Wings

The yard was like an upturned well, and the clouds floated on the square bottom. Below, where the well's walls connected to the asphalt, bright colored cars were being left for the night.

In the morning and during the day there were few of them left, and the free space was covered with white chalk lines. Girls drew patterns for playing hopscotch; boys created improvised soccer mini-fields. Sometimes, when the ball hit a window, the voices grew loud and echoed off the walls of the well, rising high towards the very bottom, towards the clouds.

But it was evening and the cars were coming back, each one of them hiding a piece of chalk pattern under its belly.

The summer was long. Igor felt lucky; he had in his possession the whole of the balcony- three meters long, almost a meter and a half wide- a huge balcony, where one could effortlessly navigate even the heaviest and most cumbersome wheelchair.

Every evening, windows lit on all four walls of the well. Electrical lights illuminated hundreds, thousands of human lives, shielded from the stranger’s gaze only by the thin curtains, which often fell carelessly, revealing pieces of evening life…

It was then that Igor would take out his binoculars and lean with his elbows onto the rusty railings of the balcony to watch. He saw light bulbs and wallpaper, darkened floor tiles, someone’s white undershirts and other laundry left to dry on the ropes, kisses, fights, homework, shadows on walls, blurred blue eyes of the TV sets, birthdays, dishes, breakfasts and dinners, lies, betrayals, and tears.

Some people lived well; some lived badly. Some lived quietly, others nervously. Some were getting married, some were getting divorced, some were getting back together after a while. The lonely student from the sixth floor finally got himself a girlfriend and had been happy for three months. The parents of the boy from the seventh floor, same age as Igor, bought him a bicycle. The strange fellow from the fifth floor disappeared, his windows remained dark, and several rows of empty beer bottles were gathering dust on the windowsill.

Of all his neighbors, the one whom Igor liked the most was the old lady from the seventh floor. Every day she would go out to the balcony to get some spring onions, which she was growing in a flowerpot, for her breakfast. She did that every single day, and when one day the spring onions remained untouched, it made Igor sad. He watched as the old lady's family members, who gathered for the commemorative feast, drunk themselves silly, and the lady’s son-in-law, a tall, fat 50 year old, forgot
to even pretend that he was upset about something.

Ten days passed, and Igor began to forget about the old lady. The boy from the seventh floor was cycling around the yard and refused to let his friends ride his bicycle.

The sun rarely reached Igor's balcony, because the windows of his and his mother's flat were facing north. But the opposite side of the well was well lit, and Igor was satisfied by that. He could continue to watch people not only in the evenings, but also during the day.

The pregnant woman from the fourth floor had twins.

The couple from the sixth floor went away for a long vacation.

On the fifth floor, one of the families was moving out. Now Igor could watch all day long how they emptied the rooms and loaded the furniture on a rented truck, how the new neighbors cleaned up the dust and garbage, changed the wallpaper, how they hammered nails and screwed bolts into walls to hang paintings and shelves. They also hung new window curtains- so thin and transparent that it took Igor no effort at all to see through them…

The new neighbors had a daughter. She was probably a little older than Igor; at least, after he had stretched on his bed, comparing the length of his body with the height of the room’s door, he concluded that she was taller than him. Not much, just an inch or two.

They woke up at the same time- at around eight. The girl came out of her room barefoot, in her long white nightshirt and locked herself up in the bathroom for quite some time. Her mother and father called on her to hurry up. Eventually, she came out dressed in a bathrobe and went to the kitchen where there was no curtain at all. She was a little lazy, that girl; she was buttering a single piece of bread so slowly that while she was doing that, her mother had already finish making an omelet, or porridge, or some fried potato.

While she was buttering her bread, the girl was probably daydreaming - at least, Igor could see that she was smiling to herself.

It took him a long time to see the color of her eyes. Of course, most people with strawberry blonde hair usually have blue eyes - but this girl’s eyes were brown. Igor saw it clearly once when she was standing near the window crying. That was the first time he regretted that, for some reason, she couldn’t see him. If she did, he could wave his hand to her, or make a funny face, or do something else to cheer her up.

After breakfast, she would usually go outside to play with other girls in the yard. From the height of his balcony, Igor could only see their heads and their legs and their bright colored shoes as they were running over the chalk painted asphalt, jumping on one leg while playing hopscotch or chasing each other in countless other games. Sometimes the girl would come out with badminton rackets. That was the game Igor liked the most because, while throwing up the shuttlecock, the girl looked up, and instead of her reddish-blonde hair, Igor could see her serious, focused face.

It was a shame that playing badminton in their yard was almost impossible. Winds blew from all four corners of the yard and the air streams, deflected by the walls and heated by the sun, intertwined in the closed space, forming miniature dust devils over the asphalt. As a result, the shuttlecock almost never flew where it was directed to by the racket.

The girl’s father left for work early in the mornings and returned home late in the evenings. On Saturdays, he spent most of his time at his desk over papers. When Igor was enhancing his binoculars’ resolution to the maximum, he could sometimes see that those were some kind of complex industrial designs. And on Sundays, Igor watched with some jealousy how the whole family would go for a walk. The father and the daughter would put on jeans and sport shoes to go to a picnic, or dress up before going to a theatre or paying a visit to the family’s friends. Sometimes, they had long arguments over what to do that day, which usually ended with the mother heading for the market with big bags and the father coming out to the balcony to clean the carpets of dust.

Igor often saw the girl playing with dolls. She was a bit ashamed of it; when her parents walked in and saw her with a doll in her hands, she would blush and pretend to be completely indifferent to the toy. At such moments, she put on such a comical “adult” face that Igor couldn’t help but smile.

He also saw her watering the only plant in her room- a big cactus that looked like the head of a green Martian baby. He couldn’t understand why she was watering it so often. After all, a cactus is a desert plant; they can live without water for months.

One day her parents had a fight. Igor had long learned to distinguish between a small argument and a serious falling out that splits one’s life into “before” and “after”. That was the day when he finally saw the color of the girl’s eyes and regretted that they could not communicate.

Three or four days passed into oblivion- and then the world, shaken by the fight, returned to its regular stable existence. The girl’s parents got back together, and Igor could watch them again dining together.

At the dinner table in the kitchen, one place always remained empty. It was always like that when three people sat around a square table. Igor liked to imagine sometimes that this empty place was for him. His wheelchair, though rather big, could probably fit in between the wall and the white side of the fridge.

All too soon, summer was coming to an end. As long as it was, the autumn was soon to begin. In the mornings, Igor now had to wrap himself into a blanket. The summer wind patterns, already familiar to him, were slowly, but surely changing. The cold air stream from the west was growing stronger and the rising warm streams no longer had the same power as they did in July.

One day, while Igor was watching the blonde girl hanging the laundry onto the ropes on her balcony to dry, he thought that it would be great to talk to her.

He had had this thought before as well. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of how to start the conversation - and how can you talk to someone without knowing what to begin with?

The girl was now hanging her mother’s stockings, which quivered their long wet legs, white bed sheets with flower patterns, tiny panties, which fluttered in the wind like the signal flags of a ship. Big drops of water ran down her bare arms - or at least Igor thought that he could see those drops.

He thought that her arms were so thin that he could probably close his thumb and his middle finger around her wrists. He thought that he should tell her that nobody waters a cactus every day and that he wanted to see her eyes up close and find out if they were really as dark as they seemed to be the day he saw her crying.

The girl’s mother came out to the balcony. She called her daughter’s name, and Igor felt – for the first time in many, many months - how the unexpected joy speeds up his heartbeat...because he had finally read the girl’s name precisely by looking at her mother’s lips. Before, he had doubts if her name was Yulia, Ella or even Marina; now it turned out that her name was Alina - Alya for short - and that explained all his previous mistakes.

And then he thought that since he knew her name now, it gave him certain rights. Moreover, he now KNEW what to start the conversation with. He smiled.

In the drawer of his desk he had lots of paper - lined exercise books, separate paper sheets, white and yellow, and even some thin grease proof paper.

He slowly, carefully bent the corner of the lined paper sheet. Then the other corner. Then he repeated the same action with the new corners formed by the ones he had already bent. The wings must be completely symmetrical so Igor did not hurry, trying to do everything with maximum precision.

He bent the paper backwards, giving the wings their final shape. Just to make sure, he launched the small paper plane across the room and it flew very well.

With great difficulty, helping himself with a long stick, he pulled the plane from the inaccessible corner where it had landed. Then he rolled out to the balcony. It was mid-day. A weak, but steady humid wind blew from the east. The sun, concealed by thick clouds, could not significantly impact the air movement.

Igor waited for the wind to weaken and then launched the plane into the treacherous air of the upturned well. The plane flew several meters straight, sunk into an air pit, tumbled in the wind, miraculously came out of the spin, stabilized and flew away, slowly descending, until it finally disappeared on someone’s balcony - the wrong balcony, dusty and trashed.

The second plane reached the end of the well and landed on the chalk lined asphalt.

The summer was over.

The girl was preparing to go to school. Leaning on the railings, Igor watched her twirling in front of the mirror in her short school uniform dress. She had grown up a lot during the summer; that was probably what her mother told her when she appeared out of the kitchen. The girl sighed and began pulling the tight dress off. Her thin undershirt accidentally got pulled up and Igor, who was used to watching adults and who by now had seen a lot of things interesting and forbidden, suddenly quivered and looked away.

He was still tempted to stare, more than ever. Curiosity was burning him from the inside - and not even curiosity, but a new, overwhelming feeling. But at the same time he somehow knew that if he didn’t turn away now, he would lose the right to whisper her name.

And it had become his favorite entertainment lately - whispering into the darkness “Alya!”, as if calling for her, the moment before he was falling asleep.

He began following the weather forecasts, watching them on TV and cutting them out of newspaper pages. He was not interested in the temperature or the clouds, but only the winds, their strength and directions.

Still, he soon realized that the temperature, the clouds, and even the humidity had their parts to play in forming the wind rose. He saw it in his dreams- a huge flower of gigantic, threatening beauty that filled the space with winds. He often saw pigeons losing their balance when caught in the focus of the clashing air streams and how the butterflies struggle against being blown away by the wind.

He kept inventing new designs of paper planes with better stabilizers, but all his inventions refused to work outside his room and the planes kept falling onto the wrong balconies, onto the car roofs, onto the asphalt…

On the last evening of August the girl stood on her balcony for a long, long time and Igor understood that she was saying the final goodbye to the summer, to the holidays, to the freedom. She probably had to go to her new school now, meet her new classmates, and for the next few weeks everyone will know her as "that new girl".

The autumn was warm and dry. Before the sunrise, the wind was weakening a little, but the air was so cold and humid that the wings sunk into it, and the planes were quickly losing altitude. By the time when the air was getting warm enough, the usual four-corner wind streams were back. In the afternoon, if the day was sunny, a weak wave of warmth began spreading from the eastern wall, and, clashing with the stream from the north, created some interesting tornado-like air movements.

Igor made himself a big slingshot and kept experimenting, shooting paper balls into different areas of the well. In the morning, the car owners removed paper planes that fell from the sky from the roofs of their vehicles, and the street cleaner cursed unintelligibly. Igor saw his eyes, scanning the countless balconies, and saw how the cleaner’s lips moved- but his words refused to fly any higher, they were heavy, wingless words…

The girl was now coming home at around two in the afternoon and immediately began doing her homework. Whenever she was calculating math, she would chewing on the end of her ball-point pen, and whenever she was writing a Russian literature coursework, she would bite her lip. She never had to learn poems by heart- probably managed to remember them while the teacher was reading them at school. One day Igor had the luck of watching her reading some story- from the very beginning and till
the very end.

The girl was sitting by the window, and at first the book seemed to make her laugh. Holding his breath, Igor watched as she laughed and tried to read parts of the story out loud, but her mother was too busy in the kitchen and couldn’t come and listen.

Then the girl’s face darkened. Her brown eyes became almost black. She stooped over the book and bit her lower lip…

And then Igor saw her crying, for the second time. When the tears stopped rolling out of her eyes, the girl pulled a thick notebook from under her pillow, sat with it on the bed and thought for a long time staring blankly in front of her. From time to time, she would write down short phrases, erase something, then write some more.

He put down his binoculars and rolled back into the room. His desk was covered by planes made of lined paper with sophisticated stabilizers – some lightened, some with added weight, planes with cut down wings and planes with lengthened ones, planes combined out of different paper types, planes with straight wings and with wings of complex shape…

Soon, the real autumn came. The square sky over the upturned well began to regularly pour rain onto the yard. The girl now wore a hooded red raincoat whenever she went to school.

The wind in the well went completely insane- the laundry on the ropes fluttered really hard, and every morning many of the housewives hurried downstairs to collect the wet clothes that flew away out of the dirty puddles.

One day, Alya had guests- a dozen boys and girls- and Igor understood that it was her birthday party.

He almost wasn’t jealous. On the contrary, he felt better seeing Alya so excited, so beautiful. She and her guests played games and danced to the music Igor couldn’t hear. One boy, black-haired and tall, did his utmost to always dance with Alya, made funny faces and kept telling jokes, causing all others to burst into laughter.

No, Igor wasn’t jealous. He felt something different. He comforted himself by the fact that neither the black-haired boy, nor anyone else of Alya’s guests knew about the notebook under her pillow- and he, Igor, knew.

The rain began falling again.

Igor returned to his room with paper plane designs. A big hand-drawn map of the yard on his table showed the primary and the secondary air streams, where they collided, where and under which angle they were being deflected by the walls- all the results of his long observations, his experiments with paper balls and feathers. Even Igor’s mother had noticed that his pillow became thinner lately.

He tied thin ropes to the tails of his last plane models, so he could pull them back up after the launch. He didn’t want to lose them. Too much was invested into them- too much effort, thought, feathers, glue, pieces of wood, cigarette paper, cardboard, thread, rubber bands, pieces of wire, paint.

The western wind dragged into the yard handfuls of red and yellow tree leaves. There were no trees inside the yard. Igor was grateful to the wind for the lively bright spots that stuck to the wet asphalt.

“Alya” he wrote on the strangely shaped wings.

The girl stood by the window. The cactus had long been removed from the balcony. A tablecloth was hanging on the laundry ropes- the same tablecloth that was on the table during Alya’s birthday party. The girl looked straight at Igor- but couldn’t see him.

And Igor looked down. Because of the wind, all the garbage in the yard tended to accumulate at the north-eastern corner, all the planes that failed the flight test also usually ended up there.

A transparent bubble of a nylon sack suddenly rose from the garbage heap. Filled by the wind, it circled over the asphalt- and suddenly began gaining altitude- higher, higher, higher… It shifted sideways, jumped from one air stream onto another, and continued moving up, and up, and up. Soon, it was already above the house roof, under the clouds, and still going up…so high that no bird could probably fly as high as this worthless, thrown away piece of garbage managed to rise...

Igor’s fingers clenched.

For a second, it seemed to him that he finally understood…it seemed to him that…no. He understood nothing. He KNEW. He always knew.

The wheelchair refused to move. With a cry of pain, he thrust it over the high threshold and rushed to his desk.

He chose a plane…no, not this one…the one he had made the other day, a complex four-winged design…

His memory was still holding on to the nylon sack’s dance, replaying it over and over again.

Please God, make it so the wind wouldn't change just yet... Please God, make it so Alya wouldn't leave the balcony…

He took scissors and quickly cut down all four wings, altering their shape. Then he grabbed a marker and, feeling his heart skipping a beat, wrote "Alya" on the plane's tail.

The wheelchair rolled heavily out to the balcony. The wind thrusted its way through the open door, invading the flat. He heard his mother shouting “Don’t you dare go out now!"…

The wind still blew steadily and in its full force- and Alya still stood at the balcony door, looking up, at the disappearing nylon sack…

The plane was launched into air- and sunk deep down. Clinging to the rusty railings, Igor watched it fall. The plane went into a spin, like a real jet descends rapidly towards the asphalt…
…Stabilized.
…Carried by a small whirlwind, it rose up…
…Circled over the empty yard, from wall to wall, from balcony to balcony…
…Changed air streams…
…Rose higher and higher…
…Froze for a moment in front of Alya’s face…
…And rested in her stretched out hands.

“Get back into your room, Alya!” her mother shouted from the kitchen. “Don’t stand on the balcony, you’ll catch a cold!”

The wet tablecloth was shaking in the wind. The girl stared at the little paper plane in her hands then at the wall of the house in front of her. Balconies, balconies…Dozens of balconies, some closed by steel and glass, some open, covered by the yellow-red vines.

Right in front of her, one floor higher, an ancient, rusty, broken wheelchair stood on an empty balcony of the flat where, as she was told by the neighbors, nobody lived for at least ten years…

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