237

Пять

On my return home, the wolf follows me from Bohemia all the way to my cottage. As I enter the kitchen, claws echo my footsteps on the tiles. I cannot leave the door ajar, for the wind is too sharp, the cold too cruel, so I close it after him, swallowing. The wolf sits watching me like a faithful dog.

Eleanor is out shopping, and so I hurry to the next room and uncover the gramophone, before crawling under the bed, prising open the wonky floorboard, and unwrapping the record that I keep in a false sleeve. In the kitchen, I set the gramophone down on the floor and wipe off the dust. I place Scriabin’s 24 Preludes, op. 11 on the turntable and crank the arm. I lie down on the floor; I am too exhausted to make it to my chair. The tiles are a delicious shiver against my back. The wolf lies down next to me, and I am glad of the warmth of his body, for I have not an ounce of energy to stoke a fire. Piano flurries and trills and polyrhythms rain down on me, blurring my cares …

I whisper to the wolf that he seems like a creature from a fable. My mother told me bedtime stories of an abandoned boy who was brought up by a pack in the forest, and who grew to be a grizzled and able hunter. He loved his substitute father so deeply that their spirits merged into one, a boy-wolf who howled and sang songs in honour of the Czar.

—I will call you Vuk, I whisper to the wolf, —after Raisa’s 238favourite Carpathian painter. She painted me. She painted me a hundred times.

She painted herself into the pictures too: in one, her shadow hovered over mine; in another her self-portrait was a framed sketch behind my silhouette. I laugh and the wolf gazes at me, his eyes dark and beautiful. Together, we lie and listen, slipping in and out of sleep, to a score that carries a death sentence.

I drink in the music I once listened to with Raisa, nose to nose. I would say to her —Note how Scriabin likes to combine a crescendo with an accelerando, and she would say —Prelude two feels like sitting in a white room feeling lonely, and I would say —The five-note harmonic clusters create a sound like bells pealing, and she would say —They sound like clouds gathering. Number 4, that was the prelude she loved the most. The wild piano flurries, she said, made her feel —like I’m in a spring garden, and it’s raining, raining through broken sky and sunshine, and I would kiss her and tell her she was the best critic I knew. Her breath would be loud above the whisper of music, another instrument weaving into the eighths …

—Jaimus?

A blast of icy air. Eleanor is wide-eyed and pale-faced at the sight of us. A loaf of bread falls from her basket and hits the floor. I sit up. The wolf is on his haunches.

—He’s harmless.

—Wolves cannot be tamed.

I get up, ready to demonstrate that she is wrong. But then his body tenses, his fur stiffens, and a low noise emerges from his throat that sounds supernatural. I pat him, and his jaws snap.

As he passes Eleanor, she hisses. There is a black blur as he strikes her. Her shrill cry rings out, and the wolf bounds across the snow and into the woods. 239

Three lashes on her hand, dropletted with blood.

—I’m so sorry, I say.

—Turn that music off! she orders, glaring at the gramophone. I pick up the bread and for the next fifteen minutes she speaks of nothing but the wolf. An anger grows inside me and I nearly make the argument that the wolf absorbed her fear, and became what she wanted him to be, for I have seen this happen with enemies of state: men frequently become what we accuse them of, such is the danger of imposing a narrative on to people.

—For God’s sake, Eleanor. The Czar says wolves are sacred. What is this blasphemy?

She falls silent, blinking fiercely, then mutters, —But it hurts.

Then I recall Raisa’s portraits, the love in her brushstrokes, and I run and get some disinfectant and wash her wound with tenderness.

—Is this man at all familiar to you? Fyodor asks me. He slides one of the more realistic portraits on to my desk.

—I am not sure, I reply, staring hard. —I don’t think so, but I can check the lists for Bohemia again.

I wonder: Is this a game?

The next week I am moved from active duty to an office little larger than a prisoner’s cell, without explanation. For five days I tussle with the composition of a decree from the Czar advising that the semicolon has been banned in all books, public communications, leaflets and newspapers. Any sinful semicolon must now be erased or painted over. In establishing a narrative as to why this mark of punctuation is so 240villainous, I declare that ‘THE SEMICOLON HAS BEEN APPROPRIATED BY COMMUNISTS’. Its dot and curl imply a secret signal, a sarcastic wink flashed at the Czar, though in truth it looks to me more like a tear falling from an eye. I know that the semicolon originated in music scores, the medieval punctus versus, but in my story, the semicolon was born in the broth of a witch’s cauldron in Ageyev, where a frog’s eye combined with a dog’s tail to form its shape and structure, and so it became the keynote of wicked incantation. AND NOTE HOW MANY TIMES IT APPEARS IN THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, I add (of that I have no idea, but, since it is a banned text, nobody can check).

I want to howl with fury at the masses who will devour this bedtime story. Once, the public believed that priests could shape the chaos of life into a beginning, middle and end. Then, they fired God and put their faith only in the Czar. To think that I once argued with Raisa over Communism, believing it could bring about a utopia, were it to be imposed on the innocent population. I’ve come to see that politics is dependent upon people; it can’t be imposed on them. The Homo sapiens is a Homo stultus.

The four walls of the office seem to shrink. There are the distant echoes of interrogations. I remember a time when, after closing up the music shop, I might spend all night composing with my yukuri, the moon our muse.

Every thud of boots in the corridor brings the terror that a voice might shout,

—Raisa Florensky has been apprehended!

I dread what tortures they will taunt her with, what tortures 241I might endure when I attempt to intervene. I dread we will find ourselves in the Czar’s dungeon where rumours say the torments are greater than flays, whips, hissed threats or electric instruments; the interrogated are laid on a bed, connected by pipes to Dante’s Inferno, induced by a strange drug to enter its world, where they are escorted into the circles of Hell, driven mad by demons, left with fractured black minds and no sense of what is real or dream anymore.

Then, on the sixth day of this new posting, Fyodor enters the office and says I am needed tonight, at Garmoshka tavern, a bar our terrorist habitually frequented.

—Isn’t that the place where you used to play?

I start.

—Oh, yes. Long before the CRG. And just once or twice, I stammer, for I had thought that my past was safely past.

When he leaves the office, a trembling accosts me. I know they are running background checks on suspects; am I now one of them? I attempt to work, but my pen is without spine.

—I have not seen any waxwings this year, I say, making conversation as we begin the walk to Garmoshka tavern. —Have you? They would normally have migrated back here by now. The snowmelt never seems to come.

Fyodor just nods, staring straight ahead, cold as the landscape.

—We ought to avoid taking pleasure in the music tonight, I say, changing tack. —If we are able to find Raisa Florensky, 242then good. Otherwise, we are there to ensure that every piece is respectful to the Czar.

Do I sound too formal? I crave the gleam of yellow eyes following me. On the horizon, a blood sun is setting.

There is euphoria in my fear. For the last week, ever since Raisa became our target, I have felt as though my feet were clenched on a narrow tightrope. Sometimes I look down and feel doomed; at others I am pierced with a perverse, giddy exhilaration. I’ve been a soldier long enough now to know that I will fall. I’ve seen the bravest of revolutionaries weep in interrogations, and become spectres in the palace dungeons. The Czar always wins. But since the loss of Raisa, my life has narrowed to an existence that is not worth saving. If they come for us, we must end our lives together; a noble death would be better than torture. Now, when I picture myself putting a bullet in my head, a bullet in hers, the splatter of blood is triumphant. At least I will have found her before death; I only long to kiss her and hold her one last time before the end.

Then I think of my mother receiving the letter with the Czar’s seal, of the story they will compose, and reality feels raw.

 

I warned myself that the tavern would not resemble my memories, but even so, its degeneration brings me sadness. Winds hiss through holes in the roof; buckets collect snowslush; the tables teeter on nervous legs. The building has the air of a suspected enemy of the state on the verge of collapse. The server at the bar does not recognise me, which I find both dispiriting and a relief. Our coats cover our uniform, but she detects who we are at once. Everyone else but us is served, 243until Fyodor slams down his ID on the table and cries, —Two kvass!

He flicks her a picture of Raisa, but she claims to have never seen her in this tavern. We sit down. In Fyodor’s presence I suffer adolescent shame and embarrassment. I want to announce to the irritated clientele that I hardly know him, to trumpet that I once played on that stage. I do not allow myself to look at the wonky table in the corner where we sat so close that our skins kissed. Is she close by? Hiding behind the green baize curtains on the stage? Watching from the wings?

A poet enters the stage and reads his verse. Fyodor’s glass freezes midway to his lips. It’s a poem within a poem, a critique of the Czar – I fear an arrest. But Fyodor applauds violently and the poet nods, a trace of disappointment in his smile at the CRG’s inability to perceive irony and subtext. Next time the message coiled within his rhymes will have a fraction less skin.

The next performer takes to the stage.

—Hang on, what’s this?

Fyodor eyes up his instrument.

—It’s a yukuri, I say. I feel a leap of recognition when I look at its beak, but it is not mine: the strings look different, thicker, as though plucked from a different horse.

—It looks like something from a fable, Fyodor observes as the playing begins.

I can sense the hostility towards us from neighbouring tables, locked tight in the faces of men and women who came here tonight anticipating escape.

—They were bred by the Enet forest tribes a hundred years back, I say quietly. —Carpathian waxwings are infused into the wood as they grow up, which becomes a sort of caged nest to them. 244

Their duet begins with an eruption of sweetness, like the first day of spring. For weeks, I have been reaching for the past. Now, as the music pierces my body, I experience a regression to a truer self, as though I am shedding the hard layers of skin I have acquired in the intervening years. Around me, saddened faces and tired eyes are touched with light, and united in transcendence. My hatred for humankind – for our stupidity and docility – dissolves into a profound sense of humanity. Raisa did not leave because of me; she left because of the state. The fierce beauty of what we shared was real, but it could not survive the blows of politics. I have always cherished a naive belief that love is an ideal immune to state oppression, but the venom of exhaustion and poverty and constriction that poisoned our love was not unique to us. The state has broken up families, made men homeless and oppressed women. Its rules have rendered music bland, and poems aborted. And with love’s loss has come a collective masochism, a desire for more laws, so that all are oppressed as we have been oppressed; all punished as we have been punished; and hatred has begotten hatred—

—Enough!

Fyodor climbs on to the stage, puncturing the mood.

—Do you have a licence for this instrument?

The yukuri bird keeps playing. The musician gently holds his claws still.

—I have not been informed that I need a licence.

Whispers in the audience. The press of eyes on me like knuckles.

I want to gather semicolons into a ball and hurl them at Fyodor.

—Section 8b of the Czar’s Code: each musical instrument shall only be played if the musician is granted a licence. Such 245licences must be renewed on a yearly basis, he recites. Under pressure, he often becomes a textbook ventriloquist. —I’ll take it for now.

—You can’t – he is my only company since my wife left me, he is like a child to me.

—You will get it back. You can give my colleague your address and collect it in three days’ time, by which time we will have issued the correct licence.

The yukuri player appeals to me.

—He needs to be fed Shostakovich and five beetles a day.

I promise that we will take care of him. I can feel Fyodor’s eyes boring into me. He declares that we must leave. He has forgotten Raisa; the small fuss of red tape and bureaucracy is his aphrodisiac.

The next act, a singer, climbs on stage, but the atmosphere is ruined. I tell myself that it is good that we did not find her: it is a sign that she is being careful; she might even survive this hunt. But my heart is breaking, for I must return to Eleanor knowing that nothing has changed, that this moment has been nothing more than a near miss.