For all that, we could not fail to notice Sonya’s aura of determination, tenacity and courage, and began to wonder whether all this self-denial was a means towards a goal of which we knew nothing. That dawning insight did not, however, make any real difference. For Lenka, with her susceptibility to nutters and punks, for our rampantly insouciant commune in general, Sonya was an outsider and knew it. We were never unkind to her and treated her like any other member, but she became increasingly uptight and, as a result, even more heroic.
“We are delivered into the hands of the Pharaoh,” Sonya might have said, but she didn’t and the millennia of endurance of her people towered behind her scrawny figure. Our commune, however, took no interest in peoples, and indeed rarely showed any concern for its individual members. Cara, however, had come to change our world, and she began with Sonya.
Sonya was extraordinarily tidy and had very few possessions. The wardrobe might spew clothes from our shelves, but Sonya’s things were in neat piles, as if on sale. She had almost no books but a few Snickers bars huddled forlornly on her locker shelf. She had a weakness for them and always kept a stock. Everybody in the commune had a sweet tooth and the concept of private property did not extend to food, but we never allowed ourselves to misappropriate Sonya’s chocolate. It was a matter of principle.
Not for Cara. Somehow she sensed its presence and started helping herself. None of us ever saw her prising open the locker drawer, extracting Sonya’s treasures and making off with them. Nobody knew a thing about it, and Sonya said nothing.
To her, Cara was an annoying pet, introduced on a whim for the purpose of giving her grief. When at home Sonya wore prim, long black skirts. Cara would jump happily up and down and hammer her beak on the hem as it brushed the floor. “Girls, do please keep your bird under control,” Sonya would say as she tugged her skirt away.
When she played the piano, Cara would sit at the end squinting at the keys as Sonya depressed them. Sonya had big hands and long, thin fingers with flat white nails. Cara would sit for ages peering intently, and heaven only knows what she was seeing at that moment. “Girls, I can’t practise like this,” Sonya would finally say, getting up. “Your bird is disrupting my studies.”
Unfortunately Sonya always complained in a way that made you not want to help her. She said nothing at all about the Snickers, and we would never have known about them if I had not been delving into the far end of the gallery one time when they came showering out with unmistakeable signs of Cara’s liking for them. “Oh, shit!” Sasha and I groaned and rushed out to the nearest kiosk for replacements, but that didn’t help.
“Girls, please take these sweets away,” Sonya said that evening, laying our purchases out on top of the piano. “As you have evidently decided to feed your bird with my confectionery, you may as well be consistent about it.” Sonya enjoyed stoically suffering adversity and we understood the tragic nature of her people’s history, but she had fanned the flames of Yakimanka’s displeasure with Cara, and Yakimanka demanded Roma should intervene.
“Hey, Titch,” Roma Jah called, knocking at my gallery, to which Cara and I had retreated to weather the storm. “Titch, I’m leaving tomorrow. You promised. There are rules, I told you.”
The last rule is: “All of You — Love One Another. Let Your World Remain Yours and All Will Be Well.”
Oh, Yakimanka, you seem to do everything in your power to make it difficult for people to love each other. A miracle flew in and you want to drive it away. A miracle flew in the like of which you have never seen before or ever will again but you don’t want it and want to drive it away.
Cara looks calm. She knows everything. Outside the gallery Lenka’s head can be seen bobbing up and down with two lynx-like tufts of hair pointing in opposite directions. “Look, look!” she exclaims, brandishing Bram’s Lives of the Circus Animals. “The Great Raven can easily be trained to talk and even uses words intelligently.”
Some day a miracle is going to fly in and say to you in human language that we are all up shit creek, and your response is going to be, “What a well-trained bird!”
“Sasha, we’re not going to turn her out, are we?” “Don’t worry about it, Titch. Everything will sort itself out.”
He lovingly loosens his chilli’s compost.
Before everything could be sorted out, however, we needed another problem and that problem was that our only bed got broken. After five phone calls which got no further than the Psychiatric Clinic, the mother of the under-age punk got through to the commune and threatened to report Lenka to the police for child molesting if she didn’t stop seeing her son. “Loony,” Lenka snorted as she put down the receiver, and the next day she and her punk had their farewell tryst in the commune.
When I came into our room I saw Lenka raising the legless frame of Sonya’s bed upright. “We were rocking and a-rolling,” Lenka explained. “Never mind. She can sleep on the mattress.” The bed had long lacked one leg and rested on a solid circular dumbbell weight. Generations before Lenka, and indeed Lenka herself and Sasha, had ridden far from the wall on this bed in the course of a night and just pushed it back in the morning. The surviving legs had, unfortunately, not been able to cope with the punk’s onslaught.
Lenka’s eyes gleamed feverishly. “We shall make an offering. Having the raven here will be perfect!” Cara and I consented to the rules. The bed was adorned with artificial flowers, fairy lights, and Lenka’s drawings of the Slavic deities. Milk, bread and cranberry liqueur were placed beside the altar and we knelt before it. Lenka was already the priestess of Devana and Cara started the proceedings by devouring the caplin sacrificed to her. We drank to the glory of Devana, but when Sasha also reached for the liqueur Lenka admonished him. “Draw back! This is a ceremony of woman. The gods will smite you!”
Sasha withdrew in confusion, grumbling like the spirit of the hearth and went off to smoke a pipe with old Artemiy. The summer twilight was already filtering through our window as we continued to drink to the glory of all the gods of the forgotten ancient pantheon. The taste of the cheap liqueur separated unmistakeably into sour cranberry juice and mean-spirited alcohol. Cara perched on top of the altar, one eye on us and the other looking towards the door where Roma Jah’s rucksack stood ready for the road. Were you really thinking about that too, Cara? Were you really thinking?
And then, right in the midst of our celebration, just as the moment was approaching for us to leap up and start beating the tambourines, Sonya Muginshteyn came in and switched on the light. “Hey, Sonya, come and drink with us to the glory of Rod and all the gods of Slavdom!” Lenka exclaimed, proffering her a toothglass.
The memory of her forebears’ valiant struggle to enthrone the One God and their wanderings in the wilderness shadowed Sonya’s stolid face for a moment, but only for a moment. “I don’t drink,” Sonya said. “The gods will smite you,” Lenka said knowledgeably, but Sonya remained silent. Frankincense smouldered on the altar and I seemed to see the smoke of the fiery furnace of Babylon. “I shall destroy you!” Lenka screamed in a frenzy. “I shall sacrifice you on this altar to the glory of Devana, to Rod and all the great Slavic gods!”
She shrieked so loudly and with such conviction that Sonya and I both believed her. That very day Lenka had bought a souvenir ritual knife which was tapered, ornately carved, and had a ring on the handle so it could be worn round the neck. It was extremely sharp although no larger than a bodkin. “The altar must be consecrated with blood,” Lenka said very calmly, cutting the palm of her hand. Ritual red drops dripped into the milk without dispersing. “To the glory of Rod!”