As Elena wrapped herself in her coat and pulled her mink hat over her ears, Nina said, “I would like to come too.”
Nina hadn’t gone to Novgorod since the one week in autumn when Elena had been deliriously ill with influenza, and yet every time Elena ventured to the city Nina asked to accompany her. “Whyever would you want to come?”
“I…” Nina’s cheeks flushed. “I miss the fresh air, and the look of the sunlight on the—”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Please.” Nina widened her cerulean eyes and pouted. “I don’t want to perish never again seeing the city.”
“Dearest, you are dramatic to beat the band,” Elena said, her stomach sinking. “Very well. Wear the fur-lined coat.”
Elena and Nina crunched through the deep snow around the boxcar, out from under the copse of bent bare trees, then onto the southern road towards Novgorod. The sky was pale blue like the tulle on a ballerina’s skirt, the air deadly cold on the thin strip of Elena’s skin between her kid glove and her coat sleeve.
As the brick wall and squat guard towers of the kremlin loomed before them, Elena tugged Nina’s coat sleeve down to hide her scales. “Keep these hidden,” she said. “And if anyone gives us trouble, I’ll—”
Her boot crunched against something stiff. She bent and pulled a piece of paper from beneath her boot heel. She shook shards of ice from the paper.
It was a flyer, warning the citizens of Novgorod that a noblewoman with accoutrement had attacked a brave defender of the Revolution, and that anyone who sheltered her would be executed.
The flyer showed an etching of a woman with black-buttoned boots and a coat billowing over a brass bird’s tail.
The flyer shook in Elena’s hand. “How dare they.” She wished she’d killed that man. She should have killed him. She could have done it, no matter what Nina thought about her toughness.
Nina began coughing, her arms pressed against her ribs as she twisted into the hacks that convulsed her body. Elena dug her boot-toe into the frozen snow, waited until Nina’s cough subsided.
“Shall we go home?” Nina hiccupped the words.
“We can’t. We need the oil. Come along. We’ll be careful.”
Nina and Elena picked their way towards the kremlin. Between the guard towers, two men barred the gate, both wearing Red Army uniforms.
The flyer quaked in Elena’s hand. She had always seen policemen, not soldiers, guarding the gate.
“Papers,” said the older of the two soldiers, his face twisting around the words.
The younger man cocked his head at them—at Nina. Of course. Elena had once garnered her share of attention—glasses of champagne and trysts in the greenhouse—but Nina was the kind of woman men wrote sonnets about. This particular admirer had a face still round with youth, but he bore a scar beneath one eye.
Elena hated the way he gazed at her sister.
“Papers,” he echoed, but the word sounded like an afterthought. Nina stiffened and licked her lips. Color suffused her cheeks.
“I’m terribly sorry, sir, but we seem to have forgotten our papers,” she said.
The older soldier spluttered, phlegm dripping from under his nose-whiskers, his hand twitching around the barrel of his revolver. “Roll up your sleeves,” he wheezed.
Elena grabbed Nina’s hand, wondered how far and fast they could run before the bullets caught them, reminded herself that she wasn’t scared.
“Gleb,” the younger soldier said, still staring at Nina. “These are girls from the city. They live just on the other side of the church. I recognize them.”
“They’re those nobles,” Gleb said. “I can tell. Look at the kid gloves. Nobles, stealing from the people—”
“I’ll take them home,” the younger soldier said. He looped one gloved hand under Elena’s elbow and one under Nina’s. Elena hated him touching her, but what other choice did she have? She forced herself to stay still.
“They scream when you rip their wings and tails off.” Gleb licked the mucus off his upper lip. “And—”
“Stop.”
Gleb ground his boot against the snow, grumbling.
“That’s an order,” the younger soldier snarled. He led Elena and Nina through the gate, marching towards the church.
“Where are you taking us?” Elena said. “Why are you helping?”
“Go out the west entrance of the city,” the soldier said. “Ivan’s on the gate, but he’ll be too drunk to question you. He’s always drunk since his wife starved during the famine last winter and left him alone with the children. And don’t come back to the city. Get out of here, fast as you can.”
“Why are you helping us?” Elena demanded, but she already knew the answer. The soldier was staring at Nina again, who demurely brushed blown snow off her cheek.
He led them towards the west gate of the city. They dodged around a line of kerchiefed women clutching baskets or children’s hands outside a crumbling storefront.
Elena cast her eyes over the line, searching for the man she had beaten with the opera glasses, or for one of the many peasants who had once worked on their family’s estate and had risen up against them.
A woman stood in the line, about Elena’s age, her green eyes sharp under her bedraggled fur hat. A threadbare brown dress peeked out from under her coat-hem, the dress of a peasant. Her bare fingers, which clenched around the handles of an empty basket, were just as red and chapped as Elena’s, just as callused from chopping firewood and scrounging for food.
The woman’s cheeks were hollow, the same hollowness that had sagged Nina’s and Elena’s cheeks these past months.
This woman didn’t murder my parents.
She shook off the thought. She couldn’t start showing mercy. Father had shown mercy, the night of the fire, had tried to reason with the mob instead of shooting at it.
She hurried after Nina and the soldier.
A few steps from the west gate, the soldier seized Nina’s hand and pressed his lips against the protruding veins there.
“Let’s go.” Elena grabbed Nina’s other hand, dragged her towards the gate.
They trudged through knee-deep snow around the shadow of the kremlin, concealing their faces under their fur hats, until they rejoined the southern road through the marshes back towards the boxcar.
“That man.” Elena’s tail creaked erect again, stretching the swollen skin on her lower back. “The way that man looked at you, Nina. I can’t stand it.”
“Aleksandr.”
“Pardon?”
“Oh…he said his name. Aleksandr.” Nina stared at the snow beneath her shoes.
“When did he say that?”
“At some point. You weren’t listening, I suppose.”
“Well, it’s good that Aleksandr was there,” Elena said. “It’s good, because otherwise we wouldn’t have escaped. But my God, only helping us because he wanted to stick—”
“That’s quite enough.” Nina cradled her right hand with her left and tightened her jaw. “I won’t listen to this anymore. Not all of them are bad, you know, he wasn’t bad, he saved our—”
“Am I offending your delicate sensibilities, dearest? If I hadn’t been there, what might he have done to you? We’re lucky. But don’t confuse it with romance. This isn’t a novel.” That man only helped us because he wanted Nina. He’s not like us, and neither is that woman. They’re nothing like us. Nothing.
“In any case, whatever are we supposed to do now?” Nina said. “He said not to return to the city, and we need—”
“I don’t care what he said. We’ll wait a few days. Then I’ll sneak into the city at night. We need oil, and it’s our city besides. I won’t let them stop me.”
* * *
Elena rummaged in her carpetbag, pushed aside their grandmother’s diadem, a tangle of shawls, her father’s book of maps of Novgorod. At last her fingers closed on cherrywood, and she pulled it out: the 1895 double action Nagant revolver-cuff. Her chest hurt when sh
e remembered the night news of the Tsar’s abdication had reached them and Father had summoned her to his study.
“You’re the son I never had, Lena,” he had said. Was he joking? She never found out. He had handed her the revolver-cuff, reminded her that she could use it without clamping it to her arm.
“Oh, you’re bringing the gun?” Nina extracted her nose from the Pushkin book. “You’re not going to…that is, you know if you affix it to your arm—”
“Yes, dearest, I’m aware of the history of revolver-cuffs.” Everyone knew that since they were first used in the war against Napoleon, revolver-cuffs had been permanent additions to the body, both to discourage foot-soldiers from deserting and to allow officers to show off their bravery.
She had heard tales of Red Army troops chopping off Tsarist soldiers’ arms and commandeering their gun-cuffs.
“But—”
“I’m not going to put it on.” Even though it would work better if I did. Elena examined the curved black metal clamps that flanked the revolver-cuff, imagined them chomping into her arm, burrowing beneath her skin. “But I’m bringing it with me tonight. Just in case.”
“Elena.” Nina sighed. “Are you positive…”
Elena dropped the revolver-cuff into her coat pocket. “I’ll go in through the west gate. That man who wanted you said the guard on that gate is always drunk.” She shouted over Nina’s cough. “I’ll simply act as though I’m supposed to be there. It’s our city. They can’t keep me out.”
“Have you considered…that is, do you envision…perhaps we should…leave?”
Elena’s stomach swooped. “And where do you think we should go?”
“Anywhere. We could try to leave Russia. We could—”
“We’re not even leaving this city. This is our land. I should’ve known that that man could make one comment and—”
“Some aristocrats leave, and have their accoutrement removed by doctors at the border, and they set up quite happy lives in—”
“Have you gone mad?” Elena’s nerves twitched as she imagined her body without her feathers’ sharp edges scraping against her thighs. “Remove our accoutrement? Perhaps I should change my name from Elena Sergeevna Trubetskoy. Perhaps I should forget who I am.”
“We wouldn’t have to sneak about, steal oil, subsist on rusk and tea, worry about being…being shot…we could have flowers and a townhouse and go boating…”
Elena imagined it, just for a moment: the life Nina had laid out, far from this place where their house and parents had burned. Would she be able to forget Russia, if they traveled far away and slipped into that idyllic life?
But Elena squeezed the revolver-cuff in her pocket. Nina’s notions were nothing but a fantasy, one that required papers and passports. She couldn’t be sidetracked, not if they wanted to stay alive. She couldn’t wonder if peasants and soldiers were suffering just as much as they were.
“I’ll return in a few hours.” Elena slipped the diadem into her other pocket, in case she had to barter for anything.
Nina snatched up her book and didn’t say goodbye.
* * *
The lit domes of St. Sophia cast ghostly light over the marshes as Elena marched on the western road towards the city. She climbed the snowy bluff along the river, then hurried towards the gate and the hollow light on the guard station.
The soldier leaning against the gate could only be Ivan—he stank bitterly of vodka, and his nose and cheeks were pocked with broken blood vessels.
Elena whipped a page, torn from a book, out of her coat pocket.
“Here are my papers,” she said through the scarf wrapped around her face. She thrust them at Ivan and shouldered towards him, but he held out a black-gloved hand.
“Lemme lookit this,” he slurred. He held up the yellowed pages, squinting. “This…this isn’t…”
“Yes, it is.” Elena pointed to the paper. “Don’t you see it? You should let me through, now.”
Ivan’s lips curled, and he shook his head. His watery blue eyes were sober enough to understand that the paper was only a book-page, that she was one of the Trubetskoys, that she had accoutrement.
Elena drew her grandmother’s diadem out of her pocket, clenched it so she could feel its diamonds through her gloves. “You’ll accept this, instead of papers.”
“No,” Ivan said. “I don’t want…” He raised his hand, opened his mouth to call his fellow guards.
Elena dropped the diadem and plunged her hand into her other coat pocket. She pulled out the revolver-cuff, curled her finger around the angry black comma of a trigger.
His children will be orphans. Just like me and Nina. The thought leapt into her mind, she couldn’t help it, but she looked at the hammer and plough on his cap.
I am the firebird. No one catches the firebird.
The snap of the safety, and then she pointed the revolver-cuff at him and pulled the trigger.
She expected the bullet to rip through his uniform-breast. She didn’t expect the bullet to make a small neat black hole through his neck.
She expected blood trickling from a wound, not dark liquid spurting from the bullet-hole, like something from a terrible theater production. Ivan clawed at his neck and crashed to his knees, then spilled onto the ground. His boots kicked against the frozen dirt beneath the harsh spotlight.
She couldn’t look. She slapped her hands over her eyes, then twisted away and clamped her hands over her ears so she couldn’t hear the swish swish of his stilling legs scraping against the ground, so she couldn’t hear the dying cries of this man, this enemy, this enemy who had children, children who would never see their father cross their threshold again…
Oil. I need to get oil. He’ll have oil for his gun. She crouched, her boots grinding into blood, and slid her hand along Ivan’s belt until she found a can.
The can slipped from her hand when her gullet turned and she threw up. She grabbed the can and ran without wiping her mouth, crashing up to her knees in the crusty snow, racing back to the boxcar, the hole blossoming in Ivan’s neck over and over like a motion picture show she couldn’t stop watching.
* * *
Elena expected Nina to cry. But she maintained a stony silence as the oil dripped into her lungs, as she sipped her tea, as she curled in her furs, arms crossed and jaw tight.
“You used that oil on my lungs,” she finally said. “You killed a man for it, a man who wasn’t so dreadful at all.”
“He joined the Red Army.” Elena pressed her boots against the woodstove, trying to stop her legs from shaking. She was oiling the revolver-cuff, focusing on the metal and wood, trying, trying, trying to forget the hole in Ivan’s neck…
“Perhaps he didn’t have any other choice. I’m sure there are plenty of them that didn’t have a choice. You’re a murder—”
“That man betrayed us, just like all the other men in Novgorod. They put on red uniforms and rose against us. Don’t you side with him.” It was true, Ivan deserved it, he deserved to die like that, he was a bad man. He was.
“I—”
Elena slammed her feet onto the floor. “Mother and Father are dead. And you’re siding with their killers.”
Nina glared and puffed out her chest. “You pretend to be so very tough, Lena, but look at you, your hands are shaking.”
“Could you be any more naïve? I’m glad Mother and Father are dead, so they don’t have to see how you’ve betrayed us by saying these—”
Nina’s hand twitched back, and Elena’s cheek smarted. She lurched away as Nina raised her hand to slap her again.
“You listen to me,” Nina snarled, her voice ragged. “You’ve gone too far, and Mother and Father would be ashamed of you, not of me. You orphaned children, and you’ve gotten blood on your hands. What you did was terrible and wrong, and you know it.”
Elena knelt, ground the heels of her hands against her eyes. All she wanted was to be a girl again, in their house, pretending to be the firebird with Nina, knowing Mother an
d Father were reading in the parlor.
The hole appeared in Ivan’s neck, over and over again in her mind, the man whose children she had orphaned…
“It was terrible, Nina.” The words spilled out before she could stop them. “Oh God, it was… I wanted to see him die, but then it was terrible…”
Nina’s hand rubbed against her back. “I know, I know. Don’t you see, though, we must leave Russia, we have to escape, because if we stayed, you’ll fall, over the line, into an irredeemable place.”
Elena felt brass feathers scrape her thighs, wondered if she would have to let them lop her tail off. “When I think of it… But we can’t leave, Nina. We don’t have any way to escape. We’re being hunted.”
Nina twisted her lips back and forth, frowning. “I’m quite sure we’ll sort something out. I’m sure we will. Perhaps you should sleep, and we’ll sort something out in the morning.”
Elena let Nina help her to her bunk, but even after she burrowed under her shawls, she couldn’t sleep. She watched the flickering light from the woodstove make bear-monsters from the furs of the boxcar walls. She turned first one way, then the other, as the candle burned low and…
Diadems dropped into the snow, and she tripped over them. Holes appeared beneath her boots, tiny holes that all joined together until there was no place on the ground for her to step. As Elena stumbled, the woman in the threadbare brown dress raced past her, leaping over the gaping holes opening in the ground. Everywhere she turned Ivan kept falling, and falling, and falling…
When she opened her sticky eyes to pale dawn filtering through the boxcar’s transom windows, she was determined. She couldn’t be the monster-firebird anymore. She and Nina would run, away from their estate and Novgorod, and once they’d reached one of the bigger cities, Moscow or Petrograd, they would blend into the crowd, find the papers and passports they needed to escape Russia.
Elena sat up to tell Nina her new plan.
But Nina’s bedclothes were thrown back. Her bunk was empty.
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