256

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I wait for Raisa to drift into sleep, before asking Baba Slata for a meeting in her office. Bears, marmots and pikas look down at us from the walls. I quiet my suspicion of her witchery, my fear of what she might have done to Raisa’s beautiful mind, for some warmth in her speaks to me; I ask her where she learnt her craft. She replies that she studied at the University of Smolensk for seven years and considers herself a scientist. I baulk at the idea. In my mind, scientists are men in white coats, men I trust, who analyse and label and weigh the world with their detached intellect, who do not dabble in the murky greys of mysticism. Scientists signal important progress from religion’s falsehoods, though I can concede that they have a moral duty, just as priests did in the past.

—Is it not dangerous for you to meddle with Raisa’s sanity? I ask.

—What I do here is a process of healing, Baba Slata asserts. —When Raisa was first brought here—

—Who brought her?

—My boy. He found her in the woods when he was hunting. She was in a terrible state, barely able to speak—

—When was this?

—Eight weeks back. I offered my healing to her. You must understand that for someone in this situation, escaping their 257everyday life is a relief. Raisa’s mind was full of cracks and fractures, she did not know who she was or who she wanted to be.

—And your methods, how are they healing her?

—It’s a very ancient therapy – one that has been used for over a century in the Ageyev villages. They used twine and incantations. To slip into the mind of an animal is рекуперативный: it connects you with nature, unifies, brings peace. In a primitive state, where decisions become instinctive, the intellect can stop scurrying – an overwrought mind can rest. An animal is at the peak of their evolution; a wolf has no further to go. But humans? We have not evolved into the beings we can be, we should be—

—Nonsense.

—It’s delusional to think that science has uncovered all there is to know. We once laughed at the idea of germs, and thought the man who spoke of them a lunatic.

—She nearly died, I say.

My heart still stammers when I think of that night. I blink hard.

—I might have lost my Raisa.

—You would not have lost her; she was always under my care and control.

—But she was bleeding …

—The wolf died; her body came to harm, but not Raisa. There are no wounds on her body. She was in the hospital this whole time, it was only her mind that followed the wolf.

—She does not seem well, she does not seem herself. I should take Raisa away right now and—

If I tell her that Raisa Florensky is wanted by the CRG, would she hand her over? I find her loyalties ambiguous; I am uncertain of her relationship to the Czar. 258

—You could do with this therapy yourself, my boy, you have the energy of a lion coupled with the anxiety of a quivering hare.

—Tsk! I retort.

Baba Slata’s mouth is a thin line but there is a softness to her eyes, as though she can see into my core. It reminds me of how I felt as a boy when I attended confession. It makes me want to weep and ask her what to do next: how to save Raisa, how to live. Instead, I swallow hard and rant a little more. But she does not respond and I begin to feel tired and foolish.

 

When I return to Raisa, I find her trying to draw. She shows me eagerly, and whispers that it is my portrait. Her style has changed. I am raw with the three years lost between us, like a rupture in a bombed bridge. I scan her face as though the new furrows between her eyebrows might enlighten me. I do not dare ask for her story of the missing past.

We eat some broth together as the sun sets, whispering softly, heeding Baba Slata’s warning not to disturb the other patients. I have been instructed, sternly, that our beds will remain at opposite ends of the hospital. I dislike obeying Baba Slata, but I respect the kindness she has shown us, even if she is a madwoman.

I kiss Raisa on the forehead. I tell her to sleep well and heal. Her nails claw my cheek softly and her eyes say there is hope for us. For weeks, my body has felt weak but now it thrums with desire, a paradoxical fever of healing. I fantasise about the burn of her skin against mine, her curves beneath my fingertips, her quivering breath against my lips. I want to weep in gratitude at whatever twist of chaos has briefly summoned order and 259brought us together. But my visions of a reunion are a precise resurrection of the past: the two of us back in Raisa’s flat in a dream of music and lovemaking. I cannot conceive how we can have a future beyond this madhouse.

 

Raisa is pale and slender and strange in her borrowed clothes. An old shawl is draped heavily over her shoulders, patterned with deer and ivy. Her lips look naked without the slash of lipstick, those plums and reds that she used to favour. There is a tiny cut on her mouth’s left side, still healing, from her time as a wolf. We sit in the office of animals. Baba Slata and the boy are doing their round of the patients.

Raisa seems more civilised today, less lupine.

—Eat your oatmeal, I encourage her, noticing that her bowl is only half-empty.

—And you eat yours, she chides me with a faint smile.

I long to hear her laugh. I realise I have not heard that sound since our reunion: that lovely wildcat noise, its throatiness.

Raisa sets down her bowl, and with dread I ask her:

—What happened, then?

—What about you? Her eyes flash to my left hand. —You’re still married, I see. And you have a beard.

—A beard? Well, yes. Do you like it?

—I’m undecided. What have you been doing?

—You go first, I reply, blushing, childish.

To begin with, she skates on the surface, speaking of how much she likes Baba Slata, of how this hospital is a kind refuge in a harsh landscape. She tells me that some CRG soldiers came last week and Baba Slata refused them entry, denying 260having ever seen or heard of a Raisa Florensky. She speaks of the weather and the first thaws of spring: the waxwing she saw through the window that morning, along with a single pink primrose in the snow. I interrupt her softly.

—Tell me everything, Raisa.

Finally, she begins:

When I came to her flat, three years ago, before she fled Bohemia, she was in a bad way. All the omens were terrible that day. Sole magpies; a black cat; her umbrella flaring open indoors. She was convinced that I was coming over to break up with her. (I am incredulous – how could she have imagined such a thing? But her voice is so fragile that I do not interrupt.) Then I had told her, carelessly, that her art did not matter. She thought it was the final sign: proof that I did not love her. As soon as I returned home, she packed up her belongings and left: it was a pre-emptive strike. She hitched lifts all the way to the border with Ruthenia. There were lines of refugees queuing on the other side: starving families, weeping children. She was heading against the tide. The guards laughed at her when she said she wanted to cross and she was turned away.

At a tavern nearby she secured a bed for the night in exchange for three of her paintings. Then, in the bar, a piece of good fortune: she met the viola player, Aleksei. The neighbour whom we had heard practising so many times. (I tense.) He had also tried and failed to cross the border; violas were outlawed in Carpathia. He had 261since been playing nightly at the tavern, and telling the authorities that it was a violin whenever he was questioned on it. Aleksei and Raisa laughed hysterically over his deception, and then, drunkenly, he mentioned that he knew of an empty flat in Bohemia, vacated by a cousin who had been arrested. They both moved there the next day.

It was a tiny, dank room. He slept on the bed, she on the floor; he got work at a local bar, she painted. They lived like that for years. She had won the ultimate freedom in her art. Her work would never be exhibited, and so she could be as political as she liked. Yet every portrait she produced looked just like me. (I squeeze her hand and she smiles.) Day after day she painted, until her colours ran low and had to be diluted, the portraits morphing from concentrated to washed-out to little more than sketches.

They had no money, and so, in desperation, she took a few of her portraits back to her old gallery. She found it swarming with guards. One forced her down to the stockroom, where various artworks were being catalogued. She came face to face with her paintings from Metamorphoses. The CRG officer said that he feared that it violated the Czar’s Code. Fortunately they were preoccupied, at that time, with more overtly subversive artists, so she evaded arrest; though this was the beginning of their campaign against her. She gave the officer a fake address, returned home and confessed all to Aleksei. To her surprise, he became angry, frightened that they would both be in trouble. She had been wrong in anticipating his loyalty; he was so worn down that all he could care about was his own survival. That is what the Czar reduces us 262all to, she adds. We’re all just surviving, making our way through the wreckage day by day. I can only really see this now that I am healed. I was acclimatised to suffering, before. She tells me she came to see me—

(What? I ask, shocked.)

She visited my music shop, and saw that it had been closed down. A neighbour informed her that I lived in a cottage on the southern row. She was halfway down the street when she saw Eleanor and me come out of the front door. Raisa was appalled at the sight of my uniform, for she could never have imagined I would become …

(Nor me, I reply, ashamed.)

She tried to contact her mother. An old friend said he thought she might have moved back to her birth village, Kryvorivnya, near the Czar’s palace. It was a journey that would take her three weeks. But after hitchhiking into the mountains, she lost her sense of direction. Baba Slata’s boy found her two days later, curled up in a hollow. She had pneumonia, and would have died, had it not been for Baba Slata. She brought her in, fed her, healed her.

Baba Slata told her that she could stay in the hospital in secret, that she had a special dispensation to treat souls in need of help: soldiers who were damaged by their duties, minds fractured by inflicting daily tortures. Her therapy involved healing through animal psychogeography, she explained. Raisa asked to inhabit a wolf.

(What was it like? I ask dubiously.)

It was like the world fell into pictures and became black-and-white. 263

The first thing I did was go into the mountains. I ran across the snow, raw and free, and my howls filled the valleys.

I was freed from mind; I was pure instinct. I knew the landscape intimately, as though I lived on the body of a lover. On the wind I could sniff a scent of rain that would fall an hour later; the threat of soldiers or a grizzly bear would give the air an edge I could taste. In the distant rustle of the forest I sensed food. The cycle of the day, the sun and the moon, the fall of shadows, became my clock. My heartache simplified to a pain in my heart. When it became too severe, I sought the valleys, running so fast that the snow passed in a white blur. I howled until the 264stars heard me. Beauty is a healer, and I once sat for hours and watched the slow shift of a sunset pattern across the bark of a tree. I found such consolation in the knowledge that even if men were busy destroying one another, nature continued to create with extraordinary detail and intricacy. Then, one day, I saw you. In the forest. You were pissing.

(I was out hunting for you, I laugh. I wanted to warn you, I would never have followed the CRG’s orders.)

I saw you and the dog in me surrendered. Raisa laughs, suddenly self-conscious. I wanted to follow you everywhere. Pathetic really.

I want to ask her more, about how it felt when the men came with their taunts and their knife, but she looks exhausted by her confession. I hold her hand, but her response is limp. She sits up.

—So you’re still with Eleanor? she asks, with a sudden swerve of subject.

—I am still with Eleanor because you left me. I had to make the best of things with her.

—But you were always telling me how much you liked Eleanor; you were never fully present with me.

I am shocked by the gap between our memories.

—I don’t remember that … I was jealous … I never felt like I had you! I would ask about your childhood, your mother, but you never wanted to let me in. You were always so distant.

—Eleanor will be missing you now.

Raisa pulls her hand away from mine.

—I’m not going home. I was a terrible soldier, it was all 265such a farce. I only joined because of – because of Eleanor. We needed the money, we needed to protect ourselves …

Raisa looks at me for some time, then touches my beard.

—You’ve changed so much.

I sit very still as she traces the scar on my forehead.