The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (27 page)

But at the moment it was Tanya that Azade was worried about. Two hours she'd been in the latrine and making the strangest noises. When two hours turned to three, Azade knocked cautiously on the plastic door.

'Are you all right?'

Tanya's arm emerged slowly from between the plastic jamb and the door. 'Extra paper,' she whispered. 'Please.'

Azade handed over the roll and sniffed mightily in her direction. 'You should have told us about the foreigners sooner. I could have cleaned a little more.' Azade leaned on her broom.

Lukeria threw open her window. 'What foreigners?'

Tanya emerged from the latrine, her hem muddy from where it had grazed the plastic floor. 'Art-loving Americans of Russian Extraction with money are coming to the museum tomorrow,' Tanya explained, and it seemed to Azade that the very idea had wearied the girl already. Azade could smell exhaustion, the kind that comes from inside the bones and from the roots of the hair and follows a woman to her bed and back.

Olga, having become so adept at tiptoeing in the presence of potentially bad news, appeared at the latrine. 'What's so bad about that?'

Lukeria planted her elbows on the sill of the opened window. 'I like Americans. They have nice luggage. Strong zips and good solid stitching.'

'They want to spend the night and live like real Russians, here in this apartment building,' she said with a deep and profound sigh. And in her long exhalation, Azade's keen nose deciphered the true and multi-faceted nature of Tanya's predicament, which Azade understood was, collectively, their predicament.

'Oh.' Olga's face blanched to the colour of split almonds. 'Disaster.'

Azade took a liberal sniff of the courtyard air. She could detect Tanya's flagging optimism, and behind it, a whiff of reality. Their chances were not good. Only with monumental orchestration between all the factious residents of their apartment building would they manage a solid wall of goodwill and unbrooked good manners. Or at least a lack of bad manners. And even then they would likely fail.

'We must construct the Russia of their expectations,' Tanya said in a solemn tone.

'Definitely then, I will hang out my best laundry,' Zoya announced.

'We can work together and do this.' Tanya pitched her voice towards the heap and the old woman's window, her voice warbling on the last words. 'After all, we've come a long way from the days when we'd spit into each other's tea water and salt each other's food mercilessly.'

'Speak for yourself!' Lukeria leaned over her elbows.

Tanya consulted her tattered notebook. 'For starters, no more visits to this latrine. We've got to save room for the Americans. Everyone knows that their turds are the biggest in the world.'

Tanya glanced at the heap, at the hole behind the heap. The hole was now a chasm of profound dimension. The children had erected a water-resistant tarp over the opening and installed a ladder. How they had managed it was beyond Azade's comprehension, for she herself each evening did her very best to fill the hole and keep it covered with metal sheeting.

'We have to cover that hole. Someone will fall in. And we must get rid of that stinking heap. It implies all the wrong things about us.' Tanya turned to Vitek. 'Weren't you supposed to handle this?'

'I have. I mean, the kids are. Every day.' Vitek swept his arm through the air. 'Can't you see the difference?'

Tanya squinted at the heap. 'No.'

'I don't understand,' Vitek said. 'I've personally supervised their daily heap hauling. I've watched them dump the rubbish on the street.' He ran his fingers through his hair in rapid succession. It was a gesture Azade knew he had borrowed from a character on a daytime television soap opera that he liked to watch. The character was a Mafiya thug who was always killing the wrong people and then had to kill some more people to make up for it. For some reason Vitek found this an admirable trait.

Vitek shoved his hands in his pockets. 'So, OK. It's a joke somebody's playing on me. I get it. But you'll be happy to know I've got a full evening of entertainment lined up for our visitors.'

Olga groaned quietly.

'First we'll arrange to have a car pick them up and take them to Lapyushka for drinks and whatever.'

'Isn't that a gentlemen's club?' Zoya asked, looking up from her fingernails.

Vitek grinned. And then I know a Gypsy guy who's got a dancing bear. For the right money, he'll lend it to us. They'll love it. Trust me. And then after that, we'll go to the pigeon races. All the best people follow the races.'

Azade narrowed her eyes. She saw now Vitek's true problem. Which, she admitted, again, started with her. She was like the woman who, mistaking an agate for an egg, swallowed a stone. The next morning she opened her legs and out slid that same stone. Only it had grown in the night, had acquired the shape and properties of a stone boy. It had agate-coloured eyes, small pebbles in its ears. And in place of a heart, more stone. She was that woman always mistaking one thing for another. So why was she so dismayed when her boy lived up to the story that seemed to have been told specifically about him?

'Capitalism is brushing its teeth,' Mircha bellowed. 'The dollar is on the march, but we shall overcome. The rouble will stabilize, we shall secure all that's been lost! Our history belongs to us, but only if we are willing to reclaim it!'

'Hear, hear!' Lukeria shrieked.

Everyone except Vitek looked to the rooftop. Azade could sense more than see that Tanya was biting her lip, probably drawing blood. It would not do to let him weave about on the rooftop broadcasting his ignorance as loudly as possible.

'Come down here. We need to talk,' Azade called to the rooftop.

'Is that you love? My pigeon? My sweet paw?' Mircha disappeared for a moment then re-emerged at the stairwell, his eyes too bright to inspire trust. He was drunk. Again. How he managed it, Azade could not imagine.

Azade pinched her nose. The stink. Really, it was hard to work around and no amount of Russian Forest perfume sprayed fore and aft head to toe had helped.

'You really smell bad. You need to wash yourself. With real soap.'

'That hurts. Right here in my heart,' Mircha said. 'But I forgive you. You see, I'm a better person now that I'm dead.' Mircha smiled a wobbly smile. 'I want to set things right. I want to make everything up to you.' He shuffled toward her, his arm outstretched, his lips puckered for a sloppy kiss.

Azade sidestepped Mircha. 'Listen. You heard the girl. People with money are coming to visit. If you really want to do something that matters, you'll settle down and be quiet. No more big ideas from the rooftop. And stop hauling all that crap back into the courtyard.'

'That is not crap. Those items are of inestimable value. They represent every good thing of our former country. Those
rusting items are our national treasures, our identity, our cultural historical identity. Just look at them!'

Azade surveyed the glistening heap. There was that cracked Moskvich motor, several pairs of crutches, a pirated copy of
Rambo,
clocks that ticked out of time, rusted scythes, ripped flags belonging to the southern republics—items of high symbolic content and laden with nostalgic overtones, even she could see that. But still.

'You have no country anymore. The villages we grew up in have been bombed out for years, razed to the ground. Only a few old-timers still speak our languages. It's pointless, what you are doing.' Azade folded her arms across her chest.

Mircha thumped his chest with his fist. 'For the first time, I have purpose, I know what it is I am about. Why should I settle down and be quiet when I feel this good? Even my stump feels good!' Mircha swayed slightly as he took a few steps towards Azade. His boots were too big now for him and he had to slide them across the concrete, the laces trailing as afterthoughts.

'You'll ruin everything in spite of yourself. You can't stay. It's not natural,' Azade said, making a last attempt at reason. The problem with the dead was that they lived to unfix what others had fixed, to undo what others were trying to do. The dead untied knots. They climbed staircases the wrong way and, in so doing, turned time backwards on a clock. Shout 'Stop!' to a dead man and he keeps moving. Shout 'Listen!' and he will merely point to his ears filled with words fibrous as cotton and round as pebbles.

Never in her life had she wanted much. Never had she been able to do much. But hope had whittled her desire to a sharp slender point, shaved it to a mere sliver. And now she knew what she wanted and, more importantly, was ready to cast that sliver in the direction where it would do the most good. She would have to get rid of him once and for all.

As if he could read her mind, Mircha gave Azade a bitter look and drew himself to his full height. The blue vein alongside his neck stood to attention. Mircha assumed his posture of rage, clenched his hand into a fist. Azade understood the momentum of instinct and emotion, how easy it was for a man like Mircha to work himself in a blink from feeling hurt to feeling pure rage. Even now he towered over Azade, his brow drawn into a scowl. The muscles in his jaw pumped mightily 'I won't go,' he said.

Azade leaned on her shovel. Who was it who told her that a woman's strength lies in her hair and her hands? Her fingers moving independently of thought tugged the long darning needle out of the bun fastened to the top of her head. A thick rope of hair tumbled past her shoulder and her fingers combed through it.

'You can't hurt me anymore,' Azade said, unwinding the braid. Now she knew, now she remembered. The words of her mother from a lifetime ago tumbled in her ear, clear as a chiming of a bell in thin air from across a high mountain lake: the hair is the strength, and the needle holds the hair. Break the needle and be strong. It was, after all, the only message the
dead could really understand: the complete irreparable quality of a strong thing broken. The only way to dispatch a deathless body, her mother proposed all those years ago, therefore, was to snap a needle between the teeth. All these years of biting her tongue had made her teeth hard, and they had been waiting for such a moment as this.

Azade put the needle in her mouth.

Mircha's eyes widened. 'What are you doing? Lapushka, please don't,' he begged.

Azade bit the needle and felt it break.

Mircha staggered towards the stone bench. 'I never!' he gasped, clutching his stomach.

'I know,' Azade said, and she heard sadness in her voice. It surprised her that she could feel sadness for her husband at such a moment, and yet she did. For he was shrinking. Not quickly, but steadily. And she could see him in a way she never had before. Literally. She could see the interior of his body. She saw his heart, a sickly thing, smaller than an early swede, dark as the eye of a rhododendron. What would have happened if as a boy that heart had been fed properly? Would it have swollen, like a root that drinks oil, and filled whatever space it was given? Would that heart have grown so that a boy like Mircha would have grown into a man who could feel the things he ought to have felt?

Mircha fumed quietly and attempted to squeeze his hand into a fist.

Azade stood and folded his hand, now only slighter bigger
than her own, against his chest. 'You can't hurt me,' she said. 'I won't let you.'

Mircha turned for the stairwell. With effort he began the long climb, this time his body facing the right way up, and Azade did not offer to help him. It was not over yet, this business with Mircha. He still had his mouth, after all. He was broken, but not beaten. Azade reached for her shovel. Still, there were things she could do to hasten his departure. The Americans were coming. It would not do to have Mircha stinking up the courtyard with his revisions. Azade leaned against the shovel and turned a sliver of earth. Would it make a difference whether or not the hole was exactly six feet and whether she cut an angled shelf as her father always had when he dug holes? Really she didn't know. It was one more thing on a long list she would like to ask God when she saw him. There were so many forms and rituals, codes of dress and rules for fasting, for standing up and sitting down, and then, of course, all the extra rules for women. If she were to see God face to face, if such a thing for a woman like her were possible, Azade wondered would she hide her hands when she saw Him? Would God think them unclean, given all that her hands had done?

So tired he was of women. The worrying and wishing kind, the nervous and shouting kind. Yuri scaled the heap, green and wet with rotting banana skins and rinds. Angry women, they were everywhere. Talking, accusing, bullying, demanding, and never in a congenial tone. They blared like tone-deaf trumpets. This new Russia, it was really the old Russia. The only difference was there were more women now than ever and they were more vocal about the causes and sources of their unhappiness. And they were so much quicker to lay blame. Take Zoya—plagued with sudden rages and terrible desires. For babies, no less. He knew, dim-witted as he was, that he would never make her happy. Babies would not fill her empty heart. There she was now in the stairwell, her phone at her ear as she meticulously turned her coat inside out so as to reduce the wear. She'd crawl out of her own skin and hang it wrong side out too, if she could. Her voice tumbled into the courtyard and shattered into pieces: '
I want ... I want...
'

The sound was a steady blow to the head: thump and pound.
Want.
Electric toaster ovens. Upholstered ottomans in split
leather. Brocade and velvet. Window treatments and stays. All of this wanting like the stone of a cherry rattling inside his head, against his teeth, hurting him in a steady unstoppable way.

Then there was his mother, home from another day of work. Through the kitchen window he could see her beating her frustrations into a lump of dough. Each blow to the soft mound was another lamentation for a lost memory. And this punctuated by sounds from the third-floor window. Lukeria making the same demands:
'Who? What?

No denying it, no matter what people said on TV, in newspapers, no amount of deliberate cheer could hide the fact that people everywhere were miserable. Especially the men.