Bird

by Sophie Cunningham

  ‘Your mama needs to be in hospital,’ Saskia says, and we both stand, heads bowed, as if that is possible; as if we don’t live in a world where the doctors and nurses are all dead, or dying. As if we live in a city where a hospital would make Mama better. I would like to reassure Saskia that Mama wants to be dead now, but Saskia needs to keep pretending. ‘This is very unfortunate, that your mother is like this. I thought she would be stronger. Your mother is a very good woman,’ she says. ‘We, at the library, we all loved working with her. We all loved her very much.’ She makes a strange little sound. Half sob, half laughing. ‘Love her, I mean. We love her very much.’

  Can Saskia tell that I am not as thin as some of the children? Does she know that I pretended to believe Mama when she said that she hated the sawdusty bread, when she told me that grownups didn’t need so much food? Does she know I have been killing my mama?

  ‘There are evacuations every day now,’ Saskia says, ‘out over the ice, across the lake. We are moving quicker; we must, before the thaw begins. I have managed to put your name on the list—it won’t be too many days now.’

  ‘And Mama?’

  Saskia flushes. ‘Of course, I have asked that Sofia be put on the list too.’

  ‘How will Papa find us?’

  ‘Oh, they will keep records. When it is all done—the war I mean—they will bring you back home. The authorities will make sure your papa knows to wait for you.’

  ‘Can we put Nikolay on the list as well?’

  Saskia looks indifferent. The list of people she cares about is, after all, finite. ‘If you know where he is,’ she says.

  That is when I realise that I haven’t seen Nikolay for over a week. But then, with Mama so ill, I haven’t gone looking for him, either. Might he be dead? No. I am sure I would feel something if he died, and I have not.

  I look at Saskia. She is very tired and sad. I give her a hug. Saskia holds herself stiff, but her hand touches my spiky hair. ‘Spring is here,’ she says before kissing me gently on the top of my head. ‘There will be new beginnings.’

  When Saskia is gone I sit by Mama and hold her hand. ‘Mama,’ I say. ‘I love you.’ I don’t think she hears me.

  After that I eat the last of the bread, then I get into bed and hold her close. She pats me. Gentle. She gives me butterfly kisses. Sometimes she speaks; her words are like tiny stars in a dark night sky, sparkling. Soon she will be free.

  ‘Bird,’ she says, ‘Papa will find you. You will live. I know this. A mother knows these things. Your life will be such a special one that no one could ever imagine a girl such as you existed.’

  Silence.

  Then: ‘Oh my little one. I am so sorry to leave you here where it is dark and cold. It is so dark and so cold.’

  I did not understand before that one night can be so long. I try to stay awake. I want to look into my beautiful mama’s eyes as she is dying. I don’t want her to be alone, but I am so cold and so hungry. I fall asleep and when I wake Mama is dead.

  For a moment I pretend she isn’t. ‘Mama,’ I say. ‘It is time for breakfast.’ But of course she doesn’t answer. Then I realise that I can use her ration card until the end of the month so I feel, for a moment, less afraid. I won’t be like other children, children I have glimpsed through windows and doors holding onto their parents’ bodies, crying. I make myself understand hard truths, just like Estella understood them. Mama will be dust soon and I am alone. That is the truth.

  I go to the cupboard and get out Mama’s favourite dress. The one she wore in the years before the war, the nights when she went out dancing with Papa. It is made of satin and the colour of cherries. It doesn’t have sleeves, but I don’t have to worry about Mama being cold anymore so I thread her bony arms into the summer dress. Then I put a photo of Mama and Papa, young Mikhail and baby me inside the dress. I rip a page out of her favourite book, a poem called ‘Courage’ she has been reading over and over, and put that in her dress as well. After that I pack a bag with a photo of Mama, some clothes and my diary, and I write a note for Papa.

  It is the beginning of April. Mama is dead. But I feel you are still here. Soon I am going across the Ice Lake. Please wait here for me because I will come back to you.

  Your loving daughter,

  Anna

  I put the letter in Papa’s box of things that is kept under the bed, with the lock of my hair and of Mama’s that we kept after we shaved our heads. To remind us we’d once been beautiful. Then I write a note for Nikolay and put it under his door.

  I hope everything is okay with you though I worry because I have not seen you. I must go away from here, but am all right. I will see you again one day. I know because the ouija board tells me!

  Suddenly I am hungry. I don’t understand how I can be still more hungry, but it is as if an animal is ripping into my organs and eating them to keep itself alive. I suddenly understand that it is the same animal Mama saw squatting beside her on its haunches, and I am scared of that animal; scared it will haunt me. I am scared I will be hungry for the rest of my life.

  It is hard getting Mama’s body down the stairs. I try to drag her, but her head thuds on the stairs and I think I am going to be sick. After that I carry her shoulders, and let her heels bump until I get outside. There is a sled out the front of the apartment so I put Mama in it and begin to walk. Once, a long time ago, people would have stared at us: a dead lady dressed in an evening gown being dragged across the dirty melting ice by a small child. Not now.

  I am taking her to Piskarevsky Cemetery. It is a long way, but I know trenches have been dug there for the bodies. I want Mama to be under the ground. I want her to be warm.

  I don’t know what happens next. An hour passes. Or is it a day? A month? Perhaps it is like this: I drag Mama’s body for ever, across the ice.

  Then I smell turpentine and there is a truck coming towards me. A soldier climbs over the bodies stacked up in the back and gets down to stand beside me. He touches me on the shoulder.

  ‘Let me help you,’ he says. ‘We will take your mother where she needs to go.’

  The soldier lifts her up gently. ‘Her dress is beautiful,’ he says, smiling at me, and I love him for saying that. He could have said so many other things, things like, ‘Her dress looks strange,’ or, ‘Did you kill her?’ He holds Mama’s body so I can kiss her goodbye. And then, as if she has been lifted up into the sky by an angel, Mama is gone.

  Saskia cries when I leave her. The train takes forever to get going and when it does it moves slowly. The old man in the seat in front of me dies before we even get to our destination: Lake Ladoga, the Ice Road, the Road of Life, the Road of Death. We wait, on the edge of endless white, for a truck to carry us across the ice. Trucks drive through the night every night, Saskia tells me, racing the thaw. I look out across the cold expanse to the skeletons of trucks that haven’t made it. A child falls beside me—a boy? a girl?—and the mother lies down beside the child and takes it in her arms. I want to say, ‘Don’t give up! Not now!’ but the words don’t come. There is a full moon above us, a full moon circled by silvery light, like a halo. The more I stare at it the more it looks like an enormous eye. Perhaps it is the eye of God? I keep looking until I see that it isn’t God at all, that it is Mama’s face looking down on me. She is so beautiful. It is so beautiful.

  Suddenly people are moving forwards, towards the truck that has appeared in front of us. The back of it is open. The driver calls out, ‘Hurry! Hurry!’ and people fall over each other in their rush to get to it. I keep looking at the moon and the way its cold light illuminates the ice and snow. I close my eyes and the white stays inside of me. I am full of light. Voices come to me from a long way away. ‘You silly girl!’ someone says. I open my eyes. There are arms reaching out to me. ‘Come. Quickly! Let’s go!’

  Lama Dorje Rinpoche

  The Fourth Noble Truth: The path to cessation involves

  the practice of morality and the attainment of wisdom. It

  le
ads to Nirvana, meaning peace or no more suffering

  When Anna finally in Mother-Daughter Cave, Lama Gyatsho become very concerned. He need to see Anna. She has problems caused by drugs. Also, people that have not eaten so well, like Anna, they must be very careful not to develop the aspect of heart illness. Lama Gyatsho have developed aspect of bad heart also. That is more evidence of their shared karma.

  We were worried about his health but he say he must go. He say, ‘Guru is for life; I know that, Anna knew that. There is never any doubt. Guru devotion makes the way possible for enlightenment…’ [long silence]

  Ana-Sofia was staying at the monastery because new mother Eleanor have gone on honeymoon. Lama Gyatsho go to Ana-Sofia’s room and say, ‘Come on, dear. We are going to see your mummy. We need to check Mummy out.’ It very important that Anna say her goodbye to Ana-Sofia now. Anna must not be sad when dying, no, that is exactly the wrong time to be sad. At dying time thought must be of Buddha, compassion for others. Not holding onto life, or being sad, frightened or any such thing. Special teacher, Jamyang Khytense, his heart advice is this: ‘At the moment of death, abandon all thoughts of attachment and aversion.’

  When Lama Gyatsho arrive to see Anna his nose started to bleed. His hands and feet swell up.

  ‘I need my guru,’ Anna say. ‘Please look after yourself.’

  ‘Guru lives in your heart,’ he tell her. ‘Guru can’t die. Unless eat too much chocolate.’

  Anna give Lama Gyatsho letter for us to send to Eleanor. Also give letter for Ana-Sofia’s father. We always think her father was Ian, but maybe we are wrong about that.

  After Ana-Sofia say goodbye to her mother she is taken away so Lama Gyatsho can give Anna her final teaching. First Lama Gyatsho give her his special mantra. ‘Say that and I be there to help. Like a phone number, huh! I give you my number.’

  Anna ask if she will see him again but he tell her, guru and student are one, so doesn’t have to worry about seeing, or not seeing. He also say that her dying will be a very good opportunity. Then it is time to get down to business. Enlightenment can take place in the blink of the eye, with right karma, right transmissions. Very rare, maybe one in a hundred billion. Or million billion. But possible. Death is the most powerful moment, it is then that clear light becomes manifest. It is best that you recognise the clear light. If not you will go through the karmic bardo of becoming, and many challenges will greet you before you are reborn. Bardo is what you call ‘transition’. There are four bardos. So, actually, life, from birth to death is bardo. Then there is the painful bardo of dying. There is the luminous bardo of dharmata, and, if you are very lucky you will be enlightened in this life.

  You know? Sometimes we do not know how powerful a practitioner is until they dead. Might think they are ordinary person or ordinary monk and then, pfft, they die in very amazing way. For example, Garuda is born fully-grown. Comes out of egg with wing feathers, everything. Same thing: cannot not know someone a Buddha then the egg cracks as they die and that is when we see their radiant qualities, their wings.

  Okay, so first your earth elements will go and at this point you may see water around you. When the water element goes you see smoke, as fire goes to air there will be sparks, then nothing, a small glow. Like a candle behind you, perhaps like that. Soon after that your body will be dead but your consciousness will remain. As the father’s essence separates there will be white, like moonlight. When the mother’s essence separates there will be kind of red haze. Then Anna will fall into darkness. This will be a terrible shock. She will feel she is suffocating and that will make her want to get right out of there—out of her body. That is the death period. This will be Anna’s chance to clear the last obstacles to achieving enlightenment.

  Your last thought creates your rebirth. Profound moment. Keep wide open this space between, this moment of luminosity. Anyway, the minimum thing is to keep good posture, to dedicate all suffering to relieve suffering of others.

  Like I said before, I never sleep, always up through the night. Never sleep. Sometimes fall down in meditation—huh!—some people think I’m sleeping. Maybe I slip up sometimes. Anyway, Lama Gyatsho and I, we both sitting together, and we pray for Anna and talk to her while she is dying so she remember to meditate on the Lord of Great Compassion when her mind is deluded by illness, so she recognise the luminosity during bardo, so she is not confused by the projections of karma which are very powerful, quite frightening, wrathful deities and so forth. At the moment she died we do Phowa. So she is liberated. There are special prayers and procedures.

  She died very well, no doubt about that. Many ways to tell, such as hair fallen out on the top her head from the force of Phowa. Skin still good. For a westerner, with only eight years teachings, not even a tulku, to die how she did, very special. Very realised person, I think. Anna, she want to have a precious human rebirth. To work to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. But you know, Lama Gyatsho and I, we think perhaps she is in the Pure Realms now.

  Anna help build this place and many people in the west will know of the Buddha’s work, know the dharma, because of her. Perhaps that is the end of her work, or perhaps she take human form again later. Not sure. Certainly there were rainbows and other auspicious signs. We checked that out. But this is for sure. She was very special, very important, our Anna, our Russian princess, our movie star girl.

  Az

  Not to be afraid of anybody or anything anymore

  I wake up in a hospital bed and look around. Robert is sitting by me holding my hand. Steve and Eleanor are hovering behind him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask Robert, removing my hand from his and offering it to Steve. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘New York,’ says Steve.

  ‘I am sorry…’ Robert begins, but Steve cuts him off with a glare.

  ‘It’s not the time,’ elaborates Eleanor, moving closer to me also, so that all three of them are practically beside me in the bed.

  I try to understand. The last thing I can remember is India. The Himalayas.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You fell,’ Robert tells me—and suddenly I see how haggard he looks—‘down the side of a mountain. And you have typhoid.’

  This is it: I want to walk, as she did. I trek three miles up in the air, higher even, so I can imagine how Anna felt in places so remote that it is hard to be sure you even exist. Despite my trekking group, despite the company, I know this is how it was for her. Words don’t seem to work when you are up so high, they aren’t adequate to the task of describing the peaks, the glaciers, the drifts of snow or the tough, weathered people. Monks live in monasteries afloat an ocean of winds. The wind is the white noise against which they chant their prayers and beat their drums. Did my mother warm herself in these places as I do, by drinking a soup of butter, salt and tea? Did the tea make her gag and leave her feeling slightly ill? I climb mountain passes, one slow step at a time. I gulp at the air in big sobs. My mother’s heart must have pumped blood painfully through her chest just like this. For a brief moment we are: together.

  Earth and rock shift. Colours change as the sun moves. The rocks glow iron red, deep purple, copper. I walk towards ridges thinking they are covered in moss, only to find minerals rusted to a dark green. It is difficult to tell what is soft and what is hard. Walls of grey slate rise hundreds of feet, shimmering in the rain, and if I look closely I see goats leaping up them step by rocky step. Around me single-petalled roses bloom, hot pink against the bare earth.

  Prayer flags are set on windy passes so the air can catch their Om Mani Padmi Hums and flutter the mantra through valleys and gorges. Mani walls stretch expansively as we get close to villages. Goat horns stained with blood are piled high to ward off evil spirits.

  One night I sleep in a narrow gorge with ruins so old they are hard to distinguish from the rocks around them. A sliver of a crescent moon rises and I am treated to our first cloudless and starlit night, the Milky Way so thick and silvery white that I
mistake it for mist. The next day I become separated from the group and find myself alone in a barren landscape scattered with skulls and lizards, bright with glare. I try to imagine Anna, my capricious mother, walking here in the heat, in her robes. I cannot.

  At our highest camp it begins to rain and by the following morning it seems as if the whole mountain will slide away. I jog past streams of mud. Rain pelts down; the river rises up. I think of Robert, the belief I had felt in a future with him. As things slip away from me I realise I am ready to start living my life rather than spend it trying to understand Anna’s. Forget me, my mother whispers. We are the past, Sofia speaks to me in sepia. Lama Gyatsho is laughing, his smile so big it seems he is the Cheshire Cat and I am Alice, fallen down the rabbit hole. This barren land high up in the clouds is, in fact, a dream. Grief is boring, Ian joins in, and I see that these mountains are full of ghosts; the air is slick with them. Empty, I find myself saying, out loud into the rain and in unison my dead family nod and smile, repeat what I have said: empty. Then I see Anna sitting there on a granite boulder that hangs above the track. She is with Lama Gyatsho and his fingertips sit lightly on either side of her temples, hover, delicate as a hummingbird before a flower: her Buddha nature. Anna leans towards him. Their foreheads touch. There is a world in which they sit this way—still as statues, grave as rocks, silent as stones—until the mountains around them are worn to dust by the beating of wings, by wind and rain, by earthquakes; until the Himalayas are plains, the oceans dry, and the earth is burning up in the heat of a dying sun; still they sit, they have always sat, together, until the end of beginning-less time.

  That is what I was thinking when the earth slipped away beneath my feet, and I was slipping and sliding down the side of the mountain. I don’t think I even screamed.

  ‘Typhoid?’