“Girls, can we finally close this window?” Sonya asked. “I am catching cold, and if I’m going to have to sleep on the floor now that can only make things worse.” She took a step towards the window, but Lenka leaped to intercept her. “Dare not! Can you not see that is an Exit? It is not yet time. We must wait!” A tornado of scandal, long developing in our room, began to stir and finally to whip up the air. Cara hopped on to the wardrobe and loudly declaimed a collection of her words. “Karvarmant! Upkarts! Kampostors! Kartel! Kargather!”
“This is all too much!” Sonya exclaimed, a note of irritation creeping into her voice for the first time. “This place is a madhouse! It’s all too much!” She left abruptly, while Cara swayed to and fro cawing, “Kalinik! Kalinik! Kalinik!”
“Hurray! She’s learned to talk!” We jumped around jubilantly, but suddenly went quiet.
We went quiet and a sudden sense of something ending came over us, through the crimson intoxication of the cheap liqueur, the outburst of outrageous behaviour and celebration. We were quiet and had a sense of time running out for this place, our rented home, our commune, our clinic, our temple of pagan mayhem.
“Perhaps her name is Sarah really,” Lenka said, “and she just can’t pronounce the ‘s’.” “No,” I replied. “Sasha told me Kara means ‘black’ in Turkic languages.” Cara, Cara the Black, impassive messenger of destiny, it was at this moment, when a sense of doom came down upon our inebriate heads, that your time came.
She glided over the room, strutted over to Tolya’s paintings propped up in the corner, looked them over with one eye and pecked out of the clay some crackers with which Tolya had inset his latest work. With her powerful beak Cara thumped them against the floor and gulped down the fragments. As if in a movie, at just this instant Tolya returned from his latest binge and appeared in the open door.
I thought he would go ape over the picture, but he went ape over something else. “I know you, Sulfat Melyukov!” he yelled, stamping into the room. Cara cawed and immediately flew to the top of the wardrobe. “What brings you here, my angel?”
“Who are you talking about?” “Sulfat, my dear friend, come on out!” Tolya groped around under the piano. “I know you’ve turned into your bird, you tricky old alky! I thought you’d croaked long ago, but here you are like a phoenix from the ashes!” “Who are you talking about, Tolya?” “Seiful Melyukov. Don’t you remember him, sitting by the pet shop on the Arbat with his animals, a raven and a monkey? They brought in the money to keep him in bread and vodka, and he was so pleased with life and told endless tales about Tamerlane.”
We were dumbfounded. We knew who he was talking about. We remembered very well the weird wino who at one time haunted the Arbat. The monkey would dance and the raven would pull out fortune-telling cards. You could be photographed with them. Then he vanished. The Arbat changed. The street musicians and hippies vanished, to be replaced by a lot of pricey food and pseudo-Soviet mementoes. We stopped going there. As I looked up at her on top of our wardrobe, though, I did wonder whether it could have been our Cara whose malign eye followed passersby on the Arbat.
“She can talk,” Lenka chimed in, and Tolya’s whole demeanour changed to that of a zealous entrepreneur. “You’ve struck gold! How can you risk keeping the window open? This is treasure, Klondike, and you’re on the verge of throwing the gold away together with the sand!”
“Cara means ‘black’ in Turkish,” I reflected. “Could she be that very one? Tolya, perhaps we should give her back? She’s his livelihood.” “You are so not with it, Titch! Melyukov is dead, so it’s foolishness to want to meet him. Tomorrow it’ll be us on the Arbat, and we’ll tell the fortune of anyone willing to part with 50 roubles!” He legged it over to the window to shut it. “She will no longer be just Cara, but Cara the Black, Bird of Omen, Descendant of the Ravens of the Tower of London!” Tolya was on a roll. “Risking my life I climbed up to steal eggs from a raven’s nest and raise this bird! She first ate meat from my own hand!”
Opening and closing the window in our room was a multi-stage process. First, everything had to be removed from the broad windowsill and then the piano had to be moved because it obstructed the window. He was doing all that as the realisation dawned on me of what precisely he was proposing. Having dawned, it became a thought, having become a thought it became a shriek of rage.
“No way!” Tolya did not even turn around. “No way am I going to let you do that! She flew to me. She was looking for friendship, and you want to exploit her all over again!” “Titch, I knew you were impractical, but this is pure sentimentality!” I jumped over and grabbed his arm. “Stop right there! It’s supposed to be open. It’s Cara’s Exit. Roma said she can’t stay. This is her last day here.” “Roma won’t mind if we bring him in on it.” He flicked me off his arm like a raindrop.
“Are you so short of money?” “I’m short of an interest in life.” “You clown! You sad waster! No way am I going to let you abuse Cara.” We hauled each other back and forth from the window. Cara took it all in, and then jumped down from the wardrobe and on to the windowsill. Tolya froze.
“Don’t breathe, Titch,” he said, interposing his broad back between me and Cara. “Fly, fly away, my Cara,” I enjoined her from behind his shoulder. “Fly, girl! There’s nothing here for you now!” “Shut it, Titch!” Tolya moved in very slowly, Cara showing no interest in him. She pecked casually at The Life of Circus Animals, then peered at him and suddenly leaned forward as if she might be about to fall. She squawked right in his face: “Goodbye, Revolution!”
Stupefied, Tolya stopped in his tracks. Cara walked along the windowsill, stepped on to the piano, pecked at the root of Sasha’s chilli, felled it, and gave it a good shake before tossing it out the window. Tolya opened his arms wide to lunge for her, but Cara shot up to the ceiling, impacting with the light bulb which dangled there from its flex. It swayed wildly, shattered and rained shrapnel down on us. In the sudden gloom I saw the shadow of Cara slip out, silhouetted against the blue sky and green June poplars.
“Stupid little idiot,” Tolya said without emotion, shaking tiny shards of glass from his hair. The dark blue sky of evening filled our room. Somebody knocked at the door and Sasha looked in to invite me to take the iron for its evening walk but his voice broke off in the twilight as he saw what had happened. “She’s gone, then?”
“Yes, and taken your chilli with her,” Lenka retorted.
What is there to be said about that? What can we say, Yakimanka, other than simply leave you to get on with your destiny as you leave all of us to get on with ours? So we went out, Sasha and I, to take for a final walk our big, heavy old communal iron with the vestiges of light fabrics baked to its soleplate. A strange feeling came over us. We were wordless and stared up at the sky where a shadow of vague foreboding flew above us like a remembrance of Cara.
It was a long walk. We came to Red Square, we came to the Arbat, we strolled along boulevards, and the first intimations of dawn were appearing when we came upon Grand, who invited us to go East. We all but agreed on the spot, but said we would have to think about it first. What was there for us to think about, though, when we both knew it was Cara the Black who had led us to him. For it had been the shadow of Cara, we both believed, which had glided down to the bench, only when we ran over she wasn’t there and instead Grand was. Neither I nor Sasha at first told the other what we had seen.