272

Десять

I have run out of cigarette papers and Baba Slata’s boy has not been able to meet with the local trader, who is sick. I rifle through the pockets of my overcoat in the hope of finding an old packet, when I come across the notebook I kept as a soldier. The pages are curled and tatty and the notes are written in an anxious hand. On the first page, in capitals: ПОМНИТЬ MANCHESTER. It stirs a curious sensation in me, as though my fingers are outstretched, teasing the edges of some memory: despite its strange lettering, the word possesses the sweetness of a fable. When I ask Raisa if it means anything to her, she laughs and says,

—Perhaps it’s some utopian city you thought up, where Communists sing and dance all day.

She still teases me for my old, discarded beliefs, even though I have told her that I no longer imbibe the opium of Communism. I fear she is sad to think I may not believe in anything except chaos now. My sense of time is butchered; I have little faith in the future. I simply live in the day, moment by moment, and it is survivable only because of: waking to see her smile, our hands laced together, eating in unison, kisses and caresses, consoling embraces, whispers and confidences.

—Come on, my darling, Raisa coaxes me. —We must focus.

In Baba Slata’s office, we sit side by side with the pictures of waxwings on our laps. 273

Each bird has a crest like a Mohican and thick black lines around its eyes as though wearing too much make up. They are plump birds, tails yellow-tipped; the male’s chin is black, the female’s brown. A waxwing calls – zeeee and seeee and a shorter descending sweeew – but it does not sing.

I glance out of the window, the summer scene filling me with yearning. Cherry trees are shedding blossom, and flowers are bursting into colour. Just last week, a sleepy bear lumbered through our grounds. Yet we must remain inside. A few weeks ago, Raisa and I were in the mountain forest when we heard some guards close by. Baba Slata said it was unusual for them to come so close to the Solomonari, for the soldiers feared being cursed by the tribe, should they disturb their rituals. Raisa and I had fled in shock and hidden under a bristly juniper thicket, just three sazhen from them. We heard them mention our names. When they left, we crept back to the hut. I couldn’t believe we’d let ourselves grow so reckless and over-confident.

Seeing the CRG was a psychic blow to my recovery. My headaches and insomnia returned, along with a prickly, restless irritation. Raisa began painting an obsequious portrait of the Czar, her colours pale with fear. When I tried to gently coax her back into letting love flow through her brush, she found she could not. Her hands remained anxiously curled into fists.

I sense Raisa’s gaze on me and I return my focus to the picture, but the waxwing blurs before my tired eyes. It is Baba Slata’s rule that, in preparation for therapy, the animal must become our obsession. As the days pass and I achieve more focus, I can sense that a metamorphosis is taking place inside. It feels as though we are already avian, our human bodies heavy and clumsy, so that our desire to enter the waxwing’s light form seems less a foreign occupation and more a return to our true 274natures. There is always a risk, Baba keeps saying: you can uncouple your psyche from your body and fail to make the transition, leaving the soul to float around temporarily unanchored by flesh, which can result in a wane, sluggish hangover of spirit. I want to say that I do not believe in souls, but I bite my lip for Raisa’s sake.

Raisa’s anticipation is infectious. She talks eagerly of flying through clouds, soaring over treetops. Secretly, I picture a stray bullet from a soldier’s rifle piercing my wing, or an eagle swooping down, its claws tearing at my belly.

—Can we go to the Western Peaks, where my mother grew up? she asks. Her voice shrinks. —I do miss her. I miss her so much.

Two weeks later, Baba Slata pronounces us ready. We sit up in a hospital bed like an old married couple, sipping from chipped teacups. Raisa glances at me with bright eyes, and gratitude. I loathe the taste of the Grand Kuding tea, the papery twists that swim in its inky depths, like pellets in poison.

I gaze at Raisa’s profile. She slips down in the bed, succumbing eagerly to the boy connecting the wires from the telephone to pressure points on her forehead. Her optimism is both touching and terrifying. What if we find her elusive mother, only to discover a madwoman, or worse, a body? My breath catches at the thought of that double blow: of losing Lysander and her mother. I picture Raisa’s fluttering body spinning to the earth in shock, and surfacing in human form with a shattered heart.

Into the dark I spiral, as if reality is a shore I am drifting away from. As I become a witness to my thoughts, I feel a rising panic. 275

Who am I?

I am Jaimus.

I am Jaime.

As the dark pulls me deeper, a memory sidles in, of walking down the streets of Manchester in the sunshine with Raisa … 276

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I cry, Zee            zee

as above me appears

the face of a predator

in khaki camouflage, yanking

wires from my plumage.

Through the slits in the boarded-up windows

of this man-made animal that puffs steam and

trundles on tracks as though wishing for flight,

I can see

flashes of leaf-twig, the air becoming thin, water,

forests in the sky begging to be teased by wings.

I rock from

side to side

whimpering zee       zee       zee

still feeling for the word for

the word for

[ ]

is still fuzzy and zeezee zee is all I can sob,

knowing that my beloved is trapped in the next

compartment of this beast’s wooden ribs, which

chugs up the tracks to the

Czar’s palace.

A door clangs open and I am thrown

Into darkness.

I stretch out, feel my consciousness travelling down

my arm, tingling into my fingertips, finding their ends

which touch the damp walls.

My bed is the floor, but there is not enough space to stretch out in full, 283

to stretch my arms without feathers, my legs without feathers,

I can only curl up foetal, shivering as though in the womb of a dead mother.

The underbelly of the palace.

Help, that was the word I was looking for,

Help help help,

but zee zee zee may as well suffice – for all the good a sound will do in here.

Raisa

whose screams before they locked her cell

splintered my heart with a needling bleed.

The guard’s last words:

Think up a good story.