The Secret History of Moscow

by Ekaterina Sedia

  There is a reason they call it the city of forty times forty churches. Splashes of gold dotted the landscape before her, unobscured by the tall modern buildings. Yellow of the poplars and gold of the churches and blue of the sky made her sigh happily, forgetting for a moment her acute misery. Then she noticed a dark cloud in the sky, and shielded her eyes from the sun. The cloud grew larger and closer, and Galina realized that it was composed of birds-jackdaws, crows, owls. Owls? She stared up at the soft soundless beats of softly feathered wings, and round yellow eyes stared back. The birds circled over her head and one of the jackdaws kept dipping lower, its wings almost brushing against her face, the wind of their beats ruffling her hair.

  "What do you want?” Galina asked. There was no one around who would care that she talked to birds, who would decide to send her back. Alone, she did not have to fake normality.

  The jackdaw landed on the edge of the gutter, tilting its head.

  Masha, she wanted to say, but bit the word back. She might be ill, but she knew well enough to recognize a hallucination. Birds appearing out of nowhere and trying to talk to her, owls not at all bothered by the sunlight-it wasn't true, it wasn't happening to her. A good schizophrenic-a brave schizophrenic-knew that she was ill and that things that she saw were not necessarily there. A good schizophrenic should ignore a hallucination once she recognized it as such.

  "Go away,” she whispered fiercely. “You do not exist, so leave me alone."

  Her spirit in shambles, she rose and headed back to the hatch that would take her back to the world below. The birds grew agitated at her departure, and all of them drew closer, their wings raising a wind so strong she almost lost her footing. They mobbed her like the crows mobbed the cats who got too close to their nests, diving low, their claws pulling at her hair, their beaks opened wide. She fled to the safety of the hatch, her sneakers slipping on the suddenly too-smooth and dangerous metal. She grabbed at the boards framing the black square opening of her exit, splinters lodged in the weeping wounds on her fingertips, panicky, half-blinded by the black-and-gray movement in the air. She pulled herself into the dusty attic and ran for the stairs, the cawing and hooting finally left behind.

  Too shaken to return to work, she walked along the New Arbat, recently converted to pedestrian traffic only and taken over by street artists. She looked as she passed; most exhibited landscapes of the city around them. She recognized the features as one would the corpse of a loved one-with features devoid of sparkling life and motion. Sketch artists called out to her, offering to draw her portrait, but she shook her head and watched the neat rectangles of the pavement. She passed several artisans exhibiting matryoshkas and painted jewelry boxes, imitating, more or less successfully, the traditional Palekh and Gzhel art. Several tourists haggled over the prices via their interpreter, and Galina shot the hassled man speaking in two languages at once a sympathetic look. She could never do that, she thought, to work for those people who descended upon the city like a plague-demanding, condescending, rude. But she wondered what it would be like, to believe that the world was created just for your pleasure and amusement.

  She looked away, and stopped. A large painting propped against a storefront caught her eye and she stared at it, willing it to disappear. But it remained, the only painting that captured the spirit of its subject-the view from the roof she had just left, dotted with fat vivid strokes of gold and yellow, capped by a pale blue expanse of the sky. Worse, several birds, all beaks and claws, hung menacingly in the empty vastness of the sky.

  The artist slouched by the painting, a dead cigarette in his slack lips. He eyed Galina with indifference and detached himself from the storefront. Unshaven, red-eyed, dirty. “Are you going to buy it?” he said.

  Galina shook her head. “Sorry, no. But these birds… Can you see them too?"

  The artist smiled, the stubble on his concave cheeks bristling. “Since last Friday. How about that! I thought it was the DTs."

  Galina smiled. Great, she thought, a schizophrenic and an alcoholic saw creepy birds together. “Have you seen the owls?"

  "Since Sunday,” he confirmed.

  "Where did they come from? Why are they here, now, during the day?"

  The artist stretched and yawned, blasting Galina with the stench of stale smoke and alcohol. “Who the fuck knows?” he said philosophically. “But if you want my opinion, it's probably the gypsies’ fault."

  "Gypsies?"

  "Or some other damn magic,” he conceded. “If you really want to know, come by some other day, after it gets dark, and I'll show you."

  "My sister's missing,” Galina said. “I think it has something to do with the birds. Can't you explain now?"

  "There ain't no explaining it,” he said. “And I can't show you until it's dark."

  He spat out his cigarette, shoved his hands into his pockets, and indicated that he wasn't going to say anything else.

  Galina sighed, and turned to leave. “I'm Galina,” she said in the way of goodbye. “I'll see you tomorrow."

  "See that you do.” He gave a short nod. “Fyodor, that's my name."

  2: Yakov

  Yakov never liked the way he looked-he seemed too prosaic, with not even a whiff of the Englishness he expected himself to possess. But from every spare line of his small square body to the last bristling hair on his head his appearance screamed ‘Russian peasant’ at the world. The world acted indignant in response and shoved him away. Moscow was especially violent in regards of shoving.

  "Limitchik,” that's what they called people like him-housing in Moscow had always been for the native Muscovites, and a limited number of out-of-towners. Native Muscovites viewed the out-of-towners with condescension and contempt that surprised Yakov when he moved here, all of ten years old. Twenty years later, the hatred did not seem to lessen. He started to suspect that he would never grow into a native.

  Yakov stood in front of the window, in his boxers and wifebeater, looking at the poplar that didn't quite reach his sixth-story window. There was a crow's nest on top of it, and the nascent wind whipped it around; Yakov worried for the safety of two young crows in the nest. Their parents were nowhere to be seen, and the young birds squawked as the mass of twigs and branches and accidental fluff swayed back and forth with the windblown treetop. Yakov wondered if the baby birds felt nauseous. He wondered what they were still doing in the nest in September.

  "Yasha!” his mother called from the kitchen. “Breakfast!"

  He pulled on a pair of track pants stretched at the knees, the red stripes down the sides faded with too many washings. Too many faded red things in his life-another one of them, in the form of his mother's housecoat, dashed from the stove to the kitchen table and back, with the desperate energy of clockwork.

  "Calm down, Ma,” Yakov said, and patted the old woman's shoulder. He always thought of her as old and felt startled on her birthdays, when he remembered that she was barely fifty. “It's Saturday, no need to rush."

  "I was going to meet Lida to go to the cemetery,” she said. “To visit your grandparents, and the grave needs cleaning, what with all the leaves."

  "It's fall. There'll be more falling tomorrow."

  "Graves have to be clean,” she said, stubborn and small. “Eat."

  "Don't wait on me. Just do what you have to."

  She sighed. “You'll be all right?"

  "Of course.” There was no need to get irritated. She always worried, a habit that wasn't going to go away. Be patient, he reminded himself. You're the grownup now, even if she doesn't realize it. “Go, do your thing. Have fun. Enjoy the graves."

  Her face pinched. “The dead need to be taken care of."

  He knew better than to argue. There was no point in telling her that she was the only one comforted by the endless, thankless, pointless labors at the cemetery, that the dead didn't care. Yakov drank his tea.

  His mother retreated to her room and slammed the wardrobe doors and shuffled polyester. He buttered bread and sliced thic
k slabs of cheese, fragrant and full of holes. He waited to be alone, and felt guilty for it.

  She came into the kitchen, armored in flowered fabric and stern black shoes. “It wouldn't kill you to visit your grandparents."

  Grandparents. He remembered his grandmother vaguely, and grandfather-not at all. His mother didn't remember him either. They knew only that he was an Englishman. Then there were half-remembered stories and conjectures, but his nationality was the only certainty. That, and the fact that he had worked on the radio for six months, between May and November of 1938, as an English-language correspondent. During this short time, he married grandma and got her pregnant, and was promptly executed-or, as they called it during Khrushchev's times, repressed. Nobody was quite sure what was buried in the grave with his name on it, and how it got there, but no one was curious enough to find out.

  "I'll stay home today, Ma,” he said. “Next weekend, maybe. We can go to church too, if you want.” Throwing pacifiers at her, trading a small present inconvenience for a larger delayed one. Smart.

  "We'll see, Yasha.” She softened. “I'll be back soon."

  He finished his tea, now cold, and found his binoculars. Through them, he could see the wide beaks of the baby birds, fringed with yolk yellow, opened in a silent scream. The wind was picking up.

  The wind was blowing the leaves in yellow eddies and swirled them upward, then let them fall back to the ground.

  The wind blew through the dry grass in the empty lot behind the day care center visible from Yakov's window and whistled in the empty bottles strewn between the peeling benches, tugged on the fur of the dogs running across the dry mud and clumped dead grass in the no-man's land, and their owners lifted their collars up and lit up, cradling the tiny flames of matches in their palms, expertly buffeting the wind with their shoulders.

  Yakov watched a young man chasing after a Scottish terrier; the dog, a blurry caterpillar of motion, ran in circles, easily outpacing its owner, even though its legs were so short they were hidden under the shaggy fur. The young man's jacket flapped around him as he ran and chased after the dog, plaintively calling out his name. A gust of wind pushed the young man in the back, forcing him into an awkward hobble, and threw the jacket over his head. As the man struggled to free himself from under the jacket, twisting and flapping his arms, another gust came and picked him off the ground. Yakov leaned closer to the window, not quite believing his eyes but too content with a Saturday alone to truly feel surprised or panicked. The man's arms flapped faster, the jacket grew longer; his feet shrank away from the ground, closed into tiny bird fists, and he hovered, half-human, half…?

  Yakov looked at the other people and dogs, but no one seemed overtly concerned or even cognizant of the young man's strange behavior. Only his terrier stopped running and sat, its head tilting quizzically, following something high in the air. And then Yakov realized that the young man was gone, and only a large crow flapped its wings above the empty lot, chased by the howling Scottish terrier dragging its leash through the mud.

  * * * *

  Mondays brought the unease and tugging in his chest, and a desire to dig deeper into his pillows and just sleep. Instead, he rose at five a.m. and went to work. The bus was populated by sleepy citizens, unwilling to meet any-one's eye in this ungodly hour, when the soul, still tender from sleep, was vulnerable to any assault of light, noise, or an unkind word. Yakov, like the rest of his compatriots, feigned sleep and hid his face in the upright collar of his uniform.

  The moment he closed his eyes, wind blew and coats upturned, dogs barked and crows cawed. He could not find a way to reconcile the scene he had witnessed, and decided to consider it a hallucination or a strange optical trick. He pushed it out of his mind, and got himself distracted by attending to one of the crows-he fell out of the nest, and Yakov spent Saturday night and all of Sunday alternately tending to the bird and trying to convince his mother that crows did not peck people's eyes out. He smiled now at the memory of the circular argument.

  "He's a wild bird,” his mother had said. “Let him go."

  "I can't, Ma,” he had answered. “There are stray cats out there, and he can't fly yet."

  She had sighed and gone about her business, knocking on his door an hour later and repeating her entreaties. Yakov shrugged and fed the bird with ground beef and boiled fish.

  Now on the bus he worried a little about the little crow.

  He kept peeking into the messenger bag that held his new pet and a supply of food. The sleeping crow felt almost like a talisman, a handy distraction from a nagging memory he avoided, feeling only its general shape-that of a man with wings. He cringed and squeezed his eyes shut, and almost missed his stop.

  The police station where he worked was located in the ground floor of an older apartment building-only seven stories tall and built of brown bricks. The stairwell smelled like every stairwell in this city-of tobacco smoke and cat piss, of cooking cabbage whose insidious smell seemed to creep from under every door, and abandoned old age. He glimpsed an old man exiting the building as he entered, not even seven in the morning.

  "Good morning,” Yakov said to the old man's back.

  He didn't answer, his back in a well-worn jacket painfully straight, seized forever in a single position. The old man walked stiffly, leaning on his homemade cane, and Yakov felt bad for the old-timer-probably a vet; was there an old man who wasn't? It had to be hard to pick up the empty bottles off the streets and playgrounds where they were abandoned by the careless young. It was probably a good thing that there were so many bottles, so an old man didn't have to starve half to death on his pension. Still, it wasn't a good way for an old man to live-a war hero, an old man had to be respected and deserved some rest. If he was Yakov's grandfather, he wouldn't have to.

  Frowning, Yakov walked up the flight of stairs and into the office. He settled at his desk, and positioned the crow, whom he had named Carl, in a comfortable nook between the radiator and the window. His desk was in the back, where actual work was taking place and no petitioners were allowed. The front room, bisected by the glass partition with small semicircular windows, was dominated by the passport desk, which was always doing brisk business.

  He longed to be at the passport desk-although boring, the work there was familiar, and one could go through the motions of looking up vital statistics and stamping and filling in the blanks while thinking about something else entirely. Other police work suddenly lacked the familiarity.

  Their station always used to be a quiet one, and Yakov had resigned himself to going through his life and retiring without ever investigating a homicide, without ever solving anything more serious than a domestic dispute or a drunken confrontation. It suited him fine, and the recent increase in crime, racketeers that came out of the woodwork, the territorial disputes, the murders, the torture-all of it was too much for him.

  He shuffled papers in his desk, hoping that he would remain unnoticed, that no one would unload a petitioner on him and make him listen to another bitter tale of misery he could do nothing about. He would give them the usual speech of how they would do everything in their power, not mentioning that it wasn't much, that they lacked funding and morale, and that retirement seemed like a distant paradise to the young among them, and a nearby oasis that would finally quench their thirst to those who were older, but none of them really wanted to be here, and all regretted going into this line of work, except maybe the girls at the passport desk.

  He managed to spend the morning pretending to be busy, and surreptitiously feeding the little crow every time he opened the bright glass beads of his eyes, his yellow beak gaping expectantly. Yakov shoved bits of raw hamburger into the hungry mouth, worried that the chunks might be too big. But Carl swallowed, and waited for more. Then Yakov worried about overfeeding.

  "Richards,” the voice by his desk said. “I need your attention for a bit."

  Yakov looked up to meet a steely gaze of his lieutenant, who despite Yakov's seven-year tenure at t
he station still had trouble with his last name-he pronounced it carefully, as if the foreign word would burn the roof of his mouth if he weren't vigilant about it. “Just be a moment, Lieutenant Zakharov,” he said.

  Zakharov couldn't wait, of course. He ushered in an older woman, an obvious provincial covered with headscarf and shod in the gleaming hooves of orthopedic shoes. She had been crying, but her mouth formed a tight pucker, to ward against any impending emotion. Yakov knew that look well.

  He sat the woman in front of his desk, and shoved Carl out of the way. She studied the chipped composite wood and a stack of papers Yakov kept there just to appear busy. The woman then turned her suspicious attention to Yakov. Her furrowed face betrayed her thoughts-she considered Yakov too young, too uneducated, not someone who should be in position of authority, making decisions that people's lives depended upon.

  "What can I do for you?” Yakov said, derailing the unpleasant train of thought.

  Carl squawked, and the woman frowned. “My name is Anna Chernina. My son-in-law is missing. He went to buy cigarettes and never came back. My daughter's been crying for two days straight now."

  Yakov wrote down the address of the woman and her daughter, and the description of her son-in-law-eyes: brown, hair: brown, beard: none, height: 1 m 81 cm. He promised to call as soon as they heard anything.

  The woman left unconvinced that Yakov was going to help her. He was pretty sure that he wasn't.

  When lunchtime rolled around, Zakharov reappeared and straddled the peeling vinyl-upholstered chair in front of Yakov's desk.

  "Yasha,” he said, more familiar than Yakov ever remembered him, “we have five disappearances reported today."