The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (28 page)

The only remedy was his space helmet. In the foam lining he could smell his father. But always somebody wanted to disturb him. When he was a boy it was his mother who cautioned him, saying things. 'Don't wear that helmet so much. It will make you feverish. It will cramp the natural growth of your brain.' This she'd say while tapping on the visor. Then she'd pull off the helmet, lay her hand on his forehead, feeling for a temperature. The worst thing that could happen—not stunted brain growth, but a temperature. Every day at school in the city the very second a child crossed the threshold a school nurse shoved a thermometer into the kid's mouth. Why? Because a kid with a temperature was contagious. And a contagious kid was sent away with his mother. And a mother with a kid in tow could not clock in, and if his mother didn't clock in, she would lose a day's wages. Disaster. Which
explains why more than once while on the way to Day Care Centre Number 137, his head burning, his eyes bugging out, off came the helmet and into the mouth went clumps of snow or chips of ice. Anything to fool that thermometer.

Yuri pulled on the helmet, stretched out on the stone bench, and sighed.

At the opposite end of the courtyard, in the one and only patch of mud completely thawed, stood Azade, a shovel resting on her shoulder. Behind her green bullet-shaped buds studded the limbs of the lime tree fore and aft. Above him the clouds converged overhead in the oddest of shapes. They were men and women kissing. Yuri closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. Now the men and women had drifted so far apart, men westward, women eastward, no hint whatsoever remained that only moments before they were inextricably intertwined. Yuri blinked. In fact, there was no suggestion of the metaphoric in the sky whatsoever. The clouds were simply clouds gathering and stretching, and nothing more.

Yuri closed his eyes.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

'Mother, I feel fine. Not hot, not in the slightest,' he mumbled.

Tap. Tap.

Yuri opened his eyes. Mircha. On the bench. Sitting next to him and squeezing Yuri's shoulder. Hard.

'Brilliant!' Mircha said. 'What you were just muttering, that bit about women. Brilliant. I agree with you entirely. The
world is far too full of women and not one of them is happy. It's beyond me, really it is.'

Yuri sat up and squinted at Mircha. He seemed different somehow. More unsteady. At a loss for breath.

'But your problem is that you don't know what it means to be a man.'

'Why is that, I wonder?' Yuri squinted at Mircha. He seemed smaller, shrunken inside his service coat.

'Russia is a country of boys coddled by their mamas and henpecked by their wives. Look at you, for example. Living with your ma and on the brink of marriage to a devil on ten ball bearings.'

'Well, what's the solution, then?'

Mircha raised his hand, closed it into a fist. 'A man shows a woman who's the boss.'

Yuri turned his hands over in his lap and studied his palms. He closed his hands into fists, opened then closed them again. Was there anything more beautiful than the architecture of a man's hands?

Mircha snorted. 'But you know, women do have their worth. They are more resilient, women. Built with twenty or more little motors inside of them, when life poses an insurmountable problem, they simply gear to another motor, turn their hands to another task, as it were. But men, they have just one big motor. All their self-worth is in the strength and power of that one motor. And once that motor is snuffed, men—they're finished. Because we only know one way.'

'Why are you telling me this?' Yuri squinted at Mircha.

'I have thoughts, insights, as it were. And no one to share them with. Now that I am dead I can see how better the rest of you should all live.'

Yuri watched Vitek emerge from behind the heap, the children in tow. 'You could tell him these things. He is your son, after all.'

Mircha worked his mouth in a circle and spat. 'Believe me, I've tried. Messages on mirrors, in dust, waking dreams, sleeping dreams. It's a lost cause. He can't hear a thing I have to say. He never could.'

Vitek approached the bench. He stretched his arms and inhaled deeply. 'The sun is shining. The birds are singing.' Vitek's chest swelled. 'It's enough to make you shit!' Vitek punched Yuri convivially in the arm.
Thump.

Yuri rubbed his shoulder. 'That hurt.'

'Listen, the wind is whispering. Let's have a drink.' Vitek sat next to Yuri and uncapped a bottle. 'We're a team, you and I.'

'Who?' Yuri tipped his head.

'Who?' Lukeria hooted.

'Do you want to get out of this shit hole? D'you?' Vitek's dark face loomed in front of his visor.

I want...

'You want to make everyone happy, and by everyone I mean yours truly. Don't you?'

Yuri nodded and smiled obliquely.

'That's my boy.' Vitek smiled and withdrew a bottle from his coat.

'That's my boy,' Mircha echoed and hung his arm around Yuri's neck.

'So here's what you're going to do.' Vitek uncapped the bottle and took a generous swallow. 'Tomorrow you're going to get to the museum, early, and get washed. Use soap. And then go and see Kochubey.'

Yuri lifted the visor. 'Who's Kochubey?'

'The recruiter, stupid. Go and see him. At the old-new Caucasian bakery. Tell him I sent you.'

Yuri nodded. Uncomfortable it was, with a dead man's arm draped over his one shoulder, a semi-blind and semi-deaf man's arm draped over the other. He couldn't decide which arm bothered him most, Mircha's or Vitek's.

'Maybe you'll get lucky and get a cushy assignment. Mine-sweeping or something.' Vitek dug an index finger into first one nostril, then the other, then examined his fingernails. 'You have no idea how much a mine-sweeper makes.'

'What's the average life expectancy?'

Vitek wiped his fingernails against his trousers. 'Inconsequential. What matters is that we each of us have only one life to expend, so we each of us must make it count.'

Meanwhile Mircha kept talking. 'I really did want to be a good father. But nobody told me how.' Mircha leaned forward and poked Vitek with his crutch. 'So I am sorry, son!'

Vitek slapped his ear as if plagued by a pesky gnat. 'Be sure
to take a pack of Marlboros. It's all Kochubey will smoke.'

'I was a terrible father. My father was a horrible father and his father before him. It has been a long and honoured family tradition. Our rage, our cruelty, and you must appreciate the importance of tradition, overrated as it may be. Which is not to say I am exonerated. Certainly not! So, I'm sorry—a hundred times sorry.'

'Speak for yourself! I am sorry for nothing!' Lukeria's voice wobbled from the heights.

'Crazy old harpy. Who does she think she's yelling at?' Vitek stared at Lukeria shaking her fist from her open window.

'Your father.' Yuri pointed to Mircha. 'He's here. Sitting next to me. Talking to me. Just as you are.'

'OK, OK. I know when a joke's being played on me,' Vitek frowned. 'Fun and games. I have a sense of humour, too. Ha! Just don't forget to get your ass over to Kochubey's tomorrow.'

'Yes,' Mircha echoed. 'Don't forget. This is just the kind of thing we men live for—to die gloriously in battle.'

Yuri pulled the helmet back over his head and the noise of the courtyard instantly went under water. It was fear that kept fish swimming. Instinct told a fish what to do, where to go. But for the right bait any creature will ignore instinct. At least this is what his commander told them in Stavropol, or maybe it was Beslan. This is why it was necessary to crawl on hips and elbows through the snow, crawling toward the heart of another village where they would kill people, some of them Russian. They were learning to replace their fear, their natural
instincts to flee, which were just other names for common cowardice. All this the commander said while thrusting a knife upward into the torso of a cardboard man as he demonstrated how easy, how vulnerable the human body really is.

But a man is not a fish. A man is a thinking creature, a creature who can reason with and beyond pure instinct. His instinct? Easy. To survive. Isn't that what everybody wanted? But why should his survival come at the expense of someone else's? There were other ways to make money. He could sell a kidney. He could yodel on a street corner. He could keep out of Tanya's way so that she could get that grant thing. He could fish.

When she says the first line of the Lord's Prayer,
Our Father, existing pure in heaven,
she thinks of the old story of Chestnut Grey, the mighty horse who flies through the air unhindered, powered by the great gusts of steam from his nose. Of fathers she knows very little, but of the sky, so much more. At the approach of Chestnut Grey, the clouds buck and pearl, then cool to the colour of birch bent by ice. The colour of God's pockets turned inside out. It was the only story Lukeria ever read to her as a girl and for this reason Tanya has invested in the tale great symbolic value. What that symbolism is, Tanya can't really say, though as she hurried for the bus she fingered her cloud notebook and imagined she was that horse: large and powerful, enlisted to aid others who cannot help themselves. She is the work horse necessary to further the plot, though it has not escaped her notice that in the old story once the peasant and princess unite, Chestnut Grey spends most of his time eating apples and making the wishes of others come true.

Much better to be the steam. Far better to be the cloud. Much better to be exactly who she was, a girl in love with sky,
swallowing every cloud and telling herself she was satisfied, her empty stomach full. Tanya pulled at her short skirt and clung for dear life to the black strap dangling from the carriage ceiling. The air inside the bus was dense and weepy like boiled chicken bones. Her eye make-up, which Zoya had generously applied, was already rising to a sweat on her skin. A twinge against her calves and behind her knees confirmed that new ladders had climbed up her fishnet stockings, the most stylish hosiery she owned. Despite her zero-one-zero diet, she'd not lost a single kilo of weight, and in fact, she seemed thicker than ever. To make matters worse, the American art-lovers had arrived at the airport and she was late for the meet and greet. Naturally.

Inside the arrivals lobby it was a job finding the Americans. A load of Germans and Australians from the Lufthansa flight burst through the lobby and spilled out onto the pavement, where they haggled with the taxi drivers. A pointless prospect, Tanya wanted to tell them. Most of the drivers were Armenian, and such fierce negotiators that God didn't even haggle with them. Another plane, a TU-204 from Tashkent, brought a load of Koreans and Uzbeks, the women wearing bright coats and trousers and wrapped in scarves. It took a while for Tanya to separate out east from west in the lobby, but finally, when there was only herself and three other women, the same women she'd noticed waiting through the waves of human arrivals, a terrible knowing gathered across her features. These were her Americans. And so odd looking they were!

All three wore trousers. Well, not trousers, not the kind with buttons, anyway. Trousers with zips. She knew it was the style in the States for women to look like men, but these three had pushed the style to limits. They wore their hair cropped shorter than Tanya had ever seen on a woman. And the colour, at least on the two older women, was not grey, but silver. Bright silver. In Tanya's experience only the poorest of the grandmothers wore her age in her hair. But from the way in which the two women ensconced themselves within a ring of luggage—sturdy leather suitcases with stout clasps—Tanya knew they weren't poor. Nor were they comfortable being in this lobby in such close proximity to so many others who were. Twice the oldest of the two, a small but sturdy-looking woman, touched her necklace and watch, as if to verify that her valuables were still on her. Standing a few paces away, as if to distance herself from her companions, the tallest of the women, a girl really, looked at travel glossies. She stood at least six feet tall, six three if one took into account her spiky hair. Her hair! Clearly an experimental work in progress. Short, purple-black and well articulated. A good deal of hair spray and egg whites had clearly gone into this risible project.

Tanya hurried towards the women as fast as her high heels would allow and stretched her lips over her faulty teeth. She did not want them to see her crooked dentition, not yet, anyway, and also, she was making a valiant attempt at inhabiting the future of the handshake in her very walk—that is, embodying the very metaphor she imagined they wanted to
see. Artistic firm intention and goodwill, style and grace at a gallop over wide open spaces. Hard to do in high heels. But she was determined. 'Good morning. You must be the Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification. I am so very glad to meet you.' Tanya thrust her hand towards the oldest woman with the shortest, sharpest hair.

The woman took a step forward, her eyes measuring Tanya. In her long gaze, Tanya detected a windswept quality that she wanted very much to believe spoke of the woman's ability—or even better, desire—to see potential in the openness of an empty canvas. Or, at least, the ability to look past Tanya's flimsy attire and see potential in a sub-standard museum. Or in her attempt at the graceful galloping handshake.

'Justine Barker,' the woman said at last. She gripped Tanya's hand and pumped it strong and hard. 'I'm the eldest Barker and this is my daughter Livia, and over there,' Mrs Barker hooked her chin toward the girl, 'is my granddaughter, McKayla.'

'Ah.' Tanya nodded at each of the women. Grandmother, mother, daughter. A matryoshka in reverse, with the granddaughter being the largest, the empty shell, and the capable mother easily fitting inside her large daughter, and the grandmother a snug fit inside the mother.

The grandmother looked at her watch and shook her head. 'We're on a schedule. Perhaps you'll take us directly to the museum now?'

Tanya smiled wide. Then she remembered her teeth and adjusted her face.

'Of course.' She gestured toward the open door and the women moved through it, leaving Tanya, in a skirt far too short for the task, to manage all five pieces of their luggage.