The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (32 page)

Though the sun was not bright, the girl shaded her eyes with a hand and squinted ferociously. 'What is the matter with him?'

'He's fishing,' Tanya said.

'He looks like he is in great pain,' the grandmother remarked.

'He is a thinker,' Tanya explained.

'He is, in fact, sick in the head,' Zoya called from the stairwell, 'if not in body.'

'He is an idiot,' Olga said.

'Is that a fact?' Now the grandmother squinted at Yuri.

'Oh, yes.' Olga laid a palm solemnly across her bosom.

At this the grandmother exchanged a significant look with the mother.

'I know what you must think,' Olga said. 'But I have to face facts. Facts are the building blocks of larger truth. And what is truth but a tall tower casting a very long shadow? And what is shadow but a terrible darkness for some but a restful shade for others?'

Vitek unpeeled himself from the side of the building and strolled towards the women. 'This is what comes of applying oneself to the rigours of metaphor.' His voice acquired a well-lubricated quality and his English flowed smooth as motor oil. 'It makes people ask absurd questions.'

'Yes, but is that normal?' the mother asked.

'It's extremely normal. Better than that, it's as Russian as birch bark shoes, I assure you,' Tanya said.

'I assure you,' Vitek mocked gently.

'Right.' Tanya wiped her hands along her skirt. 'It's been a long day packed full of, er, sights. Let's see the rooms now.'

She steered the women towards the stairwell. It looked as if they might follow, too, the grandmother double-timing it behind Tanya, the mother behind the grandmother, and the long-legged daughter behind her mother. At the rear, Yuri had dropped his rod and shouldered up their many bags. But then the grandmother stopped short. Mother collided with grandmother, daughter against mother, Olga into the winged rump of the girl and Yuri into Olga. All of whom were overtaken by the baggage, which flew, as fate or luck would have it, to the foot of the heap.

'What is that?' The grandmother wrinkled her nose and pointed to the heap.

'We don't have regular sanitation service. Therefore, it is customary for us to throw our rubbish out the window.'

'Is that what I'm smelling?' The girl pinched her nose.

Just then the twins, Good Boris and Bad Boris, emerged from the open chasm. They circled the luggage, their heads lowered, their teeth bared. Good Boris unzipped his trousers and peed on the mother's leather suitcase. Or quite possibly it was the grandmother's suitcase. It was hard for Tanya to say with certainty. She was far too distracted by the twins'
teeth, which were definitely longer and sharper today than they were yesterday.

'Do they bite?' the girl asked.

'No, but they throw rocks and metal scrap pretty well,' Tanya conceded.

'Whose children are these?' The mother turned to Olga.

'Nobody's. That is, to date, no one has claimed them,' Olga said.

'They are community property,' Vitek added. 'The future of our great country.'

The twins straightened and Good Boris adjusted his zip. Bad Boris bent from the waist in a stiff half-bow.

The grandmother walked purposefully towards the children. Though she didn't speak a word of Russian, her posture conveyed with a clarity that needed no interpretation her firm intention; she would transcend any barrier—hygienic, linguistic, or otherwise. Her mission: this child. Not the one that had micturated upon her fine luggage. But this one, still bowing.

'Come here, child.' The grandmother bent and held her hand out as if coaxing a dog. 'Someone ought to be taking care of you.'

Bad Boris's gaze darted from one woman to the next. 'It is in the shape of the Lord God's emptiness that we are made,' Bad Boris said in perfect English, his pure tenor voice rising high as notes taking flight in a tall cathedral.

Just then Big Anna emerged from the hole, a bullhorn held
to her mouth. 'Queue up, you creeps! Buy your trinkets and authentic Siberian souvenirs here!'

'Pay no attention to her.' Tanya stepped between the women and the heap and the chasm and the girl, but the women moved towards Big Anna, pulled by a force Tanya could not name nor fathom nor stop.

The mother placed her warm hand on Tanya's wrist. Again with that warm and comforting gesture. 'Please tell me, dear girl, that these children don't live in that hole.'

'Why not?' Vitek smiled. 'It's prime real estate. Very spacious. Growing more so with every passing second. And the things these little shits are unearthing! Just yesterday I found a full set of dentures. Beautiful. You should really take a look.'

'Since when do these kids speak English? And with such grammatical precision?' Olga addressed no one in particular.

Now grandmother, mother and daughter all stood precariously at the edge of the chasm, each of them peering into the darkness.

'I can't see a thing. What's down there?' The girl craned her neck.

'Everything you covet!' the children screamed in unison. From their pockets they produced war medals and tiny metal icons, the kind soldiers going into battle wore around their necks, striped navy shirts, and the hats and stoles made of prized sable fur—not those made of soggy rabbit fur that smell of damp forests.

'Down there is everything elemental. Smokeless fire. Fear.' Azade walked the perimeter of the chasm. She lifted her nose and sniffed at the air with grave suspicion.

'I'll tell you what's down there. It's an old story. As old as east and west,' Olga said. 'It's a story about mud because that's where every story begins and every story ends. Beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Because mud is like love, constantly asserting itself. One day God awoke from troubling dreams and realized that He was lonely. He had mud in his beard and mud under his fingernails. And that's when He got an idea. Out of the mud He made man.'

'To the rooms!' Tanya cried, sweeping her arm in the general direction of the stairwell. If she could get them out of the courtyard, away from the chaos, then she could show them their lives behind closed doors, the lives as she wished them to be, as she wished them to see—the kettle whistling on the hotplate, the postcards from beautiful places on their walls, the claw-footed baths.

The mother straightened suddenly and waved her hand in the air as if conducting an orchestra. 'Such a punchy odour,' she observed. 'There must be a septic tank nearby.'

Vitek leaned in the direction of the hole and sniffed mightily as if his nostrils were as sensitive as a canary to coal gas. Tanya closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. And then she prayed. To her heavenly father.
Dear God, if you love me even just a little bit, make him go away.
When she opened her eyes it
was just as she expected, things could not get any worse: Mircha stood beside the hole and was reading from a ream of papers tucked into an old philological textbook, the kind of material Azade normally doled out for use in the latrine. As Mircha finished with each page, he peeled it from the binding and let it fall, as a petal from a blowsy flower.

Mircha licked a finger, peeled another sheet from the stack and levelled his gaze on Tanya. 'The best story, by far, is yours, dear girl. A heartbreaker, too, a real three-hankie affair, five if you are easily moved. Imagine a girl haunted by her mother. The mother was water and her daughter was air. Even though the two were elementally composed of the same matter, at all times they were fundamentally separate.'

'Don't listen to him,' Azade said to Tanya. 'A fool will say anything.'

'What the girl knows about her mother could fill a thimble,' Mircha continued, completely ignoring Azade's hex-eye glares. 'What she can remember weighs less than a cobweb. Only this: pink rushes of blood behind her mother's fingernails, the soft warm hands and the skin that smelled of woodsmoke.'

'The smell!' The grandmother fanned the air around her nose. 'It's getting worse.'

Tanya hands shook. 'We better keep moving,' she said between clenched teeth.

'Don't you want to know where your mother is?' Mircha pitched his voice towards Tanya. 'Don't you want to know how your story tangles up with hers? I'll bet she's down in this hole
with every other unanswered question. Don't you want to know how to live this life abundantly?'

'Enough!' Azade approached the bench with her shovel in hand. 'What makes you think you can tell any of us how better to live?'

'What's she saying?' The mother turned to Tanya for a translation.

'Is she talking to us?' The girl seemed moved, at last, to curiosity.

'What is that woman doing?' Now the grandmother gripped Tanya's arm. 'Why is she waving that shovel around?'

'It's hard to say.' Tanya heard her own voice coiling tight, tight.

'Well, let's reason together.' Mircha tucked his sheaf of papers into his waistband and withdrew a plastic vial of nail-varnish remover. 'You've tried your old housewives' tricks before and not one of them has worked. That's always been your problem, failure to accept complete reality. You see, you can't really make me go away because it's not part of the story. You need me. I am the conflict, the plot complication. I am utterly necessary.' Mircha took a healthy drink.

Azade gripped the shovel handle. 'Let me tell you a story of weight and spectacle. Some people call it the Invention of Zero but I call it the Immeasurable Importance of Wising up to Oneself. One summer all the cucumbers in a man's field went bad. The leaves on the man's prized Persian Ironwood turned black as ravens and then, one day, grew wings and flew,
carrying off his ancestral stories and history beyond the four points of a map. He had counted all that could be counted—buckets, stars, wives, feet, lakes, words and devils—and still came up empty. There was nothing to fill that yawning expanse, and so he ate a cabbage, the last one on the last hill of his property.'

The grandmother tugged on Tanya's sleeve. 'Is that woman mad? Is there something we should do to help her?'

'Is there another staircase we can use to get to our rooms?' the mother asked.

All this English and Russian flying willy-nilly from window to broken concrete, mud chasm to heap. The noise and commerce and questions and stories—subversive and malicious—knocking knee to hip to ear. It was enough to throw Tanya into a full spin.

Sensing her suffering, the girl, an expert on the subject, touched Tanya's elbow. 'What's that lady talking about? Tell us.'

Tanya turned to the girl. 'You asked for this,' she said balefully. And then she translated word for word Azade's story.

'The cabbage spoiled inside of him. It curdled his blood and even his very thoughts to the point that even if he wanted to think good, he thought ill, even if he wanted to do right, he did wrong. Everything he touched became contaminated. On shearing day, a time of rejoicing, he shut himself in his house because otherwise the pregnant ewes lost their lambs and the horns of the rams withered on their heads. If the man went
fishing, the fish swam sideways and in spring would forget the rivers of their youth. Meanwhile that cabbage in his stomach continued to grow, as if it had a mind and will of its own. Old women teased him mercilessly, for he looked like a woman carrying a terrible burden. The man became weary with this souring weight that pulled his sinew from bone, joint from socket, pulled his body towards the ground. You may be wondering what this man ever did to deserve such luck, and the answer is not so simple. Because the man was like a jinn, or maybe something worse. More air than earth, he was a man in search of new skin to inhabit, new stories to wear. This was why he felt so empty, this was why everything he touched became cursed. But he was not without some charm. He could still talk up the requisite threesome for a round of drinking. And he had a knack for telling stories.'

'This is the strangest story I've ever heard,' the mother mumbled to no one in particular.

Mircha brightened. 'I like this man. But the story—what a mess! It has no complication. No dramatic rise. No denouement. Terrible,' he pronounced, bringing the vial of nail-varnish remover to his lips.

And here Tanya paused. For Azade, now a mere metre away from Mircha, had raised the shovel high. 'Every story, good or bad, must have an end,' Azade said, and swung the blade down hard across his shoulders. Mircha doubled over.

Azade brought the shovel down again and again, breaking bones with every blow. And Mircha, with each blow, sunk a
little deeper into the mud. But his mouth worked as well as ever as he registered each hit with a bitter complaint: 'My knees! My shoulder! My back!'

'Why is she doing that?' the grandmother asked.

'She's thrashing the mud. Very routine part of spring cleaning. It brings good luck,' Olga explained.

'Is this normal?' the mother asked.

'Very,' Olga replied. 'We each of us are like olives. Only when we are beaten, trammelled, and utterly crushed do we yield up what is essential and what is the best in us.'

Mircha flailed. 'A story is an arrow, dear girl. It always flies true and once it is spoken it can't be taken back! Tanyechka! Ask me what your future holds. I might tell you!'

Azade handed Tanya the shovel. 'There's on old mountain saying: the man is the head but the woman is the neck.'

Tanya gripped the handle. Her rage, white hot and boiling, the rage she fed with chewing gum and self-loathing, had not evaporated into cloud or into nothing as she had hoped. It was still there, in her arms, her hands. She did not hate this man with his overachieving mouth. She had never allowed herself to hate anyone. Passive by nature, she lacked the energy for pure hatred. But she hated his words, each one a stinging nettle. How dare he taunt her with her knowledge of Marina, her mother, the one subject everyone in the courtyard knew they were never to discuss? How dare he ruin this one chance with the Americans and their no-strings-attached money? Tanya lifted the shovel, so light now in her steady hands it
seemed to rise in the air of its own accord. And then it arced, level and straight, and connected with a solid crunch against Mircha's shoulder. The bad one. Mircha yelped. Tanya swung again, this time against the backs of his knees.