Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (65 page)

Jamie began to fall, the walls of the ice castle crumbling around him into grey, formless mist. He tried to grab for purchase, but there appeared to be no walls, no solidity in this place that Casey’s shout had banished him to. Then without warning, he hit and hit hard, as though a wave had spewed him onto a rocky shore. Above him was a Russian voice—a female, agitated. Each eyelid felt weighted with lead and he couldn’t find the strength to wiggle a finger.

An inch at a time, his spirit and his body rejoined and he became aware of his surroundings. The smell of antiseptic, the strange hissing silence that always seemed to reign at night in infirmaries and the scratchy wool of the blankets that covered him—no mistaking that for sable. The camp. Inside him something bowed its head in despair, for he had not escaped. It had been a dream after all.

He tried opening his eyes, but it was a Herculean task, and he was feeling anything but mythological at present.

“Don’t try to move, Yasha, you’re very weak—here.” Around him the blanket was loosened slightly, the pillow under his head fluffed.

It was too quiet and he wondered where the soft shoe of the aide was, the occasional clatter of instruments or bottles.

“Where?” he croaked, and though he felt he was shouting, it emerged only as a reedy whisper.

“We’re in the infirmary,” said the woman, confirming his suspicions. “You’ve been in and out of consciousness ever since Gregor found you. You had a terrible fever from where you were stabbed. Don’t you remember anything?”

He shook his head, a mistake as it turned out, because a pain like lightning ripped through him. A cool hand on his forehead steadied him.

“Violet?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“I… but…”

Confusion was ribboning in and out of his synapses still, dark and sinuous, twisting the real from the perceived. With it came an odd sense of desolation as though he had lost something immeasurably precious, something that had never been intended for him but was no less yearned for despite the fact. Yet he could still feel traces of heat on his body, like lines of passion written into his skin, yet it had not been real. Or had it?

Violet was slowly swimming into his line of sight, copper hair smooth as a shell against the curve of her face, the grey eyes dark with worry. Her hand still rested on his forehead.

“We thought you were going to die. You scared the hell out of Shura.”

He took her hand, and the scent of water lilies hit him as hard as a slap to the face.

“You should rest,” she said quietly, and he knew it was a delicate avoidance of the look she had just seen on his face.

He did not protest, for he was indeed very tired. Before Morpheus drew him down to that deep place of healing, Jamie felt once again the bruised bones of his hands. And for a moment he brought those same hands to his face and smelled the scent of strawberries and love.

And then he slept, no more to dream.

Chapter Forty-seven
March 1974
Katya

He came back to an awareness of his world slowly
, the first truly conscious moment arriving in the wee hours when the dark was so profound he could not at first see anything. He sat up, head spinning, but needing some form of movement in the suffocating, visceral darkness, like a blanket laid over his face that he could not push away.

In the far corner a frail light glowed, a candle’s worth, curling into a small portion of the night, and lighting it as valiantly as such a tiny light could. He could see a hand at the edge of that glowing pool, a hand crabbed and broken, bent around the handle of a smoking kettle. He was grateful that it was Nikolai who was present when he awoke.

The old man shuffled over to him, his slow gait belying the powerful presence that moved with him everywhere.

“You are awake, Yasha Yakovich,” Nikolai said and put one gnarled hand to Jamie’s brow. “You are much cooler. This is good. For a while we are worried that your brain is cooking.”

Cooked was how his brain felt, Jamie thought. But all things considered, it was preferable to dead which, he was aware, had been the only other alternative. The area between what was real and what was not still seemed like a strange no-man’s land. And he wasn’t certain which side of it he was on yet.

“I am making you tea,” Nikolai said, before sitting heavily on the stool next to Jamie’s bed. He smelled comfortingly of pinesap and tobacco and the sweet cut of fresh snow.

“How long have I been asleep?” Jamie asked.

“For more than a week. Today was the tenth day of your great slumber.” Nikolai chuckled and then coughed, his lungs crackling like frosted leaves underfoot. Jamie winced. Nikolai’s lungs were getting worse by the day.

He could smell the tea as Nikolai poured boiling water over the leaves. Every sense seemed heightened, as if he could smell the Indian hills where the tea had been grown and taste the soil where its roots had taken hold. The heat of it was almost more than his mouth, still sensitive from the fever, could bear.

He was horribly weak and tired and drifted off shortly after drinking half the tea. When next he woke it was late afternoon and dark again, but not as dark as it had been the previous night. Shura was there when he woke, having just come in from the dining hall, a soft halo of melting snow on his thick black hair and shoulders.

“I’m being allowed a long recovery time,” Jamie observed in an effort to avoid the steaming cup of green sludge Shura presented him with a few minutes later. Shura, however, was having none of it and forced it on him.

“All has changed on the outside while you have been dreaming, Yasha. We have a new camp commander. As far as such things go, he seems like a fair man, not insane like our previous boss.”

“Why—when did this happen?” Jamie asked, sitting up in the narrow cot.

Shura smiled. “It seems, friend Yasha, you have angels on your side. When you are well, you will meet the new commander.”

Twenty minutes later, Jamie had managed to choke down the vile concoction that Shura insisted would restore his strength much faster than if it was left to his weak non-Georgian constitution. Then he managed to convince Shura that if he didn’t soon shave and wash, they would all wish he had expired. Shura set him up with a basin of hot water, soap and a razor in a screened off corner of the infirmary.

Jamie was horrified by the weakness in his limbs and how erratically his heart beat from the short walk across the infirmary floor. He managed an abbreviated shave and a barely adequate wash before succumbing to the bed once again. He fell back to sleep almost immediately.

He awoke in the wee hours to find Nikolai sitting vigil once more.

Nikolai had made him tea again, not as strong as the
chifir
that Gregor liked to drink, but not far removed from it either. The brew tasted as though it had been strained through a smoked fish before landing in his cup. It was, however, hot and bracing, so he drank it down.

Nikolai pulled the wooden stool that Shura used over to the side of the bed and sat his rangy frame down upon it. “I would speak to you, James.”

“Of course,” Jamie said, the use of his name in its Anglicized form seeming foreign to him now.

“We are thinking you will die, James, and I realize this makes me very sad. For very long time I have been detached. It was necessary not to care when people came and went, whether released from prison or put under the ground. I have lived a very long time, and so there have been many, many people I have known who are now gone. But I realize I care about you, and I find this strange. I ask myself why this one Irish boy? What is so special or different that you can’t just shrug and cut same amount of wood tomorrow, whether he lives or dies? Why should he matter?” Nikolai sighed. “I still do not have answer to this question, James, but I think it does not matter so much why I care, just that I do.”

Nikolai then came to the heart of what he wanted to say. “You are good with stories, and so I think to myself that maybe I need to tell this man my story so he can keep it inside him and carry it out of this place.”

“Is there something in particular making you think that I’m more likely to leave this place than you are?” Jamie asked.

Nikolai arched a grizzled eyebrow at him. “You will outlive me if nothing else, Yasha Yavovich.”

“That,” said Jamie, “is rather debatable at present. However, I would be honored to hear your story, Nikolai Ivanovich.”

Nikolai rummaged about in the pocket of his threadbare winter coat, emerging with a battered flask that contained, Jamie had no doubt, some of the rotgut vodka that was brewed inside the camp.

He unscrewed the cap, took a healthy slug, sighed and passed the flask to Jamie, who eyed it with trepidation. The vodka brewed in the camp wasn’t subjected to any sort of alcohol limitation, so it wasn’t impossible that it could blind a man. On the other hand, one did not refuse vodka from the hand of a Russian. It was considered bad manners of the worst sort.

He had to bite down on a gasp as the searing liquid tore straight down to his stomach and did away with its lining. He handed the flask back, knowing it was fruitless to hope it wouldn’t be passed to him again. The only thing Russians liked better than their vodka was poisoning someone else with it.

There was a small silence as Nikolai stared down at the flask in his hands, as if seeking the correct place to begin his story. Stories, Jamie knew, were like that. They required the right words to begin, for if they were begun with the wrong words they would quickly go awry and wander down pathways they were not meant to.

“I have lived in camps such as this much of my life,” Nikolai said. “But I was born in St. Petersburg. Those of us who lived there simply called it Piter, though you may know it as Leningrad. And once, once I was such a musician. I played the piano, or it played me—as a good instrument will.”

Jamie could not help but flick a glance down at the man’s twisted, broken hands.

Nikolai saw the look, brief as it had been. “They were not always so. Once they were rather beautiful, the hands of a musician, straight and long. Then they were broken during an interrogation.”

Jamie looked at him enquiringly.

“I think that tale is not one that needs telling, and I am easily distracted these days, so allow me to return to my original story.” He cleared his throat and took a breath, sending a crackle through his lungs. He hit his chest with a blunt fist as though that would clear it and continued.

“Leningrad is not what St. Petersburg once was. Stalin destroyed St. Petersburg’s soul, the purges there were worse than almost anywhere else. Entire stratas of society were wiped out: fathers, mothers, children and sweethearts. It became a ghost town, with the memory of people I had once known seeming to walk at my side down the streets. We were so proud of our city. We were the new Paris, the Venice of the north, the re-birth of ancient Palmyra, an oasis of art and light and literature in a cold, harsh country. We were a reminder, I suppose, to Papa Joseph that he was no more than a peasant boy who had come to power through betraying and murdering his friends, and then through a reign of terror such as has never been known before.

“That last spring before the Siege the weather was awful. In fact it seemed that it would never turn. Then suddenly it did, right before the summer solstice, right before that whitest of white nights. We had a series of storms and then it was summer. The lime trees came out in green, the forsythia bloomed in violent golds and the roses began to spill from the balconies. The girls came out in their summer frocks, windows were opened to the streets and one could walk in the dusk and hear the strains of Scriabin or Mussogorsky drifting out into the summer night. With the night when no darkness would fall fast approaching, it seemed almost enchanted, as if there was hope. We had no idea what forces were at work in the world and how they would soon mobilize against us.

“I remember as if it were hours ago, rather than the many years it has been, strolling down the Nevsky Prospekt. It was the grandest avenue in the world, a piece of poetry with its stone and water, its granite and low skies, its light—oh, that cursed endless light. We Petersburgers were very vain about our city. We felt we were light years removed from Moscow and its backward ways. There was arrogance there, no doubt, but to us it was just the city we loved, the city that had birthed such brilliance into the world.”

Nikolai paused, his crippled hands rolling the flask back and forth between them. The light of the fire caught it and sparked silver in the night.

“I would wish, though, to tell you of that first winter, for it was in many ways the most difficult of all the seasons of the Siege. You will understand,” Nikolai said, passing the small flask back to Jamie, “that there is a certain madness that comes with hunger, that arrives like a specter on the doorstep of humanity, when death is always just around the corner, or breathing down one’s collar. I was once a man of great civility, so such things were shocking to me, until finally there was no room left for shock in my body or mind.”

Jamie nodded as Nikolai put the flask in his hands once again. He took another swallow of the oily vodka and barely noticed the fire that swept up his gullet in return. He didn’t dare so much as flinch at this point, for he would do nothing that might halt the flow of words that fell from Nikolai’s lips, like water thawed after decades of winter.

“That first winter was eternal. We were a city of silence and ice. We were a city of the dead and the dying. There were street cars frozen in the snow, everywhere, frozen in time, exactly where they’d been when the electricity failed. There was one tram on the Nevsky Prospekt that I would stop in each morning. I was so weak by that time that I had to break up my walks or risk collapse in the snow, and to collapse was to die. I was not alone on that tram. I had three friends: Masha, Boris and Natasha, or so I named them, for I had no idea who they really were. Corpses all three, frozen as they had sat, perhaps only to rest as I had, only they never got up again. I think Boris and Natasha were husband and wife. His mitten was still frozen around hers. They had clutched hands at the end. Masha had a book in his lap, Gogol’s
Dead Souls
, which seemed ghoulishly appropriate. I took to reading him a page each day on my way through. It was a way to keep my own sanity. The entire winter passed in this fashion, and I came to look almost as corpse-like as they did.