Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  He fell asleep with the pebbles lodged in the lines of his palm, which his nanny had long ago told him was the tributary of his heart seen clearly there in the skin of his hand.

  Part Seven

  Another Country

  Russia – April-September 1974

  Chapter Forty-nine

  April 1974

  The Poet Commandant

  Under the new commander, the camp assumed a semblance of order. As such things went in Soviet Russia, he was a fair man and earnest in his desire to improve life for the prisoners as much as he was able. While there was no disguising the barbed wire and automatic weapons and the glowering guards, things did improve. In the spring, the garden had been enlarged, with Violet and Shura to be in charge of what was planted when the weather was auspicious enough. The food had improved as well, with larger portions, the bread was fresher and far more edible, and more meat and vegetables in the soup. The vegetables weren’t always identifiable but they were edible, if one didn’t linger too long over the texture or taste.

  There had even been a shipment of new blankets, which were greatly appreciated and added to their worn predecessors, kept out the chill Russian nights far more effectively. The ground within the camp was cleaned up, the huts scrubbed down, the dining hall scoured from top to bottom and new uniforms issued. All in all, James Kirkpatrick reflected, it was about as good as a gulag was likely to get.

  He was currently standing in the commander’s office. The room looked out over the small exercise yard and beyond to the gates and heavy tree line. There loomed the omnipresent Russian bor that had spawned hundreds of dark fairytales, and the home of the great Mother Goddess of the Slavs, Baba Yaga. Home too of the Amba and his own recent brush with death. He shivered and turned away from the window, wondering with no small worry, why he had been summoned to this meeting with the new commander. The man was not yet present and Jamie had simply been told to wait.

  He went automatically to the bookshelves, the smell of ink and paper drawing him like fine wine. His fingers itched with the desire to touch them, to run his hands along the leather-tooled bindings, and feel the impression of the letters against his fingertips. It had been so long since he had had lost himself to the delights of a fictional world. Telling stories was an altogether different process, and did not provide the same sort of escape. It was the difference between building a world and fleeing into one. His eyes ran along the titles greedily. The great Russian poets were present; Blok and Akhmatova, Pushkin and Pasternak, and many English ones too. The Greek philosophers were well represented: Aristotle, Xenophanes, Plato and Heraclitus. There was a crumbling volume of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic too. He had his own well-thumbed edition of that particular book at home, and often referred to it on the nights when he could not sleep and the questions of life seemed insuperable. Once, long ago, the words of the Roman philosopher had been a bridge by which he had returned to life.

  “Please feel free to look at the books. You may borrow some if you would like.”

  Jamie started guiltily.

  The new commander was much as Jamie remembered him from his hazy sick visit. He was a tall man, thick through the chest and shoulders. He wore spectacles that belonged to another era and had the slight squint of the perpetual reader.

  “I meant what I said. You are welcome to choose a book or two to read, should you care to.”

  Jamie’s hands clutched tight with the desire to take the man up on the offer right there and then, but he had lived long enough in the gulag to distrust even the simplest act of kindness. So he kept his hands tight and turned toward the desk where the man now sat, relaxed, a bemused expression on his face.

  “It is not a trick nor a trap, only that Volodya tells me you are a man of some learning, and so I assume you must miss books and reading.”

  “I do,” Jamie admitted.

  “Please sit, and we will have tea.”

  Jamie sat, realizing how weak he still was. Extended activity of any sort still put him on his knees in short order.

  The commander made the tea himself, proper hot Russian tea in a glass pot, the scent of the zavarka heady before the second pour of boiling water. He poured it out into two silver-based glasses when it was done steeping.

  “Your tea will want cheering,” the Commander said, pouring a generous dollop of vodka into Jamie’s glass.

  The liquid went straight to Jamie’s blood, sending out tendrils of billowing warmth that relaxed him. His head naturally turned toward the bookshelves once again, the way the needle of a compass cannot help but point north.

  The commander gestured toward the books, the steam from his tea fogging up his spectacles.

  “I studied the Russian poets. By rights I should have been one of those intellectuals who are imprisoned in an asylum.”

  “So why weren’t you?”

  “My father was friends with Stalin,” the man said.

  Jamie did not respond for such a statement did not require commentary—nor did he know if it was safe to do so.

  “It’s alright,” the commander smiled. “I’m not proud of it, but it’s the only reason I’m not dead or locked away in a mental institution.”

  What followed was something for which Jamie no longer felt equipped—small talk, pleasantries, food, and an entire lack of hostility or Soviet subterfuge. It had the effect of putting him off balance, which was, perhaps, the man’s intention.

  There was more tea, two pots of it, and jam with which to drink it. Black bread spread with cold, salted butter and sour cherry preserves with blinis. Jamie ate sparingly, for his appetite had not fully returned since his illness.

  If he had expected interrogation, he was to be disappointed. What the man wanted was rather different.

  “I should like,” the Commander said, awkward suddenly, “to hear of your country. It is rare to have a foreigner under one’s care and I should like to take advantage, if you do not mind.”

  “My country?” Jamie said, feeling a strange emptiness below his ribs.

  “Yes. Describe it to me, if you would.”

  He looked up, curious, and saw the hunger of a man who was meant to travel the world, to see its many strange corners and beautiful haunts. But it was hard to think about Ireland, for his own country had become something distant to him, partly through necessity and partly because he felt like a different man entirely from the one who had left there eighteen months ago.

  It was as if he saw his country in miniature, a wet, green island that he had once read about in a fairytale, with far distant castles and crumbling towers barely glimpsed through a crystal scrying lense. He found that those he had left behind became figures in a painting, set upon idyllic backgrounds: verdant greens, thick and swirling; delicate blues; deep reds and soft earthen tones; contours drawn watery in outline and narrow winding roads that led off over hills he could not climb, nor see beyond the twists and runneling turns. He would picture Casey and Pamela in their home or moving about in the environs of Belfast, and found they had become figures caught in some strange romance—the tall dark stranger, the beautiful maiden, now a wife and likely a mother. But now and again, he found her head turning and gazing out of that landscape and himself looking back, like to like, and would be surprised at the power it still had to wound and bind even at this distance in time and space. He knew this was not so, that their lives moved on in parallel or as much parallel as this limbo existence of his afforded. Time was the only common denominator he had with his friends, and even that moved differently here, and certainly had a different meaning.

  He realized that he could not think of it as more than a strange painting because it was home and he knew he might well never see it again. He could not think of it because it lived in that crack inside himself that he dared not visit for fear that it would open wider and wider, until it swallowed him whole. A country could do
that to a man, countries always did when you loved them. So you did not think of a country in its truths or as your home, but as a picture, painted in colors that faded along with memory, and it was that you spoke, not truth, just a picture. It was a painting on cobweb, layered with artistry, composed with a brush made from the feathers of a phoenix. It was the exact placement of things, that magic of spatiality, that kept a man safe.

  And so, because it was what he could give, Jamie yielded up that Ireland, the one he had sold so often to the world with his linens and whiskey: the drenched green island populated by poet priests and madmen, by fairies and blarney-blowsy politicians, a land where the rivers ran sweet and slow enough to bottle for the angels and even blood vengeance came wrapped in mist and music.

  The painting in which he sometimes glimpsed Pamela moving and breathing was different, for it was personal. And there were other things in that painting, things that he wished now he had told her about, or had in some way prepared her for—the dark figures that lurked beyond the horizon’s edge, or crept about the crumbling tower at night, the shadowy cloud that passed over the verdant landscape, the cold wind that was a harbinger of storms to come.There were things in that painting that he did not understand himself, things that glimmered out beyond the edge of the canvas, where one could only guess at them the way geographers had upon ancient maps by designating it to the dragons.

  He could only guess at the form of the dragons that would come and what sort of fire they would bear in their bellies. He hoped that he had given her what she needed for this fight, that he had put the sword in her hands that she would have to wield against enemies he thought perhaps he did not know as well as he had once believed.

  Chapter Fifty

  April 1974

  Vor, Like Me

  The night after his meeting with the Commander, Jamie made his way to Gregor’s hut harboring no small misgivings in the pit of his stomach. But the hut was empty of both Gregor and his assorted flunkies, which meant they were either in the ring of trees or in the banya trying to sweat their demons out. With luck it would be the ring of trees. But luck was not on his side that evening, for the banya was puffing like an asthmatic chain smoker and there were a few men wearing swatches of cloth around their hips outside, all members of Gregor’s tribe.

  He walked into their circle, feeling the hostile wave spreading out from them at a hundred paces. He merely eyed them coolly in return, knowing that any show of fear was akin to the scent of blood in a shark pool with these men.

  “I need to talk to Gregor,” he said.

  The man shrugged. “You want to talk to Gregor, you will have to talk to him in the banya—that’s where he conducts his meetings.”

  Jamie gritted his teeth and nodded. “Tell him I’m coming in.”

  It was a sign of Gregor’s power in the camp that he had been able to convince Isay to allow him to build a banya. The Russian obsession with steam bathing no doubt also played into the decision to allow it. Russians were of the strong opinion that between steam bathing and the internal and external application of vodka, they were the possessors of the most rude good health on the planet. Jamie thought they had a point.

  The banya was built of fir logs tightly chinked with moss and had a low, peaked roof. Unlike the white steam baths in the cities, there was no changing room between the outside world and the steam bath itself, so Jamie removed his clothes behind a bushy shrub and wrapped his hips in his shirt before entering the miasmic atmosphere of the banya.

  A low bench ran along one wall, and a small stone stove sat in one corner. A man was bent over the stove, pouring a pail of water onto the rocks releasing great billows of steam. Gregor sat with one of the omnipresent flunkies at his side, unselfconsciously naked and brilliantly colored, like some huge and unpredictable chameleon with very sharp teeth.

  “I’d like to speak to you privately,” Jamie said, not bothering with any sort of greeting.

  Gregor took a long look at the expression on Jamie’s face and nodded to the men surrounding him. “Go.”

  “You don’t want us to check for weapons?” Sergei asked, favoring Jamie with a narrow look, that said he’d be more than happy to find a knife on his person. Though precisely where the man thought he might be hiding a weapon didn’t bear thinking about.

  “No, if Yasha has come to play, then Gregor will play with him accordingly,” Gregor said and flicked a hand at them, indicating that they were trying his patience by displaying less than immediate obedience. Once the flunkies had departed, Gregor looked at Jamie.

  “Please, you will sit,” Gregor said, indicating the bench beside him. Jamie sat, his skin already slick with steam and his hair starting to drip.

  “So, you reconsider my offer, Yasha Yakovich?” Gregor’s heavy-lidded eyes were in their usual insolent position but Jamie did not miss the new respect accorded him by the term of address.

  “No,” Jamie said firmly, “but I do have a request to make.”

  “You come for favors without offering anything in return? This is bad manners in my country.”

  “And in mine also,” Jamie said. “I have come with an offer, as they say, that I think you will find hard to refuse.”

  “Oh, Yasha, I don’t doubt an offer of yourself would be very hard to refuse.”

  Jamie sighed, a Russian sigh that Gregor could not mistake.

  Gregor stood to throw more water on the stones. He turned and took fresh birch branches off the wall opposite the bench, tossing one to Jamie, who, long familiar with Russian bathing habits, wasn’t surprised when the man sat down sideways, making his back accessible to him.

  “Are you sure you want me doing this?” he asked, as dryly as the atmosphere would allow.

  Gregor grunted, flexing his broad shoulders. “Da, and do it hard. I don’t like little girl taps.”

  “Alright, just remember you asked for it,” Jamie said, and set to whipping the man’s back with a crisscross motion of the birch branch. Green and freshly plucked, it was springy and must have stung like hell, but Gregor never flinched. It was a curious form of massage, but one the Slavs had been practicing since time immemorial. It was said to increase circulation and metabolism and to clean the blood. The oils from the leaves were reputed to have anti-aging properties as well as giving the skin a wondrous glow. Jamie had had it done by a lovely Swedish girl many years past, and could testify to its invigorating effects, which had not, as he remembered it, been strictly limited to his back.

  He took the opportunity to look more closely at the tattoos that spread so thickly across the man’s back. It was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. A pair of angels was the main feature, one looking west, the other east.

  “The angels are past and future,” Gregor said, and Jamie wondered how he knew what he’d been thinking. “This is Russian way, unable to let go of past and so we cannot move into future. I refuse this though—the past is important, and right now we are mired in it, but I think the future is more important, even if we have to drag ourselves there in the chains of the past. It is necessary, maybe it will even kill us, but it must be done.”

  Between the angels was a flock of sparrows. “What do the sparrows represent?” Jamie asked, continuing with the flagellation of Gregor’s back.

  “Freedom,” Gregor said, “that someday I will fly away from this, that the Soviets cannot keep me under their thumb, and if nothing else, my soul is free. It is not the back that tells most important things though, it is the chest.”

  He turned, presenting Jamie with a massive width of chest and shoulder. Jamie understood the language of much of it. The dark stars that surmounted the thick muscle of each shoulder were thieves’ stars and there was, of course, the inevitable barbed wire, with a barb for each year spent in Soviet prisons. Jamie counted fifteen barbs on the chest alone. A wolf with bared fangs was framed inside a star, but
it was a smeary blue crucifix that took pride of place across the pectorals, surmounted by a crown that identified Gregor as a ‘Prince of Thieves’. A dragon executed in rich tones of purple slithered across his stomach, its fiery breath falling into the belly button. The arms were sheathed in a variety of symbols, some of which Jamie could read and some he could not. On his knees were two crimson and black compass roses, signifying that this was a man who neither bowed to, nor acknowledged, any authority greater than his own. A snake curled in brilliant emerald green up Gregor’s left calf, the tail tickling his ankle, its forked tongue flicking at his kneecap.

  There was one last tattoo, a rose that held within its petals a single word ‘Beauty.’ It was the placement of the tattoo though, rather than its presentation that made Jamie raise an eyebrow.

  “That must have hurt,” he said.

  “It did,” Gregor laughed, a mellow sound that surprised Jamie with its fluidity. Here was a man who had laughed easily and often in his life. “To paraphrase your own words when you were stabbed, it hurt like fuck.”

  “How—” Jamie began, and then reconsidered the wisdom of the question he had been about to ask.

  “They gave me a very pretty artist for it—to keep the canvas taut.”

  “Still.” Jamie gave a visible wince.

  Gregor grinned, his broad white teeth a flash in the swarthy face. “I am tough bastard, is no problem. I am not always minding pain in this fashion—you are understanding this, I think?”

  Jamie laughed. The man was bloody incorrigible. “Yes, I am understanding this—somewhat, not in that exact fashion,” he nodded toward the tattoo in question. “Nevertheless, I know what you mean.”

  “Ah, Yasha, see, I am telling you we are same under the skin. I knew this about you. On surface, you are not quite as pretty as me, but underneath we are same dark spirit. Now—to business. What is it you want, and what do you have to offer in return?”