Death of a Nightingale

“She is so small,” he says, and there’s a frustrated tenderness in his voice. “So small that you think you can pick her up in one hand. But you can’t.”

The lights are low; the machines are humming quietly. This is not one of Kiev’s overpopulated public hospitals. Here, nothing is lacking.

The doctor clears his throat. “She’s not young,” he says. “And the risk of operating yet again … I hope you understand how great it is. It’s a minor miracle that she is still alive. But that’s the way some people are—the heart just goes on and on.”

“Do you think she can hear us?”

“You’re welcome to try speaking to her. She is unconscious. We’ve recovered more than twenty skull fragments from her brain by now, and there is no doubt that certain areas have suffered permanent damage. I honestly don’t know how much more we can do.”

“You have to try.” It’s not a request; it is an order, and that is how the doctor hears it.

“Yes, sir,” he says.

“You don’t know my mother, you don’t know how strong her will is. If anyone can survive this, she can. She’s not afraid of battle or of pain.”

“I can assure you, there is no pain, not now.”

“But … she’s still there, right? There are still thoughts and dreams and memories in there?”

The doctor places a gentle hand on his elbow. “Even if we manage to wake her up, you can’t expect her to be the same. The damage is too extensive.”

SHE SEES ALL of this from above. Looks down at Nikolaij, her beloved Kolja, as if she was standing in a tower. It is that tenderness. That admiration she cannot do without. She might have been willing to let the rest of the world think what it likes about both the past and the present, if not for him. He has to love her. For his sake, for the sake of that love, she will not let anybody drag her name through the mud. The lies, the secrets, those many, many songs of betrayal, Kalugin’s bloody nightingale … all that must stay where it belongs, in the tangled, filthy darkness of the past. She will not let it touch him. Whatever the cost, he must not learn the truth.

Then she falls down. Not into her body, but in the darkness of memories, where old ghosts rise from the grave and will not let you be. She can’t eat, speak, move; she has a tube in her mouth and another up her ass. Most of the time she can neither see nor hear. But in the darkness she remembers.