by Gina Ochsner
Yuri observed Vitek sawing and sawing with the knife and making zero progress. No, Vitek wasn't handy. But a few things he did know. That much Yuri had to give him. Though he failed entrance exams to the technical schools and though he'd never seen Vitek with a girl, the way Vitek talked about them convinced Yuri that Vitek was wise beyond his years when it came to matters of business and matters of the gentler sex. And what Vitek didn't know as fact, he valiantly made up for with an unbounded confidence that defied logic. His latest investment, bottled river water which Vitek hailed as having cryogenic properties due to the enormous chemical content, had been a dismal failure. 'It's a free market now. We have to get to the train stations and sell things—anything!' Vitek had urged, and because they had nothing they gave him their vouchers, their savings. Which he'd promptly invested and lost. Yes, Vitek thought he could crush hedgehogs with his bare ass. It was an entertaining image and Yuri closed his eyes, imagining.
'What's so funny?' Vitek puffed his chest out.
'Nothing.'
'Let me tell you something. Fishing is OK, but if you want to make some real money, you should re-enlist.'
Behind them Lukeria's windows crept up. Then out came Lukeria's head, her rubber plunger held to her ear.
'With all your experience, they'd probably promote you right away. Make you an officer. Then you'd really be in the money.'
'I'll think about that.' Yuri slung the bag with his half of the pike in it over his shoulder and climbed the stairs for the rooftop. Call him an idiot, and every day from the third floor Lukeria did, but even Yuri was smart enough to know that the Russian Army would be the death of him.
Yuri climbed the service ladder and pushed open the hatch that opened onto the roof. If he couldn't have water then give him the uncluttered air. Give him the pocked cornices and buckling tarpaper. Give him the rooftop that afforded him the perspective to see the broad expanse of landscape beyond the crumbling fringe of city. Give him the many shades of grey a city could yield, none of them pretty. Because no city lasts for ever. Something breaks the city blocks—in this case, trees, shiny and hard and blacker than city soot. A frozen vein of ice knuckled through them and into the city. It was a contrast hard and sharp on the eye, but somehow soothing to the soul. There was such a thing, even now, as black and white, and that he could still see and recognize the difference meant something to him.
Overhead a plane ripped the sky into halves. Below him in the courtyard Azade emerged from the latrine, a twig broom in hand. Yuri watched her sweep salt over the ice and listened to her muttering. Complaining. About Vitek. There was something wrong with Vitek's head, she grumbled. And she was right, Yuri knew. Since his days in the Mozdok mobile hospital, one thing he'd learned was how to determine whether or not someone had a head problem.
In Yuri's case it was simple. For three weeks he could not see, could not talk, hear or move. It was as if he'd pulled his father's cracked flight helmet on and it had attached to his head completely.
His ears could not bear to hear any more. And within this darkness and silence Yuri was plunged into a loop of nightmarish memory he could not escape: Yuri ploughing through downtown Grozny in the T-90 tank. And what were they ploughing over? The bodies of their own dead and the people standing in the hulks of their apartment buildings. They were ethnic Russians. 'Comrades! Please!' an old man yelled at Yuri, who had the gun barrel leveled at the ground floor of the apartment. Sitting ducks, that's what they all were, the wily Chechens having taken to the hills.
So who were they killing? Yuri asked the targeter. 'Looks like Russians,' he replied. And that was the moment Yuri remembered who he was, that boy who had only wanted to fish, who wanted in that moment to be anything but Russian. And when mortar rounds blew the tank in front of them and gunfire strafed the column of tanks behind them, there was Yuri, miraculously unharmed. Outwardly whole. But inwardly shattered. Shell shock, a triage field doctor pronounced—the last thing, in fact, Yuri could remember anybody saying. And then he was strapped in the open cockpit of a Black Tulip, body bags stuffed stem to stern in the small cargo hold behind him, the dark bags the last thing he remembered seeing.
And then the light crept in on tiptoe.
'What can you see?' the doctors asked, wiggling their fingers in front of his eyes.
'Fingers,' Yuri replied. 'And tracers ghosting arcs through the sky.'
'What do you hear?'
'Spookies hosing down the hills,' he'd answered. 'And a metronome.'
The doctor standing to Yuri's left exchanged a glance with the doctor standing to Yuri's right. And then, as the days passed, he began to hear a sound. Just one. Ticking. And he was recovered, the doctors said, but Yuri was not so sure. His head—it was full of problems—even now the broken radios from the heap spat and chattered at him in the too-familiar language of manoeuvres and codes, all of the noise jostling and colliding so that one problem (Zoya—will she ever be content living in an apartment without a toaster oven?) merged with another (Mother—will she ever be happy? Vitek—will he ever stop pestering me?) and he would give anything to return to that world absent of sound.
Yuri leaned against the thin railing. In the metal he imagined he could feel the vibrations of an aeroplane rumbling overhead. Below him the heap glinted with frost, glistened with hard and hurting objects. And the pile shone and sang and from up here it was not so hard to imagine the allure of a sudden jump.
Yuri cast his fishing wire over the rail and observed its fall and hook around the handle of a Latvian manufactured refrigerator.
'Pssst. Let me give you some advice.'
Yuri whirled on his feet. 'Who's that?'
Yuri watched dumbfounded as a green cockaded service hat crested the service hole. Beneath the hat was the familiar head and face of Mircha. His eyes glittered bright as he hoisted himself up onto the roof, never looking so hale and hearty as now.
Mircha coughed. A polite cough. 'Oh, I like this air. Not as pure as in the uplands, but still, it's good. Smells like snow,' Mircha pointed his nose east and inhaled deeply. The sleeve of Mircha's service coat inflated like a windsock. Mircha looked at the sleeve, then at Yuri. 'Two knots. From the north. Brisk. You know what this air makes me think of?'
Yuri could feel his mouth moving, but he wasn't making a sound, not even a squeak.
'Makes me think of those foil strips they used to drop from planes. Radar jammers. We were all wearing our winter whites and advancing the mountain pass. And silver fell from the clouds, a blizzard of tinsel, shimmering down to the snow.' Mircha looked at the sky then spat over the roof railing. 'Oh, those were confusing times. The good Russian sympathizers and the good ethnic Russians and the good Muslim Soviet citizens hard pressed into a civil faith in civil authorities, all for the common good. Oh, it hurts my liver just thinking of it. Can you imagine the confusion—Laks and Lezghins, and Uzbeks and Ingushetians, and Avars and Kumuks, all of us fighting side by side. We were to defend Soviet interests, which were our interests, we were told. No turning back, Moscow was behind us. So off we went to crush our neighbours. And what were they doing? Singing the zikr and dancing in front of our tanks. Their women and children, too. And goats! Utter chaos, I can tell you.' Mircha rubbed his stump. 'A goat can sing pretty good when it has to.'
Yuri squeezed his eyes shut. 'We laid you out a month ago. Why are you here?'
Mircha smiled a sheepish smile and shrugged. 'That's right. Ask me questions. Go on.'
'Why?'
'Because then I have to answer them.'
'Why?'
Mircha brightened. 'Now you're getting the idea. It's just the way these things work.'
'So, tell me again why you are here.'
'Because I'm not buried. I'm not happy. I'm not happily buried.' Mircha smiled, a lopsided smile. 'At least, I think that's my problem.'
'How's the fishing on the other side?'
Mircha shifted his weight from the bad leg to the good one. 'I don't know,' Mircha sighed. 'I want
to fish, but I can't.'
Yuri frowned. 'Why not?'
Mircha hooked his chin towards the edge of the roof. 'Look. What do you see down there?'
Yuri leaned over the concrete barrier. 'There's the heap with the tank and my bike beside the heap.'
'And?' Mircha prodded.
'Snow.'
'Look there at the dark patch next to the heap.'
'Melted snow.'
Mircha groaned. 'Next to the melted snow, what do you see?'
'It looks very muddy from up here.'
Mircha pinched Yuri's neck. 'Look harder.'
Yuri squinted. 'A small trench. A fox hole, but deeper.' Yuri turned to Mircha. 'What's in there?'
Mircha smiled. 'Lost things.'
'Like what?'
Mircha rubbed his stump. 'Arms, maybe. Prosthetic. Pure titanium.'
'You've not been in?'
'No, genius. That's why I'm showing it to you. There's a rule about these things. Living dead people can't go in and dead living people can. Ha! It just kills me!' Mircha leaned over the railing and spat.
'So what do you want me to do?' Yuri rubbed his head. Already he was feeling woozy about this hole business and Mircha who was dead but living. As a Jew, all talk of resurrection made him a little uncomfortable, though he thoroughly longed to believe that the body God had for him after this one expired would not falter and fail him as this one had.
'Get a shovel—a big one. And get busy.'
Mircha stepped away from the ledge then disappeared down the opened roof hatch.
Yuri rubbed his eyes, pulled the flight helmet back on and secured the strap as tight as he could. He took a deep breath, then started down the stairs for his mother's apartment.
'Who's making all that noise upstairs?' Olga called from the kitchen.
Yuri stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the outer room and studied his mother, outlined at the window. 'It's Mircha, Mother. He's on the roof. Again.'
CHAPTER FIVE
Tanya
For the devout Russian orthodox, that tenebrous moment when dark dissolved into day was the very same moment when the knees should touch the floor. This was the moment when the faithful bowed to the red corner, the place in every orthodox home where the family icons and a candle were kept. It was a hard religion for the arthritic and frail, but for as long as Tanya had lived with her grandmother—that is, all of Tanya's life—Lukeria had always been as faithful to these rituals as a barnacle to the bottom of a boat. Every morning Tanya listened to her grandmother roll carefully off her bed and scuffle through the dark to the kitchen. A soft scraping of the legs of the wooden chair, a quiet grunt, and Tanya knew the woman was up. A clatter of metal, a moment of supreme silence, and then—if she listened very hard—something odd: the sound of a kiss. This morning routine had always seemed a great mystery to Tanya. The only icons Tanya had ever seen were wooden ones displayed in a glass cabinet and that was in a church that had been shut down and then reopened as a museum. Kept as they were under lock and key, there was no possibility of owning these relics. Certainly, no one kissed them.
But then the year Tanya turned thirteen, the bells in a few of the churches were allowed to ring. People were saying the unthinkable and hoping for things they'd never allowed themselves to hope for. At the city university history professors cancelled exams. 'Not to worry,' Tanya saw one of these professors say on TV. 'We believe in the future. It's the past we're not so sure about.' About that same time Lukeria stopped hiding her metal icons behind those shabby pictures of fruit. All this inspired in Tanya a boldness she'd never felt before, and one morning she followed her grandmother into the kitchen, solemnly watched the morning protocol and even ventured a religious question.
'Why do you kiss the icons?'
Lukeria did not look at Tanya, but merely climbed down from the wooden chair as steadily as she had climbed onto it, as if she'd known all along that Tanya had been observing her. 'The kiss is a reminder to hold heaven on the lips,' Lukeria said evenly.
Tanya helped Lukeria scoot the chair back to its proper place. 'Do they kiss back?' Tanya asked.
Lukeria straightened, looked as if she'd been slapped across the face. From that day on, if heaven were at her grandmother's lips, then pure hell was on her tongue. If ever Tanya ventured a question, Lukeria turned surly and short. About her work on the Sverdlovsk line, Lukeria would say very little. Inside that steamer trunk was a wooden box her grandmother had shown her once—only once—and inside the wooden box—an Honourable Railway Worker Medal. It took her forty years to earn this medal and was not an easy feat for her, a small woman, and one of the only women on the tracks working among men.
'Did you sell tickets?' Tanya asked.
'No.'
'Inspect travel documents?' This question produced a dark look like none she'd ever seen before on her grandmother's face.
'I pulled the traction string that was connected to the switch at the box. Some trains were sent south, some east beyond the Urals. And then some were diverted to the spur that ran to Kutchina.'
Kutchina was a word in Perm like no other. If the Devil had a nickname it was Kutchina. If there was a hell outside of hell, it was Kutchina. But being the child that Tanya was, in the presence of something horrible and secret, she had to ask—wanted to know—what was in those wagons that barrelled over the tracks toward Kutchina?
'Freight.'
'Cows?'
'Not cows.'
'Pigs?'
'Not pigs. People.'
'What kind of people?'
'People like you wouldn't believe. Dissidents. People who talk. Otherwise-minded people. Poets.'
Could this be the answer to the riddle, the answer to the real question Tanya had wanted to ask: Where was her mother? Where had Marina gone? Had she, too, taken a fatal train ride? Tanya wasn't completely a child anymore, she had started to bleed down below and felt it was time her grandmother told her the things girls like her needed to know.
Lukeria merely nodded to the windows, to the clouds. 'She went to a better place,' she said in a voice as flat and formidable as the steppe in February, as the back of her iron skillet from Magnitogorsk.
Even then, Tanya knew that a better place was anywhere but here. Australia. Canada. Finland. Or maybe the Black Sea—Sochi—where they sold lemon ices. As an Honourable Railway Worker, Tanya's grandmother, Tanya figured, would know all these things. Of course Tanya asked.
'Don't ask the cuckoo in the tree foolish questions,' Lukeria replied, and it was then that Tanya understood her mother's departure had been swift and it had been Tanya's fault. Tanya had been unwanted and there was nothing she could ever do to change that fact. She felt a sadness that no words in the world could name. Yoked with that sadness was the hard and sudden understanding that if she could not be lovable, then she must try to be likeable. And if not likeable, she must at all costs find ways to be useful, malleable, agreeable. If her grandmother loved an invisible God, then Tanya would too. If her grandmother prayed on her knees in the morning, Tanya would pray too. She would learn the protocols and the rituals and recite the prayers, quietly, of course. The stories about the saints and their miraculous visions in the forests, all these things she would treasure in her heart, because these were the grand stories of faith, and her grandmother valued them. And faith, her grandmother said, was cloud, water and air, acted upon by the unseen hand of God. Faith was not about knowing where the path led, but believing the path led somewhere. And when her grandmother talked like that, in a whisper—always a whisper—her words were to Tanya the greatest gift. Her words were beautiful and wise because Tanya knew that they had first come from an old woman, maybe even the great-grandmother Tanya had never met, but who had, nevertheless, whispered them to Lukeria—but only after it had once been whispered to that old woman, and so on and so on. This was how the faithful find God—in repetition of sound and gesture over time. That was tradition and tradition was not some silly ritual or toneless chant
, but one woman after another, a mother singing into the ear of her daughter the words and the melody of an ancient unbroken song, which, Tanya was learning, almost always sounded like suffering.
On this morning, Tanya stood at the threshold dividing kitchen from living room. Lukeria had already kissed the icons, something Tanya was still not permitted to do, and now she was reading aloud from one of the many letters she kept locked in the steamer trunk.
Though it is cold and the work is hard winter will not last forever.
This was just one of the many letters Lukeria found on the tracks, tossed from the wagons. Some of the letters even had photos inside, prayer cards, locks of hair. Perhaps they were written by prisoners in transit, men and women desperate to discard anything that might be used against them or their families.
Slava has taken ill with a vapour. I have given him my blanket.
Or likely as not, they were simply letters in excess, the letters prisoners had written beyond their twice-a-year allowance. Confiscated by the guards, these missives were stowed in the wagons to be pulped and recycled, and somehow they'd found their way into her grandmother's trunk.
