Moscow but Dreaming

by Ekaterina Sedia

  They sit in silence for a while. Yakov feels like a failure. All the things he dreamt of, all the hopes are dashed and ridiculed. He wanted freedom, he wanted the yoke off his neck. He didn’t want this soulless vacuum, he didn’t want fear.

  “It’s all right, Mitya,” he answers his thoughts. “When I’m gone, you can sell this apartment. It costs a lot.”

  “Dad, don’t say that.”

  “Sorry.” It’s not fair, Yakov thinks. He just wants his son to be able to do what he loves. He wonders what the crow would think about that.

  The next morning, Yakov sits on the windowsill, waiting for the crow. His heart skips a beat when it appears. But not alone— there’s a whole murder. He counts them. Twelve. They patrol the windows in formation. Every now and again, one breaks off to rummage through a paper bag and emerge with a hotdog or a slice of ham in its beak. Yakov watches his crow. He can tell it apart from all the others.

  The crows arrive to his window. He’s waiting for them, holding out a plastic container full of beef chunks. The crows demur at first, but soon grow bold and eat. He talks to them. He tells them of all the things that bother him—that the politics have changed but the politicians are still the same exact people as back in the sixties, only balder and fatter; he tells them that nobody cares about anything important anymore. He tells them that freedom has nothing to do with money, or the McDonald’s restaurants. The crows stop eating and listen.

  They leave, but come back the next day, a dozen of them. The blueprints are still piling up on his desk, but Yakov doesn’t care. He finally found someone who would listen to him.

  One of the crows seems agitated, and flaps its wings. The others caw, and Yakov stops talking, perplexed. The crows gather around their discomfited fellow. They grow silent and watch, until the crow falls on its side, its wings beating, and its feet scraping the ledge. It twitches and becomes still, its upturned gypsy eye milking over with death.

  Eleven crows look at Yakov for a moment, and take wing. “Wait,” he calls after them. “Come back!”

  The door opens, and Luganov, his boss, looks in. “Yakov,” he

  says. “Do you have a crow problem?”

  “No,” Yakov says. “Why?”

  “People were complaining they steal lunches,” Luganov says.

  “I put rat poison in mine, and told everyone else to do the same. You need some?”

  “No,” Yakov says, shaking. “Why would you do something like that?”

  Luganov barks a laugh. “I figured, rat poison would work even on winged rats, no?”

  The door closes, and Yakov sits on his chair, his face in his hands. Poisoned. No doubt, the crows blame him. He prays that they would come back tomorrow, so he can explain.

  The crows come the next day, just eleven of them. They start their patrol.

  “No,” Yakov screams from his window. “No! It’s poisoned!” They either do not hear, or choose to ignore him.

  Yakov throws the window open and waves his arms. He makes so much noise that heads appear in the windows above and below him. He calls to the crows, imploring, warning, and apologizing. They don’t seem to care.

  Yakov climbs onto the high windowsill and stands there for a moment, his knees trembling under him. “It’s poison,” he calls again in a breathless voice. “Leave it alone! They’re trying to kill you!”

  He steps out on the ledge. The heads in the windows gape and gasp, and disappear. He hears footsteps in the hallway— his coworkers running to intercept him, to drag him inside, to silence him. Yakov will not submit to that; he has been silenced before, but he won’t let it happen again. He takes a step along the ledge, his arms still waving, his voice growing hoarse.

  Yakov’s knees shake and he feels sick to his stomach. “Come back,” he screams. “Please come back!”

  His foot slides from under him, and his arms flap like wings. Then, it’s only the exhilaration of the flight and the pinch of frozen air.

  People gather around the dead body, clucking their tongues and telling each other to call the police. They are too busy to see a dozen crows that circle high above the square building, cawing.

  HECTOR MEETS THE KING

  “I never was good at saying goodbye, and you were never good at letting go. So it starts, between me and you, and so it will end. I and you, inhale and exhale, a sigh and a kiss into a flat, adenoid face of the world.

  “I know, I do not look much like a hero nowadays—gravity, the eternal bitch, has me in its hold, my fingertips are stained with ink, and my shoulders wrap around my chest as a pair of wide, anemic wings. But believe me, I am a hero.

  “There are ties in the world, son. Nothing binds more securely than another’s pain. I watch your mother sleeping, her translucent skin flushed with dreams, her stately knees drawn at the pit of her stomach. I would have loved her even if she were short of leg and black of tooth; even then hurting her would not be a possibility. Mediocrity is the only painless state in the world, or so I thought.

  “There is a finite, immutable amount of pain in the world, and what you spare others you must swallow yourself. I swallowed my pride and my honor. I did not walk through the gates that day, unable to hurt her. I would rather be a coward than a torturer. The legends lie—they tell the story as it should have been, they tell of Hector felled in the spray of warm sticky blood and splintered bone, they tell of his body dragged behind a chariot, of his orphaned son. The truth is sadder. Hector lived to see his son grow up. He watched him through the shroud of swallowed shame, and his eyes teared, as if from acrid smoke of burning Troy. And so it ends.”

  I sing of what has not been sung before. I sing of Hector and his sacrifice, I sing his unlamented mediocrity. I sing his cowering, and I sing his end.

  I sing the dry wooden rain of arrows that drummed on the roofs of the palace and the hovels, monotonous, growing too familiar to be noticed. I sing the braying of donkeys in their stables, the crowing of rooster at dawn, and lowing of oxen. Smells of manure and hay. Incessant gnawing of saws and hacking of axes outside the city walls. The siege. I sing guilt like manacles.

  Hector took off his helm with horsehair crest that had scared the infant. With this gesture he dispensed with the heroism forever. He took his son into the crook of his arm, and his wife—by her hand. He was familiar with the labyrinth of narrow streets, and with vast open space by the city walls.

  As Cassandra’s mad cries hung over the city like a cloud, he led them to the well-hidden entrance into an underground tunnel that took them outside, into the thicket of scrub and hazelnuts. Swift, straight branches—future arrows—lashed their faces as they walked away from the doomed city.

  I sing Hector, as he cranes his neck surveying a tall, gleaming building, and I sing his new job, I sing eight hours at the office, every day, excepting the holidays and two-week vacation. I sing the plastic smile of the receptionist that greets him every morning, as the elevator spews him forth, in the crowd of other overheated bodies. I sing Hector’s sacrifice.

  I put on my helm, the horsehair crest of it moth-eaten and ready to fall apart into dust. I fold the note addressed to my son and leave it on the kitchen table. I do not dare to kiss Andromache, for fear of waking her and letting the yoke of her white arms hold me back again.

  I find my spear in the back of a coat closet, and my arthritic fingers close over its smooth, cool shaft. I do not even attempt to put on my old armor—my girth is too great now, and my back is too bent and weakened by years at the desk to bear its terrible weight. But I brush my fingertips against polished bronze of the breastplate. I pick up my shield and strap on my sword.

  I pause in the driveway, thinking whether I should take my car. I decide against it—it seems undignified somehow. I let my feet carry me past and out of the sleeping development.

  I pass green lawns and neatly trimmed hedges; somebody’s dog follows me, its docked tail wagging in tentative friendship. I do not know where I am going, but I am certain that I will find it
, and all mistakes of the past will be rectified. I think of what will become of Andromache, of her delayed widowhood. I find comfort in thoughts about pension, Social Security, life insurance. With all that, she won’t have to do any more telemarketing, and she will drop her pretense of happiness. As I think, I do not notice as I arrive here, at the miniature golf course.

  Hector stopped, the trimmed grass soft and submissive under the soles of his scuffed brown shoes. He surveyed the battlefield from under drawn greying eyebrows. His eyes squinted against the lashings of the wind and hardened to narrow slits.

  A windmill chopped the air into thick, humid slices, and the wind whistled between its four wings. A giant ape, its low forehead wrinkled with malice, grinned with bright wooden teeth and shuffled its massive foot back and forth, exposing and covering a narrow pipe, just wide enough for a golf ball. A dinosaur reared up as its mouth opened in and closed in silent screams of presumed pain.

  These were the only worthy adversaries, and Hector hefted his spear, choosing his target. The ape seemed the most malignant of all, and he shouted his challenge to it. The ape grinned and shuffled in one place, too dumb or too conceited to take cover.

  Hector’s arm felt weak as he raised his spear and hurled it toward the ape. The spear hit its shoulder and sunk into the wooden flesh, trembling from impact. The shaft swayed, and the spear fell to the ground.

  The ape roared and cowered for a moment, and then stood to its full height, its fists the size of millstones pounding on its chest. It swung at Hector, but he ducked the blow. The giant fist passed inches over his head, and his grey hair ruffled in the wind.

  Hector ripped his sword from the sheath, and lunged for the ape’s unprotected side. The gash his blade left dripped with ichor the color of papier-mâché, and the ape howled in pain.

  Hector retreated, waiting for his chance to strike, as the enraged ape chased after him, its cries piercing like Andromache’s tears. Hector was running out of breath, weighed as he was by age and manacles of guilt. He remembered the ape’s name: King Kong. It was too young and too strong for him, and he retreated until the back wall of the windmill blocked his passage—he could feel it with his shoulder blades. The ape’s fists swung in an easy rhythm: king-kong, sigh-kill, maim-kiss.

  Hector’s sword slashed across the ape’s knuckles, making it cry out again, but inflicted as little damage as a toothpick. He still waved his weapon about as the ape picked him into one of its fists, as his ribs cracked, as his world narrowed to a swirling, rolling singularity of darkness.

  In his last moments his thoughts sped up so that his short time of lingering lucidity between blindness and death stretched forever. Hector dreamed of Achilles, guilt, and ape, of the forces that grinded him into a bloodied, limp husk, of the destiny of loss and defeat. He dreamed of Andromache’s peppy voice traveling over the telephone wires, “Have you considered switching your long-distance provider?” He had spared her degradation in the Grecian hands, he had saved her from a lifetime of slavery. She would be grateful.

  And he thought of his son, of his legacy, of a sigh and a kiss. He would graduate from college and enter a law school, and become a king—like King Menelaus, King Priam, the King o’Cats, King Kong. And Hector smiled.

  CHAPAEV AND THE COCONUT GIRL

  I discovered that my mom left for Indonesia (Bali, to be exact) on her birthday. I called to wish her a happy one, but my dad answered the phone instead and informed me that she was traveling. To Bali. “She told me to tell you that she is in paradise,” he said.

  “Give her my best,” I said.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled for my mom to be able to travel like this, because really, for people of her generation and ethnic disposition (she was born in 1942, in German-occupied Lithuania) life never promised anything remotely tropical or whimsical. Yet, I was a little troubled as I had been since 1989, when the world shifted askew cracking the foundation of our existence, and the cracks spread all over the formerly impenetrable and imaginary air bubble that surrounded the then-USSR. I found myself among those who somehow slipped through those cracks, like a goldfish in a temporary prison of a plastic bag, right into the cold and big world—or a fish tank; not that it made that much difference. And this was really the crux of the issue: people like me left so that the change around them would be explainable by travel and culture shock rather than by the impossible overturning if the world which suddenly folded, did a little flip, and pulled itself from under their securely planted feet. Travel lets you pretend that the world didn’t really change, that you just chose your terms. My terms include working in an AI lab at MIT; could be worse.

  My parents stayed behind then, as they still do every time I visit, and when I leave them at the airport, I always look back, at how small they are, and my heart fractures anew. So I’m thrilled now that mom is getting to travel a little, and she doesn’t feel quite as abandoned to me when she does. She gets to do some abandoning of her own, and I console dad over the phone. Of course he can cook his own dinner, but he appreciates the sympathy. I think he does—at least, as effective as sympathy across the Atlantic can be, conveyed by sighs whispering through the impossible length of telephone wires.

  And after we hung up, I was still pensive, thinking of my mom in such a distant place, even more distant than before. The positive thing about travel though is that if you go away sufficiently far, at some point you start getting closer. And of course distance was conducive of deceit: for all I knew, mom could’ve still been at home, giggling on the couch, and not at all in Indonesia. Distances are tricky like that.

  There is a secret I have, a really embarrassing thing: I worship Chapaev. Despite the jokes that are his later legacy and the revolutionary terror of his earlier days, these people, their horses, the Red Army, and all that elementary school-level propaganda is lodged deep in my heart, like a metal splinter. Horses and steppes and wars fought with sabers rather than guns. They probably did have guns though; wouldn’t they? Of course they had guns. It’s just this is not how I imagined it in my childhood or now, for that matter. Temporal distances are tricky as well.

  Dealing with the dead is frustrating because you can never ask them anything—you could, but they wouldn’t answer. So I compose long conversations in my head, asking about the Red Army and how did it all really happen, what the dirt under the horses’ hooves smelled like, if they were crawling with lice, this sort of thing. If he really drowned in the end, trying to swim across River Ural, or did he fake it, tired of war and fame, tired of being a hero. If he decided to quit the revolution gig and instead grow pumpkins somewhere. I wonder if he’s still alive, even though he would be over a hundred years old, hundred and twenty, to be exact, but that doesn’t seem too old for a hero. Come and think about it, all heroes of the revolutions are relatively young in historical terms. And I’m left to my own yarns, recursive narratives I spin as I drink my tea and stare out of the window at the houses across the street and imagine Charles River far behind them. I squint and the buildings disappear and I can see in my mind’s eye Charles, thick and green, speckled with oil slicks like a multicolored serpent, and if I squint further, it becomes Ural on the shores of which my stories either end or begin—it all depends on a day.

  Today, I wait for the rooftops to turn molten yellow and orange, like a pumpkin, and I imagine him emerging from the freezing water, dripping wet, his teeth clattering, and the right sleeve of his uniform dark with blood. Then he walks, like giants walk, each leap taking him over a hill or a small river, the blood drips spawning lakes and craters in his wake, leaving the earth steaming and scorched, scars that it will take centuries to heal in the unforgiving Siberian climate. The pine and fir forest that gradually rises around him does nothing to impede his progress as he pushes the trees aside like mere branches, and pulls his feet out of the sucking morasses of swamps with ease.

  This is the thing that makes daydreaming so pleasant: one can keep the details vague and imagine tall firs a
nd green meadows, serpentine rivers and lakes like mirrors, fields yellow with heavy nodding wheat—everything, everything. And his walk can take him anywhere, and today I imagine him walking like that, strides of a giant, a red star on his hat illuminating his way with a crimson strobe, across Siberia and past China, all the way to the Sea of Japan. I imagine him jumping off the edge of Kamchatka as if it it was a springboard, and then—Sakhalin, Japan. I watch him treading on islands and land formations as if they were mere stepping stones, all the way to the East China Sea where the islands grow a bit scarce and he has to swim a little. Then in the Philippines, he’s picking up his inhuman stride again, and there, finally, he reaches Indonesia. My mom said it was a paradise.

  Coconut Girl is a myth common in Indonesia, my mom says. Suddenly, she is a folklorist who’s eager to educate me on foreign mythologies. She also emails me pictures of alien birds and large lizards—who is this woman?—and talks about where she would like to go next year. Right now, it’s a toss-up between Thailand and New Zealand. But for now she talks about the Coconut Girl and laughs, and I assume blushes a little, because it is really a dirty story. Girl shitting out stuff like that—of course, my mom doesn’t say “shitting out.” She says “excreting,” and that makes me giggle over the phone.

  So, the Coconut Girl: there was a farmer named Ameta who found a coconut when it washed ashore. No one ever saw such things before on his island (called Seram). The next night he dreamt about planting it—a shadowy voice instructed him how to do such a thing. He planted the coconut and soon the coconut grew into a beautiful palm tree, and many flowers clustered between its feathered leaves. Ameta climbed the tree but cut his hand, and one of the flowers became stained with his blood. As such tales go, the flower stained with blood became a coconut that then became a girl, named Hainuwele.

  Hainuwele, as it turned out, wasn’t just any coconut girl: every time she went to the bathroom, instead of regular human turds she dropped all sorts of interesting objects: earrings, serving dishes, coral statuettes, dinner plates, jewelry, stones, shells. Copper gongs and other treasures. And she gave all of those wonderful things to the villagers.