The Afterlife of Birds

by Elizabeth Philips

  Maria didn’t understand, as she sat watching the faces around her, why her grandfather was listening to this young man, was willing to accept money from him. It was something that wasn’t done, and yet it seemed to be happening. There were so many things she didn’t understand, that she wouldn’t understand for a very long time.

  A WEEK LATER THEY LEFT, sneaking away after midnight.

  They walked, mostly at night, and slept in the day beneath trees; in high grass; on rocky ground. Sometimes Mikhail gave coins to a farmer and they huddled in the back of his cart with the wheat. They rode for days in a dirty train car. When the train swayed across empty fields at night, they saw fires burning in the distance. Once the train slowed almost to a stop, and she looked out and saw a man pushing another man in a wheelbarrow. They were both starving, their bones jutting from their skin, and the man in the barrow arched his neck toward Maria, his eyes round and unblinking. They were trying to catch the train — which did not stop, which would not stop, and she was about to cry out, but Mikhail placed his hand, softly, over her mouth.

  And finally, one morning, there it was: the sea. Dimpled like old silver. And a cold salt wind blowing in their faces.

  Her grandfather had a wracking coughing fit the day before they were to board the ship. When the attack subsided, his face was a pasty grey, and he looked at Maria and smiled — the first smile she had seen on his face since they had left the village — and said he was too old to leave, too old to start a new life. He said that he’d cash in his ticket, and the money would see him through the winter.

  SHE LOOKED DOWN FROM THE DECK of the ship at her grandfather as the ship drew away from the dock. He waved vaguely up toward them. He looked small, and stooped. Much older than he had ever seemed — her grandfather, Yuri.

  She never saw him again. He died only a few months later, though they didn’t receive word for many months after that.

  Maria, her sister, and her mother lived together in London for a while. Mikhail always had at least two jobs, sometimes in other cities. He would turn up, beaming, full of a relentless energy, with armloads of food. He was compact and powerful, full of plans and schemes and secrets, a giver of crushing hugs, a force to be reckoned with. He’d stay for a few days and then be gone again. The war came within the year, and the bombings. Mikhail worked for the British — who knows what it was he did — but he appeared at their door just the same, with good vodka, with chocolate and tins of herring. Her sister married and moved away, leaving Maria with their mother, who had tuberculosis. Maria married just before her mother’s death — to Petya, her first husband — and only a year later, she herself was a widow. When the war was over, Mikhail left for America, and she for Canada, with her second husband, Bogdanov.

  Michael has been married more than once, and is now widowed, and has a daughter who lives in the city, and other grown children — Maria doesn’t say how many — scattered across Canada and the US. Wherever he’s lived, it seems he’s left a child or two behind.

  Even now, so many months later, she is astonished that Mikhail has found his way to this city, that this November he appeared on her doorstep, grinning, his arms open wide. Marusya, he said, over and over again. Bogdanova.

  HENRY STIRS IN HIS CHAIR. He looks at the old, ashen face before him, the faded green of her eyes.

  “That morning in the woods, when I helped Mikhail, he hadn’t been looking for mushrooms, he’d been looking for a grave — and that he did find. He’d been glad, almost, of the pain from his injury, he told me, because it chased away his fear. But more than that he was happy to see me, this girl with her basket. He was delighted that I was irritated with him for interrupting my quest for the best mushrooms, and he says that I had gathered that day one of the princes — a giant one. Its deep brown, almost black cap was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. I don’t remember this, but it must be true, or he wouldn’t say so. For the truth, you can always rely on Mikhail.”

  Henry helps her upstairs, and she settles into her chair in front of the television. He asks her if she wants it on and she says no. When he leaves, she has a book he’s never seen before open on her lap. He can see the Russian script in the dim light from the lamp; some of the letters, so opaque to him, are like gables, some like pillars, others are sinuous as rivers, but all are caught there, contained by the strict white page.

  Twenty-Three

  THAT EVENING, Henry rearranges his bird skeletons, playing with their placement on top of the kitchen cupboards. Should the goshawk have centre stage? Should the goose be at the far end? Will the rock dove, small and hunched, its head jutting forward like it might be about to head-butt anything in its way, look foolish beside the dignified hawk? He decides the dove’s fine where it is, at least for now. Maybe when he finishes the crow, he’ll switch up the birds again. But today, the hawk, perched as if it is ready to roost for the night in some high bough, is going to be what he and his few visitors see when they come in the door.

  The hawk’s eye, in life, would have been red. What do you see, with a red eye? Prey, the faintest shiver of movement on the ground. And what else? The hawk flies swiftly through the cottonwoods, flapping and gliding, manoeuvering with minute adjustments of its wings around living trees and standing deadwood, to land with unerring precision on its nest. What are the trees to it? They must be a screen, sweet shade, but also cover during the hunt, the leaves a foil, disguising the sound of the hawk’s approach from its prey, from the rabbits and weasels, and the other birds it tears into with that knife-like beak.

  Henry glances at his watch. Marcie will be here in minutes, and he’s forgotten completely to put the water on to boil for the pasta dish that should be well underway by now.

  He wipes the kitchen table, erasing all trace of the nearly completed crow, which he’s shifted to the desk in his bird room. He meant to get some flowers, he meant for this to be a romantic evening, or as romantic as you can be with a woman who isn’t your lover and is eight-and-a-half months pregnant. He’ll be lucky if, when she arrives, he can give the impression that she might at some point get something to eat.

  When Marcie comes to the door, her hair is scraped back into an untidy ponytail and she has dark smudges under her eyes.

  “I’ve had it,” she says, collapsing into a kitchen chair. “I’m done with being pregnant.”

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  “Tequila, a tumbler full. But I’ll settle for water, in the biggest glass you’ve got.”

  For the next twenty minutes she sits slumped at the table, staring wearily into space as he runs water into the pasta pot and chops the tomatoes into a messy heap for the sauce.

  He’s stirring in oregano and thyme when he feels a warm hand on the back of his neck.

  “Sorry, Henry,” she says.

  “I’m the one that’s behind schedule.” He smiles and keeps stirring.

  “Yeah, eight days to go and I feel like this baby should be out and talking in perfect sentences.”

  Henry laughs. His mother has told him that first babies are often late, that Dan was, but he isn’t going to pass that on. He can feel Marcie’s heat, her shoulder next to his. She has a bitter, almost animal scent tonight, which he associates with her impatient, near-ripe state.

  “That smells good,” she says.

  “Don’t sound so surprised.”

  “Well, I thought crow was your specialty.”

  “It might be better than this,” he says, reaching for the salt on the back of the stove.

  She sits down again, and he hears her softly exclaim, “Oh.”

  Alarmed, he spins around, the spatula splattering red sauce across the floor. Marcie’s facing the skeletons on top of the kitchen cupboards, a smile blooming on her face.

  “I just noticed your birds. God, I must be so out of it. I come into the room and don’t even notice a bunch of creatures with wings where there used to be nothing but skulls.”

  She sees wings, he thinks. Bird
s, not bones — not death and decay. He throws in the mushrooms and stirs the sauce wildly.

  WHEN HENRY FINALLY PLACES two heaping plates on the table, they both take a moment to admire them: the new lettuce, tossed with a few leaves of basil, is so fragrant, so green on the white plates, and the sauce on the linguine glows red, peppered with flecks of oregano. Henry pours himself a glass of red wine. Marcie puts a hand on his wrist, takes the glass from him, has a sip, and passes it back.

  They eat for a few minutes in silence, and then Henry tells her that Michael’s in the hospital.

  “How serious is it?”

  “Mrs. B. says very, and that’s the way she’s acting. She’s kind of beside herself, I think.”

  “She loves him,” Marcie says simply.

  Henry thinks about the photos, the little boy, so serious, clutching Maria’s hand. “Yes,” he says.

  “Oh,” he says a little later, “I can’t believe I almost forgot to tell you this — Dan called a couple of days ago.”

  “Really? How did he sound?”

  “Like he was running.”

  “That’s what he does,” she says.

  “He wants me to send him a pair of his running shoes. Oh, and he still wants me to send him that bone.”

  Marcie makes a face. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but honestly. Rae is working half days — she’s doing better now — finally,” she says, clasping his hand briefly, “on that new anti-nausea drug. But she’s lost so much weight that a guy she’s worked with for years didn’t recognize her. And all Dan can think of is his wanker talisman.”

  “Well, I did promise it to him,” Henry says, “though I have to say I’ve regretted it ever since. But now that I’ve got one …” He’s already told her about his trip to Percy’s shop and she seemed to enjoy his description of Mac, and the room full of trophy heads, but she hasn’t actually seen the fox bones yet. “I may as well send it to him.”

  “So is he going to carry the thing in his pocket?”

  “I dunno. I was just going to wrap it up in some bubble pack and shove it inside one of sneakers.”

  “Why don’t you see if you can attach it to a chain, or a strip of leather or something, and then Dan can actually wear his spare cock.”

  Henry laughs, then says, “I have an idea, just wait here,” and goes into his bedroom for the fox bacula, and into the bird room where he rummages around in a drawer and comes up with a handful of things that he carries into the kitchen and dumps on the table in front of Marcie.

  “This is an eye pin,” he says, showing her a loop with a screw end, “for attaching the bone to the cord, and this is the cord, nice fine leather, which I think I’ll be able to thread through the pin.

  “And here,” he opens his left hand, “are the fox bacula.”

  “Oh,” she says.

  He thought she’d laugh, but she seems merely interested as she feels the slight waviness in the small straight bones.

  Now she chuckles. “Actually, they are sort of pretty, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah, not that macho, really — but which one do you think I should give him? He can’t have two — might give him an unfair advantage over the other runners.”

  Marcie laughs. “I think you should decide,” she says.

  One penis bone is very white, the other almost ochre, as if it’s been aged in river mud.

  “Well, I’d say this one,” he says, holding up the white baculum. “Because it’ll look better, won’t it, against Dan’s skin.”

  “But where will you attach that eye hook thing?”

  “Right in the end,” and he shows her where he’ll drill a hole into the very base of the bone, the thicker end, insert the pin, add a dab of glue, string the cord and tie it, “and voila, my first fox baculum necklace.”

  She looks at him curiously. “You think you’ll be making more?”

  He says, “Let’s see how this one looks first. And actually, the thought of drilling into a boner —”

  “— kind of gives you the willies.”

  “Hey,” he says, pretending to punch her shoulder, “no cheap shots allowed.”

  They both laugh.

  And that’s what they do. After they’ve eaten their vanilla ice cream, they make his brother a fox baculum necklace.

  WHEN THEY’RE DONE, they find some shade in the backyard, and Marcie tells him about seeing Rae earlier in the day.

  “She’s got one or two treatments to go?” Henry asks.

  “Just one, July 5th, I think.”

  Henry imagines Rae at home, in the quiet house, all the surfaces clean and uncluttered. She doesn’t look for Dan anymore when she comes home after her latest chemo treatment, doesn’t check to see if his jacket is over the back of a chair or call his name. She pulls on a sweater and goes out the back door, into the garden, with her mother or father, or a friend — there’s always someone there afterwards. She notices that there’s still a faint scent from one of the new lilacs, and that a deep velvety blue groundcover she doesn’t know the name of is beginning to flower.

  “And after that?” Henry says.

  “After that we’ll have to hope it works.”

  The western horizon is stained vermillion, the sky overhead a deepening blue.

  “Beautiful,” Marcie says, and he puts an arm around her shoulders. They sit on for a while, until the dew starts to come down, and then they get up without saying a word and go inside, and Marcie walks into his bedroom and lies down. Where she’s asleep almost immediately, lying flat on her back, her great globe of a belly pinning her there. Henry props himself up beside her and opens a book, an old favourite, The Music of Wild Birds. A fly buzzes against the screen; the clear bubbling notes of a robin’s dusk song drift in from somewhere down the street.

  LATER, HENRY WAKES, still in his clothes, and gets up slowly, the bed groaning under his weight. Her hand lifts, as if of its own accord, and catches his shirtsleeve.

  “I was going to say, sleep here,” she mumbles, as if he hasn’t just risen from that very spot, as if she weren’t lying in his bed. Her hand drops to her side and she’s asleep again, her face relaxed and open, the scar over her eyebrow like a tiny white star.

  He finds his sleeping bag at the bottom of his closet and tries to get comfortable on his old springy couch. Sometime in the night he awakens, and wonders where he is. He remembers, and smiles at the thought of Marcie in the other room, and he doesn’t wake again until morning, to the sound of her in the kitchen, singing something very softly. He can’t hear the words at first, and then — she must have heard his feet hit the floor — she is singing louder:

  The cuckoo she’s a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies.

  She bringeth us good tidings, she telleth us no lies.

  Twenty-Four

  MRS. BOGDANOV IS WAITING FOR HIM, standing on the sidewalk, when he pulls up in front of her house. It’s a cooler evening, and she’s wearing a wool dress, a dress so purple it’s almost black, her white hair carefully combed into partial submission.

  “Thank you, Henry,” she says when he gets out and opens the passenger door for her, and it occurs to him that he has never gone anywhere with her before, and he’s surprised by how natural it feels. On their way to the hospital, Mrs. Bogdanov tells him that she is filling in for Mikhail’s daughter, who has removed herself for an hour or two, to give Mrs. Bogdanov this chance to be alone with him.

  Henry waits with her in front of the elevator, blanching a little at the antiseptic smells, and when they start their ascent, he squirts sanitizing gel onto his hands — there are dispensers everywhere, even in the elevators — and he thinks that this same building is where Marcie will be checking in, any day now.

  At the nurses’ station, Mrs. Bogdanov asks directions to Michael’s room, claiming — imperious head held high and Russian accent much more pronounced — to be Michael’s sister and making Henry her grandson.

  He smiles uncomfortably at the nurse and trails Mrs. Bogdanov to Michael’
s room, where she pauses to square her shoulders before she pushes the door open.

  Michael lies beneath a white blanket pulled taut across his chest, an IV threaded into his left wrist, a heart monitor flickering next to his bed. The old man seems smaller than Henry remembers, his eyes half-open and his features slack, like someone just waking up, or about to sink into sleep.

  Maria Bogdanov stands motionless, her face forcibly composed. Henry moves a chair closer to the bed, invites her to sit with a small movement of his wrist, and then retreats to the window. If he leans right up against the pane and cranks his neck to the left he can just see the river to the east, and the clouds over the water. Directly below him, a few children play on a teeter-totter in a little park.

  Mrs. Bogdanov wraps her hand around Michael’s, which rests immobile at his side.

  “Mikhail,” she says in a hoarse whisper. “Mitka, it’s Marusya.”

  Michael’s eyelids slowly close and then open again, his irises a dark blue. The ghost of an expression passes over his features — a shadow not unlike amusement, there and then gone. How did this happen?

  Mrs. Bogdanov’s head is bowed, and like someone praying, she mutters, mostly in Russian, with the odd phrase in English, “that was hard,” “that’s good,” and “that’s right.”

  Suddenly Henry hears an odd rhythmic scraping sound that wasn’t there before. A sawing. Frightened now, he looks to the heart monitor, but it’s silent, the blips floating serenely across the screen. He listens hard, and with a sick lurch in his stomach, Henry knows that the sawing is Michael’s breathing, his ribcage unmoving, the room preternaturally quiet for one, two, five beats. And then his chest heaves again.

  Maria Bogdanov is bent over him, her hands clasped together. She isn’t praying exactly. She isn’t asking for anything; she’s receiving it — pulling something out of him. Perhaps she’s summoning up their long history. Or recalling that journey they made, how she, her sister, and Michael fled with her mother and her grandfather, Mikhail and Maria seated together. Lovers perhaps. Or not, but always allied after that, always on the same side.