Chapter 23
Tall, ferocious and dark
“Not all who make love make marriages”
– Zhanna Petya
Nancy has fought with the darkness and the light her whole life. When she was fourteen, she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the river, just to see what that pull felt like. She stiffened against the cold shock as she walked directly into the water. The river turned her sideways and she slipped out of her coat. The current pulled her downstream and when she finally crawled out of the water, it took her two hours to walk home. Explaining to her mother that her coat was at the bottom of the river was not something she wanted to do. So she said it was stolen when she was by the river playing.
It wasn’t that she wanted to die; she just wasn’t sure she wanted to live. With the first tug at the weight of her coat, Nancy felt a rush of peace; a kind of relief. As if the river was whispering, ‘It’s okay, just let go.’ Her mother would not let it go. She wanted to know who stole the coat, and why she was at the river. They were not rich and now they would have to buy a new coat and they had no extra roubles for this nonsense. Winter was coming. It was when her mother switched suddenly from frustrated and angry, to caring that Nancy broke. Her mother had paused, reframed, and asked a question. “Are you okay?” Nancy inhaled sharply at the softness of her mother’s voice, and then told her everything. She told her she was in the river with stones in her pockets. She said it was because she wanted to see what it felt like. It was not that she wanted to die. It was curiosity. She begged her mother’s forgiveness for losing the coat. She was sorry.
“Forget the coat,” her mother said. “I am happy you are alive and in the world. You are more important than any coat.”
She will never forget her mother’s eyes, the brimming tears and the hollowed out sadness. Her eyes were lost in a place beyond sadness – a place so desolate that coming back was just a faded question mark. It was entirely plausible her mother’s eyes would never escape this sadness.
The doctor at the clinic, who spent a distracted hour with Nancy, called it depression and prescribed antidepressants, which augmented her periods of euphoria but did little for the darkness. Nancy was abnormally gleeful and energetic for periods of time, and then she was sleeping and curled up in her bedroom for the following weeks. There was only light, and only darkness, for her. The light was never gentle. There never seemed to be dim light, twilight or dawn. It was either full-on sunlight, or 3 a.m. darkness with nary a hint of the moon. She did not tell the doctor about the sound of the wings. Nor did she tell him about the swings from energetically happy to morbidly down. He only asked her about the river and the stones in her pockets, and if she’d ever tried to kill herself before.
“I wasn’t trying to die,” she said, crossing her arms across her chest. “If I was trying to die, I would be dead.”
“What were you trying to do?”
“I wanted to see what it felt like. That’s all.”
The doctor considered this. “Do you think there is more truth in one’s actions, or in one’s words?”
Even at fourteen years, she could recognize a leading question. “Depends on the actions,” she said. “Depends on the words.”
“Don’t mess around, Nancy,” Ray says. He tries to force his voice to sound normal but he has no idea what it sounds like. It’s probably too relaxed. His heart is pounding and he is afraid to look up. She’s joking. She must be joking. She’s saying this to shock him. She wants to scare him.
“I’m not messing around. I want you to understand how serious I am about us, and about the life we could have had.”
Ray tries to glance up at her building, twisting his neck to look out and up through the car window. “It’s not like you to say stuff like that.”
“If I wanted to be dead, I would be dead already, Ray.”
“Then what’s this about?”
“It’s about meaning and meaningless.”
“Meaningless?”
“Yes. This life. My life is meaningless. We’re born, we take a few breaths, and then we die. It’s pointless.” She hears the sound of wings – the soft wiff, wiff, wiff sound, and turns quickly toward the open air beyond the balcony. It sounds as if a bird of some kind has flown over the balcony. A raven or a crow. Something big. She looks into the sky but sees nothing but grey upon grey.
“It’s not pointless. It’s just confusing,” Ray says. “And maybe absurd.”
“What?”
“Okay, life is definitely absurd, but…”
“…fuck, Ray. How is this comforting?”
“Are we having a conversation? Are we? Because absurdity and pointlessness are two completely different things.”
“Why would you say this? Why would you go there? I’m depressed. I’m sad. I’m really depressed, and you’re giving me a lecture on existentialism. My country produced Dostoyevsky. You think I don’t recognize an existential argument when I hear one? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Well the line between pointlessness and absurdity is a delicate thing.”
“Delicate,” she says. “My brother used to call me his nezhnaya devushka. This is what he called me when I was little, his delicate girl.”
“Your brother?”
“Yes. My older brother.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Ray says.
“I have a younger brother and sister too, twins. They are still in Kursk with my mother.” She hears the wings again and this time she does not bother to look.
She thinks about her mother’s kitchen and the picture of the angel Gabriel. Many of the angels were hanging in the house, including Michael, Raphael, Uriel, and Barachiel. There was an image of an angel in her bedroom that had ferocious eyes. Her mother said it was the angel of truth but she never gave that angel a name.
“Sometimes I feel as if there is an angel standing beside my bed as I am sleeping, wishing for peace, or praying for love, or just being holy. Maybe I am dreaming it. I don’t know. But I will feel it so strongly that sometimes it wakes me up. And for a spilt second, as I open my eyes, I can see her standing there. For a fraction of a fragment of a second I think I can see this angel. And then I can feel all that remains of her. Do you ever get that, Ray? Do you ever feel as if someone is watching?”
“You believe in angels?”
“I believe there are many things I can’t understand, yes. And many more things I can’t see, or touch. Perhaps not angels, but the possibility of something intangible.”
“Okay.”
“My angels are not cute Hallmark card angels, Ray. They are tall, ferocious and dark. Or they are quiet and threatening and sad.”
“Those kind of angels I can get behind,” Ray says. The disappearing woman on the elevator. What did she say her name was? She was tall and dark, and perhaps she was ferocious.
“My mother had pictures of angels all over the house. They were beautiful and terrifying. Russians and their Orthodox Churches are crazy for angels. There’s something stoic about them that matches up with the Russian soul.”
She can’t believe she’s actually defending angels. Her mother’s unquestioning belief in angels of all sorts was an irritated sore spot between them.
If this book were truly backwards, you would already know what happens. You would know if Nancy jumps, or not. And you might be curious to see what happens next. You would be riding the climax toward a denouement. You’d be on the downward slope. Despite the backwards conventions of structure, this narrative is not backwards. Do not try and read this book in the ascending numerical order of its chapters. Even though the numbers are counting down in a form that is perfectly backwards, the story moves from beginning to end. This flipped around order is just another lie.
Perhaps the Kapitán is sitting at the simple wooden table and it is warm in front of the stove. He is slurping spoonfuls of thick borscht into his mouth. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is open on the table and he is reading as he eats. In the dacha, he reads from a collection of books he found on a bookshelf, and he chops wood. He reads Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and Injured. He re-reads The Master and Margarita. He re-reads The Sun Also Rises. He reads Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. While he is reading, he limits himself to one drink a day. On the days after he finishes a book, he is drunk before noon and stays drunk until he passes out and sinks into a tossed and turned sleep. He will do this every day until he picks up a new book, and once again begins to read. While he is reading, he has hope. Between books, he is without hope. Once a week, in a neighbouring village, he buys two loaves of black bread from a bakery, provisions to make borscht, and more vodka. He had fallen into the habit of thinking about his vodka as not simply two more bottles, but rather, two more “bottles of forgetting.”
The Kapitán has been AWOL for two months. He walked away from his posting without warning, and he disappeared effectively. Even if the military investigators were looking for him, which they weren’t, they would find no clues. They assumed he had disappeared permanently. They assumed the Kapitán was a suicide and that his body would not be found, or it would be found and no one would care. Other men who performed the duties of informing families of the deaths of their fathers, husbands, and brothers similarly disappeared. Many backed away from the darkness of the duty. Some took their own lives. Few were able to do it for as long as the Kapitán. They assumed wrong. Anatoly was very much alive, but he was also slowly killing himself as he went through bouts of bingeing vodka followed by brief sober periods, and then bingeing again. He knew his liver was failing but he was thirsty for the bliss of not feeling anything, and dulling his memory. On most days, his thirst for numbness and forgetting outweighed his thirst for life.
There were days when he was almost happy in his isolated dacha in the woods, with his soup, the books left by the last resident, and the grey Russian days of winter. He felt as if he’d been dragging a massive weight around for years, and now that cement block was diminished. It was still there but it was less.
Two days ago it warmed up to above freezing and he built a small fire outside. He took a cup of tea and his book, and leaned against the wall of the dacha. There were chickadees in the spruce trees and Anatoly watched them, listened to them and they made him smile. He did not think he would smile again before he died but the sound of the birds fretting in the trees, and their flying back and forth above his head, was an inexplicable joy. They were busy and loud in the forest. The cruelties and sorrows of the world did not concern the birds.
He placed another chunk of wood onto the fire and for the first time in a month, Anatoly checked his wrist for his watch, to see what time it was. It was an involuntary impulse. The watch was gone, of course. He remembered giving it to the girl. He’d bent down and put it in her hands. He was not sure if it was a gesture of kindness. It was probably something else. Something like a resignation, or a retreat, and an unspoken desire for forgiveness. It was most likely a desperate attempt to push back against the darkness. He remembered this particular girl. Her questioning eyes, her confusion, the fact she probably didn’t quite understand what his being there meant. But there was something about her eyes. They were deeper and older than they should have been. It was as if she’d been through these sorts of deliveries before. As if she knew, not on the surface, but three levels down.
His father had given him the Vostok watch, and now the girl had it, and he hoped it would move with her through time. He had no more need for it. Except just then, because the birds had loosened something in him and he had looked for it. He had wondered about the time. The sound of the birds had caused him to come back into the stream of time after months of a routine that put him slightly outside minutes, and hours, and days.