The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

by Gina Ochsner

  Fairly painless, as far as translations go, and just the kind of soft feature Chief Editor Kaminsky preferred to run on the front pages so as to dampen the effect of the other bad news. Olga translated the report from Koryak to Russian word by word, only altering the references to body parts while preserving the raw essence of paranoid ethnocentrism: people in the east behaved like animals and should be considered as such. Sadly, in all the offices of the Red Star the general feeling was that if it were happening to the people in the east or the south—that is, to the Mongols, the Uzbeks, the Buryats, the Avars, the Chechens, the Laks, the Lezghins, the Kazakhs—then those savages certainly deserved it. Which explains the newspaper's policy of bestowing upon these events an air of the inculpable, the inescapable and thus unavoidable, at all times suggesting that these atrocities had happened to people who in some way asked for it.

  Olga dipped her hand into the basket and withdrew another slip of paper. A recent report of anti-Semitism in the oil-rich Nefteyugansk area. Hardly surprising. Olga bit the nib of her pencil and scribbled a draft copy, writing up the incident as a low-grade malaise of ancient origin with a high nationalistic fibre content. The translation completed, Olga rolled the original work order with her rewrite into a tight scroll and slipped it into a bullet-shaped canister that rested in the open mouth of the howling tubes.

  Absurdity no. 4

  The tubes...

  ...consisted of a vascular network of transparent pneumatic tubing that snaked the walls then hooked sharply to disappear into the ceiling and floor. The moment either Arkady or Olga finished translating a report they sent both the original and translated version to Chief Editor Kaminsky for verification and approval. But it was hazardous work, retrieving or sending canisters, and Vera, Olga's best friend and senior fact-checker, told Olga about a former translator who had thrust her head in the open canister dock. Her bosom, which was not insubstantial, had been pulled into the dock. It took three men and all their strength to pry the poor woman free. What bothered the woman most was not the indignities to which her body had been subjected, but that she'd lost her brassiere. Even worse, she had been left with bruises in compromising places. And it took some effort on the part of the internal-memo-translation team to render the on-site production trauma sufficiently oblique in writing as to not make the woman the butt of everyone's break-time jokes.

  Yes, the tubes were a danger. Olga herself had witnessed the terrifying sucking power of their internal wind and had seen cufflinks and buttons, even the occasional set of dentures, clatter through the pipes, and heard their clacking and rattling against the sides.

  She took a breath, held it, then opened the plastic hatch and slid the canister in, one centimetre at a time. The canister trembled, as if it too were afraid. Then it shot up and away through the tubing, through the hole in the office ceiling built specifically for this device. Olga wiggled her fingers, sighed in relief. A good day, all in all, and taking it as a sign, she decided to quit early while she was still ahead.

  Through the snow Olga trudged, dimly aware that in faraway places people spoke with purer words of unvarnished meaning. Or maybe not. Maybe at other news agencies in other countries people simply told more palatable lies. And as she rounded the corner and climbed over the remains of the broken stone archway that marked the entrance to the courtyard, she felt despair sliding down her throat, setting up quick residence in her stomach. Language was, after all, just word-shaped stains, simply another way people hide themselves from one another, one more way to evade and obscure the truth.

  And then, perched on the roof of their apartment building, was Mircha, a one-armed weathervane leaning into a thin-set snow. 'Truth,' Mircha shook his fist, 'is a whore! And history,' Mircha stopped to point his finger at Olga, 'is giving me indigestion!'

  'Mr Aliyev,' Olga said, both a greeting and a dismissal, 'come down from the rooftop. You are drunk.'

  'I am fishing,' Mircha pronounced.

  Olga surveyed the heap of refuse glistening under a hard drop of frost. Everyone threw their trash out of their windows onto the heap; given the fact that the wind pushed from the east and that the sanitation crews were on perpetual strike, the window-toss method of garbage collection and containment was as efficient as any other. Also, it served as a visual catalogue of items no longer fit for any earthly purpose: rusted cables, engine blocks, even the burnt shell of a PT-76, an amphibious light tank. Balanced on the roof of this tank sat a typewriter minus the strikers and ribbon. And wedged in the typewriter was a fishing rod. Olga pointed to the ungainly pile. 'But your rod is on the heap.'

  Mircha leaned over the edge of the roof. 'Where I am going I have no need for such a rod; what I am fishing for requires a much larger hook.'

  Olga dismissed Mircha with a single-handed flick of the wrist and began her climb up the stairs to the third floor. At the threshold of the apartment she shared with her son, Yuri, and his semi-permanent girlfriend, Zoya, she stamped her feet and jangled her keys, wordless noise being the best way of alerting them that she was entering.

  In the kitchen Yuri sat at the table as he often did these days, swaying slowly from side to side as if in agony. Yuri, Olga knew, was born to suffer and nothing she'd done for him as a child or a man had deterred him from hewing a path through a thicket of sorrow. But she tried to encourage him. She did not pester him about his hobbies, that assortment of fishing flies, wire, paper clips, and goat hair spread across yesterday's copy of the Red Star which was in turn spread over the kitchen table. She tried not to mind the fact that Zoya spent much of her time in the kitchen, filing her nails, as she was doing at this very moment.

  'Who is making all that noise?' Zoya looked up briefly from her nails.

  'Mr Aliyev. On the rooftop again,' Olga said, bending for her jars of schi stacked under the sink. It was extremely rude to point her backside toward Zoya like that, but it was just the kind of mood she was in. Who invited this girl into her apartment? Not Olga, and as the girl had done little to familiarize herself with the kitchen and how to cook or clean in one, she was for Olga simply one more adult-child to care for. Olga emptied the soup into a large pot, slid it onto the ring and waited for it to burn bright red. Now that Sabbath had crept in on the hem of dark, they'd say a prayer, as good Jews should, and eat the soup. And like turning out her pockets by a river, the badness of the days of that week would leave her, if only for a short time. But then the soup heated too quickly in some places, not enough in other. The cabbage despaired in the pot, turning tired and stringy. It was a very bad sign, the soup being life itself. Cabbage and schi, that's our life. An old saying she'd learned. She used to know so many more of the sayings, but now they'd flown away from her. And Olga stamped her feet and fumed quietly.

  'What the matter, Mother?' Yuri looked up from his fly, which for all the world looked to Olga like a silly wad of ratty hair wrapped around a paper clip.

  'Nothing.'

  Zoya sniffed mightily in the direction of the pot.

  Olga scowled. 'Pay no attention. It's just the soup.'

  Yuri swayed on the chair slightly. And if it's good...'

  '...you don't need anything else in this world or the next,' Olga finished the saying. There. That's what she was trying to remember. Another thing about schi: it's a winter soup. You put it up in summer and let it sour through the autumn. Then in winter, when the stomach turned nostalgic, you ate it, a little at a time, stretching it through the months until May when the first cabbage of the season could be planted. Her mother taught her these things, and told her it was every woman's responsibility to teach at least one other woman how to make it.

  But it was so hard to pass on the bits of knowledge, the traditions, to people who did not care to learn them. Olga studied Zoya from the corner of her eye. Yes, the girl was good looking, hair dark as Voronezh soil. But she'd not cultivated in herself any curiosity whatsoever about the past, and little concern for the present. The girl, it seemed, lived entirely for industrial cosme
tics. Olga turned back to the pot, quietly muttering her disapproval.

  'Why not consult a cookbook?' Zoya tapped a pointed fingernail against the glossy varnish of the wooden table.

  Yes, all in all it was a bad day. And now this: opinions. Olga sighed loudly. But Yuri, busy tying flies for an imaginary fishing rod, didn't seem to notice. 'I don't trust cookbooks,' Olga stated.

  Zoya started in on another coat of varnish. 'You only say that because you work for a military newspaper. Naturally, then, you are suspicious of all print media.'

  Olga clamped her jaw and ground down on the molars. The girl was right. A cookbook was a fantasy, another form of a lie, promising things that could never happen in ordinary kitchens: that an onion sliced a certain way would not weep and neither would the cook who cuts it, that a miracle will boil up from beans if only one remembered to throw off the first three farting waters. But, as any well-seasoned cook knows, the best recipes cannot suffer being placed on permanent record. These recipes, many of them containing guarded family jokes, curses, blessings, and secrets, were never meant to be written, and certainly never meant to be read. This has to be why, Olga deduced, in the steppe culture of displaced Jews, the ultimate insult was to compliment a woman's cooking by asking for a recipe.

  The pot boiled over and hissed. 'Too much salt,' Zoya pronounced and Olga shook her head sadly. The second insult was to offer advice in the form of a helpful suggestion. Because soups were like our lives, were like our very selves, they had to be made with a flaw. This is what Olga wished she could teach Zoya. Because only God is perfect and because good Jews like Olga know that until they see God face to face, they can never be perfect, a wise cook deliberately flaws the soup. The imperfection reminds each of them that as they drain that last drop of broth, they take that imperfection—a pinch too much of white pepper, an extra dollop of pickled cabbage, a twinge of the lavender bud—into themselves, a taste on the tongue to remind them that even good things sometimes settle badly.

  The simplest of these soups is called the bride's soup, a dish Olga remembered preparing on her wedding day under the watchful eye of Ilke, her soon-to-be mother-in-law. There was Zvi, his best trousers rolled up and the guests standing behind him. Ilke brought in a basin of river water and Olga knelt and washed Zvi's feet. When she'd washed to Ilke's satisfaction, Olga drank the water, drank until she drained even the dirt. For a Jewish wife it has to be this way, taking the dust of the road, of her husband's journey, into herself so that they can carry the road between them. What words? No words, just the dust, the only true element. 'Cry out,' the rabbi canted. 'What shall we cry?' the guests asked. All men are like grass, like the flower that fades. To dust they return. 'It's bitter,' a male guest sang. 'So a kiss to make it sweet,' they all replied. And they kissed. For the first time, Olga with grains of dirt lodged between her molars.

  It was just one of the many old steppe traditions that Olga wanted to teach her future daughter-in-law, whoever that might be—but this girl here, dumb as a Tula cookie, simply could not or would not catch on. At this precise moment, for some reason—God only knew why—maybe because her eyes and ears had become well turned for a disaster in progress—Olga looked up. A dark form fell past the kitchen window and landed on the heap with a loud thud.

  'Good God!' Yuri jumped from his chair. Olga threw open the window. For a long moment Olga, Yuri and Zoya observed Mircha's broken body, steaming in the snow beside the heap. A disaster all right, and Olga couldn't find the words for it. All the phrases and euphemisms flapped about uselessly, overcoats four sizes too big.

  'Go and bring him in,' Olga turned to Yuri at last. 'We'll put him in the bath,' she said, pulling the window closed and drawing the curtain over it.

  ***

  Having read The Death of Ivan Ilyich several times, and being university educated, Olga took Tolstoy quite at his word when he advised keeping death in the living room in order to appreciate life. She just didn't account for Mircha's body bloating so. Normally so small and wiry, it was now at least twice its usual size. And him still missing an arm! It was as if, Olga decided as she poured the last of the three buckets of water over Mircha, that in death God made us larger to give us all a glimpse of how we might become grander in ways we'd never dreamed.

  With Yuri's help, Olga repositioned Mircha in the bath. An oddity of the building, this porcelain tub. It had faux gold spigots and claw feet. It was as if the building was so ashamed of its outward appearance, that the building planners, in an attempt to suggest a grandeur of long-gone days, bestowed this strange relic of misplaced opulence. Especially incongruent now, as they had been without running water in the building for over three months.

  After towel drying Mircha with a cloth made with no seams or knots, Olga and Yuri dressed him in his military uniform, though already he'd acquired so much gas they could not button the trousers at the waist and they left the service coat open.

  Zoya observed their progress from her chair in the kitchen. Occasionally she rose to stir the soup, still simmering on the stove. She pinched her nose. 'Why do we have to lay him out here? He stinks.'

  An old and slow-burning irritation flared inside Olga's chest. 'A wife should not have to lay out her husband. We'll do this for Azade and mark my words—she'll thank us for it later.' Olga leaned over Mircha, polished the prized Zhukov medal, brushed the stiff shoulder boards. She made one last adjustment to his collar and then returned to the kitchen for the salt. Olga handed Zoya a small blue bowl filled to the rim with salt. 'Put this on his stomach,' she said.

  Zoya brought her hand to her face. 'Oh, no. I'm not touching him.'

  Olga sighed. It was the way of these younger girls, she knew, to turn their noses up at antiquated ideas like duty or compassion. But what are we without our traditions? Olga wanted to ask the girl. Who are we if we will not honour our dead?

  Just then Lukeria and her granddaughter, Tanya, pushed through the door. Lukeria wore her second-best dress, the one peppered with the tiny periwinkle- and violet-coloured flowers. She kept her chin tucked to her chest and shuffled towards the bath, ignoring Tanya's attempts to guide her toward a chair. Approaching the tub, Tanya drew the sign of the cross with her forefinger and thumb, and sat in a chair, that tattered notebook pinched between her elbow and her side. A thinker, that one. Given the trouble her own words had been causing her, Olga understood the need to set things down, peg them right and true.

  Vitek arrived next, his crow-black hair stiff with shoe polish. He'd slathered thick layers of the blacking on every crease of his leather jacket as well and now that the polish had hardened, Vitek had to walk in a most unnatural way, lest the jacket shatter. Following Vitek was Azade's goat, Koza, and lastly Azade, the widow herself, red in the eyes and looking altogether like a wet newspaper wearing boots. Mircha was no treat to live with—anyone could hear their arguments from the first floor to the fifth, carried through the heating pipes. But Olga understood her tears. Women needed men. What was a woman to do if she fell down some steps and broke her leg? It was only one of the many permutations of fear, that unrelenting contract holding so many unhappy marriages together. Each of them—Olga, Lukeria, and now Azade—had one way or another been left behind. And now Olga knew it was the one thing, this fear, about which they'd never openly talk.

  'I'm so very sorry,' Yuri murmured, setting a chair for Azade near the head of the bath. Zoya handed Azade a tissue. Olga brought more chairs in and placed a large chunk of ice in Mircha's outstretched hand. At such occasions it was customary to gather around and think of complimentary things to say about the dead until the ice melted, the signal that they could begin long rounds of toasting.

  Five minutes passed, then ten. Drops of water pooled on the floor beneath Mircha's hand, and still no one said a word. The man had loved the bottle. He said strange things. He believed absolutely that all the transcaucasus people—Laks, Avars, Circassians—mountain people at heart—should unite and secede from Russia. Steppe Jews like Olga, who co
uld be more mountainly in their thinking if they tried a little harder, could possibly be grandfathered into the cause. 'Just think—a free state for all of us misfitted types. Free and autonomous. After all, who can deny that Russia has been and will always be a mother to some and a stepmother to others? This is the only solution really, and I can be president. And you, Olga, you can be my secretary.' All this he had said just days before he leapt from the roof.

  Olga scooted her chair a little closer to the bath, adjusted a stray strand of Mircha's silver hair. Now just what had changed, what unexpected reconfiguration occurred in his thoughts so that jumping from their roof was the only acceptable solution? When a man loses his dream, he ceases to be a man, he ceases to be alive. Now wasn't it Mircha who said that to her Yuri once? Olga wagged her head back and forth and made her signature sad clucking sounds.

  Finally, the last bit of the ice melted. The vodka had grown warm where she'd been holding the bottle next to her body. Olga cleared her throat. 'He was a good man in a tangential way. You could feel that behind the vitriol, the bile, and rage, really he meant well.'

  Another long moment of protracted silence, and then Yuri coughed. 'He was in terrible agony,' he said. Yuri touched Mircha's creased forehead, the source of so many of Mircha's agonies.

  'He might have jumped sooner,' Vitek stuffed his hands into his coat pockets. 'But at least he did it.'

  'He always was one for grand gestures,' Lukeria added.