Andrea Bennett - Two Cousins of Azov

He nodded and she released her grip. A dull realisation trickled through Vlad’s brain.

‘Was it a coincidence, Polly? That Anatoly Borisovich turned out to be the cousin of the man… the man who—’

She smiled. ‘Of course. Sometimes life’s like that. The man who no longer needs his flat, is the cousin of the man who doesn’t deserve his flat. Pure coincidence.’

‘You didn’t read it in his file?’

She giggled and shook her head. A shiver passed through him and he sat up to look for his clothes. His pants were still hanging from the lampshade, his trousers trampled in the middle of the floor. As he stood to collect them, they heard the slam of the front door.

‘Shit! She’s early!’

Polly grabbed up her bag.

Vlad scrambled around, sweat-stained sheet wrapped around his middle, scrabbling into his jeans, one leg still inside out, while grabbing for his pants and socks.

‘This is what you’re in it for,’ Polly taunted in a whisper as she watched him twirl and stagger. ‘You can’t live like this! You know you can’t! I’ll see you later in the week.’

She opened the door, poking her head around it, and then looked back at him. She watched him struggle, blew him a kiss and made a dash across the hall, jumping silently through the front door. It clicked behind her.

Vlad could hear his landlady in the kitchen, clanging pots and pans on the table top, switching on the radio, preparing for an evening’s baking. She called out something sharp as the front door closed. He reckoned he had sixty seconds before she came through the door to get washed and changed. He still hadn’t found his shirt. He could hear her calling now, stomping up the hallway, her hand reaching out, opening the door…

‘Citizen patient! Where are you going?’

He froze, fingers twitching in the folds of his robe. He could see the end of the corridor clearly now, the doors to the communal sitting room. He heard the tread of a rubberised sole and his head retracted into his shoulders. He wanted to look back, to see who was following him, but he felt stiff, as if he might snap. He pulled up his pyjama bottoms with shaky hands.

‘Back to your room, Anatoly Borisovich.’

The warmth of a body brushed his side, the smell of bottled roses filled his nose. He relaxed. It was the kindly orderly, the one with the blue-black beehive and friendly eyes.

‘I thought I’d stretch my legs,’ he said in a soft voice. ‘Is it late? I can’t tell: I seem to have lost my watch.’

‘You old men,’ she said, winding her arm around his, supportive and controlling. ‘Of course it’s late – almost eleven.’ She gently turned him around and looked into his face. ‘How did you lose your watch?’

‘I don’t know. I’m sure it was in my cabinet. But it’s not there any more.’

‘Hmm,’ she frowned, ‘that’s a shame.’

She held his arm as he slid one foot in front of the other, Siberian moccasins gliding on the pale lino, skating in easy, stubby strokes back along the corridor.

‘I’m wide awake now – out of routine!’

‘Because of all the drawing?’

The other orderlies had been in and out of his room all day, clucking over his sketches and interrupting his thinking.

‘Maybe. I have remembered, you see, and, well… my brain is on fire, sometimes.’

‘But it’s good to see you up. You’re making real progress, aren’t you?’

‘I think I am.’ Five more doors to pass. Snores and squeaks, sighs and buzzes came squeezing under the doors of his neighbours’ rooms and fluttered off down the corridor behind them. On he skated, hands making little twirling movements at his sides, like a pot-bellied dancer. ‘It is night now, and I know who I am, and where I am.’ He smiled at the kindly orderly. ‘I know who you are.’

‘That’s very good. Here we are, nearly back.’

‘Where do you roost after dark, my dear?’ He raised enquiring eyebrows and crinkled the skin of his cheeks. ‘You don’t patrol the corridor all night, do you?’

‘No. Up there,’ she nodded down the corridor, the opposite end from his foray. ‘There’s a camp bed in the office. I was just going to turn in when I heard you.’

‘And what’s up that way?’ he nodded in the direction he had been going.

‘The sitting room, and beyond that there are offices, the library, and the main entrance hall. You might be able to go to the sitting room in a few days, if you feel up to it.’

‘That would be wonderful.’

He gently swished into his room, the ligaments in his legs regaining long-forgotten elasticity. He felt almost human.

‘Goodnight,’ nodded the orderly as she held up the blankets for him to slide inside. ‘Sweet dreams. And no more wandering.’

He snuffled his thanks and lay back on the bed, concentrating on pulling air into his lungs. It was a long time since he had walked. But he had done it. And he would do it again.

Green eyes flicked towards the black glass of the windows glinting behind the blinds. Somewhere in the trees, he knew, there was a sound, ancient and familiar; the distant flapping of wings spangled with snow crystals. There was comfort in the sound. There was comfort in the knowledge. How could he ever have forgotten?

His eyelids drooped as his breathing relaxed, the thrill of exercise leaving his bones warm. He was falling into sleep, patting Lev’s velvety head as they sat together under the table on a long-lost Siberian evening. The stove roared in the corner. His head nodded. Soon Baba would return, and there would be sausage and cheese, and stories.

Then the sound came. Not out in the forest, not on the cottage window. Somewhere altogether closer. Somewhere on the biting green corridor outside his room. The sound of fingertips, tapping.

He curled the pillow over his head, pushing his hands against his ears. The sound got louder.

‘Go away! I’m trying to sleep!’

He listened to the roar of the silence, and then:

tap-tap-tap

‘Is there to be no peace?’

He pushed the pillow to the floor and heaved himself to sitting, but stopped as a pricking in his nose sluiced sleep from every cell of his body.

Smoke!

There was nothing to see, no fug, no yellow flame, but he could smell it all the same. It gave him a nasty feeling, sick and wicked like a belly full of spoiled meat.

A subdued troika set off for the Vim & Vigour sanatorium on that shivering Friday in late October. Sveta was quiet, the raspberry lipstick failing to camouflage her pallor as she wrapped her arms around herself. Gor observed it and threw caution to the wind, setting the car’s heating system to three.

‘I didn’t sleep,’ she said in reply to his enquiring eyebrow. ‘All kinds of dreams. I ate cheese after dinner… never again.’

Albina, meanwhile, was in rude health, but filled with disgust at having to sit in the back. She flung herself down, pushing both knees into her mother’s seat as she did so.

‘I’m actually taller than her now,’ she said, jabbing a finger towards the back of her mother’s head. ‘And I get sick in the back. It’s so unfair!’

Gor said nothing, but hummed a little ‘rum-pum-pum’ and pulled out of the courtyard with a jerk. He too had not slept well. Rapping at the door had woken him early, and although it did not go on long, sleep could not be retrieved. Another anonymous letter telling him death awaited himself and his cats had also done nothing for his mood.

‘Albina, darling, it won’t take long to get there. Please sit up properly. You agreed to be a good girl, didn’t you? Remember your promise?’

‘Yeah!’ Albina snapped forward and pressed herself between the two front seats, grinning into Gor’s cheek. He could smell her breakfast. ‘She bribed me! If I behave, whatever that means, she’s going to buy me some Danish yoghurt!’