Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (66 page)

“I knew they were dead but it didn’t seem to matter. It was a form of companionship. And they did not complain, nor cry aloud with hunger pains and the terrible cawing of the ill. And then one day, Masha read aloud to me and he turned a page. I actually saw the skeletal bone of his fingers take the page by a corner and turn it over. I ran from the car in terror. When one is in a hallucinatory state, it is simply one’s reality and so I truly believed that those corpses had come to life. I thought I could feel Masha’s bony hands around my muffler, that he would pull me back to that tram car and I would be forever one of them, part of a gruesome quartet condemned to that iced purgatory.”

Nikolai shook his head, the glow from the stove limning the mane of leonine hair in hammered silver. “I had gone a little mad at that point, but I missed them later, as though they had been more real to me than those who still shuffled the streets of the city. As though we were more ghosts than those skeletons on a train, but,” Nikolai shrugged with dark Russian absolutism, “perhaps we were. For are the dead less dead merely for breathing and moving? I admit I envied them at times, for their pain was over, their bellies no longer clawing at them to find sustenance of any sort—even the most putrid kind.”

“How did you survive it?” Jamie asked quietly, the heat of the stove, the thick plant smell from Shura’s remedies and the order of the infirmary swept away in the vision of that icebound city.

“You get numb,” Nikolai said bluntly. “You think that you’ve finally achieved the point where you can no longer feel anything, and it’s a relief. After that first winter, I thought I had achieved that. Then someone killed my dog and ate him. He was all I had left of the world I had once lived in. He was the only being I loved anymore and it broke my heart, the heart I had thought frozen and beyond feeling, hurt as though someone had sliced it open and left me to bleed out.” Nikolai shuddered. “Strelka had been the only warmth in my life, and then he ran off after a stringy cat and never returned, so I knew someone had eaten him. He had always returned to me before. I was his best friend too, you see. I stood there in the street calling and calling him for hours, my voice echoing off all those grand buildings, all those empty homes with the wind scouring my face and knew that I would never love anything or anyone again.

“I did not cry, for it is true what they say, that all Leningraders’ tears were frozen that winter. I felt as though I were a river inside that had once flowed with humanity and joy and thought and anger, and now it was winter, the most terrible of Januarys in my heart and that river was never to know a spring melt again. My heart had been frozen from the time I lost my wife.”

“Your wife?” Jamie could not keep the surprise from his tone, for Nikolai had seemed so ruthlessly alone, so self-contained within his worn exterior that he had not thought the man had once had a family.

“My Yekaterina.”

Jamie saw at once that this was the true point of everything Nikolai wanted to tell him. He sensed that the man had not told anyone of his wife before. He understood such things only too well. He himself did not speak of Colleen or his sons, or rather, he had once, and then not again.

“How to tell you what she was… She was music, like hearing a wild gypsy fiddle in a dark wood, haunting and perfect and never truly the same twice. I met her at the university. I was rushing from one class to another and heard the most wondrously sad music coming from one of the rooms. Someone was playing the cello. I stopped and I swear the earth stopped with me, just to listen to her. I hesitated to enter. I did not want to interrupt such music and I was afraid, you see, that to have a soul to make such music, she was going to be ugly—uglier than Baba Yaga—why else such suffering, such music as could plead with the very stars to rain mercy?

“But she was a vision, so beautiful that she struck me dumb. Hair like moonlight on water, that blonde that is more silver than any sort of yellow and eyes so dark that I knew I would never find the bottom of them, even if I were to try for a lifetime. I did not know what to say, and she was blind and deaf to any world except the music. And so I sat at the piano, my heart swelling out of my chest, closed my eyes and started to play with her. I followed her through each glissando, each vibrato. She began to play faster and faster. I was determined not to let her elude my grasp. Somehow, I knew this was a challenge I must not fail and that it was far more than a mere sonata being played and fought for in that room. I was wet through my shirt by the time the music came down from the skies and we were suddenly just two people in a room together who did not know one another.

“She stood, this woman. So slight, it seemed impossible that she had such mastery over her bow, for was such a creature not made only for fairytales, where suitors would fight mythical bears and dreadful old witches merely to set eyes upon her face?

“To me, she said, ‘Well, Nikolai Ivanovich, I wondered when you might get around to introducing yourself’, as though she had been expecting me all along. Later, she told me she knew as soon as she saw me that I was meant to be significant in her life. And once she heard me play she knew she would marry me. I must have seemed a dolt at that moment, mouth hanging open like some country bumpkin.”

The memory of his first meeting with his wife lit the old man’s face with a glow that was painful to witness, yet Jamie felt profound gratitude that there had once been such joy in Nikolai’s life.

“How to explain when someone knows you before words are even uttered, before more than a few glances are exchanged, when someone knows all that you are without explanation, and you feel it the minute you are in their presence?”

“Soul mates,” Jamie said quietly, thinking of his own soul friend, who had never needed explanations, and had understood him from the time she was a young girl. Then he pushed the thought away, for she was not his to have, and thinking of her here when he might never see her again was the act of a masochist.

“Ah yes, soul mate, that longing for the other half of one’s soul that humans spend their entire lives in search of but rarely find. I was fortunate there. Katya was the other half of my music, my thoughts, my soul. Before her my music had been good—many thought I had great talent. After Katya, it became something more, far richer and fuller. The notes seemed to take wing and the compositions flowed under my hands as I had only dared to dream they would.

“Some said it was too fast, a whirlwind courtship and that we would live to regret such haste. But I think we are wise at times in such things, and know when there is not time. We sense its limits may be fast approaching and that we must grab life with both hands while we still can. So we married that very month, quietly, only her family and what there was left of mine.

“That spring in Leningrad, the lilacs were so heady that their scent felt like honey in a man’s mouth and the cherry blossoms rained down through the air. When the winds blew we were caught in a snowstorm of petals. It was perfect, despite the past, despite our tenuous grip on the future, it seemed the grandest, most beautiful place on earth. Love will do that. It makes you see only the good and not the flaws, even when they are glaringly obvious. Of course, the flaws were unavoidable and coming toward us at the speed of furies.

“There had been rumblings of war, that Hitler was determined to take Russia and crush Leningrad on his way to Moscow. But Stalin declared it wasn’t so and no one seemed too alarmed at the prospect. And I—I was in blissful ignorance. I had a beautiful wife and soon we were expecting our first child. I didn’t want to believe that heartache, pain and starvation and all the other horrible realities of war were already on their way. It was casting a terrible shadow over us all, but most of us could not see it. Some did of course, but as is always the case, we called them Doomsday prophets, crazy men, wishing ill fortune on us without proof.

“The prophets, of course, were right. The Nazi jackboot came down on us with the force of a hammer. In a moment, for it seemed little more, everything was gone—all the beauty and the passion… and the music, the music lasted longer than other things but I could no longer bear to hear it, and certainly not to play it.” Nikolai shook his head.

“By late fall, all our lives had become about bread rations, about how many grams, what you were warranted according to your age and station in life. Bread became the measure of a man’s worth. What is the use of cherry blossoms and the taste of lilac on your tongue when your entire life becomes about the size of your bread ration?”

“What happened to Yekaterina?” Jamie asked softly, for the night had closed in around them as Nikolai told his story, and the hush, along with the old man’s words, had given their small space a sense of something sacred.

“She left just before the blockade. I wanted her gone from Leningrad and I promised to join her later. I sent her to her parents, thinking she would be safer with them. Of such small things are tragedies made. They came to take her father away while she was there, and so they took the entire household: father, mother, her younger brother Dmitri, and my Yekaterina and our unborn child. I was never able to find out what happened to them. For a long time I imagined they had escaped and that she made it out of this godforsaken land. Then one night I dreamed that she came to me and laid her hand on my chest. I could smell her scent, and feel the calluses on her fingers that her music had left behind. She bent down and kissed me, so soft, and I knew she was gone, that the dream was her goodbye to me. I only hope when…” he swallowed, the pain still thick and tangible after all these years, “when they took her, it was quick, that she didn’t starve to death or die in childbirth.”

“They?”

“Stalin’s henchmen, Beria’s thugs—take your pick. They were all the same. Corrupt and vile men who used every bit of their power to bleed the country and commit such atrocities as the world has rarely known. Katya’s father had known Kirov and suspected that his killing was not the work of a random assassin, as Stalin wanted the world to believe. He kept quiet about his suspicions, knowing the eyes of the secret police could fall on him next, as apparently they did.”

Jamie took the old man’s hand in his own, feeling the swollen knuckles and ropy veins and beneath them the shimmering ghosts of long flexible fingers that were a pianist’s signature. He wanted to speak words of comfort, to tell this man that even the Soviets, even the henchmen of Stalin must have mercy in their hearts for an expectant mother, but he knew this was not true. He knew some hearts were frozen from birth.

“It hurt to touch the piano after that, for how could there be music when Katya was gone? And so I closed my piano and never touched it again. I hated the damn thing and had someone take it away. An instrument never really goes away though, not one that you play for years as I did that one. It becomes an extension of your very self, a part of your being. I have often wondered if it went to a home where it was loved, where children learned their scales and played ‘Chopsticks’ hour after hour, if it ever forgave my abandonment. Do you believe instruments have souls, that with all the love and precision we put into them, with all the music we make upon them, if somehow that energy doesn’t turn into something more?”

“A friend once told me that music is proof that God loves us,” Jamie said, “so yes, I believe that an instrument has a soul. All the music that you made, with your wife and on your own, left its imprint behind somewhere.”

Nikolai nodded. “I have hoped such things myself, but do I believe them?” He shrugged, a gesture that held a wealth of expression. Jamie suspected that despite the very necessary stone walls the man had built around himself over the years, the soul of a Romantic still lived and burned inside.

“Thank you for listening to my tale. I have never told anyone of my Katya before. It was too hard to say the words, and I had put her memory away deep down so that the camps could not touch her, nor tarnish what she was to me. I believed that to speak of her would take her away. I see now that it has given her life once again. You will remember her story, and that once she was so well loved that the very universe seemed to turn to her breath.”

“I will remember her,” Jamie said softly. Just then, a rush of wind came down the chimney and sparks sprayed out into the infirmary, smoldering on linen and linoleum. Nikolai took a towel to the sparks, beating them out swiftly. Small wisps of smoke traced their way into the air, and the scent of scorched cloth filled the space.

Nikolai turned back to Jamie, his face grey in the dim light.

“Good, I am glad knowing this. It makes the rest of my journey simpler, easier.”

“The rest of your journey?” Jamie asked, alarm playing down his spine along with the draft from the chimney.

In reply, Nikolai merely reached over and squeezed his arm, then stood and went to bank the fire.

Chapter Forty-eight
April 1974
Spirit and Flesh

Jamie’s recovery continued
with what seemed infuriating slowness. He had been placed entirely at the mercy and dictates of Shura, who was, when it came to the infirmary, a dictator of no small demeanor. His visitors were monitored and timed. Even Gregor in an entirely uncharacteristic show of obedience, was utterly and meekly lamb-like under Shura’s medicinal boundaries.

The new commander had visited his sick bed, a move that was unprecedented and mildly unnerving. He was a strongly-built man with thinning blond hair combed over a well-formed skull, intelligent blue eyes framed with gold-rimmed glasses and an organized manner about him. He had given Jamie polite assurances that he would not be expected to return to the forest until he was fully recovered and could be found something less arduous in the meantime, but for now he must simply rest and rebuild his strength.

It was an afternoon a week later when he awoke to a familiar scent: sweet, acrid, bitter, and entirely seductive. For a moment he thought he was dreaming, but then he heard the familiar thud and grind of a mortar and pestle. Shura was making medicines. Where he had come across a cake of raw opium it was probably best not to ask. From the sounds and the astringent scent of alcohol, Jamie thought he was making laudanum. Shura paused, and Jamie sighed inwardly. There was little use in pretending sleep, Shura was as attuned to his varying states of consciousness as a mother elephant to her tender young.