by Gina Ochsner
'A mule among stallions,' Azade whispered.
Olga filled everyone's glasses. 'Well, that's that and God rest him, he's settled now and at peace.' Olga raised her glass and they all swallowed.
'He was never a good-looking man,' Zoya started off.
'But God rest him, he's got both arms and legs now,' Tanya replied, her open notebook balanced on her lap.
'And may he have better boots for longer journeys.' Azade raised her glass.
And may he teach the angels how to fish the glass sea,' Yuri said, bringing his sleeve to his nose.
And then they grew quiet again, thinking.
'It is just me, or is the stink in here worse than ever?' Lukeria said suddenly.
'The soup!' Olga cried, rushing for the kitchen.
'What I don't understand,' Zoya turned to Yuri, 'is how a Sabbath soup can double for a funeral soup.' Now Zoya turned to Tanya. 'You should write that down in your notebook.'
Vitek leaned toward Tanya. 'Zhirinovsky will save the country. Write that down in your notebook.'
'Please.' Tanya, overwhelmed by the combined odours of Vitek's breath and Mircha's body, waved her hand near her nose. 'There's a man dead here.'
'Zhirinovsky is an idiot. He sleeps with a pogo stick,' Yuri said.
'Please.' Olga returned with the tureen of soup, set it down on the table with a loud thunk. 'There are women here. Jews.'
'Zhirinovsky is a Jew.' Vitek smiled broadly.
'He's a madman,' Zoya said.
'He's inspired,' Vitek said.
'The things people like him call people like us.' Olga looked at Zoya, who looked at Yuri. Olga distributed the bowls, the bright orange ones with the white polka dots.
'Zhids,' Yuri wagged his head from side to side.
'Kikes,' Azade said.
'Dogs,' Tanya whispered.
'Swine,' Lukeria said nostalgically.
'Rodents and murderers,' Vitek sang.
'Well, thank heavens nobody thinks like that anymore,' Yuri said, his voice bright.
At this the room fell silent. Unnaturally silent. Olga saw that Yuri's ears were beetroot red and she knew he was not altogether the child that he so often pretended to be.
'Let's eat,' Olga said and they dragged their chairs to the other side of the room, where she ladled out the soup and they fell to eating in silence. After each mouthful of soup Azade licked the spoon, tucked it into her left boot and pulled a different spoon from her right boot. On this went until Azade had gone through at least twenty spoons and the sheer wonder and excess of it mesmerized Olga, who could not take her eyes off the woman.
'It must be a Gypsy thing,' Lukeria whispered in a voice so loud that everyone could hear her plainly.
'Avar,' Tanya whispered back. 'I think she's Avar or perhaps Lezghin.'
'Well, whatever she is, clearly she's quite mad with grief.' Lukeria paused for a split second and then added as if as an afterthought, 'This soup, it's got a distinct something about it.'
Zoya hooked her chin toward Olga. 'That's because she burned it.'
'In that case,' Lukeria stood slowly and patted her busy print dress into place, 'I won't ask for the recipe.' Lukeria turned to Tanya. 'Let's go. The smell in here is slapping me in the face.'
At that very moment Vitek's pager bleated. 'Big bizness,' he said with a smile, his gold tooth winking. Vitek pushed himself up from the chair with his legs, the whole time keeping his torso straight and level. Still his jacket creaked and complained. He tucked the opened bottle of vodka into his waistband and followed Lukeria and Tanya out the door. The goat trailed at his heels, its thick hooves thudding over the floor.
Azade stood to her feet. She bent over Mircha and looked at him with suspicion. 'Well,' she turned to Olga. 'I better get back to work.' And she shuffled out the door.
Strange, Olga thought as she watched the door fall back into its locks. Strange how they all couldn't help but be ugly at a time when people usually try to offer their best, if only to prove to each other for a short time that they can rise above themselves. It felt strange to recognize that sometimes death did not bring people together, but provided instead one more reason to further the distance between them. It was like digging through her secret stash of socks and boiled sweets only to discover that she'd come up short. That's how she felt: cheated somehow.
And she missed Zvi. Looking at Mircha, dressed in his uniform and stretched over the bath and so still, it was hard not to look at him and think of Zvi. Hard not to wonder what had become of him. She wasn't so lost in her old grief to forget that there were thousands like her in apartment buildings everywhere quietly wondering if their husbands or brothers or sons would miraculously appear. Called out of the dust, from the air, they would somehow be spirited to their doors and they would knock. Weary from their years-long journey they would be faint, tired—but alive. Marvellously alive. Although she knew from her many years at the Red Star where she examined so many reports to the contrary that this wouldn't happen, Olga liked to imagine that it could. Without a dream we are dead. Now she remembered, now she knew who said that. Not Mircha, but Zvi. In his service uniform, one of the last things, in fact, that he had said. And the gummy notion that there must be a vital clue in that bit of advice, something essential that she should have decoded by now, something she'd missed that would tell her how better to live, stuck to her like a bathhouse leaf.
Zoya and Yuri had already retired behind their shared privacy curtain, an intricate arrangement of tablecloths and sheets hung over fishing wire. Olga pulled a sheet over Mircha and blew out the candle. In the morning she would think about what to do with his body. But today, she'd had enough trouble. She gathered the bowls and carried them back to the kitchen, where she filled the sink with a little soap and some water from the kettle. It wasn't fair, this life. All these years Azade stuck with a husband she didn't want and Olga longing for Zvi, whom she did want. It was wrong to be bitter, she knew, but a person can't help feeling the way she does. Olga reached for a bowl. It slid from her hand and dashed against the sink, breaking to shards and cutting her palms.
She leaned her elbows over the sink. The tears were there, she was just that angry and beaten, but on days like these even crying required too much effort. Olga straightened, wrapped her hand in a dishcloth and crossed the darkened room, feeling her way through the strung sheets for her bed. She unbuttoned her sweater and her housedress, and hung them in the tall wardrobe. Lined her slippers carefully at the side of her bed. Then she lay on the mattress and listened to the sounds of her neighbours around her carrying on with their nightly business. Lukeria's heavy breathing rose up through the air vents and from the courtyard she could hear Vitek serenading the moon. Here, inside the apartment from behind the privacy curtains, Zoya and Yuri churned through separate dreams, Zoya murmuring her disapproval, while Yuri called out the names of rivers and the beautiful names of the beautiful fish that swam in them.
Olga's eyes watered. She was lonely. Even in the presence of all these people, all this life, she felt unbearably alone. She passed her hand over her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. Then she felt her blood turn to ice. Perhaps it was a trick of light, her eyes conspiring to organize the dust and grit in the air into strange shapes, but as she stared across the room she swore she was seeing the shape of a man backlit by the light of the moon filtering through the window.
'Zvi?' Olga called as she jumped from her bed, but then he was gone.
CHAPTER TWO
Tanya
There are three secrets at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum of Art, Geology and Anthropology. The first is that none of the exhibits are authentic. Not a single gessoed canvas, splotch of oil paint, stick of furniture or beaten metal icon is genuine. Everything inside the museum is a replica. Some of the items are replicas of replicas. That is why, where one might expect stern old women ensconced in wooden chairs and strategically positioned in each exhibit hall, there are none. Why no dehu-midifiers, no f
ans circulating the air in the summer. Why the locking mechanisms on windows and doors have been allowed to gather rust. It is also why the entrance fee is so modest, it explains the second big secret. Out of the six full-time museum employees—Tanya in coat check, old Ludmilla at the ticket counter, Zoya and Yuri as guides—only Head Administrator Chumak, who is, of course, the head administrator, and Daniilov, the caretaker, have been paid in the last three months. This, in turn, explains the third secret, which is a secret not because it's so shocking, but because no one is openly discussing it: the museum toilets. A principal part of the employee benefit package is the free use of the lavs, for as long as they like, as frequently as they like. This explained why Tanya, Yuri, Zoya and perhaps Ludmilla kept working at the museum on Head Administrator Chumak's promise that they would some day (and soon) be paid. The toilets, state of the art and of Finnish design, shone of polished chrome and sleek porcelain. And when you don't live in apartments with running water—Tanya, Zoya and Yuri, and possibly Ludmilla, do not—the importance of the benefits package swells.
Which explains why Tanya patiently put up with her humiliating demotion from the elevated position of museum tour guide to that of basement hat/coat-check attendant. Even so, the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum was still Tanya's life, the ever-shifting canvas of her love story. And while it was true that the exhibits in the museum disappointed—especially the geological display in the basement which consisted of four rocks, three of which Tanya was fairly certain Head Administrator Chumak supplied himself and which looked suspiciously like Violet Crumble chocolate bars, Tanya found herself unable to stop dreaming of upward movement, both in terms of career advancement and also of her actual geographic position. Which explained why Tanya (though she had been made by Head Administrator Chumak to understand the terrible gravity of minding the claim disks, of minding the wooden racks which contained hats and sweaters and satchels that weighed more than any bag ever should) sat in her fold-out chair, her sky-colour notebook open in her lap.
A whole summer Tanya had sat in this cloakroom, carefully inventorying every rain jacket and umbrella, scarf and satchel, lest she make a mistake. She lovingly itemized and described in great detail their fabrics and textures, even going so far as to describe their owners, their bright chatter in exotic and sometimes ordinary languages. But blame it on boredom. Or maybe it was on account of the dim lighting of the museum's underbelly. But always her gaze drifted to the window that ran high and narrow along the upper portion of the basement wall. Framed inside this long box of light, every moment of every day a dance unfolded bolt by feather, and never the same way twice.
But now summer had gone, the doughy cumulus clouds that rose steadily like good piroshki had drifted away and autumn had brought herring-scaled skies. This very morning they'd had their first hard frost. Outside the narrow basement window the clouds congealed like the winter soups with skins so thick the grandmothers could skate over them. By midday the clouds would take on the look of buckwheat porridge, the mere thought of which always wheeled Tanya back to childhood, to sitting at the steamer trunk that doubled as her grandmother's kitchen table and TV stand. Every morning before school Tanya bolted down the kasha, fishing with the spoon for the small dollop of butter. That lump of yellow was the sun, the brightest and best part of the bowl, the bit of fat that gave the kasha any flavour whatsoever.
Tanya's stomach grumbled. This soup and kasha stuff, it wasn't healthy thinking. Not if you were trying to reduce, as Tanya was trying to. All this for a bid to work for Aeroflot, which was hiring flight crew for the riskier southern and eastern routes like the Perm—Krasnodar and Perm—Vladivostok, the same routes younger, better-looking girls with brighter prospects were now giving up. Imagine—trading the dim belly of the museum for the sharp and vertical blues of sky! Imagine—exchanging her sensible shoes for high-heeled pumps and skating on a silver sea of clouds! 'Imagine!' Head Recruiter Aitmotova, a tiny woman with platinum-blonde hair and highly parabolic eyebrows, said a few weeks ago when Tanya meekly eyed the bright glossies and application form. 'Down-at-heel Aeroflot is renovating its entire fleet.' Head Recruiter Aitmotova shoved an application form into Tanya's hand and plied Tanya with figures, facts and stories of workers repairing cracked wings and faulty electrical circuits. Gone the old colours, gone the bland white bellies and baby-blue wings, for the crisper, brisker blues and oranges. Gone the traditional meal service, which began and ended with a single cup of water and a wet wipe. And gone their old slogan: 'We don't smile, because we're serious about making you happy.'
As Head Recruiter Aitmotova talked and talked, Tanya shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Living as she did so near a newspaper translator, she had learned through the thinness of the walls and the conductive nature of the open heating pipes a few things. Facts. Aeroflot had earned a long and thoroughly established reputation of aviation disaster, planes dropping right and left out of the sky to land in the great boggy flats of Siberia.
Head Recruiter Aitmotova raised her hand slowly and nodded knowingly. 'You are wondering about safety. Everybody does at some point. And I can assure you that even now our very own Aviamotor mechanics are working around the clock to overhaul the old engines. Moreover, engineers have installed black boxes so that if—and this is highly conjectural—a plane should fall, investigators will know why.' Head Recruiter Aitmotova smiled. 'It's progress; you can't stand in the way of it.'
All this the woman had said in a rolling cadence that itself could not be stopped, not by Tanya's quiet doubt, low self-esteem or complete lack of funds. 'Just fill in the application form, dear,' Head Recruiter Aitmotova said, a benediction of practical measures. 'Be focused on your dreams. And lose some weight.'
Dream. She could do that. Staring out the narrow window, Tanya imagined the taste of cloud, swallowing every fluffy hope, consuming and digesting and rising, rising beyond body, beyond reason. Her trouble: she did not yet possess a fully inflatable super-buoyant self-esteem. A theme song would help. Supersonic anti-gravity jump boots. Coiled springs. Wax wings. A flight manual. But she was straying off-topic: a bad habit of hers and the reason why she'd been demoted from guided tours in the first place.
She blamed her sudden deflated status on the oversized painting of Yermak Timofeyevich in the blue room. Who could think straight with that madman foraging across the thick layers of cheap industrial-grade paint? Heavy with winter blues, browns, and flat winter light, Yermak leads a band of Cossacks through a river. They are hacking their way through the line of Tatar defenders. The long creases on his forehead suggest a lifetime of weariness, of hunger, but the look in his eye is of wild joy. All this in spite of the heavy armour he wears—a gift from the mad Tsar. Would he have still worn that armour if he had known that some day its weight would drag him to the bottom of a river? Is he pleased to know that even now on certain days columns of fire shoot out of the river at the very spot his bones are pinned to the riverbed? These were the questions Tanya made the mistake of voicing aloud. And in front of a group of schoolchildren.
This must be why the painting of Yermak was so big, she'd told the children. Yermak was larger than life, daily fighting death in that large river that flowed out the bottom border, as if to show no mere frame could ever contain him. Yes, it was a big painting. Beyond big, the canvas was an immensity. It filled an entire wall in the museum. If it were to fall, if those hooks and cables were to fail, the weight of the painting would surely pull down the wall to the waxed floor. The toppling wall would set off a chain reaction, she speculated aloud, and as each wall fell, room by room, the upper stories would collapse like an accordion folding upon the lower storeys. Yermak would drag down the entire museum all the way to the basement, burying them all.
Naturally, there were complaints. She was demoted. Her embarrassment, colossal. Worse, sitting in the basement next to boxes of rocks and other curiosities put her no closer to Yuri than before, but rather much further away. And this is what hurt her most. S
he, a girl made of water and air and breath, she a girl who had swallowed cloud and was now more vapour and spirit than girl, was stuck in the underlit bowels of the stagnant museum at the very bottom of the bottom of the ocean of air.
Yuri's voice and that of Zoya's, Tanya's replacement, floated down opposite sets of stairs, Yuri's from the west wing and Zoya's from the east. Even separated, through the acoustic anomalies of the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, they managed to find each other, their words falling to the lowest point of the building, settling in the wells of Tanya's ears: Zoya discussing in her bored monotone the icons of Saints Boris and Gleb, while Yuri fielded questions from the purple room where the two pictures of Yermak opening the Siberian interior hung.
'Why does Yermak look so rabid?' The question tumbled down the staircase and fell loudly at Tanya's feet.
'Well,' Yuri coughed politely, 'he was a known river pirate. Ivan the Terrible hired him to go and act crazy in a grand proportion, an ability so natural to Cossacks, it seems a genetic certainty.'
A true interpretation. But risky. It was OK to criticize dead people, but not overly famous ones. Having spent the better part of a summer in the basement, Tanya ought to know. She studied the window, the particulate texture of lowering frost mixed with the grit and pollution. This time of year the rose and lavenders of the grainy air looked like a picture of a famous painting she'd seen in a book somewhere. Viewed up close, there were nothing but dots, hundreds upon hundreds of dots. But seen from a distance, out of the haze of dots a rolling green and a river, and a child and a woman with a red parasol slowly emerged. He must have lived in a very dirty world, that painter. But he found a way, with the point of his paintbrush and unbounded human patience, to render it beautiful. Tanya narrowed her eyes at the grainy block of sky framed in the window. Dots upon dots. She squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them suddenly. Alas, just dots. Tanya sighed. Flipped through her notebook. Took consolation in an old scribble:
