The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (26 page)

Olga nodded. It was a simple enough sounding procedure in theory. In practice she wanted desperately to chew off her hands. She wished she had five sets of hands so that she could chew off each and every pair. Chief Editor Kaminsky shifted more of his weight onto his arm and leaned into Olga.

'Always remember, the Russian language and, therefore,
print media itself, abhors a vacuum. Your job is to keep filling the blanks with vague substitutes, to euphemize anything that carries a disturbing tone. The trick is to make sure your deft substitutions don't lack in subtlety. Here's where your gift for humour is so necessary. See?'

'But sir, truth is a transcendent value; it matters what we say and how we say it.'

Chief Editor Kaminsky paled slightly. It may have been her imagination, but it seemed to Olga that the howling from the tubes grew higher pitched. And most certainly Chief Editor Kaminsky's arm had grown heavier, its weight now driving her heels into the floor.

'Good God, woman. You know that and I know that. But that doesn't mean you have to go about repeating it! After all, we have our readership to think of.' At this, Chief Editor Kaminsky cupped his free hand under Olga's elbow and gave a panicked squeeze.

'Right, then!' Chief Editor Kaminsky spun on his heels. He glided through the open door and down the hallway, the whole way his tie whipping over his shoulder and fluttering towards the open mouth of the tube hatch.

'Everyone knows that paid fools are no better than the ones we get for free,'Arkady said. He rose, ripped the paper from the teletype, scanned it briefly and handed it to Olga.

Olga read the report quickly. Then she started back at the top and re-read slowly, her eyes drinking in line by line her every worst fear confirmed: name after name of the dead and
the missing. Her heart pounded in her ears, her eyes watered and blurred. There were over a hundred names. And in the report conclusion even worse news. The President was calling for unilateral draft with no exemptions or exceptions, a request that had been enthusiastically passed in the Duma.

Olga sank into her chair. What to do? Forget rendering the facts harmless by means of deft and draughty euphemism. This was her boy they were talking about. Her boy who would be sent out in a ground infantry unit. Her boy who would be sent back in an open rail carriage stuffed with bodies. Olga laid her forearms on the desk and cradled her head in her hands.

'What shall I do?' Olga turned to Arkady.

Arkady speared the report with his pencil and examined it at arm's length for several minutes. At last he cleared his throat. 'You've suggested now and again that your son may be a bit of an, er, how shall I say? Idiot? Did you mean that in the literal or euphemistic sense?' he asked cautiously.

'Well,' Olga bit her lip. Yuri was more of a
balbess,
a dunderhead, which, as far as she knew, didn't carry a definite clinical classification, though perhaps it ought to. But her Yuri—an idiot? She could say yes. Her situation—his situation—was that desperate. But it wouldn't be true. And wasn't she the one who held forth her internal appeal for the truth made external? For telling a truth so pure it could not be heightened or dampened by people like her? Or was this one of those rare moments in a mother's life where she would and should break every rule for her children?

'He is an idiot in his own fashion,' she said at last, the sound of her voice in her ears foreign and strained.

'But do you have any proof of it? Anything in particular that is strange or crazy?'

'He fishes from the rooftop.'

'Does he catch anything?' Arkady sounded genuinely interested.

Olga shook her head. 'No, but he wears a souvenir cosmonaut's helmet day and night.'

'Yes, I knew about that,' Arkady said. 'Sadly, a lot of young people are dressing in odd ways. We need something more definitive. Something hugely idiotic—in writing, say. A silly love poem or poorly constructed joke?'

Olga squeezed her eyes shut, thinking. The tubes whistled and the sound was slightly obscene, like a low wolf call. 'Of course!' She opened her eyes. 'Mircha!'

'Who?'

'The Manifesto!' Olga dug through her plastic bag and withdrew Mircha's semi-transparent papers. Carefully, so that the shaky writing would not crumble at her feet, she began to read aloud:

Today a boy explains to his father how feathers on a chicken grow. Today a man looks over his shoulder and says nothing is impossible.

'Ah,' Arkady muttered.

'Wait. There's more,' Olga continued to read:

Today a woman washing shirts in a bucket of bleach watches the skin from the tips of her fingers disappear. Enough, she says. Today an old man with a violin breaks his bow and says now. Today I rattle every door handle of the city looking for the one still warm from the touch of my lover's hand and I say, I will never stop looking.

Arkady's eyes brightened. 'It has a nice poetic odour of sentimentality. And absolutely no meaning. None. Only an idiot could write this.'

Olga nodded sombrely.

'I know people who know people. People who know idiocy when they see it. People who can do things to care for such idiots.'

Olga clutched the Manifesto. 'Things? What things? You don't mean an institution?'

'Lord no! Those places are reserved for the truly handicapped—Gypsies and Grades One and Two Idiots, for instance. But Grade Three idiocy is another matter entirely. A Grade Three Idiot is eligible for food and medicine coupons and could ride the metro for free. Yes, the benefits of being an imbecile are too numerous to count.'

Olga glanced at the tube. 'But the draft.'

Arkady scratched at his arm. 'That is just it: Grade Three
Idiots can't be drafted. Most certainly arranging for the necessary documentation, that is, the Grade Three Idiot ID card, will take a little time and money, but we've nothing to lose.'

'Money?' Olga whispered. 'But I don't have any money. None of us do.'

Arkady shifted his weight from foot to foot, slowly, but with deliberation as if he were wrestling with something inside himself. At last he stood still, closed his eyes and spoke in a breathless monotone.

'I will sell my near-priceless petrified log. On the Internet. To the highest bidder.'

'No,' Olga gasped. 'You can't! It is all you have, this highly collectible item that has been in your family for generations.'

After a long moment Arkady opened his eyes. 'I've decided. My mind is made up.' He nodded to the Manifesto. 'Desperate times call for great sacrifices. Besides, something isn't priceless if someone will pay money for it. And if your son is the idiot I think he may be...'

Olga clamped her teeth and handed over the Manifesto. Still, she could not help thinking again of the lie in which she was participating. Was her son really an idiot? There was no denying he had been altered by the war, but then that was true of any veteran of the Russian army who survived a tour of duty. He was childish. A shirker. He would lie about on a stove and gather cobwebs if he could, but that was no more idiotic than anything else other people did. And the fact was just this: he was her son, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone. If she
allowed Yuri to be drafted he would die a certain death. If not at the hands of the enemy than certainly at the hands of the other veteran soldiers who had no patience for combat-shy recruits, even those who rotated in voluntarily. Olga studied Arkady, who even now was drafting the letters to the appropriate people on behalf of her Yuri, and on company time! They were doing something to save her boy. So why didn't she feel any better?

She ran her fingers over the report curling over the desk. All these boys, these other mothers' sons. She couldn't do a thing, not one thing to save them. She looked at the report again, the water in her eyes brimming. Sometimes only tears restore the heart's equilibrium. Her mother used to say that. Her mother also used to say that the sun would stop rising if we forgot the names of our dead. This was why her mother made her memorize the names of the dead from her village. This was why every night in the darkness of her corner of the apartment, in that dim space between wakefulness and sleep, Olga added the names she read here in this office to that growing lexicon of the dead. And at night she stitched those names to an old melody every mourner knows. Each night, the same song, only each night it took just a little longer to sing it, this song built of names. Every name became a musical phrase, and every phrase was a life that had ended and shouldn't have, and Olga wanted to remember every single one.

Olga's fingers tapped the keyboard. Name after name, she saw these boys, every one of them a boy from her town, the
boy who sat behind her at school, the boy who tied her shoelaces together and cried later when she wouldn't forgive him. The boy with the stutter, the boy with the girlish lips, the boy whose father jumped from the bridge. All these boys and more, she set down in print. Gone her subtle sense of humour that turned the edges of an atrocity-in-progress into a general's folly, easily forgiven. Gone her desire to dampen. Loss divided was still loss, after all. She would tell what she knew, and more. She would say with as much certainty as she dare and more everything she'd kept hidden. God—she had to believe because the prophet Isaiah declared it—would write their names on the palms of His hands. But she would type their names on this report.

Vladimir Gregarovich Aitmotov
Alexander Andreyevich Akimoff
Vyacheslav Stepanovich Aliev
Boris Vladiromich Anichov

She had no idea there could be so many names. And still, she kept typing. What would happen to her next she didn't much care. She had lied to save her son. There was nothing honourable in that. And these boys on her list, they were beyond saving. But at least they might be remembered.

Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. Olga kept typing. At first, the pneumatic tubes whistled merrily as if nothing important, nothing any different than usual, were happening at the scuffed
metal desk. But as the minutes ticked by, thirty, then forty, a low growl boiled up through the pipes. By the time Olga finished with the last of the names, all two hundred and sixteen of them, the growl had risen into a full howl, like that of an animal in great pain. She pulled the last sheet of paper from the typewriter carriage. She scanned the pages and rolled them, placing them carefully into the canister. As if it could read her translation, the tube howled an octave higher.

Olga lifted the hatch. A secondary, and her favourite, definition of the word 'translate' was to convey to heaven without death. Olga eyed the canister and wiggled her fingers at the hatch. It could happen, should happen. The world was just that strange. She squeezed her eyes closed, thrust the canister into the tube. With a jerk at her hands, the canister whizzed through the tubing and disappeared, leaving Olga stuck and dangling at the hatch. The wind rushing through the pipe tugged at her shirt sleeve, pulled savagely at her arm, all the while a loud shrieking coursing through the piping. Arkady stared in bewilderment at the tube and Olga, held fast as a fish on a hook. Only two words came to her.

'Help me.'

After a week of hard rain, the, suggestion of sun, especially spring sun, lured everyone but Lukeria out of their apartments and into the courtyard. Vitek lounged in a cracked plastic chair and barked at the children. Big Anna, Good Boris, Bad Boris, and Gleb, the red-haired boy with the glasses, barked back, shouting obscenities at anything that moved. The littlest girl had disappeared. No amount of crooning at the heap or at the lip of the hole (the hole! Oh how she hated it!) coaxed her out and Azade had to consider the possibility that the girl had gone underground to live there permanently or perhaps had gone to live in the sewers. Or perhaps the other children had driven her off. Street kids were like that. They had maintained a hierarchy, like dog packs. Also, the boys preferred now to lift their legs when they peed.

Yuri lay on the stone bench. Zoya sat in the stairwell, the trumpet of a phone pinched between her shoulder and the side of her face while she painted her fingernails. Yes, she was a talent, that girl. And she knew how to talk. 'Really?' Even now her voice filled the stairwell, spilled into the courtyard. 'Because if Lara would consider knocking twenty roubles off
the microwave, I'd colour her hair and throw in a manicure.'

Even Mircha was out, in both body and spirit. Though the mud had thawed and Azade had been digging with her little shovel for three days, she'd still not properly deposited Mircha's body into the ground. But it wasn't her fault. The spring thaw was not cooperating with her in the least. The entire courtyard was a boggy morass of mud. The heap of trash and metal scrap listed dangerously towards the ever-widening chasm, but wouldn't quite topple in. The mud seemed deliberately contrary, possessing a stubborn, sullen, petty willfulness she could only consider Soviet in nature; every attempt to move the mud around with that shovel she'd borrowed from Yuri came to nothing.

She had, however, located a copy of the Qur'an (stashed at the bottom of the heap, of all places!) and had memorized the Al-Fatiha. She'd bowed to the east, to the west—in all directions, actually, as she did not have a compass and could not say for certain in which direction Mecca lay. All this she'd done to dispatch her husband and put him both bodily and in spirit to rest. But still he lurked in doorways and behind windows, the steam from his palms fogging the panes. Worse, she noticed that at night he crept about the courtyard, silently returning all the garbage the children had removed during the day, rebuilding the heap to its former glistening putrid dimensions. She would have tried to stop him, would have shouted from her window, but she didn't want to wake the children. And, too, there was such a dogged gait to his shuffling, such determination in his carrying the rusted cables, the prosthetic leg, and even the cracked Moskvich engine from the street all the way into the courtyard, that she knew there was no point in objecting. For all his talk of revision, Mircha seemed determined to repeat the meaningless tasks as if it was repetition itself that held value.