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At the cost of the Polyhedron, the town began its return to the state Clara found it on the day she was born. So did the Saburovs, now that the haze of panic and doubt had been lifted from their eyes. The couple seemed to snap back into the positions of doting-mother-and-loving-father, which—aside from Artemy and Capella’s position dominating talks at the cathedral—was partially by their daughter’s design.
The day they expelled her from their nest, Clara swore to both that she would come home by hook or by crook, repeating her intentions in the face of every omen the Albino parted with: a mantra holding her resolve intact. To her surprise, the Saburovs offered her oath no resistance. Really, all that kept her hopes buoyant was the sorrow in Katerina’s eyes upon making the final severance of the umbilical cord.
Even Alexander looked less and less persuaded by his own accusation of brainwashing each time Clara retrieved her memory of it. He seemed disdainful, at first—the sellout—then hurt as though his love had been betrayed, then of two minds, and finally: affected. As if he had donned the mask of disdain to drive her away before the Inquisitor might darken their doorstep and demand their daughter’s head. No, not a sellout. Only a coward.
As though rubbing a talisman, she returned to those two expressions every solitary night spent in the Stillwater, with Eva inexplicably away and the Bachelor taking only brief shifts upstairs while generally ignoring her. “What? You’re still here? Well, try not to bother me.” He could feign scorn, but he couldn’t feign it well.
“Already scouting a new Mamochka and Papochka to replace the old set?” her sister would taunt. She learned not to offer this a reaction. Clara needed only one irreplaceable pair, and she’d have what was hers back if she had to carry on stealing and killing for it.
But Clara couldn’t have foreseen the scene she would make the day her plans bore fruit.
Governor Alexander Sabruov had to haul his daughter—kicking and screaming—away from her champion, whom he called a vulture—a wolf—a swine—among other members of the animal kingdom. Surely, he can’t mean me? wondered Blok. How ignorant.
The warm embrace of Clara’s old room—in the state she left it in, untouched by servants—did little to pacify her. Katerina had to assure her husband that the girl would run out of fragile objects to break, and that she had better exhaust her fury before they could begin priming their heiress. It wasn’t as though Alexander hadn’t seen Katerina face such spells early into their marriage.
Still, Alexander felt mortified by the thought of spelling out, to his daughter, why he didn’t want a man almost twice her age hovering around her. Now that Alexander’s phase of high-handed tyranny was over, and now that Clara retired from her duty interrogating his victims, he had time to reflect on fatherhood in her absence.
In this era of peace, what Alexander deemed appropriate grew more important than what he deemed necessary. But even aside from the silent treatment Clara gave him, he couldn’t handle the sticky task of explaining as much to a girl at—as Katerina called it—that sensitive, tender age. So he left that area of expertise to the expert.
Katerina rubbed Clara’s back as the latter dampened her mother’s gown with tears, reasoning, “But, little angel, how long have you known him for? Hardly a week.”
“And it would’ve been the loneliest week of my life without him.” Not that Clara’s time of life offered many weeks for comparison.
Since the Sand Pest, the town saw an inevitable development in its governance, and a military unit still posted there in place of law enforcement alleged to guard the stability of the political environment, while confidentially ensuring that the local government aligned with the Capital. It also made Blok impossible to forget; Clara would spend months reminding herself that seeing his men did not mean she could still find the man himself at the town hall. If anything, she had long suspected they were mere flies on a wall, and just as irritating as the proverbial.
So, the cover story for General Blok’s return hardly a year later had been a high-level inspection: to review the performance of the troops, to evaluate the condition of military equipment, and to address any issues that had arisen during his time away. Covertly, though, his assignment had been to assess their protection of the Capital’s interests. As the sun began to descend from its apex in the silver sky on the day of his arrival, it would be a few hours still before a meeting would formally commence at the town hall between him and local leaders.
The atmosphere tasted earthy, and the percussion of rain awakened the green hue in the Steppe’s herbs, shrubs, and undergrowth. The paint on facades shed their film of dust and came vividly to life in the cold shadows of low, heavy clouds. Since noon, Alexander Saburov and Georgiy Kain—on briefly neutral terms—were conferring in the Crucible to weigh the advantages of keeping the Capital’s pawns in town against its pitfalls.
But all Commander Blok knew was that Saburov had been seen heading for the Atrium hours prior; he’d heard as much every other time he asked a passerby for directions to the Rod. When, at a grocer’s store, he ran into the serene road planner with the vacuous eyes and cigar pinched between her index and middle finger, Blok thought he had finally found the one denizen most qualified to direct him to the Saburovs’. Yulia squinted at him and said: “She’s only seventeen, you know.”
“So was Alexander the Great when his father placed him at the head of a soldiery. So was Augustus Caesar when he led a fighting force of more than 3,000 veteran troops into Rome. So was Joan of Arc when she guided the French army in a momentous victory at Orléans. I knew a lieutenant,” reminisced Blok, “who joined our ranks at eighteen. He was so stuck on himself that he could never say 'eighteen' without putting the 'only' before it. We got to calling him ‘Only Petrov.’ And he's just where he was when he started…only worse. ‘Only’ is a bad habit—” When Yulia would only stare blankly at him, as though waiting for a response more relevant to the point she had made, Blok stopped talking.
Ankle-biters were less responsive still, just whispering to each other about ‘General Ashes’ or ‘the scary St. Petersburg man with the mole on his chin’ and answering his questions with no more than skittish laughter. Skeptical teenagers scoffed at any mention of the Saburovs’ wild and scrappy daughter, whom they seldom found worthy of their company. They foretold she would always fall just short of being a woman—short of even being a girl at all—and they’d quite forget Blok’s presence as they carried on gossiping. The flock hardly noticed him leave with his simple question still unanswered.
A few boys who fell in the awkward valley between both aforementioned age groups admitted openly to envying Clara for capturing the attention of a war general—and for continuing to hold it long after she lost practical use to him. The Olgimsky girl, who seemed to be eldest and therefore in charge, agreed aloud to the peculiarity of Blok maintaining his interest in Clara—though she didn’t say it with eyes as wide as her brethren.
Instead, they narrowed, slanting hard into Blok’s. With their backs to her, the boys couldn’t pick up on the expression and went on babbling questions. A pallid, rheumy-eyed girl Blok vaguely recognized, though he couldn’t put his finger on why, spoke up to direct him to the Rod in a sonorous tone. She had allegedly been brought there often enough to know the path by heart.
Victoria didn’t look any happier for her friend’s kind deed.
Clara could be seen by everyone in the Tanners district, standing on the balcony with arms stretched like those of a scarecrow as she welcomed the shower, though her eyes canted low at the overcast neighborhood. She swayed on her feet, taking in the heads of humbler households, and Alexander Blok was motionless as he took in the sight of Clara… But only for a sparse moment; after almost a dozen months, their reunion couldn’t wait another minute.
Without the man of the household, the servants quavered as Alexander Blok forced his way into the mansion, swinging doors open without a care for who heard the slams. Though he had never before been inside, his sharp sense of direction led him through the labyrinthine halls to the East-facing balcony he had seen outside.
When Alexander entered an unlit bedroom, his eyes fell upon a neighboring dresser. On its surface lay a heavily-marked map, a compass, and a bitten pencil in the dip between the sun-yellowed pages of a leather-bound journal on its spine. An army-green backpack lay open on the ground, scattering hard candy, animal crackers, and colorful rocks across the musty carpet. It was then Alexander was relieved to know he hadn’t fallen out of practice in the art of navigation.
Muted, achromatic sunshine fell in through open glass doors leading to the balcony, splintering the light onto an Armenian rug. When she returned to the room, Clara’s wild, bird-nest hair and threadbare clothes were soaked as though she had been crying herself to sleep every night they spent apart. Astonishment passed over her ruddy eyes when she made out the silhouette obstructing almost all light from the hall’s door. Quickly, she gathered her composure in time to don the knowing smile of a child cracking an inside joke.
“I sensed you close an hour before Father so much as mentioned you.” She took a couple of tentative steps toward him, but then stopped by a vanity table with a mirror. Katerina placed it there for her daughter—so excited to have a girl—though it evidently saw no use. Most of the denizens doubted that Clara could even see her reflection, let alone that she ever peered into a mirror in her life. “If ever, you carried any doubt in your heart that we’d soon be together again, I carried none.”
Despite his unbroken stride through the gates of the Rod and into the mansion’s depths, Alexander mysteriously lost all strength in his legs by the time he was within a foot of Clara, his knees meeting the ground before her. For a moment, all he saw were the bandages and scabs on her knobby knees, before she extended a hand, which he turned over for a chaste kiss, lips hardly ghosting her knuckles as his breath trembled with reverence.
“Silly!” She yanked her arm back and laughed low at his flickering eyes. “I’m inviting you to stand.” He seemed to hold himself together by the threads, no doubt desperate to recklessly let himself go upon their reunion. “Fine.” She opened her arms. “I won’t bite.”
Clara wasn’t ready for Alexander to throw his arms around his mistress for a rough, clinched embrace. Instinctively, she grasped behind her, leaning as far back on the vanity table as it allowed. But her shoulders hit the mirror and it slanted under their joint weight, her heels lifting off the ground.
She yelped, hands shooting above her and grasping at the back of his coat, clawing into the fabric for leverage against gravity, but she didn’t need to; Alexander was bending over far enough that she was fixed to the vanity mirror. Clara winced as his face grazed her cheek. “Your—beard’s itchy—!”
This was an exaggeration; he still had hardly more than a stubbled five o'clock shadow, but it certainly tickled. At the very moment of her protest, Alexander surfaced and smoothed out his uniform, withdrawing as though he had never touched her. Had she been anyone but breezy, floaty Clara, she might have slipped off the vanity entirely.
Nonetheless startled, she fisted the drenched fabric over her heart, pitter-pattering like the rain. A chime from the clock tower began its half-a-dozen tolls to welcome dusk. Alexander would have to report back to the town hall before they’d miss him. He explained as much to Clara, and when she answered with only a look of sorrow that they should have to part again so soon, he looked twice as sorry. “With you again in no time,” was his promise.
Pelmeni served with broth, rye bread, and sauerkraut on the side were on tonight’s menu for supper. The meal’s sulfurous, tallowy, buttery, smoky, charred odors—somewhere between the ocean and the urine of cows in a barnyard—would typically irritate Clara. But this evening, she stared obliviously at a painting of an agonized spider as she forked at blini topped with caviar, turning over, ‘With you again in no time,’ in her mind. She wondered what stories Alexander had gathered during his time away: of redemption, of vindication, of fulfillment, of absolution.
When the Sand Pest hit its climax, he had only one opportunity to relay an account. It had been on a drizzly gloaming like this, in a town hall emptied of all soldiers as their numbers dispersed to make the rounds through the streets. One of the lieutenants imparted a legend the General would repeat to Clara, who kept interjecting with her own embellishments. The lamps overlooking the map darkened the theatrical lines in their every micro-expression, and for a moment, the solitary pair were all the way in Stalingrad.
Presently seated at one end of the intimate table, Clara had her parents perched on either side, the two absorbed in a back-and-forth she couldn’t follow as Alexander Saburov transmitted Georgiy’s viewpoint to his appalled wife. Over the rim of her glass of kvass came Katerina’s parroting of, “Alexander… Oh, but Alexander—” Clara might have laughed at the way his name seemed to lose meaning the more Katerina echoed it.
In any case, their daughter wouldn’t have to hold her composure long; they couldn’t afford to draw out dinner with the town hall meeting around the corner, so Alexander-Oh-But-Alexander would have to wrap up his narration before long and leave his girls to eat alone. “I promise, I’ll be back before you know it.” Though he addressed this promise to both, Katerina didn’t need it; she had long grown past concern with her husband’s lengthy absences. Likely, she preferred he wouldn’t leave the meeting until the couple’s case had been made.
…Whatever it is, thought Clara. Then, the promise could have only been for his daughter, to whom he read dry classics every night as she lay in bed, in a lost effort to cultivate his heiress’s interests. Clara never minded it; no sleeping draught could hope to compare in potency.
After dinner, Katerina and Clara took to the drawing room, the latter reading an anthology of fables aloud to the former as she mended the frayed hems of her daughter's ever-ragged clothes. Following a hug good night and a soak in the tub, Clara’s bedroom was dyed rosy by the twilight of the lampshade as she stood in the shadow of her wardrobe doors and fumbled with the last button of her collared pajamas. With a distaste for the textures of embellishments on Katerina’s nightgowns, her husband handed down his old sets of sleepwear, still roomy on his daughter.
The open windows gave way to a chorus of crickets, which stopped when sharp knocks came from the entrance of her room. Three seconds leaked by, then came another few knocks. Clara anticipated a servant, but opening the door revealed one of her Alexanders in a coat damp with rain.
Clara’s eyes flickered at him. “You’re—back! Didn’t the meeting take long? They weren’t too hard on you, were they?”
“They let me off early,” was his answer as she threw her arms around his neck and fit her head over his shoulder.
“But why’re you here? It’s late.”
“I promised you I would be, soon. Thought I would wish you good night.”
“…Stay a while and tell me a story?”
By the time Alexander Blok found himself in the town theatre, he couldn’t remember when, why, or how he arrived in the first place. The only conclusion he could reach was that he had been dreaming. Lucid-dreaming, he amended as his feet obeyed his inclination to approach the stage, where Clara perched on the shoulders of two mimes. The two-dimensional, canvas-covered flats painted to resemble a vista of a woodland did little to contextualize this display.
The outfit Blok had last seen Clara in was swapped for a makeshift costume evidently courtesy of the odd director. Excluding her bare arms and hands, she was shrouded from her collarbone to her ankles in formless, white linen, like recycled bedsheets pantomiming a gown. The halo of leaves in her hair, as though in the aftermath of a tumble through shrubs, reflected the halo cast by the spotlight. She looked like an alpine swift or skylark, lighter than air.
It brought to mind the foreign nursery rhyme he was made to recite for his schoolboy lessons:
‘Alouette, gentille alouette,
Alouette—’
How did the rest go?
Once he was up on the stage, he took a knee and grasped her heel to bring the top of her bare foot to his lips. His breath hardly grazed her skin before the lights went out and she was gone, leaving him empty-handed.
“Banal, banal, banal,” came Mark Immortell’s laments. When Blok turned, he found that his lone audience member’s shadow-masked expression permeated with tedium and languor. “You two have managed to reach an extent of self-delusion a method actor could only aspire to, and it still looked hackneyed.”
Block might have felt more thrown by this had it not been a dream, so to this delusion posing as a man, he said: “You must be blind, then. My devotion is only the most earnest.”
“If that much had been true, would you have dedicated yourself to re-enacting paradigms? The plays that best suspend the audience’s disbelief are written in the writer’s voice, acted in the actor’s voice, and so on; their fingerprints are all over it. But do you know anything besides borrowing? Besides lifting? Are any of the stories you tell your own?” The slam of a door announced Blok’s mid-lecture exit.
When Blok was swallowed up by the night’s brisk air, its chill bit into him, rich with the scent of smoke, petrichor, plant life, and reality. He checked his watch and discovered it had been a quarter until two in the morning. Curious. Had he been awake the entire time?