If it’s love, you’ve got to tie the knot. Olga and Maksim have lived together for four years. They’re both thirty-five, but as is typical now, they look and seem nine years younger. This made Olga’s mother jealous, because twenty-seven years ago, at thirty-five, she was an exhausted adult with two kids, a dacha, and a husband. Her career had evaporated to the tune of raising kids, being a housewife, and helping her husband with his business, which she despised. She had retained some skills and knowledge, but every time she geared up to resume her career, everything fell through.

Olga’s career was in curating exhibitions. She had big ideas, wrote, and networked with artists, musicians, and other people in unstable professions, as well as with some foundations and even the government, which occasionally randomly allocated funds for some nonsense.

Olga’s father felt exasperated with Maksim. He and Olga lived as partners—the modern way. They equally split up chores, took turns cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, washing dishes, and ordering food. Maksim didn’t need to be reminded to do things around the house and knew what needed to be bought, cleaned, and washed all by himself. Sometimes he even took on more housework because he worked from home. During big exhibitions, Olga only came home to sleep.

Olga’s father complained to his wife that the kids were living as if gender roles were reversed. He never told Maksim this directly; he was afraid to scare him off. He didn’t voice any of these complaints to Olga either. Ever since she was a young girl, he had a habit of communicating with her exclusively through his wife. Maksim sensed his frustration and joked that they should live in an old-timey patriarchal dynamic for a week—he’d lay on the couch and watch TV, while Olga ironed his t-shirts and searched for his socks around the house. He and Olga laughed a lot. Olga’s mother quite liked him. Sometimes even her father did. Good young man. Olga loved Maksim. Maksim loved Olga.

Olga’s mom knew that biologically speaking, her daughter was already an old lady. She could trick the entire town, the artists, and the foundations, but no one could argue with nature. She was thirty-five with a uterus that had never carried a child. Her clock was ticking. Olga’s mother and other relatives had talked her ear off about marriage and kids. Maksim’s parents didn’t care as much. They were divorced and living in exile. Olga’s side lay in wait, until finally, a wedding! Her above-ground relatives were squealing with delight, her ancestors below were rolling in their graves in excitement. As for Olga and Maksim, they just decided to adult up together with a mortgage and get their relatives to chill out and leave them alone.

They planned the wedding themselves. Maksim took on a larger share of the planning. He found a good restaurant without a tacky ambiance. No karaoke. Together with Olga’s mother, he invited many blood and some non-blood relatives, as well as Olga’s friends, his friends, and friends of their parents.

They managed to convince Olga’s parents to do without laying flowers on the graves of notable fallen countrymen, taking photos next to military monuments commemorating said compatriots, the groom carrying the bride across a bridge, and even without hiring a toastmaster for the ceremony. But Olga’s mom did insist upon a photo shoot. It was really her dad who insisted upon it, but he communicated that through his wife, as usual. Olga invited a photographer she knew, Nina. Everything went smoothly.

Except that Olga couldn’t choose a dress to save her life. She wanted to do something unique, maybe marry in athleisure, but her mother made a scene about tradition. All the white wedding dresses struck Olga as ugly and demeaning. We live in Russia, in Central Russia to boot, Olga reasoned. Our bodies experience chronic vitamin D deficiency because we don’t get enough sunlight. We are pale, blue-pale, yellowy-pale, greenish-pale. Whites and their various shades don’t suit us at all, Olga knew. About fifteen years ago she wound up at a friend’s wedding at the bridal forest near Chekhov. At this park, in a thinned-out clearing, celebration tents with tables were set up. Wearing mostly white or off-white dresses, brides crowded the concrete square of a dance floor and puttered about on creaky swan-shaped swings.

There were a couple hundred brides. They stuck out amidst a dark mass of grooms and a bright crowd of relatives. All the brides looked the same—the lifeless white blending them all into a doomed pale porridge. It appeared that white was chosen intentionally to fatten and demean the women (white being the color of purity, as brides are not to have sex before marriage), and to sentence them to a new existence marked by a renunciation of self. Since that day, the color white turned Olga’s stomach. When she was twenty-seven and left her job at the legal department at a bank to pursue a career in contemporary art, she had wanted to make a film about the bridal park, but it was already shut down.

Olga complained to Maksim that doom-scrolling white screens full of white bridal dresses was turning her eyes chartreuse from their usual green. There was some variation in styles and colors, but none of these dresses spoke to Olga. Maksim told her to just wear whatever she wanted since the wedding was a formality anyway. Her friend Roma offered to sew her a quilted dress made of authentic, used, unlaundered aprons. Olga liked the idea but didn’t like that it wasn’t her idea.

She was angry at the wedding, and at the unfound dress that distracted her from her work, where she had just signed up to curate a large important exhibition in a large important government gallery. It looked like she could squeeze the wedding into her packed schedule. Everything was already set, the menu decided, the schedule created, transportation scheduled and borrowed (neither Maksim nor Olga drove, they lived downtown and walked everywhere), but the dress was still missing.

Her concerned mother convinced Olga to go to a bridal boutique and try on all the white and off-white dress-shaped articles. Many of them made Olga look bigger and paler, but some did suit her quite well. It was all wrong. Only a week remained until the wedding. Maksim’s outfit was simple, he just bought a gray three-piece suit. Olga’s only rule for him had been to avoid the specific shade of glossy blue beloved by spirited bureaucrats running around downtown. Olga bought herself a simple off-white outfit which she refused to call a dress.

Four days before the wedding, she went to an exhibition curated by some of her close acquaintances. She enjoyed folk projects and wanted to check out the show, and, if impressed, invite the curators to collaborate on her big project. In one of the showrooms, she saw the perfect outfit for her wedding. It was an ethnographic exhibition, with some modern art pieces and performances mixed in. In one showroom, a nude performance artist was creating an outfit made of modern Russian coins, sewing it together right on her body. She was surrounded by traditional women’s suits on display.

One of those outfits was the one: a linen shirt with long slanted sleeves, a mock neck (the chest, collar, and sleeves were all embroidered with designs), a poneva swing skirt, disconnected in the front (also with embroidered designs and a braided belt), navershnik, a tunic embroidered in red, to be worn over the top, and a beaded gaitan necklace with a cross on it. The color white was subtly visible on the costume, more of a light color than white, but only as the invisible backdrop. The embroidery and edging, rich with rhombuses and crosses rendered in red, sometimes a reddish blue, in spots a reddish green, permeated the entire costume and functioned as its circulatory system. Red was the predominant color of the suit, with blue stripes on the skirt and green, blue, and yellow detailing on the tunic.

The necklace was fashioned out of multicolored beads, including some black ones. The most remarkable piece of the entire outfit was the soroka, a headpiece with a horned tiara called a kika. It was a literal crown, with pearls on gold silk in the front, beads in the back, and two horns atop, sheathed in fringed red velvet. Olga couldn’t take her eyes off it. She stood and marveled at it for so long that the performer handed her the coin costume-in-progress to hold while she attached the second panel to her skirt. Olga obediently held up the jingling robe. She could tell that the wedding outfit was her size. And it really was meant for a wedding.

She talked to the curators and learned that luckily for her, the costume was not historical but typological. It was sewn in the image of an original, but very convincingly and authentically, which was why it was very expensive and part of a private collection. Olga invited her curator friends to work with her on her new, big project. They would have agreed regardless, sensing her intense passion and drive for the show. Olga took twenty pictures of her wedding outfit. It turned out to be traditional to one of the villages in Penza. Her mother’s family was from a Penza village, so it made perfect sense for her to wear this for her wedding.

Maksim burst out laughing when he saw the pictures of the wedding outfit. It was to be delivered to Olga right before the wedding. Maksim quite liked it, especially the horns, but his three-piece gray suit no longer matched. “Your mother will be appalled,” he told Olga. They quickly came up with a Neo-Russian style men’s suit for him: a red shirt, a clerk’s vest, breeches, and boots. Somehow it came together to look modern and stylish, but it wasn’t cheap.

The bride’s and groom’s outfits horrified Olga’s mother. She found the bridal costume hideous, accusing her daughter of having watched too many Hollywood films as inspiration (Olga found this remark especially confusing). Olga explained that this was literally traditional for her mother’s own family, and if not them exactly, then a very similar family. As proof, Olga showed her mother old, pre-Revolution photos of her great-great-grandmother, wearing a very similar outfit, including the kika, but without the horns. The horns were a special addition for the wedding. “Why do you need horns for the wedding?” her mother shouted. Olga’s father fell silent, he didn’t have a message to pass along. Maksim tried to help by modeling his wedding suit for his future mother-in-law, holding it up against his body and pacing back and forth. Olga laughed so hard she got dizzy, and her mother cried. Suddenly, the matriarch gave in and told the kids to do whatever they wanted.

Olga was very nervous that the costume with the kika wouldn’t get delivered. She hadn’t even wanted this stupid wedding, she had been content just cohabitating, having worked out all their issues, and learned to respect each other’s space. The wedding was just a distraction, designed to appease relatives. She was looking forward to getting it over with and going to Greece for two weeks on sort of a honeymoon (tickets were bought, hotel booked by their friends), except they agreed to bring their laptops and get some work done in a peaceful setting. But now Olga wanted this wedding to happen, just so she could wear the outfit. She would have agreed to marry anyone, not necessarily Maksim if it meant that she got to wear this suit for the ceremony. A woman from the curator couple brought the suit over in a special, water-resistant cover. For some reason, she made Olga sign for it. She sent over a video tutorial on how to put it all on. Olga lamented that even in creative couples, women still do the bulk of the service work.

Roma was thrilled. He had initially wanted to emcee the ceremony in a sequined dress but reconfigured his outfit to match Olga’s traditional dress choice. He added some wedding folk rhymes from a book by a folklorist who lived about a hundred years ago to the playlist. Along with photos of her wedding suit, Olga had sent him a picture of the performance artist and her coin suit. Roma quickly found her and attempted to borrow it, but she refused. He fashioned himself a dress out of flower-print aprons.

Maksim had spent the night before the wedding at a friend’s house to keep with tradition. Registration was scheduled for 11:00 am. Olga woke up at 7:34 am, had some coffee and showered. Then, her friends came over. They began outfitting the bride in the wedding suit, periodically consulting the video. At first, it seemed that the costume would be too small, as people were generally smaller back then, but it fit Olga like a glove. Only the skirt was a tad short as compared to photos of Penza village women from the beginning of the XX century.

Her friends put her hair up with a pin, and the kika didn’t even need any additional securing—it easily and snugly fit over Olga’s head, comfortably for them both. They decided against the woven bast shoes, even though they were only a bit tight. Olga pulled on thick high socks and rough red leather boots she had bought in Istanbul.

All the friends made an effort to adapt to the traditional dress code as time allowed, adorning themselves in Pavlovsky shawls. The bride walked out into the building lobby, eliciting wows from the crowd. It wasn’t just because the outfit was so unique, but also because it looked so natural on her as if she had worn the poneva, navershnik, gaitan, and kika her entire life. When the groom showed up in his millennial-merchant suit to pick up the bride, their friends drove a surprisingly hard bargain, making him solve wedding riddles from the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp’s book. They negotiated the bride price as though they really didn’t want to give Olga over to him.

Photographer Nina, wearing a multi-sleeved hoodie with a multi-armed Slavic witch on it, stood on the staircase and excitedly snapped photos. The groom’s ransom was finally accepted when their friends’ concerns about traffic on the way to the courthouse grew too loud. The bride and groom went outside. They were renting an apartment in a pre-Revolution building. Upon seeing them, one of the neighbors walking by inquired if they were filming a period piece.

The clerk at the courthouse was unfazed; she had seen it all. In a Soviet monotone, she sentenced Maksim and Olga to marriage. They took photos with family, friends, the best man, and the maid of honor. After that, the couple accompanied Nina to a park with a church and a manor, to take more photos with colorful glazed tiles as the backdrop.

When they got to the restaurant, Roma, who didn’t stand out as much earlier in his regular clothes, had changed into a dress made of aprons and a kokoshnik (a women’s headdress). He’d made it out of paper plates, gluing rhinestones and flowers cut from floral-print towels onto them. He climbed into silver high heels and did his makeup à la Russe, with bold red blush circles on his cheeks. Olga gave Roma three cheek kisses for his fabulous tribute to Mamyshev-Monroe, a famous Russian performance artist and drag queen. The friends were thrilled, but Maksim was a bit worried that all this drag would make Olga’s relatives uncomfortable. His parents couldn’t make the trip, and the rest of his family was dispersed around the country.

Roma felt inspired by his friends’ enthusiastic approval of his look and picked up the mic. The party had begun. Olga’s father sat at the table with a gloomy expression and her mother shoveled herring under a fur coat, a salad which wasn’t her favorite, into her frown. The relatives sat uncomfortably on the edges of their chairs, trying to avoid eye contact with the emcee and, just in case, the newlyweds. The awkwardness of the relatives rubbed off on the couple’s friends. Roma cracked jokes and told stories to liven up the mood. Olga’s aunt, a businesswoman, informed Olga that she had done well for herself.

The tardy DJ finally ran in and started playing folklore remixes, mostly upbeat ones, but sometimes ones with a social message like IC3PEAK. Eventually, the family started to relax, eat, and drink. Roma pulled guests from the audience for toasts, inserting traditional songs and spells from the folklorist’s book in between. Now he was rapping about Olga beautifying the house and yard. Olga’s mother and father each gave a toast, followed by the maid of honor and best man, and then by some select friends and family.

Relatives and parents raised toasts to chicken in every pot, love, joy, and support. Olga’s aunt talked up Olga’s career and said that she and Maksim were a good match. Friends used their toasts to emphasize partnership, support, understanding, tenderness, work, care, and creativity. Photographer Nina kept snapping photos. Olga and Maksim finally exhaled, sat back, and listened. Olga’s uncle amicably asked her if Roma was one of those. Olga honestly responded that he wasn’t, he was just an artist and enjoyed wearing dresses. The uncle nodded in faux understanding.

The feast graduated from champagne to wine and vodka. Only Olga’s aunt was drinking seltzer. The DJ put on “Porushka” and the guests spilled out onto the dance floor. Roma belted a traditional folk song about a rooster and a chicken into the mic. The relatives giggled.

Olga hid her phone in her skirt pocket and was covertly texting with the people who had hired her for the big project. “God Bless” by Oligarch came on. “Hope you don’t put the horns on him,” Olga’s uncle joked in his toast, taking a dig at her outfit. Everyone laughed and Olga cracked a smile. Her mom was discussing modern apartment layouts with her sister. Olga’s father was trying to convince Maksim to buy a car. More specifically, he emphasized that, as a man, Maksim should know how to drive and have a car. Olga contemplated texting the client that it was her wedding and not a good time to talk, but she was afraid they would take her for a Stepford wife. The DJ played a mournful song with a female vocalist lamenting about her man. Roma gleefully recited a lewd folk ceremonial about a flying cunt. Photographer Nina seemed to be taking a video of him. Olga was discussing the number of people on her team. It was instrumental to the project. She reached under the kika to scratch her ear.

“Turn your phone off! What the hell is wrong with you?!”

Olga took her eyes off the screen and looked around. It was her husband speaking to her in that tone.

“Now!” Maksim barked for the first time in his life.

Olga didn’t turn off her phone but hid it up her sleeve. The DJ put on the folk classic “Seni.” The guests jumped up to dance again. The entrée was served. Many friends and family members including Roma and Nina were cutting a rug on the dance floor, and the DJ was rocking out on the ones and twos.

“Max, don’t worry about what my dad said…the car…he’ll get over it, just let him talk,” the wife told her new husband.

“Give me some meat!” the husband replied to his wife.

Olga rolled up her sleeves to avoid staining them and felt the hard surface of her phone against her elbow. She stood up, stretched out her arms, and piled some slices of beef tongue onto Maksim’s plate. He began to chew them attentively. Olga’s phone was vibrating. She was brainstorming how she could take it out without anyone noticing. She wanted to tell the client that at least nine people would be needed for a proactive project team, five wouldn’t be enough, or at least let them know she was getting married right now and would reach out tomorrow. Going to the bathroom to text was an option. Olga stood up.

“Give me more!” her husband ordered.

Olga quickly began transferring more slices of the tongue from the serving platter onto Maksim’s plate.

“Oy-yo, we’re not orphans anymo-o-ore-e-e,” a voice bewailed from the right side of the table. Olga whipped her horned head around—it was her mother weeping in tongues.

“For so long we’ve lived in sin!” her aunt suddenly ululated. The audience began to nod, ooh, and aah. Olga squinted in horror in her aunt’s direction.

“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord! The fruit of the womb a reward!” her mother continued. Olga stared at her in disbelief.

“Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it,” her mother’s friend cried out from across the table. Olga’s stomach somersaulted.

“Let the wife obey her husband in everything!” her father’s bass cut through the air from the left.

Maksim sat and chewed meat with great satisfaction as the others ate, drank, and danced.

“Ye shall bring forth five sons, like father like son,” her aunt howled, “and one or two daughters to help round the house.”

“Buy a dwelling house in the fertile lands and abandon the city,” a manly voice rasped from the opposite side of the table.

Maksim sat, nodded, and smugly patted his vest. All of this made Olga feel more nauseated than the color white.

“A house! No, a home! To lead a quiet country life far away from the hustle and bustle!” the voices menacingly orbited the table. Olga’s phone kept vibrating. The song switched from the folk classic “Seni” to something equally upbeat.

“Let the wife understand that she feareth her husband!!!” Roma suddenly squealed in his apron dress and his silver high heels.

“Feareth, feareth, fea-a-a-a-reth!” chants rang out around the table.

Olga felt a powerful response rising inside her with an intensity she had not known before. The festive bridal costume had sewn itself into her skin and become one with it. The headdress had put down roots into her head. Out of Olga’s skull, growths began to sprout into the kika—two of them, on either side of her head. Bony horns grew into the costume ones and pierced them through, tips of off-white bone poking through the red velvet. Olga bent her head forward and looked at her husband with bloodshot bovine eyes.

“What the hell?!” Maksim whispered loudly.

Olga stood up, took a few steps back to get a running start, tilted her head forward, and charged, ramming her horns deep into her husband’s chest, to the very root of the kika. It was hard to tell where the velvet ended and the blood began.