Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (72 page)

“Why?”

“Why not? I think it would be good for the child as it gets older to know he or she has a father and a name that is his to keep. Our world is here for the present and possibly forever, so we must live and quit pretending the only life that is real is the one out there. Here and now is what we are granted.”

“You don’t speak of love, I note.”

“Would you like me to? I could, but then I might insult your relationship with Andrei, not to mention your intelligence.”

The silence this time was so long that he thought he might have to break it himself with an apology and a withdrawal of his offer. He could only make out her silhouette in the dark, and so could not read the colors of her skin, nor the expressions of her face.

Finally she spoke, words delicate as ether, but decisive all the same. “I think I should like you to speak of love one day, not tonight, for I do not think you are ready to say such words and mean them. Just be certain, Yasha, that it is not the music speaking, but yourself.”

“It is myself. I am no fool. I know that music makes madmen of us all, but this idea was in me before tonight.”

“Will you give me a day or two to answer? There are things I must think about before I say yes or no.”

“Of course,” he said, surprised that he was stung by her hesitancy. It was ridiculous, for he was hardly offering her the moon on a plate, only half a meal that had already been picked over by other hands.

She leaned up and kissed him on his cheek, her hand brushing over his before she turned and fled into the night.

Chapter Fifty-two
May 1974
Papa

Her answer, when it came, took a unique form
.

Under the softened regime, most of the prisoners spent their evenings—what there was of them—outdoors, soaking up every minute of sunlight to hoard against the days when it was not so plentiful. He and Violet often spent them together talking, walking the perimeter of the fence or working together in the garden. With Violet’s advancing pregnancy, this consisted more of her directing Jamie while she sat on the bench by the garden’s fence, her hands rubbing the small mound of her belly. Tonight, she had asked that he meet her in the ring of pines where they might have more privacy. He agreed, knowing that she had decided. He felt like a ridiculous schoolboy, thrumming with nerves and wishing the interview was over and done.

She was waiting for him, sitting in the shadow of a large pine, the scent of its sap heady in the late spring evening.

“Yasha, I have something to give you for safekeeping.” She sat still in the shadow and he could not see her expression, only heard the serious note in her voice. In her hands she held a bundle of what looked to be letters—letters that had been cherished and read many times. Sacred too. He could tell merely by the way she held them in her hands, as though she were surrendering some part of herself.

“Come sit, for I would tell you what this is—this thing I wish to give you.”

It was not a direct answer, but Violet was Russian so it was to be expected that she would answer in her own fashion.

He joined her under the old pines, the evening’s sun hazing through the branches, golden and liquid, seeping into their bones.

“These letters that I would give you—they are from my father and they are for my son or daughter. I would wish to give them to him or her myself one day, and likely I will, but on the chance that I cannot for whatever reason, I would have you do this.”

He took the bundle from her hands. It was tied together with a ribbon, dark blue and much tattered and soiled, the paper of the envelopes almost like silk from their many handlings. He could feel the reluctance in her even as she let them go, as if a part of her own history was now handed over and out of her keeping.

“Those letters are all from my Papa. I find it hard to explain adequately how much he meant to me, how much I loved him. These letters were all I had of him after I was ten. It has been so long now since he was taken from us—from me, that I do not know if my memories are true or merely dreams.”

She took a breath, slightly ragged as though it caught in her throat and put her hand to the cross she never took from around her neck.

“My Papa was magic, much like you, Yasha, as though God put a little extra something in when he made him, a little more stardust, a little more laughter, a little more sadness too. He was so smart—too smart for his own good in the end, I suppose. I don’t think he ever really believed in the Party, but he was brilliant and they wanted such men on their side from the beginning. He had his degree in economics and there were people always on the lookout for men such as him. He had vision—such vision of how things could be, how we might change things in Russia. He understood the cycles of capitalism and how the right marriage with socialism could create something new, something that included all the people from the sorriest peasant up to the intellectual cream. He felt certain if we could just hang on, something was coming, that things were going to change. He was right, but it was too late for him, as it turned out. One day he was a party star, the next he was not. They came and took him in the middle of the night, as he stood, without any winter clothing. I remember clinging to him, sobbing, and him saying, ‘Hush my little Violushka. You must be strong. Smile for Papa, so that is the picture he takes away with him. I will only be gone a short time. You will see, this is just a mistake.’”

She shrugged. “Well, it was a mistake, of course, but that did not matter. They charged him with belonging to an illegal organization—but I think this organization never existed. They made it up to put him away. It was how things were, one day Stalin loved you, the next day he thought you were a danger to the regime and he would sign orders to have you put away or shot.

“My Papa was sentenced to eight years in a special isolation camp in an old monastery.” She looked up at the tall tower that loomed above them, for the irony could not escape either of them. Like father, like daughter.

“He wrote me every week, without fail, and they were—are—the most wonderful letters. He filled them with bits about his day and the birds and insects and all the plants around the monastery—he drew them too, he was quite a talented artist—but you will see that if you look at the letters. He wrote for me a story, just a little bit in each letter, about a fox named Aleksei that went off into the world in search of an ideal land where people and animals and plants lived in harmony and love. He meets many other animals along the way, some good, some bad, but all with something to tell him, a story he can tuck in his packsack and take along with him. Of course the fox never made it to his destination, for there was no such land. I didn’t know at the time that he was teaching me all the life lessons he couldn’t be present to give me in person—he was doing his best to raise me from a thousand miles away. I think—” she put her head down, the words catching in her throat, “he knew he was never coming back, that he would never see me grow up and so he gave me his world through the story, so that I might always have his advice, his beliefs, and maybe sometimes even the answers to the questions a girl will always have for her papa.”

“There is one letter I would like to read to you, if I may?”

“It would be my privilege to hear it,” Jamie said quietly.

She slipped the last letter from the pile, leaving the rest still in his hands. She opened it carefully, and in the fading light, the bold hand of her father’s writing sprang off the page. The paper was rough, but worn soft from the years. It was likely that her father had written on whatever came to hand. The ink was a coarse black, but the writing itself certain. A crumbled bit of plant lay cupped in the seams, a tinge of lavender left in it.

Dear Violushka,

Happy Birthday, my love!! How were your summer holidays? Did you swim, did you find turtles in the pond and dig potatoes and beets with Dyedushka? Did you grow stronger and even smarter? Did you read any good books? Did you look up at the stars at night and remember the stories Papa told you about them?

I hope you are studying hard and doing well, though you must always remember to have fun and to laugh—it’s just as important as the studying. Be good to Mama and Dyedushka, for I know how dearly they love you, my little redheaded girl.

Try not to forget your Papa, and when you think of me, know that I am traveling with Aleksei in search of that better land. But I am always holding you in my arms as well, such things can be managed between dreamers, you see. I send you a million million kisses.

Your own Papa.

“It was the last letter I had from him, for he was shot the very next day. It was only two weeks later that Stalin died. Of such things are our tragedies made.”

She stood and walked away then, leaving him holding her history in his hands. It was an answer as only a Russian woman could give it. And he realized that he felt quite happy with what she had not said and even more so, with what she had.

Chapter Fifty-three
August 1974
Another Country

When he first heard the horses, Jamie stopped on the road
, though he risked being shot for so slight an infraction. He wondered who they belonged to for he could hear two, whickering at each other. There were no farms nearby of which he was aware, but then beyond the camp and the forest, he had not seen any of the surroundings. The sound of the horses caused a rush of homesickness to flood him, for the security and peace of his stables, and the simple pleasures of exercising a horse and brushing it down afterward. Because a horse never required anything of you beyond care and feeding, it never asked questions you had no answers for, it never asked you to give more than you had.

Then he saw the horses standing sturdy, one pewter, one chestnut, both tense with readiness beyond the perimeter of the camp. A visceral rush began deep in his blood. It was an old connection, one he had always had with horses. They represented far more than a mere animal to him, for he had grown up with them, slept between the hooves of an unbroken stallion once when he was four and awakened unharmed. Holding their reins was Andrei, gilt-headed in the sun and gesturing toward him. Jamie wondered for a moment if lack of proper nutrition had finally taken its toll and he was now hallucinating. He turned to the guard behind him and the man nodded that he might go. Jamie moved off toward Andrei, feeling the strange itchy spot on his back that he always got when a man was behind him with a loaded gun.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he said in English, his throat rusty with his own language. He felt a desire to laugh, as he often did when Andrei pulled one of his more outrageous acts.

“I was owed a favor,” Andrei said. “This is how I chose to call it in. They won’t allow us to go without guards, Yasha, but I told them they better give me bloody Cossacks for the job because they were going to have to keep up. Well, shall we?” Andrei offered the pewter’s reins to Jamie. The horses were chuffing and stamping in the warm summer morning and Jamie felt a lurch of anticipation akin to that of a child at Christmas. For once, he knew, he was not going to weigh the cost to others, he was just going to do something that he wanted to do and damn the consequences.

He mounted the pewter, a lovely mare that flashed silver under the sun, who reminded him of Phouka, and hence, of Pamela as well.

They started out at a canter, the horse liquid in joint and pace beneath him. He felt something upwelling in his soul, a feeling he hardly recognized as happiness. Soon the pace increased, Jamie letting the horse have its head, leaning in tighter to its body, stretching out with it, becoming one and allowing sense to overcome and master reason. Faster and faster, the landscape changing from the rougher forest floor to low scrub, the low scrub giving way with a suddenness to wide open, unending land that was like a freefall through air, just as frightening and every bit as exhilarating. Beside him, a furious grin on his face, Andrei matched his pace, the red legs of his pony a blur of earthbound flight. The guards pounded madly behind, but fell further and further back. They did not matter. Nothing mattered but running and the space within which to do it.

An ocean of grain billowed in front of them, rising and falling, moving with the tip and tilt of the planet, just as they did. Everything was movement and light. There was no thought in such extreme physicality, only the sheer joy and terror of taking a horse to its limits, of going beyond the limits oneself, where you knew you were courting death so closely that you could taste the dark intoxication of it on your tongue. The air was so clear that it magnified everything in passing, pure as vodka rippling down his throat and leaving a clean icy wake all the way to his bones. It was both refuge and escape. He heard Andrei laugh as they had once when they were boys together and found himself laughing in response for no reason at all.

The horse had more heart than any he had ever ridden. She responded to his slightest movement like a finely tuned engine, needing no more than a nudge with his knee to check left or right.

The grain bowed down in great golden rippling waves as they galloped through the field, and he could smell the August heat rise from the ripe heads at their passing. Overhead the sky was a blue that was painful in its intensity. He could feel the immensity of the country beneath him, a country that curved around half the globe and still was as small as the limits of a forest camp.

They halted at the edge of the fields, beyond lay—what? Another country, another life that he had once lived and no longer recognized. And yet that did not lessen his longing for it.

Andrei was looking at him strangely, a look made of equal parts expectancy and something darker that Jamie could not, did not want to identify.

“You can go,” Andrei said, still gasping, sweaty hair plastered to his head in silver whorls.

“Go where?” Jamie asked, though he understood all too well what Andrei was offering.