The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (12 page)

'Why do you kiss the icons?'

Lukeria did not look at Tanya, but merely climbed down from the wooden chair as steadily as she had climbed onto it, as if she'd known all along that Tanya had been observing her. 'The kiss is a reminder to hold heaven on the lips,' Lukeria said evenly.

Tanya helped Lukeria scoot the chair back to its proper place. 'Do they kiss back?' Tanya asked.

Lukeria straightened, looked as if she'd been slapped across the face. From that day on, if heaven were at her grandmother's lips, then pure hell was on her tongue. If ever Tanya ventured a question, Lukeria turned surly and short. About her work on the Sverdlovsk line, Lukeria would say very little. Inside that steamer trunk was a wooden box her grandmother had shown
her once—only once—and inside the wooden box—an Honourable Railway Worker Medal. It took her forty years to earn this medal and was not an easy feat for her, a small woman, and one of the only women on the tracks working among men.

'Did you sell tickets?' Tanya asked.

'No.'

'Inspect travel documents?' This question produced a dark look like none she'd ever seen before on her grandmother's face.

'I pulled the traction string that was connected to the switch at the box. Some trains were sent south, some east beyond the Urals. And then some were diverted to the spur that ran to Kutchina.'

Kutchina was a word in Perm like no other. If the Devil had a nickname it was Kutchina. If there was a hell outside of hell, it was Kutchina. But being the child that Tanya was, in the presence of something horrible and secret, she had to ask—wanted to know—what was in those wagons that barrelled over the tracks toward Kutchina?

'Freight.'

'Cows?'

'Not cows.'

'Pigs?'

'Not pigs. People.'

'What kind of people?'

'People like you wouldn't believe. Dissidents. People who talk. Otherwise-minded people. Poets.'

Could this be the answer to the riddle, the answer to the
real question Tanya had wanted to ask: Where was her mother? Where had Marina gone? Had she, too, taken a fatal train ride? Tanya wasn't completely a child anymore, she had started to bleed down below and felt it was time her grandmother told her the things girls like her needed to know.

Lukeria merely nodded to the windows, to the clouds. 'She went to a better place,' she said in a voice as flat and formidable as the steppe in February, as the back of her iron skillet from Magnitogorsk.

Even then, Tanya knew that a better place was anywhere but here. Australia. Canada. Finland. Or maybe the Black Sea—Sochi—where they sold lemon ices. As an Honourable Railway Worker, Tanya's grandmother, Tanya figured, would know all these things. Of course Tanya asked.

'Don't ask the cuckoo in the tree foolish questions,' Lukeria replied, and it was then that Tanya understood her mother's departure had been swift and it had been Tanya's fault. Tanya had been unwanted and there was nothing she could ever do to change that fact. She felt a sadness that no words in the world could name. Yoked with that sadness was the hard and sudden understanding that if she could not be lovable, then she must try to be likeable. And if not likeable, she must at all costs find ways to be useful, malleable, agreeable. If her grandmother loved an invisible God, then Tanya would too. If her grandmother prayed on her knees in the morning, Tanya would pray too. She would learn the protocols and the rituals and recite the prayers, quietly, of course. The stories about the saints and
their miraculous visions in the forests, all these things she would treasure in her heart, because these were the grand stories of faith, and her grandmother valued them. And faith, her grandmother said, was cloud, water and air, acted upon by the unseen hand of God. Faith was not about knowing where the path led, but believing the path led somewhere. And when her grandmother talked like that, in a whisper—always a whisper—her words were to Tanya the greatest gift. Her words were beautiful and wise because Tanya knew that they had first come from an old woman, maybe even the great-grandmother Tanya had never met, but who had, nevertheless, whispered them to Lukeria—but only after it had once been whispered to that old woman, and so on and so on. This was how the faithful find God—in repetition of sound and gesture over time. That was tradition and tradition was not some silly ritual or toneless chant, but one woman after another, a mother singing into the ear of her daughter the words and the melody of an ancient unbroken song, which, Tanya was learning, almost always sounded like suffering.

On this morning, Tanya stood at the threshold dividing kitchen from living room. Lukeria had already kissed the icons, something Tanya was still not permitted to do, and now she was reading aloud from one of the many letters she kept locked in the steamer trunk.

Though it is cold and the work is hard winter will not last forever.

This was just one of the many letters Lukeria found on the tracks, tossed from the wagons. Some of the letters even had photos inside, prayer cards, locks of hair. Perhaps they were written by prisoners in transit, men and women desperate to discard anything that might be used against them or their families.

Slava has taken ill with a vapour. I have given him my blanket.

Or likely as not, they were simply letters in excess, the letters prisoners had written beyond their twice-a-year allowance. Confiscated by the guards, these missives were stowed in the wagons to be pulped and recycled, and somehow they'd found their way into her grandmother's trunk.

But do not worry. Some things never change. The stars shine whether we see them or not.

Pure poetry, some of these letters. This one anyway. The Yellow Letter, Tanya dubbed it. Folded and refolded so many times it was the suggestion of paper; bends and seams rather than actual wood fibres held it together.

I will always love you.

The kettle screamed. The spell broken, Lukeria stopped
reading, carefully refolded the letter in half and tucked it between her blue bathrobe and the side of the chair.

They had lived together for so long they were like an old married couple, only noticing the other when, like a stitch dropped, a line forgotten, something in the pattern of their routine went askew. This is the only way Tanya could explain why her grandmother would make herself so painfully transparent, reading aloud a love letter that was not written to her, but that she read and reread, claiming it as her own.

Tanya carried the tea to where Lukeria sat in contemplation before the weak light resolving itself to day. A leaden hulking cloud massif, the kind that carries snow, obscured the horizon. Tanya sank into the chair opposite Lukeria and opened her cloud notebook. If she superimposed that horizontal scoring of her grandmother's forehead and the deep crow's feet at the corners of her eyes over her own doughy half-finished face she could translate cloud to image, translate water to woman, and bring her mother back, as long as they two, grandmother and granddaughter, sat at the window.

Today the grey is a hueless hue hovering between light and dark. I want to know you by your eyes, your lashes, your hands, your teeth. Instead you are light dampened by windows, colour with the noise turned low.

'When I was your age,' Lukeria paused to light a cheap Bulgarian cigarette, 'I was prettier than you are now.'

Tanya closed her notebook and made noises of quiet assent in the back of her throat. Like her morning prayers, Lukeria'a cutting remarks were simply another part of her daily routine that she had to complete in order to iron the wrinkles out of the evening. You cannot bless without cursing, her grandmother sincerely believed, and most days, ignoring her grandmother was easy enough to do: as long as the tea and cigarettes held out, her mouth was otherwise occupied. But in that twenty-second lapse, the time it took to stub out a cigarette and light a new one, her tongue moved unhindered.

'Men followed me everywhere I went. But you, Tanyechka! I think all that university knowledge has ruined your chances. You've got no waistline whatsoever. It's as if everything you learned at school went straight to your hips and thighs. I hope you are trying to do something about that. Twenty years old already and you haven't got a man on the horizon. You haven't got a single plan.' Lukeria jabbed her cigarette at Tanya, then collapsed against the chair, exhausted by her own words.

'I have plans.' Tanya calibrated her voice so as not to betray her faltering self-confidence, her very palpable understanding of her many flaws, and the crushing statistical unlikelihood that her dreams would ever materialize.

'What plans?'

Tanya tugged on the hem of her skirt. 'Aeroflot is hiring.'

'Don't get your hopes up. You're lucky to have work at such a fine museum. It took two pairs of galoshes and my entire secret stash of jellied fruit slab to arrange it. Besides, you have unfortunate dentition. I don't say this to be cruel, only to state the obvious as a nudge to the reality of your situation.'

Like an old combine that moves in one direction and at one speed, her grandmother's commentary faithfully ploughed over the same territory, grinding over familiar furrows.

Lukeria fumbled with another cigarette.

Tanya nudged a small box of matches closer to Lukeria's elbow. As she did, her hand jogged the teacup and the contents spilled onto the Bible.

'Shit!' Tanya jumped and dabbed at the mess with the dishcloth she kept handy for such catastrophes. But already the onion-skin pages of the Bible had swelled like a sponge.

Lukeria narrowed her nickel-coloured eyes, calculating the cost of the loss of tea. 'Shouldn't you be at work?'

Tanya stood, retrieved her notebook, her sweater. Her scarf.

'Another thing. Talk to Chumak.'

Tanya edged towards the door. In her grandmother's rattle-dry voice she could hear the crack and spit of a smouldering fire rekindled.

'Remind him that I knew his mother when she let that dirty pepper-eating Hungarian take her for long walks by the river. Tell him I know things. Tell him you need money for my medicine—the expensive one for my lungs.'

Tanya knotted her scarf around her neck—tight—and pulled the door closed.

Love. That's what Tanya was hearing. Behind the quick fury there had to be love. Fire consumes what it loves. That was another orthodox lesson. What Lukeria was doing was for her own good because had Lukeria poured her love unchecked on Tanya, she might have grown bloated and lazy from it. And her still-hungry but overfed heart would split from the excess, and on it would go, Tanya as a mother overindulging her own child. To what end? One little poke in life, one disappointment—major or minor—and her daughter would be done for, unable to cope with heartbreak. Thank heavens that she, now outwardly stout, inwardly anorexic, was so well acclimatized for a life without love. Yes, Tanya decided as she shoved three sticks of chewing gum into her mouth and turned for the bus stand, she'd been so well schooled in the thrifty economy of the heart, she could go months and even years without a single drop of genuine affection.

On the number 77, Tanya worked the gum between her molars. It was a form of exercise, this gum chewing. And she needed it, exercise, in any form. In twenty minutes she'd have to step on the scales for Head Recruiter Aitmotova. The very thought provoked spastic jaw pumping. In front of her a young mother held a baby. The young woman bent her head to her baby, nuzzling the fuzz of the child's hair, her mouth so close to the child's, it looked as if they were breathing each other's warm air. It was so beautiful, so foreign to Tanya that she could
not stop staring. 'Stop!' she wanted to warn that mother. Certainly Lukeria would have. Such affection was precisely the kind of waste that infuriated Lukeria, who believed that mothers cuddling and cooing, showering kisses on the heads of newborns, who'd never know the difference, were spending their love carelessly and would too soon run out. Because love, and Tanya knew this for a certain fact, was not as limitless as people in books and movies liked to suggest. Love was like food, like money. It was so rare, so precious, that it had to be accounted for absolutely. This she learned from Lukeria, who knew how to stretch a single chicken through an entire winter, who had spent a lifetime putting up any wayward piece of fruit or vegetable into glass jars that sat on a shelf as a visual reminder of the importance of thrift, the importance of preserving what was authentic and true for a day when it was needed. And as beautiful as this mother and child were, as pure and spontaneous as the woman's love was, Tanya was glad her grandmother wasn't there to see it.

Outside the recruiting office, Tanya spat the wad of gum into a dirty drift of snow, ducked under the door's low overhang, and leaned heavily into the door.

'Sit.' Head Administrator Aitmotova pointed to a tiny three-legged stool positioned beside an oversize scale. 'How many languages do you speak?' She assumed a look of grave interest in Tanya.

'Three, plus I know at least half a dozen universal gestures of varying degrees of vulgarity.'

Head Recruiter Aitmotova scribbled on her clipboard and smiled. 'That's wonderful. Now, drop your coat and step onto the scales, please.'

Tanya held her breath and lifted her arms, as if that might prevent the needle's steady sweeping march across the number dial. Head Recruiter Aitmotova noted the measurement with a click of her tongue and a sigh. 'Big thighs and a big butt aren't big assets with Aeroflot. If you could just lose two stone and about five centimetres off each thigh, your chances would increase dramatically,' she said, offering Tanya several more packs of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. 'It's really quite simple,' she smiled. 'Just don't eat so much. Try following the zero-one-zero plan.'

Tanya slid out of the recruiting office and trudged towards the museum. Eating nothing for breakfast or dinner and relying on a single midday meal was a fine idea, as fine a method of weight loss as any. But not every girl has the willpower to simply stop eating for days on end like Zoya had. And Tanya had never gone in for hawking into toilets. What a waste of good food!