She tsked in frustration and shook her head.
“No match,” she said.
“What does that mean?” Lily said, trying to remain calm.
“Don’t worry,” Maryam reassured her. “They probably just haven’t got around to digitizing his file yet. It’s still a work in progress. We have his identifier now, that should be enough. Thank you for your assistance, Madam Niemann.”
“Of course,” said Niemann. “When you find him, tell him Gussie says she’s sorry.”
She shook Maryam’s hand and reached up for Lily’s, who pointedly refused to take it.
Niemann took this entirely in stride.
“Sally will show you out, good day to you both.”
At the front door, Sally asked Lily if she’d like to go for a walk in the garden.
Sally took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from her pajamas pocket and swore Lily to secrecy while they strode past the tulip beds, which were a riot of yellows, reds and purples. The air was warm and heavy with pollen and Sally’s cigarette smoke sashayed through the dense aroma like a white snake in paradise.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about your husband,” she said at last. She pointed to the figure who sat in the backseat of the car, now nodding gently at Maryam’s stream of conversation.
“That is him, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Lily.
“Would I be able to talk to him?” Sally asked.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Lily replied. “He doesn’t quite know how to feel about you.”
Sally nodded, and took a drag from her cigarette.
“He can join the club, I suppose,” she said.
“He is grateful,” Lily insisted. “At least, I think he is. But … well. He just doesn’t know how he feels about you.”
“Hero. Villain. Something in between,” said Sally, echoing Niemann.
Lily remembered something.
“She doesn’t know, does she?” she asked. “What you did for him?”
Sally shook her head.
“I’ve known Augusta Niemann for almost seventy years. That’s the only secret I’ve ever kept from her.”
Lily nodded.
“What you did was unforgivable,” she whispered. “And I can never thank you enough.”
Without another word she turned and walked down the garden path toward the car, where her husband and Maryam waited.
As she went she could hear Sally’s feet crunching on the gravel as she walked back toward the house, and a hoarse voice calling from an open window upstairs, and Sally’s voice answering it.
“I can smell the smoke you daft bitch, you’re going to kill yourself! What about your lungs?”
“Gussie, my love, if you don’t stop howling at me I shall roll you down the stairs.”
39
“Once we entered the city it was over. By Thursday we had seized the Parliament, StaSec HQ, all the major ministries. By that point all the hard-liners had shot themselves, so there was no fuss. Few scuffles, no serious fighting. All except in ParSec HQ, of course. Burned to the ground. Quite a few bastards still inside. Never found out how that happened. Nasty business.”
—Commandant Maqsud Ağahadilu, Azerbaijani Liberation League
Their next stop was the former Ministry of Records, where the paper files of the Caspian Republic were being ravenously cannibalized and converted into data by an army of volunteers. Hundreds of young men and women sat scanning volume after volume while a small, gray, teardrop-shaped device affixed to their temples extracted the visual data directly from their brains and beamed it to a remote server where it was rendered, read and filed to await the eyes of history. They worked quickly and mechanically, barely registering what they were reading.
But every so often you would hear a gasp of horror as some new grisly detail was plucked wriggling from Caspian’s fetid underbelly.
Even after two months, they could still be shocked.
With Maryam leading, the trio marched through the buzzing hall to the coalface, the massive paper archive that was still to be converted to data. Maryam handed the head researcher the three code words that Niemann had provided, and assured Lily that they would have the location of Oak Passover Antler within the hour.
It took them four days.
The prisoner known as Oak Passover Antler had spent twenty-seven years in Kobustan until, as Niemann had said, he had been transferred to a new facility in Birna in the southeast of the country. Maryam had been less than happy on hearing this. She had already had dealings with the staff at Birna and was convinced they had spent their days since the cease-fire huffing paint.
They had flown out to Birna and, after a delay of seven hours, were told that Birna definitely did not have any record of any prisoner interned under the identifier Oak Passover Antler.
Back to Ellulgrad they went, and back to the Ministry of Records, and back to the coalface where they were told that it was possible that Oak Passover Antler had been transferred to one of the other two internment facilities that had been built in 2237.
Darnagul was now empty, having been the smallest of the three, but there were still some prisoners waiting to be processed in Mingachevir.
A flight to Mingachevir, and one back.
Again they returned to the Ministry of Records and Maryam begged, pleaded and threatened for any clue as to the whereabouts of Oak Passover Antler.
At which point a young researcher of around seventeen, who just happened to overhear them as he passed by on his way to the restroom, piped up that Oak Passover Antler might not have been processed under his 52 Identifier.
Maryam had grabbed him by the shoulders and, with frightening intensity, had demanded that the young man explain himself forthwith.
“He might have been medical!” the young man had yelped.
He informed them that the army had a separate register of prisoners who were in need of medical supervision and that these prisoners were usually issued new reference codes. He took Maryam to a separate archive where the records of Medical Needs Prisoners were kept and Maryam was finally able to learn that Oak Passover Antler had indeed been reclassified as MNP after a prison riot had left him with six broken ribs and a damaged liver and had thereafter been given the far less poetic name of M-67461. M-67461, the records revealed, was still alive and residing in …
“FUCKING BIRNA!” Maryam roared as she stormed past Lily and her husband, who were taking a nap on a bench in the corridor and almost rolled onto the floor in fright.
Upon their return to Birna, Maryam slammed a piece of paper on the reception desk and angrily demanded that Prisoner M-67461 be released into her custody immediately.
The clerk, a charmingly plump old lady in her seventies, searched for the number in her terminal and when she got a result her face broke into a beatific smile.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “You mean Nicky South!”
Fortunately, Lily and her husband were able to restrain Maryam, and the matter escalated no further.
It was a very “Caspian” room, Lily thought as she waited with her husband for Maryam to return with news of South. Bare table and chairs and absolutely nothing frivolous. On the wall there were two gray squares of dust where the portraits of Maria Koslova and Dimitri Gaetz (the last Caspian prime minister but one) had been taken down. The last prime minister of the Caspian Republic had been Suri Amash, but since she had held the position for only eight hours after Gaetz’s suicide, Lily doubted there had been time for her to have an official portrait done.
Lily sat at the table in silence while her husband looked out at the town of Birna, which was repeating the transformation of Ellulgrad, if only on a smaller scale. He was a pillar of tension, and Lily noticed with pity, a mist of sweat was forming on the nape of his neck. She was about to go to him when Maryam burst through the door, took a survey of the room and exclaimed, “He’s not here!”
Lily glanced at her husband and saw her shock and despair m
irrored on his face but also (she thought) a tiny flicker of relief.
“He’s not here?!” Lily exploded, now almost frantic.
Suddenly realizing what she had said, Maryam tried to reassure her, while simultaneously raising her voice and becoming even more animated.
“Oh no no no no no! I just meant ‘here in the room.’ He’s here! He’s definitely here,” she said, wheeling her hands in wide circles. “Here, in the building. I mean, he has to be! We were told he was here. I mean, he couldn’t just disappear!”
She laughed, a little too loud.
“Although of course,” she continued, more to herself, “many did disappear because, obviously, it was an awful, awful regime.…”
Realizing that this was not what Lily wanted to hear, she wheeled around and headed for the door saying, “I’ll sort it out.”
“Is it wrong to say I’m starting to miss the party?” Lily asked her husband, who burst out laughing.
“Well, well,” she said. “I hadn’t seen you smile with that face yet. It’s a good face for smiling. You should use it more.”
“I make no promises,” he said.
“Are you all right?” she asked him.
“It’s just a shock,” he said. “Being back after all these years.”
“Is that all?”
He shook his head, and she gently laid her hand on his face and stroked his cheek with her thumb.
“It’s all right to not be all right,” she whispered.
“What am I going to say to him?” he asked.
“Well,” she said. “I’m going to start with ‘thank you.’ And see where we go from there. We owe him everything.”
Her husband nodded.
Maryam reentered. She seemed a different person, all the manic energy drained away.
“Sorry,” she said. “They sent him to the wrong room, and then he was tired out and needed to go back to his cell.”
She silently mouthed the words, Fucking Birna.
“Is he all right?” Lily asked imploringly. “Is he…”
“He’s fine,” said Maryam quietly. “He was just tired. They’re bringing him down now. Look. You should both know. He’s … he’s very old. And he’s not entirely…”
She sat down opposite Lily and laid a hand on hers.
“What I mean is,” she said slowly. “He probably won’t remember you.”
Lily was silent for a few moments.
“I see,” she said at last.
Her husband laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Well. We thought that might be the case,” he said.
Maryam had never met a long, somber silence she enjoyed and resolved to break this one.
“But…,” she said, suddenly standing and regaining some of her previous charge. “You have to look on the bright side. He is alive. And with all he went through that’s kind of amazing. That’s not what you want to hear.…”
She had seen Lily’s agonized expression but was unable to do anything about it as the speed with which she had stood had caused her to become light-headed and she swooned. Lily and her husband caught her and gently eased her into a chair while Maryam swung back to consciousness and apologized profusely.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said. “I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s just … ever since the revolution everything’s been so chaotic, everything’s changing and rushing forward and it’s all so new and free and wonderful and it all just gets a bit much sometimes I feel like I don’t have time to breathe…,” she said, clearly demonstrating her point.
“Have you eaten today?” Lily asked, concerned.
“No,” Maryam realized. “That could be it, too.”
Lily opened her handbag and took out a nutrition bar, tore open the wrapper and passed it to Maryam. The bar did not survive the encounter for more than a second.
“Ohhhhh that is so good,” Maryam rumbled through a hail of crumbs. “Yes. Oh I needed that. I’ve told the Ministry I’m staying on for another three months until things settle down. Then I’m gone. I’m leaving and never coming back. I am going to go to Paris and I am going to eat everything.”
“That sounds like a good idea to me,” said Lily’s husband with a smile.
“And then I am going to upload myself onto a sex site and fuck with a man with three cocks,” Maryam mused aloud. “Sorry. You don’t need to know that. I’m just very, very excited.”
She turned to look at them and there was a love-light in her eyes. She took both of them by the hand and squeezed tightly.
There were tears in her eyes.
“I’m just so glad you’re here,” she said to them, her voice hoarse and raw. “I’m so glad I got to meet you. It’s like the future is finally here. It finally came. And it’s wonderful. Also, when he comes, I’m going to have to leave the room, because I’ve done eight of these prisoner releases where families are reunited and I always end up crying, so I’ll just be outside. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m rambling. It’s just … it’s all been a bit much.”
Suddenly, at last, she fell silent.
The door had opened, and I had stepped into the room.
All three of them looked at me in shock. I had never been tall, but now I was the size of a child.
Eighty-seven years old, and with hair as white as a summer’s cloud.
I was almost blind, and walked with a pained, halting limp. And my face had changed greatly.
It was now lined, over and over and over, like a rough sketch, and the muscles of my face no longer seemed entirely under my control and twitched with restless, aimless energy.
I was followed by a guard, who gently shepherded me to the table, pulled a chair out for me and guided me down. That done, he laid a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
It was Maryam, again, who broke the silence.
She rose (more slowly, this time) to her feet, and produced a document from which she read aloud.
“‘Nikolai Andreivich South. On behalf of the Republic of Atropatene you are hereby pardoned of all crimes alleged by the Caspian Republican Government and you are to be released from this place effective immediately. Additionally, I would like to formally thank you on be…’”
She got no further as Lily rushed toward me and embraced me as tightly as she dared.
“Nikolai. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. Thank you. Thank you,” she whispered in my ear.
She had chosen the body she now wore because it bore a modest resemblance to the one she had taken to Caspian, but it was by no means identical. And yet, I seemed to recognize her.
“It’s you…,” I said with a soft smile.
Lily buried her hands in my hair and squeezed and kissed my forehead and wept with joy.
“Yes. It’s me,” she breathed. “It’s me. It’s me. I came for you in the end.”
That was Maryam’s breaking point, and she made her excuses and retreated to the corridor to compose herself.
“Don’t cry, Olesya,” I said. “Don’t cry.”
Lily’s face fell.
“No, Nikolai,” she whispered. “No. It’s me Lily. Lily? You remember me, don’t you?”
“Lily?” I said, a mere echo.
“Do you remember me?”
“Oh of course,” I said. “Of course. Wonderful to see you again.”
I was trying to be kind. They both knew it.
“Have they been treating you well?” Lily asked.
“Oh very well. Very well,” I replied with an innocent smile. “The new people. Very kind. To all of us. So young. They’re all so young.”
“They’ve done amazing things,” Lily’s husband said, addressing me at last.
He wouldn’t meet my gaze, however, and looked quite sick.
“Nikolai,” said Lily. “This is … well, this is my husband. You and he are going to have a talk now.”
“Oh. Hello,” I said to him, nodding politely.
“You two should be alone,” she said. “So I’ll just say … I owe you everything. I owe you so muc
h. And I can never, ever repay you. But I will try. I promise.”
She gave me one last embrace, and shot her husband a comforting look, and was gone.
There was silence.
“So,” I said at last. “You’re her husband?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“You’re a lucky man.”
“Yes. Luckier than I think you realize.”
“That was Lily. She was crying,” I said, suddenly realizing.
“Yes,” he said.
“It’s all right,” I said matter-of-factly. “She needn’t. I’d do it again.”
“I feel humbled,” he said, and sat down across from me.
“Gussie Niemann kept her word,” I continued. “I always wondered.”
“She did.”
“I suppose she’s dead now?” I asked.
“Oh no,” he replied. “We visited her, actually. She’s under house arrest while they figure out what to do with her.”
“Really?”
“Yes. She’s a complicated figure. Everyone here is still trying to work out how they feel about her.” He gave a gentle laugh.
“Not that I suppose you are,” he continued, more seriously. “I would imagine your feelings on her are quite clear.”
“You’re her husband?” I asked, having lost the thread and picked it up at an earlier point.
“Lily’s. Yes,” he said patiently.
“I’m glad you two were able to make it work,” I said. “You were very foolish.”
He looked confused.
“I’m sorry?”
“Leaving her. Coming here, of all places.”
Realization dawned on him and he looked away awkwardly.
“No. No. That’s not … I’m not who you think I am.”
He stood up and went to the window.
“I’m not Paulo Xirau,” he said after a few moments. “I’m … I’m trying to think of the best way to explain. Do you remember, Nikolai, you were standing on the tarmac? Watching Lily walk toward the drone?”
Like with most old men, the old memories were still as strong and real as stone.
I launched into a long and vivid recounting of the shoot-out at Ellulgrad International Airport.
When the Sparrow Falls Page 27