Dan won’t be running today, anyway, even if he’s miraculously recovered from the flu overnight. Surely at age thirty-two he would know that running fifteen miles in minus thirty weather will lead, not to increased fitness, but to puking and fever? He should have phoned Dan before he left his apartment this morning. It’s what he’d do without thinking, ordinarily, but he pictured Lazenby — sleeping on Dan and Rae’s couch in front of the TV, the coffee table covered with empty beer bottles — and went out without a glance at the phone.
Henry climbs the hill that constitutes the front steps, and when he looks up is surprised to find Mrs. Bogdanov in the open doorway. She wears her usual flinty expression as she motions for him to come inside, where the sharp, clean scent of new snow gives way to a spicy herbal aroma, the house’s bouquet, which he’s never encountered elsewhere — the smell of another country.
“Such a day,” Mrs. Bogdanov says as she bangs the door closed, her white hair standing out from her head like dry grass. She doesn’t seem surprised to see him. He casts around for the snow shovel, which she keeps behind the coat rack in the small entranceway, but she holds out her gnarled hands to take his coat. “Tea first,” she says.
A few minutes later, she comes into the overheated sitting room carrying a tray with a plate of biscuits on it, the usual battered pewter teapot, and two delicate blue teacups he hasn’t seen before. They’re rimmed with gold and covered in overlapping waves of bright blue flower petals. Placing the tray on the rickety table, she manoeuvers her bulky frame easily into the small space between the table and her chair, and settles down opposite him.
“Last night, did you hear? I thought the wind it would tear the roof right off the house.” She pours his tea too quickly and it splashes into the saucer.
“I did,” he says. He didn’t wake up, but he was aware of the storm gnawing at the edges of his sleep.
“In the night,” she says, “I look, and the air it is snow, all snow, and the river, the trees —” she flicks a hand toward the window, “gone!”
“My friend Michael, he phoned this morning, he was going to come himself to shovel — him with his heart. I say, ‘No, Mikhail, for that I have Henry.’ This is his first winter here and I have to remind him how much snow fell on our own village in Russia! I say, ‘How could you forget, so much snow when we were small, we could drown in it?’ Her cheeks, pleated with soft folds, are flushed pink. “Mikhail says to me, ‘Maria, sometimes it is better to forget.’”
Henry almost burns his tongue on the tea, which is too strong, as usual. He’s been working for Mrs. Bogdanov for a couple of years now, and she’d never mentioned this Michael, and now, for the last couple of months, it’s Michael says this, Michael says that.
“But sometimes, I tell you, Henry, to forget is not so easy.” She pinches the handle of her tea cup daintily, little finger crooked out to one side, and the sun, sparking briefly in the window, dapples her face, her wistful smile.
THE WINTER THAT MARIA WAS FIVE, she woke up each morning listening to her grandfather Yuri as he told her mother what he planned to do that day. Maria lay very still because she had to hear — she’d know by his tone of voice — was the day a wolf or a sparrow? If Yuri was certain that spring was just around the corner and all four feet of snow on the ground would melt into a stream, then a puddle, then a cup of water just big enough for a sparrow to bathe in, Maria would jump out of bed and into his arms. But on the days he cursed the winter for an old white wolf that refused to die, Maria stayed under her blanket as long as she could.
One morning she woke earlier than usual, thinking she’d heard her grandfather feeding wood into the stove that covered almost the whole back wall of their cottage. But the stove threw only the dullest orange glow — and there was an anxious flapping over her head as wind plucked at the loose roof tile her mother had been nagging her grandfather to fix.
Maria eased out of bed, careful not to disturb her sister, Katerina. She climbed onto a stool, and all she could see, after melting ice from the pane with her breath, was snow: all that white and yet it was a kind of shattered darkness hurling itself at the window.
Her grandfather was sleeping on his pallet beside the stove. She knew she couldn’t open the stove door by herself so she grasped a split of birch and let it fall with a soft thud against the warm brick. She did this twice more, until she heard his pallet creak.
As he built up the fire, she crawled into his bed. When he lay down beside her, she took a chance, because she had a hunch, looking at his weathered, peaceful face, that today was a sparrow, and so she spouted any kind of nonsense that came into her head — until his eyelids fluttered open again and he began to speak in a voice so low it was as if the words rumbled directly out of his chest and into her ear.
One night years before she and her sister, Katerina, came into the world, there came a storm as terrible as this one, but it was a rainstorm not a snowstorm. This was back when Yuri and everyone he knew worked in the service of Count K, a man whose name no one spoke aloud any longer, although then it was as familiar to Yuri as his own.
Yuri was posted at the iron gates of K’s estate, where he stood beneath a rude shelter, a few poles holding up a wooden roof that kept off most of the rain. Usually, he’d be in the fields, or tending to the animals K liked to call his “collection,” an odd assortment of guinea hens and other exotic birds, a colony of foul-tempered mink, and a single, sickly monkey.
Yuri had waited hours for a delivery he didn’t believe would arrive. All afternoon and into the evening he saw no one, except for Valentin, a husky young fellow, his fat fingers so clumsy that he almost dropped Yuri’s supper of boiled potatoes and salted meat into the dirt.
The delivery he didn’t believe in had been promised by a certain Prince R. This rascal had promised things before, a case of French wine once owned by Napoleon, a painting by a member of the Tsar’s court, a keg of ale — and none of these had materialized except the ale, which had been so dirty that those who had seen it poured out into a glass said there were shiny bugs, like a swarm of seeds, swimming in it.
Just as Yuri heard the distant ring of the village church bells tolling nine o’clock, a thunderous clap struck above his head, lightning cracking open a birch only a few arms-lengths away. The burning tree was soon doused by pouring rain but the instant he tasted its sweet smoke, a humming sensation began under his breastbone. He listened hard for the clatter of horses approaching, but all he could hear was rain tearing through windblown leaves.
He slept hunkered down against one of the poles and slept, waking to a wet scuffling coming down the clay road toward him. Grabbing his lantern, he went out into the rain that was now just a mist, the greasy clay sucking at his boots.
Six men, half-starved, and in ragged clothes that scarcely covered them, were walking two abreast, and fenced in by them, entwined with chains that were wrapped with rope, was a shape cut out of the night — was it, could it be?
Yuri held his lantern higher and the animal’s head followed, its eyes seeking the light. And then a great gust of wind came roaring down through the trees, wind loaded with rain, and his lantern was struck from his hand.
And they were, all of them, enveloped in darkness.
But he was sure of what he had seen. A bear. A black bear with a leather muzzle binding its snout, and if Prince R had told the truth for once, it had been captured in the woods where the Tsar wanted no bears to live, because the deer and the hare and the wild grouse belonged to his royal hunger alone.
Yuri relit the lantern and again caught the bear’s eyes — brassy, frightened — in the pitching light. The rain that had made its keepers into half-drowned wraiths tipped the fur along its back, its spade-shaped head, with points of liquid silver.
And now here was Count K, riding up on his favourite stallion and circling the men and the bear as casually as if this were an everyday delivery — boards from the mill, lamp oil, the rough red wine he favoured. The men cowered under his s
crutiny, though he paid them no mind at all (they might have been posts that the brute was tied to).
“Good,” was all the count said, and he slapped the horse’s rump and rode away.
In no time a dozen of K’s men hustled around the bear and its captors with shouts of “the ropes” and “hold fast,” and soon the weary travellers were free and Yuri thought they might fall — that the fear of the bear had been all that was keeping them upright — but instead they staggered off toward one of the larger huts where they’d be given food and drink and a place to sleep.
And now K’s men were leading the animal toward the path through the woods that would take them to the cage Yuri had built for this creature he hadn’t believed in, and that young troublemaker, Valentin, was stumbling along at their heels.
“Be careful, Valentin,” Yuri called out. He hauled on the iron gates and swung them closed, and then he, too, set off toward the cage. He could hear curses interrupted by laughter, and by the time he reached the clearing, the rain had stopped, the bear was in the cage, and the men were outside it, arms flung over on one another’s shoulders.
“Pyotr, you fool,” one of them cried, holding up the leather muzzle, “you almost lost a hand to them teeth.”
They dumped the rope and chain in a heap at Yuri’s feet and bid him good night.
Valentin was fascinated by the animal and he picked up a stick and thrust it through the bars, laughing when the bear broke it in two with one snap of its jaws. Then the boy stood with his hands seizing the bars as if he wanted to lift the cage off the ground and shake it. Yuri had to twist the idiot’s fingers to get him to let go.
“Do you want your hands to be the beast’s breakfast?” Yuri growled.
The fellow just stood there, his burly arms limp at his side, hands knotted into fists. Yuri gave him a hard nudge between his meaty shoulder blades and finally he stalked off.
And then Yuri was alone with the animal.
The bear slouched around the borders of the cage until it arrived at the mixture of meat and berries Yuri had left for it earlier in the day. It sniffed at the food but didn’t eat, then reared up onto its strong hind legs, sleek head weaving back and forth in the drenched air, catching whatever scent, whatever tale of this man the wind spirited toward its flaring nostrils. And Yuri in turn inhaled wet bear, a piney sweetness so intense it smothered all his other senses.
When Yuri’s sight returned the bear was on all fours and charging him, and it was as if the creature were galloping through the forest, and Yuri felt every immense stride, felt the pounding of the ground, coming up through his own legs like vertigo — and then the bear’s chest and neck slammed up hard against the wooden timbers of the cage.
In the next breath, a forepaw, with its razor-tip claws, crept out between them, slowly, as if to draw the man into an embrace. And Yuri, as he quavered just out of the bear’s reach, unable to turn and run as his racing heart exhorted him to, knew that his fate was linked to this creature’s, that they were lashed together by a tie stronger than ropes and chains, and that this bond was all the more powerful because no one, not even his beloved wife, would believe it.
And Yuri began to sing a song taught to him by his father:
Nyekomu byeryozu zalomati,
nyekomu kudryavu zashtshipati,
lyuli, lyuli, zalomati,
lyuli, lyuli, zashtshipati.
Nobody shall break down the birch tree,
nobody shall tear out the curly birch tree,
lyuli, lyuli, break down,
lyuli, lyuli, tear out.
A TIMID BUT PERSISTENT RAPPING from somewhere in the back of the house cuts off Mrs. Bogdanov in mid-, bittersweet strain, and Henry startles, his teacup quaking on its saucer.
“Ach,” she says, “it’s nothing, just a branch down at the back door, a big one, from that maple, and the wind …” She turns her head away, a finger pressed against a moist red eyelid. “I should not have called you today, the snow — more, more, more — it just keeps coming.” She stands and looks out at the street.
Henry holds up the fragile blue cup, translucent now that it’s empty, for her to take from him, and places it on the tray Mrs. Bogdanov lowers to receive it.
As he pulls on his parka he sees that it’s true; more snow is coming down, blustering through the grey, skeletal branches of the elms on the boulevard, adding a soft new layer to the curved backs of the drifts.
Bear snow, Henry thinks, passing a hand over his eyes.
OUTSIDE, HE HEAVES the maple branch into the middle of the backyard — he’ll cut it up into firewood in the spring, he tells himself, though Maria Bogdanov never uses her fireplace, which is too old, she says, its mortar lining full of cracks.
As he attacks the drifts along the back walk, the snow heavy as sand in the mouth of the shovel, he imagines a small frame house, and the field behind it, where Maria’s grandfather Yuri is trailing an old horse hitched to an iron plough, and on the far side of the field an opening in the woods: the path that meanders through trees to the bear pacing back and forth in its rough-hewn enclosure, and on the dirt floor a battered food dish like an upended helmet. There’s an ugly gash on the bear’s snout, from when he was captured.
An hour later Henry has finally dug his way around the corner of the big house to the front yard, and is within reach of the trench he made in the snow earlier, on his way to the front door. Despite the razor-sharp air, the numbness of his cheeks and brow, he’s sweating beneath his parka. A three-foot-high wedge of snow separates him from his tracks. The drift is so elegantly sculpted that he stands for a few seconds, admiring its crisp lines, the way the wind glides along it, scattering a few white crystals in its wake.
It comes to him, then, the refrain: any way now, any day now, I shall be released.
And then he breaks the back of the frozen wave with the blade of his shovel.
AT HOME AFTER LUNCH, Henry lies down on his bed, and in a few minutes, he’s asleep.
He dreams of a bear in a cage. He slips his hands between cold iron bars and the bear swings his heavy head toward them and breathes into Henry’s cupped palms — and Henry leaps back, snatching his hands away from the dark snout. And then he’s ashamed, and wants to return his fists to that heat, the breath of the bear like a force he must draw close to, a fire he needs to keep his blood flowing, his hands cramping on the handle of the shovel as the snow fills and fills the road he works to clear, never making any headway, never moving from the spot where he labours pointlessly, a road that is not much more than a path, a sliver of light between the trees.
Six
LATE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, Henry sits hunched over the crow he can’t help but think of as Amy’s crow. The orbits, the hollows where bright eyes once interrogated the world, are surprisingly large, and empty. A crow’s gaze is constantly roving, scanning for anything of crow-significance, but Henry has only seen this crow’s eyes filmed over, grey and opaque. And Amy was beside him, a fleeting smile on her slender face.
Henry gets up and hits the radio’s power button. A program about songbirds is coming up that he’d like to hear, but the news is on, and he turns the volume down.
He sits down again with a groan. Amy was such a sweet girl. She teared up over the slightest thing, a mean bit of gossip about one of her girlfriends, or the snide asides made by a rude customer in the clothing store where she worked. She didn’t even like to eat chicken on the bone — did he really think he could initiate her into the mysteries of bird-building?
IT WAS A LATE MORNING IN JULY, a Saturday, a hot day in a whole week of hot days, when Henry and Amy got out of his car and strolled into his mother’s greenhouse. On the far side of the building, Marcie, his mother’s assistant manager, was bent over, pruning a flowering jasmine, her hands roving quickly and surely among the leaves and blossoms. She was singing with that breathy quality that meant she was totally immersed in her work, the notes seeming to rise from the white petals.
He made his wa
y toward her, winding through a display of ceramic pots, while Amy lingered uncertainly just inside the door.
“Marcie.” He spoke her name softly. The air heavy with the mixed scent of jasmine and wet soil.
She straightened up slowly, reluctant to take her eyes from what her hands were doing. At first she didn’t appear to register who he was, and then her round face, with its hawk-like nose, slowly lit up.
“Henry, I was just thinking about you. Well, actually I was thinking about Rae. It’s been too long since she and Dan came out. Tell her I miss her, eh?”
“If I see her, sure.”
Marcie shoved a lock of dirty blonde hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist. “Don’t just stand there, Henry, lift that dracaena onto the cart here,” and she nodded toward a cart half-loaded with several hibiscus covered in magenta flowers.
“Where did these come from?” he asked. They didn’t usually deal much in houseplants.
“Special order,” she said. “For a wedding.”
Henry hefted the thick clay pot by the rim as Marcie’s voice rang out behind him. “Evelyn, they’re here!” and immediately his mother’s voice answered from the direction of her office.
Henry shoved the four-foot-high plant into place on the cart, and then stood fingering the bark on its trunk, which was made of overlapping scales, like snakeskin.
When he looked around, Marcie was hugging Amy hello. Marcie was only a few years older, but with her tanned, wiry arms, and bare muscled legs planted firmly on the ground, she looked like she could wrest Amy off the ground in one easy lift, as you would a spindly child.
Henry ambled slowly toward them. Marcie had released Amy and was smiling her generous smile. His mother, wearing a blouse the same iron grey as her hair, was smiling too, but more warily. She and Marcie stood with Amy between them like a fancifully wrapped gift in her bright yellow sundress.
The Afterlife of Birds Page 5
