The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (22 page)

Fish, Yuri knew, had no need for the curative effect of vodka. Where a man has regret, fish have only dreams. Their problems are few. They do not suffer cold sweats or night terrors. They don't worry about employment. They have jobs, sure. Even Yuri knew that. But as they went about it all so quietly, it was as if whatever they did was no work at all. And they don't argue with the clumsy failings of their fellow cohabitants. They don't remind each other of how stupid, how morally bankrupt, how useless they have become to one another.

Likely they were not overly harassed by the females of their species, nor were they bullied about by fish with greater clout. Probably they did not hear ticking inside their heads. In fact, the fish Yuri knew moved about their world with such grace and dignity, flapping their gills in a way that suggested theirs was a world so beautiful, so completely free of complication that they simply could not fathom an end to it. Which explained their umbrage, the baleful looks they cast when hooked.

The line went taught. Yuri yanked the line and hauled up his catch, visor-level for inspection: a pike, and ornery, judging by its vicious snapping and thrashes in the air.

'You! Spaceman!' Volodya's bellows knocked from bank to bank, tree to tree.

Yuri dropped the fish on top of his plastic bag and pounded on the flight helmet with an open palm and scoped the fog.

Volodya's entourage emerged from the darkness, materializing grain by grain until Yuri could discern with definite clarity the two vets, each of whom had a hand on one of the chair grips, and each of whom now appeared taller somehow, broader of shoulder. Volodya sat straight as a plank in his chair, his service cap low over his forehead. Volodya had lost his legs just below the hips and with his service trousers tucked tight under his stumps it appeared that the front wheels of the chair were his feet. And now the vets had set the brakes so that those wheels rested on top of Yuri's feet.

'What are you doing here?' Volodya asked.

Yuri looked at the pike on the bag. 'I'm fishing.'

Yuri glanced at the vet standing to the left of the chair and took in his service coat with the many badges, confirming what he already suspected: here was a man honoured several times over for doing serious harm in Georgia. Yuri squinted at the vet on the right. This one had received even more badges for his service in Bosnia. In the hierarchy of the feeding chain, Yuri, who had received no medals, no honours, no badges for
kicking anybody's ass anywhere, would be lucky to make off with the fins and tail of his pike.

'You know the rule,' the vet on the left said quietly.

'Whose river do you think this is?' the vet on the right asked.

'His?' Yuri pointed to Volodya.

'So whose fish is that you're holding?' the vet on the left asked.

'His?' Yuri lifted his visor, pointed to Volodya.

'The kid is not as stupid as he looks,' the vet on the left said to the vet on the right as they took off their coats and draped them over the grips of Volodya's chair.

'Gentlemen, please!' Yuri pulled off the flight helmet and attempted the cavalier pose of one who has considered the possibility of getting beaten within a centimetre of his life and found it not a bit troubling.

'This pike is so small, of such insignificance, but absolutely I was going to bring it to you anyway.' Yuri looked at the pike resting stone still on the plastic bag. 'I just haven't had time to bash it properly on the head.'

Mention an itch. No sooner were the words out than the vets rolled up their sleeves.

'Cheer up, boy-o.' Volodya flashed Yuri a munificent smile as the Bosnian vet retrieved the pike. 'This is the price of living. And you're lucky.' Volodya glanced at Yuri's legs, marvellously whole and intact.

Then pain: a pounding punctuated with sharp interjections.
A dash, dash. Boxer's blows to the face. Oh Mother. A comma, a semi-colon, a reprieve and then ellipses. All the pieces of punctuation brilliantly effected by the closed fist, the knee to the groin. Yes, he was getting the message. He was, merciful God in heaven, learning the lesson loud and clear. Oh Mother. Full-stop.

When he came to, a quick inventory. Afternoon glare achingly white. His flight helmet, check. His rod, check. Pain scale was six and holding. He hadn't made out too badly, all things considered. And Volodya was right: Yuri was lucky. This time they'd only given him a warning beating. Yuri pulled on his helmet (Oh, Mother!), retrieved his bike and pedalled slowly towards the museum. Beyond the city the sky had cracked open for the afternoon, allowing a thin verge of throbbing light to spread into a low welt of frost and pollution. Yuri turned his head and trained his gaze on the front tyre. The ticking in his head—still there—and afternoons like these, even the sky hurt him.

He wheeled his bike through the back door of the museum. This door no one ever bothered to lock because, with the exception of the toilet paper that Caretaker Daniilov stocked on Tuesdays, there was nothing to steal. Which said something about the art hanging on the walls. The art! Oh, God, it hurt. Yuri moaned and steadied himself on a faux statue of Venus. Someone had taken a healthy bite out of Venus' left buttock—not hard to do, as the statue been fashioned from foam.

In the beginning it bothered him, this art. If he had any
pride, any shame, any artistic integrity he would denounce this museum as a cheap fraud, ridiculous in its pretensions. But the sad fact was that even if he were to shout it from the rooftops, no one, not a soul, would care. Even sadder, after a few weeks of working in the museum, Yuri stopped caring, too. After all, a job was a job. And he needed a job. Catching the occasional pike or carp, deficit items each, wasn't enough and even though Russia was a new country, it still went better with men who made some attempt to work than with those who outwardly loafed.

Yuri let the visor fall and felt his way towards the hat/coat-check counter. This corridor he'd never liked. Even in the interior gloom of low wattage lighting, the art was still offensive. The pseudo-Kuntskamera exhibit turned his stomach. Never mind that he had actually helped fashion the foetuses out of yellow foam. In the main, Yuri was a big fan of babies everywhere, but these were not babies. These were circus freaks, and not even real circus freaks at that. And yet, the babies paled in comparison to the painting boldly displayed next to the bathrooms. A reproduction of an eighteenth-century painting divided into twelve squares, each square depicting deaths of beloved apostles. Yuri flipped up the visor and squinted at the apostles meeting their reward, in this case horrible deaths by dismemberment, boiling, crucifixions, stonings. And the expression on their faces was so serene, of such solemn patience, as if the loss of their life was of no great importance, that Yuri couldn't help looking at them. Couldn't
help looking at them and counting twelve more reasons why he could never be a Christian.

And then came sound, noise of a museum in the afternoon. Shoes and umbrellas, galoshes, clicks and thuds, thumps, the noise of children moving in groups, and then the distinct sound of Tanya behind the check counter: clomp clomp clomp. Even when wearing her most fashionable pair of shoes her tread was of the heaviest sort. And there she was, her full face round and close and peering through the darkened visor at him.

'Oh, Yuri,' Tanya flipped up the flight visor, 'what have you done to yourself?'

'I went fishing and I got into some trouble.' Yuri sat cautiously in Tanya's fold-down metal chair.

Tanya bit her lip. 'We're going to have to clean you up. Take off that silly helmet.'

'I can't.'

Tanya sighed.

Together, he pushing, she pulling, they worked the yoke of the helmet over Yuri's head, painful centimetre by painful centimetre. In the relative warmth of the museum basement Yuri felt the blood moving behind his skin, felt his face swelling and the cuts opening.

Tanya licked her finger and smoothed Yuri's eyebrow. The pain, definitely a seven now. Why does a woman's touch hurt as often as not? And then their words. Mother, for instance, some months ago speaking on the subject of Tanya, who was
so close now he could kiss her if his lips weren't split and bleeding: 'Please do not disgrace yourself by falling in love with a Gentile. She's nice, but she's not one of us. If you marry her your grandmother Ilke will torment us in our dreams.'

No, Tanya really didn't have a chance with him. It wasn't right to let her believe that she ever would, either. And yet ... and yet no denying the small pleasure he felt at this very moment. Tanya chewing her gum close to his ear, cooing over him, grooming him, giving him soft womanly advice he in no way planned to heed.

'You might fish elsewhere, you know.' Tanya licked at a paper tissue and dabbed at a gash on the side of his face.

Yuri winced. He could feel the tissue cling to the cut. 'But it's my spot. I earned it.' It was further evidence of his self-loathing, a plague that he could only ascribe to having grown up without a father and to that hazy generational curse of growing up a Jew in Russia.

Tanya stepped back to examine her work. 'You can't take schoolchildren on tours looking like this. And we can't let Head Administrator Chumak see you, either. Let's get that helmet back on.' Tanya shoved the helmet over Yuri's head.

And just in time, too.
Thump—slide. Thump.

Yuri crawled under the counter.

'Oh, Tanya! News! Big news!' Wedged as he was beneath the long hat/coat-check counter, Yuri could not see Head Administrator Chumak. But he could see the effect Head Administrator Chumak's words had on Tanya. Her hands
shook and her knees literally knocked, setting the dimples on her rump in an uproar. No, for all her efforts, that cigarette and chewing gum diet wasn't helping her much. But she was kind, and though kindness didn't get girls like her very far, it ought to, Yuri decided. She deserved much better than what the bowels of the museum afforded.

'The Americans are coming! It's officially confirmed. They are buying their airline tickets even as we speak!'

'They're coming,' Tanya repeated, with what sounded to Yuri like disbelief and horror.

'In three weeks.'

'Three weeks. That's wonderful news, sir.'

'Wonderful? Wonderful?' Head Administrator Chumak's voice rolled through the corridor. 'This is better than wonderful. Do you know what this means?'

'No, sir.'

'If we get this grant I will buy a fence. I will buy my wife a car. And driving gloves. At last she will be happy and stop pecking at me. But of course, of course, there's so much to do in the meantime. This is such a delicate operation and there's so much.' Head Administrator Chumak peered over the counter. 'What is that unsightly protrusion? That cannot be a hat.'

'No, sir. It's Yuri. He is not feeling well.'

Yuri unfolded his body and straightened for Head Administrator Chumak's inspection.

Head Administrator Chumak's smile faded and his liver
spots darkened. 'Well, young man, if you weren't feeling well, you shouldn't have come here. We have been charged with the honourable task of preserving and presenting fine art. It won't do to look like a bleeding tomato wearing a mushroom for a hat.'

'Preserving and protecting art is, of course, of vast importance and I have the utmost respect for art in all its configurations and manifestations—high, low and everywhere in between.' Yuri glanced at Venus' half-chewed ass.

Head Administrator Chumak turned to Tanya. 'What's he saying?'

'He says he's leaving this very moment.'

Outside the museum, the light had fallen to hips and knees. A three o'clock dusk, and the basement windowpanes reflected a lavender wash and the streetlights dispatched sullen arcs of hazy orange.

Yuri tied his rod to the frame of his bike and wheeled it through the narrow path shovelled through the snow. Winter was a dangerous time because the cold forced people closer together than nature intended. Not that Yuri didn't love his fellow man, but last week alone he'd been mugged twice on the same day. This very morning he'd nearly lost his sprocket and he'd most certainly lost his entire pike and five-eighths of his remaining pride. What next? Yuri wondered as he walked his bike around a corner, and then immediately wished he hadn't.

At the sound of his steps, two men leaning against a
doorway straightened and approached Yuri. They had a sleek and sporty air to them Yuri had learned to recognize as Mafiya. Probably they had been like him once, vets of an unpopular military action, but unlike him, they had the broad shoulders of wrestlers or near-champion boxers. And unlike Yuri, they wore slick tracksuit trousers with long stripes up the leg and expensive sports shoes, the hallmarks of eager recruits who understood that violence was necessary for their career advancement. And cruelty was inexpensive entertainment. Experience had taught Yuri that the only hope for a guy like him was to stick himself to shadow and disappear. Or walk straight up to them, and get it over with. Yuri lifted his visor and smiled. He knew they were considering his suspicious features, the unusual length of his face, his jaw. His blaring cuts and bruises that advertised his victim status.

Yuri unstrapped the rod and tucked it behind his trouser leg. 'Please fellows, take the bike. It may not look like much, but part by part, it is of extreme value.'

'Bargaining already?' the leader, a tall man in an Adidas sports jacket said.

Yuri sighed. 'Please, fellows. I don't wish to be hit in the face. Or the knees either.'

'Life is full of hard decisions, isn't it?' Adidas ran his tongue over his gold tooth.

Where it started—with his ribs—he could recall, but where it ended, how many blows to the back and kidneys, Yuri lost count. That they'd found his fishing rod was not in doubt: he
heard it whistle through air and land some distance away in the snow. Then came the pounding of fists. His head felt like a big empty box hit with a stick, but never the same way twice. The important thing was not to beg for mercy, or they'd kill him. Also, it was important not to appeal for help to any passersby. A street beating in Russia was purely a spectator sport. Possibly the next Olympic event. In no circumstances would anyone help out his fellow brother being thrashed within a micrometre of his life. That being said, when Yuri spotted Mircha, materializing from behind a lamp post, Yuri could not help himself: 'Do something.' Penny whistles between his cracked teeth.