Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (88 page)

“And you?” Jamie asked, because the words were inevitable between them, always had been. Because here under the stars there was no room for anything but simple honesty.

“Someone must be the fuel, Yasha, for the fire to continue to burn.”

And that, thought Jamie, watching the stars raining cold fire above him, was the answer that ended all questions between them, forever.

Chapter Sixty-four
June 1975
The Clerk’s Tale

It was quiet in the greenhouse
, the lilac twilight that the Russians called
sommerki
, laying a soft haze over the plants and buckets of compost, the watering cans and assorted tools. He had come this evening because Violet wanted a sprig of chamomile for Kolya’s gums. Volodya was inside, hands black with dirt, humming a tune to himself. He was tending an orchid, a gift that the commander had given him for his name day. Jamie had always liked the small, bookish man and sometimes brought him tea in the evenings, as he was always to be found here with his flowers.

Two months had passed since Andrei’s visit, and there had been no word, no coded message to tell him that escape from this place was imminent. Such things were complicated, he knew, and so he had put his impatience and fears in a tightly locked room that he kept within his mind and found a strange peace existed in the place beyond.

He handed Volodya a cup of tea, the steam wafting off it in elegant curlicues.

“How is the boy?” Volodya asked, and took a small sip of his drink before setting it aside. He picked up a brush so delicate it looked to be composed of no more than a few hairs. Each of the man’s movements was precise if slightly fussy, though Jamie knew him for a kind-hearted person who would not undertake the smallest of jobs without ensuring it was done well.

“He is fine, just cutting a tooth, and fussy with it. I rubbed his gums with vodka, as per Gregor’s instructions, but Violet wants the chamomile for a tincture for him.”

Kolya, thank heaven, despite his genes, was a very contented baby who had more fussing aunties and uncles than any child needed.

“Volodya…” he began, and then thought better of his curiosity for the clerk was a very private man and he had no wish to intrude upon such well-guarded territory.

Volodya turned, brush in hand and smiled. “It is alright, Jamie. You are wondering why I am here? I wondered if you would ever ask for my story. Though it is not terribly exciting, for you know small things can imprison a man in this state.”

“I wasn’t thinking you were a murderer or anything,” Jamie said, smiling, and then abruptly flushed, for what if the small clerk was indeed guilty of murder?

Volodya raised a dark brow at him. “No, I am not a murderer.”

He paused to sip his tea and then picked up a pair of tweezers that Dima had fashioned for him in exchange for a dark pink orchid for the woman he was courting. Volodya removed the pollinia from a snowy white orchid and placed it with the care of a watchmaker into the stigma pocket of a deep lavender plant. He then recorded the date and details of the cross pollination in a small cardboard-backed book he kept for the purpose.

“I want to make an orchid the color of the twilight here,” he said, and sat on an upturned bucket, gesturing to Jamie that he should do the same.

Jamie sat, breathing in the scent of the soil and water and thick waxen petals.

“I was a postal clerk in a small village near to the Finnish border. I never longed for much, just a fire of my own, some books, flower seeds for the summer and to take care of my mother, who was old and had the rheumatics very bad.

“It wasn’t a bad life, though there was never anything in the stores, but we made do. And we always had a garden filled with potatoes and dill, beets and radishes and onions, and we kept cows for milk and meat. In the summer the woods near where we lived were filled with berries and mushrooms. That and vodka and what else does a man need?”

“Shura tells me he’s never seen anyone with your feel for flowers, not even Violet.”

Volodya smiled, his lean cheeks pinking with pleasure. “I love flowers and they seem to know that and so respond accordingly. It was flowers that were my downfall and that landed me in here.”

“Flowers?” Jamie echoed, wondering how even the Soviet Union could prosecute you for growing flowers.

“Yes, flowers. Armloads of violets to be specific. Well, that and a woman.” Volodya went even pinker at the admission, as though he had just confessed to congress with a sheep.

“She was my boss at the post office and I think I fell in love with her the minute I set eyes upon her. I kept it to myself for a very long time. It was enough to admire her from afar. I would leave small things for her, from time to time, anonymously in her work locker so that she might know she was thought of most kindly. I made her ornaments for
Novyi God
—small, delicate things from twisted wire and birch bark. It was harmless and I think she enjoyed the mystery of it.

“One day, deep in winter, she was lamenting the snow, the white unchangingness of it, how dirty it looked by that time of year and how she longed for color and greenery. To her it was only a passing thing. To me it was a dream I could give to her.”

He sighed and brushed a few bits of dirt from his worn trousers. His small face was dreamy, as though he saw the woman in front of him now.

“She had eyes like velvet—deep and lush—you know the sort of eyes in a woman where you think you could happily drown for the rest of your days?” Volodya looked up, face still flushed, but with memory now rather than embarrassment.

Jamie nodded, for every man knew at least one such set of eyes.

“She lived in a tiny house near the edge of the village. She had a little walkway from the gate to her door. I filled it with violets so that the snow was purple with them—I had to time it just right, so they wouldn’t wilt before she could see them. And then I hid myself so that I could watch her reaction. I saw more than I had bargained for. She was surprised and delighted. She stood there in the snow and cried and then picked up the flowers and held them to her face as if she could will spring if she could only breathe the scent of the violets in deeply enough. I should have left then, but I was drinking in her reaction the way an alcoholic drinks in his first vodka of the day. So it was that I was still there, crouched in the dirty snow behind a clump of shrubbery when a car pulled up. It was the car of a party official, for it was much better than what any of us could purchase. I had not known, though I suppose it was common gossip, that she was the mistress of a party official from Kiev. He stepped out and she ran to him, thanking him, thinking of course that he—her lover—had done this for her.

“He was furious, for he thought she was playing him for a fool. That she had another man partaking of her favors. He hit her across the face, first one cheek and then the other. She fell to the ground and then he started kicking the violets at her and calling her a whore. I knew what I risked if I went to her rescue but I couldn’t just sit there in the bushes and watch him beat her. So I charged him—I hit him in the face as hard as I could manage. But he was a big man and I am not terribly strong.

“She reviled me, even spit on me as I lay bleeding in the snow. Well,” Volodya shrugged, “what else could she do? She had to prove to him that she had no feelings for me, that I was less than dust beneath her feet. The things she said…” he closed his eyes, lean face pale once again, “I still cannot take them from my mind. For when someone is that vehement and the curses come so readily to their tongue, you know they have always, in some part of themselves, thought this of you.

“Two weeks later she accused me of rape which was, of course, completely untrue. But here I am nevertheless. She was badly beaten and I think it likely she had been raped, only not by me but by her lover. In Soviet courts though, if a Party
apparatchik
accuses you, you are always guilty.”

He looked at Jamie, setting his teacup to the side, the scents of recently dug soil and petals surrounding them. His small, neatly trimmed mustache trembled slightly with emotion.

“All my life, humiliation is my companion. It rises with me in the morning and I taste its bitter gall in my throat at night. I ask myself many times, what is it in me that makes others want to shame me, to deny the little bit of dignity the world allows a man?”

“I don’t know, Volodya,” Jamie said quietly, for the world did seem to visit such things upon certain people. And dignity, in such a place as the Soviet world, might be the only bastion a man had between him and outright brutality. It wasn’t much in the way of a shield but it was necessary all the same.

He left him then, the small dignified man, taking the chamomile Violet had requested with him.

He could see it clearly, the dark blush of violets in the snow, the sensitive man who had summoned all the romanticism of his nature in one poetic gesture and had it end in blood and cold, humiliation and imprisonment. It was a most Russian story in the shape of its tragedy and pathos.

He looked back, the dim now sifting up from the ground, more lavender than lilac, and saw Volodya in outline, still sitting as he had left him amongst his flowers and his ruined dreams.

Chapter Sixty-five
September 1975
Destroying Angel

Since the advent of Valentin as their camp commander
, they had been allowed to forage for edible things in the forest. Hence, one Sunday in September they were allowed out—with guards—to pick mushrooms, a delicacy that Jamie discovered was dear to the heart of each Russian. Even Nikolai, not given to overt emotion, was apt to go into raptures about the various kinds, shapes, flavors and medicinal values of each grubby fungi.

When Jamie, basket in tow, asked how he was supposed to know a good
gribny
from a bad one, he was confronted with several faces looking at him as if he was an idiot or a strange species of human that they had never stumbled across before.

“I’ve never picked mushrooms before,” he said, feeling that this was a weak explanation for a profound lack in his character, but possessing none better, it was all he could say in his own defense.

This brought forth more strange looks, then laughter and shaking of heads. His sense of being the village idiot heightened considerably.

Violet smiled up at him from under the rim of her drab cap. “It is something we all do as children—go mushrooming, for food, but also for fun. When we live in cities, the Russian soul still longs for the earth, for the muck of soil between our fingers and the scent of the forest in our noses.”

It was a theme common amongst the Russian people, that of their country as mother and provider, their connection with the land remaining many generations after they had left for the city. Every one of them was a peasant at heart.

“We have so much war and lack of food,” Nikolai told him as they walked together, “that we must forage everywhere for things to eat, always. The forest provides much food and so we accept that bounty. In a famine nation such as this one, you learn to eat all that the earth puts forth and to use what isn’t edible for other purposes. It is said that many mushrooms is a sign of war, for they will be needed in the terrible times to come. In the summer of 1940 there were more mushrooms growing than even the old ones could ever remember seeing.”

The day was beautiful, cloudless and sunny, not hot as the summer had often been but one of those rare and perfect autumn days with the leaves at their peak glory in golds and russets. A gentle breeze whispered through the pines, and rustled the birches. The scent of decaying leaves and vegetation was ripe and warm on the air.

When he wondered aloud why they didn’t stop in any one of several likely-looking clearings, he was told very earnestly by Violet, “You can smell when it is the right place. You can feel that it is a mushroom patch.”

The funny thing was he
could
smell them at once—a change of light and air as much as scent. The light was low, filtering through the trees, leaving small fields of shade deep in the verdure of the forest floor. The air was thicker, heavier, and fecund with dark life.

Violet took him in hand and showed him how to find the mushrooms. How the slightest curve often differentiated them from the pile of browning leaves in which they nestled. How certain ones favored particular trees: the
berjozovik
living with the
berjoza
—birch tree, the
podosinovik
growing with the
osina
—aspen. The odd nature of others—the spindly
opjonka
that only lived a few hours before melting into a pool of inky fluid, the slick, slimy ones that Russians called ‘fat of the earth.’ Soon he could wander off on his own, and tell the good white ones from the beautiful death-dealing ones and was even lucky enough to stumble, in a boggy crag, upon large black ones that Violet clapped her hands over as if he had just presented her with a basketful of pearls. He began to feel slightly less idiotic and somewhat smug.

The sun was strong by late afternoon and induced a certain laziness in all. The desire to stretch out in the velvet grass and mosses and have a nap, to store some of that golden heat, to be pulled up out of the marrow on the long, dark winter days that were soon to come was overwhelming. Even the guards looked relaxed despite their guns slung at waist-height and arcing through the prisoners every few moments.

Once his basket was full he went to sit by Nikolai, who was resting against the broad trunk of a birch, the gleaming silver of his hair contrasting against the parchment pale bark.

Nikolai acknowledged his presence with a grunt and a pat on Jamie’s shoulder. Jamie smiled in return and offered him two of the biggest black mushrooms, which Violet assured him were a delicacy beyond price.

Nikolai waved them away. “You keep them for Violet and the baby. They will need the extra when winter comes.”

They sat for a stretch, content in the drowsy stupor the autumn sun had created. It was small things that gave pleasure, counted like beads on a string. A basket of mushrooms, heat, no deaths in the camp for the last two months, the way the sun turned Violet’s hair to a blazing penny as she explained the finer points of a hairy-leafed plant to Vanya. Jamie smiled at the picture the two made.