“I wonder how long it would take to land?” she mused, sensing that people had returned to the room. “Has she gone?” I asked and my heart shrank.
“No way!” Lenka said with a shrug and returned the chilli plant to the piano. She leaned against the window frame and put her nose back in a textbook. I turned round to see Sasha standing on the locker from which the ascent to my gallery begins, and looking inside my home. “Oh, what kicks, what kicks!” he intoned.
I got up on the locker beside him and looked. There was Cara, crouching by the far wall next to my book towers and sleeping bag, which was rolled up because it was daytime.
“Roma,” I said. “Is it all right if she leaves the commune when it’s the right time for her?” “We will all leave the commune when it’s the right time for us,” Roma responded from his corner. “I will soon be leaving. If she stays after that you won’t be able to control the riot.” “So be it,” I agreed.
A red plastic sign on our window reads, ‘Emergency Exit’. Lenka put it there. She met up with a young punk and in the evenings they would walk around building sites, from one of which this icon came to enliven our commune. The window is always open here and how delightfully true that is. Lenka sees things very precisely, which gives her whimsical ideas a slightly existential touch.
Like a harbinger, Cara, you know about time and when your own time will be up. You strut around our room, your claws clattering like horseshoes, not deigning even to glance in the direction of the open window. The Emergency Exit is for the future, and for the present you are here, Cara, changing our world.
That wasn’t my idea, it’s what Max said. Max is a strange being, everybody’s friend and yet nobody knows anything about him. He is a visitor to the commune. He comes in like a shadow, almost unnoticeable but tangible. He photographs us and all kinds of odd stuff in the apartment, talks to each of us about things personal to us, and goes away again. After he leaves, we always find sweets in unlikely places, but he never admits to bringing them. He is a Muscovite and it seems to be like a visit to the zoo for him, or more precisely to a safari park where you can see animals in their natural habitat.
He is older than me and like an elder brother. I have known him for a long time, in fact he brought me to Yakimanka. Nobody knows what he does for a living, but he has the confident manner of an all-round professional. He has already made his way in life, unlike the rest of us who live in the commune, and that seems to give him the right to be unfathomable and keep his cards close to his chest. That’s all I know about Max.
He visited us the day Cara arrived. His eyes lit up and he had his camera pointing at her the whole evening. “These creatures arrive to change our world. As you know,” he said when he was leaving.
Cara would stroll round our room and Yakimanka’s hallways would throb as people listened to the clatter of her claws. She was against the rules, but how can you change the world without breaking rules? “Anarchists!” old Artemiy grumbled when we went into the kitchen.
Cara likes to crouch motionless and stare for a long time at the bookcase glass which protects Roma’s books. If you squat down and pat your knees, she will come nearer and touch your outstretched hand with her big, polished beak. She loves to play, to roll crumpled paper over the floor, throw it up and catch it. She invites you to join in her volleyball by fluttering around and tapping your legs with her beak. It doesn’t hurt, although it’s a little frightening, because if nature contains anything really alien to human beings it is surely birds.
She is a fussy eater and her favourite fish are very pale, scary caplin. Sasha and I were at our wits’ end at first about how to feed her. We placed different foods near her beak. “Craap”, Cara would say unambiguously and move away. She found only the caplin acceptable. She would twitch her head, give the fish a shake and swallow it so fast we could never see her do it.
Sasha and I looked after Cara, Roma shook his head, and Lenka took to answering the phone with a deadpan, “Psychiatric Clinic”. The caller would ring off. Lenka would cackle, jump up on a stool in the middle of the room and recite, Exegi monumentum aere perennius… and continue to the end of the text. This was an indication it was exam time.
When you go to sleep in my gallery, Cara, you move away as far as you can, tuck up your feet and roll back your eyes, covering them with a frightful membrane. I watch you for a long time and can’t get to sleep. You inhabit a world as remote from our own as it is possible to imagine, and yet so close, so near to us. Who can say that is not totally miraculous?
Even from my gallery I could hear the hallways filling with ill-natured gossip. “You may not be able to see your neighbours, but always remember they are there,” says the Yakimanka rulebook, and how diabolically true that is. Even if your neighbour is out of sight, don’t overlook their existence. Even if you can’t hear them, remember they are aware of you.
All of them were only too aware of Cara and me, and nobody more so than Sonya Muginshteyn.
Sonya was the fourth person living in our room after Sasha’s expulsion. She was sane, which didn’t fit in with Lenka’s idea of a psychiatric clinic and led her to conclude that Sonya’s arrival was a simple mistake. I didn’t expect her to last long either, but we had underestimated her. She stayed and stayed and showed no signs of moving anywhere else. In fact it was Tolya who was crowded out. She was studying piano at the Conservatory and when she came home would practice on our piano. Tolya complained he could not sleep under it afterwards because she had so stirred up the instrument’s innards, which for many years had slept the sleep of the just, that it buzzed and groaned all night after Sonya had done with it. So he said and so he believed, and accordingly he ratcheted up his efforts to find himself a girlfriend with a place he could stay. He evidently succeeded, because there was no sign of him in the commune all the time Cara was there.
Sonya was normal which, by the commune’s rigorous criteria, was synonymous with dull. For us a dull person was anybody totally ordinary. If that was not true of Sonya, we had no way of knowing it because she was very secretive, not to say uptight. She suppressed her emotions and feelings, never revealed whether she liked or disliked anything, and the result was that we assumed she disliked everything. The only expression we saw on her face was one of toleration. She seemed angular, as if all her movements were inhibited. People who look like that usually have stomach trouble. Giving them a hug would be as unpleasant as trying to cuddle a large white fish. When Lenka and I tried imagining what she wanted from life (and picturing nonsense like that was our favourite pastime) we quickly got bored and went to the kitchen for a cup of tea.
We could not understand how Sonya could live as she did, however, so we didn’t lose interest in her. We observed her as a bizarre creature which in some ways resembled us but was in fact basically alien. She was incredibly hard-working and held down three jobs at the same time, which our indolence found deeply repugnant. She was economical with everything, even food, and would cook herself a bowl of plain porridge before retiring for the night. She drank a glass of tea in the morning and went to work. To people as self-indulgent and wasteful as us that seemed weird, and we speculated she must be scrounging meals at work off someone else. She was modest to the point of priggishness, wondered how we could live in the same room as boys and, after a first night spent on a fold-up bed in the middle of the room, told us her back hurt and she couldn’t sleep like that. At the time Lenka was sleeping in the bed for old times’ sake. She sniffed and relinquished it, and the same day Sonya brought a folding pink screen, which meant that now only I could spy on her sleep from my gallery. Sonya wore heavy pyjamas at night, which we children of the commune found very strange.