Chapter 2 #4
He held my eyes while he said the last part. Not Kiryl’s. Mine.
There it was, laid on the table with the bread: sign, obey, smile, or your brother comes to Sicily as my personal guest, and you will spend every day of your marriage wondering how he is.
My father ate his soup. Kiryl said, “Thank you, that’s—very generous,” in a voice I’d taught him myself, and did not look at me, because I’d taught him that too.
“How wonderful,” I said. My voice came out warm and bright and perfect.
Under the table, I pressed my thumbnail into my palm until it bit, until I felt the little crescent open in the skin—a private, stinging arithmetic, one small pain I chose myself, to hold down all the ones I hadn’t.
Little birds, ptichka. Ask any man who’s grabbed a firebird what happened to his hands.
The house went to sleep in a particular order, like a body shutting down—kitchen first, then the halls, then the men, and last of all my father’s office light, which went out at ten past midnight the way it had gone out at ten past midnight my entire life.
I gave it twenty minutes more. Then I went up the back stairs in socked feet, past the blind three feet the new camera couldn’t see, and let myself into the nursery, and turned the little brass key in the lock behind me.
A locked door in this house meant nothing, of course. Every lock in this house answered to my father. But the click of it was a ritual, and rituals are what you have when you don’t have doors.
The loose floorboard lived under the window seat, third plank from the wall, and it had been loose since before I was born—some carpenter’s small failure that had become, over eleven years, the most valuable square foot of real estate in the Sokolov empire.
I lifted it out. Underneath, wrapped in one of Mama’s silk scarves, lay a coloring book and a tin of pencils.
The book was called The Tale of the Firebird, printed in Leningrad before there stopped being a Leningrad, its cover soft as cloth from handling.
My mother bought it the year I turned seven.
On the bad nights—and in a pakhan’s house there is a generous supply of bad nights—she would take it out and we would lie on our stomachs on this floor and color the firebird’s feathers, one each, taking turns, and she would say the same thing every time: Slowly, Lenochka.
The bird doesn’t fly if you rush her. When she died, I was fifteen, and I took the book before my father could seal it into the shrine with everything else of hers, and it has lived under this floorboard ever since.
It is the only thing I have ever successfully stolen from Lev Sokolov. So far.
I did what I always did. I pulled the old blanket off the shelf—the scratchy one, the ugly one—wrapped it around my shoulders, and folded myself cross-legged onto the floor with the book open in the lamplight.
Kiryl’s mug still sat on the windowsill where I’d left it.
The chocolate at the bottom had gone cold and dense as pudding, the pink marshmallows dissolved to pale ghosts, and I drank it anyway, because my brother had made it for me, and because cold disgusting chocolate made by someone who loves you beats anything served at that dinner table tonight.
And then I colored.
Here is the thing I have never told anyone, not even Kiryl, not even the version of my mother I still talk to in the study: this is the only hour I am allowed to be small.
Kiryl was right. I am still that nine year old girl.
All day I am the pakhan’s daughter. I am poised, I am armored, I am handling the invoice and the compressor and the fiancé and the fear, and I am twenty-six going on a thousand.
And then, after midnight, behind a lock that means nothing, a person no one has ever met sits on a nursery floor in a scratchy blanket and colors a children’s book with her mother’s pencils, and breathes.
Just breathes. The pencil whispers against the paper.
The feathers fill, one by one, slowly, because the bird doesn’t fly if you rush her.
If my father ever saw it, he would find it useful, and that is precisely why he never, ever will.
The men in my life have taken my name, my shares, my exits, and my wedding. This they don’t get. This is mine.
For ten minutes I colored nothing at all. Aimless. A curl of orange, a lick of red along a wing. My shoulders came down from around my ears. The crescent in my palm stopped throbbing. My breath found the bottom of my lungs for the first time since the brooch.
Then, when my hands were steady, I turned to the centerfold—the great firebird, wings spread across both pages, her plumage a spray of hundreds of feathers—and I went to work. Because here is the other thing no one knows about the colouring book.
It was a map.
I started it two years ago, the night I understood that my father was actually going to find a buyer for me and that no one was coming.
Any diary would be found. Any file would be opened.
But a woman’s sentimental coloring habit, hidden with her dead mother’s things—even if they found it, what would they see?
An overworked illustration. A childish mess of color So I built my intelligence into the bird, feather by feather, in a language of pencils.
Blue feathers were cameras—one feather per lens, placed on the bird’s body where the camera sat in the house.
Black were armed men, their posts, their overlaps.
Gold were locked doors, and the shading told me the kind of lock.
Green—there were painfully few green—were the gaps.
The exits. The places where, for a minute or an hour or a shift change, the cage forgot itself.
Two years of watching lived in that plumage. The whole anatomy of my father’s fortress, disguised as a little girl’s comfort.
Tonight I added the day’s harvest. A gold feather on the bird’s left wing, shaded dark and cross-hatched: the terrace doors, latch replaced by keypad, six digits I didn’t have yet.
A new blue feather along the spine: the eastern corridor camera, with a fleck of white at its root for the three blind feet by the stairwell door.
Two black feathers restacked at the shoulder for the nine-o’clock rotation and the unfamiliar men.
Into the tail — the tail was Kiryl’s, the whole streaming tail was my brother — I worked the night guard’s hours, eleven to seven, a black feather barred with the hours in tiny strokes that looked like texture.
Along the crest, I numbered six small feathers in a sequence any casual eye would read as a colourist counting her work, and which I would read as Gianni Scordato’s birthday, his phone, his mail, his whole preening life, six digits long.
And at the bird’s breast, one small red dot, no bigger than a pencil’s kiss: the lipstick tube, and where it slept.
My phone lit on the floor beside me. My father’s secretary—a man who transmitted Lev’s will at all hours in prose as warm as a toe tag.
Friday, 8 pm, Zhar-Ptitsa. Formal. Your presence is required. A representative of the Scordato family arrives from Chicago.
I read it twice, and the cold walked up my back on little feet. Another Scordato. Another serious man at another long table, flying in to inspect the merchandise, or the alliance, or both—and I would stand there in silk and smile while they discussed the daughter’s trucks over the black bread.
And then the other part of my brain—the part that colors in code, the part my mother built and my father never once thought to look for—sat up.
A guest changed things. A guest from Chicago changed the seating, the security, the schedule, the temperature of the whole room.
Doors would open that stayed shut. Men would watch the stranger instead of the bird.
My father would perform, Gianni would preen, and everyone’s eyes would be exactly where mine were not.
I didn’t know what this Scordato wanted.
I knew nothing about him except that his family had produced Gianni, which was not what you’d call a reference.
But I have never needed men to be good. I have only ever needed them to be useful, and every new piece on the board makes the board move.
I chose a pencil. Green.
Slowly—because the bird doesn’t fly if you rush her—I colored one final feather at the tip of the firebird’s wing, out at the farthest edge of her reach, where the wing becomes flight.
“All right, Friday,” I said to the bird, to the room, to my mother, to nobody. “Let’s see what you bring me.”
Then I put the book under the floorboard, and the tin beside it, and the scarf over both, and fitted the plank back into the silence, and went to bed a pakhan’s daughter.