Bird

by Sophie Cunningham

  ‘You never got my note?’ Anna asks—though she had, till this moment, forgotten about the note she’d dashed off in those final hours. It was hard to imagine she was the same person as the little girl who’d known this boy or even the girl who returned home to Leningrad to find André waiting. She hadn’t known what to expect when she’d stepped off the train and onto the platform, but there he was—it was autumn, the sky was blue—in a white shirt, his arms held wide. ‘Bird,’ he said, ‘We are going to America!’ And she asked him how they would get there and he said ‘walk’ and they walked together from Leningrad to Finland. In those months millions walked across Europe, as if they were ants whose hill had been disturbed. At first they streamed out in an ordered fashion, but, over time, their paths became more erratic. Some ants turned back and went the way they’d come. Some began to walk all over each other, others ran round and round in circles. The blisters on Anna’s feet were so terrible that André had to carry her, on his back, for days on end. They slept in barns and in train stations, then found a boat to take them to Amsterdam where she saw faces of children who looked as old as the century. André held Anna at night to ward off the cold and fear and repeated, over and over, like a mantra: ‘America’. From there they walked again, through Belgium to Paris. In Paris they lived on the streets until they found a ship to take them to Ellis Island, New York, where André looked up an American soldier he’d met, a man who organised for them to cross the country to Los Angeles and for a job to be waiting.

  The past could be shed on the journey; yes, Anna was sure of it: a tattered snakeskin; a moulted feather; a name, brittle as a cicada’s shell; left there on the floor of the Greyhound bus. They sat in silence and watched the highway. What lay on either side of it. Cities and towns, forests, lakes, plains, then, finally, the glorious scars of the canyons, the ascension of the Rockies. It was at the foot of the mountains, in the desert of the Los Angeles basin that they emerged from the labour of travel. ‘In America,’ Anna told André, ‘everything starts again like it is new.’

  The man she has known since he was a small boy is shaking his head. ‘I never got a note from you. If I did, I would carry it here always.’ He puts his hand against his shirt pocket, the pocket that sits over his heart.

  ‘Well,’ Anna says, blushing. ‘Anyway. We came here, to Paris. There was walking and boats and buses. It took four years. At the time it felt like an eternity. But it is nothing to me anymore.’ She takes his hand back and strokes it, then holds it to her cheek. ‘Actually, I think I am happier to see you than I have been to see anyone else in my life.’

  ‘And your papa?’

  ‘André is fine,’ Anna says. ‘Well, you know. He drinks too much. We live in Los Angeles. We have lived there for some years. I have only been in Paris for a few weeks or so. It is meant to be some kind of, you know, adventure.’ Anna hesitates for a moment, because in truth she doesn’t know why she’s chosen to return to Paris. She lets go of his hand and lights a cigarette. She waves the waitress over so she can order a pain au chocolat.

  ‘And you? I wonder how you got here.’

  Nick leans over, ‘May I?’ and takes her cigarette from her. ‘I’m not silly, like you,’ he gives her a big smile. ‘I flew in an airplane. I was working in the cinema in Russia. They trusted me enough to send me to a convention.’ He laughs. ‘Foolishly.’

  ‘So you are not to be trusted?’ Anna is flirting now. It makes her feel safe. But later, when he takes her in his arms and kisses her—on the corners of her mouth, her forehead, the tip of her nose—she does not feel so safe at all. When he puts his face to her neck and breathes in deep as if he is finally home, she begins to cry. He smells, he tastes, like childhood.

  Nick talks through that first night, endlessly flinging words into the darkness. ‘The day the blokada ended, the day the war was over, was one of the most exciting of my life. Twelve Germans were captured and hanged in the city square. I went and threw stones at the bodies, we all did, to see how far we could make them swing. There were parades. Stalin came to the city and praised our bravery. And not long after that, the generals all went missing, including Zinoviev, who had battled for our lives. Everybody said they’d been tortured. So, just when we thought it was over we were back under Stalin’s fist. And I start to understand, many of us did, what he was doing to us. I was fifteen and so proud of surviving, then suddenly I am wondering, we are all wondering: for what?’

  ‘You were proud?’ Anna murmurs, almost asleep. ‘I…’ He can’t hear her though he leans in close. He gazes at her—there is nothing so beautiful as watching someone you love sleeping—and finally lays himself down with a finger wrapped in her hair. He won’t sleep unless he is touching some part of her, but if he hugs her too close he will wake her with his restless energy; his legs twitch and jerk all night, as if there are electric currents going through them.

  ‘Everyday,’ he begins to whisper in a low, low voice, ‘I have thought of you. When you left the city I felt it. That you were still alive, I felt that too. The pain was here,’ he lifts his hand into the air, spreads the fingers wide to indicate the gaps where Anna’s fingers sat whenever they held hands as children.

  A few days after they have been to the Pergola together Gabriel drops by Anna’s apartment. She hears him before she sees him. She knows his erratic stride, senses his frustration that the stairs are too wide to take two at a time.

  ‘Nick,’ Gabriel says, as he walks in the front door. ‘He’s cool. Where does he live? Maybe I’ll drop by and see him.’

  ‘I thought you were leaving. Actually, I do not even know where he lives. It will be easiest to find him at work.’

  ‘Never been there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you’re cool with that?’

  ‘Of course. His apartment is in Rome, that is where he lives. In Paris he is just staying in some hotel somewhere. You want some coffee? Let me make you some coffee.’ She gets up and prepares a pot to put on the stove.

  ‘Has he promised you anything?’

  ‘Gabriel, darling, I have no idea what you are getting at. Suddenly, you are my father?’

  ‘Sometimes chicks don’t see shit. You need to see a man in his home to understand him.’

  ‘I understand you and as far as I have figured out you don’t have a home.’

  ‘That’s it!’ Gabriel is practically shouting now. ‘My home is the street! But not Nick’s. That guy has class.’

  ‘You don’t like him?’ Anna begins to feel ill. Gabriel is crazy, she knows that, but he has instinct.

  ‘No, baby. He’s the greatest. A good man. Just got to make sure he’s your man. Men, well, you know how it is. We’re pigs.’ He gets on his knees by the chair she is sitting on and pats her lap in a strange, awkward fashion. Tenderness just isn’t his style.

  ‘Perhaps it is just you who are a pig.’ She kisses his cheek. ‘Did he say something?’

  ‘Not a thing. No-thing. It’s just,’ he persists, ‘you got to see the man in his en-vir-on-ment,’ he draws out the word. ‘Then you’ll know.’

  ‘I have never known a man so well as I know Nick. He is…’ she flounders for words, rests her hand across her left breast. ‘My heart.’

  Gabriel shakes his head with concern. ‘Fuck baby,’ he says. ‘You’re gone.’

  Anna doesn’t see Gabriel for six months after that. The next time she does, the circumstances are surprising. The police track him down at the Latin and ask him if he can rescue one Anna Davidoff from a police cell. Apparently Anna was singing at her regular club when a young man started coming on to her. Instead of playing along, as she usually did, she smashed a glass against the side of the bar and slashed at her want-to-be suitor’s face. The man moved quickly and his injuries were minor. Well, that is what Anna tells Gabriel later that night. Actually, she can’t remember the details.

  Gabriel is surprised at how neat Anna is when she emerges from the cell. Her hair is done, her lipstick on, and she has a whit
e fur coat pulled around her that Nick has given her.

  ‘Heavy shit,’ Gabriel draws her into a hug.

  Anna attempts a smile, but her face is more a grimace.

  ‘I am losing it, I think.’

  ‘Like the man says: the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live…’

  ‘Your Jack?’

  ‘Actually, we’re his. Since On the Road came out he’s our spokes-man. He’s the guy. He’s the expert.’

  ‘You sound jealous.’

  ‘It’s dangerous shit he talks,’ Gabriel is taking such long, angry strides that Anna has trouble keeping up. ‘Automatic writing, no redrafting. All these guys talk like this and it’s fucking bullshit, baby. Jack’s been working on this book for years. Did Plato redraft? Did Shelley? I think so. Verily I fucking think so.’

  ‘I could beat him up for you, darling. I have a knack as you have seen.’

  ‘You need a garland,’ Gabriel says, as they walk towards the metro. ‘A trophy for every person you have attacked. Like Angulimala.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Hundreds of years ago, thousands maybe, in fact infinitely and imaginatively long ago, Angulimala was told by his guru that he would be liberated if he killed a thousand people in one week. The cat went crazy. He shot and he stabbed hundreds of people, 999 of them. There was blood everywhere. Then he cut their fingers off and threaded them on a string. Angulimala: garland of fingers,’ he pauses for breath. ‘Why did the pigs call me? Why not your man?’

  ‘My man,’ Anna doesn’t check the tears that flow down her cheeks, ‘is married.’

  And Gabriel, for perhaps the only time in their friendship, has the sense to drape his arm over her shoulders without saying another word.

  ‘But I can tell you what I was thinking,’ Gabriel leaned towards me. ‘Her heart was broken.’

  Gabriel was slurring his words and I was so tired and drunk that I was close to hallucinating. It was a miracle that neither of us had thrown up. Gabriel slumped and put his head in his arms but he kept talking. I don’t know if he intended for me to follow what he was saying. It seemed he was talking to the table top, not me: ‘I know how you began,’ he muttered. ‘I was there.’

  *

  Anna rouges her face and her nipples. She puts on her long, fake eyelashes and silvery-blue eyeshadow, then squeezes herself into the black leather costume she wears each night. When she has prepared herself she scales a ladder into the rigging and—this always feels like the dangerous moment—gets into her cage. She has only a few moments to compose herself before she is lowered onto the stage, in silence, in the beam of a single spotlight. She grips the bars at the top of the structure and lets her arms carry her weight as she hangs, motionless, still as a candelabrum. When the cage lands its roof magically folds away and Anna lifts herself out. She is extraordinarily elegant. Then, to uproarious hoots and cheers, the spotlight explodes into a frenzy of colours that verge on psychedelic and the music begins. Anna peels off her leather suit to reveal a bikini underneath and strobed colours flicker across her skin: red, blue, green and yellow. Despite a frantic edge to all this light and sound, Anna maintains the quality of stillness that marks out all her performances. ‘I like to imagine,’ Anna always says of this section of the show, ‘that I am made of light.’

  After she is done Anna goes backstage to take off her makeup. She always takes time over this task. It is a ritual that returns her to herself. She is quite absorbed when someone, a man, calls her name across the changing rooms and a dozen dancers glance up, briefly, from whatever state of dress or undress they are in. Anna pulls on her robe and turns around, thinking it must be Gabriel come to visit.

  It is Nick. He looks much older than the last time Anna saw him. He holds out a bottle of champagne. ‘Gabriel brought me along, he’s back having a drink at the bar. I hope you don’t mind. You were very amazing tonight,’ he hesitates. ‘Very unusual.’

  ‘You don’t approve?’

  ‘No, you misunderstand. I don’t mean to sound…’ he is flustered.

  Anna takes the champagne from him. ‘It is okay, darling. Let’s go somewhere we can drink this together. Somewhere not so,’ she gestures around the room full of half-naked women, ‘public.’ They walk upstairs to a room where the girls are allowed to entertain guests. It is an old-fashioned room for such a modern establishment, with a red velvet chaise longue and crimson and gold flock wallpaper.

  ‘My God,’ Nick laughs. ‘It is like a womb.’

  Anna turns a lamp on and the overhead light off. ‘That’s better, no?’ She gets two glasses and sits while he fills their glasses. She rests her head on his shoulder. ‘It is good to see you,’ she says. ‘It is always good to see you.’ What she means is that only when she is with him does she stop thinking: about what might happen next, how she might get through life, what it is she wants to eat, or wear, or drink. She does not know how to find that quiet place when she is not with him, yet thinking of him brings no reprieve. She finds herself imagining instead his life in Rome. His young Italian wife, Bella, and his two children; a boy and a girl.

  ‘I worry that it makes you sad,’ he confesses. ‘I myself find it…well, hard. But then when I look at you,’ he strokes her cheek with the back of his hand, ‘I feel happy. I was in Paris last year. I looked for you then. Where were you?’

  ‘I was abroad!’ Anna teases him: transforms herself into Dickens’ Estella; reverts to the games of their childhood. ‘Far out of reach; prettier than ever; admired by all who saw me. Did you feel that you had lost me?’

  Nick gets down on his knees before her and puts his head in her lap. ‘I love you. How shall I say it? Against promise, and reason and hope.’

  Anna smiles. ‘You remember.’

  He reaches up and into her robe so that his hand is cupping her breast. Anna leans down and breathes in the smell of his hair, before tracing her mouth down the side of his face and kissing his lips. He places his hand on her thighs, high, up close to where her robe parts, and she melts back against the couch then clasps her legs around his waist. He sees the look of intense concentration in her face give way to a smile and feels her body give into a swoon before he finally lets himself collapse and spill into her.

  And that is when I chose them: at the moment that their hearts were brim full with love.

  At around three a.m. the staff asked us to leave the restaurant. Gabriel began to abuse the waiter half-heartedly. I tried to soothe him as if he was a small child. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I have to go anyway.’

  ‘Anna and I went to Morocco together,’ he slurred. ‘I haven’t told you about that yet. With that fag boyfriend of hers. This was later than Paris. In the sixties. Ruth Fainlight was there, do you know her?’

  ‘I’ve heard of her,’ I said, as I stood up and gathered my things together.

  ‘I am going to give you a present,’ Gabriel staggered up to a standing position. He put his hands on my shoulders and stepped so close to me that I thought he was going to kiss me.

  ‘I am going to give you a line from a poem Ruth wrote. A sacred transmission.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. I looked into Gabriel’s eyes. For a moment I forgot about Robert and forgot that this man was a decrepit old poet in his seventies. I breathed him in, alcohol and all, in the hope, perhaps, that there would be traces of her perfume on him still.

  His lips brushed my ear as he whispered: ‘You understand, there is no proof / this actually occurred.’

  *

  Budger of history Brake of time

  Robert and I had been dating for two months and it had been, romantically speaking, two of the best months of my life. It was not so much that we were crazy with passion for each other. What we had was a connection and ease—a knowing—that I was mature enough to recognise was precious. He was an architect, which I liked. It meant I could be interested in his work, and he in mine, without us stepping on each other’s toes. Too often I’d gone out with guys only to have the
m whip out a manuscript at some crucial moment. New York did that to people: focused them on what they could get from each other rather than allowing the space for general regard, and affection.

  So. Robert was funny, and sexy. He liked to cook. He liked to read. I suppose this is all starting to sound like a series of clichés but maybe that is what love is—clichéd moments that, when you inhabit them, don’t feel clichéd at all. But I’m procrastinating. I’m embarrassed about what happened next.

  ‘I am going,’ I said, when he was still hanging his coat up on the hook by the door, ‘to India.’

  ‘Oh,’ he turned to me, not quite focused yet. ‘That’s nice. For work?’

  ‘Not for work,’ I said. ‘For me. I am not sure how long I will be gone for.’

  ‘Can I join you?’ he was smiling. ‘Can we take a holiday?’ It was a reasonable question. Eight weeks isn’t long to be going out but we’d already begun to talk about moving in together. Like I said, we were getting comfortable very quickly.

  ‘You can’t come,’ I said, without finesse. ‘I’m thinking a couple of months. Or longer.’

  We were still standing in the foyer.

  ‘Can I have a drink?’ he asked. ‘Or is that out of the question as well?’ He handed me a bottle of wine which I took into the kitchen and poured into two glasses.

  ‘Here you are,’ I thrust the wine at him.

  ‘Do you need to not be with me?’ Robert asked. ‘If so, you must be honest.’

  I rallied. I stepped towards him and took his right hand. I placed it over my heart. ‘It is because I want to be with you that I must go,’ I said.

  He looked at me, uncertain. He didn’t believe me.

  ‘Can you take the time off work?’

  ‘My boss said that more than a week at this time of year would be a problem. There’s a lot happening.’

  ‘So will you have a job to return to?’ Now he was looking at me as if I was slightly unbalanced.