Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  “She was my boss at the post office and I think I fell in love with her the minute I set eyes upon her. I kept it to myself for a very long time. It was enough to admire her from afar. I would leave small things for her, from time to time, anonymously in her work locker so that she might know she was thought of most kindly. I made her ornaments for Novyi God—small, delicate things from twisted wire and birch bark. It was harmless and I think she enjoyed the mystery of it.

  “One day, deep in winter, she was lamenting the snow, the white unchangingness of it, how dirty it looked by that time of year and how she longed for color and greenery. To her it was only a passing thing. To me it was a dream I could give to her.”

  He sighed and brushed a few bits of dirt from his worn trousers. His small face was dreamy, as though he saw the woman in front of him now.

  “She had eyes like velvet—deep and lush—you know the sort of eyes in a woman where you think you could happily drown for the rest of your days?” Volodya looked up, face still flushed, but with memory now rather than embarrassment.

  Jamie nodded, for every man knew at least one such set of eyes.

  “She lived in a tiny house near the edge of the village. She had a little walkway from the gate to her door. I filled it with violets so that the snow was purple with them—I had to time it just right, so they wouldn’t wilt before she could see them. And then I hid myself so that I could watch her reaction. I saw more than I had bargained for. She was surprised and delighted. She stood there in the snow and cried and then picked up the flowers and held them to her face as if she could will spring if she could only breathe the scent of the violets in deeply enough. I should have left then, but I was drinking in her reaction the way an alcoholic drinks in his first vodka of the day. So it was that I was still there, crouched in the dirty snow behind a clump of shrubbery when a car pulled up. It was the car of a party official, for it was much better than what any of us could purchase. I had not known, though I suppose it was common gossip, that she was the mistress of a party official from Kiev. He stepped out and she ran to him, thanking him, thinking of course that he—her lover—had done this for her.

  “He was furious, for he thought she was playing him for a fool. That she had another man partaking of her favors. He hit her across the face, first one cheek and then the other. She fell to the ground and then he started kicking the violets at her and calling her a whore. I knew what I risked if I went to her rescue but I couldn’t just sit there in the bushes and watch him beat her. So I charged him—I hit him in the face as hard as I could manage. But he was a big man and I am not terribly strong.

  “She reviled me, even spit on me as I lay bleeding in the snow. Well,” Volodya shrugged, “what else could she do? She had to prove to him that she had no feelings for me, that I was less than dust beneath her feet. The things she said…” he closed his eyes, lean face pale once again, “I still cannot take them from my mind. For when someone is that vehement and the curses come so readily to their tongue, you know they have always, in some part of themselves, thought this of you.

  “Two weeks later she accused me of rape which was, of course, completely untrue. But here I am nevertheless. She was badly beaten and I think it likely she had been raped, only not by me but by her lover. In Soviet courts though, if a Party apparatchik accuses you, you are always guilty.”

  He looked at Jamie, setting his teacup to the side, the scents of recently dug soil and petals surrounding them. His small, neatly trimmed mustache trembled slightly with emotion.

  “All my life, humiliation is my companion. It rises with me in the morning and I taste its bitter gall in my throat at night. I ask myself many times, what is it in me that makes others want to shame me, to deny the little bit of dignity the world allows a man?”

  “I don’t know, Volodya,” Jamie said quietly, for the world did seem to visit such things upon certain people. And dignity, in such a place as the Soviet world, might be the only bastion a man had between him and outright brutality. It wasn’t much in the way of a shield but it was necessary all the same.

  He left him then, the small dignified man, taking the chamomile Violet had requested with him.

  He could see it clearly, the dark blush of violets in the snow, the sensitive man who had summoned all the romanticism of his nature in one poetic gesture and had it end in blood and cold, humiliation and imprisonment. It was a most Russian story in the shape of its tragedy and pathos.

  He looked back, the dim now sifting up from the ground, more lavender than lilac, and saw Volodya in outline, still sitting as he had left him amongst his flowers and his ruined dreams.

  Chapter Sixty-five

  September 1975

  Destroying Angel

  Since the advent of Valentin as their camp commander, they had been allowed to forage for edible things in the forest. Hence, one Sunday in September they were allowed out—with guards—to pick mushrooms, a delicacy that Jamie discovered was dear to the heart of each Russian. Even Nikolai, not given to overt emotion, was apt to go into raptures about the various kinds, shapes, flavors and medicinal values of each grubby fungi.

  When Jamie, basket in tow, asked how he was supposed to know a good gribny from a bad one, he was confronted with several faces looking at him as if he was an idiot or a strange species of human that they had never stumbled across before.

  “I’ve never picked mushrooms before,” he said, feeling that this was a weak explanation for a profound lack in his character, but possessing none better, it was all he could say in his own defense.

  This brought forth more strange looks, then laughter and shaking of heads. His sense of being the village idiot heightened considerably.

  Violet smiled up at him from under the rim of her drab cap. “It is something we all do as children—go mushrooming, for food, but also for fun. When we live in cities, the Russian soul still longs for the earth, for the muck of soil between our fingers and the scent of the forest in our noses.”

  It was a theme common amongst the Russian people, that of their country as mother and provider, their connection with the land remaining many generations after they had left for the city. Every one of them was a peasant at heart.

  “We have so much war and lack of food,” Nikolai told him as they walked together, “that we must forage everywhere for things to eat, always. The forest provides much food and so we accept that bounty. In a famine nation such as this one, you learn to eat all that the earth puts forth and to use what isn’t edible for other purposes. It is said that many mushrooms is a sign of war, for they will be needed in the terrible times to come. In the summer of 1940 there were more mushrooms growing than even the old ones could ever remember seeing.”

  The day was beautiful, cloudless and sunny, not hot as the summer had often been but one of those rare and perfect autumn days with the leaves at their peak glory in golds and russets. A gentle breeze whispered through the pines, and rustled the birches. The scent of decaying leaves and vegetation was ripe and warm on the air.

  When he wondered aloud why they didn’t stop in any one of several likely-looking clearings, he was told very earnestly by Violet, “You can smell when it is the right place. You can feel that it is a mushroom patch.”

  The funny thing was he could smell them at once—a change of light and air as much as scent. The light was low, filtering through the trees, leaving small fields of shade deep in the verdure of the forest floor. The air was thicker, heavier, and fecund with dark life.

  Violet took him in hand and showed him how to find the mushrooms. How the slightest curve often differentiated them from the pile of browning leaves in which they nestled. How certain ones favored particular trees: the berjozovik living with the berjoza—birch tree, the podosinovik growing with the osina—aspen. The odd nature of others—the spindly opjonka that only lived a few hours before melting into a pool of inky fluid, the slick,
slimy ones that Russians called ‘fat of the earth.’ Soon he could wander off on his own, and tell the good white ones from the beautiful death-dealing ones and was even lucky enough to stumble, in a boggy crag, upon large black ones that Violet clapped her hands over as if he had just presented her with a basketful of pearls. He began to feel slightly less idiotic and somewhat smug.

  The sun was strong by late afternoon and induced a certain laziness in all. The desire to stretch out in the velvet grass and mosses and have a nap, to store some of that golden heat, to be pulled up out of the marrow on the long, dark winter days that were soon to come was overwhelming. Even the guards looked relaxed despite their guns slung at waist-height and arcing through the prisoners every few moments.

  Once his basket was full he went to sit by Nikolai, who was resting against the broad trunk of a birch, the gleaming silver of his hair contrasting against the parchment pale bark.

  Nikolai acknowledged his presence with a grunt and a pat on Jamie’s shoulder. Jamie smiled in return and offered him two of the biggest black mushrooms, which Violet assured him were a delicacy beyond price.

  Nikolai waved them away. “You keep them for Violet and the baby. They will need the extra when winter comes.”

  They sat for a stretch, content in the drowsy stupor the autumn sun had created. It was small things that gave pleasure, counted like beads on a string. A basket of mushrooms, heat, no deaths in the camp for the last two months, the way the sun turned Violet’s hair to a blazing penny as she explained the finer points of a hairy-leafed plant to Vanya. Jamie smiled at the picture the two made.

  “On days such as today,” Nikolai said, “I am reminded of what it is to be young. I remember how sweet it was and I feel it in my bones for a second, but then it is gone and it leaves only bitter residue behind.”

  For Nikolai this was unusually garrulous and Jamie wondered what had brought it on. The old man had mellowed of late, partly because of the return of his music, Jamie suspected, but in larger part because of Kolya. He had been pleased when they named the baby after him and had taken to spending his evenings rocking Kolya, and singing old Russian ditties to him in a rough voice that was quite beautiful. The piano and the child together had brought a softness and a life out in him that had been well hidden before.

  Nikolai’s eyes were closed as he basked in the sun. His skin was like whisper-thin vellum, with fissures running through it as deep as the bark in an oak tree. He looked terribly frail suddenly, as if every trial and tragedy and all the terrible years in the gulags had risen up from within him and showed themselves now on the map of his body and face. His cough had been worse with the chillier nights and mornings, and sat deep in his chest, an implacable old enemy that Nikolai claimed he would be lost without. Jamie feared it would be the companion that killed him.

  “We all die some day, Yasha. It is not always a bad thing,” he said as if Jamie had spoken his thoughts aloud. He reached over with one gnarled hand and touched Jamie’s hair, softly, like a benediction from a father to a son. “Go and be with your wife. It is a lovely day. Do not waste it. They are rare enough.”

  It was good advice. Violet was in a dappled patch of woods, tall silver birches surrounding her like a dryad in an old tale. She was utterly absorbed in her mushroom picking and so did not notice his approach until his shadow fell across her own.

  She looked up at him, white camellia face haloed in copper hair, and smiled. It was an expression of such sweetness that he felt his heart miss a beat before resuming its normal tread. She flushed, and looked back down at a patch of delicate mushrooms as fragile and ephemeral as fairies at dusk. He pulled her to him and kissed her swiftly, feeling the softness of her body against his own. She laughed up at him, smears of dirt on her fair face, smelling pungently of pine and earth and water, and then pulled his face down in her mucky hands for a kiss of much deeper proportions. Her mouth tasted sweetly of the overripe cloudberries she had been eating and of the dense earth in which she had been digging. She swayed against him and he had to clamp down on a wild desire to take her down in this patch of bracken and make love to her.

  She must have read his thoughts for she pushed him away and smiled, her eyes telegraphing that they could resume what they had begun later. They continued their mushroom search, with Violet providing him with botanical information on a variety of plants and their uses. She could set up shop as an herbalist and do well for herself, Jamie mused, for it was clear that she had an understanding of plants that was rare.

  “Those are bad,” Violet pointed to a small cluster of brown mushrooms that looked rather innocent.

  “Poison?” Jamie asked, watching a butterfly hover over a late blooming patch of cornflowers.

  “Poison—yes,” Violet said, “but good in very small amounts for bad headaches and for great stiffness.” She nodded toward Nikolai, and Jamie understood that she meant these were medicinal for arthritis.

  “You know how to make medicine from them?” Jamie asked, pausing as the butterfly landed on his forearm and balanced there for a moment, its delicate abdomen pulsating and its celadon wings impossibly fragile. Two more joined it within seconds and he sighed. He hated to brush them off, for to touch them was always to risk damaging them, but he knew how this usually went with him.

  “My mother told me that butterflies were guardian angels and that when you saw one go by, you knew you were safe, for it was keeping a close eye on you.Your angels are plenty,” Violet said, looking at him in a way that made him slightly uncomfortable. He could not explain this to anyone, but he thought perhaps it was nothing very special, only rare in that animals and insects and people knew they could trust him and so could venture close without fear.

  The sunny day and the promise of a feast of fungi seemed to have mellowed even the guards’ collective mood, for they allowed Shura and Violet to cook an entire feast of mushrooms—under two sets of watchful eyes and machine guns—but nevertheless, allowed it.

  Back in the camp, the dinner was hearty compared to what they were used to, the earthy smell of the mushrooms mixing lushly with the warmth of the garlic and the rich oil of butter. From somewhere Gregor had produced a bottle of okhotnichaya—hunter’s vodka, a brown brew flavored with ginger, cloves, lemon peel and anise, topped off with wine and sugar. It tasted ambrosial to Jamie’s tongue, and along with the food gave him a feeling of sated well-being he had not known in a very long time.

  After dinner, Gregor sang a couple of songs, his voice deep and growly but well-suited to the sturm und drang of Russian folk music. Then Shura stood up on the table, his hand over his heart, dark eyes glowing soporifically with the drink and food. He sang an old Georgian song, beginning low and whispery which befit the song’s melancholy yearning. There was a bit of muttering at first, for Suliko had the misfortune to have been a favorite of Stalin’s, proving as always that the old monster had an odd sentimental streak.

  “I was looking for my sweetheart’s grave,

  And longing was tearing my heart.

  Without love my heart felt heavy -

  Where are you, my Suliko?

  Among fragrant roses, in the shadow,

  Brightly a nightingale sang his song.

  There I asked the nightingale

  Where he had hidden Suliko.

  Suddenly the nightingale fell silent

  And softly touched the rose with the beak:

  “You have found what you are looking for,” he said,

  In an eternal sleep Suliko is resting here.”

  Later, Jamie could not have said just when the tenor of the evening shifted, for all had been mellow goodwill for a time, with laughter and conversation that was as good as any he had known in the many circles he had traveled within in his lifetime. Perhaps it was after the song, for it had cast a strange mood over them all and turned the atmosphere of the evening ever so slightly, bringing the darkness down earlier
than intended.

  He was turned from Violet, listening to a story Gregor was telling about a hunting trip in Siberia, when he felt her hand convulse in his own.

  “Yasha.” Only two syllables, but a harbinger of disaster. Jamie looked around to see what had put that tone in Violet’s voice. A rush of icy adrenaline washed his cells as he saw what had Violet’s small face white with tension. Gregor had stopped speaking and silence spread down the table like dominoes toppling slowly toward disaster.

  Volodya, the small shy man who had once filled a snowy walkway with flowers for a woman who could not love him, was standing up. His entire frame shook with suppressed emotion. A lifetime of it, to be exact. In his hand he clutched that day’s ration of bread.

  “Listen people—let us talk about bread, let us talk about this miserable scrap of life we call bread and how it has ruled all our lives for so long now.”

  Faces around the table turned to stare, uncomprehending and frightened, the relaxation, the camaraderie melting away like snow touched to a fire. Volodya stepped up onto the table, carrying with him the burdens of humiliation and survival in a country where survival came at a very high cost.

  “Every day it is the same thing—bread rules our existence from morning to night—the questions, the hope—will I get more today? If I toady to the foreman will he share his ration, if I do a favor for a guard, will he look the other way when I take that extra bowl of soup because for once the bastard cook miscounted heads? Bread,” he crushed the heel in his hand, “goddamn bread—is this the measure of a man’s life? Is this the soul that is left of Mother Russia, a lousy few grams of goddamnable bread?” He flung the bread across the room, raising his fists to heaven in a boundless anger. “Is this all there is for Russia—a fucking moldy heel of bread?!”

  “He must stop,” Violet said tightly and Jamie squeezed her hand under the table, knowing that there was no way to stop Volodya now because he was set upon his course. He gave her hand another squeeze and then stood. Even when the odds were entirely against a man, he must try to avert complete disaster.