The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

by Gina Ochsner

  But do not worry. Some things never change. The stars shine whether we see them or not.

  Pure poetry, some of these letters. This one anyway. The Yellow Letter, Tanya dubbed it. Folded and refolded so many times it was the suggestion of paper; bends and seams rather than actual wood fibres held it together.

  I will always love you.

  The kettle screamed. The spell broken, Lukeria stopped reading, carefully refolded the letter in half and tucked it between her blue bathrobe and the side of the chair.

  They had lived together for so long they were like an old married couple, only noticing the other when, like a stitch dropped, a line forgotten, something in the pattern of their routine went askew. This is the only way Tanya could explain why her grandmother would make herself so painfully transparent, reading aloud a love letter that was not written to her, but that she read and reread, claiming it as her own.

  Tanya carried the tea to where Lukeria sat in contemplation before the weak light resolving itself to day. A leaden hulking cloud massif, the kind that carries snow, obscured the horizon. Tanya sank into the chair opposite Lukeria and opened her cloud notebook. If she superimposed that horizontal scoring of her grandmother's forehead and the deep crow's feet at the corners of her eyes over her own doughy half-finished face she could translate cloud to image, translate water to woman, and bring her mother back, as long as they two, grandmother and granddaughter, sat at the window.

  Today the grey is a hueless hue hovering between light and dark. I want to know you by your eyes, your lashes, your hands, your teeth. Instead you are light dampened by windows, colour with the noise turned low.

  'When I was your age,' Lukeria paused to light a cheap Bulgarian cigarette, 'I was prettier than you are now.'

  Tanya closed her notebook and made noises of quiet assent in the back of her throat. Like her morning prayers, Lukeria'a cutting remarks were simply another part of her daily routine that she had to complete in order to iron the wrinkles out of the evening. You cannot bless without cursing, her grandmother sincerely believed, and most days, ignoring her grandmother was easy enough to do: as long as the tea and cigarettes held out, her mouth was otherwise occupied. But in that twenty-second lapse, the time it took to stub out a cigarette and light a new one, her tongue moved unhindered.

  'Men followed me everywhere I went. But you, Tanyechka! I think all that university knowledge has ruined your chances. You've got no waistline whatsoever. It's as if everything you learned at school went straight to your hips and thighs. I hope you are trying to do something about that. Twenty years old already and you haven't got a man on the horizon. You haven't got a single plan.' Lukeria jabbed her cigarette at Tanya, then collapsed against the chair, exhausted by her own words.

  'I have plans.' Tanya calibrated her voice so as not to betray her faltering self-confidence, her very palpable understanding of her many flaws, and the crushing statistical unlikelihood that her dreams would ever materialize.

  'What plans?'

  Tanya tugged on the hem of her skirt. 'Aeroflot is hiring.'

  'Don't get your hopes up. You're lucky to have work at such a fine museum. It took two pairs of galoshes and my entire secret stash of jellied fruit slab to arrange it. Besides, you have unfortunate dentition. I don't say this to be cruel, only to state the obvious as a nudge to the reality of your situation.'

  Like an old combine that moves in one direction and at one speed, her grandmother's commentary faithfully ploughed over the same territory, grinding over familiar furrows.

  Lukeria fumbled with another cigarette.

  Tanya nudged a small box of matches closer to Lukeria's elbow. As she did, her hand jogged the teacup and the contents spilled onto the Bible.

  'Shit!' Tanya jumped and dabbed at the mess with the dishcloth she kept handy for such catastrophes. But already the onion-skin pages of the Bible had swelled like a sponge.

  Lukeria narrowed her nickel-coloured eyes, calculating the cost of the loss of tea. 'Shouldn't you be at work?'

  Tanya stood, retrieved her notebook, her sweater. Her scarf.

  'Another thing. Talk to Chumak.'

  Tanya edged towards the door. In her grandmother's rattle-dry voice she could hear the crack and spit of a smouldering fire rekindled.

  'Remind him that I knew his mother when she let that dirty pepper-eating Hungarian take her for long walks by the river. Tell him I know things. Tell him you need money for my medicine—the expensive one for my lungs.'

  Tanya knotted her scarf around her neck—tight—and pulled the door closed.

  Love. That's what Tanya was hearing. Behind the quick fury there had to be love. Fire consumes what it loves. That was another orthodox lesson. What Lukeria was doing was for her own good because had Lukeria poured her love unchecked on Tanya, she might have grown bloated and lazy from it. And her still-hungry but overfed heart would split from the excess, and on it would go, Tanya as a mother overindulging her own child. To what end? One little poke in life, one disappointment—major or minor—and her daughter would be done for, unable to cope with heartbreak. Thank heavens that she, now outwardly stout, inwardly anorexic, was so well acclimatized for a life without love. Yes, Tanya decided as she shoved three sticks of chewing gum into her mouth and turned for the bus stand, she'd been so well schooled in the thrifty economy of the heart, she could go months and even years without a single drop of genuine affection.

  On the number 77, Tanya worked the gum between her molars. It was a form of exercise, this gum chewing. And she needed it, exercise, in any form. In twenty minutes she'd have to step on the scales for Head Recruiter Aitmotova. The very thought provoked spastic jaw pumping. In front of her a young mother held a baby. The young woman bent her head to her baby, nuzzling the fuzz of the child's hair, her mouth so close to the child's, it looked as if they were breathing each other's warm air. It was so beautiful, so foreign to Tanya that she could not stop staring. 'Stop!' she wanted to warn that mother. Certainly Lukeria would have. Such affection was precisely the kind of waste that infuriated Lukeria, who believed that mothers cuddling and cooing, showering kisses on the heads of newborns, who'd never know the difference, were spending their love carelessly and would too soon run out. Because love, and Tanya knew this for a certain fact, was not as limitless as people in books and movies liked to suggest. Love was like food, like money. It was so rare, so precious, that it had to be accounted for absolutely. This she learned from Lukeria, who knew how to stretch a single chicken through an entire winter, who had spent a lifetime putting up any wayward piece of fruit or vegetable into glass jars that sat on a shelf as a visual reminder of the importance of thrift, the importance of preserving what was authentic and true for a day when it was needed. And as beautiful as this mother and child were, as pure and spontaneous as the woman's love was, Tanya was glad her grandmother wasn't there to see it.

  Outside the recruiting office, Tanya spat the wad of gum into a dirty drift of snow, ducked under the door's low overhang, and leaned heavily into the door.

  'Sit.' Head Administrator Aitmotova pointed to a tiny three-legged stool positioned beside an oversize scale. 'How many languages do you speak?' She assumed a look of grave interest in Tanya.

  'Three, plus I know at least half a dozen universal gestures of varying degrees of vulgarity.'

  Head Recruiter Aitmotova scribbled on her clipboard and smiled. 'That's wonderful. Now, drop your coat and step onto the scales, please.'

  Tanya held her breath and lifted her arms, as if that might prevent the needle's steady sweeping march across the number dial. Head Recruiter Aitmotova noted the measurement with a click of her tongue and a sigh. 'Big thighs and a big butt aren't big assets with Aeroflot. If you could just lose two stone and about five centimetres off each thigh, your chances would increase dramatically,' she said, offering Tanya several more packs of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. 'It's really quite simple,' she smiled. 'Just don't eat so much. Try following the zero-one-zero plan.'

&
nbsp; Tanya slid out of the recruiting office and trudged towards the museum. Eating nothing for breakfast or dinner and relying on a single midday meal was a fine idea, as fine a method of weight loss as any. But not every girl has the willpower to simply stop eating for days on end like Zoya had. And Tanya had never gone in for hawking into toilets. What a waste of good food!

  Tanya stood outside the employee entrance to the museum and leaned against a piece of metal twisted in a huge Russian 'R'. It had been donated to the museum in commemoration of the possible resurrection of the Russian rouble. It was modern art. That meant it was OK for Tanya to push her gum into hard rivets along the metal undersides and kick her heels against it to knock the ice loose from her boots.

  She pushed through the glass door and waved her badge at Ludmilla. Tanya's first stop, always, was the basement-floor exhibit of curiosities. Not the tiny storage room where they kept the rocks meant to be representative of the kinds of geological samples one could actually find underneath Perm, but the larger exhibit room with the dark green walls and the torches Tanya had strategically placed to achieve optimal atmospheric effect. This was where they kept the pseudo-Kuntskamera collection, their most popular exhibit with museum-goers. The exhibit consisted of a collection of spontaneously aborted neonates that Peter the Great had obtained from a Dutch doctor. All of the foetuses possessed alarming defects: a third arm, missing legs, no eyes. She and Yuri and Ludmilla had studied the photos of the real exhibit that sat in the Kuntskamera building somewhere in St Petersburg. Then they had lovingly fashioned the babies out of foam, submerged them in jars of orange-flavoured Fanta and artfully draped several of Lukeria's doilies and scarves around the jars—all of which had also been co-opted for the cause. All this in a bid to attract more visitors to the museum.

  And it worked. People did come to see the exhibit, out of moribund curiosity, out of boredom, Tanya couldn't say. She herself, for a reason that defied human logic, took comfort looking at them in their glass jars. If she had not known they were meant to be human, she might have considered them beautiful for their excesses and lacks. Especially the boy who had no arms or legs. Having only a head and torso, he was unfinished, as if a seamstress had run out of stuffing and stitched shut his tapered torso. But the real boy, whose picture she'd memorized, had developed enough to grow a short tuft of red hair on his head and wore the sweetest smile on his face. Did his mother love him any less because he was monstrously malformed? Tanya wondered. Or how about the twins, turned toward each other, clasping one another with arms and legs, sharing the same heart and head? Sharing every secret and every thought. Possessing enough between them, what need did they have for this world that would only tear them apart? And yet, did their mother grieve their passing any less? Would not these women have cradled them to the breast and called them perfect? Tanya pressed her fingers to the glass. She knew this much: she would have called them perfect because they'd have been hers.

  And if we, each, of us still children in our own ways, you missing your father and me having never known a mother, were to have a child it would be whole. Between us, we would be gloriously whole, perfectly completed, giving this child the things we never had or knew. You would teach him to fish and I would explain to her the theology of love unbounded. You could arrange the scales of the trout in intricate patterns that mirror the constellations and I would teach her the importance of sorting the greens when making sorrel soup.

  Her pencil flying across the page, Tanya almost didn't hear gathering in the stairwell the trademark sounds of Head Administrator Chumak working himself up the steps: thump-slide, thump—slide, thump—slide. First his head appeared, brilliant beetroot red, then his thick torso, his legs, and at last, that leaden foot.

  'Oh, Tanya! There you are!' Head Administrator Chumak reached the top of the landing. His face burned through the shades of magenta and then as it cooled through the pinks, his freckles slowly reasserted themselves.

  'How are you doing with that application form?'

  Tanya bit her lip. 'Some of the questions are giving me a little trouble. The one about handshakes, for instance.'

  A smile blazed across Chumak's face. 'I love a good handshake, don't you?'

  'That's just it. I don't know what a handshake is meant to signify.'

  Silence. As thick as calf's liver.

  'A handshake signals firm intention, goodwill, and trustworthiness in commercial transactions.'

  'Oh.' Tanya rolled her gaze to the ceiling. 'Then I'd say the handshake is most definitely on the wane.'

  'Don't write that. An application is an occasion for optimism at all costs,' Chumak said through that blazing smile, but his eyes were steely like flint. 'Any other, er, problems?'

  An affectionate pass of her hands over her notebook, a hard swallow. Optimism.

  Tanya patted her notebook affectionately and swallowed hard, thinking optimism. 'No. Almost finished.'

  'Wonderful! Because there is so much at stake, for all of us.' Head Administrator Chumak eyed Tanya's notebook. 'And that's why I believe in you, Tatiana Nikolaevna Bobkov. I believe because you are a little like me—a person of great substance, placed under great pressure, and we all know what that produces!' Another savage grin galloped across Head Administrator Chumak's face.

  'Ulcers?' Tanya ventured.

  'Ha,' Head Administrator Chumak laughed—a single combustive bark. From his file, he withdrew a fax, a single thin sheet of paper that curled in the air, and began reading.

  A delegation of the Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification will visit the museum that submits the best application and demonstrates the greatest need and greatest potential for development. Also the benefactors wish to observe the museum workers in their natural environment.

  Tanya's stomach seized. 'You don't mean...?'

  Head Administrator Chumak nodded gravely. 'Precisely. If they come, then they will want to spend a night with you and Zoya and Yuri—in your apartments.'

  'But, sir. Our apartments are in no condition to be seen and certainly in no condition to live in.'

  Head Director Chumak grimaced. 'Oh, I know. I faxed them most emphatically, but these people are quite determined. They wish to.' Head Administrator Chumak squinted fiercely at the fax: '"Experience first hand how living as you do, amidst the intersection of art and life, defines your artistic aesthetic."' Head Director Chumak winced. Apparently this is quite important in their selection process. So it will be up to you to make the apartments habitable.'

  Head Administrator Chumak stretched his lips into another flinty smile, then turned and began his long thump and slide back down the stairs.

  ***

  At the far end of the museum café Zoya and Yuri sat behind a small metal table. To get there Tanya had to skirt around a series of tables pushed together into a long line. A local chess club was practising for a simultaneous chess tournament. Five men brooded over five different chessboards while the other five men roamed from board to board. With each move of a chess piece, Tanya could hear their excited misery and terrible human longings amplified by the strange acoustics of the café: too old for the army, too young to retire, too beat up by life to find a job and keep it, too broke for a bottle.

  Zoya blew clouds of cigarette smoke above Yuri's head. Yuri, a metronome out of kilter, tipped his head first to one side, then the other. His colour was off, more sallow than usual. When Yuri saw Tanya, he hopped up and pulled out a chair for her.

  'Are you all right?' Tanya asked Yuri.

  Zoya laid a hand across Yuri's forehead, a gesture borrowed from Olga. 'It's just that shell shock again. You know—he hears things.'

  'Oh. The ticking,' Tanya suggested.

  Yuri's shoulders lifted and fell as he sighed. 'Last night I saw Mircha on the roof.'

  'But he's dead,' Tanya said.

  'But not buried,' Yuri said.

  Tanya bit her lip. 'I wonder what he wants.' Everybody knew the dead only lingered out of spite. Or someti
mes a deeply held nostalgia for the tangible provoked their return. A beloved handbag. A pair of shoes.

  'We stood together on the roof and he pointed down to our frozen dvor and the scrap heap and to a place beside the heap and that's when I saw something I had never noticed before.'

  'What?'

  'A black open gouge in the ground. A big dark opening.'

  'How did it get there?' Tanya whispered.

  'I don't know. But he told me that beneath this world was another world. A bright country of lost things.' Yuri swayed slightly in his chair.

  'We live on top of a marsh. Try to be relevant.' Zoya tugged at her hair, which was dyed a brassy brick red.

  Yuri's gaze locked on Tanya's. 'You believe me, don't you?'

  Tanya blinked. 'Oh, absolutely.'

  'Good. Because I need you to ask Daniilov for his shovel.'

  'What's wrong with Azade's?'

  'No good, Mircha says. It's not big enough.'

  'Oh, for God's sake.' Zoya stood and ordered a coffee.

  She was, Tanya decided, an impatient woman, lacking in common compassion. She could not suffer any deviation in the conversation. Which was to say, if Zoya were present, all conversation revolved solely around herself. And she was plagued by the artistic temperament. She abhorred all art except her own, found recognition of any other artist or any other unattached female morally reprehensible. Working these days, as she did, in the museum, if Zoya weren't taking a cigarette break or with Yuri, she was extremely miserable. Her only recourse was to dye her hair as often as possible in the most brilliant hues possible. When her hair, brittle and frayed, could not possibly sustain another dye job, she turned her artistic sensibilities upon family and co-workers.