Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (71 page)

It was a full week later before Violet spoke to him again
. He had attempted to apologize for his shortness with her, and though she had accepted said apology she had maintained a cool distance since. He was sitting outside one evening, quiet, watching the light fade from the sky, streaking it with long washes of lavender and heated crimson like the tail of the mythical firebird. Violet came and sat beside him just as the moon rose above the smoking stacks of the huts.

“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly, “that morning—it was none of my business what you had done. I forget sometimes that you might want privacy, might cling to whatever shred of it is possible in this hell we live in.”

“No, it’s I who needs to apologize. You caught me at a very vulnerable moment that morning and I didn’t want to be seen. So when you stepped out I was angry because I had hoped that night would not exist beyond my leaving the hut. But that was only a very stupid and momentary hope.”

“No, not stupid. It is only natural to want some part of one’s life for oneself, even if it is the very dark parts. For a very long time I kept Andrei to myself, the very idea of what we had would be soiled by this world…” her small white hand indicated the world that surrounded them—the world of barbed wire, machine guns, quotas, and a forced communal life that made it next to impossible to have a private thought, much less a private life.

“I admit I was jealous and I know how that sounds. Because I know the circumstances and that if you had any other choice…” she trailed off, sensing his discomfiture. “Still, I felt like he had something of you that I was not allowed.”

Jamie felt a hot, not entirely pleasant moment of confusion. “What aren’t you allowed?”

“Intimacy with you,” she said bluntly. “You and I have been nothing but awkward with one another since your illness and yet you—you allowed that man to—”

“Don’t assume you know what Gregor did to me, or I to him,” he said sharply.

“Of course,” she said, embarrassed at her faux pas.

“Violet, what about Andrei?”

“Do you think,” she said bitterly, “that he’s not making love to Ilena several times a week? Do you actually believe that a married man can be faithful to a mistress?”

“No, but having sex with me isn’t likely to improve that situation,” Jamie said, rather too aware that he was cutting off his very pretty nose to spite his lovely face.

“One has nothing to do with the other. A month ago it might have, but now… now I find it’s about you, and has nothing to do with Andrei. I know right now you may not want anyone to touch you, but I think about it a great deal—touching you, being touched by you. I’m sorry, Yasha, this is the last thing you need to hear after what happened to you, but I seem to lose the ability to hide my thoughts around you. Even though it wasn’t me that you were making love to—that time when you were sick—I—I—can’t seem to put it out of my mind.”

“I think I better show you just what Gregor did to me,” Jamie said firmly.

He almost laughed at the startlement on her face, but knew there was really no laughter in this situation anymore for either of them. He pulled his shirt off over his head and heard her gasp before he even laid the worn garment aside.

“That bastard!”

She was silent for several minutes, grey eyes round with disbelief and then slowly she began to take in each picture, each story that had been carved and ink-bled into his chest and arm. A small and perfectly executed field of skulls curved in a crescent across his left pectoral, trailing from the bottom of these was a vine twined with violets, done in a purple that was almost black. Partway along the vine, nestled amongst the flowers, was a barbed wire, each point prinked with a delicate flower. Jamie knew the story each flower told, and knew that she could read the truth there on his skin.

She paused at a wolf’s head inside a perfectly aligned, eight-pointed star. The wolf was close-mouthed, but its eyes bore out from his skin with a look of cold sovereignty.

“It means, Gregor said, ‘man is wolf to man’, and that I must remember that in all future dealings with him.”

“So he didn’t—you didn’t?”

Jamie laughed. “No, we didn’t in any way, shape or form. But I will carry his calling card on me for the rest of my life.”

And so she came to the last of his story, a heart stabbed hard by a gilded dagger, a delicate lily carved at its base. The heart formed like the rough of a raw emerald, ragged about its edges but glowing at its center.

“It’s beautiful,” she said tracing the vine with her finger, eyes following in a manner that made Jamie’s breath short. “You’re beautiful, Yasha.”

“As are you,” he replied softly, and brushed a hand along the line of her chin.

She smiled sadly and then clasped her small hands together. His skin felt bereft where her touch had left him. “I must tell you something, Yasha. I am pregnant.”

His mouth opened in shock, a tumult of things to say tumbling through his mind. He immediately dismissed all of them as inadequate.

She flushed. “It is Andrei’s child. I am too far along for it to be yours.”

“What will you do?” he asked.

She smiled up at him, a thing of such sweetness that it pierced him to the core.

“Doesn’t it seem to you, Yasha, that life like this, life formed through two people loving one another is a miracle, particularly in these surroundings?”

“It does,” he said simply, for Violet needed no lecture on the feasibility of having and raising a child in their current surroundings.

“So I will have this baby and we will see what we will see.”

It was, he thought to himself, Russian fatalism at its best. He only hoped, having much experience of loss in this area, that what they would see was a living, healthy child. That would be a miracle, and they all needed a miracle though they tended to be a little thin on the ground here in the camp.

He reached over and took one of her hands in his own, knowing she needed reassurance and knowing he was the only one, in Andrei’s absence, who could provide it.

“We will get through this together, Violet.”

She smiled at him, copper hair a dim glow in the night.

He was grateful that she did not ask him how they were to get through it, for he had no answers for her.

Chapter Fifty-one
late May 1974
The Piano

When Gregor delivered, Jamie had to admit
, the man did it with incomparable style. The piano was old but in good shape, a baby grand. And after three days of cursing and sweating and appealing to the gods of music, Vanya, who had long ago been trained in the art of tuning by his grandfather, had assured him the tone was now pitch perfect. Jamie and Violet had spent time after dinner each night polishing and oiling the cabinet until it gleamed with a rich luster befitting such a beautiful instrument.

Jamie requested Nikolai’s company after the evening meal. Nikolai was busy tamping down his after dinner smoke and looked up at Jamie with a quizzical expression.

“Just trust me, it will be worth it.”

The inside of the common hut smelled richly of piano oil and Nikolai, recognizing the scent at once, turned sharply to Jamie before striding forward, then stopping short halfway across the room. He turned back to Jamie, his entire frame a study in emotion—joy, fear, anger.

“What—what have you done?” The anger was there, but not primary. Jamie had expected it and did not reply. It took Nikolai a few moments to walk to the piano and a few more to put one trembling hand to its surface. It gleamed like a living thing. Nikolai stroked it slowly, as though he felt it a creature of flesh and blood that needed both time and reverence.

“Why, James?” he asked simply.

“Because I wanted to hear you play.”

“What if my hands and the keys no longer know each other?” Nikolai asked, his normally stoic countenance completely abandoned at the feel of the ivory under his crooked fingers. “I am afraid, James. Don’t you see? My music was my soul, and they took my soul out, scalpel cut by scalpel cut over the years.”

Jamie shook his head. “No, they didn’t. Tell me they broke your hands, your body, tell me they laid the lash upon your spirit, but you will never convince me that they took your soul. You’re too much of an old son-of-a-bitch for that to be true.”

Nikolai laughed and Jamie felt relief that his gift had been accepted. The old man sat down on the bench that Vanya and Shura between them had built. Jamie left him there, for this was not a moment to be shared with anyone. He looked back only once, as he crossed the threshold of the building. Nikolai sat, head bowed, crabbed hands resting on the keys, but not playing, not yet. Then Nikolai closed his eyes and threw back his head, tears streaming in an unceasing river through the fissures in the old man’s face. The mere touch of the instrument beneath his hands had set in thaw the river that had been frozen so long ago inside the man. Jamie closed the door quietly and left Nikolai to reacquaint himself with his soul.

Here in the camp anything might become an event
, and so something as momentous as Nikolai playing to the public, even if it was the gulag public, took on the air of a party. Even Gregor had his hair slicked back and a clean shirt. This did not preclude him from winking at Jamie, but Jamie knew such actions were no longer meant to intimidate, but were only part of the strange friendship that had been struck up between them. Violet’s face was flushed with anticipation and nerves on Nikolai’s behalf, worried that she had not massaged his hands enough over the last couple of weeks. Vanya was seated next to her, fretting about whether he had gotten the tuning just right and Shura wore a tie, a gaudy green thing gained in one of his infamous trades. He also exuded a festive air that was infectious. The Commander sat apart, hands folded in his lap, his expression as unruffled as a lake on a still morning. But he was here, he had allowed this event to take place and Jamie was grateful to him for it. To be grateful to one’s own jailor was a new experience in grace for him, and it was a measure of how life had changed that he could even recognize it as such.

It was natural that Nikolai should turn to his fellow Russians for music, for inspiration, and so the evening’s programme began with Rachmaninoff’s technically demanding
Etudes Tableaux
, and flowed on into Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and the lesser known Alexander Borodin.

As his hands warmed, he flowed on into other composers and pieces: Bach’s
Prelude in B Minor
, Schumann’s gorgeously manic
Piano Concerto Op. 24
, then Beethoven and Liszt, Chopin and Berlioz, the music both transcendent and earthly, both angry and melancholy, and so achingly beautiful that the rugged old prisoner seemed a hybrid—half human, half angel.

He returned to the Russians to close out the evening, finishing with Rachmaninoff’s
Vocalise
. Jamie had heard it played many times on both violin and piano, but had never heard it as Nikolai played it, bleeding the keys for all the emotion they could render. Through his playing, he was reconstructing the Russia before the Revolution and all that it had been, that firebird that might yet, through whomever of her artists survived, rise from the ashes of Stalinist destruction. He was playing for his Katya.

There was a hush at the end, and Nikolai looked around, startled out of his reverie. Jamie sensed that he had been so lost in his performance he had forgotten his surroundings entirely and was now surprised to find himself in the dingy common room. His fingers still rested on the ivory keys as though he were afraid if he stopped touching them they would disappear. Now that he had music once again, he would need the sustenance of it daily. It was good to need things. Jamie had long understood that, but only here in Russia had he seen the absolute necessity of it in a human life.

Jamie began to clap, and then the others took it up, but Shura stood, his hand clasped over his heart, tears running from his eyes into his beard. His big sentimental heart had been denied music for so long that having it, hearing it played at this virtuoso level had been more than he could manage. Nikolai looked at him and smiled, for there was no greater accolade than Shura’s tears were giving him.

After, they filed out slowly, restless, for such music stirred a person’s soul opening wounds best left untouched. To merely go back to their meager beds and lie awake for hours in the dark, still hearing that sublime music, note by painful note, over and over in one’s head did not bear thinking about.

Outside in the dark, with the stars appearing beyond the deep feathery tops of the firs, one could pretend for a moment that one did not see the tall fences topped with barbed wire. One could not deny the music though, for it had pierced each of them too deeply.

Violet came and stood beside him, as was their habit now, to drift together whenever they happened into one another’s orbits. She was silent, for words would seem trivial after such a fiery display. Except perhaps for the ones he was about to utter. He found himself quite ridiculously nervous.

“I think we should marry,” he said quietly. There was a shocked silence from Violet.