The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (17 page)

Olga bobbed her head meekly as Chief Editor Kaminsky backed out of the office and into the corridor. 'Oh, the tyranny of rock-solid certainties,' he mumbled. 'Oh, help.'

With a trembling hand Arkady set another cup of tea at her elbow. 'I think that went over really well,' Arkady whispered. Together they sat in silence watching the clock. Four fifty-nine. They studied the slow sweep of the second hand and waited for the minute hand to move. Five times the second hand swept the face of the clock before the minute hand finally moved.

Arkady jumped from his seat and bowed gallantly. 'I absolutely applaud and salute your bravery. You are a real woman, Olga Semyonovna. A gem in the rough. A diamond amongst the turds.' Arkady reached for her hand and kissed it.

Only then did Olga notice that her wedding ring had been lost in the tubes.

***

Outside, the smell of old snow and diesel fumes settled in her mouth. Every swallow brought the taste of rusty coins and grit. It was sad to think what her life had become: churning out sludge, trying in vain to make bad news more palatable. It was hard to keep at it without succumbing to complete self-loathing. Two things sustained her: Olga's fragile hope that there was a heaven for translated words. That somewhere every edited thought and sentiment, every bit of raw truth, was catalogued and preserved, kept safe from the meddling hands of humans. And the second thing: her Yuri.

Miraculously he'd been returned to her from Grozny, unharmed, catapulted clear from the only tank in the column that did not explode. How lucky she was—she did not have to travel hundreds of miles to the train station in Mozdok, where the bodies of Russian soldiers were packed in open railway carriages. But her relief was surprisingly short-lived. What with all these reports coming in over the teletype, who knew what would happen to her boy now? If God would just smile
in her direction. If she could be a little more clever, could work a little harder, longer, she might think of a way to save her Yuri, for it was becoming clearer to her each day that Yuri was incapable of saving himself. He would always need a mother, always a woman to look after him, a mother and a wife. If she were very lucky, Yuri would marry a woman who would be both.

In the square a gathering of Red-Browns, hardliners and reactionary communists, young unemployed punks, and old men waved paper flags. Just the type who'd vote for a man like Zhirinovsky, a Jew-hating loudmouth who couldn't wait to orchestrate another world war.

A man wearing a leather jacket with the slogan of a rock band on the back side held up a bullhorn. 'And who will clean up the cities and countryside? Who will settle once and for all the question of foreigners?'

'Zhirinovsky!' the old men and the young men cried.

'And who will erect giant fans and blow all the toxic fumes and pollution from our great country into the pathetic Baltic states?'

'Zhirinovsky!'

Olga ducked her head and concentrated on her feet. Some days the snow crunching beneath her boots and the blast of cold air were the only things that made any sense to her. She passed beneath the stone archway and entered the courtyard. Yuri and Vitek stood next to the heap and sawed at a fish with a butter knife.

'What's the news?' Vitek pointed his nose in her direction.

Olga snorted. 'More than you can bear.' She trained her eyes on the snow and kept charging for the open stairwell, and pretended she could not hear the nonsense spewing out of Vitek's mouth.

'Because, you see, Yuri, you are making no money at the museum. But the Russian army, they pay brilliantly for people like you. Even a child can do the sums.'

'I don't know.' Yuri's voice followed her up the stairs.

'Listen, boy-o. I can't do all the thinking around here. I am whacked as it is, bottling air and selling it as medicinal oxygen. Just the other day I had to beat up an old man who forgot to pay me rent for the privilege of begging on our street. I mean, how much can one person do?'

Olga kicked off her boots and let herself into the apartment. She smelled Zoya before she saw her, the girl's laundry boiled and bubbled in a pot on the stove. And then her voice, plaintive and sharp.

'All the best people have toaster ovens these days,' Zoya said, the trumpet of the phone held tight to her ear.

Olga let her keys fall to the kitchen table with a clatter, but it was no use. Once Zoya got onto the subject of Things She Wanted, it was nearly impossible to derail her. Aiding and abetting the girl's folly was a western magazine, glossy and slick with advertisements for things they could never afford. Where Zoya got the money for the magazine, Olga could not even fathom, though she suspected the Korean-owned
kiosk at the end of the street might be to blame for the magazine.

'You know,' Zoya dropped her voice to a mumble. 'If I were to get pregnant, then we'd qualify for a better apartment. Maybe even one with a balcony. What a position of status we would occupy then. And, of course, I would be so much happier if I could hang my laundry outside with a view of more sophisticated trash.'

The smell of the kitchen, the sounds issuing from Zoya's mouth, it was all too much for Olga to bear. She spun on her heels and headed for the stairs, where it was a short climb up the metal ladder that opened onto the roof. The smell might not be much better out of doors than in, but at least she could have the illusion of privacy.

She lit a cigarette. She pulled hard and exhaled a long jet of smoke. By the end of the day, thinking of her responsibilities to the dead wore her out. And more absurdity: she actually envied the women who'd lost their husbands in the war and had the red star on a cupboard shelf to prove it. Better to know what happened than to be stranded amid the rigours of the imagination. Because as long as Olga didn't have Zvi's body, as long as his name didn't appear on any list, she both hoped and despaired. And because hope is stupid and stubborn, Olga couldn't help but conjure him out of the nighttime darkness in the apartment; and by day her eyes couldn't help but parse him from a city of eyebrows, ears and noses.

She blew another cloud of smoke.

'I beg your pardon most sincerely,' a man's voice called from behind the heating stack.

Olga dropped her cigarette. 'Zvi?'

The man coughed politely. 'Not quite.' The man stepped forward and Olga could see that it was not a man, but Mircha. The lights of the TV tower flickered behind his body, which had shape but no substance. She knew she should have found the fact that Mircha was there on the rooftop surprising, or at the very least strange, but strangely, she did not. Nothing—not the purely disastrous, nor the monstrous, nor evidence of the supernatural seemed to move her any more. She might have included the miraculous on this list but it had been such a long time since God had sent a true miracle that she was no longer sure she'd recognize one if she saw it. Certainly what she observed winking at her now was no miracle.

Olga sniffed. 'You have acquired a strange odour.'

Mircha cupped a hand to his ear. 'What's that?'

'You stink.'

Mircha hiked his nose into the air and breathed mightily.

'Why don't you settle down now and go away quietly? We gave you a good wake.'

'I can't go away. These thoughts ... these ideas ... they torment me.'

'What thoughts? What ideas?'

Mircha withdrew a faded piece of paper from his pocket, pinched a corner and slowly whipped it open with a flourish as a maître d' presented a fine linen napkin, though Olga could
see twilight through the creases. 'I am seeing things so much more clearly now that I'm dead. The mysteries—why we suffer, what use sorrow is and the causes of hatred—I see, now that I am dead, how each of us should live this life. You, dear lady, for instance. You are only living half a life.'

'What do you mean?'

'You jump at every squawk from a telephone, thinking it could be your husband. Every scratch at a windowpane, rattle at a door, you tell yourself it could be him. What if your story went like this.' Mircha paused and cleared his throat:

'Once there was and was not a woman who fell in love with words. Each day she gathered eggs from her hens and each egg was another word. But the word had no meaning until it was broken and the contents consumed. The shiny egg, brown and mottled, beautiful in the way things found only in nature are beautiful, of course would be destroyed. The woman buried the eggs in the mud and seven years later.'

'Stop!' Olga held her hands up. 'Please tell me this is not why you are hanging around licking light bulbs. Please tell me there's some better reason why you are here.'

Mircha consulted his notes. 'Your problem is that you lack the courage to see and tell the truth. Your husband is dead—you and I both know it. You are hiding behind your imagination and that flimsy thing people call hope.'

Olga took a breath, held it. 'I see now, Mr Aliyev, why you had such trouble getting up the requisite threesome for a round of drinking. You are frank to a fault.'

Mircha smiled. 'You should try it sometime. They say truth sets people free.'

'It also got them shot or sent by rail to the east. If I'm lucky, and the boss is in a good mood, I'll only lose my job.'

Mircha folded his notes and handed them to Olga. 'Consider this friendly advice, a gift, even. From me to you.' Mircha smiled then retreated into the darkness.

Because on Mondays the museum was officially closed, on Sunday afternoons, before locking up, in anticipation of the coming day, Daniilov the caretaker always hung a sign on the entrance:
GO AWAY, YOU MORONS. IT'S MONDAY!
But every third Monday of the month was designated as a museum work day. This was a purely volunteer venture, which meant for Tanya that her participation was absolutely mandatory. All because she had once taken an art survey course and another in general chemistry and had once read, though never claimed to understand, a translation of Newton's
Opticks.
And because on Mondays the museum was closed, Ludmilla had no reason whatsoever to sit behind the glass ticket office and Zoya and Yuri no reason whatsoever to spew their well-worn exhibit scripts to museum goers. Certainly they were not required to work. 'They have no artistic vision. Not like you do, dear,' Head Administrator Chumak said when she asked why she should have to come in. Then he chuckled as if hers was the most ridiculous question and now she should feel as if his compliment was the greatest of rewards. Almost as great as having the upper floors of the museum to herself.

And here's the strange thing: it was. The resentment she might have felt, would have felt if she were any other girl, vanished the moment she unlocked the back door. Sublimated in a blink at the possibility of the entire museum being a blank canvas, waiting to speak in a language of colour only she could unlock.

Tanya stood before the door, basking in Daniilov's warm welcome. She wiggled the key in the ward of the lock, turned, turned, turned until the tumblers rolled once, twice, three times, and the door yielded with a soft click. She withdrew her key and hurried to the hat/coat check, her footsteps on the dark floor heavy slaps, then echoing as duller softer ones. Hat/coat check was where she kept her artistic supplies, and no, she was not just talking about the dream notebook now. Real supplies. Hidden in a box tucked in a rack. Tanya retrieved the box. She stopped briefly at Chumak's office, just long enough to slide the application form under his door, and then up, up, up the steps she climbed.

On the mezzanine Daniilov dragged the mop listlessly behind him. He had a hangover, always on work days he brought with him a hangover, and the only remedy was to nurse it with cheap apple brandy or vodka, bottles of which stood in readiness beneath a poorly constructed bust of Peter the Great.

'Good morning,' Tanya called.

Daniilov stopped, bent his wiry body in half and clutched his forehead. 'Is it? Is it?' he moaned bitterly.

Tanya opened her supply box and slowly withdrew a bottle of Marsh Lilac and a small tin of boot blacking. Consumed together they could give a man a spectacular intoxication. 'I need to borrow your shovel.'

'What for?'

Artistic purposes.'

Daniilov eyed the loud first-floor exhibits. 'Burying it, I hope.' He grabbed the perfume, uncapped it, took a swig, and looked at the liquid with fond appreciation. 'The shovel's in the broom closet. Bring it back clean.'

When Tanya had gained the landing to the third and final floor, she set the box in the middle of the room and waited for her breath to return. This was the first step in the creation of art: contemplation. Tanya took a deep breath and held it. All along the walls hung the icons that spelled the story of orthodoxy through the ages. When she looked at the faces of the saints, sombre beneath their weighty halos fitted like tight hoods over their heads, she could see their commitment to calm. For some reason, knowing that others could be calm, even if they were just pictures painted on wood or beaten out of iron, helped her own unsteady heart to settle.

Tanya studied the icon Mother of God, touched Mary's halo, ran her finger lightly over her throbbing heart rimmed in gold. Exposure to the air, the lightest of water, had rusted Mary's heart, but in terms of colour, gold (or in this case, chocolate foil) was a good choice as it advanced on the eye and suggested warmth. This is what she always said to tour groups.
Had
said. What she didn't say: If it were true what her grandmother taught her, that God revealed himself through the line and colour of these icons, then it was through Mary's dark eyes and dark heart that Tanya thought she could see something of an invisible God. Mary gazed at her child and her child had his gaze trained on her.

It was as if Mary knew this child would break her heart, but her eyes said, 'Go ahead, break it a million times anyway,' because she couldn't imagine her heart designed for any other purpose. Now that was love—allowing your heart to be bruised and broken for the sake of your child. It was not the tight-fisted love a woman gives when she senses her situation may be far more impermanent than she'd like, in this way sparing her own heart. Not, say, the frugal love that her grandmother favoured.