Back to You, Houston (3b)

      Back to you again, Houston.
      Roger that, Roger.
      Marge here, over.
      Where is Roger, over.
      Never heard of him. Good night.
      I could have sworn, over.
      Don’t, over.
      < cluck >

My Handsome Cossack

Praskovya Fëderovna feverishly fastens a leather belt around her canvas jacket, "Forty one years." She wraps her goat down shawl over her head and around her neck with dignity, as to assert her emotional restraint, "Too much time has gone by," she tells her pale reflection in the mirror. Outside her modest tenement, though, she speeds her steps in the gloomy half light of the evening fog, "But he has returned," ignoring the cold numbing her to the marrow, "to see me."

She has forgotten the years weighing on her back, she is fueled with hope, hope reborn from the coat of arms she had recognized at once on the letter hand-delivered hours ago, "Crazy muzjik." She doesn't doubt him, only her agitation while she was getting ready, "I must be beautiful for him," changing clothes again, "Red is for young people," reading his letter for the nth time, "He said six o'clock," pacing her apartment until the time had come, but she couldn't wait anymore, she had left way too early for the short walking distance to the park.

Forty one years ago she had stood in a similar square, back then devastated by the war. A revolution, to be exact, the Great October Revolution, but they called it a war because of the pogroms, because of the famine.

The discomfort in her left side grows as she approaches the town square. "I behave like a teenager." The beating of her heart quickens. Forty one years ago she was snatched from the ground by a horseman and carried off. The Red invaded the town soon after. Owing her life to the Cossack, she became his woman. When the Red Army won the Bolshevik Revolution, Misha Melvinski vanished with his regiment; she returned to the service of the more fortunate, she was expecting.

She has to stop at the gate and steady herself against a skeletal lilac bush. "This is silly. I shouldn't be here." The last sounds of the day die in the distance at the church bell ringing half past the hour. Sadly, it reminds her of the toll of the bell when, months later, the news of the civil war had reached her remote countryside where harvests, newborns and burials punctuate life. Like many women of poor constitution in those hard times, she lost her baby before the term. Hardened too young, she didn't shed a tear. "C'est la vie," they also say in Russian.

She swallows hard, "Those were terrible days." She awaits without waiting, trembling, searching the public park for a known figure. Only the tall silhouette of a statue peers at her in the pea soup; a water nymph shouldering an urn pouring water down the basin. The streaming of the fountain fills Praskovya Fëderovna with nostalgia. The war had brought more soldiers and, one day, Misha Melvinski galloping a plough horse. The steed was a perfect match in size and strength for its rider of poor manners whom she saw as a charger-riding god come to save her again. Didn't he lift her up from the ground to his lap with one hand? Didn't they dash through town and enemy lines like a cannon ball? They weren't invisible, they were invincible.

Her shoulders stop shaking, "Misha!" She closes her eyes and immediately returns to her kidnapper, her heart swells as it did in the midst of the battle after she had recognized his laugh, his smell, his lips, his eyes. How secure she had felt bouncing on the soft-rounded pommel of the Cossack saddle and against his chest.

Praskovya Fëderovna shivers, rubs her arms and stamps on her feet to shake the ankylosis gaining on her. Her legs stiffen under the long shapeless jumper. "I have warmer safarans. How foolish of me to wear this dress to please him." She shrugs, "at my age."

And then, she chuckles remembering how carefree she had been at the abandoned farm where he and his cavalrymen had set up camp. All they had was a roof and themselves. "I didn't have to wear anything to please him."

They had rolled on bear hides and a straw mattress to ignore the dust, the smoke, the rubbles, the fires, the gun shots and the shouts of the wounded, but nothing could erase the smell of blood, the sight of death. She had told him about their lost baby. He had nodded and said, "We'll make another one."

How could she forget, four decades later, the resounding laugh at the height of his excitement, how he exploded in her with a strung out growl dying into a plaintive series of hiccups as if his pleasure had opened a wound deep inside his body? Between the scars, there were deep lines on his face, "He was so handsome!"

The memories warm up her body ever so slightly, but she wonders, "Will I recognize him? What if he doesn't recognize me?" She covers her face with both hands. The furrows of time past flatten under her fingertips. Back then she too had hid behind her hands because she was afraid of him. He had kissed her fingers until she opened them, telling her with the rich musical tongue of the steppe that, yes, he was a bird of prey, a bird of prey searching for her.

A rustling startles her. Pigeons come to drink and wash at the fountain. The church bell rings three quarters of the hour. She reasons herself, "Praskovya Fëderovna, you are making a fool of yourself." But the film continues in her head. His eyes were crying, "And I found you." The sound of his voice was promising, but he was a blind warrior, not a man of letters nor of the robe. She kept her love and tears deep inside with the map of his body. She had drank his vitality and sucked his energy, screaming silently at her own tear she let bleed and pour on his last day. No need of words for him to understand. Too soon for her, the war ended, battalions were disbanded. She thought she'd keep him this time but life decided otherwise. His seed was already growing inside of her when he was wounded and sent away.

She presses her hands on her belly. "Misha!" Her Misha was gone, another Misha was born. Every Christmas, someone had delivered burning wood, coal, blankets, food and candies, until the year little Misha turned seven. She recalls vividly finding a little pyramid of oranges at the door of her attic room. "That was him, I'm sure of it."

An image persists with her son staring at the fruits shining in the candlelight under the Christmas tree, a picture of the post-office calendar nailed on the wall above the table set for two. She remembers staring as well and forgetting the meal in the oven, oblivious to the smoke invading the room, how she had rushed to save the food. She had cried, she had cursed, she had bit her lips at the look of her child, their son, who, a man already, had said, "At least we have each other." They had moved from place to place, "The mail didn't follow," she had explained to little Misha. One day she had resigned herself to the idea that her savior had died gloriously at war. She showed her son a picture of him, "You look just like him." Little Misha grew up to become a soldier in a distant land they call the New World.

Praskovya Fëderovna lets out a long sigh, and an other one before wiping her tears with a trembling hand. Who knows how long she has been hiding in the dark. "Oh God, I missed him!" She crosses herself and steps in the clearing. "Misha?"

The church bell rings the hour. She laughs, "How unbecoming," admonishing herself. Patience is an extremely important virtue among Russians; punctuality is not. "Where are you, Misha?"

"I am here, Praskovya Fëderovna." The quivering bass voice comes from a bench shrouded in the fog only a few feet from her.

She spins on her heels, "Misha Melvinski, have you been spying on me?"

In the moving shadows of the bushes stands out a man who had been tall and strong, he's slightly stooped in his long traveling-cloak reminiscent of an officer's great-coat; his Astrakhan fur cap completes the slender stature which doesn't hide its left arm leaning on a cane.

She covers her mouth with one hand as if to mute a shout, the words she had forbidden herself back then to even whisper to him in his sleep.

"I thought I'd sweep you off your feet as I did from my battle horse," he stumbles towards her and laughs, "but I couldn't find a horse."

She reaches out and cuddles inside his open coat, "You are going to catch your death of cold, running around with your buttons undone." She buries her face against his chest to hide her sobs and inhales deep. Same smell. "I've been waiting for you." Then she slips under his right arm, "Take me away, crazy muzjik."