The Stones of Years Ch. 01

A flicker of light caught his eye and he saw Soloff step out onto the low covered porch of the musician's classroom building. And what was this; a young student? Ah, yes. He recognized Lev Podgolskiv and immediately remembered the boy's father, the way the man had looked contemptuously at him before he had shot him in the head. Kushnirenko smiled at the thought, smiled when visions of raping the boys' mother played in his mind. Both of the boys had been forced to watch that first time, and the other boy -- what was his name? -- had been forced to watch many more times. Hadn't that one been sodomized, too?

He couldn't remember anymore, and anyway, what did it matter?

He watched the boy walk away from the classroom building, stepped back from the window just a bit and watched the Soloff bitch watching the boy.

The sky flared, great sweeping arcs of luminescence filled the air and he gasped; in all his years out on this frozen hell he had never seen such a bright display of the aurora. He came back to the window, his breath frosted the icy glass as he looked up into the night and he wondered what caused this to happen. Was it, as his father had once told him, a sign that great change was about to come -- or was it just radiation?

No. It was, he knew, an omen of things to come.

He greedily wondered what change might be coming his way but soon felt a creeping darkness fall over his soul and he shivered, looked back down at Soloff and at the boy in the middle of the lake, and then he laughed out loud.

"What a fucking moron!" he said as he watched the boy swaying to the beat of unheard music; it was as if he was conducting a vast, unseen orchestra, and he forgot for a moment the feeling of darkness that had just swept over him. He looked on with darkness filling his heart and took another deep drag from the cigarette and coughed again, but this time even more violently. He held his hand to his mouth, felt the moisture spray his hand again, and he turned on the lamp by his desk. He looked at his hand, at the little red droplets of blood and wet flakes of pink tissue on his skin and on the cuffs of his clean, white shirt, and his lips curled in a feral snarl.

"Now what the fuck," he said grumpily -- but then the darkness reached out for him. He reached for a handkerchief in his back pocket as fear crawled up his spine, then started to laugh as if he was without a care in the world -- until another fit of coughing came for him out of the growing darkness.

______________________________

Misha and Lev walked across the lake the next morning toward the school house just outside the administrative compound; the early morning sky was cobalt-blue and crystal-clear, Venus still was brightly visible just over the trees that lined the distant eastern horizon.

"Look at that star," Misha said as they walked along. "How come that one stays so bright after all the others have gone? Is it closer to us?"

Lev looked up from the ice ahead; without thinking he told his brother that the 'star' was in fact a planet, that it was between the Earth and the Sun, and that the Soviets were building probes to land on it. Lev did not see the look of hatred on his brother's face as he spoke, nor would he have understood it if he had.

Misha knew his brother was more intelligent -- gifted, he had heard teachers say -- and that one simple fact more than any other drove him to wild despair. He loved his brother more than anything in the world; Lev was, in fact, the only thing that grounded him to life. He could not imagine life here in this camp without him -- yet the simple fact the deck had been so unfairly stacked against him made him feel dirty, unclean, and he struggled to understand his feelings about not just his brother, but about himself. He could never admit to feelings of simple jealousy… no, it was more complicated than that… it had to be… had to be -- something else.

Some times it was all so complicated. Nothing made sense.

They made it to the classroom building and went their separate ways; he to a basic mathematics class, Lev to a class in something called calculus. It was always thus, he knew, and it always would be; they were brothers, yet they were so much more. They were twin brothers. Though they hardly looked alike, though intellectually they were as different as night and day, the incontrovertible fact was that the had shared the same moment of creation, they had formed together in the warm seas of their mother's womb, and they had come into this world just moments apart. They were, he remembered his father saying more than once, cut from the same cloth.

The same cloth.

Same cloth?

"Cloth?" Misha said aloud as he walked down the close wooden corridor to his classroom.

"What was that, boy? You there!" he heard a voice say, but he ignored it, walked on by lost in his own little world. A moment later he felt a hand on his shoulder, felt himself being spun viciously around, and when he had collected himself he saw Mr Kushnirenko looking down at him, his face angry and red.

"Sir!" he quailed, his voice a trembling shambles.

"You know you are not to speak in the hallway!" the stout old man sputtered. "To whom were you talking?"

"Talking?" Misha didn't know what Kushnirenko was talking about.

"Yes, you daft turd! Talking! You know? Open your mouth… sounds come out? Talking?"

"Sir… I… I don't know…" but Misha saw the old man was staring at his shirt.

"What is that on your shirt?"

"What?"

The blow to his face was instantaneous and stinging and his eyes welled up with hot tears.

"This shit all over your shirt, you imbecile! Are you deaf as well as stupid?"

Misha looked down, saw the red stains, remembered last night…

"Cherries, sir."

"Cherries?! Where did you… who gave you..."

Now Misha understood the danger he had put his brother in. "I found them, sir. On my way home from school -- just last night."

The next blow knocked him off his feet. He came down in a ball, crying, and he looked up in time to see Kushnirenko balling up his fist and kneeling, coming his way.

"Does that make you feel better, Mr Kushnirenko?" he heard another voice saying. "To beat up little children? Do you feel like a man now?"

Misha turned toward the voice, saw Professor Soloff standing between him and Kushnirenko.

"You would do well not to talk me like that, Madam," the old man said quietly, yet Misha could feel the brooding malevolence in his voice.

"Oh, really? I think I would do rather well, Mr Kushnirenko." She knelt beside Misha, dabbed his lip with a tissue, and he saw his blood when she pulled it away from his face.

"So, did you enjoy Prague?" the old man said as he stood. "Did everything meet with your satisfaction?"

"Yes, thank you, it was lovely. I can't wait to return in the Spring."

"Spring? No one's said anything about you…"

"I want to see the flowers bloom, you see…"

"Flowers?"

"Yes, I long to see white lilies. Vast clouds of white lilies."

"Ah. Well, perhaps that can be arranged. Perhaps even sooner than Spring."

Soloff looked at Kushnirenko with knowing eyes and she smiled at the implied viciousness of his threat. "I would welcome it, Comrade Kushnirenko."

"Really?" he said, his voice dripping with uncertain sarcasm, but she was helping the boy up now, then pushing him down the hall toward his classroom.

Misha ran unsteadily into the classroom and took his seat. Mrs Tritov looked at him unsteadily as he took out his paper and a pencil, then at the door -- nervously, he saw. She remained, as everyone else in the room remained, quiet, filled with a tremulous sort of dread that hovered somewhere between hopelessness and fear.

Nothing. All was quiet. Misha fell into the dreams that always came this time of day.

Later that morning, in literature class, the teacher was discussing the poetry of an Irishman named Yeats while Misha daydreamed, and he drifted off suddenly onto limitless vistas of white lilies on fields of black cloth. He saw Madam Soloff kneeling by his side, Kushnirenko's red face sputtering, and as these dreams came to him he could just make out the words of his teacher talking about a poem.

"Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," Misha heard her saying as he drifted away from her voice once again.

He saw his mother, her broken body shuddering over her husband's lifeless form…

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Her blue dress tattered and torn, the deep reddish-brown blood that ran from the gunshot wound in his father's face…

I have spread my dreams under your feet

Kushnirenko standing over his father, a pistol in his hand, blue-gray tendrils of acrid smoke arcing up lazily from the end of the barrel…

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

There was a commotion outside on the snow-covered lawn and everyone rushed to the windows. Kushnirenko had Madam Soloff by the hair and he was whirling her body around, dragging her across the snow, shouting at her, taunting her. He let go of her and her body tumbled across the snow, and he walked over to her. He kicked her once in the head; her body shot over backwards and came to rest on the snow. She was lifting her head, trying to stand…

The world grew blue and dim and dark -- and all grew very still and slow -- as Kushnirenko walked over to Madam Soloff; he had that same pistol in his left hand and he raised it and fired once, twice, into her head. She fell back silently onto the snow, and Misha saw the deep red well of her life emptying onto the snow. He wanted to cry -- but could not.

He watched as Kushnirencko -- laughing first, then coughing -- slipped the pistol into his coat pocket, and still he could not cry.

He stared at Madam Soloff as Kushnirenko walked away from the school, laughing as he went. The old man was enjoying the power of his performance, knowing he had his cowed audience in the palm of his hand -- and still Misha could not cry.

He saw his brother run from the schoolhouse to Madam Soloff's side, saw his twin brother kneeling beside the dying woman, saw him take her hand in his, lean over her body and listen as she tried to speak.

Misha was aware he felt nothing at all.

He saw Lev rocking over her body, saw his brother lost in prayer, and then, as teachers came slowly out of the building, only then did Misha Podgolskiv turn away from the mute horror of the scene.

But still he did not cry.

Indeed, no, he did not because he could not. He looked at the writing on the slate-board, at the lines of a poem:

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

He looked at the line from the poem his teacher had been reciting for a long time before he noticed that no one was left in the room, then he looked down at his hands to see if there was any blood on them.

When he saw that there was none he smiled, then stood and walked silently from the room.

©2008 by Adrian Leverkuhn