He grappled with her hands and threw her off. She skidded over ice, the swollen skin around her tail grinding into the snow as her coat rode up.
She pulled herself up using the low branches of a pine tree, then skidded towards him, pulling up her coat-sleeve to reveal the thick brass opera glasses installed on her left wrist. She swooped her arm down on his head.
He screamed. The oil bottle rolled into the snow. She snatched it up and ducked away from his stomping boots. He was still screaming, and she hit him again, from behind. He tripped, rolled into the snow with a red line spidering up his forehead.
Elena jammed her black-buttoned boot into his side. He wasn’t dead, but he should be.
A shout, and shadowy figures marched around the church, coats buttoned tight and hammer-and-plough hats pulled low over eyebrows. Elena ducked behind the silver bell hulking on a frozen patch of dirt beneath the birches that lined the market. She pressed her back against the frozen metal, remembering when this bell had hung in the belfry of St. Sophia’s, before the city’s new commissars had taken it down to melt it for metal.
Elena peered around the bell: the soldiers clustered around the man she had hit. She slunk around the other side, then raced towards the kremlin gates—her tail aching in its socket with every step she took—towards the road that would lead her back to Nina’s raw cough and to the boxcar, the only home they had left.
* * *
In Elena’s girlhood of lemonwood dressers and ice skating parties, her favorite folktale was the story of the firebird, the wild creature that men hunted through the dark Siberian forests. In the best version of the story, which Mother didn’t like her to read, the firebird turned vicious when it was caught, lighting villages aflame and clawing out the necks of the men that captured it. She knew, as a girl, that when she came of age she would receive accoutrement, the tails or wings made of metal or jewels that had become fashionable among aristocratic women in the last century, And she always knew that her accoutrement would be modeled after the jeweled tail of a firebird.
Nina, on the other hand, had always loved the story of the rusalka, the drowned women who mope around after lost lovers in marshy rivers, and so the summer of Nina’s debut she had received fish scales on her arms along with the customary opera glasses. Of course, consumptive Nina, who grew tired even after an afternoon of playing the piano, already had another accoutrement: the pair of brass lungs she’d received when Mother and Father had sent her to a spa in Switzerland one summer.
As Elena trudged along the road towards the boxcar, the blackened gold tower of the horseshoe-shaped house loomed on the other side of the hill. She clenched her teeth, remembered Mother’s peppermint perfume, Father playing the piano, his epaulettes quivering on his shoulders. They were nothing but fading sepia photographs now, and she and Nina, the last members of the Ankudinov family, were countesses only of an abandoned wooden boxcar hidden on the outskirts of what had once been their estate. As dark fell and the boxcar loomed behind the copse of trees, Elena’s thoughts crashed over and over into the images of the life she was supposed to have: seasons in Petrograd with daring affairs, a year traveling the Continent, Mother and Father growing old in the house, and Nina living in their sky-blue palace by the canal in Petrograd, filling the rooms with lilies and books of poetry.
We will never have any of that, now, Elena thought as she yanked open the boxcar door. I’m the woman who uses her opera glasses accoutrement to beat peasants instead of to watch the Ballets Russes.
“Oh thank goodness, you’ve returned,” Nina said. Several dark-stained handkerchiefs wilted on the sawdust-covered floor around her feet. She was draped in a fur coat, the only one that Elena hadn’t nailed up around the boxcar windows for insulation. A book—one of the few their great-grandfather had had signed by Pushkin—dangled from her fingers. “Were you—”
Elena held up the bottle of oil, and Nina clapped.
“I smashed up one of them, too.” Elena peeled off her gloves, scooped a set of pliers and a wrench out of a carpetbag.
“I hope wolves eat him.”
“Elena, that’s not very—”
“Hush, don’t become agitated. It’ll only make your cough worse. Now hold still.”
Nina sighed and hunched over the back of her chair. Elena peeled down her sister’s dress to reveal the brass door fitted into the flesh between her shoulder blades.
“I despise this part,” Nina whispered. “I hate when—”
Nina jerked up, barking out a cough that bounced through the boxcar and shuddered her body. She grappled for a handkerchief, her cheeks puffed out and darkness filled the white cloth.
“All right, you’re all right.” Elena’s head swam as she watched Nina cough up blood. She hated that Nina, who had once curled beneath blankets by fat radiators, now had to live in this drafty boxcar, her cough wracking her body whenever they ran out of oil.
After the coughs subsided, Elena unscrewed the brass plate on Nina’s back, lifted it up with the creaking of rusty hinges. The smell of old metal and pus drifted through the boxcar.
“This isn’t much oil.” Elena shook the bottle, then positioned the spigot over the gaping hole that revealed the rusted swell of Nina’s brass lungs. “And it’s not good oil, either. It’s just gun oil, not even accoutrement oil. Not worth giving up jewels.”
“Are you telling me you stole—”
“What else could I do?” Elena shook the bottle and liquid dripped into the seam between the lungs. “It’s all corroded back here.”
After she finished Nina’s lungs, Elena oiled the creaky scales on Nina’s arms. She cleaned the blood off her opera glasses, then oiled her feathers and the crease between her back and tail. She flexed her tail and at last the skin that anchored it to her back didn’t pull painfully tight.
She put her feet on the woodstove while Nina curled in her fur and they shared porcelain cups of tea and a chunk of rusk.“This is a far cry from picnics in the Crimea,” Elena said.
“Oh, picnics when you would pilfer jam from the—”
“From that old cook who despised me? You were self-righteous about stealing even then, dearest. Yet you always ate the jam, didn’t you?”
“I only ate the jam because you forced me to eat it.” Nina was laughing, and already her cheeks flushed healthy in the woodstove light. “You always forced me to eat your pilfered jam and to play the princess—”
“Because you wanted to play the princess. And I wanted to play the knight.”
“Until you fell running and skinned your knees and cried for Mother, because you’ve always pretended to be tougher than you are.”
Elena jabbed her sister in the ribs, but warmth and comfort tugged at her. At least Nina was here, Nina had survived, and for now Nina’s cough had subsided and she was laughing.
But then Elena reminded herself of how much they’d lost, of how she must already start thinking about where their next bottle of oil might come from, and how her anger burned in her chest, an eternal flame.
* * *
Within a week, Elena had shaken the last drop of oil onto Nina’s lungs. Nina grew pale again, and barely slept; Elena woke sometimes in the night to the sounds of Nina coughing as she clattered around the boxcar.
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 beat 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 her protruding veins.
“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 she 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.
S
he 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.”
“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 Ankudinov. 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.
Speaking to Skull Kings Page 10