Jackal, Jackal, page 22
I felt gentle hands on my shoulders and I looked up to find Tatyana, the oldest of the three, wiping my tears, concern stark in her wooden eyes.
“I am a killer,” I sobbed. “I killed my mother, and I killed my father. I deserve to die.”
“Tah,” Medved shook his huge head. “Stop that. What child has a say in the manner of their birth? That is the story your father has told you. That is the story you have told yourself. And it is one you must kill.”
He lifted me in his huge arms.
“Now, come, Midnight,” growled Medved. “For I have brought the Matryoshki, and we have vedma to hunt.”
The room fell away, and I found myself on Medved’s back, clinging onto his thick fur as he bounded through the snow. The world dissolved into a blur as he ran, and we were no longer in the city with its high rises and steel and mortar constructions. We were no longer in the present as I understood it, bound by the rigour of rationale; we were in an old place, at the origin and dawn of things. White-capped mountains stood guard in the distance, regarding us as we raced across the tundra; to the east, a curtain of lights lit up the horizon, shimmering green and blue and orange. Above, a spattering of stars winked in the night sky. I burrowed deeper into Medved’s coat, the warmth from his powerful muscles washing over me.
The Matryoshki kept pace with him, their legs a blur, their upper bodies stiff and unmoving, their faces set with determination.
Soon the hut appeared in the distance, the same one from the painting in my room. It was much bigger up close, with a heavy layer of snow on its thatch roofing like icing on cake. It sat at the very bottom of a mountain covered in fir trees. And as in the painting, there were no windows or doors.
“Alright, Midnight,” said Medved. “It is you she has eaten of, so it is you who must say these words: Turn your back to the forest, hut, hut, and your front to me.
I opened my mouth and repeated the words. “Turn your back to the forest, hut, hut, and your front to me.”
Cracks spidered across the frozen ground. At first I thought an earthquake was shaking the earth, rending it in two, but then, impossibly, the hut began to rise. Higher and higher into the air it rose, stretching from the earth with a resounding crack, wobbling on two scaly chicken legs. Wickedly taloned and draped in ice, each leg stood twenty feet tall and thick as a tree. I gawped in wonder and terror as, slowly, the legs began to turn, the hut swaying precariously until, at last, I saw the front of it.
It had a single door with no jamb which hung open, and two windows like eyes out of which poured warm yellow light.
“I have you now, Baba Yaga,” said Medved, quiet rapture in his voice. “I have you.”
For a moment, everything stood still. The wind ceased to whip and howl; the northern lights ceased shimmering as if the world was frozen in that moment.
Then—
With an otherworldly shriek, the chicken legs loped off in long, powerful strides, fast vanishing into the mountain.
Medved took off after it, roaring, strings of saliva flying from his mouth. I yelped, clinging desperately to him even as the wind whipped me blind and tears streamed out the corners of my eyes.
“Hang on, Midnight!” He roared.
But I couldn’t hang on, not with that ferocious speed. I flew off him, howling in pain as I bounced and skidded painfully across the ground. Medved did not stop. Neither did the Matryoshki.
I watched him leap through the air in a long arc, slamming hard into the hut like a rock loosed from a trebuchet. The hut exploded with the force of impact, bits of wood flying free. The chicken legs stumbled, tripped, and everything came crashing to the ground in a puff of snow.
A figure shot out of the ruins of the hut. I thought at first it was Medved, but then I glimpsed the gaunt form of my landlady, her white hair billowing in the wind as she rode in her mortar, frantically paddling the air with her pestle.
The Matryoshki moved, producing the thing I had seen them knitting, and as three, as one, they flung it. It flew through the air and became a cloak, that became a net, that closed around Baba Yaga. The vedma screeched as she plummeted like a rock, crashing into the ground where she thrashed, desperately trying to free herself.
The Matryoshki swarmed her: Tatyana seized her, dunking her into the mortar. Tanya seized the vedma’s pestle, and in her hands it became three pestles. Seizing a pestle each, the Matryoshki began to pound, crushing, grinding, singing as Baba Yaga screeched in pain.
I could not have said how we returned to my apartment, to my room, to my bed. I could not have said with certainty that we had left it in the first place. But once again I lay on the bed, flanked by Medved and the Matryoshki, and they were, once again, human.
Tatyana began to undress me, peeling away the rotted clumps of my clothes stuck with flesh and sinew. Tanya left the room and returned with two cast iron pots. One was filled with boiling water and the other with golden-brown honey. Tanyushka dipped a washcloth into the boiling water, wrung it, and then began to dab at me. It hurt at first, the hot cloth against my raw wounds, but then a soothing sensation came over me and I started to feel drowsy. Their hands were soft against my skin as they dabbed me with honey—honey which Medved tried very hard not to lick, but he kept dipping a hand into the pot and spooning honey to his lips, to Tatyana’s chagrin. Finally, they wrapped me in fresh linens, binding every inch of my body from the neck down so that I resembled a mummy.
“Thank you,” I said, “for everything.”
Tanyushka smiled. It was the first time I had ever seen her smile, the first time I had ever seen emotion on any of their faces for that matter. The Matryoshki were not particularly expressive, or talkative.
“Tak. It is over,” said Medved. “You should rest. Regain your strength.”
“Is she finally dead, then? Baba Yaga?”
Medved was silent a while. “The truth is I am tired, Midnight. I am tired of hunting her. I have spent many of your human lifetimes hunting her. But she always comes back. Because she still lives on in the minds of the people. It is as I always say—”
“Stories have power.”
“Da,” Medved smiled. “You learn at last.”
That was the last I saw of Medved and the Matryoshki. I slipped into dreamless sleep, and when I woke up, the sun streaming through the windows, they were gone.
I stayed one more week in room 909 before leaving. The last thing I did was burn the painting, which had been empty, and devoid of Baba Yaga’s hut. I watched the canvas turn to ash, then flushed it down the toilet.
Now as I watch the landscape whip past as the train rattles through the countryside, moving deep into the steppe and out of Russia, I find myself thinking about stories. The stories we hear, the ones we tell ourselves.
All my life I had defined my identity in relation to my father: Midnight, cursed child who had stolen his mother’s life that he might live; Midnight, who had killed his father; Midnight, fugitive in Moscow, burdened with guilt and shame. No more. No more of that life, no more of that guilt. I know not what my story will be, but I will find it, and tell it to myself over and over until it becomes true.
As for Medved, well. He saved me from Baba Yaga. The least I can do is return the favour. How do stories begin? How do they endure? An idea, a word, repeated over and over, passed from mother to daughter, from father to son, from stranger to stranger until it comes alive.
A little boy watches me while his mother snoozes. I smile at him. “Would you like to hear a story?”
He shrugs.
“Have you heard the one about how Medved killed Baba Yaga?”
He squints suspiciously. “She’s not dead.”
“But she is,” I say, settling into the tale. “He had help from his friends of course, the Matryoshki. It all started when a boy called Midnight came to Moscow...”
IN THE SMILE PLACE
It is amazing how some things never change. Where we grow older, crawling from youth into adulthood and all its attendant responsibilities, some things remain unfazed, unbothered by passing years—perhaps even existing out of time—as though its sole purpose is to anchor you to a particular moment, a particular memory, a particular place. As I stood in front of my childhood home that late October evening, I felt like I was staring at a Polaroid from 1992. The brick walls were the same watery pink, faded by an unrelenting sun; the roof was the same lichen-spotted affair of interlocking shale tiles; the rusted drainpipe hanging down the west wall like some limp mechanical phallus. Even the clothesline still sagged between two poles as though it had only recently been relieved of fresh laundry. If I closed my eyes I could almost imagine I was twelve again, playing football in the front yard with Deji and Chinedu and Nonso, while my mother threatened softly through the kitchen window to let my brother play with us or she’d give me the beating of my life, so help her God. But I wasn’t twelve anymore; Mama was several years in the ground, and my brother, well...
He was the reason for my return. I had been in the middle of a practice sales presentation, exalting the merits of our new cobalt drill bits to a roomful of test audience, when I received the call that my brother was missing.
“Missing?” I asked a little too loudly, eliciting quizzical stares. I stepped out of the conference room, legs suddenly weak as I hissed into the phone. “Are you sure?”
“Affirmative,” said deputy Emeka, wheezing. Then he broke into a hacking cough.
Never gave up those cigarettes, did you? I thought, while I waited for his cough to subside. I could almost see him in my mind’s eye, squeezed behind the wheel of his too-small cruiser, blunt in mouth and sweating like a pig—he was always sweating—as he patrolled the neighbourhood.
“Sorry. Where was I? Yeah, so Timi didn’t show up to work for a week, which according to his employer, is highly unusual. He also wasn’t responding to phone calls. So they sent someone to his home, you know, to check up on him. No luck. She thought it prudent to report him as a missing person.” More wheezing, as though he’d just climbed up a flight of stairs. “Look, John, I won’t lie. It’s not looking good. We went through the house, and...well, we found your number. He had you listed as his emergency contact.”
I didn’t catch much after that. I just sat there, staring at the wall, wondering how to feel. I hadn’t seen nor spoken to Timi in nearly fifteen years. I wouldn’t know if he had grown a paunch, or a beard. My brother was...a stranger to me, had been a stranger for most of my life. He might be missing now, lost, or...or dead. But that was really only his physical body. The truth was I lost my brother many years ago.
The truth was, I wasn’t really sure Timi ever returned from the Smile Place.
The house reeked of neglect. Rats scattered as I flipped on the light switch and stepped into the living room. The curtains, so stiff with dirt they hung like cardboard, were drawn across the windows. A thick layer of dust coated every surface. In the kitchen I found a rotting tower of unwashed dishes already blooming with mushrooms and fungi. The refrigerator still worked, though, and I helped myself to the lone bottle of Gulder.
I plopped onto the couch, nursing my beer, wondering why I had come here, what I had hoped to accomplish, when my eyes settled on the cardboard box tucked beneath the coffee table.
Curiosity got the better of me. Surprisingly heavy, it took more effort than I’d have liked to pull it out and place it on the table. I opened the box to find a camcorder seated atop a pile of VHS tapes.
“Oh, Timi.”
I fought to steady my hands as I reached for the camera, a grey 1996 JVC camcorder. It smelled of him. God help me, it smelled of Timi: of lollipop, and Delight!, the only body cream he used because he reacted to every other brand. Long-forgotten memories raced through my mind as I turned the camera over: Uncle Ephraim gifting it to Timi for his seventh birthday; Timi, bright-eyed, going everywhere with the damned device, shoving it in our faces as he pretended to be a videographer. I remembered how much it had annoyed me, but mum had encouraged him, calling him her “fine little director.” I was frankly surprised he still had it, that he’d kept it intact even after all these years. But then we all have things like that, bits and pieces of paraphernalia, cherished not for their function but for the memories they hold. Shaking my head, I tossed the camera into the box. My eyes fell on the tapes. Timi had recorded everything, at least until he didn’t. And as I looked at those tapes I realized that some small, nostalgic part of me wanted to remember how we had been as children, happy and without a care in the world, what we had been like as a family before our lives changed forever.
I spent the next half-hour hunting for a VHS player, eventually finding one in the old pantry-turned-junkroom, mouldering beneath a pile of broken bicycles, old baby cribs and other childhood knickknacks. It took me a while to clean it and get it working and by the time I finished, evening was fast approaching.
I popped the first tape into the player.
Static bloomed across the screen for a few seconds before resolving into a lo-fi video recording of what I recognized with a sinking feeling of dread as Providence Mall. Small white text at the bottom right corner of the screen read: MAY 21 2000, 5:14 pm. The camera slowly panned from left to right, showing a yellow dump truck parked next to a heap of gravel, the half-completed mall looming in the background.
My brother’s excited voice poured through the TV speakers: “So this is Providence Mall.” He turned the camera on himself and my heart immediately melted at the sight of that face. Those bright eyes filled with wonder and innocence. He had only been an annoying little prick at the time who I couldn’t get rid of fast enough, but seeing him now, the child that he had been, I realized I loved him.
“Do you want to know a secret?” he whispered. “I shouldn’t be here!” He giggled, then cast around as if to make sure he was alone. “It is-is f-f-forbidden. John and his friends always c-c-come here. He n-n-never takes me even—even...even th-though I want to come. But I s-s-saw him coming this time and I f-f-followed him. I’m g-g-going to scare him.” He winked at the camera, then swivelled it around. Heavy chains and a large industrial padlock bound the doors, which did not quite shut completely, but had a sliver of space between them like a half-closed eye. It was just large enough for Timi to squeeze his small form through and crawl into the foyer beyond. I had always wondered how he managed to enter the mall; us bigger kids could never squeeze through but always went in through a high window near the back of the mall. “This is sooooo awesome. We’ll have our own mall so close to the house! If Mummy knows I’m here she’ll go mad. But I won’t tell. I’m n-n-not a snitch.” The sounds of his footfalls as he advanced further into the mall. “John says there’s going to be an arcade! Can you imagine? An arcade! I’ll be able to play pinball and Mario and—”
He looked off-camera, as a loud sound echoed in the distance.
“I think it’s my b-b-brother,” he said. “I th-th-think I found him!”
A devilish smile lit up his face as he flipped the camera around, the frame snapping into focus. His hand was surprisingly steady. But then mama was right; he was a natural videographer. Timi’s breath quickened—from excitement, perhaps anticipation—as he stalked into the recreation area where a large carousel idled in the very centre, two dozen wooden horses impaled on steel poles, their black eyes gazing unseeing into the distance. There was no electricity at the mall yet, and the empty bulb-sockets stared like gouged-out eyes; but sunlight streamed in through the windows and skylight, leaving unlit parts as dark as night. Perhaps from a trick of the light, or the camera lens, or the general gloom of the recreation area, the horses looked oddly alive. Alive and in agony.
“Oh my God!” Timi whispered. “A carousel.”
He scrambled onto the platform, weaving between the horses, patting and stroking and speaking to them. He clambered onto one horse and made galloping noises as he pretended to ride it, yee-hawing like a cowboy. Then he remembered why he had come in the first place and slid off the horse and off the platform, entering into a hallway with the sign CINEMA hung over it.
The sounds came then: synchronized grunting and moaning, and over it a rhythmic squeaking which grew louder the closer Timi drew to the door.
“I wonder what they’re doing?” he whispered before kicking open the door and leaping into the room. “Surprise!”
Bent over a folding chair was my then-girlfriend, Naomi, her skirt bunched around her waist. Behind her stood a fifteen-year-old me, sweaty and shirtless, jeans around my ankles. We both froze, rabbits caught in a trap, as we gawked at the camera.
Then, several things happened at once.
Naomi screamed, pushing me away and hastily rearranging herself to preserve her modesty. I stumbled backwards, tripped on my jeans, and sprawled onto my ass. At that same moment my dick twitched, spouting long strings of spunk. Timi let loose a cry of disgust and horror as he realised what he’d just walked in on.
“What are you doing here?” I cried, my voice strangled with rage and shame. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I—I j-j-just wanted to—“
“You j-j-just!” I mocked, yanking up my jeans and struggling to my feet. “Why do you have to keep following me around, ehn? GIVE ME THAT CAMERA. GIVE ME THAT FUCKING CAMERA!”
