Moskva

45 Talking to Owls

Sometimes you lose a piece of yourself. Sometimes someone steals it. She couldn’t take back what was taken. But she could still take what had taken it. Wax Angel’s logic wasn’t the world’s. The world’s logic was safe and cowering and servile. She couldn’t expect everybody to be as clear-eyed as she was.

The bus driver was reluctant to let her on board. Even more so when he realized she didn’t have the money for a ticket. So she told him she’d fought in the Great Patriotic War so that little brats like him would have a future and if she’d known she would be treated like this, she wouldn’t have bothered. He asked – very rudely, she thought – what she’d done in the war. Cooked, cleaned, encouraged the troops from the safety of a mattress?

She told him she’d been a sniper in Stalingrad.

She’d shot five German officers in four days, one of them a colonel.

While his own father or grandfather had probably been thieving from the shops or complaining that he couldn’t march because his feet hurt, she’d been eating rats in ruined factories, wrapped in sacks for camouflage and to keep warm, and she’d been happy to do it, grateful for the opportunity.

The little shit would still have made her get off, but by now everyone over sixty was nodding and looking serious; some were watery-eyed and the driver had more sense than to push it. He’d let her travel to the next town and when she shambled down the aisle to disembark at the concrete block that passed for its coach station, an old man in a nice coat who was going further stood up and stopped her.

‘Here,’ he said.

He tried to push fifty roubles into her hand.

When she shook her head, he insisted.

She’d looked at him.

‘I was there.’

He was too. She could see it in his eyes.

He didn’t seem surprised when she kissed his cheek. Simply put his hand up to touch the spot. It was fine, kissing his cheek like that. Quite possibly they’d known each other at some time.

The next bus driver had looked at her doubtfully but she’d told him she was on her way to see her grandchildren and waved the fifty-rouble note at him. He couldn’t change it but he let her get on the bus anyway. You were hardly going to refuse someone travelling with a fifty-rouble note, were you?

It took her longer than she had thought it would to travel the distance.

All of it she did by bus, except for the last stretch where she begged a ride with a lorry delivering fridges. They were large and smart and white. Odd, really. In her memory, fridges were tallow yellow.

The driver assured her that these ones even worked. Mostly.

The last few miles were the most complicated. She was tired and hungry and felt as if she’d been travelling for days. It didn’t help that she got lost, which forced her to retrace her steps back to a wretched small-town bus station. She got the right coach this time though, one that delivered her to the village where she got the lift with the lorry. The driver gave her coffee and shared his packed lunch, and though he opened the windows when she began to sweat a little under her rags, he did it casually, as if he simply needed air. She liked him.

Even if he did lie about his fridges.

She liked the crows by the roadside too. She’d always liked crows. They were so uncomplicated. They never minded what colour uniform anyone wore. Sometimes, they’d start trying to eat people before they were dead, but they were always apologetic when that happened. And they’d flap away like sharp black knives and wait until their meals were ready.

In the end, Wax Angel decided that it would be a good idea to rest so she curled up in the hollow of some tree roots a mile from where she needed to be, wrapped her rags around her so tightly they looked like leaves or feathers and fell asleep. A bear shuffled out of the trees in the hours that followed, stopped to sniff her, nudged her once or twice and went on his way.

A squirrel settled in the oak above without really noticing she was there. An owl came later and Wax Angel’s sleep was filled with dreams of her husband and memories of childhood walks in the woods behind the dacha at sunset.

At dawn, she woke to thin sunshine through the firs and the huge-eyed, half-blind gaze of an owl up past its bedtime. It blinked once as it looked at her and flew away, quickly lost in the trees. Sighing, the old woman dipped into her pocket for a tiny angel, which she gave owl’s eyes and placed where she’d slept. When it came to collecting debts, it was always best to have paid your own.

Then, with her back against a different tree, she reached again into her pocket, for a sharpening stone and a knife, spat once on the blade and again on the stone and began to get the best edge she could. There was something she needed to do. It was so long overdue she’d stopped imagining she’d ever do it. But there were circles to square and ends to tie, and all the other things her husband used to say, when he was still her husband and she was still somebody’s wife.

They’d had a daughter. She’d died young.

Very young. But not before having a daughter of her own.

Her husband had brought up the grandchild and done a good job of it.

And even if he’d lost his own wife to the camps, and taken so long to find her she could no longer bear to be with him, or anyone really, girls needed mothers and Sveta should have had a mother of her own, instead of fading photographs of a beautiful blonde girl who killed herself before she was out of her teens.

It was noon before the sun rose high enough above the firs to glint off the blade Wax Angel had sharpened until it could cut cold air. The sun’s position reminded her to eat, although she had to scrape a lot of snow away from a lot of tree trunks before she found anything worth eating. When that was done, she pushed herself to her feet, looked for signs of life and saw only the tracks of a bear. There would be men later, close to where she needed to go. There were always men. They always overestimated their abilities.

They always underestimated hers.

She was right about that. There were men, and they did overestimate their abilities. She slipped between the trees, silent and fluttering, and not one of them saw her coming. Not one of them lived to tell the tale after she’d gone.