Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (48 page)

He missed his dog and his favorite chair in the study, the one his grandfather always sat in, and he missed the way the moon rose over the oaks outside his study, spilling light across the floor in the evenings. He missed his small Protestant friend, Nelson. He thought of how the firelight turned Nelson’s brown hair into a burnished chestnut, how the child did not have a poker face at all but was a burgeoning chess player. He hoped that someone was making sure Nelson had pants that were long enough and lenses in his glasses to keep up with his weakening eyesight. But he knew, of course, Nelson would have those things because Pamela would see to it.

Pamela. He tried not to remember, but sometimes a stray moment snuck in when he was too tired to ward it off. There was a night, just before Casey came to take her home, when the despair of waiting for her husband had been more than she could bear alone. She had crossed the space between herself and him in the study, knelt down on the floor and put her head in his lap the way a child would who desperately needed comfort. There had been nothing strained or awkward about the moment, and he had stroked her head, watching the play of his emerald ring against the night-blue silk of her hair.

Around them, the old house was silent, peaceful, the only sound the fire in the grate hissing softly and the only feeling that of Pamela’s breath warm against his knee. In that deep silence, her hand had come up and lain softly over his, and so they had sat for a very long time as the night flowed over them and the stars pinwheeled across the heavens and slipped off to set in another sky, far away.

“May I sit with you?” The voice seemed to come out of the ether and startled Jamie in his fugue of exhaustion. “I’m sorry, I did not mean to frighten you.”

At the edge of the bench, copper hair a dull glow in the dim, stood Violet. He was momentarily stunned into open-mouthed silence, for she had done no more than nod curtly in his direction in all these weeks in the camp.

He regained his faculties enough to nod and clear the dust from the bench.

She sat down, tucking her hands between her knees, her shoulders rising up to meet the shorn edges of her hair.

“You were praying?” she asked, a quiet curiosity in her words.

“No—or yes, but only in a broken-down way. My relationship with God has always been difficult.”

“On your side or on God’s?” she asked, smiling.

“Both. Likely it’s more problematical for him,” he said returning the smile, despite his exhaustion. “Mostly I just come here for the peace.”

“You can feel it though, can’t you? There’s something here, a presence. It’s more than mere emptiness.”

“Yes,” he said, grateful suddenly for her company. It was true there was something here, whether the echoes of a faith that had been practiced once, or the presence of a spirit beyond the trappings of earthly woe. Still, it was here, indefinable as things of the soul always were, but undeniable.

Her nose was tipped pink from the cool evening, charming against the camellia white of her skin. She was tiny, yet had a persona much larger than her physical size, and she exuded a kind of peace that quieted others merely by her proximity. He had been careful in his observations of her, once he had understood just who she was. He understood what it was that had drawn Andrei away from his elegant and icy wife to this woman. The fire that never left Andrei in peace would be tempered by this woman, and in her arms he had likely found brief moments of peace, that he had not been able to find elsewhere in his life.

She touched the hollow of her throat, and closed her eyes. It was a gesture with which he was long familiar. He looked more closely and saw the glint of gold hidden beneath her uniform. Almost as invisible as faith, but somewhat more tangible.

“You pray?” he asked. She looked at him sharply and he realized he had made a Western gaffe for in Russia, religion was more private than sex. God had never left Russia entirely, but had remained within hearts and minds, hidden in secret cupboards and the memories of the peasants and the grandmothers. For her, it would be natural to think he prayed, for it was part and parcel of the Irish soul, but in Russia that same flame of faith had to be hidden to the point of snuffing it out.

She spent a long moment studying his face, and he allowed it, not masking his thoughts.

“Yes, I pray. I was raised by a peasant woman named Masha, as my mother was too busy with her Party duties, and the Party did not allow a true believer to show great affection to her child. Nights she studied at the Institute of Foreign Trade. Often it was just Masha and me, for my father was exiled and I was not allowed to speak of him. Masha was a devout Old Believer and she prayed morning and night and included me in all the rituals of her religion. When I was small, it was like believing in a fairytale or a ghost, something delicious that made me shiver. But as I got older, it became something deeper, something that formed a strange lifeline with a presence, an idea beyond the cold empire into which I was born. I suppose you could call me an internal immigrant. Outside I am a Soviet: inside I have left for a far country.”

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“For much the same reason as you are, Jamie—my relationship to Andrei.”

He raised a questioning eyebrow and she smiled in response. “I see you are not the man for a simple explanation. I was the daughter of an exiled economist and that alone would have been enough. But I was also part of a group that started an underground newspaper called
The Record
. The idea was to make a record of all the unpublicized news events in the Soviet Union: human rights abuses, arrests, trials, demonstrations,
samizdat
publications—and hope that we could smuggle it out to the West to bring attention to what was happening inside Russia.

“You have to understand that when the thaw came after Stalin’s death, we really thought everything would change. No one could have imagined that it would all stagnate under Brezhnev and that many of the old repressions and punishments would come back. It was exciting to believe that we could change, that our generation would be the one to break the chains of Communism.” She shrugged, face clouded with old memories.

“The KGB waged war on us, which told us we were hitting a nerve, that word was getting out beyond our borders. They searched our homes, offices, anywhere we might have papers. Once they stormed in on me and I had to dump a bunch of papers into a pot of soup boiling on the stove. I knew it was only a matter of time before I got into really hot water. Then I was sent to work on a project at Zvyozdny Gorodok and I met Andrei.”

She looked down at her small hands. Jamie waited in silence. She would continue her tale, or not.

“I would not have you think I went lightly into the affair with Andrei. You are not Russian, so perhaps you do not believe in Fate as we do—the knowledge that your life is meant to have these meetings, these interstices where things are supposed to happen—and you cannot avoid them no matter if they are going to break your heart or ruin you entirely. This is what I felt when I saw Andrei. Fate. I knew I was meant to love him, to sacrifice my entire being to him if that was what he wanted. Oh, I know it sounds very dramatic, but that is Russian love. I was fully prepared to love him in vain, to have no return of my affections. But then a miracle—he did.”

She looked at him openly, grey eyes dark in the old chapel. “Sometimes it has felt like all my life has been a suppression of feeling, of avoiding emotion, of not longing for that which was not possible, of never allowing yearning to take root in my soul. When I met Andrei, I decided that I was not going to suppress anything, no matter the price. So I am here in this camp, for that sin—for feeling when I should not have. They used my ties to
The Record
as an excuse.”

“Does your family know what happened to you?”

Another shrug. “For myself,” she said slowly, “there is no one left to mind. My father died in a gulag much like this one. My mother disowned me, and Masha went to her God long ago.”

She took a deep breath, and smiled, a gesture he felt more than saw.

“We have holey memories in Russia. So much is lies in this country and we are fed the Party line from our cribs. We are also taught to look the other way, to be quiet, to keep our mouths shut. It does strange things to your mind after awhile. You can’t remember what was true and what was false about a given incident. It is better sometimes to just believe as you are told to believe. It makes life more livable.”

“Does it?” he asked, for the night was one of those oddities that allowed such questions as daylight would not.

“No, but it is better not to admit that too often,” she said and stood, leaving him alone in the church. There had been both admission and warning in her words.

Chapter Thirty-four
June 1973
Gregor’s Story

Jamie and Nikolai had cut above quota for a month straight
, earning them extra rations for a week. The bread was hard and the meat stringy, but it was edible. Still, he put away part of the bread and meat for Volodya, whose meals were even smaller than the norm. Volodya often cut under quota, as the skill of sawing seemed to be something he could not learn, and each day in the forest was a struggle for him.

He took the opportunity of his extra rations to sneak off to the showers during suppertime. To have a moment alone was as rare and precious as stumbling over a hillock of diamonds and he had no intention of wasting it. He intended to get decently clean for a change. Gregor held court at the supper table, he and his
vor
, taking up one long table entirely, eating their meals like the wolves they were but lingering afterwards unless they had business to attend.

He had decent soap from a trade with Vanya who had access to mysterious channels of black market goods. Jamie had given three cakes of it to Violet and kept one for himself. It was dense hand-milled soap and heaven only knew where the man had found it, but Jamie wasn’t going to look this particular gift horse in the mouth.

The water, heated in the cistern by the day’s sun, was hot enough to sluice the dirt from his skin in great waves, rolling down his body in blissful comfort. It made him long for the ocean, to be totally immersed in water, to have the force of it sweep him away, to take him home.

He scrubbed his hair, which had grown out to a downy half inch upon his scalp, until it squeaked, and then lathered his body with what seemed a sinful amount of soap.

The night before he had dreamed of the forest maiden. She had, as before, remained in the shadows but this time she had spoken to him in the ancient language of water and woods and she had touched him, her fingers smelling of green and movement, of the dark light that lived within water and the thickness of cold amber in the trees. Her touch had been both dreamlike and real on some shifting level, and his body had responded to her with an ache he had not known in some time. She had felt as fresh and raw to his flesh as the first flicker of green upon a spring willow bough, as sweet as a cold green apple, fetched from a well.

His dreams, other than the strange dream language of the
rusalka,
were beginning to speak to him in Russian.

The dream of the water woman had lingered with him all day, like webbing around his senses that he could not shake.With the extra rations restoring some of his strength, he had found some of his other hungers returning. Even now, the memory of the forest maiden’s eyes meeting his and her mouth opening to speak sent a surge of warmth through him.

His body, starved as it was for touch of any sort, stirred at the dream memory and he was grateful to be alone for the moment. It wasn’t uncommon in the camp to see men in various states of arousal. Men, after all, were men. Even half-starved and worked to the point of collapse, the desire for sex still somehow rose to the top and flouted itself, looking for any sort of release. He had experienced bouts of abstinence before, but never one quite this long.

“Now
that
is what I call a proper welcome,” said a thick, lazy voice behind him.

Jamie turned slowly, wiping the water out of his eyes one-handed. Inwardly he cursed himself for letting his guard down.

Gregor stood at the edge of the showers, Jamie’s towel swinging from the end of one hand. He would have to brazen it out. There was nothing to cover up with anyway, and he couldn’t afford any show of weakness with this man.

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” Jamie said, certain he had never felt more naked in his entire life. He was also very aware that the last time he and this man had been in contact, he had been holding a knife to Gregor’s throat.

“Ah well, Jamie, as long as I have you,” Gregor purred, “I am not fussy about the terms.”

“Could I have my towel?”

“Mm,” Gregor pulled the towel suggestively across his mouth. “You look like you would taste good, all clean skin and golden hair. I have wondered, you know,” he looked directly at Jamie’s erection, “if you would disappoint, but I see now that things are even more pleasing than I had hoped. You are, as your good book says, ‘most fearfully and wonderfully made’. So what do you want? You need Gregor to be the
peduh
for you? It has been many years since I was any man’s bitch, but for you I will make exception. You want to be on top, is okay with me.”

“Is there anything, aside from the obvious,” Jamie said dryly, “that I can do for you?”

Gregor sighed. “It is a shame to waste such a thing, but this I did not come here for. He tossed the towel at Jamie. “Get dressed. We need to talk.”

Ten minutes later, dry, clean, clothed and more than a little irritated, Jamie joined Gregor who was waiting for him, minus his minions, outside the bathhouse.

“Come,” Gregor said, tossing aside the clover he’d been chewing on. “Take a little walk with me.”

“Where?” Jamie asked, wondering if an ambush was waiting for him in a secluded spot.

“Not to worry, Yasha. Your virtue,” Gregor smirked unpleasantly, “such as it is, will remain intact tonight.”