She thought she could save just one, but even that is apparently too much for them.
“Yes,” she says out loud. “We need to talk. Let me just check on her.”
Helen squeezes her eyes shut and waits for the woman to close the door, cutting off the thick slab of light reaching in from the hallway. The light makes the monster retreat into its den somewhere between the bed and the floorboards, where its eyes glow with quiet red ferocity in the darkness. She wants to ask the woman—Janis, mom—to leave the door open, to put the lights on, but she cannot, and she cries silently, her salty tears sliding down her cheek and into her hair, soaking into the pillow.
The woman does not leave. Instead she comes in and sits on the bed, the white texture of her cable-knit sweater exaggerated by the light from the hallway and darkness inside the room. It is cold tonight—the cold has finally caught up with Helen. It chased her across the unfathomable chasm of the ocean and nine hours of flying through the air over the stationary clouds. The autumn is here now, and there are no more moths fluttering in the curtains.
Helen peeks between the tear-soaked eyelashes, and the beam of light twinkles and breaks into a myriad of tiny stars. The woman looks back at Helen but does not smile like she usually does when their eyes meet. Instead she sighs and strokes Helen’s hair. She feels the moisture under her fingertips, and she looks like she’s about to cry herself.
Helen considers opening her eyes completely but decides against it and squeezes them shut, feigning sleep. If she looks at her new mom directly, she will start talking, and then Helen would cry in earnest at her inability to understand, to explain about the monsters and shadows and fear.
Helen wants to talk about summers in Siberia—so short and so intense, so full of high-pitched whining of mosquitoes and the smell of pine trees oozing fresh sap, of spongy bogs studded with butter-yellow cloudberries. About the lake where the runaway boy drowned but which becomes transformed by a cloudless blue sky overhead into a swath of precious smooth silk surrounded by soft, succulent-green branches of firs.
But Helen cannot explain these things and she forces her eyelids tighter together, until her eyes burn.
Janis gives up and rises to her feet, the springs of the mattress squeaking in relief. The door closes behind her, cutting off the light.
In the darkness, there is shifting and stirring. Helen watches the sheet of wallpaper peel away, admitting a thin beam of bluish light into the room.
Helen sits up and peers into the widening gap—carefully at first, wary of the monsters. She sees a small man, no bigger than a cat, crouching on the other side of the wallpaper barrier. His withered narrow face looks at Helen over his shoulder, and then he turns away and draws on the inside of the wall—a chain of tiny cranes, dwarfed by the shadows of daisies and poppies. They seem paler on the other side but alive, nodding in the invisible breeze.
Helen pulls the sheets of the wallpaper apart, and she sees a bright blue lake surrounded by yellow-needled larches. The monster crawls from under the bed and stands beside her, panting like a dog, the black fur between its wing-like shoulder blades bristling. Helen is surprised to not be afraid of it anymore.
The monster leaps into the gap and Helen follows, timid at first. She turns to look back and watches the wallpaper fold back with a quiet rustling and grow together, fusing. She sees the ghostly flowers, and behind them—her room, a shadow image from a magic lantern.
The monster growls and bounds ahead, then stops and waits for her by the tiny man and his cranes, which are flying in place, their wings sweeping up and down in a graceful motion. She watches them for a while, never moving and yet flying south among the daisies and poppies which are still blooming despite the autumn and its cold fingers reaching even behind the wallpaper, where the monsters sleep during the day.
The monster barks and laughs and leaps to the right, then to the left; then it gallops toward the lake, looking over its shoulder, inviting Helen to follow. Helen sighs and walks through the fallen leaves, rubbery under her white socks, she walks to the lake where a blue boy with sharp teeth is waiting for her, the monster by his side like a hound.
YAKOV AND THE CROWS
Yakov is glad to see that the crow has come back. He watches it out of his office window, five stories up above a frozen Moscow street; just another window on the flat, uniform facade of the square building. They call places like this one “the box”—not just because of its shape, but also because no one really knows what goes on in there. Government buildings. Yakov knows, he works here. He proofreads blueprints. Now they pile on his desk, and Yakov watches the crow.
He has noticed it a few days back, when he cracked the window and took his lunch bag from the ledge just outside. Many did this—it saved a trip down to the refrigerator in the common room. Yakov noticed that the ham sandwich lacked ham, and the entire neat package has been eviscerated with surgical precision. He looked outside, as if hoping to glimpse a thief. He saw a crow.
The crow does its usual rounds—it flies level with the sixth story, from one end of the building to the other, inspecting every window for a paper bag. The crow disdains hardboiled eggs and laughs at bread, but savors meat and cheese. Yakov waits for it.
It alights on the ledge and looks at Yakov, its head tilted, one roguish eye studying him. The black of the crow’s head looks like a beret, and its body is of dull but somehow shiny grey. Black feathers on the tips of its wings are folded primly, like laced fingers. What a gypsy eye, Yakov thinks. How familiar. Maria used to have black gypsy eyes like that, until they closed, forever weighted by dull copper coins.
The crow watches him, the glimmer in its eye almost humorous. It seems indifferent to Yakov’s lunch bag. It moves closer, with short hops along the ledge, until its black rogue eye is aligned with Yakov’s blue. The crow shakes with suppressed laughter.
“Maria?” he says before he even realizes his lips are moving.
The crow flaps its wings and continues its solitary patrol. Yakov returns to his desk. There are three other desks in the room, covered with dust, empty since the budget cut last year, in 1989. They still keep Yakov.
Five o’clock rolls by, and he takes the subway home. It’s crowded, and he leans against the doors, thinking about the crow, as the train carries him away from the hateful wind-scourged outskirts, towards the center, the old city, where his home is.
It is dark as he walks down the frozen boulevard, past the sleeping bums and squeezing couples undeterred by the cold and the frigid iron of the benches. Streetlamps light his way with their wan mercury glow.
He ascends to the third story, and listens outside of the door. Young voices and music reach into the stony stairwell full of echoes. His son Mitya has some friends over. Yakov likes the music—one of the new bands, Aquarium it’s called. He listens to the lyrics from outside; they have nice imagery. Gold on blue, flame-maned lions, wolves and ravens. He turns the key.
Mitya and two of his friends, Andrey and Slava, greet him with fake moans of disappointment. Yakov smiles —he likes the kids, and they seem to like him back, despite their many differences.
“Yakov Mihailovich,” Slava says. “We did some nice business today. I just thought I’d tell you that.” He knows how much Yakov disapproves of all the recent wheelings and dealings, and never misses a chance to tease him.
Yakov bites. “There’s more to life than money, boys.” All three giggle.
“Dad,” Mitya says, grinning from ear to ear, his eyes as dark
and mischievous as those of the crow. “Don’t you want to know how?”
Yakov nods.
“This morning, we bought a case of beer at seven rubles a can. And this afternoon the prices went up, all the way to fifteen.”
“And you sold it,” Yakov guesses.
The three laugh.
“No,” Mitya says. “We’re drinking it. Want some?”
Yakov laughs too. They all think that the inflation is funny. “You call that business?”
“Life’s too short to drink cheap beer,” Andrey says.
