The Secret History of Moscow

2: Yakov

Yakov never liked the way he looked-he seemed too prosaic, with not even a whiff of the Englishness he expected himself to possess. But from every spare line of his small square body to the last bristling hair on his head his appearance screamed ‘Russian peasant’ at the world. The world acted indignant in response and shoved him away. Moscow was especially violent in regards of shoving.

"Limitchik,” that's what they called people like him-housing in Moscow had always been for the native Muscovites, and a limited number of out-of-towners. Native Muscovites viewed the out-of-towners with condescension and contempt that surprised Yakov when he moved here, all of ten years old. Twenty years later, the hatred did not seem to lessen. He started to suspect that he would never grow into a native.

Yakov stood in front of the window, in his boxers and wifebeater, looking at the poplar that didn't quite reach his sixth-story window. There was a crow's nest on top of it, and the nascent wind whipped it around; Yakov worried for the safety of two young crows in the nest. Their parents were nowhere to be seen, and the young birds squawked as the mass of twigs and branches and accidental fluff swayed back and forth with the windblown treetop. Yakov wondered if the baby birds felt nauseous. He wondered what they were still doing in the nest in September.

"Yasha!” his mother called from the kitchen. “Breakfast!"

He pulled on a pair of track pants stretched at the knees, the red stripes down the sides faded with too many washings. Too many faded red things in his life-another one of them, in the form of his mother's housecoat, dashed from the stove to the kitchen table and back, with the desperate energy of clockwork.

"Calm down, Ma,” Yakov said, and patted the old woman's shoulder. He always thought of her as old and felt startled on her birthdays, when he remembered that she was barely fifty. “It's Saturday, no need to rush."

"I was going to meet Lida to go to the cemetery,” she said. “To visit your grandparents, and the grave needs cleaning, what with all the leaves."

"It's fall. There'll be more falling tomorrow."

"Graves have to be clean,” she said, stubborn and small. “Eat."

"Don't wait on me. Just do what you have to."

She sighed. “You'll be all right?"

"Of course.” There was no need to get irritated. She always worried, a habit that wasn't going to go away. Be patient, he reminded himself. You're the grownup now, even if she doesn't realize it. “Go, do your thing. Have fun. Enjoy the graves."

Her face pinched. “The dead need to be taken care of."

He knew better than to argue. There was no point in telling her that she was the only one comforted by the endless, thankless, pointless labors at the cemetery, that the dead didn't care. Yakov drank his tea.

His mother retreated to her room and slammed the wardrobe doors and shuffled polyester. He buttered bread and sliced thick slabs of cheese, fragrant and full of holes. He waited to be alone, and felt guilty for it.

She came into the kitchen, armored in flowered fabric and stern black shoes. “It wouldn't kill you to visit your grandparents."

Grandparents. He remembered his grandmother vaguely, and grandfather-not at all. His mother didn't remember him either. They knew only that he was an Englishman. Then there were half-remembered stories and conjectures, but his nationality was the only certainty. That, and the fact that he had worked on the radio for six months, between May and November of 1938, as an English-language correspondent. During this short time, he married grandma and got her pregnant, and was promptly executed-or, as they called it during Khrushchev's times, repressed. Nobody was quite sure what was buried in the grave with his name on it, and how it got there, but no one was curious enough to find out.

"I'll stay home today, Ma,” he said. “Next weekend, maybe. We can go to church too, if you want.” Throwing pacifiers at her, trading a small present inconvenience for a larger delayed one. Smart.

"We'll see, Yasha.” She softened. “I'll be back soon."

He finished his tea, now cold, and found his binoculars. Through them, he could see the wide beaks of the baby birds, fringed with yolk yellow, opened in a silent scream. The wind was picking up.

The wind was blowing the leaves in yellow eddies and swirled them upward, then let them fall back to the ground.

The wind blew through the dry grass in the empty lot behind the day care center visible from Yakov's window and whistled in the empty bottles strewn between the peeling benches, tugged on the fur of the dogs running across the dry mud and clumped dead grass in the no-man's land, and their owners lifted their collars up and lit up, cradling the tiny flames of matches in their palms, expertly buffeting the wind with their shoulders.

Yakov watched a young man chasing after a Scottish terrier; the dog, a blurry caterpillar of motion, ran in circles, easily outpacing its owner, even though its legs were so short they were hidden under the shaggy fur. The young man's jacket flapped around him as he ran and chased after the dog, plaintively calling out his name. A gust of wind pushed the young man in the back, forcing him into an awkward hobble, and threw the jacket over his head. As the man struggled to free himself from under the jacket, twisting and flapping his arms, another gust came and picked him off the ground. Yakov leaned closer to the window, not quite believing his eyes but too content with a Saturday alone to truly feel surprised or panicked. The man's arms flapped faster, the jacket grew longer; his feet shrank away from the ground, closed into tiny bird fists, and he hovered, half-human, half…?

Yakov looked at the other people and dogs, but no one seemed overtly concerned or even cognizant of the young man's strange behavior. Only his terrier stopped running and sat, its head tilting quizzically, following something high in the air. And then Yakov realized that the young man was gone, and only a large crow flapped its wings above the empty lot, chased by the howling Scottish terrier dragging its leash through the mud.

Mondays brought the unease and tugging in his chest, and a desire to dig deeper into his pillows and just sleep. Instead, he rose at five a.m. and went to work. The bus was populated by sleepy citizens, unwilling to meet any-one's eye in this ungodly hour, when the soul, still tender from sleep, was vulnerable to any assault of light, noise, or an unkind word. Yakov, like the rest of his compatriots, feigned sleep and hid his face in the upright collar of his uniform.

The moment he closed his eyes, wind blew and coats upturned, dogs barked and crows cawed. He could not find a way to reconcile the scene he had witnessed, and decided to consider it a hallucination or a strange optical trick. He pushed it out of his mind, and got himself distracted by attending to one of the crows-he fell out of the nest, and Yakov spent Saturday night and all of Sunday alternately tending to the bird and trying to convince his mother that crows did not peck people's eyes out. He smiled now at the memory of the circular argument.

"He's a wild bird,” his mother had said. “Let him go."

"I can't, Ma,” he had answered. “There are stray cats out there, and he can't fly yet."

She had sighed and gone about her business, knocking on his door an hour later and repeating her entreaties. Yakov shrugged and fed the bird with ground beef and boiled fish.

Now on the bus he worried a little about the little crow.

He kept peeking into the messenger bag that held his new pet and a supply of food. The sleeping crow felt almost like a talisman, a handy distraction from a nagging memory he avoided, feeling only its general shape-that of a man with wings. He cringed and squeezed his eyes shut, and almost missed his stop.

The police station where he worked was located in the ground floor of an older apartment building-only seven stories tall and built of brown bricks. The stairwell smelled like every stairwell in this city-of tobacco smoke and cat piss, of cooking cabbage whose insidious smell seemed to creep from under every door, and abandoned old age. He glimpsed an old man exiting the building as he entered, not even seven in the morning.

"Good morning,” Yakov said to the old man's back.

He didn't answer, his back in a well-worn jacket painfully straight, seized forever in a single position. The old man walked stiffly, leaning on his homemade cane, and Yakov felt bad for the old-timer-probably a vet; was there an old man who wasn't? It had to be hard to pick up the empty bottles off the streets and playgrounds where they were abandoned by the careless young. It was probably a good thing that there were so many bottles, so an old man didn't have to starve half to death on his pension. Still, it wasn't a good way for an old man to live-a war hero, an old man had to be respected and deserved some rest. If he was Yakov's grandfather, he wouldn't have to.

Frowning, Yakov walked up the flight of stairs and into the office. He settled at his desk, and positioned the crow, whom he had named Carl, in a comfortable nook between the radiator and the window. His desk was in the back, where actual work was taking place and no petitioners were allowed. The front room, bisected by the glass partition with small semicircular windows, was dominated by the passport desk, which was always doing brisk business.

He longed to be at the passport desk-although boring, the work there was familiar, and one could go through the motions of looking up vital statistics and stamping and filling in the blanks while thinking about something else entirely. Other police work suddenly lacked the familiarity.

Their station always used to be a quiet one, and Yakov had resigned himself to going through his life and retiring without ever investigating a homicide, without ever solving anything more serious than a domestic dispute or a drunken confrontation. It suited him fine, and the recent increase in crime, racketeers that came out of the woodwork, the territorial disputes, the murders, the torture-all of it was too much for him.

He shuffled papers in his desk, hoping that he would remain unnoticed, that no one would unload a petitioner on him and make him listen to another bitter tale of misery he could do nothing about. He would give them the usual speech of how they would do everything in their power, not mentioning that it wasn't much, that they lacked funding and morale, and that retirement seemed like a distant paradise to the young among them, and a nearby oasis that would finally quench their thirst to those who were older, but none of them really wanted to be here, and all regretted going into this line of work, except maybe the girls at the passport desk.

He managed to spend the morning pretending to be busy, and surreptitiously feeding the little crow every time he opened the bright glass beads of his eyes, his yellow beak gaping expectantly. Yakov shoved bits of raw hamburger into the hungry mouth, worried that the chunks might be too big. But Carl swallowed, and waited for more. Then Yakov worried about overfeeding.

"Richards,” the voice by his desk said. “I need your attention for a bit."

Yakov looked up to meet a steely gaze of his lieutenant, who despite Yakov's seven-year tenure at the station still had trouble with his last name-he pronounced it carefully, as if the foreign word would burn the roof of his mouth if he weren't vigilant about it. “Just be a moment, Lieutenant Zakharov,” he said.

Zakharov couldn't wait, of course. He ushered in an older woman, an obvious provincial covered with headscarf and shod in the gleaming hooves of orthopedic shoes. She had been crying, but her mouth formed a tight pucker, to ward against any impending emotion. Yakov knew that look well.

He sat the woman in front of his desk, and shoved Carl out of the way. She studied the chipped composite wood and a stack of papers Yakov kept there just to appear busy. The woman then turned her suspicious attention to Yakov. Her furrowed face betrayed her thoughts-she considered Yakov too young, too uneducated, not someone who should be in position of authority, making decisions that people's lives depended upon.

"What can I do for you?” Yakov said, derailing the unpleasant train of thought.

Carl squawked, and the woman frowned. “My name is Anna Chernina. My son-in-law is missing. He went to buy cigarettes and never came back. My daughter's been crying for two days straight now."

Yakov wrote down the address of the woman and her daughter, and the description of her son-in-law-eyes: brown, hair: brown, beard: none, height: 1 m 81 cm. He promised to call as soon as they heard anything.

The woman left unconvinced that Yakov was going to help her. He was pretty sure that he wasn't.

When lunchtime rolled around, Zakharov reappeared and straddled the peeling vinyl-upholstered chair in front of Yakov's desk.

"Yasha,” he said, more familiar than Yakov ever remembered him, “we have five disappearances reported today."

Man. Wings. Scottish terrier abandoned in the empty field. Yakov banished the thought. “Racketeers,” he said.

"It's happening all over Moscow. Thirty people in the last week."

"Racketeers are all over Moscow."

Zakharov rested his aristocratic skull on his hands folded over the back of the chair, his gaze traveling up the freshly whitewashed walls and to the ceiling blinking with naked bulbs. He sighed. “I suppose. God, why me?"

Yakov shrugged and reached for the bag with his little crow.

"Neat,” Zakharov said. “Where'd you get it?"

"He fell out of the nest Saturday,” Yakov replied. “It was windy.” And there was no man turning into a bird.

"I can keep an eye on him,” Zakharov said.

"Oh? And I will be doing what exactly?"

"You'll be visiting the families of the missing persons and finding out whether they were involved in any sort of commerce."

"Who isn't nowadays?"

"My point exactly. See who they worked for, see if any Chechen gangs were involved."

Yakov looked up. “Chechen?"

"Yeah. Armenian, Georgian-whatever. Caucasian nationals."

"Most thugs I see are Russians,” Yakov said.

The lieutenant frowned and tossed a notepad with names and addresses at Yakov. “Go see to it."

Yakov went.

He couldn't understand why his mother had decided to move to this city. Sure, the center, the old city, was beautiful. But they lived in the suburbs, which were dreadful and empty and grey, all natural vegetation twisted and starved by overturned dirt, by too many people, by the incessant burrowing of new construction. One couldn't cross a yard without accumulating great clods of clay on one's boots, and their weight inevitably dragged down the spirit. By the time Yakov reached the well-paved streets and the bus stop, he would usually lose the desire to live anywhere, let alone this place. The anorexic poplars bent in the persistent wind given free rein in this neighborhood, rarely more than corridors between tall flat buildings that begat drafts and winds; Yakov hoped that one day the confluence of air streams and accumulated depression in the air would create a tornado. He pictured it in his mind, a perfect whirlwind picking up the discarded garbage, the construction bricks carelessly left in sloppy piles, cars parked by and occasionally on the sidewalks. Just clearing out all the trash which hard life had deposited here and forgotten about. He went back and forth on whether he wanted the people gone as well.

His first visit took him into the heart of this desolate labyrinth. He imagined himself a Theseus in a police uniform; only a thread and an Ariadne attached to it were missing. Sweat trickled down his neck and cooled in the hollow between his shoulder blades as he imagined a minotaur waiting for him-a terrible creature brought forth by the upset of the world's order, born from the chaos that ruled the land and the pungent dreams of the new Russians, a misshapen embodiment of lawlessness and despair.

The hoodlums hanging out by the building gave him oblique looks but didn't heckle. He was grateful for that, for being able to go by without being called names. He ducked into the entrance and ran up two flights of stairs to the second floor where his first appointment waited.

He rang the bell and waited. He pushed the door and it swung noiselessly, admitting him into a crammed one-bedroom apartment, where pride masked poverty with knick-knacks and imitation wood furniture. He saw a cockroach, scuttling away shyly, and called into the empty place, “Hello?"

"Over here,” he heard from the kitchen.

A young girl, maybe seventeen, sat at the kitchen table, her hands folded in her lap. Her gaze never met Yakov's, and remained directed toward the single window. “When we first moved here,” she said, “there were apple orchards. This house was the first to be built in this district, and all the rest was just gardens, and the woods past the railroad tracks. There were owls there-I could hear them hooting every night. The trains whistling and the owls hooting, this is how I remember it. Especially in the summer."

"I'm with the police,” Yakov said. “We got a report of a missing person?"

"My mom,” the girl said, stubbornly staring out of the window. Her voice wavered a bit, and with a sinking heart Yakov realized that she'd been crying.

He never knew what to say to the crying people, especially the younger ones. It made him panic and make promises he couldn't possibly keep, just to stem the tears and the heartbreak. “Please,” he said. “Don't cry. We'll find your mom. But you'll have to help me there, all right?"

The girl rubbed her face with her palm angrily, and shot him a smoldering look, furious that he'd seen her like this, red-eyed and snot-nosed. He pitied her for her grief and for her plain face and sharp nose, for her thin mousy braids, for her obvious awkwardness.

"When did you last see her?” Yakov asked, and sat down at the table though no invitation was forthcoming.

"Friday morning,” the girl said. “She went to work but she didn't come back."

"Where does she work?"

"At the meat processing plant across the railroad tracks.” The girl pointed. “Where the woods used to be. They say she didn't come to work Friday."

He wrote it down. “Do you have any relatives you can stay with meanwhile?"

"No.” She gave him a dark look from her eyes reddened with recent tears. “I can take care of myself."

He nodded. “We'll call you if we find anything. Your name is…?"

"Darya,” the girl said. “And you?"

"Yakov,” Yakov said. “If you call your local police station, just ask for me, all right?"

"All right,” the girl said, and turned back to the window.

Yakov headed for the door. There was a yelp, and he spun and ran back into the kitchen, imagining something horrible happening to the girl. Instead, he found her unharmed but pale as she pointed at something outside the window. He looked at the flock of birds winging their way toward the building, not understanding at first. And then he saw.

The birds were owls, squinting in the luminous sunlight, but circling nonetheless.

"Where did they come from?” Yakov muttered, looking over the expanse of asphalt and construction.

The owls seemed confused as well. They remained silent, and their wings, soft as down, made no noise; they were phantoms, not birds of flesh and bone, he thought. They were not real because they were not supposed to be here, had no right to exist, had no reason to fly about in daylight. Yet Darya saw them too and waved at the birds, shooing them away or inviting them closer, Yakov couldn't tell.

One of the owls split from the flock and headed directly for the window. Its eyes, huge and round and yellow, set in a white triangular face, gripped Yakov's. The bird screeched once and slammed into the windowpane, its speckled feathers erupting at the impact and showering down, falling just seconds before the dead owl's body hit the asphalt below. Darya cried.

It was dark when he arrived at the last address, not too far from the station-he planned it that way. An older woman opened the door; her eyes were haunted. A stained and wet housecoat clung to her spindly legs, and the buttons were missing, showing a yellowing slip underneath. The woman motioned for him to come in, and he heard water rushing into the bathtub and a baby crying.

"Doing the laundry,” the woman explained. “My daughter's missing. This is her baby."

"I can wait a little,” Yakov said.

The woman nodded and disappeared down the hallway, muttering to herself and sighing. Yakov felt for her, left like this with a double burden of a missing child and care for the grandchild. He didn't dare to venture inside the apartment and waited by the door, resting his back against its smooth surface, until a lock clicked and the door shoved him into the hallway.

"I'm sorry,” the woman who entered said, and eyed him suspiciously. She was taller than Yakov and about his age; she carried grocery bags. “Are you with the police?"

"Yes,” Yakov said, resisting the impulse to sarcasm. “I'm sorry it took me so long-I'm interviewing many people today. A lot of folks seem to be missing. I think I just spoke to your mother?"

The woman nodded. “My sister disappeared two days ago."

"Where did she work?"

"She was a student, at the Pedagogical Institute. Started last year. She just had a baby."

"A boy or a girl?” Yakov asked.

The woman looked at him with a strange expression in her dark eyes. “I don't know,” she said. “I was so shaken, I never thought of asking."

The old woman reappeared, wiping her hands on the housecoat. “It's a boy,” she told Yakov, pointedly ignoring the woman with grocery bags. “Come on in, son. I'll tell you all about it."

She led him into the living room, where he sat on the collapsed couch, a spring digging into his thigh, and asked questions. Just like everyone else, the missing girl had no criminal connections and led a startlingly ordinary life. The only unusual thing was the circumstances of her disappear-ance-giving birth in the bathroom and then melting into thin air.

"And you haven't heard or seen anything?” he asked. “And are you sure the bathroom door was locked?"

"I'm sure,” the woman said. “And there wasn't anyone else, except myself, and Galina."

"And a jackdaw,” the tall woman said from the doorway where she apparently stood for some time, silent.

Man. Wings. Scottish terrier.

The old woman shook her head in exasperation. “Excuse her,” she told Yakov. “She's not-right."

There didn't seem to be anything wrong with the woman, except that at her mother's words she shrank and retreated into the hallway.

"Wait,” Yakov called. “Did you say a jackdaw?"

The woman peeked in again. “Yes. Other birds, too. And I think I know someone who can help you look. Only…"

"Stop that,” the older woman said. “You're embarrassing me."

And Galina faded from view, silently disappearing into the darkness of the apartment. She reappeared once, when Yakov was leaving, and shoved a crumpled note into his hand. “Call me at work. There's a street artist who knows something,” she whispered and fled under her mother's withering stare.