The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

by Gina Ochsner

  Mircha withdrew a faded piece of paper from his pocket, pinched a corner and slowly whipped it open with a flourish as a maître d' presented a fine linen napkin, though Olga could see twilight through the creases. 'I am seeing things so much more clearly now that I'm dead. The mysteries—why we suffer, what use sorrow is and the causes of hatred—I see, now that I am dead, how each of us should live this life. You, dear lady, for instance. You are only living half a life.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'You jump at every squawk from a telephone, thinking it could be your husband. Every scratch at a windowpane, rattle at a door, you tell yourself it could be him. What if your story went like this.' Mircha paused and cleared his throat:

  'Once there was and was not a woman who fell in love with words. Each day she gathered eggs from her hens and each egg was another word. But the word had no meaning until it was broken and the contents consumed. The shiny egg, brown and mottled, beautiful in the way things found only in nature are beautiful, of course would be destroyed. The woman buried the eggs in the mud and seven years later.'

  'Stop!' Olga held her hands up. 'Please tell me this is not why you are hanging around licking light bulbs. Please tell me there's some better reason why you are here.'

  Mircha consulted his notes. 'Your problem is that you lack the courage to see and tell the truth. Your husband is dead—you and I both know it. You are hiding behind your imagination and that flimsy thing people call hope.'

  Olga took a breath, held it. 'I see now, Mr Aliyev, why you had such trouble getting up the requisite threesome for a round of drinking. You are frank to a fault.'

  Mircha smiled. 'You should try it sometime. They say truth sets people free.'

  'It also got them shot or sent by rail to the east. If I'm lucky, and the boss is in a good mood, I'll only lose my job.'

  Mircha folded his notes and handed them to Olga. 'Consider this friendly advice, a gift, even. From me to you.' Mircha smiled then retreated into the darkness.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Tanya

  Because on Mondays the museum was officially closed, on Sunday afternoons, before locking up, in anticipation of the coming day, Daniilov the caretaker always hung a sign on the entrance: GO AWAY, YOU MORONS. IT'S MONDAY! But every third Monday of the month was designated as a museum work day. This was a purely volunteer venture, which meant for Tanya that her participation was absolutely mandatory. All because she had once taken an art survey course and another in general chemistry and had once read, though never claimed to understand, a translation of Newton's Opticks. And because on Mondays the museum was closed, Ludmilla had no reason whatsoever to sit behind the glass ticket office and Zoya and Yuri no reason whatsoever to spew their well-worn exhibit scripts to museum goers. Certainly they were not required to work. 'They have no artistic vision. Not like you do, dear,' Head Administrator Chumak said when she asked why she should have to come in. Then he chuckled as if hers was the most ridiculous question and now she should feel as if his compliment was the greatest of rewards. Almost as great as having the upper floors of the museum to herself.

  And here's the strange thing: it was. The resentment she might have felt, would have felt if she were any other girl, vanished the moment she unlocked the back door. Sublimated in a blink at the possibility of the entire museum being a blank canvas, waiting to speak in a language of colour only she could unlock.

  Tanya stood before the door, basking in Daniilov's warm welcome. She wiggled the key in the ward of the lock, turned, turned, turned until the tumblers rolled once, twice, three times, and the door yielded with a soft click. She withdrew her key and hurried to the hat/coat check, her footsteps on the dark floor heavy slaps, then echoing as duller softer ones. Hat/coat check was where she kept her artistic supplies, and no, she was not just talking about the dream notebook now. Real supplies. Hidden in a box tucked in a rack. Tanya retrieved the box. She stopped briefly at Chumak's office, just long enough to slide the application form under his door, and then up, up, up the steps she climbed.

  On the mezzanine Daniilov dragged the mop listlessly behind him. He had a hangover, always on work days he brought with him a hangover, and the only remedy was to nurse it with cheap apple brandy or vodka, bottles of which stood in readiness beneath a poorly constructed bust of Peter the Great.

  'Good morning,' Tanya called.

  Daniilov stopped, bent his wiry body in half and clutched his forehead. 'Is it? Is it?' he moaned bitterly.

  Tanya opened her supply box and slowly withdrew a bottle of Marsh Lilac and a small tin of boot blacking. Consumed together they could give a man a spectacular intoxication. 'I need to borrow your shovel.'

  'What for?'

  Artistic purposes.'

  Daniilov eyed the loud first-floor exhibits. 'Burying it, I hope.' He grabbed the perfume, uncapped it, took a swig, and looked at the liquid with fond appreciation. 'The shovel's in the broom closet. Bring it back clean.'

  When Tanya had gained the landing to the third and final floor, she set the box in the middle of the room and waited for her breath to return. This was the first step in the creation of art: contemplation. Tanya took a deep breath and held it. All along the walls hung the icons that spelled the story of orthodoxy through the ages. When she looked at the faces of the saints, sombre beneath their weighty halos fitted like tight hoods over their heads, she could see their commitment to calm. For some reason, knowing that others could be calm, even if they were just pictures painted on wood or beaten out of iron, helped her own unsteady heart to settle.

  Tanya studied the icon Mother of God, touched Mary's halo, ran her finger lightly over her throbbing heart rimmed in gold. Exposure to the air, the lightest of water, had rusted Mary's heart, but in terms of colour, gold (or in this case, chocolate foil) was a good choice as it advanced on the eye and suggested warmth. This is what she always said to tour groups. Had said. What she didn't say: If it were true what her grandmother taught her, that God revealed himself through the line and colour of these icons, then it was through Mary's dark eyes and dark heart that Tanya thought she could see something of an invisible God. Mary gazed at her child and her child had his gaze trained on her.

  It was as if Mary knew this child would break her heart, but her eyes said, 'Go ahead, break it a million times anyway,' because she couldn't imagine her heart designed for any other purpose. Now that was love—allowing your heart to be bruised and broken for the sake of your child. It was not the tight-fisted love a woman gives when she senses her situation may be far more impermanent than she'd like, in this way sparing her own heart. Not, say, the frugal love that her grandmother favoured.

  This was the difference between a woman like Mary and a woman like her grandmother. Mary's heart grew larger through sorrow, while constant heartache had shrivelled her grandmother's heart to the size and consistency of the stone of a cherry. And where her grandmother had once had some love for Tanya—she had to believe this—and from that love had tried to instill belief in an orthodox God, now all Lukeria had was the trappings of faith, the brittle traditions and sayings. And here was the strange thing, Tanya realized with a jolt. This faith had been a hair shirt woven by someone else, the smells of another body of belief running warp and weft. An awkward fit at first. But this shirt, having rubbed against her skin for so long, now fastened itself tight to Tanya. So completely had the shirt become her skin that Tanya could not fathom not being orthodox, not loving an orthodox God in all her little orthodox ways. What may have been given to her as a substitute for love had become familiar. And now Lukeria's faith was Tanya's faith, for herself, a faith unfeigned that worked itself through the fingertips, here in this museum, amongst these icons.

  Tanya carefully withdrew her supplies: a wooden bowl, a fork, fizzy water, a packet of flour, three eggs. Squares of cardboard with thin wood glued to them. Swatches of cheap fabric. All necessary items in the making of an icon, which, for Tanya, actually started every third Sunday of the month when she
glued balsa to cardboard. OK, not balsa, but ice-cream sticks shaved to transparency. Yes, true, this meant on Sundays she ate, on account of her devotion to art, at least eight and sometimes ten ice creams, but that was suffering at the throne of the muse, and because it was the least she could do, Tanya did it.

  The wooden sticks having been shaved and glued to cardboard, Tanya then draped scraps of cloth over the sticks. Over all of this she then slathered a gooey layer of primer: a mixture of glue and powdered crushed chalk. OK, not glue, but these eggs and chalk. Depending on whether or not the upper floor had heat that day, it might take two, maybe three hours for this binding mixture to dry. During this time Tanya tried to make herself useful, in accordance with her theology of love. After all, Daniilov, who so often climbed the cork and suffered the dizzying effects afterwards, needed her help. For this reason Tanya cleaned the glass surrounds of the Kuntskamera exhibit and the paltry geology exhibit. She would have skipped the toilets, but nature urged and while she was there, her conscience pinched. Before she knew what she was doing, she was bent over, scrubbing with the brushes, spraying with the sanitizers, aware that if she didn't do it, quite possibly no one else would or could.

  When three hours, maybe four, had passed, when the chalk and glue had dried, then Tanya could draw a design incised on the surface with a penknife. Once she had been so bold as to mention in passing to Father Vyacheslav that she might like to learn to paint icons for the church some day. He had assumed a look of umbrage and wagged a finger in the air. Such a stuffy gesture for a man who hadn't quite outgrown the pimples on his face. 'One does not paint icons,' he said. 'One writes an icon. It is an inspired expression affording a glimpse into heaven.' Never was she more aware of this than now, as the knife quavered in her hand. Tanya pulled a sharp breath through her nose, held it. She studied the face of the Mother of God. Then she exhaled, slow and steadily, and let the long lines of her serene sorrow guide her hand.

  There. A woman had emerged before her. Then the child. They were not perfect, but they did not have to be. They only had to represent—however crudely—the human form, a receptacle for the God story that was a light so lovely the viewer would gaze in wonder, longing to learn the source of it.

  From out of the box Tanya withdrew the rest of her supplies. This was what she came for, for this part of the story She spread the contents of the box on the floor and blew on her hands. If God is light, then God is colour. This much she had gathered from the Baptist Bible and what she remembered from that lone general chemistry course. Red she loved. In particular, Siberian red, a lead chromate that can be made to dance the scales of colour from lemon yellow to chrome orange to a disturbing blood hue. Also she was fond of oxide viridian, so beloved by Cézanne. So glad she was to see something like these colours in Zoya's arsenal of industrial make-up. And blue. Tanya sighed. One musn't ever rush blue. Certainly one musn't rush blue eye-shadow. Here's the thing: if the world were perfect, if she had money and the shops had supplies, she would buy tempera paints, powdered colours mixed with egg yolk and beer. But the economy being what it was, a mysterious game of constant disappointments, Tanya had learned how to make do with what was available: Zoya's nail varnishes and make-up, Lukeria's tea, shoe polish, chewing gum of assorted colours and flavours, and the occasional beer borrowed for the cause from Daniilov's private stash.

  Tanya knelt on the floor and surveyed her landscape of materials. Egg, fork, bowl. She cracked the eggs into the bowl and whisked with vigour. What few people knew was how great a binder egg really was. Egg and beer together would glue the colour fast to the cloth strips. At least, this is what she had read in a pamphlet explaining how the old fathers made icons out in the woods. But this pamphlet was written in Old Slavonic. Quite possibly she didn't understand the recipe fully. But this was the Russian way: substituting at all times one thing for another and calling it good, very good, or at least commendable.

  Consider colour, for instance. Tanya mashed the chalk into separate piles. A vegetable broth bouillon cube smashed under her fist into one pile made an earthy brown. The turquoise green oval and boot blacking crushed in the next chalk pile made for a brilliant iridescent blue. With cosmetic brushes she mixed the egg mixtures and chalks, then applied the colours to her canvas. To the Mother of God she gave a brilliant blue veil, the symbol of humility, doleful brown eyes, and pale skin. Ditto for the child, except instead of a veil she left a blank space for a gold nimbus. This required gold foil. Fortunately, Tanya came prepared: inside her coat pocket she kept a candy bar for emergency artistic purposes. Tanya unwrapped the candy bar, carefully flattened the foil, and with the penknife cut a snood of gold to fit around the baby Jesus' head.

  The last step, the very last thing, was to seal and fix the colour and the foil with a quick shot of hair spray, which would give the icon the trademark high shine glossy effect commonly associated with lacquered antiquities. Tanya propped the cardboard against a chair leg and sprayed in slow arcs. That done, she rested on her heels, the dreambook open across her lap, and munched the chocolate bar thoughtfully:

  Gold was mustard gone fallow in the long fields. Gold was the falling notes of the bells from the church. Gold the sound carried over the river, troubling the water so that things long forgotten at the depths swilled up briefly only to be pulled back under. Gold the flecks in the Colour of your eyes. The distance of many miles. Where are you now? I ask. What are you remembering? You can tell me. What you say is like a whisper inside a church, it is between us, neVer to be repeated.' Bells you said. A call to prayer. In Grozny. Where there are good Russians and bad. And wolves and whistles. And ticking.

  And then disaster. The blue of the veil weeping. The eye-shadow and beer and glue and flour mixture sliding, sliding. Falling. The flour, egg, beer, cosmetic mixture in all its bright bubbly glory was a blue-green smear and the Mother of God looked like an absinthe-stained impressionistic experiment. The Christ child resembled a sickly watermelon in her arms.

  Tanya's eyes burned. Always this was what came of her attempts to think in hues and gradations of saturation; this was what happened when she tried to knuckle an understanding of her own life as it ticked from shade to hue. This was what came of her attempt to depict love in any form, even if it was from stuff as low and humble as wet coloured flour smeared on ice-cream sticks.

  ***

  Tanya trudged home, pulling the shovel behind her over the snow. From across the Kama a high series of yodels rose in the darkness. People believed these were the sounds of wild dogs crying for their human mothers. The old story said that wild dogs could be tamed and turned back to their child selves again if only their mothers would cry out their human names. It was a good story that bore repeating. In fact she had heard it many times carried up through the heating pipes of their building, and with each recitation it became that much more true.

  In front of the apartments the children lobbed ice chunks at each other and scaled the snow-covered heap with angry shrieks. With her broad frame Tanya knew she was an irresistible target. If that gaping hole existed as Yuri said it did, skirting the heap and taking cover inside the latrine was out of the question. Tanya forged toward the stairwell, keeping a close eye on the oldest girl, who gripped the neck of an empty bottle. The girl, Tanya noted, never blinked and Tanya found this unnerving. It suggested she understood far more than she should at that age. And then there were the things the children said and how they said them, each child picking up where the other left off:

  'Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,' a tiny voice sang out from the stairwell.

  'What?' Tanya peered behind the heap and saw the smallest girl with the black hair crouched over a flattened bottle of kvass.

  'Blessed are the meek,' called one of the twins—Good Boris - she was pretty sure of that, because Good Boris always bowed slightly from the waist, an altogether gentlemanly gesture for so young a child.

  'For they will inherit the earth,' Bad Boris, standing
in front of the heap, replied.

  And then from the red-haired boy with the glasses, 'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.'

  'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,' the oldest girl said, levelling her gaze on Tanya. Always the children talked like this. Tanya didn't know if it was the effect of the glue they liked to sniff, or a manifestation of a preternatural wisdom given sometimes to some children, a wisdom she herself had never possessed.

  Tanya squinted at the girl. The thing was, Tanya wanted to like these kids. She wanted to love them as easily as she loved the Kuntskamera boy. But they were so unchildlike, sharing between them a hard feral quality that made them immune to normal human kindness. Even so, Tanya couldn't stop making her attempts. She saw that somebody needed to like them. Tanya understood that they all, and by 'they', she included herself in the count, had quite a lot in common, that they were like her, lost in this world that didn't care for them. Underneath the dirt, buried beneath the layers of soiled clothes, their criminal extracurricular activities, they were children. Tanya walked to the stairwell and held out a piece of chewing gum for the little girl. 'What's your name, anyway?' Tanya asked. Before the girl could answer the other children swarmed around Tanya, pulling the gum from her fingers, pulling her keys and pencils and tissues from her purse.

  'Is this all you got?' the oldest girl, Anna, asked.

  'Don't you have something better?'

  'Like food?' one twin asked.

  'Or money?' the other asked, with a measure of indignation.

  'What's this, then?' The boy with the glasses found the botched icon. He sniffed at the paint and danced the icon away beyond the heap. The other children kept their hands on Tanya, propelling her to the stairwell, pushing her up the steps. If there was a hole behind the heap, as Yuri had claimed, certainly they weren't about to let her see it, though she noted with dismay that they had made off with the shovel.