Unseaming

by Mike Allen

  It was a miracle, perhaps, that he could even produce a note from the reed. No one had taught him how—he seemed to simply have a knack for it, as some do. He knew few songs, so often the notes he chose were random. He once played a song he remembered in his mother’s voice, and after he repeated it a few times, from one of the cells a woman’s voice joined in: bayu bayushki bayu, bayu detushku moyu, she sang, chto na gorke, na gorye, o vesyennei, o pore. He kept playing, wanting the voice never to stop, but it finally did, and he never learned who it was who sang that day.

  One of the four walls of the prison yard held no doors. The stones and mortar were pocked and stained. He liked to run his fingers in the dirt before the wall because of what he sometimes found there, shining buried treasures. He remembered from the days outside, when the warm winds from the sea heralded the great battleships, and the men on horseback would greet them, their swords at their sides, their coats glinting with shiny medals. That’s what he found in the dirt: officers’ medals, badges, pins, a trove of them.

  He hid them in the yard now; he didn’t bring them back to the cell. The only time he did, he showed them off to the one who took it upon herself to make sure he ate, the one who wiped his face afterward, who let him call her aunt; and she began to weep. Others, too, saw the shining metal things in his hands, began to cry, started to scream at him. Soon he was crying himself. He didn’t understand what he’d done to upset them.

  So now he kept them to himself in the yard, unburied them and laid them out, moved them around. He tried to use their shapes and colors to create things in the dirt, letters or images. He arranged them in a face, his father’s face. He did not know where his father was. The landlady’s dog had tried to bite him, and when Danilo told his father, his meaty face grew dark, and he took a knife and left the flat. Later Danilo heard the landlady screeching in anger. He half-heard phrases: You shouldn’t have dared and I can prove and kontr-revolutsiya. Only two days later the prison men came.

  Danilo played in the dirt, arranging the medals in circles that radiated out like the petals of a flower.

  Ural Mountains, 1932

  Galina knew the truth.

  Her father insisted that Danilo’s carvings could never measure up to his own, not without the blessing of the Queen of the Copper Mountain. They had no heart, he said. Pretty as they were, they would never breathe, never live, he said.

  But any untrained eye could see that Danilo’s work in stone and wood and paint was at least the equal of her father’s, if not better. He had carved and painted a likeness of their cat so real in its tabby-striped softness she absentmindedly began to pet it one day, only to jerk her hand back in surprise—and then spotted the real tom under the big table playing with a rat’s tail.

  She thought Danilo already the better artisan at fifteen than her bitter sire at forty-one, tainted green with envy that when he made the monthly wagon trips to the village market the boy’s creations sold better then his own.

  So Sergei Prokovich lorded this pathetic superstition of the mountain queen over his ward to deny his approval, ensuring the boy always fell short of an invented standard. She had voiced this opinion exactly once, making sure Danilo saw, and heard. Her father rewarded her with a drunken backhand, then slumped with a sob into his creaky wooden chair. She continued to glare until he screamed at her to leave. She had then dashed off into the twilit field, mosquitoes swarming to drink from her flesh when she finally collapsed in the grass.

  Snow-capped even in summer, the mountains pushed against the sky, weary giants slouching their rounded shoulders. Would that one could reach out its fist now and crush her.

  Danilo, who had stayed silent, shaking, through the exchange, found her in the encroaching dark, perhaps guided by the cloud of insects. A year her junior, he was so fragilely thin, though so was she, so was father. Danilo had been lean when he came, after his own parents died in Odessa, and exhausted by the endless miles in the cart. Danilo’s mother and Galina’s father were distant cousins, he had agreed to take Danilo on as a favor to his aunts, who thought it a good fit as the boy showed an artistic spark. She had thought so many times about the sad story of the boy’s imprisonment that it had become, in a way, her own memory—

  “You should not fight with him,” Danilo said, appearing next to her with no warning. “Not over me.”

  She sat up from the weeds, defiant. “He should never speak to you like that. He has no right.”

  Danilo would tell her later, how, despite the puffiness around her eyes, his breath caught at the sight of her face in the moonlight, and how his head swam, surrounded by the buzz of mosquitoes. But she thought he gasped at the bruise on her cheek, and when he reached with a trembling hand to brush a tear away, the touch surprised her, warmth spreading from the contact. She caught his wrist before he could pull his fingers away.

  Later they lay in the grass, oblivious to the stings that welted their skin. The night grew colder, but neither wished to return to the house.

  Something rustled in the grass, and Danilo sprang up. She heard him whisper, come back.

  “What is it?”

  His voice came in nervous starts and stops as he answered in the dark. “Sometimes when I come out here to be by myself, to play the pipes I made to please my mothers, a tiny dragon comes to listen. It has gold eyes. Scales like tarnished copper. It stays until I stop playing.”

  Galina snorted. “You play pipes for a lizard?” She felt strange. At times she had heard him play, and wherever she was she would stop and listen, but not go to him.

  He peered long into the grass. Then he stood. His voice sounded odd. “You should not talk back to your father. What he says about me, he is right.”

  She watched in stunned silence as he walked away.

  Ural Mountains, 1933

  Galina’s boots would never hold up to a hike into the unforgiving mountains, so she navigated her tiny bedroom in the dark, relying on touch and familiarity until she pulled aside the faded sheet hanging in the door. In the main room her father snored on a pallet beside the remains of the fire. Grateful that the few embers still dying in the hearth had lasted long enough to gift her with their light, she waited for her eyes to adjust. Then, stepping with care, she searched through the room for every rag she could find.

  Her father stirred in his sleep, moaned words she could not make out. She held her breath until his returned to a steady rasp.

  Back in her room, she grew bolder, lighting a lamp so she could accomplish the task at hand. By the little flame’s illumination she wrapped the rags around her booted feet, and bound the wrappings in place with heavy twine. She pulled three plain dresses on over her leggings, and over all of that her hooded fur cloak, the one that had been her mother’s.

  No longer so concerned for secrecy, she took the lamp out into the main room. Horrible as the cold would be, she needed to leave while the stars still shone. She wanted the sun to be as high in the sky as it could go once she reached the mountain, because she knew that was where she would find Danilo.

  In the village, the laughing women with faces like plump apples had shaken their heads in mock shame, while their thick-bearded husbands chuckled and joked about the rooster who fled the coop. A boy skilled with his hands, for certain, but without the stomach to right a wrong and endure a wedding. Hardly the first time the villagers had observed such a disgrace unfold, but perhaps, truly, she was better off.

  Yet she knew Danilo: no matter how his craft consumed him, no matter how his jaw clenched at her father’s taunts, he had wanted their child to have a father, she absolutely knew it in her heart. She could not believe he intended to run away from her. No, her father’s lies had driven him to do something insane. And wherever he was, he wanted to come back. She knew it.

  But how could he be alive after so many days on the mountain? It did not matter. In some manner not unlike the way she felt the life that was theirs to sculpt thriving warm in her belly, she knew with certainty he was alive, and trapp
ed. She did not want to think about what the journey she was about to undertake could mean for their baby. Her faith in herself was all she could trust.

  She did not notice till she was almost to the door that her father had sat up to watch her—his face, turned away from the firelight, a black oval fringed by the wisps of gray that clung to his temples.

  “Your lies brought this,” she said.

  He began to shake. She could not tell whether he was laughing or crying.

  At last he spoke, a flat whisper. “She wouldn’t take me, but she wanted him.” His own words seemed to choke him. “You will never get him back.”

  “Are you going to stop me, then?”

  The coward didn’t answer.

  Her rage carried her outside, kept her heart pounding, a source of heat to fight the terrible cold.

  The dawn found her trudging into the foothills, a black flea atop an endless snow-covered hide, slogging through drifts at times deeper than her hips. A breeze clawed her face with fingers so cold they burned, and it strove to worm those terrible fingers through the layers of her clothes. A quavering voice in her head grew louder with every cloudy breath, telling her she had already doomed herself, her baby, one suicidal fool chasing another.

  But then the way became easier—because she found tracks in the snowdrifts. Tracks like she’d never seen before in winter, something with clawed feet and a belly that slid across the top of the snow as a snake’s or lizard’s would—though if it was such a creature, it was larger than any variety she’d ever laid eyes on. She followed the trail, and her trek ceased to be such an ordeal.

  The path led her onto the stony shoulders of fallen giants, and higher still.

  By the time the sun blazed overhead, she found the first of the flowers, a carving of concentric petals half-hidden in snow. She brushed the flakes away and uncovered a rose bloom, larger than her head, every petal sculpted out of the mountainside in detail that astonished.

  That find was just the first of many. Not long after, still following the path drawn for her in the snow, she arrived at the cave mouth.

  When she called out in that dark space, the words that echoed back to her no longer sounded like her voice.

  Denmark, 1939

  They fled from yet another tyrant.

  Danilo’s silver tongue had acquired them a second horse to drag their cart through the icy muck that snowfall had made of the road. “What do you need it for now?” he had cajoled the farmer they’d fallen in with two nights ago, as the bent and browned old man made his own plans to flee over the border. “Too many will slow you. Take no more than you need.”

  Around them barren trees scratched at the grey sky. They struggled on alone—once they had been part of a great caravan of covered wagons, rolling carts, even automobiles pulled by horses. A few refugees pedaled their bicycles through the sleet. The caravan was beset with storms, once assaulted with machine gun fire and artillery. To stop and help the wounded or the dying meant offering yourself to Death.

  They had slipped again and again past that bony grasp.

  Had Danilo not bluffed his way past a Schutzstaffel officer, using fake orders typed on stolen stationary marked with an official seal, they would have been forced like all the others to turn south instead of north at Hamburg—the wrong direction.

  Despite the cold, she couldn’t bear to stay under the stifling canvas covering. She insisted, despite Danilo’s protests, on managing the reins. She would forever be the first to acknowledge her husband’s genius, but his astonishing talents did not extend to horsemanship.

  Eons had passed, it seemed, since the terrible winter when they left her father’s farm—but she felt certain that winter and its malevolent Queen had pursued them, had found them here.

  Danilo walked beside the wagon and sometimes pushed. He had grown thick as a tree, and strong. It was a wonder his hands could still be so gentle.

  He hurried to the head of the cart, keeping pace beside her now, his head level with her knee, and tried to lighten the mood. “When we have our son, we should call him Sergei. Would you like that?” She stiffened, but he didn’t seem to notice. “It’s your father’s name. Of course you’d like that.”

  “How could you know what I like?” she said. “But I suppose you’ll do whatever you like.”

  He laughed. “What is this now? I want what you want.”

  She knew better, but she said it nonetheless: “I want you to play the pipes.”

  “What?” He laughed again, even more incredulous.

  “You heard me.”

  “How silly. You know I can’t play pipes.” Yet, improbably, on this horrific day, one of many they’d endured, many more still ahead, his smile brightened. “But for you, if it is what you want, I will learn. Now, our baby—”

  But she did not know, not then, if she could ever have another child.

  “If it is a girl,” he went on, “I like the name Tamara.”

  Then his sky-wide grin faltered, for she had begun to shake her head, no, no, no, no. “You cannot call her that,” she said. “You cannot!”

  He touched her knee, frightened. “What’s wrong?”

  Furious, she turned to him. “I could tell you, and tell you, and tell you,” she said. “But you will never remember.”

  Then she spoke, and no matter how many times he asked her to repeat herself, he could not hear the words.

  Virginia, 1985

  A warm wind wafted through the screen door into the den, ruffled sensuous fingers through Daniel’s beard. As he held up the eagerly anticipated letter—the page practically burned in his fingers—the caress of the breeze felt like Fate herself offering congratulations.

  Had he sculpted a mountain and built a watchtower at its top, he could have stood no higher than he felt at that moment. Though in a way, he had done exactly that, choosing this site in the Appalachians after they arrived in New York; carving this home out of the earth; building the school through word of mouth, then advertising in print and broadcast; building a career to heights that sometimes dizzied him. And here, in his trembling hand, fluttered the ultimate reward.

  As soon as the lump in his throat loosened, he pulled the screen door open, strode out onto the freshly varnished deck and bellowed to be heard in every corner of his wife’s garden terraces. Students and their easels were scattered throughout the trellises and beds. He called them all inside, his order evoking frantic protests from the silly teenagers and even sillier grown-ups. “It’s not time yet! I’m not finished!” whined the freckled girl perched beside the snapdragons—Jackie, not quite fourteen, with just enough talent that she could perhaps get somewhere if she ever took her lessons seriously.

  He wasn’t unsympathetic to her complaint. Only twenty minutes ago he had ordered all the little chickadees out into Galina’s fantastic flowered landscapes with instructions to complete an oil painting from life in exactly an hour, merciless instructor that he was.

  “Don’t worry about that. Put your brushes down and leave your easels. I have news!”

  Once certain they were coming, he turned—to find Galina leaning on the back of the couch, wearing a paint-stained smock of her own, eyeing him with a twinkle of coy suspicion. He offered her a smile bright and broad as the sky.

  When everyone assembled, he read the letter aloud.

  In Daniel’s newest series of sculptures—the most attention-getting of his career—he molded busts of great world leaders: Winston Churchill. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy. He had chosen to include in the series the current president, whom he admired with fervor, whom he saw as Kennedy’s heir. Kennedy had paved the way for civil reform here in the land that Daniel now thought of as home. But Kennedy had also understood the threat posed by the monster that consumed the land Daniel could never return to, the Russia of his childhood, a monster grown from medals sown in the dirt.

  Kennedy’s party lost its way in the Vietnam quagmire, lost its courage, began to act as if they no longer percei
ved the bear slavering inches from their exposed throats. The man who was now president, who never lost his nerve or his humor even when wounded by a would-be assassin’s bullet—he understood the world would never sleep in safety so long as the monster lived.

  So Daniel had sculpted him, and the great man had somehow gotten word of it. His staff had asked a price and Daniel had named one. And in the letter he read to his enraptured students, the White House chief of staff informed him that his price would be honored: the statue given freely in exchange for a private audience with the president.