(Download) "Bukharin's Fox (Short Story)" by West Branch " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Bukharin's Fox (Short Story)
- Author : West Branch
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 52 KB
Description
The great leader's daughter drowses by the aviary. It is a Sunday afternoon in early autumn and visitors wander through the halls dressed in green and gold. Cheers erupt at intervals from the activity room, where the Packers game plays on the big screen television. The birds in the aviary flutter from branch to branch--canaries, parakeets, finches, lovebirds. To her father, she was his little sparrow. Malinky vorobrey. She hears his voice. Malinky vorobrey. He lifts her. Cold tunic buttons press her cheek. There is about him an aroma of pipesmoke, the animal scent of leather. She is lighter than air and afraid, so she begs him to stop. He does. What does she know of him? What of his cruelty? What of his guilt? Nothing, she knows nothing, only what every daughter knows of her father, which is to say only what he allows. Bending his face to hers, he covers her with smoky kisses, wet and loud. What if this were her only memory? How happy would she be? Muffled gunshots report from the north woods, hunters no doubt--but what is in season?--and she is again aware of the aviary and the brightly flapping things behind the glass and of something, no, someone else. A small girl stands near the glass, her hands splayed on it like tiny pink starfish. She turns and asks, "Do those birds miss the sky?" Her eyes are somber gray and flecked with green. If she could hold her, gather her in, she would never let her go. "Whatever they see above them is the sky," she answers. How much of one's daily happiness depends upon forgetting? How much of that other life, the one that came before, must disappear for us to make happiness of the one we have now? The girl faces the aviary again, leans sideways in a slow arc so that her long curls nearly brush the floor. "Look," she says. When she points bracelets slide along her arm. "Somebody painted clouds for them." "Ah," says the great leader's daughter. "That is a kindness." When the night nurse, Violet, wants to smoke she props the north wing exit door open with a folding chair from the storage closet. And when she isn't smoking, she sits at the front desk singing along to the radio--light rock favorites, hits of the sixties and seventies, even commercials if she's feeling lonely or bored. Her voice echoes through the hallways of the home as the great leader's daughter wanders late at night, pushing her walker. She cannot sleep. This she inherited from her father. The nation's great leader, the ruminating insomniac, pacer of the Kremlin hallways during small hours, speaking his plans hoarsely to himself and startling night sentries to attention. But she knows him also as a shadow passing by her room, humming a nonsong under his breath. She knows him as a sulfurous smell of matches in the corridor, the strip of light burning under his study door. His restlessness resides within her. It draws her into the antiseptic corridors at night, and Violet's voice trails behind, a sound both familiar and lonesome. To hear it makes her remember something told to her by a famous soprano from Leningrad. "The soul is too large," said the soprano, "and so we must each find a way to fill all that empty space. This is why I sing." The great leader's daughter is not afraid to die. She hasn't been afraid of that for such a long time. What she fears instead is the ever-widening of her soul and its refusal to be filled. She has sensed this fear in even the happiest people she has known, in the people she has loved, in her father. Passing the activity room on her nightly rounds, she is aware of the looming presence of the darkened television and the room's emptiness, an emptiness that is more a presence in itself than an absence of anything. Sometimes she sees her father inside, sitting in his specially crafted chair, alone, watching films. He prefers Charlie Chaplin, Tarzan, westerns and newsreel footage of himself. He stares at the men and women who hold above their gleeful faces placards with his image. Rows of choreogra
 "Bukharin's Fox (Short Story)" by West Branch " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}