Red (Moscow, 1980)

They walk, they talk, they breathe, they hurt, they are in so many ways almost human.

They remain the same, in a way that humans cannot, will not. And they change in ways that humans will never be able to do.

Theoretically, humans are capable of forgiveness, but the act, the word, the shift in their existence, will always remain an immovable object around which their reality bends. The rock that the sea must flow around.

To a country, which may exist for two, three, four hundred (thousand) years, grief is a soluble thing. The rock that seems so insurmountable becomes as sand and water once more. It must. There is no other way. (It's too late for any other way)(If there is no solution, there is no choice, and nothing but acceptance can follow)(acceptance or madness, and the breaking of a Country is something horrendous and beautiful and full of blood and stone and pain and snow and metal and mud and and and)

And Yao, the eldest of them all, Yao who hides grim purpose behind the surface, Yao who is relentlessly, cruelly practical, does not smile over his teacup as he tells Ivan this. And Ivan is not ashamed when he sees how Yao has broken and twisted and changed.

Reach for my yellow star. Can you see the steel across the mountains? You, China, you, land of history and ancient secrets… this star is going to shine so bright… you're going to burn…

(China is a phoenix wrapped in redness wrapped in metal wrapped in silk wrapped in the tarnished pale plastic of a thousand dying factories… It's burned its nest and now only the future wakes at its touch)

And a hundred things are not said. (But really, they are. Not everything needs words)

(I did not give this star to you. You took it, and now that it fades and withers, like tissue cranes punched through by the heat of the sun, did you really want it?)

They say nothing (everything).

Yao, with silent delicacy, pushes a teacup across the polished table. Ivan takes it in hands blistered and cracked by winter, and turns it round and round. The fractured red lines of the phoenix shine against the pale porcelain between bruised fingers.

Russia smiles.