Maple walnut. Yummm!
A graduate student at M.I.P.T. – Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, known as Phystech, the U.S.S.R.’s version of M.I.T. -- Magda had been expelled and sent to Kolyma on charges of treason against the State. Upon graduation, she’d received her napravleniye, just like every other Soviet university graduate, assigning her to her new place of work, a branch of the Soviet arms industry developing new weapons of destruction. When she refused, they sent her to the gulag instead. A physicist, she’d committed the heinous crime of wanting to make ploughshares, not bombs.
“Science should be the investigation of the unexplained rather than the explanation of the uninvestigated,” she’d complained to one of her doctoral supervisors one day. “Look what happens to us in the system. We start kindergarten with a book bag and sixty four colours of crayons with a sharpener on the back. Eighteen years later we come out with uni-colour ball point pen. Somewhere along the line we’ve lost sixty three colours and the ability to keep sharpening ourselves.”
In Kolyma, she began her real education. One of the Asian inmates had introduced her to it. Forced to stand in the snow as a disciplinary measure holding buckets of water in outstretched arms until the water got cold enough to freeze solid, Magda came to learn that stillness was peace, serenity, was strength. Only in the stillness could decisions be properly made. Think of a mountain or a tree, how still they are. Only when you became as still as a mountain or rock would you be able to think. The Japanese even had a proverb for it: Ishi no ue ni mo san nen -- to spend three years waiting on the same stone.
With her background in Physics and math, Magda was often called upon to work on the camp finances. She also trained herself in cosmetology, calling herself a Mathabeautician, and doing makeup for the other prisoners and guards, hours spent keeping her mouth shut and her mind and ears open. By the time she was let out of Kolyma, she spoke seven languages, but paradoxically began to talk less, sure enough in herself that she didn’t mind if someone might not like her. Even after she was released, she carried the camps around in her thinking like others carried their passport or a small Bible. She either had no ego, or one so large it was impregnable.
If you always knew where Pig was, clanking and blustering along, Magda could stand absolutely still, like one of those submarines with the engines off, on sonar silence, waiting to hear the clues that resided in the deep. What was the American running shoe company’s slogan? Just do it? Running, skating, never thinking, just doing? It seemed to suit the age perfectly. Magda preferred meditation. Movement brought only chaos.
If she was telling the truth, she could tell you exactly how many trees were in any given square kilometre of Siberia.
"Fight the bastard,” the Doctor brayed, because he knew that’s what he was supposed to say, a vat of slivovitz hanging over his belt, his accent the colour of a winter suicide and a tattered Inter Milan football jersey loosely untucked to hide his belly. If he’d washed since yesterday, you couldn’t tell. Completely bald from the ears forward, he compensated for his lack of hair with a Stalinesque moustache and a surfeit of unsubstantiated opinions, from Putin’s triumphs to the perfidy of the Jews, the price of vodka in the shops and who was Lady Di’s real assassin. It was as if he couldn’t have hair, he could have opinions.
The Doctor had once misdiagnosed colon cancer in a very prominent Palestinian politician, which explained how he came to be here in Siberia. It was the only place that would accept his qualifications and provide him with paid work. As the politician was later heard to blackly joke, “He had his head so far up his own ass he couldn’t see up mine.”
“I wonder if she’ll put out for me?” the Doctor mused, watching Magda grieve over Snow’s comatose body. Magda noted that both the Doctor’s grin and the teeth inside it seemed false, like the colour of creamer mixed into chicory broth instead of fresh farm milk in an elixir of brewed Colombian beans.
Bandar, his mother and father had christened him and that was the name he insisted everyone in camp call him; not Bandy, not Band, but Bandar, emphasis on the first syllable only, never the second. Call him anything else and he would refuse to answer, stomping off in a snit and running to complain. As a result, inventing variations of his name and watching him go into contortions over it had become the main camp sport, beating out even shooting empty vodka bottles with Kalashnikovs.
Doctor Bandar had answered Magda’s numerous questions about Snow -- treatment options, possible complications, etc. -- with the surliness of a government food store clerk, a faceless type who made you wonder if he invented the rubber stamp or it invented him. A homeless Palestinian with a Jordanian passport, he was welcome to use the papers just so long as he didn’t actually return to Jordan. Paper will stand whatever you write on it. As a result, he would do whatever Pig told him to. It was either that or go back to being homeless.
“Nado zhits,” he’d declaim anytime someone challenged one of his many questionable actions. “You have to live.” Then he’d comb over a few straggly hairs that seemed to grow out of his ears over the top of his bald head, creating the first human bar code.
Magda Perskanski had gone into the gulag as a Communist in a Communist country. She had come out as a realist in a chaotic one. In the interim, the Bolshevik Party had fallen, the country was no longer the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin was distinguishing himself by visiting foreign countries only long enough to get out of the plane and piss on the end of the runway then go back in the plane to sleep off his hangover while his advisors pillaged the nation.
The rest of the Union was in even worse shape than Boris’ liver. Released from the gulag, the penniless Magda had been put on a train for Moscow and told to resume her life as she wanted. She got only as far as Noyabrsk, where the train broke down and no one could say when it would be fixed or another one sent to replace it. With no money in her pocket, no job, and no idea when – or if – the train would be functional again, she did what she had to survive.
What does a fallen Physics professor do to survive?
Whatever she has to, using whatever hard-earned experience she’d gained in the gulag. Deciding to do what she knew best, Magda opened up her own beauty shop, not such an oxymoron even in a town as prosaic as Noyabrsk. God lends a touch of beauty even to the ugly. Perhaps it was even more important to be touched by beauty in such a drab atmosphere. And so the local ladies flocked in. And had their hair done, their cuticles clipped, their bushes trimmed. Who could have ever guessed that Brazilian wax jobs would become so well-known in the taiga.
Using another skill she’d learned at the gulag, Magda combined this service with a "deficit exchange club." Besides good men, Noyabrsk was short of just about everything. Good products were hard to find except on the black market, so Magda acted as a go-between for people who worked in industries that had access to desirable goods. Her job was not vital, noble or important -- but, then, not everything had to be. And she knew that.Those with access to cosmetics, push up bras, I-pods, Nintendo, Swiss chocolate: they all brought the surplus to Magda's shop and exchanged them for something else just as desirable that they happened not to have. Magda did not sell things here, she just set the barter rates. So many tubes of lipstick were worth one Victoria’s Secret promise. And so on. She did charge membership dues however and the privilege was steep. How did she get away with it? She’d fooled herself into thinking it was because of how clever she had set it up, customers came in with full bags to have their nails done and left with the same bags just as full. Who was to know the contents had been swapped? In truth, in the New Russia, what she was doing was no longer forbidden. What it was, was just the new way of doing business.
Finally, Magda advertised herself as a psychic who could read people’s pasts. “Psychic” and “Physics” and were almost spelled the same way, anyway. She put on an old tiara that had once belonged to Catherine the Great and charged a fee for telling people to do what they wanted to do anyway but needed an excuse to justi
fy it. The tiara was so tacky no one even checked to see if it was real or not. Which it was, unknown even to Magda.
Had she not been Slavic, Magda Timofeyeva Perskanski might even have thought she was happy in Noyabrsk, her new home.
Magda’s other business in Noyabrsk was running a brothel. That was why Pig called her “skank,” or “slut.” It had little to do with her last name.
Young, good-looking, naive and fresh as a peach, Magda Timofeyeva Perskanki hadn’t been in the gulag long before she was plucked. Cleaning up in the beauty shop after shutting down for the day, a guard knocks on the locked door. Magda pantomimes that the shop is closed for the day. He knocks again. Harder this time. She puts aside the broom for a moment and reluctantly cracks open the door. “It is my birthday,” the guard says. He wants to look good for his party. Reluctantly – she is tired – Magda lets him in, trims his hair, lathers and shaves his beard, pomades him with some scent.
Before she is done, the rest of them come. More guards. Grinning, smiling and nervous as long-tailed rats in a room full of rocking chairs. There for the party, they say. Magda tries to wish them well and rush them along. That’s when one of them grabs her and plants a rough kiss on her mouth. She struggles, protests she has never been with a man before. It only spurs them on. Her shirt is ripped open, her flesh roughly grabbed. More hands than she can count. She is pushed back on the chair and it is reclined. The Birthday Boy is first. Then, he nominates who’s next. Points again. And again. It seems to take forever. The chair will never be the same again, the gears in its reclining mechanism stripped. When they are spent, the boys decide to have more fun with her, using the shop’s cosmetics to make her up. Pouring their drinks on her. Sticking ice cubes and shop implements up inside. A curling iron burns her, inside and out. Someone covers her in shaving cream, then sticks a maraschino cherry inside. “There,” he says. “We were never here. You’re good as new.”
When it became a regular routine – every guard in camp has to have a birthday, after all – Magda decides to stop fighting it and go pro. At least that way she can dictate the terms.
Magda looks at Snow’s palms. She’s been sitting there holding his hands. Waiting. They are covered with blisters filled with clear pus. During the long, cold hours Snow was outside, the tissue froze and ice crystals formed in the tiny spaces between his cells, sucking water from them, blocking the blood supply. His hands and fingers will eventually turn black, the color of bloodless, dead tissue. Some of the digits may recover; others may have to be amputated. The lifelines are erased, unable to be seen through the swelling and discolouring. He couldn’t die, she knew. He’d had to have lived first and he hadn’t. How could you call what he’d endured up to now a life? He’d had it far worse in his sheltered life back in Canada than she’d ever had it in the gulag.
"They'll be fine," a voice breaks through her tears. Doctor Bandar. "His hands. The damage looks superficial. The blisters will break in a week or so, and the tissue should revive after that."
"These men knew nothing," Magda thought. How many of them had woken up in the middle of the night to find a warm spot where their loved one was supposed to be? Gone padding through the hallway to find him sitting in an overstuffed chair staring at the gas flare in the oil refinery burning off impurities in the distance? Or if he got tired of that, the picture of Lenin arriving at Finland station on the wall?
Snow never said anything – he didn’t have to -- but Magda knew. She'd been there herself. In camp after depressing camp dotted across the tundra. The deep, dark February of the soul where nothing was enjoyed, but only survived. A crushing inner darkness so pulverizing it couldn't be fought, only endured. A texture of pain so dense it was impossible to break through.
There was one big difference that worried her, though. Unlike herself, Snow had never hated anything or anyone strongly enough to want to keep himself alive.
“The bedroom was our most important room,” Magda absently told the waiting room. Everyone smirked, thinking she was talking about sex, not dreams.
It was all Magda could do not to do anything, just sit there helplessly and watch Snow dying. What had she done to him? She had meant well. But of all the things that start well and end badly -- relationships, pet ownership, your latest job -- none deteriorated so drastically as a plan begun with good intentions.
Finally finding something to do, Magda pulled the sleep mask down over Snow's eyes, her knuckles revelling in their arthritis. "He couldn't sleep without it," she explained when everyone looked at her like she’d just turned down a kilo of sugar. When it came to insomnia, they were both semi-pro. Only Magda -- Magda who was what Snow had discovered he’d come to Russia for -- could have told you what was going on behind those flickering lids.
Snow had first noticed it when he was out exercising a colt. First ice. Strong to enough to hold an eight-year-old boy. Silently, he genuflected, sodden woollen mittens splayed to the sides; face pressed up against the ice, laying on his stomach, staring down where the water was still moving over the gravel. A loon's cry. Solitude. Grace. The cold. The silence of God. A tadpole darted, frightened by the grey shape above. Had the tadpole looked up, it would have seen Canada: children racing and sliding and laughing; boys warming noses around bonfires built of discarded two-by-fours; wooden sticks slapping against frozen pucks; metal blades rasping through hollow ice; long searches for pucks buried in the snow.
Eight years old and, by then, the Game had already reached out and found him. How, he'd never know. One minute he'd been sitting staring out the frosted window at the foraging elk on the ranch his widowed father ran, the next he'd been sitting in a snow bank lacing up skates dug up out of a forgotten pile in the barn. Sharpening them on a grinder. Following the creeks through the dark for miles on end. No limits. The turns went on for ages. Only to come home for hot chocolate and stare up to the infinity that was the stars.
"You know," he'd told Magda the first time he'd told her the story. "That was the night my mind was opened up. It was the first time I realized there was more."
On the hospital cot, Snow’s eyes were fluttering in the typical manner indicative of R.E.M. sleep. He was dreaming of his beloved Oilers. Edmonton Northlands. When the team still carried such immortals as Gretzky, Kurri, Anderson, Coffey, Messier and Nilsson. Cheap beer night. Jillian on her sixth Big Rock by his side, magicians playing impossible tricks with language and time under the dome.
“Will my dreams come true?” Snow had once asked Magda while they communed in his room.
“You mean ambitions,” she corrected. “Dreams are true.”
“He’s at peace,” Doctor Bandar reassured her, looking at the still form. “Happy.”
“He was never happy,” Magda snorted, knowing Snow had never been one that was interested in happy endings, just endings. “Only morons are happy.”
“Listen, Skank,” Pig said, his voice cold as the click of the lock in a prison cell. “When I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you. You fat, lesbian slut!”
Since she was one of the few women around camp who wasn’t in Pig’s ‘shed and spread’ category, he had little use for her. The only thing he would have wanted her for would be if she were willing to open her legs like a chequing account with free unlimited overdraft.
“Is there a problem between you two?” the Doctor asked.
“No, no problem,” Pig demurred. “It’s just that I’m tired of this politically correct crap. Look, we both know that all women are are ‘herrings with ideas.’ Lenin’s wife might have pissed in the same toilet as him but that doesn’t mean she knew piss all about Leninism. But no, no problem. Everything’s fine. Magda was just being a radical hippie feminist Nazi lesbian quantum physicist, weren’t you Dear?”
“And what were you being?” Magda asked. “Daft?” She wasn’t impressed by the lies that “normal” people wore like clothes.
“I am a veteran of the Afghan campaign,” Pig said. Successfully running Soviet military camps i
n the middle of the mujahidin had made Pig qualified to run camps for the Russian oil companies after the fall of Bolshevism. “I proudly served my country while you were being punished for trying to destroy it.”
“Yeah, yeah, you risked your life fighting the fairies in the war, I know. So what? What else have you ever risked? Have you ever risked disapproval? Being poor? Not having enough to eat the next morning? Have you ever risked belief? Looking foolish? Being ostracized? So you risked your life in Afghanistan. That’s not courage. Real courage is risking something you have to keep on living with every day.”
Plump she may have been, but Magda had more heart in her than most people had body. So when Pig mocked her for being the aforementioned fat, lesbian slut, the only part she resented was being called fat. She’d earned her heft, paid for it with a good chunk of her soul.
Besides failing to diagnose the colon cancer of the unfortunate Palestinian politician, the Doctor had something else hanging over his head. Shortly after his arrival as the Doctor for the Noyabrsk medical camp, a young petroleum engineer had been brought into the clinic with a touch of food poisoning from the out-of-date supplies Pig habitually purchased for the canteen. A bit of rest and a saline I.V. drip to flush out the poisons and re-hydrate him after the bouts of vomiting and diarrhea should have done the trick. And it would have, too, if the Doctor hadn’t gotten blind drunk on medicinal alcohol and shoved the catheter into an artery instead of a vein. One reason veins are preferred over arteries is because the flow will pass through the lungs before passing through the rest of the body. Air bubbles left inside catheter tubes by incompetence can leave the bloodstream through the lungs. Air bubbles left inside catheters by mistake and going by artery straight to the heart can stop it. Can and did. Turned out the young petroleum engineer was the nephew of the oblast governor. ‘Was’ being the operative word. Past tense. As in dead.
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