Bird

by Sophie Cunningham

  ‘I don’t think you can blame them for that,’ he said. ‘In their culture it’s normal for kids to be separated from their parents for a while. That makes them blind to other shit that’s going on for Anna.’

  ‘What shit is that?’

  ‘I don’t understand it myself. She thinks she was a bad daughter. In her head that somehow translates to being a bad mother. It’s something to do with thinking she’s responsible for her own mother’s death.’

  I said nothing. I hadn’t known that, though of course I should have guessed. I must have looked taken aback because Ian changed the subject. ‘You’re looking very Ali McGraw these days, darling, with your long skirt and tight little jumper. Always moving with the times. How have you kept your figure? What, are you forty yet?’

  ‘Oh please,’ I said, though of course I was flattered. ‘Tell me. What are the lamas like?’

  ‘I’ll never forget the day Anna told me she was going to rent a house and move them into it,’ Ian said. ‘I walked outside and there they were. In the greenhouse, would you believe. Lama Gyatsho was trying to meditate while Az…’ ‘You call her Az, too?’

  ‘Ana-Sofia. A-S. Az. It just works.’

  I smiled at the coincidence; we’d come to the same pet name separately.

  ‘Anyway, Az sat on the bed next to him. Lama Dorje Rinpoche was having a rest—he never actually sleeps—with two feet sticking through the door because the space was too small. It was absurd. “You sure got them jammed in there,” I said to her, when we were finally alone but she just gave me one of her shrugs and told me that they’d walked all the way from Tibet and didn’t feel the cold. Can you believe it? Then I asked if it was true the kid has TB and she had the cheek to tell me that he was a tulku and it was disrespectful to call him a kid. As if it wasn’t disrespectful to stick him in the garden shed. I wasn’t there long after that.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing much. I attended a couple of teachings with her and realised I just wasn’t cut out for it. One morning I asked Lama Gyatsho what would happen if I died. He said, “We wrap you in white cotton, like what you call a mummy. We carry your body to the burial ground, up high on the mountain, for sky burial.”

  ‘“Sky burial?” I asked and he looked at me very seriously and said: “Yes, you heard of it? They take out a big knife and cut off your limbs. Then cut out your organs—including your brains and heart—and your entrails and feed them to the vultures.” I asked him if that was it and he said, “That’s it. Once you die, eaten by the birds. Kaput. All over.” Then he burst out laughing. I decided that was him telling me I was a lost cause. I like that about him. He knows people. Just by looking at them. He knew me, that’s for sure.’

  ‘And Az? How did she cope when you left.’

  ‘That was an awful scene,’ he said. ‘She screamed. I cried. It was an hour before I could untangle myself from her and even then she ran down the street shouting, “Daddy!”’ He turned to me. ‘And now, it seems, she’s yours. If you need any help let me know. I’ve decided to head back to the States. I’m going to settle in San Francisco. It’s a good scene there. And I want to be close to Az.’

  I found the teachings incomprehensible, though I did like the early morning and late evening meditations. But even then I often sat, wide-eyed, while everyone else had their eyes closed. I was one of the oldest people there and I felt my age. At dawn I felt particularly stiff and had to stretch constantly. I brought my right knee towards my chest while I stretched my left leg in front of me; then I did it the other way round. I leaned backwards, slowly, in an arc, to stretch the muscles of my back.

  Ian only lasted to the point of the teachings where sexual conduct was discussed. ‘I’m doomed to the hell realms,’ he announced, then left the tent. An hour later he was arranging to leave with Steve, a much younger student from San Francisco State. As it turned out I knew Steve from the cafe. I suspected he was another reason Ian was keen to move to San Francisco.

  When Ian left he bear-hugged you and promised he’d see you soon. He kissed me, then he kissed Anna on the mouth in a very un-monastic fashion before hauling his backpack on and heading for the gate where Steve stood waiting for him. We watched him walk down the hill and as he reached the first hairpin he turned and waved at us all. Anna watched him every step of the way and I could see, from the way she looked at him, that she did in fact love him.

  Some time after that there was a meditation on death. It was late at night and Lama Dorje asked us to imagine we were dying, our organs failing, our flesh falling in on itself. He asked us to think about bodies as things that rotted and decomposed. Every time I closed my eyes I imagined Col: long dead but with decaying flesh still clinging to his bones. I became filled with rage at Lama Dorje for forcing such visions upon me. Then I became short of breath and began to panic. I fell in my rush to get out of the tent. Anna watched my leaving with concern and that is when I knew we had to talk. I went to her room at first light the next morning. When she answered the door of her hut the air that rushed in was so cold that our breath made little clouds and the clouds moved towards each other. We were like two cold fronts coming together.

  ‘Anna, I am worried about you,’ I was nervous, though there was no reason I should have been. ‘It is cool here and everything. But you should finish now. You are not the same. You don’t have fun anymore.’ For the first time since I’d arrived I touched her.

  ‘This is better than fun,’ Anna smiled.

  ‘What about André? What about Ana-Sofia?’ I asked. I always used Anna’s name for you when I was speaking to her.

  ‘You know I cannot do anything about my father,’ Anna answered. ‘You always said so yourself. To be alone, to drink, that is his karma. I can see that now.’ She was right; there was no saving André, but I’d hoped mentioning him might help me get through to her.

  ‘That’s not you, Anna,’ I was surprised by how upset I was. I thought I was reconciled to losing her but it seemed I wasn’t. ‘You’re talking like them, not you. And what about Ana-Sofia? You think it is normal for a girl of nine to have no mother, and then when she does visit to spend months at a time with monks?’

  ‘There is nothing you can say,’ Anna said, ‘about my mothering that I have not thought myself. I am not a good mother, not like you, but I am learning how to love Ana-Sofia, how to love everyone properly, without need. Without vanity. As for my father, I pray for him,’ Anna went on, ‘every night I pray that he will stop being driven by alcohol. I pray that he is burning off all his bad karma. That in his next life he will find peace.’

  ‘Doesn’t it worry you?’ I asked, trying a different tack, running my hand over Anna’s velvety scalp. ‘Not being touched, not having a man tell you you’re beautiful?’

  ‘I don’t care about men and I am not beautiful,’ Anna said. ‘Maybe inside I will be. One day. But outside. This,’ Anna grabbed the underneath of her upper arms, pulled the sagging flesh down, made it swing, to show me how repellent she really was. ‘This is not beautiful. This is nothing. It will rot and decay. It does not make me happy. Just the other day, Lama told me I was ugly, and it made me proud.’

  ‘That is sick, you know that don’t you? You are beautiful. We all are.’ That was Haight-Ashbury talking. I’d thought what was happening in India and Nepal was somehow in tune with the scene there, but the longer I was here, the harsher it all seemed, the less I understood what Buddhism actually was.

  Anna gave me a final shrug. ‘We are both of us mud. And maybe one day a lotus will emerge from us. That is all.’

  I began to cry, squatting down on my haunches, rocking back and forth. ‘I’m scared of what will happen to you.’

  ‘The point is,’ Anna said, ‘that nothing bad can happen. If I learn compassion, true compassion, nothing can go wrong.’

  She got down on her haunches too. She pulled my face towards her and put her forehead against mine, in the Tibetan way.

  ‘I love you more than ever,’
she said to me. ‘I love you better than I ever was once able.’

  By the time my final letter arrived from Anna I was expecting it for I had dreamed of her the night before. In my dream she was still young, still beautiful. She had golden curls and a smiling face. She was swathed in white. In her hands—there seemed to be many of them—she held a pair of scissors, a sword, a skull, a blue flower. Snakes circled her waist. She wore a diadem made of bones. She was seated on a lotus but it withered and died and then she was sitting cross-legged on the heart of a corpse. There was a stench coming from her and when I reached out to touch her face, the flesh fell into my hand. I frantically tried to push the mess back onto her skull. If she didn’t have her face, how would I know her? She cocked her leg: first her left, then her right. She bobbed up and down. She struck the ground with her palms, she beat the earth with her feet. It seemed that she was dancing. ‘Now!’ she roared, and the sound was triumphant; it rippled through space and trembled in my chest like the low, deep notes of a Tibetan trumpet. I woke in a cold sweat and put my hand to my heart, until slowly, slowly, the vibrations faded away.

  ‘You are Ana-Sofia’s mother now,’ Anna wrote bluntly, and by that stage she was right. Along with the letter there was a notebook, ruled pages bearing a description of her childhood written in long hand. ‘When Ana-Sofia is old enough,’ Anna explained. ‘I want her to understand.’ That was how I know Anna’s story, though some of it I’d guessed by then, and some of it Ian had told me. Childhood can’t explain everything of course, I know that, but that was the moment that I saw what it had done to her. What the hunger was that had driven her across continents towards me, then away from me. Towards you, then away from you.

  It was after I read her story that I decided to write down my memories of her also, the memories you are reading now. I knew that after you stopped hating your mother, you would need to know her. And there is, of course, a pleasure in remembering. That was the thing about Anna; she drew people, and held them, despite everything about her that ought to have driven us away: just knowing her made everything seem more alive.

  Anna

  In unprecedented darkness the city is drowning

  I hold my arms high above my head, point at the sky and stand on my tippy toes. I am a ballerina. I spin and everyone moves in a circle. Leaflets fall from the planes above us and they blow around me too. Even the orange and brown leaves which fall from the trees tangle themselves about me.

  Mice are dancing in a round

  On a bench a cat is sleeping

  We raise our voices as we sing so we can hear ourselves over the rumbling air. Suddenly I feel dizzy. I stop, and that is when I hear Mama calling me.

  ‘Anna, darling, you must be careful. They say there are to be bombs any minute. You must come. You must all of you come.’ I look up to see mothers appearing from everywhere. They race towards us, gathering us up in their arms.

  Once we are home I read a leaflet snatched from the air: Beat the Jews. Beat the Commissars. Our mugs beg to be bashed in. Wait for the full moon. Bayonets in the earth! Surrender!

  ‘Aren’t we Jews, Mama? Aren’t we close to the full moon?’ I ask.

  Mama tells me yes and explains that that is why Papa and my brother Mikhail are fighting, and why I have been collecting bottles for General Molotov. ‘It is to make little bombs, Bird. They will help protect us.’

  ‘Is the war why Natasha was sent to the country? Why aren’t I in the country?’

  Mama pulls me close. ‘It is best if my little Bird stays close by my side,’ she says then starts to make me dinner. I love watching Mama in the kitchen. She is so pretty, with her long blonde hair and blue eyes. When I tell her she looks pretty she says that if she is pretty it is because she looks like me. That is what she always says.

  ‘Where is Papa? Are there bombs where Papa is? Is he safe?’

  ‘Papa is at the front and there might be bombs there but Papa is brave, like us. He is sending us his love now. Can you feel it?’

  I pretend that I can. ‘And Mikhail?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Then the kitchen rocks and we’re lying on the ground. Mama gets up quickly.

  ‘We will go to the library for the rest of the night,’ she says. ‘It is safer there.’

  ‘Can we take Nikolay?’ I am worried about my friend next door.

  ‘Nikolay has his own family to take care of him, Bird,’ Mama says. I want to argue with her, tell her that Nikolay’s family are not so nice, but she is already holding my coat out, grabbing my hand and pulling me out the door.

  There is a magazine that Mama’s friend, Saskia, showed me once with pictures of movie stars in America. Saskia explained to me that we shouldn’t be looking at these pictures or these magazines. That it was our secret. In this magazine there is a picture of a lady from the olden days with her hair all in curls. Her name is Scarlett O’Hara and she stands on a hill in front of a red sky full of fire with everything burning around her. That is what it looks like when Mama and I go outside. The smoke is so grey and thick it looks like storm clouds. Where there isn’t smoke the sky is dull red and orange. Like fireworks, but not as bright.

  ‘They’re bombing the food warehouses,’ Mama says. ‘Badayev.’

  It smells of burning sugar. The fire roars, eats the buildings, breaks them into pieces of charcoal which become smaller and smaller, small as dust motes, smaller again, then turn into smoke which we breathe in as we run. Because of the thick red light, because all the street signs have been painted white, I am scared we will lose our way. But I don’t cry.

  When we get to the library basement there are dozens of people already there, including Saskia. I run to hug her. She is nice looking, though not as pretty as Mama. She has short black hair and green eyes. She is my best grown-up friend.

  ‘It is lucky we finished our packing,’ Saskia says.

  She is talking about the work she and Mama have been doing all summer. Before the bombs began I used to go in and watch them. As she worked, Mama explained to me that it was best not to think about what she was doing or why she had to do it. ‘Otherwise I could not resist,’ she said. ‘Pushkin’s letters, Voltaire’s diary: these are the most special things that can be imagined. You know, darling? If a German soldier were to come in here, sit down and read one word of our literature, things could change. He might understand that it does not have to be like this. That humans need not be cruel to each other.’

  Mama moved like a dancer. She had long fingers and dancing hands. ‘So, instead of thinking,’ Mama said, ‘I take a piece of paper, like so,’ she reached across to the box of tissue, picked up a sheet, then laid it on a letter in the box, ‘to keep the letters safe.’ When the pile was high enough she marked the box carefully so people would know what was inside.

  ‘It is all done then?’ Peter asks. Peter is very old. Sixty-five years old. Saskia is twenty-three and I am ten and Mama is forty-three. Peter’s beard is white and long and he is always teasing me. He scares me.

  ‘Well, no. 360,000 books and papers. The rest are in the cellar. The attic has been filled with sand.’

  ‘The rest?’

  ‘Half a million volumes.’

  ‘And the sand will save the books?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ Saskia ruffles my hair. ‘It will.’

  I suddenly realise we can hear each other talking because the shelling has stopped. It is quiet outside. I put my head on Mama’s lap and begin to drift, I suppose I sleep, and then I wake because Mama is on top of me. When I crawl out from underneath her I see that everyone: Peter, Saskia, all the rest, are on the floor with their arms held across their faces. I start to giggle and soon we are all laughing.

  ‘That sounds closer,’ Mama says. ‘Maybe Smolny.’

  ‘There is no problem,’ Saskia is confident. ‘Even the generals who work here can’t find this place. The library is draped with nets. And have you seen the golden minarets? Pfft. Disgusting. Covered with dirty grey paint.’

>   When I was just a tiny girl Mama and I used to play a game together. Now I am too old for it—I am almost eleven after all—but Mama wants to play the game now.

  ‘Please, darling?’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, and actually, it is true that the idea of playing makes me feel less frightened.

  Mama begins. ‘When Anna was…’

  ‘A little girl,’ I join in.

  ‘She slipped out of her mama like a fish. When her papa first met her she looked straight into his eyes like she knew him already. “Shall we call her our little fish?” asked Papa, and Mama said, “No, she flies out like a bird! Look at her, feathers already.” And you know it is true. Because when she was a…’ ‘Little girl…’

  ‘She had blonde-white hair that was soft as down. So the mama and the papa decided that her name should be Bird.’

  I put my hands together at the end of this story. That is how it goes: I always clap my hands to show that I am my mama and papa’s little Bird.

  Saskia watches us play and I think she must be sad because she doesn’t have a mother anymore, so I go over to her. Mama comes over also and soon the three of us are asleep. ‘Like a pile of kittens,’ Mama says when we wake at dawn.

  As we are walking home from the library I see a witch. I know she is a witch because her fingers are gnarled and she points them at the sunrise.

  ‘The black crows are coming,’ she shrieks and then, as if she has spun some kind of spell, bombers lift themselves up in front of the sun and move over us. Soon there are shells raining down. There is nowhere to run so we drop where we stand and crouch by a wall with our hands over our faces. We press so hard against the wall that the bricks make their shape on my skin. Well, I imagine they do. I am wearing so many clothes I can’t actually see them.

  When the dust settles Mama and I stand up. I look around for the witch but all I see are marks on the ground where she was standing. I stare and stare, trying to see what they are. It is like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Then suddenly I understand: the witch is all in pieces. Her head has been tossed one way; her legs another. Mama grabs at me and tries to cover my eyes but I push her away. I can only see one arm. I wonder where the other has gone.