The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

by Gina Ochsner

  But on evenings like these, Tanya wished her grandmother would progress with the times. They were, after all, new Russians, no matter what the red-browns and other reactionaries were saying. All you had to do was look around and you could see times had changed and in ways none of them had ever imagined. Now a hundred grams of cheese cost fifty roubles instead of ten. The rise and fall of inflation could be tracked in the price of chewing gum and chocolates, the morale of the country measured by the price of vodka, which was never more than the price of bread. And where old pensioners like Mircha and her grandmother once could count on a monthly salary, it was now up to the new Russians like Tanya, who made less than the workers at the western-style coffee shops, to look after their own. No wonder her grandmother was so nostalgic for the past.

  'Doors!' Lukeria shouted from her perch at the window. It was an orthodox greeting meant to hurry Tanya from the corridor lest the Devil come in on a draught and blow out the candle.

  Tanya scuttled into the apartment. She kicked her boots off, and looped her scarf and her plastic bag with Head Administrator Chumak's file over a nail in the wall. Then she folded her coat and carried it to the claw-footed bath where they kept all their necessary clothing.

  Lukeria squinted at the dark window. 'Who was the first exile to Siberia?' Tanya shuffled into the kitchen, where she put the kettle on the ring. 'The bell of Tobolsk,' Tanya said. This was the beginning of a long catechism of calls and responses, a test designed to gauge Tanya's appreciation of all things orthodox.

  'Seven hundred pounds it weighed when it was cast. Six hundred and eighty after Boris Godunov had it flogged and its clapper ripped out. Exiled to Tobolsk, it sits silent, still forbidden to ring.'

  The point of the bell Tanya couldn't quite follow, only that making a lot of noise and suffering for it later seemed an integral part of orthodoxy. The kettle shrieked. Tanya poured hot water over the strainer, aligned cup and saucer, and walked, as carefully as a trained high-wire artist, to where her grandmother brooded. Tanya placed the teacup on top of the steamer trunk that doubled as their supper table, then slid the thin Bible Lukeria liked to use as a coaster under the saucer. This Bible had been given to Tanya by some Baptist minister at the bus station. Because of this, even though the Bible was the verbal icon of Christ, Lukeria announced that it could be used for any domestic purpose except biblical study.

  Lukeria slid her chair closer to the tiny fortochka, a small hinged glass pane lodged at the corner of the larger window. It opened separately, a convenience Tanya appreciated, as large-boned girls like her tended to wilt on winter days inside the apartment where the central heating could not be adjusted. Her grandmother, she knew, kept the fortochka cracked open less for Tanya's benefit than for her own: Lukeria sat here to smoke and the open window allowed for convenient eavesdropping on all courtyard conversations. But Lukeria was hard of hearing and the only help available was a toilet-bowl plunger, the bulb of which she'd dismantled and now held to her ear so that she could shamelessly listen in on Olga's Sabbath preparations that wafted up from her downstairs kitchen window, which was also opened a crack. On this night - a gasp from the matches, the lighting of candles, and then the prayer, musical words in a language Tanya did not know.

  Tanya tipped her head listening to the plaintive sound of Olga's voice. Lukeria leaned to the window and her features seemed to soften. It may have been the effect of the words. Or maybe it was the way that the yellow orthodox glow of the candlelight made all things more beautiful in the textured bathy haze.

  'Jews. They pray well enough.' Lukeria leaned and lit a cigarette from the candle's flame, inhaled deeply. 'Still,' she spoke on the exhale, a long ribbon of blue wafting from her mouth, 'I am sick to death of hearing about their problems. Their persecution. Their obsession with history. If they are so unhappy, they should not be living here. After all, Perm is the heart of orthodoxy. Perm is the bear that carries the orthodox cross on its back, the great white bear that will rise up with a roar.'

  'Hmmmmm.' Tanya opened her sky notebook. Most evenings Lukeria's words were easy for Tanya to dismiss. Words of a woman whose world was one of diminished proportion that had collapsed to a single point: this apartment, those suitcases, her trunk full of letters and that newspaper.

  'There are, after all, other cities people can live in, these days. Jews don't have to stay here and be persecuted anymore if they don't want to be persecuted.' Lukeria's voice fell to a distant rumble, a hollow knocking that became one and the same with the thuds and pings of the heating pipes.

  'Who says they're the only ones on the whole planet who have suffered? Does anyone ask me what I lived through during that war? I was seven. I watched my mother starve. We ate book binding and wallpaper paste. Does anyone ask me about it?'

  Tanya kept her pencil moving over the open page of her notebook. 'No,' Tanya said dully. 'Nobody asks.'

  'Who decided some people's suffering was more insufferable than other people's?' Lukeria pushed her chin towards the window pane and the skin of her neck pulled tight. 'It makes me want to choke.'

  Instead Lukeria began to cough. And cough. Her face turned violet. Tanya ran for the bottled water kept for such emergencies.

  'Do you want me to call Father Vyacheslav?' Tanya held the water to Lukeria's lips.

  Lukeria batted it away with surprising strength. 'Him!' she spluttered. 'How can I trust a priest whose beard hasn't even grown in properly?'

  'It's not his fault. He's only twenty-one.'

  'Exactly.' Lukeria's nickel-coloured eyes bore holes into Tanya's. 'Young people don't know anything anymore. And I don't want him anywhere near me.'

  Lukeria stood and Tanya assisted her to the shabby fold-out couch. Divan, Lukeria preferred to call it, a more nostalgic nomenclature suggesting elegance and culture they'd both read about in books but had never actually experienced. To this end, Lukeria had collected fragments of lace and doilies and scattered them like cobwebs over the back and arms of the couch. And now, creak by groan, she slowly lowered herself onto the fold-out.

  'You know, Tanyenchka, the real problem of this world is that there are simply too many people living on it.' Lukeria's voice trailed after her like a noxious vapour. 'Why should we all try to get along? What use is that? Where does it say that we should all like, or, God forbid, love one another? Let's say someone annoys me like an old headache, then just answer me this: why should I have to start liking them? Doesn't that strike you as false?' Now Lukeria lay on her left side so as to regain her air.

  Tanya tucked a blanket around Lukeria's bony shoulders. These things she said came as a result of seeing and knowing more than a person ought to, of ageing quickly and alone, and with a heightened sense of how little time she had left. All of this, in turn, provoked a terrible need to deliver every scathing remark and cutting observation she'd quietly kept to herself through the years, lest she'd not get another chance.

  These things she said, harsh as they sounded in Tanya's ear, were like the old church bells that could be heard every now and then if the wind blew just right; the deep tolling was not a pretty sound, but there was something to the low tones that seemed true and right and somehow beyond question.

  Who said to love one another? Well, Jesus. But where was he right now? In heaven, loving everybody and loved by everybody. And here the rest of us were, waiting down below. And what had we been commanded to do while we waited? Love love love. Where were we supposed to go to get this extra love? And what an enormous burden, this business of loving, especially when Tanya had worn herself out loving people who wouldn't or couldn't love her back. Especially when she herself had been given so little, she could ill afford to part with any extra.

  Tanya withdrew the application envelope from her plastic purse and returned to her chair at the window. It was hard to read the instructions, what with only one candle to read by and it guttering already. She squinted at the first question.

  1. If you were stranded on an island and were allowed t
o have with you three pieces of art, which pieces would you choose and why?

  Tanya blinked. She flipped the paper over in disbelief. This could not possibly be the correct application form. Perhaps this was Head Administrator Chumak's idea of a joke, and yet, there was no mistaking the dead earnest tone in his voice, no questioning how very important it was that she complete this application form, and satisfactorily. Tanya skipped Question One and read the next question.

  2. Describe what team spirit and cooperation mean to you.

  She could read English as well as the next person, but this was not the English she'd learned in books. Tanya shook her head slowly from side to side, her eyes stinging with tears.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Azade

  Because Perm was the fifth, coldest city in all of Russia, it was certainly as cold as the Daghestani uplands or North Ossetia, the places where Azade's family had originally come from. Too cold to make a ground burial possible. Especially if you didn't have a backhoe, and Azade did not have a backhoe. Nor did she have a pick, trowel or spade. She had a smallish-sized shovel and this nyuzhnik, the Little Necessary, also known as the latrine—small mercies each. If she really wanted to sit down and take a rest she could; she was in custody of the only key and had the broad authority to use as many squares of tissue paper as she might need. Another comfort: mornings like these when the temperature was a near balmy minus fifteen degrees Celsius, the warmer fumes rising up from the latrine made a small dent in the otherwise flat landscape of cold. And here, in her little brown portable Necessary, she had all the time in the world to consider the gravity of her situation—namely, she had a dead husband to bury. A month had passed since Mircha's wake and Azade, a good wife, a respecter of people both dead and alive, was coming off the rails. When somebody died, her father always said the Al-Fatiha over the body. The Sura Al-Fatiha was only seven verses long, but Azade had never been able to learn it by heart. She was, after all, a girl, and unclean. In the mountains girls could pray by memory, but were not allowed to touch the Holy Book.

  In the old days, in Vladikavkaz, where her father tended the Muslim graveyard, when somebody died all you had to do was go to the civil registry bureau and before the sun set that very day someone would send a truck around for the body. This the state did, her father explained, because in Vladikavkaz, a town divided between Ossetes—Armenian Christians, Orthodox Russians, Muslims and Jews—it was universally agreed that the worst thing you could do was to leave a body lying about, unburied. And Azade knew this because her father, who had studied mountain history so thoroughly that he received a PhD in the subject, told her how during the mountain wars, the famous Murid warriors would die trying to retrieve a body rather than let it remain above ground.

  All this because the unburied were known to visit the living while they slept and bite them all over their bodies or scratch them with their long, claw-like fingernails. It's why, even if she were to travel to Moscow, even if she were to receive a pension so large as to allow such a journey to such an important city, she would not—repeat, not—visit Lenin's tomb. It was craziness—an invitation to disaster—to stuff such a man, paint him with make-up and display him like a puppet under glass. And what has come of it? Nothing but badness. The man still haunted the country, skating with his girl-sized feet into people's dreams, yes, between lovers in their beds. He wasn't biting and scratching, but his memory, and an inexplicable nostalgia for the man, was like yeast, constantly reasserting itself. In conversation. In recycled pedagogy and rusty ideas. In latent bigotries stirred by the crashing economies. Each passing day as Azade stood in the looming shadow of the apartment building, she heard that old ideology, which once was for her family the meaning of their toil and the substance of life, knock from window to wall and wall to window. Oh, yes, she was almost certain Lenin haunted Mircha in his last months. It was the only way she could explain his leap from the rooftop.

  Azade stamped her feet and forced the blood to bite in her toes. So put the man to rest, she wanted to tell the world. The man was tired. His words were weary. Bury him, and we will all be better for it, she wanted to tell this new president of the New Federated Russia, whose troubles were really a predictable extension of older troubles that Lenin—for all his greatness and polished thoughts within his shiny head—could not have predicted, let alone prevented. Bury him. No, bury both of them, and quick. That's all she wanted. But it was winter already and she was old. Her joints hurt. The roots of her teeth ached in their sockets. Business at the latrine had fallen off in the sharp cold, the inhabitants of the building preferring to use pots than brave sub-zero temperatures for the courtyard latrine.

  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 sa
vage.

  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.