Off the Beaten Tracks

by Irina Bogatyreva

  Even from my gallery I could hear the hallways filling with ill-natured gossip. “You may not be able to see your neighbours, but always remember they are there,” says the Yakimanka rulebook, and how diabolically true that is. Even if your neighbour is out of sight, don’t overlook their existence. Even if you can’t hear them, remember they are aware of you.

  All of them were only too aware of Cara and me, and nobody more so than Sonya Muginshteyn.

  Sonya was the fourth person living in our room after Sasha’s expulsion. She was sane, which didn’t fit in with Lenka’s idea of a psychiatric clinic and led her to conclude that Sonya’s arrival was a simple mistake. I didn’t expect her to last long either, but we had underestimated her. She stayed and stayed and showed no signs of moving anywhere else. In fact it was Tolya who was crowded out. She was studying piano at the Conservatory and when she came home would practice on our piano. Tolya complained he could not sleep under it afterwards because she had so stirred up the instrument’s innards, which for many years had slept the sleep of the just, that it buzzed and groaned all night after Sonya had done with it. So he said and so he believed, and accordingly he ratcheted up his efforts to find himself a girlfriend with a place he could stay. He evidently succeeded, because there was no sign of him in the commune all the time Cara was there.

  Sonya was normal which, by the commune’s rigorous criteria, was synonymous with dull. For us a dull person was anybody totally ordinary. If that was not true of Sonya, we had no way of knowing it because she was very secretive, not to say uptight. She suppressed her emotions and feelings, never revealed whether she liked or disliked anything, and the result was that we assumed she disliked everything. The only expression we saw on her face was one of toleration. She seemed angular, as if all her movements were inhibited. People who look like that usually have stomach trouble. Giving them a hug would be as unpleasant as trying to cuddle a large white fish. When Lenka and I tried imagining what she wanted from life (and picturing nonsense like that was our favourite pastime) we quickly got bored and went to the kitchen for a cup of tea.

  We could not understand how Sonya could live as she did, however, so we didn’t lose interest in her. We observed her as a bizarre creature which in some ways resembled us but was in fact basically alien. She was incredibly hard-working and held down three jobs at the same time, which our indolence found deeply repugnant. She was economical with everything, even food, and would cook herself a bowl of plain porridge before retiring for the night. She drank a glass of tea in the morning and went to work. To people as self-indulgent and wasteful as us that seemed weird, and we speculated she must be scrounging meals at work off someone else. She was modest to the point of priggishness, wondered how we could live in the same room as boys and, after a first night spent on a fold-up bed in the middle of the room, told us her back hurt and she couldn’t sleep like that. At the time Lenka was sleeping in the bed for old times’ sake. She sniffed and relinquished it, and the same day Sonya brought a folding pink screen, which meant that now only I could spy on her sleep from my gallery. Sonya wore heavy pyjamas at night, which we children of the commune found very strange.

  For all that, we could not fail to notice Sonya’s aura of determination, tenacity and courage, and began to wonder whether all this self-denial was a means towards a goal of which we knew nothing. That dawning insight did not, however, make any real difference. For Lenka, with her susceptibility to nutters and punks, for our rampantly insouciant commune in general, Sonya was an outsider and knew it. We were never unkind to her and treated her like any other member, but she became increasingly uptight and, as a result, even more heroic.

  “We are delivered into the hands of the Pharaoh,” Sonya might have said, but she didn’t and the millennia of endurance of her people towered behind her scrawny figure. Our commune, however, took no interest in peoples, and indeed rarely showed any concern for its individual members. Cara, however, had come to change our world, and she began with Sonya.

  Sonya was extraordinarily tidy and had very few possessions. The wardrobe might spew clothes from our shelves, but Sonya’s things were in neat piles, as if on sale. She had almost no books but a few Snickers bars huddled forlornly on her locker shelf. She had a weakness for them and always kept a stock. Everybody in the commune had a sweet tooth and the concept of private property did not extend to food, but we never allowed ourselves to misappropriate Sonya’s chocolate. It was a matter of principle.

  Not for Cara. Somehow she sensed its presence and started helping herself. None of us ever saw her prising open the locker drawer, extracting Sonya’s treasures and making off with them. Nobody knew a thing about it, and Sonya said nothing.

  To her, Cara was an annoying pet, introduced on a whim for the purpose of giving her grief. When at home Sonya wore prim, long black skirts. Cara would jump happily up and down and hammer her beak on the hem as it brushed the floor. “Girls, do please keep your bird under control,” Sonya would say as she tugged her skirt away.

  When she played the piano, Cara would sit at the end squinting at the keys as Sonya depressed them. Sonya had big hands and long, thin fingers with flat white nails. Cara would sit for ages peering intently, and heaven only knows what she was seeing at that moment. “Girls, I can’t practise like this,” Sonya would finally say, getting up. “Your bird is disrupting my studies.”

  Unfortunately Sonya always complained in a way that made you not want to help her. She said nothing at all about the Snickers, and we would never have known about them if I had not been delving into the far end of the gallery one time when they came showering out with unmistakeable signs of Cara’s liking for them. “Oh, shit!” Sasha and I groaned and rushed out to the nearest kiosk for replacements, but that didn’t help.

  “Girls, please take these sweets away,” Sonya said that evening, laying our purchases out on top of the piano. “As you have evidently decided to feed your bird with my confectionery, you may as well be consistent about it.” Sonya enjoyed stoically suffering adversity and we understood the tragic nature of her people’s history, but she had fanned the flames of Yakimanka’s displeasure with Cara, and Yakimanka demanded Roma should intervene.

  “Hey, Titch,” Roma Jah called, knocking at my gallery, to which Cara and I had retreated to weather the storm. “Titch, I’m leaving tomorrow. You promised. There are rules, I told you.”

  The last rule is: “All of You – Love One Another. Let Your World Remain Yours and All Will Be Well.”

  Oh, Yakimanka, you seem to do everything in your power to make it difficult for people to love each other. A miracle flew in and you want to drive it away. A miracle flew in the like of which you have never seen before or ever will again but you don’t want it and want to drive it away.

  Cara looks calm. She knows everything. Outside the gallery Lenka’s head can be seen bobbing up and down with two lynx-like tufts of hair pointing in opposite directions. “Look, look!” she exclaims, brandishing Bram’s Lives of the Circus Animals. “The Great Raven can easily be trained to talk and even uses words intelligently.”

  Some day a miracle is going to fly in and say to you in human language that we are all up shit creek, and your response is going to be, “What a well-trained bird!”

  “Sasha, we’re not going to turn her out, are we?” “Don’t worry about it, Titch. Everything will sort itself out.”

  He lovingly loosens his chilli’s compost.

  Before everything could be sorted out, however, we needed another problem and that problem was that our only bed got broken. After five phone calls which got no further than the Psychiatric Clinic, the mother of the under-age punk got through to the commune and threatened to report Lenka to the police for child molesting if she didn’t stop seeing her son. “Loony,” Lenka snorted as she put down the receiver, and the next day she and her punk had their farewell tryst in the commune.

  When I came into our room I saw Lenka raising the legless frame of Sonya’s bed upright. “
We were rocking and a-rolling,” Lenka explained. “Never mind. She can sleep on the mattress.” The bed had long lacked one leg and rested on a solid circular dumbbell weight. Generations before Lenka, and indeed Lenka herself and Sasha, had ridden far from the wall on this bed in the course of a night and just pushed it back in the morning. The surviving legs had, unfortunately, not been able to cope with the punk’s onslaught.

  Lenka’s eyes gleamed feverishly. “We shall make an offering. Having the raven here will be perfect!” Cara and I consented to the rules. The bed was adorned with artificial flowers, fairy lights, and Lenka’s drawings of the Slavic deities. Milk, bread and cranberry liqueur were placed beside the altar and we knelt before it. Lenka was already the priestess of Devana and Cara started the proceedings by devouring the caplin sacrificed to her. We drank to the glory of Devana, but when Sasha also reached for the liqueur Lenka admonished him. “Draw back! This is a ceremony of woman. The gods will smite you!”

  Sasha withdrew in confusion, grumbling like the spirit of the hearth and went off to smoke a pipe with old Artemiy. The summer twilight was already filtering through our window as we continued to drink to the glory of all the gods of the forgotten ancient pantheon. The taste of the cheap liqueur separated unmistakeably into sour cranberry juice and mean-spirited alcohol. Cara perched on top of the altar, one eye on us and the other looking towards the door where Roma Jah’s rucksack stood ready for the road. Were you really thinking about that too, Cara? Were you really thinking?

  And then, right in the midst of our celebration, just as the moment was approaching for us to leap up and start beating the tambourines, Sonya Muginshteyn came in and switched on the light. “Hey, Sonya, come and drink with us to the glory of Rod and all the gods of Slavdom!” Lenka exclaimed, proffering her a toothglass.

  The memory of her forebears’ valiant struggle to enthrone the One God and their wanderings in the wilderness shadowed Sonya’s stolid face for a moment, but only for a moment. “I don’t drink,” Sonya said. “The gods will smite you,” Lenka said knowledgeably, but Sonya remained silent. Frankincense smouldered on the altar and I seemed to see the smoke of the fiery furnace of Babylon. “I shall destroy you!” Lenka screamed in a frenzy. “I shall sacrifice you on this altar to the glory of Devana, to Rod and all the great Slavic gods!”

  She shrieked so loudly and with such conviction that Sonya and I both believed her. That very day Lenka had bought a souvenir ritual knife which was tapered, ornately carved, and had a ring on the handle so it could be worn round the neck. It was extremely sharp although no larger than a bodkin. “The altar must be consecrated with blood,” Lenka said very calmly, cutting the palm of her hand. Ritual red drops dripped into the milk without dispersing. “To the glory of Rod!”

  “Girls, can we finally close this window?” Sonya asked. “I am catching cold, and if I’m going to have to sleep on the floor now that can only make things worse.” She took a step towards the window, but Lenka leaped to intercept her. “Dare not! Can you not see that is an Exit? It is not yet time. We must wait!” A tornado of scandal, long developing in our room, began to stir and finally to whip up the air. Cara hopped on to the wardrobe and loudly declaimed a collection of her words. “Karvarmant! Upkarts! Kampostors! Kartel! Kargather!”

  “This is all too much!” Sonya exclaimed, a note of irritation creeping into her voice for the first time. “This place is a madhouse! It’s all too much!” She left abruptly, while Cara swayed to and fro cawing, “Kalinik! Kalinik! Kalinik!”

  “Hurray! She’s learned to talk!” We jumped around jubilantly, but suddenly went quiet.

  We went quiet and a sudden sense of something ending came over us, through the crimson intoxication of the cheap liqueur, the outburst of outrageous behaviour and celebration. We were quiet and had a sense of time running out for this place, our rented home, our commune, our clinic, our temple of pagan mayhem.

  “Perhaps her name is Sarah really,” Lenka said, “and she just can’t pronounce the ‘s’.” “No,” I replied. “Sasha told me Kara means ‘black’ in Turkic languages.” Cara, Cara the Black, impassive messenger of destiny, it was at this moment, when a sense of doom came down upon our inebriate heads, that your time came.

  She glided over the room, strutted over to Tolya’s paintings propped up in the corner, looked them over with one eye and pecked out of the clay some crackers with which Tolya had inset his latest work. With her powerful beak Cara thumped them against the floor and gulped down the fragments. As if in a movie, at just this instant Tolya returned from his latest binge and appeared in the open door.

  I thought he would go ape over the picture, but he went ape over something else. “I know you, Sulfat Melyukov!” he yelled, stamping into the room. Cara cawed and immediately flew to the top of the wardrobe. “What brings you here, my angel?”

  “Who are you talking about?” “Sulfat, my dear friend, come on out!” Tolya groped around under the piano. “I know you’ve turned into your bird, you tricky old alky! I thought you’d croaked long ago, but here you are like a phoenix from the ashes!” “Who are you talking about, Tolya?” “Seiful Melyukov. Don’t you remember him, sitting by the pet shop on the Arbat with his animals, a raven and a monkey? They brought in the money to keep him in bread and vodka, and he was so pleased with life and told endless tales about Tamerlane.”

  We were dumbfounded. We knew who he was talking about. We remembered very well the weird wino who at one time haunted the Arbat. The monkey would dance and the raven would pull out fortune-telling cards. You could be photographed with them. Then he vanished. The Arbat changed. The street musicians and hippies vanished, to be replaced by a lot of pricey food and pseudo-Soviet mementoes. We stopped going there. As I looked up at her on top of our wardrobe, though, I did wonder whether it could have been our Cara whose malign eye followed passersby on the Arbat.

  “She can talk,” Lenka chimed in, and Tolya’s whole demeanour changed to that of a zealous entrepreneur. “You’ve struck gold! How can you risk keeping the window open? This is treasure, Klondike, and you’re on the verge of throwing the gold away together with the sand!”

  “Cara means ‘black’ in Turkish,” I reflected. “Could she be that very one? Tolya, perhaps we should give her back? She’s his livelihood.” “You are so not with it, Titch! Melyukov is dead, so it’s foolishness to want to meet him. Tomorrow it’ll be us on the Arbat, and we’ll tell the fortune of anyone willing to part with 50 roubles!” He legged it over to the window to shut it. “She will no longer be just Cara, but Cara the Black, Bird of Omen, Descendant of the Ravens of the Tower of London!” Tolya was on a roll. “Risking my life I climbed up to steal eggs from a raven’s nest and raise this bird! She first ate meat from my own hand!”

  Opening and closing the window in our room was a multi-stage process. First, everything had to be removed from the broad windowsill and then the piano had to be moved because it obstructed the window. He was doing all that as the realisation dawned on me of what precisely he was proposing. Having dawned, it became a thought, having become a thought it became a shriek of rage.

  “No way!” Tolya did not even turn around. “No way am I going to let you do that! She flew to me. She was looking for friendship, and you want to exploit her all over again!” “Titch, I knew you were impractical, but this is pure sentimentality!” I jumped over and grabbed his arm. “Stop right there! It’s supposed to be open. It’s Cara’s Exit. Roma said she can’t stay. This is her last day here.” “Roma won’t mind if we bring him in on it.” He flicked me off his arm like a raindrop.

  “Are you so short of money?” “I’m short of an interest in life.” “You clown! You sad waster! No way am I going to let you abuse Cara.” We hauled each other back and forth from the window. Cara took it all in, and then jumped down from the wardrobe and on to the windowsill. Tolya froze.

  “Don’t breathe, Titch,” he said, interposing his broad back between me and Cara. “Fly, fly away, my Cara,”
I enjoined her from behind his shoulder. “Fly, girl! There’s nothing here for you now!” “Shut it, Titch!” Tolya moved in very slowly, Cara showing no interest in him. She pecked casually at The Life of Circus Animals, then peered at him and suddenly leaned forward as if she might be about to fall. She squawked right in his face: “Goodbye, Revolution!”

  Stupefied, Tolya stopped in his tracks. Cara walked along the windowsill, stepped on to the piano, pecked at the root of Sasha’s chilli, felled it, and gave it a good shake before tossing it out the window. Tolya opened his arms wide to lunge for her, but Cara shot up to the ceiling, impacting with the light bulb which dangled there from its flex. It swayed wildly, shattered and rained shrapnel down on us. In the sudden gloom I saw the shadow of Cara slip out, silhouetted against the blue sky and green June poplars.

  “Stupid little idiot,” Tolya said without emotion, shaking tiny shards of glass from his hair. The dark blue sky of evening filled our room. Somebody knocked at the door and Sasha looked in to invite me to take the iron for its evening walk but his voice broke off in the twilight as he saw what had happened. “She’s gone, then?”

  “Yes, and taken your chilli with her,” Lenka retorted.

  What is there to be said about that? What can we say, Yakimanka, other than simply leave you to get on with your destiny as you leave all of us to get on with ours? So we went out, Sasha and I, to take for a final walk our big, heavy old communal iron with the vestiges of light fabrics baked to its soleplate. A strange feeling came over us. We were wordless and stared up at the sky where a shadow of vague foreboding flew above us like a remembrance of Cara.

  It was a long walk. We came to Red Square, we came to the Arbat, we strolled along boulevards, and the first intimations of dawn were appearing when we came upon Grand, who invited us to go East. We all but agreed on the spot, but said we would have to think about it first. What was there for us to think about, though, when we both knew it was Cara the Black who had led us to him. For it had been the shadow of Cara, we both believed, which had glided down to the bench, only when we ran over she wasn’t there and instead Grand was. Neither I nor Sasha at first told the other what we had seen.