'm wearing it like a soldier's kilt," he said.

"When people murmur that the husband of the queen once wore her clothing, I will be able to say, I never saw him wear any such thing, and I can swear to it by the Holy Virgin."

"Are you telling me that it's better for me to come to your parents' house naked?"

"It would be better for you to come to my parents' house dead than wearing women's clothing."

"Well, here's an idea. How about if I don't come to your parents' house at all? Give me your hand so I can see the bridge, and I'll be on my way."

She whirled around to face him, to clutch at his hands. "No, no, wear whatever you want. You can't leave, you must come to my house, you have to marry me or we lose it all. After everything, after you fought the bear, after you woke me, to leave now would be worse than if you had never come!"

He held her hands. "Listen, I understand that wearing women's clothing is a..." He struggled for a word for tabu. "A sin. When we get near the village, I'll wait in the woods until you can bring me men's clothing." Gingerly he removed the hoose and handed it back to her.

She looked at him with disgust, refusing to touch the garment. "Do you expect me to wear this now that it's been around your loins?"

"No," said Ivan. "No, I see that you can't wear it now." He reached out and dropped the hoose into the chasm. "It's gone."

Her disdain was undiminished. "Nothing is gone," she said. "You just gave the hoose to the Widow."

"I was just down there," he said. "She wasn't there."

"She makes the rules, not you," Katerina said. "I have to marry you, but you're a fool. She must have picked you out herself."

That really pissed him off. "Maybe you have to marry me, but I don't have to marry you."

"Naked in the woods, a deformed peasant who wears women's clothing and speaks like a stupid child, it's not as though you had a lot of choices."

Her taunt was so ridiculously myopic that he had to laugh. He thought of Ruth back in New York, waiting for him. All this magic, these dreams of childhood, the evil monster he had beaten, the princess he had kissed, what were they? Foolishness, he could see that now. He didn't belong here. The rules made no sense to him. Clearly she expected him to go through with a real marriage. Like the rules in a china shop: You break it, you bought it. Only in this case, you kiss her, you've married her.

Well, he didn't like the rules. He didn't like the idea of marrying someone who thought he was a deformed cross-dressing peon, and even less did he like the idea of getting caught up in some kind of struggle with a mythical witch from the nightmares of fifty generations of Russian children. He'd done his part. He woke her up and set her free. The prince didn't have to stay. Especially when he wasn't a prince.

"Look," he said.

"I've already seen enough," she said.

"I mean listen."

"If you mean listen, say listen," she said. "Why do you talk so funny? Twisting all the words around?"

"Because I'm not from here!" he said. "Your language isn't my language." To prove it, he burst into modern Russian. "You speak a language that is already dead, that is hinted at only in fragments of ancient manuscripts, so you're lucky I speak any language you can understand at all!"

She looked at him now with dread. "What kind of curse was that? You spoke of death. Did you curse me to die?"

"I didn't curse you," he said in Old Church Slavonic. "I spoke in my own language."

But then he wondered what language was his own. Russian was the language of his parents' home, but the language of his childhood was Ukrainian. But all these years of thinking, speaking, writing in English—didn't that make English his language, too? When he was married to Ruth, wouldn't English be the language of their children? For that matter, didn't Old Church Slavonic have as much claim to be one of his languages? However badly he might speak it, it had been the private language he and his father once shared. And now, could he really pass up the chance to learn a dialect of proto-Slavonic, the true spoken language, after all these years of knowing and using the shadow of it that had survived?

Yes, he could. He had a life, and this wasn't it. He had done what he came to do—he cleared away the leaves, defeated the beast, crossed the chasm, woke the princess. That was as far as the stories ever went. None of the stories included shivering naked between forest and pit, the princess scorning you as a peasant, sneering at the symbol of your childhood covenant with God and loathing you for daring to try to cover your nakedness.

Well, actually, that wasn't true. Western stories ended with getting married and living happily ever after. And Russian fairy tales went far beyond that—to betrayal, adultery, murder, all within that romantic marriage that the wanderer stumbled into. The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.