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‘No,’ she agreed wryly, after a short pause, ‘it’s not. You’re my sunshine, boy. You are my joy. Don’t ever change.’ She hugged him close, bread knife in hand, and breathed in the familiar, warm smell of his hair, his neck, his young life.
They set about their tasks, and swapped stories of the day’s events.
‘Did you draw me anything today, young Tolya, eh?’
‘No, Baba. I need a new piece of chalk. That one’s all worn away, I can’t hold onto it.’
‘Akh, again? Well, we’ll see what I can do. Maybe up at the school house we’ll be able to beg a piece of chalk. We’ll keep trying. I love your pictures. You’ve got a gift there, son. Much good it’ll do you.’
The well bucket clanked as the wind whipped out of the trees and across the yard. The boy dropped his spoon. ‘So, Tolya,’ said Baba slowly, ‘now you’ve told me about school, what’s this talk of the moth boy? Where’s this coming from? Old stories, boy … not good Communism.’ She observed him from the corner of her eye as she began to cut the black loaf into slices. Tolya stirred the buckwheat porridge with an inexpert hand.
‘We were talking after school, Baba. Pavlik has seen him. And Gosha. He came to their windows, in the night. He was tapping for the candles. And cousin Go—’
‘He should know better!’ Baba tutted, and shook her head.
‘It’s true though! He said the moth boy wants to get into their houses, to get near the light, and lay eggs in their ears. They’ve all seen him! All of them! He waits at the windows! Maybe he wants to eat them! Suck out their brains—’
‘Enough! On with your jobs!’ Baba scowled over the bread. ‘Those boys with their stories! I’m going to have a word with that cousin of yours!’
Tolya pretended to get on with his jobs, but his eyes strayed back to the window. In his head, he could really see moth boy: his moon-washed face, pale as the northern summer night, pale as milk, luminous as ice; his huge eyes, round, bulbous, staring from his shrunken skull like twin planets, empty and dead; his stomach, round and furry, grossly blown up and dissected into two pieces – thorax and abdomen, both parts moving and throbbing; worst of all, his wings, fluttering, green and brown and blue, vibrating, shimmering, huge and furry: inhuman. He could see him flitting amongst the trees, shivering, diving, a puff of moth-dust from his vibrating wings, projecting himself, aching to cross from the trees into the village, from the dark to the light, fluttering over chimneys and into window frames, knocking on the panes, reaching out with limbs that were withered and ice-cold, frond-like … were they wing-tips, or antennae?
‘Is that done?’
He sucked in air with a jolt. The spoon in his hand was hovering over the pan, not stirring but making useless round movements in the air. The porridge looked stodgy, and was drying at the edges.
‘Yes, it’s done, Baba.’ He nodded and smiled, and carefully scooped a good serving into each of their bowls, adding a peck of salt as he went.
‘Eat well, Tolya. We have a Subbotnik tomorrow: you will need your strength for the voluntary work.’
‘Another Subbotnik! But Baba, it’s Saturday! I want to play, and help Papa in the yard, and teach Lev how to march!’
Baba gave Tolya a tired look, and sighed into her lumpy porridge. ‘Tolya, that’s the point of a Subbotnik. We do good works on our day off. Well, we who have no choice do. And everyone reaps the benefit. It is our duty.’
‘But that’s not fair!’ The boy’s bottom lip started to tremble.
‘Life’s not fair, Tolya, life’s not fair. Now eat your porridge, and grow big and strong. Then you can tell them what to do with their Subbotnik.’ She laughed, the sound gravelly and low. Tolya cuddled up closer to her, sharing her warmth, and chewed on his black bread and buckwheat, determined to grow big and strong.
Later that night, as they lay side-by-side in the big wooden bed in the corner of the room, Tolya listened to his baba’s breathing. Steady, big breaths whistled in and out of her chest, making the quilt rise and fall, rustling slightly. She was warm and solid, like a living stove. He knew she wasn’t asleep.
‘Tell me a story, Baba.’
‘Get to sleep, boy – it’s late. Too late for stories.’ She turned onto her side towards him, plumping up the straw pillow with her shoulder, and tucking down her head so that her nose and mouth were under the covers.
‘Tell me the moth boy story, Baba.’
‘Akh, I wish I’d never opened my mouth. Moth boy … what nonsense! There is no story. It’s just a myth; tittle-tattle. I’ve never seen him …’ Baba’s voice trailed off and she yawned, ‘And it was all so long ago.’
‘Not that long ago, Baba. Not like when you were a girl.’
‘Ha!’ She chuckled and opened her eyes. ‘No, not that long ago … yes, when I was a girl … that was another century! There were no radios, no mobile cinemas, no electricity, not anywhere – and no one could read! No one like us, I mean. There were no communes, no soviet councils …’
‘But that was before moth boy?’ prompted Tolya.
‘Akh, moth boy. No, moth boy’s not that old – although, if he’s a spirit then … he’s as old as water, as old as the stars. Maybe the shaman knows, eh? You know the local people believe, don’t you? And who’s to say they’re wrong.’
‘What did you see, Baba?’
‘Nothing. It was a dream … a story. The story got into my dream. Some words people were saying.’ She began to doze off.
‘But what about the story?’ He pressed his elbow into her chest.
‘A boy ran away to the forest; a strange boy. He wanted to be a shaman, that’s why he went. He hid in the trees, shaking the leaves … but the moonlight slid into him, through the cracks round his eyes.’ Tolya felt around his own eyes with soft fingers, looking for cracks. ‘It shone in his brain, you see. And once it got into him, he couldn’t come back, no matter how cold and lonely he was. He was moonstruck; a lunatic, half boy … and half moth. He taps at the windows, but he can’t come back.’ Baba’s voice was becoming thick with sleep.
‘I’ve heard him, Baba!’ Tolya rocked his blond head into Baba’s shoulder to rouse her. ‘He’s real.’
‘Oh, my boy! Real, not real: what’s the difference, eh?’ She smiled and patted his hair with a heavy hand as her eyes fell shut. ‘Nothing lasts forever, except stories.’
‘But we believe in him, don’t we Baba?’
‘Go to sleep. We believe what we want to. And what we believe must be real, mustn’t it?’ Tolya nodded. ‘Maybe you’ll be a scientist when you’re grown up, and you can tell me if spirits are real or not.’
‘I will, Baba. I’ll be a scientist. Then we’ll know.’
‘Good. But now it’s time to sleep. Papa will be home soon, and he’ll be angry if we’re awake.’
Tolya closed his eyes and pressed his nose into the pillow, nestling into the warmth of his babushka, and imagining how his laboratory might look, when he was grown and big and strong. He would get to work in a flying machine, and eat only sausages and sweets.
‘Next time you see moth boy, Baba, you know what to do?’ She did not reply, but he carried on talking, looking down into his own hands. ‘Just close both your eyes, and cross both your fingers, and say to yourself, as loudly as you can, “Comrade Stalin, protect me!” and all will be well. That’s what the boys said. All will be well. Just believe. That’s what they told me.’
Baba grunted and stroked his head. The warmth of the bed spread through his limbs and over his mind as he fell into the velvet nest of sleep. A sleep so deep, he heard nothing, sensed nothing. Not even the lonely sound on the windowpane.
tap-tap-tap
The old man’s head snapped up.
‘You see, Vlad, moth boy is as old as the wind, the water. The story … I didn’t make it up! Ask anyone!’ He rubbed his eyes with a sticky, squelching sound. ‘They go to the flame, they get too close and – fssssst!’
Vlad stared at the old man, puzzled, and then turned his eyes to the fine grey mist rising from the mud flats beyond the window. He blew out his cheeks.
‘We didn’t really get very far, did we, Anatoly Borisovich?’
‘I was too young … too young to know the half of it! I thought Comrade Stalin would protect me! What did I know?’
Vlad glanced at his watch.
‘Indeed. Anatoly Borisovich, I’m sorry, I have to go.’ It was gone four o’clock. He licked his lips at the thought of Polly. ‘I am sorry to leave at such an interesting moment.’
‘Interesting?’ Anatoly Borisovich yawned. He felt warm inside. He hadn’t talked at such length for a long, long time, and had forgotten how energising it was to converse with another person, instead of muttering to himself. He also felt extremely tired.
‘I’ll come again, maybe later in the week? Perhaps then we can get to the research part? What you’ve told me is fascinating, thank you, but I can’t use it. It doesn’t help me understand what has been troubling you recently, you see, and what caused your collapse, and your memory loss. That is the point of my research.’
‘Research?’ repeated the old man absently. ‘Collapse?’ He frowned. ‘Oh yes.’ He cleared his throat. ‘You couldn’t see your way to bringing me a little morsel to eat next time, could you? We don’t get much that is sweet here, Vlad, and I do find talking exhausting. Do you like a bit of cake, yourself?’
‘Cake?’ Vlad looked hurt. ‘I don’t eat cake. I’m an athlete – or at least, I was.’
‘Oh really? That’s a story!’
‘Not really.’
The old man’s eyes rested on Vlad’s arms as the muscles flexed under his sweater, then travelled to his legs, slim in their close-fitting jeans.
‘I’ll see what I can do to find you something sweet. And hopefully next time we can make some progress on how you got those scars. It will help us make sense of what is … going on now.’ Vlad was shuffling his papers and jangling his keys.
The old man reached a wrinkled hand up to his cheek to feel the marks with dry fingers.
‘I loved my baba. It wasn’t my fault, you know, what happened to her.’
A Study in Bisection (#ue0435510-83e1-5197-9377-fc03b7299c17)
Gor drove home through the autumn mist, back across the bridge, past the newspaper stand, past the busy, bustling square, past the kiosks and the lights, hurrying for a little peace. On arrival, he bolted the door behind him, put on the safety catch, and cleaned his teeth, twice. The second time, he used rock salt and oil of menthol, slicing through the film of moth that clung to his canines. He flossed with a piece of white cotton, and examined his mouth in the bathroom mirror, grinning back at himself with a mirthless growl.
A visit to a psychic: he couldn’t believe he had agreed to it. But Sveta had been keen to help, and what was more, her concern had seemed genuine. He hadn’t expected it. When they first met, two weeks before, he had not found her a promising prospect. She had been hesitant and largely displeased, full of sighs and fussy questions: not the best properties of a magical assistant. Their second rehearsal had been little better. But today she had smiled, laughed even, and turned into a real person. A real person who served up giant, hairy moths in her sandwiches. Gor shuddered. Was he losing his mind? Had the moth even been real? No one else had seen it. He ran his tongue around his teeth as he sat in his armchair, the cats twisting around his ankles, mewing.
But the rabbit – there were witnesses to that. It had been very real, and very disturbing. A rabbit and a moth: there must be some logic to this. He leant down to tickle Pericles’ chin and thought back to his first encounter with Sveta, searching his mind for clues, trying to remember everything, exactly as it had happened. It had been warm and sunny in the morning, with a fine rain setting in at lunchtime. The headlines on the radio were of the rouble plummeting against the dollar, savings disappearing, huge rallies in oil stocks, the threat of war in Chechnya. And in his own apartment, he had been invaded by a woman who had answered his advert – fluttering on a lamp post in the leaf-strewn street – the day it had been put up. She had come in, fully unprepared, and fussed.
‘Mister Papasyan—’
‘Call me Gor.’
‘As you wish. Mister—’
‘Gor, please,’ he repeated politely but firmly. He was hunched away from her, grunting slightly with the effort of doing up the box clasps. She chewed on her red bottom lip, and then remembered her lipstick.
‘All right. Gor …’ Her voice trailed off.
She had forgotten what she was going to say. She strained her neck to observe the outline of his shoulder-blades through the old, thin cotton of his shirt, listening to him grunt, and wondered if he suffered from asthma. Her own chest felt tight with a sudden edge of panic. She breathed out noisily and tried to relax.
‘It would make what we have to do this afternoon much easier if you could just call me Gor. And breathe in.’
‘I see.’ She breathed in again, trying to make herself smaller, but resenting the implication of his words. She was not a large woman, although equally, not birch-like. Who needed twig women? What good were they? And who was he to tell her to breathe in? He had her at a disadvantage, and she wondered for the tenth time if this afternoon had been a mistake. All she could do was close her eyes, patient and saint-like, as he huffed and puffed.
‘And I will call you Sveta, if that is permissible to you?’
‘Oh yes, very good.’ Her voice fluttered and she did not open her eyes.
‘There, that all seems correct.’ He made a vague ‘rum-pum-pum’ sound in his cheeks and stood up tall, towering over her. ‘Where were we?’ He scratched his head, the silver hair ruffling as his fingers played a trill against his skull. He appeared more fuddled than she had expected.
She pursed her lips, unknowingly pushing her red lipstick further along the crevices that radiated from her mouth, out into the soft, doughy pallor of her face. Suddenly, she brightened.
‘You ask me to wiggle my toes?’ she asked hopefully, arching one heavy brown eyebrow.
‘No, not yet. It’s far too soon for that. We have a little way to go. Just …’ He positioned her hand higher, pulling on her fingers, and paused to observe the effect. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Um, fairly … normal. Not magical, at the moment, I have to say.’
He turned away tutting to himself, hands on hips, shaking his head.
‘Is something wrong?’
He did not reply, but turned slowly this way and that, scanning the room.
‘Gor?’
‘The saw …’ his voice came from between tight lips.
He turned back towards her and his eyes, large as the moon and dark as night, rolled slowly from one side of their sockets to the other, and back again. She felt a sweat break out on the palms of her hands and a fluttering in her stomach: he really was a fright to look at. ‘The saw, Mister … er, Gor?’
Gor spun away. He was annoyed with himself and what he considered the rather slow-witted woman before him. He took in the windowpanes, the rain behind them threatening to dissolve the sky and the land and bring everything to a smudgy, dripping halt. He took in his living room, bathed in the brown, honest glow of the books and sheet music that lined its walls, exuding a scent of permanence. He took in his baby-grand piano, dark and shiny as polished jet, perfectly tuned to be played at any moment. He took in the fluffy white cat reclining over its lid, one claw-prickled paw raised as if to strike at the polished perfection of the wood. And there, in the middle of it all, he took in the corpulent middle-aged woman, in a box.
He sighed, and removed his eyes from her: she upset him. The lipstick was too sticky, the hair too blonde, her understanding of magic zero and … and the rasping sighs that plumed and flowed from her like lava would have singed his tired nerves at the best of times. This afternoon was definitely not the best of times, despite the comforting rain. And now he couldn’t find the bloody saw!
‘It’s on the table, by the door,’ said Sveta quietly. He started at the words, coughed and refocused his eyes. They came to rest on the small table by the door. He shook his head.
‘Ah, I see, madam, I see. My eyes are … tired.’ He crossed to collect it, hips and ankles clicking as he went. He examined the blade in the puny light of the lamp.
‘Yes. The saw: good! We’d better move on, before I forget something else. Do you feel … stable?’
She considered briefly, and nodded carefully. Gor did not respond. He was stroking his chin and staring through her. She swallowed.
It wasn’t that his face was old: no, any face can make you wonder how it once belonged to a baby. But this – it was a face that was so mournful, so haggard and frayed, with such huge eyes, it could make a priest cry. Sveta shuddered, and the box rattled softly. On top of the piano, the white cat lay in abandonment, upside-down, and eyed her with mild interest.
‘Svetlana Mikhailovna, hold fast. All will be well. I have to pause to think … I am an old man – you may have noticed. We take our time, in all things.’ As he spoke, he waved a large, thin hand in the air, and then let it flap down again, the gesture both artistic and defeated. He did not smile. In fact, he looked exceedingly morose. ‘Strange, you may think, as time is against us, but there it is.’
Again Sveta pursed her lips, and tried not to look at Gor or the cat, which now seemed to be winking at her with its sapphire eyes.
‘I am holding fast. You may have noticed – I have no choice.’ She eyed the window and the rain swirling against the murky sky. The light was fading, and it made her anxious: she had a hair appointment at six. ‘Do please hurry.’
The old man stood beside her, the top of his head not far from the ceiling above.
‘You may feel some vibration, I fear. But there should be no more than that. It is a long time since I have attempted this action, so I have had the saw cleaned and sharpened. There will be no rust. My last assistant, God rest her soul, was quite against rust. She had an allergy.’ Gor shrugged.
Sveta offered him a tight-lipped smile. ‘I am not against vibration.’ Her chin rose. ‘And I have no known allergies.’
He nodded, and rolled up his sleeves. ‘When we attempt this action on the stage, of course, you will not be balanced in the box between two chairs. I will have my whole magical cabinet at my disposal. It is just our misfortune we cannot use it today.’
‘That’s a relief. But why can’t we use the cabinet today? I think I would feel a lot more “in character” if I were in a magical cabinet rather than balanced on two chairs. It was a lot of fuss getting into this box. And it seems quite unprofessional, to me.’
Sveta did not feel in character, or professional, or magical, at all. In truth, she did not know what the character of a magician’s assistant should be, but she was fairly certain that it should be more glamorous than this. What was the point in her lipstick and her impending hair appointment if she were just to be packaged up in a musty apartment in the suburbs, laughed at by cats and repeatedly observed by an off-putting old man with a face like death? She chewed her lip.
