The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (13 page)

Tanya stood outside the employee entrance to the museum and leaned against a piece of metal twisted in a huge Russian 'R'. It had been donated to the museum in commemoration of the possible resurrection of the Russian rouble. It was modern art. That meant it was OK for Tanya to push her gum into hard rivets along the metal undersides and kick her heels against it to knock the ice loose from her boots.

She pushed through the glass door and waved her badge at
Ludmilla. Tanya's first stop, always, was the basement-floor exhibit of curiosities. Not the tiny storage room where they kept the rocks meant to be representative of the kinds of geological samples one could actually find underneath Perm, but the larger exhibit room with the dark green walls and the torches Tanya had strategically placed to achieve optimal atmospheric effect. This was where they kept the pseudo-Kuntskamera collection, their most popular exhibit with museum-goers. The exhibit consisted of a collection of spontaneously aborted neonates that Peter the Great had obtained from a Dutch doctor. All of the foetuses possessed alarming defects: a third arm, missing legs, no eyes. She and Yuri and Ludmilla had studied the photos of the real exhibit that sat in the Kuntskamera building somewhere in St Petersburg. Then they had lovingly fashioned the babies out of foam, submerged them in jars of orange-flavoured Fanta and artfully draped several of Lukeria's doilies and scarves around the jars—all of which had also been co-opted for the cause. All this in a bid to attract more visitors to the museum.

And it worked. People did come to see the exhibit, out of moribund curiosity, out of boredom, Tanya couldn't say. She herself, for a reason that defied human logic, took comfort looking at them in their glass jars. If she had not known they were meant to be human, she might have considered them beautiful for their excesses and lacks. Especially the boy who had no arms or legs. Having only a head and torso, he was unfinished, as if a seamstress had run out of stuffing and
stitched shut his tapered torso. But the real boy, whose picture she'd memorized, had developed enough to grow a short tuft of red hair on his head and wore the sweetest smile on his face. Did his mother love him any less because he was monstrously malformed? Tanya wondered. Or how about the twins, turned toward each other, clasping one another with arms and legs, sharing the same heart and head? Sharing every secret and every thought. Possessing enough between them, what need did they have for this world that would only tear them apart? And yet, did their mother grieve their passing any less? Would not these women have cradled them to the breast and called them perfect? Tanya pressed her fingers to the glass. She knew this much: she would have called them perfect because they'd have been hers.

And if we, each, of us still children in our own ways, you missing your father and me having never known a mother, were to have a child it would be whole. Between us, we would be gloriously whole, perfectly completed, giving this child the things we never had or knew. You would teach him to fish and I would explain to her the theology of love unbounded. You could arrange the scales of the trout in intricate patterns that mirror the constellations and I would teach her the importance of sorting the greens when making sorrel soup.

Her pencil flying across the page, Tanya almost didn't hear gathering in the stairwell the trademark sounds of Head Administrator Chumak working himself up the steps:
thump-slide, thump—slide, thump—slide.
First his head appeared, brilliant beetroot red, then his thick torso, his legs, and at last, that leaden foot.

'Oh, Tanya! There you are!' Head Administrator Chumak reached the top of the landing. His face burned through the shades of magenta and then as it cooled through the pinks, his freckles slowly reasserted themselves.

'How are you doing with that application form?'

Tanya bit her lip. 'Some of the questions are giving me a little trouble. The one about handshakes, for instance.'

A smile blazed across Chumak's face. 'I love a good handshake, don't you?'

'That's just it. I don't know what a handshake is meant to signify.'

Silence. As thick as calf's liver.

'A handshake signals firm intention, goodwill, and trustworthiness in commercial transactions.'

'Oh.' Tanya rolled her gaze to the ceiling. 'Then I'd say the handshake is most definitely on the wane.'

'Don't write that. An application is an occasion for optimism at all costs,' Chumak said through that blazing smile, but his eyes were steely like flint. 'Any other, er, problems?'

An affectionate pass of her hands over her notebook, a hard swallow. Optimism.

Tanya patted her notebook affectionately and swallowed hard, thinking
optimism.
'No. Almost finished.'

'Wonderful! Because there is so much at stake, for all of us.' Head Administrator Chumak eyed Tanya's notebook. 'And that's why I believe in you, Tatiana Nikolaevna Bobkov. I believe because you are a little like me—a person of great substance, placed under great pressure, and we all know what that produces!' Another savage grin galloped across Head Administrator Chumak's face.

'Ulcers?' Tanya ventured.

'Ha,' Head Administrator Chumak laughed—a single combustive bark. From his file, he withdrew a fax, a single thin sheet of paper that curled in the air, and began reading.

A delegation of the Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification will visit the museum that submits the best application and demonstrates the greatest need and greatest potential for development. Also the benefactors wish to observe the museum workers in their natural environment.

Tanya's stomach seized. 'You don't mean...?'

Head Administrator Chumak nodded gravely. 'Precisely. If they come, then they will want to spend a night with you and Zoya and Yuri—in your apartments.'

'But, sir. Our apartments are in no condition to be seen and certainly in no condition to live in.'

Head Director Chumak grimaced. 'Oh, I know. I faxed them most emphatically, but these people are quite determined. They wish to.' Head Administrator Chumak squinted fiercely at the fax: '"Experience first hand how living as you do, amidst the intersection of art and life, defines your artistic aesthetic."' Head Director Chumak winced. Apparently this is quite important in their selection process. So it will be up to you to make the apartments habitable.'

Head Administrator Chumak stretched his lips into another flinty smile, then turned and began his long thump and slide back down the stairs.

***

At the far end of the museum café Zoya and Yuri sat behind a small metal table. To get there Tanya had to skirt around a series of tables pushed together into a long line. A local chess club was practising for a simultaneous chess tournament. Five men brooded over five different chessboards while the other five men roamed from board to board. With each move of a chess piece, Tanya could hear their excited misery and terrible human longings amplified by the strange acoustics of the café: too old for the army, too young to retire, too beat up by life to find a job and keep it, too broke for a bottle.

Zoya blew clouds of cigarette smoke above Yuri's head. Yuri, a metronome out of kilter, tipped his head first to one side, then the other. His colour was off, more sallow than usual.
When Yuri saw Tanya, he hopped up and pulled out a chair for her.

'Are you all right?' Tanya asked Yuri.

Zoya laid a hand across Yuri's forehead, a gesture borrowed from Olga. 'It's just that shell shock again. You know—he hears things.'

'Oh. The ticking,' Tanya suggested.

Yuri's shoulders lifted and fell as he sighed. 'Last night I saw Mircha on the roof.'

'But he's dead,' Tanya said.

'But not buried,' Yuri said.

Tanya bit her lip. 'I wonder what he wants.' Everybody knew the dead only lingered out of spite. Or sometimes a deeply held nostalgia for the tangible provoked their return. A beloved handbag. A pair of shoes.

'We stood together on the roof and he pointed down to our frozen dvor and the scrap heap and to a place beside the heap and that's when I saw something I had never noticed before.'

'What?'

'A black open gouge in the ground. A big dark opening.'

'How did it get there?' Tanya whispered.

'I don't know. But he told me that beneath this world was another world. A bright country of lost things.' Yuri swayed slightly in his chair.

'We live on top of a marsh. Try to be relevant.' Zoya tugged at her hair, which was dyed a brassy brick red.

Yuri's gaze locked on Tanya's. 'You believe me, don't you?'

Tanya blinked. 'Oh, absolutely.'

'Good. Because I need you to ask Daniilov for his shovel.'

'What's wrong with Azade's?'

'No good, Mircha says. It's not big enough.'

'Oh, for God's sake.' Zoya stood and ordered a coffee.

She was, Tanya decided, an impatient woman, lacking in common compassion. She could not suffer any deviation in the conversation. Which was to say, if Zoya were present, all conversation revolved solely around herself. And she was plagued by the artistic temperament. She abhorred all art except her own, found recognition of any other artist or any other unattached female morally reprehensible. Working these days, as she did, in the museum, if Zoya weren't taking a cigarette break or with Yuri, she was extremely miserable. Her only recourse was to dye her hair as often as possible in the most brilliant hues possible. When her hair, brittle and frayed, could not possibly sustain another dye job, she turned her artistic sensibilities upon family and co-workers.

'What are those?' Zoya narrowed her eyes at the manila-colored file.

'Some applications forms.' Tanya rubbed the back of her neck where Zoya had recently burned her with peroxide solution.

'For?'

Aeroflot.' Tanya's voice was flat and heavy as a grounded Ilyushin.

'Oh.' Zoya's gaze settled on Tanya's hips, measuring her girth. 'Really?'

'Yes,' Tanya slid another piece of gum into her crowded mouth. 'I have to reduce and quite possibly I need to have my teeth looked at before I can begin flight-crew training. But at least I'm on the waiting list. And the recruiter said she'd definitely give me a call. Maybe.'

With another glance, Zoya inventoried Tanya's hair, her nails. 'Well, if you need professional advice regarding hair and make-up, let me know,' Zoya said in a voice meant to be a whisper, but the acoustics in the museum were so highly unique that Tanya knew everyone, even those closeted in the lavs, could hear it all perfectly well.

And this?' Yuri pointed to Head Administrator Chumak's file.

Tanya laid the folder reverently on the table. 'It's an assignment. For us.'

Zoya opened the folder and began reading. Zoya was smarter than she was, Tanya decided as she watched Zoya. She could read English without moving her lips and she read the entire application form, top to bottom, front to back in less than a minute. It was disgusting.

'Imagine,' Zoya shook her head, but her hair remained absolutely still. 'People in America with extra money and they want to give it away. Incredible. And all we have to do is answer these questions.'

'What do they want to know?' Yuri asked.

Zoya cleared her throat and began reading: '"Describe what 'positive work ethic' means to you. Do you like Americans, and
in particular, those of the western variety? Explain what you think team spirit means (please use a separate sheet of paper for your explanation)."'

'This is the strangest application form I've ever heard,' Yuri said.

'It's written by people who appreciate art; you wouldn't understand,' Zoya replied, a sour expression on her face.

'You're right,' Yuri said, his torso listing harder to the right. He turned to Tanya. 'What is "positive work ethic"? Do such words even belong together?'

Tanya shrugged. 'Inscrutable.'

Zoya smoked fiercely. 'Americans are mad for work. It's why they have so much extra money. It's why they feel so positively about working.'

'I would too, if I got paid for it.' Yuri scratched his nose absently. 'But that "team spirit" stuff makes me nervous.'

'Maybe it's like the old idea of the
mir,'
Tanya mused. 'You know—the close kinship of community. Like what we're doing here. We're answering hard questions. Together. This is very Russian. This is very team spirit. We could write this down.'

Zoya licked her lips. 'We could write this down. Team spirit is answering together these three questions: who's to blame, what's to be done about it, and how to divide it all up.' Zoya lit another cigarette. 'This is the very definition of Russian team spirit. And it's easy to answer the first two questions. The blame falls squarely on you, Tanya, if anything goes wrong.
After all, it's not for nothing that Chumak gave the assignment to you. What's to be done about it? Again, Tanya, your problem. How to divide the resources? Now that's where the team work gets interesting.'

Tanya could see in Yuri's eyes that he had his bags packed, was travelling to faraway places, fishing no doubt for the magical pike who would solve their every problem.

'Just imagine,' Zoya sighed happily, spooning sugar into her coffee, 'what we could do with this money.' Zoya looked under her eyelashes at Yuri. 'We could honeymoon like real Europeans. We could have a baby and bring it up
kulturny,
a miniature version of a better us.' She smiled obliquely.

Zoya's desire for a child was so naked and near that Tanya could feel the skin of her face and neck tighten. Always she had considered Zoya to be a little like those cheap bras the Korean woman sold at the end of their street. Fabricated out of whatever materials were on hand, they were transparent and the straps wandered no matter how tightly you cinched them. And this is what bothered her: how very similar she and Zoya really were in substance if not form, in ambition and desire. Tanya glanced at her dreambook. The only difference was that Tanya kept a little quieter about her wishes. That's all.

Zoya, noticing Tanya's brooding silence, turned a vague smile in her direction. And Tanya! You could get your teeth fixed or something.'