Raven Eye

Words by Julia Shraytman

Art by Yaleeza Patchett

There are five of us. The sixth one, we are told, fell into a ditch on his way here and did not get up.

“He did not scream,” Sergeant Pavlovich says matter-of-factly with a small nod in our direction. A bleak spark of pride emanates from his one living eye.

Which ditch? I wonder.

Leningrad is full of ditches, of smallpox scars. Some are deeper than others. But you can never tell their actual size because this week there was a snowstorm that filled the ditches. Just like last week. And the week before that. And before that.

The emaciated city bared its teeth and grabbed one of us. Dead meat, he is.

I can feel my heartbeat in my empty stomach. If he weighed more, maybe he would have had the strength to climb out.

Which ditch? I wonder.

It is minus twelve degrees Celsius outside the police station, but inside there is a small fire going in the rusty bucket in the middle of the room. The five of us congregate around the metal bucket, our palms stretching toward the crackling, skinny warmth.

Sergeant Pavlovich walks to the sawed pieces of furniture on the other side of the room, grabs a wooden table leg, breaks it against his knee and feeds the pieces to the fire. The charred smell fills the room, and I want to reach for the piece of wood and take a bite. But I do not. I remind myself that I am not an animal. Not yet.

The only object in the room that has not been broken down for firewood is a large blackboard. Today’s date, December 17^th, 1943, is scribbled in the corner. I did not know it was December. I do not think of my existence in dated terms. My only awareness is of cold, and colder. I stare at the hand-drawn map of Leningrad.

Sergeant Pavlovich draws faint circles around Petrovskiy Prospekt and Malyy Prospekt.

“Here and here,” he says as he points to the two streets with a piece of chalk the size of a pebble before hiding it in his pocket.

The two streets are on the opposite sides of the Malaya Neva River which, with the precision of a knife, cuts Leningrad in half as if the city was a boiled chicken.

The last time I tasted chicken was two years ago. One day Nadia boiled it with potatoes and carrots, and the next day I was called up to build anti-tank fortifications for the Red Army within the city, but by the following month Leningrad was surrounded by German forces, cutting off all routes. That is how it has been since then. Us, inside. Them, outside.

Cutting off all routes. All routes, but one. Small provisions are reaching the very few. Sergeant Pavlovich is missing teeth, and his cheeks are sinking, yet his shivers are not perennial, and he is able to carry his weight without stumbling and getting out of breath. That’s how I know his rations are bigger. Not just three slices of bread, I imagine. Maybe potatoes? Maybe carrots? Not chicken.

If I find out he eats chicken, I will kill him.

The five of us look like we could be brothers. Most people in Leningrad look the same. Does not matter the age, or the sex. Big, empty eyes in shrunken faces atop stooped, crooked bodies.

“Why are we here?” one of my four twins rasps.

I take a step back. I recognize him. Before the war, he worked violent crime and held the rank of Starshina. A distant snapshot of him, healthy and red-cheeked, flashes through my mind. I ran into him in this very building more than once when I worked homicide.

I catch his eye and watch for any spark of recognition, but he looks through me, as if I am but a fading flicker.

Sergeant Pavlovich walks from one corner of the room to another, then he walks back again, and I notice a hole in his dirty winter coat. The hole is near his armpit, and it smiles at me when he moves his arms.

“We have a problem here in Leningrad,” he says, and looks at us expectantly. He fixes his hat, pushing it back just a smidge, revealing a bald spot. He scratches his forehead.

“Just one?” one of my four twins calls out, his voice diving into something resembling laughter that turns into a deep, prolonged cough. He spits a mouthful of bubbly green.

“I know you are tired. I know you want to lay down and sleep. But the city of Leningrad needs you.” Sergeant Pavlovich lets those words sink in as he looks each one of us in the eyes, one by one. It gives me a déjà vu feeling. In that very moment, I feel a little less dead, and the sensation submerges me, like a dream.

Ghostgrad. The city should be renamed.

“Come,” he says, and we follow him. He takes us into an interrogation room and there is a table in the middle. There are six chairs around the table.

We stare. A table! And chairs! In this room the furniture has not been turned into firewood just yet. There are mugs on the table.

He does not understand, instead he says, “Pardon me,” as he takes one of the chairs and removes it from the room. “That was insensitive of me.”

There are now five chairs, and we take our seats around the table.

Sergeant Pavlovich reappears with a samovar. He pours hot tea into our mugs, and we breathe it in as the scalding mist licks our faces. The tea smells strong and bitter.

“There is a drop of sugar in there,” Sergeant Pavlovich whispers to us and winks at our shellshocked faces. “You might even be able to taste it.”

Once the tea cools, and we sip it, gingerly, civilized-like, he stands with his back to the wall, crosses his arms and says, “You are our newest police division. It is a new world out here.” He clears his throat.

We stare up at him, enthralled, our hands curled around the mugs in front of us.

“You will be working cannibalism.”

* * *

Petrovskiy Prospekt and Malyy Prospekt are where the bodies were found, and Sergeant Pavlovich thinks the five of us are bound to make progress if we divide into two groups. He is giddy and he rubs his hands together as if he is about to sit down for a scrumptious meal.

He pairs me up with the twin I recognized earlier, Starshina Peter Lesov, and he assigns us to the cannibalized body found on Malyy Prospekt. The other three twins he assigns to Petrovskiy Prospekt. He tells us we need to give him a report by the end of the week.

He leads us outside to the two black Gazik automobiles and gives us ration cards for fuel. Only the top military brass and the rich drive in Leningrad. The rest crawl through the snow. I let my gaze glide over the autos’ sleek, cockroach bodies. They have enough wood and material in them to keep me warm for several days.

He must have read our minds because he glares at us, his one living eye deadly and serious. “You will be executed if you steal fuel or break the vehicles down for firewood. Think of the vehicles as a part of you. One of your body parts. A leg. An arm. Your eyes.”

* * *

My new partner, Starshina Peter Lesov, is behind the wheel. We are making decent progress down the main street. Outside, the gray human forms are eyeing us with hunger, as if we are an exotic bird. I take off my mitten and slide my hand between the buttons of my winter coat, gliding it along my ribs, toward my pistol. There are six bullets in the chamber. I wonder if Starshina Peter Lesov has a pistol. I wonder how many bullets are in his chamber.

We park behind the city morgue. Starshina Peter Lesov nods when I instruct him to remain behind the wheel, to be on the lookout in case of attempted theft. I step down and make my way inside the dilapidated two-story building.

There is no heat, and my teeth chatter; it feels colder inside than it was outside. The air in the morgue is translucent.

There are dead bodies scattered on the floor in various states of undress. Most are wearing nothing more than underwear, which is iced to the skin. As I make my way down the long hallway, I step carefully over the sprawled corpses.

I stop in front of the door that has a plaque with Coroner written on it. I rap on the glass and as I do the door creaks open to reveal a bearded man sitting on a metal stool in front of a metal desk. His hat is on the table beside him and his white hair is in disarray.

He looks up at me, startled and fearful, but then he breathes a sigh of relief and goes back to writing in his notebook. I stand in front of him and listen to the scratching of pen against paper. The notebook is thick, and I calculate that it can keep me warm for two, possibly three, hours.

Finally, he finishes, slams the notebook shut, places it in a metal cabinet behind him, and locks it with a key, which disappears in his coat pocket.

When his hand reappears, it is holding a pack of cigarettes.

My heart pounds, the way it did when I graduated with a gold medal from the university and had to give a speech, and when I was promoted to lead investigator, and when I first laid down with my wife.

He offers me a cigarette and a light, and my hands shake.

“I remember you,” he says.

I don’t remember him.

He hunches over on his stool, and I stand in front of him, shifting weight from one leg to another.

“You look a little thinner,” he says.

“You look the same,” I say. I don’t remember him.

“Hmm,” he huffs through the cigarette smoke, which tumbles out of his nostrils. Quietly and respectfully, we watch the smoke glide around the room. I am starting to believe that we are watching the Holy Ghost.

I do not let a single drop of smoke escape my being. I eat it.

“I am here to investigate a death.”

“Ah!” he says excitedly, a finger in the air. “I am currently in possession of three-hundred-and-seventy-two dead. We buried two thousand and fourteen. They were unlucky. Died before the cold came. The rancid flesh was attracting vermin.”

He stands up slowly and shuffles to the door, yet there is a tiny little sprint to his rusty gait. He pushes the door open, and I see what I saw as I made my way down the long hallway to his office. The sprawled dead bodies.

He looks embarrassed, like a little boy. “Ran out of freezers, as you can see.”

The spark in his eyes is burning, deep and strange.

I wonder which dead body finally made him lose his mind.

“Coroner, you don’t handle all of Leningrad's dead?” I ask. I have seen dead bodies on the streets. Dead of disease, or starvation, or the cold, or blown up to bits by a dropped bomb.

The man puts his hands on his hips. “And you call yourself a detective? What have you been doing all this time?” He shakes his head.

He speaks slowly to me, as if I am the one who had lost my mind, “Outside, are the naturally dead. Inside, are the suspiciously dead.”

“Coroner,” I say with a polite bow, “I am here to look into a case of cannibalism.”

* * *

Snow is falling again. The wind whispers and moans through the walls of the morgue in a tongue that seems foreign. I listen. What language is it? I wonder. Not Russian.

“Ah, this one,” the coroner says and points to one of the bodies lying face down on the hallway floor. “They brought it in two days ago.”

With his foot the coroner pushes the other bodies crowding the hallway toward the walls, creating a narrow path for us to drag our victim to the examination room.

We turn the body over and the coroner laughs. I watch the old man until he is satiated, until he stands empty and silent, and we each grab a leg and pull the body down the hallway.

“Maybe if we had more meat on our bones,” the coroner says after five fruitless attempts to hoist the body onto the metal table.

“Wait here,” I say, remembering that I have a shiny, new partner.

I step out into the muttering whiteness and make my way to the automobile.

Starshina Peter Lesov’s head is thrown back, and his mouth is open. I bang on the window, but he does not stir. I turn the knob and pull on the door. My heart, this famished red canary, convulses inside my ribcage. I try to catch my breath.

Starshina Peter Lesov rouses and opens his eyes. I smell his rotting breath.

“You are not dead,” I say, my heart settling back down into its slow, sleepy rhythm.

He shrugs.

“We have the body. We need your help inside.”

He looks away. “I need to guard the auto, don’t you think?”

He is squeezing his hands inside his mittens. He does not want to step foot inside the morgue. I do not blame him.

“We’ll make it quick. We need your help to lift the body.”

He does not move.

Snow falls harder. The wind whispers and moans in a tongue that seems foreign. I listen. What language is it? I wonder.

It’s the Old German tongue.

I nod. That makes sense.

“There’s cigarettes,” I say, and with that I have his attention.

* * *

The eyes are murky. I lean closer. A paper-thin layer of frost covers the gaping, dead eyes. The coroner leans over the prostrated corpse on the examination table and with his thumbnail scrapes off the frost.

“Mother of God,” Starshina Peter Lesov murmurs from his spot in the corner, Belomorkanal between his teeth. The cigarette is just a stub and any moment now the flickering crimson flame will bite his lips.

“Ah! Blue!” the coroner says and looks at me.

I nod. “That’s good.”

“A blue-eyed Russian! Well, gentlemen, the case is near its completion then,” Starshina Peter Lesov growls, the cigarette giving him a breath of life.

The coroner throws Starshina Peter Lesov a dejected look, before returning his attention to the corpse. “A sturdy man. Look at the proportionality of the hips to the wide shoulders. Look at the big jaw.”

“A young man, perhaps?” I ask.

The coroner fits his finger into the partially open mouth and after pushing and thrusting he triumphantly retrieves false teeth.

He shakes his head. “Not young.”

I navigate my gaze up and down the body.

Outside, the wind howls. There is a crash on the roof. It is a strange time of day for artillery shelling. We stare up, as if in prayer.

The coroner licks his ashen, weather-beaten lips. “A bough broke off a dying tree. It’s not the Germans.” He laughs and giggles.

Starshina Peter Lesov paces back and forth, swaying his head from side to side. He reminds me of my stepdaughter’s red-maned mare. Go to sleep, I thought, as I shot it right between the eyes last summer. I skinned the thighs and then called Nadia to do the rest. I went from house to house, banging on the doors and yelling, “horse meat!” and the neighbors came out with their sharp knives. They surrounded the carcass like hyenas and stripped the mare of all flesh. And at dusk, I watched a pack of starving dogs gnaw on the young bones.

“Coroner,” I say, “bag me the toothmarks.”

“Aye, aye!” he replies and springs into motion.

He uses a blade to cut around the bite; with a scalpel and scissors he tugs a sizable piece of the victim’s flesh off. He pulls his grimy handkerchief out of his coat pocket and wraps the evidence with it.

“There you are,” he says, his eyes shining with pride, as he hands me the bundle.

I shove the evidence into my coat pocket.

I start to make my way toward the door, and Starshina Peter Lesov follows.

I make a sudden U-turn, walk back to the corpse, grab a pair of scissors and cut off a clump of the dead man’s long beard. The swift, rapid movements cause my blood pressure to drop, and the room spins, and I am on the floor on my knees, my eyes closed, taking deep breaths.

The dead man’s beard is in my fist. It is thick and coarse. It is red, a deep red.

Red Beard.

“Are you alright?” comes a voice through a fog.

I open my eyes and stand up. “I am alright.”

* * *

I slam the passenger door shut behind me. Starshina Peter Lesov turns the ignition on, and the automobile huffs and stammers into submission. It is midday, but the falling snow and the wind make the exact time of the day unclear.

As the pace of the snowfall increases, the road is becoming difficult to see. If we drive fast to outrun the storm, we run in danger of coming off the road and overturning. If we drive sluggishly, we run in danger of being snowed in. Either possibility is likely death.

Starshina Peter Lesov and I exchange a quick glance.

“What now?” he asks.

I know exactly what he is thinking because I am thinking the exact same thing. We need to drive back to the police station, return the auto, and trudge back to our respective homes.

My home stands dark and silent. A mythical beast with a withering heart.

Nadia sleeps with her daughter in the closet. I sleep alone in the bedroom. Nadia does not want a grown man and her teenage daughter in the same room.

The wind outside is speaking in Old German. Red Beard is lying dead inside the morgue.

I watch a raven race across the sky, its well-fed body cutting through the wall of falling snow with a powerful grace.

There is so much to do. There is evidence to search for. Witnesses to question. A man-eater to find. Identity of the deceased to ascertain. Surely, Red Beard is not the dead man’s name. Surely!

I unclench my jaw. “We have a case to solve,” I say through copper-tasting lips. “Let’s drive to Malyy Prospekt where the body was found. We might be able to find a witness or two.”

Starshina Peter Lesov remains dead quiet. Not a breath. Then, he steps on the gas and the automobile shakes over fresh snow as we head into the storm, down a long stretch of road that takes us further and further away from the police station, and closer to Malyy Prospekt.

* * *

A little over a year ago, shortly after the siege of Leningrad began, Malyy Prospekt was bombed. The street with its red-brick apartment buildings that stood shoulder-to-shoulder and bubbled like champagne with life, now sleeps.

As our auto snakes along the road, Malyy Prospekt prostrates before us, greeting us with a toothless grin. Where the apartment buildings used to breathe, mountains of red bricks are now tombstones.

A conspiracy of ravens atop a frozen body quit pecking and quietly observe us as we roll past.

“Haven’t you heard you shouldn’t look at them?” Starshina Peter Lesov mutters, his eyes staring at the white road ahead. “You look a raven in the eye, and he will fly into your mind and make you mad.”

Russia lives on a steady diet of superstition. We slurp it down like hot gruel.

I reach into my pocket and pull out the bundle containing the evidence. I unwrap the handkerchief and Red Beard’s flesh falls into my lap.

“It is definitely not an animal,” I say. “The toothmarks are human. The mouth is of average size.” I look closer. “Interestingly, our cannibal might be missing a tooth.”

I pull out the clump of red hair and study it. Its coarseness is tugging at my brain. Before I shot my stepdaughter’s beloved horse, I watched the sunlight kiss its flame-red mane. I felt the coarse horsehair in my fist as the animal lay shuddering and then as it lay watching me through its dead dark eyes. Red Beard was a horseman. There is no doubt in my mind of that fact. I could see it. Red Beard atop a red-maned horse galloping across a summer plain, his red beard sinking into the red mane of his horse forming one thick red wave. The image hangs in front of me like a mirage.

We drive further, but our progress is slow, more difficult. The auto comes to a stop, the tires thrash against snow and the motor whines. Starshina Peter Lesov turns the ignition off.

“We can’t drive anymore,” he says.

I nod.

The white storm surrounds us. It dances and twirls, and also sings to us.

I close my eyes. The wind outside is speaking Old German. Red Beard, the horseman, is dead in the morgue.

Red Beard was old, the coroner stated.

Why him? Wouldn’t you want to devour flesh that was younger? Why him?

* * *

“Wake up!” I am being shaken roughly. “Wake up! We are being snowed in!”

I open my eyes and I am faced with a blinding brilliance. The windshield is buried in snow. Inside my valenki, my toes are frozen knobs.

Starshina Peter Lesov pushes his door and forces himself out of the automobile into the snow drifts. I follow his lead.

It takes a minute for me to orient myself. The blizzard blinds and deafens me. Starshina Peter Lesov is beside me, he is bent at the waist, his head down, his chin tucked in.

We make our way forward, through the snowy maze. I follow Starshina Peter Lesov’s dark, stumbling form.

We approach one of the few apartment buildings left standing. It is a two-story, gray cadaver.

Inside, rats scurry. Starshina Peter Lesov howls and the rats squeal and scatter and all is silent. The smell of decayed plumbing permeates through every pore.

There are four apartments on the first floor. The doors are off their hinges, the windows are broken, and the wind blows snow inside. We leave footprints in the snow on the floor.

There are two apartments on the second floor. We enter one. The window in the main room stands open and the curtain swells. Save for the spiderweb of cracks running along the glass, the window functions, and with a creaky effort I force it shut. There is a shabby red divan in the middle of a room.

Starshina Peter Lesov sits down on the divan, leans back, and smiles.

* * *

The apartment is so vast, and my mind is so muddled, that I do not notice the black piano until I am in front of it.

I was drawn to the painting hanging on the wall. The painting is of a red-haired, bearded Medieval royal atop a red-maned horse, a great sword at his side, a dog at his foot, leading an army of men into what seems like battle. I study the imperial blue eyes.

I do not notice the black piano until my hand rests upon its cracked black and white keys. The instrument emits a strange, crowing sound that rises and fills the room, then slowly settles back down like dust. I take a step back.

My stepdaughter played her piano before the siege. After the siege, I forbade her. Eleven months ago, I hacked it for firewood as she intoned that I was the devil, and all through last winter when the frost in the house commenced to consume us, I fed logs into the fire.

I see a small shadow out of the corner of my eye.

It pushes the door to the apartment open, and it stands there now, in a winter coat and a blanket, its head wrapped in a wool scarf.

I take my mitten off, slide my hand between the buttons of my coat and grab the pistol. I turn and aim it at the shadow.

The shadow shakes and shudders.

“Who are you?” I call out.

Starshina Peter Lesov is on his feet.

The shadow disappears behind the door.

I lower my gun.

“Apartment next door,” I whisper.

* * *

The child sits on a cushion on the floor. The apartment is carpeted and warm. A small fire crackles in the fireplace. There is a large pile of logs and stacked books in the corner. The last time I felt warmth was months ago, back in the summer.

The frail child watches us out of dark, sleepy eyes.

“Who is in here?” I call out. No answer. I walk from room to empty room.

“Where is everyone?” I ask the child.

No reply.

“What is your name?”

“Galya,” she whispers.

Starshina Peter Lesov crouches down. “Galechka, where is everyone?”

No reply.

“Well, Galya, if you don’t mind, we’ll make ourselves at home,” I say. I take my mittens off and lay them out by the fire. My hands are reddish-blue and puffy. I warm them over the burning flame.

Starshina Peter Lesov joins me. It is the first time I see his hands. Two fingers are missing, and the afflicted hand is wrapped in a filthy, old gauze.

“Well, Galechka,” I say, “do you know why we are here?”

She studies me, and after a prolonged silence, she shakes her head.

“We are detectives, you see. We solve mysteries. Like in detective stories.”

Her sleepy eyes are more awake, and her eyelids come alive and blink, blink.

“Like Sherlock Holmes,” she says breathlessly.

I nod my head, yes.

“You see, my partner and I have come here to interview the witnesses and collect the evidence. Can you help us?”

She nods, her mouth in a little O.

The excitement is tiring her. She slides down and puts her head on the pillow, facing me. The reflection of the fire dances in her eyes.

“A man was murdered near here. His body was found on Malyy Prospekt. You know where that is?”

She smiles and nods.

“He is a great horseman. He is old, yet he doesn’t look very old. He has wide shoulders and a strong jaw. Icy, blue eyes. A thin nose. And a long, thick red beard.”

“Here it is.” I take out the red clump of hair from my pocket. “See here?”

The girl gasps. “I know him!” she says with absolute conviction.

“I’m listening,” I say, as my heartbeats start playing hide-and-seek. I wince and press my palm against my chest.

“That’s Barbarossa,” she says sweetly, childlike, the way one would say Oh, you silly, old goose.

“Barbarossa?”

“The King of Germany,” the child patiently explains. “A thousand years ago he vanquished Italy. There is a painting of him in the apartment right next door.”

My mind glides out of the warm apartment and slips next door. It lingers by the painting above the crowing, black piano. I surely see the resemblance between the Medieval German King and Red Beard. In fact, I see more than a resemblance. It is a portrait of the very man.

As surely as the Russian blizzard. And war. And famine. As surely as death.

It is a portrait of the man himself.

About the author

Julia Shraytman graduated with a B.A. in English Literature and is currently pursuing her M.A. in English. Her short stories appeared in Suspense Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Encounters Magazine. After years of living in the real world, she discovered she prefers to reside in the fictitious one.

About the illustrator

Yaleeza Patchett has been creating whimsical art and illustrations since a child; her inspiration comes from the cartoons, comic strips and animated movies she grew up with. In 2016, Yaleeza began expanding her art into her own business named Rowan Ink. It began with a simple pair of hand-painted, custom-made shoes for a friend’s birthday. Through her artistic journey she has expanded into different art mediums, but her true passion is sketching, illustrating and painting. Yaleeza currently resides in the south side of Indianapolis with her husband, her dog, and her cat. You can find her current artwork at Rowaninkstudio.com.