The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (20 page)

There was more to the story, but her father explained that it couldn't be told because the other half hadn't been walked out with the feet yet. All of them, displaced into this concrete city of leaden skies, were those royal subjects skinned by the mad prince whose madness passed from ruler to ruler. It was up to her, he said, to live out the second half. Up to her, he said, to remember the family and return them to their ancestral home. Only then could the spell be broken. All those years of hearing her father tell that story to anyone who would listen and even those who wouldn't had made Azade impatient in her muscles. As a girl she knew with a certainty that defied her age that she would do it, she would walk the story backward, walk it to the beginning, to Mount Kazbek where the world began. But she was not a girl anymore. Her father was gone. Her mother, too. The years had ground her down one vertebra at a time. And though she still wanted the mountains, now it was only in her dreams she remembered that old desire. The only way to force clarity of desire was to remember the old pain, the hurt of one skin chafing against the other. The only way to force the memory was to plunge her hands in a pot of boiling water. Like the thin sleeves covering garlic, her own skin curled to paper and peeled. But days later, when her burns began to heal, she scratched and clawed at her skin—a miserable relief, because it only made her skin ache even more.

***

Azade unlocked her Little Necessary and sat on the commode. Though a fork in a door drives out bad luck and a spoon left out on a step invites it in, the worst thing a person could do was to let a door stand open to the wind. Even so, every morning Azade propped open the plastic door of the latrine. It was the only way to ventilate the virulent odours of all these unfulfilled dreams wafting up around her and fluting the edges of her skirt. And with this plastic door open she could keep a better eye on the children. No matter what the weather, as soon as they heard her stirring, they scrambled to the heap and staked out their spots. The girl Anna maintained a perch on the top of the heap while the younger children, Gleb, and the twins, Good Boris and Bad Boris, and the littlest—dark like Azade—anchored the four corners while they waited.

Every morning went this way, Azade setting out what she thought the children might need, it being the mountain way of greeting the morning with a gift. In Vladikavkaz, her mother said that the Orthodox Russians did this on St Ilya's day, laying out straw and opening their dog doors that swung to the east. And when the dogs gathered, the Russians put out tumblers of vodka—extra tumblers for larger dogs. That was the difference between Orthodox Russians and Mountain Muslims: Russians gave once a year, but Azade's parents and their neighbours, they gave every day, every day a St Ilya's day. And so now, out of habit, out of genuine concern, Azade put
out sweaters, boots, socks—all the things Mircha left behind when he jumped all those weeks ago.

And this morning, as she had every morning for the last several months, she shuffled to the heap and set out bread and kefir, a sour yogurt drink, so that even if their brains went to waste, their bodies would not bend with the wilted bones like those of the street kids who lived entirely on sugar packets and chewing gum. Still, Azade worried. Their every word and action seemed to her far too deliberate. They were like ancient men and women trapped in sad child bodies. Even stranger, they had never dreamt a single dream—not even one tired dream shared between them. And when she trained her nose in their direction she smelled battery acid and the sharp plastic odour of glue, chemical fumes that spirited the children far from the world of the more ordinary, palpable dreams.

Azade rewound her hair and pinned it high atop her head and watched the children hunker over the food. They ate mechanically, their gazes trained on Azade. If she were honest with herself, it bothered her that for all her efforts, not a single one of them would call her mother, not one of them would look at her with soft recognition in their eye. Another heartache for her. But she had never been the type to give up easily. She would mother them anyway.

'Ma!' Vitek emerged from the stairwell. His hair stuck out in ninety odd angles. From his stilted gait Azade knew he'd had a full night of drinking and now even the hair on his head hurt. Bilious vodka fumes trailed him, knocking a crow from
the rooftop aerial and sending Koza into a paroxysm of sneezing. Vitek bobbed his Adam's apple and spat under the frozen lime tree. Then he withdrew and uncapped a fresh bottle of vodka, immediately downing a quarter of its contents. He was performing a time-honoured therapeutic practice called
pokhmelitsa,
or the 'glass remedy', as drowning a hangover in alcohol was the only way to truly cure oneself. That done, Vitek then dropped his trousers and repositioned himself on the seat.

'Paper!' he cried, thrusting a hand out the open door.

Azade rummaged in her wicker hamper for a suitable text. There was the
Artist's Guide
—a nine-hundred-page instructional tome outlining how and in what poses one was allowed to depict Lenin. Nine hundred pages. Well, some artists needed all the help they could get—at least that's what she'd gathered from the things Tanya and Yuri said about the museum.

'Now!' Vitek barked.

Azade jumped and handed Vitek a copy of the previous day's
Red Star.
Except for the rustling of the newspaper as Vitek turned the pages, it was completely quiet in the latrine. It meant Vitek was constipated with thoughts of high speculative content.

At last he let loose with a low whistle. 'So many things to invest in. Oil, maybe. The war.' Vitek turned the pages in a flurry then opened the plastic door and flung the paper at Azade's feet. 'If only we had a little money. A little money in the right places makes more money.' Vitek winced. 'Then I could buy myself a new liver.'

Azade pinched her nose. 'You're just like your father, you drink too much.'

'And a wise man he was. The one true thing he taught me was that a man can never drink too much.' Vitek rebuckled his trousers and stepped out of the latrine.

Azade sniffed. No, not a healthy smell for a boy his age. His shits smelled like wet rust and his dreams were of the dangerous sort. It would be up to her to save her son from his own greed and folly. Well, it was a mother's duty to lie under her child like a log, her back becoming the smooth road so that her child's feet would not stumble, so that he could walk right over her and straight up into the sky. But on days like these she really feared, despite her best efforts, that Vitek would come to a bad end and for some reason God was punishing her by forcing her to witness it.

Azade nodded at the children, each of them executing wooden pirouettes and curtseys. They reminded her of those carved figures that emerged from the cuckoo clock, their movements accurate, but lacking grace. Azade turned to Vitek. 'These kids—they don't look so good.'

'They're fine. They're just happy.'

'Kids need to play.'

'Oh.' Vitek waved his hand and his rusty fumes swirled up into her nose. 'They play games.'

Azade squinted. As if on cue Big Anna, still in mid-squat, lifted her chin and hollered: 'What's the essential nature of man?' It was a game they sometimes called Dialectical
Materialism and sometimes called philosophy. Either way, Azade really didn't like the sound of it.

'Senseless!' Red-headed Gleb adjusted his glasses.

'Faithless,' Good Boris called out.

'Heartless!' Bad Boris beside him said.

And then from the end of the row the little girl yelled with a gusto that seemed at odds for a mouth so small: 'Ruthless.'

Azade drew her breath between her teeth and turned to Vitek. 'Just be careful, that's all I'm saying.'

'Why?'

'Because when we die God will judge us by how we treat children and animals, calling on them to give an accounting of our behaviour.'

Vitek swung his gaze across the courtyard, to the glittering heap and the children squatting. 'Ma—the way you talk, you could get yourself hurt in the mouth.'

Azade blinked. She wanted to say, 'Shame on you!'—the most potent words in a mother's arsenal—but the words were tied tight to her tongue and Azade realized that she was in actual fact afraid of her own son.

Azade swallowed and aligned her molars. The back teeth couldn't be knocked loose if the jaw was locked tight.

'What you're doing with these kids, it's criminal.' There, she said it.

'They are practising their social graces, nothing wrong with that. Everybody loves a snappy bow and curtsey.'

'Who is everybody?'

'The art-loving Americans who are possibly going to visit us very soon. Possibly.'

So that's what she'd been smelling in Tanya's shit. Foreign visitors, and important ones, too, from the looks of the ferocious bowing and curtseying going on in the courtyard.

Vitek blew on his hands, then tucked them into his armpits and stamped his feet. 'Incidentally, today is rent day,' he said.

'You can't charge me rent. I'm your mother. And you're living in my apartment.'

'Wake up, Ma. This is life—everybody gets screwed every now and then.'

Azade supposed she should take comfort in the small reality that some things, like getting ripped off, you could still count on, that some things hadn't changed. But it was gravel between her teeth: when family treat each other worse than a highway robber. How could she take any real comfort in that?

Vitek's gaze slid over Azade's face and then to her boots where she kept her stash of spoons.

'It costs, you know, to live as freely as we do. But I don't want you thinking I'm not human. I am just as upset with the situation as anybody else. Maybe more. Do I enjoy being forced to do things I prefer not to? Of course there's no joy in it. But life is not about preferences or feelings, and most certainly not about joy.' Vitek ran his tongue over his front teeth. 'And I
am
a human being, no matter what the others may think about me. It isn't as if I don't believe in the enduring human capacity for love and hope, for dignity. It isn't as if I don't secretly want
those things. But I'm a realist and I see how things are and understand how things have to be to make it in a world like this one.'

Azade bent and withdrew a silver spoon. In the curved face of the spoon she glimpsed her own image, bowed and beaten.

'I see how things are. You've become a cheap con artist and a crook.' Azade pressed the spoon into the meat of Vitek's palm.

Vitek waved the spoon near her nose, his conscience conveniently unstirred. 'What I'm doing here, it's a small thing. Better I should collect rent than someone else. Do you think someone else would be as friendly about it as me? Let me tell you something.' Vitek leaned closer to Azade. 'In Moscow people are luring the old pensioners out into the woods and killing them. And those bodies lie there under the snow until April thaw when other oldies walking their dogs discover them. Want to know why they're getting killed?'

'No,' Azade shook her head.

'For the keys to their apartments. People are killing each other for space to live in and for the papers to prove they have a right to live there. So tell me I'm a bad man for collecting a little rent, these small tokens of appreciation for the services I provide.'

'Which services are those, exactly?'

Vitek laughed. 'Oh, Ma. I'm keeping you safe from yourself and protecting everybody's interests. And it costs to live with such security.'

'What about them?' Azade hooked her chin towards the children, who were now waltzing with exaggerated slow moves.

'I'm teaching them how the world of bizness works. They're going to clean the courtyard because Americans love clean outdoor places to sit and drink pricey coffee.' Here Vitek tapped the side of his head with a finger. 'I know this because I am a keen observer of human consumption and trends. We will clean the courtyard. We will remove that trash heap with its broad and potent odours. We will steal café chairs and offer pricey teas and coffees and dance in folk costumes at all times and sashay across the concrete.'

Azade held her head between her hands. The more he talked, the stranger he sounded.

'All this to secure the funds which the Americans have very nearly promised me. I mean, us. Incidentally, it would be really grand if you'd service the latrine. The smells are extremely provincial and narrow in focus. Now I'm going upstairs to work out our bizness prospects. And you,' now Vitek addressed the children, 'are all going to be very very quiet and quietly get rid of this trash.' Vitek lumbered toward the stairs, his rusty fumes and the dog following him into the stairwell and up the stairs to the roof, where Azade knew he would spend the rest of the day slowly healing himself with more vodka.

As soon as Vitek was out of sight, Good Boris and Bad Boris, in mid-bow, shuffled over to the mound of snow where Mircha was buried. They peed, their urine burning the letters
of their names into the snow. As if that weren't bad enough, Big Anna and Gleb held cigarette lighters to the mound, melting long patches of snow, slowly revealing the rounded shape of Mircha, whose feet now protruded in a completely conspicuous way. As much as Azade loved these kids, she had to admit that possibly they were not quite right.

'Stop that! Stop what you are doing!' Azade shook her broom, but there was no help for it. The twins each had a leg in their hands and were tugging at Mircha's unlaced boots. And then here came the littlest one. She could not speak yet, and always snot dripped from her nose. The girl slipped a hard object into Azade's coat pocket. Azade thrust her hand into the pocket and withdrew a spoon, a prized gold-plated spoon like the ones they used to make only in Tula. Then the boy with the glasses, Gleb, approached. He was covered from head to toe in mud, nothing new there, but in his hand he held a pair of clattering dentures. Not wood or plastic but real Russian Gzhel porcelain, the make and model of which had always been far beyond Azade's financial grasp.

'My, what a fine set of teeth you have.' Azade tried to flatten from her voice all surprise and envy.