Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  She paused at a wolf’s head inside a perfectly aligned, eight-pointed star. The wolf was close-mouthed, but its eyes bore out from his skin with a look of cold sovereignty.

  “It means, Gregor said, ‘man is wolf to man’, and that I must remember that in all future dealings with him.”

  “So he didn’t—you didn’t?”

  Jamie laughed. “No, we didn’t in any way, shape or form. But I will carry his calling card on me for the rest of my life.”

  And so she came to the last of his story, a heart stabbed hard by a gilded dagger, a delicate lily carved at its base. The heart formed like the rough of a raw emerald, ragged about its edges but glowing at its center.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said tracing the vine with her finger, eyes following in a manner that made Jamie’s breath short. “You’re beautiful, Yasha.”

  “As are you,” he replied softly, and brushed a hand along the line of her chin.

  She smiled sadly and then clasped her small hands together. His skin felt bereft where her touch had left him. “I must tell you something, Yasha. I am pregnant.”

  His mouth opened in shock, a tumult of things to say tumbling through his mind. He immediately dismissed all of them as inadequate.

  She flushed. “It is Andrei’s child. I am too far along for it to be yours.”

  “What will you do?” he asked.

  She smiled up at him, a thing of such sweetness that it pierced him to the core.

  “Doesn’t it seem to you, Yasha, that life like this, life formed through two people loving one another is a miracle, particularly in these surroundings?”

  “It does,” he said simply, for Violet needed no lecture on the feasibility of having and raising a child in their current surroundings.

  “So I will have this baby and we will see what we will see.”

  It was, he thought to himself, Russian fatalism at its best. He only hoped, having much experience of loss in this area, that what they would see was a living, healthy child. That would be a miracle, and they all needed a miracle though they tended to be a little thin on the ground here in the camp.

  He reached over and took one of her hands in his own, knowing she needed reassurance and knowing he was the only one, in Andrei’s absence, who could provide it.

  “We will get through this together, Violet.”

  She smiled at him, copper hair a dim glow in the night.

  He was grateful that she did not ask him how they were to get through it, for he had no answers for her.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  late May 1974

  The Piano

  When Gregor delivered, Jamie had to admit, the man did it with incomparable style. The piano was old but in good shape, a baby grand. And after three days of cursing and sweating and appealing to the gods of music, Vanya, who had long ago been trained in the art of tuning by his grandfather, had assured him the tone was now pitch perfect. Jamie and Violet had spent time after dinner each night polishing and oiling the cabinet until it gleamed with a rich luster befitting such a beautiful instrument.

  Jamie requested Nikolai’s company after the evening meal. Nikolai was busy tamping down his after dinner smoke and looked up at Jamie with a quizzical expression.

  “Just trust me, it will be worth it.”

  The inside of the common hut smelled richly of piano oil and Nikolai, recognizing the scent at once, turned sharply to Jamie before striding forward, then stopping short halfway across the room. He turned back to Jamie, his entire frame a study in emotion—joy, fear, anger.

  “What—what have you done?” The anger was there, but not primary. Jamie had expected it and did not reply. It took Nikolai a few moments to walk to the piano and a few more to put one trembling hand to its surface. It gleamed like a living thing. Nikolai stroked it slowly, as though he felt it a creature of flesh and blood that needed both time and reverence.

  “Why, James?” he asked simply.

  “Because I wanted to hear you play.”

  “What if my hands and the keys no longer know each other?” Nikolai asked, his normally stoic countenance completely abandoned at the feel of the ivory under his crooked fingers. “I am afraid, James. Don’t you see? My music was my soul, and they took my soul out, scalpel cut by scalpel cut over the years.”

  Jamie shook his head. “No, they didn’t. Tell me they broke your hands, your body, tell me they laid the lash upon your spirit, but you will never convince me that they took your soul. You’re too much of an old son-of-a-bitch for that to be true.”

  Nikolai laughed and Jamie felt relief that his gift had been accepted. The old man sat down on the bench that Vanya and Shura between them had built. Jamie left him there, for this was not a moment to be shared with anyone. He looked back only once, as he crossed the threshold of the building. Nikolai sat, head bowed, crabbed hands resting on the keys, but not playing, not yet. Then Nikolai closed his eyes and threw back his head, tears streaming in an unceasing river through the fissures in the old man’s face. The mere touch of the instrument beneath his hands had set in thaw the river that had been frozen so long ago inside the man. Jamie closed the door quietly and left Nikolai to reacquaint himself with his soul.

  Here in the camp anything might become an event, and so something as momentous as Nikolai playing to the public, even if it was the gulag public, took on the air of a party. Even Gregor had his hair slicked back and a clean shirt. This did not preclude him from winking at Jamie, but Jamie knew such actions were no longer meant to intimidate, but were only part of the strange friendship that had been struck up between them. Violet’s face was flushed with anticipation and nerves on Nikolai’s behalf, worried that she had not massaged his hands enough over the last couple of weeks. Vanya was seated next to her, fretting about whether he had gotten the tuning just right and Shura wore a tie, a gaudy green thing gained in one of his infamous trades. He also exuded a festive air that was infectious. The Commander sat apart, hands folded in his lap, his expression as unruffled as a lake on a still morning. But he was here, he had allowed this event to take place and Jamie was grateful to him for it. To be grateful to one’s own jailor was a new experience in grace for him, and it was a measure of how life had changed that he could even recognize it as such.

  It was natural that Nikolai should turn to his fellow Russians for music, for inspiration, and so the evening’s programme began with Rachmaninoff’s technically demanding Etudes Tableaux, and flowed on into Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and the lesser known Alexander Borodin.

  As his hands warmed, he flowed on into other composers and pieces: Bach’s Prelude in B Minor, Schumann’s gorgeously manic Piano Concerto Op. 24, then Beethoven and Liszt, Chopin and Berlioz, the music both transcendent and earthly, both angry and melancholy, and so achingly beautiful that the rugged old prisoner seemed a hybrid—half human, half angel.

  He returned to the Russians to close out the evening, finishing with Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise. Jamie had heard it played many times on both violin and piano, but had never heard it as Nikolai played it, bleeding the keys for all the emotion they could render. Through his playing, he was reconstructing the Russia before the Revolution and all that it had been, that firebird that might yet, through whomever of her artists survived, rise from the ashes of Stalinist destruction. He was playing for his Katya.

  There was a hush at the end, and Nikolai looked around, startled out of his reverie. Jamie sensed that he had been so lost in his performance he had forgotten his surroundings entirely and was now surprised to find himself in the dingy common room. His fingers still rested on the ivory keys as though he were afraid if he stopped touching them they would disappear. Now that he had music once again, he would need the sustenance of it daily. It was good to need things. Jamie had long understood that, but only here in Russia had he seen the absolute necessity of it in a
human life.

  Jamie began to clap, and then the others took it up, but Shura stood, his hand clasped over his heart, tears running from his eyes into his beard. His big sentimental heart had been denied music for so long that having it, hearing it played at this virtuoso level had been more than he could manage. Nikolai looked at him and smiled, for there was no greater accolade than Shura’s tears were giving him.

  After, they filed out slowly, restless, for such music stirred a person’s soul opening wounds best left untouched. To merely go back to their meager beds and lie awake for hours in the dark, still hearing that sublime music, note by painful note, over and over in one’s head did not bear thinking about.

  Outside in the dark, with the stars appearing beyond the deep feathery tops of the firs, one could pretend for a moment that one did not see the tall fences topped with barbed wire. One could not deny the music though, for it had pierced each of them too deeply.

  Violet came and stood beside him, as was their habit now, to drift together whenever they happened into one another’s orbits. She was silent, for words would seem trivial after such a fiery display. Except perhaps for the ones he was about to utter. He found himself quite ridiculously nervous.

  “I think we should marry,” he said quietly. There was a shocked silence from Violet.

  “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 m
ade 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.