The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (18 page)

This was the difference between a woman like Mary and a woman like her grandmother. Mary's heart grew larger through sorrow, while constant heartache had shrivelled her grandmother's heart to the size and consistency of the stone of a cherry. And where her grandmother had once had some love for Tanya—she had to believe this—and from that love had tried to instill belief in an orthodox God, now all Lukeria had was the trappings of faith, the brittle traditions and sayings. And here was the strange thing, Tanya realized with a jolt. This faith had been a hair shirt woven by someone else, the smells of another body of belief running warp and weft. An awkward fit at first. But this shirt, having rubbed against
her skin for so long, now fastened itself tight to Tanya. So completely had the shirt become her skin that Tanya could not fathom not being orthodox, not loving an orthodox God in all her little orthodox ways. What may have been given to her as a substitute for love had become familiar. And now Lukeria's faith was Tanya's faith, for herself, a faith unfeigned that worked itself through the fingertips, here in this museum, amongst these icons.

Tanya carefully withdrew her supplies: a wooden bowl, a fork, fizzy water, a packet of flour, three eggs. Squares of cardboard with thin wood glued to them. Swatches of cheap fabric. All necessary items in the making of an icon, which, for Tanya, actually started every third Sunday of the month when she glued balsa to cardboard. OK, not balsa, but ice-cream sticks shaved to transparency. Yes, true, this meant on Sundays she ate, on account of her devotion to art, at least eight and sometimes ten ice creams, but that was suffering at the throne of the muse, and because it was the least she could do, Tanya did it.

The wooden sticks having been shaved and glued to cardboard, Tanya then draped scraps of cloth over the sticks. Over all of this she then slathered a gooey layer of primer: a mixture of glue and powdered crushed chalk. OK, not glue, but these eggs and chalk. Depending on whether or not the upper floor had heat that day, it might take two, maybe three hours for this binding mixture to dry. During this time Tanya tried to make herself useful, in accordance with her theology of love. After all, Daniilov, who so often climbed the cork and suffered the
dizzying effects afterwards, needed her help. For this reason Tanya cleaned the glass surrounds of the Kuntskamera exhibit and the paltry geology exhibit. She would have skipped the toilets, but nature urged and while she was there, her conscience pinched. Before she knew what she was doing, she was bent over, scrubbing with the brushes, spraying with the sanitizers, aware that if she didn't do it, quite possibly no one else would or could.

When three hours, maybe four, had passed, when the chalk and glue had dried, then Tanya could draw a design incised on the surface with a penknife. Once she had been so bold as to mention in passing to Father Vyacheslav that she might like to learn to paint icons for the church some day. He had assumed a look of umbrage and wagged a finger in the air. Such a stuffy gesture for a man who hadn't quite outgrown the pimples on his face. 'One does not paint icons,' he said. 'One writes an icon. It is an inspired expression affording a glimpse into heaven.' Never was she more aware of this than now, as the knife quavered in her hand. Tanya pulled a sharp breath through her nose, held it. She studied the face of the Mother of God. Then she exhaled, slow and steadily, and let the long lines of her serene sorrow guide her hand.

There. A woman had emerged before her. Then the child. They were not perfect, but they did not have to be. They only had to represent—however crudely—the human form, a receptacle for the God story that was a light so lovely the viewer would gaze in wonder, longing to learn the source of it.

From out of the box Tanya withdrew the rest of her supplies. This was what she came for, for this part of the story She spread the contents of the box on the floor and blew on her hands. If God is light, then God is colour. This much she had gathered from the Baptist Bible and what she remembered from that lone general chemistry course. Red she loved. In particular, Siberian red, a lead chromate that can be made to dance the scales of colour from lemon yellow to chrome orange to a disturbing blood hue. Also she was fond of oxide viridian, so beloved by Cézanne. So glad she was to see something like these colours in Zoya's arsenal of industrial make-up. And blue. Tanya sighed. One musn't ever rush blue. Certainly one musn't rush blue eye-shadow. Here's the thing: if the world were perfect, if she had money and the shops had supplies, she would buy tempera paints, powdered colours mixed with egg yolk and beer. But the economy being what it was, a mysterious game of constant disappointments, Tanya had learned how to make do with what was available: Zoya's nail varnishes and make-up, Lukeria's tea, shoe polish, chewing gum of assorted colours and flavours, and the occasional beer borrowed for the cause from Daniilov's private stash.

Tanya knelt on the floor and surveyed her landscape of materials. Egg, fork, bowl. She cracked the eggs into the bowl and whisked with vigour. What few people knew was how great a binder egg really was. Egg and beer together would glue the colour fast to the cloth strips. At least, this is what she had read in a pamphlet explaining how the old fathers made
icons out in the woods. But this pamphlet was written in Old Slavonic. Quite possibly she didn't understand the recipe fully. But this was the Russian way: substituting at all times one thing for another and calling it good, very good, or at least commendable.

Consider colour, for instance. Tanya mashed the chalk into separate piles. A vegetable broth bouillon cube smashed under her fist into one pile made an earthy brown. The turquoise green oval and boot blacking crushed in the next chalk pile made for a brilliant iridescent blue. With cosmetic brushes she mixed the egg mixtures and chalks, then applied the colours to her canvas. To the Mother of God she gave a brilliant blue veil, the symbol of humility, doleful brown eyes, and pale skin. Ditto for the child, except instead of a veil she left a blank space for a gold nimbus. This required gold foil. Fortunately, Tanya came prepared: inside her coat pocket she kept a candy bar for emergency artistic purposes. Tanya unwrapped the candy bar, carefully flattened the foil, and with the penknife cut a snood of gold to fit around the baby Jesus' head.

The last step, the very last thing, was to seal and fix the colour and the foil with a quick shot of hair spray, which would give the icon the trademark high shine glossy effect commonly associated with lacquered antiquities. Tanya propped the cardboard against a chair leg and sprayed in slow arcs. That done, she rested on her heels, the dreambook open across her lap, and munched the chocolate bar thoughtfully:

Gold was mustard gone fallow in the long fields. Gold was the falling notes of the bells from the church. Gold the sound carried over the river, troubling the water so that things long forgotten at the depths swilled up briefly only to be pulled back under. Gold the flecks in the Colour of your eyes. The distance of many miles. Where are you now? I ask. What are you remembering? You can tell me. What you say is like a whisper inside a church, it is between us, neVer to be repeated.' Bells you said. A call to prayer. In Grozny. Where there are good Russians and bad. And wolves and whistles. And ticking.

And then disaster. The blue of the veil weeping. The eye-shadow and beer and glue and flour mixture sliding, sliding. Falling. The flour, egg, beer, cosmetic mixture in all its bright bubbly glory was a blue-green smear and the Mother of God looked like an absinthe-stained impressionistic experiment. The Christ child resembled a sickly watermelon in her arms.

Tanya's eyes burned. Always this was what came of her attempts to think in hues and gradations of saturation; this was what happened when she tried to knuckle an understanding of her own life as it ticked from shade to hue. This was what came of her attempt to depict love in any form, even if it was from stuff as low and humble as wet coloured flour smeared on ice-cream sticks.

***

Tanya trudged home, pulling the shovel behind her over the snow. From across the Kama a high series of yodels rose in the darkness. People believed these were the sounds of wild dogs crying for their human mothers. The old story said that wild dogs could be tamed and turned back to their child selves again if only their mothers would cry out their human names. It was a good story that bore repeating. In fact she had heard it many times carried up through the heating pipes of their building, and with each recitation it became that much more true.

In front of the apartments the children lobbed ice chunks at each other and scaled the snow-covered heap with angry shrieks. With her broad frame Tanya knew she was an irresistible target. If that gaping hole existed as Yuri said it did, skirting the heap and taking cover inside the latrine was out of the question. Tanya forged toward the stairwell, keeping a close eye on the oldest girl, who gripped the neck of an empty bottle. The girl, Tanya noted, never blinked and Tanya found this unnerving. It suggested she understood far more than she should at that age. And then there were the things the children said and how they said them, each child picking up where the other left off:

'Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,' a tiny voice sang out from the stairwell.

'What?' Tanya peered behind the heap and saw the smallest
girl with the black hair crouched over a flattened bottle of kvass.

'Blessed are the meek,' called one of the twins—Good Boris - she was pretty sure of that, because Good Boris always bowed slightly from the waist, an altogether gentlemanly gesture for so young a child.

'For they will inherit the earth,' Bad Boris, standing in front of the heap, replied.

And then from the red-haired boy with the glasses, 'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.'

'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,' the oldest girl said, levelling her gaze on Tanya. Always the children talked like this. Tanya didn't know if it was the effect of the glue they liked to sniff, or a manifestation of a preternatural wisdom given sometimes to some children, a wisdom she herself had never possessed.

Tanya squinted at the girl. The thing was, Tanya wanted to like these kids. She wanted to love them as easily as she loved the Kuntskamera boy. But they were so unchildlike, sharing between them a hard feral quality that made them immune to normal human kindness. Even so, Tanya couldn't stop making her attempts. She saw that somebody needed to like them. Tanya understood that they all, and by 'they', she included herself in the count, had quite a lot in common, that they were like her, lost in this world that didn't care for them. Underneath the dirt, buried beneath the layers of soiled clothes, their
criminal extracurricular activities, they were children. Tanya walked to the stairwell and held out a piece of chewing gum for the little girl. 'What's your name, anyway?' Tanya asked. Before the girl could answer the other children swarmed around Tanya, pulling the gum from her fingers, pulling her keys and pencils and tissues from her purse.

'Is this all you got?' the oldest girl, Anna, asked.

'Don't you have something better?'

'Like food?' one twin asked.

'Or money?' the other asked, with a measure of indignation.

'What's this, then?' The boy with the glasses found the botched icon. He sniffed at the paint and danced the icon away beyond the heap. The other children kept their hands on Tanya, propelling her to the stairwell, pushing her up the steps. If there was a hole behind the heap, as Yuri had claimed, certainly they weren't about to let her see it, though she noted with dismay that they had made off with the shovel.

Inside their apartment Lukeria, in her best polyester dress, sat at the window as she always did this time of day. A copy of
Pamyat,
'Remembrance', a reactionary news magazine noted for its anti-cosmopolitan leanings, was spread over her lap and the bulb of the plunger held to her ear. Another ritual. Lukeria was remembering the good days when she sat in the station room for her twenty-minute breaks and sifted through the news brought from the borders: which crops they were railing in, which base metals were going out, which group of undesirables was being relocated. How diminished her horizons
now, collapsed to the four corners of a small window overlooking a dingy courtyard.

On the table Lukeria had laid out a dish called 'Fruit of the Chicken a la Varit'. Which was to say, boiled eggs. Again. Tanya let her keys drop on the table.

'Oh, it's you,' Lukeria said, leaning closer to the window. She frowned and straightened. 'That Yuri,' she circled a finger at her ear. 'I think he's coming off the rails—even now he's on the rooftop talking to himself. And then there's the way he mopes around, looking like he's just seen a ghost.'

As a matter of fact, he says he's seen Mircha.'

Lukeria shook her head. 'Well, he's always been a little fragile, mentally, I mean. Take, for example, that space helmet he wears. At least he's grown into it now. Remember when his head was a little smaller and the helmet was too heavy for him, dragging his head towards the ground?'

'I remember.' Tanya edged stoveward where the kettle waited on the ring.

'Good thing I put a stop to that. What would your life be, living with a man like that, an expert in the make and model of other people's bootlaces? You working like a dog so he can find his feet in this life. He's just the sort to sit on the stove all day, thinking to hunt up the magical pike that will solve every problem.' Lukeria wagged her head, a human metronome of complete disapproval.

'Jews. When life gets rough, they are the first to leave the country. I know, I watched it happen. They live with their bags
packed in readiness. Why don't they stay and suffer with the rest of us?'

'You keep your suitcases packed,' Tanya observed.

'That's different. Altogether different. But you wouldn't understand.'

No. She doesn't understand, not one bit. And she has tried. She has tried to see beyond the strangeness she was born into and to understand a world of dim light and half-answers. She has tried to understand this woman before her, utterly divided. How is it, for instance, she could sit there with a steamer trunk full of letters, none of them belonging to her? And the buttons! She's seen them, several envelopes of buttons, the dark threads trailing from the eyes. They came from the trousers of the male prisoners. After all, a man can't run if his trousers drop, and only guards wear belts. These buttons were put in envelopes and sent in the mail as messages to families that the prisoner had not run, would never run, would never again wear trousers that required buttons.