The Devil_s Garden

TWENTY-EIGHT

In his mind, in the realm of both near and distant future, often-times centuries into the future, he could not see himself. Not in the sense in which one sees oneself in a mirror or a store window, or even the slightly ethereal vision of one’s face in a body of still water, looking back in a dream, only to be disturbed by a breeze, rippling away.

No, his vision of himself as the deathless one was more in the realm of a god. He had no physical presence, no matter composed of flesh and blood and sinew, no muscle, no bone. These were things organic, things of the earth. He was of the ether.

They say that he was found, swaddled in a white altar cloth, lying in the cemetery next to a crumbling Lutheran church in south-eastern Estonia, thirty-three years ago. They say one winter morning, a gray wolf scratched the rector’s door, and led the man to the baby in the graveyard. The elderly priest took the baby six miles to the Russian orphanage at Treski. They say the wolf sat outside the gate of the home, day and night, for days, perhaps weeks. One day, one of the Russian workers brought the boy, who had begun to regain his strength, to the gate. The say the wolf licked the boy’s face, just once, and disappeared into the forest.

They say that, pinned to the brilliant white cloth had been a piece of yellow paper, a note card with a single word written out in a young girl’s loopy scrawl. Aleksander.

As a child, as he moved like a ghost through the Soviet-run orphanages, he was considered unmanageable, and therefore passed from one home to another. He learned many things. He learned how to hoard and ration his food. He learned how to lie, to steal. He learned to fight.

Often he was discovered in the small schoolrooms, the sparse libraries, reading the books of older children by candlelight. He was beaten many times for this, deprived of supper, but he never learned the lesson. He did not want to learn the lesson. For it was in these worn, leather-bound volumes that he found the world outside the stone walls, where he learned the history of his country, his people, where he learned of Estonia’s much conquered shores by the Danes, the Norse, the Russians. He would study the photographs of these men, then study his own in the mirror. From whom had he descended? What blood coursed through his veins? He did not know. At the age of eight he decided it did not matter, he would learn to be unconquerable, a nation of one.

At ten, a visiting teacher named Mr Oskar showed him how to play the flute. It was the first kindness ever shown him. He taught Aleks the basics, and every Sunday afternoon for two years gave him lessons. Aleks learned not only the Estonian composers – Eller, Oja, Part, Magi – but many of the Russian and German composers as well. When Mr Oskar died from a massive stroke, the elders saw no worth in the battered old flute. They let Aleks keep it. He had never been given anything.

At eighteen, Aleks joined the federal army. Over six-feet tall and powerfully built, he was immediately deployed to Chechnya.

Soon after completing his basic training he was recruited and trained by the FSK in interrogation techniques. He did not take the lead so much as provide a presence, a phantom that haunted prisoners by night, and shadowed them by day. He learned to sleep soundly as men around him pierced the night with their screams.

Within six months he was deemed ready for the front. They sent him first to the border city of Molkov, but that would prove to be only a stopover. Three weeks later they sent him to place called Grozny.

They sent him to Hell.

The siege of Grozny began on New Year’s Eve 1994, and was a disaster for the Russian forces. At first, the one thousand men of the mighty Maikop 131st Battalion, amassed just north of the city, met with little resistance. They took the airport north of Grozny with few casualties.

But their gains were short-lived. Ill-trained, poorly supplied, the Russian soldiers were not ready for what awaited them in the city. Some commanders were as young as nineteen.

The Chechens, in contrast, were fierce and determined warriors. They were, by and large, trained and highly experienced marksmen, having learned to shoot and handle weapons since they were children. After picking off fleeing and confused soldiers, they would come down from the hills and grab weapons from the dead Russians, bolstering their meager armories. Some managed to steal machine guns from the armored vehicles, turning them on the doomed men inside.

As the day wore on, the Chechen separatists fought back, using everything they could: Russian-made, rocket-propelled grenades, fired from rooftops; Russian grenades thrown into tanks; even the deadly kinzbal, the prized Caucasian heirloom daggers. The number of dismembered and decapitated Russian soldiers all over the city were testament to the effectiveness of these comparatively primitive weapons. It was estimated that in the Battle of Grozny, Russians lost more tanks then they did in the battle for Berlin in 1945.

Over the month of January, federal forces would suffer even greater humiliations and defeat.

In each ill-conceived and executed battle, against clearly underestimated Chechen separatist forces, the bodies fell. All around Aleks, Russian soldiers and Chechen rebels were dead or dying. Yet, many times, while the blood of his fellow soldiers, his enemies, drained into the fields, mingling with the bones of centuries below, only Aleks was left standing.

Three times that January, in three fierce firefights, he emerged with little more than a scratch. His legend began to grow. The Estonian who could not be killed.

Then came January 15, 1995. One hundred and twenty federal soldiers were hunkered down in the marshes, outlying buildings, and silos just south of the Sunzha River. Intel, or what little they could gather with their primitive radios, told them that there were one hundred rebels holed up in the village. Their orders were to wait them out. For three days, with few rations, and even less sleep, they waited. Then the order came to advance.

At just before dawn Aleks’s unit of twenty began to make their way slowly across the frozen marsh. Some marched with newspaper stuffed into their boots for warmth. They did not make it far.

First came the mortar fire, huge 150-millimeter shells. The outbuildings and silos exploded on impact, killing all inside. Red rain fell. The shelling went on for more than six hours, the incessant roar of the explosions was deadening.

When the quiet came, Aleks dared to take a look. Body parts were scattered up the hillside. The armored cars were destroyed. The sounds of moaning could be heard beneath the staccato of automatic-weapons fire near the river.

Nothing stirred.

Then came the helicopters and their NURS mini-rockets.

In all, one hundred and nineteen Russian soldiers were killed. Most of the village was burned to the ground. Livestock were slaughtered and the streets ran crimson.

Only Aleks lived.

When the smoke cleared, and the screaming stopped, Aleks prepared to return to his base. He walked through the deserted village, now little more than blackened rubble. The smell of death was overpowering. At the end of the main street was a rise. In the near distance was a farmhouse, mostly intact.

As he strode up the hill, on alert, he began to feel something, something that had been growing within him for years. He stood tall, threw his rifle sling over his shoulder. He felt strong, the numbing fatigue and fear sliding away.

He looked through the doorway of the farmhouse, saw a Chechen woman, perhaps in her seventies, standing at her small kitchen table. On the table was an old leather-bound book. The walls were pitted clay, the floor dirt.

It was clear that the woman had seen the firefight, the grenades, the torn flesh and rivers of blood. She had seen it all. When it was over, she was not afraid of the Chechen rebels, or the Russian soldiers. She was not afraid of the war itself, or even of dying. She had met many devils.

She was afraid of Aleks.

He put down his weapon, and approached her, hands out to his sides. He was starving, and preferred to sit at a table. He meant her no harm. As he neared the woman, her eyes grew wide with horror.

“You,” she said, her hands beginning to tremble. “You!”

Aleks stepped into the house. It smelled of fresh bread. His stomach lurched in hunger.

“You know me?” he asked in halting Chechen.

The woman nodded. She touched the weathered book on the table. Next to the book was a loaf of black bread, a stone-sharpened carving knife.

“Koschei,” she said, her voice quivering. “Koschei Bessmertny!”

Aleks did not know these words. He asked her to repeat them. She did, then crossed herself three times.

In a flash she lifted the razor-sharp knife from the table, brought it to her throat, and slashed her jugular vein. Bright blood burst across the room. Her body slumped to the cold floor, quaking in its death throes. Aleks looked at the table. The loaf of bread was splattered with deep carmine.

Aleks fell upon the blood-soaked bread, wolfing it down, the taste of the old woman’s blood, along with the yeast and flour, an intoxicating mixture that both sickened and exhilarated him.

It was not the last time he would taste it.

In the dying light he read the book, a book of folk legends. He read the fable of Koschei the Deathless. There were many tales, but the one that moved him was the tale of the immortal Koschei – a man who could not die because his soul was kept elsewhere – and Prince Ivan’s sisters: Anna, Marya, and Olga.

He wept.

After his discharge, Aleks returned to Estonia, where he took odd jobs – carpentry, plumbing, fixing fifty years of shoddy Russian construction. He worked the slaughterhouses in the south, the mines in central Estonia, anything to get by. But he always new he was destined for something else, something greater.

Aleks befriended the mayor of the town, a man who also owned just about every business within fifty kilometers.

The man brought him along on a job, a job robbing an old Russian of his wealth accumulated on the backs of Estonians. Aleks had no loyalties, no God. He went. And found that the violence was still deep within him. It came easy.

Over the next few years, from the Gulf of Finland to the Latvian border to the south, and sometimes beyond, there was not a shop owner, business man, farmer, politician, or criminal enterprise, large or small, that did not pay Aleksander Savisaar tribute. He always worked alone, his threats and assurances couched in his ability to make believers of those who doubted his sincerity with torture and cruelty of such intensity, such speed, that his actions never had to be repeated.

By the age of twenty-seven his legend was widely known. In his pocket were politicians, law-enforcement agents, legislators. He had bank accounts and property in six countries. A fortune he never dreamed of.

It was time to turn his attention to his legacy but, with all his wealth and power, he did not know where or how to begin.

He began by building a house, a large A-frame set among tall standing pines atop a hill in Kolossova. Isolated, secure, and tranquil, he began to fell the logs he needed. By fall he had all the lumber milled, and had the structure fully framed.

He returned to the long-abandoned Treski orphanage, the place where he had been left. At great expense, he had locals tear it down stone by stone. Back in Kolossova he hired stonemasons to build a wall around his house.

Hurrying to close in the roof before the winter snows came, Aleks worked well into the evenings. One night, just as dusk claimed the day, he sat on the second floor, looking out over the valley as it began to snow in earnest.

He was just about to gather his tools when he thought he saw movement amid the stand of blue spruce to the west. He waited, stilling his movements, his breathing, dissolving into his surroundings, becoming invisible. He fingered the rifle at his side, shifted his eyes back and forth, scanned the clearing, but there was no movement. Yet there was something. A pair of shining pearls, seemingly suspended on the snow. He looked more closely, and a form began to take shape, seeming to grow around the glistening orbs. The high dome, the pointed ears, the dusty rose of a lolling tongue.

It was a gray wolf.

No, he thought. It cannot possibly be. The wolf who had discovered him in the cemetery, by all accounts, was full grown at that time.

When he saw the old wolf slowly rise, on its terribly gnarled forelegs, and begin to move with an arthritic sluggishness, Aleks believed. The ancient wolf had come to see him before he died.

But what was the message?

Days later, when he saw the young girl, the soothsayer named Elena Keskkula, standing on the same spot, observing him, it was an epiphany.

He watched many times over the next few years, even after her family moved north, observed the people coming to her farmhouse, their tributes in tow – money, food, livestock.

In these days he often envisioned himself on a hillside, the days speeding by, spring given unto winter in seconds, decade born of decade. He watched the fields grow ripe with fruit, fall fallow. He watched cities grow from timberland, only to flourish, expand, reach for heights of glory, then decay, and crumble into ash and dust. He watched saplings reach to the sky, then yield to farmland. He watched animals grow fatted, calve, nurse their young, only to see their offspring seconds later begin the wondrous cycle again. Skies blacken, seas churn and calm, the earth opens and closes in massive quakes, pines grow down the mountains to the valleys, only to farther lakes and rivers, which in turn gave life to the gardens and farms.

Through all of it, through eons of war and pestilence and greed, generations of lawlessness and avarice, there would be his daughters at his side. Marya, the pragmatist, the keeper of his mind. Anna, the artist of his heart. Olga, never seen, but always felt, his anchor.

He fingered the three vials around his neck. Together, one way or another, they would live forever.

He watched them play their games in the backyard, their gossamer blond hair lifting and falling in the breeze. They had Elena’s air about them, an aura of prudence and insight.

He crouched down to their level. They approached him, showing no fear or apprehension. Perhaps they saw in his eyes their own eyes. Perhaps they saw in him their destiny. They were so beautiful his heart ached. He had waited so long for this moment. All the while he had feared it would never happen, that his immortality had been something of fairy tale.

Without a word he reached into his pocket, produced the two marble eggs. He handed them to the girls.

The girls studied the eggs closely, running their small fingers over the intricate carving. Aleks had seen the drawing they had made on the refrigerator. He saw that one section of the drawing was missing.

Anna, the one they called Emily, beckoned him close. Aleks got down on one knee. The little girl leaned even closer, whispered: “We knew you would be tall.”