“I know.” Mitya sighs. “I’m surprised that you’re so reactionary. I thought you hated the communists.”
Yakov nods. “Still do. But I like free education and healthcare, and guaranteed employment.”
Mitya has heard all this before. “I know. But the free healthcare didn’t save Mom.”
Yakov sits up. “Don’t say that. It was cancer, no one could have done anything for her.” He sighs. “At least, the doctors who cared for her were not there for the money, but because they wanted to help people.”
They sit in silence for a while. Yakov feels like a failure. All the things he dreamt of, all the hopes are dashed and ridiculed. He wanted freedom, he wanted the yoke off his neck. He didn’t want this soulless vacuum, he didn’t want fear.
“It’s all right, Mitya,” he answers his thoughts. “When I’m gone, you can sell this apartment. It costs a lot.”
“Dad, don’t say that.”
“Sorry.” It’s not fair, Yakov thinks. He just wants his son to be able to do what he loves. He wonders what the crow would think about that.
The next morning, Yakov sits on the windowsill, waiting for the crow. His heart skips a beat when it appears. But not alone— there’s a whole murder. He counts them. Twelve. They patrol the windows in formation. Every now and again, one breaks off to rummage through a paper bag and emerge with a hotdog or a slice of ham in its beak. Yakov watches his crow. He can tell it apart from all the others.
The crows arrive to his window. He’s waiting for them, holding out a plastic container full of beef chunks. The crows demur at first, but soon grow bold and eat. He talks to them. He tells them of all the things that bother him—that the politics have changed but the politicians are still the same exact people as back in the sixties, only balder and fatter; he tells them that nobody cares about anything important anymore. He tells them that freedom has nothing to do with money, or the McDonald’s restaurants. The crows stop eating and listen.
They leave, but come back the next day, a dozen of them. The blueprints are still piling up on his desk, but Yakov doesn’t care. He finally found someone who would listen to him.
One of the crows seems agitated, and flaps its wings. The others caw, and Yakov stops talking, perplexed. The crows gather around their discomfited fellow. They grow silent and watch, until the crow falls on its side, its wings beating, and its feet scraping the ledge. It twitches and becomes still, its upturned gypsy eye milking over with death.
Eleven crows look at Yakov for a moment, and take wing. “Wait,” he calls after them. “Come back!”
The door opens, and Luganov, his boss, looks in. “Yakov,” he
says. “Do you have a crow problem?”
“No,” Yakov says. “Why?”
“People were complaining they steal lunches,” Luganov says.
“I put rat poison in mine, and told everyone else to do the same. You need some?”
“No,” Yakov says, shaking. “Why would you do something like that?”
Luganov barks a laugh. “I figured, rat poison would work even on winged rats, no?”
The door closes, and Yakov sits on his chair, his face in his hands. Poisoned. No doubt, the crows blame him. He prays that they would come back tomorrow, so he can explain.
The crows come the next day, just eleven of them. They start their patrol.
“No,” Yakov screams from his window. “No! It’s poisoned!” They either do not hear, or choose to ignore him.
Yakov throws the window open and waves his arms. He makes so much noise that heads appear in the windows above and below him. He calls to the crows, imploring, warning, and apologizing. They don’t seem to care.
Yakov climbs onto the high windowsill and stands there for a moment, his knees trembling under him. “It’s poison,” he calls again in a breathless voice. “Leave it alone! They’re trying to kill you!”
He steps out on the ledge. The heads in the windows gape and gasp, and disappear. He hears footsteps in the hallway— his coworkers running to intercept him, to drag him inside, to silence him. Yakov will not submit to that; he has been silenced before, but he won’t let it happen again. He takes a step along the ledge, his arms still waving, his voice growing hoarse.
Yakov’s knees shake and he feels sick to his stomach. “Come back,” he screams. “Please come back!”
His foot slides from under him, and his arms flap like wings. Then, it’s only the exhilaration of the flight and the pinch of frozen air.
People gather around the dead body, clucking their tongues and telling each other to call the police. They are too busy to see a dozen crows that circle high above the square building, cawing.
HECTOR MEETS THE KING
“I never was good at saying goodbye, and you were never good at letting go. So it starts, between me and you, and so it will end. I and you, inhale and exhale, a sigh and a kiss into a flat, adenoid face of the world.
“I know, I do not look much like a hero nowadays—gravity, the eternal bitch, has me in its hold, my fingertips are stained with ink, and my shoulders wrap around my chest as a pair of wide, anemic wings. But believe me, I am a hero.
“There are ties in the world, son. Nothing binds more securely than another’s pain. I watch your mother sleeping, her translucent skin flushed with dreams, her stately knees drawn at the pit of her stomach. I would have loved her even if she were short of leg and black of tooth; even then hurting her would not be a possibility. Mediocrity is the only painless state in the world, or so I thought.
“There is a finite, immutable amount of pain in the world, and what you spare others you must swallow yourself. I swallowed my pride and my honor. I did not walk through the gates that day, unable to hurt her. I would rather be a coward than a torturer. The legends lie—they tell the story as it should have been, they tell of Hector felled in the spray of warm sticky blood and splintered bone, they tell of his body dragged behind a chariot, of his orphaned son. The truth is sadder. Hector lived to see his son grow up. He watched him through the shroud of swallowed shame, and his eyes teared, as if from acrid smoke of burning Troy. And so it ends.”
I sing of what has not been sung before. I sing of Hector and his sacrifice, I sing his unlamented mediocrity. I sing his cowering, and I sing his end.
I sing the dry wooden rain of arrows that drummed on the roofs of the palace and the hovels, monotonous, growing too familiar to be noticed. I sing the braying of donkeys in their stables, the crowing of rooster at dawn, and lowing of oxen. Smells of manure and hay. Incessant gnawing of saws and hacking of axes outside the city walls. The siege. I sing guilt like manacles.
Hector took off his helm with horsehair crest that had scared the infant. With this gesture he dispensed with the heroism forever. He took his son into the crook of his arm, and his wife—by her hand. He was familiar with the labyrinth of narrow streets, and with vast open space by the city walls.
As Cassandra’s mad cries hung over the city like a cloud, he led them to the well-hidden entrance into an underground tunnel that took them outside, into the thicket of scrub and hazelnuts. Swift, straight branches—future arrows—lashed their faces as they walked away from the doomed city.
I sing Hector, as he cranes his neck surveying a tall, gleaming building, and I sing his new job, I sing eight hours at the office, every day, excepting the holidays and two-week vacation. I sing the plastic smile of the receptionist that greets him every morning, as the elevator spews him forth, in the crowd of other overheated bodies. I sing Hector’s sacrifice.
I put on my helm, the horsehair crest of it moth-eaten and ready to fall apart into dust. I fold the note addressed to my son and leave it on the kitchen table. I do not dare to kiss Andromache, for fear of waking her and letting the yoke of her white arms hold me back again.