The Secret History of Moscow

16: One-Eyed Likho

The soldiers went about their business outside-Galina heard their footsteps, accompanied by the cheerful clinks of their spurs against the cobbles of the yard.

Timur-Bey shook his head in disapproval. “Tearing up their horses’ sides, that's not good. Horse is a clever animal. It's like spurring your child."

"I don't know about that,” Yakov replied. “Be quiet-I'm trying to hear what's going on."

The voices that reached them were muffled, the words indistinguishable. And then there were other sounds-scratching and awful quiet slurping, and whispers like icy needles. Galina bit down on the knuckle of her index finger, trying to keep herself from screaming and running in blind terror.

The terrible sounds-she didn't dare to imagine their source, but she knew without verbalizing it that the calamity outside was not human-drew closer. It was as if someone was licking the door of the barn with a scratchy yet wet gigantic tongue. Stories, stories forgotten out of fear when she was still a child, flooded her memory, as fresh as years ago. The witch that licked through oven doors made of seven layers of cast iron. Creatures with tongues hanging down to their withered breasts, their claws finding the eyes of their children-victims with the unflinching accuracy of fate. Words like needles, eyes like coals.

The snuffling by the door. A giant wet nose pressed against the treacherous boards, sniffing out the human flesh inside. Hot fetid breath reached her face through the gaps between the wooden planks, bathing it in a stench of rotten onions. She bit harder in order not to gag.

Even Zemun seemed scared-her massive body pressed into Galina, seeking comfort and almost toppling her. She pushed back, and the warmth and the milky smell of the cowhide momentarily comforted her. She wondered what was inside Zemun-was it real flesh or just stars? If one were to poke a hole in her white hide, would the blinding light spill out, burning everything in its proximity to hot astral cinders?

And then, just like that, something burst through the boards, like a blast from a sawed-off shotgun. Galina saw spread claws and a giant eye, burning like the stormy anxious sun, and she felt a knock on her chest, an impact throwing her to the ground. Yakov and Timur-Bey grabbed at the intruder, and Zemun's hooves beat the air as she reared up. Her horns tilted and threw the attacker against the wall. He landed with a dull thump and Galina sat up, her breath ragged and wheezing.

The creature was smaller than she had originally thought-it was human-sized, but with sharp talons and tufts of feathers on wrists covered with puckered livid skin. Its lipless mouth twisted, baring large yellow teeth square like the grid of a chessboard. Its single eye blazed from the middle of its forehead, and Galina realized who had just laid hands on her.

Zemun spoke first. “One-Eyed Likho,” she said. “I thought we were rid of you two."

Galina heard the stories about Likho and its companion, Zlyden. She knew these two parasitic entities, the embodiments of bad fortune, that attached themselves to their victim until the victim lost everything and was eventually killed by the sheer constellation of bad luck.

Likho breathed heavily. “Stupid cow,” it said in a rasping voice. “You think putting me into a barrel and throwing me into a river would get rid of me? There's always some poor fool who will open it. People can't stand closed barrels and chests and boxes-haven't you learned that?"

"Those soldiers let you out then,” Koschey said. “Stupid mortals."

"Yes, they did,” Likho gloated. “And we stuck to them, stuck to them like tar to fur. We followed them home, only they were dead and dumb, stuck on the wrong side of the river, never to find their kin, never to find your stupid little town. Too dead to know what bad luck is."

"Why are you staying with them then?” Timur-Bey asked. “And why the birds?"

Likho gave a small, demented titter. “Too curious and yet too blind. Blind like Berendey-stupid old man, thought he could lure us back into a barrel. But we changed his luck, changed his luck. And your luck will change too, you two-insane girl, lazy cop. You'll have it so bad you'll think you had it good before."

The soldiers crowded the doorway, muskets at the ready.

Zemun lowed and shook her head at them. “You don't have to do what Likho and Zlyden tell you to."

"Yes, we do,” said the Corporal. “They promised us life, they promised us that we will walk the earth again, escape this tepid hell and live again. They promised us eyes and wings of birds that fly, that see…"

As his voice trailed off and his musket lowered, its bayonet leveling at Yakov's chest, he stepped forward. The embrasure left where the door used to be let in the scant light, and Galina's gaze followed the upward sweep of the palace wall outside. The roof was too high above to see it, but she could imagine it, crusted over with the black mass of poor displaced birds. “Masha!” she screamed.

The soldiers stepped closer but stopped, unsure whether they should do anything-after all, she was not fighting them, but calling. “Masha, Masha!"

A thunderous clapping of wings and cawing answered her, the birds startled by her screams. She could picture them, circling, crying out-and then they came, pouring in a feathered stream, black as pitch, through the doorway.

The birds seemed confused as they attacked the soldiers, then turned on Galina and her friends. Zemun chased the flapping birds away with flicks of her tail, unimpressed by their sharp beaks and shiny eyes. Yakov just covered his head with his folded arms, but looked up into the cloud of birds, as did Galina, both of them searching for the impossible recognition-every jackdaw looked the same as any other, every crow was the same too. Maybe Masha was among them, maybe not. And she suspected that Yakov was hoping to see his pet crow Carl, and perhaps ask his forgiveness.

She peeked between the fingers protecting her eyes, and saw that the soldiers chased the birds away with their muskets, even knocking some out of the air with the stocks. There were feathers fluttering through the air. One of them, shiny-black, spun past her face like a miniature helicopter rotor.

"Please,” Galina whispered to the spinning feather, even as rough hands and wooden musket stocks pushed her through the doorway, “please don't let me die before finding you. Please don't let them kill me before I talk to you again.” She whispered to the feather until it hit the ground, like it was a falling star.

"Of course they're not going to kill us,” Yakov said. “Weren't you listening? Why would they kill us if they can just drain our luck? Use your brain, for once."

Galina bit her lip and didn't answer. Ever since they had been ushered into the palace, all the while fending off frenzied, screeching birds, Yakov had seemed unsettled. His usual apathetic demeanor was replaced with irritability and occasional vicious malice.

The room they currently occupied was a bona fide dun-geon-underground, with a crisscrossing of thick beams, a heavy bolted door and a stern tiny window in the door, guarded by iron bars. There was plenty of straw to sleep on and a dim light in which Yakov's face seemed haunted and angry. Perhaps it's just the beard, Galina thought, giving him that hungry, desperate countenance. But his angry words still rang in her ears, and she retreated to a corner, wishing nothing better than to bury herself in the straw and disappear.

Yakov paced the room. “I can't believe it,” he said. “This place… they plunder everything you believe, then they take your memories, and now our luck. What kind of place is this?"

"Elena said it wasn't supposed to be a utopia,” Galina said.

Yakov shook his head and continued pacing. “Where did they take Zemun and the rest?"

"I don't know,” Galina said.

"Well, think!"

She dug herself into the straw and hugged her knees to her chest. She would've killed for a bath about now, and for an opportunity to be alone just for a little while. With Yakov acting like that, she couldn't concentrate on anything. She felt irrelevant and small, just like she did when a teacher quizzed her in front of the class and she couldn't get any answers right, and the more she scrambled the more she messed up. She felt like crying. “I don't know,” she repeated. “Stop talking to me like this."

He stopped and spun around. “Like what?"

"Like this,” she repeated. “You keep acting like it's my fault."

"And it's not?"

She shook her head in disbelief. “You're the cop here."

"And I was doing my job. I was doing it well, thanks, and then you showed up and dragged me to meet your crazy friend who nevertheless was smart enough to stay out of this little adventure, and then we all are here. How do you know your sister is here? How do you know this kerfuffle has anything to do with us?"

"The birds…” she started.

"Yes, yes, I know. The birds are everywhere. And how does it help?"

"They are their eyes,” she said. “They see everything. Maybe if we could find a way to learn what the birds know…"

"And how do we do that?"

Galina sat up, straightening. “Do you have any food left?"

"No. Well, just a bit of that awful fruitcake David made.” A brief smile lit his bearded face when he thought of his grandfather, and Galina felt a pang of guilt at denying him this reunion.

"This will do,” she said. She took the sticky slice covered in lint and grime from Yakov's calloused fingers. Her father used to have hands like that, she remembered. Hard and tough as leather, and she had thought that all men had hands like that. She remembered her surprise when she shook hands with one of her mother's coworkers, and discovered that his hands were soft, feminine. In fact, she soon learned that very few people had hands like her father; that was one of the very few things she remembered about him still.

She kneeled by the grate in the door and crumbled the fruitcake on the floor, cooing gently. If she craned her neck, she could see the length of the corridor outside and at the end of it the small embrasure of a window too small for a person but large enough for a bird. “Come on,” she cooed. “Come, little birds, I have a nice cake for you."

A bird perched on the sill of the tiny window, its black feathers slicked and its head cocked, the black shining bead of an eye trained on the bits of fruitcake strewn on the floor.

"It's no use,” Yakov said. “It's not going to come."

"And how do you know that?” Galina asked without turning.

"We have no luck,” Yakov said. “Don't you get it? When Likho and Zlyden are both around, we have no chance. Any time anything can go wrong, it will."

Galina didn't answer and crouched lower. Her fingers grew numb from crumbling the cake; it crumbled and crumbled and turned to fine dust.

They used to feed pigeons, she and Masha; Masha was only little then, and for some reason she wanted nothing better than a pet pigeon. Galina smiled, remembering the wooden crate they found by the back door of the neighborhood liquor store, and how it smelled of fresh wood shavings and sour spilled beer; how they found a stick and borrowed a ball of yarn from one of the morose old ladies who liked to knit sitting on the bench by the entrance of their apartment building. Of how they propped the crate up with a stick wrapped in bright cerulean yarn and crumbled day-old bread under it. How they waited, breathless and giggly, for the pigeons to crowd under the crate, as if impatient to be caught.

Galina wished to feel like she felt that day-a bit flustered and apologetic, ready with excuses for any grownup who would question their purpose in trapping the pigeons, but happy with anticipation, happy that her little sister looked at her with such admiration, was so impressed that Galina, generally useless and awkward, was in possession of such arcana as building pigeon traps. Usually Masha, only five at a time, treated Galina with the kindness and sensitivity extended by adults to ailing children. Galina was not ungrateful-on the contrary she was convinced that Masha was the only person under the sun generous enough to love the unlovable-but she cherished the rare glimpses of memories where she was competent.

She frowned when she remembered the pigeon they managed to trap in the frantic scattering of other birds and the heavy thud of the crate, how the bird flapped against the wooden slats of its prison, almost lifting the crate off the ground. The crate hopped on the pungent heated asphalt if the yard as if possessed, and they laughed guiltily, and hurried to examine their prisoner. It was an average enough pigeon, gray under most circumstances but blooming with greens and purples, like an oil slick on a puddle, when the sun rays struck its feathers at the proper angle. Masha seemed pleased and stroked the bird. “Its heart is beating so hard,” she said. “I can feel it jumping on my fingers."

It was then that Galina noticed that the bird was not quite right-its feet, clawed and leathery and reptilian, seemed bigger than they were supposed to be, a swollen purple in color.

Masha noticed too, and gasped. “Look,” she said, and pointed at a dirty bit of thin string dangling from one of the pigeon's feet, and cried. Galina tried not to cry too when she realized that someone-probably the boys who terrorized the local stray cats and spent most of their time playing in the concrete pipes of the nearby construction site-had trapped this bird before, bound it with string and flown it like a kite. The string was tied too tight and cut off the circulation in the bird's feet-this is why it was so easy to trap the second time.

Galina wiped Masha's tears and led her home, the poor bird still nestled in her hands, not fighting its capture anymore. The bird with the swollen feet lying passively in the five-year-old's open palms stood clear in her mind, as perfect an image of defeat as she could wish for. They tried to remove the string, but the swelling was too great-the scaly skin bunched over it, and the pigeon trembled every time they touched its injured feet. Soon, it couldn't stand, and they took the bus to the vet clinic. The pigeon died on the bus and they saw no point in getting off but traveled to the final stop and waited for the bus to turn around and take them back home. They buried the pigeon in the remaining orchard patch, and never tried to trap another one again.

The bird on the sill hopped onto the floor of the corridor, hesitant, studying Galina and the crumbled fruitcake with one eye, then the other.

"Just be still,” Galina whispered to Yakov. “Please, I beg you, be still."

He didn't answer but stopped his pacing. Galina couldn't see his face, but she imagined he watched the bird's reluctant progress and frequent backtracking with the same intensity as she.

The bird pecked at the crumbs tentatively, glancing sideways at Galina's hand resting on the floor palm up.

"It's all right,” Galina whispered. “Go ahead, eat."

The bird did, its neck bobbing with each peck. Its crop swelled with fruitcake, and the bird appeared thoroughly absorbed in its dinner. Galina moved her hand, centimeter by centimeter, until it almost touched the bird's foot. The bird stopped pecking and studied the hand that again came to rest on the floor.

Galina chewed her lips, feeling the dry skin peel under her teeth, giving way to tender flesh and pungent wet blood. “Don't move,” she whispered, “be still."

The bird hesitated, and Galina lunged. She hit her head on the metal bars of the door-she had forgotten they were there, and the impact made her cringe with pain. Her hand grasped at the bird and brushed against the wing just as the startled bird took flight, avoiding capture without much effort. It disappeared through the embrasure of the window at the end of the hallway, and still Galina grasped at empty air, her overextended arm aching in its socket, creaking at the elbow. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

"It's gone,” Yakov said. “Don't feel bad-you almost got it."

"Almost is never good enough,” she whispered. That's what her mother used to say anyway.

"What would you have done with that bird?” Yakov said. “Think about it-if Likho can talk to the birds, it doesn't mean you can do the same."

"We have to try,” she said. “What, you want to rot here?"

Yakov opened his mouth to answer but a flapping of wings interrupted them. A fat white rook squeezed through the window and half-fell, half-fluttered to the floor. In short hops it approached the cell.

"Finally,” it said. “It took me forever to find you."

"Sergey!” Galina picked the bird up and cradled it, resisting the urge to give it a kiss. “How'd you find us? Why did they let you go?"

"I played dumb,” the rook said, and even its high-pitched bird voice couldn't hide its self-satisfaction. “They didn't think I was important enough to chase-they were talking to Zemun and Koschey."

"What about Timur-Bey?” Galina asked.

"Him? I don't know. He's human, so they probably put him somewhere to get to his luck, if he has any left after all these years underground.” Sergey chuckled, pleased with his wit. “So I went to look for you, but you'll never believe what else I found."

Sergey couldn't fly, since his clipped wings were useful enough to buffer a fall but too short and ragged to support real flight. He hopped and fluttered his way out of the barn and into the first-story window of the palace; there, he traveled from one room to the next. He found many birds and a few more soldiers, some of them French. All of them paid him no mind and he soon discovered why-albino birds perched on windowsills, mingling with black-feathered newcomers, and pecked at the fruit in the tree branches outside. Sergey still found it strange to think of himself as a bird, but he had to admit that in this case it was handy, a perfect disguise. He hopped across the hardwood floors and hand-woven runners striped in red, yellow and blue; he flitted awkwardly up onto the sills and out to the balconies, hopped up the winding staircases, lost direction in the endless corridors and galleries of empty rooms inhabited only by dust bunnies. He stopped caring after a while if he came into the same room as before, and wasn't particularly sure if he was moving up or down.

He didn't remember how he arrived at the entrance of one of the seven towers; he only knew that he had to crane his neck to see the next turn of the wide staircase that swept up and to the left, its steps stacked at a slight angle so that it took them a whole floor to turn all the way around. He hopped upwards, thinking that only a really tall tower would have a staircase with such slow turns. He spiraled upwards, occasionally zoning out and thinking that he was still guarding a silo, still in his human form, and that his corporal had sent him to fetch something from the storage facility. Then he came to and saw that the sun was setting, and then it rose again-funny things happened to time on that staircase.

It was then that he heard the singing. The voice sounded small and ragged, and stopped often to gulp air in large noisy swallows, and resumed again, trembling, weak and uncertain. At first, he imagined a child, a sick child perhaps, a little boy with asthma who passed the time in his sickbed by pretending to be in a church choir. Then another voice joined the first, and a feeble duet echoed in the stairwell. The third attempted to sing but coughed, wailed and dissolved into sobs before falling quiet again.

Sergey hurried up the stairs. The voices didn't sound like Likho or its soldiers, and he decided that there were prisoners. They didn't sound like Zemun or Koschey, or even Galina for that matter, but he hurried, hoping to find out who it was that sang so piteously.

At the top of the staircase there was a single door with a narrow slot at the bottom. Sergey squeezed through the opening with some effort; his biggest worry was to encounter a cat or to be forcibly ejected by the inhabitants, but he did not expect to feel such fierce pity and anger.

At first, he thought that he was looking at three naked women chained to the wall; whatever small sordid joy might've stirred in his heart at the sight of female bondage had evaporated as soon as he saw the long bloodied bruises on the wrists of narrow fingerless hands, the drooping narrow breasts and the bird's feet so swollen that puckered flesh half-concealed the manacles. The faces that reminded him of Byzantine saints and angels-with large dark eyes that took up half of these narrow faces, the fine-boned Eastern cheeks that tapered into small sharp chins, and small but perfect lips half-opened in suffering.

Then he noticed that their naked bodies were shapeless sacks, reminiscent of plucked chickens, and he realized with a start that they were the bodies of birds-picked clean of feathers, with just a few downy tufts and jutting feather shafts remaining in place.

"Who are you?” he whispered to the bird-women.

One by one they lifted their faces, their eyes half-hidden under heavy dark eyelids, and whispered in turn, “Alkonost,” “Sirin,” “Gamayun."