The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (7 page)

This struck Azade as somewhat unfair: she'd never overcharged anyone. She only asked for ten kopeks. Twenty kopeks if the visitor required the use of a socialist textbook or the napkins she pilfered from the pricey western coffee shop. Also she made sure to keep the lid of the commode shut, as the Devil looked for open holes to hide in. This was a service she provided for free. Most days it was lonely work, situated here at the far end of the courtyard under the frozen lime tree, and of course, no one was ever happy to see her, and under no circumstances did anyone touch her hands.

In mornings, if they came, Lukeria would arrive first, supported by her granddaughter Tanya, and a few minutes later Olga would appear. Always they walked with their heads down, their eyes trained on their boots. They were angry. They were broken. Their building had been without sewer service for over four months. They needed her Little Necessary, and this they found an embarrassment. Well, so did Azade. It never seemed right to her to make people pay for what a body naturally had to do. But it was a job, and it did have a certain appeal. This job got her out of the apartment. It kept her close to human warble and bustling and their careening stench. And here was a funny thing: when she sat on the cracked seat of the latrine, as, say, a queen on her throne, she was almost content. On her perch she could survey the entire courtyard, seeing without being seen. She could watch the street kids, all five of them, drift from window to window on the second floor where she'd laid out blankets and set out bowls of steaming
kasha, and if she could find it, milk. She could keep on eye on her son, Vitek, lounging in the stairwell. And as long as she worked she was eligible for a pension and one doctor's visit per year. At least this is what Vitek, who fancied himself everyone's business advisor, said.

But these expansive feelings of near-contentedness she kept to herself. She'd seen the way the other women in the building looked at her. She knew what they were saying and thinking. For at least two reasons, maybe three, she knew she was considered very bad luck. In the city where she was born people who tended latrines or graveyards were always considered the worst kind of bad luck. The rumour, according to her mother, who knew all the old stories and understood how people thought, was that only jinns—genies—lived or worked in such places. This was why people who work at public rest-rooms or who keep latrines were never invited to share prayers, were never the guest of unexpected hospitality, as the worst thing that could happen to a devout believer—whatever his brand of religion—was to inadvertently shake hands over the threshold with a jinn. Because jinns, made of fire and air and longing to be more human, will leap into any body they can touch. This was why the faithful hung knotted ropes from their doorways. Why knowledgeable Orthodox Russians arranged fish bones in the shape of a cross over their front and back doors. Why a rabbi blessed the entry way of a home belonging to a Jew anytime a member of the family has used an outdoor latrine or walked past a cemetery. Why Azade's father and
mother, good people both of them, were never asked into the homes of their neighbours.

It's why even now, living here in this nearly abandoned apartment building where everyone was almost as poor and as desperate as she, her status was of the lowest sort. No matter what she might say or do, she, regardless of her silver hair—her dignity - plaited and wound around her head and covered by a bright cap, she was and would always be considered a
dikii,
a savage.

This must be why Lukeira spoke to her as if she were a small child, her words over-enunciated and loud, though Azade's hearing and understanding of Russian was nearly perfect. In fact, she felt like Russian was her second skin, though when she wore it, it chafed against the mountain skin underneath. Scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tatar. This is a true saying and one more reason the other women of the building didn't like her: she had wide-set eyes and dark skin and nothing, she knew, could make her more suspect. It didn't matter to them that Azade could write Russian as fine as the next person. It did not matter to them that she could curse in Ossetian and bless in Kumyk, those fibrous languages of mud and straw. Nor was anyone impressed that she knew how to read the moods of her goat, Koza, by observing the movement of his ears. She could speak the language of dogs. She knew what they thought about while they slept, what extraordinary soil their feet ploughed during their dreams. From her mother who taught her to read the Urals, she learned how to gauge sunset by the lengthening of shadowfall, and by the smell of
the dust she could tell how many days they'd been without rain. She had learned from her mother, too, who took her to the banya where she worked, that other women did not care about these things. Nobody talked about shadows and rainfall, clouds or mountains. Who looked up to the mountains when the very earth beneath their feet was so unsteady?

'It's this ground,' her mother whispered into her dark hair. 'It's sour. Full of sulphurous gas. And the Kama—pure poison.' That was Perm in those days. A closed city, a red circle on the map. A city of fly ash and coal, salt and tanks, bicycle parts and sighting mechanisms. Smoking hills of mine waste. A city of bad luck.

Just think bad luck and it is sure to find you. That was another jinn saying her own mother told her, and Azade believed it, for around the toppled stone archway strolled her boy Vitek. Boy!—he was almost thirty, and every day he was the biggest heartbreak of her life. Never lifting a finger to help. And here he came, out of breath and reeking of alcohol. And this at eight-thirty in the morning.

'Good news!' Vitek waved a newspaper. 'Given the estimated increase in human population, and hence the increase of human shit, latrine-sitting will be a growth industry.'

'So everything will stink more. That is good news.' Azade swept her twig broom over the tops of Vitek's shoes.

'Yes, but you're forgetting the principles of supply and demand. The price people will pay for the privilege of stinking with privacy will rise.'

'Why?'

'Because it just will. It's so simple, really. Instead of charging ten kopeks, we'll start charging a rouble—maybe even two.'

Vitek jostled the handle of the locked latrine.

'One square or two?' Azade held up the wad of paper.

'Two.'

'Two roubles, then,' Azade said with a smile and Vitek stomped through the frozen courtyard. One by one, the kids left the heap and followed Vitek through the stairwell, where they reappeared on the roof. The oldest child, a ten-year-old girl, made crude gestures, while the next oldest child, a boy with dark red hair, and Vitek dropped their trousers. Jets of urine arced from the roof and froze mid-air, falling to the ground in hard amber drops.

Azade whisked the urine into a pile under Lukeria's window, trudged back to her latrine and sat on the toilet with a loud sigh. Vitek. A disappointment, sure. But it was her fault he turned out the way he did. Vitek's trouble started with her, because his trouble, her trouble, was merely a continuation of older troubles, which all began so long ago it was as if they had no beginning because there was never a time when they didn't already exist. And when Azade thought trouble—her trouble, his trouble—she started with the city of her birth, Ordzhonikidze. Some people called it Dzaudzhikau and on Russian maps it was called Vladikavkaz. In her mind it was a city of changing names, a city of changed people, a city she
only knew because other people knew it first. Her father described it so many times she felt like it was she, not her father, who hollowed out the graves for good Muslims with a backhoe. Because he told her in such painstaking detail about his days spent turning the dark earth over—the oily smell of clay and the eyeless fish turning beneath their mantles of mud - she felt certain it was she, not he, who listened to those fish quietly marking the minutes and days of each season. She felt certain that it was she, not he, who carefully notched the graves so that the bodies lay on a burial shelf and so that she could stand in the hole with them, her hands clasped in front of her chest. And it was she who bowed to the heaven and to the earth, and toward the Arab countries where their religion, which nobody in her family had ever pretended to completely understand, had come from. It was she, not her father, who wound the bodies in the white cloth and, after placing the body so that the head faced west, intoned the old burial prayers, words they needed to hear to have a proper send-off.

And because her mother told her about the open bins of cracked coriander, cumin and dried sage, mustard, the stalls of watermelon and cabbage, Azade felt like it had been she, not her mother, who had bartered in the open-air meat market. She who heard the Jewish dogs, who were wiser than the other dogs, bark first at the women with long blue skirts and smart-looking glasses handing out political leaflets. Well, why not? Her mother would say: theirs was still an open city, and as such it was a meeting place, a crossroads in the mountain. Stand at
the crossroads and ask what is the good way and follow it. Good mountain advice and in those days the passes were unregulated. Kamyks, Laks, Uzbeks, Georgians, Chechens—even leaflet-distributing Russians—crossed freely from one mountain territory to another. If you were healthy enough for a mountain crossing, nobody stopped you. It was like this through the strange days of the thirties, until that terrible war. Then the city was no longer called Ordzhonikidze, but Dzaudzhikau. Then came soldiers. Security officers. Until then, her mother explained, they had not known they were part of a people's union of soviets. And when her father, a proud man and a fighter at heart, had heard there was a war, he attempted to enlist. Her mother told her this so carefully Azade could see in vivid detail the enrolling officer's amused but weary smile.
'Nyet,'
the officer said, pointing to a sheet of paper tacked to the wall. People of questionable ethnicity—that is, anyone who was not originally from northern Russia—were to serve their country by relocating. The officer explained then that the spot had already been picked out for them. The sudden understanding that he would be a stranger wherever he went, that he was considered a stranger already in his own town, was almost too much for her father to take.

'What if we refuse to go?' her father had asked, a question so direct it earned him a rifle butt in the stomach. According to that sheet of paper, they were to be allowed to take 500 kilograms of their belongings, which, for most families, amounted to a few pots, a blanket, some salt. But everyone was in such a
hurry, her mother said, prodded into the cattle cars, packed like animals, they were lucky if they got all their children with them.

All this her mother told her. Every story Azade had ever known she heard first from her mother. Because this is the way it is with words between parents and children. The stories of the adults are given to the children as a gift, as a blessing, as a reminder, as a curse. And when the story jumps from mouth to mouth, skin to skin, it becomes so fluid and malleable as to sustain numerous retellings in innumerable contexts, stretching so much as to allow a daughter to know all that the mother knew, and in this way to thoroughly become her. Because when her mother told these stories, it was as if Azade became her mother, just as when Azade's father told his stories she felt she had become him. And then it was easy to recall how they'd been packed into the cattle cars with an ox who'd had its knees broken. How the children had to stand on the back of the beast lest they be crushed underfoot. How they looked for sky between the carriage seams. The thirst, her mother told her, was unbearable, and those who could, drank their own urine. The babies had no tears to cry with.

For three weeks, no food, no water, everyone pressed together so close they could not squat to relieve themselves and so had to shit all over each other's feet. And when the train stopped in Perm it wasn't until the line workers pushed open the doors of the wagons and offloaded those pressed closest to the doors that they could even tell who was dead and who
still alive. 'What are all these darkies doing here?' the railway inspector asked, and that is how they learned, blinking in the shock of sudden light, that there had been a huge mistake. They should have been sent to the Sarozek, the Kazakh desert, but somehow they had ended up at the gateway to Siberia, where nobody wanted them. They'd been deposited here to work the jobs real Russians didn't want to do and to occupy the dwellings of recently relocated families who were—impossibly—even more subversive and less Russian-looking than they. And what did they bring with them? The pain of an empty stomach. And shame.

The officers took turns with the women, her mother even, but not until they'd broken the arms and noses of all the men. The thud of boots. The crack of bones, the muffled cries. With each sound, each push, each tear of fabric, her mother explained how she retreated beneath her skin. Because beneath that skin there was another skin. And beneath that skin was yet another skin. And hiding in the centre of herself where there was nothing, her mother said, only air, a strange alchemy of torment occurred. At the end of her human self and wishing nothing more than for a few moments of flight, misery turned her leaden bones to hollow ones. And then her mother wasn't a woman anymore but a bird. 'This is what you do when something unspeakable happens,' her mother said. 'This is what happens to a girl when something unspeakable is done to her. She turns herself into a bird. This is how she flies away.' And when the men had finished with those women,
with her mother, even as the blood dried along the insides of their legs, the women hugged each other and sang an old song:

One day I will become a blue dove
And I will sit in the blue grass
Do not rush me, oh stranger,
Do not rush me now.

A song to numb the senses and dull the dreams. Days passed. Each one another dark bird that rises into a wrinkle and flies away. Her father's nose healed, but now it sat crooked on his face. Her mother, she healed too, in a fashion, the way women do. The song that she sang, it helped as much as any song can, smoothing back old hurt to make way for the new. The stinging hard looks other women gave her in the courtyard as she hung their laundry, the job assignments she could not get, the many kiosk vendors who would not sell to her. It was the same way for her father. The men of the apartment building called him Nose and would not allow him to play chess with them. 'Animals. Godless animals,' her father said. 'Sloppy eaters with foul mouths, most of those men. And their chess moves lack grace.' Azade can remember the indignation her father had felt, her father, who had been proud and devout, prayed seventeen times a day and had the prayer bruise on his forehead to prove it. 'In what way are they better than me?'